Everything you love will.., p.7
Everything You Love Will Burn, page 7
From then on, he devoured any piece of political folk music he could get his hands on. It wasn’t so much the peacenik sentiment of the songs that grabbed him but rather the fundamental unfairness of the United States imposing its will on other people.
Once, after a concert at Towson, Matthew cornered the anarchist folk singer David Rovics and told him how important his music was to him and that it had given him a sense of purpose. Rovics smiled and told him to never give up. Matthew was impressed that a star like Rovics had taken the time to talk to a nobody like him, and he came away inspired.
In high school Matthew fell in with the theater crowd and started building sets and decorations for school plays. He never tried his hand at acting but did discover that he was good at building things. He also liked the people he met through the theater. Most of them were left leaning like him, and many of the girls were impressed by the fact that he regularly hung out with college kids at Towson and that he seemed to know his way around an argument.
Around the same time Matthew and his grandmother, mostly for fun, got into genealogy. Matthew discovered that one of his ancestors, a Joseph R. James from North Carolina, had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. He was still exceedingly fond of history, even then picturing himself following in his dad’s footsteps and becoming a history teacher, and the revelation that his own blood had fought in the war prompted him to go to meetings at the local chapter of the Descendants of Confederate Veterans. He began identifying more and more with his ancestors, and through Civil War reenactments he began seeing the war differently—not as a struggle to liberate slaves by a benign North as he had always been taught but instead as a struggle for Southern freedom in the face of blatant Northern aggression. As he looked at the world he lived in, he couldn’t help but recognize the forces that drove modern US ambitions in the world as the same ones that fueled the Civil War: not benevolence but a malevolent hunger for power.
His newfound southern identity was causing friction in other areas of his life. He still went to meetings at the Socialist Student Union at Towson, but he fretted that they were getting caught up with small issues and not focusing on anti-imperialism. Gay rights and feminism were all well and good—Matthew was still an atheist at that time, and the culture wars didn’t really interest him, except for the abortion issue, on which he was vehemently on the side of the right to life—but what good was social justice in a fundamentally unjust world where the United States trampled around like a bull in a china shop? He had also been reading about how immigration was really no more than a tool developed by capitalists to further their own agenda, so it frustrated him when his socialist friends took up issues such as immigration reform when it seemed so clear that immigration and socialism were mutually exclusive. As he saw it, immigrants from developing countries provided cheap labor for the fat-cat capitalists, and he was flabbergasted that his fellow socialists couldn’t see that.
He was also becoming increasingly frustrated with the petty and meaningless squabbles within the group that made it all but impossible to get anything done. There were Trotskyites who were endlessly preoccupied with the Spanish Civil War, Leninists who went on and on about the need for a Bolshevik revolution in the United States and about how the Trotskyites fundamentally got the role of the proletariat wrong, Marxists who felt like the Leninists had perverted Marx’s vision of Marxist Bolshevism, and finally the Maoists who said they were all wrong and that the revolution needed to come from the rural districts of America and not the urban workforce. Matthew didn’t know how to fight US imperialism, but he felt that if there was going to be any chance of success, one would need to reach regular, working people, not sitting around a campus discussing the finer points of General Francisco Franco’s fascist regime.
During a visit to the library Matthew picked up a copy of a book that would solidify his political shift. Death of the West, published in 2001, was Pat Buchanan’s polemical tirade on how everything from socialism to immigration was ensuring the death of the white race. Buchanan was a former power player inside the Republican Party, advising both Presidents Nixon and Reagan, but when he failed to secure the GOP presidential nomination in two primaries running—1992 and 1996—Buchanan veered to the right, leaving the Republican Party in 1999 and warning that “this year I believe is our last chance to save our republic before she disappears into the godless New World Order that our elites are constructing in betrayal of everything for which our Founding Fathers fought and lived and died.”
