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Episode 214: Seyward Darby's Deep Dive into the 'Sisters of Hate'
136 Plays4 years ago
Seyward Darby is the editor in chief of The Atavist Magazine and the author of Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
I don't know, man. I don't know anymore. Hey, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm looking right at you, right in the eyes. Thanks for listening.
'Sisters in Hate' and Women in White Nationalism
00:00:25
Speaker
Say Where Darby Makes a Return to the Podcast, her new book, Sisters in Hate, American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism,
00:00:36
Speaker
The kind of book you want to read to your kids before bed. James and the Giant Peach. Sisters in Hate. It's an incredible book. Bleak as hell, but incredible. Beautifully written. Tightly written.
00:00:51
Speaker
No fuss. No boss. She tells it like it is. Lean. That's how I like to describe how this thing is written. Dives into the people who are soft so they can say hard things is one of Sayward's main characters, not man characters.
00:01:09
Speaker
main characters says keep the conversation going on Twitter at CNF pod why because I'm wasting no time this week this conversation is raw unedited didn't have the time to do it so whatever if I sound like a moron while that you know why now and we're getting right into it because I'm gonna spare you my usual bullshit for this week so here we go a one and a two and a riff
Writing Simultaneously with Her Husband
00:01:46
Speaker
You know, I know you and your husband are both writers and you both had books come out. So what has that been like, the fact that the two of you had books come out at roughly the same time?
00:01:58
Speaker
Yeah, well actually his book isn't out yet. It's coming out October 13th. Yeah, I just promote it along. I'm promoting it constantly. So you might, you have very good reason to be confused. I don't think that people normally promote books this far in advance, but I'm just so excited that I'm constantly talking about it online.
00:02:17
Speaker
But yeah, we were certainly writing the books at the same time, and we've been together a long time, over a decade, and he's been writing full time since 2011, and editing is my full-time job, and then I started working on this book about three and a half years ago.
00:02:38
Speaker
And it's been interesting. I mean, we did not know that our books were going to come out at the same time, roughly. Initially, we actually thought they were going to come out the same month, which would have been insane. But then, you know, they were spaced out more like three months.
00:02:54
Speaker
I think one of the most interesting things about the whole process has been the fact that, you know, I wrote a nonfiction book, obviously, and my husband writes fiction, so he has a novel coming out. And just in parallel, seeing how different those processes are, you know, for instance, him slaving away to perfect a manuscript before even sending it to, you know, agents and then publishers versus, you know, me throwing together a proposal and
00:03:23
Speaker
and being like, I promise I can pull this off. You know, all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, the similarities, like he had an incredible copy editor. And, you know, the kind of copy editor, frankly, you know, every magazine should have. So yeah, it's been it's been interesting. And, you know, his his book will be coming out at a pretty crazy time politically. And mine came out at a very
00:03:51
Speaker
crazy time from a I mean, I guess it'll still be crazy when the public health stuff will still be crazy in October, but But yeah, I mean nobody expects to birth a book into the world when there's so much chaos In what ways was it helpful to have to have your husband Corey, correct? Yep
00:04:12
Speaker
So in what way what was that like to be both writing books at the same time and maybe even the fact that he was writing fiction and you were doing nonfiction like how did how did maybe that that piggyback off off each other as you were you know creating both of your works?
00:04:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think I learned way more from him than the other way around, especially because he has been doing this for so much longer. He has figured out how to have a day job, so to speak. I mean, he's an independent contractor, but he has other people he is responsible toward.
00:04:49
Speaker
Um, and has those hours of his day, but he's always been extraordinarily disciplined about building a writing schedule for himself and being so committed to it. And so, you know, I was certainly when I, uh, you know, especially as I got into the real thick of book of writing, as opposed to research for the book. Uh, I, you know, he, he was very supportive in helping me figure out.
00:05:12
Speaker
schedule and helping me stick to it and you know reminding me that if I had said these are the hours when I'm gonna be working on the book not to beat myself up when I wasn't in those hours because I think you know a book can be this all-consuming thing and and when you set a schedule for yourself you know part of that is to actually you know have the time to write but then the flip side of that is to not be mad at yourself that you're not spending all of your time writing so I
00:05:40
Speaker
So I think I definitely learned a lot from him just from the standpoint of how to structure my days. And then certainly we each read each other's work and that was massively helpful.
