What does White Nationalism really mean?

Maxwell Anderson
Aug 26, 2017 · 9 min read

I hesitate to cover the biggest stories of the moment. One of the reasons I write theWeekend Reader is to fight back against a news cycle that prioritizes the urgent over the important. But some things are both urgent and important, and it’s helpful to get a broader perspective.

So this week is about Charlottesville and what it means about who we are and where we are headed.

Read widely. Read wisely.
- Max


This Week’s Recommended Readings

1. “Southern Comfort”

by James McPherson in (21 min)

“One of the questions in an exam administered to prospective citizens by the US Immigration and Naturalization service is: ‘The Civil War was fought over what important issue?’ [officially] The right answer is either slavery or states’ rights.”

McPherson is one of the most respected Civil War historians of the past fifty years. Here he reviews three books about the competing narratives of why we fought the Civil War. Was it about slavery or state rights? McPherson explains that the states rights argument came into vogue only after the war. “The Lost Cause myth helped Southern whites deal with the shattering reality of catastrophic defeat and impoverishment in a war they had been sure they would win.”

Selection:

“The Confederate vice-president, Alexander H. Stephens, had said in a speech at Savannah on March 21, 1861, that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution” of Southern independence. The United States, said Stephens, had been founded in 1776 on the false idea that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, by contrast, is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

2. “What White Nationalism Gets Right About American History”

By Derek Black in (8 min)

A former white nationalist explains why leaders of the alt-right believe racial separatism is ingrained in the American spirit throughout history.

Selection:

Until Trump’s comments [about Charlottesville], few critics seemed to identify the larger relationship the alt-right sees between its beliefs and the ideals of the American founders. Charlottesville is synonymous with Jefferson.

The city lies at the foot of Monticello and is the home of the University of Virginia, the school he founded…While we all know that Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, which declared that “all men are created equal,” his writings also offer room for explicitly white nationalist interpretation.

My father observed many times that the quotation from Jefferson’s autobiography embedded on the Jefferson Memorial is deceptive because it reads, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these [the Negro] people are to be free.”

It does not include the second half of the sentence: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

3. “The White Flight of Derek Black.”

by Eli Saslow (33 min)

Derek Black is the author of the opinion piece above and this is the story of how he became a leader of the white nationalist movement then rejected its ideology. “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.”

Selection:

Matthew Stevenson had started hosting weekly Shabbat dinners at his campus apartment shortly after enrolling in New College in 2010. He was the only Orthodox Jew at a school with little Jewish infrastructure, so he began cooking for a small group of students at his apartment each Friday night. Matthew always drank from a kiddush cup and said the traditional prayers, but most of his guests were Christian, atheist, black or Hispanic — anyone open-minded enough to listen to a few blessings in Hebrew. Now, in the fall of 2011, Matthew invited Derek to join them.

Matthew had spent a few weeks debating whether it was a good idea. He and Derek had lived near each other in the dorm, but they hadn’t spoken since Derek was exposed on the forum. Matthew, who almost always wore a yarmulke, had experienced enough anti-Semitism in his life to be familiar with the KKK, David Duke and Stormfront. He went back and read some of Derek’s posts on the site from 2007 and 2008: “Jews are NOT white.” “Jews worm their way into power over our society.” “They must go.”

Matthew decided his best chance to affect Derek’s thinking was not to ignore him or confront him, but simply to include him. “Maybe he’d never spent time with a Jewish person before,” Matthew remembered thinking.

4. “After Backing Alt-Right in Charlottesville, A.C.L.U. Wrestles With Its Role”

by Joseph Goldstein in (14 min)

The ACLU has exploded in popularity since the election of President Trump. “Membership in the group has almost quadrupled, and donations online have reached $83 million since the election, when, in a typical period, about $5 million or less might be expected, a spokeswoman for the A.C.L.U., Stacy Sullivan, said.”

“But the group’s defense of the Charlottesville rally has crystallized a recurring challenge for the organization: how to pursue its First Amendment advocacy, even for hate-based groups, without alienating its supporters.”

Some have criticized the group for remaining on the sidelines when conservatives are threatened with limited free speech, but the group defended the demonstrators protesting the removal of the Lee statue in Virginia. That is making many inside the organization feel uncomfortable.

Selection:
The A.C.L.U. has long maintained that defending the First Amendment rights of white supremacists does not only vindicate constitutional rights where they are under attack,The organization’s Virginia affiliate then brought a lawsuit representing a Charlottesville man who was organizing a rally to protest the removal of

but also protects speech rights for all groups. Social justice and equality, the group believes, are best served with more speech, on all sides, and by confronting hateful ideas head-on rather than suppressing them.astatue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The City Council had changed the park’s name from Lee Park to Emancipation Park in June. After initially granting him a permit to hold the rally at the park, the city tried to move it to a larger park, about a mile away.

The A.C.L.U. argued that the rally organizers ought to be able to stage the event at the park associated with Lee — where the symbolism was greatest and the meaning of the rally clearest. The city argued that for safety reasons the protest should be moved to the other site. A federal judge sided with the A.C.L.U.

