Welcome to the show. I'm gonna jump straight into it,
because this is honestly one of the most fascinating stories
I've ever come across.
I remember an op-ed you wrote about it,
but I'm gonna start with you, Eli.
How do you decide to write this story?
How do you even believe this story,
and where do you start in saying,
"Here's a former white nationalist"?
When did you start learning about Derek?
So, I was writing about Dylann Roof,
who'd committed the hate murder of nine people in a church
in Charleston, South Carolina-- a historically black church.
And he'd spent a lot of time on this site called Stormfront.
So I went on the site
to try to learn about him, learn about this community.
It's the largest hate site in the world.
And there were certainly threads on there
saying really upsetting things
about what Dylann Roof had done, celebrating him.
But the biggest thread was about somebody named Derek Black,
who was the son of the founder of this board,
David Duke's godson,
-had been raised to sort of lead this ideology. -Right.
And then had disavowed it and sort of disappeared.
And so I wanted to find him, uh, and I did.
So you're looking for a man by the name of Derek Black
who people are saying on the site
is basically the mastermind behind this ideology,
someone who's inspired them.
When you're reading through these threads and ideas...
You say "hate,"
but, like, what are we specifically speaking about?
Well, in Derek's case,
we're talking about somebody who was on the radio every day.
He had a radio show every day
talking about anti-immigration talking points,
talking about spreading false information
about IQ scores from different races
-and saying that white people were smarter. -Right.
We're talking about somebody, in Derek's case,
who had already run for office in Florida,
spreading this kind of information, and been elected.
Had risen to a position of power
and then had written a letter later on
to the Southern Poverty Law Center
unwinding all of these talking points,
all of the reasons he'd had, the facts-- totally wrong.
-Right. -And trying to convince other people
that these conclusions were disastrous
for the future of the country.
Now, Derek, I mean, on your side,
you have a really interesting story.
You know, a lot of the time people will say,
"Nobody's born racist,"
but I feel like you are one of the few people
who's closest to this place because...
No, because, I mean, your mom was married to David Duke.
-Yep. -You were born
into a family of the Ku Klux Klan.
So from the very beginning,
you were taught to think a certain way.
How do you even begin the journey
of starting to think differently?
I didn't until I was at college.
Um, I spent my-- all the younger years
getting more and more involved in feeling
like I really needed to help push this
-as my parents were getting older. -Right.
And it wasn't until this weird experience
of being outside of that in this different environment
and seeing people who were...
not supposed to fit into my in-group but who I really liked
and we were hanging out and, uh--
and also a college community that really condemned
everything I was saying. And I wanted to know--
first thing I wanted to know is why do you condemn it
so strongly. Like, I think it's f-fine.
-It's not attacking anyone, right? -You--
So, you-you genuinely believed these ideas.
-Like, just when you were alone, in your room by yourself, -Yeah.
you went, like, "I believe this. I believe that black people
"have lower IQs. I believe that people cannot mix.
I believe--" Like, you-- This was, like, your truth.
There's whole sections of white nationalist organizations
that spend their time putting out journal papers,
uh, putting out articles, putting out things
that seem very scientific, that make a lot of sense,
-misusing statistics and misusing facts -Yeah.
and making a case for all this just being
the unfortunate truth that people don't want to believe.
So you go to college. You meet kids who are not like you.
Do you come in with your Klan hood or do you...
Like, I-I genuine-- no, I genuinely want to know.
Like, how-- like, did you-- or did you disguise your identity
as a person? Was that-- was that how you started working
-in this world? -I didn't disguise it.
Um, since I was a-- from the time that I was a little kid,
I was very aware that it was controversial,
-and I just didn't bring it up in anything -Got it.
that was not the white nationalist conference world.
And as I got older,
it became harder and harder to have two parts of my life.
And before college, everybody who I was doing stuff with
that was not white nationalist
just sort of said, "Oh, you know, I don't like that a lot,
but what am I gonna do? Let's hang out."
And it was college, was the first time
where I had this community that said, "This is disgusting.
"We do not accept this at all.
I'm not gonna just let this pass."
So, you-you have all of this information at hand.
But when do you actually start changing?
'Cause, I mean, like you say, you have people
who've opposed you. You know that people oppose you.