00:05:56
Speaker
I'm not a fiction writer. And so reading his book, I went through it kind of like a nonfiction editor and then vice versa. So I was probably hopeful for him with things about consistency or
00:06:13
Speaker
uh structure to a certain extent um and then with me you know he was so helpful with the pros um and you know pointing out where i was overreaching or not saying enough um and yeah it was it was a very uh like organic kind of process relationship i don't know we uh
00:06:35
Speaker
I can imagine a situation where our house could have been very stressful place while we were both trying to finish this and it I mean we certainly were stressed out but but not with each other you know and I think that.
00:06:49
Speaker
We were also always really good about like, okay, we're going to sit down for lunch every day at the same time together. And, you know, at a certain time of night, we're going to stop working and, you know, just be together. And, uh, and I think that kind of having that other person to hold you accountable to those schedules was, was really, really helpful. And were you still editing the Adivis full time while you were writing your book and researching it?
00:07:15
Speaker
Yes, so I took three weeks off, so essentially a long vacation, to go to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts last August. And my book was actually the manuscript was due in October. So the whole idea was kind of this like, you know,
00:07:33
Speaker
full-on, three weeks. I got off social media. I didn't check my work email. Nobody was allowed to call me during the day, all that kind of stuff. But that was really the only time I took off. The rest of the time I was full-on at the Atavist. I'm lucky the Atavist has been a remote operation for many years and we're owned by WordPress now, obviously.
00:07:58
Speaker
The thing about WordPress is also entirely remote distributed. One of the nice things was I didn't have an office that I had to go to from 9 to 5 or 10 to 6 or whatever. I could be flexible about saying, okay, I'm going to start my out of this workday a little later and work a little later. As long as I was getting the work done and getting the hours in, it didn't quite matter when they were.
00:08:23
Speaker
I don't recommend working full time and writing a book. It's very hard. But I was lucky in that my job allowed me some flexibility just on a day-to-day basis so that I could make it work.
00:08:37
Speaker
And I think a lot of people who listen to this show, especially they have their day job in book dreams or some other kind of dream. So it's kind of good to hear that someone who I find as accomplished as you is such a sharp editor and such a brilliant writer, that you are able to thread that into your daily life and to build a practice around
Insights into Sayward's Writing Process
00:09:00
Speaker
it. So I think it's inspiring for people to hear that.
00:09:03
Speaker
So how did you fall into the right practice that allowed you to generate the research and then, of course, generate the pros that you needed to hit your deadlines while also holding down your full-time job for the most part? Yeah. Well, I mean, you're very kind to say such nice things about me. I appreciate that. And I don't know. Initially,
00:09:28
Speaker
I was doing so much information gathering. And so certainly that meant some on the ground reporting. I had a reporting trip that I had to go on out to the Pacific Northwest. But I actually remember I would spend my day reporting, being with the subjects that I needed to see.
00:09:47
Speaker
And then I would come back to my hotel room and I was actually editing a Josh Dean piece for the Atavist. And so I would switch gears from asking lots and lots of questions to reading about North Korea and editing a piece about North Korea.
00:10:05
Speaker
And I think that, you know, in an ideal world, that kind of situation, I actually remember my husband saying when I went on the trip, he's like, it's so cool, you're going to be reporting all day and you're going to come back to the room and you're going to write and you're going to, you know, get everything down and reflect on the day. And that it was not like that at all, because I had no other thing that I had to be doing when I got back to the
00:10:24
Speaker
got back to my hotel. And so I think that more than anything, I just kept trying to remind myself that there's no precise right way to do this. And that, for instance, because that was my husband's kind of romantic idea of what nonfiction reporting is like, didn't mean that if I wasn't executing it according to that vision, that there was something wrong. And so, especially in the first
00:10:52
Speaker
couple of months of working on the book. I just did tons and tons of information gathering, figured out a filing system on my computer where everything could go. And at that point, I really wasn't writing that much. I would write little snippets sometimes because I would just have something that came to mind that I felt like I really needed to get down on paper or on my computer screen.
