I bought this book because I was under the impression that the author had been undercover with WNs for six years, but apparently he was always out as a “reporter.” He doesn’t stint on the virtue-signalling, which does not mean he has nothing valuable to say. I’ll read and I’ll let you know if there’s anything important. So far, I’ve found nothing.
On the other hand, I find that our enemies just as often have valuable insights as our friends.
As I write this, nineteen people are being treated at University of Virginia Medical Center for injuries sustained when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. One woman is dead. The victims were struck as they protested one of the largest gatherings of right-wing radicals in America in recent history. Last night I watched hundreds of predominantly young, white men march in a torchlight parade, paying tribute to a history that produced slavery, Jim Crow, and a society that still discriminates against its minorities in a million ways, large and small. They were not only paying tribute to white hegemony but also protesting the cracks in that hegemony, airing grievances that seemed both petty and fabricated. As they marched en masse to chants of “Jews will not replace us!” I had to wonder exactly how Jews were replacing them and how these young, white men—by any statistical measure perched at the top of the societal food chain—had come to feel so deeply aggrieved as to see the world’s progress as an attack on them…
It should be stated that I’m not a neutral observer. In many ways I represent what my subjects believe to be the enemy. As long as I’ve been able to vote I’ve voted socialist (in my native Norway that is still, thankfully, a viable option), and I’ve made no secret about that in my reporting…
Matthew [Heimbach] had no doubt that the elites were bought and paid for by the Jews, and if there was one thing no one could accuse Matthew Heimbach of, it was being part of the elite…
He switched on the wipers and watched as the threadbare rubber strip redistributed the rain across the windshield. He needed to get new ones. In fact, he needed to get a new car, but he had no money since losing his job at Child Protective Services in Indiana when they found out about his other life as one of the most notorious nationalists in the country. It wasn’t the first time he’d been fired for his politics: he had been excommunicated from his church, cut off by his family, and suffered daily death threats since he was a teenager. Losing a job was nothing new, but it did make it harder to do political work when he had to hustle to find new employment. Also, Brooke was pregnant with their second kid—Matthew wanted a large brood—so there was that to pay for. Recently he’d found a new job as a picker in one of Amazon’s giant warehouses, but it was lonely, miserable work. The warehouse was vast, and to save money on electricity Amazon had installed motion detectors that made sure the light was only on where the picker was, meaning Matthew spent close to twelve hours per day walking around in a small cone of light, barely ten feet in diameter, surrounded by endless darkness.
BY NOVEMBER 2016 I had known Matthew for a few years, having met him in the early days of what would be a six-year field trip into the underbelly of the American white nationalist scene. It had been a journey littered with skinheads, Klansmen, fights, bad barbeque, rallies, threats, and endless highway miles. Matthew was an unexpected encounter, a seemingly earnest and in some ways sensible outlier in a sea of virulent racists—which isn’t to say that Matthew wasn’t racist, merely that he wasn’t so unambiguous about it. Also, you didn’t need to wince your way through a conversation littered with racial slurs when talking to him, which set him apart from many of his fellow white nationalists. One could argue that this made him all the more dangerous—an ostensible voice of reason covering up an insidious form of white supremacy—but it also made him easier to talk to. What had initially motivated my excursion into the world of white supremacy was curiosity about a brand of politics that seemed almost too outdated to be real—and one that I was surprised to find thriving throughout the country. At the time my impetus was little more than a fascination with the strange and offensive.
