Preface.  Whenever collapse from peak oil, peak soil, and peak everything else begins, these racist white groups with military training, in the military or from returned vets, could make many regions of the country unpleasant or even deadly for minorities or liberals, forming small armies that go house to house to requisition food, bullets, and guns. 

Well this just in, no need for collapse to force these cockroach humans out of the woodwork, they just attempted a coup on behalf of their Great Leader Trump in the capitol building! Now back to the review.

They’ve got way more guns and other weapons than you can possibly imagine from bank robberies, dozens of illegal and often violent crimes, and selling drugs. Above all, stockpiles of weaponry that military men have stolen from where they’re stationed, for example:

“In 1986, investigators for the United States Congress and Department of Defense reported growing concern in the U.S. Armed Forces over missing weapons. Hundreds of millions of dollars in military arms, ammunition, and explosives had disappeared. The military supply system had grown so large, officials told the New York Times, that matériel could be lost “without anyone knowing the items were gone.” Scrutiny quickly turned to Fort Bragg, an army post in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The command there, the Army Audit Agency found, had routinely assigned security guards for the armory without proper background checks. With large, open areas and regular comings and goings of all sorts of people, the post was easy to rob. A congressional report on Fort Bragg cited a large amount of missing ordnance recovered around the post, including 148 pounds of plastic explosives, 142 pounds of TNT, 1,080 feet of detonating cord, 13 hand grenades, and 35 antipersonnel land mines. Some of the weapons and explosives turned up in private homes.

By the time the military noticed that weapons were going missing, however, the scale of the problem was staggering. In 1986, a Pentagon official estimated, $900 million in arms, electronic components, parts, and other equipment and supplies disappeared nationwide.  “

Although they’ve been portrayed as lone crackpots, there is a large, strong, and hidden organization encapsulated in cells that is hard for law enforcement to penetrate and understand the extent of it.

Below are some excerpts, by all means buy the book for the complete story.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Kathleen Belew. 2018. Bring the War Home. The white power movement and paramilitary America. Harvard University Press.

I use “white power” to refer to the social movement that brought together members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism between 1975 and 1995. Some have described this group of people with the terms “white nationalist,” “white separatist,” the “racist right,” or “white supremacist.” None of these terms is appropriate for describing the larger movement. Not all proponents of white power advocated white nationalism or white separatism, and white nationalism presumes a different outcome—one inherently less violent—than that envisioned by a vocal segment of the white power movement.  The term “racist right” presumes a political continuum that does not properly describe this activism, which at times shared more with the revolutionary left than with the conservative mainstream.

White power activists increasingly saw the state as their enemy. Many pursued the idea of an all-white, racial nation, one that transcended national borders to unite white people from the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and beyond.

At the end of the tumultuous 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam War and in the midst of economic turmoil and widespread distrust of public institutions, the white power movement consolidated and expanded. In these turbulent years, many Americans lost faith in the state that they had trusted to take care of them. Loss in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal undermined their confidence in elected officials and besmirched the presidency itself. As legislation dramatically increased immigration, many worried that the arrival of immigrants would change the very meaning of American identity. They saw the rights movements of the 1960s redefine race and gender relations at home and at work. They noted with alarm the government’s failure to help those who lost their farms to the banks or their factories to faraway places.

People from all regions of the country answered the white power movement’s call to action, bridging the divide between rural and urban. They were men, women, and children. They were high school dropouts and holders of advanced degrees; rich and poor; farmers and industrial workers. They were felons and religious leaders. They were civilians, veterans, and active-duty military personnel. From its formal unification in 1979 through its 1983 turn to revolutionary war on the government and its militia phase in the early 1990s, the white power movement mobilized adherents using a cohesive social network based on commonly held beliefs. These activists operated with discipline and clarity, training in paramilitary camps and undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. White power violence reached a climax in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

A holistic study of the white power movement reveals a startling and unexpected origin: the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The story activists told about Vietnam and the response to the war on the right were major forces in uniting disparate strands of American white supremacism and in sustaining that unity. As narrated by white power proponents, the Vietnam War was a story of constant danger, gore, and horror. It was also a story of soldiers’ betrayal by military and political leaders and of the trivialization of their sacrifice. This narrative facilitated intergroup alliances and increased paramilitarism within the movement, escalating violence.

The white power movement that emerged from the Vietnam era shared some common attributes with earlier racist movements in the United States, but it was no mere echo. Unlike previous iterations of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist vigilantism, the white power movement did not claim to serve the state. Instead, white power made the state its target, declaring war against the federal government in 1983.

This call for revolution arrived during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which many historians have considered the triumph of the mainstream New Right. Anti-statism in general, and hostility toward the federal government in particular, had motivated and shaped earlier conservative and reactionary mobilizations as well as the New Right itself, but white power capitalized on a larger current of discontent among conservatives. By 1984, Time magazine had noticed a “thunder on the right”: a growing dissatisfaction, especially among evangelicals.

Reagan’s moderation, as activists saw it, revealed conventional politics as unsalvageable and signaled a state of emergency that could not be resolved through political action alone. Their paramilitary infrastructure stood ready; the war could not wait. After declaring war, activists plotted to overthrow the government through attacks on infrastructure, assassinations, and counterfeiting to undermine public confidence in currency. They armed themselves with weapons and matériel stolen from military installations. They matched this revolutionary work with the publication and circulation of printed material, recruitment drives aimed at mainstream conservatives, political campaigns, talk show appearances, and radio programs. These activities both disseminated a common set of beliefs, goals, and messages to the movement faithful and worked to recruit new members.

At the height of its mainstream appeal in the mid-1990s, the militia movement counted some five million members and sympathizers, according to one watchdog analyst. That number certainly represents the upper bound of possibility, and it is likely that the white-power-identified cohort of militia members and sympathizers was significantly smaller. However, five million places the militia movement in line with the largest surge of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership peaked in 1924 at four million.

While white power activists held worldviews that aligned or overlapped with those of mainstream conservatism—including opposition to immigration, welfare, abortion, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights—the movement was not dedicated to political conservatism aimed at preserving an existing way of life, or even to the reestablishment of bygone racial or gender hierarchies. Instead, it emphasized a radical future that could be achieved only through revolution. While some white power activists might have longed for the reinstatement of Jim Crow laws, white-minority rule as in Rhodesia and South Africa, or slavery, most agreed that such systems could not be resurrected through electoral politics alone but would have to be achieved by more drastic measures.

Christian Identity congregations heard their pastors explain that whites were the true lost tribe of Israel and that nonwhites and Jews were descended from Satan or from animals.

