More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 12 - April 24, 2023
Just because the last insurrection failed doesn’t mean the next one will.
In truth, for anyone willing to pay attention, a female Trump will always have been an inevitability.
“You sound like a nigger!” the woman yelled again.
Five words that spoke to nearly four hundred years of accumulated racial privilege and contempt. The slur rang harshly, and “like” spoke volumes.
sounded like an accusation of tri...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
She looked proud.
It’s a convenient distinction, if a false one.
“The political rhetoric of hate does not fall on deaf ears.”7 White nationalists make explicit ideas that are already coded, veiled, or circumscribed in the wider white imagination. Hate is what many white Americans would see if they looked in a fun-house mirror: a distorted but familiar reflection.
Online, “red-pilling” has come to mean accepting the truth—a wholesale myth, in fact—about the oppression of men and white people at the hands of a liberal, multicultural establishment intent on wiping out America’s heritage.
in Anglin’s words, that black people’s “biological nature is incompatible with White society” and that a white woman who wastes motherhood on mixed-race children is a traitor. “It’s OUR WOMB,” Anglin once wrote. “It belongs to the males in her society.”13
“RACE IS AN idea, not a fact,”
Who counts as white—what they look like, where they come from, even what they believe—has shifted over time according to what Painter describes as “individual taste and political need.”15 White supremacy, however, is a constant.
White supremacy lurks in mediocrity and civility as much as it fuels slurs and violence. It conceals itself in the false promises of Christian kindness, race blindness, and e pluribus unum.
white supremacy is “a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”
their stories reveal how abstract, toxic ideas can become knitted into people’s lives and how women in particular can be swept up in a cause that seeks to circumscribe their freedoms.
politics—“distinctions among white power factions melted away,”
“anti-communism was used as an alibi for racism.”18 The alibi stuck, and others followed: Heritage not hate. It’s okay to be white. All lives matter.
Only in 2019 did the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledge that white supremacy is a national security threat.26
WHITE NATIONALISTS HAVE long used the “just biology” argument to defend their worldview.
Hate can be understood as a social bond, a complex phenomenon that occurs among people as a means of mattering and belonging. It is a currency that arises “in particular social, cultural, political, and historical contexts, and it shapes the possibilities for future social interactions,”
“Social camaraderie, a desire for simple answers to complex political problems, or even the opportunity to take action against formidable social forces can co-exist with, even substitute for, hatred as the reason for participation in organized racist activities.”
A network, finally, is a group of “important others such as family members, close friends, or comrades [who] function as an epistemic authority.” The network reinforces the narrative, and together they fulfill the need.8 A cycle of nourishment sets in.
Yet neither do white Americans suddenly “wake up one morning with a new desire to engage in
radical action, whether violent or not,”
The socialization of hate can last weeks, months, or years, feeding on personal discontent and wider social anxieties to reach clarifying moments—“awakenings,” the criminologists call them, that “might be l...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Hate becomes a cure for loneliness.
Hate is a failing, but not an isolated one. In a perverse twist on the cliché, hate takes a village.
Devi was a vocal proponent of India’s caste system because she believed it preserved racial purity.
He claimed that he officially birthed the NWF on November 5, 2008, one day after “black Tuesday,” his description of Barack Obama’s election. “My nigger Barry and his ho bought the White House,”
“racist Martha Stewart.”
Get in touch with a lot of the modern world—a cringeworthy phrase that crammed the violence of colonialism and human bondage into the suggestion of a friendly phone call.
described immigrants of color in Europe as “repulsive…a bunch of monkeys running around.”3 On the topic of slavery, she later mocked calls for reparations and said that black people should “get over it.”
Lana resurrected the UDC’s agenda and declared that slavery was not all bad—slaves were allowed to marry and have children, after all.
YouTube “promotes, recommends, and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes.” The platform, she concluded, could be “one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”

