The History of White Supremacy in America

The Charlottesville marchers have roots that go deep in the nation's history and its present

 The angry men marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend seemed alien to many Americans. They shouted "Blood and Soil," imitating the Nazi slogan "Blut and Boden" – meaning that the blood must be racially pure, and the land must belong to the racially pure. For these new American Nazis, the enemies are the black and brown people supposedly destroying their pure white United States. The marchers chanted, "Jews will not replace us," echoing Hitler's paranoid fear of Jews as the ultimate enemy.

Although they may seem a bizarre throwback to brown-shirted, goose-stepping stormtroopers of 1930s Germany, these men – and they were nearly all men – have roots that go deep in American history and America's present. They are also some of Trump's biggest fans. David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, said the marchers were there to "fulfill the promises of Donald Trump" to "take our country back." Others in Charlottesville found Trump too moderate. Vice News filmed one rally speaker named Christopher Cantwell arguing he'd prefer a president who's "a lot more racist than Donald Trump," someone who would not "give his daughter to a Jew."
This is the new face of white supremacy in the United States. It goes beyond the systemic racism minorities in America have long faced and continue to face. White supremacists dream of a world in which minorities are either subservient or nonexistent. Below is a brief history of some of how today's white supremacist movement came to be.
The nation's founding and mainstream white supremacyArticle I of the Constitution says slaves are three-fifths of a person, and Article IV requires states to return runaway slaves. The United States was founded on white supremacy.
The Civil War ended legal white supremacy, but it continued to be enforced by Southern leaders and white militant groups, most famously the KKK. Black people were kept under control by extralegal violence, including lynchings.
With the reimposition of white supremacy in the South, the original Klan faded away. In the early 20th century, however, it was reborn as a Protestant nativist movement. The new KKK was anti-black but also targeted Catholics and Jews, part of a long anti-immigrant tradition in America. The second Klan was a fad that attracted millions of supporters and then rapidly faded away in the 1930s.
The third Klan rose during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s. Whites, angry at attempts to end segregation, again put on white hoods and joined local officials – often they were the local officials – in attacking Civil Rights workers. Blacks and whites were targeted for beatings, bombings and assassination. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 put the final legal nails in segregation. Support for the Klan dwindled.


White supremacy goes undergroundThe legal defeat of segregation did not, however, end white dreams of supremacy. Instead, angry white supremacists, no longer part of the mainstream, splintered into numerous underground racist organizations. Many of these groups borrowed ideas from the Nazis, creating a new kind of white opposition. These movements also spread out from the South, reaching every part of the United States.
An inspirational guru for this new white opposition was Wesley Swift, a former Methodist. Swift founded a church in the 1940s that preached a gospel of white superiority. He called his twisted version of Christianity "The Church of Jesus Christ, Christian," and preached that only white Europeans were blessed by God. He was particularly hostile to the Jews, borrowing from Nazi anti-Semitism.
One fan of Swift's was William Potter Gale, a World War II veteran, who was outraged at the federal government's interventions on behalf of the Civil Rights Movement. Gale formed his own "United States Christian Posse Association," later known as "Posse Comitatus" (Latin for "force of the county"). Gale argued that the federal government had overstepped its legal bounds. It had no right to use troops to protect black students during integration efforts, no right to collect income taxes and no right to run a Federal Reserve. Essentially, he said, the U.S. government was an illegitimate entity and its orders and officials could be opposed, with violence if necessary. The people had the right to form their own armed posses to oppose the federal government. This view became accepted among far-right groups and helps to explain their repeated clashes with federal and state authorities.
Gale was also violently anti-Semitic (quoted here in Daniel Levitas' The Terrorist Next Door):
"You're damn right I'm teaching violence! You better start making dossiers, names, addresses, phone numbers, car license numbers, on every damn Jew rabbi in this land ... and you better start doing it now. And know where he is. If you have to be told any more than that, you're too damn dumb to bother with."
In the 1970s and '80s, Posse Comitatus established chapters across the country, especially in places where an economic slump had led to farm foreclosures and desperate farmers.
Richard Girnt Butler was an associate of both Swift and Gale. On Swift's death, he took over his church and moved it to Idaho. There, he created a new organization, the Aryan Nations. Butler was even more anti-Semitic than Gale. He preached that the United States was being controlled by Jews and that it was the duty of all white Christians to fight against this oppressive force. Butler held annual meetings for Aryan Nations members and like-minded groups. Hundreds of racists would show up at the Aryan Nations compound for these conventions to discuss tactics and feed each other's hatreds.
Fear of the Jewish threatA group with a similar mindset was the National Alliance, founded in 1974 by William Pierce, a former physics teacher. Pierce had been an associate of George Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, before Rockwell was assassinated in 1967, and shared Rockwell's anti-Semitism and his belief in the superiority of an American Aryan (white) nation. Under Pierce's leadership, the National Alliance gained an active membership of more than 1,000 people and became one of the nation's most successful far-right organizations.