The movement’s religious extremism was integral to its broader revolutionary character. While increasingly politicized evangelical congregations espoused belief in the rapture—a foretold moment when the faithful would be peacefully transported from the world as the apocalyptic end times began—Christian Identity and other white theologies offered believers no such guarantees of safety. Instead, they held that the faithful would be tasked with ridding the world of the unfaithful, the world’s nonwhite and Jewish population, before the return of Christ. At the very least, the faithful would have to outlast the great tribulation, a period of bloodshed and strife. Many movement followers prepared by becoming survivalists: stocking food and learning to administer medical care. Other proponents of white cosmologies saw it as their personal responsibility to amass arms and train themselves to take part in a coming end-times battle that would take the shape of race war.

The movement adopted a strict set of gender and familial roles, particularly regarding the sexual and supportive behavior of white women and their protection by white men. Another unifying feature of the movement was its strident anticommunism, which at first aligned with mainstream Cold War conservatism and then transformed into an apocalyptic, anti-internationalist, antisemitic set of beliefs and conspiracy theories about what activists called the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) and, later, the New World Order. Increasingly, white power activists believed that the Jewish-led ZOG controlled the United Nations, the U.S. federal government, and the banks, and that ZOG used people of color, communists, liberals, journalists, academics, and other enemies of the movement as puppets in a conspiracy to eradicate the white race and its economic, social, and cultural accomplishments

To confront this grave threat, activists organized as a paramilitary army and adopted masculine cultural forms. The article that levied the plea “We Need Every One of You” was titled “White Soldier Boy” for a reason. It targeted young white men, not women, for recruitment into the presumptively male world of camouflage fatigues, military-style camps and drills, and military-grade weapons. It also spoke directly to combat veterans and active-duty military personnel.

In this respect, white power can be understood as an especially extreme and violent manifestation of larger social forces that wed masculinity with militancy, in the form of paintball, war movies, gun shows, and magazines such as Soldier of Fortune that were aimed at armchair and weekend warriors.

However, the white power movement departed from mainstream paramilitary culture in carving out an important place for women, relied on as symbols of the cause and as activists in their own right. As bearers of white children, women were essential to the realization of white power’s mission: to save the race from annihilation. More concretely, their supporting roles, auxiliary organizations, and recruiting skills sustained white power as a social movement.26 They brokered social relationships that cemented intergroup alliances and shaped the movement from within.

In all these ways—its unity, revolutionary commitments, organizing strategy, anticommunist focus, and Vietnam War inheritance—white power was something new. Yet it has often been misunderstood as a simple resurgence of earlier Klan activity.

Activists such as David Duke mounted political campaigns that influenced local and national elections.29 They produced a vibrant print culture with crossover appeal that reached more mainstream readers. They traveled from church to church, linking religious belief with white power ideology. They created a series of computer message boards to further their cause. They pursued social ties between groups,

The dramatic, hard-won gains of feminism, civil rights, secularism, and gay liberation left the 1970s ripe for conservative backlash.

The post–World War II welfare state had promised jobs, education, and health, but, beginning in 1973, a series of economic shocks displaced the expectation of continued growth and prosperity.32 An oil crisis brought about the realization that natural resources would not always be cheap and plentiful.33 Wealth inequality grew and unemployment rose. For the first time since the late 1940s, the promise of prosperity stalled.

Writing the history of a subversive movement presents archival challenges. White power activists routinely attempted to hide their activity, even when it was legal. Documentary resources are scattered and fragmentary. This is especially true of the period after 1983, when white power activists worked particularly hard to avoid being depicted as a coherent movement. They used old Klan strategies such as maintaining secret membership rolls, as well as new ideas such as cell-style organizing. Such strategies foiled government informants and forestalled public awareness of violence, obscuring the scale and intentions of the movement and limiting opposition.  But when they felt it useful, they also overstated their influence and membership in order to boost their apparent strength.

This deliberate obfuscation has clouded many journalistic and scholarly accounts. Press coverage too often portrayed organized white power violence as the work of lone gunmen driven by grievance and mental illness. Sensational true-crime and undercover reporting in pulp magazines and one-source interviews in small-town newspapers kept activists safely ensconced within their cells and depicted every case of violence as uniquely senseless. Thus groups went undetected, and the motivations underlying violence were rarely taken seriously.

Government documents also vary widely in their level of redaction. Many such sources are accessible only through Freedom of Information Act requests, which means that not everything the government collected is available to researchers.  Little is known about white power mobilizations within prisons.

An important source of information about the movement is the opposition. Watchdog groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Center for Democratic Renewal collected material on white power activists as part of their mission to combat intolerance. Some compiled extensive databases including biographical information, photographs, news clippings, and legal records. They also obtained photographs, transcriptions of conversations from undercover informants, journalists’ notes, and other items outside the published record.

The story of white power as a social movement exposes something broader about the enduring impact of state violence in America. It reveals one catastrophic ricochet of the Vietnam War, in the form of its paramilitary aftermath. It also reveals something important about war itself. War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.

Ku Klux Klan membership surges have aligned more neatly with the aftermath of war than with poverty, anti-immigration sentiment, or populism, to name a few common explanations. After the Civil War, the Confederate veterans who formed the first Klan terrorized both black communities and the Reconstruction-era state. World War I veterans led second-era Klan efforts to violently ensure “all-American” racial, religious, and nationalist power. Third-era Klansmen who had served in World War II and Korea played key roles in the violent opposition to civil rights, including providing explosives expertise and other skills they had learned in the military. After each war, veterans not only joined the Klan but also played instrumental roles in leadership, providing military training to other Klansmen and carrying out acts of violence.8 The effect of war was not simply about the number or percentage of veterans involved, but about the particular expertise, training, and culture they brought to paramilitary groups. Significantly, in each surge of activity, veterans worked hand in hand with Klan members who had not served. Without the participation of civilians, these aftershocks of war would not have found purchase at home.

The overspills of state violence from wars, therefore, spread through the whole of American society; they did not affect veterans alone.

Combat in Vietnam often took a form unfamiliar to a generation of soldiers raised on World War II films that depicted war as righteous and tempered depictions of its violence. In Vietnam, American soldiers waged prolonged, bloody fights for terrain that was soon abandoned. They often described enemies and allies as indistinguishable. Infantry patrols embarked on long, aimless marches in the hope of drawing fire from hidden guerrillas. “Free-fire zones” and “strategic hamlets”—designations that labeled as enemies anyone who did not evacuate from certain areas—placed civilians in the path of war. And because success was often measured in the number of people killed, rather than in terrain held, a mix of circumstances in Vietnam created a situation in which violence against civilians, mutilation of bodies, souvenir collecting, sexual violence, and other war crimes were not just isolated incidents but ubiquitous features of war that permeated the chain of command.

