The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir by R. Derek Black

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir by R. Derek Black https://amzn.to/3V1mTF0 From the former heir-apparent to white nationalism, The Klansman’s Son is an astonishing memoir of a childhood built on fear, of breaking from a community of hate. Derek Black was raised to take over the white nationalist movement in the United States. Their father, Don Black, was a former Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and started Stormfront, the internet’s first white supremacist website—Derek built the kids’ page. David Duke, was also their close family friend and mentor. Racist hatred, though often wrapped up in respectability, was all Derek knew. Then, while in college in 2013, Derek publicly renounced white nationalism and apologized for their actions and the suffering that they had caused. The majority of their family stopped speaking to them, and they disappeared into academia, convinced that they had done so much harm that there was no place for them in public life. But in 2016, as they watched the rise of Donald Trump, they immediately recognized what they were hearing—the spread and mainstreaming of the hate they had helped cultivate—and they knew that they couldn’t stay silent. This is a thoughtful, insightful, and moving account of a singular life, with important lessons for our troubled times. Derek can trace a uniquely insider account of the rise of white nationalism, and how a child indoctrinated with hate can become an anti-racist adult. Few understand the ideology, motivations, or tactics of the white nationalist movement like Derek, and few have ever made so profound a change. When coded language and creeping authoritarianism spread the ideas of white nationalists, this is an essential book with a powerful voice.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

The Great Old Trouble. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Mainly, I have the Iron Lady sing that part that we used to sing for the first 14 years. So she can give me that shrill voice that wakes me up and goes, Holy crap, we're live on a podcast. Let's get to work. As always, refer this show to your family, friends, and relatives. Remember, you have to have five people in your downline on the Chris Voss Show.

We're like an MLM, only it's free. Tell them to go to goodreads.com for it says Chris Voss..com for just christmas christmas one of the tick tockety and all those crazy places we have an amazing story that's going to blow your mind today and educate you move you and if it doesn't go just keep go keep listening to the story uh over and over again until you get it listen to about 20 times just to make sure you got every list word he is the author of the newest book that just comes out may 14th 2024 r derrick black joins us on the show with us today his book is entitled the clansman's son my journey from white nationalism to anti-racism and he's going to talk to us about his journey his cathartic move through growing up to be a white nationalist to becoming, well, we'll get into it. He is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Chicago.

Since 2016, he's spoken to many audiences at universities, foundations, institutions, museums, synagogues, and churches. He received the, they received the Eli Wiesel Award. Do I have that right on the pronunciation? Eli Weasel. Eli Weasel. And a humanitarian award from the Anti-Deaf Animation League. The Klansman Son is their first book. Welcome to the show, Derek. How are you? Thanks for having me on today, Chris. I'm doing well. There you go. And I, just to make clarification, I probably should have done this in the bio. Your pronouns are they and them, and that's why I'm pronouncing it that way. People in the audience are like, Chris is clearly losing it.

And I can't spell half the time anyway, or read half the time. I'm the opposite of dyslexic. I'm hyperlexic. Hyperlexic. There you go. Thanks for saving me as my joke bombed in my setup. So there you go. Thank you very much.

So Derek, give us any dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Oh, I hate the social media, but I feel like that is the main way to find stuff I post. One of the things about writing a book that really appealed to me was I am a very slow writer, putter-outer thinker. And I really appreciate the fact that I've been afforded a way to write exactly what I wanted to write and put it out there. And honestly, I like people to read the book. There you go. Order the book, damn it, and read it.

That's what he wants. No, I'm just saying. Without all the violence. No, get it from your't know it doesn't need to be something you buy borrow it from a friend i just think read it share it it's passed yeah it's something i've thought about for years and years and years and it's really i've waited a long time to write it and i feel really good about what it ultimately is there you go congratulations this is it's a lot of work to write a book and you pour your heart and soul in it there's all the editing the editing part and now it's out and so people are gonna people are gonna see you in a different light as an author it's really weird

you can you'll be the most successful man in history and everyone goes that's kind of nice but when you put a book out people go oh you must be smart it's funny when i put mine out i fooled everybody they're like you must be smart i'm's funny. When I put mine out, I fooled everybody. They're like, you must be smart. I'm like, you guys bought it. But I'm sure yours is intelligent. Mine isn't. So give us a 30,000 overview of what's inside your new book, The Klansman's Son. It's a memoir, which I had to spend a lot of time trying to figure out the difference between a memoir and an autobiography.

When I started writing the thing, I ran away from even biography at all. I tried to write something that was deeply argued, kind of academic, and it was a bunch of essays. Each one had a topic that I wanted to put out and that was the first year. And then the second year was restructuring it to be something that was deeply tied to chronology and deeply tied to telling a story from my perspective. And I think both of those together is the really authentic thing that I wanted to describe because everything I've learned has been this combination of personal experience and having the emotional impact and the relationships and the communities

and then having enough perspective to spend time researching things, talking to experts, talking to people who understood the context that I experienced firsthand and trying to describe that and distill it into here are the takeaways and the things that I've learned, but here's the context that I learned it in. And I've learned by putting this together that that is the goal of a memoir. You know, it's not just to try to describe an experience but to see what is valuable in it and your experience is quite unique tell us about your upbringing which ties into your book how you were raised i was just watching the jenny jones episode that you were on in 2001 give us a rundown of that what that journey was like yeah so i grew up in one of the central families that had founded white nationalism, and I also was born relatively late in their lives,

so by the time I was born, it's been decades trying to build that movement, and then I never had a moment when I wasn't deeply aware of being, growing up in South Florida in a relatively like multiracial and a large Jewish population for a movement that was anti-semitic and racist and I grew up with people from all over all parts of this movement coming over to the house and being a really central locus trying to put it together and it's not exactly what I think people might imagine. It wasn't rural. It wasn't explicitly isolated.

