Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Term Analysis

No family had done more to help white nationalism bully its way back into mainstream politics, and Derek was the next step in that evolution. He was precocious, thoughtful, and polite, sometimes delivering handwritten thank-you notes to conference volunteers. He never used racist slurs. He didn’t advocate for outright violence or breaking the law. His core beliefs were the same as those of most white nationalists: that America would be better off as a whites-only country, and that all minorities should eventually be forced to leave. But instead of basing his public arguments on emotion or explicit prejudice, he spoke mostly about what he believed to be the facts of racial science, immigration, and a declining white middle class.

As Derek explained it to his listeners, white nationalists were not fighting against minority rights but fighting for rights of their own. As the white population in the United States continued to drop, Derek and other activists were “simply trying to protect and preserve an endangered heritage and culture,” he said. They were trying to save whites from an “inevitable genocide by mass immigration and forced assimilation.” Theirs was the righteous cause. They were the social justice warriors. “What’s happening right now is a genocide of our people, plain and simple,” Derek said. “We are Europeans. We have a right to exist. We will not be replaced in our own country.”

During the coming months, Don and Derek would watch as white nationalism continued to explode into mainstream politics. There would be fights over the destruction of Confederate monuments, followed by a succession of marches and rallies led by white nationalists throughout the South. One of those marches would arrive in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, where Richard Spencer, David Duke, and hundreds of neo-Nazis would carry guns and torches into downtown, threatening counterprotesters with chants of “White lives matter” and “You will not replace us,” until one neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd, killing one counterprotester and injuring nineteen others. Trump would go on national TV to explain away the violence by blaming “both sides”—what he called the “alt-left” and also “the good people” on the “alt-right”—creating a moral equivalency between racists and antiracists. Don would call Trump’s comments “the high point” of white nationalism during his lifetime. Derek would write another opinion piece for The New York Times to say that Trump’s “frightening statement” had “legitimized” a racist ideology. Don would watch Stormfront's traffic triple overnight, spiking to 300,000 daily page views, signifying what he called the “full awakening of our people.”