Even for those who served in later wars, such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a combat veteran of the Gulf War, the Vietnam War narrative and the culture it engendered remained a major symbolic force that worked to organize ongoing acts of white power violence. For white power activists, a shared story about Vietnam outweighed the historical reality of the war itself.

As historians have shown, the draft disproportionately targeted poor black communities, and was also used as a punitive measure to send black race rioters to war in order to quell domestic dissent. Black soldiers received the fewest promotions and the most courts-martial. Racial tension permeated military installations at home and in Vietnam. While white and black soldiers faced combat together, the rear echelon was intensely segregated: one black soldier described Saigon as just like Mississippi.

By 1970, the Marine Corps recorded more than 1,000 incidents of racial violence at installations both in Vietnam and back home. White supremacist groups targeted black military personnel around domestic bases and posts.

At Camp Pendleton, a Marine base in southern California, active-duty personnel organized on-base Klan activity beginning in 1973, according to a Naval Investigative Service study and a report by the New Times. The Camp Pendleton chapter of the Klan had garnered some two hundred members, according to a local news report, and had participated in the systematic “kidnapping, shooting, firebombing, torturing, beating and otherwise harassing [of] black Marines” even as some officers promoted Klan members and issued, the paper claimed, “secret” clearances for six of them. The report catalogued almost two hundred racial incidents at Camp Pendleton from 1973 to 1976.

Grievances expressed the frustrations of soldiers with the state, political leaders, and civilians who appeared to be corrupt and complicit in the failed war, and reflected feelings widely held by American soldiers in Vietnam about how retreat from combat zones frequently offered no real sense of safety, how racial tension split the rear echelon, and how the inability to distinguish allies from enemies among the Vietnamese hid the enemy. Prevalent night attacks meant that death could come for soldiers at any time. Beam wrote of the plight of the “poor grunt bastards,” the foot soldiers used as bait to locate enemy positions and then call in air attacks. Their most common form of engagement with the enemy was ambush, while land mines and booby traps created intense and constant fear.

White power advocate Beam consistently used the horror of blood, death, and mutilation to argue that the government and civil society had betrayed and abandoned soldiers in Vietnam, and, therefore, that civilians should face the violence of war at the hands of white power activists on the home front and repeatedly called for violence in his writings,

Spanning decades, Beam’s narrative of unending combat appealed to Vietnam veterans, active-duty soldiers, and a wider audience of disaffected white men and women. In the 1970s, the movement would begin to militarize and unify around this narrative. Klansmen would shed their white robes to don camouflage fatigues, neo-Nazis would brandish military rifles, and white separatists would manufacture their own Claymore-style land mines in their determination to bring the war home.

In 1977, Louis Beam used a Texas Veterans Land Board grant—a program designed to provide economic benefits to returning veterans—to purchase fifty acres of swampland. On a landscape that recalled the rice paddies of Vietnam, Beam built Camp Puller, a Vietnam War–style training facility designed to turn Klansmen into soldiers. Over the next few years, Beam would climb from participation in a small Klan group to leadership of a national, unified white power movement that shared a paramilitary orientation and adopted violent methods. Beam would implement a Klan Border Watch to target undocumented immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, and he would recruit active-duty military personnel. He would create an elite Special-Forces-style unit within the Klan, and proceed to build a network of paramilitary training camps. He would call upon his soldiers to foster a harassment campaign against Vietnamese refugee fishermen on the Texas coast, whom he deemed enemies.

“Over here, if you kill the enemy, you go to jail. Over there in Vietnam, if you killed the enemy, they gave you a medal,” Beam said. “I couldn’t see the difference.

The camps also prepared participants for future antigovernment combat. Beam believed that the United States and the Soviet Union would soon engage in a nuclear struggle but would lack the military strength to follow missile attacks with a land invasion. He planned to wage race war at that moment of vulnerability, after the missile strikes. A white separatist army, he said, could take control of the United States—or at least Texas—expelling all nonwhite people to create a white homeland. It would be convenient that their vehicles, uniforms, and weapons looked like those issued by the U.S. government, with their original army paint and markings; as Sisente told an undercover reporter posing as a recruit, “We may need to pass for National Guardsmen or Army guys someday. We’ll set up our own state here and announce that all non-whites have 24 hours to leave,

 “Lots of them won’t believe it or won’t believe us when we say we’ll get rid of them, so we’ll have to exterminate a lot of them the first time around.

In 1980, the first Vietnamese in the area earned their citizenship. The violence rapidly escalated. Three Vietnamese boats and a mobile home were firebombed; two Vietnamese shrimpers were beaten. Guns were fired out in the bay. A group of Vietnamese fishermen were pelted with beer bottles thrown from a speeding car as they walked home from the docks one night. A boat was set adrift. Someone pulled a gun on a Vietnamese fisherman walking across a dock without permission and shot him in the leg.

It was not just economic anxiety and mistaken identification of Viet Cong enemies that drove demonization of Vietnamese refugees. The Klan and neo-Nazis also pushed explicitly racist tropes. In their periodicals, the groups accused “boat people” of carrying tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases to the United States.  Sensational reports on Vietnamese refugees in white power publications highlighted radical cultural difference to foment violent responses. Such stories consistently described the refugees as a “flood” that threatened to wipe out white jobs, and claimed refugees were eating neighborhood pets.

The most damaging rumors, however, alleged that the refugees were welfare cheats and wards of the state. Anger at these supposed freeloaders provided a bridge between Klan and neo-Nazi publications who wrote that the “most sickening aspect of all of this” was the idea that white American taxpayers would have to pay for the welfare illicitly received by the single Vietnamese men who were outfishing them.

When arriving refugees wanted to buy old boats, white fishermen charged them dramatically inflated prices, as much as $10,000 for an old shrimping boat worth perhaps a third of that. Jim Craig, an ally of the refugees, owned a wharf informally known as Saigon Harbor, where some thirty-five Vietnamese boats docked. “The Americans laughed at them,” Craig said, “and sold boats to them for more than the Americans thought they were worth because the Americans thought (it) … was ‘government money’ anyway, because the Vietnamese had received aid.” Less than 9 percent of the 23,000 to 25,000 refugees in the Houston-Galveston area, however, received any kind of welfare, and those who did collected $36 per month on average.

Neighbors knew the camp was open by the bullets flying past their doors. A community of black families lived on one side of the camp, and the white trainees aimed their guns in that direction during target practice, although white neighbors on the opposite side of the camp also reported errant bullets. The local sheriff said that none of the trainees came from the area, and that they were “mostly ex-Marines and all ex-military.” The sheriff said his hands were tied. “No one has filed a complaint,” he said, “they won’t file complaints because they fear reprisal, or potential reprisal.

