Reading Scholars Reading Fascists Reading Shakespeare with Drs. Chloe Ahmann and Devin Proctor
Expert analysis on the authorizing role of literature in contemporary fascist movements, whose leaders are just as likely to write books as they are to ban them. Drs. Ahmann and Proctor’s article, “Reading Fascists Reading Shakespeare: Literary Populism in White Power Fiction,” is forthcoming in Public Culture.
February 2025
TT: Please tell us who Harold Covington was and describe his relationship to the Northwest Front separatist movement.
Harold Covington was an active figure in the American White power movement from the 1970s into the 2010s. After a childhood as the self-avowed “school fascist” in his North Carolina hometown, he joined the National Socialist White People’s Party (formerly the American Nazi Party) and moved to South Africa to fight for “Rhodesian Independence,” before being deported for his activism. Back in the United States, he participated in the 1979 “Greensboro Massacre,” which left five people dead, and then became leader of the National Socialist Party of America—and nearly North Carolina’s Republican candidate for attorney general in 1980. In the mid 1990s, Covington established a website on the early Internet under the pseudonym “Winston Smith” (the protagonist from 1984). He continued circulating White power and Holocaust denial narratives online for the next decade before founding the Northwest Front in 2008.
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The Northwest Front seeks to prepare “racially aware” White people for a near-future race war through which, per Covington, they will secure a section of the Pacific Northwest to establish a White ethnostate. The movement’s website tries to lay the groundwork for that future, providing materials to aid in the “relocation” of the “racially conscious White community” of the United States to the “Northwest Homeland” in anticipation of the impending conflict, and provisional governing documents like a draft constitution. Covington died in 2018, but the site has passed hands and is still regularly updated with podcasts, promotional materials, and guides for on-the-ground action.
TT: How does this movement make use of the “Western canon,” particularly Shakespeare?
In addition to relocation materials, podcasts, and general White power talking points, the website for the Northwest Front includes a capacious library of PDFs. That library hosts works of speculative fiction by Covington himself, alongside a range of fiction by other authors and a spate of philosophical, self-help, and prepper books. Through this curation of texts, Covington both creates an imagined future and prepares his comrades for that future. But the library is doing more than that: it is endowing Covington’s work with outsized legitimacy by shelving it side-by-side with “canonistic” texts, and it is endowing those texts with new meaning. In blurbs written to accompany the PDFs, for example, readers are told that The Stranger tells the story of a Frenchman unfairly put to death for murdering an Arab, while Starship Troopers is an allegory for the Great Replacement.
Meanwhile, Animal Farm, 1984, and Brave New World presage a present marked by mind-numbing medications, depraved mass entertainment, and the “hidden influence” of globalist “elites.”
In this way, the Northwest Front retools the “Western canon” to amplify Covington’s message, and in doing so proffers what we describe as “a strongman’s reading praxis.” Unlike some other fascist movements of our time, this one works to limit the interpretive terrain not by banning books but by enrolling celebrated authors into autocratic schemes.
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As we read through this library, we were not surprised to see many of the dystopian classic mainstays that have been co-opted by the far-right (such as 1984 and Brave New World), nor were we shocked at the inclusion of overtly racist tomes (like Camp of the Saints and The Turner Diaries). In reading Covington’s own work, however, we were startled at how often Shakespeare was invoked and retooled in this same way—made into a marker of the author’s intellect and an authorizing discourse for his mission. And once we noticed this, we began to see Shakespeare popping up all over the authoritarian landscape that we were examining: in screenplays written by Steve Bannon and biographies penned by Boris Johnson; in Third Reich propaganda; in early twentieth-century American nativist rhetoric. It was overwhelming and fascinating, and inspired our forthcoming article, “Reading Fascists Reading Shakespeare.”
TT: Covington created a fictional character named “Shane.” Who was this character and what literary role does he play in the movement?
Most of Covington’s novels tell the story of a young man’s racial awakening and ascension into the ranks of the Northwest Volunteer Army (NVA) through literary rites of passage. One such youth is Shane, who figures early in his Northwest Independence series. Shane grows up poor in rural Washington, surrounded by the degraded and Orwellian politically correct culture that the novels rail against. In the midst of these disintegrations, Shane’s one saving grace is books. And not those taught in school, where we’re told that White men only play the part of dupes and villains. Instead, books set in “better times and places,” Shane explains, “when everyone who mattered [looked like me].”
His early learning is quite self-directed and makes the most of what remains on library shelves after the fictive government has culled books for burning in “a hate cache.” But a series of fateful encounters leads him to Red Morehouse, an older man who leads a covert school for “racially aware” White youth, who will go on to fight the War for Northwest Independence. Their lessons are pieced together from banned books whose mere possession in this world can net a reader time in penitentiary.
