As a 19-year-old man killed 17 people at a Florida high school, the hosts of a white nationalist podcast named to mock the Holocaust coddled a white nationalist extremist college student who had boasted that he wanted “to be violent” and told the student he was being “targeted.”
Last week, students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) protested their university’s inaction after video was released of a known white supremacist student, Dan Kleve, seeming to endorse violence among neo-Nazis. In Newsweek, Michael Hayden reported:
Antifascist Action Nebraska, a local group that has developed a national reputation among activists for the relentlessness with which it tracks the movements of white supremacists, published a video of [Dan] Kleve speaking with other extremists on Google Hangout, and it went viral last week, further inflaming the sense of outrage about him.
“Just because I dress like a normie—a regular person—doesn’t mean I don’t love violence,” Kleve said to a group of peers regarding his ambitions as a white supremacist. “Trust me. I want to be violent. Trust me. Really violent.”
Kleve, who is fond of posting selfies with guns to social media, also said that “now is not the right time” for violence, and he has argued that the edited video took his words out of context—but the language spoke for itself to students who were already concerned about him and his demonstrable connections to neo-Nazi groups. Hundreds of students demanding Kleve’s expulsion gathered on campus grounds to stage a protest on Wednesday of last week, adding a physical presence to what was already a sustained campaign of activism.
Yesterday afternoon, violence unfolded at a high school in Parkland, Florida, as hosts of the white nationalist podcast “The Daily Shoah” featured Kleve in the first segment of the day’s episode. One of the podcast’s host introduced Kleve as “the poster child for when it’s OK to completely just harass somebody and try to ruin their lives on a day-to-day basis.”
Kleve told the hosts that he had a Google hangouts conversation “with a couple of skinheads” and had encouraged those “skinheads” to be “better representatives” for white people and not participate in meaningless violence. Kleve said that he “spoke irresponsibly” in an effort to confirm that he wasn’t “a pacifist,” which he said made his fellow students “chimp out”—a disgusting term used by racists that refers to instances when they believe black people reveal their “inner chimp.”
One host said he was angry that “some fucking Jew” complained about feeling unsafe because Kleve appeared to advocate racially motivated violence. Alt-right activist Mike “Enoch” Peinovich responded that “special snowflakes on these campuses” claim to feel unsafe in order to “extort attention, money and power,” before suggesting that Kleve do the same.
“In your case, it’s literally true. You’re being targeted and you feel unsafe,” Peinovich told Kleve.
Later in the podcast, Peinovich said Kleve is a guy who’s “literally being victimized, who’s literally being witch-hunted, who’s literally being targeted and who is literally unsafe.”
Peinovich warned that if white nationalists like himself and Kleve don’t “wake white people up” before “Jewish institutional power” takes over societal institutions like universities, “we could literally be put in camps and gassed and nobody would say a word.”
Update: This post originally noted that the suspected Florida shooter had “allegedly trained with a white supremacist group.” Local law enforcement has since cast doubt on those allegations, so we have removed the reference from this post.
