Everything you love will.., p.8
Everything You Love Will Burn, page 8
Matthew had been pondering the so-called JQ—the Jewish question—for some time. The Jewish question has, for centuries, been used as a handy tool to disguise blatant racism in ostensibly anthropologic curiosity. The question, throughout its many iterations, boils down to whether Jews should be considered white and what their place in (white-led) society should be. Matthew was now beginning to believe that not only were they not white, but they were also not friendly to whites like him.
He had been reading revisionist history about World War II and the Holocaust that, to him, seemed to prove that the murder of 6.6 million Jews was not only likely an exaggeration but probably a fabrication that in large part benefited its supposed victims. A popular number thrown around in revisionist circles is roughly a tenth of the number historians agree upon, often even lower, although no serious scholarship supports this. The higher number of 6.6 million is, according to some Holocaust deniers, not only wildly inflated but also a tool used by Jews ever since in order to guilt the world into giving them what they want.
Matthew had now moved on from Buchanan and was testing the much more frigid waters of far-right writers such as David Duke. Duke—a former Grand Wizard in the KKK, former one-term representative in the Louisiana House of Representatives, twice-failed presidential candidate, demagogue, talk show host, and strident Holocaust denier—pinned on the Jews not only the woes of the world but also many of the societal advances he and his fellow arch-conservative racists so loathed. According to Duke, both abortion rights and the feminist movement are schemes hatched by the Jews to decimate the Gentile populations of the world. Not only that, Duke claims that Jews were behind communism and, by extension, the Gulag, once again in a brazen attempt at undermining white, European culture.
Matthew embraced Duke’s ideas. For a long time he felt that Jewish groups on campus vilified him, even though he had—ostensibly—supported Israel. In his mind he had never had a problem with Jews, but they seemed to have a problem with him, attacking him at rallies, calling him a Nazi, and threatening him and his family. Once the YWC were attacked for protesting the University Muslim Society over their invitation to a speaker whom Matthew and his friends saw as a radical Islamic. Matthew believed the ringleaders behind this attack were Jewish, and he struggled to understand why Jewish students would have a problem with the YWC protesting radical Islam. Why should Matthew go out of his way to support a people who clearly hated him? As a child he had always been taught that Jews were God’s chosen people and that he had to be on their side, but the books he was reading proved that God’s chosen people were the enemies of his race.
Being the leader of the Towson chapter of YWC was Matthew’s entrance into the public political arena, and as the leader of a group basically known as “the campus Nazis,” it was a baptism of fire. Other students hurled abuse at him in the quad, and he was deeply unpopular in class. Except for his regular posse of hangers-on who had followed him from Montgomery, he didn’t have many friends at school, and the few friends he did have outside of YWC were distancing themselves from him. One of his friends in YWC suffered a nervous breakdown and left school. Matthew was threatened, and his family received abusive phone calls. His mother begged him to stop, but despite being ostracized and ridiculed, he kept at it, convincing himself that his work was far more important than his own comfort.
He started going to church again, at first on Sundays and then every day. He read old religious texts, soon reaching the conclusion that the weakness and fecklessness that had made him despise the Church was a result of modernity. The Church wasn’t weak, only the people who had been running it for the last five hundred years, ever since the East-West Schism that divided the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy felt right to Matthew. It was strong and often merciless. It was masculine for men and feminine for women, celebrating the differences of the genders rather than claiming that genders were equal. Every day he knelt by the statue of his favorite saint, St. Michael, who in the orthodox faith is invoked for protection against invasion from enemies. As he prayed, Matthew looked up at the statue, the great archangel holding a flaming sword, and imagined himself the protector of his people and his race.
After being condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit based in Alabama that specializes in monitoring far-right activity in America, the faculty sponsor withdrew his support, and YWM at Towson folded. Once again Matthew was outraged by what he saw as a refusal to support basic fairness. He couldn’t for the life of him understand the furious and sometimes violent reactions to YWC. Every kind of minority got to organize, but as soon as white students organized in a way that signaled pride in their race, everyone was suddenly all up in arms about Nazis on campus. The fact that Towson University was more than two-thirds white and that student unions had been formed for groups who found themselves in the minority was not something Matthew considered.
Throughout its brief existence YWC had been called the White Student Union by its critics, and so Matthew decided that if that was what people decided they were, that was what they would be. With that, the White Student Union (WSU) was born. The organization, which had seventeen members at the time it was founded, was meant to be a safe space from what Matthew had come to believe was deliberate anti-white discrimination at Towson. Somewhere over the course of his time with YWC, Matthew had decided that Towson was becoming increasingly hostile to whites, particularly white women, who he believed were targets of racially based slurs and sexualized violence. Matthew believed that, like St. Michael, it was his job to protect his kin from the predatory nature of other races.
