Rising Out of Hatred shows how powerful of a tool language can be: from the different arguments that Derek uses to convince others to join his white nationalist cause, to the dog whistles that politicians use to implicitly signal that they endorse white supremacy, to the racist stereotypes that white nationalists perpetuate. This is because language often leads to action. For instance, even though Derek and his father Don (who’s also a white nationalist) disavow violence, mass shooters and other violent extremists often report that they are motivated by white nationalist rhetoric. So, even if racist language isn’t violent in and of itself, it can directly cause racially motivated violence and discrimination. The book shows that especially in the context of white supremacy, words can hurt people, as rhetoric can be used to manipulate others and cause tangible damage.
Rhetoric has the power to lure people into believing an ideology or signaling support for one, particularly because it can use implicit rather than explicit language. Derek recognizes the power of rhetoric early on in his involvement in the white nationalist movement, when he runs for a local office in Florida as a teenager. He talks about “highway signs in Spanish, urban crime, outsourced middle-class jobs, a collapsing economy, and a societal insistence on political correctness.” Using this kind of coded language, Derek beats a Cuban American incumbent and wins with 60 percent of the vote despite having no political experience. This illustrates the power in using veiled rhetoric, because Derek can allude to racial issues without making explicitly racist statements to gain support.
Derek broadens this idea to the white nationalist movement as a whole. He and Don describe white nationalism as a “modern civil rights movement for whites,” reframing the language to insist that “white people were the victims—not the perpetrators—of structural racism.” By portraying the movement in this way, white people feel more permission to air their grievances and join the movement than they did when the movement’s language centered more on hatred and violence toward non-white people. This demonstrates again how language can be a powerful tool for manipulating people. Politicians also co-opt this strategy to signal their support for the white nationalist movement, doing so in a way that makes it harder to criticize and easier for people to support because it’s vague. The book notes that Donald Trump did this when he ran for president in 2016. He said that he was the “law and order” candidate, that he was qualified to be president because of his “beautiful, terrific genes,” that American cities were overrun by “gangs and thugs,” and that he wanted to “take America back.” Thus, even if Trump wasn’t necessarily a white nationalist, he was alluding to enough of their aims to gain their support without using explicitly racist language.
Language isn’t only used to manipulate people into offering political support or signaling beliefs—it can also have tangible consequences by influencing people to hurt others. For a long time, Derek doesn’t understand how prejudiced and racist language can be harmful. But Derek’s friend Allison illustrates how his words—his statements that racial and ethnic minorities don’t deserve to be full members of society—impact people. She shows him studies proving that racist discrimination and stereotyping negatively impact people’s health, their poverty levels, their ability to be promoted at work, how often they are arrested, the prices they pay at car dealerships or grocery stores, and more. Even if words don’t have a physical impact, they lead to biases that do. Language becomes very salient for Dylann Roof, a Stormfront user who murdered nine people in a historically Black church in 2015. Roof’s attorney later stated that “every bit of [Roof’s] motivation came from things he saw on the internet,” and that “he is simply regurgitating, in whole paragraphs, slogans, and facts—bits and pieces of facts that he downloaded from the internet directly into his brain.” This is another example of how rhetoric can lead people to violent action. Similarly, a man named James Jackson had watched YouTube videos posted by alt-right leader Richard Spencer and white nationalist David Duke, which convinced him "that the white race is being eroded." This idea led him to board a bus from Baltimore to New York City with a sword and two knives. Jackson followed a 66-year-old Black trash collector named Timothy Caughman into a dark alleyway in Times Square and stabbed him to death. Duke and Spencer’s words, therefore, had fatal consequences.
When Derek ultimately disavows white nationalism, he understands that the only way to counteract the harmful language he has used in the past is to reveal the danger and manipulation within it. After Trump wins the 2016 presidential election, Derek tries to “sound a warning to the biggest national audience he could find,” writing an op-ed in The New York Times to explicitly condemn “the wave of violence and vile language that has risen since the election.” Derek knows the power of his voice as a former white nationalist, and he hopes that he can show the danger in that wave of “vile language” that he helped foster. The only way to fight harmful rhetoric is to combat it with his own words, showing his manipulation for what it was. The book itself shows another way in which words have power: in the final passage, Derek says that he’s trying to “warn people” about the dangers of white nationalism and the rhetoric it has spawned in mainstream politics. Through Rising Out of Hatred, he and author Eli Saslow are doing just that: revealing the harmful language that Derek used, how it shaped American politics and manipulated people, and how it ultimately damaged society.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Rhetoric and Language ThemeTracker
Rhetoric and Language Quotes in Rising Out of Hatred
Under his watch, Stormfront grew into a gigantic, international community of message boards and chat rooms that offered everything from academic research on racial differences, to daily Nazi news links, to dating profiles rife with racial slurs. A few of Stormfront’s frequent users went on to bomb synagogues or murder minorities; the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-watch group, published a report connecting Stormfront to more than a hundred murders. Don discouraged violence in his own messages on the site, but he also managed the website with the language of a wartime commander, writing about “enemies” and “comrades,” in the “fight for our future.”
