The Daily - Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2017

Episode Date: December 27, 2017

The Daily is revisiting our favorite episodes of the year — listening back, and then hearing what’s happened since the stories first ran. Today, we’re going back to a conversation that first ran this summer, two weeks after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. turned violent and right after President Trump drew intense criticism by saying there were “some very fine people on both sides.” Guest: Derek Black, who had been poised to lead the white nationalist movement but then left, betraying his father, a former grand master of the Ku Klux Klan. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Hi, it's Michael. This week, The Daily is revisiting our favorite episodes of the year, listening back and then hearing what's happened in the time since the stories first ran. Today, we're going back to a conversation that first ran this summer, two weeks after a white supremacist rally

in Charlottesville, Virginia turned violent, and right after President Trump drew intense criticism by saying there were, quote, some very fine people on both sides. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily Watch. Today, Derek Black left the white nationalist movement he was poised to help lead,

betraying his family and friends in the process. After leaving, he came to see it as a fringe movement, on the margins and reprehensible to most Americans, which is why he has been shocked by the events of the past couple weeks. It's Tuesday, August 22nd. It's Tuesday, August 22nd. Yeah, I was born into one of the most prominent white nationalist families in the country. Wow. My godfather, for lack of any other words, David Duke, who was married to my mother before I was born.

And then my father started the largest white nationalist website, Stormfront, the first white nationalist website on the Internet. And it has been the largest one ever since. So I grew up with the leadership of the white nationalist movement all coming over to the house. And when I got older, we'd go to conferences. And it was my life. Derek Black grew up in West Palm Beach, Florida, across the water from the president's Mar-a-Lago mansion. And he used to drive past it almost every day in a red pickup truck with a Confederate flag sticker on the back window. His father is Don Black, once a Grand Wizard of the KKK.

Sounds like what you're describing is that you're kind of the first child of American white nationalism. I mean, I did. I knew everybody. I knew everybody who was involved in it. And I knew all the different organizations. And I expected that it would be my life's work to try to advance this. I thought it was the right thing. How did you process these ideas of your godfather and your father and your mother and this entire movement as a child.

What is white nationalism through the eyes of a child? It's a really tight-knit movement of people. It's important to understand the context that in my family, pioneering white nationalism on the web was my dad's goal. That was what drove him from the early 90s, from the beginning of the web. And so growing up, we always had the latest computers and the fastest broadband. We were the first people in the neighborhood to have broadband because we had to keep Stormfront running. And so technology and connecting people on the website long before social media and the way the web is set up now was his driving purpose. So we were very connected to everybody in the white nationalist movement around the world.

When I was a little kid, I would get on chat rooms in the evenings and I had friends in Australia who I would talk to because they were at a certain hour. I had friends in Serbia who I'd talk to at a certain hour. And what would you be saying to each other? I remember in the late 90s, I was talking to a white nationalist kid and he was explaining to me the American invasion of Serbia and how it was tied to Jewish control of the American military. Wow. Not the conventional understanding of the U.S. military action, which was to spare people genocide. Absolutely, yeah. I started a kid's website on Stormfront, on my dad's website. And so

from the time I was 12, you constantly get death threats in email. So there's... So you started your own kind of white nationalist website for children? Yeah, when I'm not sure what age, maybe 11 or 12 or something, I set up a pretty basic little webpage on there and posted some essays that I was writing at the time. Actually, in a lot of ways, that brings people together. I know it brought my family together, the fact that you have media

coming over as I went on television and newspapers, which were usually coming over to talk to my dad, and then you'd get these really bad stories about us. But we're all working towards a cause. So the fact that everybody is so opposed to something we know is so right really brought us together. At this point in your life, when you're a young man and you saw an African-American or you saw a Jewish person, what was going through your mind? What kind of things were you thinking or saying to yourself? I think my family made a distinction between individuals and big groups. There's many opinions on this among white nationalists. There are people who say, oh, you can't be friends with anyone who's not white. And my family was generally a bit more cosmopolitan, although I think they've

gotten more extreme in the last couple of years. I have to pause and tell you, the notion of a cosmopolitan white nationalist is a little tricky, but I'm going to go with it. If you, when you zoom in on it and it becomes the whole world that you're viewing, then all the different factions take on a bigger role. Right. And so, yeah, I think my family usually, at least it was my, definitely my attitude by the time I got to college was that individuals are one thing. You talk to people and anybody can be anything and their race is not going to predict an individual's life or anything about

