Learning from Derek Black, "The Klansman's Son"

Empathy for a child actor

A few weeks ago, R. Derek Black released a memoir entitled “The Klansman’s Son.”¹ Derek was brought up as a white nationalist, while I was raised around ethnically Jewish family. While Derek became a liberal, I became a racist. Learning about Derek’s story over a decade ago made a deep impact on me, and reading her memoir recently has caused certain emotions to reemerge within me. Like Derek, I am deeply interested in how people change their ideology, despite their families.

My Persecution Complex

Before I got into racism, I was already known for my “edgy” views. At one point I was railing against FDR, at another time denouncing fiat currency, criticizing Winston Churchill, blasting organized religion, rejecting the concept of government entirely. To my teachers and peers, my views could be described as eccentric and weird, but fundamentally harmless. My weird opinions were fitting for my weird demeanor.

The closest I ever came to “threatening” or “intimidating” others on the grounds of “extremism” was in 9th grade. The assignment was twofold: study a “utopian” project in American history, and come up with your own. It was supposed to be a fun look into American culture.

For the first part, I studied the Amish, who seemed worthy of condemnation for religious extremism, but also worthy of some grudging respect for holding to their principles. The second part was a group project, but like many group projects, things didn’t go so well.

“So, uh, what do you guys want to do?” — “I don’t know, this is kind of stupid”

I chimed in: “I was thinking of doing a scientific utopia. Do you guys just want me to present my ideas?” The idea of skipping out on schoolwork was too seductive. My classmates agreed to stand there like idiots, taking credit for “group brainstorming,” while I monologued on the virtues of science.

Other students presented utopias which were superficial and idiotic. “In our utopia, there would be no hunger.” “In our utopia, everyone would be equal.” “In our utopia, everyone would be a millionaire.” No plan, no vision, just “good stuff” with no real ideas on how to get there.

Then, it was my turn. “Our utopia is not religious, but scientific. Religion will be outlawed. Science will govern the state. Instead of deifying false Gods, we will elevate men like Carl Sagan and Isaac Newton. Genius will rule in our utopia, instead of the lies of bronze age goat herders. Our utopia will be the richest, smartest, most educated, most moral, least violent society on earth. Since all wars are caused by religion, there will be no need to kill someone because they violate a made-up commandment. Instead of democracy, which elects theocrats like George Bush, the scientific utopia will be run by a council of scientists, who have proven their real worth in the field of science. Any questions?”

I thought my presentation was interesting, well reasoned, and thought provoking. Surely, in the spirit of “utopia,” my ideas would not be regarded as any more ridiculous than the banality of “free stuff” offered by the other students. Instead, I was met by blank or nervous stares. My own partners in the presentation (one was gay, the other was an atheist himself) were shocked and uncomfortable. The teacher was traumatized by what I had to say and quietly told us to sit down. Instead of talking to me after class, she enlisted the help of my Sped teacher to talk to me about it.

Boldly proclaiming the supremacy of atheism in front of my class, without being able to predict the emotional reaction of the room, was a very autistic thing to do.

My Sped teacher told me that my presentation was being rejected by the teacher, and I would have to redo it. “Rejected? Like I got an F?” No, he replied, it was just unacceptable. “Ok, what did I do wrong? What’s the feedback? How did I not fulfill the assignment?” There was no argument. “Just do something different,” he said.

I was furious, righteously indignant, failed by the American education system. I decided that the people who run the world are fundamentally unjust. They will silence me, humiliate me, and reject me — not on rational grounds, but to protect the prejudices of the insane and the stupid.

When I adopted racist views, I had no illusions about what would happen to me if I made those views public. Despite that, I still evangelized to all my friends. Instead of trying to make out with the girl who invited me over (“my parents aren’t home!”), I made her sit through all 24 episodes of “MrHerrIQ” on Youtube. Looking back, I can laugh at my own ridiculousness, but this was deadly serious stuff at the time.

