The Radicalization of Eric Atwood, The Neo-Nazi Tarot Reader.

In 2016, I met a white nationalist who had come to his ideology via Buddhism and New Age spirituality. He said he was launching an alt-right fraternity. Did I want to join?

The one time I got a tarot reading, it was from a professed Nazi in Manhattan Beach. Eric was his name. He sold solar panels and lived in a condo a few blocks from the water. We’d been chatting for a couple of months by then, having all kinds of vigorous debates. Long emails and calls from the road. One time he sat in the car park, after the gym, and we spoke for ninety minutes about White genocide. We disagreed but it was always civil and friendly. So, when he offered me a free reading, in order to create a scene for the story I was writing, it was a natural extension of the goodwill that had developed between us.

It was a miracle that we were speaking at all, of course, much less getting along. But 2016 was full of surprises, one of which came long before that watershed election. Remember when America’s Nazis decided to rebrand as the ‘alt-right’? Suddenly, a rare window opened up in which people like Eric agreed to meet with people like me. Nazis began appearing in magazines with the message: We’re not your old school Nazis with pointy hoods and we’re not angry skinheads either. We’re the Nazis-next-door. Young, hip and edgy. We shitpost, we meme, and we shop at Wholefoods just like you. It was a grand coming out, like Nazi Pride and they were loving the spotlight, flicking their hair and giving sassy quotes. No more shame or skulking in the shadows. They wanted to be accepted, like any other minority. We’re here, we hate queers, get used to it.

I found this all highly strange, but quite exciting too. Because Nazis are fascinating, the way they’ve come to embody evil in our culture, a warning to humanity about the monsters within us, and yet still they persist, from one generation to the next. How does this happen? Don’t they know they’re the baddies? This was my chance to find out. Not just to meet some Nazis and understand this “alt right” moment, but also to bond, find the connective tissue. Because if we could be friends it might just give them pause, slow their goose-step a tad. I’m not saying that I went in trying to single-handedly avert the race war, but I also didn’t rule it out, butterfly effect and all that. If Hitler had had more Brown friends growing up, things might have turned out differently. That was my theory. And anyway, isn’t it true that personal connection is more effective than argument if you want to change someone’s mind?

My enquiries began with a boomer segregationist named William Johnson of the American Freedom Party (AFP). We met for lunch a few times in the World Trade Center downtown, me and ‘old man Johnson’, who had an actual farm like the line in ‘Raspberry Beret’, although when I mentioned it, he had no idea what I was on about. He’s a folksy Mormon grandfather who works as a commercial lawyer for Japanese businesses in America. Every so often, as we discussed the failures of multiculturalism, he’d get a call, excuse himself, and launch into a startling torrent of Japanese. (White nationalists love Japan for its ethnoculture. Jared Taylor, the patrician head of American Renaissance is another Japanophile.)

It was Johnson who introduced me to Eric at an AFP strategy meeting at Taix, an old-timey French restaurant in Echo Park. I found myself at the table with six neo-Nazis as they discussed how to advance fascism in LA—astonishing access, by any standard, they even let me record the meeting. Of them all, the most animated was Eric. About six foot in his boxy court-appearance suit, he addressed me as “sir”, and gave a firm handshake. Looking me in the eye, he told me that he was open to speaking further. (Which often happens, by the way, people volunteer their stories. In fact, when someone wants to tell you their story, there’s almost nothing you can do to stop them.)

We began our back and forth. He became my ask-a-Nazi (Ashkenazi?) one stop shop, and we covered the gamut—White grievance, melting pots, who’s the best race, is America an idea or a people and, of course, “the Jews”. For as long as I can remember these were settled issues and, anyway, dissent could get you cancelled, more so in 2016 than today. So, it was bracing to address them again freely, en plein air. And Eric was a good faith debater, always happy to steel man the counter argument, and cheerful too, no matter how grim the topic. It didn’t dampen his spirits that White birth rates were plummeting and his people risked enslavement if current trends continued “just look at South Africa”. If anything, it energized him, like a fire and brimstone preacher. He had the gleam of a convert who had at long last seen the world for what it truly was—the scales had fallen from his eyes, he’d experienced the Damascene force of the red pill—and, as a result, he had found his calling, the cause for which he might die one day. Which is what young men crave in the end, more than money and power. They want their life to mean something. To adapt the Chris Hedges quote, “race war is a force that gives us meaning.”