I grew up in a relatively urban part of South Florida. I was across the water from Donald Trump's house, so I always was familiar with his antics and his giant American flag and his fireworks and his odd politics and loudmouth things and all the other odd people who live in South Florida from a lot of different political scenes. But I always had this sense that we were a part of a movement that existed in every part of America and people live in every place in the United States and they don't look like anything, but they consider themselves a

part of this movement and that's what makes them a part of it. Their identities are based on the fact that they read the same literature, they have the same sort of central heroes and a sense of history, a sense of being a part of something that's 50, 60 years old. And my family were some of the most public outspoken advocates who had founded the first web presence for white nationalism and really tried to create a big umbrella for it. Wow. And, you know, it's hard when you grow up because you grow up kind of indoctrinated and instilled in that. And like you say, you think everybody has that same journey. It's not a good example, but, you know, an example I had when I grew up, my parents rented apartments and oversaw them in Hollywood.

And so we lived around the block from some famous stars and we'd walk the dog with them. And so I just thought everyone owned BMWs, Rolls Royces, and Mercedes Benz. That's how the world worked. And so I can see how growing up in that environment, you know, you just assume that this is the, this is the way you process the world. Now, your father was Don Black, and he was a former Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan. Do I have that correct?

Yeah, he had gotten involved in the movement first with the Nazi movement when he was a teenager. He had met David Duke on that same trip, and they were very close friends, and both went on to sort of help build that movement together and they founded a clan organization together and had both left it not because of a change in their beliefs but because they decided it wasn't a good brand it wasn't something that could create a big tent it wasn't something that they could separate from violence and terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s, and they wanted to go into politics. And so by the time I was born, they had already made that shift.

And to your point before, I don't think there was ever a moment when I was not deeply aware of the fact that my family represented a movement and an ideology that the rest of the world thought was just absolutely insane and hateful and wrong, you know, in all these different levels. And my rationalization as a little kid, you know, I can look at myself when I was 10 years old on TV talking about it. And it was that nobody else understood us. Nobody else got that we were not the bad guys we were not hateful we were not like like that was the rationale and that was the rationale they often told themselves that they were the ones like defending something and that's that was also a big reason why growing up as a

teenager i spent so much time trying to rationalize why this community that i felt so committed to was something that i could see myself as not wanting to isolate myself, not wanting to harm other people and still becoming a major figure within it. And it's hard because, I mean, it's kind of all you know, you, you, you, you know, you grow up in it and you're, you're kind of probably at an early age indoctrinating and a lot of this stuff. Now, I don't know if you want to touch on the Jenny Jones thing. It was interesting to watch. You were one of the early people to set up a website on the web there and do some of that.

And I was watching the interview with you. Tell us a little bit about that part of your life. Yeah. Media and trying to get this message out still is a big part of how the far right operates. And so something that I was thinking about with the book was, you know, if you maybe if I didn't say anything about it, maybe the wise thing was just to not talk about it, not give them oxygen. And I think I wrestled with that for a while and realized that it's not about just giving them oxygen. It's about not giving it without context. And that was what my dad had always been trying to do in the 90s.

I'd seen him giving interviews. I'd seen people coming over to the house. And I believed the ideology as well as I thought I could. You know, as a 10-year-old, I look back and I have a lot of sympathy for being 10 and realizing that it doesn't matter how many times an adult asks you, you know, are you sure you want to do this? There's no sense of context and consequence. And I just wanted to be somebody who my parents, I think, felt proud of.

And seeing this opportunity to try to be outspoken and go on national television and advocate this ideology felt like something that was genuinely exciting like we went up to chicago for the first time and i'd grown up in florida the producers paid for me to go to disney quest with my dad's this like 1990s virtual reality theme park that was in the loop in chicago and and it was this just kind of thrilling trip. And hearing the audience cursing and yelling, and even though I had this separate interview, it really instilled this idea that just other people don't get us, they misunderstand who exactly we are. And also, it made me feel like I had taken a step onto this self-identification that I didn't have any way

out of. It wasn't that I was necessarily trying to. It wasn't necessarily for the years that followed that I realized, oh, you know, this is wrong and I just want to escape or something. And, you know, eventually this story goes into college and I really had to wrestle with that. But even then, it wasn't something that I felt like I was wrong about. I spent all those years going to these academic conferences that white nationalists put on, talking to highly controversial tenured professors who argued that race was this biological real thing. And I tried to solidify myself with the idea that I had facts on my side, that as bad as it it felt it was true and truth should be the most important thing that was what i told myself and that's an interesting lesson too and in how sometimes we believe that things are true because we feel very deeply about them and it's hard to it's hard to see outside of that ego of what we believe is our truth, maybe. Does that sound about right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't want to give away the ending, but I did eventually go through years of this community at a liberal arts college that condemned me. And my reaction to that was not initially, oh, I must be wrong, you know, because I feel committed to you and this community is telling me I'm harming them. Therefore, I need to stop because I feel committed to you and this community is telling me I'm harming them, therefore I need to stop because I thought I had all these facts. It took years of dealing with really looking at the evidence and realizing how bad the facts were. And at the end of it, it's where I got to that place where I recognize, wow, it is not that nobody's told me racism is bad. Nobody's told me it's wrong and incorrect. it's that i wasn't willing to sit with it or listen to it or think about it or really interrogate it because my identity was at stake

