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HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: In the wake of the violence and tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, last Saturday, much of the past week has been spent examining the so-called alt right the ideology, based on white nationalism, rejects Jewish people, people of color, those in the LGBTQ community and immigrants, and its typically seen as a movement made up of white men.

However, as reporter Seyward Darby writes in the September issue of Harpers magazine, there is a disturbing trend worth paying attention to. Seyward Darby joins me now.

The women, the women have not really been in the imagery that weve seen just in the past week, but as you find out, they exist, and theyre growing in numbers.

SEYWARD DARBY, REPORTER, HARPERS MAGAZINE: I went into this story with a simple question, and that was, where are the women? And I started to think of this question last winter around the time that, you know, millions of women around the country were organizing for the womens march on Washington, and simultaneously, the alt-right was celebrating Trumps victory and being portrayed as a movement of young white men.

And I went looking for these women, and they very much exist. And there is a cluster of them that are very vocal on YouTube, Twitter, sometimes in real life at conferences and events. And they are very keen to let other women know that theyre there, and that the alt-right is a place where, if theyre white women of a certain mind, they would be welcome.

SREENIVASAN: So, whats the allure? I mean, when you see the displays of sort of bravado that some of these men exhibit, why would women want to be there? Is it because they like that sort of manliness of manhood, or do they see a place for them in the organization?

DARBY: The short answer is yes. They very much like the idea of alpha men who embrace a very sort of aggressive form of masculinity. But in terms of the place women see for themselves, they dont believe that these men are misogynistic in the way that people looking from the outside might.

They think that the men of the alt-right just understand biology and that men and women are fundamentally different, not equal, but equally important, and that men should be alpha, macho, fighting battles, running countries, making policy, whereas women have an equally important role on the home front, nurturing family units, inculcating the beliefs of this movement. They would say they dont see that as, you know, submission or subjugation. They would say that its equally important, almost like a yin and yang.

SREENIVASAN: So, what kind of numbers are we talking about here?

DARBY: Its really hard to say. And I spoke to many academics who have studied right-wing extremism for a long time, and they said because the alt-right is ultimately this movement from the Internet, very motley, very disparate, from comment boards and various social media platforms, its really hard to get a sense of precise numbers. In terms of women within it, the number you hear bandied about is 15 percent to 20 percent. But theyre not necessarily the ones youre going to see in Charlottesville.

SREENIVASAN: Lets talk also about the network effects here. How do these women congregate online? How do they meet each other? How do they get recruited?

DARBY: I think it is a deeply, deeply inside the Internet in a way that can take a while if youre an outsider to find, to see the patterns of connection. They will say that there are meet-ups happening in real life that, you know, women are organizing in ways you cant see, but I do think fundamentally most of this is happening on these various Internet platforms.

SREENIVASAN: Is there a moment that they see coming? I mean, do they see their influence increasing?

DARBY: They will say that they do. They would say that the moment is now, that were seeing it. They dont necessarily see Donald Trump as alt-right. Lana Lokteff, for instance, when I met and interviewed her, she pointed blank said, hes not one of our guys.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

DARBY: But hes got the coattails that they felt they needed to be pulled more so into the mainstream. And what were seeing in Charlottesville and other places where the alt-right is, you know, stepping out into the world to show themselves. I think that they very much see this as the moment when they can garner more followers.

They want it to seem like they have a lot of momentum. Whether or not they do

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

DARBY: its hard to say.

SREENIVASAN: All right. Seyward Darby has this as one of the big stories in Harpers thanks so much for joining us.

DARBY: Thank you so much for having me.

See original here:
Why are women joining the 'alt-right'? - PBS NewsHour

The scores of people carrying flaming torches and chanting Jews will not replace us last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, bore the message of the alt-right, the name given to the white supremacist movement dedicated to eradicating religious and ethnic minorities from America. This racist uprising will be followed by at least nine rallies this weekendostensibly dedicated to free speech but sure to broadcast messages of hateacross the U.S., held by members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other groups.

