The Daily - Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2017

The Daily is revisiting our favorite episodes of the year — listening back, and then hearing what’s happened since the stories first ran. Today, we’re going back to a conversation that first ran this summer, two weeks after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. turned violent and right after President Trump drew intense criticism by saying there were “some very fine people on both sides.” Guest: Derek Black, who had been poised to lead the white nationalist movement but then left, betraying his father, a former grand master of the Ku Klux Klan. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Duration: 38m
Broadcast on: 27 Dec 2017
Audio Format: other

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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Derek Black grew up in West Palm Beach, Florida across the water from the president's Mar-a-Lago mansion. And he used to drive past it almost every day in a red pickup truck with a Confederate flag sticker on the back window. His father is Don Black, once a grand wizard of the KKK. Sounds like what you're describing is that you're kind of the first child of American white nationalism. I mean, I did. I knew everybody. I knew everybody who was involved in it. And I knew all the different organizations. And I expected that it would be my life's work to try to advance this. I thought it was the right thing. How did you process these ideas of your godfather and your father and your mother and this entire movement as a child? What is white nationalism through the through the eyes of a child? It's a really tight-knit movement of people. It's important to understand the context that in my family, pioneering white nationalism on the web was my dad's goal. That was what drove him from the early 90s from the beginning of the web. And so growing up, we always had the latest computers and the fastest broadband. We were the first people in the neighborhood to have broadband because we had to keep storm front running. And so technology and connecting people on the website long before social media and the way the web is set up now was his driving purpose. So we were very connected to everybody in the white nationalist movement around the world. When I was a little kid, I would get on chat rooms in the evenings, and I had friends in Australia who I would talk to because they were at certain hour, I had friends in Serbia who I'd talk to at a certain hour. And what would you be saying to each other? I remember in the late 90s, I was talking to a white nationalist kid and he was explaining to me the American invasion of Serbia and how I was tied to Jewish control of the American military. Wow, not the conventional understanding of the US military action, which was to spare people genocide. Absolutely. Yeah, I started a kid's website on storm front on my dad's website. And so for the time I was 12, you constantly get death threats and emails. So you started your own kind of white nationalist website for children? Yeah, when I'm not sure what age, maybe 11 or 12 or something, I set up a pretty basic little webpage on there and posted some essays that I was writing at the time. Actually, in a lot of ways that brings people together. I know it brought my family together, the fact that you have media coming over as I went on television and newspapers, which were

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