May I take your hats, your coats, and your swastikas?

Today in Help I Am In Too Many Book Clubs, I spent a nice, relaxing weekend in Maine cramming Vegas Tenold's Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America so that I can attend the final session of BDSA PEWG's Understanding Fascist and Reactionary Thought Reading Group. 

 

I finished the book a few days ago and I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about it. I knew going in that this was about the on-the-ground far-right, not about online radicalization, and that's certainly an important piece of the rise of white nationalism, especially the fash street-fighting thing they've been trying to build up. For most of Tenold's time reporting he's embedded with Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Worker's Party, who is definitely an important figure in the resurgent fash movement (or at least was until the Night of the Wrong Wives, but that was after this book went to print). And yet, especially as we get further along in the book and closer to events like the Trump inauguration and the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, I couldn't help but feel like we'd missed most of the action. Tenold spends most of his time checking out legacy hate groups like the Klan and the National Socialist Movement, which... were not resurging, exactly. These groups have been reduced to social clubs for terrible people; they were beaten ages ago and have not recovered. This isn't to say they're harmless and that they couldn't resurge, but it looks like they never really did. Even the Hammerskins, the most notorious and violent group of loudly tattooed skinheads in the U.S., seem to have been reduced mostly to beating up each other now that the Internet has largely cut off the revenue stream for white power music. So when, three-quarters of the way through the book, Heimbach is trying to figure out whether and how to liaise with Richard Spencer, it feels like the actual stuff happening has come out of nowhere. This is especially obvious when Tenold contrasts the down-and-out unemployable racists he's spent most of the book hanging out with the douchey white frat boys he runs into at college events, like it's the middle-class white boys who are showing up to the movement brand new. My dude, these kids might be only 18 or 19 but they've been stewing in Gamergate nonsense for several years now, I assure you. In many ways, they are the foot soldiers of the new far right much more than the "white trash" numbnuts who don't realize tattooing a swastika on your face might limit your employment prospects, and the complete lack of limitations on their employment prospects arguably makes them more dangerous than even the shortest-fused Hammerskin.

 

I also kind of worry that focusing mostly on Mountain Dew-swilling, trailer-park-dwelling coal country Klansmen risks solidifying an already inaccurate image of racism as a "low-class" phenomenon in a way that a book that also followed absentee cotton landlord Richard Spencer or other trust-fund fascists a bit more wouldn't.

 

Heimbach is an interesting figure. Though his adult life has hewed closely to the "white trash" stereotype that well-off liberals like to pretend all the racists are, he grew up middle class and attended college. He ultimately ended up as poor as he is through repeatedly tanking anything resembling a path to professional employment by being not just racist but also a screaming weirdo in a way that doesn't generally fly in the professional-managerial class, where one is expected to couch one's racism in genteel terms and only pick on people who won't or can't do anything about it. I'll admit that one of the few times I felt sort of bad for Heimbach was during the description of his stint as an Amazon warehouse worker, which is an infamously dystopian job. And yes, these days, a lot of people go to college and then fail to land in the professional-managerial class, but in Heimbach's case the fact that he was an openly, aggressively Nazi-sympathetic asshole from the time he was in college probably didn't help. You're supposed to only be an asshole on the Internet until it's time to get yourself spectacularly fired from something respectable so you can jump on the Wingnut Welfare train, like James Damore did. (Also, a lot of people go to college and fail to land in the professional-managerial class and don't become Nazis, because it is possible to realize that Jeff Bezos has more to do with the working conditions at an Amazon warehouse than does that black lady you saw using food stamps while having a cell phone once.) Anyway, the weirdest bit about reading about Heimbach as the narrative throughline here is that the TWP kind of comes off like the real threat to combine the corny white-hood meatspace nazis and the growing movement of virulent online racists, and it's jarring to remember that the TWP has folded and I don't think we've heard much out of Heimbach since his arrest for domestic violence. 

 

I also took issues with Tenold's analysis of "Antifa," which was capitalized throughout the entire book. On the one hand, I suppose it's good that someone embedded with Nazis the whole time got a very limited view of what antifascist organizing actually does and why; on the other hand, he authoritatively provides analysis that I think is very short-sighted, and there is no good reason to capitalize the damn term!

 

On the positive side, this book really provides the kind of access into the lives of hate group members that you're not going to find too many other places, and at several points the subject matter is, despite its moral hideousness, quite funny. It's pretty informative if you're interested in taxonomizing the far right and if, like many, your taxonomy of the recent far right is heavy on the Extremely Online and you want to round out the picture a bit.