But, like, Eli, when you-- when you were following the story,
like, what do you find, as someone who's observing
from the outside, started to change
somebody's mind and what they believed was right?
I-I think one of the things, for me, about reporting this book
was learning how hard it is
to, uh, effect that kind of change.
I mean, from students on this campus,
it took two years of sustained activism,
uh, and engagement with Derek
in order to begin to even see
some kinds of results of a change.
And that was, you know, civil resistance on campus,
shutting down the school at one point
to sort of say, "These beliefs are not okay.
You don't belong here."
Uh, it was people reaching out to him,
people who were the victims of his prejudices
who invited him over for dinner,
sat with him again and again and again and again,
even when they weren't seeing change,
just hoping that maybe Derek would-would go beyond
the stereotypes and start encountering the humanity
beyond-beyond what he believed.
And it took a long time.
It sounds like a-- like a process.
And it also sounds like it's extremely unrealistic
for it to be a process that works for everyone,
because you would need every single person
who believes in these ideas to be engaging with people
who are not like them, which is- which is really difficult.
You went on to become someone
who started writing about your experience.
I remember I first read your op ed in the newspaper,
and it was... it was... it was amazing how you spoke
about what you believed in, how people changed you
and why you now believed differently.
But when you go back and speak to the people
who you preached hate to, they don't come with you.
No, no. When I left, I left alone.
And I spent a lot of years totally alone.
Um, there were a couple of people
who I could keep in contact with,
but once I left that community, it wasn't even clear
-that I was gonna be able to talk to my parents. -Right.
And there's not an anti-racist world
that you just move to, so I spent a bunch of years...
-You've arrived. -...not know what I should do
and not talking to anybody and going by my middle name...
-Right. -...and trying to believe
that I never would have to speak about this again.
And then, maybe, in that way, I could continue living a life.
So now, not only are you not racist.
-Your last name is "Black" which... -(laughter)
...is like an added... is like an added part of the story.
The, um... the...
The part of the book that really, really gripped me was
when Eli's writing about your relationship with your father...
-Mm. -...and how he genuinely treats this
like a death in the family,
where he sees you as the son he wishes he never had
because you now go against everything
that he truly does believe.
How do you grapple with that?
I mean, we struggle with this so much as human beings.
I'm assuming you still love him because he's your father?
-Mm-hmm. -But you also speak out against the rampant hatred
that he professes and taught you.
I think in a kind of weird way,
the stuff that I was raised with that--
although all of society thinks we're nuts--
this is truth, and we have to say it.
And that we've gotten there by being independent thinkers
who are curious and look at facts,
even though everybody says it's wrong.
Like, that stuff was also the things that I needed
to be able to leave it, and I...
I know he doesn't exactly see it that way,
but I think, in some ways, he respects
that I believe something strong enough
-that I have to talk about it. -Right.
'Cause that's the value that I was raised with,
even if it didn't end up how he hoped.
When you look at the conversation
around white nationalism and Donald Trump,
-there is no mistaking the rise, as your book talks about...
-Right. -...of this rhetoric.
The Stormfront Web site, that I believe you designed, correct?
-Parts of it, yeah. -Parts of it you designed
I think when you were, like, ten years old,
which is insane.
That Web site, after Trump was elected,
-experienced its highest traffic. -Right.
So, we're starting to see
that there is something in what Trump is saying
that connects with this message
that is completely white nationalist.
I think that's totally true.
I think the even scarier thing is the things
that Trump are saying
that are pretty explicitly white nationalist,
also connect with a large portion
of white voters in the country.
I mean, we see studies all the time that 30% or 40%
of whites believe they experience more prejudice,
they're the victims of prejudice and discrimination
more than people of color or Jews,
which is factually wildly off base.
But by playing to that sense of grievance,
white nationalists and people in power,
like the president, by saying things like,
"We don't want people here from shithole countries,"
or, uh, you know, "We need to build a wall,"
by retweeting stats about, you know, black-on-white crime
that are factually incorrect, uh, you know, it's effective.
It gets people elected.
And I think that's the scary power of this ideology.
It's historically embedded
in a lot of what the United States has been,
and unless we go through the act of confronting it,
it's going to continue to grow and be a dangerous force
-in what the country is. -Let me ask you this, um,
Derek, before we go.