An FBI background memo filed in May 1981 further noted that the U.S.-born fishermen “only selectively obeyed some of the laws and some of their own customs.” Anticommunism, racism, and invocation of the lost Vietnam War fueled the white community’s resentment of the refugees—not failure to follow fishing laws. Many of the Vietnamese fishermen—representing 69 boats—tired of living under such harassment and offered in March 1981 to leave on the condition that the white fishermen buy back the boats. Many even signed bilingual English-Vietnamese documents declaring their willingness to sell, including a clause stating, “I guarantee that, after the boat is sold, I will not buy another one and will not engage in fishing or shrimping activity.” However, since the white fishermen had systematically overcharged the refugees—as Craig noted, $3,000 boats had been sold to the refugees for $10,000, and the Vietnamese had then made repairs and improvements that increased the vessels’ value—few white fishermen could afford to buy back the boats. So most of the Vietnamese stayed in Galveston Bay.

Beyond the camps created specifically for the white power movement’s projected race war, others opened to a broader assortment of would-be mercenaries, gun hobbyists, and survivalists. A few camps even catered to leftist paramilitary movements, such as the Brown Berets, a Latino group. These camps often included the instrumental participation of veterans, and used the weapons, tactics, and uniforms of the Vietnam War and its paramilitary outgrowth.

In Texas, the fishermen’s dispute ended with the injunction against Klan paramilitarism and with the passage of laws in the Texas legislature putting limits on shrimping, in an effort to control overfishing. On June 4, 1982, Judge McDonald made her injunction permanent. Ruling that the paramilitary training both intimidated Vietnamese refugees and violated state law banning private armies, she disbanded the Texas Emergency Reserve, ordered the Klan to “stop paramilitary training” in Texas entirely, and permanently enjoined the Klan from combat, combat-related training, or parading in public with firearms. The ruling specifically shut down Camp Puller, as well as Camp Bravo at Liberty, Texas; Camp Winnie in Winnie, Texas; and Camp Alpha, location unknown. “Regardless of whether it is called ‘defense training’ or ‘survival courses,’ ” McDonald told the Houston Chronicle, “it is clear to this court that the proliferation of military / paramilitary organizations can only serve to sow the seeds of future domestic violence and tragedy.

However, the white power movement had already garnered too much momentum to be slowed by one court decision. Camps were still up and running in Florida, North Carolina, Idaho, Missouri, Arkansas, Colorado, Mississippi, Tennessee, Indiana, West Virginia, and other states.

In the next few years, Beam would pursue his war against nonwhites and develop the cell-style strategy of leaderless resistance. His ideas would teach white power activists how to carry out the revolution he had envisioned in Texas. Despite the court injunction, Beam still saw things the way he had four years earlier.

NOVEMBER 3, 1979, a caravan of neo-Nazis and Klansmen fired upon a communist-organized “Death to the Klan” rally at a black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina. Five protestors died—four white men and one black woman—and many more were injured. Fourteen Klansmen and neo-Nazis faced murder, conspiracy, and felony riot charges. Although three news cameras captured the identity and actions of the Klan and neo-Nazi shooters, all-white juries acquitted the defendants in state and federal criminal trials. A civil suit returned only partial justice. The Greensboro confrontation heralded a paramilitary white power movement mobilized for violence, and also revealed a legal system broadly unprepared to convict its perpetrators.

The Greensboro shooting was the culmination of almost two years of intense antagonism and repeated clashes between white power groups and the radical left. In July 1978, Tom Metzger, Grand Dragon of the KKKK in California, encountered left-wing opposition when the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and Committee Against Racism (CAR) tried to forcibly prevent Metzger’s Klan from screening Birth of a Nation in an Oxnard, California, community center. According to the KKKK newspaper Crusader, the communists had come to the screening prepared for a fight: “PLP / CAR put over nine police in the hospital, swinging lead pipes rolled in Challenge newspapers.” The Los Angeles Times reported that forty leftist demonstrators had charged the community center, wielding clubs, bottles, and pipes.

Similar incidents across the country showed rising tension between the left and the nascent white power movement. In August, leftists attacked neo-Nazi Michael Breda in Kansas City as he was giving a radio interview—twelve to fifteen men with clubs and pipes broke into the radio station and beat Breda and another member of his group, the American White People’s Party.

Two months later, some forty members of Metzger’s Klan met to discuss “illegal aliens and Vietnamese boat people and communists and other things” in Castro Valley, California. Thirty chanting and stone-throwing CAR members stormed the meeting to break it up. The Klan swiftly responded with a fifteen-man contingent armed with clubs and plywood shields, dubbed the “Klan Bureau of Investigation.” Sheriff’s deputies broke up the fight, which resulted in only one minor injury. The speed of the Klan response showed both an escalation from the Oxnard confrontation the previous year and the expansion of group activities throughout California.

As violence came to the fore of the movement, distinctions among white power factions melted away. Klansmen and neo-Nazis set aside their differences, which had been articulated largely by World War II veterans with strong anti-Nazi feelings, as the Vietnam War became their dominant shared frame. White men prepared for a war against communists, blacks, and other enemies. As one Klansman said just after the China Grove altercation, “I see a war, actual combat, eventually between the left-wing element and the right wing.

Klansmen and neo-Nazis united against communism at the same moment that elements of the left fractured and collapsed under the pressure of internal divisions and government infiltration. In Greensboro, for instance, the CWP competed locally with the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party. The members of each group refused to speak to each other and more than once came to blows while attempting to unionize the same textile mill.

In contrast, white power activists bound by paramilitarism also developed a cohesive social movement managed through intimate social ties. Intermarriages connected key white power groups, and Christian Identity and Dualist pastors provided marriage counseling. White power activists, who often traveled with their families, stayed at each other’s homes and cared for each other’s children. They participated in weddings and other social rituals and depended on others in the movement for help and for money when arrested. They founded schools to teach their ideas.

Activists understood how World War II affected relations between their groups. “You take a man who fought in the Second World War, it’s hard for him to sit down in a room full of swastikas,” Pierce said. “But people realize time is running out. We’re going to have to get together. We’re like hornets. We’re more effective when we’re organized.” Pierce argued that urgent threats—particularly communism—required Nazis and Klansmen to band together. They named their coalition the United Racist Front and pledged to share resources.

Shifting from the openly segregationist language of the civil rights era to a discourse in which anticommunism was used as an alibi for racism, Klansmen spoke publicly of race as a secondary concern. “The one thread that links all Klan factions and other extreme right-wing groups such as Nazis is hatred of communists,” one Associated Press article reported just after the shooting.

