5 Things podcast: White nationalism is surging. How can it be stopped?

On Sunday's episode of the 5 Things podcast: The rise of white nationalism has become a growing global concern. Earlier this year, three people were gunned down by a white supremacist in Jacksonville, Florida. In Germany, a youth group tied to one of their national parties – with members as young as 14 – was just branded as extremist. Why is white nationalism on the rise and what can be done to stop it? Kathleen Belew, an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, is an expert on the history of the white power movement and joins the podcast to discuss what people should know about this disturbing trend.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to 5 Things. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, October 8th, 2023.

The rise of white nationalism has become a growing global concern. Earlier this year, Germany branded a youth group tied to one of their national parties with members as young as 14 as extremists, one of the first to be branded that way since the end of Germany's Nazi era. Closer to home in Jacksonville, Florida, recently three people were gunned down by a white supremacist, a man who authorities say admitted to hating Black people. Why is white nationalism on the rise and what can be done to stem it? Here to discuss white nationalism is Kathleen Belew, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, and an expert on the history of the white power movement. Kathleen, thank you for joining us.

Kathleen Belew:

Thank you for having me.

Dana Taylor:

So, are the terms white supremacy and white nationalism interchangeable? How are they defined?

Kathleen Belew:

So it's helpful to think about white supremacy as a broad and systemic web of inequality. In other words, the systems and beliefs that prevent equal outcomes on the basis of race in our country. Some of these have to do with individual belief, someone who is white supremacist, someone who believes that white people are better than non-white people for any number of reasons, but a lot of them are not to do with belief, and here we could think about incarceration rates, medical outcomes, jury outcomes. There's a number of measures in our society where we see statistical differences based on race. That big web is white supremacy.

Then within this belief space, when we're talking about white power groups and white nationalist groups, we're talking about not only people who believe in the supremacy of white people who outright say that they are racist in many cases, but people who are often willing to take violent action to do what they see as defending the white race. White nationalism tends to exist in a more political space. I think white power is the best moniker for a lot of this activity because it correctly conveys the revolutionary intent of these groups.

Dana Taylor:

So when we look at the shooting that recently happened in Jacksonville, a lot of the narratives out there refer to the shooter as a lone wolf, but these kinds of incidents are on the rise across the country. How do we shift the discussion to talk about the shooter as part of a violent and disturbing pact instead of just a lone wolf?

Kathleen Belew:

The phrase lone wolf was popularized by the white power movement precisely to divert our attention away from combating it. That happened in the early 1980s along a strategy called leaderless resistance, which is effectively cell style terrorism. There are leaders in leaderless resistance, it's just that this cell structure of action makes it much more difficult to prosecute them and also makes it much more difficult to see their interconnected acts of violence as part of a movement. So instead, what we get are these stories about lone wolves. We see a story about Jacksonville and other words and fail to connect it to other actions of white power violence that follow the same ideology, share the same social networks, share the same meaning. Really, Jacksonville should be in the same story as the shootings in Buffalo and Charleston, those are all shootings that targeted African-American communities, also on that list should be shootings in El Paso against Latinx folks in Pittsburgh against Jewish parishioners at the Tree of Life synagogue in Christchurch, New Zealand. The list goes on and on here. All of those shootings share an ideology of perpetrators.

Dana Taylor:

So what motivates people to become involved with white power groups, and what's your perspective on how to engage someone who holds those beliefs?

Kathleen Belew:

Deradicalization is an incredibly difficult business, and even people who are working to deradicalize folks out of this movement have a really hard time scaling it up because it really involves one-to-one relationships. It works very much like something like Alcoholics Anonymous, where other people who understand the way the ideology work have to do individual outreach. What makes somebody move from a person who's casually consuming ideological content to someone who's radicalized and prepared to commit violence is, to my mind, a largely unanswered question. And radicalization is its own field of study at this point, but the historical archive tells us there are as many routes into radical action as there are people who take radical action. So sometimes you see a trajectory that makes sense intuitively where somebody begins with casual activity and then becomes radicalized and moves towards the middle because of ideas towards that inner circle of hardcore activity, but sometimes it just has to do with social relationships or a church offering white power content that also has free childcare and marriage counseling. We see all kinds of reasons for people to become involved.

The other thing to know about this movement is it really works in concentric circles. So in the middle, you'll find people a small group that are deeply, deeply dedicated to the movement, then a larger number of people outside of that who are more peripherally involved, people who go to rallies, donate money, subscribe to newspapers. Then outside of that are people who don't themselves donate money, but they show up and stand on the other side of the street and cheer if there's a march or they don't themselves subscribe to a paper, but they often read it when it's passed to them by a friend. Those numbers historians have been tracking more or less overtime.