At one point, I got my friend and his girlfriend to listen to an audio book reading of Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century. His girlfriend was half Asian, but I read the captions about the “Aryan race” out loud as they appeared alongside the audio, performing it like a ritual. This went on for an hour before they finally stopped me. They weren’t angry or upset, just bored.

No one seriously challenged my views — but I also didn’t garner any converts to the cause. I was reading Richard Lynn, watching Ryan Faulk, and my friends were normal (above average intelligence) high school students. Looking back, I feel bad for them, being subjected to my rants and diatribes. Something was clearly wrong.

Being Closeted

Eventually, I decided that evangelism was useless. Libertarianism taught me that the masses always want easy answers that justify themselves, and will never accept harsh truths. Only a revolutionary vanguard of exceptional individuals (read: me) can change the world. When the moment of crisis strikes, and the hour of decision comes, I and my internet friends would be ready to seize power.

This is the universal psychology of all cults — or, “early religions.” Early Christians believed that, although they were a minority among a minority, their religion would eventually conquer the world. Every knee shall bow, every tongue confess. This world-conquering ethos can be found as far back as the Torah, which proclaims that in the coming world, men from all nations will grab Jews by the hem of their shirts and beg for spiritual guidance. (Zechariah 8:23) A bold prediction for a perpetually exiled, persecuted, and defeated people. Yet look at the Jewish people now. Are they not a shining example of the indomitable Will or spirit, which no matter how small, can survive despite the prejudice of the masses?

Derek’s Trauma

Derek was raised in an unusual family situation (to say the least). Her mother’s first husband, David Duke, was his father’s best friend. What were these two men doing being best friends since their teenage years… and marrying the ex-wife of the other? No one in Derek’s family ever seemed to address this elephant in the room. The uncomfortable and bizarre family situation, I speculate, was part of a larger attitude of “ignoring fundamental problems” for the sake of “pragmatism.”

One of those fundamental problems was putting a 10 year old boy on a TV show to argue for political extremism. I generally regard any form of child acting as a form of child abuse. Childhood is an extremely sensitive time in the development of a child’s core identity. Coaxing or grooming children to put on performances for adults, I believe, always risks psychological trauma. But this is amplified a thousand times when that performance is politically charged. I deeply sympathize with Derek’s traumatic childhood experiences.

Learning about Derek’s persecution in the media during her childhood hit a nerve with me. Here was someone who, in their own inherent demeanor, was non-violent, law-abiding, kind and gentle. Yet they were being vilified in public as some kind of “Nazi,” because of the demands and pressure of their family. While Derek writes about “consenting” to all of these political decisions, I cannot accept that framing of events. A child cannot help but blindly accept the ideology handed to them by their parents.

Derek’s insight into the deep dysfunction of White Nationalism is valuable. For those on the far right who dismiss Derek on the grounds that she is transgender, this should provoke some introspection. If transgenderism is a disease of liberalism, why wasn’t Don Black able to stop it? If transgenderism is a product of a degenerate environment, then what kind of environment was white nationalism? What kind of tree bears that fruit?

Conversion

Derek’s conversion away from White Nationalism was not sudden. There was a long stretch of time where Derek held “intermediate” or moderate beliefs.

What is most interesting to me about Derek’s life and her development is that crucial period, around 2012, where she disavowed white supremacy, but still identified as a white nationalist. It is fascinating to me that this political movement was willing to ignore or explain away Derek’s positions by justifying them as “good optics.”

Derek’s positions during this period were a mishmash of the following: that white people had a right to exist, but only in a defensive and passive way. She rejected imperialism, colonialism, and slavery as criminal and evil. Instead of celebrating the European conquest of the earth, she wished that whites had stayed holed-up in Europe, and only opposed immigration on those grounds that everyone had a right to exist. She was a conservative of the meekest kind, not wishing for any victory or expansion of racial conflict, but only trying to defend and preserve the racial status quo. She insisted that there were no racial differences in mental capacities.

Whereas I was raised without any political extremism in my family, she was raised by a man who committed terrorism in the name of his beliefs. While I was disgusted by the banality of suburban life, Derek discovered a community of loving people who rejected her family’s extremism.