“I’m telling you Sanjiv, you’ll be red pilled by the end of this,” he would laugh. “You’re not White, but you’re Aryan, we’ll give you a pass.”

Eric came to White nationalism through spirituality. Which is not the narrative I was expecting. There was no founding trauma, no bullying by black kids at school, or getting dumped by a Jewish girlfriend. What drove him to the swastika was an effort to fill a God-shaped hole in his life, a restless quest for truth and purpose.

He had a privileged upbringing in a “Pleasantville” town just outside of Chicago—White, Christian and conservative, small ‘c’. His mother was a bond broker and the main breadwinner while his father stayed home to look after Eric and his younger sister. Far from the tradwife set up he now advocates, but nevertheless, a happy home. In some ways Eric reminds me of Luigi, the alleged shooter of the United Healthcare CEO, another privileged White male, driven by ideology and grievance, and a willingness to sacrifice it all in order for his life to matter.

Teenage dreams of professional ice hockey were scuppered by a torn ACL. But while he was injured, he had a religious experience, the first of many. He decided to become an artist, specifically a musician: “I wanted to inspire people and share the passion and purpose that had awakened in me.”

He formed a skater punk band at college, and after graduation, he and a bandmate took their musical ambitions to Las Vegas where they wrote songs and supported themselves by playing poker and working in sales. Then one day, while he was working out in the shared gym of his condo building, an older Black man in his sixties—let’s call him Frank—sat beside him and introduced himself. “He was telling me things about myself,” Eric said, “It’s called doing a ‘cold read’. Very common with spiritual practitioners. Certain gifts are involved.”

It might seem a leap to go from New Age woo to “maybe Hitler was right.” But for Eric it was a natural transition.

Frank was a successful businessman, prominent in the African American spiritual community. He became Eric’s mentor, introducing him first to the Sufi mystic, G I Gurdjeff, author of The Fourth Way, and then to Japanese Buddhism, specifically the Soka Gakkai International temple, whose website looks like a commercial for racial diversity. Eric would visit Frank’s home for spiritual instruction and they would meditate and chant together. And through their friendship, Eric came to know Frank’s wife, a clinical hypnotherapist, whose work appealed to him. Perhaps he could be a healer too? After five years in Las Vegas, he moved to LA to study hypnotherapy and took a bunch of other New Age courses too—energy healing, past life regression, numerology, tarot, astrology. He was entering a new phase of his spiritual growth. When he wasn’t at college, he worked in a cosmic bookshop, performing psychic and tarot readings, as well as teaching the I-Ching. This went on for two years.

It might seem a leap, a sharp 180, to go from New Age woo to “maybe Hitler was right.” It certainly did to Frank who has since parted ways. But for Eric it was seamless, a natural transition. In fact, he found multiple bridges from one shore to the other, each one compounding the idea that this was indeed a crossing that had to be made.

For example, his interest in ancient wisdom prompted him to dig into the origins of these things, which in turn led him to the field of evolutionary psychology, the study of human behavior and cognition through a Darwinian lens. A favored discipline of “race realists” evolutionary psychology has produced a lot of research that supports their positions on in-group preferences, say, or racial competition, framing each one as natural and hard-wired, even optimal. To be clear, there’s plenty of research that points in other directions, but Eric was selecting for his bias, as we all do. He was shaping his own funnel. As a straight White man, he felt the sting of a rising woke culture which openly discriminated against him and attacked his history. He felt disoriented by the pace of cultural change around LGBTQ issues, and alarmed by White demographic decline in the West, with White people themselves hastening their own demise. The deeper he went, the more his Tetris pieces fell into place—his spiritual quest, his identity, his search for meaning. And he heard the call like a trumpet, to a cause greater than himself, one as righteous as any he could imagine—the cause expressed in the famous 14 words of White nationalism “to secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.” (For a Hollywood dramatization of the man that coined those words, David Lane, check out The Order, probably the best thing Jude Law has done.)