them. It's only when you're talking about millions of people that this becomes a defining aspect of humanity. In reality, it is white supremacy. It's just that they wouldn't see it that way. I never saw it that way. My dad, I genuinely believe, who I know very well, does not believe that he is doing something bad to other people. That does not make it untrue, but a lot of these people don't believe that they're actually hurting other people by their policies. He instead believes what? That he's doing something for himself? For white people. He believes that for white people to exist and live and have a country like America was before 1950, everybody needs to be the same color and be together because race is this real genetic thing that predicts all this

stuff like intelligence and ability and and that race is so real that every race in the world should be separated saying this in living as i do now it sounds delusional but it is something that is possible for somebody to believe and think that it makes sense. Derek, can you take me to 2008 and President Obama's election? I don't know exactly how old you were at that moment, but do you remember where you were and what you were doing around that time? And this is a big one. Senator Barack Obama will carry the state of Virginia. This is an important win for Senator Obama. In 2008, I was 19. And at the same time as Obama was heading towards winning the presidency in the first election, I had also submitted my name for this local Republican executive committee election,

which was county level. And I won that. I got 60% of the vote. This little known U.S. senator only a few years ago seemingly coming out of nowhere and now he will be the first african-american president of the united states this is a moment so many people have been waiting for and they're really excited especially in chicago let's listen in for a moment. After he won, David Duke organized a conference for, I think it was the weekend after the election.

And I went up there and it was pandemonium. I knew people who were sobbing and saying that now there's never going to be another white president again and that the country is lost, thinking they had to make contingency plans. And the thinking of white nationalist leaders at the time was that Barack Obama has won, but now that he's won, you're going to have a huge white backlash against him. Wow. to have a huge white backlash against this. Wow. And so it became this meeting to try to figure out how to make the movement bigger while he's president. Yeah. And Derek is very, very, well, I'm going to let Derek speak for himself here, but Derek

has really made some progress. I've been speaking for years about how we've got the soft underbelly of politics is available to us. And I've been preaching this, you know, you've got to go out there, just go out and take votes, go to small elections where you can knock on the doors, reach the people. And Derek went out there and he did it. He ran for the Republican executive committee of his parish and he won the election. and he won the election. I had just won that little Republican position, so I was very encouraged that if we went around and told people all the white nationalist talking points

without necessarily saying that we're white nationalists, that we could win elections, whether they're little county things like that or maybe even larger ones. Here is Derek Black. And after Derek... Derek Black Actually, I do a radio show on Stormfront. I don't know. Well, I'll do what James did. How many people here listen to Stormfront radio?

My whole talk was the fact that you could run as Republicans and say things like, we need to shut down immigration, we need to fight affirmative action, we need to end globalism, and you could win these positions, maybe as long as you didn't get outed as a white nationalist and get all the controversy that comes along with it. So the Republican Party, which had just lost to Barack Obama, your argument was that it could be the vehicle for the mainstreaming of white nationalism or white supremacy. Yeah, my thinking at the time was that all this backlash, which you eventually did see of white people against having a black president,

would have to go into the Republican Party because America is a two-party system and the Republican Party would become the white people's party. Well, you know, my election happened last month and the newspaper, the local newspaper said I was a stain on the state of Florida. And I don't think you people realize how emotionally distressing it is to be called a stain on your state. And then you went to college. So tell me about

that. In 2010, I moved across the state and started college at this little liberal arts college in Florida, which was about three and a half hours from home. And it was the first time that I had been lived away from home. Nobody knew who I was and I did not volunteer who I was or anything about my background. Made friends, hung out with people, played my guitar on my balcony in my dorm. It was nice to come back from class and be able to talk about history or philosophy or whatever other subject and be around other people. And so that whole fall that I was being a student there trying to live this two lives like I had done for years.

And welcome back to the program. This is the second broadcast of my program. I am Derek Black on WPBR 1340 AM. I'd get on the phone in the morning and call into my dad's radio show and talk about the news and then go to class and hang out with people who were often strong social justice advocates. And trying to live both of those lives was terrifying because I knew that one day somebody was going to type my name into Google. All right. Let's bring on now my longtime family friend from calling in from Europe, David Duke, a former Louisiana representative and probably the biggest spokesman, the greatest spokesman for white rights in the United States. David, are you online?

