The best article I've read this year

POSTED BY: kpo
UPDATED: Friday, November 4, 2016 01:12
VIEWED: 1674
PAGE 1 of 1

KPO

Thursday, November 3, 2016 4:43 PM

The white flight of Derek Black - https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-derek-blac
k/2016/10/15/ed5f906a-8f3b-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html

"Derek Black, 27, was following in his father’s footsteps as a white nationalist leader until he began to question the movement’s ideology."

Quote:

Their public conference had been interrupted by a demonstration march and a bomb threat, so the white nationalists decided to meet secretly instead. They slipped past police officers and protesters into a hotel in downtown Memphis. The country had elected its first black president just a few days earlier, and now in November 2008, dozens of the world’s most prominent racists wanted to strategize for the years ahead.

“The fight to restore White America begins now,” their agenda read.

The room was filled in part by former heads of the Ku Klux Klan and prominent neo-Nazis, but one of the keynote speeches had been reserved for a Florida community college student who had just turned 19. Derek Black was already hosting his own radio show. He had launched a white nationalist website for children and won a local political election in Florida. “The leading light of our movement,” was how the conference organizer introduced him, and then Derek stepped to the lectern.

“The way ahead is through politics,” he said. “We can infiltrate. We can take the country back.”

Years before Donald Trump launched a presidential campaign based in part on the politics of race and division, a group of avowed white nationalists was working to make his rise possible by pushing its ideology from the radical fringes ever closer to the far conservative right. Many attendees in Memphis had transformed over their careers from Klansmen to white supremacists to self-described “racial realists,” and Derek Black represented another step in that evolution.

He never used racial slurs. He didn’t advocate violence or lawbreaking. He had won a Republican committee seat in Palm Beach County, Fla., where Trump also had a home, without ever mentioning white nationalism, talking instead about the ravages of political correctness, affirmative action and unchecked Hispanic immigration.

He was not only a leader of racial politics but also a product of them. His father, Don Black, had created Stormfront, the Internet’s first and largest white nationalist site, with 300,000 users and counting. His mother, Chloe, had once been married to David Duke, one of the country’s most infamous racial zealots, and Duke had become Derek’s godfather. They had raised Derek at the forefront of the movement, and some white nationalists had begun calling him “the heir.”

Now Derek spoke in Memphis about the future of their ideology. “The Republican Party has to be either demolished or taken over,” he said. “I’m kind of banking on the Republicans staking their claim as the white party.”

A few people in the audience started to clap, and then a few more began to whistle, and before long the whole group was applauding. “Our moment,” Derek said, because at least in this room there was consensus. They believed white nationalism was about to drive a political revolution. They believed, at least for the moment, that Derek would help lead it.

“Years from now, we will look back on this,” he said. “The great intellectual move to save white people started today.”

Eight years later, that future they envisioned in Memphis was finally being realized in the presidential election of 2016. Donald Trump was retweeting white supremacists. Hillary Clinton was making speeches about the rise of white hate and quoting David Duke, who had launched his own campaign for the U.S. Senate.

White nationalism had bullied its way toward the very center of American politics, and yet, one of the people who knew the ideology best was no longer anywhere near that center. Derek had just turned 27, and instead of leading the movement, he was trying to untangle himself not only from the national moment but also from a life he no longer understood.

From the very beginning,

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SECOND

Thursday, November 3, 2016 7:26 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by kpo:

"Derek Black, 27, was following in his father’s footsteps as a white nationalist leader until he began to question the movement’s ideology."

I skipped forward to Derek's extremely slow realization that his father had taught falsehoods to Derek:

But then came the election campaign of 2016, and suddenly the white nationalism Derek had been trying to unlearn was the unavoidable subtext to national debates over refugees, immigration, Black Lives Matter and the election itself. Late in August, Derek watched in his apartment as Hillary Clinton gave a major speech about the rise of racism. She explained how white supremacists had rebranded themselves as white nationalists. She referenced David Duke and mentioned the concept of a “white genocide,” which Derek had once helped popularize. She talked about how Trump had hired a campaign manager with ties to the alt-right. She said: “A fringe movement has essentially taken over the Republican Party.”

It was the very same point Derek had spent so much of his life believing in, but now it made him feel both fearful for the country and implicated. “It’s scary to know that I helped spread this stuff, and now it’s out there.”

I can easily imagine Derek changing back into the person his father created if Derek does not keep a great physical distance from him:

Late this summer, for the first time in years, Derek traveled to Florida to see his parents. At a time of increasingly contentious rhetoric, he wanted to hear what his father had to say. They sat in the house and talked about graduate school and Don’s new German shepherd. But after a while, their conversation turned back to ideology, the topic they had always preferred.

If Derek has a major setback in his present life because of his white supremacist past he could return to that comfortable past where everything was so much simpler and easier to comprehend. And he would be enthusiastically welcomed.

SIGNYM

Thursday, November 3, 2016 8:25 PM

Democrats and Republicans are both the party of stoopid.

Here you are, flogging a non-issue to make your point. "Mexican" isn't a race, and neither is "Hispanic" or "illegal alien".

The non-white immigrants that I know who are who are voting for Trump tend to be well-educated Asian women. Why??? Because THEY think our immigration policy is STOOPID. And it is.

Hillary is a WAR CANDIDATE, and that's just what we need, right? More war?

G, THUGR, MAL4: Oh BTW, please define intelligence.
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SECOND

Friday, November 4, 2016 1:12 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Democrats and Republicans are both the party of stoopid.

Here you are, flogging a non-issue to make your point. "Mexican" isn't a race, and neither is "Hispanic" or "illegal alien".

The non-white immigrants that I know who are who are voting for Trump tend to be well-educated Asian women. Why??? Because THEY think our immigration policy is STOOPID. And it is.

Is there a possibility the Asian women simply told you, a gaijin, they were voting for Trump in order to calm your anxieties without them actually voting for Trump? Yes, there is that possibility. "When talking to gaijin, it is unwise to be too open." I think that is from fortune cookie.

https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-and-the-rise-of-white-identit
y-in-politics-67037
In a study of white Americans’ attitudes and candidate preferences, we found that Trump’s success reflects the rise of “white identity politics” – an attempt to protect the collective interests of white voters via the ballot box. Whereas racial prejudice refers to animosity toward other racial groups, white identity reflects a sense of connection to fellow white Americans.

We’re not the first to tie Trump’s candidacy to white identity politics. But our data provide some of the clearest evidence that ongoing demographic changes in the United States are increasing white racial identity. White identity, in turn, is pushing white Americans to support Trump.