Leonard Zeskind, a dogged tracker of right-wing hate groups, who foresaw before almost anyone else that anti-immigrant ideologies would move to the mainstream of American politics, died on April 15 at his home in Kansas City, Mo. He was 75.
The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, Carol Smith, his wife, said.
Long before Donald J. Trump’s nativist rhetoric in 2023 accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the United States, Mr. Zeskind, a single-minded researcher, spent decades studying white nationalism, documenting how its leading voices had shifted their vitriol from Black Americans to nonwhite immigrants.
His 2009 book, “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream,” resulted from years of following contemporary Klansmen, neo-Nazis, militia members and other right-wing groups. His investigations earned him a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1998.
“For a nice Jewish boy, I’ve gone to more Klan rallies, neo-Nazi events and Posse Comitatus things than anybody should ever have to,” Mr. Zeskind said in 2018.
Recently, “Blood and Politics” was one of 381 books removed from the U.S. Naval Academy library in a purge of titles about racism and diversity ordered by the Trump administration.
One of Mr. Zeskind’s central themes was that before the 1960s, white supremacists fought to maintain the status quo of segregation, especially in the South. But after the era of civil rights victories, he maintained, white nationalists began to see themselves as an oppressed group, victims who needed to mount an insurgency against the establishment.
Their principal adversaries were immigrants from the developing world who were tilting the demographics of the United States away from earlier waves of Northern Europeans.
Despite the subtitle of Mr. Zeskind’s book, asserting that white nationalists had moved “from the margins to the mainstream,” many reviewers in 2009 were skeptical, treating his work as a backward look at a fringe movement led by racist crackpots whose day was over. The United States had just elected its first Black president, and extremist movements such as Christian Identity, which preached that white Christians were entitled to dominate government and society, seemed antiquated.
The Los Angeles Times waved away those hate groups as questing after “an impossible future.” NPR noted that “while a handful of bigots” were still grumbling about the South’s defeat in the Civil War and spreading conspiracies about Jews, “some 70 million others have, in a testament to the overwhelming tolerance of contemporary American society, gone ahead and elected Barack Obama president.”
Mr. Zeskind insisted that white nationalists should not be underestimated, and he was especially concerned about their influence on Republican politics.
He identified those influences in the candidacies of David Duke, a former Klan leader who won a majority of white voters when he ran for statewide office in Louisiana in 1990, and in Pat Buchanan, who fared well in G.O.P. presidential primaries in the 1990s, running on a platform of reducing immigration, opposing multiculturalism and stoking the culture wars.
Mr. Buchanan’s issues offered a template for Mr. Trump, who leveraged similar ideas to wrest control of the Republican Party from centrists.
Mr. Zeskind spoke about Mr. Trump in a 2018 town hall speech in Washington on the one-year anniversary of the march in Charlottesville, Va., by young white supremacists, whose zealotry the president had minimized. Mr. Zeskind said that Mr. Trump hadn’t created an upsurge in hatred of nonwhite people — he was a product of it.
“White supremacy and white privilege have been dominant elements of our society from the beginning,” he said. “It breeds a whole set of behaviors in people, and it should be deeply and widely discussed in every level of our society.”
Leonard Harold Zeskind was born on Nov. 14, 1949, in Baltimore, one of three sons of Stanley and Shirley (Berman) Zeskind. His parents, who ran a pension management business, moved the family to Miami when Leonard was 10. He graduated from Miami Senior High School, and then studied philosophy at the University of Florida and the University of Kansas, though he did not graduate.
Ms. Smith, his wife, said he was expelled from college in Kansas after taking part in a 1960s campus protest of the Reserve Officers Training Corps.
Mr. Zeskind earned a welding certificate from the Manual Career and Technical Center in Kansas City, and for 13 years worked as a welder and ironworker and on assembly lines. He was also a community organizer on Kansas City’s East Side, seeking to lower tensions between white working-class families and their Black neighbors.
He met Ms. Smith in 1979. She had grown up on a dairy farm in Kansas, and through her he became aware that during the farm crisis of the 1980s, a conspiracy movement known as Posse Comitatus had spread among economically ravaged farmers, who were convinced that they had been targeted by Jewish bankers and others because they were white Christians.
Mr. Zeskind was invited to speak about Posse Comitatus to a group of progressive farmers in Des Moines, and he mobilized Jewish groups nationally to counter the conspiracy movement.
From 1985 to 1994, he was the research director at the Center for Democratic Renewal (previously the National Anti-Klan Network). In 1983, he founded the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a study and watchdog group focused on hate groups.
Besides Ms. Smith, he is survived by a brother, Philip. His first marriage, to Elaine Cantrell, ended in divorce.
At the 2018 town hall meeting in Washington, Mr. Zeskind called on Democrats in Congress to vehemently oppose a little-noticed bill sponsored by Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, to end birthright citizenship, the post-Civil War guarantee that anyone born in the United States is a citizen. The cause had become a focus of anti-immigrant groups warning of threats to the “white race.”
“They want to smash up the 14th Amendment,” Mr. Zeskind said, addressing Democratic officials, “and I think you guys should scream about it.”
The following year, in an article in The New York Times about how Mr. King, a backbencher in his party, had anticipated many of Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant stances, the congressman said in an interview, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
Republican leaders in the House stripped Mr. King of his committee assignments over the remark, and he lost re-election in 2020.
But the issue did not die. One of President Trump’s first moves in January was an executive order to end birthright citizenship.
Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over Mr. Trump’s order.