and and that was the real lesson that i had at the end there that it's not that facts are not deeply important it's not that rigor and truth is not really something that we need to engage in. It's that our ability to even look at what we think is true. And it's not just somebody who grows up in, you know, sort of far-right, strange ideology. I think to some extent it's true for everybody. Our ability to even assess why do we believe what we believe, what do we consider true, what facts are we willing to even see as being contradictory to what we believe, is based in the fact that if I seriously change my mind about whatever thing we're talking about, I will likely lose the community and the people I care about and the relationships and the sense

of who I am that comes from that. And I think when we recognize that, we see why changing your mind, you know, is such an understatement when we're talking about something fundamental to who we are as a person. Yeah. You said that so perfectly, our identity. And it's really hard to change your identity. I mean, I've had to change my identity when I've, you know, had businesses fail and my identity was wrapped up in those companies and, you know, this is who I am. And then, you know, 2008 caused a lot of crisis for a lot of people. But yeah, identity. And you know that this is who i am and and then you know 2008 caused a lot of crisis for a lot of people but yeah identity and you described that a lot of us you know we do confirmation bias

regardless of what we believe in and so we build that in our identity and in the security around that identity i must be right because you know here's the news of what i found you know some batshit website conspiracy or something and but it but it must be right because I, you know, I'm being confirmed by my thing, you know, and people do that. You know, you buy, if you buy a red Porsche, you start, you start driving home on the freeway, your brain starts doing confirmation and going, Hey, look at all these red, it starts pointing out on the red Ferrari or the Porsches. And, and you're like, Oh, I have made a wise decision because look at all these other smart people. And you know, it was interesting.

There was the other thing about what you said, where you were trying to talk to the community there at the college, et cetera, et cetera. I think I saw a little bit of that in the conversation with the Jenny Jones show, where you were talking about how you were getting beat up at school and harassed at school was, was that you also at the same time trying to educate those people as to who you were or what the movement was about and you really felt like kind of it was a more of speaking your truth but also trying to let people know that you weren't evil or bad you just you know here's how we think and you must be misunderstanding us yeah i, I mean, that's definitely how I saw it. And I try to sort of separate out my feeling of growing up within it

from people who are drawn to racist movements. Like, I don't ever want to give myself an out or anything. And I don't even mean that here. I think I take a lot of response. I do take a lot of responsibility for the fact that I grew up in a movement in a world that I accepted as a child but there's a certain point you know when I needed to take responsibility and I did eventually but you know I was 18 19 20 years old and was still thinking that this is something I believed and that sort of rationale that they told themselves that i told myself it takes a lot of

holding a bunch of different things that are contradictory and just not really examining them and the fundamental one the one that broke down for me was the fact that you can't hold both beliefs that i wanted to be open to other people. I wanted to be somebody who didn't harm people, you know, did not at the very least was neutral, but hopefully made other people's lives a little better. That was something that I cared about, particularly, and I looked at it in retrospect, people who I knew and cared about and who were a part of my life. And that was what drove me as a, you know,, teenage, and adolescent white nationalist activist, because I became very outspoken.

I became a national speaker. I eventually ran for office. I ran a website. I did all these things that I could see myself as standing up for this community that I cared about. And I could also rationalize and say that I wanted things at some kind of high level. I didn't want harm for other people. And the rhetoric within white nationalism often says that and tries to claim like the line between their politics or their arguments that it's not about

superiority or hierarchy, like that these things are separate from the massive violence and the terrorism and the fear that comes out of this movement. And eventually, you know, I had to look at the fact that there's just no rationale here. But the reason why was because I was suddenly in a community that I had formed these intimate relationships with. And I was hearing people who I knew, respected, cared about, and who probably just as importantly, knew and cared about me. Like they knew who I was. They knew that I wasn't, you know, like a personally scary person or a dangerous person. They knew that I was a good friend because I had spent a semester on campus without telling people my background and we had made these relationships. And that wasn't new for

me. I think I often thought i could just have have both worlds and the people would maybe accept it once they found out but when they didn't i just was faced with this where's the misunderstanding is there some way that i can explain how i don't see myself as harming you you know and it's sort of embarrassing that it took years and years of wrestling with it but i take some sympathy and i I think that it's just genuinely incredibly hard to look at the fact that you need to fundamentally change what you're doing because it's at odds with everything else you say about yourself, at odds with your values, and it's going to cause this loss. I can look back on it now because it was over a decade ago that I condemned white nationalism and recognized, wow, it felt like walking into a void. It felt like it was losing every relationship that I'd built up until I was 21 years old, including my family and most of my intimate family members, and see just how dangerous and how blank that feels.

