You Can’t Joke About That Anymore: Racist Humor, Violent Fantasy, and the Young Men of the 1970s Revolutionary Racist Right

In the waning years of the 1960s, neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups such as the American Nazi Party, the National Socialist White People’s Party, and the National Youth Alliance targeted young people as cadres for their ideologies of hate. Although each organization had unique goals and visions, these groups operated as communities for young boys and men to gather in spaces devoted to rejecting mainstream society, often with the deployment of racist and violent jokes within their activism. By the dawn of the 1970s, the young people who once served as shock troops for radical right organizations now took on leadership positions, and the identities within these far-right communities evolved beyond the tactics of disruption and racist agitation and towards explicit fantasies of white supremacist violence. Using David Duke’s White Youth Alliance and Joseph Tommasi’s National Socialist Liberation Front as case studies, this paper investigates how white supremacist youth activists in the 1970s emerged from the shadows of their adult predecessors and weaponized racist, antisemitic, and misogynistic humor beyond strategic community building and into their own unique political philosophies of revolutionary violence.