Having washed its hands completely of YWC, Towson University wanted nothing to do with Matthew’s new group, but that didn’t stop him from staging protests on campus and arranging nighttime patrols in search of crime. Despite a complete lack of evidence, Matthew believed that the school was in the middle of a dramatic crime wave and that white students often were its victims, so he and his friends armed themselves with Maglite flashlights and pepper spray, stalking the campus grounds looking for evildoers. Although no delinquents were ever foiled, Matthew did find plenty of national attention, landing him on newscasts and in articles almost overnight, announcing him as the new face of racism in America. Journalists and pundits liked him because he was gregarious and affable and always willing to talk to them while at the same time putting a new spin on old clichés about racial separation. It was in the WSU that Matthew first debuted his signature “live and let live form of racism,” describing later, in a documentary produced by Vice, how he believed that “especially the black community will find areas in the South, areas like Detroit, where they can have their own homelands, we don’t have to be antagonistic toward them. And if you want to sell yourself and your children down the river of multiculturalism, you can do that. But we deserve the right to exist, deserve the right to defend our culture, and deserve the right to have a future for our culture.”
The attention amused Matthew, but his family had had enough. Matthew had been regularly making the news, and it was causing friction with his mother and siblings. During Easter in 2012, Matthew’s senior year, at a family gathering he got into an argument with his aunt about the Trayvon Martin shooting, in which he firmly defended the shooter, George Zimmerman. After that Matthew’s aunt made it clear that she no longer wanted to be in the same room as Matthew, and as a result, he was asked to stay away at Thanksgiving. Matthew’s grandfather died the day after. Although his mom asked him not to come to the funeral, Matthew, who had loved his grandfather dearly, still showed up, sitting awkwardly with his family who didn’t want him there. He left after the funeral without saying good-bye. It would be the last time he saw his family.
He returned to Towson and threw himself into his new venture, the WSU. He would take what he learned about organizing during his time with YWS and use it to expand his group to colleges across America. And from there he would build a movement.
CHAPTER 4
Kiggy
Souvenir collectors cut pieces of clothing from the two bodies and bark from the lynching tree. One person took a shoe home to display.… The most prized souvenir was rope, cut in small segments: dozens of spectators took pieces home.
—James. H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America, chapter 1
“They’re all criminals, and that’s just about all there is to it,” Doll Baby said. She was sitting by a table overlooking the parking lot of a Shoney’s Restaurant in Johnson City, Tennessee, talking animatedly, throwing her hands into the air as if what she was saying was a complete no-brainer, and she couldn’t believe she even had to explain the many reasons why black people were more likely to be a burden on society than white people. Her real name was Andrea, but for as long as she could remember everybody had just called her Doll Baby, so she had gotten it tattooed in big, pink cursive just below her belly button, next to a couple of Hello Kitty tattoos. She was twenty-five years old, but her bubbly voice and quick, sing-songy laugh that opened her face in a wide smile made her seem younger. She had a sweetness about her, at least when she wasn’t talking about marauding black people, a subject that greatly upset her. It was the end of summer 2015, and Doll Baby and her boyfriend, Dan Elmquist, had driven to Tennessee from Kentucky in Dan’s old BMW to take part in a funeral for the son of Gary Delp, the Grand Wizard of the Virgil Griffin White Knights. Matthew was there, and for the last thirty minutes I’d been listening to the three friends discuss the Baltimore riots after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, while another friend of theirs, Eric Woodzell, a former neo-Nazi turned Klansman, shuttled back and forth to the buffet, loading up monstrous servings of scrambled eggs and gravy.
Matthew wasn’t really keen on the Klan scene and had mostly stayed away since the rally in North Carolina where I’d first met him in 2011, but he and Dan were buddies, and if Matthew was serious about being the one to finally unite the disparate groups of the far right, he’d need to suck it up and see if the Klan had something to offer. Since our trip to Tennessee and Tom Pierce’s flag rally, Matthew had been hard at work trying to build a coalition of sorts under the Traditionalist Workers Party. He’d made some headway, recruiting the Keystone State Skinheads, a crew from Pennsylvania, as well as their counterparts in Oakland, Golden State Skinheads, but it was hardly enough to call it a grand alliance, and he needed to cut a wider swath through the far right. As much as he disliked the KKK, he certainly wasn’t above hearing what they had to say, and who knows—they might be persuaded to come around to his way of thinking.
“All I’m saying is the way these black folks are misusing the welfare system and looting and misbehaving, they should be arrested,” said Doll Baby in an exasperated Kentucky drawl before taking a swig from a tall glass of sweet tea. “They should be made to suffer the way they make us suffer, and then they should be killed. Now, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get upset or angry about this, but I just can’t help it.”
I asked Doll Baby how they were making her suffer.
“Well, we’re paying for their welfare, aren’t we?” she said. “That’s coming out of my paycheck.”
Dan shook his head. “See how she gets?” he said. “When she’s like this I try and stay out of it or she’ll tear me a new one.”
“You like it when I get all racist,” Doll Baby laughed and pouted.
“Damned right, I love it,” he said.
Dan and Doll Baby had been dating for a while, and things were going well. Doll Baby was his first girlfriend who had been raised in the white power movement, and Dan loved that about her. For the first time, he had been able to sit down with his in-laws and discuss his political beliefs without getting chased out of the house.
