“Do you have a different number?”
“There are several different accounting methods. Just as there are different ways to interpret the same historical events. Our research is continuing, of course, but right now we’re at just under eight hundred twenty thousand confirmed Jewish dead.”
“Low, isn’t it?”
She held my gaze and pursed her lips. She wore diamond, ruby, and sapphire earrings to match the bracelet. She looked like a Fourth of July magazine cover.
“Low?” she asked. “Well, I’ll admit that after eighty years of academic, governmental, and Zionist brainwashing aimed at people like you and me, it can be easy to believe so. But if that number offends you... like I said, we’re finding out new things all the time.”
“No offense at all,” I said. “I studied some history in college when I wasn’t surfing. Only got a BS, but I did learn that the past is constantly being revised. It’s human nature. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong.”
“That’s why we exist,” she said with a small smile. “To get it right.”
“I should have seen that one coming.”
“Here’s a flyer and a link to us,” she said. “We do important work. We are not the Hysterical Review, as lib pundits like to say. We do not hide anything. Not all conservatives are low-IQ knuckle-draggers like some of these people. Come to our site. Listen and learn. We accept Bitcoin donations and good American greenbacks.”
“You’re persuasive. But save the paper.”
She gave me a nod and a look that concluded she couldn’t help me, sighed, and put the flyer back on the table.
I continued my blue tent tour: The Daily Stormer, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, The Right Stuff, Western Hammerskins, Patriot Front, Soldiers of Odin — LA/Ventura, Crew 38, Alamo Christian Foundation, Conservative’s Forum, Jihad Watch of Sherman Oaks, Counter Jihad Coalition of Santa Monica, Traditional Values Coalition of Anaheim, ACT for America, San Diegans for Secure Borders.
Most of the reps were confident and well rehearsed in their pitches and opinions. There were a few knuckle-draggers, as Laurel had pointed out, but most of the White Power Hour presenters were young and well-groomed. They looked like normies themselves until they opened their mouths.
I wandered through a labyrinth of voices:
Martin Lucifer Coon was a fraud and a degenerate...
At the core of Jewish Identity is a malevolent supremacy... The root of the kike problem is of course sexual inferiority...
Stay in your own nations, we don’t want you here...
Kyle Odysseus says it the best — Islam isn’t just a religion, it’s an economic, judicial, and military system, too...
Whites must be allowed to take their own side in their affairs...
Racism has had its day. It’s over. The remaining chasms between blacks and whites are natural, biological, and can never be narrowed...
38
Alfred Battle took the stage just before one. The crowd overflowed the shade of the white tent, leaving scores of people standing in the muggy monsoonal heat of the afternoon. I found shade under the less-crowded red tent just as a barrage of heavy raindrops hit the canvas above me and sent a ripple of surprise through the unprotected rally crowd. A moment later it stopped.
Battle stood at the lectern in his heavy brown suit, silver-haired and gaunt. He looked uneasy. Said a few words about the white race ceasing to be the dominant race on earth and likely extinct within a century, perhaps two. This would be a “bleak and self-inflicted catastrophe.” And if you didn’t believe him, read his book.
Next, he had some advice for his beleaguered race.
“As my writings explain,” he said, “our solution is simple in concept, clear in design, and certain to be effective. SNR.”
I perked up. At last: the mysterious initials explained.
“Segregate, Nullify, Remove. The inferior. The infidel. The dark and savage, the addicted and addled, the perverted, the weak and the malformed. And so, too, their white enablers, these beautiful children of privilege and Hollywood and Satan. Segregate them. Nullify them. Remove them. Also.”
The applause was polite. He shuffled his papers nervously until the applause trailed off.
“But I am an old man,” said Battle. “Listen now to tomorrow. God bless you all, and bless this once great nation.”
Odysseus looked thirty. Wavy brown hair and a boy’s face. Sleek in a trim black suit and a skinny black tie.
“It’s difficult to retake and redirect the modern narrative,” he said. A clear voice with a measured tone. “But we’re going to have to. I’m Kyle Odysseus, a middle-class Orange County, California, boy. My real last name is Smith. But to best redirect one’s self, sometimes you need to rename yourself. An ontological fine point, but nonetheless true. We become what we imagine. When I got out of college I traveled the world. I didn’t just go to the places people think are pretty or important. I saw it all. I went through thousands of dollars and six pairs of boots. And when I came back I felt like Odysseus returning home from Troy. Kind of tired and pissed off. And like him, when I looked around at my quaint suburban home and tried to recognize the loyal girl who used to be my friend and partner, I was appalled. She had surrendered to sloth and narcissism. I saw the self-absorbed, money-stunned drones who used to be my friends, openly consorting with the black and the brown and the swarthy and the pederasts and the mad. I wanted to slaughter them all. Are you people listening? Do you even fucking hear what I’m saying?”
Whistles and war whoops.
“And slaughter them we must. With their own swords. Let’s start with the federal government of the United States of America...”
While Kyle Odysseus started in on “our hypocritically egalitarian one-party system,” I looked out past the crowd at the old yellow house falling to the ivy and a swimming pool with the patio furniture covered and the big sloping orange grove that continued all the way down the hillside to the road. I saw the cops turning cars away. The protesters were still at it. The old woman with the hat and gloves stooped out of sight for a moment, then rose again amid the scraggly trees, looking up. The rain again thundered into the tent top above me for a few seconds, then again stopped.
I sidled out the back, meandered down to the parking area like a disappointed rallygoer, then cut downslope and into the dripping orange grove. Slipped my sunglasses into my shirt pocket.
Midway to the woman, I took cover under a tree and waited to see if I’d been followed. Raindrops dripped from the trees, silver in the gray day. A distant blaze of lightning far in the south. A grumble of thunder. No one behind me. All fascinated by Kyle Smith, aka Kyle Odysseus, aka a voice for white America. I turned and saw the woman putting something into a white bucket.
I sidestepped down the hill toward her, calling out.
“Marie? Marie Knippermeir?”
She looked at me and set down the bucket. Put her white-gloved hands on her hips as I approached.
“Marie?”
“Yes?”
I took off my hat in a show of manners. “I was hoping I’d find you here. I’m Blake Hopper, with the Family Values Coalition, up in Fallbrook. One of Alfred’s groups.”