This strategy drew on a long history of Klan rhetoric that intertwined racial equality, communism, labor organization, immigration, anti-imperialism, and internationalism as threats to the “100 percent American” nationalism early Klans sought to defend. Such ideas were linked not only in Klan rhetoric but also on the left. In Alabama, for instance, the Communist Party attempted in the 1930s to mobilize the same groups targeted by Klan vigilantism and harassment. Communists called the Jim Crow South an oppressed nation, pushed for black self-determination, decried lynching, and defended black men accused of rape. They organized for shorter workdays, better labor conditions, and the right of tenant farmers to engage in collective bargaining. Those who opposed communism in the South—not only the Klan, but many southerners—explicitly associated communism with free love, assaults on the family and on the church, homosexuality, the idea of white women becoming public property, and the threat of interracial sex. In this way, communism and unionization were seen as threats to the white supremacist racial order, which the Klan purported to defend.

When the Klan and Nazi caravan drove to Greensboro on November 3, its members expected to wage war on communists.

Several communists wore hard hats. Others armed themselves with police clubs and sticks of firewood.

The United Racist Front in North Carolina, following the movement at large, had outfitted itself as a paramilitary force. White power activists brought three handguns, two rifles, three shotguns, nunchucks, hunting knives, brass knuckles, ax handles, clubs, chains, tear gas, and mace.

They had packed several dozen eggs for heckling and “a .22 cal revolver as fresh as the eggs—a receipt for its purchase was with it.” This implied that the Klansmen and Nazis armed themselves particularly for the November 3 confrontation, with plans to use the guns. They also had two semiautomatic handguns and an AR-180 semiautomatic rifle, a civilian version of a military assault rifle.

Although the Vietnam War had also impacted the left, the militarization of the left never matched that of the paramilitary right, in part because of the right’s cultural embrace of weapons and in part because of the matériel and active-duty personnel that the white power movement continued to draw from the U.S. Armed Forces.

While some on the left advocated radical activism in the name of anti-colonial self-determination, however, many wavered on the use of violence.

They intended to picket the march, taunting and throwing eggs, but they also brought the guns and planned to use them if necessary. As Klansman Mark Sherer would later testify, “By the time the Klan caravan left … it was generally understood that our plan was to provoke the Communists and blacks into fighting and to be sure that when the fighting broke out the Klan and the Nazis would win. We were prepared to win any physical confrontation between the two sides.

Caudle climbed out of his powder-blue Ford Fairlane and walked calmly around to the trunk, from which he distributed shotguns, rifles, and semiautomatic weapons to six men. One of these men, Klansman Jerry Paul Smith—a cigarette dangling from his lower lip—dropped one knee to the ground, a gun in each hand, as he fired into the panicking crowd.

Others took aim and shot, over and over. One gunman, a survivor remembered, passed up a clean shot at a white woman in order to kill Sandi Smith, a black woman, instead. Klansman Dave Matthews, firing buckshot, would later recount, “I got three of ’em”;

The police didn’t arrive until the gunfire had subsided and the yellow van had fled the scene. By then, five protestors lay dead or mortally wounded; as many as seven more protestors and one Klansman were injured, and damage to the Morningside Homes community would reverberate across generations.

The U.S. Department of Justice marked 1979 as a particularly violent year, noting that serious Klan violence had increased 450%.

Trial proceedings began on August 4, 1980, and from the outset reflected the entrenched racism of the North Carolina judicial system. The all-white jurors were all Christian and therefore likely to be fundamentally opposed to communism, understood in 1979 as a threat to any organized religion and, in the South, tinged with the threat of race mixing.

“Almost all of my men have killed Communists in Vietnam and I was in Rhodesia as well,” he wrote, “but so far we’ve never actually had a chance to kill the home-grown product.” Covington, who saw himself as a person who killed communists—he killed them abroad and he intended to kill them at home—showed how violence at home and anticommunist interventions abroad would link white power organizing with a network of mercenary soldiers who waged war in Central America and beyond.

Instead of delving into the domestic white power movement, however, Posey took a different route. He formed a new group that used similar guiding principles for violent action, Civilian Military Assistance (CMA). Drawn largely from Vietnam veterans and active-duty National Guardsmen in the South, CMA described itself as a civil organization dedicated to supporting anticommunist combat in Central America with supplies, weapons, and manpower. CMA conducted vigilante patrols of the U.S.-Mexico border, adopting the tactics of the earlier Klan Border Watch, and contributed mercenary soldiers to the Contras, a loose alliance of paramilitary groups that sought to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua after the 1979 revolution. In Nicaragua, CMA acted covertly on behalf of the U.S. government—it was funded by the CIA and supplied by the U.S. military. Under President Ronald Reagan, the state’s semi-official interventions would swell into a bustling, multilayered network of mercenary soldiers, CIA operatives disguised as rogue mercenaries, and civilian veterans doing the work of state military advisors, all participating in a frenzied effort to circumvent public opinion and congressional checks, to contain or roll back communism, and to redeem the loss in Vietnam.

Links between white power activists and mercenaries were strong and sustained. In Rhodesia, where between 1965 and 1980 as many as 2,300 American mercenaries defended the white minority-rule government, soldiers for hire included John Birch Society members and neo-Nazis.

Although the number of veterans who became mercenary soldiers represents a very small percentage of the men who served in the Vietnam War, their activities made a profound impact—both in politics and in violence—in countries throughout the Third World. Veterans who used their combat training in Vietnam to act as mercenary soldiers elsewhere brought the war’s violence to new battlefields and new enemies. Between the 1960s and the end of the Cold War, American mercenaries fought to preserve white minority-rule governments in Rhodesia and South Africa, and in Latin America and the Caribbean they propped up U.S.-supported regimes, opposed leftist movements, and attempted to overthrow leftist governments. Some traveled back to Southeast Asia, where they supported anticommunist actors and regimes, and to Angola and the Congo, where they augmented U.S. support of guerrilla factions that opposed the Soviet Union.

The government also failed to take seriously the links between American mercenaries and the white power movement. One example of this is the story of Operation Red Dog. On April 27, 1981, FBI and ATF agents arrested a group of ten men on their way out of New Orleans. Authorities seized their cache of weapons and supplies: eight Bushmaster automatic rifles, ten shotguns, five rifles, ten handguns, ten pounds of dynamite, 5,246 rounds of ammunition, Nazi and Confederate flags, the neo-Nazi newspaper National Vanguard, and various military manuals. Investigation eventually revealed that the men were participants in a plan to send mercenaries by boat to the small Caribbean island of Dominica to overthrow the government there and set up a puppet regime that would funnel millions of dollars to the Klan in the United States.

