Glenna Gordon

Projects Galleries: American Women of the Far Right

At a luncheon after she'd dressed up as a "Black Rose," a confederate widow mourning, Tara Bradley told me, “It’s not that I want to forget [slavery]. It’s not that I try to pretend it didn’t happen. I don’t. It happened, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” 

Much has been said and written about the “toxic masculinity” of the far right. But, when we talk about the extreme right and discuss angry white men and lone wolfs, we have a national blind spot: the role of women in spreading ideas that drive hatred. They operate as agents and symbols, justifying violence and quietly driving the radical fringes forward as they spin America’s center towards the right. 

The other side of this is a toxic femininity just as invested in the idea of a whiteness as victimized, at risk, and requiring protection. Not all extremists are equally racist or equally dangerous, but everyone I spoke to contributes to that exclusionary and poisonous discourse. For some I met, their de facto membership in The Movement is a fundamental way of life, an identity, and a set of core beliefs through which everything is filtered. For others, it’s a phase, like joining a sorority during college, cosplay for racists, but with far more menacing consequences. 

These portraits are of American women who are prominent far-right organizers and leaders, online and offline. The women I met with range from white supremacists to ethno-nationalists, the alt right, militias, conspiracy mongers, Twitter personalities, sovereign citizens, racists, haters, xenophobes, and all the way across the spectrum to Nazis. 

These images serve to deflect from the public-facing propaganda of groups’ self presentation, the front stage of street fighting with antifa, and to show the true nature of this intermeshed “Movement.” 

After all, it’s white women who elected Trump, and it was white women who, once they won right to vote, used their political experience as suffragists to become leaders in the Ku Klux Klan. 

For some groups within The Movement, racism is the primary reason for their existence: they believe in myths about persecuted whites, and that genocide and race war are imminent. For others, racism underscores their actions, and is implicit but secondary to their activism. And for women in The Movement, many find meaning in providing the wombs upon which the collective future of the white race depends. Some are maternal archetypes for all the men who didn’t come home from school to milk and cookies; others are beautiful plastic Aryans peddling an illusion of availability. 

Women like Amanda and Erika also do the grunt work of pro-white activism. And women like Tara and Ayla follow the time-honored tradition of bringing up racist children—that #trad lifestyle they admire so much that once included taking the family out for a day’s entertainment at public lynchings. These women present outsiders with an “acceptable face” of white supremacy, a soft, palatable point of entry with the nostalgic glow of an idealized, wishfully apolitical past. This attempt to neutralize the stigma of more overt racism makes women of The Movement valuable recruiting tools, far more insidious than skinhead thugs or robed Klansmen. To understand the radicalization of white supremacy in the United States, we need to comprehend its roots as a complex, extensive ecosystem with unexpected hubs of power. 

In the aftermath of the violence at Charlottesville in 2017, many said, “This isn’t America!” But this is precisely America: from slavery to segregation, the violent reinforcement of hierarchies through lynchings to Jim Crow, mass incarceration to police brutality, nothing is more American than racism. It is built into our institutions and psyches. And nothing ensures the survival of white supremacy like denying white supremacy. This isn’t just about extremists and those whose symbols are more legible as white supremacy: this is about the way America is built on the foundation of white supremacy, and the way those at the farthest ends of the spectrum influence the middle. 

It is difficult to look at the painful reality that we share this country with racist extremists. Many argue that we shouldn’t cover the far right, that it gives them oxygen and that we are better-off depriving them of a platform. The problem is they already have a platform—their own—and they aren’t going away. We must look critically at these groups and who holds power and how their ideas enter the mainstream. It’s not just about their performative hoods, but who the people in the robes are, and who is signaling more quietly but just as dangerously. 

Fringe extremists like the ultra-violent group Atomwaffen pose a grave risk to public safety, but they are not the ones changing America. Women like Ayla Stewart are doing that, one white baby and one white follower at a time. 

Read more about this work and women's involvement in white supremacy in my piece for the New York Review of Books.  