In 1978, Pierce, writing under the pen name Andrew Macdonald, put out The Turner Diaries, a badly written racist novel that imagined the violent overthrow of the U.S. government by white militants. The United States, as depicted by Pierce, was controlled by a Jewish elite, who used blacks as their tools. In the book, the evil federal government orders all guns confiscated. White patriots fight back in an uprising that begins with the bombing of the FBI headquarters in Washington – a scene would become the model for Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995.
The themes in Pierce's book crop up again and again in far-right groups then and now. They shared a fear of a United States government bent on total control of society – a government controlled by Jews. They coined a nickname for the federal government: the Zionist Occupational Government, or ZOG. They also shared Pierce's fear that the government would take away their guns. This was also a fear spread by the more mainstream National Rifle Association – a group that had been a relatively boring advocate for hunters' rights for most of its history until it became radicalized after an internal shakeup in 1977.
Linked by their paranoia about government power, the far-right fringe shared a hostility towards all non-whites. They often expressed admiration for the ideas of Adolf Hitler, the hero of racists everywhere. They wanted to protect the power and the purity of the white race. They saw themselves as under attack by waves of "mud people" (Mexicans, Asians, blacks). The Jews were behind it all.
Violence defines the far rightAlong with preaching white supremacist ideas, the far right has been incredibly violent. One of the perversities of American history is that there has been more fear of the left (the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground) than the far more violent right (the Order, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Militia movement). From the assassination of radio host Alan Berg to the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 innocents, the right is more willing to use violence, and more murderous when they do so. Recent right-wing mass murder episodes include Wade Michael Page's 2012 attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, which killed six; Frazier Glen Miller's 2014 targeting of Jewish community center in Kansas, which killed three; and Jared and Amanda Miller's 2014 murder spree in Las Vegas, which killed five (including themselves).
And then there's Dylann Roof's 2015 murder of nine black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof was an avowed white supremacist who posted pictures of himself posing with Confederate flags and guns and burning an American flag. Reportedly his last words to his victims were, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."


White supremacy todayToday's white supremacists are splintered into dozens of groups with similar ideologies. There is a lot of crossover between these groups, with people moving back and forth between them. There are the neo-Nazis, who use websites like Stormfront and the Daily Stormer to coordinate their activities. Then there are the slightly more mainstream white nationalists who call for the creation of an ethnically pure white state (an "ethno-state") and the neo-Confederates who do the same but with an added dash of pre-Civil War nostalgia. The Klan still exists, of course, with splinter factions around the country.
Then there's the modern alt-right, a term coined by white nationalist Richard Spencer. They tend to be younger and snarkier than those in the older movements. They are particularly offended by what they see as excessive political correctness. They share contempt for mainstream liberals, feminists, "social justice warriors" and immigrants. There is no one alt-right organization, but they tend to gather on platforms like 4chan or the The_Donald (a pro-Trump subreddit). Some of the alt-right came out of the misogynistic Gamergate mess, while others got their start with the Red Pill, a subreddit devoted to pure misogyny. (The "Red Pill" refers to the scene in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves takes the red pill and discovers what the world is really about.) Some take on cute names like the Proud Boys (created by Gavin McInnes, a hipster co-founder of Vice Media) and the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights.
Even more mainstream is Breitbart, the right-wing political site. Steven Bannon, when he ran Breitbart, proudly claimed it was the platform of the alt-right, and right-wing gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos once wrote a long, gushing profile of the alt-right in the publication. Bannon, who was until Friday President Trump's chief strategy adviser, has claimed to reject the ethno-nationalism of the alt-right, and instead calls himself an economic nationalist. He's also, however, a fan of a rabidly racist 1973 book called The Camp of the Saints, which portrays a white world overwhelmed by a horde of brown and black people.
There is a sad mix of paranoia and inferiority in all these supposedly superior white people. They claim they are the real victims in America – they are the ones who face real racism. Stormfront's website cries out, "We are the voice of the new, embattled White minority!" They portray themselves as warriors, but when they are attacked, they are shocked, hurt, afraid. After Richard Spencer was punched while doing a TV interview on Trump's Inauguration Day, he complained to CNN, "It was absolutely terrible. I've certainly never had this happen before, a sucker punch in broad daylight."
Jason Kessler, the petty criminal and wanna-be nationalist leader who helped to organize the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, gave a press conference Sunday, the day after Heather Heyer was killed, to complain about how the right was being mistreated. "It really is a sad day in our constitutional democracy when we are not able to have civil liberties like the First Amendment," he said. "That's what leads to rational discussion, and ideas breaking down, and people resorting to violence." Then he fled, as a heckler ran up to punch him.

