More than fifteen years in the making, Blood and Politics is the most comprehensive history to date of the white supremacist movement as it has evolved over the past three-plus decades. Leonard Zeskind draws heavily upon court documents, racist publications, and first-person reports, along with his own personal observations. An internationally recognized expert on the subject who received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work, Zeskind ties together seemingly disparate strands--from neo-Nazi skinheads, to Holocaust deniers, to Christian Identity churches, to David Duke, to the militia and beyond. Among these elements, two political strategies--mainstreaming and vanguardism--vie for dominance. Mainstreamers believe that a majority of white Christians will eventually support their cause. Vanguardists build small organizations made up of a highly dedicated cadre and plan a naked seizure of power. Zeskind shows how these factions have evolved into a normative social movement that looks like a demographic slice of white America, mostly blue-collar and working middle class, with lawyers and Ph.D.s among its leaders. When the Cold War ended, traditional conservatives helped birth a new white nationalism, most evident now among anti-immigrant organizations. With the dawn of a new millennium, they are fixated on predictions that white people will lose their majority status and become one minority among many. The book concludes with a look to the future, elucidating the growing threat these groups will pose to coming generations.Leonard Zeskind has written widely on racism and anti-Semitism for publications such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and the Forward. More than fifteen years in the making, Blood and Politics is the most comprehensive history to date of the white supremacist movement as it has evolved over the past three-plus decades. Leonard Zeskind draws heavily upon court documents, racist publications, and first-person reports, along with his own personal observations.

An internationally recognized expert on the subject who received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work, Zeskind ties together seemingly disparate strands--from neo-Nazi skinheads, to Holocaust deniers, to Christian Identity churches, to David Duke, to the militia and beyond. Among these elements, two political strategies--mainstreaming and vanguardism--vie for dominance. Mainstreamers believe that a majority of white Christians will eventually support their cause. Vanguardists build small organizations made up of a highly dedicated cadre and plan a naked seizure of power. Zeskind shows how these factions have evolved into a normative social movement that looks like a demographic slice of white America, mostly blue-collar and working middle class, with lawyers and Ph.D.s among its leaders. When the Cold War ended, traditional conservatives helped birth a new white nationalism, most evident now among anti-immigrant organizations. With the dawn of a new millennium, they are fixated on predictions that white people will lose their majority status and become one minority among many. The book concludes with a look to the future, elucidating the growing threat these groups will pose to coming generations. This April, when the Department of Homeland Security issued a report titled 'Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, ' the media world was briefly ablaze debating whether it was true. 'Rightwing extremists, ' the report maintained, 'have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda.' Citing the economic downturn, it drew parallels to the 1990s, a fertile time in the development of militia-style factions. In a footnote, rightwing extremism is defined broadly as applying to groups, movements and adherents that are 'primarily hate-oriented' toward particular religious, racial or ethnic groups, or 'are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority, ' or may be dedicated to single issues such as opposition to abortion. What favorable timing, then, for Leonard Zeskind's Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream, which addresses all of these issues, provides a context in which to assess them and offers an extended look inside a little-understood cultural zone that is really a panoply of small groups . . . Zeskind tracks the white supremacist impulse, as embodied in various groups since the mid-1970s, in chronological fashion. He analyzes every twist, turn and rivalry--historically, the groups hardly yielded a harmonious or even coherent 'movement, ' although there is more of one today than in the past. (In a prequel section of the book, Zeskind also traces roots stretching back into the mid-1950s.) Much of his narrative is cast around the schism between 'mainstreamers' who seek to temper their message in return for broadened public support and potential electoral success, and more militant 'vanguardists' who have not and often take a separatist approach . . . Blood and Politics would seem merely a compendium of relatively fringe groups and their leaders. Part of the challenge he faced was inherent in the terrain . . . And yet there is continuity too among the figures Zeskind follows . . . Zeskind's account is fine-grained.--Art Winslow, Los Angeles Times

Acts of madness like the killing of George Tiller and Stephen T. Johns can be too easily dismissed as the work of disturbed individuals and then subsumed in the usual rumble of recrimination between left and right. But if we are to understand the deeper implications of those acts of murder, what must be examined is their origin in the shadow world of white nationalism. Nobody knows more about the movements that spawned the alleged gunmen than Leonard Zeskind, who has spent most of a lifetime observing, analyzing and opposing racism and anti-Semitism in America and abroad. Now he has distilled those hard and dangerous decades of work into Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream, a magisterial new book that explains how and why racial hatred became and remains a significant political force in American society.--Joe Conason, Salon

We are all in Leonard Zeskind's debt. Exhaustively researched, Blood and Politics is not only a brilliant account of the origins, modes of operation, collaborations, and internecine disputes of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denier, and anti-Semitic groups in America, but alerts us to the fact that despite--or perhaps because of--significant improvements in race relations and changing demographic patterns, we are likely to witness a resurgence of their activities.--Drew S. Days III, Professor of Law, Yale University, and former U.S. Solicitor General

Leonard Zeskind deserves our gratitude for his lifelong commitment to the battle against the international racist underworld. He combines the skill and zeal of the investigative reporter with the shrewd perspective of the historian. In this magisterial work, Zeskind identifies the leaders, politics, and strategies of that dangerous movement with great literary skill--and explains why the perils they represent remain aliv

"Journalist Zeskind delivers a thorough, if scattered, dossier on white nationalist politics in America from the end of WWII to the present, focusing closely on three plotters on the fringe of the American mainstream: Willis Carto, William Pierce and David Duke. Among the book's dizzying investigations of neo-Confederates, skinheads, survivalists, tax protestors, Second Amendment nuts and anti-Semites, these three men loom largest as the provocateurs and grandfathers of racist politics. Drawing on writings from Oswald Spengler and Francis Parker Yockey, these white nationalists constructed a narrative about the death of Western civilization, where white nationalists are patriotic race warriors hawking their ideas at gun shows, in print and in online forums. With the breadth of an encyclopedia, this book features a staggering number of actors, publications, flashpoints and organizations, such as the Posse Comitatus movement, which denies all of the Constitution's amendments after the 14th, prints community money and seeks independence from ZOG (the Zionist Occupation Government). Zeskind's rigorously researched and eloquent book is a definitive history of white nationalism and contains alarming warnings for a resurgence in racist politics." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

From a MacArthur Award-winning author comes this comprehensive history of the white supremacist movement as it's evolved over the last three-plus decades.