A Little Backstory

Please bear with me as you read over this. This story will be long and complex with most likely quite a few tangential twists, turns, back-tracking and chronological breaks. Basically, it will be poorly written, at best. But, with any luck, I’ll figure out a way to bring it all around into something resembling a coherent story. I have chosen to publish this information because I feel like it is the first step in building trust in a community that I do not deserve and ounce of trust from; a community that, for the past decade, I have waged ideological war against only to my own detriment. Hopefully I will be able to make amends with the people I’ve hurt with my words and actions so that they and I can move on with our lives and maybe, just maybe, I can do my part in moving mankind forward towards peace.

This is me, starting over.

I grew up in a conservative, protestant household in rural South Carolina. My parents did a great job at raising me and had nothing to do with the views I would one day come to adopt, however. Though, given the region’s notoriety for espousing at least some implicit racism, I grew up believing that it was just something everyone believed in and it never really caused me any problems. Everyone “stuck to their own” out of habit, formed over decades of a traditional outlook that saw the various races of humankind as inherently different and therefore separate. By most people’s standards, I was mostly isolated from the world. My family owned a ranch and when I wasn’t at school, I was working on the ranch for my grandfather. I was, needless to say, not exposed to many new or different ideas. That would come later when I joined the military.

Due to the circumstances surrounding my birth date and the state’s age requirements for starting school, I entered elementary school a year earlier than my classmates, and due to that I graduated at 17. I got along great with pretty much everyone, experiencing much the same as any regular high school student. I joined NJROTC my freshman year and by the time I was a senior, I was the cadet commander of my unit. This is what got me interested in joining the military. After graduation, my parents signed a waiver and I was allowed to join the Marine Corps. I left for basic training in August of 2000. While I was in the Marine Corps, I developed a strong sense of belonging. It wasn’t just a group of loosely organized men and women doing a 9-to-5 job Monday through Friday. It was a family with a camaraderie that is difficult for other organizations to match outside of the military. When I got out, I lost that familial bond and it created a void that I couldn’t fill. I was honorably discharged in 2005 and left to make my career as a software developer.

The reader might be surprised to know that about half way through my Marine Corps enlistment, I actually joined the Communist Party USA. As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t grow up in what anyone would consider a “wordly” environment but I was a naturally curious person. I joined up with a group of other service members that I was drawn to because they had such radically different ideas than those I grew up with and had hitherto known. They were knowledgeable on such things as politics, economics, history, etc. and I couldn’t get enough of it. Pretty soon I found myself reading the works of Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Howard Zinn and many others like them. Despite reading mostly anarchist material, I didn’t become an anarchist at that time. It just seemed a bit too far-fetched to become reality. Ultimately, I came upon the Communist Manifesto and I was immediately hooked. I started reading everything I could about and by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. I wanted to know everything there was to know about Communist movements and efforts around the world as well as the Russian Revolution. Communism, as opposed to anarchism, seemed to me that it was a possible solution to the Capitalist problem and so I dedicated myself to it, joined the Communist Party and even began my own weekly newsletter I called “Propaganda Machine.” Looking back, it was kind of silly. I wasn’t really making any new arguments in that newsletter, but it was a genuine effort and a learning exercise for me.

While I didn’t know it yet, my joining the CPUSA was the first step in developing my own long-held belief that, if you’re genuinely interested in something (a political organization, for example) and want to know as much as possible about it, you shouldn’t just read about it, but instead you should perhaps join it, participate in it, get to know the people involved, and learn as much as possible from that immersive experience. This personal practice is, unfortunately, was led me down a long and dark path. I should say that I do not endorse this practice anymore. Trust me, it’ll get you into trouble somewhere down the line.

As with everything I seem to start, mainly due to my inherent curiosity and wont for new information, I eventually suffered from burnout with regard to my studies into Socialism and Communism. While my sympathies for, and ideas regarding, Communism didn’t die, my interest in studying and activism did.

I relegated myself to just reading books on generally leftist ideas and after about a year my “burnt out” phase had ended and I began becoming more interested again. This time, though, I was more interested in learning more about Anarchism. I went back to Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. From there I branched out into other popular anarchist thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and PJ Proudhon. In no time at all I was ready to get back into the fold. This time, though, I wanted to actually do some real-life activism.

I started by joining online anarchist forums to see if I could find people in my area. I was then living in San Antonio, Texas so it wasn’t difficult to find people. One morning I logged on to find that I had a message from someone interested in starting up a local anarchist meetup group. We spoke on the phone, met at a coffee shop downtown, and soon after our group was born. We dubbed the group “Alamo Rising.” The next weekend we were printing and posting flyers downtown and on college campuses. Although we didn’t have much success, we did end up with a handful of people who would join us at times to post flyers and/or sit around discussing ideas and anarchist literature and theory.

However, I didn’t learn my lesson from my first foray into political and social struggle. I went into it full-blast and didn’t give myself any breaks. My interest in meeting up with the group began to wane and soon I was back to just sitting at my computer reading over leftist forums or books I’d read hundreds of times before. This time my sabbatical from activism lasted a little longer than the first time. I had two kids already and the pressures of raising children, being a husband, and the constant challenges of my day job were enough to keep me away.

Then along comes Barack Obama. He announced his bid for President of the United States in February of 2007. I can remember thinking that this junior senator had absolutely no chance of becoming president due not only to his lack of experience in politics, but also because he was a black man in a mostly White nation. I remember saying to my wife, “There’s absolutely no way a black man can become president. But, if it happens, it would be about damned time.”

Little did I know that President Obama’s bid for, and eventual election to, the Presidency would be the gateway that would lead me into the White Nationalist movement.