The 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, VA, where white supremacists march with tiki torchs through the University of Virginia campus. Getty Images/Zach D. Roberts

Manyfind the sight of hundreds of racists chanting their intentions for a so-called "ethno-state" and the forceful removal from Americaof anyone who isn't whitehorrific. But othersnamely, some psychiatristssee these individualsas mentally ill. Which leads to a disturbing question: Are we seeing the emergence of a nationalist movement fueled by prejudice or a widespread personality disorder that requires psychiatric care? Answering thatdredges up long-held notions about racism in America.

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In the 1960s, Alvin Poussaint, now a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, was providing medical and psychological care to civil rights activists in Jackson, Mississippi. As a black psychiatrist in the South, he often feared for his life. He witnessed many acts of violence, cared for victims of racist acts and had frequent run-ins with state troopers. Once, when he told an aggressive police officer that he was a doctor, the officer continuedtocallhim boy with a hand onthe gun in his holster. I saw the malignancy of the racism much more clearly, and the genocidal element of the extreme racism where they wanted to kill you, Poussaint tells Newsweek.

He wondered if that hatred was an actual sickness that could be diagnosed and potentially treated. When he wasin his early 30s, anda prominent psychiatrist at Tufts Medical School, Poussaint and several other black psychiatrists approached the American Psychiatric Association (APA) with the idea that extreme racism wasnt just a social problem or a cultural issue. To these professionals, extreme racismthe kind that leads to violencewas a mental illness.

Poussaint and his colleagues wanted the APA to include extreme racism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a delusional disorder. The DSM is the definitive guideline used by mental health clinicians to diagnose patients.

The DSM is not infallible. Over the years, it hasprovidedinsights into the countrys ever-changing values and belief systems. Homosexuality, for example, wasnt completely omitted from the DSM until the late 1980s. The last time the APA revised the DSM (in 2013) they declined the request by a group of psychiatrists to add pornography and sex addiction to the index. For psychiatrists updating the guidea process that can take more than a decadedoing so means wrestling with the very nature of humanity, what is normal and abnormal when it comes to behavior and beliefs.

Poussaint wasnt arguing about the relatively milder beliefs that cause a person to stereotype and classify groups of people negatively. Rather, he and the other psychiatrists were addressing the kind of racism that leads to violent behavior, like killing and injuring people by driving a car into a crowd, as happened in Charlottesville. That extreme form of racism, said Poussaint, could reasonably be classified as paranoid and delusional.

In July 2017, Ku Klux Klan protests planned removal of General Lee statue from park in Charlottesville, Virginia. Chet Strange/Getty Images

The APA was unreceptive. There was a lot of resistance to the idea, he says. The problem, Poussaint explains, was that those in charge saw racism as too ubiquitous to diagnose. They felt racism was so embedded in culture, that it was almost normative, that you had to deal with all the cultural factors that lead to this behavior,

Members of the APA also argued that the extreme racism is amental illness claim lacked hard science. That objection was weak, says Poussaint, because many mental health diagnoses listed in the DSM don't have a solid scientific premise, including personality disorders. Some APAmembers said classifyingextreme racism as an illness would excuse terrible beliefs and reprehensible behavior.

But Poussaint wasnt interested in excusing or stigmatizing behavior;he wanted to help people he believed were sick. Inclusionin the DSM, he insisted, could allow individuals suffering from extreme racism to access services such as state-mandated psychiatric counseling, and therefore benefit society because, it could protect people they might otherwise attack.

Poussaint still believes extreme racism is a form of paranoia and should be treated that way. In therapy, a psychiatrist would help the patient understand the origins of their racism. Like any psychotherapy or treatment you would try to tie it all together, he says. Other psychiatrists have testified and acknowledged such individuals may improve from treatment when they come to understand these beliefs and why they are projecting them onto other people and acting out.

Racism as a Symptom

The question of whether extreme racism is a mental illness still haunts psychiatry. About 15 years ago, Carl Bell, a psychiatrist at Jackson Park Hospital Family Medicine Clinic and professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicagos School of Medicine, resurrected Poussaints attempt to convince the APA to classify racism as a mental disorder. But Bell tried a different tack from Poussaint. He viewed extreme racism as a type of pathological bias that signaled an underlying personality disorder.