By the 1970s, with multiple guerrilla groups in El Salvador opposing an increasingly militarized, corrupt, and ultraconservative government, U.S. militarists saw another opportunity to relaunch, redeem, and hone Vietnam War methods. American military advisors, largely from Special Forces, guided the Salvadoran army in implementing counterrevolutionary tactics. Congress imposed a limit of fifty-five advisors, but the actual number reached as many as twice that at any given time, augmented by more than a hundred CIA agents. The war in El Salvador would rage for twelve years.

Mercenaries involved in El Salvador sometimes acted as state agents by meeting with official U.S. military advisors to report on Salvadoran performance in the field. In this way, U.S. military advisors barred by their superiors or by congressional restraints from traveling into combat areas could still judge the Salvadoran performance in battle by the reports of experienced Americans. Roberto D’Aubuisson, ultraright leader, death squad commander, and School of the Americas alumnus, went so far as to say that he preferred mercenaries to the official deployment of more advisors. The presence of mercenaries in Central America often correlated with violence against civilians.

In El Salvador, Soldier of Fortune teams worked most closely with the Atlacatl Battalion. Between its official U.S. military training and the arrival of the Soldier of Fortune teams, the battalion had massacred nearly 1,000 civilians, more than half of them children, in the village of El Mozote. Battalion members stabbed and decapitated some victims, and shot others with bullets manufactured for the U.S. Army and stamped “Lake City, Missouri.” The Salvadoran military encouraged these abuses with its own anticommunist training, but the presence of American mercenary trainers correlated with civilian-targeted violence.

The helicopter crash was a precipitating event in the public’s discovery of the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration sought to unseat the Sandinistas as part of a new rollback policy that committed the United States not only to containment, or stemming the tide of communism and leftist governments to new countries, but also to violently removing them from territories already won. In the legislative branch, however, Congress attempted to stop the Reagan administration from waging war on the Sandinistas. Congressional limits and public reluctance drove the administration to increasingly covert methods.

To circumvent congressional limitations on intervention, Reagan administration officials funneled the proceeds from arms sales to Iran to illegally fund the Contras. Iran-Contra, as this deal became known, became a widely reported public scandal in 1986, with trials of high-placed Reagan administration officials stretching through the years that followed. Although the systematic destruction of documents occluded a full accounting of the deal and those who approved it, several officials were indicted. George H. W. Bush later pardoned several of those convicted in the final years of his presidency.

Posey carried a letter offering his services to Honduran army commander General Gustavo Álvarez—head of Battalion 3-16, a School of the Americas–trained and CIA-aided death squad within the Honduran army that carried out most of that country’s assassinations and disappearances throughout the 1980s. As La Barricada reported, Posey was leading “an organization that the [CIA] created as a screen to funnel millions of dollars from official channels in the Reagan administration to [supporters of Somoza] so that they can develop their campaigns of terror.

According to a CMA affiliate attempting to gain immunity from prosecution, the mercenaries plotted to blow up the U.S. embassy in neutral Costa Rica and to frame the Sandinistas for the attack.

They intended to create outrage in the United States that would lead to public pressure for invasion.

The camouflage fatigues later worn by members of the Order when training for overt race war were purchased at a Soldier of Fortune convention. There, Randall Rader, head of paramilitary training for the Order, said he spent between $10,000 and $15,000 obtained through armored car robberies on uniforms, boots, “military goods and sophisticated equipment of different sorts.… It all fell right into the military science and the guerilla warfare I was teaching.

Reagan’s soaring rhetoric about the dangers of communism “in our own backyard.” The president spoke frequently of Nicaragua’s proximity to the United States, and of the necessity of defending the U.S. border from an impending communist flood as the Sandinistas would “ultimately, move against Mexico.” Reagan warned that Managua, Nicaragua, was just a two-day drive from Harlingen, Texas. As he told the nation in 1986, “If we don’t want to see the map of Central America covered in a sea of red, eventually lapping at our own borders, we must act now” by supporting the Contras. On other occasions, he made the same argument about the rest of the region, claiming that the Soviet Union and Cuba were trying to “install communism by force” throughout the Western Hemisphere. “What we see in El Salvador is an attempt to destabilize the entire region and eventually move chaos and anarchy toward the American border.

Opposition to immigration had rapidly gained traction nationwide, with a particularly strong foothold in the Southwest. The Arizona border had, by 1986, undergone a series of transformations that increased its militarization and surveillance. Only four days before the CMA border action, Congress had finally passed the long-debated Immigration Reform and Control Act. The measure granted amnesty to some three million undocumented immigrants, but also strengthened the Border Patrol, made it illegal to knowingly hire undocumented immigrants, further militarized the border, and criminalized so-called illegal aliens.

The immigrants opposed by mercenaries and white power activists on the fringe had arrived in the United States in large part because of the violent impact of U.S. covert interventions in their home countries. While migrants from Mexico were still largely impelled by economic inequality, most other immigrants to the United States in these years came from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, and other countries where the United States had carried out military actions.

In 1983 the white power movement declared war on the state. This marked a tectonic shift for the movement, which until then had featured populist and reactionary Klan mobilizations and vigilante violence. Rather than fighting on behalf of the state, white power activists now fought for a white homeland, attempted to destabilize the federal government, and waged revolutionary race war.

In the Texas paramilitary camps before the fishermen’s dispute, Louis Beam had speculated to an undercover reporter about how he would use his paramilitary infrastructure for eventual race war.

Something happened in July 1983. The archive clearly shows that before that date, Klansmen on the Texas coast, Klan and neo-Nazi gunmen in Greensboro, and mercenaries in Central America had justified their violent actions by claiming to serve state and country. Even as they targeted new communist and racial enemies at home and abroad, they claimed to be continuing the work of the state. After the Aryan Nations World Congress, where white power leaders purportedly made a formal declaration of war, the movement shifted nationwide to call for revolution against the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG), bombing of public infrastructure, undermining of national currency, assassination of federal agents and judges, and attempts to break away into a white separatist nation.

“The old ways have failed miserably.… Out with the conservatives and in with the radicals! Out with plans for compromise and in with plans for the sword!

Following the convention in Idaho, activists widely adopted two new strategies: using early computer networks to mobilize and coordinate action, and “leaderless resistance,” cell-style organizing in which activists could work in common purpose without direct communication from movement leaders. Both strategies facilitated greater connection between white power activists while making their movement activities less visible. Both served to occlude direct orders from movement leadership. Cells and individual white power activists determined their actions and targets through a set of common cultural narratives obtained through speeches, relationships, movement publications, and new computer message boards.