00:11:17
Speaker
um but I you know was just really focused on gathering as much as I as much as I could and then um when I actually started writing and I would say this was like I don't know maybe like let's see book was due in October this was probably like
00:11:33
Speaker
February, March. And I actually benefited in this very strange way. I applied for a grant, which I did not get, but that's okay because the grant required me writing about a third of the book because you had to submit a certain number of pages or I forget exactly what the parameters were. But my editor encouraged me to apply
00:12:00
Speaker
And so I kind of had to fly through writing a big chunk of the book. And I think that in some way, and that was definitely just, you know, I did out of a stuff most of the day, and then I was doing that on nights and weekends kind of thing. And I think that that was beneficial not only because it, you know, forced me to actually, you know, sit down and do the work, but I think it also showed me because I was so worried after all that information gathering that I was not going to be able
00:12:29
Speaker
to put it all together, that I didn't have a coherent way of saying what I wanted to say. And so in some ways being under that pressure to get something together for the grant, which I mean, I obviously edited it before it ultimately became part of the book, but I don't know, it was kind of the push I needed to get outside of my own head.
00:12:50
Speaker
and actually start putting things down. And then after that, you know, a key thing, the way the book is structured, it's divided up into three main parts. And so I tried to, you know, really take each one individually. And I also, and I gave this advice to somebody the other day, that's something that I hadn't really thought of before I started working on the book, but I tried to
00:13:20
Speaker
work on whatever section of one of the given thirds of the book, I felt most inspired to work on in a given day. So if I woke up in the day before I had been writing, I don't know, the third chapter of section two or whatever, I was like, but you know, God, I've just been thinking a lot about this thing that I know comes in section six, but I just want to do it. And I feel like that to me, I was following my own sense of
00:13:51
Speaker
direction, but also directions on following my own sense of direction. That's the most like, tautological, I don't even know. But anyway, what I mean, what I mean is like, I was kind of following my, following my gut almost. Like, if I had this feeling that like, this was the thing I wanted to work on, that was, that was better than trying to force yourself to work on something that you weren't feeling that day, if that makes sense.
00:14:14
Speaker
And I found that also, especially, you know, when I was figuring out, okay, you know, I'm going to work three mornings a week from eight to 11 on the book and, you know, all day Sunday or whatever. I can't remember exactly what my schedule was. And then, you know, add with stuff the rest of the time.
00:14:33
Speaker
I think that it made those chunks of time more enjoyable as opposed to if I felt like I was really stuck on something or there was a problem I was trying to untangle, I could come back to it. And I think that everybody writes differently. I can imagine how that
00:14:52
Speaker
wouldn't work for some people who need to just kind of proceed according to plan. But I kind of worked according to what I was feeling inspired to work on on a given day. Yeah, and so and then the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts really was so amazing for me. I just, you know, got up every day, seven days a week, and went to my studio and worked all day and had no interruptions. And I was able to knock out at that point, I had about two thirds of the
00:15:20
Speaker
of the book written. So that was hugely, hugely helpful. But yeah, I mean, again, I do not recommend trying to work a full time job and write a book. But but it, you know, it worked out. And I also think that, you know, my topic was pretty heavy, you know, white supremacy, light, light stuff. And I think that there was something to knowing that I had other
00:15:50
Speaker
creative things happening in my life. So working on out of the stories with writers that had nothing to do with my book topic. Like I actually think it was probably almost cleansing to me intellectually to go and work on a story that had nothing to do with the women of white supremacy. And so, I mean, maybe this is just me in retrospect being like blessing in disguise, but I do think there's something to that.
00:16:21
Speaker
In what way is being an editor at the Atavus and the kind of deep dives you do with these long-form pieces, how has that strengthened your skill as a writer? Yeah, sure. I think I got a really good piece of advice from my agent, actually.
00:16:46
Speaker
really early on when I had just submitted the book proposal, or I guess it had just been sold. And he said, you know, a book is not magazine stories strung together, unless it's literally an anthology, right? That a book needs to hang together in a way that
00:17:03
Speaker
a magazine story does, but at a drastically shorter length. And he works with a lot of magazine writers. And he said, they feel very comfortable in these little, focusing on little bits, right? By little bits, obviously, I mean thousands of words, but the 5,000 word feature or whatever. And he's like, and sometimes chapters can start to just feel like magazine articles that have been compiled into a book, basically.
00:17:30
Speaker
And so he was like, so avoid doing that, basically. And so I definitely tried to avoid doing that. At the same time, I'd certainly think that working on long form pieces at the Atavist gave me a better instinct for structure. And I mean, I know my book, some people, like one of the criticisms some people have,
00:17:56
Speaker
Um, uh, given about it is that, you know, they feel like the structure is actually a little loose. Um, I mean, I personally disagree with that as their opinion. Um, but I, but I think that, you know,
00:18:09
Speaker
Transitions, for instance. Transitions from one topic to another that would not seemingly go together, but needed to go together. Because when you started to unpack whatever that second topic was, you realize how much it connects to the first. I think being the editor of the Atavist has really given me a better instinct for how to do things like that.