Bell proposed adding pathological bias to the DSM as a trait of personality disorder. With that addition, extreme bigotry would be a majorcriterionfor the diagnosis. The broad term could also apply to individuals who direct violence and hatred toward other groups, such as gays or women.

But again, the APA said no. When I raised this issue for the personality disorders working group they shut me down, says Bell, they were like, Hell, no. As in decades past, the APA justified their objection on the grounds that racism is and always has been entrenched insociety.

The difficulty is that if you are in a racist society, how do you tease that out from biology or personality? says Bell, whocould not even convince the APA to study why racist thoughts and action manifest in some people during manic episodes.

The Association did finally issue a statement in 2006 acknowledging that some psychiatric factors cause a person to become racist,although further research would be needed to explore this hypothesis. The group also noted that racist beliefs and behavior often cause depression and psychiatric illness in people who are subject to them. In a statement provided to Newsweek about its approach to prejudice-based violence, Saul Levin, CEO and Medical Director of the APA, said,"The APA has a longstanding policy noting the negative impact of racism and mental health. APA policy supports public education efforts and research on racism and its adverse impact on mental health."

Bell and other experts continue to view some instances of racism as a symptom of other disorders. Racist thoughts and actions are often a manifestation of some other established and diagnosable mental disorder, says Bell. People with narcissistic personality disordera mental condition many experts have claimed Trump has often have fixed valuesrooted in racism. Dylann Roof, the teen white supremacist convicted of killing nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, had been diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder. People with conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder often experience extreme paranoia related to race or ethnicity, though not always violence.

Outside the court hearing for James Alex Fields, the suspect who drove his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, Matthew Heinbach, of the white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party, shouts at journalists. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

There is also evidence that most of us harbor prejudices, leading some experts to believewe are hardwired to discriminate in some fashion (though not specificallyagainst others). The Implicit Association test (IAT), a tool used to understand the roots and extent of bias, measures impulses of subconscious racismfor example, whether we associate certain types of people with negative or positive feelings. The test, which was developed by social psychologists at Harvard, the University of Virginiaand the University of Washington more than two decades ago, has been taken by more than 17 million people. The results show that at least 90 percent of Americans are at least slightly biased against people unlike themselves. Psychologists remain split on where to draw the line, though. Some say discrimination requires a diagnosis when thoughts become actions. But others doubt whether acting on racist beliefs warrants a label of its own.

This Is Not Normal

The fact that many people who act on extreme racist beliefs leadhigh-functioning lives may also stand in the way of labeling this demographic as mentally ill. In the early 1960s, Jewish author and journalist Hannah Arendt covered the trials of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for theNew Yorker. She was shocked that half a dozen psychiatrists had certified Eichmann as normal, despite the fact that he orchestrated the mass murder of millions of Jews. One psychiatrist described his familial relationships as not just normal but desirable.

In the decades following the Holocaust, the idea that someone who commits crimes against racial and ethnic minorities could still be considered sane by psychiatrists was unsettling, says James M. Thomas, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi. Many people turned to the explanation that there must be something wrong with the German psyche to have allowed this to happen.

Social scientists knew that creating a clinical definition was critical. They understood that stigmatizing extreme racism could help society wake up to the abnormality of this pathology, and possibly prevent other genocidal acts. Three psychologists devised the California F-scale F stands for fascista test used to evaluate a person for authoritarian personality type. They thought understanding how people wereseduced by Adolf Hitlers rhetoric could help prevent future such movements. Although the F-scale fell out of favor, it enabled psychologiststo identify common traits of people who cling to dangerous ideologies. They included an inflexible outlook, strong allegiance to leadership, a tendency to scapegoat others and a willingness to lash out in anger and violence.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, on July 8, 2017, members of the Ku Klux Klan gesture during a rally calling for the protection of Southern Confederate monuments. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

Sander Gilman, who teaches psychiatry at Emory University, and co-authored with Thomas the book Are Racists Crazy?, agrees that dangerous racists leadingseemingly normal lives are hard to identify. Racists, sadly,cope quite well with daily life, says Gilman. They have a take on the way the world should be, and that take functions in the world they live.