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Derek looks back on her “conservative” views of 2012 with embarrassment and shame, as a reminder of a time when she still tolerated right-wing views. She has gone on to live a successful life as an academic, has received prestigious awards, given television interviews with millions of views, and has published a book.

For years, I was interested in sharing my thoughts on Derek’s story, but regarded Derek as someone who was tired of the limelight. I had deep sympathy for her discomfort, even while I felt we were ideological enemies. After reading her book, things seem different now. Derek seems to want people to learn from her life.

Apostasy

There are many apostates from racism, who fall into three categories:

1. True apostates, who genuinely have some change of heart;

2. False apostates, who began their careers as federal informants and never believed in the message they were pushing to believe in;

3. Partial or temporary apostates, who denounce white supremacy, but end up extolling the virtues of Strasserism or some other more esoteric affiliate of Naziism.

The psychology of apostates is not unique to racists and applies to any creedal faith.² What distinguishes racist apostasy is that it is the only meaningful apostasy under the current religious paradigm.

This is not to say that other forms of apostasy do not have personal ramifications. If you grew up in an evangelical family and became gay or an atheist, you might be disowned, stripping you of intergenerational wealth and love. Prior to the rise of assimilationist Judaism (prior to the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which affected Jews as much as it affected blacks), intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews was also grounds for disownment.

Yet, from the perspective of the central authorities (police, army, academia, congress, banks), all these forms of apostasy are morally neutral. It doesn’t matter if you leave one religion to join another. It doesn’t matter who you marry, or what you do in the bedroom. As far as military, media, and money are concerned, all these forms of apostasy rise, at the most, to the level of eccentricity at idiosyncrasy.

Apostasy goes both ways: away from racism, and towards racism. A social survey was conducted to determine, among other things, what percentage of white nationalists are apostates from liberalism. Or, to ask the same question from the opposite perspective: how many white nationalists have liberal parents? Unfortunately, the results of the poll have not been fully released.

However, a survey of popular racist leaders seems to show, at the very least, a theme of intergenerational apostasy: Richard Spencer, Andrew Anglin, Michael Peinovich, and Nick Fuentes all had parents who were either liberals or mainstream conservatives. Nick seems to have the most politically supportive parents, although it is difficult to image that he was raised by ideological white nationalists, since he is the product of interracial marriage.

At least from the perspective of its leadership, racism is an apostate’s creed, a deviation from the norms of family tradition. Derek’s father, Don, was a teenage radical whose political activism was violent from an early age. Don’s attempt to make the politics of revolution into an intergenerational tradition failed spectacularly. Trying to turn a revolution into a tradition is difficult to do, especially for an ideology like White Nationalism, which has remained an abject failure (especially prior to the 2012 Trayvon Martin case and the rise of 4chan).

2012 was an inflection point in racist meme culture, just as Derek was leaving WN.

Hitler

"I refused to read Mein Kampf [..] Hitler seemed cursed." (p 80)

In this passage, Derek is describing her childhood, prior to college. It is fascinating to me how shallow³ and hollow the ideology of White Nationalism, as passed from father to son, turned out to be. It’s not that Derek merely grew up viewing Hitler as inconvenient, or morally neutral, but that she had a natural aversion to this figure. How could it be that I had less of an aversion to Hitler than Derek did?

One of the early memories I had about Hitler was being shown a picture of him as a baby by my 8th grade teacher. The teacher openly fantasized about going back in time to kill Hitler. He claimed that Hitler was a coward: during the First World War, he would hide from the battles while other people were killed. Then, when he took power, he killed all of the soldiers who knew he was a coward, so the truth would never come out. I was skeptical. I was willing to believe that Hitler was an evil killer, but not that he was a hypocrite. I googled his name, and found that he was granted the Iron Cross for bravery under fire. It seemed that my teacher was lying to me. If they could lie about this, what else were they lying about?