I sure am. It's good to hear from you. Great to talk to you, Derek, and congratulations on your new program. And I look forward to you taking your rightfully won seat. There was this one really memorable moment where I was sitting in the cafeteria and talking to some people I knew, and one of them discovered this website, Stormfront, which is the site that my dad ran and that I had a kids page on, and I had run the internet radio on for years. The views and opinions expressed on this program are those of the host, guests, and callers, and do not necessarily represent those of WPBR, its staff, management, or advertisers.

And I was still running while I was in school, even though I didn't have as much time for it. Last night was the Republican Executive Committee meeting in West Palm Beach, downtown West Palm Beach. It is the big issue. And a guy who was sitting across the table from me found the Lord of the Rings section of the Stormfront website and showed everybody and turned it around and said, can you believe these people are trying to get Lord of the Rings nerds into white nationalism? Isn't this insane? And I had founded the Lord of the Rings section because when the movies came out, I got super into it. And I figured you could probably get people who like such a super white mythos. A few of them are probably going to be turned on by white nationalism.

And more mundanely, I just wanted to talk about the movies. So I had founded that thing maybe 10 years earlier. And so this guy turned his computer around to show everybody this section. And I just pretended like I had never heard of the website before. Huh. You just acted as if it didn't exist and you had no role in it. Yeah. So what, you know, what is that? What is Stormfront? And so then, of course, inevitably it happens. You're found out.

The student forum explodes, and you're shunned on campus for quite some time. But then you get an invitation, right? Tell me about that. I had a friend on campus who I had gotten to know during my first semester when nobody knew who I was. He was an observant Jew who had Shabbat dinners pretty regularly. Whenever he was in town on Friday night. And he would invite people of atheists and all sorts of different religions. It was just a nice dinner. And so he actually invited me to one of the Shabbats and I knew him. And so I brought wine

and went to it. Even after learning what he did about you? Yeah. Yeah, he did. He had read my posts on Stormfront going back years. He, even the stuff when I was a teenager and he doubted that he was going to convince me of anything. And he just wanted to let me see a Jewish community thing so that if I was going to keep saying these anti-Semitic things that at least I had seen real Jews. It was ultimately in private conversations with a person I met at the Shabbat dinners who we would we would talk about things, not only white nationalism, but eventually white nationalism. And I would say this is what I believe about IQ differences. I have 12 different studies that have been published over the years. Here's the journal, a white

nationalist journal that's put this stuff together. I believe that this is true, that race predicts IQ and that there are IQ differences between races. And then they would come back with 150 more recent, more well-researched studies, explain to me how statistics works. And we would go back and forth until I would come to the end of that argument and say, yes, that actually makes sense. That does not hold together. And I'm going to remove that from my ideological toolbox. But everything else is still there. And we did that over a year or two on one thing after another until I got to a point where I didn't believe it anymore. So as you and this friend are going around and around and your mind is changing about this, what's the definitive moment where you make a decision and do something about it? It was really this letter over the summer of 2013. And I sent it to the Southern Poverty Law Center,

which is an organization my entire life that had been the enemy. They had come after my mother. They had constantly written articles about my father. They had tried to get his website taken down. They had been one of the biggest opponents of my family for my entire life. And then you turned to them as somebody who would disseminate this letter you wrote? I did. I turned to them to publish my letter because I knew that their intelligence report was the most widely read thing in the white nationalist world, more so than any white nationalist publication. This was like the gossip mag that the white nationalist world turned to to find out what everybody else was doing. And by sticking my letter on their website, I knew that every white

nationalist would see it and every anti-racist would hear about it. The audience was in a lot of ways my own family. I wanted them to know that I understood what we believed, and I was systematically disbelieving each point. And then I just sent it, and they published it. And when it came out, my dad called me up in the morning and said, I think you've been hacked. I think your email was hacked because somebody sent this letter. Wow. He didn't believe you'd written it? No, we hadn't talked about my beliefs changing. At first, he was incredibly sad. He called me a day or maybe two days after I had written the letter. It was maybe the first time we had talked since he first called to ask, tell me he thought I had been hacked. And it was maybe the first time we had talked since he first called to ask to tell me he thought i

