White nationalism doesn’t have to be your final destination.

Right now there are people who have been getting addicted to the alt/far right rhetoric and have gotten themselves in over their heads. They think that what they say can’t effect them.

I recently saw a video of a young man in Charlottesville rip his shirt off and claim that he wasn’t actually “white power” and that he just thought he was being “funny”. I get why he did it. Things took a turn in a direction that he wasn’t prepared for. He thought the way he did because he really didn’t understand the community that he is a part of.

I am a former white nationalist. I was one of the co-leaders of Pioneer Little Europe Kalispell in Montana. I was open about it. In general, I kept the things I said on the less derogatory side of things as much as possible. I was fairly successful as an activist and never really had any problems in the local community. That doesn’t say anything negative about that local community, it says more about the ability of some to normalize white nationalism.

I also knew what the white nationalist community was like. I spent lots of my time complaining about the amount of “toxoids” or “toxic people”that were a part of it. I used to say to myself that those were only a “vocal minority” of the movement. In actuality the worst of the worst are the majority. The minority consists of those that are well-meaning individuals that are wearing opaque blinders.

Moving On.

For me, moving on was fairly easy. I already spent as much time raging against my associates as I did those I once considered my enemy. So, I stopped having much to do with the white nationalist movement. At the time I still had roommates that were WN, but I found better things to do with my time. I found better causes to promote.

I started contacting people who had been opponents to let them know that while I have few regrets about the life I had led, I used it as a learning experience to try to be better. I let them know that I would no longer be opposing them.

I went back to college as a non-traditional student. I started at Flathead Valley Community College and then last summer moved to Bozeman to go to Montana State University. I continued to evolve, learn, and grow.

In some cases I also decided to back my former opponents when far worse went after them. An example of that was when the Daily Stormer decided to go after the Jewish community of Whitefish, Montana. I reported to Cloudflare that they had posted an attack on a 12 year old boy. They decided to give DS a heads up and got me attacked in the process. ProPublica did an article about the Cloudflare incident, so that is not something I am going to go into.

It’s a new life.

The point of what I am trying to say to those white nationalists that feel that they are stuck in that life, is that it doesn’t have to be that way. You can change. You can do better with life. All you have to do is seek it out.

Every day that new white nationalist news comes out I realize I made the right choice. When you take your blinders off and see the problems with your old life you will be much happier.

There are times when you need assistance. If that is the case, there are people that you can go to for help. Sometimes that can just be family and/or friends. In other cases, you may need someone like lifeafterhate.org, exitusa.org, and other organizations that help former white nationalists.

In the end, your life is what you make of it. You live, you learn, and you can do better.