Gilman does not favora standalone diagnosis of extreme racism, and believes that attempts to categorize such people as mentally ill masks the greater problem of society allowing them to commit vengeful acts. Those people are evil. Theyve made bad choices, but theyre not choices you can then attribute to mental illness, says Gilman.The minute you do that you let people off the hook.

Link:
Alt-Right: Are Racists Mentally Ill? Some Psychiatrists Say Yes - Newsweek

Last weekend, a group of neo-Nazis marched alongside other white supremacists and far right activists in Charlottesville. The chants and visual tools they used from swastikas to wooden shields to blood and soil chants revived rhetoric and imagery that many in America believed to be entirely eradicated: so beyond the pale of common morality that no reasonable person could possibly seek to revive it.

That belief, and the complacency it engendered, was erroneous. If anything, the sheer taboo nature of Nazi imagery how thoroughly outside the window of acceptable discourse it is has, to its supporters, only added to its appeal. Its very transgressive nature has made it easy for propagandists to market it as sexy and forbidden.

This is not new. The sexualization of fascist and, specifically, Nazi imagery precedes even World War II. In his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written against the backdrop of the Nazi rise to power in the late 1930s, critic and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin warned against the aesthetic dangers of fascist imagery, as it was predicated on eroticized notions of power and submission.

"The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life, Benjamin wrote, latter adding: [Mankinds] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

In other words, we culturally fetishize both absolute power and our own apocalyptic destruction, and fascism capitalizes on that fetishism to win supporters. And certainly the success of Hitlers own propaganda lay in part in the Nazis ability to harness that erotic undertone to gain support. Consider German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahls Olympia documentary series, which celebrated (Aryan) German masculine beauty at the 1936 Olympics. (Riefenstahls conscious complicity with Nazi ideology has long been a subject of debate she strenuously denied it but its undeniable that her lens captured how Germans of the time saw their Germany identity, and their Fhrer.)

The taboo nature of Nazi imagery made it even more of an eroticized phenomenon after World War II. Cultural critic Susan Sontag noted this in her 1974 essay Fascinating Fascism, pointing out how the trappings of fascism (particularly here, too, Nazi fascism) gained a cultural potency from being illicit and forbidden.

"To those born after the 1940's, Sontag wrote, fascism represents the exotic and the unknown. ... Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. ... Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.

French philosopher Michel Foucault, likewise, commented in an interview that Every shoddy erotic fantasy is now attributed to Nazism. Arent we witnessing beginnings of a re-eroticization of power, taken to a pathetic ridiculous extreme by the porn shops with Nazi insignia that you can find the United States?

Plenty of films about World War II made in the second half of the 20th century echo those tensions. On the high culture front, there was Liliana Cavanis The Night Porter, about a sadomasochistic relationship between a concentration camp survivor and her old guard. On the pulp side, there was 1975s Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, one of so many Nazisploitation movies that treated the Holocaust as Eli Roth-style torture porn, complete with a sexual frisson. In Ilsa, the main character and her contemporaries were leather-clad, whip-wielding Nazi dominatrixes.

The more taboo the approach, the more powerful it became in the popular id. After all, Nazi prisoner-themed pornographic pulp, or stalags," were so popular in the newly created state of Israel the population of which was at that time 50 percent Holocaust survivors that the Israeli government had to ban the genre in 1963.

Even today, we fetishize the taboo nature of Nazi ideology. A November 2000 New York Times style article celebrated fascist chic as the in look of the season, quoting a magazine editor as saying: "Fascism I hate to say it, but it's sexy. ... It expresses the idea of taking and then relinquishing control. Often, the aesthetics of Italian fascism a more palatable aesthetic than the German version would make its way into pop culture. The article quotes a New York fashion designer who modeled her latest collection after architecture under Mussolini: Brutal granite and travertine structures, the dictator's pet mode of propaganda, are all about power, the article quotes her as saying, and power is the greatest turn-on.