Why Trump Can't Quit the Alt-Right

In the wake of Charlottesville, Donald Trump clings to the only constituency he has left

 Well, it's over now – right? He may have three and a half years left in office, but Donald Trump is finished. The Charlottesville tragedy was the final stake through the Grinch-heart of his presidency. If he didn't deserve it so enormously much, it would be sad.

The presidency of Donald Trump has already seen mass dismissals, felony accusations, a key adviser raided by the FBI, a press chief accusing a fellow official of auto-fellatio, a preschool version of a nuclear stare-down with North Korea, and countless other fiascoes and indignities. But a rampage of misjudgment and anti-leadership starting on August 12th, 2017, was a clear nadir.
It began that Saturday morning. After torch-bearing neo-Nazis stormed a postcard-perfect Virginia university town, and the life of a young woman was snuffed out by a vehicular terrorist, Trump – the same man who couldn't shut up during the campaign, tweeting at all hours like a friendless coke addict, notably berating Barack Obama for failing to identify terrorism by name – suddenly lost the power of speech.
When he finally did make a statement, it was only to issue a preposterous parody of presidential evenhandedness, decrying bigotry and violence "on many sides." Those three words instantly set a new standard for Trump-iniquity. The president of the United States had announced he was so insecure, so politically alone, that he couldn't even disavow people making Hitler salutes in broad daylight. For a normal politician, the calculus is simple: Don't hug Nazis. It's on page one of Presidenting for Dummies. But Trump's narcissism is so malignant that it alters basic equations. The president seemed paralyzed by the fact that some of the Charlottesville protesters wore MAGA hats, an indemnifying variable in Trump-math: "They like me, therefore they are me. And me can't be all bad – even if me is a Nazi."
Trump is not just the first president in history to flunk the Don't Hug Nazis rule, he may be the first one to have a chief strategist stroll him through the Rose Garden on the way. Former Breitbart chief and bestubbled alt-right Pope Steve Bannon, one of the few people to whom Trump listens before he tweets, reportedly consulted with Trump repeatedly over that weekend. Bannon, finally ousted six days after the Charlottesville tragedy, is said to have generally urged Trump to not criticize the alt-right too strongly, for fear of alienating Trump's core supporters.
White-supremacist nitwits of the type that came to Charlottesville – so dumb that some came flying a Detroit Red Wings logo, because they couldn't be bothered to design their own swastika – may be the only thing Trump has left resembling a base of support. Similar to his financial empire, every other part of his political coalition was either borrowed, temporary, inherited or acquired by fraud. And the notes are all coming due.
The mainstream GOP, whose institutional machinery Trump appropriated just long enough to win a national election, is long gone as an ally, its officials now fleeing the administration at top speed. The executive agencies, particularly the security services, are in open rebellion, leaking to newspapers every move the Trumps and their surrogates make. There's no analog to this situation in American history – a presidential administration under prolonged siege by its own Cabinet agencies.
Trump's presidency looked like it would be reduced to a Gilligan's Island of family members, in-laws, the white-power Rasputin Bannon, hired help like John Kelly, and whatever soon-to-be-disbarred lawyers they've been able to find to rack up billable hours stalling the boss's multitudinous criminal and civil messes. He has virtually no political help anywhere outside the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
In the wake of his "many sides" comments and as his approval numbers cratered to 34 percent, you could almost hear the shrieking of the rats as they abandoned ship – desperately trying to untether themselves from the Charlottesville white-power freaks, who were yanking them all at light speed down the anus of history. The onetime master of media manipulation was in free-fall, and even with the vast powers of the presidency at his disposal, he seemingly had no way to turn the situation around.

President Donald Trump addressed the nation again on Monday to condemn all those involved in the weekends heinous attacks and to assure that "justice will be served."

