626: White Haze

Ira Glass

OK, this thing happened last month at our radio show, where, I'm sure you remember the rally of white nationalists and offshoots of the alt-right who descended into a kind of white haze on Charlottesville, marched with torches, one woman was killed. The president spoke about it several times. Anyway, when that story first broke here at our show, we realized that the guy who organized that rally in Charlottesville, Jason Kessler, was a member of this right wing men's group that one of our producers, Zoe Chace, had been following for months, like, since the winter.

The group has since disavowed Kessler. This was a group founded on the premise that they are not racist. The group's leader denounced the rally. But it's confusing, right? Like, all these groups that you hear about these days, like the groups at Charlottesville. All these little groups that stand for slightly different things in this movement that's shifting, and slippery, and hard to get a grasp on. And often the things their leaders say in public seem like a whitewash, if you'll pardon the expression, of what they really believe. Not that the leader of this particular group necessarily was whitewashing anything.

Anyway, today we have the story of a guy who stumbled upon that group that Zoe was following and got involved with them. And this is, like, long before Charlottesville, long before Trump was president. And this guy is not exactly who you'd expect would end up with a group like this. He's a liberal black guy, a relationship expert, and a comedian named Dante Nero. He makes part of his living giving advice to guys on how to pick up women, like this. This is from a podcast.

Ira Glass

Dante Nero became the spiritual leader of sorts for this right wing group that Zoe was following. He was drinking with the guys. He was giving them pointers about women. And he saw the group's evolution, and he was really surprised when a couple of the guys in the group ended up in Charlottesville. Surprised and disturbed. Well, today on our program, the fuzzy boundaries between these right wing groups and how guys who do not think of themselves as racist end up sharing opinions, and hanging out with guys who definitely are. Where does that lead?

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And let's just jump right into Act One.

Ira Glass

Act One, Lost in the Proud. Quick warning before we start. There's some strong language in this story. Nothing graphic, but some slurs, and men referring to the existence of sex. Or, actually, to the nonexistence of it. Here's Zoe. Her story about Dante Nero starts earlier this year.

Zoe Chace

I only met Dante after months of hanging out with these guys, these new right, alt-right, alt-light Twitter trolls. I started meeting up with them right after Trump's inauguration. Even though their guy won, they were still acting like insurgents, not like winners. Like their revolution wasn't over yet.

Zoe Chace

I'd go to one party at some clubby leather seat whiskey bar in DC or in New York. That would get me invited to another and another. And then finally, at this one bar crawl near Trump Tower in March, I met the group I've been following for a few months now, the group this story is about.

Zoe Chace

This is Sal. He's 29. Huge beard. His head is a circle of hair, like that wild thing from Where the Wild Things Are. He's got a sharp tongue. It's hard to tell when he's joking. Here's how he'd introduce me sometimes at bars.

Zoe Chace

It was hard at first to get people to explain exactly what the Proud Boys were about, and Sal gets impatient. Even though he founded the Long Island Proud Boys chapter, there are chapters all over the country.

Zoe Chace

Sal's roommate, Cameron, put it differently.

Zoe Chace

The Proud Boys have these rituals, degrees.

Zoe Chace

OK, first degree is declaring you're a Proud Boy. Second degree is getting punched while you try to name five breakfast cereals, like, to show you can focus your mind while under attack. The third is getting "Proud Boy" tattooed on your body. The Proud Boys have special greetings. Like, they yell "proud of your boy," or "uhuru" at each other. Which is this pro-Africa socialist slogan. It's kind of an ironic thing. They have theme songs.

Zoe Chace

That's from Aladdin. It's not in the movie, but it is in the Broadway musical. What interested me in these guys was this thing they believed that I'd been hearing since the beginning of the presidential primaries, that they were feeling marginalized and depressed. This feeling came up so much with guys I talked to during the Trump campaign it seems like one of the driving forces that got him into office. For a lot of people, "Make America Great Again" was about "make men great again." I kept asking guys to tell me how were you marginalized? Like, what happened to you personally that made you feel like this? But every time I asked, I'd get these grand statements. Like it's the whole culture that's against them.