The Vietnam War was the major frame that organized these narratives and the ensuing campaign of violence.

Neither the first- nor third-era Klan sought to overthrow the federal government itself. Both groups had limited and local objectives, seeking to regain local power or prevent federal influence in local contexts.

The post-1983 white power movement represented a major break with prior Klan activity.

The movement’s new strategy of cell-based organization was intended to conceal the movement’s organization and protect its leaders, make it difficult for agents provocateurs to infiltrate the movement, limit the government’s ability to prosecute movement members for incidents of white power violence, and forestall public opposition

Miles proposed an organized network of white power cells: 600 centers, positioned 100 miles apart and outside of the range of likely Soviet nuclear strikes against the United States. In one sense, Miles’s formulation was a preparation for something still to come rather than the war at hand: he wrote of an apocalyptic battle or post-nuclear moment, a forced evacuation, a mandatory seizure of guns—or simply a call to concentrate white power members through migration in order to found a white homeland. The

centers could respond after an apocalyptic crisis. Meanwhile, he wrote, they should focus on knowing their local areas and local enemies, and also on preparing supply and escape routes.

Beam was thinking in terms of how to capitalize on a Soviet-U.S. showdown and how to seize a white homeland. Beginning in 1983 and intensifying with the fall of communism in 1989, however, he would shift his target to the state. As he wrote in 1992, “Col. Amoss feared the Communists. This author fears the federal government. Communism now represents a threat to no one in the United States, while federal tyranny represents a threat to everyone.” Seeking to avoid “government infiltration, entrapment, and destruction of the personnel involved,” Beam envisioned a cell-based terrorism that drew both on the American Revolution and, significantly, on strategies successfully deployed by communists.

The Turner Diaries

Cell warfare without direction from movement leadership depended upon commonly held cultural narratives and values, and shared texts and symbols, to motivate and coordinate activity. In this new climate, movement texts that had already captured the imagination of white power activists came to play a major role in shaping action. The racist utopian novel The Turner Diaries, perhaps the most prominent white power text, was one that served this function. It first appeared in serial form in Attack!, the newspaper of the neo-Nazi group National Alliance, in 1974. Group leader and author William Pierce published

Over the next twenty years, The Turner Diaries sold some 500,000 copies, gaining tremendous popularity both in the white power movement and around the mercenary soldier circuit. That the Turner Diaries popped up over and over again in the hands of key movement actors, particularly in moments of violence, reveals its utility in coordinating acts of underground resistance.

Timothy McVeigh would sell the novel on the gun show circuit prior to his bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

The Turner Diaries worked as a foundational how-to manual for the movement, outlining a detailed plan for race war. Presented as a diary found and published after a white racist revolution has overthrown the U.S. government, it describes an all-white utopia. It recounts a series of terrorist attacks leading up to the partitioning of a white homeland in California and the use of nuclear weapons to clear first the United States and then the world of nonwhite populations. In the future world, in which the diary serves as a historical artifact of the revolution, the white supremacist army, called the Organization, has abolished the dollar, started a new calendar at year zero, and made women subservient. At various moments, the novel describes the forced migration of all people of color out of California, the genocide of Jews, the nuclear bombing of high-density black populations in the South, and the public lynching of all people in interracial relationships.

The book drew heavily on the idea of veterans as white power soldiers and on the utility of paramilitary violence. The protagonist, Earl Turner, implies that many Organization members were military men. Turner says, “We have decades of guerrilla warfare in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to instruct us,” and he warns that the white supremacist movement will force the public “into the front lines, where they must choose sides and participate, whether they like it or not.

In the novel, set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Earl Turner works as a soldier in the racist movement attempting to overthrow the government, which he calls the System. An engineer handy with weaponry, Turner advances quickly through the ranks; after he blows up FBI headquarters, the Organization inducts him into the Order, a secret society of key soldiers. He then performs the Test of the Word, proving his knowledge of movement ideals, and the Test of the Deed, proving himself through violent action. He vows to kill himself before giving away the group’s secrets. The Order, he writes, “will remain secret, even within the Organization, until the successful completion of the first phase of our task: the destruction of the System.

When Turner is arrested, he breaks his vows by failing to kill himself with a cyanide capsule prior to interrogation. Although the group breaks him out of prison, they decide to punish him for his failure by assigning him a suicide mission. The diary ends as Turner prepares to fly a small plane—loaded with a sixty-kiloton nuclear warhead—into the Pentagon. A small afterword, in the voice of someone who has found Turner’s diary, describes the ensuing revolution and white victory after his death. This narrative, outlining a strategy that is dependent on secrecy, loyalty, and violence, would become the sustaining myth of a real-life Order dedicated to a violent war on the state, and a guidebook for decades of white power terrorist violence.

Activists in resistance cells hoped to follow the model of The Turner Diaries in mounting a campaign of violence designed to awaken a sympathetic white public. They hoped that acts like destroying infrastructure, poisoning water, assassinating political targets, and undermining public confidence in currency would reveal the problems with “the System.” They thought people of color, race traitors, Jews, communists, journalists, academics, and other enemies were lost causes. But they hoped that they could sway a white public in their favor, make small territorial gains, and eventually seize movement objectives ranging from a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest, to a white America, to a white world secured by the annihilation of all people of color. The Turner Diaries provided an outline for each step of this plan.

Aryan Brotherhood

The Aryan Brotherhood inducted members for life, and failure to keep group secrets was punishable by death.

In addition to a sustained focus on recruiting veterans and active-duty military personnel, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Aryan Nations adopted an aggressive strategy to recruit activists directly from prisons. Butler focused on detention facilities with visible racial tensions. So did other white power leaders, with one Texas Aryan Nations and Klan leader claiming that more than 300 inmates subscribed to his mailing list in a single Texas prison.

In Arizona, this would be realized by hundreds of gang members, including current and former inmates, involved in a broad range of criminal activity outdistanced only by prison gangs in California. The Arizona Aryan Brotherhood’s organized crime extended statewide and included murder, kidnapping, armed robbery, burglary, drugs, assault, rape, child molestation, and child prostitution.

Modeling its name, structure, rituals, and actions on The Turner Diaries, Mathews outlined the Order’s six-step strategy. First was paramilitary training in the camps in Idaho and Missouri. Second, “fundraising”—robbery and counterfeiting. Third, the purchase of weapons. Fourth, distribution of stolen and counterfeit money to other white power groups. Fifth, “security,” or the assassination of individuals on a circulated hit list. Sixth, expansion into cells to avoid prosecution.

