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IT’S A COMMON STORY, banal, even: a child of privilege, an heir apparent, leaves for college to get a good enough education—and maybe have a little fun—before taking over the family business. But the child, away from the nest for the first time, is exposed to new kinds of people, new ways of being. Novel experiences lead to uncomfortable questions. Upon returning home, the child, now an adult, begins to regard their upbringing with contempt, to see the values instilled in them since birth as retrograde, false, maybe even dangerous.
R. Derek Black was one such child, and probably the most interesting variation on this theme. Black was a prodigy, building a website at age ten, winning a local election at nineteen, and hosting a popular radio show at twenty-one. The website, KidsStormfront, was an offshoot of Stormfront, the white nationalist forum that Black’s father, Don, launched in 1995. The radio show, first hosted on Stormfront and then later, bizarrely, broadcast by a South Florida radio station with a large Haitian audience, featured interviews with prominent racists, discussions of the...