The eroticization of Nazism was twofold, in other words. It relied on both a wider existing cultural fetishization of power and masculinity and a more recent fetishization of the forbidden. As scholar Laura Catherine Frost writes in her book Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, the politically forbidden and repudiated is just as likely to be the substance of erotic fantasy and the chosen political object. ... Images of sexualized fascism derive their meaning precisely from the distance mainstream culture puts between itself and deviation.

To admit the erotic charge of Nazi ideology openly may seem distasteful or outright immoral. But it is precisely the dialectic between repression and transgression that allowed Nazi ideology to flourish in certain corners of the internet: permitting the Twitter trolls of the alt-right to morph, slowly, into flesh-and-blood perpetrators of racial violence.

After all, as I wrote for Real Life magazine in November 2016, the loose coalition of alt-right that came to form the umbrella we know today wasnt entirely composed of conscious, intentional white supremacists. Some were, to be sure, but as many denizens of alt-right gathering places like 4chans /pol/ modeled themselves after British free speech firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos saying the most offensive thing possible to get a rise out of people, reveling in his disengagement as well as those who were committed white nationalists like Richard Spencer.

Many members of the alt-right and alt-right-adjacent I interviewed then spoke of the Overton window the field of culturally acceptable discourse and how they wanted to widen it as much as possible. Unchecked free speech, including the freedom to do a Hitler salute, was integral to how they presented themselves: as sexy, transgressive agent provocateurs.

And widen the Overton window they did. Capitalizing on those same erotic tropes that defined a 1974 genre of soft porn, or a sexy 2000 fashion trend, they managed to present themselves as the real underdogs: the most punk rock of us all, going beyond the boundaries of outrage, morality, and good taste. In so doing, they provided a culturally acceptable avenue for jokes about a pure ethnostate to become ideology, for the implicit racism underpinning so much of America to become explicit, and to reinforce itself through repetition the real meme magic so popular with the alt-right until irony became truth.

As long as the alt-right continues to be glamorized, we risk making more would-be rebels without a cause like the man who drove his car into the crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.

Indeed, perhaps the most effective portrayal of Nazism is one that looks on its horrors with humor. Mel Brookss 1967 film The Producers so controversial when it came out culminated in the (Jewish) protagonists attempting to stage a schlocky propagandistic musical, Springtime for Hitler, a surefire (they hoped) bust. The film presents the musicals title number in its entirety: awkward goose-stepping and robotic salutes, Nazi Rockettes, and a drugged-out Hitler who can barely remember his lines. That film, created by Jews just two decades after the horrors of the Holocaust, smashed open the Overton window far more defiantly than Milo Yiannopoulos and his ilk could ever hope to do.

If the alt-right is correct about anything, its that we should in this one instance keep that very window of discourse open, to strip Nazi ideology once and for all of the taboo eroticism its had since Leni Riefenstahl captured some strapping Aryan boys on camera. And we should use that space to point and laugh.

Read this article:
Sexualized fascism: how the taboo nature of Nazi imagery made the alt-right more powerful - Vox

For all that he did in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting anti-Semitic slogans, carrying a torch through Emancipation Park, he wasn't even aware that the alt-right existed one year ago. It wasn't until Hillary Clinton condemned the movement in a campaign speech last August that he first learned of it, and from there, the radicalization of William Fears, 29, moved quickly.

He heard that one of its spokesmen, Richard Spencer, who coined the name "alt-right," was speaking at Texas A&M University in December, so he drove the two hours to hear him speak. There, he met people who looked like him, people he never would have associated with white nationalism - men wearing suits, not swastikas - and it made him want to be a part of something. Then Fears was going to other rallies across Texas, and local websites were calling him one of "Houston's most outspoken Neo-Nazis," and he was seeing alt-right memes of Adolf Hitler that at first he thought foolish - "people are going to hate us" - but soon learned to enjoy.

"It's probably been about a year," he said, "but my evolution has been faster and faster."

