Promoting “white wellbeing”
Kohne is a sandy-haired, well-groomed man in his early 40s. Like Beirich, who adores political activists, considers him to be a key figure in the white nationalist streaming and podcasting scene.
He’s claimed on his shows that he’s been a “pro-white advocate” since he was a preteen in the early 1990s, but he seemingly started gaining recognition across the wider white nationalist world from 2017 to 2018 when he began livestreaming and uploading videos of himself monologuing, often while driving, to social media under the name NoWhiteGuilt. He eventually gave up driving and instead moved to a home studio, where he began to write books.
Little is known about his private life because, as he has explained in livestreams, he avoids sharing details to minimise his risk of being doxxed. However, according to the public records of two angry white nationalists, Barry and other researchers believe Kohne is a prison guard or at some point was, and that she was briefly a co-defendant in a lawsuit over the death of an inmate in 2006 asphyxiated. On procedural and technical grounds, Kohne and other prison guards who had been named as co-defendants were dismissed from the case.
He claims to have once spoken with neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce III, a physics professor who founded the National Alliance in 1974, which later became the country’s most powerful white supremacist organization before dying in 2002.
In 1978, Pierce also co-authored The Turner Diaries, a story about white nationalists who rebelled against the supposedly Jewish-controlled US government through attacks that escalate into a global war, a victory for the white nationalists, the execution of all nonwhite people, and white “race traitors” who were executed. Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, handed copies of the book out to friends. Elements of McVeigh’s attack directly mirrored the text.
In 2019, Kohne praised Pierce’s contributions to white people and mused about “how tall will]his] statue be when we regain our destiny”.
Kohne describes “antiwhitism” as the “greatest threat facing Western civilisation”. Antiwhite policies, according to him, include efforts to address historic racial injustices and embrace equity and diversity, which he sees as abandoning “excellence”, media coverage of violent white nationalist rallies, which he claims are staged by “antiwhite” interest groups to demonise white people and justify attacks against them, and depictions of interracial relationships, which he sees as promoting “miscegenation” and “white erasure”.
Kohne typically steers clear of slinging slurs at other races or calling for violence, in contrast to more stereotypical white nationalists. “No race is the enemy, and genetics don’t make you virtuous”, he argues. Members of other races can be “pro-white”, he adds, and thus allies, just as white people can promote “antiwhitism” and thus be foes.
Instead, he contends, white people should abandon their traditional institutions and abandon them in favor of what he sees as “white wellbeing.”
Nurturing a sense of “purpose, safety and happiness” within insular white communities, he believes, will create a wall of inner and communal strength that “antiwhite” forces cannot penetrate, helping white people reclaim the power he believes they’ve lost.
Those ideas have an audience: Kohne has amassed tens of thousands of followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Gab, Telegram, Spreaker and more niche right-wing platforms as well as several sites he operates. In 2018, he became a regular contributor to the weekly livestream show of Mark Collett, who founded , PA, the prominent British far-right group, in 2019. Kohne was given the invitation to speak at PA’s first major conference in 2020 by Collett.
Simi, who has followed Kohne’s career since about 2020 says “his approach to white nationalism is gaining salience” even if it’s unclear whether he is gaining prominence as a leader.
No White Guilt flyers, banners, and signs were already appearing in towns and at demonstrations all over the US by the year 2019. In 2022, a community of “White Wellbeing” advocacy groups emerged on social media, amplifying Kohne’s rhetoric. In 2023, an independent game-development studio, Dynostorm, announced it was working on a game reportedly based on Kohne’s ideas. Previews suggest that it involves players killing atheists, journalists and furries to save Western civilisation. And in 2024, his supporters established a Foundation for White Wellbeing to facilitate Kohne and his allies receiving money.
Kohne’s rise coincided with a wave of backlash against traditional, aggressive, outward-looking white nationalist groups and figures after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, one of the largest white nationalist gatherings in recent US history.
Members of a variety of far-right organizations gathered in the city to demand that a Confederate statue be removed. They also needed to unite their movements. Counterprotesters and reporters reportedly clashed violently with the rally.
The rally’s aftermath triggered a series of investigations into far-right groups, including RAM, and spurred social media platforms, online payment processors, web hosts and other services to ban far-right groups and individuals linked to them. These blows led white nationalists to re-evaluate how to organise and present themselves, explains Kurt Braddock, a professor at American University in Washington, DC, who studies white nationalist rhetoric.
Some resisted “accelerationism,” the notion that decentralized cells that commit racial violence without selling to each other out if their members are detained can cause enough unrest to create a power vacuum for white nationalists to fill. Prior to the attacks, the Christchurch mosque shooter made a reference to accelerationism in writings.
But many white nationalists turned inward, focusing on strengthening their own communities while making themselves seem innocuous, even acceptable, to outsiders. Kohne’s language exemplifies this trend, explains Barry, who’s monitored the far-right ideologue’s content for several years.
Source: Aljazeera
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