Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America

Six years ago, Vegas Tenold embedded himself among the members of three of America's most ideologically extreme white nationalist groups-the KKK, the National Socialist Movement, and the Traditionalist Workers Party. At the time, these groups were part of a disorganized counterculture that felt far from the mainstream.

But since then, all that has changed. Racially-motivated violence has been on open display at rallies in Charlottesville, Berkeley, Pikesville, Phoenix, and Boston. Membership in white nationalist organizations is rising, and national politicians, including the president, are validating their perceived grievances.

Everything You Love Will Burn offers a terrifying, sobering inside look at these newly empowered movements, from their conventions to backroom meetings with Republican operatives. Tenold introduces us to neo-Nazis in Brooklyn; a millennial Klanswoman in Tennessee; and a rising star in the movement, nicknamed the "Little Fuhrer" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, who understands political power and is organizing a grand coalition of far-right groups to bring them into the mainstream.

Everything You Love Will Burn takes readers to the dark, paranoid underbelly of America, a world in which the white race is under threat and the enemy is everywhere.

 

"Vegas Tenold has produced a timely, eye-popping account of the edgy and often violent world of White Nationalists. He's been crisscrossing the country going back six years-on the ground and in the trenches, from New Jersey to Tennessee, Maryland, Indiana and elsewhere-taking copious notes about supremacists in all their chaotic varieties. It's meant hanging with neo-Nazis, skinheads, Hammerskins and Klansmen-at his own peril. It's meant attending fiery cross-burnings and white-members only caucuses at roadside motels or backyard barbecues. He's interviewed crude-cussing, weapon-toting racists alongside articulate radical-right leaders claiming to simply be pro-white, not anti-black. Then came Donald Trump's election as president, when their collective chant became, 'This Is Our Time.' But is it? Tenold was there for all of it — and for anyone wanting to untangle this dark, unruly sliver of Trump's web, Everything You Love Will Burn is a must read." Dick Lehr, author of Black Mass and The Birth of a Movement

"Ever since Tocqueville, some of the keenest observers of American society have been foreigners, able to see what locals might take for granted. In this book, Vegas Tenold takes us inside the varied world of the extreme right. He gets us so close that we can see every pore of paranoia, every follicle of delusion, every unhinged ligament of logic-thus rendering them both more human and more terrifying at the same moment." Michael Kimmel, author of Angry White Men

"A penetrating portrait of the men and women who are trying to instill fear and terror in our community. Vegas Tenold has done a great service by exposing their toxic ideologies in this must-read book." Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning

Vegas Tenold is an award-winning journalist. He has covered the far right in America for years, as well as human rights in Russia, conflict in central Africa and the Middle East, and national security. A graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism, his work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Rolling Stone, New Republic, and Al Jazeera America. He was born and raised in Norway, and lives in Brooklyn.