Sisters in Hate

Journalist Seyward Darby takes the reader deep inside the lives of three women whose experience in the white nationalist movement pulls back the curtain on racial and political extremism in America today
Beginning in December 2016, journalist Seyward Darby began working to find, meet, and understand the women of the so-called "alt-right." With women dominating the formal resistance to the Trump administration, most notably through the Women's Marches, Darby wanted to know - why were women, at the same time, increasingly joining a movement that espouses racism and anti-feminism, and who are they?

Over the course of fourteen months, as Darby met, interviewed, and researched dozens of alt-right women, she began to piece together surprising conclusions that only raised more questions. Many of the radicalized women had come from the left, not the right; many consciously rejected a feminism they had previously espoused. Darby wondered: How do toxic rightwing ideas spread and become knitted into communities? How do people become swept up in movements that seek to limit their individual rights? And how does the involvement of women change the way we understand this movement?

Darby's book will seek to answer these questions through the story of three notable white nationalist women, all prominent voices in positions of power that struck Darby as capturing the complexities of the present-day movement. All three were born in 1979 to middle-class families, and later radicalized after 9/11. Recreating each woman's childhood and young adulthood, Darby will investigate the circumstances that would eventually lead to their radicalization, while weaving in relevant historical and political context to show how these women draw on and repackage ideas championed by the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party. At the same time, Darby s an untold history of women's vital roles in white nationalism over the last century. Finally, she asks how we can confront hate groups, and what it takes for a woman to leave.