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For Covington, Shane represents not only the potential of White youth writ large but also echoes Hal, the titular character from Shakespeare’s Henriad—Shakespeare scholar Alvin Kernan’s shorthand for the epic four-play narrative that includes Henry the Fifth. Hal, the story goes, grows up in a similarly immoral and chaotic environment, until circumstances force him to take up his birthright, and eventually the throne. Covington’s novels do not leave this analogy implicit. Henry the Fifth is quoted at length at the beginning of the first Northwest Independence novel and then again to announce the NVA’s victory in war. When fighting in the war, Shane even names his gun “Henry the Fifth.” In his not-so-subtle framing as a wayward youth reclaiming his royal birthright, Shane/Hal is Covington’s archetype for the young White racial soldier: schooled on verboten knowledge; radicalized against the lies passed down from cosmopolitan elites; and, ultimately, victorious in the cause of White separatism.
This is another way that Covington appropriates Shakespeare to authorize his books and, through those books, his movement.
TT: You have pointed out that “good propagandists must be social theorists.” What do you mean by that?
Historically speaking, fascist regimes seem to understand that text-objects shape social worlds. For instance, the Nazi Party’s expert use of literature, art, and media to move the German public inch by inch toward the gas chambers has been amply documented. Propagandist Joseph Goebbels held a PhD in German literature and drafted “individual screenplays” for electoral campaigns during Hitler’s rise to power. Under the Third Reich, books figured as explicit objects of state care because, as Goebbels held, “the Volk lives in the book” This ideology was given form through book burnings and book festivals alike. For the Nazis, a central goal of this focus on literature was to cultivate an Aryan reading “public”—Michael Warner’s term for groups that crystallize in relation to specific media. Publics conjure up the groups that they address, imbue them with particular traits, and enroll them in particular projects: like the making of a pan-Aryan nation existentially concerned with “foreign elements,” or (in Covington’s case) a raucous band of White Americans counterposed to liberal media regimes.
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Evidence suggests this second public has grown over the past decade. Consider the first Trump administration’s desire to fight texts with texts, advocating patriotic education as an antidote to journalistic efforts like the “1619 Project.” Or outlets such as Breitbart that “red pill” readers through their dim computer screens. Or long invectives by mass shooters that have recruited thousands into the White power movement. Covington is appealing to this public, perhaps in the hope that literature will translate to real action—just as it did with the Nazis.
TT: You have written that reading fiction is not about taking delight in the escapism it offers, but rather about bringing into reality the speculative world it describes. Could you explain that point in relation to the Northwest Front separatist movement? Would this point hold for any other fiction reader?
Well, obviously a lot of fiction is about escapism. Tolkien, for instance, was not trying to bring Middle Earth into fruition in any concrete sense. More substantially, speculative fiction often proposes cautionary tales and, occasionally, blueprints for building a more just world. But then there are White power mainstays like The Turner Diaries, which envision—and advocate—war against the government. When Timothy McVeigh dog-eared his copy of The Turner Diaries to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City in a scene drawn directly from the text, he quite literally brought the book to life.
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Covington aspires to precisely this, and he says as much when he tells readers that the ethnostate he writes about is preordained, and that the books tell a tale of righteous violence whose end justifies the bloody means. In the novels, fictional soldiers are spurred on by what they discover in “forbidden” texts, and Covington hopes his books will call real soldiers into action. The Northwest Front is composed of these potential soldiers, and they have already started settling in the area and making tangible plans. This is hardly unique. To return again to the example of The Turner Diaries, we know that White power activists have long sought to shatter borders between text and world. Our sense is that this reading’s final aim in fascist movements: not to delight in the escapism of fiction, but to spark the bloody war to realize fiction’s promise. To make the speculative a reality.
About Authors:
Chloe Ahmann is an assistant professor of anthropology at Cornell studying how people politicize “impure” environments in the long afterlife of American industry. Her early work followed industrialism’s enduring traces in toxified landscapes, patchy regulation, quotidian expressions of white supremacy, and particular orientations toward time in Baltimore. Her current work scrutinizes environmentally conscious separatist groups in the Northwest that seek to repair body, soil, and soul from the “corruptions” of modernity.
Devin Proctor is a cultural anthropologist who studies identity and community construction in online spaces, which has led him to ethnographic work with otherkin, tradwives, vampires, and trolls. His current work examines recruitment and radicalization techniques white nationalist groups employ to attract young Internet users. He is an assistant professor of anthropology at Elon University, and his volume Practicing Digital Ethnography is forthcoming from Routledge.
