Latest news with #Zeskind
Indian Express
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Who was Leonard Zeskind, the relentless watchdog of white nationalism?
Leonard Harold Zeskind, who spent a lifetime mapping the dark and tangled undercurrents of American white nationalism died April 15 at his home in Kansas City. He was 75. The cause, as confirmed by his longtime colleague Devin Burghart, was cancer. Zeskind had been fighting it for years, though if you knew him, you also knew he was never one to make a big production out of personal hardship. He had other battles on his mind. Over more than four decades, Zeskind established himself as one of the country's fiercest, and, most stubborn, chroniclers of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-government extremist groups. His 2009 book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, remains, even now, the definitive roadmap for understanding how hate moves, how it adapts, and how it sneaks into places it shouldn't belong. He wasn't the flashiest activist. Or the loudest. He was the guy still in the archives at 2 AM., still trying to cross-reference the tenth alias of a neo-Nazi leader most Americans had never heard of (yet). For his trouble, in 1998, the MacArthur Foundation gave him one of their Genius Grants, recognising a career spent mostly working in the shadows. A childhood shaped by justice Zeskind was born in Baltimore in 1949, the son of Stanley and Shirley (Berman) Zeskind. When he was about 10, the family packed up and moved to Miami, chasing new opportunities like so many mid-century American families did. It was the early '60s. The country was cracking open with civil rights protests, sit-ins, the slow, grinding march toward change. Zeskind soaked it in. He remembered, later in life, the moment a local NAACP president spoke at his synagogue during his bar mitzvah. It wasn't a thing that most kids would necessarily remember forever, but Zeskind did. 'It was the way you grew up in those days,' he said. 'And I just didn't stray from that.' College? He gave it a shot. University of Florida first, then University of Kansas, studying philosophy — which made sense for a guy who liked to question everything. But he didn't make it to a degree. The Vietnam War was raging, and Zeskind ended up getting expelled from KU for protesting the ROTC program. (He was proud of it.) Instead, he went to work. Real work, welding, ironwork, auto plants. Thirteen years of it. Somewhere along the way, he started organizing on the East Side of Kansas City, trying to cool the tensions between working-class white and Black neighbors who, frankly, had been set up to resent each other. It was messy, thankless work. He didn't expect a medal. Building a life on the front lines By the mid-1960s, Zeskind had found what would be his true calling: fighting racism not by grandstanding, but by getting into the weeds. The idea was simple enough, white people needed to organize other white people against racism, but living it out wasn't so simple. He started in Kansas City, talking to poor white kids who'd grown up believing the deck was stacked against them (because it was, just not in the way they thought). And when the Klan started bubbling back up in the late '70s, along with newer, slicker hate groups — Zeskind shifted gears. Watching wasn't enough anymore. Someone needed to document it. In 1982, he launched a little magazine called The Hammer, anti-racist, anti-fascist, fiercely independent. It wasn't exactly a bestseller, but it got noticed. Three years later, he became research director at the National Anti-Klan Network, and by 1983, he'd founded the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) back in Kansas City, where he could do the kind of methodical, painstaking work he believed in. Zeskind's research was the opposite of surface-level. Court documents, extremist newsletters, informants, first-hand field notes, he dug everywhere. He knew who these groups were, not from TV soundbites, but because he'd sat in on their rallies, read their screeds, traced their networks across states and decades. One of the biggest myths he loved to demolish was the idea that white supremacists were all ignorant hillbillies. 'They think that white supremacists are uneducated people with tobacco juice dripping from their mouths,' he once said, almost wearily. 'Nothing could be farther from the truth.' A lot of them were middle-class – professionals, teachers, small business owners, the guy fixing your car, the woman arguing about property taxes at the town council meeting. And they weren't looking to preserve the old racial order anymore. They wanted to overturn it completely. Blood and politics If you want to understand just how far ahead Zeskind was, look no further than Blood and Politics. Sixteen years of research went into that book, and not the comfortable kind of research you do in an air-conditioned library, either. The book traced the white nationalist movement from the margins to the edge of the mainstream, following figures like David Duke, Willis Carto, and William Pierce. It laid out strategies like 'mainstreaming' – toning down the rhetoric just enough to sound respectable, and 'vanguardism,' which aimed to build smaller, hardcore cells to take power when society collapsed. When it first came out, some readers thought Zeskind was being alarmist. He wasn't. Charlottesville in 2017. January 6 in 2021. The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Trumpism, all of it was there, sketched out in Blood and Politics, before most people even knew they should be looking. Zeskind also wasn't shy about pointing to figures like Pat Buchanan, whose presidential runs in the '90s flirted with white nationalist talking points. He saw the signs early, maybe too early for most people's comfort. Even after he was gone, the battles he fought kept raging. In 2025, the Trump administration oversaw a purge of 381 books, mostly on racism, civil rights, diversity, from the U.S. Naval Academy library. Blood and Politics was one of them. Burghart, who succeeded him at IREHR, called it what it was: 'a systematic attempt to erase and exterminate Civil Rights.' Leonard Zeskind never wanted to be a hero. He didn't even much like the spotlight. But he understood, better than almost anyone, that silence, even polite, well-meaning silence, is what lets hate grow. And he refused to be silent.