We forget now, because the 2016 presidential race seems like a thousand years ago, but candidate Donald Trump once specialized in moments like these. They were what made him. Thorny racial controversies, along with tasteless responses to the same, were Trump's secret weapon.
Trump won the hardcore race nuts over on Day One of his campaign with his 4chan-worthy "they're rapists" speech and his accompanying Mexican-wall idea, an alt-right centerfold fantasy if there ever was one. He then spent the rest of the campaign cleverly leveraging that single tumor of intractable support all the way to the presidency. Whether it was the symbolic booting of anchorman Jorge Ramos off the lawn of his press conference ("Go back to Univision!") or his attacks on Mexican-American Judge Gonzalo Curiel, Trump specialized in using racial dynamite as a marketing tool.
For two years, whenever the press corps charged at him like rhinos, hurling accusations of insensitivity and demanding apologies, candidate Trump would say … something, the wrong thing, inevitably, but he was usually gaming the news cycle to come out ahead in the end. Selective silence was a key weapon. At times, Blabberguts would hold his tongue or plead ignorance. The most infamous instance was after Klan leader David Duke pledged his support to Trump early in 2016, and a deadpan Trump pretended not to know what white supremacists or the KKK were.
"I don't know what you're even talking about with 'white supremacy' or 'white supremacists,' " he croaked to CNN's incredulous Jake Tapper. He promised to "do research" and get back to us.
This was despite the fact that he had gone on TV to denounce "David Duke ... a bigot, a racist" way back in 2000. Trump knew exactly who Duke and the Klan were – and knew exactly what he was doing by saying he didn't.
Crucially, and this part of the record often gets overlooked, Trump would usually come around and push the conventional kumbaya take in subsequent media appearances, disavowing whatever horrible thing he just said 10 minutes before. It was a triple game. The initial hesitations and defiance reinforced his hero status with the outright race nuts, who caught his not-so-subtle signals of solidarity. Then, the belated denunciations and/or apologies reassured the merely closeted racist Republicans, a far more numerous group that didn't like to think of itself as openly prejudiced.
And in the final stage, when he'd throw up his hands like a victim and say things like, "How many times do I have to reject or disavow?" he'd turn the issue all the way around. Each episode became a story not about Trump's attitudes, but about liberal-media unfairness and bias. This endeared him to an even wider range of conservatives who may not have even heard the beginning of the story, but certainly hated the press enough.
All of these behaviors created an air of mystery around Trump. Was this strategy or pathology? Was he smart enough to play heel and statesman in the same breath as a strategic ploy, or was that just a disorganized brain doing its natural tumble? Trump hyped this question like the reality star he was: Tune in next week to find out just how insane or dangerous I really am!
Even reporters who followed him daily weren't sure: Who was he? A not-so-secret white supremacist who kept a book of Hitler speeches by his bedside, or a secret liberal who once donated to the Clintons, favored universal health care, and even said he was "totally pro-choice"? Or was he just a self-obsessed attention hog with a 24-hour boner who didn't know what he was doing from minute to minute? Trump encouraged all of these legends.
In two-plus years now of facile Hitler comparisons, this is the one area where the Reich analogy consistently holds true. Trump, like the Austrian monster, rose to power using what Explaining Hitler author Ron Rosenbaum called the "secret technique." He continually keeps enemies off-balance by alternately playing the menace and the raving buffoon.
On the way up, he convinced enough smart people to not take him seriously that by the time reality set in, he was already sitting on their throats. And when Trump took power, he brought with him a cadre of self-professed race warriors like Bannon and Muslim-basher Sebastian Gorka, seemingly answering the question about who Trump "really" was underneath.


The "secret technique" never failed Trump as a candidate. But the buffoon act hasn't worked in office, leaving him cut off and in a psychological tailspin. Being alone and despised in the pressure cooker of the presidency seems to be driving Trump quite mad, if his response to Charlottesville is any indication.
The fallout from Virginia played out much like every other major Trump controversy. He started with a trademark stretch of ignominious silence, then moved on to a monstrous and indefensible public statement. Then his surrogates said the obvious things Trump himself was not yet ready to say. National Security adviser H.R. McMaster called the vehicular attack by 20-year-old neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. that killed counterprotester Heather Heyer "terrorism," and daughter Ivanka, supposedly the administration's secret human being, needed a whole day before she was able to say there was "no place ... for racism, white supremacy and neo-Nazis." Finally, on Monday, August 14th, two days after the incident, Trump himself said "racism is evil" and added that "the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists" were "criminals and thugs." But by the next day, he was back on the offensive in a wild-eyed impromptu presser at his Saddamoid Trump Tower that may go down as his Beautiful Mind break-from-reality moment.
He went to the lobby to face a phalanx of buzzing reporters, angrily barking back all those begrudging by-rote remarks he'd just made about the wrongness of bigots and racism. As he spoke, he was flanked by National Economic Council chair Gary Cohn, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao – two Jews and an Asian-American woman, who all looked like they were ready to swallow their own faces the moment Trump began to speak. Former Goldman honcho Cohn must have been dreaming of the salad days when he was merely the globally despised co-head of the world's most infamous investment bank. What impelled these people to stand by Trump at this moment will be a thrilling mystery for future historians to unravel.

