https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opin ... ction.htmlAs I watched the televised 2016 presidential debates, listening to the then-candidate Donald Trump arguing various points with Hillary Clinton, a chill went down my spine. I was in the middle of writing a new play, a comic parody of white supremacist fiction. With his hyperbolic attacks on immigrants and minorities — African-Americans “living in hell,” Latino “gangs roaming the street” and insinuations that a long list of Jewish philanthropists and politicians was conspiring against him — Mr. Trump sounded like a character straight out of my research.
Trump’s habit of echoing the racist far right is now well-known, but back then, everyone was unsure of what was even happening, let alone what to call it. Two years later — after Richard Spencer, after Charlottesville — the public has heard a lot about white supremacist culture. But I’d argue that we haven’t quite heard enough. To understand their ideologies and why they support this president so strongly, we need to examine their literature.
The books act as a kind of binding agent, a Bible-like codification of basic principles that underpin the various denominations. And yet, for understandable reasons, they remain largely unknown. Journalists are inclined to avoid name-checking the books publicly, for fear of inadvertently promoting them. This is no longer a winning strategy. Heidi Beirich, who tracks far-right hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center, agrees. “We needed to have been talking about these books for decades,” she asserts. “They’re very influential, they’re reaching the highest levels of power, they’re having an impact on terrorism, on policy, and so on. Not talking about them is just wrong.” So, let’s talk.
Most of the books are self-published. Others are distributed by small, activist imprints or the publishing arms of white nationalist organizations. They are sold online, at gun shows or person to person. This scattershot distribution system makes it hard to track sales, but the more popular titles are estimated to have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. I acquired some out-of-print titles from rare book dealers. They are dog-eared, annotated and often inscribed.
The genre ranges broadly in tone and topic, from dark, foreboding dramas to broad, slapstick comedies; from neo-Confederate romances to futuristic dystopian nightmares. They’re dangerous and disgusting, for sure, but they’re also absurdly stupid and, on the whole, very badly written. As a playwright who specializes in edgy humor, I find them endlessly fascinating. Their vocabulary of broad stereotypes, paranoid fantasies and preposterous global-takeover schemes is the stuff comedy is made of.
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