American Swastika

"Simi and Futrell provide a valuable service by shedding light on the ""ordinariness"" of white power activism, which can make it that much more dangerous. They take social networks seriously when addressing the big questions about how people can adhere to despicable beliefs and to endure stigma in their daily lives for holding those beliefs and engaging in repulsive activities. They remind us of how collective identities are not created in a vacuum and if they are not regularly reinforced, they die. American Swastika shows how heterodox beliefs and practices require constant reinforcement in settings that normalize white supremacy and embed it within cultural practices and social ties. The timely third edition of this extraordinary book offers priceless insight into the way that racist extremism has polluted our politics. --Rory McVeigh, University of Notre Dame Since its initial publication in 2010, American Swastika has been the go-to source for comprehending the dangerous persistence of racist hate movements in the U.S. With this new edition, Pete Simi and Robert Futrell take an important additional step--offering not only a catalog of the white supremacist threat as it exists today, but a framework for explaining how related movements have, and will, continue to develop and evolve if left unchecked. Their crucial intervention--demonstrating how the troubling far-right mobilizations that marked the Trump presidency furthered longstanding patterns of racist hate--serves as a lucid and insightful primer on how evolving technological and political landscapes have provided tools for white supremacists to exploit. Scholars, policymakers, and invested citizen-readers alike will find no better resource for understanding the threats posed by organized racism--and no clearer roadmap for effectively responding to those threats. --David Cunningham, Washington University in St. Louis"