Eric left the spiritualist bookshop. New Age culture in LA was too feminine for his tastes anyway: “I wasn’t interested in fortune telling or counseling women about their love lives.” His spirituality began to drift too, from Eastern mysticism to Norse paganism, the “Odinist” community, which is also more masculine in focus, and more White. And he found the validation he needed here too, in Aryan Invasion Theory which argues that yoga and Indian mysticism actually had White origins, since it was early Europeans who settled the Indus Valley. This idea was concocted by the German Indologist Max Müller and seized upon by various Europeans to justify colonialism and it has since been thoroughly debunked through DNA tracing. But Eric latched onto it all the same. “Apparently the Hindu god Indra is a derivation of the Norse god Thor, because he is described throwing lightning and carrying a hammer,” he told me. “And other gods are described as being fair skinned with red or golden hair.”

Indo-Aryan mythology was another bridge from the New Age to the Alt-Right. And it delighted Eric that the Nazis of old had made these same connections over a century ago—the fact that he was inadvertently following their breadcrumbs only added to his conviction that he was genuinely onto something. In the late 19^th Century, as the Judeo-Christian foundations of German culture were weakening, it became popular to extol Eastern mysticism, and Nazis were especially keen on finding ancient validation for their project of supremacy. So, as Indo-German studies grew in popularity, with scholars making multiple trips to Tibet, Hitler’s top brass paid close attention, particularly the SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, who already knew his way around the Bhagavad Gita. Hence the adoption of the swastika, a Hindu symbol of good luck and prosperity, and the introduction of yoga and meditation—again by Himmler—to the officer class at the Wewelsburg castle that served as a kind of ground zero for Nazi esotericism.

Perhaps the Buddha is the perfect mask for Nazi aggression, the exact story that they need to tell themselves.

It’s hard to think about Nazis as yogis. The serenity of the Buddha somehow hand in hand with the violence of the Third Reich. And yet, it happened. And it’s happening again with Eric. Perhaps it’s the Buddhist part that’s jarring, and it’d be more palatable if the religion was Christianity or Islam. Or perhaps the passive nature of the Buddha is the perfect mask for Nazi aggression, the exact story that they need to tell themselves in order to appease their own consciences. Or perhaps it doesn’t matter which scriptures the Nazis dabbled in. They’d dishonor them all anyway. What matters is that there’s very little distance between “we have the superior truth” and “we are the superior people”.

The more you dig into the roots of this Indo-Aryan stuff, the more deranged things get. The Nazis also believed in World Ice Theory, whereby the original White Aryans were not descended from apes like the rest of us, but from divine sperm that arrived from outer space by meteor and spawned the first civilization of Supermen in Atlantis. And that’s who settled the Indus Valley.

I never found out if Eric believed the Atlantis Supermen theory. But he made it clear that he’d taken his own leap into madness. Because White pride alone won’t cut it—if you want to be a proper White nationalist, you also need to embrace the JQ, the Jewish Question, namely all those wild anti-semitic conspiracies, the blood libels, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the whole caboodle. After all, every mythic struggle requires an antagonist. For Eric, this leap came naturally; as a spiritualist he was primed. Conspiracy theory slots neatly into the void that religions leave behind. There’s the same leap of faith, the secret knowledge, the elixir. The same sweeping explanation for all of human history. And, as Richard Hofstader described in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, “in such a scheme, there is no random event, no coincidental fact. Everything is connected, and the forces that govern the world are known only to the true believers.”

Naturally, we argued about this stuff. The Rothschilds. The Shoah. The six million. The control of the media. AIPAC. Hollywood. We ticked them off. And though we didn’t see eye to eye, neither of us expected that we would. What mattered was that we were still talking, despite his having revealed his most noxious views. I hadn’t followed him down the rabbit hole of holocaust denial, though he was eager to take me—the red-pill is a secular religion, and its converts are as zealous as any wide-eyed missionary. But I hadn’t stormed off in disgust either, which reassured him that our working relationship, if that’s the term, was on a solid footing. Because what we did agree on, Eric and I, was that we should keep talking. About everything.

Eventually, I secured a commission from the Observer/Guardian for a story in the Sunday magazine. Eric was stoked. He was about to appear in one of the most famously liberal newspapers in the world as an antisemitic yogi, a segregationist Buddhist. Oh those Guardian readers didn’t know what they were in for…

I told him that the story required scenes, we couldn’t just yap on about White genocide, so we weighed a few options. One involved an alt-right fraternity he was starting called The Beach Goys, with a band of the same name, he just needed to find a drummer. They were already meeting occasionally on Rockweiler Beach, a few miles from his condo, where they held barbecues and burned books to trigger the libs. So I asked to join and become the first Brown member. And Eric loved the idea, it was absurd and ironic, it had troll energy, everything that the alt-right prided itself on. “Let me check with the Goys first, though,” he said. “They’re a bit cagey about you for obvious reasons. How about a tarot reading in the meantime? It’ll be great for your story: ‘My reading with the Hitler youth!’”