00:18:31
Speaker
And I mean, certainly just for building a scene. And often, you know, building a scene where you wish you had more detail, but you've got to, you know, squeeze as much as you can out of relatively little. And that's something, you know, in any magazine writing, but certainly an out of a stories we're always seeking to do. So yeah, instant infrastructure and transitions, better with, you know, wringing the details out of things.
00:19:00
Speaker
And then I also think, you know, I think activist readers are really smart. They don't need their hand held through everything. You know, we are not a publication that has a nut graph that basically tells you what the story is going to be about. I mean, some of our stories aren't that, but, you know, we're really telling a story and unpacking it as we go.
00:19:24
Speaker
You know, in a book you obviously have or not every book, but my book and lots of books had an introduction where you kind of framed everything. But at the same time, you know, realizing that like your readers smart enough to. You don't have to point out explicitly every connection, every way that something they just read, you know, has to do with something they read 50 pages ago.
00:19:49
Speaker
And I think that that's one of the things I kind of love about out of his stories is that you definitely need to read them start to finish because you can't get the highlight at the top. Right. And and I think that, you know, books are similar. And yeah, so it also just made me I mean, the out of his gosh, you know, I think the longest thing I've worked on at the out of us was like twenty five thousand words. And even even working on when the book ended up being like eighty five thousand eighty
00:20:18
Speaker
or something like that, between 80 and 85,000. And on the one hand, that's four times longer than, or not quite four times longer than the longest out of a story. And yet having dealt with that many words definitely made 80,000 words feel less daunting. So yeah.
00:20:40
Speaker
Structure was something I wanted to talk to you about. You have Karina, Ayla, and Lana, and to me, there was like an escalation of intensity to the characters.
Book Structure and Women's Role in Extremism
00:20:54
Speaker
And maybe an escalation into your approach to them.
00:21:00
Speaker
I was wondering what was your motivation behind the way you structured it, how you decided to slot them beside each other, and what the calculus was among your three big pieces. Yeah. Structure was really hard in this book. It was actually something that my agent and I grappled with a lot
00:21:21
Speaker
even in the proposal phase, because initially the idea was, so all three of these women, Karina, Eila, and Lana, they were all born in early 1979, which was a nice synchronicity, but also it's not like I went looking for that. I just realized as I was sorting out who I wanted my main subjects to be, that they had all been born around the same time.
00:21:45
Speaker
And so originally the idea was like essentially telling intertwined stories. But what I quickly, so, you know, from 1979 to the present, basically, like using their collective arc, if you will. And what I realized the deeper I got into research was that
00:22:06
Speaker
It just didn't make sense. I mean, first of all, there were, you know, it's hard to intertwine stories that don't actually intersect, like, in a physical, tangible way. But then on top of that, I just felt like their stories each had
00:22:21
Speaker
such distinctive, distinct themes that tied into, you know, wider topics that I was interested in with regard to, you know, white supremacy in America. And so I started to realize that their stories each represented different things thematically. And so maybe that was the way to
00:22:42
Speaker
to think about them, was to let the stories build on each other as opposed to intersecting with each other. And so the way I ultimately, I realize that sounds super ambiguous, so I'm going to try to be more concrete as I explain each section. So Karina is the first one I talk about in the book. And you could argue that she's the most extreme because she's just made it a series of life choices that
00:23:10
Speaker
the average person might find deeply weird. So she, in addition to being a neo-nazi for a time, which that's, that's a lot. She also is a professional embalmer. She was an amateur bodybuilder. She was briefly paid to be in torture porn. She ultimately left neo-naziism and is now a Muslim. And
00:23:40
Speaker
The way I actually found Karina was an old Gawker article from 2010 that had described her as the Renaissance woman from hell.
00:23:49
Speaker
And I wanted to put the most extreme person or the person who seemed the most extreme early in the book because I wanted to try to beat back the notion that she was somehow unknowable or like so deeply unlike anyone you've ever met that
00:24:12
Speaker
there's nothing to relate to there. And so I wanted to kind of put that up and knock it down. And I hope I did in the book by showing the motivations for the various choices she's made and how they all certainly intersect with the reasons that she got into neo-naziism and then ultimately left the movement.
00:24:37
Speaker
And she also provided, because she's both radicalized and then ultimately de-radicalized. And so her story was a very helpful entry point to thinking about some building blocks of the book. So what is hate? What do we mean by hate when we say that? What are the catalysts for radicalization? What are the catalysts for de-radicalization?
