So You’ve Got a Hate Cult Problem: Living With the Kingston Klan and its ‘Alt-Right’ Cousins

Now that the neo-Nazi car attack on a group of anti-racist pro­tes­tors in Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, has once again remind­ed Amer­i­ca that hate groups rep­re­sent a and sig­nif­i­cant threat to the coun­try (and world, if you look around), it’s worth keep­ing in mind that these groups are in many ways cults rein­forced by far-right media ecosys­tems that have been steadi­ly rad­i­cal­iz­ing Amer­i­cans as Amer­i­can con­ser­vatism has veered fur­ther and fur­ther to the right. A media ecosys­tem that includes Steve Ban­non’s Bre­it­bart along with sites like Dai­ly Stormer and InfoWars and tells its audi­ence that a cabal that includes every­one from lib­er­als to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood are all work­ing togeth­er to under­mine white Chris­tians and The West in gen­er­al. It’s the kind of hate land­scape that might make a vio­lent lunatic run over a bunch of anti-neo-Nazi pro­tes­tors. But this is where we are and now a sig­nif­i­cant con­tem­po­rary chal­lenge for Amer­i­can is fig­ur­ing out how to get fel­low Amer­i­cans trapped in such hate cults to rec­og­nize they got sucked into some­thing awful and need to leave it and join Team Nice. Sure, that might be fruit­less in many cas­es, but it’s still impor­tant to try. And nice. And as we’re going to see as we look at a recent report from the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter on the Kingston clan, a ~6,000 mem­ber strong polyg­a­mous inces­tu­ous super-racist apoc­a­lyp­tic cult that runs its own busi­ness empire, it’s pret­ty clear that fig­ur­ing out how to encour­age hate cult mem­bers to join their fel­low humans and just mel­low out is a chal­lenge we can’t ignore. Because they might be apoc­a­lyp­tic death cults plan­ning on win­ning a race war and becom­ing div­ing kings. With their own high-end firearms man­u­fac­tur­er. Hate cult recov­ery ser­vices are some­thing soci­ety is going to have to get real­ly good at if its going to sur­vive so we should prob­a­bly work on that.