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Leonard Zeskind, Who Foresaw the Rise of White Nationalism, Dies at 75
Leonard Zeskind, a dogged tracker of right-wing hate groups, who foresaw before almost anyone else that anti-immigrant ideologies would move to the mainstream of American politics, died on April 15 at his home in Kansas City, Mo. He was 75. The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, Carol Smith, his wife, said. Long before Donald J. Trump's nativist rhetoric in 2023 accusing immigrants of 'poisoning the blood' of the United States, Mr. Zeskind, a single-minded researcher, spent decades studying white nationalism, documenting how its leading voices had shifted their vitriol from Black Americans to nonwhite immigrants. His 2009 book, 'Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream,' resulted from years of following contemporary Klansmen, neo-Nazis, militia members and other right-wing groups. His investigations earned him a MacArthur 'genius grant' in 1998. 'For a nice Jewish boy, I've gone to more Klan rallies, neo-Nazi events and Posse Comitatus things than anybody should ever have to,' Mr. Zeskind said in 2018. Recently, 'Blood and Politics' was one of 381 books removed from the U.S. Naval Academy library in a purge of titles about racism and diversity ordered by the Trump administration. One of Mr. Zeskind's central themes was that before the 1960s, white supremacists fought to maintain the status quo of segregation, especially in the South. But after the era of civil rights victories, he maintained, white nationalists began to see themselves as an oppressed group, victims who needed to mount an insurgency against the establishment. Their principal adversaries were immigrants from the developing world who were tilting the demographics of the United States away from earlier waves of Northern Europeans. Despite the subtitle of Mr. Zeskind's book, asserting that white nationalists had moved 'from the margins to the mainstream,' many reviewers in 2009 were skeptical, treating his work as a backward look at a fringe movement led by racist crackpots whose day was over. The United States had just elected its first Black president, and extremist movements such as Christian Identity, which preached that white Christians were entitled to dominate government and society, seemed antiquated. The Los Angeles Times waved away those hate groups as questing after 'an impossible future.' NPR noted that 'while a handful of bigots' were still grumbling about the South's defeat in the Civil War and spreading conspiracies about Jews, 'some 70 million others have, in a testament to the overwhelming tolerance of contemporary American society, gone ahead and elected Barack Obama president.' Mr. Zeskind insisted that white nationalists should not be underestimated, and he was especially concerned about their influence on Republican politics. He identified those influences in the candidacies of David Duke, a former Klan leader who won a majority of white voters when he ran for statewide office in Louisiana in 1990, and in Pat Buchanan, who fared well in presidential primaries in the 1990s, running on a platform of reducing immigration, opposing multiculturalism and stoking the culture wars. Mr. Buchanan's issues offered a template for Mr. Trump, who leveraged similar ideas to wrest control of the Republican Party from centrists. Mr. Zeskind spoke about Mr. Trump in a 2018 town hall speech in Washington on the one-year anniversary of the march in Charlottesville, Va., by young white supremacists, whose zealotry the president had minimized. Mr. Zeskind said that Mr. Trump hadn't created an upsurge in hatred of nonwhite people — he was a product of it. 'White supremacy and white privilege have been dominant elements of our society from the beginning,' he said. 'It breeds a whole set of behaviors in people, and it should be deeply and widely discussed in every level of our society.' Leonard Harold Zeskind was born on Nov. 14, 1949, in Baltimore, one of three sons of Stanley and Shirley (Berman) Zeskind. His parents, who ran a pension management business, moved the family to Miami when Leonard was 10. He graduated from Miami Senior High School, and then studied philosophy at the University of Florida and the University of Kansas, though he did not graduate. Ms. Smith, his wife, said he was expelled from college in Kansas after taking part in a 1960s campus protest of the Reserve Officers Training Corps. Mr. Zeskind earned a welding certificate from the Manual Career and Technical Center in Kansas City, and for 13 years worked as a welder and ironworker and on assembly lines. He was also a community organizer on Kansas City's East Side, seeking to lower tensions between white working-class families and their Black neighbors. He met Ms. Smith in 1979. She had grown up on a dairy farm in Kansas, and through her he became aware that during the farm crisis of the 1980s, a conspiracy movement known as Posse Comitatus had spread among economically ravaged farmers, who were convinced that they had been targeted by Jewish bankers and others because they were white Christians. Mr. Zeskind was invited to speak about Posse Comitatus to a group of progressive farmers in Des Moines, and he mobilized Jewish groups nationally to counter the conspiracy movement. From 1985 to 1994, he was the research director at the Center for Democratic Renewal (previously the National Anti-Klan Network). In 1983, he founded the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a study and watchdog group focused on hate groups. Besides Ms. Smith, he is survived by a brother, Philip. His first marriage, to Elaine Cantrell, ended in divorce. At the 2018 town hall meeting in Washington, Mr. Zeskind called on Democrats in Congress to vehemently oppose a little-noticed bill sponsored by Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, to end birthright citizenship, the post-Civil War guarantee that anyone born in the United States is a citizen. The cause had become a focus of anti-immigrant groups warning of threats to the 'white race.' 'They want to smash up the 14th Amendment,' Mr. Zeskind said, addressing Democratic officials, 'and I think you guys should scream about it.' The following year, in an article in The New York Times about how Mr. King, a backbencher in his party, had anticipated many of Mr. Trump's anti-immigrant stances, the congressman said in an interview, 'White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?' Republican leaders in the House stripped Mr. King of his committee assignments over the remark, and he lost re-election in 2020. But the issue did not die. One of President Trump's first moves in January was an executive order to end birthright citizenship. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over Mr. Trump's order.