00:25:02
Speaker
kind of going through these, I don't know, it's almost like the fundamentals you're going to need for the rest of the book. And then as I moved into Ayla and Lana, I wanted to, again, move from the person who readers might think of as the person they can't imagine knowing into the people that they can imagine knowing. So Ayla is married with six kids. She used to be a feminist. She's
00:25:27
Speaker
she holds two degrees, she's accomplished, and she also radicalized. And so looking at the reasons for that, and also she represents some themes that Karina doesn't in the same way. So for instance, the ways that motherhood and sort of
00:25:53
Speaker
traditional classical white femininity and religion can be weaponized by the far right. And then moving into Lana, who I think arguably is the person, at least to me, who felt the most familiar, just in terms of I feel like I know people like you. I feel like I know people like you who have the same ambitions. They just happen to
00:26:16
Speaker
you know not be avowed white nationalists um so you know she runs a business um she's traveled the world she uh you know is married now and has two kids but didn't rush into that she you know is in some ways like more feminist than she would would ever admit um and she rep she was a chance to really dive into um the ways in which uh white nationalism can
00:26:45
Speaker
be an outlet for, you know, making a profit, frankly, in the digital age. She runs a platform that she and her husband make money off of and also, you know, kind of...
00:27:00
Speaker
competes would be the would be a strong word but uh you know they think of themselves as something along the lines of info wars or another you know alt news site um and so she was a chance to look at
00:27:16
Speaker
the internet at disinformation on the internet and how that's deeply intertwined with white nationalism. But then also because of the rather prominent kind of position she has in the movement, not only because she has this platform, but because she's invited to speak at conferences, she's interviewed on other platforms and podcasts and things like that. She was a chance to look back in time at other women who in various iterations of
00:27:43
Speaker
the far right in America have, you know, inhabited similar roles as, you know, figureheads and organizers and
00:27:53
Speaker
communicators and all these different things that I think women are often not given credit for in this space. So yeah, I feel like they each definitely have their own arcs, each of the stories. But if you read them together, at least I hope, I feel like the structure subtly builds. And I do think it definitely got scarier to me. And I feel like I'm glad.
00:28:20
Speaker
glad to hear that you felt similar, that there's like an intensity that builds. And part of that is because Karina's left the movement, Ayla and Lana have not. And so, you know, you're moving into stories of people who are still active. But then again, I think it's also this aspect of familiarity, of seeing pieces of people you know in them. And I think that that certainly, to me, was one of the scariest parts of doing this research.
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah, because I would say with Ayla and Lana, it's like there's a more there's sort of an insidious nature. Like you don't know that could be your neighbor harboring these views that are just hiding under a rock. And since their guy, their guy won in 2016, it's like that rock got kicked and all of a sudden, it's like, oh,
00:29:10
Speaker
They've been around the whole time, and now we're starting to see this, especially in Oregon, especially with a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-protests. We're finding just who the racists are around here, and as you know from your reporting, Pacific Northwest is almost like a racial hotbed.
00:29:29
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely, and it has been for quite a long time. Yeah, I actually recommend this book, I've been recommending it to a lot of people, but it's called A Hundred Little Hitlers, and it's by this journalist, Eleanor Langer, and it's about the 1988 murder of an Ethiopian immigrant in Portland.
00:29:50
Speaker
And it was like one of the worst hate crimes in the city's history and led to all of this really important legislation, important court proceedings against a very prominent white nationalist on the West Coast. But her book is just a masterful
00:30:09
Speaker
work of reporting and I think does a really nice job of capturing that particular moment in time in the Pacific Northwest, but also the roots of some of the radical right that exists out there. Did you consider putting Karina last because she actually got out and in a weird way that's kind of like a good outro of these three she got out and that's sort of a good coda to the book? Did that ever cross your mind?
00:30:39
Speaker
Absolutely, yeah. And that was something I talked about a lot actually with my agent and my editor. And there were a couple of reasons I decided against it. One is just that she ultimately got involved in the space in the far right a couple of years before the other two women. And so she had radicalized and de-radicalized before they were even really getting into it.
