White Supremacy and Childhood Trauma: The Case of David Lane

Drawing on a psychoanalytically informed psychobiography of David Lane, one of the ideological architects of the White supremacist movement, I aim to illuminate the link between his White supremacist ideology and his emotional experience in childhood with a brutalizing father. The most significant threat to America may lie within. When COVID-19 becomes a nightmarish memory of a ghastly cultural plague, I fear the social virus infecting America from White supremacists will continue to haunt, bewilder, and assault us. It is easy to miss the mark when thinking about White supremacists and homegrown extremists. Amid a raging culture war, people tend to be divided between White supremacist sympathizers who condone recent racism and violence and opponents who abhor it. When a significant segment of the population is viewed by some democrats as “deplorable,” it is tempting to advocate that we “exterminate the brutes,” as Kurtz said in Joseph Conrad’s (1950, p. 123) Heart of Darkness.