Lavin Exclusive Speaker
The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone wolves, but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. Historian, former CNN contributor, and author of Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the history of this movement, which consolidated decades ago around a potent sense of betrayal after the Vietnam War, and went on to make tragic headlines in Waco and Oklahoma City. With a sustained attention to the white supremacist violence of our past, we can avoid future attacks on American democracy.
An Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, Kathleen Belew specializes in the recent history of the United States, examining the long aftermath of warfare. She focuses on the broad themes of history of the present, looking at conservatism, race, gender, violence, and the meaning of war. Her book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America explores how white power activists wrought a cohesive social movement through a common story about warfare and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. Kathleen reveals how the movement united previously disparate Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi, skinhead, and other groups, carrying out escalating acts of violence that reached a crescendo in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City.
Her latest book, A Field Guide to White Supremacy, co-edited alongside Ramon A. Gutierrez, connects the dots between current events—acts of hate, racial violence, and racist law-making—and the deep, violent roots of white supremacy in this country. An essential read for legislators, educators, journalists, and activists, it offers the knowledge necessary to understand why America is what it’s like today.
As a speaker, Kathleen is lucid and compelling, showing us the common threads in white supremacist actions at every scale, from hate crimes and mass attacks to policy and law. Her talks reveal an unsavory, but necessary truth: white supremacy is a motivating force in many parts of American life. But by learning how this impacts us today, Kathleen says, we gain the tools to face it and forge a better future.
Kathleen has appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, AC 360 with Anderson Cooper, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered, among others. Her research features prominently in documentaries such as ABC’s Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us and Frontline’s Documenting Hate: New American Nazis.
In her forthcoming book Home, At the End of the World, she illuminates our apocalyptic era through the history of her native Colorado. She’ll reveal how the accumulation of crimes and dangerous ideologies exposed rifts in America’s social fabric—dramatically changing our national relationship with place, violence, and politics. When we understand the events and history that created these rifts, we are better equipped to protect the future of this country.
Kathleen has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Rutgers University. She has contributed essays to The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment and the New York Times bestseller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends about Our Past.