American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement's Hidden Spaces of Hate
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Overview
A 2024 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title
Today’s white supremacist activism originated in carefully cultivated homes, parties, rituals, music festivals, and digital media and went on to reshape the U.S. political landscape. With powerful case studies, interviews, and first-person accounts, the third edition of American Swastika guides readers through these hidden enclaves of hate to link past circumstances to present conditions. It discusses new players in the world of white power and offers a vital perspective on how white supremacy persists and why we must be vigilant if we want to check its influence. American Swastika is essential reading for anyone hungry to understand the threat of white supremacist extremism to American society.
New to the Third Edition
- Discussion of white extremists’ “surprise” return to the American political landscape counters claims that this is “new” by explaining that it emanates from networks and ideas long nurtured outside the public eye
- An investigation of new hate music genres and changes in the white power music festival scene expands the discussion of how music is essential to white supremacist identity
- Research on new digital spaces where white supremacists connect and cultivate their culture, including mainstream and fringe networking platforms, retail sites, and video gaming sites demonstrates how online mechanisms serve as entry points for radicalization
- Discussion of new attention from the Biden administration on domestic terror offers hope for confronting and constraining white supremacy, while also defining many challenges involved
Preface
Introduction
1. Hidden Spaces of Hate
Explaining White Power Persistence
Studying White Power Persistence
Plan of the Book
2. White Supremacy
Ku Klux Klan
Christian Identity and Neo-Paganism
Neo-Nazis
Racist Skinheads
White Supremacy Doctrine and Collective Identity
3. White Supremacist Hate in the Home
Seth and Jessie’s Hard-Core Home Life
The Newly Respectable: Todd and Kate
Darren and Mindy’s Communitarian Family Life
4. White Power Parties
Getting Back to “God’s White Wilderness”
White Supremacist Bible Study
House Parties and Crash Pads
White Power Ritualism
5. White Power Music
Hate Train’s Rise
Hate Bands and Hate Music
Consciousness-Raising Music
White Power Bar Shows
A Place to Let Go
Music Rituals and Member Recruitment
Festivals
A Chance to Build Unity
White Power Music Companies
6. Virtual Hate
White Power Hate Culture Online
Selling the White Power Aesthetic
White Power Online Gaming
Children’s Virtual Indoctrination
White Power Video and Social Networking Sites
“It Keeps Me Feeling Connected”
Discovering “Truth”
Betrayal, Dispossession, and Violence
Declarations of Faith
White Power Virtual Therapy
Coming Out to Nonmembers
Dependency and Loneliness
Online Ties to Offline White Power Spaces
7. Private White Power Communities
Pure White Space
The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord
Elohim City
National Alliance
Aryan Nations
8. Enduring White Power Activism: Estimating White Supremacy’sThreat and What to Do about It
An Infrastructure of Hate
Estimating the White Supremacist Threat
What to Do
Appendix: Making Contact and Developing Rapport
Notes
Bibliography
Index
American Swastika is a must-read volume for anyone trying to understand both the history and the rise of white supremacy in the US. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, Simi and Futrell interrogate white supremacy organizations in the contemporary US. Specifically, they take a deep dive into four social movements, broadly defined: the Ku Klux Klan, Christian identity groups, neo-Nazis, and racist skinheads. The authors accomplish this task by considering the history of white supremacy in the US and among these social movements, but they go one step further, elucidating the processes of their formation by focusing on key structures of white supremacy movements, including hate in the home, white power parties, white power music, virtual hate, and white power communities. Drawing heavily on their ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, Simi and Futrell paint a stunning and horrifying picture of white supremacy movements, both at the margins and right under everyone’s noses. This critical update to the first edition (CH, Nov’10, 48-1786) is a necessary study for any scholar, student, or citizen seeking to better understand the persistence and pervasiveness of white supremacy in the US. Essential. All readers.
The main strength of American Swastika is the degree to which Simi was able to directly interact with these groups and attempt to accurately describe their specific point of view. When analyzing this material with Futrell, they were able to give an in-depth analysis of this process and the phenomenology that emerges from it.
The main strength of American Swastika is the degree to which Simi was able to directly interact with these groups and attempt to accurately describe their specific point of view. When analyzing this material with Futrell, they were able to give an in-depth analysis of this process and the phenomenology that emerges from it.
American Swastika sheds clear light and the beliefs, activities, and goals of those in the far right. Actually hearing their words and “seeing" them in action via the qualitative descriptions helps readers get a clear idea as to who these people are and the danger they pose.
The ethnographic nature of American Swastika provides students with a close, intense look at the disturbingly banal nature of white supremacy. The accessible writing provides a visceral experience for students, who are confronted with the reality of race-based hatred within the United States
The ethnographic nature of American Swastika provides students with a close, intense look at the disturbingly banal nature of white supremacy. The accessible writing provides a visceral experience for students, who are confronted with the reality of race-based hatred within the United States.
Since its initial publication in 2010, American Swastika has been the go-to source for comprehending the dangerous persistence of racist hate movements in the U.S. With this new edition, Pete Simi and Robert Futrell take an important additional step—offering not only a catalog of the white supremacist threat as it exists today, but a framework for explaining how related movements have, and will, continue to develop and evolve if left unchecked. Their crucial intervention—demonstrating how the troubling far-right mobilizations that marked the Trump presidency furthered longstanding patterns of racist hate—serves as a lucid and insightful primer on how evolving technological and political landscapes have provided tools for white supremacists to exploit. Scholars, policymakers, and invested citizen-readers alike will find no better resource for understanding the threats posed by organized racism—and no clearer roadmap for effectively responding to those threats.
American Swastika, now in its updated 3rd edition, has long been the text for understanding the white supremacist movement, its ideas, its activists, and its allure for those drawn into its orbit. Fully updated to capture how in recent years hate movements have become more public and more powerful, this text is fundamental to grasping the challenge America faces and the task ahead if white supremacy is to ever be vanquished from our society and culture.
Simi and Futrell provide a valuable service by shedding light on the “ordinariness" of white power activism, which can make it that much more dangerous. They take social networks seriously when addressing the big questions about how people can adhere to despicable beliefs and to endure stigma in their daily lives for holding those beliefs and engaging in repulsive activities. They remind us of how collective identities are not created in a vacuum and if they are not regularly reinforced, they die. American Swastika shows how heterodox beliefs and practices require constant reinforcement in settings that normalize white supremacy and embed it within cultural practices and social ties. The timely third edition of this extraordinary book offers priceless insight into the way that racist extremism has polluted our politics.
- Title: American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement's Hidden Spaces of Hate
- Authors: Pete Simi, Robert Futrell
- Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 240
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781538173091, 9781538173077, 1538173077, 1538173093
- Resource ID: LLS:9781538173091
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T02:58:37Z
Pete Simi is professor of sociology at Chapman University and executive committee member for the National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center at the University of Nebraska.
Robert Futrell is professor of sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and longtime expert on right-wing extremism.
Emily Wagner is a Ph.D. student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies right-wing politics and activism.