Virginia Tech ‘white supremacist’: ‘I’m not a white supremacist’

Mark Neuhoff, a graduate teaching assistant at Virginia Tech, has been under fire since August for controversial posts he made on social media, for which Tori Coan, a student, exposed him at the beginning of this school year.

Numerous demonstrations have been held on the Virginia Tech campus in protest of Neuhoff's employment as a teaching assistant in the English department.

After reading The Tab's recent interview with Coan, Neuhoff contacted us to request his own chance to speak out.

Accused of releasing Coan's personal information and issuing a death threat via phone, Neuhoff was cleared of all charges against him in early November.

What has your experience been since everything came up online?

Well it’s been a lot of misunderstanding. Tori in particular – like for your story she just got to go with you and give a one-sided story where she whines, and then you have all these article titles where it says things like 'Virginia Tech Teacher Sent Death Threats to a Student' or 'Neo-Nazi Virginia Tech Teacher.' So there’s been lots of slander, lots of lies, and I haven’t really had a chance to get it out there.

You claim there’s misunderstanding and misrepresentation in the information. Do you want to address any of that?

First of all, I’m not a white supremacist. My post was taken out of context. I made a post responding to another person’s article where he is redefining that term to basically mean something that lots of conservative people stand for. I had nuanced discussions about history with a private group of people who understand what I am saying, and that was taken from the context to falsely portray me as a racist or a hateful person when I’m nothing of the kind. My wife is Asian. I have students who are of various racial backgrounds and none of them have any problems with me even though I’m sure lots of them have read the news. No one complains about bias or anything like that.

Are there other facts or opinions you would like to dispute?

I think that Tori Coan is lying when she says that she was issued death threats. Her phone number was posted. You can’t fulfill a death threat through someone posting a phone number. It’s impossible. The worst someone can do with a phone number is send mean text messages. So for her to characterize that as a death threat is intellectually dishonest.

Sure, you can be harassed through the phone. But she’s claiming that it was a death threat. And I just told another reporter this: if someone broke your arm, but you told people that they broke your arm and your leg even though it’s visible that your leg wasn’t broken, why should I believe that your arm was broken? Like, if someone harassed me, that’s bad enough. Why would I need to go and say, "no, it was a death threat?" That casts suspicion upon whether or not she actually felt harassed. Tori is an activist. Prior to protesting against me, she protested against an author who wrote the book The Bell Curve, so she has a history of activism. I believe she’s using her constructed victimhood as a weapon.

Tori also claims that she’s too afraid to go to class because she’s afraid of violent retaliation. Well, in the student hearing that her and I were both a part of, we both received no-contact orders. She should know I have her home address. So why would she feel safe at her home address but not safe enough to go to classes? The reason why she intentionally chose not to go to classes was because one of the charges against me was harassment, and a stipulation of harassment is that you’ve been subject to words that are pervasive enough to interfere with your ability to do your work at the university as normal. So I suspect that she saw this document and she said "huh, I should not go to class and claim that I’m afraid." So I think she did that on purpose. I think she intentionally avoided going to class in order to make it seem like she’s afraid, even though she should be afraid at her home as well. If she’s really afraid of violent retaliation, why would she feel any safer at her private home where there’s no public and no police around, but not at campus where there is a public and police around? I think it’s ridiculous.

Are you saying she should feel afraid in her house?

I’m saying it’s ridiculous that she would feel safer in her house than on the campus if she’s actually afraid of retaliation. I think that if a person is actually afraid, then you would feel more unsafe being alone in your apartment or your house than being on campus where police are walking around and where you’re always surrounded by students. She has no reason to be afraid because I’m not a violent person. I have no history of violence. I haven’t issued any threats. She’s making it all up completely.

You said that Tori is an activist. Would you not say that you are also an activist in the way that you speak out online?

No, because everything I do is private and I want to be left alone.

When you say you are a white supremacist in your post, what do you mean? What’s the definition of that for you?

The normal definition of white supremacist is a racist person who believes that one race is superior to others. And they typically think that they want to use violence against other races. So if someone says 'I am a white supremacist' the perception it gives us is that this person thinks that whites are superior, that others are inferior, that they probably want to use violence against other people.

What’s your definition?

So, none of that is true at all. That’s the first thing I want to go on record saying. I am not that at all. I reject all of that. I’m completely unbiased, and I do not think people are inferior or superior.

The definition I was responding to is by a conservative author named John Derbyshire. He was basically going through a list of terms saying, "What do we on the dissident right call ourselves? Alt-right, paleoconservative?" And then he went to white supremacist and he said, "People on the left want to use this term against us," to be what I just told you, a racist and all that. But we can also look at what the term means semantically, which is a society where the key decision makers in that society are people of European decent, which is what America and all of Europe has been for hundreds of years in America, if not thousands of years in Europe. I agree with that.

I think America has always been a white majority nation, and I think it should stay that way. I think in 2050 when it’s projected whites become a minority population, the country’s going to be very different, if not unrecognizable. And I think that’s something to be avoided.

