First, it should be noted that this is a very small group. The KKK today is virtually a defunct organization. It has been defunct since the 1980s. It has, at most, a few hundred members nationwide. If the Klan were to organize a rally anywhere in the country, its members would be overwhelmed by a much larger group of counterprotesters. And no, the KKK doesn’t have a real newspaper. The Crusader—the so-called newspaper that praised Trump—is nothing more than a crude twelve-page pamphlet that comes out four times a year.
Historian David Chalmers, whose book Hooded Americanism is a history of the Klan, is frequently asked by reporters to explain the KKK revival. He tells them that they are the Klan revival; in other words, there is no revival except in their fevered reporting. Chalmers even recounts an episode in which a KKK cross-burning was held up until the TV crews arrived.21 The left-wing media needs the Klan to sustain their political attack on the right. So they magnify the organization, allowing the public to believe that it still poses the kind of threat that it historically posed under the aegis of the Democratic Party to blacks and other minorities.
Let’s assume that the Klan has five hundred to a thousand members. What is the evidence that these guys voted for Trump? Actually, there is none. The media loves to trot out former Klansman David Duke not because he is representative of anything but because he is the only prominent name associated with the Klan that can be tied to the Republicans, notwithstanding the GOP’s insistent repudiation of him on numerous occasions. It is hard to name anyone else because historically the entire leadership of the KKK—Imperial Wizards, Grand Dragons, Exalted Cyclopses, Great Kleagles and all—have all been Democrats.
Has anyone conducted a survey of neo-Nazis or Skinheads to show that they are actually Trump voters? I am not aware of any. When CNN commentator Van Jones was asked by conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt what percentage of Trump voters are white supremacists, he replied, “Probably less than one percent.” Columnist Will Saletan invoked an opinion survey to show that while 3 percent of whites said they “mostly agree” with the white supremacy movement, 5 percent of Trump voters fell into this category.22 So the data are scarce and all over the place. What we can agree on is that we are dealing with a quite marginal phenomenon.
In the aftermath of Charlottesville, there have been several media profiles of white supremacists. The intention, I am sure, is to show what clear and present dangers these individuals pose to society. Given racism’s dark history, I was prepared to believe it. But reading the articles, I am struck by how pathetic and powerless these people are. Racism is only dangerous when prejudiced people have real power. It is blatantly obvious that these sorry individuals have little or no power.
Something else emerges from the profiles, peeping out from under the overwrought verbiage: many of the most prominent white supremacists have a left-wing background. The Southern Poverty Law Center looked into the past of Jason Kessler, organizer of the Charlottesville rally, and was astounded to discover that he had been an Obama supporter and active in the left-wing Occupy movement.23
What could be more interesting than to explain how an Obama supporter could become a white supremacist? Or how an Occupy Wall Street sympathizer transitioned into a defender of the white cause? Yet the progressive media went dead silent on this one. Only one local Charlottesville newspaper, The Daily Progress, bothered to dig into this, noting that Kessler’s previous tweets, his neighbors and several of his friends “attest that he held strong liberal convictions just a few years ago.”
In those earlier tweets, Kessler said that not only was he a former Democrat, but many of his current followers previously voted for Democrats. David Caron, a childhood friend, said Kessler became alienated when he realized that there was no place for him in a Democratic Party focused on ethnic diversity and minority issues. In Caron’s words, “He was a Democrat until last year. The main thing is, he said he felt like the party didn’t want him.”
Laura Kleiner is a Democratic activist who dated Kessler for several months in 2013. According to the article, “She said Kessler was very dedicated to his liberal principles, and that he was a strict vegetarian, abstained from alcohol and drugs, embraced friends of different ethnicities and was an atheist.”
Kleiner said that notwithstanding his Jewish heritage, Kessler showed no indication of being anti-Semitic. She also said he had a roommate for several years who was an African immigrant. Speaking of Kessler, Kleiner told the newspaper, “He broke up with me, and a lot of it was because I was not liberal enough . . . I am a very progressive Democrat, but he didn’t like that I ate fish and that I’m a Christian.”24
I mentioned Kessler’s leftist background on social media and he lashed out angrily by releasing a video denouncing me. The video itself is rambling, incoherent and laced with obscenities. The most interesting thing about it is that Kessler attacks me as a rich brown-skinned guy who only stands up for big business and special interests. In other words, notwithstanding his disavowal of my portrait of him, Kessler sounds just like the left-wing racist I made him out to be. If he has undergone any kind of conversion, his video gives no indication of it.
Examining other profiles of these extremists, things only get weirder. The New York Times profiled Tony Hovater, portrayed as a foot soldier of various white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Yet despite the paper’s attempt to make Hovater look menacing, his comments suggest a tone not so much of fanaticism as of irony. Hovater insists, for example, that Hitler didn’t necessarily want to exterminate the Jews; that was Himmler! Hitler, he claims, “was a lot more kind of chill on those subjects.”