It sort of felt like going into not having a future. And so for somebody who thought that they were driven by facts and driven by evidence, it was kind of painful to get to that place and realize, wow, okay, it was about community and connection and identity. And I eventually looked at facts, but I didn't want to because I didn't want to lose those feelings yeah it's interesting how we take belief systems and sometimes from what I've studied with belief systems I don't know scientists but I grew up in a cult in a religious cult and and I kind of went through my journey too where around 16 or 18 I I had to say hey I don't want to I just

don't want to do this anymore with you guys. This is your thing. I don't think this wants to be my thing anymore. And the reaction was probably some of your families. But we take like a belief system, just something you might believe. There's aliens walking around in government. You take that and you start wrapping all those confirmation biases, and then it becomes that identity thing. It becomes like this whole wrapped piece of ball of yarn. wrapping all those confirmation biases, and then it becomes that identity thing.

You know, it becomes like this whole wrapped piece of, you know, ball of yarn, and trying to unpackage that whole onion, if you will, that you built is so hard to do because, you know, there's so much in there, and there's so many belief systems you pile on top of it that support it. And you feel like you're losing a part of yourself, your identity. And then, of course, what happened when you wrote your letter denouncing white nationalism with your family? I mean, it was something I hadn't warned them about. They knew that I'd been withdrawing for years before that, two or three years of college before that. But they didn't realize that I felt so firmly against their ideology that I felt like it was harmful, hurting people, that I needed to speak out against it. I couldn't just

be silent about it, especially because I had been so outspoken in favor of it. And their reaction to that was immediately disconnection. It wasn't full. My parents spent a week talking and having these really hard, dark conversations about whether it was possible to have a relationship going forward. And I would argue, you know, there's clearly family relationships here that go beyond politics. And then my family would come back and say, you know, what about our lives have ever suggested to you that we maintain relationships that are not in line with our politics and to their credit they decided that week that they wanted to have both my parents

wanted to have some kind of relationship but most other people in my family didn't and definitely nobody in the movement it's not like i was trying to but you know the this sense of in and out was so fundamental to a movement like that. And it was painful and it was, you know, embarrassing for a long time to even realize that, oh, you know, I rely so much on this feeling of being a part of something that I should have never been able to rationalize. Like, you know, it's that sort of feeling that now i can look back and say there's no such thing as should you know you you do what you can you learn what you what you can you you know you make the choices that are the next best choice in front of you but like that feeling of not being able to see how contradictory what i was absorbing was to who i wanted to be in the world and what else I knew about the

world. It was, it really shook me. It made me feel like for a while afterwards, it was like, I didn't know how to make choices for a minute. I was like, how can I be, how can I know confidently that something I believe is something I believe? You know, how do I answer that question? It was a very strange sort of dark moment when I did not speak out publicly for years. After that, I went into grad school, I studied medieval history, it was something to really occupy me. And it was this feeling like, I don't know how to trust myself. Like, I don't know how to even decide what it is that I am and what I do. And that was something that was really disconcerting. You're breaking down in a cathartic moment where your identity is erased and then

you're like, who am I? And I mean, that's from the sounds of it. You wrote in the book about how your mother ended every call with, I love you. And then the week you published the the annunciation of abdicating from white nationalism she wrote you back and said you need to make new friends and family what was that like no it was it was really rough it was really hard it was it was harder than I had anticipated actually and I think that was probably self protective, because it was predictable. Like my family were very, very clear. Even going back to when I was a kid, speaking out on behalf of this, I never saw myself as trying to win their love or something. It's not how I thought I was acting. But it was also clear, I was growing up in a movement where that was their passion. And being a part of it was the most sure way for them to love and trust and

respect me and think that I was you know somebody worth paying attention to and so it was kind of predictable but it was something that I just had not been able to wrestle with before making the choice it was like I felt like I had to make the decision because I had spent years after I came back to college and this community that was, you know, speaking out against me and sort of split between trying to ostracize me saying I didn't belong in this community. They wanted to prioritize people who felt threatened by white nationalism and people who said, oh, you know, maybe we can change, change, you know, Derek's mind. And I had spent years in that setting and had lost my feeling of the evidence.

I had lost my feeling of moral rightness bit by bit, not thinking it was going to undermine who I was, not thinking it was going to undermine even this identification as a white nationalist. And it was really only at the end where I just had, okay, there's no rationale. There's no defense for it. I don't believe this. I can see that I don't believe this. I can see that they are willfully ignoring facts and they're not willing to change their minds. It's about the ways they see themselves in the world. I need to therefore do something because I feel like they are hurting people and I don't want to be a part of this anymore. And, you know, it was like, I i felt but i don't want to you know i want to

be somebody who has my community who my family cares about and loves and trusts and seizes the next generation like realizing oh i wanted to be an important person to the people i cared about and i can't and there's not like you just switch to another community it's not i'm not i'm not sure what your experience was exactly but i've talked to a lot of people over the years and and i think religion is often an experience that people have like very very intense family religions and it's never the case that people had the experience where they were like ah you know there's here's another place i go it's often the case that they had made connections with people that made them realize they wanted to go somewhere else. But that's not the same thing as I'm going to disconnect from everybody who cares about me and, you know, plug in over here. It's

something that I went into just this feeling of I don't know what my connections are. And it's taken over a decade since then to one by one sort of build relationships, think about who I am. And at this point, I feel deeply connected and deeply meaningful and who I am and my identity and what I want to do. It's, you know, for the most part, like anybody, relatively clear, and I don't have this sense of, oh, no, you know, who am I? But the fact that it took years and years and was so really challenging, I try to emphasize that as not an aberration. And I mean, I know my experience is unusual. I know my experience is unique and all this. But the idea

of radically changing your mind on something plays out really similarly every time. It's that feeling of this is going to be incredibly hard to rebuild who I am. And it's not something that we should think is so easy or lighter. Obviously people should do it. You know, if they realize that they're a part of something that's bad, they should just leave it, you know, and do what?

