A former neo-Nazi finds path out of hate
For years, Ken Parker lived in the world of bigotry and hate.
He wore the green robes of a grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan. He stood at podiums and shouted racist catchphrases. He posed shirtless in a photo posted on Facebook, a swastika tattoo on his chest and a gun cradled in his arm.
He paid $30 to ride in a 15-person van from Jacksonville, Florida, to Charlottesville, Virginia, for the 2017 Unite the Right rally, where he marched as part of the National Socialist Movement contingent. They spit out slurs and anti-Semitic slo-
gans, clashed with counter-protesters and celebrated the violence and chaos.
When a neo-Nazi plowed into the crowd, killing Heather Heyer, who was there to stand against white nationalists, Parker and his crew were in a parking garage about a mile away, giddy over what they saw as a victorious day.
Parker was immersed in white supremacist ideology, radicalized by a steady diet of racist propaganda. Like Dylann Roof, who killed nine AfricanAmerican churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Like Robert Bowers, who police say gunned down 11 Jewish worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Like a growing number of disaffected white men.
After Charlottesville, something shifted inside Parker. He began to turn away from hate and toward the people he once might have targeted.
Why did Parker change? And how was someone like him, a U.S. Navy veteran who said he grew up in a “good Christian” family outside Chicago, drawn to hate groups in the first place?
The answers offer insight into the dynamics feeding the spread of rightwing extremism.
Need, narrative, network
In many ways, Parker was the perfect recruit for the hate movement.
After serving in the U.S. Navy for 11 years, he was floundering. Scuffling to find a job in a bad economy. Trapped in a crumbling marriage. Seething about demographic changes that seemed to leave him behind.
Parker felt lost without the camaraderie and rank structure of the military.
He couldn’t wait to get to Unite the Right in Charlottesville.
“I was so pumped up,” Parker said, of the August 2017 white nationalist rally. “Everyone was saying that we were going to start a revolution.”
But the rally did mark a turning point for Parker – through an unlikely encounter with a Muslim filmmaker.
Confronting 'the enemy'
“This is Ken Parker,” Deeyah Khan narrates in her Netflix documentary “White Right: Meeting the Enemy.” “Ken is exactly the kind of person I’ve always been afraid of.”
Khan, a British Norwegian filmmaker had gone to Charlottesville to try to understand what drove people into hate groups.
For Parker, who had often spewed the ugliest kind of anti-Muslim taunts, Khan’s compassion and respect were revelatory.
On the last day of filming, Parker surprised Khan, the first Muslim person he had ever spent time with, by referring to her as a friend.