The problem with the diversity-mongers in politics, according to Hovater, is that “at this rate I’m sure the presidential candidate they’ll put up in a few cycles will be an overweight, black, crippled dyke with dyslexia.” Hovater interrupted one of his tirades against democracy with the aside, “I guess it seems weird when talking about these types of things. You know, I’m coming at it in a mid-90s, Jewish, New York observational-humor way.”25 Apparently we have a Nazi Seinfeld on our hands.
And the beat goes on. Newsweek published a profile of Andrew Auernheimer, coeditor of the world’s biggest neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer. Despite his notoriety in the United States, Auernheimer lives in the Ukraine. He fled there after serving jail time in America on a computer hacking conviction that was later vacated.
In its research for the article, Newsweek interviewed Auernheimer’s mother, who disclosed that her son comes from a “large, mixed-race family” with Native American heritage and that he has Jewish lineage “on both sides of his family.” So we have a mixed-race guy who hates mixed-race people and a descendant of Jews who wants, in his words, to slaughter them “like dogs”?26
Atlantic Monthly journalist Luke O’Brien traveled to Whitefish, Montana, to do an in-depth profile of the other coeditor of the Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin. Anglin was apparently organizing a rally that he promised would include European nationalists, a Hamas representative and a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But no rally actually took place.
Anglin told O’Brien that he had given up on the United States and wanted to burn it to the ground. “There is rapidly approaching a time when in every White Western city, corpses will be stacked in the streets as high as men can stack them. And you are either going to be stacking or getting stacked.” Yes, we are dealing with a highly disturbed individual.
But how did he get that way? O’Brien talked to Anglin’s friends from the school he attended in Columbus, Ohio. They told him that Anglin was a kind of hippie who enrolled in an alternative education program. Anglin was a vegan and his girlfriend Alison was an animal rights activist. He was also an atheist who wore his reddish hair in dreadlocks. His trademark hoodie bore the sign “F*CK RACISM.”
Anglin began his blogging career after high school. His early blogs are revealing. “Here his leftist leanings were on full
display: He wrote posts encouraging people to send the Westboro Baptist Church death threats from untraceable accounts, and he mocked the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations.” Reporter O’Brien is puzzled. Anglin doesn’t sound like a fascist; he sounds like a member of Antifa.
In March 2007, Anglin posted about Donald Trump, attaching a video clip from a roast of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani appears in the video in drag, and Trump rams his face into Giuliani’s chest. It was all apparently in fun. Even so, Anglin describes them both as “fags” and writes that Giuliani is clearly involved in a “twisted homosexual transvestite affair with Donald Trump.”
In 2010–11 Anglin visited Southeast Asia, where he became a rainforest activist, dated Filipina women, and railed on his podcast against Christian missionaries. “You see the way white people—and it is white people—went around the whole world and f*cked everybody. I think the white race should be bred out.” This was a sentiment he routinely expressed.
While O’Brien speculates that something happened in the rain forest to make Anglin a neo-Nazi, he has no idea what that might be. Neither does Anglin, apparently.27 So what we have is a leftist atheist environmentalist who thinks Trump is a fag and that white people screwed up the world running the world’s largest neo-Nazi website. Go figure!
IDENTITY POLITICS FOR WHITES
My purpose in highlighting the leftist roots of today’s white supremacists is not merely to undermine the claim that they are right-wingers. It is also to show how easily people like Kessler and Anglin have morphed from leftist political activism to white supremacy. None of them underwent any conversion or transformation. Rather, they moved, as it were, laterally, from leftist radicalism to neo-Nazi radicalism. The Nazis, let’s recall, made precisely the same journey. Now, as in the past, leftism, racism and neo-Nazism go hand in hand.
I recognize that these ragtag extremists are a muddle-headed group. We should not, however, be muddle-headed about them. One of the few scholars to make a genuine attempt to study their movement is political scientist Carol Swain. Swain, who was featured in my film Hillary’s America, is one of the leading African American scholars in the country. Swain has written two books, a detailed study of the white nationalist movement called The New White Nationalism in America, and another consisting of searching interviews with its most prominent members.
Swain recognizes that the “new white nationalism,” as she calls it, is different from old-style racism. Most significantly, the nationalists of today vehemently deny that they are white supremacists. They insist that they are simply advocates of white identity and white power in the same mode as the advocates of black identity and black power. Incredibly, the white nationalist movement seeks to portray itself as a kind of civil rights movement, fighting for equal treatment for white people!