Railing against both Democrats and Republicans as unable and unwilling to “drain this political swamp”—a debut of what would become a mantra in a successful presidential campaign sixteen years later—Buchanan went on to defeat his biggest rival in the Reform Party primaries and the person who would eventually go on to use much of his rhetoric to win the presidency: Donald J. Trump. Although his campaign after the primaries went nowhere, his rhetoric and ideas not only inspired a generation of far-right activists but also gave rise to a new American nationalism.
Paleo-conservatism has deep roots in American society, with much of its ideological detritus going back to the Old Right—the conservative movement that fought hard against Roosevelt’s New Deal—and the wildly isolationist and anti-Semitic John Birch Society. The John Birch Society (JBS), named after an American missionary killed in China whom its founder, Robert W. Welch Jr., believed to be the first casualty of the Cold War, was a fiercely anticommunist proponent of very limited government. Founded in 1958 by Welch—a man so eminently paranoid that he once accused President Eisenhower of being “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” and alleged that the US government was “under operational control of the Communist Party”—the JBS institutionalized the virulent xenophobia and isolationist tendencies that would later propel Pat Buchanan to fame and Donald Trump into the White House. Although the JBS is remembered primarily for its members’ inveterate fear of anything that smacked of communism, it reserved much of its ire for the fight against civil and equal rights in America. Even this, however, was couched in an ostensible fight against the Soviet menace. In an advertorial in the Palm Beach Post from October 31, 1965, a JBS representative explained that while the Society had nothing against civil rights per se, the Civil Rights Movement was founded by communist agitators acting on behalf of the Soviet regime, much like future paleo-cons and nationalists would dismiss both feminism and social justice movements as false-flag operations instigated by the insidious skullduggery of global Zionism. Indeed, the JBS took an early stand against the so-called New World Order, a perceived global, socialist world government led by liberal financiers, a common code word for Jews. To this day remaining JBS members warn of the dangers of the United Nations as a first step toward a complete loss of US sovereignty.
The rise of Barry Goldwater—no stranger to race-baiting himself—coupled with the ascendancy of the brand of conservatism espoused by the National Review, temporarily broke the back of the John Birch Society and, by extension, paleo-conservatism in America. By that time, however, many of the Society’s most ardent zealots had moved on, building a radical and at times violent strain of white nationalism upon the foundation of America First xenophobia. For example, after leaving the JBS, Robert Matthews became one of America’s most notorious far-right terrorists, performing a streak of violent robberies and, in 1984, killing the Jewish radio host Alan Berg. Gordon Kahl was also a member of the society before his foray into the antigovernment world of the Posse Commitatus ended with the death of two federal agents as well as the firefight that, in 1983, took Kahl’s own life.
The same forces that had vanquished the JBS almost three decades earlier fueled the rise of Pat Buchanan’s brand of paleo-conservatism. Weary of the neocons’ interventionism and worried about rising immigration, the Republican base was ready to accept a more isolationist strain of conservative politics, and Buchanan, having been a vocal critic of the first Iraq War and a furious opponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), was able to capitalize, despite the racism and anti-Semitism running through his politics.
Matthew found himself enthralled by the urgency of Buchanan’s message. He not only shared Matthew’s sense of moral decay but also railed against US leaders’ policies in a way Matthew had never read before. In The Death of the West Buchanan argued that socialism, liberal values, and expansive government had led America down a road to ruin from which there was almost no escape without major upheaval. Then, in his book A Republic, Not an Empire, Buchanan scolded American policy makers for their jingoistic ways, arguing that the United States had no place meddling in other nations’ affairs. According to Buchanan, the baby boomers, complacent from a childhood in front of the TV and with no great war to forge them like their parents had, were as decadent as they were entitled, demanding equal rights not just for African Americans but also—and in Buchanan’s view perhaps more shockingly—women. Weaving an intricate web of cause and effect, Buchanan claimed that women’s rights not only led to promiscuity and moral collapse but eventually the very demise of the white race. According to him, “doing one’s own thing” had subverted the perpetuation of the white race.