“How about a tarot reading? It’ll be great for your story: ‘My reading with the Hitler youth!’”

So we met at Pancho’s, one afternoon, a Mexican Cantina in Manhattan Beach. We found an isolated table out back and ordered a couple of Negra Modelos, which I couldn’t help but mention. What was wrong with the blonde ale?

He laughed. “I like my beer like I like my… no, I’m not going to say it!”

But as the reading began, I quickly realized that I simply wasn’t prepared for this. It’s quite a ride, a tarot reading, if you’ve never done one before. I’d always disdained it as little more than a branch of woo, a mild branch like astrology, but nonsense nonetheless. If I gave it a try, it would only be to better understand what it is that I don’t believe. Not a great attitude, I grant you. But as soon as the cards came out I found myself plunged into introspection, contemplating my life in quite a profound way. It was all so sudden. One minute I was joking about the beers, the next I was surveying my life in the mythical terms of the cards. Confronting my choices, my many mistakes. It was like being thrust into analysis from a standing start. Why was I here? What was my purpose? I was reeling.

Eric opted for a fairly standard arrangement, the 10 card Celtic Cross. And the deck he chose was fitting, all things considered—the Osho Zen Deck, created by an American disciple of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. If you saw the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, Rajneesh, aka Osho, was the Indian cult leader from central casting who established a free sex commune in Antelope, Oregon, amassed multiple allegations of child abuse, and had his underlings conduct a bio-terror attack against the locals. There was even a Hitler connection. In the criminal trial against the cult, one disciple testified that Rajneesh’s number two, his sociopathic henchwoman Ma Anand Sheela, played a tape recording of the guru saying that “actually Hitler was a great man…[he] had great vision.”

(And, what do you know, the original Nazis were also fans of tarot¹. Which makes their treatment of gypsies especially harsh. It was all part of their desperate campaign to harness the supernatural, and in the scheme of things, tarot was small beer. They were also into werewolves, vampires, Lucifer and the Holy Grail. Himmler founded the SS Witches Division while Goebbels employed dowsers to swing pendulums over maps to locate British warships. As the far right rises again, it’s worth remembering just how important magical thinking has always been to the fascist project. When Mussolini fell, the Nazis released a crack squad of astrologers, tarot readers and dowsers from the camps and set them to work. In fact, by 1943, a time of acute labor shortages, some 3,000 tarot-card readers were working in Berlin. Three thousand.)

The intimate dynamic between reader and seeker feels a little strange when the reader is a neo-Nazi.

I won’t go through every card here, but I’ll say this: they spoke to me. And they shed light on Eric’s story too. Cards like “Totality”, “The Dream” and “Letting Go” all seemed to resonate with us both, drawing uncanny parallels between us. Often, Eric’s interpretations of the cards had such a piercing relevance to his own life, that it felt like he was talking to himself. With the card “Aloneness” for instance, featuring a solitary monk in the night, Eric had a lot to say.

“No one can hold your hand and pull you along to self-discovery. To discover your connection with the universe and your purpose in life you have to test your limits and go through a pilgrimage. Oftentimes people only do that when they have no other option, because they are at a very low point in their life and what they've been doing isn't working or they've had a tremendous feeling of loss or pain or suffering. So they need a transcendent journey to give them perspective.”

Another thing about the experience of a reading: it creates an oddly intimate dynamic between reader and seeker. Which feels a little strange when the reader is a neo-Nazi. Because the cards call for reflection and vulnerability, but are you meant to feel vulnerable around Nazis? Or grateful, for that matter? And yet both were true. Because Eric was a generous and insightful reader, he cited Nietzsche and Zen parables, sparking all kinds of epiphanettes that I didn’t dare share out loud. More than once, I had to remind myself: You’re here to interview him, not bare your soul. But there’s also an aspect of a reading in which both parties are invited to believe in magic together, which in itself constitutes a kind of closeness. Not that I saw Eric as some kind of soothsayer—his role was to reveal and explain the cards, nothing more. But when he shuffled at the beginning, it fell to me to tell him when to stop . And in this small way I could influence my reading via various mystical forces like the power of intention and the energetic connection between reader and seeker.

