The troubling framework of the “Neo-Nazi’s girlfriend”

In January 2023, 34-year-old Sarah Beth Clendaniel obtained a driver’s license for the first time. Allegedly next on her to-do list? “Sacrifice **everything** for my people”  and blow up the Baltimore power grid. 

Clendaniel and her co-conspirator, Brandon Russell, were arrested on federal charges this February before they could attack the electric substations, which serve a population that is over 60% Black. According to the criminal complaint filed with the Maryland district court, both had previous connections to extremist ideologies. Russell founded the Atomwaffen Division, a Nazi Group, and hoarded explosives and Neo-Nazi paraphernalia, like a picture of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. As for Clendaniel, the court documents revealed pictures of her posing with rifles and in tactical armor. Some of her online monikers, like “Nythra88”, contained the number associated with Hitler.

Despite her obvious ties to white power politics, the press offered misleading coverage. The Guardian, joined by NPR, AP, and USA Today, called Clendaniel a “US woman” plotting with “neo-Nazi leader” Brandon Russell. In its headline, Business Insider opted to categorize Clendaniel as “his girlfriend.” Other outlets, such as Al Jazeera and BBC, erased Clendaniel from the headlines altogether. 

“Clendaniel, the Nazi’s girlfriend” is the latest addition to a pattern: Dismissing the agency of women extremist actors. This reductive framework takes modern women extremists — paramilitary Nazi sympathizers, transphobic book banners, tradwives — at their word, obscuring their direct role in white supremacy harming communities of color.

“For my people”: Women take up the mantle of tradition

Coverage of the far-right centers around men: Neo-Nazis marching with tiki torches. Proud Boys on the House floor. An author penning The Turner Diaries. Incels. But that does not mean that women take no part in crucial roles in an attempt to “protect” American culture “from those who might try to diminish it.”

“The violence of far-right women is directly related to cultural tradition, and also the reason why we tend to overlook it,” Noelle Cook, who researches women in the modern far-right, explained to The Objective.

On the surface level, Cook said, these women appear to be engaging in “softened, traditional feminine spaces, like the home, and activities, like childcare.” 

“Many of these women claim that they are looking out for the betterment of children,” she explained. “Once protecting children is mentioned as a reason for their cause, we feel like they’re just ‘doing as wives and mothers do.’ And they want us to buy that.”

However, as Dr. Jenn Jackson writes, women and white supremacy have been “bosom buddies” for decades. During the Reconstruction era, white clubwomen ingrained racist school curricula via promotion of Lost Cause textbooks, eerily similar to the modern-day Moms for Liberty. Women also held a major role in Ku Klux Klan “whispering campaigns,” in which they gossiped about people whom they hated or suspected were Jewish. Their gossip would be responsible for the shuttering of Jewish shops and pushing Black families out of white neighborhoods. 

As a disturbing modern example, Cook cited the tradwife (“traditional” wife) movement, composed of mostly conservative millennial and Gen Z antifeminist women who value homemaking and traditional marriage roles. Many tradwives dismiss concerns from critics who argue that they lean on a Christian fundamentalist understanding of women’s submission to men. Cook noticed that some tradwives use this semblance of “nostalgia” as a facade to conceal their obsession with atavistic gender role ideals, rife with the fantasy of white wives replenishing the white race — a development not coincidental with concurrent crackdowns on trans rights and drag queen story hours.

“Extreme tradwives share ‘manifestos’ using the hashtag #RevoltAgainstTheModernWorld,” she explained. “It’s a reference to a book by the same title written by an Italian fascist and racist, Julius Evola.”

Coverage on tradwives ranges from columns labeling it a “lunatic fringe” to more apologetic accounts of how the lifestyle became a cure for burnout (though ties to extremism are mentioned, it’s not the stories’ angle). To Cook, taking the benefit of the doubt and using the latter angle only offers racism and sexism legitimacy in political discourse. 

“These women say that there’s no white supremacy involved in their movement, but that is not true,” Cook said. “They engage and interact with it in plain sight. They’re trolling.”

In perhaps the most obvious connection between the two movements, “Groyper” and accelerationist Riley Williams, who was “obsessed” with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, stormed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office at the January 6th Capitol attack. The so-called “Groyper Army,” according to the Anti-Defamation League, attempts to “normalize” their racist ideology by claiming to champion traditional, conservative Christian values, such as heterosexual marriage and family.

According to court documents, Williams desired to swap this extremist ideology for the tradwife movement following her arrest. Her mother wrote that her daughter dreamed of “a home on a large plot of land, a large family … and farm animals to raise for their own consumption.” Her fiance also wrote to the United States District Judge that Williams had plans to homeschool her future children and “wants a garden to grow food, sheep for their wool, and a cow to get fresh milk.” 

