A former neo-Nazi’s path out of hate
Extremism offered him structure and fed a need
For years, Ken Parker lived in a world of bigotry and hate.
He wore the green robes of a grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan. He stood at lecterns 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 slogans, clashed with counterprotesters 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 African- American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Like Robert Bowers, who police said gunned down 11 Jewish worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Hate crimes leave grieving families and terrorized communities – from the Muslims whose Texas mosque was burned to the ground to the Indian-born immigrant gunned down in a Kansas bar to the two African-Americans killed last week in a Kentucky Kroger grocery store.
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 the 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 Navy for 11 years, he floundered. Scuffling to find a job in a bad economy. Trapped in a crumbling marriage. Seething about demographic changes that seemed to leave him behind.
One rainy night in early 2012, as he and his now-ex-wife shuffled through shows on Netflix, they stumbled on programs about neo-Nazi skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan.
As they watched the show about the KKK, the oldest hate group in the country, his wife turned to him. “You should look them up,” she said, according to Parker. “They seem right up your alley.”
Parker reached out to Klan groups he found through an online search and got a call within 15 minutes from the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. At first, he bristled at the anti-Semitic rhetoric the members tossed around, thinking it conflicted with the Christian teachings he had grown up with.
“Within six months, I was head over heels,” said Parker, 38. “I was looking through my Bible just to put down Jewish people.”
Parker’s path is an almost textbook example of how hate group members are radicalized.
They often feel “less than,” searching for someone to blame, for some place to direct their rage, said Tony McAleer, a former leader of the White Aryan Resistance and co-founder of Life After Hate, which helps people leave hate groups.
Parker felt lost without the camaraderie and rank structure of the military – and even more alone after his marriage collapsed and his wife left him.
Arie Kruglanski, a social psychologist at the University of Maryland who has studied extremists around the world, calls that dynamic the three N’s: need, narrative and network.
The “need” is a basic human “quest to matter, to be somebody, to have respect,” Kruglanski said.
In some cases, that need for significance leads people to good deeds; in others, it leads to violent means. The deciding factor, Kruglanski explained, is the narrative to which they are exposed.
“If you’re exposed to a narrative that the way to attain significance is by contributing to society and helping others, then you would follow that particular course of action,” Kruglanski said. “However, if you’re exposed to a narrative that tells you the way to do it is through violence, through fighting the enemy of your group or the enemy of your culture, then that is what you are going to do.”
The third “N” refers to network – the community that rewards behavior and dispenses adulation and recognition.
In the 1980s, when McAleer first joined a group of racist skinheads as a student in England, it took months, sometimes years, for someone to be radicalized. They had to order books and material promoting racist beliefs through the mail and look for places to meet in person. Now, someone like Roof, whose descent into hate began with a Google search, can binge on white nationalism through YouTube videos and online forums such as 4chan.
Once in the KKK, Parker was further indoctrinated through weekly “Klan class,” a Bible study that used Scripture to advance racist beliefs, and a Klan website and chat room.
He attended his first Klan rally in May 2012, months after his first contact. Soon, he had risen to the rank of grand dragon, a reward for recruiting other members.
After four years with the KKK, Parker broke away from the organization. Not because he had renounced racist beliefs but because of a woman, who is now his fiancee, whom he met at a cross-burning. The Klan disapproved of her because she associated with black people.
“I said, screw you,” Parker recalled. “That’s how I became a Nazi.”
The rise of ‘White Power’
In video footage, Parker stands at a lectern, wearing the black “battle dress” uniform of the National Socialist Movement, one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in this country. Behind him, Confederate flags rustle in the breeze.
He rails against Muslims, refugees and Mexican immigrants and vows to “stop at nothing” to wipe out those groups. He flings his arm out in a Sieg Heil salute and chants, “White Power.”
The NSM, which has roots in the original American Nazi Party, espouses violent anti-Jewish rhetoric and warns of a “white genocide.”