“This reading is up to you,” Eric said, shuffling away. “You’re going to choose the perfect cards. All I'm doing is trying to empower you to affect change in your life, to achieve your goals and help you evolve.”

The Observer story came out in October. Big picture of Eric at home, sitting in a meditative half lotus, with a Norse Sun Cross draped behind him. The headline read: “Call me a racist, but don’t say I’m a Buddhist.” (He insisted on being identified as an Odinist). I wasn’t there for the shoot, Eric had never invited me to his home. But I put him in touch with the (White) photographer and they made their own arrangements. It’s an arresting picture.

I was happy with the piece too, in the end, even though it didn’t turn out as planned. For one thing, I was only paid £900, despite six months of reporting and unprecedented access etc. The Observer loves to opine about corporate exploitation while underpaying their freelancers. Plus ça change. But I didn’t get to wrestle with Eric’s views either. The editor wanted a lighter touch. “Have more fun with it,” he said, which was typical of alt-right coverage at the time. We weren’t meant to take Nazis seriously, but rather to mock them gently as part of the general clown show of the Trump candidacy, which was bound to fail, as everyone knew. In fact, the more we exposed deplorables like Eric, the more certain a Hillary victory would be. Remember those days?

At the time, I wasn’t fussed about all this because I intended to publish more about Eric and his friends. At least one piece, perhaps two, if Eric was game. And he seemed to be. He loved the Observer piece, “very fair” he called it, though the vitriolic comment section rattled him a bit. And we already had plans for the next one—I’d be joining The Beach Goys this time, and Eric was busy trying to persuade the others. He set up a meeting with a couple of the ‘Goys’ at The King’s Head pub in Santa Monica: “Matt” and “Nathan”, fake names both. And we got along just fine. Jousting about the evolutionary roots of racism, whether or not I counted as English. We were going to go shoot guns together. They said I could come to the next cookout. I was in. Things were going so well that a couple of weeks later, on election night, just as the Trump victory was announced, they called me, laughing their asses off. “Oh poor Sanjeev, are you drowning in liberal tears right now? Do you need support??

But that second story never happened.

On January 20^th, the inauguration, Richard Spencer, the most prominent alt right voice of the time, was giving an interview to camera in Washington DC, when a member of Antifa just walked up and thumped him. It became an instant meme. A Twitter poll. A hot take. Is it OK to punch Nazis, or should we respect their freedom of speech? Is Antifa stooping to their level or speaking the only language that fascists understand? And the response was overwhelming—everyone was pro-punching. Gone were the days of the old ACLU who fought to let Nazis march at Skokie in Illinois. That was 1977. Forty years later, as Trump took office, liberals were angry and flexing. The media’s “have fun with it” coverage of the alt right was now being sharply criticized, and the movement to deplatform pro-Trump voices kicked up a gear. Make Nazis Scared Again became the new slogan.

It worked. Eric and the Beach Goys backed out of all future stories. They were afraid. I couldn’t blame them.

I stayed in touch with Eric for a couple more months. He was still up for doing the story but there was no convincing the others anymore. Shit was getting real. But Eric seemed to welcome the escalation. His Beach Goys band was coming together, they’d found a drummer at last, and he was writing nationalist songs. In his last email to me, our last communication in fact, he could scarcely have sounded more positive. “Life is going great. Work is great,” he wrote. “I’d love to get a beer sometime. I have a very clear vision for a next generation White Nationalism band which gives voice to this movement in a way that captures the unique place of the alt right in our zeitgeist.”

That was in April. Just short of four months later, Charlottesville happened, the infamous Unite The Right rally that devolved into violence and the murder of Heather Heyer. I didn’t know it for a fact, but I felt sure that Eric was somehow involved and that this was why he’d cut off contact—because of some order from on high to end communication with reporters, so as to protect the rally, the biggest gathering of white nationalists in our lifetime.

I got confirmation of sorts a few years later in 2022, when Eric was doxxed by PacAntifa, the Pacific Antifascist Research Collective. Dedicated to exposing White nationalists on the west coast, PacAntifa had studied the Charlottesville footage and identified Eric, the guy from my Observer article. They used the picture to geolocate Eric’s house address, which yielded his full name, Eric Lyle Atwood. And they posted the following page, outing him as a “violent and dangerous racist.”