What Williams had in common with Clendaniel (who, according to Clendaniel’s mother, plotted the attack “for her kids”) is the rhetoric of “saving the next generation” from the outside world as dutiful mothers, wives, or, as William’s defense attorney described her client, “a girl who wanted to be somebody.”

“It paints this ideal of a self-sustaining woman who wants to be a good mom,” Cook argued. “But in reality, it’s upholding the ideology of a white ethnostate, where anyone not white is removed.”

The question of the white supremacist men 

“The Girlfriend” trope doesn’t conclude with taking violent women at their word to inaccurate ends — it also flirts with a largely false assumption that women are indoctrinated into the white power movement only through men. 

Clendaniel indeed conspired with the Atomwaffen founder to “completely lay [Baltimore] to waste” and considered mothering Russell’s children. However, her embrace of racist ideology traced to before her encounter with Russell in 2018, according to family members who told the Associated Press “her descent into neo-Nazism occurred against a backdrop of mental health issues and drug addiction.”

In her book Sisters in Hate, The Atavist Magazine’s editor-in-chief Seyward Darby follows the accounts of three white nationalist women who joined the movement out of their own accord. She explained in a call with The Objective that when journalists write them off as wives and girlfriends, they wrongly suggest women are allowed to exist in the far-right space by virtue of being with a man. 

“The assumption implies women must be committing hateful things because they’re forced to by men,” Darby said. “I think mainstream media struggles with the idea that within misogynistic spaces like the far-right, women retain their agency.” 

Darby underscores in her own reporting that white power women join hate campaigns independent of their relationship with men. One of her subjects, Lana Lokteff, who promoted racist content on a radio show with her husband, proudly declared: “I guess, to be really edgy, it was women that got Hitler elected.” 

It was not Hitlerism nor her husband who primarily drew Lokteff to a vitriol of hate; it was its promise to bring women “beauty, family, and home.”

“White supremacy is an animus to link up as proactive agents of hate,” Darby said. “They strongly believe that they are networking to restore the natural feminine order of things, like the nuclear family and ‘traditional’ beauty norms. When we don’t recognize that, we risk missing huge warning signs about plans going on in spaces without men to attack non-white communities.”

Cook, the researcher, agreed. 

“Much of their right wing project … is about turning the domestic into the political,” Cook said. “[Clendaniel] is not just some girlfriend who naively followed a Neo-Nazi. She is an agent of destruction who intentionally targeted a city with a lot of Black people.”

Could coverage of white supremacy improve?

Not all news media mischaracterized Clendaniel. The Daily Beast, albeit mockingly, described her and Brandon Russell as “Neo-Nazi Bonnie and Clyde,” while ABC News and Intelligencer respectively labeled them “suspected white supremacists” and “pair of Nazis.”

Darby, from The Atavist, argues that other journalists can take similar measures to contextualize women extremists, particularly by transforming the way reporters understand objectivity. From the way journalists are trained, it’s “defined by legacy white institutions as ‘being neutral’.” 

“Media obviously has an obligation to get things right,” Darby said. “But that takes understanding the threat of women ethnonationalists, exposing the gendered danger of white supremacy, and being extremely clear in our reporting that we condemn this way of ‘traditional’ thinking.” 

Philadelphia Magazine editor-at-large Ernest Owens recommended in a statement to The Objective that journalists consider “creating an imaginary balance, but being fair” in how they seek out sources.

“A best practice would be to measure the impact and necessity of the source and be mindful of not perpetuating further harm in your reporting,” Owens wrote. “Amplifying the voices of white supremacists in the same reporting that seeks awareness of the voices who are combating said bigotry is counterproductive.”

The bottom line? Owens and Darby keep it simple.

“Just as we do in other fields, journalists should seek actual scholars and practitioners in the field of race [rather] than just people who hold a certain identity alone,” Owens suggested. 

“Don’t follow the fascist playbook. They want us to classify them as ‘just a woman.’ It’s a shield,” Darby said. “When Moms for Liberty incites an anti-trans panic at school, call it transphobia. When a woman declares that she will blow something up for the white race, call her a white supremacist.”

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Alina Kim is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who researches LGBTQ+ rights, disinformation, campaign politics, and occasionally gaming culture. When not writing, she serves as tech crew for The Sonic Transducers, D.C.’s Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast. Find them on Twitter @the_alina_kim.

This piece was edited by Janelle Salanga. Copy edits by Omar Rashad.