But there is this outer circle of more diffuse involvement even beyond that, where we're talking about people who would never pick up something called the official newspaper of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but who might agree with some of the ideas that are presented in it, especially if those ideas come from a friend or at the hair salon or at a picnic, through these social relationships. That mode of organizing makes it really easy to pull people from those outer casual consumptions of these ideas into that radical center. It also lets people push ideas from the radical center out into our political mainstream.

Dana Taylor:

As you mentioned, the internet and social media played a significant role in the spread of extremism. How do you address extremist content online, especially when it's used to recruit people to adopt extremist ideologies? Is there any way to combat that?

Kathleen Belew:

So this is a tricky thing because the white power movement has been using the proto internet, early computer message boards all the way since 1984. This is not a new problem. They had a series of computer to computer message boards called Liberty Net that they used not only to circulate things like assassination lists and ideological content, but also to circulate social materials like personal ads. That tells us that this social network activism is decades if not generations in use by this movement. But what has happened as the internet has become more central to all of our lives, as more of us spend time on social media the ways we do, it's just supercharged those kind of connective pathways. Now, there's no way to unring the bell, I don't think we can ever remove white power content from the internet, but we also have research that shows that deplatforming does work to slow the speed at which people can recruit and to sort of muddy the waters as people prepare for violent action, and deplatforming also lowers the body count of white power violence.

Dana Taylor:

Well, setting aside the internet and social media, what are some of the ways that law enforcement agencies have responded to the rise in extremism and have they worked?

Kathleen Belew:

So the good news here is that the FBI and the DHS have turned their massive resources to this problem. Within the last few years, we have seen declarations from both of those agencies that this white power extremist violence is the single greatest domestic terror threat to the country. That comes with money and surveillance resources that comes with law enforcement buy-in in many cases. The problem is that we are very, very late to this party. This movement, as I mentioned, has been organizing since the late 1970s, early 1980s, and throughout that time, there have been massive stretches of time when the FBI was not paying attention, and nobody except for civilian watchdog agencies was actually keeping tabs on how big and how widespread these networks have become. Now, in some cases, we have some declarations that organizations are moving towards doing this work. The Department of Defense, for instance, during the stand-down after January 6th, said that it would get a tally on how big extremism and extremist infiltration as an issue has become within the armed forces, but it has not followed through on those promises.

Dana Taylor:

So, what do you think the responsibility of the government is here? It sounds like they're doing something, but it's not enough, but who else holds responsibility?

Kathleen Belew:

So, to be clear, this is a movement that has declared war on the United States. We talk about white nationalism. The nation and white nationalism is not the United States of America, these are activists that imagine a transnational white polity at the expense sometimes at the death of everyone who does not fit within that racial identity. This is a profoundly anti-democratic and anti-American movement. It is not going to be enough to address this through our court system or through our legislative system, this is going to require a full scale social response. We need to think about education, interpersonal relationships, we need to think about how we teach civics and history, we need to think about how we can better come together to protect the communities that are targeted by this threat, how we can stand in solidarity with communities of color, with Jewish congregations, with immigrants, and with others, and how we can protect our elections so that we can continue to have free elections as this movement attempts to undermine those structures as well.

Dana Taylor:

Well, do you think that hate crime laws do more than send a message against hatred? I don't want to minimize the importance of that, but have they been an effective deterrent or are they mostly symbolic?

Kathleen Belew:

Hate crimes, law and domestic terrorism additions to sentencing can be one tool in a judicial response, and I don't want to minimize that tool. My concern as a historian is that take for instance, a domestic terrorism law. I think reasonable people can see the argument that if a person born in the United States blows up a target and says that they did it because of ISIS, or if the same person blows up the same target and says they did it because of Atomwaffen, those should not be differentially treated. We should not have a justice system that assigns a graver penalty to a terrorist idea we see, as external to the country and a terrorist idea we see as internal to the country.

Dana Taylor:

Have you spoken to people who once believed in extremist ideologies but who ultimately left those groups, and what did they share with you?

Kathleen Belew:

Some of the most compelling stories have to do with simple person to person interactions, where over the course of many meals shared, many difficult conversations, people sort of came to have a different belief system through meeting people who are different from them, through interpersonal connection, through not to be corny about it, but through love and community. I think that in many cases, there are roots out of radicalization that are simply about resources and mentorship. For instance, people who are in a relationship with someone in the movement and are facing domestic violence, have to be able to move out of that apartment before they can leave, people who are in the movement and need to be able to be in a different social circle in order to get a job before they can leave. Often, these are very interpersonal small scale kinds of relationships through which people find their way out again.

Dana Taylor:

Kathleen, thank you so much for joining us.

Kathleen Belew:

Thank you for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for her production assistants, our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening, I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson Will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of 5 Things.