And you're in, like I said, that ball of yarn, that, that identity that's so wrapped up, you know, some people don't even know where to start pulling the string at because there's so many belief systems built on it.

Now your journey is kind of interesting too we mentioned the we mentioned your they them pronouns and one of the things that you go through is exploring and trying to understand your gender identity in the lgbt community and of course with many of the folks in these in the white nationalist movement they're not too excited about the l community, from what I understand. Tell us about how that's a part of the book and how you go through that journey as well. Right.

It is not extremely explicit in the book. I talk about it a little bit, mostly in the epilogue, and it's been sort of a little bit surprising how much emphasis there's been in some of the articles about it. And I'm not unhappy about it. I think it's good because at this point, I really am ready to talk much more about it. But I've been writing the book for several years. And during that period, I was like, you know, at the beginning, I was like, this is personal.

This is not something I knew I ever wanted to talk about. And I got to the place where I'm like, yeah, I never contradicted or not or avoided in the book, but I didn't want to get explicitly into it because it was the fact that I've had conflicted gender feelings since I was a little kid and probably similar to ideology absorbed the idea that you know just because you want something but you can't have it I sort of lost the feeling of what's the difference between wanting to do something and not being able to do something like it must be that I didn't want it and it's still something that I like process over time. And being in college was also, you know, an experience of recognizing that we do not have to conform. We don't have to present any particular way.

We don't have to be anything. And a lot of the, a lot of structures we have and a lot of assumptions people have tend to sort of often sort of kind of some kind of power structure i think not saying race and gender at all the same thing but the idea of things being incredibly rigid whenever i think i am willing to say whenever an ideology or a social construct tries to emphasize how absolutely rigid a category of body or person is and there's absolutely no transgressing in and there's no there's person is, and there's absolutely no transgressing in it,

there's no fluidity, and there's no permeable barrier between these categories. It's never true, and it's also often serving some kind of power, some kind of structure, some kind of ideology, and I think that's something that I really had to unpack over time. And the book isn't about gender, but anybody who reads it who is interested in it, please kind of ideology and I think that's something that I really had to unpack over time and the book isn't about gender but anybody who reads it who is interested in it please recognize that you're reading a book from somebody who has lots of trans thoughts in most of these scenes and talks about it a bit at the end and I have more things that I'm writing about it now and putting out now and I think that's that's what complicates the story and and gives it more depth

more more challenges and losing your identity because you're going through several different evolvements at the same time of who you are what you're about you know flushing away what you were raised with racism and white nationalism you're young and you're you're trying to find out who you are as a as human being who's not a racist who's not a white nationalism you're you're young and you're trying to find out who you are as a human being who's not a racist, who's not a white nationalist, and you're trying to understand your sexuality and your identity there. I mean, that's really a complicated journey to go through. And I think those sort of stories are important

because there's probably people out there that may be going through something similar. Maybe they're only going through one of the journeys of those two that you went through. But, you know, you can kind of help give people a blueprint, a guide print to, you know, maybe how to cathartically move through those things. We always talk on the Chris Voss Show about how people's stories are the owner's manual to life. And usually when you, you know, we have people on the show who've gone through their cathartic moments, their journeys, and they figured out the blueprint is that how to survive that and come through it. You know, it ends up helping so many other people that are like,

you know, someone told me a long time ago, they go, somebody needs to read your book. There's somebody out there, probably a lot of people that need your book and they're not gonna, they're not going to get it until they read your book and you're going to save them from whatever sort of thing they're struggling with, but they need you to write that book and finish it.

And so I think, you know, there hopefully will be people that read your book. I'm sure there will be. And they'll be like, Hey, I know that I'm going through this struggle right now from whatever those two venues are. And, and your, your leadership and saying, you know, this is the way I got through this can give them a blueprint for getting through theirs. I appreciate you saying that. Yeah. I hope so. I'm glad that I waited until now to write it.