  • Tara Bradley poses for a portrait in her official “mourning gear”. She is a member of a group called the Order of the Confederate Rose. Though similar to groups like Daughters of the Confederacy, members of this group insist that they are not political and are open to all people. . On April 21, the group laid wreathes at a Confederate cemetery in Raymond, Mississippi for Confederate Memorial Month. The keynote speaker from the local Sons of Confederate Veterans group mentioned Hitler, the KKK and David Duke in his speech. One member of the Roses left in the middle, but it was later discovered that she did not leave in protest but because her feet hurt. After the ceremony, when pushed on dressing up as confederate slaveholders, members repeated false statistics like only 5 percent of Southerners owned slaves (in Mississippi, it was 55 percent), and argued that people also dress up as Union soldiers. When it was pointed out that no one dresses up like slaves, one woman exclaimed, ““We’d love to have someone that would!” All of the women present boasted about volunteer work and civic duty and none thought their costumes or activities were racists or offensive. Groups like the OCR help keep the traditions of the Confederacy – and it’s racists policies – alive and well.
  • Amanda, the {quote}den mother{quote} of the League of the South, a neo-confederate group that publicly advocates for southern succession, and privately endorses slavery. This portrait was made at their annual convention in Wetumpka, Alabama on June 30, 2017. The League of the South takes great pains to distance itself and differentiate from the KKK, yet promotes many of the exact same ideas under a different outward facing rhetorical stance. The argument about “optics” pits different hate groups against each other as they vie for local power. LOS is almost completely male in its power structure and women like Amanda can only play informal roles. Amanda is not from the south but when she met her now husband online as his nutritionist and moved to Mississippi to be with him, she joined. She said that all the people at the meeting (which did include Klan members) were the greatest people she’d ever met. This reporter was forcefully ejected and escorted out of the meeting without clear cause.
  • Roadside in Montana.
  • Laura Loomer, an anti-Islam activist, is unique in her role in the extreme right because she is Jewish. After being continuously trolled by David Duke and others, which included pictures posted of her photoshopped in to gas chambers, she decided to get a nose job so she could further her own agenda without appearing so Jewish. Her antiIslam activism drives islamophobia in the USA, and she also plays the important role of victim within the far right twittersphere. Lauren Southern and others enjoy taking pot shots at her, and Pamella Geller was quick to distance herself from the toxic Loomer as well.
  • Irma Hinojosa is the kind of woman who complicates the way we understand far right activism – she is the head of Latino’s With Trump, and while she argues that she supports “legal immigration,” much of her rhetoric is strongly anti immigrant and pro border and security. She live casts, youtubes, and creates content constantly for her nearly 100,000 followers. At a freedom of speech rally in Washington DC organized by Richard Spencer and well known anti semite Baked Alaska, where someone gave a shout out to John Wilkes Booth in front of the Lincoln Memorial, she was the only woman who spoke on a line up of nearly ten people.
  • Though members of the clean cut group Identity Evorpa are technically not supposed to have tattoos, that didn’t stop Erika from joining. Her chest tattoo says, “I will never be silenced.” Like many on the far right, she believes she is unfairly censored by liberal tech companies and politically correct culture. The night of Charlottesville, she was the host of an IE party at a vacation rental home on the outskirts of the city. Though someone had died that day and many others were injured, IE partied hard. The ratio of men to women was about 15 to 1, but the women who were present bragged of enjoying the male attention and of their desire to preserve traditional feminine roles. Erika made sure the party ran smoothly and all could celebrate that day.
  • A police car covered in pink paint during the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, the first woke the nation to the current wave of pro white activism.
  • {quote}A Wife With a Purpose,{quote} the online super star Ayla Stewart, poses for a portrait at a public park in the southeastern United States on August 23, 2017 along with her six children. She's known for promoting #tradlife (traditionalist homemaking and white culture). She's been kicked off twitter for hate speech, though has started accounts on Gab and other platforms, and continues to have a huge youtube following. Though she believes there are three definitions of the word Nazi, she says there is only one definition of the word racist and she claims she is not racist.
  • Clarice Ryan is a wealthy donor in Montana politics, which in a sparsely populated state, gives her a large amount of sway. She is a proponent of conspiracies around Agenda 21 (a non binding UN resolution about climate change) and believes that the federal government is usurping rights through a land grab. She also actively demonstrates against immigrants and Muslims, and is against sharia law coming to Montana, a common platform for conservatives in the predominantly white and Christian state.
