Our upgraded new site goes live early next month, I'll make sure to come back and announce when it's up. If you send me an email at dburghart (at) gmail dot com, I'll add you to our email announcement list, too.

Definitely pick up Blood and Politics, it's a great book. As Publishers Weekly noted, “Zeskind’s rigorously researched and eloquent book is a definitive history of white nationalism and contains alarming warnings for a resurgence in racist politics.”

Thanks for the compliments and for your thoughtful reply. I’m very glad we’re having this discussion. You raise some interesting points that I’d like to address more thoroughly. Let’s examine your key quibbles around the economic anxiety thesis, white nationalism and the “fringe,” and concerns about civil rights and civil liberties.

1. Economic Anxiety Thesis

I’d encourage you to read Leonard Zeskind’s book Blood and Politics, so you can get a better look at the mountain of data Zeskind examines when addressing this pivotal question. From examinations of voting patterns where white nationalism has gone mainstream, to a look at white nationalist memberships, etc. the data overwhelmingly indicates little relationship to individual economic circumstance. I certainly don’t think I could do justice to the extremely compelling argument which runs throughout the book by attempting to boil it down to a paragraph or two, so please pick up a copy and take a look.

Moreover, it seems to me that the burden of proof should fall upon on those make the claim that there is a relationship between individual economic anxiety and white nationalism. You’re absolutely right that most people don’t own an appreciable amount of stock and that the national unemployment rate masks a lot of pain, but if we don’t use the unemployment rate or the market as indicators of economic distress, what should we use? Poverty rate? Income level?

The country’s poverty rate dropped to 11.8 percent in 1999, the lowest rate since 1979 and real median household income reached $40,816, the highest level ever recorded (household income data were first recorded in 1967), according to the Census Bureau. The poverty rate for non-Hispanic Whites, 7.7 percent, equaled its measured low reached in 1988-1989 and did not differ from the rates recorded during the 1973-1974 and 1976-1979 periods. Between 1998 and 1999, the number of poor non-Hispanic Whites dropped from 15.8 million to 14.9 million, a decline of 900,000.

The 1999 median income level for the nation's households rose, in real terms, by 2.7 percent, from $39,744 in 1998 to $40,816. The 1999 median income was the highest ever recorded for non-Hispanic White households ($44,366). Based on comparisons of two-year average medians (1997-1998 versus 1998-1999), real median household income did not decline for any state and increased significantly for 14 states, including the heartland states of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.

Further at odds with the “angry white man” thesis is the data showing that the real median earnings of men who worked full time, year-round increased by another 1 percent in 1999. On the other hand, the earnings for comparable women remained statistically unchanged that year (yet we didn’t see a surge in women joining white nationalist groups in 1999).

Let’s recap the economic “anxiety” of 1999: Individual income levels, across the board, up. Poverty rate, down. Unemployment level, down. Market, up. Real earnings (for men), up.

Going back again to burden of proof, where’s the evidence that says that the folks joining white nationalist groups back in 1999 were one’s who’s lives had been disrupted by technology and globalization?

The individual anecdotal evidence clearly points in a different direction. The only “globalization” Benjamin Smith, Buford Furrow, et al. gave a damn about was the international Jewish conspiracy they saw around them. They could care less about disruptions by technology and globalization.

2. The “Fringe” on top.

I’ve very glad to hear that you agree that white supremacist thought is “scarily close, and we need to be vigilant.” But I’m not convinced that the term “fringe” helps describe the problem. Zeskind has a post on contextualizing the white nationalist “numbers” here. As Zeskind notes elsewhere, “Today the white nationalist movement is the motor inside the anti-immigrant movement; and that movement has blocked comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, and it has successfully enacted dozens of draconian measures at the state and local level.”

Indeed, it would be difficult to describe the white nationalist powered anti-immigrant movement as anything but fringe. At the Institute, we presently monitor around 15 different national nativist groups, who have an active donor base of 1,036,741 (down slightly from the 1,111,942 in 2008), and combined budgets of over $15 million. They’ve helped develop nearly 400 state and local groups. And they have unfettered access to the ninety Congresspersons in the House Immigration Reform Caucus (HIRC) and the eight members of the US Senate Border Security Caucus. Does that sound “fringe?”

They’ve prevented comprehensive immigration reform. They’ve even reintroduced legislation to eliminate birthright citizenship, eviscerating the 14th Amendment and cornerstone civil rights protections.

Here’s a quote I like to read during presentations:

"Every new immigrant adds to our crime problems, our welfare rolls and unemployment of American citizens. In two or three years, the majority in our most populous state - California - is expected to be non-white. That's incredible. It is said that whites will eventually become a minority in Texas. New Mexico is literally becoming a new Mexico. We are being invaded in the southwest as if a foreign army were coming over the border ... They're going to take more and more hard-earned money from the productive middle class in the form of taxes and social programs. This massive immigration will change the face of American politics."

OK, who said it? (no fair Googling the answer or reading ahead!). And when did they say it?

At presentations, people almost always guess Lou Dobbs, (former) Rep. Tom Tancredo, Glenn Beck, or some other current politician or pundit. Some guess John Tanton or one of the other nativist leaders. Some get as close as white nationalist standard bearer Pat Buchanan. The answers aren’t surprising, since I could give you a long list of startlingly comparable quotes from those sources.

But it didn’t come from any of them. It came from none other than former Klansman and national socialist David Duke. He didn’t say it recently. In fact, he said it way back in 1981, just a few years after staging the first Klan “border patrols” near San Diego.