Last weekend's Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which ended with dozens injured, a woman struck dead by a car, a president again engulfed in scandal and another national bout of soul-searching over race in America, was a collection of virtually every kind of white nationalist the country has ever known. There were members of the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads and neo-Nazis. But it was this group, the group of William Fears, that was not so familiar.

The torch-lit images of Friday night's march through Emancipation Park revealed scores like him: clean-cut, unashamed and young - very young. They almost looked as though they were students of the university they marched through.

Who were they? What in their relatively short lives had so aggrieved them that they felt compelled to drive across the country for a rally? How does this happen?

The answer is complicated and unique to each person, but there are nonetheless similarities, according to lengthy interviews with six young men, aged 21 to 35, who traveled hundreds of miles to Charlottesville to the rally. For these men, it was far from a lark. It was the culmination of something that took months for some, years for others. There were plot points along this trajectory, each emboldening them more and more, until they were on the streets of Charlottesville, ready to unshackle themselves from the anonymity of online avatars and show the world their faces.

- - -

From New Orleans, one man journeyed 965 miles. Another arrived from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania - 247 miles. Another drove all night, more than 20 hours in all, from Austin, Texas - 1,404 miles. One more traveled from Dayton, Ohio - 442 miles.

The road to Charlottesville, 540 miles away from his home in Paoli, Indiana, began decades ago for Matthew Parrott, who at 35 calls himself "the first alt-righter," referring to a small and decentralized movement of extreme conservatives, many of whom profess white-supremacist and anti-Semitic beliefs and seek a whites-only ethno state.

AJ Mast / For The Washington Post

Parrott was socially awkward and had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at 15. So his family pooled their money and got him a computer with access to the Internet - a rarity in his neighborhood of mobile homes - which he came to see as his "secret portal in my bedroom." In chat rooms, he developed a taste for intellectual combat, always taking the contrarian side, obsessing over how to dismantle progressive arguments until, as he puts it, he "ended up self-radicalizing."

That radicalization was rooted, he said, in his own feelings of alienation, which intensified when he went to Indiana University and confronted an elite he soon came to disdain. "They made fun of my accent and overbite and they called me white trash and hillbilly," Parrott said. "I was never able to identify with a single person."

He dropped out after his first semester, and his disillusionment festered until, at age 23, he went to the national conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-nationalist organization based in St. Louis. He considers this moment when comparing what white nationalism once was and what it has become. "I was the youngest one in the room," he said. Old men, "asked me, 'Whose grandson are you?' They were baffled. . . . And now those guys are too frail to understand what's going on."

What was going on: The same alienation and purposelessness that once defined his life had come to characterize that of so many others. An economy capsized, a job market contracted, a student-loan crisis erupted, and feelings of resentment and victimization took hold among some members of Parrott's generation.

"This is not some hypothetical thing," said Parrott, who soon established the white nationalist Traditionalist Youth Network and started recruiting. "This is, 'I'm stuck working at McDonald's where there are no factory jobs and the boomer economy is gone and we have got this humiliating degrading service economy. . . . They feel the ladder has been kicked away from them."

And who was to blame for all of this? Those who joined the alt-right did not view impersonal economic factors or their own failings as culprits.

"In some respects, it's not that different from Islamist extremists," Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Center said. A similar set of conditions - disaffected young men, few jobs for them and a radical ideology promising answers - have fueled recruitment for the alt-right movement. These young men, Lenz said, were told "they were sold a raw bill of goods. The government is working against them and doesn't give a s--- about white people, and they were told this during a period when the first African-American president was in the White House."

There came a moment for every young man interviewed when they felt whites, and particularly white men, had become subject to discrimination, a perception that formed the foundation of their new identities.

Peyton Oubre, 21, of Metairie, Louisiana, perceived it after graduating from high school when he was looking for a job. "Where I live, go to any McDonalds or Walmart, and most of the employees are black," said Oubre, who is unemployed. "And I could put in 500 applications and receive one call. Every time I walked into Walmart, there were no white people, and how come they are getting hired and I can't?"

"White privilege," he said. "I'm still waiting on my privilege."