Jared Taylor is the editor of the white nationalist website American Renaissance. An American who spent his youth in Japan, Taylor is much more urbane and cosmopolitan than we might stereotypically expect. Pointing out that minority groups often prefer to relate to members of their own group, he says, “If a white person says, ‘I like being white, and I prefer my associates to be white,’ that’s hate? Why?” Taylor adds, “Races are different. Some races are better at some things than others.”28
Yet in his conversation with Swain, Taylor takes this line of thinking in a surprising direction. “I think Asians are objectively superior to whites by just about any measure that you can come up with. This doesn’t mean I want America to become Asian. I think every people has the right to be itself . . . Even if Asians build societies superior to those built by white people, I think white people are perfectly legitimate in preferring the kind of societies they build.”
Lisa Turner, the women’s coordinator of a white nationalist group called the World Church of the Creator, also insists she is merely standing up for whites as a group, although she takes a dimmer view of Asians than Taylor. Turner tells Swain, “Asians are nothing but imitators, copycats. It’s monkey see, monkey do. They have copied what white Europeans have done, and that’s the only reason that Asians have any kind of civilization at all.”
Despite its name, the World Church of the Creator is an atheist organization, as most white nationalist groups are. “The philosophy behind Christianity,” Turner says, “is utterly poisonous. Turn the other cheek, love your enemy—these kind of ideas have put a guilt trip on the white race. The biggest enemies we have out there are the Christian churches.”
Swain quotes Michael Hart, who advocates a separate nation for whites somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. “I have no desire to rule over blacks . . . or to have someone else rule over blacks on my behalf. Quite the contrary. I do not want to rule, enslave or exterminate anyone . . . All that I—and most white separatists—want is the opportunity to rule ourselves, in our own independent country.”
Even David Duke is on board with this approach, as suggested by the name of the group he founded, the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP). Duke says that just as the NAACP works for black interests and La Raza Unida works for Hispanic interests, his group is “about preservation of our identity as ethnic people, our existence, our values, our culture, our traditions.”29
One white nationalist that Swain did not interview is Matthew Heimbach, founder of the Traditionalist Youth Network. Although he has been dubbed the “Little Fuhrer” in the media, Heimbach insists that “we reject the label of any form of racial hatred . . . We have contact with comrades in Syria, comrades in the Philippines, comrades around the world and black nationalists in the United States. We believe every group of people should be able to have self-determination.”30
I can from personal experience verify Swain’s observation that this appeal to group identity and self-determination is the language of contemporary white nationalism. In the mid-1990s, as part of my research for The End of Racism, I attended an American Renaissance conference. There I heard Jared Taylor trace his intellectual lineage not to the Republican right but to the Democratic Party and the Confederacy. His ancestors stood up for their cause and for their race, he told me, and he intended to do the same.
At the conference, I also heard Sam Francis, then a columnist for the Washington Times, make an argument I had never heard anyone make in public before. “What we as whites must do,” he said, “is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites . . . The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”
I quoted Francis saying this, and the Washington Times fired him over it. Swain mentions this episode as one of the first skirmishes between a mainstream conservative—me—and a white nationalist—Francis—who had been successfully posing as a mainstream conservative.31 I wasn’t trying to get Francis fired. I quoted his remarks because they struck me as one of the very first explicit articulations of a doctrine of white racial consciousness.
Not only is Swain right that the white nationalists are not the bigots of old, but she also correctly discerns that the point they make is not entirely wrong. It takes a courageous scholar to make this point. The progressive economist Glenn Loury is, as far as I know, the only one on the left to make it. “I really don’t know how you ask white people not to be white in the world we are creating,” Loury says. “How are there not white interests in a world where there are these other interests?”32
The usual progressive response to Loury is that white solidarity is dangerous because whites as a group have the power to put their prejudices into practice. Racism is prejudice plus power and whites supposedly have both. Black and Hispanic solidarity is not dangerous because minority groups may have their prejudices b
ut they don’t have the accompanying power. Moreover, the motives for minority collective associations are benign. In the progressive view, disadvantaged groups have a right to form in their desire to resist white oppression and white supremacy.
This argument, however, fails to consider the contemporary reality that minority interest groups are much more powerful than white nationalist groups. It’s not even close. Which group has more clout, the NAACP or the NAAWP? Black representatives in Congress have a Black Caucus, which does not hesitate to fight for explicitly black interests; where is the White Caucus that openly promotes white interests? Moreover, black and Latino interest groups have powerful allies in Hollywood and the media.
The white nationalists have none of this. They are shunned by both political parties and they have much less power to enforce discrimination in their favor than their black and Latino counterparts. While the old-style racism is now outlawed as a consequence of civil rights legislation, affirmative action—racial preferences against whites and in favor of blacks and other minorities—is currently the law of the land.
So marginalized are the white nationalist groups today that they are the ones who feel victimized. They are the ones who are branded as hate groups. Even most whites hate them! Their ideology is so controversial that on campus it sends students fleeing in search of safe spaces. “The only occasion on which it is acceptable for whites to speak collectively as whites,” Jared Taylor writes, “is to apologize.”33 Consequently, their racial solidarity, the white nationalists say, is a necessary response to being so besieged in mainstream culture.
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