00:31:05
Speaker
um there was a kind of historical issue there that if you know I had jumped back in time suddenly toward the end of the book I can imagine how it would have felt uh jarring um and then uh the other issues had to do with the fact that the the
00:31:26
Speaker
iteration of the far right that she was involved with, you know, predates the so-called alt-right and is a much more
00:31:38
Speaker
I don't know, classic version of digital neo-fascism. You know, she found out about white nationalism on Stormfront, which has been on the internet since the mid 90s. And, you know, kind of ran with people who had been figures in the movement for a couple of decades at that point. Whereas Ayla and Lana sort of represent more of the far right as we know it, particularly like in the post 2016 era,
00:32:08
Speaker
Or that's not fair to say post 2016, because I think that, I would say maybe from like Dylann Roof onward, I feel like there's been this recognition of like this online ecosystem that nurtures these, not just hateful, but you know, wrong, like just factually wrong beliefs. And, and so, you know, again, moving Karina
00:32:31
Speaker
behind that I think would have there would have been so many things that Karina's story about history that Karina's story elucidates that I would have had to build in some other way. So
00:32:47
Speaker
The book though does originally, I had, and I know you've read it, but I have something in the conclusion that was originally in the Carina section, and I decided to move that to the conclusion on the advice of a couple of people who read the book.
00:33:05
Speaker
So her story picks up in a sense at the end, just a little bit, but there was one piece of her story that I wanted to keep for the end. It's so funny talking about structure because it's also just something that I hemmed and hawed and cried
00:33:25
Speaker
and, you know, berated myself over trying to figure it out. And I will say this, like, I kind of resisted this structure for a long time because I was like, no, you know, I'm not being explicit enough or I'm not
00:33:40
Speaker
I don't know not giving as many like signposts along the way or whatever and I kept coming back to it because it was the one that felt most intuitive and felt like it would allow me to say the most that I wanted to say and I think that you know one
00:33:59
Speaker
You should definitely kill your darlings in writing, but at the same time, sometimes if your gut is telling you that this is the way to proceed, you have to follow that. And I did, I mean, again, I think it works, but I certainly respect people's opinions who say that it doesn't.
00:34:16
Speaker
Well, early on you write that the movement is based largely on need, narrative, and network, and then this quest for personal significance. And that ties in to all three of them so well. So maybe you can speak to that as really something that this book really hinges on and hangs on.
00:34:36
Speaker
Yeah, no. So that comes from a study. I actually read it when I was out on the West Coast for that research trip. I was in a taco restaurant reading about white supremacy. There's like a whole, you could probably plot various restaurants and bars where I've printed out something that I needed to read or looking at my notes by myself and then having some good food.
00:35:04
Speaker
But yeah, it's an article that basically looks at extremism, broadly speaking. So not just the far right, but extremism in any number of directions and cultures and whatnot. And they boil it down to say that
00:35:21
Speaker
essentially the drivers of radicalization are needs. So if you think of it as everybody has needs, right? I mean, we have needs to eat, sleep, all these different things, but then we also have these more complicated needs of needing to believe in something, needing to feel like we matter, needing to feel like we have human connection, you know, depending on
00:35:47
Speaker
levels of narcissism, a need to be superior to. Essentially, what these researchers say is that with extremists, there's a need that becomes
00:36:03
Speaker
outsize basically so uh you know everybody has needs some are bigger than others and an extremist there's a need that grows and grows and grows to to the point that you know filling it becomes the most important thing
00:36:18
Speaker
And this is not necessarily conscious, to be clear. It's not like somebody's sitting around thinking, wow, I really have this overwhelming need for meaning. I mean, I guess maybe they are, but I think it's often more subconscious than kind of laying it out would imply.
00:36:36
Speaker
And so what then happens is they find a narrative to explain their place in the world, to explain the need, to also explain how to fill it. And then there's a network, which is, I think that the
00:36:56
Speaker
the researchers refer to it as like an epistemic authority or something like that. But essentially, you know, a network which can mean literally people, but can also again mean like an online ecosystem of information or whatever, where the narrative gets reinforced and reinforced. So it's not the kind of thing where like there's a need, you find the narrative and then there's the network. It's a more sort of like
00:37:21
Speaker
circular nourishment, I guess, where it's like the network is validating the fact that you have this need, the narrative is helping you fill it, and the network is also reinforcing the fact that the narrative is right and good. And another thing that the researchers talk about is how when the need, whatever again the need is, so let's say to have
00:37:44
Speaker
to have meaning or whatever, is so big that people also start to engage in what the researchers call untethered behaviors. So things they might not have done before, but whatever it takes to fill this need, fulfill this narrative, they start to engage in that. And so untethered behaviors can, in the context of hate, mean using slurs or committing violence.