As Derek explained it to his listeners, white nationalists were not fighting against minority rights but fighting for rights of their own. As the white population in the United States continued to drop, Derek and other activists were “simply trying to protect and preserve an endangered heritage and culture,” he said. They were trying to save whites from an “inevitable genocide by mass immigration and forced assimilation.” Theirs was the righteous cause. They were the social justice warriors. “What’s happening right now is a genocide of our people, plain and simple,” Derek said. “We are Europeans. We have a right to exist. We will not be replaced in our own country.”
The new status quo in the late 1960s was constant turmoil, so Don started searching the library for possible solutions until one day he found a slight paperback titled Our Nordic Race, written by a Virginia preacher named Richard Hoskins. “Today the entire world is seething with unrest,” the introduction read. “The line of conflict is found wherever our civilization comes into contact with the belligerent and aggressive nations of the colored world. It is a critical problem which will be solved not by emotion but only by the cold processes of intellect.”
In June 2015, Roof scouted out a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and traveled there alone with a handgun. He went to a Bible study attended by black and mostly elderly congregants and waited until they stood up to pray. Then he opened fire and killed nine people, firing off dozens of rounds as he shouted about wanting to “start a race war.”
“A crazy kid latching onto portions of our cause” was how Don later explained it to the media, as the shooting brought Stormfront back onto the front page of The New York Times. “If the movement has a leading edge, it is Stormfront,” the Times wrote, and later in court Roof’s defense attorney attempted to blame the “racist internet” for Roof’s massacre. “Every bit of motivation came from things he saw on the internet,” his attorney David Bruck said. “He is simply regurgitating, in whole paragraphs, slogans, and facts—bits and pieces of facts that he downloaded from the internet directly into his brain.”
What Trump said during those next months was that he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the United States. He said he was the “law and order candidate” in the age of Black Lives Matter. He said he was qualified to be president in large part because of his “beautiful, terrific genes—a wonderful inheritance.” He said his primary goal was to erase the legacy of Barack Obama, the country’s first black president, who Trump continued to insinuate was a foreign-born Muslim. He said America’s inner cities were overrun by “gangs and thugs,” and “right now, if you walk down the street, you get shot”—and then to prove that point he re-tweeted a crime statistic suggesting that 81 percent of white murder victims were killed by blacks. A few days later, after criminologists told Trump that his number was wildly off base—that in fact it was only 14 percent—Trump said, “What? Am I gonna check every statistic?”
The wave of violence and vile language that has risen since the election is only one immediate piece of evidence that this campaign’s reckless assertion of white identity comes at a huge cost. More and more people are being forced to recognize now what I learned early: Our country is susceptible to some of our worst instincts when the message is packaged correctly.
No checks and balances can redeem what we’ve unleashed. The reality is that half of the voters chose white supremacy...
It’s now our job to argue constantly that what voters did in elevating this man to the White House constitutes the greatest assault on our own people in a generation, and to offer another option…
Those of us on the other side need to be clear that Mr. Trump’s callous disregard for people outside his demographic is intolerable, and will be destructive to the entire nation.
During the coming months, Don and Derek would watch as white nationalism continued to explode into mainstream politics. There would be fights over the destruction of Confederate monuments, followed by a succession of marches and rallies led by white nationalists throughout the South. One of those marches would arrive in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, where Richard Spencer, David Duke, and hundreds of neo-Nazis would carry guns and torches into downtown, threatening counterprotesters with chants of “White lives matter” and “You will not replace us,” until one neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd, killing one counterprotester and injuring nineteen others. Trump would go on national TV to explain away the violence by blaming “both sides”—what he called the “alt-left” and also “the good people” on the “alt-right”—creating a moral equivalency between racists and antiracists. Don would call Trump’s comments “the high point” of white nationalism during his lifetime. Derek would write another opinion piece for The New York Times to say that Trump’s “frightening statement” had “legitimized” a racist ideology. Don would watch Stormfront's traffic triple overnight, spiking to 300,000 daily page views, signifying what he called the “full awakening of our people.”