Matthew sat across from him and made a slight grimace as Doll Baby spoke. His problem with the Klan wasn’t necessarily their racism—Matthew had told me time and time again about the problems of living in a predominantly black part of Cincinnati; instead, it was the completely overt nature of that racism. If nationalism was ever to become palatable outside the boundaries of the far right, they would need to change some of their messaging. White supremacy would never attract a wider audience, and it was counterproductive to what he was trying to achieve. He firmly believed that nationalism didn’t need to be racist and that once he explained to blacks and browns that his nationalism was also their nationalism—it was about the right to self-determination for races—then real change might be achieved. However, it would be a tough sell if his comrades in the movement ran around shouting slurs and claiming that whites were the master race. The Klan was pure white supremacy, and Matthew knew that it was an anchor that would drag the entire movement down.
Unlike most Klansmen, Dan hadn’t grown up in the Klan nor did he have relatives who were members, but he claimed to have ancestors who were in the German Luftwaffe, although he never expounded on it. Sometimes he joked that he was the latest in a long line of hateful people. According to Dan, he was a mess before joining the Klan. After high school he had followed the remaining members of the Grateful Dead around the country, doing whatever drugs he could get his hands on and getting into fights. He claimed that Jesus and the Klan had saved him.
When I first met him he was married and miserable. His wife was making him choose between the Klan and her, and divorce was clearly coming down the pike. On top of that, he had just lost his second job in two months. He’d been a loader at the local Walmart but got fired due to downsizing. During his time there he’d thrown out his back doing thirteen-hour shifts loading and unloading boxes, and his doctor prescribed painkillers. He got his next job, sandblasting paint off sheets of metal, through a temp agency, but the agency had neglected to tell his new employer about his pain medication, and when his drug test came up positive for opioids, they let him go. Broke and about to lose his house in a divorce, Dan’s only network for support was his Klan family. Since then his divorce was finalized, and his ex-wife had taken the house. He’d been doing odd jobs, but the back injury made manual labor—pretty much the only jobs around—painful, and the pain medicine made him loopy. Still, he had found Andrea, and he had his Klan. Nothing else, he decided, was really all that important.
The marginalized, disaffected, and lost were the radical right’s ideal audience, and Dan was far from the first person I’d encountered who had found a sense of purpose and belonging within the open arms of extremist groups. A study by the British Council found that one of the major drivers of extremist recruitment was the desire to be a part of something bigger and to no longer “feel invisible.” On a larger scale this was much the same sentiment that would fuel Donald Trump’s victory among those large parts of the electorate who increasingly felt alienated and forgotten by politicians. Matthew hoped it would provide fertile ground in which he could sow the seeds of his nationalistic movement.
I’d spent some time with Dan since he first invited me to a rally with his former group, the now-defunct Imperial Knights of America. Since joining the Virgil Griffin White Knights he’d been excited to show me what a “real” Klan group was like. Much like National Socialist groups, the Klan measures their “realness” in terms of lineage, placing a premium on groups with direct lines to a perceived legitimate leader or some kind of event that cemented the forebear as a committed Klansman.
The Virgil Griffin White Knights had taken their name from Virgil Lee Griffin. Griffin, who died in 2009, was the leader of the Greensboro White Knights, famous in Klan circles for their role in the Greensboro Massacre of 1979. On November 3, 1979, industry workers and members of the local Communist Party gathered in the outskirts of Greensboro to rally against the Klan. The Communist Party had been feuding with the local chapter of the KKK ever since some of its members had interrupted a screening of Birth of a Nation a few months before. For over a hundred years the movie has been a staple with Klan groups all over the country, and interrupting a screening of it was a slap in the face to the members of the Greensboro White Knights.
The protestors had called out the Klan and stood in the streets holding signs and shouting “Death to the Klan” as an armada of cars carrying armed Klansmen, among them Doll Baby’s dad, slowly rolled through. At one point the demonstrators attacked the cars, and suddenly shots rang out. It’s unclear who fired first, but it whipped the demonstrators into a panicked frenzy. As they ran, one of the cars carrying the Klansmen, a powder-blue Oldsmobile, slammed on the brakes, and four Klansmen jumped out, brandishing pistols, rifles, and shotguns. They fired into the crowds, and some of the demonstrators who were also armed fired back as the Klan crouched for cover behind the car. Soon the shots died down, and the Oldsmobile fled the scene. Five bodies lay in the street. Eventually fourteen members of the Klan and the American Nazi Party were charged with the murders but acquitted by all-white juries.
Since then the massacre had become a point of pride for members of the Virgil Griffin White Knights, some of whom claimed to have taken part in it. Rather than a massacre, the Klan saw it as a glorious battle in which the Red Menace was beaten back by American Patriots, marking the first of what was surely to be many battles to come before America was restored to its former glory. To Gary Delp’s group, it was a badge of honor, signifying that they were the real deal. Dan wouldn’t say if Gary Delp had been involved, but he alluded that the Grand Wizard, who’d only been a regular foot soldier at the time, had been involved in “some serious shit in his day.” “These guys don’t F around,” he’d warned me. They were a group that would not modernize or soften, because they were a group that had fought and killed for the white race.