00:38:14
Speaker
You know, even just, I think, like engaging again in that in that online ecosystem in a way that maybe people hadn't felt comfortable doing before or hadn't thought to do before. And I remember reading this, this, this
00:38:29
Speaker
research paper and being like, Oh my gosh, this is such a helpful framework because you can apply it to individual stories and you can start to see how their radicalization happened. Um, and I mean, it's, it's rudimentary in its own way, obviously. Um, but I think that's kind of part of the point because the thing about radicalization is that it's hyper individualized. Like no two people wind up, you know, a neo-Nazi or a supporter of the alt right or whatever, for exactly the same reasons.
00:38:58
Speaker
But if you look at these fundamentals, they exist. And I think that that's so important. And certainly it was critical for me in figuring out how to tell their stories.
00:39:13
Speaker
Yeah, and then this is something I unpack in the Karina section. And again, I think that Karina, who was very generous with her time and was a very helpful source and willing subject, she was also very blunt about that period of her life. And so I think her story was the one where it was the easiest to map the need narrative network.
00:39:39
Speaker
framework onto her story. And so that really helped, I don't know, elucidate the framework in a way.
00:39:52
Speaker
And I know you've got to get out of here shortly, so I'll just- No, you're fine. Yeah. So also, of course, at the center of the white nationalism and the alt-right movement are a lot of charismatic male figures. But of course, your instincts were, it can't all be male. And of course, the name of the book is Sisters in Hate.
00:40:14
Speaker
Why is it so important for the movement to live, in order for it to live, women play a huge role in the growth of it?
00:40:25
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think that there's a baseline of, you know, it's a pronatal movement where, you know, if the fate of the white race is at stake, then women are necessary because they have to have some babies. And so that's like a super baseline way of thinking about gender in the movement. But it really does matter because they, you know, hold that purpose very dear. The women of the movement do. But then I think that there's also
00:40:55
Speaker
Well, a couple of different things. Women are seen as keepers of communities, keepers of families, keepers of history. Again, the way that women are in so many walks of life, they fill really similar roles in the far right. They're just in a hyper-traditional way. But they're key from that sort of
00:41:24
Speaker
internal standpoint. They're also the most important symbols of the movement. So this idea that white women are under threat, that their ability to have children is under threat, that their purity might be violated. They are like the beacon that the white nationalist movement holds up.
00:41:48
Speaker
and claims to be fighting for. The 14 Words, which is this famous or infamous white nationalist slogan, is basically, we must secure a future for women and children. And that's
00:42:04
Speaker
that's you know women as like the ultimate symbols and of course children are in there too and we would not have children without women so um but then I think there's another really really important layer of this and I think that this is probably the thing that I found scariest is that women in the movement can first of all serve to
00:42:27
Speaker
deny the hyper misogyny of the space simply by saying look here I am like why would I ever you know want to engage with men who hate women like that's just silly um and so they can you know raise their hand and and people will say oh well interesting yeah you're right you're a woman you're there um okay you know maybe maybe I'm wrong about the hyper misogyny I
00:42:47
Speaker
I'm really reducing this down to dumb people having conversations, but you get the idea. And so they can serve as that, almost like a shield against those accusations. And then the other thing that they can do, and certainly
00:43:05
Speaker
do nowadays online, is serve as these bridges to the mainstream. Because they can say, you know, I'm a mother, you're a mother. Or like, I'm a sister, you're a sister. Like, you know, look at the things that we have in common. I just, I just really care about, you know, my kids going to the best schools possible, don't you? Or, you know, I just care about my community being safe, don't you? And this is all like the language that, you know,
00:43:34
Speaker
is a part of so many conversations around so many issues in the United States. And they can serve as connectors to the mainstream with regard to those various issues. And then, of course, you know, they will make race more explicit in whatever their conversations are about schools or neighborhoods or, you know,
00:43:56
Speaker
just national borders or whatever it may be, but they are able to kind of find that common ground with mainstream white women in a way that, I don't know, men just aren't as successful at. And if they are the common ground, I think also often has to do more with a sense of being embattled or a sense of being angry or whatever. And with women, it can cover a more
00:44:26
Speaker
nuanced series of bases, if you will. So I think that that's an incredibly important role that they play and they'll outright say it like with Lana, the third woman in the book, she has said in speeches, you know, because women are soft, they can get away with saying hard things.
