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LEONARD ZESKIND, WHO FORESAW THE RISE OF WHITE NATIONALISM, DIES AT
75  
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Trip Gabriel
April 24, 2025
The New York Times
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_ With “Blood and Politics,” Zeskind predicted that
anti-immigrant ideologies would become part of mainstream American
politics, and warned about downplaying the threat. _

Leonard Zeskind in 1992. Long before President Trump accused
immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of America, he studied white
nationalism, photo: Dorothea von Haeften, via Zeskind family

 

Leonard Zeskind, a dogged tracker of right-wing hate groups, who
foresaw before almost anyone else that anti-immigrant ideologies would
move to the mainstream of American politics, died on April 15 at his
home in Kansas City, Mo. He was 75.

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, Carol Smith, his
wife, said.

Long before Donald J. Trump’s nativist rhetoric
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2023 accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the United
States, Mr. Zeskind, a single-minded researcher, spent decades
studying white nationalism, documenting how its leading voices had
shifted their vitriol from Black Americans to nonwhite immigrants.

His 2009 book, “Blood and Politics: The History of the White
Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream,” resulted
from years of following contemporary Klansmen, neo-Nazis, militia
members and other right-wing groups. His investigations earned him a
MacArthur “genius grant” in 1998.

“For a nice Jewish boy, I’ve gone to more Klan rallies, neo-Nazi
events and Posse Comitatus things than anybody should ever have to,”
Mr. Zeskind said in 2018.

Recently, “Blood and Politics” was one of 381 books removed
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the U.S. Naval Academy library in a purge of titles about racism and
diversity ordered by the Trump administration.

One of Mr. Zeskind’s central themes was that before the 1960s, white
supremacists fought to maintain the status quo of segregation,
especially in the South. But after the era of civil rights victories,
he maintained, white nationalists began to see themselves as an
oppressed group, victims who needed to mount an insurgency against the
establishment.

Their principal adversaries were immigrants from the developing world
who were tilting the demographics of the United States away from
earlier waves of Northern Europeans.

Despite the subtitle of Mr. Zeskind’s book, asserting that white
nationalists had moved “from the margins to the mainstream,” many
reviewers in 2009 were skeptical, treating his work as a backward look
at a fringe movement led by racist crackpots whose day was over. The
United States had just elected its first Black president, and
extremist movements such as Christian Identity, which preached that
white Christians were entitled to dominate government and society,
seemed antiquated.

The Los Angeles Times waved away those hate groups as questing after
“an impossible future.” NPR noted that “while a handful of
bigots” were still grumbling about the South’s defeat in the Civil
War and spreading conspiracies about Jews, “some 70 million others
have, in a testament to the overwhelming tolerance of contemporary
American society, gone ahead and elected Barack Obama president.”

Mr. Zeskind insisted that white nationalists should not be
underestimated, and he was especially concerned about their influence
on Republican politics.

He identified those influences in the candidacies of David Duke, a
former Klan leader who won a majority of white voters when he ran for
statewide office in Louisiana in 1990, and in Pat Buchanan, who fared
well in G.O.P. presidential primaries in the 1990s, running on a
platform of reducing immigration, opposing multiculturalism and
stoking the culture wars.

Mr. Buchanan’s issues offered a template for Mr. Trump, who
leveraged similar ideas to wrest control of the Republican Party from
its establishment.

Mr. Zeskind spoke about Mr. Trump in a 2018 town hall speech
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Washington on the one-year anniversary of the march in
Charlottesville, Va., by young white supremacists, whose zealotry the
president had minimized. Mr. Zeskind said that Mr. Trump hadn’t
created an upsurge in hatred of nonwhite people — he was a product
of it.

“White supremacy and white privilege have been dominant elements of
our society from the beginning,” he said. “It breeds a whole set
of behaviors in people, and it should be deeply and widely discussed
in every level of our society.”

Leonard Harold Zeskind was born on Nov. 14, 1949, in Baltimore, one of
three sons of Stanley and Shirley (Berman) Zeskind. His parents, who
ran a pension management business, moved the family to Miami when
Leonard was 10. He graduated from Miami Senior High School, and then
studied philosophy at the University of Florida and the University of
Kansas, though he did not graduate.

Ms. Smith, his wife, said he was expelled from college in Kansas after
taking part in a 1960s campus protest of the Reserve Officers Training
Corps.

Mr. Zeskind earned a welding certificate from the Manual Career and
Technical Center in Kansas City, and for 13 years worked as a welder
and ironworker and on assembly lines. He was also a community
organizer on Kansas City’s East Side, seeking to lower tensions
between white working-class families and their Black neighbors.

He met Ms. Smith in 1979. She had grown up on a dairy farm in Kansas,
and through her he became aware that during the farm crisis of the
1980s, a conspiracy movement known as Posse Comitatus had spread among
economically ravaged farmers, who were convinced that they had been
targeted by Jewish bankers and others because they were white
Christians.

Mr. Zeskind was invited to speak about Posse Comitatus to a group of
progressive farmers in Des Moines, and he mobilized Jewish groups
nationally to counter the conspiracy movement.

From 1985 to 1994, he was the research director at the Center for
Democratic Renewal (previously the National Anti-Klan Network). In
1983, he founded the Institute for Research and Education on Human
Rights, a study and watchdog group focused on hate groups.

Besides Ms. Smith, he is survived by a brother, Philip. His first
marriage, to Elaine Cantrell, ended in divorce.

At the 2018 town hall meeting in Washington, Mr. Zeskind called on
Democrats in Congress to vehemently oppose a little-noticed bill
sponsored by Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, to end
birthright citizenship, the post-Civil War guarantee that anyone born
in the United States is a citizen. The cause had become a focus of
anti-immigrant groups warning of threats to the “white race.”

“They want to smash up the 14th Amendment,” Mr. Zeskind said,
addressing Democratic officials, “and I think you guys should scream
about it.”

Mr. Zeskind in 2019. “White supremacy and white privilege,” he
said, “have been dominant elements of our society from the
beginning.” Suzanne Corum-Rich

The following year, in an article in The New York Times
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how Mr. King, a backbencher in his party, had anticipated many of Mr.
Trump’s anti-immigrant stances, the congressman said in an
interview, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western
civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

Republican leaders in the House stripped
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King of his committee assignments over the remark, and he lost
re-election in 2020.

But the issue did not die. One of President Trump’s first moves in
January was an executive order to end birthright citizenship.

Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments
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Mr. Trump’s order.

_Trip Gabriel [[link removed]] is a Times
reporter on the Obituaries desk._

_Get the best of the New York Times
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* white nationalism
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* Racism
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* hate groups
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