Zoe Chace

But as I got to know them, what surprised me the most was the foundational principle of the Proud Boys, the thing that caused them to band together. Here it is.

Zoe Chace

This is Franklin Wright. He works at Proud Boy Magazine.

Zoe Chace

A quick heads up to listeners. People are going to be saying the word "wank" and its synonyms a lot for the rest of the story. Because the Proud Boys were founded, in part, as a group of men who refrain from masturbating.

Zoe Chace

Which brings us finally to Dante Nero, the relationship expert comedian who got involved in this world. Dante was the mastermind behind no-wanks. It started for him as a personal life choice.

Zoe Chace

Dante is striking. He's 51, bald-headed, lots of tattoos. He has a huge bone stuck through one of his ear lobes. He has his own podcast, the Beige Phillip Show, about relationships. "Beige" because he's a light-skinned black guy, "Phillip" for "Dr. Phil." Like this is his version of Dr. Phil's show. Dante used to be a male stripper. He's had sex with lots of girls, and so his sex advice comes out of those experiences. And he felt like no-wanks was a good idea for a lot of the guys who listen to his show.

Zoe Chace

Dante believed that these guys weren't going to get women to sleep with them unless they turned off the computer, got out of the house, talked to women in real life, listened to what they said, and got to know them enough to charm them into bed.

And one day, back two years ago now, he explained this theory to the guy who would latch on to the idea and go on to create the Proud Boys, a guy named Gavin McInnes. Gavin helped found Vice Media long ago. He's kind of a libertarian punk, but now he hosts a right wing TV show on the internet. And Dante went on Gavin's show and started telling him and his viewers about how he doesn't masturbate.

Zoe Chace

Gavin kept inviting Dante on his show. And Gavin's show is pretty popular. Dante figured he'd get more listeners to Beige Phillip. Like, Dante is a successful working comic, but it's not full time for him. He still works a day job at the phone company. Gavin's take on no-wanks was a little different from Dante's. Gavin's show is political, and he took no-wanks and added it to the stew of right wing ideas he was talking about already.

It was more than just helping guys pick up chicks. Gavin wanted the guys to stop masturbating, go out, talk to women, and then marry them, procreate, be strong American family men, help restore the natural order of things that had been knocked out of whack by feminism. This was all before the group even had a name. And when Gavin McInnes finally announced the name in May 2016, no-wanks was right in there.

Zoe Chace

The alt-right without the racism. If you think about it a certain way, it's an ingenious sales pitch for his products. The names and affiliations of these right wing groups keep shifting around. Today, the alt-right is straight up racist, like white supremacist and anti-Semitic. Whites should have their own ethno-state. Now, Gavin's version of right wing nationalism kept some of the feelings and ideas that animate the alt-right, how affirmative action and feminism have marginalized white men, made them powerless. He kept that part. But he'll say explicitly "we're not racist." "We're not the alt-right." "We don't think white people are superior." "What we think is the West is superior. Western civilization. The West is the best."

The Proud Boys aren't the only group like this. They keep some of the supremacy without the whiteness. It's a step removed from race. That's how he sells it, anyway.

Zoe Chace

Like, listen to how he answers this question from a caller shortly after he founded the Proud Boys.

Zoe Chace

Wayne Dupree is black, a right wing blogger.

Zoe Chace

It's ingenious, because clearly there's a market of guys who don't think of themselves as racists, and who don't want to suffer the social costs of their coworkers, and family, and friends finding out they're part of a racist group, but who do feel aggrieved, and marginalized, and under attack as white guys. Those are Gavin's boys, though Gavin says the focus is more on beer than aggrievement.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Dante Nero was not down with all these ideas. He's never watched Gavin's show. But his audience of guys who wanted to pick up girls and Gavin's audience of right wing guys who wanted to pick up girls overlapped. So we joined along for the ride. He became first degree. Obviously, no-wanks made him eligible for second degree. Often at these events, people would be getting punched and yelling out the name of five breakfast cereals. Dante skipped that, progressed straight to third degree, the tattoo.

