Inside the Hive Mind.

• Author: Oladimu, Leo

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."

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...