  • A klan document from the 1920s, photographed in rural North Carolina at the home of the Grand Dragon of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, on August 18, 2017. Some of America’s most prominent suffragists used their political experience to become leaders in the Ku Klux Klan of 1920s, when the organization was at its peak with as many as four million dues paying members.
  • Elaine Willman hosts community leaders in her “War Room,” which is what she calls the basement of her Montana home. Though many insisted that they were racist and saw no color at all, they also spent time that day in and in their lives protesting immigrant rights and the advancement of Native Americans. Elaine’s home is coverd in Native American art, and she insists she loves the people, just doesn’t like the tribal leadership.
  • No other woman is perhaps as public a face of modern white online activism than Southern. In addition to pictures of hedgehogs (her fav) she also posts regularly about the plight of white South Africans and the way the liberal media suppresses her and her comrades. She is most well known for a botched effort to stop charities and NGOs from saving drowning migrants in the Mediterranean. Among the many blatant untruths spoken when we met, Lauren Southern told me she didn’t fit the traditional standards of beauty. The petite and pretty young Canadian with nearly 400,000 followers on twitter, is supine and heavily made up in her profile pic. On a recent instagram selfie she posted on her birthday that had more than 23,000 likes five days after posting , here are just a few comments:•	constant.dominationLauren please sit on my face•	jamar_akachigenetics for dinnermakarov._.daBig salut from Russia! God, you're pretty.ghostwulffI want my future wife to be like youforeversmoothkeratin????????♀️????????????????❤❤trevormichael_*tips fedora*https://www.instagram.com/p/BkBSvonHIFT/?taken-by=laurencheriieThough Southern holds no formal position within an organization, she is a thought influencer and is the literal embodiment of the female ideal of white nationalists. She has complained about not being respected as a woman by members of the far right who say she should get married and have children. The contradiction in philosophies doesn’t seem to bother her or even register.
  • Nina Spencer, pregnant with her second child amidst rumors of a separation from Richard, poses with her husband near their home in Montana. Nina is known to spend her free time translating racist Russian texts to English.  She volunteered that she is not a dominatrix in control of Spencer without any prompting, though also without prompting argued that the person in control publicly is not the person in control privately. For a moment, Richard Spencer was able to temporarily hold the reins of power of one specific vertical silo of millennial, internet aficionados, cosplaying deniers of racism and purveyors of irony. Just because he has been displaced does not mean his followers have disappeared. They are still there, scanning twitter, waiting for the next person to follow. His current lack of influence is likely a low point in what will be a long trajectory of rise and fall, much like David Duke, whose charm and dressing were often commented upon much like Spencer’s. Nina plays an important role in combatting many rumors about Spencer that range from allegations that he is gay to that he has an Asian fetish. He is able to refute them and maintain a veneer of family values by posing with Nina and discussing his marriage. Looking at the role of children and the future of the white race is a common touch stone for many groups who otherwise insist they are different.
  • Clarice Ryan is a wealthy donor in Montana politics, which in a sparsely populated state, gives her a large amount of sway. She is a proponent of conspiracies around Agenda 21 (a non binding UN resolution about climate change) and believes that the federal government is usurping rights through a land grab. She also actively demonstrates against immigrants and Muslims, and is against sharia law coming to Montana, a common platform for conservatives in the predominantly white and Christian state.
  • Therea's domesticated bobcat, named Fancy,  who apparently often licks Manzella's feat.
  • Mike Cernovich, most known for his instigation of “PizzaGate,” wherein a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton trafficking children at a DC pizza shop motivated a man to actually show up at the restaurant and fire a weapon, hosted an event in midtown Manhattan called “A Night for Freedom.” Most guests were not interested in being photographed by the press and many told this journalist that their places of work would not allow them to have these political affiliations. The ratio of men to women was unsurprisingly about 10:1, but what is more surprising is the several persons of color who were present. The event featured racists men’s rights activist Gavin McGuiness and other names in the so-called “alt light.”
  • Pamela Geller has been a leading anti-Islam activist for years. She’s formed alliances with everyone from Milo to Richard Spencer to European nazi groups, despite being Jewish herself. Her anti-Islam rhetoric is not based in fact or on actual beliefs of Islam, with outrageous claims like Muslims practice bestiality with goats. Her most recent book was published by Milo Yiannopoulos on his label “Dangerous.” Geller likes to think of herself as counterculture and revolutionary in her ideas, and the victim of PC culture. She called this photographer a hunchback who can’t see her own hunch.
  • Barbie Rogers, who runs the Patriot Information Hotline, which is a one woman outfit that connects people wanting to join the movement to their local militia groups. Though women like Roger’s do not base their political activism around racist ideology, she holds certain racist beliefs, is staunchly antigovernment, anti immigrant, and is upset that the SPLC supposedly only lists her in their top 500 activist, not top 100 activists. (They do not list her at all on their hate map, though she is briefly mentioned in a blogpost from 2015 on nativist groups.) Rogers has been involved in citizen militia efforts to patrol the border and in recruitment for the group.
  • Many groups on the far right insist that they are not Nazis and do not publicly use swastikas. Privately, the symbols are rampant. Image provided by the leader of the women’s faction within a group largely involved in organizing the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, 2017, who has since left The Movement.
  • Amanda Barker, known as Imperial Komander Amanda, married Chris Barker, her high school sweetheart, who is the Grand Dagon of the Loyal White Knights, one of the most active chapters of the KKK in the country. Though Chris is the public face, it is widely acknowledged that Amanda does the bulk of the work to keep the operation afloat. Chris has an incredibly long criminal wrap sheet, which includes multiple accounts of beating Amanda up, but is seldom convicted in a court of law as he is thought to also be an FBI informant.
  • Many people join the militia movement and the patriot movements through gun rights issues. Gun sales peaked under Obama as militias believed that a Clinton presidency would restrict their access to firearms, and yet under Trump, they have continued to grow robustly despite a total lack of any gun reform despite mass killings. Many people on the radical right believe that the government is coming for their guns any day now, and that this is the beginning of the erosion of civil rights. This gun, at the home of Barbie Rogers, was one of more than half a dozen that were visible and she argued that she had many in other locations, including stockpiles offsite.
  • KrisAnne Hall is a one-woman road show, traveling around the country preaching antigovernment activism. She argues that lawmakers, legislators and citizens are not required to follow any regulations from the federal government. Her insistence on local and community based governance is so extreme that even organizations like the FDA are overstepping. Though she doesn’t personally advocate violence, many of her followers do and her message is seen as one that agitates people to breakdown government structures that protect minorities and individuals. She poses for a portrait in the Michigan State Legislature building, where she was the guest of the Delta Gun Club and told legislators and citizens that they don’t need to follow federal laws.
  • Before his arrest and the breakdown of the Traditional Worker’s Party in March, Heimbach was considered the most prominent white power youth organizer in the country. Though he argues he is not a nazi but a national socialist, this is a difference without a distinction. He and his wife Brooke met at an American Renaissance conference, a group that supports eugenics. She was selling books, and he there representing his college group the White Student Union, and he purchased “Prison Notes” so he could flirt with her. Brooke’s role in TWP was to support Matthew until she left him after their widely publicized assault and love triangle. Brooke is young and sweet, but has limited exposure to the world. Her idea of a vacation was to go to a spa in Indianapolis, and she insists that her children will be better off in a white ethno state. Matt argues that Mexicans and others could visit his ethno state if they get visas. Matt said Brooke is probably too good for him, and he is probably right. He also had all of his personal property in her name to avoid his assets being seized during a lawsuit, so is now flat broke. Brooke has not been heard from since the scandal.
  • Former reality tv star Anna Khait wears a {quote}Make America Great Again{quote} pin at Mike Cernovich's midtown Manhattan event, {quote}A Night for Freedom.{quote} Cernovich is known for his conspiracy theories and role in PizzaGate. Khait was one of the few women in attendance at the event. The St. Petersburg born star shows the links between the alt-right and conservative extremists from Russia.
  • West Virginia.
  • It is the most disturbing to meet children brought up in the movement. “Smiley,” isn’t exactly a tough nomme de guerre, but this little girl is thought of as the future of the movement by her mother Morbid Angel and the head of the small III% cell that her de-facto step father runs in a rural corner of Alabama. The relationship with Terry, the head of the an offshoot militia, and Smiley’s mother was unclear, his creepy affection for Smiley was clear. Though he claimed to be a military man, he said he was sent on the kind of operations that aren’t on paper and showed none of the discipline or organization of someone with formal training. Nonetheless, he runs exercises and survivalist meetings with his group, and Smiley comes along. She has her very own BB gun and her mom and Terry will allow her to shoot other guns too. Terry says Smiley knows not to touch the other guns stockpiled in their home, but she wouldn’t follow the same instructions about a candle on the coffee table. Her mother was repeatedly ask to confirm that her daughter’s photo may be used, and her mother was not just insistent but proud that her daughter is the future of “The Movement.”
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