Dante felt like he understood these guys on a couple of different levels. He shares a lot of their views on men and women, that all men are essentially the same, all women basically want the same thing. And he agrees with some of the anti-politically correct "dudes are being shut down these days" stuff. "Guys can't say anything anymore without being attacked," Dante told me. Whenever they complain about it, they're called sexist.

One big difference between Dante and these guys, though, they mostly turned into Trump supporters. Dante is pretty liberal and doesn't like Trump. But this was before Trump became the place to put your resentment over political correctness. Anyway, they didn't talk politics with Dante much. They asked him for relationship advice.

Zoe Chace

Dante was into it. He says being in a pope-like position wasn't weird for him. He explained it like he's used to being a figurehead. He helped organize the male strippers of the Bronx. He also managed a strip club and its escort service. Now he's a union steward at the phone company. And if he noticed things that alarmed him about the Proud Boys, he ignored them. It's only now, with a little hindsight, that he points to things he wishes he'd taken more seriously at the time. Like the time he brought his nephew to a Proud Boy meet-up.

That was a red flag, Dante says, as was the Holocaust denier video one of the Proud Boys sent him later, disputing how many people had actually died in the Holocaust. Or this other meet-up he went to.

Zoe Chace

Dante wasn't necessarily getting more listeners to his show, but he also has a relationship consulting business. He thought maybe the Proud Boys would become customers. He seems like he was probably having fun sometimes, though he won't cop to that. He had a million other things going on too, his own show, his day job, bit parts in movies. And, he says, he liked the idea that when he was in the mix he could push back on some of their ideas.

Zoe Chace

And then something happened that really freaked him out. Warning, this involves a racial slur. He got an invite to the Proud Boys' Facebook page, and he went on there.

Zoe Chace

Dante did not see Gavin's show in mid June of this summer, when the guy who organized the rally in Charlottesville, Jason Kessler, joined Gavin and invited the Proud Boys to come down.

Zoe Chace

Jason was just getting to know the Proud Boys chapter in Virginia. He and Gavin talked about that and some ideas they have in common.

Zoe Chace

Shortly after that it seems Jason became a Proud Boy himself, second degree. Punches, breakfast cereals.

Zoe Chace

That's what Gavin always says at the end of an interview for some reason. He was unsure whether to endorse this event or not.

Zoe Chace

Richard Spencer is a famous white nationalist leader.

Zoe Chace

We know now, of course, how that rally turned out. Tiki torches, actual Nazis, and white supremacists, and then a woman was killed. After it happened, Gavin McInnes insisted that event had nothing to do with the Proud Boys. He did not go. As it got closer, he told the Proud Boys not to go, because it seemed like white supremacists were going to be involved. They were.

According to Gavin, any Proud Boy who went to the event-- we know there were at least two-- got kicked out of the Proud Boys. And Gavin now says the guy who organized the rally, Jason Kessler, is not a Proud Boy, never was, and was spying on them. But Kessler has told us he was a member of the group. He was going to meetings, and there's video of him going through the second degree initiation-- getting punched and yelling out breakfast cereals. In any case, Gavin had him back on the show to yell at him.

Zoe Chace

Gavin accepts absolutely no responsibility for some of the guys in his group turning alt-right or white supremacist-esque. Even Sal from the beginning of this story, that Long Island Proud Boy I met at the bar, he went to Charlottesville. He took a selfie with David Duke and tweeted it. He's out of the group now.

Fact is, there's overlap between what the Proud Boys espouse and what white supremacist groups believe. I ran through the list for Gavin.

Zoe Chace

Dante didn't know that the guy who organized the Charlottesville rally had been a member of the Proud Boys, and that he'd gone on Gavin's show promoting it. I was the one who told him that during our interview. He had a hard time with it.