I viewed Hitler as being a scapegoat for all of the world’s ills. It seemed to me that there were psychopathic killers on all sides. America genocided the native Americans; the British enslaved Africans and starved Indians — no one was innocent or “anti-racist” in 1939. Why was it that mass slaughter of millions in Germany was held to be so evil, and the allies, who similarly slaughtered millions, were “the good guys?”

This view, while controversial at the time, is not illogical when viewed through the paradigm of modern leftist scholarship. No, America in 1939 was not somehow blameless, nor was Britain. In fact, Nazi ideology was mostly imported from a combination of American eugenics and British Nordicism — much as Japanese imperialism only took place after Japan “westernized” and “modernized” in the 19th century.

Part of the reason why Derek had such a natural revulsion to Hitler, in contrast to me, was that she "had known and been friendly with lots of Jewish kids throughout my life. [..] As a kid, I always held two things as simultaneously true: that many of my friends were Jewish, but also that my family believed it was trying to defend the world from a global conspiracy being enacted, presumably, by their parents." (p105)

In other words, despite Don Black’s hatred of Jews, he allowed his child to attend both public schools as well as homeschooling groups which were filled with Jews, in part of the country with the largest percentage of Jews (West Palm Beach).

The cognitive dissonance of being told, as a child, that another group of people is your racial enemy, but simultaneously being thrown into a social setting with those people, is untenable. In contrast, having grown up with Jewish family, I should have had an even stronger revulsion for antisemitism. But just as Derek’s family dysfunction is part of the story of her break from White Nationalism, my family’s dysfunction is part of the reason why I was unable to accept the narrative that antisemitism is an “unexplainable evil.”

At the very least, growing up, I saw Judaism as an extremely flawed religion. Jewish people, like all ethnicities, are capable of ethnic hatred and ethnic conflict, and that every conflict has two sides. To view one side as completely blameless, and the other side as irrationally hateful, sounded to me like a “just so” story, written by the victors. There are bad people on both sides.

Derek as an American

Derek is the descendant of pioneers.

Derek, far left.

Looking at this picture, what strikes me is how different Derek looks from everyone else. While there are certainly some white people in this picture, none are as rosy pink and pale as Derek. Her long red hair reminds me of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson in their youth.

Young Andrew Jackson.

It is also interesting to listen to how Derek’s voice has changed over time

When doing her radio show over a decade ago, Derek deliberately adopted a style of speaking which was “country” or “hick,” and lower pitched than today, which seems much more urban or standard American. Derek speaks in her book about how during 9/11, her father spoke about the attack on America as if her family was not American — they were against the government too. Derek seems to have broken with this anti-American “unreconstructed” attitude and assimilated into mainstream culture.

One of my theories is that liberalism is essentially an ideology of the founding stock of America. It was not invented by Jews, Chinese, Mexicans, blacks, or Catholics. Curtis Yarvin presents this in a negative light, blaming liberalism on “Calvinism.” Unlike Yarvin, who views this development as a sin against the natural order of monarchy, I think there is something inherent to the Anglo-Saxon soul, which makes it unique throughout the world, in its special striving for the kind of universal utopia which liberalism also seeks.

In that sense, I see Derek’s adoption of anti-racism and even transgender identity as an attempt to reconnect or “come home” to her Anglo-Saxon roots. As ridiculous as that would sound to her family, it wasn’t Derek who created the paradox: her family’s hostile posture toward America, their only home, created the paradox. Her family could argue that the hostility was originally created by the American government itself, which rejected its founding stock in favor of mass immigration. These arguments are not necessarily mutually exclusive. But by embracing America in its current form to the best of her ability, Derek is attempting to heal intergenerational wounds in her personal and national identity.

As much as it is possible to criticize Derek’s current ideology of sexual liberation and racial equality, she has done her best in an impossible position. Her family clearly failed. The far right generally has no good alternative to liberalism, other than worshipping Russia and China. The problems and questions that Derek has attempted to answer are problems and questions for all of us. Whether we are white, non-white, or ethnically mixed, there are no easy answers to questions like, “who are you? What does it mean to be an American? What is the American nation?” These are questions which have historically been answered for us by religious dogma. But with religious dogma in flux, we are left stranded in a sea of confusion.

