American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement's Hidden Spaces of Hate

by Pete Simi Chapman University, Robert Futrell

Overview

Today’s white supremacist activism originated in carefully cultivated homes, parties, rituals, music festivals, and digital media and went on to reshape the U.S. political landscape. With powerful case studies, interviews, and first-person accounts, the third edition of American Swastika guides readers through these hidden enclaves of hate to link past circumstances to present conditions. It discusses new players in the world of white power and offers a vital perspective on how white supremacy persists and why we must be vigilant if we want to check its influence. American Swastika is essential reading for anyone hungry to understand the threat of white supremacist extremism to American society.

New to the Third Edition

• Discussion of white extremists’ “surprise” return to the American political landscape counters claims that this is “new” by explaining that it emanates from networks and ideas long nurtured outside the public eye
• An investigation of new hate music genres and changes in the white power music festival scene expands the discussion of how music is essential to white supremacist identity
• Research on new digital spaces where white supremacists connect and cultivate their culture, including mainstream and fringe networking platforms, retail sites, and video gaming sites demonstrates how online mechanisms serve as entry points for radicalization
• Discussion of new attention from the Biden administration on domestic terror offers hope for confronting and constraining white supremacy, while also defining many challenges involved

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538173077
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	03/05/2024
Edition description:	Third Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.26(w) x 9.27(h) x 0.78(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Pete Simi is professor of sociology at Chapman University and executive committee member for the National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center at the University of Nebraska.

Robert Futrell is professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and longtime expert on right-wing extremism.

Emily Wagner is a Ph.D. student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies right-wing politics and activism.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Hidden Spaces of Hate

Explaining White Power Persistence

Studying White Power Persistence

Plan of the Book

2. White Supremacy

Ku Klux Klan

Christian Identity and Neo-Paganism

Neo-Nazis

Racist Skinheads

White Supremacy Doctrine and Collective Identity

3. White Supremacist Hate in the Home

Seth and Jessie’s Hard-Core Home Life

The Newly Respectable: Todd and Kate

Darren and Mindy’s Communitarian Family Life

4. White Power Parties

Getting Back to “God’s White Wilderness”

White Supremacist Bible Study

House Parties and Crash Pads

White Power Ritualism

5. White Power Music

Hate Train’s Rise

Hate Bands and Hate Music

Consciousness-Raising Music

White Power Bar Shows

A Place to Let Go

Music Rituals and Member Recruitment

Festivals

A Chance to Build Unity

White Power Music Companies

6. Virtual Hate

White Power Hate Culture Online

Selling the White Power Aesthetic

White Power Online Gaming

Children’s Virtual Indoctrination

White Power Video and Social Networking Sites

“It Keeps Me Feeling Connected”

Discovering “Truth”

Betrayal, Dispossession, and Violence

Declarations of Faith

White Power Virtual Therapy

Coming Out to Nonmembers

Dependency and Loneliness

Online Ties to Offline White Power Spaces

7. Private White Power Communities

Pure White Space

The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord

Elohim City

National Alliance

Aryan Nations

8. Enduring White Power Activism: Estimating White Supremacy’sThreat and What to Do about It

An Infrastructure of Hate

Estimating the White Supremacist Threat

What to Do

Appendix: Making Contact and Developing Rapport

Notes

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

Cornel West

Even with the historic victory of Barack Obama, the legacy of white supremacy in America is alive and well. This book lays bare the specific groups and particular practices that sustain the extreme forms of the legacy. Don’t miss it!

Betty A. Dobratz

If you want to understand the white power movement in the U.S., you must read American Swastika. Pete Simi and Robert Futrell draw on their own observations and interviews as well as the work of previous researchers to produce a compelling, well-researched, and comprehensive examination of white power activism. They skillfully tackle the difficult issue of explaining why this movement has persisted in one form or another for so long.

James F. Short Jr.

This book is an eye-opener in several ways, revealing the every day lives of an important element in the U.S. that has power beyond their numbers. Pete Simi and Robert Futrell's data describe real people with real concerns that are too-often dismissed as the lunatic fringe.

Editorial Reviews

Simi and Futrell provide a valuable service by shedding light on the "ordinariness" of white power activism, which can make it that much more dangerous. They take social networks seriously when addressing the big questions about how people can adhere to despicable beliefs and to endure stigma in their daily lives for holding those beliefs and engaging in repulsive activities. They remind us of how collective identities are not created in a vacuum and if they are not regularly reinforced, they die. American Swastika shows how heterodox beliefs and practices require constant reinforcement in settings that normalize white supremacy and embed it within cultural practices and social ties. The timely third edition of this extraordinary book offers priceless insight into the way that racist extremism has polluted our politics.

Rory McVeigh

The ethnographic nature of American Swastika provides students with a close, intense look at the disturbingly banal nature of white supremacy. The accessible writing provides a visceral experience for students, who are confronted with the reality of race-based hatred within the United States

Cedric Heraux

American Swastika, now in its updated 3rd edition, has long been the text for understanding the white supremacist movement, its ideas, its activists, and its allure for those drawn into its orbit. Fully updated to capture how in recent years hate movements have become more public and more powerful, this text is fundamental to grasping the challenge America faces and the task ahead if white supremacy is to ever be vanquished from our society and culture.