00:44:47
Speaker
Um, and she's also been told in podcasts by other far right supporters, men, you know, you can say things I can't, like you can basically, like you can connect with people in a way that I can't. Um, and I think that, that is a very, uh, underappreciated aspect of the far right. Um, the ways that these women can, you know, find their way into conversations about everything from, um,
00:45:15
Speaker
homeschooling, to resistance to vaccines, to neighborhood watches, to all these different things. That's, to me, maybe the scariest role that they play.
Interviewing Challenges in 'Sisters in Hate'
00:45:30
Speaker
As a liberal feminist journalist, how hard was it for you to resist pushing back and taking the bait?
00:45:38
Speaker
Oh my gosh, so hard. So I made a pact with myself very early on that I was not going to argue with my subjects because I knew, based on having watched a lot of their content and having engaged with a few of them, that
00:45:54
Speaker
uh arguing would not help arguing was would get into a you can't argue with a bad faith actor right like when when they're arguing if you try to cite data or whatever and they just tell you your data is like made up or you know something along those lines like you're you're at a dead end already and they want to pull you
00:46:14
Speaker
into a rabbit hole where you start accepting the conversation on their terms to a certain extent. And I didn't want to do that. So I told myself I wasn't going to argue. And for the most part, I think I succeeded. But at the same time, I was telling someone this the other day, a friend, there are a handful of mostly waiters and waitresses.
00:46:37
Speaker
in different parts of the United States who after I was in a really tough interview or not even necessarily an interview just like I had spent my entire day you know watching YouTube videos of these people saying things that were just out not just like again it's a combination of both oh my god I cannot believe they just use that language but then also no that's just patently false you know and so you have like two kind of like your your like ethical indignation and then like your
00:47:04
Speaker
your intellectual indignation all at once. And I would go get a drink or do whatever, go get dinner, and I'd be like,
00:47:15
Speaker
So how you don't know me, but I would really love to talk to you about my day. There was actually this one day in Seattle where I had a really tough reporting day and I was like, I'm gonna treat myself to a really nice sushi dinner. And so I went and I sat at like the omakase bar or whatever. And there was a couple on one side that was there for vacation and a couple on the other side that was there for a birthday or an anniversary or something. And then me right in the middle, sandwiched. And after like one glass of wine, it's like friends.
00:47:45
Speaker
you don't know me, but I'm gonna tell you all about my day. And what's crazy is that people were always so like, generous and actually interested. And oftentimes, like I, you know, things came out of those conversations that were were valuable for the book. Um, but I think that that's a very long way of saying, you know, I found ways to get the frustration I felt from not arguing out. And then certainly my poor
00:48:09
Speaker
poor husband has heard me rant endlessly. So thank you to my husband and the various waiters, waitresses, patrons, bartenders who were there for me in my times of need. Well, there's that Krakauer quote that you cite. It was like, a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. So you just can't argue. You can't. There's no way that you can. And if you do,
00:48:39
Speaker
I mean, of course you can, I guess, but it's just not, it's never going to end in a satisfying way because they are coming to the table on a different level than you are. And like, with just a different worldview, with different data, with different, it's not just opinions. And so arguing, ultimately, if I had argued, I would have gotten less information because we, you know, would have gotten stuck
00:49:06
Speaker
Yeah, arguing about like black on white crime and like what statistics actually show and then suddenly, you know My time that I have with them is up and it's like oh well crap I didn't get to talk to you about any number of things. So So yeah, I just bit my tongue and and then talked nice Wait staffs ears off
00:49:26
Speaker
Awesome. Well, the book is just the leanness of the writing. It's tight. It's great. You tell such a great story about such a deep, dark material and important stuff for us to hear at this time, especially as we head towards a very pivotal, maybe the most important election in a hundred years. Who knows?
00:49:45
Speaker
So in any case, Sayward, thank you so much for the work and for all you do with Atavist and of course this wonderful book that you wrote. So thank you and best of luck with it. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
00:50:10
Speaker
Hey, you, CnF'r, fellow CnF'r. Thanks for listening. I mean that. Some people say that perfunctorily, but I really mean it.
00:50:20
Speaker
I'm feeling a bit down of late, and it's nice to know that I get to have this interaction with you. I don't have many people to talk to, so at least I get to hang with you at this time of the week. Thing is, the analytics tell me nobody listens to the end of the show, so these words are likely bouncing off the wall and hitting me right in the face. So, I guess I'll just say this, if you can do interview.
00:51:03
Speaker
you