I use the quote to help illustrate the white nationalist conveyer belt of ideas. White nationalists have incubated, nurtured, and introduced arguments like these into the mainstream. Ideas that were completely unacceptable three decades ago have become all too commonplace, Immigration is just one of the racially charged issues white nationalists have successfully introduced into the mainstream. Another hot one is “reverse racism” - a term popularized by Duke and his followers decades ago that’s now part of the mainstream conversation around a Supreme Court nominee. We also shouldn’t forget the success they’ve had mainstreaming scientific racism, with the success of works like The Bell Curve.

3. Civil Liberties Concerns

As for your concerns, I, too, am extremely concerned about the protection of civil rights and civil liberties. I am reminded that the corollary to the freedom of expression is the responsibility to speak out against views that are reprehensible. As individuals, and as a movement, I hope we will do this loudly and proudly in the future. I’m not calling for government intervention. As I spelled out in my initial post, there is the need for a sustained movement impulse to tackle head on racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry for what they are -- racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry – not merely the bi-product of economic anxiety.

Such a movement impulse, in civil society, is essential to making a difference before more killers are created. Should we choose not to act, we allow the situation to worsen. If we wait for another long, bloody summer, before taking this problem seriously as a movement, we risk government intervention and more erosion of civil rights.

Thanks again for posing these challenges. I look forward to continuing this very important line of discussion.

Scott Roeder, who is being held in the murder of Dr. George Tiller, has become infamous for his anti-abortion fanaticism. As a result, he’s often thought of as emanating from the so-called right-to-life movement -- which is almost always considered part of the Christian right, motivated by a fundamentalist theology and a literal reading of Biblical scripture. A closer look, however, reveals a much more complex picture.

Lost in the rush to try to explain such a horrific act has been Roeder’s connection to the so-called Christian common law courts and the militia movement. There is also mounting evidence that Roeder may have been influenced by the racist and anti-Semitic theology known as Christian Identity.

In the mid-1990s, Roeder associated regularly with both Kansas militiamen and he declared himself a "sovereign" citizen, immune from the responsibilities of paying taxes or driving with a registered license plate. While active with a group of "Freemen" in Kansas in 1996, Roeder was arrested in Topeka after law enforcement stopped him for not having a license plate. In his car, officers said they found ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder and two 9-volt batteries, with one connected to a switch that could have been used to trigger a bomb.

Judy Thomas, an investigative reporter at the Kansas City Star and co-author of the fantastic Wrath of Angels: the American Abortion War, also discusses Roeder’s involvement in the white nationalist netherworld here and here.

Blood and Politics author, Leonard Zeskind, also has an article more fully answering your question here.

With the institutional backing of The Occidental Quarterly, MacDonald has become a force for anti-Semitism, inside and outside the academy. There’s been plenty written discussing MacDonald’s work elsewhere so I won’t waste a lot of time here on it. The prominence of Kevin MacDonald in white nationalist circles, however, highlights a growing fissure within the movement around the question of anti-Semitism. In Blood and Politics, Zeskind vividly reminds us that the white nationalist movement is not monolithic.

Since the emergence of American Renaissance as the flagship intellectual voice amongst white nationalist mainstreamers in the early 1990s, the “Jewish question” had been in movement stasis. From its first conference in 1994, American Renaissance leader Jared Taylor included Jewish speakers at the biennial event, and there has been a small but consistent presence of Jewish white nationalist activists in the crowd. To protect the peace, Taylor also banned discussion of the “Jewish question” from conferences. Taylor was backed up by widely respected white nationalist philosopher general Sam Francis, who once denounced what he viewed as a “monomaniacal obsession with the omnipotent Jew."

The first blow to the uneasy truce was the death of Francis in 2005. His death created a vacuum that national socialists like David Duke and anti-Semites MacDonald were eager to fill. It didn’t take long for things to completely implode.

As described in The Forward, at the 2006 American Renaissance conference, David Duke seized the opportunity and the microphone to declare to the crowd that, "There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and spirit."

"Tell us, tell us," someone in the back yelled.

"I'm not going to say it," Duke replied. Laughter began to fill the room, until Dr. Michael Hart, leapt from his seat. Hart is a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton and is known in white nationalist circles for his proposal for a racial partition of the United States. He is also Jewish.  Hart stormed up to Duke and began to curse, "You f--king Nazi, you've disgraced this meeting!"

The rift surfaced again in 2007 at a flashy National Press Club tribute to Sam Francis. A day designed to have the white nationalist intelligentsia posthumously praise Francis' intellectual prowess (and promote a new book of his writings to the CSPAN audience) was tarnished thanks to an anti-Semitic monologue.

The Hart-Duke blow-up reverberated throughout the movement, creating a schism forcing most the influential organizations to take sides in the dispute. Earlier this year, Hart and a considerable faction of American Renaissance attendees held their own Preserving Western Civilization conference (which I’ve written about here ).

The conference was an attempt to create a new ideological pole friendlier to Jewish participation, but within the broader white nationalist movement. They would bind Islamophobia and nativism with scientific racism. The proceedings pointed to the direction at least one part of the movement will take in the near future.

It’s too early to tell if this schism will become permanent, or if a new organization rises out of the meeting. We will be watching. It is an important lesson from the pages of Blood and Politics. The white nationalist movement is constantly changing and adapting to conditions - both internal and external.  As we create a movement-wide impulse to tackle bigotry head on, we should also be developing the capacity to quickly identify, adapt, and respond to these changes.