What does a white minority nation look like to you and why is that something you’re concerned about?

I think we would want to point to Southern California to start with. There are whole neighborhoods there where people can’t speak English, where they can’t read the street signs. I was reading a book – it was probably Adios, America! by Ann Coulter – where she’s talking about how the literacy rate of California has been dropping. So someone in my position would say, "We’re going to see Mexifornication — the Mexification of California — happen on a nationwide scale because we aren’t taking the time to assimilate people. So that means that our prestige as a country is going to sink."

And it really doesn’t have anything to do with race. Like, if you’re a bunch of poor, illegal immigrants from Europe and you’re coming here and not assimilating, that’s going to affect it as well. So ultimately it’s not a question of race, it’s a question of culture. If people who have internalized American culture, who’ve assimilated American culture, if they become a minority and people who don’t internalize American culture increase in numbers then of course, the country’s going to be completely unrecognizable.

So you're affirming that white supremacy is not racism, correct?

No, that’s not what I’m saying. The standard definition that we all agree upon is that white supremacy is racist. The way that John Derbyshire used it in his article is not racism, and that’s what I was responding to.

In the post you made, you say there is a difference between white supremacy and white nationalism. Do you believe that the John Derbyshire definition of white supremacy is what separates white nationalism from the 'socially constructed view' of white supremacy?

That's complicated. I’m not sure I understand your question.

You mentioned that your wife is Asian. How does she feel about the idea that a white majority should be making the political decisions in this nation?

She’s completely on board because that’s how it’s always been in America. She’s from Vietnam. She would say that you wouldn’t want a minority population who are coming to Vietnam to overtake the Vietnamese people as the key decision makers in society. You’d want the Vietnamese people to be the key decision makers in that society. That’s not saying that no one else can do it. It should just be proportionate to your population in the society.

So let’s take this for example – historically, America was 90 percent white and 10 percent black. The leadership should be something like 90 percent white and 10 percent black. Otherwise, then you’ll have too much representation from whites or too much representation–you know? It would be uneven. So you want the leaders to fairly represent the demographic makeup of the country. That’s not to say that in Vietnam if you have immigrants there shouldn’t be any immigrant representation in the decision-making process, of course not. They should have a role. But it should be proportionate to their percent composition in their society.

So you believe that immigrants should not have a majority representation in our political state, correct?

If they are not the majority of the nation, then no. They should have as much representation in positions of power as they are a percent in the society. It should be directly proportionate.

What do you think about the idea that America was built on immigration?

We hear that term a lot, but I think that it’s misleading. The people who came here were colonists. They weren’t migrant. They didn’t have to go through customs. They didn’t enter a nation. They found land as pioneers and colonists, and they established societies on that land. Now, that’s not to say it was a completely peaceful process, of course not. There was violence between the Native Americans and the white colonists, of course. I’m just saying that to say that it’s a nation of immigrants is incorrect. That doesn’t apply to me though. My family came here in the 1900s, and we were certainly immigrants. So for my case that’s true. My family [members] were immigrants. But the original people who came here in the 1600’s, I think it would be unfair to say they were immigrants.

What is it that you find distasteful about the Jewish population?

That’s a great question, and one which more people need to ask because that can be confusing. What I talk about is people predominantly in politics and the entertainment industry. There’s a heavy Jewish involvement in the entertainment industry, and they use this position of power often in order to push anti-white policy. There are many people of Jewish decent on Twitter, for example, who are always saying that white people are bad, white people are responsible for these things. But they are Jewish.

Many Jewish people want to be able to have their cake and eat it too. They want to call whites racist while also presenting themselves as being white people. I don’t feel that’s true. If you’re a Jewish person that keeps blaming white people for things, especially if you say "I’m proud to be Jewish", I think that’s racism.

Do you think that’s something we can apply to [people such as white celebrities] by saying that their majority is racist against Jewish minorities?

The fact that they’re a majority? No. If they’re using their position as a public or popular figure in order to bash someone of another race, of course. That’s racism. But I don’t really see that happening. Like maybe you have a kook like Mel Gibson. You know, he made those remarks. That’s unfortunate.

So you don’t believe that there is oppression from a white majority on people of minorities?

No, course not. That’s a theory that we often hear for things. We often hear, 'There’s problems in the inner city, with the black population in the inner city.' They’ll tell us the problem is institutional racism, it’s white people’s fault. No, of course not. That’s racist to believe. We live in a society where everyone is bending over backward in order to be seen as diverse. I mean if you ever work in the government or something like that, then you have mandatory diversity equal opportunity workshops. Companies can get sued for discriminating against people.

It’s ridiculous to claim that there’s institutional racism. The reason why the inner cities are that way is because you have scumbag politicians who want to create a class of dependents so that the dependent population keeps voting for the social welfare programs that keep them dependent. It’s the politicians that are the problem, it’s not institutional racism by the white race. That view itself is racist, I think.

Cover photo credit: WDBJ7