Breaking point

The vandalised vehicle of a National Socialist Movement member ahead of a public rally in Atlanta, Georgia 2013

“Charlottesville showed the world what I had been witnessing for a long time: right-wing hate groups are gaining traction and it’s not the same white supremacists that you know from the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s – they’re a lot younger and better educated. Traditionally the Ku Klux Klan neo-Nazi organisations and skinhead groups have been very blue-collar. I don’t want to say members were wholly uneducated, but there were a good percentage of people who didn’t finish high school that made up the ranks of a lot of these organisations.

Now we’re seeing new groups made up of predominantly young college-aged white males, such as the groups that organised the Charlottesville rally. They have sociology degrees, marketing degrees. So they’re much more media savvy. They have essentially rebranded their beliefs and are actively trying to appeal to more people.

They talk about ‘white civil rights’ and their ‘right to exist’, with the implication that there is some kind of effort via Jewish, Muslim, communist, liberal, socialist etc. movements to make them a minority. In the case of Charlottesville they were angry at the proposed removal of a statue of [Confederate general] Robert E Lee: their view is that such statues symbolise their great achievements as a people and that efforts to remove them equate to efforts to turn the majority into a minority.

I started photographing far-right groups while I was a student at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, but it took five months of groundwork before I could take a single picture. Nobody wanted to let me attend their events. Eventually ‘Duke’ Schneider (pictured right), a member of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), which claims to be the largest national-socialist organisation in the country, responded to one of my hundreds of emails and allowed me to take some shots at a rally. I was 22 and nervous as hell. This was my first project and I was threatened a number of times, which shook me up – but Duke was fairly high up and he vouched for me. Once members saw the pictures I took, it was like I was ‘in’; my access just kept getting better and better.”

Matthew Heimbach, right, with members of his organisation, the Traditional Workers Party, prepare for a public rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 2016

Keith “Duke” Schneider at a banquet of the National Socialist Movement in 2012. Schneider was in charge of the organisation’s SS, the private security for its commander, at the time

“A good number of the people I have met in the last six years were involved in Charlottesville, marching under the banner ‘Unite the Right’. This idea of bringing all these groups across the country together into one powerful organisation is gaining some traction. But it’s very tentative.

In 2016 the Aryan Nationalist Alliance brought together about 20 groups under a single banner, but it failed and I’d say a dozen groups have now left. A lot of it is down to ego. A big reason why there’s not one single Klan any more is because every imperial wizard of every Klan wants to be the imperial wizard of the entire KKK. They also have varying ideologies even within the Klan – some organisations incorporate neo-Nazism whereas others are strictly traditional and religious. So they’ll never be on the same page, which will make it virtually impossible for them to wholly unite.

But the younger groups like Vanguard America and Identity Europa, plus some of the old guard like the NSM, know their demographics. They know that in order for them to be able to mould minds they need to be united, and they are. They go to college campuses, they speak to young Republican groups and anybody else who will listen, under the protection of the First Amendment. These groups are also trying to attract more women and, unlike in the KKK, they’re not always destined to do domestic tasks. The top shot on this page is of a female member of the NSM standing guard outside a meeting of the organisation’s leaders. Men still dominate, but women are definitely welcome too – they’ll take as many people as they can get.”

Members of the Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan march as part of a private Memorial Day rally in Indiana in 2016

Art Jones of the National Socialist Movement at a 2016 rally announcing the unification of various White Nationalist groups

A National Socialist Movement member stands guard outside a meeting of the organisation’s leaders, 2013

“A good number of the people I have met in the last six years were involved in Charlottesville, marching under the banner ‘Unite the Right’. This idea of bringing all these groups across the country together into one powerful organisation is gaining some traction. But it’s very tentative.

In 2016 the Aryan Nationalist Alliance brought together about 20 groups under a single banner, but it failed and I’d say a dozen groups have now left. A lot of it is down to ego. A big reason why there’s not one single Klan any more is because every imperial wizard of every Klan wants to be the imperial wizard of the entire KKK. They also have varying ideologies even within the Klan – some organisations incorporate neo-Nazism whereas others are strictly traditional and religious. So they’ll never be on the same page, which will make it virtually impossible for them to wholly unite.

But the younger groups like Vanguard America and Identity Europa, plus some of the old guard like the NSM, know their demographics. They know that in order for them to be able to mould minds they need to be united, and they are. They go to college campuses, they speak to young Republican groups and anybody else who will listen, under the protection of the First Amendment. These groups are also trying to attract more women and, unlike in the KKK, they’re not always destined to do domestic tasks. The top shot on this page is of a female member of the NSM standing guard outside a meeting of the organisation’s leaders. Men still dominate, but women are definitely welcome too – they’ll take as many people as they can get.”

The daughter of a Klansman takes part in a lighting ceremony of a swastika and cross in Georgia, 2016

“When I started Obama was president. Now we have Trump, whose election was not surprising to me at all. Fear has crippled many people over the last 20 years, and their reaction is ‘preservation’, which means growing isolationism, populism and nationalism. This has led to a presidency that has really incorporated these things into policy, breathing new life into a movement that had relatively minimal political clout. You cannot say Trump is responsible for these groups – they were rising in popularity long before he stood for office – but they are getting bolder under him. The Charlottesville rally was the largest public show of force yet. White nationalists marching through an American city, clamouring “we will not be replaced” under ‘White Lives Matter’ banners is a clear result of the strong societal push towards isolationism and ethnocentrism under Trump.

The guy in the centre of the shot in the first picture below is Richard Wilson Preston, the imperial wizard of the Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. I have been photographing Preston for five years, but the last time I saw him was when video footage emerged apparently showing him firing his gun in Charlottesville. He’s now facing charges of discharging a firearm within 1,000 feet of a school.

I was shocked when I heard the news about the Charlottesville rally – but looking back maybe I shouldn’t have been. Things are so volatile at the moment and have been for a while. Violence has become almost normal and major situations seem to flare up almost annually. This year was Charlottesville, two years ago it was the Charleston shootings [when white supremacist Dylann Storm Roof killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in the hope of igniting a race war]. I don’t know if this project has made me cynical or not, but it feels like it’s only a matter of time until there’s another major clash.

This story is not just going to go away, but there is some love amid the hate. Duke, my original contact at NSM, the man who really made the project possible, left the organisation abruptly in 2013. The reason was that he’d fallen in love with an African-American woman, who is now his wife. She was an actress and she had a stalker, an ex-boyfriend or something like that, and Duke was hired as her bodyguard. Apparently they fell in love. So he left the National Socialist Movement and married this woman. I photographed the couple recently and asked him, ‘Is it really that easy to just drop a lifetime of ideology that you really grew into?’ He said, ‘Yeah. I just kind of let it go.’”

Richard Preston, centre, Imperial Wizard of the Confederate White Knights of the KKK, in Maryland. Preston was arrested in 2017 for firing a gun at the Charlottesville rally

Duke” Schneider, who left the NSM in 2013, photographed with his wife in 2015

Posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2023 - Categories: #28 - Jul-Sep 2017, App Issues.