Zoe Chace

I did talk to guys who were in it for the beer and the friendship and the no-wank solidarity, but also obviously, guys who were in it for "the West is the best." And as Dante says, that's not such a big jump over to "white people are the best." Which really upsets him. He told me this story, that the very first time Dante had Gavin on his podcast, like back two years ago now, they sat down, he and Gavin, and started talking about politics.

Zoe Chace

This is basically the opposite of "the West is the best," obviously. Dante is definitely upset about Charlottesville. He's upset someone died. He's upset about Nazis. But in the mix of what's frustrating Dante right now is, he feels like the guys misunderstood no-wanks. And the thing they misunderstood about no-wanks is the same thing he thinks they misunderstand about history. They leave out the empathy. No-wanks, as Dante saw it, was supposed to lead to a friendlier, more understanding, and more inclusive world. Or kinda.

Zoe Chace

Maybe those Charlottesville guys should have stayed at home wanking, Dante says. Then they wouldn't have taken the initiative to go show up at a Nazi rally.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace is one of the producers of our program. Coming up, a grudge match between two men, one black, one white, and where that leads. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, White Haze. We try to make sense of all those overlapping groups that marched in Charlottesville, the fuzzy mix of alt-right and alt-light, and all the others that were there, and how people who say that they are not racist and not white supremacists have ended up in a melting pot with people who are.

One of the things that we wondered here on our show after Charlottesville is why are there so many of these little groups? Like, why are there a lot of them? Why are they small? Like, why isn't there some big umbrella organization to advance their interests? And we were surprised to learn that for decades in the white power movement, this was a strategy. It was an actual strategy. And it was put into place in the 1980s. The strategy was called "leaderless resistance." And the white power movement adopted it because the FBI and federal law enforcement were successfully planting informants and covert agents inside the ranks.

Ira Glass

Kathleen Belew is a historian at the University of Chicago, and she's written about this period in the '70s and '80s and the white power movement for a book that's coming out next year. She says with leaderless resistance, people all over the country were reading the same propaganda, the same kind of playbook, if you will. But they all acted on their own. They were uncoordinated.

She says the idea for leaderless resistance was popularized by a man named Louis Beam, who was in the Klan and in the group Aryan Nations in 1983. She says we know how he sent out the memo to the rest of the movement on this.

Belew says the FBI believes leaderless resistance was actually discussed at this event. Several people from the movement testified that it was. Others denied there was a real plan like this.

Ira Glass

Out of that come incidents like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, in which 168 people died. Which Belew says is often mistakenly thought of as the work of a lone bomber, Timothy McVeigh and a co-conspirator, but fits entirely the sort of thing that an activist would do as part of leaderless resistance. And this is the way that the white power movement worked for decades, small groups, people staying below the radar to avoid attention and avoid prosecution. And that is what is changing today.

Talking to people who are knowledgeable about what's going on with white nationalist groups today, including researchers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, what they say is that what's happening today is that leaders are stepping forward. They are becoming public figures. And the separate little groups, they are, in fact, trying to band together. Maybe not to become one big organization, but to work together when it's helpful.

The name of the rally in Charlottesville, after all, was "Unite the Right." This was a public rally where groups came together in common cause, where they were proudly visible. And that's what's different about this new incarnation of the white nationalist movement today. That's what's different from the last few decades.

Ira Glass

And now we have arrived at Act Two of our program, Act Two, Phone Calls to an Undisclosed Location. OK, so remember back during Act One, during Zoe's story, when the guy who organized the rally in Charlottesville, after the rally, he went on to Gavin McInnes's show, and the two of them argued over who was to blame for the death of that woman who was killed at the rally. And Gavin McInnes was pretty direct.

Ira Glass

The organizer of the rally, Jason Kessler, said he could not be blamed for that death. And one of our producers, Robyn Semien, saw this quote that Kessler gave somewhere else, where he talked about the same thing, about who was to blame. And the quote was really interesting. In that quote, Jason Kessler put the blame on somebody else, somebody very, very specific. Here's Robyn.

Robyn Semien

I read about it in an article days after the rally. When asked what prompted him to organize the rally, Jason Kessler said, "I didn't do it. Wes Bellamy did." Wes Bellamy is the vice mayor of Charlottesville, and the only black member of city council. Jason Kessler put the blame on him, not the mayor, not city council, not the police. Wes Bellamy.

I knew about Wes Bellamy before I read that quote, because I saw him on TV that Saturday, after the president's Many Sides press conference. Was Bellamy was doing interviews. He's handsome, black, young, and memorably, he was in a white t-shirt that said "Menace 2 Supremacy" on it. The "to" like the number two in Menace 2 Society. He stood out. I liked it.

Kessler lives in Charlottesville, and it seems like he's had a maniacal focus on Bellamy for almost a year. It started with the statue. Bellamy wanted to remove it. Kessler got pissed. Then a bunch happened. When Bellamy and others protested racism outside an Italian restaurant, Kessler showed up and ate pasta in their faces.

Kessler exposed scandalous tweets from Bellamy's old Twitter account, which cost Bellamy his jobs at a high school and at the State Board of Education. But Bellamy's supporters didn't seem to care. Back and forth, many failed attempts by Jason Kessler to undo Wes Bellamy, including, last December, Kessler showing up at a council meeting to look Bellamy in the eye while blaring Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down from a portable speaker. So I wanted Wes Bellamy to talk to me about all that.

Robyn Semien

I had told him I wanted to talk about the rally and the events leading up to the rally, but I only realized sitting in front of him that I assumed he knew that meant talking about the man who organized the rally and his history with him. I ran that Kessler quote by him, or where Kessler said he organized the rally because of Bellamy.

Robyn Semien

He was candid and had lots to say, until I mentioned I'd be talking to Kessler for my story, and then his whole body changed. He looked annoyed, stopped looking me in the eye.

Robyn Semien

I get that. But ignoring Jason Kessler isn't going to make him go away. And I don't have the same job as Wes Bellamy. He's a politician with a political vision for Charlottesville. It makes sense for him to avoid talking about Jason Kessler. He's not going to be derailed by one guy. But I'm in Charlottesville because Jason Kessler wrote the blueprint for the rally. And at this point, he's in hiding somewhere, presumably planning something. I wanted to know what's coming and how dangerous he is. And if this story was true, that Jason Kessler's beef with this one guy motivated him to organize this rally, I wanted to understand that too.

Before I spoke to Kessler, I went back and forth on telling him I'm black. I really chewed on it, wondered what was more honest. Tell him or don't tell him? Maybe he'll look me up. Maybe he'll ask me. I didn't know. It'll come up, I thought. And I don't usually start interviews with "hi, I'm black Robyn from This American Life." So I didn't do it with this one either.

Robyn Semien

I wanted to ask him about Wes Bellamy, but we got on the phone and he just started going. He talked for 40 minutes, mostly about how he did have a plan for the rally, but it was thwarted by the state of emergency.

Robyn Semien

His First Amendment right to free speech was violated. There was a lot of First Amendment talk.

Robyn Semien

He was rambly and excitable, and he talked over me a lot. And when I finally got to ask him about Wes Bellamy and that quote, he was even more hopped up. Bellamy is against him, but it's not just Bellamy. It goes all the way up to the highest levels of Virginia government.

Robyn Semien

I asked him more questions about Wes Bellamy until it became clear-- there wasn't much there. Kessler's resentment of the vice mayor didn't prompt him to organize the rally. That's just something he said. But we did talk about the rally, and his plans and expectations, which eventually led to something that was new to me, something specific about his beliefs that felt important to know.

When President Trump stood before the press after the weekend in Charlottesville, he said not everyone at the rally was a neo-Nazi. Not everyone was a white supremacist.

Robyn Semien

But even the guys who don't call themselves white supremacists believe all sorts of things that sound very close to or exactly the same as white supremacy. Jason, for instance, explained to me he's not a white supremacist. He's pro-white, fighting for white rights. And he organized one of the largest gatherings of white supremacists in recent memory. And he said things to me like, "each race has something to be proud of. Black people's thing being--" mhm-- "basketball."