Heidi Beirich

Since its initial publication in 2010, American Swastika has been the go-to source for comprehending the dangerous persistence of racist hate movements in the U.S. With this new edition, Pete Simi and Robert Futrell take an important additional step—offering not only a catalog of the white supremacist threat as it exists today, but a framework for explaining how related movements have, and will, continue to develop and evolve if left unchecked. Their crucial intervention—demonstrating how the troubling far-right mobilizations that marked the Trump presidency furthered longstanding patterns of racist hate—serves as a lucid and insightful primer on how evolving technological and political landscapes have provided tools for white supremacists to exploit. Scholars, policymakers, and invested citizen-readers alike will find no better resource for understanding the threats posed by organized racism—and no clearer roadmap for effectively responding to those threats.

David Cunningham

American Swastika sheds clear light and the beliefs, activities, and goals of those in the far right. Actually hearing their words and "seeing" them in action via the qualitative descriptions helps readers get a clear idea as to who these people are and the danger they pose.

Harold Geistman

The main strength of American Swastika is the degree to which Simi was able to directly interact with these groups and attempt to accurately describe their specific point of view. When analyzing this material with Futrell, they were able to give an in-depth analysis of this process and the phenomenology that emerges from it.

David Polizzi

America's white racists see themselves as an endangered minority, according to this disturbing look at the white supremacist movement. Simi, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, teams up with Futrell, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, to provide a panorama of the white power movement in its different regional and ideological iterations. With insight and clarity, the authors offer a detailed review of supremacist literature, as well as the role the Internet has played in strengthening the movement. Although occasionally dry, the book is indisputably a powerful and unnerving study of how parents indoctrinate their children to hate and fear minorities, and the role that activities as mundane as concerts, house parties and tattooing can play in the conversion of new recruits into these subcultures. Also helpful is the overview of groups ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to racist skinheads, each of whom have their own distinctive beliefs, social codes and agenda.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly - Library Journal

If you want to understand the white power movement in the United States, you must read American Swastika. Pete Simi and Robert Futrell draw on their own observations and interviews as well as the work of previous researchers to produce a compelling, well-researched, and comprehensive examination of white power activism. They skillfully tackle the difficult issue of explaining why this movement has persisted in one form or another for so long.

Betty A. Dobratz

Even with the historic victory of Barack Obama, the legacy of white supremacy in America is alive and well. This book lays bare the specific groups and particular practices that sustain the extreme forms of the legacy. Don't miss it!

Cornel West

This book is an eye-opener in several ways, revealing the everyday lives of an important element in the United States that has power beyond their numbers. Pete Simi and Robert Futrell's data describe real people with real concerns that are too often dismissed as the lunatic fringe.

James F. Short Jr.

American Swastika is one of the best researched accounts of Aryan groups yet. This book is hands down the most effective for communicating information to students about how Aryan groups understand their beliefs, behaviors, and organizations. It is indispensable.

Lisa L. Garoutte

American Swastika is one of the best researched accounts of Aryan groups yet. This book is hands down the most effective for communicating information to students about how Aryan groups understand their beliefs, behaviors, and organizations. It is indispensable.

Even with the historic victory of Barack Obama, the legacy of white supremacy in America is alive and well. This book lays bare the specific groups and particular practices that sustain the extreme forms of the legacy. Don't miss it!

If you want to understand the white power movement in the United States, you must read American Swastika. Pete Simi and Robert Futrell draw on their own observations and interviews as well as the work of previous researchers to produce a compelling, well-researched, and comprehensive examination of white power activism. They skillfully tackle the difficult issue of explaining why this movement has persisted in one form or another for so long.

This book is an eye-opener in several ways, revealing the everyday lives of an important element in the United States that has power beyond their numbers. Pete Simi and Robert Futrell's data describe real people with real concerns that are too often dismissed as the lunatic fringe.

From the Publisher

Those not familiar with this pathological world would do well to read the 'inside' look by Simi and Futrell. They are a criminologist and sociologist, respectively, who have used their research skills to see deeper than most of us will ever go into the reality of white supremacist groups. Their on-scene investigation shows us some of the rawness of life within actual white supremacist communities. . . .Simi and Futrell are engaged in ethnographic observation which, given how little is known about these particular communities, provides helpful information. They certainly do not promote white supremacy. . . .The world looks more and more threatening to those who believe in the supremacy of their white group over all others. This book may not show us how to respond, but it surely show us the need to do so.

