Last November, a week after Donald Trump was elected President, I spoke on the phone with a fifty-five-year-old divorced college graduate—he declined to specify his alma mater—who had been working as a construction manager in Sacramento, California. The man, who identified himself as James Zarth, said that he was “Grand Klaliff,” or second in command, of the “California realm” of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a subgroup of the notorious white-supremacist group, which, according to a recent estimate from the Southern Poverty Law Center, has five or six thousand members in the United States. Previously a member of the White Aryan Resistance and various skinhead groups, Zarth said that he joined the K.K.K. when Barack Obama first became President. “I did a lot of soul-searching,” Zarth told me in November. “At first, I thought it was a hate group. I’d been a skinhead for a long time, but I figured out that a lot of them are just into drugs and violence—they’re not helping their own race. The K.K.K. is one of the only white-nationalist organizations that’s family-oriented and looking out for white rights.”
Zarth crudely articulated the many things that he and the K.K.K. hoped and expected that Trump would do for white nationalists. I had been put in touch with him by James Spears, a “Great Titan” of the Loyal White Knights, who’d responded to a message that I sent to a general-inquiry address listed on the group’s Web site. (The site has since been removed.) I sent the e-mail after learning about a Trump “victory parade” that the Knights were planning to hold the following month—the first parade they’d had cause to hold in eight years, Zarth said—at a then undisclosed location in Pelham, North Carolina. The planned parade had been widely reported in the media, and I aimed to write about what went down. But the night before it was set to take place, at a “pre-rally gathering,” the leader of the California chapter stabbed another member of the group; he and another Loyal White Knight were arrested. The parade the next day amounted to chants of “white power” yelled from a few dozen cars. “Even the simple task of carrying out a highly publicized parade to celebrate President-elect Trump’s victory turned into a farce,” the S.P.L.C. wrote. It had been evident for a while that many white supremacists liked Trump—Evan Osnos had reported on this for The New Yorker in the summer of 2015—and the failed rally didn’t seem to merit the attention that the K.K.K. obviously craved. My editor suggested that the reporting I’d done could come in handy down the road. We shelved the piece for the time being.
I’ve been thinking about that conversation with Zarth all week, ever since white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of them allegedly killed a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, with his car, injuring nearly twenty others. After Trump’s press conference on Tuesday, in which the President of the United States equated the mostly peaceful counter-protest with the Nazi-themed violence and Klan-style rhetoric of “the other side,” I pulled out my audio recorder and listened to Zarth’s words again.
“I noticed something was going wrong in America decades ago,” Zarth told me. He mentioned the TV shows “Father Knows Best,” “Andy Griffith,” “The Brady Bunch,” and “Little House on the Prairie.” “Usually, those shows had a Christian moral,” he said. “But now that the Jews own the majority of the media stations, they’re showing things that are against God’s law, like race-mixing and homosexuality.” He pointed to America’s diverse population as its primary source of violence and conflict. “We advocate for living separately within America. We are a benevolent, fraternal, Christian, white-civil-rights organization,” he claimed. “We are for family and for God. We see our race and our heritage going away and being harmed by intermixing with these mongrel races. It has to stop.”
He added, “I think we now have a President with some of the same ideals.” He insisted that the Loyal White Knights had been growing since Trump’s victory. When I asked him for specifics, he replied, “I can’t give out exact numbers—that’s why we’re called ‘the invisible empire.’ But I can tell you this: since Trump has been elected, people have been calling us left and right wanting to join, from all walks of life.” The claim was difficult to fact-check. In February, the S.P.L.C. published a report asserting that the number of operating U.S. hate groups rose from eight hundred and ninety-two, in 2015, to nine hundred and seventeen, in 2016. “The radical right was energized by the candidacy of Donald Trump,” the report read.
Zarth, not surprisingly, listed illegal immigration, welfare reform, and the loss of manufacturing jobs as issues that Trump was getting right, and he said that he liked Trump’s politically incorrect talk. “He doesn’t have a filter between his brain and mouth,” Zarth said. “It’s hurt him a couple times. But I believe everything he’s said—including being a Christian—is true. He’s not a politician. People voted him in because they are tired of the same old establishment. We want a person we can relate to.” When I asked how, exactly, he related to a self-proclaimed billionaire from New York, Zarth responded, “He’s a white Christian man.” Zarth seemed unfamiliar with Steve Bannon—“I think he’ll make a good senior adviser” was all he could muster about him—and he had no idea who Reince Priebus was. Some of his positions were surprising; he expressed a concern for the environment, for instance, and professed a belief in global warming. But slowing the destruction of the earth was not, for Zarth or the K.K.K., an urgent issue.
He told me how Will Quigg, the leader of the Loyal White Knights, had made headlines in March, 2016, when he said that he was endorsing Hillary Clinton. Quigg tweeted after Trump’s victory that he’d been using “reverse psychology.” “When you have a group with the stigma of the K.K.K. endorsing a candidate,” Zarth said, “of course the candidate is going to disavow, because it’s going to make people think he’s a racist. That’s why we stopped endorsing Trump. If these other white-nationalist organizations and people were thinking straight, they would have never endorsed Trump, either. They should have kept it to themselves.”
Zarth claimed to disapprove of hate crimes, including those that had already occurred after Trump’s election. He spoke at length about the supposed underreporting of black-on-white crime. When I asked him if there were any recent instances of white-on-black violence that he condemned, he thought for a moment, then mentioned Dylann Roof, the young white killer of nine black parishioners at a Charleston, South Carolina church, in June, 2015. “When he went and shot and killed those people in church, I did not agree with that,” Zarth said. “If he had that in his mind, that he wanted to go out and kill some negroes—we do not want people to go out and do that,” Zarth said. He added, “But if he would have went down to a drug neighborhood and shot a whole bunch of drug dealers and criminals, felons, I would not have felt as bad. But he should not have went to a church and killed those people while they were praying to their God, whatever God that may be.”
Just then, Zarth received a call on another phone, and his ringtone, a few notes from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” played. I asked him if he and the K.K.K. really had complete confidence in Trump. “He could fall back and not do any of his campaign promises now that he’s in there,” Zarth said. “He’s already softened up his stance on Muslims. But I don’t think there’s a chance of him softening all the way.”
This week, I talked to Adam Domby, a professor of Southern history at the College of Charleston, about what he thought had changed for white supremacists since Trump’s election. “We need to acknowledge that these beliefs have always been here and are not on the fringe,” he said. “Now people are just being open about it. They have taken off their hoods and are lighting their faces up for all to see with tiki torches. That’s a feeling of empowerment beyond measurement. No longer are they embarrassed or fearful of repercussions. In part, they see their views as validated by the election.”
I called Zarth back, too, a day after the rally in Charlottesville. I wanted to know if this is what Zarth had hoped for, if this violence was a kind of fulfillment for him and the Klan. A woman who would not identify herself answered the phone. At first, she claimed that she didn’t know who Zarth was. Then she said that she simply didn’t know where he was. When I pressed her about his feelings about the state of things, referring to the violence in Charlottesville specifically and the matter of race relations more generally, she said, “He’s happy.”