Robyn Semien

Kessler's a UVA grad. He's 33. He voted for Obama. And when he talks about what set him down this path to pro-white activism, he points to a single experience. I was surprised what a common experience it was, something that happens to people all the time, and they do not end up organizing rallies with torches. He didn't get a job he wanted. Here's what happened.

He didn't come from money. His parents didn't go to college. He graduated with a psych degree and student loans, and started looking for a job. He says he'd been working some. Says for about a year he was a counselor in a mental health facility.

Robyn Semien

The full-time job went to someone else.

Robyn Semien

I suggested, maybe it wasn't discrimination. Maybe the woman was a better interview, or some other thing you didn't know about. But he decided-- discrimination, something fishy, even though he admitted he didn't have proof.

Robyn Semien

Of course, even if he were right, this is a story that happens much more often to women and people of color than white men. But years later, this is what Kessler points to as the beginning of a real shift. Slighted as a man, feeling like women and blacks get all the breaks, this story about being pushed out made sense to him, and it stuck. And this brings me to the thing I learned from this conversation. From there, he made a leap I truly can't understand, a leap from that experience back then to this conclusion.

Robyn Semien

The Hart-Cellar Act is the immigration policy that ended preferential treatment for certain European countries. It got rid of the old policy, which favored white immigrants. He's wrong, by the way, about the UN definition of genocide. It's not replacement. Genocide, according to the UN, is violent. It's the physical destruction of a people. But the way Kessler sees it, there's a genocide of white people, because America allows immigrants from countries all over the world.

Robyn Semien

"Destroy a people," "genocide." I'd never heard that before. I couldn't have guessed it. This is the new thing I learned from this conversation. But apparently this is something lots of these groups believe in. It came up 2 and 1/2 hours in, and it kind of washed past me when it happened. But later I'd mention it almost immediately to every person I talked to about him. The man who organized the rally in Charlottesville believes there's a genocide of white people in America.

White civil rights, discrimination against white people, white oppression-- Kessler is constantly stealing the language of the truly disenfranchised to talk about his feelings of white disenfranchisement. He calls people racist all the time. He calls Wes Bellamy a black supremacist. He calls me a racist toward white people. I have no idea if he knew I'm black, by the way.

That language is designed to have power. It took black Americans centuries to exact, black people who needed to communicate a message for our own survival, that we are not partial people, we are not a threat, we are not marginal, we are not invisible. We're people. Those words have power, the words Jason has co-opted. And they get results. I bet they'll get results for his movement too.

We talked for four hours in two conversations. Jason Kessler says he's not a white supremacist, but he believes in white genocide. And that's just as terrifying, because it takes you to the exact same place. Namely, taking back what's yours. I told Jason as much.

Robyn Semien

After talking to Jason Kessler suddenly this past year in America looked different to me. I thought for lots of people "Make America Great Again" and white attachment to Confederate symbols was about white power, white people trying to maintain their power. Just a way of saying "remember the hierarchy. Don't forget who's on top." But Jason Kessler is a guy who does not believe he has power, and he wants it. Which is frightening, because it's unclear what he'll do to get it.

He's tweeted about a coming civil war and being one of the first to go. There was one question that I wanted to ask Kessler that I never got to, because he cut the conversation short. So I called him back one more time to try and ask him.

He didn't call me back. When I sent an email following up this week, asking, "Do you want a race war? What will that look like?" He responded, quote, "Ridiculous. Just run what you have. I'm not a cartoon villain." I never thought he was.

Ira Glass

Robyn Semien is one of the producers of our show.

Our program was produced today by our senior producer, Brian Reed. People who put our show together include Elna Baker, Elise Bergerson, Susan Burton, Zoe Chace, Dana Chivvis, Stephanie Foo, Michele Harris, Kimberly Henderson, Chana Joffe-Walt, Mariya Karimjiee, David Kestenbaum, Seth Lind, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, BA Parker, Robyn Semien, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he just finished learning to speak Japanese. He picked up the language in just three months, because of all the spare time he had. So much spare time. You know why?

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.