America is not the first nation to experience an identity crisis. Rome, the Sassanid Empire, Maccabean Judea, and medieval Britain all experienced radical shifts in identity, brought on by invasions, new religions, and even mass migration. In each case, these radical changes came from top-down elites, and the population at large responded with mass hysteria, violence, or sudden ecstatic conversions. The cults of Dionysus, as described by Euripides in the Bacchae (405 BC) also fit this pattern, as does the cult of Zoroaster, and the emergence of Judaism itself.

Celibacy in the early Christian church, combined with the prominence of prostitutes and eunuchs, seems ironic when compared with the current state of Christian extremism, which demands “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” Yet it is exactly these sorts of people — the sexually unique, those who are outside of the reproductive paradigm — who are the most sensitive and attuned to periods of identity crisis. Rather than viewing Derek as a coward who is attempting to ignore black crime in order to reap the rewards of social conformity, or who is merely pretending to be trans to get attention, it seems more logical to suggest that Derek is doing the best she can to try to work through, in her own flawed way, the crisis of identity which faces us all.

One of the keys to understanding Derek’s traumatic history with ideology and identity is through a religious lens:

Both of my parents were raised by Protestant Christians, and both of them became atheists when they were teenagers and in college. So I was raised by atheists with a strong enough conviction that I was sent to Sunday school when I was a kid. And I remember asking my dad, a few years later, what was the incentive for that, because I had enjoyed it a lot, and I got awards for memorizing Bible verses. And he said, “It was because I wanted you to be familiar with religion so that, later on, you couldn’t say I had kept it from you, and you would understand that atheism made the most sense.”

I can empathize with Derek’s experience of being introduced to a religion in a cynical manner by atheistic parents. I can also attest that, in my experience, if we truly take religion seriously, as a matter of heaven and hell, as a matter of metaphysical identity itself, this is a form of trauma and abuse. While we may think it is appropriate to introduce children to religion and let them “make up their own mind,” religion cannot be “introduced” in a neutral or passive way like trying brussels sprouts or soccer. Religion is not a matter of taste or preference — it is an entire totalizing worldview. I believe that Derek’s experience with religion was extremely destabilizing, and her parent’s choice to expose her to it was just as disorienting as the “three-way” relationship between her father, her mother, and her mother’s ex-husband.

Religion was not an insignificant side-issue for Derek, but actually the main issue which led her to develop a strong friendship with an Orthodox Jew, despite being a white nationalist at the time. That Orthodox Jew’s mother’s mother, incidentally, was a gentile. As such, he had to make a formal conversion, rather than simply being accepted into the community as a matter of course. While Derek says, of religion, “I don’t know exactly what it [my interest in religion] means,” it seems that both men grew up struggling with the idea of religion. One man was introduced to Christianity by atheists, and the other had to convert to Judaism, despite having three grandparents. It was this odd conflict over a fractured religious identity that may have subconsciously formed a bond between the two.

Conclusion

Rather than rehash Derek’s book, which is worth purchasing and reading, I have tried to introduce my unique perspective on her life, and contrast it with my own. Looking into Derek’s eyes, I cannot help but reflect on my own life and ideological conversions. Why do we believe what we believe?

Derek loves her family. When she began to deviate from their ideology, she was met with intolerance, judgment, and hatred. Derek still loves her family, despite the fact that they fundamentally reject her. I have to wonder if her family had been more flexible, and less dogmatic, if she could have seen more value in their ideas, and not fully abandoned them. It is ridiculous to put a child in an educational setting with Jewish students, and when she comes home, to tell her, “Jews are a separate race who we can never get along with.”

Derek’s solution, which has been to oppose white nationalism without replacing it with a new religious or ethnic identity, has its own contradictions. Orthodox Judaism, which played a role in Derek’s journey, is generally supportive of Trump in America, and has been a huge part of the Netanyahu coalition pushing for an expansion of the illegal colonization of Palestine. While Derek’s own idiosyncratic ideology may have room for these contradictions on grounds of personal experience and exceptions of grace and mercy, can young people be sold the idea that transgender ideology and Orthodox Judaism are mutually compatible?

