More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
That fantasy is one in which patriotic white Americans rise up and reclaim their country. The pipe dream has been regurgitated since at least the Civil War by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, far-right militia members, and other proponents of white supremacy.
Today, fear of racial replacement is the beating heart of Trumpism, a populist politics of white anxiety and resentment. Trumpism prioritizes white needs and wants over collective well-being, and white feeling over hard fact. Permissive of white bigotry and cruelty, it forces a narrow vision of America onto policy-making and storytelling.
On November 3, the day before the Iran hostage crisis overtook headlines, a group of white supremacists attacked an antiracism event organized by members of the Communist Workers’ Party in Greensboro, North Carolina. Four white men and a black woman were shot and killed. The perpetrators were acquitted in both state and federal court. Among them were neo-Nazis and Klan members who found common cause in their opposition to liberal politics—“distinctions among white power factions melted away,” writes historian Kathleen Belew, and “anti-communism was used as an alibi for racism.”18 The alibi
...more
A 2003 study of 157 sites found that only a small percentage “specifically urged violence” and that one-third “disavowed racism or hatred.”6 This made it difficult for unsuspecting internet browsers to distinguish between fact and fiction, news and propaganda. Cloaking was a matter of strategy, an effort to widen what sociologists call the Overton window—the range of ideas considered viable or tolerable in public discourse.
Researchers have described the “underlying force” of extremism as “the basic human desire to matter and have meaning in one’s life.” They call this “the quest for personal significance,” and there are three main parts: need, narrative, and network.
Also influential was a woman named Savitri Devi, who in 1962 joined Rockwell and others in founding the World Union of National Socialists. Devi was born Maximiani Portas in 1905, into a well-to-do family of Greek, French, British, and Italian heritage. A passionate supporter of the Third Reich, she took the name Savitri Devi after moving to India, believed by some racist thinkers to be the birthplace of the so-called Aryan race that migrated to Europe and established Western civilization. Devi was a vocal proponent of India’s caste system because she believed it preserved racial purity. Devi
...more
According to Corinna, Gaede bragged about a particular item under her bed: a container holding David Lane’s ashes. Lane had been one of the most infamous white nationalists in the country, a key member of the Order, a violent organization that had robbed banks, racketeered, planted bombs, and committed murder before law enforcement caught up to it in the mid-1980s. The group took its name from The Turner Diaries. Lane, sentenced to 190 years in prison, maintained his influence on the radical right from behind bars. He coined the closest thing white nationalism had to a campaign slogan, known
...more
Trumpism had tapped into the notion that there was one people worthier than others—in this case, white Americans who supported the president. “Under Trumpism, no defense of the volk is a betrayal, even if it undermines the republic,” Adam Serwer would write in The Atlantic in 2019, “and no attack on the volk’s hegemony can be legitimate, even if it is a defense of democracy.”
In proudly showing off her life, Ayla demanded to know one thing: If all she wanted was safety, prosperity, and health for her family and nation, how could she be considered hateful? It was a disingenuous defensive trick, and she was far from the first woman to use it. Historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, whose research focuses on resistance to the civil rights movement, has described the profound impact of “politics that emphasized performing whiteness as synonymous with ‘good’ womanhood.”
Neither side in the battle over feminism has ever held pure intentions. Many prominent early feminists wanted equal rights for disenfranchised groups, so long as white women got them first. Susan B. Anthony opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted black men the right to vote in 1870, because it did nothing for women’s suffrage.
Racial segregation was another important Progressive idea, premised on Social Darwinism and eugenic science and goaded by popular depictions of white superiority (most famously in The Birth of a Nation).
as political analyst Alexis Grenell wrote in a 2018 New York Times op-ed, that “the gender gap in politics is really a color line.”
The Nazis fostered a cult of motherhood and undertook what historian Claudia Koonz calls “the world’s most ambitious fertility drive.” It even gave mothers medals: gold, silver, or bronze, depending on the number of children they had.
Women who policed the color line did so in the name of decency and virtue, patriotism and pride, science and God. They justified their white supremacy as maternal responsibility.
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in the 1800s by people who defended slavery as a matter of faith.
“America as we know it, as a country, its ideas, philosophy, laws, et cetera, they all came from European people, from European ideas,” she said. “Our architecture, our language, our predominant religions, our holidays, and so forth, are white European and Christian.” To the extent that this was true, America’s origins of violence and prejudice didn’t seem to matter to Ayla, who once said on Gab that “colonization was the best thing that ever happened to the world.” Because America felt white to her, ipso facto, whiteness was American.
“I know that what is contained herein will be bitterly denied,” former Union soldier James McElroy wrote in his 1879 account of life in a brutal Confederate prison, an early challenge to the narrative of the Lost Cause. “I know that hell hath no fury like the vindictiveness of those who are hurt by the truth being told to them.”
Lana called the Holocaust a “religion” that no one was allowed to doubt, and she criticized the “massive brainwashing operation” that insisted Nazis only did terrible things. “I used to be there, too,” Lana said in a monologue. “This is where most truthers, anarchists, left and right, CNN and Fox, Christian and atheists, join as one: on the Nazi issue. It is politically correct to demonize Hitler.”
Tyler’s chief skills were in marketing and conscription. She owned a Klan newspaper called Searchlight and sent weekly missives to “kleagles,” recruiters around the country tasked with expanding the KKK’s reach. Tyler encouraged them “to study their territories, identify sources of concern among native-born Protestant whites, and offer the Klan as a solution,” writes Kathleen Blee. The “sources of concern” could be anyone: “Mormons in Utah, union radicals in the Northwest, and Asian Americans on the Pacific Coast.”
Today, this view manifests in the hate movement as a celebration of misogyny, which supporters describe as natural and necessary. Men are strong and rational, women yielding and emotional; men are good at navigating politics, women at nurturing family units; men make decisions, women provide counsel.
Lana didn’t wear a Klan robe or keep a Nazi flag flapping in the breeze outside her home. Her belief system, however, was all but indistinguishable from women who did. She inflicted injury by unilaterally limiting the definition of harm and then doing what fell just outside it. If a person was hurt by what she said or did, it wasn’t her problem.