For Tony Hovater, 29, of Dayton, Ohio, it came after he had dropped out of college and was touring with his metal band, for which he played drums, and he passed through the small towns of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. He started thinking that so much of the national narrative focuses on the plight of poor, urban minorities, but here was poverty as desperate as any he had seen, and yet no one was talking about poor whites. "You see how a complete system failed a group of people and didn't take any responsibility for it and has done nothing to help," he said.

For Connor Perrin, 29, of Austin, who grew up upper-middle class, it was during college when he felt campus liberals were ostracizing his fraternity because it was white. "If only people would stop attacking us," he said."I can't say anything just because I'm white. I can't talk about race, and I can't talk about the Jews because I'll be called an anti-Semite, and I can't say I want to date my own race."

For Eric Starr, 31, of Harrisburg, Pa., who has been convicted of disorderly conduct for fighting and possession with intent to manufacture or deliver, it was growing up white in a poor black neighborhood. "I got bullied and I got made fun of and I got beat up," he said. "Cracker, whitey, white boy."

And for William Fears, who has been convicted of criminal trespass, aggravated kidnapping and possession of a controlled substance, it happened while he was incarcerated. "I don't think any race experiences racism in the modern world the way that white people do in a jail," he said. "In jail, whites come last."

From these disparate geographies, social classes and upbringings - rich and poor, rural and urban, educated and not - they converged on a single place last weekend, Charlottesville, with a shared belief that they, white men, are the true victims of today's America.

- - -

"I wanted to be in the fight," Perrin said.

"I need to be more aggressive," Parrot said.

"We never fight for anything," Fears said.

The violence that they would mete out and receive on the streets of the picturesque college town was the most pivotal moment to date in the evolution of the alt-right movement, the men interviewed believe. The alt-right has always been a diffuse movement, but it has also been intensely communal. People make and share memes that glorify President Trump and make jokes of Hitler and the Holocaust. They discuss events on 4chan, Reddit and Discord. They get to know one another despite a distance of hundreds of miles. They learned not to fear being called a racist or a Nazi, and in fact, some found those descriptions liberating, even "addicting," as Parrott described it.

But Charlottesville represented an opportunity to further transcend what they called confining social taboos. Many came prepared for violence, like Fears, who was wearing a blue business suit, a helmet, gas mask and goggles. He rode a van with a group of other alt-right members, and described it as "being transported into a war zone." Bottles burst against the van's windows, he recalled. People hit the van. It stopped before Emancipation Park, and everyone started yelling to get out as quickly as possible. Gripping a flag like a weapon, Fears strode to the front and melted into the melee. He threw punches. He took punches. He felt disgust. "Someone hit me in the head with a stick," he said, "and it split my goggles off."

"Little savages," Starr said of the counterprotesters.

"Subhuman," Perrin said.

Neither the day's events leading to the car crash that killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others in Charlottesville, nor the condemnation from politicians and people across the country that followed, has persuaded those interviewed that their beliefs are wrong. For some, it only confirmed their sense of victimhood. They felt silenced and censored, deprived of their rights. They felt as if the death of Heyer had changed everything, and that uncontrollable forces had been unleashed.

"It was like a war, and some people died, and it was an eerie feeling," Fears said. "Things are life and death now, and if you're involved in this movement, you have to be willing to die for it now, and that was the first time that had happened."

Soon after the rally, Fears started the long trip home to Houston, where he is a construction worker. He talked to his family, who "pretty much agree with me." He tried to calm down his little brother, who was "shaken up by it." He thought about what would happen if he died. "If I'm killed, that's fine," he said. "Maybe I'll be a martyr or something, or remembered."

He knows there will be another Black Lives Matter event soon, and he has plans to go. "I'll take a megaphone and see what they have to say," he said. "I would like there not to be more violence. . . . But it might be inevitable, so let's get this out of the way. If there is going to be a violent race war, maybe we should do it, maybe we should escalate it."

The Washington Post's Alice Crites contributed to this report.

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The road to hate: For six young men of the alt-right, Charlottesville is only the beginning - Chicago Tribune

There's evidence to suggest the events in Charlottesville have motivated numerous individuals to join or actively reengage in dark web white supremacist forums.