Derek can be forgiven, as a human being, for holding imperfect or even incoherent beliefs. But the question remains if her broad umbrella of diversity can hold against the pressures of youthful radicalism. Has there ever been a state in history which maintained its sense of identity without any central unifying ethnicity or religion? Austria-Hungary had a strong principle of Catholic monarchism holding it together, but even this was not enough to save it from the forces of nationalism.

I do not expect America to be torn apart or “Balkanized” like Austria-Hungary. Liberals, conservatives, blacks, and Hispanics are all too geographically mixed throughout the country to allow for any clean break. I also do not expect America to devolve into any kind of Yugoslavian partisan “race war.” However, polarization is real. How long can it persist before a new steady-state emerges? How long until we have a new January 6th on our hands?

As far as I can tell, Derek doesn’t believe in God. She doesn’t have any particular loyalty to a language, a culture, or an ethnicity. If I had to sum up her hope for America, it would be equality, and more fundamentally, harm avoidance. Yet America is an empire. From its very beginning, it expanded west, and then into the Caribbean, south America, the Pacific, and now has military bases all over the world. Every empire in history survives only because there is a small group of men who are willing to fight and die for it. At times it was for the glory of Rome, for the crusade, the prophet Muhammed, or the white man’s burden of civilization. But I am skeptical that the ideas of equality and harm reduction, no matter how virtuous they may seem, can ever inspire men to fight and die for an empire in the long run.

This is not merely a hypothetical question, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s posture toward Taiwan present imminent threats. If America cannot sustain a militaristic form of patriotism among its warrior class, then it will be replaced by world powers who care much less about infinite equality and harm reduction for Africans. The question is not whether Derek sincerely believes in her own ideals, but whether or not her ideals are sustainable in an age of apathy, cynicism, and nihilism.

Despite being an atheist, Derek’s morality is deeply Christian. Christendom has always had an inherent contradiction between its priest class and warrior class. The priest class preached perpetual peace, but generally in Latin, a language the warrior class didn’t understand. Even when Protestants made the Bible readable, it was still centuries before the common man was educated and literate enough to fully understand its message and implications. In this sense, it is possible that during the medieval period, “true Christianity was never tried.” This is certainly the case at least in terms of the full application of the spiritual core of equality.

Derek, like many post-Christians, has discarded the divinity of Jesus, but embraces the message of equality to an unlimited degree.

The catalyst or “breaking point” of unlimited equality will be technological. That is not to say that I adopt a materialistic view of the world, but that often, philosophical tensions can only be released by seemingly material triggers. This was the case with the horse, the chariot, the mounted archer, the development of the clock, firearms, the steam engine, the camera, the radio, and the internet. Each invention unleashed, transmitted, or amplified certain energies already existing, resulting in a domino effect which became the death of some civilizations and birth of others.

Derek’s lament about the rise of racism is absent of any consideration of the role of AI and genetic engineering. What role will such technologies play on the idea of equality? While Derek attempts to heal the wounds of the past, the future marches on. The clash and confrontation which awaits us make petty ethnic grievances seem trivial and quaint. Viruses can wipe out entire races, and through embryo selection, entirely new races can be forged.

Although Derek has fought tenaciously to reject the far right and enjoy the camaraderie of the political left, I view her as the ultimate conservative, whose only desire is a calmer and kinder version of the status quo. Like so many conservatives before her, she is not capable of considering the revelations of the future with ecstasy, but only with horror. Like Cicero, she will defend the republic until its dying breath, and never embrace the future. But it is only in the future that life becomes.

1. Although the memoir is entitled “son,” instead of “child” or “daughter,” Derek now uses she/they pronouns.

2. Matthew 13:3-23.

3. "The white nationalist movement is a shallow ideology rooted in fear of change." (p275)