President Donald Trump calls those protestors attacking white supremacist hate groups the "alt-left."

Trump opened by blasting the "alt-left" for coming to the rally "with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs." He then drifted into a freewheeling rant about the removal of statues of figures like Robert E. Lee. "George Washington was a slave-owner," he complained. "Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?" He shook his head, adding, "You really do have to ask yourself: Where does it stop?" He then pulled out a line that might have been straight from a Stormfront editorial. "You're changing history, you're changing culture," he said, hurling log after log on the bonfire of his credibility. Nothing like this had ever been seen before. It was the presidential equivalent of a run on the bank, an instant mass liquidation of political capital.
When it was done, stunned reporters watched as Trump retreated from view, presumably to plot his next mistake. The whole cycle was classic Trump: offend, deflect, reverse course, deny, counter-accuse, re-offend, re-ignite. Arguments about one set of remarks turn into interminable arguments about even worse sets of counter-remarks. Life in the Trump era is like the president's favorite medium, Twitter: an endless scroll of half-connected little anger Chiclets rapidly spinning us all into madness and conflict, with no end in sight.
This is Trump's legacy. Because of his total inability to concentrate or lead, he will likely never do anything meaningful with the real governmental power he possesses – if he had a tenth of the managerial skills of Hitler, we'd be in impossibly deep shit right now. But as an enabler of behavior, as a stoker of arguments and hardener of resentments, he has no equal. Under Trump, racists become more racist, the woke necessarily become more woke, and areas of compromise among all quickly dwindle and disappear. He has us arguing about things that weren't even questions a few minutes ago, like, are Nazis bad?

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion … People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love … For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite

One of the difficult but primary duties of the modern presidency is to speak for the nation in times of tragedy. A space shuttle explodes. An elementary school is attacked. The twin towers come down in a heap of ash and twisted steel. It falls to the president to express something of the nation’s soul — grief for the lost, sympathy for the suffering, moral clarity in the midst of confusion, confidence in the unknowable purposes of God.
Not every president does this equally well. But none have been incapable. Until Donald Trump.
Trump’s reaction to events in Charlottesville was alternately trite (“come together as one”), infantile (“very, very sad”) and meaningless (“we want to study it”). “There are so many great things happening in our country,” he said, on a day when racial violence took a life.

At one level, this is the natural result of defining authenticity as spontaneity. Trump and his people did not believe the moment worthy of rhetorical craft, worthy of serious thought. The president is confident that his lazy musings are equal to history. They are not. They are babble in the face of tragedy. They are an embarrassment and disservice to the country.
The president’s remarks also represent a failure of historical imagination. The flash point in Charlottesville was the history of the Civil War. Cities around the country are struggling with the carved-stone legacy of past battles and leaders. The oppression and trauma that led to Appomattox did not end there. Ghosts still deploy on these battlefields. And the casualties continue.

But Trump could offer no context for this latest conflict. No inspiring ideals from the author of the Declaration of Independence, who called Charlottesville home. No healing words from the president who was killed by a white supremacist. By his flat, foolish utterance, Trump proved once again that he has no place in the company of these leaders.
Ultimately this was not merely the failure of rhetoric or context, but of moral judgment. The president could not bring himself initially to directly acknowledge the victims or distinguish between the instigators and the dead. He could not focus on the provocations of the side marching under a Nazi flag. Is this because he did not want to repudiate some of his strongest supporters? This would indicate that Trump views loyalty to himself as mitigation for nearly any crime or prejudice. Or is the president truly convinced of the moral equivalence of the sides in Charlottesville? This is to diagnose an ethical sickness for which there is no cure.
There is no denying that Trump has used dehumanization — refugees are “animals,” Mexican migrants are “rapists,” Muslims are threats — as a political tool. And there is no denying that hateful political rhetoric can give permission for prejudice. “It acts as a psychological lubricant,” says David Livingstone Smith, “dissolving our inhibitions and inflaming destructive passions. As such, it empowers us to perform acts that would, under normal circumstances, be unthinkable.”
If great words can heal and inspire, base words can corrupt. Trump has been delivering the poison of prejudice in small but increasing doses. In Charlottesville, the effect became fully evident. And the president had no intention of decisively repudiating his work.
What do we do with a president who is incapable or unwilling to perform his basic duties? What do we do when he is incapable of outrage at outrageous things? What do we do with a president who provides barely veiled cover for the darkest instincts of the human heart? These questions lead to the dead end of political realism — a hopeless recognition of limited options. But the questions intensify.