It was a decade ago that I condemned my family's movement. I felt lost for a long time. But it wasn't too long after that that I think I had the opportunity to. And I was really happy that I didn't. I said no and didn't know if I ever would get the chance to and hoped that at some point I would understand more what I wanted to write and at this point I can look back on it and say yeah I basically understand what was happening in those times and I basically have a lot more understanding and compassion for myself and so I'm glad that I'm the version of myself

You know who's telling people about what I experienced and by showing people that example if they're going through that or or just as a learning Thing, you know, I think I think like I said, we all have confirmation bias. We all build in our biases We all believe that the news channels we subscribe to are the correct ones and you know what we're reading and you know i've seen people you know they watch cnn which i watch a lot we've had several cnn people on the show you know it tries to cut it down the middle as best they can you know when someone's on doing a crime wave yeah they're going to talk about a certain person a lot if they're on a crime wave but and that appears to be biased but you know there's there's certainly other news channels and other consumptions you know i've talked to people

that are deeply into conspiracy theories and you know i mean even ones that you would seem logically implausible like jfk is still alive and he's running the government and you're like he would be like 120 years old or something i don't know what it would be is seriously you're going with that that seems a little i mean that just seems so implausible but you know so to most conspiracy theories but i think it's a good example of where you've gone through the journey and it maybe it can shine a light to where other people can go through the journey whether it's understanding their sexuality or whether it's dealing with racism, you know, and it's sad that racism is taught at such an early level. Someone asked me, how do we beat racism?

And I think it was me and Eddie Glaude Jr. We're talking the first time he was on the show, we were talking about how to beat racism. I think it was him or somebody. And we were like, we need to change laws we need to you know change redlining we need to do all this stuff at this higher level when people are adults to fight racism and I remember I told them I said you know what we need to do is we need to fight it in schools and at the child level because that's where it's being taught it's being taught by the parents of the children and you know by probably the time they enter school they're already indoctrinated in what

the parents have taught them and so somehow we need to fight that at the elementary school level the junior high school level what do you think about that is is is there a way where we can is there a way to combat that so if we were to look at you as a 10-year-old child entering school, was there some way we could have, do we fuck up? Do we miss out on trying to help you through it? Or is it something you just had to go on this journey? I've got a lot of answers to this. Baseline, I think, I'm not sure I mentioned it, talk about it in the book, that my family did take me out of school when I was nine. And I think the baseline is this recognition that they were worried about my being close to people who were contradicted our worldview. You know, I was somebody who wanted to be open to other people.

And I think they recognize that that's not the worldview they wanted. They want isolation was how they tried to practice their lives. And so probably being in school, certainly being in school, my life would have been different because of my relationships, but I don't know how, you know, it's probably telling that college was the time that I was closest to people for the first time since that point. And it was also the point when I most radically rethought my worldview. And so I think school itself, being close to people who aren't like us in any setting and not just school, you know, at any point in your life. It's not even not just about being young.

It's about any point in your life being very close with other people who are not just mimicking what you say and what you believe and have your values and sort of understand your context. And you're all sort of trying to stay connected in that way you're trying in any setting like that where you are equals where you really stay in each other's spaces for a long time you have to reconcile those distinctions and differences and if somebody says you know this is something that you fully misunderstand about me and your response is like you know i care about you tell me more about it that's the moment when we really start rethinking what we believe and who we are and on a fundamental level how do we decide what is true you know that's the time when we make those decisions and I think it can happen at any point in your life the general lesson I think I took from that from this experience of you know coming

to that coming to that community leaving my the one that I had grown up in condemning it realizing I've been that I had grown up in, condemning it, realizing I've been wrong. I had that moment I was mentioning earlier about wondering how do I even decide that what I believe about anything is true. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but it was this feeling like that. And where I landed the general idea was that as long as what I was valuing was always trying to expand the circle of people that I cared about trying to find a larger constellation of relationships even if it's just a one that I'm thinking about not a person who I actually know just thinking about how can I imagine that I'm connected to that person that I've just met or heard about or know somebody who

knows somebody? And if my worldview allows for that, if I'm always trying to sort of expand the relationships that I have and how I feel connected to people, then the ways that I'm assessing, you know, how am I affecting other people? How am I judging what is true? How am I making sure that I'm consistent with my values and myself? That's something that doesn't steer, I don't think, anybody wrong. This idea, especially if you think about it the opposite way, whenever we're trying to rationalize something, when there's something that maybe in the back of your mind makes you wonder about how you are actually acting in the world, like how you're actually affecting other people.

It's the opposite of that heuristic. It's the idea of, you know, I'm not responsible for that person. You know, if this thing that I need does seem to put them in a bad situation, you know, like that's there, somebody else needs to look out for them. I'm looking out for these people, and this is not my problem, and I can't be blamed. And like, you start saying all these sort of things. And it's something that I think we all are tempted to do and feel. And it's an important part of being alive. You know, you can't, it's a bit overwhelming to think there's no end to your connections to people. It's not just the people you meet day to day. It's everybody in the world at some point. And how do I deal with that fact? But the moment that you aren't willing to do that, you start rationalizing things and you start losing yourself.

