ADDICTED TO HATE
ON JULY 4, 2013, one of Shane Johnson’s pals pushed through the front door of his trailer and announced that “a bunch of black guys” had just “said some shit to him.” Johnson was small and lithe, tattooed from neck to toe with swastikas, and his throat was inked with a portrait of Jesus and the words “I AM NOT A JEW.” As a teenager, he’d earned the nickname “Punchy” for his willingness to make up for his stature with an even shorter temper. It served him well as the leader of his Ku Klux Klan chapter in Kokomo, Indiana.
On his orders, he and several of his buddies tied bandannas to padlocks and stuffed them into their back pockets. Johnson, who had been awake for three days on an Adderall and whiskey bender, led his posse to a nearby park where a band was performing an Independence Day concert for a crowd of families. Johnson didn’t see the kids who had trash-talked his friend, but on the edge of the grass he spotted something even more offensive—an African American man and a white woman sitting on a blanket holding hands. He and his crew fanned out, swinging their padlocks at anyone within reach, shouting, “White power, you niggers!”
Indiana has long been a hotbed of white supremacist activity. In 1923, Kokomo hosted the largest KKK rally in US history. Two years later, half the city’s residents were Klan members. Today, infamous movement leaders like White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger and alt-right figurehead Matt Heimbach live in the state, and Klan branches remain active in major cities. Johnson grew up in one of Kokomo’s best-known Klan families; his dad even appeared in full robe and hood on The Jerry Springer Show in the ’90s. “Nobody liked me,” he says. “I didn’t have any friends or anything.”
Starting at the age of five, he received two hours of daily Bible study from his dad. He was schooled in the doctrine of “Christian Identity,” which holds that the enslavement or extermination of all non-whites will usher in the second coming of Christ. In kindergarten, Johnson got in trouble for refusing to sit next to a black child. He dropped out in seventh grade to dedicate himself to the march toward racial Armageddon. “We was told we’d go to eternal damnation if we didn’t fight Jews and blacks,” he says. “That’s some scary shit for a young kid.”
Yet in the months before the attack in the park, Johnson had had flashes of doubt, moments when his indoctrination and reality didn’t seem to match up. There was the “proof” that Adam and Eve were Caucasian—something about how the sand in Eden was white—which “just didn’t make any damn sense.” He’d started to feel pangs of embarrassment about getting that Jesus neck tattoo. But the most troubling moment came one day as he and his girlfriend, Tiffany Gregoire, were driving around and she asked him, “If there was a black baby right here and you could kill him or her and get away with it, would you?”
“Fuck yeah, I would,” Johnson remembers answering. “That would potentially stop a whole bunch of black people from being born. I don’t believe they have souls, anyway. It’d be like killing a dog.”
Gregoire, who had been dating Johnson since she was 17, grew up in a tolerant household in Georgia before moving to Indiana. She had been gently prodding him since they met, introducing him to rap music, or “seed planting,” as he would later realize. But even though she wished he’d change, she didn’t like confrontation and loved Johnson despite his beliefs.
“What, you think less of me or something?” he said, noticing her disappointment.
“No, no, that’s fine,” she said, turning the music up. “I don’t care. I was just wondering.”
As he drove near the route where 200,000 Klan supporters had marched in 1923, he had an inkling of an epiphany, which he tried to put out of his mind. Nah, hell no I wouldn’t murder a black baby, he thought. There’s no fucking way.
If he actually believed in white supremacy and race war, what did this hesitation mean? In the past, he might have asked his dad, a lifelong Klan member, who would have rebuked him and reminded him that doubt was Satan talking. But for the first time, Johnson wasn’t sure he wanted to know what his father