Although Matthew wasn’t particularly concerned about promiscuity and declining morals, he was concerned about US imperialism. In Buchanan he found a kindred spirit and, more importantly, a guide to the world of right-wing politics. He left the socialist group at Towson behind and instead focused on organizing at his own high school. In 2008 the first Black Student Union was formed at Poolesville High School, and Matthew decided to form a White Student Union in response. In his mind he formed the White Student Union out of a sense of fairness: if the African American kids got their own union, then so should the white kids. Fair’s fair, political correctness be damned. Besides, Poolesville was an overwhelmingly white town, and all the black kids sat together in the cafeteria anyway, so if the races were segregating themselves naturally, then it followed that the white students should have all the same things that black kids had. But the school didn’t see it that way. Matthew had gathered the requisite number of signatures to form his union, but the school’s principal, Deena Levine, still refused permission, saying that the very notion of a union for white students was offensive. Matthew was furious. The school leadership, he determined, was made up of a bunch of weak cowards. Of course, he realized that a white student union would offend some people, but wasn’t that the point of fairness? Nobody deserved special treatment, and if that pissed some people off, that was just too bad.
During his senior year Matthew’s parents split up and his dad moved in with his new girlfriend, pretty much severing all ties with Matthew, his brother, sister, and mom. A devout Catholic, Margaret never agreed to the divorce, even keeping her ex-husband’s name, despite the ignoble nature of the breakup. Matthew was crushed. He’d been close with his dad and looked up to him, and now his dad was out of his life. It would be years until they spoke again. Matthew was seventeen and becoming increasingly ardent in his views. He lived in a good school district and hated the sight of kids from poorer neighborhoods being bused in. He resented the rich, DC families in his town and assumed they resented him too. Once, during a school debate on immigration, he called his Hispanic opponent a “wetback” and told him to get the hell out of his country. He recognized Buchanan’s writings in the world around him. If race really wasn’t important, then why did black kids mostly hang out with black kids, white kids with white kids, and Hispanic kids with Hispanic kids? Also, why could black kids talk about black power, but that one time he wore a T-shirt with a Confederate flag a black kid called him a racist and smacked the back of his head?
By fall of 2009, when he enrolled at Montgomery College in a neighboring town thirty minutes away, Matthew was an avowed paleo-con. He’d also started making his way back to Catholicism, realizing that although faith wasn’t key to who he was as a person, Christianity nevertheless formed the foundation of the white race. His politics had hardened into a worldview in which the white race represented the pinnacle of human endeavor, and he believed that most if not all major human achievements in the last centuries could be attributed to whites. Eventually, he believed, the world would see a clash of civilizations. There was no getting along with other cultures and religions because the future was a zero-sum game in which the white race either prevailed or vanished. That is why he started coming to school with a T-shirt that said, “Everything I Need to Know About Islam I Learned on 9/11.”
He majored in history and was vocal in class. He liked to provoke, and according to his teachers, he wasn’t very popular with the other students in class, save for a couple of friends who hung on his every word. Sitting behind a laptop that had a sticker that said, “If I Knew the Trouble They Would Cause I Would Have Picked the Cotton Myself,” he would lob racist and incendiary comments around no matter what topics the class was discussing. Once, during a lecture on lynchings in the South, he said that at least the lynching saved the state the expenses of a trial.