Here’s Eric at Charlottesville, marching through the University of Virginia.

Here he is a day later, preparing for battle.

He’s the one at the back with his hand strapped in athletic tape. The man out front with the pipe is Ben Daley, and the man behind him with the back-to-front red baseball cap, is Michael Miselis, both of whom plead guilty to “conspiracy to riot” in 2019, receiving sentences of between 2 and 3 years in prison. I remember Miselis as “Nathan” from the King’s Head and from the American Freedom Party meeting at Taix back at the start. Whether Eric was also arrested and charged is not clear.

I don’t want to sound naive here, but the Eric I knew wasn’t a violent guy. We all have our demons, and I’m a journalist, he wasn’t about to reveal them to me. But I’ve met hard men before and that just wasn’t Eric. He was a reader. A seeker. Open and trusting. A segregationist, sure, and an anti-semite, but also generous in spirit and intellectually curious. People are complicated.

I believe he was reachable. And yes, I failed in that regard, I didn’t deradicalize him as I’d secretly hoped. Sometimes I think about “Frank”, his Black mentor in Las Vegas, who must have also tried to sway Eric from the path he was on—if I could contact Frank, we’d have a lot to talk about. But even though we failed, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Or that it shouldn’t be tried. Besides, I might yet have got there if we could have just kept talking. In other words, if talking to Nazis was as acceptable as punching them.

One of the ironies of this time, was that Eric and I could argue away about all kinds of inflammatory topics, respectfully disagree and move on, while almost everyone else I knew, liberals all, was terrified to speak openly about the sweeping social changes that were taking place. The woke left had instilled such fear at that time. It sounds absurd but I felt freer speaking with an actual fascist than with my liberal neighbors.

I also learned that extremists are more relatable than one might think. Eric’s hopes and anxieties all made sense to me. I too want to feel at home in my country, to find meaning and purpose, to retain some measure of status. Doesn’t everyone? I realize that I’m expressing empathy for a Nazi here, which is risky in this climate, when the Nazi threat feels so near at hand. But empathy is how the conversation begins, and conversation is our best hope here. As this story shows, it’s when the talking stops that the trouble starts.

So here’s my plea—let’s keep talking to neo-Nazis like Eric. Of all the sins of the wokeness, the most egregious may be the policy of silencing people who have the “wrong opinions”, whether by cancellation, deplatforming or just ending the conversation once and for all. Because opinions can change if we engage in good faith. We are all of us plastic and persuadable. And the more incendiary the opinion, the more urgent it becomes to confront it in the open, not to suppress it, or punch it in the face.

I applaud Substack for standing firm when it came under fire for “platforming” Nazis. No question, these issues are complicated and lines must be drawn—we absolutely need limits for our tolerance for the intolerant. But with fascism on the rise, Trump back in the saddle and “Roman salutes” making headlines yet again, isn’t it time we accepted that suppression didn’t work? We are in for some hard times, but whatever world emerges from the coming trials, we will have to share it with people like Eric. It’ll go better if we can talk to each other.

As I look back, I see the tarot reading as probably my best shot at nudging Eric onto a more peaceful path. We were on the same side that afternoon, because that’s what the Tarot teaches us—that at our core we are all human, extremists or otherwise. And the card that I think about now more than ever is “Moment to Moment”, in which a man calmly crosses a river, going from one stepping stone to the next, despite a swirling psychedelic world around him.

Eric seized upon it immediately. Between this and “Aloneness” a journeyman theme was emerging. And what was Eric if not a journeyman like me?

“He’s got his eyes closed and his hands out,” he said. “He’s keeping his balance while there’s confusion all around him. But we know that certainty is always an illusion. To be a spiritual adventurer, you need to be comfortable in the confusion. But he is at peace. He knows that all he has to do is take one step at a time. The steps are all laid out. It’s the earth element, you can trust it.”

That reading felt like a stepping stone in both of our stories. He moved onto Charlottesville, to violence. But was this just another stone in his journey? Could he be passing through white nationalism as part of his larger spiritual pilgrimage?

Eric, if you’re reading this. Give me a call.

1. For more on the Nazi obsession with the “supernatural imaginary”, ready Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich