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Title: The War on Everyone Author: Robert Evans Date: 10 August 2019 Language: en Topics: Nazism, Fascism, radicalization, white supremacy, terrorism, antisemitism, Christian Identity, Militia Movement Source: http://www.thewaroneveryone.com/
By Robert Evans
Transcribed by Grateful Members of the Behind the Bastards Community
On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi stormtroopers and party members took to
the streets of cities throughout Germany. They burned synagogues,
shattered the windows of Jewish owned buildings, beat and murdered
hundreds upon hundreds of Jewish people in the streets. This bloody
pogrom is known to history as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
Itâs one of those moments in history so shocking and brutal that itâs
become stained into our collective consciousness, a single moment of
horror forever printed on the human psyche.
Adolph Hitler and the other members of Nazi high command considered
Kristallnacht to be failure. Rather than being enthused by the violence,
the German people were horrified by this outpouring of brutality. World
media harshly condemned Hitlerâs regime, and from their plush offices in
Berlin, the Fuhrer and his inner circle began to revise their plans for
how to sell anti-Semitic brutality to De Volk. Joseph Goebbels decided
that film was the right medium to help crack this nut, his efforts
culminated in the 1940 production, The Eternal Jew. The essential
through line of this particularly vile piece of propaganda was the idea
that Jewish people were an age-old parasitic force, leeching off their
host nations and almost habitually working to undermine and destabilize
them. As with most pieces of vile, racist propaganda, The Eternal Jew
reveals more about the men who made it than it does about Judaism. There
is no eternal Jew. But there might be an eternal fascist.
Umberto Eco was probably the first person to really grasp this idea and
try to define it in a scholarly way. His 1995 essay Ur-Fascism is still
one of the single finest pieces of writing on the subject. Eco was an
Italian novelist, a literary critic and a professor. He was born into
fascist Italy. In 1942, at the age of 10, he won an award in the
provincial competition for young fascists where he gave an elaborately
positive answer to the question âShould we die for the glory of
Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?â Eco came to hate fascism
slightly later in life, and he came to also love the partisans and
rebels who fought back against Benito Mussoliniâs regime. As he grew
older and began to analyze his world, and the history behind the war
that had torn apart his childhood, Eco found himself drawn again and
again to the question: What is a fascist?
Thatâs not an easy question to answer. Most dictionary definitions you
will find for the word fascism leave rather a lot to be desired. Hereâs
Merriam-Websterâs definition: âA political philosophy, movement, or
regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts the nation and often
race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic
government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social
regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.â Now, that
definition seems decent enough on its surface, but you could apply the
bulk of it to the USSR, or Maoâs China, or Saddam Husseinâs Iraq for
that matter. Now, that may not seem like a problem to you. After all,
Hitler and Mao and Stalin and Saddam were all pieces-of-shit dictators
who did horrible things to their people. But there is a reason Fascism
is more than just a system that brings about dictators. Fascism arises
out of, and murders, vibrant democracies. As such, it only comes to
power with the enthusiastic consent of the people. Umberto Eco
understood the singular nature of fascism. He also understood that when
it reappeared in the future it would come in different guises than the
ones that had popped up all around Europe in the 1920s and 30s. He
wrote: âI think that it is possible to outline a list of features that
are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or eternal fascism.
These features cannot be organized into a system. Many of them
contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism
or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow
fascism to coagulate around it.â
Ecoâs concept of eternal fascism started with a cult of tradition. The
belief that âTruth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we
can only keep interpreting its obscure message.â Whether youâre looking
at Nazis and their concept of the Aryan civilization or youâre looking
at modern American fascism and this idea that there was a point in which
America was great and perfect that we need to get back to. Now, you
might translate this to conservatism, which doesnât mean that
conservatives are all fascists, just that fascism gestates within
conservative movements.
Next, according to Eco, is a rejection of modernism, particularly a
rejection of modern depravity. As traditionally marginalized and
oppressed groups stand up for their human rights in modern societies,
fascists inevitably seek to reverse these trends. The first books the
Nazis burned were Magnus Hirschfieldâs library of research on
transgender individuals. Hatred of trans men and women is still a
central unifying tenant of modern fascists. Then there is the cult of
action for actionâs sake, expressed as a worship of the soldier, of the
man with a gun in his hand, willing to do violence at a momentâs notice.
For fascists, according to Eco, thinking is a form of emasculation. Eco
also recognized a rejection of criticism and disagreement as central
aspects to fascism. âThe critical spirit makes distinctions, and to
distinguish is a sign of modernism.â He wrote.
Itâs worth noting that 8chanâs /pol/ board, one of the largest gathering
places for neo-Nazis on the internet, the community that spawned both
the Christchurch massacre and the Poway synagogue shooting was formed as
a direct result of Gamer Gate. Gamer Gate was a reactionary movement
inspired by rage at female video game reviewers who had started to
critique what they saw as artistic shortcomings of popular video games.
Before too long, gamer-gaters took to harassing and threatening to
murder these video game reviewers, which got them off of 4chan and sent
them scurrying to 8chan. Once again, Eco hit the nail on the head.
Racism and hatred of diversity, exploitation of the natural fear of
differences, these are the other characteristics of Ur-Fascism. Eco
recognized it as derived from social frustration, generally rising out
of an âappeal to a frustrated middle class. A class suffering from an
economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation and frightened by
the pressure of lower social groups.â Ur-fascism promises its followers
a social identity, in the kind of false equality that comes from
belonging to a nation and a people that are set above all the other
nations and peoples of this earth.
Fascism of course requires an absolute rejection of pacifism. Life is
lived for struggle, war is permanent. We see this translated in our
modern fascist movements in an obsession with the tools and aesthetics
of war. Black and camo and tactical everything. Earlier on the day I
wrote this, I was browsing Twitter and I came across a post of someoneâs
bug-out bag. He wrote in the Twitter post, âHowâs this for a bug-out
Boogaloo setup?â if you arenât aware, Boogaloo is a far right term for
the civil war that many in that corner of the populace believe is
coming, as in Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo. This guyâs emergency
preparedness kit contained no food, no water, no medical supplies. His
gas mask had no actual filters, and seemed to be only for aesthetics.
But he did have an AR-15 rifle, a 12 gauge shotgun, a Glock sidearm with
a 30 round magazine and a .44 magnum revolver, along with a tomahawk, a
throwing knife, and stylish green body armor the exact same shade as his
tactical backpack. Seeing this post brought to mind what Eco wrote about
the fascist Armageddon complex. âSince enemies have to be defeated,
there must be a final battle after which the movement will have control
of the world. But such a final solution implies a further era of peace,
a golden age which contradicts the principle of permanent war.â No
fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
Umberto Eco goes on to name contempt for the weak, the cult of the hero,
machismo and a sense of contempt for women and femininity, as other key
aspects of incipient fascism. For a fascist movement to evolve, a number
of these things must coalesce together, generally around the personality
of a single charismatic man with dreams of power. This man will of
course never admit to desiring power. Instead he claims to speak for
some broad mass of the population. A claimed majority that stands behind
him and his movement. Eco called this âqualitative populismâ, and noted
that in the modern era, âWe no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome,
or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or internet
populism in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens
can be presented and accepted as the voice of the people.â
Umberto Eco was not wrong, but he did miss something, and since yâall
are listening to my audiobook, I hope youâll forgive my arrogance in
adding one new element of fascism to Ecoâs list. Fascism often wraps
itself in irony humor as a way to disguise its true intentions as black
comedy and test the waters for its most extreme goals. If youâre someone
whoâs paid attention to the rise of fascism on the internet, if youâve
followed my work on 8chan or read much about the alt-right, you
understand what Iâm getting at, but you probably view this as a rather
new wrinkle in the history of fascism. The truth is that it goes all the
way back to the beginning.
If you want a picture the personality of the Fuhrer, what he was like on
a day to day basis with the people he liked and trusted, Hitlerâs table
talk is about the best resource that exists. Starting in 1941, Martin
Boreman, Hitlerâs secretary, convinced his boss to allow a series of
aides to transcribe his private conversations for posterity. Some of
these were the traditional Hitler ranting monologues youâd expect,
others were just, yâknow, chats between courses at dinners and the like.
Thereâs a lot of debate as to how truly off the cuff any of these were,
but Hitlerâs table talk is generally regarded as an incredibly useful
resource for understanding the minds of the top Nazis. In his 1998 book,
âExplaining Hitlerâ, journalist and historian Ron Rosenbaum turned to
the table talk records several times in his attempt to understand, in
essence, how bouncing baby Adolph turned into the genocidal warlord we
all know and hate. He focuses on one passage in particular. âThe passage
in which Hitler, Himmler, and Heidrich are ostentatiously debunking the
rumor, that they know to be true, that the Jews are being exterminated.
âItâs silly that people should say such things, Hitler piously avers,
when weâre only parking the Jews in the marshy parts of Russiaâ.
Although he adds that if it were true, it would be no less than the Jews
deserved. It seems to me a transparent charade in which the three
architects of the Final Solution were becoming the first Holocaust
deniers. The first revisionists, so to speak, and doing so in a
particularly repulsive winking and nodding way.â Rosenbaum brought his
theory to another scholar, a fellow named Lange, who agreed that this
was probably evidence of Hitler company concealing their crimes via
humor. Both to keep explicit discussion out of the historical record,
and so that those in the know could laughingly revel in their
crapulence. Lange said âthe inventiveness seems to me in some ways
really to come to the heart of the matter, even though its subtler than
the brutality. Primo Levy used the phrase Needless Violence, which is
not quite what Iâm saying. Itâs the element of gratuitousness, but itâs
more than the gratuitousness, there seems to be this imaginative
protraction, elaboration that one finds best exemplified in art forms in
which in art we usually take to be indicative of a consciousness, an
artistic consciousness of an overall design.â
For Nazis and their modern descendants, shittiness is a form of art.
Itâs never enough to gain power, or even to hurt or kill your rivals.
These peopleâs ultimate goal is to shift the nature of reality itself to
be further in line with their own narcissistic beliefs. Irony is a
powerful tool to achieving that. Lange goes on, âBrutality is
straightforward. Itâs not imaginative. This isnât just brute strength,
it seems to me that thereâs a sense of irony constantly. The sign over
the entrance gate to Auschwitz you know âArbeit macht freiââwork will
make you free. Itâs like a joke, it is a joke. The orchestra playing as
these people go out to work.â
Hitlerâs sense of humor is not something we talk about much. But perhaps
we should. Ironic humor was used regularly by the incipient Fuhrer
during his rise to power. In August of 1920 in one of his earlier
speeches, Hitler told an audience that he supported âremoval of the Jews
from our nation, not because we would begrudge them their existence, we
congratulate the rest of the world on their company.â This line was met
with widespread laughter. âBut because the existence of our own nation
is a thousand times more important than that of an alien raceâ. Lucy
Davidowitz, the Holocaust scholar who brought that speech to Rosenbaumâs
attention believed that the joke and the thing that Hitlerâs audience
was laughing at was not the line âWe congratulate the rest of the whole
world on their company,â but the earlier line âWe do not begrudge them
their existence.â Iâm going to quote again from âExplaining Hitlerâ,
âThis, Davidowitz suggests, is an inside joke for party members who know
the secret meaning. That in fact, they do begrudge, they are dedicated
to eradicating the Jewsâ existence.â Now reading that quote brings to
mind a post I found on 8chanâs /pol/ board, during one of my regular
sessions browsing that image board in between the mass shootings carried
out by its members. In one thread I found anons discussing the value of
comedic memes about mass killing as a way to camouflage their very real
efforts to inspire more massacres. One user typed, âThe best thing about
this is that they will never be able to discern an ironic,
tongue-in-cheek frog poster from a man of action like Terrent or Bowers.
We have all the plausible deniability in the world and unless theyâre
going to start locking people up for shitposting, we have nothing to
fear.â
In the decades since Adolph Hitler shot himself in his bunker, ironic
racist humor has been one of the through lines connecting every Nazi and
fascist movement thatâs arisen around the world. George Lincoln
Rockwell, the founding father of American Nazism, had his minions dress
up in racist gorilla costumes to interrupt events and distract attention
from civil rights activists. The main weakness of Rockwellâs humor is
that it was far too overt and hateful to be viewed as ironic by most
Americans. But down through the years, his descendants have become much
better at straddling the fine line between dog-whistling to people in
the know and maintaining plausible deniability. One good example would
be Count Dankula, a failed UK political candidate who first achieved
notoriety for a video in which he trained his dog to Sieg Heil. When he
was fined for this, he was able to frame himself as a free speech
crusader and raise thousands of dollars while claiming to fight back
against political correctness. There is tremendous power within humor.
It's why satirists and comedians are some of the first people purged by
a dictatorial regime. Itâs why nothing is more important to fascists
than to powerful and serious. Getting hit by a milkshake is worse for a
Nazi than getting hit by a brick. Blood looks cool, milkshakes look like
milkshakes. But humor also has an incredible ability to act as a sort of
ideological Trojan Horse, allowing ideas to sneak into someoneâs mind,
cloaked as jokes. Actual fascists know thisâitâs why the Nazis on 8chan
spend so much time crafting memes to spread their ideas. But this
process can take place even within the head of an individual fascist.
In 2016, Jo Cox, a member of Parliament for the Labour party, was shot
and stabbed to death by a fascist terrorist named Thomas Maier. Maierâs
chief stated influence was an earlier British fascist terrorist, David
Copeland. Back in the year 2000, Copeland killed three people and
injured many more by setting off a series of nail bombs. He picked the
locations he bombed because they had high Black and Asian populations.
According to the Guardian, âHe came up with the idea when a bomb went
off in Centennial Park during the Olympic Games in Atlanta four years
ago. He told the police that the Notting Hill Carnival was on about the
same time, said Mr. Sweeney. He began to wish that someone would blow up
the Notting Hill Carnival. To start off with, he treated the thought as
a joke, but he couldnât get it out of his head. The thought became
stronger. He woke up one day and decided that he was going to do it.â
Last year I carried out a study for the journalistic collective
Bellingcat. I combed through hundreds of online conversations between
fascist activists who planned the first deadly Unite the Right rally in
Charlottesville. My goal was to find out how these men had been
âred-pilledâ, or converted to their extremist beliefs. Over and over
again, these fascists mentioned the influence ironic jokes had on their
ideological evolution. One conversation stands out to me in particular.
In it, one fascist recalled how his first red pill came during an
argument over an anti-Semitic joke he saw posted to Facebook. The joke
spawned an argument, âThen I saw people negging Jews so I joined in as a
meme first off. Then all of a sudden, it stopped being a meme.â
Much of âThe War on Everyoneâ will discuss moments in the history of the
American fascist movement that are much bloodier and much silly than
shit posters on the internet. We will talk about hard bitten militia
men, vicious acts of terror, and methodical plans of genocide that are
everything but ironic. When we talk about the original Nazi party or
George Lincoln Rockwell, the American militia movement that culminated
in the Oklahoma City bombing, or todayâs meme-spouting ironic fascists,
itâs easy to look at all these things as separate, discreet problems,
sprouting up at different times and inspired by different causes. I
think thatâs as wrong as looking at men like Timothy McVeigh or Brenton
Terrant as lone wolves. Each swell and surge of fascism across the world
and across time is more like an eruption of a cold sore. The underlying
cause of the virus that is ever present. During World War II, we bombed
it into submission for a while. But like the herpes virus, it never
quite went away. It continued to lurk underneath the surface, hiding in
off color jokes at bars, hand printed magazines, and eventually internet
forums until our nationâs immune system grew weak enough for it to flare
up once more. Itâs anyoneâs guess what happens next.
At 9:50 AM, on October 27, 2018, Robert Bowers entered the Tree of Life
Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He carried a Colt AR-15, three
Glock handguns chambered in .357 sig, body armor, and a substantial
amount of ammunition. Bowers proceeded to open fire during a Shabbat
morning service. He killed eleven of the 75 people worshipping at the
synagogue that morning. In the hours and days that followed, journalists
and researchers in the countering violent extremism community began to
dig into Mr. Bowersâs social media presence and internet footprint. If
you read or listened to any coverage about this, it probably focused on
his use of the social media website Gab, which is essentially Twitter
for Nazis. Gab earned a lot of attention because itâs where Bowers chose
to announce his attack and his belief that a Jewish conspiracy was
responsible for flooding the United States with non-white migrant
âinvadersâ. But Bowers said other things on the site, stranger things.
In various posts, he claimed that people of Anglo-European descent were
the âchosen peopleâ, and that Jews were their ancient enemy. He warned
his fellow racists of a coming false flag attack that would be âone of
the final desperate attempts by the Jewish international oligarchy to
maintain power in the face of collapsing public trust in the mediaâ
which he believed they controlled. On the profile page for his account,
Bowers included a quote: âJews are the children of Satan.â A little more
than two weeks before his rampage, he reposted a link to the Wikipedia
page for Christian Identity and wrote, âIf the Jews hate it, then it
must be the truth.â
If you havenât heard much about Christian Identity, donât worry, neither
had I before Bowers went on his rampage, and this is where I give a
shout-out to my friend, Sarah. Sheâs a CVE researcher who made damn sure
I got learned up about this topic before I started writing this book.
Christian Identity is not a widely known belief system in modern
America.The vast majority of people who have been influenced by it have
probably never actually heard the term. Itâs been around for so long,
and embedded itself so deeply in the consciousness of the far right,
that itâs woven itself into the DNA of American fascism. It did not,
however, begin in America. The origin of Christian Identity traces back
to Britain, in 1791, when crazy person and retired Navy man named
Richard Brothers started having visions. Rather than writing these
visions off as a result of bad canned sardines or ergot poisoned bread,
he decided these visions were God telling him that he had to lead the
Jews back to Palestine.
He also decided that he was a descendent of the Biblical King David.
Revelation followed revelation, as they so often do for people with
these particular sorts of illnesses, and by the time Richard Brothers
was done, he concluded that the majority of Jewish people were actually
hidden in Britain. This âhidden Israelâ as he called it became one of
the central tenants of British Israelism. Brothers was eventually
declared insane by, which is probably fair. He was stuck in an
institution from to 1795 1806. But in the four years before he got
locked up, he earned himself some followers. And although his flock
didnât stick together until he got out of crazy people jail, some of his
ideas persisted for years amongst the fringes of British society.
In 1840, a writer named John Wilson wrote âLectures on Our Israelitish
Originâ and began lecturing across England and Ireland about the theory
that the real Jews were basically everyone but Jewish people. According
to the book, âReligion and the Rightâ by Michael Barcun, âThe Lectures
depended less on the interpretation of Biblical prophecy than on
Wilsonâs attempt to demonstrate empirically that the Lost Tribes had in
fact migrated from the Near East to Europe. Like many writers after him,
one of his favorite techniques was to look for words in different
languages that sounded the same, assuming, usually erroneously, that if
the sounds were similar, then the languages and their speakers had to be
connected.â Since similar sounds often crop up in otherwise unrelated
languages, they allowed Wilson to claim and to believe that he had
proved that âmany of our most common English words and names of familiar
objects are almost pure Hebrew.â
Now I find this part particularly interesting because itâs a tactic
still used by charlatans of many stripes today, to make lurid claims
about ancient aliens influencing cultures, based on the fact that
multiple languages have words that sound sort of similar. Terrible minds
think alike. Anyway.
British Israelism continued to evolve. A guy named Hine added the
assertion that Germans were really Assyrians because apparently those
people had gotten lost too and wound up in Europe somehow. Hine claimed
that the United States was also full of Israelites. Now at that this
point in the history of British Israelism, actual Jewish people were not
seen as bad guys. They were considered part of a greater âAll Israelâ,
which was made up of the House of Israel, which was Europe, and the
House of Judah, which was the people we would actually consider Jewish.
There was no evidence for any of this but nonsense and mental illness,
but thatâs never stopped an idea from taking off.
A fellow named Joseph Wild was the first American British Israelite. Or,
if he wasnât the first, heâs the first guy who tried to popularize it
here that we have any record of. Wild was a pastor at the Union
Congregational Church in Brooklyn. At this point, the theory, or
whatever you would call it, was fundamentally pretty harmless. But as it
drifted across the United States, from the frigid to the East, to the
also frigid Northwest, something funny happened. British Israelism
turned racist as fuck.
The man most responsible for this turn seems to have been, appropriately
enough, an Oregonian - Reuben H. Sawyer. In the late 19-teens, he
started writing for a monthly magazine âThe Watchmen of Israelâ, which
was dedicated to the idea that âThe English speaking peoples of today
are the lineal descendants of the Lost 10 Tribes of Israel and must
fulfill in these Latter days the responsibilities to creed for them
through the Patriarchs and Prophets.â Rueben was the pastor of the
Eastside Christian Church in Portland, Oregon and over the years, he
built up a sizable British Israel group in the city of roses. In fact,
he was so successful at this that he left his job as a pastor in 1921 to
lecture and write about British Israelism full time. Well, not quite
full time. He did have one other side gigâas a member of the Oregon Ku
Klux Klan. If youâve listened to any of my episodes of Behind the
Bastards on the origins of the KKK, you know that the early 1920s were a
massive boom period for Americaâs most famous racist organization.
Rueben was big into the Klan for several years. In fact, he helped sell
his fellow Portlanders on it, addressing 6,000 of them on December 22,
1921 at the Municipal Auditorium. He told them the KKK sought âa
cleansed and purified Americanism where law abiding citizens will be
respected and their rights defended irrespective of race, religion, or
color, so long as they make an honest effort to be Americans, and
Americans only.â Now, at this point, what heâs saying wasnât totally
bullshit. The 20s Klan was more a pyramid scheme than a terrorist
organization. It was racist, but not more racist than mainstream
American society, at least not when it came to skin color. The KKK was
more racist than mainstream Americans about some things though. They
hated the Catholic, the foreign-born, Asians, and of course, Jews.
This presented an issue for Reuben Sawyer; British Israelism loved the
Jews, but over time, and exposure to the other anti-Semites in the Klan,
Reuben radicalized. In his first speech about the Klan, he brought up
âthe Jewish questionâ, but made a point of noting that some Jews were of
ancient and honorable faith, while only some were objectionable.
According to âReligion and the Right,â âby 1922, however, this innuendo
had been replaced by full-blown anti-Semitism that was as crude as it
was open. âJews are either Bolshevists undermining our government or are
Shylocks in finance or commerce who gain control and command Christians
as borrowers or as employers. It is repugnant to a true American to be
bossed by a Sheeney, and in and in some parts of America, the kikes are
so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk on the sidewalk.
And where they are so thick, it is Bolshevism there talking. Bolshevism
and revolution.â The transformation is so startling that one wonders at
first if it is the same person speaking.â The key lies in the
distinction Sawyer had begun to make in 1921 between authentic and
inauthentic Jews. The former, ill treated and in need of protection, the
latter masquerading as genuine members of All Israel, even as they
plotted the destruction of Christendom.
Reuben became a major force for pushing his fellow American British
Israelites toward anti-Semitism. In the early and mid-1920s, the
Dearborn Independent, the newspaper funded by Henry Ford, began pushing
even more extreme anti-Semitic ideas on the wider American public. Its
editor, William Cameron, was a British Israelite. Thanks to people like
Reuben and Cameron, the category of âgood Jewsâ shrank every year, and
the dangers of the âbad onesâ expanded to something resembling the
all-encompassing anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that set Robert Bowers
off on his rampage.
From the late 1920s to the 1930s, Howard Rand, a British Israelite from
New England became a thought leader in the movement. His goal was to
build it into a political organization. In 1933, he formed the
Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, that claimed that actual Jewish
people were not in fact descended from Judah. By the late 1930s, Randâs
ideas had evolved to the point where he began to claim that Jewish
people were literally the children of the Devil. If youâre curious about
how this went down, hereâs an explanation from the website of a modern
Christian Identity group: âMost that call themselves Jews today are in
fact the race of Lucifer through his son Cain. Cain was inherently evil
from the beginning because he was of Luciferâs seed. Eve was beguiled by
Lucifer and did, in the carnal sense, lay with and begot Cain. It was a
pear on the ground, not an apple on the tree. Eve was deceived by
Lucifer and was led to believe that she was laying with Yahweh God.â
Rand was the very first person to use the term âChristian Identityâ and
his thinking had a huge impact on William Dudley Pelley, the founder of
the American Fascist Silver Shirts movement, who I also talk about on an
episode of âBehind the Bastards.â
By the 1940s, the core of the Christian Identity belief system was more
or less formed. It includes three specific ideas: Number one, Aryans are
descendants of the Biblical tribes of Israel. Number two, real Jews are
the result of the Devil having sex with Eve in the Garden of Eden. And
number three, the apocalypse is nigh, and when it comes, Aryans will
have to go toe-to-toe with the worldwide Jewish conspiracy in order to
save the world. When he walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue that cold
October morning, Robert Bowers saw himself as a soldier taking part in
this great battle.
Hart and his fellow Christian Identity believers had to be careful
during World War II, since their belief system was essentially just
Nazism without swastikas. But that didnât stop him from railing against
FDRâs appointment of the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Felix
Frankfurter. It also didnât stop him from opposing the admission of
Jewish refugees into the United States after 1938. Hartâs specific
beliefs were always fringe, but they bled over into the mainstream
American rightwing due to the Rightâs obsessive fear of socialism.
Iâd like to quote next from a great Tablet magazine article âThe Bloody
History of Americaâs Christian Identity Movementâ, âThe broader concern
of Hart and his allies and the ârespectableâ wing of anti-Semitism,
liberal journalist Casey McWilliams called them the ââarmchair
anti-Semites of the Rightâ was that liberal and socialist Jews were
ultimately behind the hated New Deal and the corresponding
transformations in American society. These armchair anti-Semites
believed that admitting Holocaust survivors into the United States after
World War II would be the first step in dismantling the Immigration Act
of 1924 to preserve the racial character of America. American Jews, many
of whom supported easing immigration restrictions broadly, were the
boogeymen of the nativist Right, and since Right wing nativists also
often subscribed to Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theories, opposing
immigration was a way to strike a blow against communism as well as
Judaism, and to preserve the white Christian character of the United
States.
From the beginning, Christian Identity connected more with the dark and
violent chunks of the far Right than mainstream conservatism. This
started with the Silver Shirts and the KKK, and continued into 1964 when
this peculiarly American fascist cult met George Lincoln Rockwell.
If you havenât, Iâd recommend listening to the three-part episode of my
podcast, Behind the Bastards, where I talk about George Lincoln
Rockwell. The first two episodes of that cover his life and career in
detail. But just so weâre all caught up, Iâll summarize his life here.
Rockwell was the founder of the American Nazi Party, not much more than
a decade after World War II ended. He was the first post-war Holocaust
denier, the first fascist to make money by lecturing in American
colleges and provoking fights with anti-fascists, he invented the term
âwhite powerâ and was basically the Johnny Appleseed of the modern
fascist movement. Rockwell was an original thinker, a pioneer of the
tactics that fashy folks still use today to get media coverage and play
the victim. But he came into the game early enough that he never quite
figured out how to hide his âpower levelâ, which is a term modern
fascists use for hiding their beliefs as garden-variety conservatism.
Rockwell was initially somewhat anti-Christian, because, you know, Jesus
was Jewish, which was something that didnât exactly play well with 1960s
conservatives. In 1964 though, he met with Wesley Swift, the leader of
the Christian Identity Church. Rockwell instantly recognized what an
opportunity Christian Identity represented for Nazis in America. As it
stood at that point the party, and as a result all American fascism, was
basically just a cheap rip-off of German fascism. This was good for
triggering Jewish war veterans and civil-rights activists, but it didnât
click with regular Americans in a way that would allow it to spread.
American fascism, Rockwell thought, needed a spiritual core, something
esoteric, a little occult, and thoroughly American.
Whenever it arises in the world, fascism takes pieces of different
spiritual traditions and hammers them together around its central
authoritarian framework. This is part of what allows it to spread in
different cultures. Umberto Eco identified this trait as âsyncretismâ.
âThe Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult
elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the
new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and
Germanic Empire. If you browse in the shelves that, in American
bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint
Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint
Augustine and Stonehenge â that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.â
Obviously, Eco didnât write his essay until thirty years after
Rockwellâs death, but GLR was such a natural fascist; such an
instinctive Fuhrer type that he instantly seemed to know that grafting
Christian Identity onto American Nazism was going to be critical. He
appointed Ralph Forbes, head of the California branch of the Nazi party,
to be the party Christian Identity Minister. âFor Race and Nationâ, my
favorite Rockwell biography, says this about Forbes: âHis strident
racial views, his flair for the dramatic, and his loyalty to Rockwell
made Forbes the perfect man for the job. California was an ideal
location, there were numerous Identity ministries successfully operating
there. Forbes would be the first Nazi officer to preside over a flock.
By fusing Christian Identity and National Socialism, Rockwell hoped to
maximize the synergies of the groups and broaden the potential
membership for each group. Nazis could find religious justification and
legitimization in the Church, Identity members could find political
expression for their ideology in the ANP. A riot could now be expressed
as religion under the guise of the Identity Church. The push was on
within the party to legitimize the cause, to de-emphasize Nazism and
push racial issues to the forefront. Racial issues could be easily
exploited, because they preyed upon nativist fears of the white
population.â
Thankfully for all of us, Rockwell was assassinated by one of his own
men on August 25, 1967. Weâll talk about what happened to the American
Nazi party after his death in more detail in the next chapter. Right
now, whatâs important is that Rockwellâs marriage of American Nazism
with Christian Identity took. It spread throughout the fascist right.
Richard Butler, the reverend who founded the Aryans Nationsâ compound in
Idaho, was a Christian Identity believer. Throughout the 1980s and
1990s, the Aryan Nations acted as one of the linchpins of American
fascism. a place where every kind of violent, right wing extremist would
gather and meet and make connections with one another. From the Aryan
Nations, Christian Identity beliefs were able to make inroads, not just
among Klansmen and neo-Nazis, but into the American militia movement.
Tanya Telfair Sharp, a researcher with the Journal of Black Studies, was
one of the first academics to document the spread of Christian Identity
outside of explicit fascists and into the murkier world of white
âpatriotsâ. She documented evidence of Christian Identity pamphlets and
underground literature spreading in small local gun and knife shows
around the country from 1995 to 1999. It had, of course been prominent
in that world well before 1995. Christian Identityâs focus on the
inevitable apocalyptic battle against Aryans and satanic Jews meshed
well with the apocalyptic fetishism of the survivalist and militia
communities. As Tanya Sharp wrote, âBoth groups were tied together by
their belief that âreestablishment of white sovereignty depends on the
use of organized aggression against the enemies of the true Christians;
all non-whites and all non-white Protestants. The first two letters of
ârace holy warâ make up the battle cry RAHOWA , often used in Christian
Identity speeches and publications.â
Christian Identity literature focused on preparing for this apocalyptic
battle, which allowed them to subtly recruit preppers by focusing on
not-explicitly ideological tasks, like acquiring dried food and
weaponry, or building anti-personnel traps in order to protect woodland
compounds. Y2K was a goldmine for Christian Identity. Fear of the year
2000 brought thousands of new Americans into the world of survivalist
magazines, conventions, and online message boards. The worlds of the
militia movement and the survivalist communities are of course closely
tied into the world of conspiracy theories. In the late 1990s, guys like
Alex Jones werenât preaching overt anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Youâd never catch him claiming that Jews were the spawn of Satan, for
example. But Jones and his ilk were major proponents of the New World
Order, the king of conspiracy theories throughout the 1990s and early
2000s.
The NWO took different forms in the mouths of different conspiracy
theorists. The most mainstream and least racist version of the theory
was that a secret world government of shadowy globalists was now slowly
taking over the US federal government and the governments of the world,
with the aim of enforcing total Orwellian control over the populace and
massacring the vast majority of the worldâs population, particularly the
Christians, for unclear reasons. The New World Order conspiracy was
again, not inherently anti-Semitic or racist, but in practice, most
expressions of the theory wound up focusing on beliefs that a Jewish-led
cabal of Blacks, homosexuals, Hispanics, immigrants, and liberals was
trying to wipe out all straight, white, Christian Americans. Christian
Identity believers introduced the term âZionist Occupation Governmentâ,
or ZOG, into the lexicon of American fringe politics. It took off like
wildfire, entering the vocabularies of countless Americans on the far
right who would never have considered calling themselves a Nazi.
Christian Identity beliefs just happened to mesh perfectly with every
other extremist right wing belief in the United States. In the late
1980s and early 1990s, tax protesting became more common. Christian
Identity fit in with that too, arguing that paying taxes was really just
paying for the âdemonic Jewsâ to carry out their white genocide aims
even faster. In 1997, William Luther Pierce, a former devotee of
Rockwell, and head of a Nazi group called the National Alliance, wrote
this in a newsletter, âThe truth of the matter is that the new world
order people ultimately aim to create a new world population of serfs
for their global plantation, a homogenous population of coffee-colored
serfs, a population of docile, predictable, and interchangeable serfs,
and they definitely donât want any large reservoir of white people
anywhere who might rebel.â If you take the word âwhiteâ out, that
sentiment matches almost word-for-word with any one of a thousand rants
Alex Jones has gone on over the years.
Under Rockwell, the American Nazi Party never numbered more than a few
dozen real, committed members, and its ideas failed to gain any kind of
mainstream hold. His vulgar, racist cartoons and explicitly hateful,
divisive rhetoric left a bad taste in most peopleâs mouths. By the late
1990s, American fascists were no less hateful or violent than they had
ever been, but their rhetoric had evolved to fit with the deep
conspiratorial undercurrents sweeping through American society. Rockwell
had shotgunned out hardcore racism, and as a result heâd only been able
to recruit a small number of the craziest assholes in America. New
American fascism, blended with Christian Identity, was capable of hiding
out in more moderate spaces, and luring in new believers without waving
swastikas in their faces. Perhaps the most potent weapon Christian
Identity added to the arsenal of American fascism was the idea of white
genocide.
If you spent much time studying neo-Nazis, youâre aware of the
significance of the number 14. It stands in for the 14 words âWe must
secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.â
This is the invention of a guy named David Lane, a neo-Nazi bank robber
and, for decades, a Christian Identity believer. While Lane has moved on
from Christian identity to some weird sort of bastardized Norse
mythology rip-off, he and other Christian Identity believers in the 80s
and 90s were largely responsible for seeding the fear of white genocide
into American fascism. From Tanya Sharpâs article, âThe Identity
literature is filled with negative images full of white women caring for
mixed-race babies. Race mixing in and of itself is a cause for an
organized and radical plan to separate the races.â The National Vanguard
magazine, a leading neo-Nazi publication suggests that the cult of
miscegenation, which according to them has proliferated over the past 30
years, has placed the white race on the precipice of biological
extinction. Furthermore, they argue that only radical action will end
the morality of death. The urge to protect white babies and ensure the
future of the white race, inspired Eric Rudolph to bomb an Alabama
abortion clinic in 1996. Rudolph was a Christian Identity believer, and
his beliefs led him to bomb Atlantaâs Olympic Park the same year, along
with a gay nightclub. Rudolph spent more than a year hiding in the
woods, eluding federal agents. He killed two and injured more than 120
people over his almost two year bombing spree.
He was not the last person moved to violence by this picture of a
declining white race. Everyone listening to this will remember the 2019
Christchurch massacre, in which a fascist extremist murdered 50 Muslim
worshipers at a New Zealand mosque. That shooter did not identify as a
Nazi, and his manifesto lacked the expected anti-Semitic rambling, but
he ranted at length about the threat of white genocide and what he
called âThe Great Replacementâ. In between those two terrorists are
dozens and dozens of other attacks, with bits of Christian Identity DNA
coded into them. John Earnest, the Poway synagogue shooter did not
identify himself as a follower of Christian Identity theology, but
according to Tablet magazine, âThe manifesto left behind by the Poway
shooter reads like a hybrid of classical Christian anti-Semitism and
contemporary white nationalism. He alternated within paragraphs,
sometimes within sentences, from charging the Jews with the
responsibility for the deaths of Jesus and the early Christian saints to
declaring that Jews fund politicians and organizations who use mass
immigration to displace the European race. The document is riddled with
contradictions, and is inarticulate even by white nationalist manifesto
standards as it moves between citing the gospels and the killerâs love
of Frédéric Chopin, with explosive hatred toward Jews. But what it does
evince, clearly, is a grounding of a form of anti-Semitism thatâs
equally in debt to older Christian traditions and more modern secular
variants centered on race and soil.â
Christian Identityâs influence in the fascist right is so deep and so
well woven that attacks are now carried out by terrorists who have been
inspired by its tenants without ever learning the words âChristian
Identity.â You will be hearing about it regularly throughout the rest of
this audio book. Iâll be sure to point out wherever groups or
individuals we discuss are Christian Identity believers, but it almost
isnât necessary. Christian Identity is now just a part of the furniture
of American fascism.
If the international fascist movement has a single founding father, that
man would be George Lincoln Rockwell. George took the ideologies and the
hateful, vicious drive to exterminate and dominate that Adolf Hitler
established, and he found a way to let these things function in a
post-world war two era. After the war, fascism had lost its ability to
attract a mass audience in the United States. It was seen as the
ideology that had torn the world apart - because it was. People wouldnât
show up to Nazi party meetings, or pay dues, or vote as fascists, and so
Rockwell instead focused on generating mass media attention with the few
men he actually had at his disposal. He picketed civil rights marches
wielding signs covered in racial slurs and trusting in the police to
defend him and his outnumbered crew. Even if he could only get 9 or 10
men to march with them, the rage and violence his signs inspired in
counter-protesters were a guarantee of mass media coverage. He spoke at
colleges for the same reason, knowing the protests and attacks caused by
his presence would get him in the papers and ensure a steady stream of
donations. Rockwell positioned himself as a free speech crusader, since
arguing to the public about his desire for genocide would have seemed
less appealing. These are all tactics modern fascists use today. We see
them on display with men like Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes and his
Proud Boys, Joey Gibson and Patriot Prayer. Whether they know it or not,
all these men cribbed from the playbook of George Lincoln Rockwell.
But the fascist movement has evolved considerably since GLRâs days.
While many of the tools he pioneered are still incredibly effective
today, his obsession with Nazi imagery and the swastika in particular
was doom for his hopes of ever creating a mass movement. He had started
to realize this near the end of his career. In 1966 he came up with the
brilliant slogan âWhite powerâ, which he had printed up on t-shirts and
protest placards. He worked the phrase into his speeches in Chicago,
where he arrived to counterprotest Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King was
in the city to organize a protest that advocated for more public housing
in traditionally white, and thus more affluent, parts of the city. For
the first time in his career, Rockwell was able to strike a nerve with a
large number of white Americans, by focusing on their fear and
resentment of black people. On August 6th, 1966, Martin Luther King Jr.
Led a group of marchers through Gauge park. He was met by an enormous
crowd of counter-protestors, organized, and radicalized, by George
Lincoln Rockwell. They numbered more than 2,500. The crowd carried
placards and banners emblazoned with Rockwell quotes like âJoin the
White Rebellionâ, and âWe Worked Hard for What We Gotâ. Thousands of
furious voices shouted âWhite Powerâ at king and his comrades. It marked
one of the most violent and vicious receptions Dr. King ever received.
And it also marked the high point of Rockwellâs career. He was shot dead
one year later. His dream of fomenting a white revolution, however, did
not die with him. It lived on in his apostles, and chief among them was
a man named William Luther Pierce.
Pierce was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 11th, 1933. His
father, also William Luther Pierce, died in a car accident when he was 8
years old. His mother had to scramble to support him and his younger
brother. Leonard Zeskind, author of the crucial book, Blood and
Politics, suspects her background heavily influenced the fascist Pierce
would later become. âMarguerite, his motherâs biological father had run
off when she was a child, leaving her fatherless until Margueriteâs
mother, Billâs grandmother, remarried. The new stepfather was a Jewish
man, from New York, who had moved south and Marguerite had a bitter
relationship with him. William Pierceâs story thus begins with his own
absent father, and his motherâs unhappy tie to a Jewish stepfather.
Marguerite moved about the south with their two young sons in tow. From
these travails, William Pierce claimed he learned the virtues of
self-discipline, and the importance of delaying immediate gratification
for a greater goal. Values, he said, that became constant themes in his
life. Pierce worked as a child to help his mom feed the family. He would
later write that his difficult upbringing made him into the man he later
became. âI think this external discipline, this external control, being
forced over a long period of time to do things I didnât want to do but
were necessary to do helped me develop self-discipline. A lot of
children these days never learn that. Itâs amazing how many adults canât
do that. They canât stick at a job they donât want to do.â Young Bill
was clearly a brilliant boy. He did well in high school and went to a
military Academy in Brine, Texas, from 1949 to 1951. He earned a job
there, cleaning the chemistry lab stockroom, and that job wound up
stoking what would become a deep love of science. William went to
college and then graduate school where he studied to become a physicist.
He worked at the jet propulsion lab in Pasadena for a year, and married
Patricia Jones, who was also a brilliant mathematician. The couple moved
to Boulder and Pierce finished his doctorate in physics in 1962. His
dissertation, which had something to do with nuclear dipole and electric
quadrupole resonance, held no hints as to the sort of man he would
become. Pierce got a job as the assistant professor of physics at Oregon
State University, in Corvallis. He and his wife had twins and they
settled into what seemed like It would be a perfectly dull, normal,
healthy life. Pierce later wrote âUntil I was 30 years old, I had hardly
given a thought to politics, to race, or to social questions.â That
changed after he started working at Oregon State University. He started
showing up at meetings of the John Birch Society.
Now, you may not have heard of these guys, but theyâre one of the most
important organizations in the history of the American radical right.
Named after an American advisor in China, who the groupâs founder,
Robert Welsh, considered to be the first American who died fighting
communists, the John Birch Society publications encouraged the US to
withdraw from the UN, urged the impeachments of Chief Justice Earl
Warren, accused former president Eisenhower of being a secret communist,
and other similar battiness. Hereâs a quote from one of their 1960
publications, âThe Blue Book'', which William Peirce would certainly
have read. âNow if the danger from the Communist conspiracy were all we
had to worry about, it would be enough, but every thinking and informed
man senses that even as cunning and ruthless, and as determined as are
the activists whom we call Communists, with a capital C, the conspiracy
could never have reached itâs present extensiveness and the gangsters at
the head of it could never have reached their present power, unless
there were tremendous weaknesses in the whole body of our civilization;
weaknesses to make the advance of such a disease so rapid and itâs
ravages so disastrous.â Now Robert Welch always denied any anti-Semitic
leanings within the John Birch Society, but many people suspected that
the weaknesses Welch saw in American society were, in fact, Jewish
people. This is because John Birch Society propaganda was often
incredibly similar to the Third Reichâs own propaganda. The Nazis also
felt like Communism was brought down on society by hidden actors who
weakened the state enough for this disease to advance on it. The main
difference between the two is that the Nazis named the Jews explicitly,
and the John Birch society did not. Pierceâs primary issues with the
John Birch Society is that it wasnât willing to discuss âthe Jews'' or
explicitly racial issues. The Birchers were far-right, but they didnât
want anyone to mistake them for literal Nazis. Peirce later wrote, âI
quickly found out that the two topics on which I wanted an intelligent
discussion, race and Jews, were precisely the two topics Birch society
members were forbidden to discuss!â.
William Pierce maintained a successful career as a physicist while he
devoured more and more John Birch propaganda. In 1965 he left the
university, and got a job in Connecticut, working for the Pratt &
Whitney aircraft plant as a senior research associate physicist. He made
good money and he did well, but his coworkers described him as a real
loner, who worked poorly with others and seemed almost unable to manage
subordinance. Pierceâs political leanings were kept more or less under
wraps until the plantâs workers went on strike. This face to face
contact with what Pierce considered Communism, infuriated him so much
that he tried to drive his car through a picket of a thousand union men.
This is perhaps not so surprising since William Pierce had used his move
to the East coast as an opportunity to start visiting the American Nazi
Party headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
William and George Lincoln Rockwell got along well, and Pierce found
national socialism a perfect fit with the beliefs heâd been developing
since his move to Oregon. His only issue with Rockwell, and the Nazis
was, well, all the Nazi stuff. Pierce thought that the old fashioned
fashy uniforms and swastikas made them look like they were LARP-ers,
rather than serious revolutionaries. Obviously he didnât use the term
âLARP-erâ but he accused them of âHollywood anticsâ, which amounts to
the same thing. In May of 1966, Pierce resigned from his factory job,
and moved his family to Virginia. His wife, Patricia, started teaching
university math so she could support her husband in his, you know, Nazi
efforts. Weirdly enough Patricia wasnât a Nazi, and later divorced her
husband for his beliefs. But for a time she was willing to, I donât
know, humor him? She may have thought it was a phase he was going to get
over eventually. Spoilers; he did not.
In Blood and Politics, Zeskind writes, âOver the decades Pierce showed
little emotional commitment to his two sons or multiple wives. Only his
mother, Marguerite, and his Siamese cats successfully vied with his
single-minded devotion to national socialist politics. During these
early years he began a small business selling guns, NS arms, and
registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. His
inventory included machine guns. The business folded after passage of
gun control legislation in 1968. (One guess as to what âNS Arms'' stood
for.) Now Rockwell and Pierce embarked on a publishing venture together,
putting out 6 issues of a Nazi magazine, but William refused to actually
join the group until Rockwell changed its name from the American Nazi
Party to the National Socialist White Peopleâs Partty. When Rockwell was
gunned down outside the parking lot of that laundromat, the movement he
had spent his adult life crafting quickly began to fracture. Nazis were,
then, as now and always, catty bitches. GLR had kept his party together
by sheer force of will, and even he hadnât done a great job of that,
what with the whole âgetting murdered by one of his own men'' thing.
Pierce stuck with the NSWPP, which retained the most members after
Rockwellâs death. For a while, he tried to take Rockwellâs place, acting
as the functional head of the party, writing all its propaganda, and
even speaking at university campuses. He did not have Rockwellâs talent
for drawing media attention. His only real success was saying that Nixon
should be dragged out of his office and shot, which drew some coverage
and got the FBI to start looking into him. During this period, Pierce
became something of a mentor to a fella names James Mason.
Young James had joined Rockwellâs American Nazi Party back in 1966, when
he was 14. Two years later, at age 16, James got in trouble at school;
he was disciplined by his principle and in retaliation started planning
to go on a shooting spree, and murder multiple members of the school
administration. Before carrying out his plan he called the NSWPPâs
headquarters and wound up on the horn with William Pierce. The two
talked it out, and Peirce convinced Mason to move to Virginia, work for
the party, and learn how to run a printing machine instead of massacring
his classmates. Weâll be talking about Mason more in a later chapter. He
would go one to write a book titled Siege, which provided the nuts and
bolts inspiration for the terrorist group Attomwaffen, but Iâm getting
ahead of myself.
As the 60s wound to a close, Pierce started to get frustrated with the
NSWPP, mainly with the fact that, again, it was just too darn Nazi-y. He
believed fascism needed an authentically American character, and
movement, if it was going to have any chance of taking over in this
country. Just dressing up as Nazis was not going to cut it. He quit the
party in July of 1970, and published a paper called âProspectus for a
National Frontâ, which he circulated around neo-Nazi circles. Hereâs how
it opened; âAmerica today, and more specifically the American people,
face the most serous and deadly menace which has arisen in their entire
history. This menace far overshadows that post by any war we have fought
and the economic catastrophe though which we have passed, or any
domestic strife which has torn us. For today were are faced not just
with a threat to out territorial integrity, or to our material
possessions, or to our way of life, or even to our own lives, but to
something far dearer. Today, all that we ever have been and all that we
ever might be, our race itself, is threatened with extinction. â
Pierce went on to complain that none of the existing radical right-wing
organizations existing in the United States had the ability to turn into
a âlarge scale revolutionary movementâ. âTheir long established and
unbroken record of failure is the best evidence of this fact.â He wrote.
He attacked the movement for being filled with âovergrown childrenâ and
said âIn essence, we need to stop waiting around for a new Hitler to
rise up and unify all of our fringe little groupsâ. Instead, Pierce
suggested Americaâs fascists take a leaf out of Communismâs book and
create a national front; a large umbrella organization that would
combine and coordinate all the different right-wing groups, and allow
them to recruit people more easily, without the baggage of swastikas and
Klan robes. Towards this end, William Pierce established the National
Alliance in 1974. Weâll talk more about it throughout this book but
obviously the National Alliance didnât wind up being the trick to create
a mass Fascist movement in the United States. It was, objectively, more
successfully than Rockwellâs American Nazi party, drawing in thousands
of members over the years and generating millions of dollars in income.
But it proved no more capable of creating a popular revolution than the
ANP had been. However, buried in Pierceâs prospectus, was a very
important paragraph that contained a realization far more crucial than
his National alliance would ever become. âAbout the only good thing
which can be said about all these little groups is that they do generate
quite a flood of pamphlets, leaflets, bulletins, newsletters, and other
printed materials which express some excellent sentiment. But even here,
it is largely an incestuous sort of affair in which the propaganda and
the sentiment are circulated largely within the same vaguely defined
âmovementâ in which they were born. Any real contact or rapport with the
general population is absent, and this lack of contact with the public
is not due simply to problems of distribution or lack of access to the
mass media. Most movement literature would fail to evoke a sympathetic
response from the masses even if it could be placed regularly in their
hands. It is, for the most part, too esoteric, too introverted, and too
kooky to strike a responsive chord among the general public.â Pierce
correctly understood that to really make progress, American Fascism was
going to have to craft propaganda that could infect the hearts and minds
of normal white Americans. It would take years for Pierce to translate
this insight into action, but when he did, the result would quite
literally shake the world.
First, however, came his dalliance with a spritely gentleman named
Willis Carto. Now, Carto is one of the very few individuals in this
story whose commitment to Fascism precedes the activism of George
Lincoln Rockwell. He started a monthly paper in 1955 called (revealingly
in my opinion), âEntitled Right, the Journal of Forward-Thinking
American Nationalismâ. According to Zeskind, âIt promoted many of the
anti-communist, anti-Semitic and segregationist ideas then circulating
on the far right.â In 1957 Carto first wrote openly about his idea to
create something called âThe Liberty Lobbyâ, which he promised would
âLock horns with the minority special interest pressure groups in order
to support the needs of white people.â who, it must be said, were
suffering mightily in the 1950s. Carto wrote that âTo the goal of
political power all else must temporarily be sacrificed.â He spent his
life embodying that creed. Now, Willis Carto was not an
out-in-the-street bullhorn and placards activist. Nor was he an armed
revolutionary, clutching a rifle and calling for racial holy war.
Instead, he sought to bring anti-communists and segregationists together
and craft a thoroughly American fascist movement. In 1962 he started
publishing a magazine, âWestern Destinyâ, dedicated to inculcating these
ideas among the American right. He wrote about âculture creatorsâ (white
people) and their eternal battle against âculture destroyersâ (black
people). âToleranceâ, Carto wrote, âcan often be a culture-retarding and
culture-distorting weaknessâ. âWestern Destinyâ began to attract a
dedicated audience of budding extremists, including a teenager named
David Duke. It is possible that Willis Carto is the man who red-pilled
Duke.
Throughout the 1960s, as William Pierce was coming up with his idea for
a National Front, Willis Carto built the Liberty Lobby into a moderately
large mailing list for distribution of far-right, but not openly
fascist, propaganda. He latched on to the 1968 presidential bid of a
fellow named George Wallace. The 45th governor of Alabama, Wallace was
one of the leading voices against the Civil Rights Movement. His most
famous line is probably this: âIn the name of the greatest people that
have ever trod the earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the
gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say âsegregation today,
segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!ââ One guess as to what
color of people Wallace thought were the âgreatest on earthâ. So, you
can see why George Wallace would appeal to a guy like Willis Carto.
Carto turned the Liberty Lobby towards the cause of getting Wallace
elected president. He was, of course, unsuccessful in this goal, but the
campaign was an incredible success for the Liberty Lobby. By its end,
theyâd become the home for almost-but-not-quite Nazi politics in the
United States. Their newsletter, âThe Liberty Letterâ, had 170,000
subscribers. When Wallaceâs campaign fell apart, Carto was able to swoop
in and acquire a mailing list with the names of another 230,000 people,
members of a group called Youth for Wallace.
Willis felt that the failure of George Wallace to win the presidency was
no good reason to let the movement of young fascists heâd inspired go to
waste. Under Carto, Youth for Wallace was molded into the National Youth
Alliance. According to Zeskindâs Blood and Politics, âIn the subsequent
months the National Youth Alliance sponsored several regional meetings,
including its January 1969 event at Conleyâs Motor Hotel in Monroeville,
outside of Pittsburgh, PA. It was here that the youth organization first
began to unravel. Several officers in the new group objected to the
content and tenor of the meeting, at an attendant socialist supporters
home. The claimed that the affair was awash in Nazi heraldry, including
women who wore swastika jewelry and men who sang the Horst-Wessel-Leid,
a Nazi party anthem from the 1930s. The host and MC promoted a new
booklet by Cartoâs west coast enterprise, Noontide press, Myth of the
Six Million, it argued that the Nazi genocide was a figment of the
Jewish imagination. One of the formal presentations was entitled âPlato
the Fascistâ.
So, Carto had revealed his power level too quickly, and the National
Youth Alliance quickly alienated the majority of its potential
membership. These people may not have felt black and white folks should
use the same water fountains, but they werenât about to identify
themselves as Nazis. Most of them probably had parents whoâd fought the
Nazis. But Cartoâs work had attracted some new blood. William Pierce and
a sizable herd of national socialists. They started hovering around the
Liberty Lobby like flies around the hovering corpse of George Wallaceâs
presidential ambitions. They worked together for a while, but it was an
acrimonious pairing, and the straight up national socialists conflicted
with Cartoâs old guard who were fine with basically towing the Nazi
line, but not fine actually identifying as Nazis. Carto and Pierce wound
up breaking apart, and after a complex series of bureaucratic battles I
donât care to recount, Pierce wound up reincorporating the National
Youth Alliance in Virginia, in October of 1970. Carto accused Pierce of
stealing the Liberty Lobbyâs mailing list, which was probably true.
Peirce accused Carto of embezzling $55,000 from his own organization,
which was also probably true. Carto accused Pierceâs faction who were,
again, literal Nazis, of being Zionists. Pierce responded by calling
Carto âswarthyâ, which was racist code for ânot white enoughâ.
The fighting between Pierce and Carto just underscored how unsuccessful
Pierceâs efforts to build a National Front had been. His plan had been
to start by recruiting more students, starting in the DC area but this
was a miserable failure. When he was invited to speak at George
Washington University for some reason, in February of 1972, Pierce
couldnât gather more than two dozen students. Anti-fascists showed up
and threw raw eggs at him and his men. I should note that in the
immediate wake of the Christchurch shooting, a far right Australian
politician, senator Frasier Anning, blamed the massacre on âan
immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New
Zealand in the first placeâ. Shortly thereafter, a heroic teenager hit
him in the head with an egg. $70,000 was raised in a gofundme for the
boys defense, which he donated instead to the victims of the
Christchurch shooting. I write a lot in this book about the linkages
between old-school and modern fascists, but let us also acknowledge that
anti-fascists have their own long-standing traditions and one of them
is, apparently, egging.
Anyway, on February 26th, 1974, William Pierce decided to revamp the
National Youth Alliance into a new organization, the National Alliance,
which he incorporated in Virginia. He continued to publish the
organizationâs newsletter, âAttack!â, which included guides on how to
bomb movie theaters, and which guns would work best in urban uprisings.
It was the sort of fare Nazi newsletters had always focused on. But the
next year, in January of 1975, Pierce introduced his first real
innovation into the annals of right wing terror, a book titled The
Turner Diaries. Published in sections across several issues of âAttack!â
The book is presented as a series of diary entries from a revolutionary.
You might compare it to a Nazi answer to A Handmaidâs Tale. The Turner
Diaries were meant to take place in a near-future America, in which a
Jewish dominated liberal government had taken over and forcibly
instituted such horrors as multiculturalism, and gun control. Peirce
presents those things from a Nazi point of view, of course, so
multi-culturalism is presented as feral, animalistic black people raping
white women at will, and gun control is portrayed as the forcible
confiscation of all privately owned firearms. There are âequality
police'' in this book, to give you an idea of its tenor. The hero, Earl
Turner, is a normal white man who gets swept up in a secret terrorist
organization, led by a group called The Order, who organize their
insurgency in a series of small cells to carry out a series of vicious
terrorist attacks, including the bombing of an FBI headquarters. The
goal of these attacks is to destabilize the American government and
provoke a vicious race war. The Order funds its operations by robbing
banks and armored cars, which allowed them to buy weapons and explosives
to carry out more attacks and, gradually, to tip the country into a
nightmare.
The book launched a number of concepts into the Fascist mindset, not the
least of which is the idea of âthe day of the ropeâ. Iâm going to quote
now from The Turner Diaries and the section later in the book, âToday
has been the day of the rope, a grim and bloody day but an unavoidable
one. Tonight, from tens of thousands of lamp posts, power poles, and
trees throughout this vast metropolitan area, the grizzly forms hang. In
the lighted streets one sees them everywhere, even the street signs at
intersections have been pressed into service and at practically every
street corner I passed this evening on the way to HQ there was a
dangling corpse. Four at every intersection, hanging from a single
overpass only about a mile from here is a group of about 30, each with
an identical placard around its neck bearing the printed legend âI
betrayed my raceâ. Two or three of that group had been decked out in
academic robes before they were strung up, and the whole batch are
apparently faculty members from the nearby UCLA campus. The first thing
I saw in the moonlight was the placard with the legend, in large block
letters, âI DEFILED MY RACEâ. Above the placard leered the horribly
bloated, purplish face of a young woman, her eyes wide open and bulging,
her mouth agape. Finally I can make out the thin, vertical line of rope,
disappearing into the branches above. Apparently the rope had slipped a
bit, and the branch to which it was tied had sagged until the womanâs
feet were resting on the pavement, giving the uncanny appearance of a
corpse standing upright of its own volition. I shuddered and quickly
went on my way. There are many thousands of hanging female corpses like
that in the city tonight, all wearing identical placards around their
necks. They are the white women who were married to, or living with
blacks, with Jews, or with other non-white males.â
Earl Turner dies in the book, carrying out a suicidal but successful
attack on the Pentagon, but the Order is victorious in the end. The book
is essentially framed as a historical document, with researchers from
Earlâs future commenting on it. They note that after the US was purged
of all non-white people, the same thing was done to the rest of the
planet, using a series of nuclear and chemical weapons attacks, to
âcleanseâ Asia. Itâs super fucked up, but it took off like gangbusters
among the American far-right. It was eventually published as a book,
selling as many as 500,000 copies. The Turner Diaries did not sell the
traditional way, in Barnes and Noble or whatever. Instead it
proliferated virally on the gun show circuit, at survivalist
conventions, and in tiny small-town shops owned by racists. 500,000
copies is a substantial success even by mainstream publishing standards.
Itâs not an earth-shattering book but, you know, itâs still really good
sales. I found a good article in the Atlantic by J.M. Berger, who
authored a scholarly paper called âThe Turner Legacyâ. It notes, âThe
Turner Diaries is notable for its lack of ideological persuasion. At one
point its protagonist, Earl Turner, is given a book to read. Turner
claims the book perfectly explains the reasons for white supremacy and
the justification of all the Orderâs actions. Importantly, this magical
tomeâs contents are never specified. Although the novelâs epilogue
broadly hints at a Nazi orientation, the book never explicitly
identifies the Order with a specific movement.â Due in part to Pierceâs
desire to appeal to normal people, as well as the novelâs limited
circulation among Neo-Nazis, Turner assumes its readers are already
racist and do not need to be recruited to that mindset. The abandonment
of âwhyâ empowers a single narrative focus on âwhatâ and âhowâ, the
necessity of immediate, violent action and concrete suggestions about
how to go about it. This is part of why the book has so often been
associated with violence and terrorism.
The Turner Diaries would go on to become probably the most influential
single piece of fascist propaganda since Mein Kampf. Itâs inspired more
than 200 murders since its publication. But itâs also inspired a hell of
a lot more than just murder. The Turner Diaries became the ideological
underpinning of a vicious American insurgency, which eventually led to
hundreds and hundreds of armed men around the country working actively
towards the establishment of a white supremacist state. The Turner
Diaries also inspired a whole genre of fascist and quasi-fascist
propaganda books, written to the same rubric but reining in on the
racism, just a little bit, in order to avoid freaking out the ânormiesâ.
In 1996 John Ross published Unintended Consequences, a novel that is
best described as The Turner Diaries but all the racism is whispered.
The cover of the copy I have features a burning copy of the
Constitution, with a black-clad cop attempting to sexually assault Lady
Justice in front of it. Its main innovation from The Turner Diaries was
to switch the focus of its revolutionaries away from race war and
towards just gun rights. The plot focuses around a man, Henry Bowman,
who winds up being framed by the ATF for some stupid reason related to
their desire to take all of Americaâs guns. He kills most of the ATF
agents who come for him and then brutally tortures one who he captures.
Bowman and a small group of gun rights activists then carry out a
terrorist campaign, horribly murdering gun control advocates around the
nation until the president repeals all gun control law. Alex Jones has
mentioned multiple times on InfoWars that Unintended Consequences is one
of his favorite books.
In more recent years a guy named Matt Bracken has written a whole series
of books starting with Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Like Unintended
Consequences, his first book is basically Turner Diaries with less
racism. The liberal government creates a false flag mass shooting to
take away everyoneâs guns. The ATF is the bad guy, and brave patriots
beat them via terrorism. Brackenâs innovation was to have the cast of
his books include numerous non-white people. The idea seems to be that
if most of the people arenât white, then the book canât be racist. On an
unrelated note, the second book in the series is Domestic Enemies: The
Reconquista. Its plot is that the evil liberals orchestrate an invasion
of Mexicans with the goal of having them ban English in the Southwest
and secede from the United States. J.M. Berger, this time writing for
The Daily Beast identified some similarities between Brackenâs third
book and The Turner Diaries. âAfter an earthquake demolishes Memphis,
black refugees turn into a seething mob of gang-rapists and cannibals,
characterizations that feature memorably in The Turner Diaries, while
urban blacks loot a path from Baltimore to Washington DC, where they
demand and receive a new Socialist constitution engineered by a thinly
veiled caricature of President Obama. The narrative disclaimers
continue; one character condemns white racist killings in the chaos
after the quake, and a battle-weary white racist girl near the end of
the book accepts the hand of comfort offered by a black army medic, but
these and other individual moments of race-grace are hard pressed to
counter the otherwise vivid, lengthy depiction of African-Americans en
masse as cannibal rapists directly responsible for destroying Americaâs
constitution.â
In writing The Turner Diaries, William Pierce ignited a movement within
the far right that is still very much present and relevant today. The
next chapter will discuss, in depth, the generation of terrorists who
were inspired by his words to take horrifying, bloody action. Like
Christian Identity, The Turner Diaries have influenced many people who
may never have even read the book. In his manifesto, the Christchurch
Mosque shooter wrote about his hope that his attack would spark renewed
calls for gun control in the United States, because he believed this
would lead inevitably to a new civil war. The Poway Synagogue shooter
repeated the same desire. William Peirce died in 2002 but his ideas
live, and kill, to this day.
The struggle between William Pierce and Willis Carto would prove to be a
microcosm of a larger struggle within the fascist right itself. On
Cartoâs side are the mainstreamers â their goal is to gain political
power by pushing the Overton window further and further right and
convincing more and more of their fellow Americans to adopt hardcore
fascist politics. Carto supported political parties and candidates, most
notably David Dukeâs successful run for the Louisiana state senate, as a
republican, and unsuccessful run for governor. He was also a backer of
Pat Buchanan. Carto and other mainstreamers believe that the main
majority of white Americans can be converted to their political ideals,
so gaining power is just a matter of properly propagandizing to their
fellow white people. William Peirce, on the other hand, was a
vanguardist. Vanguardists believe that politics is hopeless, and the
only way for their side to win is to, as in The Turner Diaries, form
small, dedicated groups and basically bring on the collapse of society
in order to take control. George Lincoln Rockwell himself is hard to pin
down. He had elements of both mainstreamer and vanguardist in his
writings and in his activism, but his most direct descendants, men like
William Peirce and James Mason, became two of the most influential minds
in the vanguardist movement, and the vanguardist movement is the chunk
of the white supremacist movement that we are focusing on in this
audiobook. Because in the late 1970s, a new wave of fascists and
neo-Nazis began to rise. For more than a decade, they would build a
potent insurgency, armed with missiles, machine guns and bombs, utterly
dedicated to a single, dire mission; turning The Turner Diaries into
reality.
Everything youâre going to read about in this chapter really happened.
It is documented history. I feel the need to emphasize that here, at the
beginning, because the history Iâm going to discuss is criminally
underreported. Iâd be willing to bet most of you have not come across
any of it in textbooks or in news articles unless youâve gone out of
your way to learn about this particular subject. The question of why
none of this is very well known is a good one, because the story Iâm
going to tell in this chapter is the story of a bloody, vicious, and
exceptionally deadly insurgency that, had a few things broken
differently, could have plunged this nation into mass violence. As it
was, hundreds upon hundreds of people were killed, and the killing
continues to this day. The story of this insurgency starts, as most of
these stories do, with a single man named Louis Beam. Like me, Louis
Beam was a Texan. Born in 1946 in Lufkin, he grew up in the America that
modern conservatives still longingly harken back to. His parents were
working class people and his father served in combat during world war
two. That tradition inspired Beam to enlist in the army at age 19. He
had a pregnant wife at this point and every reason to avoid conflict,
but Beam sought out a baptism by fire.
Louis Beam entered a US military that was, for the first time, racially
integrated. This did not sit well with him. He was a fierce supporter of
George Wallaceâs presidential campaign, which put him in the same
ideological orbit as Willis Cartoâs liberty lobby and Williams Peirceâs
band of Nazi revolutionaries. Itâs possible he read some of Cartoâs
newsletters during this period. Shortly after shipping out to Vietnam,
Beam and some of his comrades hung Confederate flags in their barracks
as an act of protest against the civil rights movement. "Bring the War
Home" by Kathleen Belew provides a good context for the nature of racial
strife among American soldiers in Vietnam during this period. âWhile
white and black soldiers faced combat together, the rear echelon was
intensely segregated. One black soldier described Saigon as âjust like
Mississippiââ. In Beamâs camp at Chu Chi in Vietnam, black and white
soldiers frequently exchanged insults, slights, and blows. Beam served
in the 25th aviation battalion at a moment of escalating racial
tensions. As the language of black power circulated between home and
battlefront, black soldiers created a culture of Afros and black berets,
greeting each other with fist bumps. Some white soldiers in the 25th
reported feeling alienated or threatened because of such actions.
Klansmen serving as active duty personnel in Vietnam announced plans for
cross burnings and spray-painted racial epithets on rear echelon
buildings. By 1970 the marine corps recorded more than a thousand
incidents of racial violence at installations both in Vietnam and back
home. Now, in 1964 four members of the united Klans of America murdered
a black army reserve lieutenant colonel. Later in the 1960s the camp
Pendleton Klan chapter reached 200 members in size and carried a
campaign of shooting, firebombing, torture and harassment of black
marines.
Louis Beam did not join the Klan until being discharged from service,
but he served in a military where racial violence was common, and where
membership in extremist groups by uniformed service members was common.
Beam was a helicopter door gunner, manning a 50-caliber machine gun,
and, by his own recollection, killing over 50 people. He expressed
appreciation for âThe joys of killing your enemyâ but also struggled
with what would later come to be known as PTSD. Beam called it âPost
Vietnam Stress Syndromeâ. After coming home from the war, he said this
to an undercover reporter at a KKK event. âAfter I got home from the
war, things didnât seem like they were before I went to Vietnam.
Everything seemed different. The whole climate of the nation had
changed. Before I went over to fight most of the people seemed behind us
soldiers, but when I returned it seemed the majority of Americans were
against us; against war as a wholeâ. Louis Beam came home in 1968 and
almost immediately joined the KKK. He was racist, certainly, but the
primary hatred heâd developed in Vietnam was an intense disgust with the
left, and communism. In the early 1970s he was involved in a spate of
terroristic crimes. A machine gun attack on a communist party
headquarters in Houston, and the bombing of a left-wing radio station.
No one died and he managed to avoid charges for either attack, so in
1976 he switched to a different sect of the KKK. The Knights of the Ku
Klux Klan led by a guy named David Duke.
Now Duke had grown up reading Willis Cartoâs Western Destiny Newsletter
before flirting with Naziism in college, dressing in an SS uniform as he
marched up and down his schoolâs free speech alley. His Knights of the
KKK became the most prominent Klan group of the 1970s, in large part due
to Dukeâs decision to wed the organization more closely with outright
Nazism and help organize Klan border patrols to stop migrants. Racial
paranoia and fear of communism led to a vast surge in Klan ranks
throughout the state throughout the 1970s in 1975 there were an
estimated 6,500 Klansmen nationwide. By 1979 that number had increased
to 10,000 plus another 75,000 Klan sympathizers. For a while, David Duke
seemed like a good pick for someone who might manage to take on the role
of being the next George Lincoln Rockwell. He was charismatic and good
at drawing media attention. In 1978 and 1979 he became a constant figure
on American talk shows. In 1975 Willis Carto covered Dukeâs campaign for
the Louisiana senate in an issue of his weekly magazine, the National
Spotlight. Carto wrote: âhe sees the Klan not as a terrorist
organization, but as a political movement with ideological leadership.â
Duke only won about a third of the vote but that was still seen,
rightly, as a massive improvement in the political fortunes of the
fascist right. Gallup reported that the number of people with favorable
opinions of the Klan had nearly doubled from 1967 to â75. Duke then
represented the best hope of mainstreamers in the late 1970âs. Beam and
a number of other Klansmen would wind up on the side of the
vanguardists.
One of these men was Bill Wilkinson, a former mid-level leader in Dukeâs
Klan who created his own group, the Invisible Empire, in the late 1970s.
Bill was noteworthy for his sheer willingness to make violent threats,
saying in an interview âIâm the only Klan member who believes in having
guns around. These guns arenât for shooting rabbits, theyâre for wasting
people.â In 1979, his Klan protested a march by the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference in Decatur, Alabama. They showed up with clubs and
wound up fighting with both the marchers and with local police. Gun fire
ensued and three people were wounded. No one was killed, but that would
change in November of 1980, when Wilkinsonâs Klan marched against
communist demonstrators in Greensboro, NC. They opened fire there,
killing 5 of the protestors. Later investigation revealed that the
police were complicit in the massacre, actively directing officers away
from the site in order to ensure that no law enforcement was present at
when the Klan attacked. None of the killers were found guilty in a
subsequent criminal trial. They argued that firing into the crowd, often
from the back of moving vehicles, had been justified because of the
threat to their lives posed by the communists. A later civil trial found
the Klansmen and the local police jointly liable for the death of one of
the protestors. Greensboro was a huge moment for the Klan and seen by
many within the American fascist movement as nothing less than the first
shots fired in a war to take back their country from communist
infiltrators. The Greensboro Klansmen went on to become heroes in the
movement, giving speaking tours and acting as living billboards to the
cause. And this brings us back to Louis Beam.
While he was not present at Greensboro, Beam kept extremely busy in the
late 1970s. In 1979 Deng Xiaoping, the leader of China at the time,
visited the United States. When he arrived in Texas, Louis Beam
attempted to spray him with red paint in the lobby of his hotel. He was
punched out by a security guard. Later variations of the story would
mark it down as an assassination attempt against the Chinese statesman,
but the reality seems to be much dumber than that. Beam, however, was
not a joke. Right around the time he began to help operate a
paramilitary training camp in Oklahoma called Camp Puller. White
supremacists would gather there to train in combined arms techniques,
and prepare to fight a civil war against communists, blacks, and Jews.
Attendees with military experience were encouraged to wear their medals
and insignia over their Klan fatigues. I found a UPI article from
November of 1980 covering the camp. âA Ku Klux Klansman who says heâs
prepared to do battle against communists and homosexuals instructs
explorer scouts and several air patrol cadets in guerilla warfare
techniques at a paramilitary camp, a newspaper report. The post, which
has not been fully chartered by the Boy Scouts of America is run by
Robert John Sisente of deer park who denies he is a Klan member, and
Louis Beam of Pasadena, grand dragon of the Texas KKK âI am proud to be
a member of the Klanâ said Bogart, a former marine from La Porte, Texas,
who said he had been a member for two years, âThere are only two groups
Iâll battle with; communists and homosexuals. Thatâs the basic reason I
joined the Klanââ The article notes that concerns about the camp were
initially sparked when the parents of explorer scouts and civil air
patrol cadets complained that their 15-19 year old sons were learning
guerilla warfare techniques, and racial slurs from leaders at the camp.
Civil Air patrol major Paul Renfro, who investigated the camp, stated
âThere was nothing Boy Scout about it. They were on maneuvers, they were
firing, unloading, using live ammunition and the parents were very upset
because they were told nothing about this. These guys mislead the
Scoutsâ. Camp Puller came together during a very different time in the
United States, when membership in extremist groups like the KKK was not
explicitly forbidden for active duty service members. It was also a time
when weapons theft, and the smuggling of military grade arms to civilian
militias and domestic terror groups was vastly more common. These two
facts were very much connected.
In 2019, as I write this episode, the state of Oregon is currently
ground zero for a resurgent militia movement. You can trace the start of
our most recent band of troubles back to the standoff at the Bundy
compound in Bunkerville, Nevada, which led to the occupation of the
Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. A number of the men who were involved
in that are currently helping state-level republican legislators hide in
Idaho after they fled the state in an attempt to stop a cap and trade
bill. Oregon governor Kate Brown sent state police to bring the
recalcitrant senators in. When informed of this, senator Brian Boquist,
hiding in Idaho said, âsend the bachelors, and come heavily armedâ. Even
from that brief summary it should be obvious how groups like this work.
They do not have the numbers to enforce their will democratically, and
they are not willing to yield to the preferences of the majority. So,
they take up guns, and they use violence, or like Boquist, the threat of
violence, to get what they want. And they gamble on the fact that no one
else will have the guts to use force against them. When these people are
not confronted, and made to face consequences for breaking the law, they
will continue to push. This was the strategy Louis Beam pursued in the
early 1980s while his camp trained new guerilla fighters for the war he
felt was coming to the United States. He looked for opportunities for
him and his militiamen to enforce their own rule of law in places where
they felt the government would not have the courage to stand against
them. Greensboro had been proof that Klansmen could get away with taking
justice into their own hands. The state had stood aside while they
murdered communists and acquitted them afterwards. So, Louis Beam looked
south after Camp Puller, and saw the town of Seadrift, Texas as another
place where he and his comrades could exercise their will and force the
cowardly state to flee before them.
Seadrift was a crabbing town, with a population of about a thousand
people. Life there had recently been disrupted by the arrival of roughly
100 Vietnamese refugees. Overnight, Seadrift went from a very homogenous
culture, where everyone spoke English, to a town where 10% of the people
were native Vietnamese speakers. That on its own might not have been an
issue, but the Vietnamese families proved to be extremely adept crab
fishermen. They worked together, in large collaborative family fishing
groups, and worked more efficiently and more effectively than the native
crabbers of Seadrift. In August 1979, there was a dispute over the
distance between two sets of crab traps. A fight ensued, and a white
crabber was shot dead. Two Vietnamese crabbers were acquitted for the
shooting, on self defense grounds. What happened next will sound very
familiar to all of you. Rumors began to percolate that the Vietnamese
refugees were being funded on sketchy government welfare checks, and
that theyâd smuggled gold out of Vietnam when theyâd fled. Several of
the men in Seadrift were Vietnam veterans, and the scars of war had
hardened their hatred to their new neighbors, which was ironic, because
the Vietnamese refugees who settled in Seadrift did so because theyâd
sided with the Americans and worked for South Vietnamese government.
They had more cause to hate communists than most of the white crabbers
who cursed them as red infiltrators.
In 1980 the first of these new immigrants earned their American
citizenship. This provoked a paroxysm of rage. Three of the Vietnamese
boats and one mobile home were firebombed. There were beatings. One man
pulled a gun on a Vietnamese fisherman walking home across a dock and
shot him in the leg. Louis Beam and his men waded into this mess with
glee and consummate expertise. They started pointing out reams of
propaganda, newsletters and magazines, calling the Vietnamese refugees
âboat peopleâ and accusing them of being riddled with tuberculosis and
malaria. Klan propaganda also sought to stoke fears that the new
immigrants would sexually assault local white women. They even named
their activities in Seadrift âoperation hemlineâ, a reference to the
modest, decent white women they were supposedly protecting. In one
interview with a reporter, a Klansman in Seadrift said, âGalveston bay
is just like a fine woman, if you rape her, sheâs never good anymoreâ.
On January 10th, 1981, the Vietnamese owned shrimping vessel Trudy B was
lit on fire in its dock. The next night, another Vietnamese shrimping
boat was burned. Local police reported seeing four white males, in Klan
robes, starting the fires. This would prove to be but a prelude. In
February of 1981 the Texas KKK held a massive Klan rally in Santa Fe,
Texas, drawing three our four hundred armed paramilitaries. Louis Beam,
master of ceremonies, burned a small rowboat named USS Vietcong. He told
the gathered Klansmen to pay attention to his technique, because it was
illustrated the proper way to destroy a boat by arson. He decried the
theft of job security of âreal Americansâ by immigrants and promised
that if the Vietnamese fishermen in Seadrift didnât flee by May 15th,
the KKK would âtake matters into its own handsâ. In March, robed
Klansmen started carrying armed boat patrols of the Galveston bay,
wielding assault rifles and displaying an effigy of a lynched Vietnamese
person on the rigging of their boat. Several Vietnamese families living
on the water fled their homes after close passes by the Klanâs armed
patrol. There are pictures of these patrols you can find, and they are
quite shocking to behold. In one we see seven men and one young woman in
a mix of Klan robes and military fatigues. They wear rifles and stare
out with surly expressions into the sea. Most of them are overweight and
on an individual basis they look distinctly absurd in their costumes and
military gear. But there is nothing funny about the broader image of a
squadron of armed and uniformed racists enforcing their own laws on
American soil.
Camp Puller had closed briefly after that controversy over their
recruiting of boy scouts, but it reopened in April 1981, in the middle
of all this. Dozens of uniformed militiamen began showing up again and
firing their guns past the homes of several black families who lived
nearby. The local sheriff complained that he could do nothing because
âNo one has filed a complaint. They wonât filed complaints because they
fear reprisal, or potential reprisal.â The mayor of Kima, a small
neighboring town to Seadrift, where many of the threatened Vietnamese
fishermen lived, was less sympathetic. He admitted that the sight of the
Klansmen in robes was disturbing but declared âI donât have any reason
to believe the Vietnamese are not safe.â So, help did not come from the
local government, or from law enforcement. Instead it came from the
Southern Poverty Law Center, who helped a group of Vietnamese fishermen
file suit against the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Beam showed up in
court to defend himself wearing his Klan robes, and claimed âIâm only
charged with loving this countryâ. Beam wore a gun to his own trial, and
challenged Morris Dees, the lawyer for the SPLC, to a duel to the death.
Eventually, however, the sunlight of this court case acted as a moderate
disinfectant. Or at least, the first sign of real resistance finally
checked the Klanâs escalating use of force. During the trial, video was
played of Beam training militiamen at Camp Puller. In that segment he
was seen advising his soldiers on how to conduct themselves in battle.
He told them âUtterly destroy everybody. Maximum damage. Maximum
violence in the shortest period of time. They can do only one thing.
Dieâ. Finally, on December 3rd, 1989, under an avalanche of death
threats, the judge issued a court order demanding an end to Klan
harassment. Beamâs paramilitary group, Camp Puller, and four other
far-right militia training camps in the area were ordered shut down.
Vietnamese fishermen had won. But Louis Beam was far from defeated. He
continued to write speeches, newsletters and articles in various far
right journals of record, culminating in his 1983 book, Essays of a
Klansman. In this book, he encouraged his fellow fascist Vietnam
veterans to âbring the war on home to the United Statesâ.
While the legal prescriptions against Beam and his fellow Klansman after
Seadrift were more effective than the complete exoneration they received
after Greensboro, it effectively did nothing to actually stop Klan
organizing. While the far right receded ever so slightly in the first
years after Reaganâs election, by 1984 Americaâs fascists had realized
that the president was not going to be the quasi-Nazi leader they hoped
he might be. His failure to do things like ban abortion and reinstate
segregation was proof to them that politics was useless. The
mainstreamers were wrong. Consequently, the white power movement began
to grow again, particularly its vanguardist section. According to "Bring
the War Home", âScholars and watchdog groups whoâve attempted to
calculate the numbers of people in the movementâs varied branches,
including, for instance, Klansmen and neo-Nazis, who are often counted
separately, estimated that there are about 25,000 hardcore members in
the 1980s. An additional 150-150,000 bought white power literature, sent
contributions to groups, or attended rallies or other events, signifying
a larger, although less formal, level of membership. Another 450,000 did
not, themselves, participate or purchase materials but read the
literature. The John Birch society, in contrast, reached only 100,000
members at itâs 1965 peak. A Klansman in the south might participate in
burning crosses, wearing the white robe and hood, and embrace the
Confederate battle flag alongside a lost cause narrative of the civil
war. A neo-Nazi in the north might march under the banner of the
swastika and don an SS uniform. But the once disparate approaches to
white supremacy represented by these symbols and ideas were drawn
together in the white power movement. A suburban California skinhead
might bear Klan tattoos, read Nazi tracts, and attend meetings of a
local Klan chapter, a National Socialist political party, the Militant
White Aryan Resistance, or all three."
Now in this chapter, we focus mostly on Louis Beam, the KKK, and the
Neo-Nazis but itâs important you know that an awful, awful lot of other
fascist groups were active, organizing, and growing during this period.
Militant right-wing organizations popped up constantly throughout the
1980s. One important group was the Posse Comitatus. In brief, the Posses
were a series of militant antigovernment cells. They were believers in
Christian Identity Theology and these âtrue Israelitesâ also subscribed
to a conspiratorial interpretation of American history in which all
government above the county level was fundamentally illegitimate. Posse
believers felt that the Federal Reserve and the IRS were part of a
Jewish plot to wipe out the white man. In their view, the county sheriff
was the only legitimate power in the land and if he did not act in
accordance with the wishes of the county, he should be hung by the neck
until dead. As a general rule, Posse members were big fans of hanging.
Modern day sovereign citizens descend from the Posse Comitatus and you
can draw a direct line between them and many modern militia movements,
including the Constitutional Sheriffs who supported the Bundy clans
Malheur occupation. Appropriately enough, the first Posse Comitatus cell
seems to have been formed in Portland, Oregon, back in 1969. But Posse
beliefs did not generate national awareness until 1983 when a guy named
Gordon Kahl got in a series of gunfights with authorities. Kahl had
declared himself a âtax protestorâ in 1967, writing the IRS to let them
know he would no longer pay taxes to the âsynagogue of Satanâ. He was
arrested in 1976 but got out on parole and went to ground near Medina,
North Dakota. A warrant was eventually issued for his arrest over parole
violations, which prompted US Marshalls to try and arrest him while he
and his family were driving home from a Posse-related meeting in
February of 1983. A shootout ensued, and Kahl and his family killed two
US Marshalls. Gordon went on the run after that and was finally brought
down in June, after a viscous gun fight that left an Arkansas Sheriff
and Kahl himself dead.
By the time Kahl died, the Posse movement had metastasized into a series
of townships filled with White Supremacist Christian Ideology believers
who considered the federal government illegitimate, were heavily armed,
fiercely independent, and more than willing to kill for their beliefs.
This was part of a broader trend on the far-right to attempt to create
autonomous enclaves for their ideologies in isolated rural communities.
Another such group was the Aryan Nations, a Neo-Nazi organization
centered around a compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho. On paper, the Nations
were officially a Christian Identity Church, but by the self-proclaimed
reverend Richard Butler. In the early 1980âs Butlerâs group began to
reach out to incarcerated white Americans, eventually leading to the
formation of the Aryan brotherhood, a Christian identity prison gang
that remains influential to this day. Another Christian Identity
compound was, and still it, Elohim city in Oklahoma. By the early 1980s,
Elohim was a totally self-sufficient community with it sown sawmill,
crops, and weapons ranges on 400 sprawling acres. Elohimâs operations
were funded by a trans-continental trucking company and construction
business operated from the compound. The denizens of Elohim considered
American society to be decadent and sinful beyond salvation, and they
homeschooled their children and stockpiled weapons in anticipation of
societal collapse. There were numerous other right-wing groups doing
similar things around the country in the 1980s. Most of them fell either
into the mold of Elohim city, urging total separation from society, or
the mold of the Aryan Nations, attempting to build a white insurgency
against the Zionist occupied government. These disparate groups were
tied together loosely by Christian Identity Theology, and recruited
heavily from the nascent âpreppingâ movement that had started to crop up
in the 1980s. In Blood and Politics, Leonard Zeskind notes: âFor William
Pierce, survivalist events became an opportunity for national alliance
cadres to sell literature and find new recruitsâ. Pierce wasnât
concerned about human existence per se, rather he worried about the
preservation of white genes during a time of âracial decayâ. To ensure
this preservation, he needed to influence the large survivalist
movementâs direction. As usual, he began with a cold-eyed analysis. One
can recognize three distinguishing traits in the survivalist, Pierceâs
National Vanguard opined. The first was the strong personal identity,
the second was a will to survive, and the third was alienation from the
present society.
Despite this positive assessment, Pierce also looked for weak spots. The
largely individualistic approach bothered him the most. Survivalists
were interested in self-preservation, like professionals practicing
lifeboat ethics, rather than the advancement of the white race. So
Pierceâs goal in this time became to infuse white racial consciousness
into the survivalist movement, and then turn it from a disconnected
community of armed loners into something he could use to bring about the
fascist revolution he so desired. Independently, Klasnman Louis Beam
spent the early 1980s working on a similar goal â spreading white racial
consciousness and a desire for revolution to disaffected white Vietnam
veterans. In 1982 he wrote âAmericaâs political leaders, Bankers, church
ministers, newsman, sport stars and hippies called us âbaby killersâ and
threw chicken blood on some of us when we returned home. Youâre damn
right Iâm mad, Iâve had enough. I want those same traitors to face their
enemy now. The American fighting man they betrayed; all 3 million of
usâ. Beam wrote articles in which he warned of a coming mass gun
confiscation. He told his readers to arm up and hide their weapons and
hope the future might bring headlines like âMillions of formerly
peaceful, law-abiding citizens up at armsâ, âVigilantes of one and two
persons take law into own handsâ, âPolitician cut in two by shotgun
blast as he steps from carâ, âFederal judge killed by bomb blast as he
starts carâ, âJudge found dead, hands tied behind back, throat cutâ, âUS
Senator found hanging from limb of tree on riverâ. In June of 2019
Walter Lubke, a Christian democratic union politician in Germany was
shot dead by a Neo-Nazi terrorist. Lubke was hated for his support of
Angele Merkelâs open door refugee policy. His killer had ties to a large
organization of German Nazi radicals which included of law enforcement,
with a massive stockpile of arms and a list of other politicians theyâd
planned to murder. Their goal was nothing less than the overthrow of
democratic Germany, in a manner vey similar to the story traced out in
the those fantasy headlines written so long ago by Louis Beam. Like many
white nationalists in the 1980s, Beam expressed a growing
dissatisfaction with the Republican party, and American conservatives in
general. He damned compromise and wrote that his readers should take up
the sword, adding âThe sword need not be literal, although many of us
would enjoy a righteous satisfaction from lopping off heads of the
enemy. A sword in the year od our lord 1981 could be an M16, 3 sticks of
dynamite taped together, a twelve-gauge, a can of gas, or whatever is
suitable to carry out any commission of the Lord that has been entrusted
to youâ.
In 1983 Louis Beam published an essay in the inter-Klan newsletter
titled Leaderless Resistance. In it, he argued that the top-down
organization of traditional fascist group, like his own Klan, Rockwellâs
old Nazi party, and its successor William Pierceâs National Alliance,
were fundamentally vulnerable to penetration from law enforcement. This
was backed up by the well-known fact that Rockwellâs marches had often
been half composed of federal informants. It was also backed up by the
disastrous 1981 attempt of several American Klansmen to conquer the
island of Dominica. Now, Dominica is a small island nation near
Venezuela, an assortment of Neo-Nazi commandos, including a Klan leader
named Don Black, whoâd previously been the driver of George Lincoln
Rockwellâs hate bus, had gathered enough weaponry that they believed
they could deploy enough force to overthrow the prime minister and
install their own government on the tiny island. They could then use
Dominica as a base of operations and a funding engine to support an
insurgency in the United States. The whole thing fell apart before Black
and his minions could set sail. FBI agents arrested 10 Nazi commandos in
New Orleans on a rented boat filled with guns, dynamite, bullets, and
Confederate and Nazi flags. Don Black and his comrades spent a bit of
time in prison, and when Don Black got out, he went on to found the
Neo-Nazi website Stormfront, but weâll talk about him a little more
later.
After Dominica, fascist thinkers like Louis Beam were eager to find a
new way to organize that wouldnât just get them infiltrated by the FBI.
As he noted in Leaderless Resistance âAn Infiltrator can destroy
anything which is beneath him in the pyramid of organization.â In order
to counter this, Beam suggested white supremacists adopt a cell-type
organization, similar to those used by communist insurgencies. Iâm going
to quote again from Zeskind and his Blood and Politics: âIn these small
groups of people worked together but were known only to one another.
Other small groups worked independently and the participants of one cell
remained unknown to the personnel of another. Thus, an enemy infiltrator
could possibly betray the one cell, but couldnât break up the entire
underground. While the cell structure was an improvement over the
traditional pyramid, Beam decided it also had weaknesses. The problem
was that it required a central command to give direction to all the
cells, and their new vision of vanguardism did not support one single
leadership. Beam proposed instead a structure composed of cells, like
the communists, each operating independently of the others, but without
a headquarters. Now, this put Louis Beam in direct opposition with
William Pierce. His National Alliance and the idealized Neo-Nazi
insurgency heâd imagined In the Turner Diaries. The Order had included a
strong central structure directing a series of small independent cells
and wielding them as weapons towards the greater goal of destroying
society and rendering it ungovernable. Pierce and Beam and their
separate camps were at loggerheads. But in 1983 a man came along with a
vision to synthesize their dueling theories into one, violent whole.
Robert J. Matthews was born in Martha, Texas on January 16th 1953. He
joined the John Birch Society at age 11. In 1971 as a young adult, he
was on his way to enlist at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, when he heard a
radio report on the prosecution of Lieutenant Bill Calley, the American
officer whoâd presided over the murder of hundreds of Vietnamese
civilians at Mai Alai. Matthews obviously, thought the killing of women
and children was imminently justified in the fight against Communism. He
decided he would not join an army that wouldnât let him murder little
kids with impunity. Matthewâs first found himself first drawn to violent
extremism as part of the tax protest movement. He formed an
anti-communist militia called the Sons of Liberty and did time for tax
fraud in the early 1970s. through his involvement with the survivalist
movement Matthews was gradually drawn into the cause of white
nationalism. He moved to Metaline falls, Washington in the mid-1970s
and, in 1980, he joined William Pierceâs National Alliance. Robert
Matthews fell in love with the Turner Dairies and the vision of a
possible white revolution it provided. His earliest on-the-ground
activism involved the kind of childish fistfights with antifascist
protestors that have become so common today. During a Nazi rally in a
Spokane public park, he single-handedly fended off several anti-fascists
and earned a place in Richard Butlerâs inner circle. And so, Matthewâs
was on the Aryan nationâs compound in Idaho in July, 1983 for the annual
congress of white power leaders. That summer day, 300 wannabe Aryan
revolutionaries sat down to plan the future of their movement. Louis
Beam and another fascist thinker, Robert Miles, seem to have dominated
the discussion. Now there arenât minutes taken in such meeting since
what was being planned at the congress was nothing less than the violent
overthrow of the United States government, but it is generally accepted
that the white supremacist leaders who assembled that day walked away
with two broad conclusions about the future of their movement. The
first, was that they would need to use computer networks to organize and
coordinate the leaderless resistance Beamâd advocated. And the second
was the value of cell-style organizations, and taking their movement
forward into the future. Their dreams were grand indeed. Robert Miles
sought to establish a series of no less than 600 cells, each 100 miles
apart, so the nuclear war the all feared was coming wouldnât wipe them
all out. Milesâ theories were very much focused on the importance of
building a white supremacist movement that could dominate America in the
wake of a nuclear exchange with the USSR. Beam anticipated nuclear war
too. But he was more interested in building a network of terrorist cells
that could start carrying out attacks on the âenemies of the white raceâ
at once. But in order to do all this, Beam and his fellow fascists were
going to need a lot of money. Computer equipment was not cheap in the
1980s, and the insurgency they planned to build required weapons, too.
Not just civilian weapons and sidearms, but military grade equipment.
Rocket launchers, and machine guns, often bought from bribed military
supply officers. In order to fund all this, Miles suggested robbing
armored cars. Bit by bit, a plan became to take place. Louis Beam and
Williams Pierce had spent years sketching out theories and passing out
propaganda. Theyâd been rewarded by an American fascist movement that
was hundreds of times larger and more capable than anything George
Lincoln Rockwell had ever commanded. Now it was time for them to take
the next step forward, and make the fantasies William Pierce had written
down in the Tuner Diaries into a reality. Young Bob Matthews would be
the man to do that.
One of the issues with discussing the history of secret organizations
formed to overthrow the government is that, for obvious reasons, an
awful lot is left in shadow. We do not know the precise day or the hour
that the Order was founded. We do not know its exact composition or to
what precise extent men like Louis Beam or William Pierce were involved
in it. Officially, the Order was founded in September of 1983 by Robert
Matthews during a convention he attended for Pierceâs National Alliance
in Arlington. While Beam and Pierce tended to approach the issue of
sparking a fascist revolution rather differently, Matthews had deep ties
to both men. It was profoundly influenced by Beamâs ideas and writing,
and was also an obsessive fan of the Tuner Diaries. He essentially aced
as a bridge between the two sides of the vanguardist movement, tying
Beamâs Klansmen and Christian Identity nuts together with Pierceâs Neo
Nazis. William Pierce called the Order âThe Aryan Resistance Movementâ.
Robert Miles called it BrĂŒder Schweigen, or âThe Silent Brotherhoodâ.
But to Bob Matthews, and to most of its members, it was simply known as
the Order, in direct imitation of the group responsible for organizing
the fictional white nationalist insurgency in the Turner Diaries.
It originally had just 9 men. Three members of the National Alliance,
four men from the Aryan Nations, and one former Klansman. Matthews
devised a six-step strategy for his new terror organization. He would
start by recruiting a base of soldiers around the nation, and train them
at sundry fascist compounds. Once Matthews had trained a corps of
soldiers, they would begin committing robberies and counterfeiting
money. This would fund the menâs purchase of an arsenal, which would
allow them to commit more ambitious robberies and raise millions of
dollars, which they would then dispense to various fascist groups around
the nation. In essence, Bob Matthews had looked out at all the white
supremacist compounds around the nation. Places like Elohim City, the
Aryan Nations, Nehemiah township and various Posse Comitatus
communities. He felt these groups had huge potential if only they were
connected and funded more effectively. The Order was a way to do that.
In carrying out this plan Matthews was both working to fulfill Pierceâs
dream of a big tent fascist organization, and funding Beamâs plan to
connect these different groups via the early internet. The Orderâs end
goal was a white ethno-state in the Pacific Northwest. Here, too,
Matthews was following in the footsteps of other fascist thinkers.
The Northwest Imperative, as it is now known, first popped up in the
1970âs, and was initially cheered on by Christian Identity pastor, and
Aryan Nations leader, Richard Butler. In creating the Order, Matthews
had synthesized decades of far-right thinking with his love of the
turner Diaries into a serious plan for revolution. And on paper, it all
looked kind of like ridiculous LARP. It was even, you know, inspired by
a piece of speculative science fiction. But Matthews quickly turned his
plans into action. On October 28th, 1983, Bob and several of his men
held up an adult bookstore in Spokane, Washington, netting $300. It was
an anxious, small-scale crime. Perhaps even a laughable one when
compared with their ambitions. But Matthews and his crew kept right on
robbing. Two months later, they stole $25,000 from a Seattle bank, and
then $3,600 from a Spokane bank. They robbed a courier after picking up
the daily cash receipts from a Shonieâs restaurant and made off with
$8,000. The order professionalized quickly, and within a matter of
months theyâd already started counterfeiting $50 bills.
By spring of 1984 Robert Matthews had proved himself to be a competent
and dangerous guerilla leader, and his Order was quickly becoming the
New Big Thing in American fascism. Dozens of young militants flocked to
join and do their part to further the cause. They flooded in from other
far-right groups with names like The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of
the Lord, sundry Posse Comitatus crews and assorted KKK chapters. In
order to build camaraderie and loyalty, Matthews developed rituals for
his warrior elite. Iâm going to quote again from Bring the War Home,
âThey took their inductions up on Matthewsâ farm. They stood in a circle
around a white female infant, who symbolized the race they sought to
protect. They raised their arms in a Hitler salute. âI, as a free Aryan
manâ, they recited, âhereby swear an unrelenting oath upon the green
graves of our sires, upon the children in the wombs of our wivesâ. They
swore they had no fear of death or foe but had a sacred duty to do
âwhatever is necessary to deliver out people from the Jew and bring
total victory to the Aryan raceâ. They pledged secrecy about all
activities to follow. They swore to rescue any of their number taken
prisoner. âShould an enemy agent hurt youâ, they promised their silent
brothers, âI will chase him to the ends of the earth and remove his head
from his bodyâ. Their oath recognized them as racial warriors, but also
transformed them into weapons. âMy brothers, let us be Godâs battle axe
and weapons of war. Let us go forth by ones and twos, by scores and by
legions, as true Aryan menâ they vowed. âWe are in a state of war, and
will not lay down our weapons until we have driven the enemy into the
sea and reclaimed the land which was promised to our fathers of old, and
through our blood and His will becomes the land of our children to beââ.
In March, 1984, the Order carried out their first robbery of an armored
car. They netted $43,000. They robbed the same armored car again and got
their biggest score yet; $230,000. Later that month, members of the
Order also bombed a synagogue in Boise, Idaho. As the summer of 1984
rolled along, Matthews and the other members of his inner circle began
to worry that one of their men, Walter West, might talk. Two of Bobâs
men shot and buried him in the woods on June 1st. A little more than two
weeks later, on June 17th, Matthews and three of his men shot and killed
Alan Berg, a Jewish radio host and anti-fascist, who regularly attacked
Neo Nazis on the air. The Berg murder officially raised the Orderâs
profile, and guaranteed major law enforcement attention. The groupâs
danger was reinforced a month later when they heisted a Brinks truck in
Ukiah, California, and made of with a staggering $3.6 million. Now flush
with enough cash to wage a revolution, Matthews and his order began
buying up guns like they were going out of style. They also purchased a
300-acre plot of land in Missouri, and 110 acres in Idaho. Each
participant in the robbery got $40,000 but the bulk of the money went to
other fascists around the country. Different organizations received
grants in $100,000 increments. Matthews tithed 10% of his stolen money
to the Aryan Nations. Members developed crude codenames and acquired
fake IDs. Matthews even had silver medallions crafted to act as proof of
membership. The nicknames were suitably grandiose, and what youâd expect
from people whoâŠI donât knowâŠtheyâre all giant nerds. âLone Wolfâ,
âField Marshallâ, âYosemite Samâ. One member was nicknamed âMr. Closetâ
for his love of assaulting gay men. Louis Beam was codenamed âJollyâ,
and âLonestarâ. Pierce was codenamed âBrighamâ after Mormon leader
Brigham young. Both men had medallions.
In nine months, Bob Matthews had turned the dreams and theories of men
like Beam and Pierce into a real revolutionary movement. Heâd made the
Turner Diaries real. New recruits to the Order were reportedly handed
copies of the book, and for quite awhile law enforcement seemed
powerless to do anything to stop them. According to Bring the War Home
âEven if federal agents and a few journalists were aware of the white
power movement, the mainstream public continued to see most white power
violence as the work of errant madmen. The phrase âlone wolfâ,
previously used to describe criminals acting alone, was employed
increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s to describe white power activists.
This played into the movementâs aim to prevent anyone from putting
together a cohesive account of the groupâs actions.â
Their undoing came from an Order member and former National Alliance
goon named Tom Martinez. Matthews had brought Martinez in to help pass
counterfeit bills around his home in Philadelphia. He was caught by the
FBI and turned informant to avoid prison. The FBI used his information
to trace Matthews to Portland, Oregon, where they engaged him in a short
gun battle. Bob was wounded but managed to flee to Whidbey Island in
Washington with several of his most loyal soldiers. The FBI surrounded
the house and eventually all of Matthewsâ men surrendered. But Robert
Matthews refused to give up. Alone, he fought the FBI off for an
astonishing 40 hours. The FBI eventually burned the cabin down around
Matthews, killing him on December 8th, 1984. With their leader dead, the
Order eventually crumbled. Proving, by the way, that Louis Beam had been
wise to emphasize Leaderless Resistance. After five months of arrests
around the country, more than 50 members of the order had been arrested.
The FBI recovered a great deal of cash as well, but millions remained
unaccounted for. They found some of what that money had bought though,
when they eventually raided the heavily armed Ozarks compound of the
Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. LAW anti tank rockets and
machine guns were found hidden on the property. The CSA was not the only
group who had bought rocket launchers with the Orderâs ill gotten gains.
The first trial associated with the Order took place in Seattle, and
included several members of the CSA. They plead guilty on weapons
charges, and were convicted of racketeering. Next the US attorney
brought a 93-page indictment against 23 members of the Order. Robert
Miles, Louis Beam, and William Pierce were not indicted. In the months
leading up to the trial, members of the Order rolled over on their
comrades with unusual regularity. By the time the trial rolled around in
September of 1985, only ten of them actually faced trial. This hardened
corps of loyal racists included David Lane, the man who would years
later coin the 14 words that Neo Nazis still use to this day as a
calling card. During the case, prosecutors specifically noted that the
Tuner Diaries had acted as a blueprint for Bob Matthews. According to
Blood and Politics, âIn an opening statement a defense attorney
acknowledges that his client was a Klan member and an avowed white
separatist. âNow I say white separatistâ, he continued âBecause there is
a significant difference in an individual who professes to be a white
supremacist as opposed to a white separatist. What was that difference?
The white separatist is nothing different than a black nationalist who
advocates a separation of races, wants to live only with those members
of his own races. He advocates the fact that races, when mixed together,
cannot survive because of their division and their cultural backgrounds,
their upbringing, and their history.ââ The Seattle Jury did not buy this
spurious distinction between white supremacy and white separatism in
1985, anymore than the US Supreme Court was willing to endorse the
separate but equal doctrine in 1954. Neither did the jury believe
defense efforts to impugn the credibility of Aryans who became
prosecution witnesses. Nor did jurors accept contentions that the
defendantsâ beliefs were unrelated to the enumerated crimes. After four
months at trial, all were found guilty.
In death, Bob Matthewsâ Order became a potent symbol for fascists around
the nation. In Raleigh, North Carolina, hundreds of them rallied under
banners that said âWe Love the Orderâ. In Idaho, a group called âOrder
2â set off several bombs in Coeur dâAlene. The date of Matthewâs death,
December 8th, became martyrâs day to many Neo-Nazi. Some of them started
carrying out memorial camping trips near where he had died on Whidbey
Island. But still, the Order had failed in itâs goals, and that failure
had come at a substantial cost. William Pierce and Louis Beam had not
been indicted or charged as a result of Matthewsâ activities, but they
now found themselves at the center of way, way more FBI attention. In an
operation named âClean Sweepâ the FBI began seeding white supremacist
organizations around the country with undercover operatives. Later, in
1985, they stopped an Aryan Nations plot to kill a government informant.
Another terrorist associated with that group was stopped after bombing a
federal building, several business and a rectory in Coeur dâAlene. In
1986, the feds busted William Potter-Gale, founder of the Posse
Comitatus, in Nevada. Gale and several allies were convicted of planning
to bomb the IRS. Near the end of 1986 the FBI busted 8 members of a new
group, the Arizona Patriots, before they could carry out their goal of
following in Bob Matthewâs footsteps. The group had planned to rob banks
to finance a domestic insurgency. All around the United States, white
supremacists continued to plot and launch attacks. One of these men was
Glen Miller. Formerly the leader of a group called the White Patriot
Party, heâd received at least $75,000 in Order money from Bob Matthews.
As the FBI busted more and more of these guys, they found more evidence
of the Orderâs influence and money. Gradually they pieced together the
story of what had really gone on, and came to realize that Matthewsâ
group had sought nothing less than the complete overthrow of the United
States government.
In mid 1986, Louis Beam, Richard Butler, Robert Miles, and several other
ideological leaders of the American Fascist movement were finally
indicted for their role in the order. The Justice Department charged
these men with a number of crimes, including seditious conspiracy to
Overthrow, put down and destroy by force the government of the United
States and form a new Aryan Nation.â William Pierce, oddly enough, was
not indicted. Seditious conspiracy was a crime numerous communists and
Puerto Rican nationalists had already been successfully convicted of
committed. But no Nazis or white supremacists had ever been convicted of
the crime. Despite the Orderâs shocking violence and well-documented
goals, this fact was not about to change. The trial convened in February
of 1988 and the fascist defense attorney managed to exclude any black
people from the jury. The trial was, almost instantly, a shitshow and
served more to allow Louis Beam to preach his views to the nation than
to guarantee justice. In his opening stamen, he told the jury âThe only
reason Iâm here is because I said what I think. If the constitution is
still alive, Iâm innocent.â Beam admitted that heâd set up computer
bulletin boards for different fascist groups around the country, but
denied that these boards were used for any illicit communication. He
told the jury heâd been changing his daughterâs diaper when the
purported meeting that created the Order had occurred. He dubbed the
governmentâs case âThe baby diaper conspiracyâ. Beam ended one speech in
his defense with an almost word-for-word recitation of something heâd
written in Essays of a Klansman about his anger at the protestors heâd
supposedly encountered after returning home from Vietnam. âAs I sat
there watching the flag disintegrate, rage and bitterness began to
engulf me. The flames consuming the flag changed to flames enveloping an
armored personnel carrier in the Ho Bo woods north of Saigon. The cheers
of the demonstrators became the screams of a 19 year old soldier over
his radio as he burned to death, trapped inside what was fast becoming
his coffin. The clapping of hands as the flag fell to the ground became
the deafening roar of my M16 machine gun as I literally melted the
barrel in an attempt to pin the enemy down long enough for the dying
soldierâs friends to reach him. Finally, at last, came the laughter of
those demonstrators as they spit on the ashes of their feet, blending in
my mind with the sobs of grown men as I remember the armored personnel
carrier disappearing in a ball of orange flame.â After seven weeks of
trial Louis Beam and all of his fellow defendants were found not guilty
of seditious conspiracy. They were released, presumably free to return
to their lives and the movement.
The Justice Department had taken itâs shot at the intellectual center of
white supremacism. Theyâd failed. And ultimately, their failure came not
from law enforcementâs unwillingness to prosecute Nazi revolutionaries,
but from ordinary white Americans, and the sympathy they held for men
like Beam, who billed themselves as warrior against communism, and
patriotic Americans. Beamâs racism, and his desire to overthrow the
government, simply werenât seen as all that bad by a jury of his peers.
The leaders of the white supremacist movement had gotten off, more or
less, scot-free. But the court battle, and the months many of them had
spent on the lam before being arrested, had aged them all horribly.
Richard Butlerâs influence would gradually fade after he returned home
to Idaho. Louis Beam continued to be an influential mind within the
movement, but he would be more careful and much quieter from now on. The
heat brought on by the crackdown forced Beam to retire his beloved
inter-Klan newsletter and survival alert. The last issue contained an
essay by an unknown author â probably Beam. In it, he wrote, âThe second
American revolution will be a revolution of individuals, a revolution
without exact precedent in recorded history. Because individuals can
accomplish complex acts of resistance without peril or betrayal or even
detection by the most advanced snooping devices. Missions formerly
assigned to groups may be undertaken by individuals equipped to fight
alone.â It would not be long before a young man named Timothy McVey
would prove these words prophetic.
[Transcriber's Note: I'm leaving out Robert & guest's off-script
comments except where relevant, they will appear in brackets.
Occasionally, 2-3 words were changed to better adapt speech to writing.
If using in academic text please reference actual recording as there are
points (specifically Robert quoting from 'American Terrorist') where
proper quotation became unclear & I just went with my best guess.]
The 1988 Seditious conspiracy trial held important lessons for the chief
minds behind the white supremacist movement. When they leaned into their
patriotism, their love of an America that was white and Christian, but
America nonetheless, they could draw significant sympathy from their
fellow white men and women. Swastikas and klan robes were much less
useful than tearful stories of hippie protestors spitting on flags.
The 1990s saw continuous growth in both the survivalist and the american
militia movement. Neither of these things was inherently white
supremacist, but Beam and his colleagues had been remarkably successful
at seeding their propaganda into gun shows and conventions. As a result,
the early 90s brought them a whole crop of fellow travelers: men and
women who did not identify as nazis and had never held Klan membership,
but who were also quite capable of reading the Turner Diaries and
identifying with its message.
Randy Weaver is a perfect example of this new sort of recruit. He was a
former green beret, a patriot who loved his country and working with his
hands. He and his wife Vicky were Christian conservatives. They fell in
love with the first generation of evangelical TV preachers - men like
Jerry Falwell - they also read a book called "The Late Great Planet
Earth" by Hal Lindsey which focused on using the bible to predict the
near future. Lindsey's book convinced Randy and Vicky that Gog, an
anti-Christian empire from the book of Ezekiel was the Soviet Union.
They became more and more gone into conspiracy theories and convinced
themselves that a great and firey apocalypse was imminent. I'm gonna
quote next from 'American Experience' by PBS. "Concerned citizens, they
set out to spread the word. They weren't able to find a church that
approached these matters with what they felt was the appropriate level
of seriousness, so they held their own Bible studies with like minded
friends and neighbors. This sparked the attention of a local reporter
who came to do a story on them. The Weavers, Walter learned, did not
appreciate the results. They felt betrayed, but they'd never been more
sure in their beliefs: a great conflagration was coming, and they felt
increasingly unsafe in Iowa. Vicky started having visions in the
bathtub - God was speaking to her - and God was telling her to go west
to find for her family a mountaintop. They would be safe there."
The Weavers moved to a place that would later come to be called 'Ruby
Ridge' in Idaho, not far from Richard Butler's Aryan Nations compound.
Randy Weaver began to visit the compound, attending several events and
beginning to make friends among the neo-nazis. The exact nature of what
he believed precisely is unclear and heavily debated. It seems that he
identified with some aspects of Christian Identity theology, and it's
safe to say he was racist by normal people standards, but it's also fair
to say that Randy Weaver was not really a nazi or really an ideological
white supremacist. He hung around Aryan Nations because he lived in the
middle of nowhere, they were the only people to hang with, and he just
didn't care about their racism. He was not the kind of man who'd have
joined a group like 'The Order' BUT he would come to play an important
role in the next step of the white supremacist movement.
Now, the FBI wound up wiretapping several of the fascists that Randy
Weaver befriended. It was quite immediately obvious to them that Mr.
Weaver had no plans to overthrow the government, spark a race war, or do
anything more subversive than live off the land with his family and
picnic with Nazis from time to time. In fact, when other people in these
wiretapped conversations would suggest committing crimes [lynchings],
Randy would say something like, "We don't really go in for that stuff."
While the feds knew that Randy Weaver wasn't really dangerous they saw
him as the perfect guy to approach as an informant. He wasn't a true
believer, and he was VERY poor. If they could entrap him into committing
a crime, they could scare him with prison time til he agreed to wear a
wire and help them catch some of the big fish in the Aryan Nations
community. An undercover agent approached Randy and offered him good
money to illegally saw off a couple shotguns. Now, Randy was not a
believer in the legitimacy of American gun control regulations, and he
needed the cash, so he gladly acquiesced and was subsequently busted for
it. The feds made their offer, and Randy refused them. He was arrested
on federal firearms charges and taken to jail. Randy made bail though
and he fled back to Ruby Ridge and holed up with his family, and a whole
bunch of guns, in the hope the federales would not follow. They did.
But the attempted arrest did not go well. A US marshal was shot dead by
the Weaver clan and the authorities responded with a blizzard of
indiscriminate gunfire which killed Randy's 14 year old son, the family
dog, and his unarmed wife, Vicky. A standoff ensued, the law came in
with helicopters, armored vehicles, and the kind of militarized police
that look familiar to us now but were new and terrifying back in 1992.
The media descended on Ruby Ridge too, and the assault on the Weaver
family was spread virally throughout the far right. The Weavers were the
perfect poster family to illustrate government overreach. Footage of
black helicopters floating over Ruby Ridge, and saint-like photos of
Vicky Weaver were almost tailor-made to sell the idea that a New World
Order was coming for white Christian gun-owning Americans.
Louie Beam and his fellow fascists knew a great opportunity when one
came a-knockin. In 1992, while Ruby Ridge was still in the news, the
leading minds of the white supremacist movement gathered in Estes Park
for a summit on how, precisely, they could use this tragedy to their
advantage. The Summit was convened by Pete Peters, a Christian Identity
preacher from Colorado and the head of a sizeable Christian Identity
church, the LaPort Church of Christ. Here's how Leonard Zeskind
summarizes the proceedings in "Blood and Politics": "For two days they
met in committee, deliberated in plenary sessions, and engaged in the
kind of one-on-one conversation known in the parlance of business
professionals as networking. They made decisions in the name of Jesus
Christ and Yahw-h, sang 'Arms for Christian Soldiers', and carried
themselves in a manner of quiet resolve appropriate for their
surroundings: a YMCA in a facility abutting the park. No guns were
waved, and even the most heated rhetoric seemed to have the blood
drained out of it." Estes Park signified a radical shift in the tactics
of the white power movement. Like the 1983 Aryan Nations conference, we
mostly know what was discussed at Estes park because of the things that
happened after it. The Nazis started reaching out to more moderate
americans.
Louis Beam published an article in his magazine appropriately named 'the
Seditionist' - because he'd gotten declared innocent of sedition. He
called for leaderless sedition in the wake of Ruby Ridge. Big Star One,
a militia with members in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico carried out
grenade launcher and mortar training exercises in rural Texas. The
Montana militia published a guidebook on how to engage in domestic
terrorism. In 1993 law enforcement across the nation found explosives
caches meant to be used as attacks in various-- National Afro-American
Museum in Ohio, and a black church in LA. None of this made the news in
a big way because of something that happened in mid-1993. The siege of
the Branch Davidian compound in Waco Texas.
The Branch Davidians were not a Christian Identity sect, their leader
David Koresh was not affiliated with the white supremacist movement, but
the ATF siege of their compound so close after Ruby Ridge was useful for
Louis Beam and his congregants to propagandize around. On --1993, ATF
agents attempted to serve a search warrant about sexual abuse and
illegal weapons charges. People inside the compound opened fire, 4
agents and 5 Branch Davidians were killed, and the situation devolved
into a bloody siege. On April 19th, the FBI, who'd taken control of the
situation, launched an assault on the compound. In the ensuing melee
several fires broke out and quickly swept through the structures. By the
time the smoke had cleared and it was all over 53 adults and 23 children
were dead.
The whole tragedy was inarguably a clusterfuck on the federal
government, which of course helped groups like the fascists.
Kirk Lyons, a close friend of Louis Beam and a white supremacist militia
leader himself, sent out an issue of his groups fundraising letter that
featured a photo of a 14 year old girl who'd died in the Waco siege. The
girl was of course, white, and the photo was captioned 'Why We Fight'.
There were dozens, hundreds, and eventually thousands of pieces of
similar propaganda. Gradually, day by day, and month by month,
explicitly fascist and white supremacist groups began to wrap their
ideological claws around the militia movement and suck in ever more
patriots. British Journalist John Ronson was one of the few journalists
who spent a great deal of time embedded with the fringe right during.
The Michigan militia during this time had about 12,000 members, which
was a significant surge in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco. One of those
members was a young Desert Storm veteran named Tim McVeigh.
Timothy McVeigh was born on April 23 1968. McVeigh grew up in Pendelton
New York and had an early childhood that was pretty standard for the 70s
and 80s. He watched 'Gumby' and 'Truth or Consequences', he played
cowboys and indians or cops and robbers with other kids in the
neighborhood. Tim preferred playing the good guys as he saw them, cops
or cowboys, whenever possible. He was sickly and somewhat prone to
accidents, hurting himself in all sorts of ways that young boys who
spend a lot of time in the woods tend to do. Tim was an energetic boy
and he might've been someone who'd ended up on Ritalin had he been born
a decade or two later. He was constantly in trouble for minor things,
but he also had a good heart, as this story from 'American Terrorist'
makes clear. Tim was playing near the pond when he noticed one of the
older neighborhood boys carrying a burlap sack. The sack was weighted
down with rocks, curious Tim could see there was something else
wriggling in the sack and he watches as the older boy pitched the sack
out into the pond where it quickly sank to the bottom. "What was that?"
Tim asked, running to the far shore of the pond where the neighborhood
boy stood. "Those are kittens my dad had," the boy answered in a matter
of fact tone, "we had to get rid of them". For Tim, who loved animals
and especially kittens, the realization of what he had witnessed hit him
hard. He cried about the incident for days.
[They break from script to chat, at some point Robert summarizes: "He
was a sensitive kid. The story of Tim McVeigh is the story of how a
young mind got enraptured with this kind of terroristic apocalyptic
ideology who wouldn't have gotten caught in the first iteration of it.
This is a guy who would only have been caught by the changes made to the
movement's propaganda outreach after Estes Park."]
Tim fell in love with guns at an early age, his grandfather first took
him shooting when he was 7, and Tim's Grandpa, Ed McVeigh, everyone
said, was a stickler about firearm safety. He considered safe gun
ownership to be an integral part of American citizenship. [So he likes
guns, but he doesn't like killing things, he's like a target shooter and
stuff] . Being small and sort of weird, Tim McVeigh was a bit of a
magnet for bullies. He developed a deep hatred for bullying and a
reflexive rage at the sight of anything he saw as bully behavior whether
it came from an individual or an institution. Tim's parents divorced
when the kids were young, his sisters chose to go live with their mother
but Tim stayed with his father so that he would not have to be alone
[again, sensitive kid]. After the OKC bombing, a number of pundits would
try to tie his parents' divorce to his evolution as a terrorist; this
would seem to be an overstatement, but he did tie his mother leaving his
father to broader social trends, later stating in an interview that, "In
the past 30 years because of the women's movement they've taken an
influence out of the household."
When one reads about McVeigh they get the feeling that had he been born
later he might've found a home within the alt-right. For one thing, he
was obsessed with the Star Wars movies and identified heavily with Luke
Skywalker. As the 80s rolled along and home computers started to become
more common, McVeigh became one of the first generation of computer
nerds. He was on the internet before basically anyone else. His handle
on those early message boards was "The Wanderer". We can't know
everywhere McVeigh went in the early internet, but it's unlikely to be
pure coincidence that Timothy grew obsessed with survivalism and the
second amendment during the years he was most involved in nascent
internet culture. It's entirely possible he came across some of Louis
Beam's writings during this time. We know for a fact that he fell in
love with a book... 'The Turner Diaries'. He first heard about 'the
Turner Diaries' from an ad in 'Soldier of Fortune' magazine. He ordered
the book by mail, and fell madly in love with it. For the rest of his
life he'd insist that the book's gun rights advocacy was what drew him
to it, not its depiction of a genocidal worldwide race war. [and it's
kinda likely he was telling the truth. Again, like Randy Weaver, Tim
McVeigh was a racist, but it's not his motivation.]
Post-Estes Park, the Turner Diaries remained on of the lynchpins of
white supremacist recruitment in the US. Ads for it in magazines like
Soldier of Fortune often posed the question "What would you do if the
government comes for your guns?". None of this is to say McVeigh wasn't
racist, he grew up in a place where everyone was white, at age 19 he got
a job as a guard on an armored car, he later recalled his colleagues
expressing casual racism towards black residents on the east side of
Buffalo and eventually he adopted those beliefs and their propensity for
using racial slurs. Racism was a fact of Tim's life, but again, it
wasn't like the main thing for him. What was his main thing, were guns.
During his time spent as a security guard, McVeigh spent most of his
recreational time shooting. He eventually got in trouble with his
neighbors for doing so and this seems to have influenced his desire to
join the army. McVeigh was an excellent recruit and by all accounts a
very good soldier. He fell in love with most aspects of army life,
although he disliked the emphasis training placed on killing. In a later
interview he recalled, "20 times a day they'd make us say 'blood makes
the grass grow, kill kill kill', you'd be screaming that til your throat
was raw. If somebody put a video camera on that they'd think it was a
bunch of sickos."
On base McVeigh continued to read far-right literature, devouring
conspiracy theories about the United States and UN conspiring to steal
the freedoms and guns of Americans. He handed out copies of the Turner
Diaries to his closest comrades. He was warned several times by friends
who had read the book that people would think he was 'fucking racist' if
he kept passing that stuff around. The Gulf War would give Tim McVeigh
his first chance to actually use guns against other human beings, and
interestingly enough, he seems to have hated it. He was not on board
with the war from the beginning. McVeigh felt the US military should
only get involved in conflicts that directly affected the lives of
american citizens. He saw the US intervention against Iraq as bullying.
Tim Mcveigh hated bullies. When he shipped over to Iraq, McVeigh was the
gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle. In a battle in country he killed
two Iraqi soldiers with the Bradley's very large gun, and watched in
horror as their bodies disappeared into a red mist. The incident scarred
him. Unlike Louis Beam, McVeigh did not enjoy killing.
The whole war left a bad taste in Tim's mouth. He was particularly
furious when he read about the US Air Force bombing of the Al-Amira bomb
shelter in Baghdad which killed 300 women and children. McVeigh returned
to America much less enchanted by military life. He focused some of that
frustration on the black soldiers he served alongside. Several of them
walked around the base in black power shirts, which infuriated Tim. He
was heard several times using the n-word, and had a reputation for
ordering some of his black subordinates to sweep up the motor pool. When
pressed about this later, McVeigh pointed out that "some of [his]
closest comrades in the military were black". I'm going to quote again
from 'American Terrorist', "While he swore he never embraced racism,
McVeigh actively explored the racist point of view. He had already begun
selling copies of 'the Turner Diaries' at gun shows, and because of the
racist content of the book McVeigh wound up on a mailing list for the Ku
Klux Klan. McVeigh claimed he had virtually no idea what the KKK was all
about the first time he had received literature from the racist group,
but he was impressed by one of its pamphlets which expressed concerns
about the loss of individual rights in american society and the desire
to go back to the way things were in the days of the founding fathers.
McVeigh spent $20 for the trial membership of the KKK headquarters in
North Carolina. One of the enticements for joining was a "WHITE POWER"
t-shirt that McVeigh planned to wear around Fort Raleigh. Why would a
non-racist want a WHITE POWER t-shirt? McVeigh maintained that it was to
protest what he saw as a growing double standard in the army. He said
that he never did wear the shirt but made no apologies for buying it. "I
wanted to make a point," he said, "black guys were wearing black power
t-shirts on the base, they weren't supposed to. I wanted to see what
would happen if I wore the white power t-shirt." McVeigh didn't renew
his KKK membership when his first year was up. He had joined the KKK, he
said, because he thought the Klan was fighting for the restoration of
individual rights, especially gun rights, but the more research and
reading he did, the more he realized the Klan was almost entirely
devoted to the cause of racism. He decided the KKK was manipulative to
young people, and didn't renew his membership.
Tim McVeigh, like Randy Weaver, was a perfect example of the type of man
Louis Beam was hoping to reach: not motivated enough by racism to have
sought out the movement, but comfortable enough with racism, and
frustrated with mainstream American culture to be radicalized by the
anti-gun control NWO conspiracies peddled by the propagandists of the
white power movement. McVeigh opted not to reenlist after his time of
service ran out, and outside of the military McVeigh's life was just one
frustration after another. Despite his glowing service record he had
trouble finding work, the civil service jobs he had applied for in the
state and federal government had turned him down. He convinced himself
that this was because he was a young white man, and thus the victim of
what he referred to as 'reverse discrimination'. Affirmative action
became the focus of McVeigh's boarded ambitions. He started spending
more and more time around gun shows and flirted vaguely with some
militias including the Michigan Militia. He started sending his sister,
Jennifer, stories he'd read about the Feller?** family and their
supposed control of most of the organs of state power. The conspiracists
McVeigh embraced were not quite open neo-nazi anti-semites, but they
were kissing cousins to that kind of belief. From 'American Terrorist',
quote, "The brother and sister's conversations sprawled from the bible
to the pyramid and its all-seeing-eye on the back of the dollar bill.
McVeigh was reading more anti-government books and pamphlets, and he
shared them with his inquisitive younger sister. He wanted to expand her
perspective, but some of the claims in the literature seemed bizarre and
inconceivable to Jennifer, including one writer's contention that the
government was building massive crematoriums and 130 concentration camps
to exterminate individuals who disagreed with the federal government's
policies.
The authors of the pamphlets, anticipating skepticism, warned that
americans risked becoming victims of 'it can't happen here' syndrome
when it came to government usurping power from the people. Jennifer
wasn't sold on everything she read, but just as McVeigh hoped, the
literature got her thinking about the government and individual rights.
She looked up to her older brother, flattered that he thought enough of
her to engage her in political discourse. McVeigh believed that the
federal government intended to disarm the american public gradually and
take away their right to bear arms under the second amendment. In the
summer of 1992, he pointed to events in Ruby Ridge Idaho as proof
positive that his theory was correct. One of the publications that
McVeigh read during this period was called 'the White Patriot'. It was
published by the former KKK leader, the attempted invader of the island
of Dominica, and the founder of Stormfront, Don Black. It featured
articles with titles like, 'Why is the Klan opposed to Jews?', and also
hosted essays from William Pierce.
As McVeigh's life prospects dimmed, he grew more obsessed with guns and
gun shows, traveling around the country selling weapons, literature, and
survivalist gear. The gun show circuit introduced him to more fringe
right-wing literature. McVeigh began to express frustration that
American women were unfairly withholding sex from American men. He
called them 'prudish' and 'stingy'. When the Waco siege began, Mcveigh
was instantly obsessed with the story. He drove to Mt. Carmel and sold
t-shirts outside the siege lines, communing with his fellow survivalists
and militiamen as they worriedly awaited the outcome, and when that
outcome came it radicalized Tim McVeigh as nothing else could've. He
read that the government had used CS gas which McVeigh had been exposed
to during his military training. To McVeigh, this was the ultimate
representation of government overreach. Pure vicious, murderous bully
behaviour. McVeigh didn't stop being furious at the murder of dozens of
innocent people. He became convince that Waco was the prelude to a mass
government crackdown on gun owners and freedom. He told one friend that
he suspected the feds had purposefully started the fires in the
compound. "The government wanted it to burn, the government couldn't
win, the public sentiment was changing," he said.
McVeigh's rage was reciprocated by the other men he met on the gun show
circuit. Men like Terry Nichols, a sovereign citizen whose beliefs were
essentially descended from the Posse Comitatus movement. Mcveigh spent
time living on Nichols's farm and crafting explosives and small homemade
bombs, initially just for amusement. Over the months that followed Waco,
McVeigh's rage, and the paranoia stoked by fringe right-wing conspiracy
theories and his love of 'the Turner Diaries' metastasized into a plan.
A plan to bomb the Murrah building in Oklahoma City.
The structure of McVeigh's attack was directly inspired by a passage
from 'the Turner Diaries'. At one point Earl Turner's cell bombs the
FBI's headquarters. Pierce goes into exhaustive detail about the device
they use, a truck bomb made with 44 lbs of ammonium nitrate: essentially
the same weapon McVeigh constructed and used to destroy the Murrah
building. On the day he detonated his bomb, wounding 168 people, McVeigh
put together a manifesto of sorts in an envelope in his car. It included
many photocopied pages of 'the Turner Diaries', McVeigh had highlighted
one passage in particular from a chunk of the book where Earl Turner's
cell carries out a mortar attack on Washington DC. "The real value of
our attack today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate
casualties. More importantly though is what we taught the politicians
and bureaucrats: they learned this afternoon that not one of them is
beyond our reach. They can huddle behind barbed wire and tanks in the
city, they can hide behind the walls of their country estates, but we
can still find them and kill them."
In Tim McVeigh, Louis Beam and his fellow fascists had found the perfect
soldier, the perfect exemplar of Beam's concept of leaderless
resistance. He was not a lone wolf as some foolish pretenders in
journalism had named him. McVeigh was radicalized by a constellation of
writers and thinkers as well as hundreds of men he had spoke with at gun
shows and survivalist conventions and sitting outside the siege lines at
Waco. He was radicalized by William Pierce, who wrote 'the Turner
Diaries' hoping desperately that someone would do exactly what McVeigh
did. McVeigh's attack prompted response from federal law enforcement,
but not the one you might expect. While there were some crackdowns on
militia cells and organizations, the justice department largely
responded by taking a lighter hand with white supremacists and militias.
In 1996 'the Montana Freemen' wound up in a standoff with the federal
government. As a group they represented a synthesis of Christian
Identity and Posse Comatatus beliefs. They declared themselves
independent of federal control and wound up in an 81 day standoff with
law enforcement. For awhile it looked like the Freemen compound might
become another Waco. But the standoff ended peacefully. Video footage of
the 23 adults and 4 children surrendering showed no giant armored
vehicles or military-looking police. The FBI's hostage rescue team wore
sneakers and casual civilian clothing. McVeigh would go to his grave
convinced that the lighter hand used on the Montana Freemen was the
result of his attack on Oklahoma City. And he might have been right.
According to 'American Terrorist', "Clinton R. VanZandt, the former FBI
agent who'd tried without success to negotiate a peaceful end to the
Waco standoff three years earlier, agreed with McVeigh, at least on that
point. Retired from the FBI and working as a security consultant,
VanZandt feels that the government learned a painful lesson from the OKC
bombing. In VanZandt's words, 'the government realized that it must
become a velvet brick, not a battering ram.' 'What an absolute classic
tragedy,' VanZandt had said soon after the conflagration at Waco, 'what
a total indictment of mankind's inability to communicate and relate even
though we have different religious beliefs and personal philosophies.'
While VanZandt condemned the OKC bombing, he felt that Waco had started
a war and that McVeigh's bombing had not only been an escalation, but a
turning point in the war."
My only disagreement with Mr. VanZandt is the idea that the war Mr.
McVeigh wound up fighting in had started with Waco. This war had been
going on much longer than that, at least as far back as the days of
George Lincoln Rockwell. Timothy McVeigh may have seen himself as a
patriotic American, but he fought as a soldier of the american fascist
movement under generals Louis Beam and William Pierce. The failure of
the federal government, and almost everyone, to see this war is one
reason why things have gotten so bad in 2019 as I write this. McVeigh
would be joined on down 30 years by dozens of other angry young men. Men
like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the infamous Columbine shooters.
Most experts would agree that Harris was the motivating force behind the
attacks, more or less pulling Klebold along with him. This is not often
reported on, but Harris was obsessed with Adolf Hitler and Nazism. He
wrote constantly about Nazi ideology, his hatred of free speech, the
press, and his desire to see mentally defective people executed. Harris
was also obsessed with Timothy McVeigh.
Dave Colon is a journalist who spent more than a decade studying the
massacre. He found regular references to OKC and McVeigh in Harris's
writings before the shooting. Colon writes, "In his journal, Eric would
brag about topping McVeigh. Oklahoma City was a one-note performance,
McVeigh set his timer and walked away. He didn't even see his spectacle
unfold. Harris admired McVeigh, but desperately wanted to beat him,
carrying out a larger attack, killing more people." Eric Harris and DK
did not succeed in their goal of topping McVeigh, but Harris may yet
manage to beat McVeigh's 'High Score'. In the decades since the 1996
shooting at Columbine it has inspired at least 74 copycat attacks which
have killed 89 people and injured 126 more. You can draw a direct line
from George Lincoln Rockwell to William Pierce and Louis Beam, to Tim
McVeigh, and then to Eric Harris. By the late 1990s, it was incredibly
clear that leaderless resistance as a tactic was the best weapon in the
white supremacist arsenal; but it would take the mass adoption of the
internet and the era of the smartphone for Louis Beam's deadliest
innovation to see its full potential.
In the years since the OKC bombing, the white supremacist movement seems
to have spent most of its fury. Nothing like Seadrift occurred in the
late 90s. Nazi violence, when it happened, was mostly focused around
racist skinheads and groups like 'the White Aryan Resistance' or 'the
Hammerskin Nation'. In 1996, a group called 'the Aryan Republican Army'
robbed 22 banks in the midwest. Several of them had ties to Elohim City,
where Tim McVeigh had also tried to hide out after his attack, but
these, and other eruptions of violence, were dealt with in short order.
By the time the early 2000s rolled along, and the War on Terror kicked
off, you could be forgiven for thinking the white supremacist movement
was on its way out.
"Everything You Love Will Burn", by Vegas Tenholdt, chronicles the
movement during this period. One of the largest actions in these days
was an 80 man march in Toledo by the National Socialist Movement.
Putting together a march that large was the work of the entire national
organization, and they were so overwhelmed by counter-protesters that
they were never able to take to the streets. Back in Seadrift Louis Beam
got three-or-four-hundred Klansman just to show up in Texas. In 2010,
the National Socialist movement held a gathering in Trenton, New Jersey.
Vegas attended to chronicle the event and the night before the march he
was present when a group called 'Anti-racist Action' assaulted the nazis
as they ate dinner in a rented meeting hall. The next day, the National
Socialist movement marched, "The entire route of the march was lined
with national guard and riot police, they'd closed off every access
point and no one was around to watch the nazis trudge along the wet
streets while the rain soaked their black uniforms. They arrived at a
wide square in front of the capitol building, a few modest steps led up
to the entrance, and a small podium stood at the top. Police had
cordoned there, and off in the distance counter-protesters had gathered.
The police, fearing another showdown, kept them two blocks away from the
nazis, just barely within shouting distance, so the rally was reduced to
a couple dozen neo-nazis screaming obscenities at 50 or so anti-racist
demonstrators down the street while the anti-racists screamed right
back." The National Socialist Movement billed itself as direct
successors to George Lincoln Rockwell's party. In 5 years they'd gone
from being able to make a national gathering of 80 men down to less than
30. But looking at those numbers does not give a full picture of the
American fascist movement during this period. While the ability of old
guard fascist groups like the NSM and the clan to draw numbers had
declined, the movement was deep in the process of spreading to a new
generation through new means.
In the last chapter, I mentioned John Ronson's 'Them'. John;s book
givews us a look at the movment in the late 1990s from the perspective
of individuals like Alex Jones. Jones first rose to prominence within
the fringe-right in the mid/late 1990s, and his career illustrates the
first stages of what would grow to be known as the alt-right. Now on
paper, Jones was a libertarian, a political independent who attacked
democrats and republicans with equal vigor, seeing both as agents of the
NWO and the globalist elite. You would not hear attacks on the Jews and
ethnic groups from Jones, nor would you see him sporting a swastika, but
if you dig in just a little bit, there have always been connections
between Alex Jones and the fascist right. At one point in 'Them', John
tried to infiltrate a meeting of the Bilderbirg Group with a writer
named Big Jim Tucker, editor of 'the Spotlight', Willis Cartow's
magazine. Big Jim Tucker was a friend and frequent guest on Alex Jones's
'Infowars' in its early days. Like Jones, Jim was obsessed with the
Bilderbirg group, he viewed it as part of the Jewish conspiracy to
dominate the globe. Jones possessed the same beliefs, minus the J-word.
That 1999 gathering at the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound near
Waco... well that gathering was an attempt to rebuild the Branch
Davidian Church, organized by 25 year old Alex Jones. He told 'the
Oklahoman', "We've had schoolteachers and black single mothers and
auto-mechanics and doctors, there was even a Jewish rabbi out here one
day helping us. Sure we've had folks in their camo hats with the
militias helping us too." One of the men who gathered at Mt. Carmel that
day to help Alex Jones was Col. Bo Grits.
Grits was a legendary figure in the patriot movement: a decorated
veteran, the supposed inspiration behind the character John Rambo, and a
hardcore believer in Christian Identity theology. In 1998, right before
the Mt. Carmel meeting, he sent out this in an online bulletin to his
followers, "Do you see the sign, the scent, the stain, and mark of the
beast on America today? Are you willing to submit and join this seedline
of Satan? Look to those who are openly antichrist - who in the world are
promoting abortion, pornography, pedophilia, godless laws, adultery,
new-age international banking, entertainment industry, and world
publishing - wherever you find perversions of god's laws you will find
the worshipers of Baal with their roots still in Babylonian mysticism."
Now, 'new age banking, the entertainment industry, and international
publishing' is a bit coyer than just shouting 'THE JEWS', but Bo Grits
was more direct in a bulletin he sent out a year later during the 2000
election: "Jews, feminists, sodomites, other liberal activists may
install Gore over an apathetic moral majority. If so, runaway abortion,
antichrist God, and globalism are certain."
Now, think about those messages as I read this quote as Alex Jones as
related in 'Them' was said at the Mt Carmel meeting. "The
Bilderbergers," he said, "are the Roman senate. It's a pyramid, they're
way up there, below them you got the IMF the world bank, the UN, then
you got us down here, the cattle, the human resources, and Randy Weaver
is way out over there, see? He left, they hate that so they scare the
cattle back in the pen, see? Burn em out. I'm living in a place where
black helicopters 150 miles south of me are burning buildings,
terrorizing people, and I'm the extremist?" "Who says you're an
extremist?" I ask (Ronson Speaking). "The Anti-defamation League," he
yelled, "the ADL are a bucket of black paint and a brush, they are worse
than the clan. They get massive funding from the globalists, it doesn't
matter if your girlfriend's Jewish, your little sister is Korean,
anybody who wants to live free is a racist. The ADL is the scum of the
Earth." So these are more or less than same beliefs that AJ has spent
years broadcasting to millions of listeners around America in the late
1990s and early 2000s. Viewed independently, Jones looks like a harmless
conspiracy theorist, but placed next to Bo Grits we can see him for what
he really is: a way to ease people into Christian Identity style beliefs
that lead inevitably to exterminationist anti-semetic beliefs.
17 years later, I published a study with the journalist collective
Bellingcat on how 75 fascists were initially 'redpilled' to the cause.
My research was based on leaked internal conversations where these
neo-nazis, klansman, and other extremists discussed their ideological
evolution. 6 of them credited Alex Jones with their redpilling, they
even had a name for it, 'taking the conspiracy pill'. There was an
explicit understanding that . One user wrote, "IDGAF if you think it
[the secret rulers of the world] are aliens or not, as long as those
rulers are Jewish at the end of the day."
For those of us who grew up online in the early 00s the past 5 or so
years have been a continuous dispiriting process of watching outright
fascist beliefs bubble up on places like reddit and 4chan. It seems at
times as if the Nazis have literally eaten the internet we all knew and
loved as kids. This did not happen by accident, Alex Jones is just one
prong of a concerted digital power grab that began before most of us
knew the internet existed. In 1994, Louis Beam used money he received
from Robert Matthews's 'The Order' to create 'LibertyNet', an
international network of code-word accessed message boards. The goal of
LibertyNet was to link the white power movement together. It was used to
spread recruitment materials, and its establishment allowed the movement
to switch tactics quickly as was seen after Estes Park. It also included
personal ads and penpal programs which could be as innocuous as
connecting racists for social purposes, but was also useful in planning
crimes. The internet allowed Beam to send racist propaganda into places
where it was illegal, like Canada and Germany. After setting up
LibertyNet, Beam wrote, "Finally we're all going to be linked together
at one point in time. Imagine, if you will, all the great minds of the
patriotic christian movement linked together and joined to one computer.
Imagine any patriot in the country being able to call up and access
these minds. You are online with the Aryan Nations braintrust, it is
here to serve the folk. It has been said that knowledge is power, which
it most assuredly is. The computer offers to those proficient in its use
power undreamed of by rulers of the past." [Louis Beam, 1984]
Computers were not cheap in the 1980s, Beam's work require the modern
equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in seed money. A single Apple
computer cost $2000 at the time. Without 'The Order', none of this
would've been possible, and while law enforcement was diligent about
trying to track down all the rocket launchers, and machineguns, and
explosives, bought with the Order's ill-gotten gains, they barely seemed
to notice the computer equipment that Louis Beam had bought. By 1995,
slightly over a decade later, nazi efforts online had crystallized into
a cohesive and effective digital reich. Fascists were some of the first
people to effectively harness the power of the internet in an organized
way. The book 'Nation and Race', edited by Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore
BjĂžrgo, includes a chapter that delves into the state of the online
white power movement at this time. They cite Walter Benjamin, a scholar
who wrote an essay about how new technology like photography was
harnessed by nazis. "Mass movements are usually discerned more clearly
by a camera than by the naked eye. A birds-eye view best captures
gatherings of 100s of thousands, and even though such a view may be as
accessible to the human eye as it is to the camera, the image perceived
by the eye cannot be enlarged the way a negative is enlarged." While
photographs and film best captured the character of the original nazi
movement, its modern descendent is best captured online, in countless
conversations and debates across message boards, image boards, youtube
comments sections, and the like. In the wake of the OKC bombing, and in
response to the effectiveness with which anti-racist movements like
'Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice' shut down fascist street
gatherings, the internet became increasingly central to the development
of American fascism.
In the early 1990s, Milton John Kleim Jr. was a 25 year old studying at
St. Cloud University. His school provided him with a free Usenet
account, and one of his professors rather accidentally gave him the
listing where he came upon alt.skinheads, a neo-nazi news group. Milton
was one of the first young men to become radicalized into fascism
through the internet. Kleim grew obsessed, spending hours a day writing
thousands of newsgroup posts and emails. He'd become a coordinator for
several digitally inclined fascists. Kleim graduated in 1995 and shortly
thereafter had his first face-to-face encounter with a member of the
movement, Lin Young, William Pierce's secretary. She gave Kleim a check
for $500 which he used to buy a computer to continue his work now that
he had left the university. Kleim never again met another neo-nazi in
person, but he continued his activities and later that year wrote an
essay on digital strategy that he posted to the Aryan Digital Crusader's
Library website. In it he wrote that the internet, "offers enormous
opportunity for the Aryan resitance to disseminate our message to the
unaware and the ignorant. It is the only relatively uncensored,
freeform, mass medium which we have available. The state cannot yet stop
us from advertising our ideas and organizations. Now is the time to
grasp the weapon which is the net and wield it skillfully and wisely
while you may still do so freely."
In the mid 1990s, Usenet - an early predecessor to modern forum
culture - was where most online discussions occured. The most critical
nazi destinations had names like alt.nationalism.white,
alt.revolution.counter, alt.skinhead, and as a prelude to 8Chan's pol
board, alt.politics. This was all very much in line with the ideas that
Beam had laid out a decade earlier, but Kleim wanted to see his fellow
fascists move on from their digital safe spaces and become what he
called 'cyber guerrillas'. He decided they should, "take up positions on
mainstream groups. Except on our groups, avoid the race issue, sidestep
it as much as possible, we don't have time to defend our stance on this
issue against the comments of hundreds of fools, liars, and degenerates
who, spouting the Jewish line, will slaughter our message with
half-truths, slander, and the ever-used sophistry." Kleim's writing is
particularly fascinating to me for the similarities between it and the
things I've encountered in my own explorations of modern online nazi
haven 8chan. Near the end of his essay, Kleim writes, "All of my
comrades and I, none of whom have ever met face to face, share a unique
camaraderie, feeling as though we've been friends for a long time.
Selfless cooperation occurs regularly amongst my comrades for a variety
of endeavors. This feeling of comradeship is irrespective of national
identity or state borders." What Kleim expressed there is not so
different from what Poway Synagogue shooter John Earnest related in the
8chan post he made announcing the start of his rampage, "It's been real
dudes. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything. Keep up
the infographic redpill threads, I've only been lurking for a year and a
half, but what I've learned here is priceless. It's been an honor."
Kleim's last line about feeling comradeship across national barriers,
would prove to be an eerie premonition of the future of the
international fascist movement, because during the late 1990s and early
2000s the American fascist movement went international in a way it never
had been before. Even back in the 30s & 40s, Italian, German, and
Spanish fascism were all very different beasts. One side effect of the
propaganda that started emanating out of the US as a result of Beam's
LibertyNet was that all the world's sundry fascists started getting on
the same page. I found a 2002 study by Les Black published in The
Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies: Les interviewed an Irish fascist
with the internet handle WhiteWolf, "During the height of his
involvement in the movement he was spending 5 hours a day online. He
lives in an Irish town where there are virtually no visible minorities,
he was drawn to the white power movement through a fascination with
Nazism. He concluded, 'mostly Americans are on the net, but there are
British, Irish and lots of others from different countries. In spite of
the distance, a person who was living on a 2000 acre farm in Australia
and had nobody to talk to about his views suddenly understands that he
can link people who would never have met and talk with them, plan with
them, learn and teach one another things, help each other. Our Aussie
friend, who may may be well-removed from the rest of his comrades can
nevertheless take part in forwarding the agenda of a group'." Racists
LOVE the internet.
17 years later, a young man who might have well been the Aussie friend
that WhiteWolf was talking about, drove to a mosque in Christchurch New
Zealand and gunned down more than 50 people. Like WhiteWolf, he was a
loner, spending hours a day online building a sense of rapport with his
far-flung digital comrades in fascism before finally deciding to take
action.
The thing that really shocked me when I first began doing this research
was how damned groundbreaking the fascists were in their understanding
of what online culture would become and how to manipulate it. From
'Nation and Race', "This arena has spawned its own language and combines
previous forms of right-wing organizing with new political strategies.
CNG, variously referred to as the Cyber Nationalist Group, Cyber Nazi
Group, or Computer Nationalist Group, is the brainchild of activist Jeff
Voss. In his article entitled 'The CNG, an Idea for Online Organization,
a complete division of labor is outlined that assigns operative to
particular roles within an overall strategy. Voss makes a distinction
between idea men and men of action, the former provide background
information for the latter to post within usenet. This manifesto
outlines four different types of foreground operative:
-DISS: a subtle disseminator of information, places it on FTP sites, and
makes subtle references to endorsements of such info on news usually
pretending to be a disinterested observer.
-A Pirate: a person who will pirate an account for one-shot high
saturation dissemination of propaganda.
-An Impersonator: who impersonates the enemy posting, embarrassing the
left and infuriating the enemy.
-Infiltrator: who infiltrates the enemy camp. [1995]
Fascists were some of the first folks to develop a cohesive strategy
around what they called 'flaming'. As early as 1995, researchers into
online extremism had realized that, "a common endpoint used by
right-wing activists is the stylized disclaimer 'I am not a nazi'."
Those same researchers also noted the use of 'mail bombs', or software
that allowed fascists to deluge a recipient in 100s and 100s of pieces
of spam email in order to make an opponent's account functionally
unusable. 21 years later, when I wrote my first article critical of
8chan in the leadup to the 2016 election, my work account was deluged in
a massive flow of spam emails which is why I still get emails from
homeschooling dot com everyday.
Wyatt Kaldenberg was an internet activist affiliated with Tom Metzger's
White Aryan Resistance, or WAR. Tom was a major part of the skinhead
movement as well as an associate of the Order. Back in the 1970s he
worked with David Duke to help organize the Klan border watch. Wyatt
helped spread WAR's message online and gained infamy as one of the first
proponents for what would come to be known as 'brigading', interrupting
other online communities in an organized way. Wyatt wrote, "this oughta
be our new tactic. Instead of hanging around the four racist news groups
we can hit news groups as a mob. We cannot win when we are outnumbered
by Jews but if we go in as a group we can win with the average Joe
Six-pack. Post facts about black crime, give them your update numbers,
web addresses; push books, newspapers."
Fascist groups like 'the Carolinian Lords of the Caucuses' started going
into news groups dedicated to loneliness and people who had just ended
relationships. They went into news groups for popular musicians and even
the news group for Denny's. Raids like this were often just for the
purpose of harassment, but over the years fascists got better and better
at spreading their ideology this way. They basically hit upon the tactic
of hiding their beliefs as humor, retreating behind the shield of 'we're
just joking' when people responded badly to their rants about Jewish
people or black-on-black crime. Christian Identity theology also spread
online in this period. I found an article in the Journal of Black
studies written by Tonya Sharp in 2000. She noted, "the internet has
become a primary means for disseminating information for these groups.
Currently there are 25 websites and 13 newsgroups specifically devoted
to identity christianity on the world wide web, as well as 130 websites
that are devoted to similar and related topics. Individuals can tap into
these websites to find procedures for making bombs, obtain hate
propaganda tracts, and request catalogues that market white supremacist
books and paraphernalia."
Bit-by-bit, and almost entirely in a decentralized manner, the digital
reich came together in the early 2000s. Law enforcement was not only
helpless to do anything, it's debatable whether or not they even
realized what was happening. Most of their online efforts were spent
keeping track of known-quantities with long-standing online ties, like
Don Black's popular fascist website, Stormfront. Stormfront is
important, nearly 180 hate crime murders have been traced to the site,
but the FBI wasn't even particularly good at monitoring them. In July of
2019, in response to a FOIA request, the Bureau admitted that they had -
somehow - lost almost all of their files on Stormfront.
The FBI only did a quarter-ass job of monitoring even the most obvious
nazis online, so it's no surprise that they completely failed to notice
when fascists began infiltrating communities like 4chan and reddit. It
happened slowly, camouflaged in irony and humor. As a young man I was
only vaguely aware of the changes in the digital spaces I had grown up
around. Holocaust jokes became more common, so did racist humor. More
than just growing more frequent, these jokes grew more specific,
evolving from jibes about Jewish people being stingy with money -
clearly inspired by South Park - to memes about 'Hitler Did Nothing
Wrong' and image macros that repeated bad science about race and IQ. In
2018 I found an article from 'the Observer' by holocaust scholar Timothy
Snyder. In it he comments on the use of irony and humor by fascists to
mainstream their views. Quote, "What the 21st century culture has
introduced is that nothing is really serious, and that is an
interestingly dangerous idea, because if nothing is really serious you
can have this ambiguity where you can actually be doing something very
serious but you're pretending not to, and you can always fall back and
say 'well that was just a joke', because everything is just a joke, but
of course you don't really believe that everything is just a joke or you
wouldn't be promoting fascism, or white supremacy, or whatever it may
be."
In 2014, things on the internet rather suddenly boiled over into the
cultural phenomenon known as 'gamergate'. On the surface, gamergate was
a reaction to corruption in video games journalism. In reality, it was
an eruption of white and male supremacist hatred, an attack on modernity
and liberalism by an army of young men who believed they'd been wronged
by society. There has not yet been a great deal of research into whether
or not there'd been an organized attempt by the white supremacist
movement to co-opt gamergate, but there is ample evidence that the ideas
of that movement quickly made it into popular memes spread by
gamergaters. During my research I came across a thread on the website
recetera filled with other confused digital natives trying to figure out
just what the fuck had happened with gamergate. One user posted a series
of memes he'd saved during that time. In retrospect they seem to show a
progressive descent into white nationalism. The first is a propaganda
poster featuring a cartoon mascot of 4chan's /pol/ board, 'Polina',
advising the anons of pol on how to effectively aid the movement. Polina
is blond haired and blue eyed. At the top of the poster are the words
'Who is that girl? Blond haired, blue eyed, fair skin? Why, it must be
Polina!' Another meme, from further on in the collection, is
significantly nazier. It's based around an old labour movement political
cartoon, 'the pyramid of a modern capitalist system', showing laborers
at the very bottom being exploited by the classes above them. In the
gamergate adaptation, gamers are at the bottom of the pyramid, with
games journalists above them, critical theorists and social justice
warriors above them, cultural marxist academia above them, and then
FAFSA loans above them at the top represented by the all-seeing
illuminati eye symbol. We don't see explicit anti-semitism in this
cartoon, but it is there subtly, in the caricature drawings of Jewish
video game critics. It's clear at this point that some white supremacist
talking points had started to mutate to better appeal to modern and
extremely online youths.
Eventually the harassment of video game journalists and critics, most of
whom were women, grew severe and illegal enough that 4chan exiled its
gamergaters. Many of them migrated to 8chan and over the next several
years, they grew more radical and more explicitly fascist until,
eventually, they were openly planning for how to cause a new holocaust.
It's impossible to know how much of the ironic fascist shitposting
started off innocently, and how much of it was seeded by white power
activists, but we know they were engaging in that sort of behavior
purposefully for over 20 years, and in the years after gamergate this
work has paid dividends. The true danger of the digital reich was best
expressed by Alex Curtis, publisher of a neo-nazi magazine and
self-proclaimed 'lone wolf of hate'. In the early 2000s he wrote of his
hope that, "Some well placed Aryans will one day cause some serious
wreckage. A thousand Timothy McVeigh's would end any semblance of
stability in this racially corrupt society." We have not yet reached
1000 Timothy McVeighs thankfully, but we have seen a marked increase in
the amount of right-wing domestic terror over the last several years,
and it certainly seems to be driven largely by online radicalization.
Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter, was radicalized in
part on Gab, a social network for nazis.
He announced the start of his rampage there. Six months later, the Poway
Synagogue shooter announced the start of his rampage on 8chan, as had
the Christchurch shooter 6 weeks prior. There are other names in the
roll-call of internet inspired fascist violence, the Atomwaffen
terrorist group responsible for 3 murders so far, started off with
extremely online nazis working to form a terrorist cell in imitation of
the book 'Siege' written by James Mason. We talked briefly about Mason
and 'Siege' at the start of this book, he was a student of William
Pierce, and 'Siege' might best be understood as a more academic
accompanying text to 'the Turner Diaries'. Where the diaries proposes
fiction, 'Siege' outlines in strategic depth. Mason advocates for
leaderless resistance and lone-wolf style attacks. "The lone-wolf cannot
be detected, cannot be prevented, and seldom can be traced. If I were
asked by anyone of my opinion on what to look for or hope for next, I
would tell them a wave of killings or assassinations of system
bureaucrats by roving gunmen who have their strategy well mapped out in
advance and well-nigh impossible to stop."
Early in 2019, Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Hasson was caught planning
this exact sort of attack. He had a cache of weapons and ammo and a
kill-list of journalists and democratic politicians. Hasson was obsessed
with the manifesto of Anders Brevik, a right-wing shooter who murdered
dozens of students in Utoya, Norway. We don't know where he first came
into contact with that manifesto, but spreading it has been a priority
of online fascists for years. In the wake of the Christchurch shooting,
fascists have started spreading Tarrant's manifesto as well. The Poway
synagogue shooter cited both manifestos as inspirations for his attack.
In his own rampage thread on 8chan, the Poway shooter stated his desire
to beat Tarrant's 'high score'. In this we see echoes of Eric Harris,
the Columbine shooter who was obsessed with beating Timothy McVeigh's
'high score'. Right now, as I read this, violent men in 8chan's pol
board and numerous dischord chat rooms are plotting ways that they might
beat their heroes and win a 'high score' of their own. On telegram, 'the
Bowl Patrol', a group of young fascists dedicated to Charleston church
shooter Dylan Roof, celebrate St. Roof and fantasize about new acts of
violence in his name.
The early harvest in blood these young men will reap was sown by Louis
Beam, William Pierce, and Bob Matthews. Now, though, there is no need
for an organization to buy up arms and plan terror attacks. 'The Order'
proved to be less resilient than the completely decentralized
radicalization and killing machine made possible by the advent of the
internet. The internet had given the white power movement a steady
supply of armed and ready young killers, living cruise missiles who
strike unpredictably at targets around the country. Bit-by-bit, their
attacks chisel away at our sense of security, our national stability,
and our trust in each other. It took decades, but Louis Beam and his
comrades did bring the war home, to all of us, and against all of us.