Rising Out of Hatred: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Derek’s civility and intellectual curiosity have always made Don believe that Derek is the future of the white nationalist movement, leading it beyond its violent history and into the cultural mainstream. Derek’s tactics of talking about cultural erosion and white genocide have become popular. Andrew Breitbart manipulated a tape of a speech from Obama-appointed Shirley Sherrod to make her sound prejudiced against white people. Rush Limbaugh warns listeners about “Obama’s America,” in which Black kids beat up white kids. Lou Dobbs rails on CNN about “rampant illegal aliens,” and Glenn Beck tells viewers on Fox News about Obama’s “deep-seated hatred of white people.”

Don has largely stopped speaking in public, instead hosting his radio show and monitoring Stormfront. He spends most of his time alone at home, growing more and more depressed about his disability following his stroke. He’s also discouraged by the fact that even after 40 years dedicated to a revolutionary movement, its revolution has not yet come. Don is still firm about his ideology, but he regrets not taking a softer, less confrontational approach, working within the system rather than escaping from it. He wants to gradually move people in his direction rather than shocking or scaring them.

Growing up, the first people Don shocked and scared were his parents, who were quiet, steady conservatives. Just as Don began his junior year of high school, the school was desegregated, creating constant turmoil between Black and white students. He then found a paperback called Our Nordic Race by preacher Richard Hoskins, which stated that the only way to solve the “critical problem” was to separate the races. Don sought out more books from the same publisher and ultimately found the National Socialist White People’s Party and a newspaper called White Power. He started handing out copies of this paper until one day, he came home to find an FBI agent and a sheriff waiting for him.

Don’s parents didn’t disagree with his opinions on desegregation, but the agent and sheriff warned him about hate speech and spreading racial unrest. This only pushed Don further toward segregationism, though, as he felt he was being monitored. He wanted to be a nuclear physicist; now he knew that dream was dead. So, he continued mailing newsletters to his classmates and organized a conference for a gathering of young Nazis in Arlington, Virginia.

On the way to his conference, Don met two other young white nationalists to carpool together. They were David Duke and Joseph Paul Franklin, and together they would come to define the white supremacy movement for the next several decades. Don thought Duke could be preachy; he often gave monologues about racial science. Franklin, meanwhile, was a high school dropout who delighted in using racial slurs. The three of them quickly became allies, trading book recommendations and always returning to what they agreed on: that white people were biologically superior to other races, and that their superiority was being threatened by desegregation, immigration, and Jewish political influence.

The conference convinced Don to jump into the movement, Duke would go back to LSU and continue to make speeches, and Franklin would privately plan efforts to “spark a race war.” Franklin eventually bombed three synagogues and shot Black and interracial couples in the South. He was finally caught, convicted, and executed after killing 15 people and wounding 12 others. Don, meanwhile, continued to study Our Nordic Race and other texts to convince others of his ideology.

A few months later, Don went down to Georgia between his junior and senior years of high school volunteering for J.B. Stoner’s campaign. Stoner was a segregationist and a KKK member once convicted of bombing a Black church. One of Don’s tasks was to break into the office of a rival white power organization and steal its mailing list—but Jerry Ray (the brother of James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin) stopped Don and shot him in the stomach. The hospital notified his parents as he recovered; he turned 17 in the hospital.

By 19, Don was distributing white power pamphlets at the University of Alabama. At 22, Duke initiated him into the Knights of the KKK. By 24, Don was running for mayor of Birmingham as the city’s most famous white nationalist in an election that would result in the city’s first Black mayor. It seemed to Don that white people were always losing, bit by bit. However, Don continued to assert that the tide was turning that would allow white people to regain power. Don eventually became Grand Wizard, taking over for Duke, but he realized how difficult it was to convert people when they associated Don’s group with other Klan organizations that were violent and militant.

Leaving the Klan, Don joined with other white nationalists in Operation Red Dog, a plot to overthrow the island nation of Dominica and reclaim it for white people. Their army consisted of only 10 men, and their plan depended on teaming up with a group of local Black mercenaries, who had no intention of turning over control of the country to white nationalists. Only a few miles into their boat trip to Dominica, federal agents surrounded and arrested the men, who were carrying a Nazi flag, dynamite, tear gas, shotguns, handguns, and automatic rifles.

A few days later, many of the men disavowed their white supremacist ideologies and got lesser sentences by testifying against one another—but not Don. He remained loyal and viewed the jury as another audience to convert. They found him guilty of violating the Neutrality Act of 1794, which makes it illegal for Americans to wage war against countries that are at peace with the U.S. Don was sentenced to three years in prison.

During Don’s tenure in prison, he continued to reflect on how to grow the white nationalist movement. Don learned to moderate his language in the prison to protect himself from attacks, as the guards feared a race riot. His cellmate had made five-figure political donations in Texas and became an honorary member of the Department of Public Safety, though he wasn’t an open white supremacist. From this, Don learned that if he wanted political power, it might be best to maneuver through back channels.

With this idea in mind, Don started learning about computers and coding on an early-model TRS-80 microcomputer. He realized he could disseminate information much more quickly with this machine, and by the time he was released from prison in 1984, he was feeling optimistic about the movement. He and Duke recalibrated: their goal was now to reposition white nationalism as a modern civil rights movement for white people. At the same time, Don reconnected with Duke’s ex-wife, Chloe. They married in 1988, and she became pregnant a few months later, as Duke launched his first run for the Louisiana state legislature.

For the next six months, Don split time between Florida and Louisiana, helping Chloe with their new baby and Duke with his campaign. They decided not to make race a talking point but instead to make it subtext, talking about crime, affirmative action, and welfare. It was a relatively small race, but Duke’s history with the Klan made it visible. President George Bush and former president Ronald Reagan denounced him, but Duke received thousands of letters thanking him for representing “politically-incorrect white Americans.”

Three days before Duke won the election, Chloe went into labor. Don rushed out of the office, but before he crossed into Florida, Chloe called again, saying that the baby was born. They named him Derek in honor of Theodoric the Great, a ruler who restored the Roman Empire in the fifth century. His middle name, Roland, came from The Song of Roland, in which the main character dies as a martyr fighting Muslims in Spain for King Charlemagne’s army. Don said that it was the name of a fighter.