Trump has faced a wave of bipartisan backlash in the wake of a jaw-dropping press conference Tuesday at Trump Tower in which he blamed the violence that led to the killing of counterprotester Heather Heyer in Charlottesville on both sides of the conflict, not solely on the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who instigated the rally.

"You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say it, but I will say it right now," Trump said during a contentious back-and-forth with reporters in the lobby of his midtown Manhattan building.

The mixed messages coming from the White House have only fueled the escalating rhetoric from "alt-right" figures and notable white supremacists -- many of whom cheered Trump's statements Tuesday. Law enforcement officials have indicated they are worried about more violence ahead of the widespread alt-right rallies planned in coming weeks across the US.

"I just think the rhetoric has really brought this to a different level, and that's what we're worried about," Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans said Friday when asked about an event planned in his city. "I've never seen so many people looking, almost looking for confrontation, and we've gotta knock it down."

James Norton, a former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, said he thinks the President's remarks "obviously reignited the issue in a not-productive way."

"It is incumbent on the President to tone down the rhetoric and be clear that the US government has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to racially charged hate group organizations that's mission is to commit violence, spread fear and divide the country," he said.

Several organizers of the upcoming "alt-right" rallies have pledged that their events are about free speech, but that reasoning has done little to mitigate concerns.

"What they're doing is choosing flashpoints around the country to try to rally their people around," said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.

"They do it under guise of free speech or security," he said. "But really what it is is an opportunity for them to express their hatred in the communities."

The uptick of white supremacist online activity taking place within these secure chat rooms reflects "a new sense of motivation to either actively re-engage or get started in this community," according to Alex Kassirer, Flashpoint's director of counterterrorism.

And that renewed motivation has spawned a number of posts that echo the comments made by one subscriber to the white nationalist site Stormfront on Tuesday.

"Just want to say I've been a long time lurker, but with the events in Charlottesville I feel more supportive/compelled than ever. I want to join the fight for a White nation that rules as it was ..." the post said.

The decision of several online hosting providers to deny service to alt-right websites in the wake of the events in Charlottesville has resulted in the migration of such communities to the dark web, according to Flashpoint's analysis.

"Individuals with alt-right sympathies are actively seeking out spaces for interaction with like-minded individuals," which will "likely result in sustained surges of activity on deep dark web white supremacist forums," according to their recent report.

For the most part, local and federal law enforcement agencies said they will prepare for the upcoming rallies the same way they do for all public protests and rallies.

One law enforcement source at the Boston Police Department told CNN that they anticipate large crowds, but there is no indication of an uptick in white supremacist threats.

Officers "expect good behavior but will be prepared should it go bad," the source said.

The Department of Homeland Security said it continues to work with federal and local partners "to assess threats and analyze trends in activity from all violent extremist movements, regardless of ideology."

While law enforcement agencies may not be changing their approach following the violence in Charlottesville, CNN has previously reported that the threat from far-right groups has been on their radar for months, as noted by an internal DHS and FBI memo from May.

The authors of the memo predicted that attacks from white supremacist groups in the coming year would be mostly "spontaneous and involve targets of opportunity."

But despite monitoring efforts by law enforcement, alt-right and white supremacist organizers have been clear that they have no interest in deescalating the situation after Charlottesville.

"I think a lot more people are going to die here before we're done here, frankly," said Chris Cantwell, a white nationalist and speaker for "Unite the Right" in an interview with Vice News.

Former Ku Klux Klan Wizard David Duke called the deadly protests in Charlottesville "a turning point for the people of this country."

"We are determined to take our country back. We're going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump," Duke said in an interview while attending the rally on Saturday.

Duke also praised Trump's comments on Tuesday, thanking the President for his "honesty and courage" in a tweet.

"Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa," read the full tweet from an account that is not verified by Twitter but appears to represent Duke and features videos apparently posted by and of him.

CNN's Jessica Schneider and Rene Marsh contributed to this report.

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Trump's mixed messaging sparks concerns of 'emboldened' alt-right - CNN