Run Out of Town: How A Small Town Dealt with Right-Wing Extremism

My father was a doctor in a small town in Minnesota after World War II. He was a right-wing extremist with a terrifying temper and deep anti-Semitic views. The townspeople feared he would become a mass shooter. To protect themselves, they launched a three-year vigilante campaign and ran my family out of town. The vigilantes were non-violent.

I may be the only woman who had a right-wing extremist father who has an education and can tell this story so I’m outing my father in the hope that something I say will help people figure out how to stop these men. My father was stopped. Maybe it can be done again.

I grew up in gun culture and I know it well. I want my New York friends to understand what gun culture is so I wrote a book called “Gun Culture USA. Where It Comes From and Why It Won’t Go Away.” It’s up on Amazon. America has around 500 million guns and many unstable citizens. When politicians start mainstreaming anti-Semitic and hateful rhetoric in an environment like ours, it becomes incredibly dangerous. We have to talk about this openly because the human cost of violence is just too high to ignore.

Performer and Writer: Toni Hart