And I think that's really the lesson that I tried to take with me. It's difficult. It's hard. There's never an answer. I always feel a bit inadequate thinking like that. But it's something that I can make sure that what I'm saying, what I'm doing, how I'm acting, at least is consistent. At least is who I want to be. And even if it never feels like enough, it's at least always a step towards feeling

like I'm living the life I want to live. There you go. It sounds like you're seeking a true authentic self of what the truth is. And you're still on that journey as you go through it and trying to, you know, I went through a similar journey with my cult where I was trying to you know I've been isolated like you were where everyone is evil stranger danger that's actually how the cold operates here in Utah it's still still this day and and you know you you can't trust the outside world you can't talk the outside world you can't get that outside perspective and but then when you go out it takes a long time to unwind of that yarn ball of of all the different things i mean it they're probably

it's been 40 years probably 40 years since i officially left and there's probably still an imprint that that has on me and then family of course losing your family or you know the thoughts losing your family is incredibly challenging and i've i've actually had to deal with that because i still have family members in the cult and so i still deal with them pushing the cult at 56 it's a little old yeah so i feel you man and i i i'm glad you went through this journey i'm glad you saw the light i'm glad you're sending an example and letting people know as a beacon that hey there's a better way and here's the way out and you can you can find your way to a better life a better happiness being more agreeable with the people around you and and joining humanity instead of isolating

yourself into this you know ideology where you're like we're better than you the one thing that was interesting to me is when i there i had an epiphany one day that that religion and ideologies really have this moral high ground that gives people this pompous sort of ego pump that we are better than you and i never really understood that was what was going on but it's a it's a look down your nose and glasses that go we're we're the moral high ground because we believe in i don't know space aliens and and you don't so clearly we are better than you and i never realized that was part of it it's kind of interesting sort of psychology that is true that's a really good way to put that something that like applies to my life

and applies to basically everybody who i've ever met who had you know some isolated upbringing and then left it it's that feeling of the people on the outside are somehow not as good as you yeah and all of us we are the ones we really care for each other we're really important to each other and those other people they're they're not just you know you don't have to worry about them they hate you and you're like huh you know realizing that's not true is very hard you know it's like uh that i don't know what it was about me i sort of wonder sometimes if it was i don't know like i was just inherently i never wanted to isolate myself from people, even when I was a little kid. I didn't want to tell somebody that, you know, I can't be friends with you or something like

that just wasn't quite rationalized that I said, you know, why nationalism has to be scientifically backed or it has to be true about millions of people, but not about individuals, because I'm not going, I can tell individuals are not one thing. Everybody is a world unto themselves. I could see that when I was 10 years old. And that eventually was my unraveling where this ideology that tries to explain how everybody is born to be something based on their race or whatever, isn't true, because an individual, what's a community community what are millions of people but lots of individuals and and i really am thankful i had that feeling you know and i don't think it makes me better i don't think it makes me like oh you know i was like you know empathetic or moral

or something it was just this feeling that i didn't want to be cut off from other people and that led to eventually ironically having to cut myself off from other people. And that led to eventually, ironically, having to cut myself off from the people who most cared about me in the world. And I don't know, there's like a deep irony there. And also, I think I don't want to make myself and I guess, you know, you, I think like everybody who has this experience, like case lessons or something, but the idea that it's easy to feel like you're going to lose the community that cares about you and tells you how dangerous the outside world is and that you know if it seems unreasonable you should just do that i think too many people believe that too many people think changing somebody's mind or persuading them is about telling them what they believe is wrong

and maybe the community around them is actually ignorant or something and to believe that somebody's natural response to that would be like oh thank you for you know telling me i'm a jerk or telling me my you know community and family are insane or something like oh i'm so glad you've intervened it's not how it works the only way it works is to be a specific person in their life to be a relationship that can talk to them that they trust, that I trust, that, you know, whatever the relationship is. And then say, you know, I care about you either way. And I just want to, like, talk about life. And I'm not here to change you necessarily. But I do think you're wrong.

And I do think you should listen to me and go from there. That's how persuasion works. And the reason is because it's all about relationships. Yeah. There you go. And that's a good point you know we live in a world now where everyone is at odds with each other and we're highly politicized on both sides of the thing white nationalism is white nationalism is a big part of the gop now and then you know i mean the left we have our woke people that are kind of extreme left i mean they've gone so far left

They're supporting Hamas now evidently some of them They've curved around the other corner, but you know, we need to talk more and we need to build those relationships I think your point about relationships is really important one of the things I had a conversation with somebody who's into a lot of conspiracy things yesterday and there's just it's just so hard to figure out where to start with them because every time you talk to them they they will spout off to you 20 of the most craziest batshit things and you're just like how do i even try and figure out a way to have this person understand anything you know like how do we get to square one and it's really hard it's difficult

but you know i try and build a relationship and usually when i have political discussions with people that i think we can have them i set a foundation and i say i say okay but here's here's the relationship part as you've talked about we're all americans first we're not sitting here having this conversation as you're a gop and i'm a Democrat we're not we're not having that this sort of thing we're Americans first and and the great thing is we can debate but and so it kind of focuses on that relationship first and by focusing on the we're all Americans first seems to get me to better conversations I can see that. I think in my movement it wouldn't have worked because white nationalists view themselves as not American.

They view themselves as beyond nations and countries and they see themselves as transnational. So it would have been something where they would be like, yeah, I don't care about America, would have been the reaction that they had. On 9-11, I remember my dad waking me up in the morning and saying they were attacked. Like this country was attacked as opposed to, you know, not us.

