Leonard Zeskind, Researcher Who Foresaw Rise of White Nationalism, Dies at 75

Politics|Leonard Zeskind, Who Foresaw the Rise of White Nationalism, Dies at 75

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.