Media and Digital Culture Journal of Religion

Your academic friends will find much to learn about the eye-opening subject of hardcore racism in Pete Simi and Robert Futrell's harrowing American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement's Hidden Spaces of Hate (Rowman and Littlefield, $19.95). These two young university profs, through first-person accounts and interviews with members of white-supremacy groups, dig deep into the subculture's cracks and crevices, the music and the lifestyle, to tell us what's going on. 'Weapons and race war are consistent topics of crashpad conversation,' they write, a crashpad being a rundown motel or dilapidated apartment around Los Angeles where skinheads gather for days, sometimes weeks, on end. Simi and Futrell don't flinch at anything—the hate-spewing rock bands, the rituals, the Internet propaganda. Swastika isn't preachy; rather, it's a sociological analysis of what happens in those invisible places where hate festers, even at the moment when—and perhaps due to the fact that—a black man resides in the White House.

The Tuscan Weekly

An important account of the neo-Nazi White Supremacist movement in the United States. Drawing on extensive field work, including numerous interviews, the authors explain the movement’s various groupings, their 'infrastructure of hate,' their extremist ideologies and agendas, how they radicalise, recruit and indoctrinate their members (including through private homes, 'hate' parties, rituals, music festivals and online), and response measures to effectively counter and marginalise the influence and activities of these militant groups. The appendix includes a valuable guide for academic researchers to make contact and develop rapport with such militants (while avoiding the ethical dilemma of building 'too much' rapport with them) in order to understand their mindsets and activities.

Perspectives on Terrorism

Pete Simi, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha kept going back, kept trying to get deeper into the mind of the modern American white supremacist. And that's likely why his book, "American Swastika," is such a fascinating read-an unusually lively read, really, considering it's also intended to be an academic look at the subject by an academic. His walk on the wild side not only enriched the sociological insights of the book, but inspired vivid, frightening narratives from his time spent walking with some of this country's most fanatically racist people.

Omaha World-Herald

Simi and Futrell conducted extensive fieldwork and interviews with white power activists and groups between 1996 and 2006. Their impressive data include 89 initial and 94 follow-up interviews, observation in a number of movement spaces and, most unusual, visits to white power activist houses that extended from several days to five weeks. With these rare data, the authors provide an insiders’ look at white power activism. . . . This book needs to be read by anyone interested in white power activism. It is a well-crafted study of the range of social practices and emotions that sustain racial extremism in today’s America.

Contemporary Sociology

American Swastika takes readers into the 'free spaces' of the white-power movement, where members emerge to speak their minds without fear of retribution. Researched and written by Pete Simi and Robert Futrell...the book takes us into the homes of white-power believers, to their rallies, concerts and to children's birthday parties with swastika-shaped cakes.

Las Vegas Weekly

Simi (Univ. of Nebraska, Omaha) and Futrell (UNLV) provide an unprecedented look into communities of white supremacy in the US. Their particular areas of focus are the movement's free spaces, both material and virtual, where white supremacists can safely come together to express their racial views, form hate-centered communities, and recruit new members. Birthday parties, house parties, rock shows, Bible study, Internet groups, and weekend retreats all reveal the startling normality of racial hatred in these communities and make the book compelling for several academic genres. This rich community study explores issues of identity, refuge, inclusion, empowerment, bonding, and division. It also is relevant as a study of a contemporary social movement that seeks survival and change in a world hostile to its beliefs. Further, the book contributes to the study of racial identity and contemporary racism, highlighting the need to continue to examine overt forms of racism in a color-blind society. It is important for its contribution to multiple fields and its compelling readability. Essential.

Choice

White power adherents are not typically 'out' about their extremist leanings. They straddles the worlds of white power and mainstream society, often publically playing down or hiding their extremist identities. In the past this might have Robert Futrell, a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Pete Simi, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, been a hindrance. But these days, they thrive in what we call hidden spaces of hate, often online, where they gather to support one another and their cause.

The New York Times

Simi (Univ. of Nebraska, Omaha) and Futrell (UNLV) provide an unprecedented look into communities of white supremacy in the US. Their particular areas of focus are the movement's free spaces, both material and virtual, where white supremacists can safely come together to express their racial views, form hate-centered communities, and recruit new members. Birthday parties, house parties, rock shows, Bible study, Internet groups, and weekend retreats all reveal the startling normality of racial hatred in these communities and make the book compelling for several academic genres. This rich community study explores issues of identity, refuge, inclusion, empowerment, bonding, and division. It also is relevant as a study of a contemporary social movement that seeks survival and change in a world hostile to its beliefs. Further, the book contributes to the study of racial identity and contemporary racism, highlighting the need to continue to examine overt forms of racism in a color-blind society. It is important for its contribution to multiple fields and its compelling readability. Essential.

CHOICE

White power adherents are not typically “out” about their extremist leanings. They straddles the worlds of white power and mainstream society, often publically playing down or hiding their extremist identities. In the past this might have Robert Futrell, a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Pete Simi, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, been a hindrance. But these days, they thrive in what we call hidden spaces of hate, often online, where they gather to support one another and their cause

New York Times

This is perhaps the most essential resource for understanding the white power movement in the United States. Using harrowing interviews and observations, Simi and Futrell confirm that white supremacy is thriving and give the reader unprecedented access to the "free spaces" of the movement, where ideology is articulated: birthday parties, punk rock concerts, and rallies.

Library Journal