The country’s demographic changes are part of standard white supremacist talking points. Combined with easy online access to racist propaganda, it is what experts who track extremism call
“I don’t believe it’s the job of minorities to reform racists or to have to engage with their abusers.” Deeyah Khan filmmaker
a perfect formula for the spread of hate.
“When these talking points slip into political debate, it lends legitimacy to it, “said Keegan Hankes, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “People get sucked into the echo chamber.”
The alleged Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, who blamed Jews for the caravan of asylum seekers making its way north through Mexico, called the immigrants “invaders” – echoing descriptions used by President Donald Trump and by pundits on the Fox cable news network.
Parker, who said he did not hear racist beliefs when he was growing up in a churchgoing Baptist family outside Chicago, absorbed the hate disseminated by the NSM on its website and on a radio station run by the neo-Nazi group, where it promotes an “all-white ethno-state.”
He would let loose with racial slurs if someone from a different ethnicity bumped into him in a store. He was furious when the NSM changed its logo from a swastika to the Odal rune, another Nazi symbol the group thought would be more palatable to a mainstream audience.
And he couldn’t wait to get to Unite the Right in Charlottesville.
“I was so pumped up,” Parker said of the white nationalist rally in August 2017. “Everyone was saying that we were going to start a revolution.”
In reality, he realizes, they did not score a victory. Instead, a “bunch of angry white guys got locked up for a long time,” and an innocent woman was killed. “Her mother doesn’t have a daughter,” Parker said. “That is not cool. At all.”
The rally marked 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 who was targeted by racists, went to Charlottesville to try to understand what drove people into hate groups. She found “broken men” who were afraid – afraid of being marginalized by women and minorities, of being emasculated, of their own trauma and weakness.
She found Parker, whom she followed back to his home in Jacksonville, Florida. There, as Khan’s camera rolled, Parker made flyers with antiJewish slogans and swastikas that he tossed into front yards.
At first, he laughed and boasted about the hate act, then grew increasingly anxious as Khan questioned him about his actions. He listened as Khan read samples of racist e-mails she had received.
For Parker, who had often spewed the ugliest kind of anti-Muslim taunts, Khan’s compassion and respect were revelatory. Khan, who said she had previously tried to combat fascism with angry demonstrations and inyour-face retorts, described her approach as a necessary way to retain her own humanity.
“I don’t believe it’s the job of minorities to reform racists or to have to engage with their abusers,” Khan said. “When we’re confronted with people who hold such ugly views, who act out in such horrible and violent ways, it’s hard to hold onto your own humanity. But I refuse to become like them.”
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.
“What does this change?” she asked him. “What is this going to do for you moving forward?”
After Khan’s documentary was completed, Parker watched it over and over. By the fifth or sixth viewing, he saw himself and the NSM with new eyes. “I’m like, dude, I look stupid,” he said. “We all look so stupid. This is foolish.”
Shortly after that, Parker and his fiancee struck up a conversation with a neighbor – the pastor of an AfricanAmerican church. Like Khan, the neighbor treated the couple with kindness, inviting them to Sunday service.
They became regulars at the All Saints Holiness Church, where they were welcomed by the African-American congregation.
At first, Parker could not discard what he saw as the brotherhood of the NSM, and he planned to go to a rally in Georgia.
The night before, he prayed to the Holy Spirit for guidance – and decided not to attend the rally. Instead, he sent a resignation e-mail to the National Socialist Movement.
“I could not keep living that lifestyle of hate,” Parker said.
Just as Parker’s journey into the KKK and the NSM illustrates the pull of hate groups, his path out shows how extremists can be deradicalized.
“You have to basically reverse the process,” said Kruglanski, the social psychologist. “You’ve got to convince potential recruits that this movement will not bring significance. It only brings humiliation and ignominy.”
That counter-narrative must come not only from friends, Kruglanski said, but also from public officials and political leaders.
Parker, who rejects the message of hate he once promoted, found a new network. Almost a year after he marched as a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville, a few days before he began the process of having his white supremacist tattoos removed, he was baptized in All Saints Holiness Church.
He walked hand-in-hand with his black pastor into the Atlantic Ocean, dipped his head under the water and rose into a new life.