As someone who grew up white nationalist,
as someone who studied it, I guess, more than anybody...
would... would you say you consider Donald Trump
a white nationalist?
He's not a white nationalist, because a white nationalist
is this little insular world where everybody believes
a bunch of very specific things.
But I was raised with a really firm belief
that has always been true
that America was founded as a white supremacist country,
that a lot of people's assumptions about race
in America remain there, and that that's untapped.
And what he taps into is the same thing
that white nationalists tap into when they're trying to recruit,
when they're trying to convince somebody
to go from some sort of garden-variety,
sort of racist belief to something that's ramped up,
that's more extreme.
That process looks exactly the same.
So in a way, it's almost like there's a...
like, a latent or dormant idea that is embedded in America...
It's something you have to work against.
-Right. -Um, I think the big surprise, uh, recently
has been that it's a lot harder to be an anti-racist
than it is to be a white nationalist,
because being an anti-racist means you're saying
we have to change the status quo;
being a white nationalist is saying
that things are fine as they are and you're good
and don't give 'em an inch if they call you a racist.
And that's easier, to tell somebody
they don't have to do anything.
It's a powerful story, and honestly,
I-I was fascinated by it, because you share
your experiences in a really transparent way.
And there's only one question I had,
and it sounds like a joke and it sort of is, but...
are you not afraid that, like, you now know the non-truth?
So what if, like, would you flip the other way?
Does that make sense?
'Cause you believed something was true for so long,
and now you go like, "No, the opposite is true."
Do you ever wonder if it's the other way around?
-Like, how do you... -Yeah.
how do you contort your brain around that idea?
Because I've never flipped on an idea, like, that extreme,
if that makes sense. So how do you say to yourself,
"No, now I believe the correct thing"?
Yeah, yeah. No, it's legitimate.
It is hard. I think for those years
where I was living in the wilderness, right,
metaphorically, like, what do I do,
I spent a lot of time saying, like:
What are my assumptions about the world?
What-what do I think about things?
What do I think about people? And how much of that comes
from something that I never even really challenged.
And figuring out how I make choices
and what I speak about and what I do.
There's still a part of me that says
maybe I can't even trust things I feel convictions for,
but I do think that I can say
that if I'm driven by what doesn't hurt people,
like, what makes life better for people,
then attacking a white supremacist system
that is unfair, that is unjust,
and being the person in the room who challenges
the latent white nationalism is something that does that.
It makes life better for people,
-including white people. -Right.
And that is a value that I don't think could be wrong.
And that was what was missing before.
It was the fact that I considered the only people
who were important, who I needed to advocate for,
was this little group, and realizing that that's wrong,
that the little group has to expand,
and that we're all a part of this.
And if something hurts other people
then we have to figure out a way to change the system
so that we're all included,
and that we can all work forward there.
And you have to be the voice in the room doing that,
'cause it doesn't just happen.
The status quo is not going to lead us there.
The only thing that undermines a white nationalist
who's trying to ramp somebody up
to a more extreme version of racism
is somebody in the room challenging those beliefs,
keeping it from escalating, and reminding them
that what you're saying is wrong.
Do you think white people would be more effective at that?
-Do you, like... -Yeah.
Do you think there could be more white people
who are actively doing that, as opposed to, as you said,
turning a blind eye and saying, like, "Oh, I don't like
that you believe that, but let's still hang out"?
It's a white person in the room who has the strongest voice
to counteract a racist thought.
We were aware of that as white nationalists.
We were explicitly aware that if you were talking to somebody,
and you're trying to get them to go from "Those Mexicans,"
or maybe, "The South Side of Chicago is a problem,"
and get them to escalate into,
"It's about race, we need to be going..." -Right.
The person who's going to ruin that for you
is another white person who's saying, "Stop that,"
-because it's equal. -Right, right, right.
Like, they have literal skin in the game.
And what they say shuts any sort
of white nationalist racist thing you're saying down,
and it stops the room.
And that's the thing that people can do.
That's the thing that people at college did.
It's the thing that anyone anywhere can do is speak up,
because being silent is a choice.
-Wow. -(cheering and applause)
Thank you so much for being on the show.
-Thank you, Eli. -Thanks, appreciate it.
Rising Out of Hatred is available now.
It's a fascinating story.
I really recommend it.
Eli Saslow, Derek Black, everybody.