In prison, mess halls, cells, and jailhouse politics are all arranged along color lines. You are forced to one side or another. This would usually have put me, a person of mixed ancestry, on the black side of things.
But I grew up in the white, upper-middle class suburbs of Washington, D.C., and present as more white than black. Due to the way I look and speak, I found myself on the white side of the line when I went to prison for my first bid in New York, thirty years ago. Over several years submerged in violent prison racism, I went further and further across that line: I became a fascist.
During this time in state prison, I began reading Francis Parker Yockey. He was a twentieth-century American fascist whose authoritarian political philosophy seemed to leave enough room in it for someone like me. In Yockey’s magnum opus, Imperium, he studiously avoids reference to his cause as anything to do with whiteness, instead calling it “the West” or “Western culture.”
Self portrait by Leo Ọládímu
I see clear echoes of this today in fascist groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, who stop short of calling for a white nation, and even admit black and brown members to their ranks. The Proud Boys refer to themselves as “Western chauvinists” rather than white nationalists. Yet in every other respect these groups are waging cultural and ideological war against black and brown people in this country, and against progressives of all shades.
In practical terms, this Western-over-white thing is a distinction without a difference. Yockey, writing three years after Europe was soaked in blood to defeat the original Nazis, likely avoided an overtly racial fascism to keep from being painted with the Nazi brush.
Likewise, contemporary alt-righters have tailored their message to seem less noxious while advancing policy positions indistinguishable from those of explicitly pro-white organizations. They oppose immigration from non-Western countries, affirmative action, and multiculturalism, while advocating for Eurocentric school curricula, Euro-positive cultural policies, and the lionization of the police and military. They engage in violent activism, which was central to Yockey’s politics as well. But the violence committed by these groups is generally street-level, protest-oriented, and nonlethal, whereas what Francis Parker Yockey called for was war.
This finds voice today in at least one Nazi group, The Base. Founded by a military veteran who calls himself Norman Spear, The Base’s stated purpose is to link militant white nationalists with each other so they can plan and commit acts of terrorism against Jews, nonwhites, and other perceived enemies of the West. Their rhetoric has reminded me of the letters and conversations between myself and my erstwhile comrades in the neo-fascist movement twenty years ago.
It all came to a head in 2001, shortly after my release from New York state prison, when I was arrested by the feds. I was later convicted, along with my co-defendant, of conspiring to manufacture bombs they said were to be used against Jewish groups in Boston.
Thankfully, nothing actually happened. But the same can’t be said of similarly minded fascists in the Trump era. The massacres in Charleston, Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Christchurch, New Zealand, are exactly the kinds of actions called for by Norman Spear and The Base, and are not meaningfully different from what my former associates and I wanted to do. And yet the goal of these atrocities is not always to incite a “race war,” as Charleston shooter Dylann Roof proclaimed, but rather—however abominable—to employ one’s life against the perceived enemies of one’s people.
In my case, my co-defendant and I intended to be dead within a few months of our would-be terror spree. We predicated nothing on whether or not some mass uprising would result from it. Frankly, I doubt many of today’s fascists do either.
On the contrary, Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson wrote at length in his seminal work Sociobiology that self-sacrificial altruism occurs in all sorts of species on this planet, humans included. It’s within that context that I understand various kinds of political extremism. These are individuals acting in what they perceive to be the defense of their tribe, giving up their lives in the process—a lot like how a honey bee acts in defense of her hive.
When the honey bee stings you, she dies, whether this ends up helping the hive or not, and whether or not you even meant to harm the hive in the first place.
Leo Ọládímu is scheduled for release in 2026. He is the author of Beige: An Unlikely Trip Through America's Racial Obsession.