That Time that I was Accidentally Friends with a White Supremacist

So you guys, here's a thing that's happened this summer:

I'm part of this super low-key homeschool group in my town--for those of you playing the home game, it's the nice one, not the one with the mean moms who bullied me for several years. This nice homeschool group trends more hippy than not, with the kind of people who drink homemade kefir out of jars and pass around grain-free snack bars and form nature co-ops. We used to have an afternoon playgroup every week. We've gone on camping trips together. I chip in on the natural foods group buy sometimes. I love them.

One of the moms in this group was among the hippiest of them all. She once lovingly explained to me why tampons are bad. She sometimes brought homemade jello--like HOMEMADE jello, made with, like, organic gelatin and applesauce and coconut oil, and she ate it out of a Mason jar. On a hike, she gamely pretended to consult with me about tree identification via bark, politely ignoring the obvious fact that I obviously cannot identify any tree beyond if it's a maple or an oak or a sycamore, and for sure not by its bark. We were Facebook friends, and I was really into all the photos that she posted of her sheep and the stuff that she wove on her honest-to-god loom. On one camping trip, she taught my kid how to use a drop spindle. I really liked her, you guys. I really, really liked her.

She and her husband are farmers, because, you know, of course they are, and they sell at some of our local farmer's markets. That's not important right this second, but hold onto it.

Okay, so a couple of months ago I was scrolling Facebook, as you do, and my friend had vaguebooked some weird post about people who were spreading lies about her. I had no idea what she was talking about, which is generally the point of vaguebooking, but in the comments to her post, someone commiserated with her and said it was awful, all those awful things people were saying about her in our town's local Facebook group.

Does your town have one of those? A sort of indie little Facebook group where people ask for recommendations of good carpenters and bitch about the road construction and sometimes gossip? Our town has two--an official one and a sort of anti-official one for the snarky people who can't say anything nice. I swear that I've heard more breaking news on these groups that later ends up in the newspaper! I also know all the good carpenters, and where to get a watch fixed, and that the McDonald's by the highway always tells people that they're out of soft-serve when really they just don't want to get the machine fixed.

So OBVIOUSLY I immediately clicked onto that Facebook group and scrolled down to see who was talking trash about this friend, and indeed, people were talking trash about her!

Okay, here's another tangent: last year, in the county over from mine, a guy committed a hate crime by vandalizing a synagogue. He'd originally planned to burn it down, and still had bomb-making supplies in his car when he was arrested. His trial recently happened, and as part of it the transcript of the FBI interview was released, and on page 70ish of this interview transcript he gives the first names of two people who were members of a white nationalist hate group, Identity Evropa. He claims that these people had dinner with him in a local diner, and within a couple of days of that he'd used a money order to pay dues and join this group. He's pretty disjointed, about what you'd expect, but there's a pretty strong implication that these people who met with him are the ones who recruited him into this hate group, not long before he became radicalized enough to commit an actual hate crime.

And now we're back to the story: in his interview, he gave the first names of these people he met with, the members of Identity Evropa, and their first names matched the first names of my friend and her husband. People were claiming that they WERE these people, and were trashing them and telling people not to buy produce from them and that they should be banned from the farmer's market, etc.

I've had mean lies spread about me before, and it sucks, so I was loaded for bear at this point, and I immediately went into research mode. It shouldn't be that hard to prove that my friend wasn't the person named in the FBI transcript, and shame on the FBI for making it so easy for someone to be falsely accused like that.

Step 1: I found the FBI transcript for myself, and read it for myself. And yes, the names did match, and the location that he gave for their meetup was feasible. BUT in the interview, he also gave the woman's handle that she used when she posted on the Discord message board associated with Identity Evropa. So...

Step 2: I Googled that handle and Discord, and the first hit was Unicorn Riot, a non-profit that specifically worked to obtain and post the messages from neo-Nazi Discord chat boards. You can search this by Discord handle, and doing so gives you all the leaked posts from that specific handle. There's no context to tell you what the user is replying to, so all you really have to go by are what that user says.

I read through all of the posts that this specific user posted, looking for clues to help me prove that this person was not my friend. Except that all of the identifying information that she gave did line up--not enough to definitively identify her, but enough that, frustratingly, I couldn't definitively say it wasn't her, either. She posted pictures of her sheep. My friend has sheep. She posted a picture of a weaving that she'd done. My friend weaves. She posted the sexes and ages of her children. My friend has children of those ages and sexes. She posted a picture of her newborn. My friend's baby was born then. She posted about homeschooling. My friend homeschools.

At some point, although I was still looking for identification details that would prove that this Discord user wasn't my friend, I went back and also started taking screenshots of the upsetting, racist things that the Discord user was posting. She posted about taking the gentle children's world history curriculum, Story of the World, and supplementing it for her children with another book that purports to be a history just of white people, and is used as a call to arms by a LOT of white supremacists. She derided a particular self-help book as "anti-white." She claimed that there was no such thing as a Native American genocide, and that Native Americans could be prospering but "do not today for other reasons." She wrote these words: "Any Whites who have spent time living in a neighborhood or attending a school with a non-white majority know the strife that Whites endure."

