Exactly six months after a white nationalist killed 11 Jewish congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, another white nationalist has carried out a shooting directed against American Jews.
On April 27, during Passover services at Congregation Chabad temple in Poway, Calif., a 19-year-old male shot four Jewish worshipers. One of his victims, a 60-year-old woman, died of her wounds, having used her own body to shield her rabbi.
The twisted nature of the suspected Poway shooter’s thinking was displayed in the manifesto he uploaded to 8chan, a website which hosts white nationalist and other subversive content. In it, he stated that Jews “deserve nothing but hell,” and detailed his previous involvement in the March 24 arson of the Dar-ul-Arqam mosque in Escondido. Referring to President Trump as a “Zionist, Jew-loving, anti-White, traitorous c—sucker,” the Poway shooter cited as motivation the white nationalist shooter who killed 50 Muslims during attacks on two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques on March 15.
While some elected officials in recent months have muddied the definition of white nationalism, even seeming to conflate it at times with conservatism, it is important to note that white nationalists hold neither the views nor values treasured by mainstream political parties. Blaming the president or Republicans for white nationalist attacks misses the mark by both furthering the division that has kept Americans at one another’s throats for 27 months, and neglecting to confront the true hatred that percolates within an environment of political discord.
The deadly, high-profile attacks perpetrated at home and around the globe by empowered white nationalists should be troubling to members of all political parties. In their wake, it is vital to gain an understanding of the movement’s motivations and desires, and ensure that its proponents face factual, reasoned opposition wherever they seek to peddle their hate-filled theories.
To understand white nationalism, I joined members of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Mich., on April 7 to listen to former white nationalist Derek Black explain the ideology in which he was raised, and on which he has turned his back.
The godson of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, and son of Don Black (the founder of the white nationalist internet site Stormfront), Black explained the process by which, for years, his family has been cultivating white nationalism as a variation on white supremacy that could “wear a suit and tie.” Under an exterior of quasi-respectability, and promoting goals like “maintaining a white national identity,” Black described a movement steeped in the pseudoscientific notion that race is determined by biology, and fueled by age-old anti-Semitic rhetoric about the dangers of Judaism.
To gain acceptability and recruit new members, white nationalists often mask the truth of their motivations. They state, for instance, that they believe in separating people of different races not out of a hatred of others, but out of a love for their own kind. This thin veneer also offers a degree of deniability when white nationalists, like the shooter who killed nine black Christians at a South Carolina church in 2015, commit deadly attacks. His father, Black explained, would shrug such events off as a “series of unfortunate coincidences,” believing that, because he never advocated for violence, he personally bore no responsibility for promoting the ideology that stoked such hate.
Black discovered the instability of the foundation that underlays white nationalist ideology while attending New College of Florida. At school, he guarded closely the truths that he ran Stormfront’s site for kids, regularly hosted a white nationalist radio show with his father, and was instrumental in promoting and growing the white nationalist movement.
A classmate eventually exposed Black’s involvement to the small student body. Rather than attack Black, in the passing months and years, some students engaged with him, pushing back on his “bad science,” and eventually leading him to “dismantle [his] worldview.”
In 2013, Black publicly condemned white nationalism, permanently altering his long-held relationships with family and friends.
Today, Black still struggles with his past. Answering a question from the audience, he admitted that attacks perpetrated by white nationalists bring on an “infinite sort of guilt” because of the role he played in promoting the ideology. While he “can’t take things back,” he “can keep pushing against [white nationalism].”
Three days earlier, in an April 4 interview with Detroit News’ Editorial Page Editor Nolan Finley, Black stated that, where white nationalism is concerned, “everybody has a responsibility … to do something.” The first and easiest step, he said, is “condemning that system.”
The term “hate,” Black explained several days later before the crowds at the Holocaust Memorial Center, was something his father believed had been invented to marginalize and dismiss his belief system and make it more difficult for his movement to recruit new members. This weakness in white nationalism’s factually unstable ideology can, and must, be universally exploited.
Wherever we see that hatred beginning to rise, all Americans must speak out against it, and identify it for what it is. White nationalists should never have reason to believe that their perverse views will have a safe, unchallenged home within the mainstream.
The escalating vitriol of the last 27 months has allowed white nationalism to flourish. Complacency in the face of this series of white nationalist attacks, or pointing fingers at blameless groups and persons rather than the true culprits, can only lead to the further empowerment of these hate-fueled individuals.
This is the time for Republicans, Democrats, independents, and libertarians to put aside their differences to unite against the pseudoscientific hatreds and anti-Semitic tropes that once festered in dark corners of society, but which are increasingly dragged into the light.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