And that feeling was, you know, alarming in retrospect. But there is actually, I don't know if you have a minute, there's a point I didn't want to make I was thinking about, just like listening to that, about this idea of crossing identities. And there's something that, it's one of the observations I've made as an adult looking back on white supremacy and white nationalism, not something that they believe themselves. But I feel like it would have made sense even at the time to hear it if i've been a teenager and somebody tried to explain it to me i would have said you know it would have stuck with me which is that they rationalize race and they rationalize these like hierarchies and white people are smarter and more creative and all this sort of stuff and they want to isolate themselves so they want to segregate the whole country and you know they

have this really horrifying vision of the future but at base they grew up in the whole country. And, you know, they have this really horrifying vision of the future, but at base, they grew up in the same country as everybody else did. And they saw enormous inequality and enormous injustice. They on its face, see that based on how someone's born, that's going to predict what sort of like life they have in aggregate, whether they have more money, whether they can

go to college whether the jobs and connections they get like how the police treat them whether they get in prison like all these sort of things are very different based on what body you're born into and how you're identified racially legally structurally and they see that the way everybody does the same things that anti-racists say oh oh my god, this is so unjust, we must change the structures of this society. We need to create a world that changes the ways this has all been intentionally built over centuries. And white nationalists weren't taking an inherently different conclusion. They were looking at that injustice and saying, I need this to be okay in some way. I need it to be the case that I, you know, don't have a more comfortable life than someone else because I was born into some category and it's just a social injustice,

a social crime, and this makes me feel horrible. They instead look at that and say, oh, it must be that I deserve, I am better than, like maybe, you know, the stories are true, maybe I really do deserve it, maybe other people are worse than me, maybe they have lesser living a harder life, because they're a worse kind of person than me. And, you know, depending on your worldview, you can look at that and say, oh, that's insane, or that's cruel or something. But the way there is about the same, it's just living in a world that's deeply unjust and coming to a conclusion that I need this to be rational. I need this to make sense to me. It makes sense if you sort of think about it. And it explains why racism is, you know, why it exists. It's not that people are just

inherently bigoted and just, you know, hate people who aren't like them. It's much more that the world is structured in a way where they need things to not feel so bad and they come up with a worldview to explain it and maybe that's a i don't know a search for security or a search for i mean we all we all approach the world where we try and you know it's chaotic it's scary it's madness and we we try and somehow give it reason and we try and you know i studied a little bit of the stoicism we try and give reason to catastrophe you know and you know why are we here because we're here why do things happen because they happen if i want to quote me up here to rush you know in and I grew up with a religious community that said, oh, the earthquake happened

because God, I don't know, he didn't have antacids and he was upset or something. Or he just, I don't know, he just woke up on the wrong side of the bed of a hangover or something. And the way we would rationalize all sorts of stuff and really it could be that the universe

just operates the way it is and that bad things happen because they happen. And there doesn't have to. But I think sometimes we build these models to try and rationalize and bring context to the world. Because, you know, it is kind of scary to walk through the world and just think bad things can happen any time to you. And there's really no rhyme or reason to it. Have fun with that. You know, you never leave the house right so it's interesting but i i love how you've you've done the psychology

of this and going through your journey and it gives a roadmap to people to kind of have a deeper understanding of why they're believing in things like racism or other beliefs. And then they can start unwinding that thread and saying, maybe there is a better way. Maybe there's a way outside of the box. So there you go. This has been a wonderful discussion, my friend. As we go out, give us your final thoughts and.com so people can find you on the interwebs.

I need to set up a.com. This is a good reminder. I've got one. I just don't have anything. Let me get that book.com for you there. Yeah, just search for The Klansman's Son. That's the title of the book, and there's ways to get it and look for it.

And all I ask for people is just, if you're interested and curious and want to engage on this stuff, I do have social medias that I sometimes see if you post it, but mostly I put a lot of work and thought into the book and that's where i really have invested my thoughts and i'm really waiting the book came out earlier this week and i'm just looking forward i think both

to critique and to just talking about it with people this i think i really have lived a life where i feel like ideas and trying to figure out how do we want to live is something that is communal, something that's based through conversation. You can't do it by sitting alone. And I really like engaging with people on it. even read the book or not read the book, but just like the idea of just trying to understand how we can live more meaningful lives, I think is something that I, the main thing that drives me at this point, how you can lead a life that you don't feel like you're lying to yourself in any way. Like you don't have to have some sort of rationale to justify some relationship or some ways that you're connected to other people or way that you affect other people. And to understand how hard that can be. I think that it's not inherent that everybody wants to be an unharmful person who lives a good life.

And it is so much more complicated than that. It's so much more perilous and dangerous. And I think we just have to have a lot more sympathy for each other. There you go. And I love that message. Have more sympathy for each other. We had somebody on recently who was talking about the third perspective and how we need to, you know, recognize the humanity of each other and empathize with each other, like you say, as opposed to, you know, all these tribes and identities we put up. You know, I'm American and you're this and I'm white and you're not.

And, you know, when it comes down to it, we're all human beings and we all should learn to get along. Why don't we all just get along? Famous line. So thank you very much for coming on the show. It's been a wonderful discussion, Derek. I applaud you and what you've done. I know how hard a lot of these journeys are to go through, of cathartic

moments, rebuilding your identity and losing them and finding your way through the darkness. But thank you and thank you for providing that light for people. Thanks so much for having me, Chris. It's been great to talk to you. There you go. And thanks to Ronis for tuning in. Order up the book where refined books are sold, The Klansman's Son, My Journey from White Nationalism to Anti-Racism, a memoir out May 14th, 2024. Be good to each other, other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time and that should have us out there