You see where this is going, right?

But still, it wasn't definitive that this racist Discord user spewing upsetting, racist things was my friend, I mean, it wasn't definitive to me at the time. Until--and I don't remember if I found this link on the Discord leaks, or if it was another comment on the Facebook group that gave it to me--but either way, I learned that this person had a short-lived YouTube series. In it, she goes by her Discord handle, and tells us about plantain and yarrow and the benefits of bone broth.

Step 3: I clicked on the YouTube channel and played the first video, the one on yarrow. Twenty-two seconds in, my friend's voice says, "Greetings from the homestead. I'm Volkmom." Two minutes and 45 seconds in, she informs me that "race is sacred."

And that's it. She basically handed me the clearest way to identify her--I'd know her voice anywhere.

The Facebook gossip was absolutely correct. This Discord user really wasn't my friend, but only because I can't be friends with someone whose worldview is not just wrong, but abhorrently wrong. I feel sick to my stomach, wondering why she hid this about herself, why I could be so fond of someone who had such a rotten heart. She was one of my aspirational Facebook friends, you know those ones who you read their Facebook posts and you're all, "Gee, I wish I wanted to install a hoop garden and keep sheep! Aww, look at how pastoral they all are, sitting in the sun and eating blackberries!" My kids know her. My kids like her! I've now given my children memories of hanging out at the lake with a white supremacist.

I thought she was so great, you guys.

Unfortunately, this wasn't one of those things where everyone in the know could simply be all, "Hey did you know so-and-so is basically a neo-Nazi? We're not going to hang out with them again, okay? Okay!" That's because remember when I told you to hang onto the knowledge that this woman and her husband sell at the farmer's market?

They sell at the farmer's market. And this fact is blowing up my town.

My town apparently can't legally evict them, although another farmer's market, run not by the city but as a non-profit, did. The mayor says that sure, he super hates white supremacy, but the town also arrested a peaceful protester who was simply standing next to their booth holding a sign saying she'd been harassed by them. The town makes all of the anti-racism protesters stand outside the farmer's market, but the creepy dudes with the visible knives, who literally told a reporter that they were Three Percenters--you know, the actual right-wing militia that was active at the Charlottesville rally? Yeah, they get to hang out in front of their booth. On Saturday, less than half an hour after the peaceful protester was arrested, my kids and I walked past their booth and past a whole group of those guys laughing and chatting in front of it. I'd have had to push past them if I wanted to approach the booth. Most people were pretending like they didn't exist, but plenty of people were squeezing past to deliberately buy from them, as well.

It has been weeks and weeks of this mess, there's been a conflict there for the past two Saturdays, at least. And then on Monday, driving the big kid to horseback riding, I heard on the radio the breaking news that the city is SUSPENDING THE ENTIRE FARMER'S MARKET. They say that they're suspending it for two weeks, but who knows?

Are a bunch of farmers and producers going to lose a lot of money? For sure. The farmer's market here is bustling, even when white supremacists and their pet right-wing militias scare away a bunch of potential customers.

Are they saving us from an incident in which people are going to get seriously hurt? It's starting to seem like it. I mean, I guess? If arresting peaceful protesters but letting avowed Three Percenters stand armed in the exact same spot is honestly the best that the city can do to keep its people safe at a farmer's market, of all places, then sure, I guess, just shut the damn thing down and we'll all be racist or not quietly inside our own homes.

You guys, I am not built for the soul-searching and internal conflict and Feelings that this has made me feel. The weird guilt that I was accidentally friends with a white supremacist. The upset that I really liked her, and the worry that maybe I should talk to her and tell her--I don't even know, that racism isn't okay?--and I'm doing the wrong thing by avoiding her, instead. Or should I join the protesters? I want to hate her and demonize her, but man, I can't get the picture out of my head of hanging out around a campfire with her, listening to her and the other hippy moms talking about orgone boxes (WHICH ARE ACTUALLY A THING AND NOW I HAVE TO GO RESEARCH THEM AGAIN TO MAKE SURE THEY'RE NOT RACIST, BECAUSE MY LIFE HAS BECOME ME QUESTIONING ALL OF MY MEMORIES), and how she was really nice and I liked her.

And who else do I know who's secretly racist? That's the thing. I don't trust my pleasant memories of pleasant times anymore. I don't trust all of my friends anymore. I don't trust myself to know who's a great person and who's a really, really, really terrible person.

ANYWAY... Apologies for the last few paragraphs basically being a bonkers, incoherent rant. I don't really have any summing up thing to say, or, like, some kind of profound insight or whatever. Mostly, I just wanted to tell you about this crappy thing that's been happening and how I'm feeling super crappy about it.

If you, too, were ever accidentally friends with a white supremacist for a while, let me know and we can start a club!