Seyward Darby writes:

Hate always exists, but it surges during periods of social upheaval, offering racist explanations for seismic change.

The Ku Klux Klan formed after the Civil War and reached its zenith in the 1920s, in an expanding, diversifying country. “Its allures were manifold,” the historian Linda Gordon writes of the Klan. “They included the rewards of being an insider, of belonging to a community, of expressing and acting on resentments, of participating in drama, of feeling religiously and morally righteous, of turning a profit.”

White Citizens’ Councils and other organs of resistance emerged in reaction to the civil rights movement. Hate fed on opposition to second- and third-wave feminism, the expansion of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shifting racial demographics.

Then came the election of President Barack Obama. “Right-wing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment tool,” a Homeland Security report noted in 2009. The first year of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Stormfront registered nearly 100,000 new users.

[Corinna] Olsen was part of this wave, which also found fuel in the xenophobia of the post-Sept. 11 era and public disgust with the financial crisis. Her involvement accelerated quickly. Some of her online friends asked to meet in real life, and by 2009, she was the head of Portland’s chapter of the National Socialist Movement. She read “Mein Kampf,” donned a uniform with Nazi insignia for meetings, and placed recruitment fliers with phrases like “Jewish people are ruining America” on windshields in parking lots.

In November 2009, she traveled with fellow neo-Nazis to Phoenix to attend a rally demanding a halt to the immigration of anyone who was not white. Participants also wanted to expel nonwhite people already in America. The rally’s theme was “America First,” a slogan once used by isolationist politicians and the Klan that, several years later, Mr. Trump would invoke in his campaign for the White House. [Continue reading…]