had been hacked and it was just this sad moment where he said i've thought about it and it's really hurting me i think it might not have been a good idea to have a son if this is the pain that's going to come from it. He said that he wondered whether it was a good idea to have had a son because of the shame he felt because you had written that letter and rejected everything he stood for. Yeah. And I could understand it. He called again later that day and said, I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry. And then we started talking bit by bit. I made the argument that family and political beliefs should not be the same thing and aren't the same thing. And he came back at the time with the case that there is nothing in your life experience, Derek,

that would suggest that our family is not a political family. We believe these things. That is the basis of our family. The idea that you could be anti-white nationalists and that wouldn't affect your relationship to the family is not going to work. It was how we connected. That's what holds us together. It sounds unbelievably painful. It was. When's the last time you spoke with him? Not since before Charlottesville. Not since all this. We'll be right back.

My big revelation when I left this movement and no longer talked to anybody in the movement was that most people don't talk about race very often. And so I came to the conclusion that white nationalism is a fringe movement. Everybody is aware that it should be a fringe movement. Uh, Barack Obama is the president. He'll make sure that it stays, remains a fringe movement. And I'll just try to quietly fade away and never talk about this again. And the future will be fine. And nobody wants to say that, but I'll say it right now.

You had a group, you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent. You had a group, you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent. The Tuesday remarks took my breath away. Do you think that what you call the alt-left is the same as neo-Nazis? All of those people, excuse me, I've condemned neo-Nazis. I've condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of the movement that you're working against the establishment. And that's what every white nationalist event is. It is very easy for the local politicians to condemn it, and you expect them to condemn it, and there's nothing else that

you would dream might happen. And so that's the context. And all the usual condemnations came from everybody else. And I have a message to all the white supremacists and the Nazis who came into Charlottesville today. Go home. You are not wanted. People in Congress and governors and mayors and white nationalists, white supremacists, they don't, they don't, they're not a part of anybody's base. They're not a part of this country. They're a part of hatred. They're a part of bigotry. They're a part of evil. And we need to stand up to that. And so whether it's the president... White supremacists, neo-Nazis, racists, Ku Klux Klan members, you are cowards and we condemn you. People who just wanted to get in their condemnation because everybody knows it's extremely easy to condemn a white nationalist rally. And then on Saturday, it was weird that he didn't. Everybody took that

as a huge victory. There were their tweets. People were commenting online saying like, wow, that's very new. But Tuesday, I was sitting in a coffee shop, and I thought basically the news from this was done. When I read that he had come back, and he had said that there were good people in the white nationalist rally, and he salvaged their message. George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down, excuse me, are we going to take down, are we going to take down statues to George Washington? What do you mean when you say he salvaged their message? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson?

You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now are we going to take down his statue? The message that they were trying to get out was that tearing down Robert E. Lee's statue is an assault on white culture. is an assault on white culture so if you think that tearing down robert e lee's statue is the wrong choice then these are your guys that these are the people who are willing to say it but then in amidst all the violence and the chaos i think that got lost you're not going to follow these people even if you believe that and in his message saying that these were good people even if you believe that. And in his message saying that these were good people because they're fighting for something that a lot of people believe in, he salvaged the message that they wanted to spread, which is that if you believe this too, and maybe you're on the edge

about whether this is a fringe movement or not, Donald Trump thinks we're fine. I don't think the whole world reads it that way. But within the white nationalist movement and anyone who is thinking maybe this might be a movement for me, suddenly being at that rally becomes a historical moment. What they wanted to do was blow apart that context to say that if you think Robert E. Lee's statue should stay up, then there's no distinction between what you believe and what a white nationalist believes. And it felt like he was agreeing with them. What do you think the impact Having the president, in your words, salvage their message and make all right what they were doing there in the broader sense. I think Tuesday was the most important moment in the history of the modern white nationalist movement. Wow.

