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So welcome to the show.

I'm going to 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 must start with you, Eli. How do you decide to write the story? How do you even believe the 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 committed the hate murder of nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, historically black church. And he'd spent a lot of time on the 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 Derrick Black, who was the son of the founder of this board.

David Duke's godson had been raised to sort of lead this ideology and then had disavowed it and sort of disappeared. And so I wanted to find him and I did.

So you're looking for a man by the name of Derrick Black who people are saying on the site is the 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 Derrick's case, we're talking about somebody who is 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 with different races. And white people were smarter. And 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 and 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 and trying to convince other people that these conclusions were disastrous for the future of the country.

Now, Derrick, 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.

Oh, because I mean, your mom was married to David Duke. You know, 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 know until I was at college. I spent my all the younger years getting more more involved and feeling I really needed to help push this as my rights were getting older. 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 ingroup but who I really liked.

And we were hanging out and and also a college community that really condemned everything I was saying. And I wanted to know. First thing I want to know is why do you condemn it so strongly? Like, I think it's fine. It's not attacking anyone.

You so you genuinely believe these ideas, like just when you are alone in your room by yourself, you went like, I believe this. I believe that black people have lower IQ as I believe that people cannot mix.

I believe like you, this was like your truth. The whole sections of white nationalist organizations that spend their time putting out journal papers, putting on articles, putting out things that seem very scientific, that make a lot of sense, misusing statistics and misusing facts 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 manhood or do you like.

I genuinely, 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 since I was a kid. 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 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, you know, I don't like that a lot, but what am I going to 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 going to just let this pass.

So you have all of this information at hand, but when do you actually start changing? Because, I mean, like you say, you have people who oppose you. You know that people oppose you. But like Eli, when you when you're 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 think one of the things for me about reporting this book was learning how hard it is to affect that kind of change. I mean, from students on this campus, it took two years of sustained activism and engagement with Derek in order to begin to even see some kinds of results of a change in that civil resistance on campus, shutting down the school at one point to sort of say these beliefs are not OK, you don't belong here. 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 go beyond the stereotypes and start encountering the humanity beyond beyond what he believed.

And it took a long time.

It sounds like like a process and 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 believe differently.

But when you go back and speak to the people who you preached hate to, they don't come with.

You know, when I left, I left alone. And I spent a lot of years totally alone. 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 going to be able to talk to my parents. And there's not an anti-racist world that you just moved to. So I spent a bunch of years even not knowing what I should do and not talking to anybody and going by my middle name 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 is an added it's like an added part of the story.

The the the part of the book that really, really gripped me was when I was writing about your relationship with your father 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, 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 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'm happy to talk about it. 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 all of this rhetoric. The Stormfront website that I believe you designed, correct words that parts of it you designed, I think when you're like ten years old, which is which is insane, that website 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 nationalists also connect with a large portion of white voters in the country. I mean, we see studies all the time that 30 or 40 percent of whites believe they experience more prejudice. They're the victims of prejudice and discrimination more than people of color or Jews, which is actually 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, you know, we need to build a wall by retweeting stats about black on white crime.

Right. Factually incorrect. 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. May I ask you this before we go? As someone who grew up white nationalist, as someone who studied, 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'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 if you just work against. Right. I think the big surprise 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 them 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 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 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 because you believe 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 how do you know 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, 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 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 and makes life better for people. Including white people, right?

And that is a value that I don't think is could be wrong and that 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 that's wrong, that the little group has to expand and that we are 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 are all included and that we can all work for there.

And you have to be the voice in the room doing that because it doesn't just happen. The status quo is not going to lead us there. The only thing that undermines a white nationalist is trying to ram somebody up to a more extreme version of racism as 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? Would you like 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, I don't like that you believe that political hangout, 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 want the person who's going to ruin that for you is another white person who's saying stop that because it's equal like they have they have literal skin in the game.

And what they say shuts any 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.

Rising out of hatred is available now. It's a fascinating story, I really recommend it. Eli Saslow. The Daily Show with Criminal Lawyers Edition wants The Daily Show weeknights at 11:00, 10:00 Central on Comedy Central and the Comedy Central Watch full episodes and videos at The Daily Show Dotcom. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and subscribe to The Daily Show on YouTube for exclusive content and more. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, and if you're like me, you're probably worried right now, in part because of the fascist insurrection on January 6th in Washington, D.C. But what if I were to tell you that what happened in D.C. was just the latest in more than a century of fascist attempts to take over democratic governments, many of them successful, learn about the history of these insurrections and the history of anti fascist actions attempting to stop them.

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