5. “Tech Censorship of White Supremacists Draws Criticism From Within Industry”

by Yoree Koh in (7 min)

“Over the past week, tech companies including Inc., Inc., and GoFundMe Inc. , overthrowing the image some of the companies convey of being neutral platforms with free-speech principles.”

In this article, Matthew Prince, CEO of web security company Cloudflare, explains both why he made the decision to refuse service to the neo-nazi site Daily Stormer, and the misgivings he has about making such a move.

Selection
The Chief Executive of Cloudflare Inc., one of several internet companies this week to cut ties with Daily Stormer, effectively preventing the neo-Nazi website from appearing on the web, admitted he set a troubling precedent.

“As [an] internet user, I think it’s pretty dangerous if my moral, political or economic whims play some role in deciding who can and cannot be online,” Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare, said in an interview.

Mr. Prince said that while he and Cloudflare employees had long thought of Daily Stormer’s content as “repugnant,” Daily Stormer crossed the line when it claimed that Mr. Prince and others at the company secretly supported its views. Daily Stormer was the first time the company removed a client for reasons other than under court order or for explicit violations of their terms of service.

postscript

Killer Angels is Michael Shaara’s gorgeous historical novel about the battle of Gettysburg. In it, Shaara paints a picture of Robert E. Lee as the most brilliant general on either side of the civil war, maybe the most brilliant in American history. Shaara points out that Lee was offered command of the Union forces but chose to fight for the Confederacy because he couldn’t fight against his home state of Virginia:

“The war had come. He was a member of the army that would march against his home, his sons. He was not only to serve in it but actually to lead it, to make the plans and issue the orders to kill and burn and ruin. He could not do that. Each man would make his own decision, but Lee could not raise his hand against his own.

And so what then? To stand by and watch, observer at the death? To do nothing? To wait until the war was over? And if so, from what vantage point and what distance? How far do you stand from the attack on your home, whatever the cause, so that you can bear it? It had nothing to do with causes; it was no longer a matter of vows.”

Shaara portrays Lee as an honorable man stuck between a rock and a hard place. Is the portrait accurate? I can’t say definitively, but even if it is, it doesn’t explain the motivations of the protestors in Charlottesville. They weren’t chanting in support of someone who had moral courage in an ethically ambiguous situation. They were chanting that Jews should be expelled from the United States.


Stephen Colbert had one of the best takes on Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville:
“I have seen angrier Yelp reviews. And they weren’t afraid to use the word ‘Nazi’ when they complained about how long their jalapeño poppers took.”

“If only the president was as mad about neo-Nazis murdering people in the streets as he’s been about , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and .”

I laughed when I read this, but as I clicked through to the various tweets, my smile faded. What a tremendous failure of leadership. This was a moment when the nation needed a president to be clear about the values we need to stand up for in our society. At this point I’m not surprised that Trump failed to deliver moral leadership. That’s what I’ve come to expect. But I just feel sad that this is my expectation. We deserve better.


One of the more important questions arising in the wake of Charlottesville is who decides what speech is protected. In particular, what role does Silicon Valley play? Google and Facebook, in particular, have broad power to influence which voices are heard and which are silenced. They abdicated responsibility for dealing with fake news in the election, but are taking an active role this week.

How much power should we cede to these private companies for determining what speech is permitted?

AirBnB connected to the Charllotesville rally. PayPal of white separatist leader Richard Spencer. Even the ethically bankrupt of banning white supremacists from its service.

Companies that don’t take these stands will face social media pressure. Some will argue that businesses have an obligation to their shareholders not to take political stands. Others will argue that these stands are so popular that not taking them will hurt shareholder value more.

It’s easy for many people to feel comfortable with Silicon Valley censoring speech when it comes to neo-nazis. But how far might these new editorial powers stretch? As far as the market allows? Or maybe just as far as the courts allow. Many less radical conservatives fear that they will be unfairly lumped in with the alt-right for holding views about topics like abortion and marriage that don’t fit within the Silicon Valley ethos. They point to former Mozilla CEO Brendan from his job after it was discovered that he donated a thousand dollars to the campaign for Proposition 8 in California to prevent gay marriage. What, critics argue, do his private political views have to do with his ability to run a company? On the other side, gay marriage advocates argue that keeping him would be akin to keeping a white nationalist as CEO.

Every leader is choosing how to respond to the events of our day. Businesses are not morally neutral. Not doing anything is in itself a philosophical and ethical act. Leaders need to think deeply about the consequences of wading into these waters and what their roles are as stewards of great cultural power.

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THE WEEKEND READER

READ WIDELY. READ WISELY. The Weekend Reader explores technology, culture and the meaningful life in the modern world. I share the most valuable writing from multiple sources to explore the ideas and trends shaping our world.

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Maxwell Anderson

Written by

I publish The Weekend Reader. Subscribe at www.maxwella.com I’m also a founding partner of www.saturnfive.com.

THE WEEKEND READER

READ WIDELY. READ WISELY. The Weekend Reader explores technology, culture and the meaningful life in the modern world. I share the most valuable writing from multiple sources to explore the ideas and trends shaping our world.

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