1. I can't recommend this interview enough. Derek Black is the son of the KKK Grand Wizard who started the most important white supremacist website in the country, Stormfront. In college Derek renounced white supremacy and he tells his story here. npr.org/2018/09/24/651…
2. So many takeaways from this interview. Here are a few. Derek was instrumental in rebranding white supremacy as white nationalism. This involved muting the violent, hateful rhetoric and playing up the racial pride--"I'm just proud to be white, what's wrong with that?"
3. Derek pioneered many of the key talking points of contemporary white nationalist rhetoric like the idea that South American immigration posed the threat of "white genocide," or that white people were more discriminated against than people of color.
4. These are typical white nationalist (or identitarian) talking points...Tucker Carlson, Tomi Lahren, Ann Coulter and others on the right have given credence to many of these talking points on Fox and elsewhere. Worth noting who developed these ideas in the 2000s...the KKK.
5. Derek also recants his run for a local seat in West Palm Beach, FL as a white nationalist. He ran in the Republican primary and found that his white nationalist message (white supremacy with the hateful parts muted) resonated really well with ordinary white voters.
6. "Those people in Chicago are really different from us, huh? Mexican immigrants are destroying our culture, huh? It's tough being a white person these days, huh?" He found that more often than not, white Republicans felt liberated by him saying such non-PC, "honest" things.
7. Another thing I learned is that Holocaust denial is an essential piece of this message because it decouples white nationalism and violence.
8. If white nationalists can get folks to think of Nazi Germany as a benign effort to create a homeland for a racially distinct people (& forget about the 6 million killed), then it makes contemporary white nationalism seem far more benign & utterly unconnected to mass genocide.
9. The most sobering part comes at the end. This son of a KKK grand dragon (whose godfather was David Duke) says that Trump's message was borrowed almost entirely from the white nationalist messaging that he & his KKK compatriots innovated in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
10. Derek thinks Trump is not a full blown white nationalist, but he says that white nationalists regard Trump as someone who has advanced their movement by at least 10 years and is a fellow traveler at the very least.
11. These are just a few of the points raised in this interview. I can't encourage you strongly enough to listen to it. It's really important, especially if you're a white person.