One of his professors, Dr. Joseph C. Thompson, remembers him as a clever kid who liked to argue but whom he could never quite figure out. Matthew wasn’t the first conservative kid to walk through his door nor was he the first antigovernment or racist kid, yet Matthew didn’t fit any of the regular boxes. Sure, he was far right and conservative, but he was also fiercely pro–workers unions. Also, for an arch conservative, he had little interest in the culture-war issues—beyond abortion—that normally animated conservatives. What drove him seemed to be a profound worry for the future of the white race. Once, Dr. Thompson told him that demographers estimate that by sometime between 2040 and 2050 Caucasians will no longer be in the majority in the United States and asked Matthew what he thought about that. “That terrifies me,” Matthew had said. “Does it not scare you?” Matthew would often spend hours in Dr. Thompson’s office, arguing with his liberal professor. “He was always polite during our discussions,” Dr. Thompson recalled, “and it was never ugly.” Most of the time they discussed race or history, and Dr. Thompson sometimes got the feeling that Matthew was using their meetings to hone his arguments, often coming in and blustering about one thing or another, then becoming quiet when his professor gave him a rebuttal. Other times he wondered if Matthew was perhaps using their meetings to talk him off the ledge. Dr. Thompson suspected that Matthew’s politics were taking him in a direction he didn’t necessarily want to go in. He had noticed that Matthew’s clique of fellow conservatives had begun peeling off as Matthew’s viewpoints became increasingly outrageous, and he wondered whether perhaps Matthew was looking for someone to tell him that he was wrong emphatically enough to make him change course.
Another of Matthew’s teachers, Dr. Kurt Borkman, one of the only conservative professors at Montgomery and a devout Lutheran, remembers Matthew as an “intellectual arsonist,” seemingly more interested in provoking than convincing others. Both Thompson and Borkman regarded Matthew as “smart” or “clever,” but neither was ever sure he was intelligent. Dr. Thompson said he was smart because he could recite facts but perhaps not intelligent because he never seemed to give the facts his own interpretation. Dr. Borkman saw him as someone who was clearly clever but wondered how he wasn’t intelligent enough to see through the blatant pseudoscience behind the paleo-conservative arguments.
As with Dr. Thompson, Matthew would spend hours in Dr. Borkman’s office discussing history, and like his colleague, Dr. Borkman would try to steer the young ideologue away from his increasingly racist and hardline views. In particular he felt that Matthew could be guided away from the path he was on and tried to push against Matthew’s most bombastic arguments. But despite the best efforts of the teachers Matthew most looked up to, it wasn’t enough. Matthew continued to move steadily further right.
In his sophomore year Matthew discovered Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), a national organization with local chapters that perfectly summed up his politics at the time. Not only were they against immigration and multiculturalism, but they also saw odious forces working to undermine Western society by advancing both.
Formed in 2005 by student activist Kevin DeAnna, YWC sought to “defend Western culture” from the perceived threats of immigration and liberalism. Although the organization claimed it wasn’t racist, its fetishization of Western (i.e., white) culture and close association with known racists placed it far to the right of other paleo-cons. In many ways YWC, which boasted a few hundred members when Matthew discovered it, was a precursor to what would become the alt-right movement.
Matthew met DeAnna in 2010 at CPAC, an annual convention for conservatives outside Washington, DC, and was immediately inspired. YWC was expanding, adding chapters at universities all over the country, and Matthew wanted to set one up at Montgomery but couldn’t get the faculty sponsorship required to start an official student group. Matthew would have better luck when he transferred from Montgomery College to the larger Towson University at the start of his junior year. There he threw himself into YWC. He eventually managed to recruit a professor to serve as their faculty adviser and soon was the head of the brand-new Towson University branch of YWC.
Politically YWC was far to the right of mainstream Republicans but shared almost no ground with the thuggish skinheads and Nazis on the outer fringes. For one, they were supportive of Israel. Rather than stern speeches, their activities, although offensive to most and certainly racist, were tongue in cheek, and their goal was as much provocation as it was political advocacy. Once, they held a “Straight Pride Parade” in open mockery of the gay civil rights movement. Another time they hosted an “Affirmative Action Bake Sale,” where they sold cupcakes to students at varying prices, depending on who the buyer was. White males were charged $2, Hispanics $1.50, African Americans $1, and Jews 75 cents. The student body was outraged. Various student groups organized protests, including Jewish students at Montgomery who weren’t buying YWC’s stated support of Israel.
