|
White nationalist organizer Billy Roper says the job of recruiting people to his cause—building a white ethnostate—starts with something as mundane as a trip to Walmart.
“I could be at the grocery store and be next to someone at the produce aisle and simply say, ‘Wow, can you believe the price of produce these days?’” he tells Newsweek of the way he starts conversations on the subject in his hometown of Mountain View, Arkansas. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Roper “the uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism.”
His “agitation” technique—highlighting shared grievances in an effort build up feelings of solidarity for a political cause—would be familiar to any labor organizer. But in an era in America when union participation is declining, inequality is widening and mistrust of authority is spreading, Roper and others are building alliances not based on shared economic interest but on the color of human flesh. Referring to the range of tolerated ideas in public discourse, he says President Donald Trump’s election helped “shift the Overton window far enough to the right” for him to make new inroads.
web page
|
May 2017: Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists Are Recruiting Trump Supporters Who Are Mad at Colin Kaepernick