the history of the modern white nationalist movement wow um i it's just impossible to say what will happen in the future like maybe nothing but if you were on the fence about whether you should get involved in this this stuff or not the president's okay is the biggest thing that's ever happened right and so i don't want to be alarmist and say, oh, this is a movement that's going to take over the world. But it's more precarious now than any point in my life on whether this thing as a movement and as a dangerous ideology grows. Because we don't seem to be as clear as we once were that we have to keep this suppressed,

that we cannot let this be who we are. I usually have a set of normal reactions in these interviews and my vocabulary kind of fails me a little bit. So I acknowledge that. Sure. No, I understand. I'm in this weird position these days where I have this background. I understand what people at these events and rallies are thinking, but I also know what I know now, my experiences. And so I can see on one hand where something is horrifying and on the other, I'm looking at it and wondering why they organized the event like that or why they were so kind of gauche to have swastika flags flying. Weren't they worried about the messaging? And then I come back and say, what is happening to my country? I have these two experiences and I have a lot of trouble reconciling them sometimes. As I try to deal with events this week, I wonder just how much the fact that Bea and my family and other people I knew were willing to push to try to get people

who were maybe on the fence or maybe thought that they were being discriminated against or that their kids couldn't get into college because of affirmative action and try to push them a little bit more and try to get them a little bit more angry. How much of an effect that had, I can't say. I don't know. Right. It sounds like you've given some thought, though, to your role in this. It's something I think about every day, I think. Derek, you know this, I'm sure. There are still pictures of you online as a child attending various far-right white nationalists,

white supremacist conferences, and you've got a little hat on, and you are in it. I'm guessing you don't go online and look at those all that frequently, but what do you think when you look back on those images and that version of yourself? on those images and that version of yourself? I'm always very conflicted that I have come to terms with myself. I'm not too much filled with deep shame all the time because I don't know what else I could do. What I wanted to do, what would have been more comfortable, and what I really, really wanted to do was just leave.

Never say anything again. Disappear off the face of the earth. Pretend that I had never lived the life that I lived, and I didn't know anything about white nationalism and never be heard from again. And it was a few more tough conversations that convinced me that that wasn't enough. You can't, because I had actually done harm. I try to follow the, the beliefs that my father has, if you look kind of sideways,

that if you believe something, if you think that there's a danger to our society, you should do something about it. And I don't want to be involved in this stuff, but I just want to try to offer context sometimes because I think that it's hard to understand what this movement is and how somebody can be a part of the movement and feel like they're doing something good and also offer that perspective on how you can realize that you're doing something very bad. something very bad. It sounds like what you're saying is you're still following your father's

beliefs, just not the way he intended for you to follow them. I don't know if he sees it that way, but sometimes I do. Derek, thank you very, very much. I appreciate it. Thanks, Michael.

Thanks for talking to me. Earlier this month, Derek Black was in New York and visited The Times to talk about the attention he's received since this episode first ran. Yeah, so there were a handful of good, interesting opportunities and people reached out and emailed me. One of the most memorable is the Obama Foundation, who listened to the Daily, some of the staff members listened to the Daily. And so their first event, they were coming together and bringing all these activists from around the world. And they just had all these people who had very impressive resumes,

outrageously self-sacrificing and productive social endeavors, like running orphanages or getting people out to vote or feeding the homeless. And then I'd say, well, I used to advocate white nationalism, and then The Daily interviewed me because I don't do that anymore. And sometimes that was awkward. After years of watching Barack Obama from a distance and thinking of him originally a, originally as something that was destroying America. I have this quote in a magazine from when I was 19 years old saying I

thought that his election was going to lead to a field of burning tires and homeless people. I originally ran for a little Republican office, largely in response to him running for the presidency. I started a radio show and I ran seminars trying to help white nationalists recruit, largely with Barack Obama as the backdrop. And so here I was at the Obama Foundation Summit sitting in a workshop and he walked in. And so I was sitting near the back. There was an empty chair. He sort of leaned in and said, oh, can I, do you mind if I sit here? And that was totally, it's fine, go ahead. And these are like 30 minutes.

I was trying to pay attention to the panel, but also wondering if it's acceptable for me to have at one time talked about how this is the end of white America. After like 30 minutes, he got up, made some comments about how the panel had been going, and then walked away. Later on in the weekend, we met like he was meeting everybody else. He slapped me on the shoulder and we shook hands and he said, you know, keep up the good work. And I just walked away absolutely baffled. While in New York, Derek also joined his friend from college for Shabbat dinner. Tomorrow, the unexpected relationships that formed in the wake of a hate crime.

We return to a mosque in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow. Thank you.