This iteration of white power valued, but did not require, the participation and stories of veterans. Several members of the Order were too young to have served, but the Vietnam War story still shaped their actions, and veterans played an instrumental role in guiding the group’s violence.

Decades before the popularization of social media as a method of organizing, white power activists used computers to connect with one another personally, and to coordinate violence and radical activism. In one of the first effective deployments of computer networks for social mobilization, Beam created a series of code-word-accessed message boards that linked the white power movement around the country and beyond. Liberty Net, implemented in 1984, featured recruitment materials; personal ads and pen pal match programs to connect white power activists; and messaging about targets for sabotage and assassination. It enabled the forging and maintenance of the social connections that sustained white power activism and violence. Liberty Net provided immeasurable benefits to the movement. Beam immediately began to send electronic hate literature into Canada, bypassing laws prohibiting such materials from crossing the border. Klan chapters around the country began to dial in to the computer network: the Texas Klan was online by 1984, and others soon followed.

While Beam worked on messaging and connection at a national level, the Order supported the Liberty Net project with robberies and counterfeiting

Mathews robbed a bank near Seattle, Washington, in December 1983, coming away with a more lucrative haul of $25,952. Still moralizing their violence, Order members understood bank robbery—and later, armored car robbery—as a way both to fund their war on the state and to target what they saw as corrupt, Jewish-controlled banks.

Then the group turned to armored car robbery. In March, Mathews, Pierce, and Duey robbed an armored car in Seattle and netted $43,345; the next month, Mathews and five others robbed more than $500,000 from an armored car parked outside a Seattle department store.

The Order altered its methods so that its fake bills would be caught less frequently. For this, members recruited a meticulous ex-Boeing engineer and sometime Contra supplier, Robert Merki. As did the Organization in The Turner Diaries, the Order regarded counterfeiting not only as a source of income but also as a way to wage war on the Federal Reserve by flooding the market with fake money. Eventually the Order hoped to undermine public confidence in paper currency, fomenting revolution.

Mathews, eager to propagate the white race, had set up a second home with her 28-year-old daughter, Zillah, in Laramie, Wyoming, while still married to Debbie Mathews. In doing so, Mathews took part in a newly condoned polygamy within the movement, whose leaders put aside some ideas about traditional family structure in order to encourage the birth of white children.

For years, dating at least to 1979, Denver talk radio host Alan Berg had clashed on-air with members of the white power movement. An outspoken and confrontational commentator on KOA-AM radio, Berg was the kind of prominent Jewish and liberal voice that the Order sought to silence.

Armed, several members of the Order drove to Denver via Laramie. At 9:15 P.M. on June 18, 1984, Pierce fired the MAC-10 as Berg stood in his driveway, cutting him down with a one-second burst that lifted him off the ground and riddled his body with bullets.

Yarbrough became fixated on the murder weapon, which had jammed, ominously, on the thirteenth round. He decided to keep it, leaving a trail of evidence for agents to follow later.98 The FBI got a break in the counterfeiting case in June 1984, the same month as the Berg assassination. Order member Tom Martinez—a working-class Philadelphian who stridently maintained that his Hispanic surname came from white, Castilian origins—bought a fifty-cent lottery ticket with a ten-dollar bill counterfeited by the Order. Surprisingly, given the preparation and training of Order members, Martinez did the same thing in the same store the next day; Secret Service officers arrested him on the spot. Eventually Martinez pleaded guilty to counterfeiting and then turned informant, passing Order secrets to the FBI.

Hayden Lake for the 1984 Aryan Nations World Congress was all about how to build and detonate explosives, concentrating on infrastructure targets such as utilities, railroads, and bridges. The idea was that after attacks on infrastructure, the black community would begin to loot, creating a diversion during which “the white supremacist organization” could assassinate federal judges. In one session they instructed white power activists on how to shoot and kill FBI agents and other law enforcement personnel wearing body armor.

Hate-group incidents had already increased more than 500% in Idaho between 1980 and 1984. The World Congress itself generated immediate violence. During the meeting, seven arson fires occurred in Spokane, Washington, the nearest large city. Just afterward, Klansmen linked to Aryan Nations firebombed the SPLC headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama.

In July 1984, an Order robbery yielded a stunning payday that would catapult the war on the state forward. Twelve Order members and associates including Mathews, Scutari, Yarbrough, and Pierce robbed a Brinks armored car near Ukiah, California, netting $3.6 million in cash,

Yarbrough, with his red hair and beard, was “Yosemite Sam.” Rader was known by a trainer’s title, “Field Marshal,” until he killed and ate his pet dog to prove a point about survivalism; then he became “Big Boy.” Barnhill was “Mr. Closet,” because he had a record of seeking out and hurting homosexuals. Kemp, who had killed Walter West with the hammer, went by “Jolly.

Even 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 “lone wolf,” previously used to describe criminals acting alone, was employed increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s to describe white power activists. This played into the movement’s aim to prevent anyone from putting together a cohesive account of the group’s actions. The white power movement’s cell structure stymied the kind of public understanding that had worked to limit the civil-rights-era Klan, as well as the political will that could have brought about real change in how the judicial system responded to violent white power activism.

On October 18, the FBI raided Yarbrough’s house in Sandpoint, Idaho. Inside, they found the MAC-10 semiautomatic that had killed Alan Berg, as well as two shotguns, two rifles, and five semiautomatic rifles. They also found 100 sticks of partially deteriorated dynamite, a three-foot-high shrine to Adolf Hitler, fragmentation grenades, night vision scopes, more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition, four loaded crossbows, police scanners, booby traps, and Aryan Nations uniforms. There was also a disguise kit, as recommended in The Turner Diaries. Rounding out the arsenal was a pound and a half of C-4 plastic explosives—enough, Harper’s Magazine reported, “to blow up the federal courthouse in Boise.

When federal agents found the safe house on Whidbey Island, Mathews would engage in a fiery last stand and ultimately die. Stories of Mathews’s lone stand and death reached mythic prominence in and beyond the movement, and have been used to bolster an analysis of warrior culture and paramilitary masculinity as a defining force of the 1980s.

Although the white power movement organized around the symbols and legacy of the Vietnam War and deployed notions of paramilitary masculinity, the revolutionary turn that necessitated cell-style organizing—the use of social networks and relationships to connect and coordinate activists—relied on the work of female activists.

The wives, daughters, and girlfriends of Order members brokered social relationships and performed supportive work for white power cells. They disguised male activists and drove getaway cars, trafficked weapons and matériel, created false identity documents, destroyed records when pursued by federal agents, and helped to produce the symbols and rhetoric that defined the group.

The movement quickly canonized Mathews as a martyr. Activists made annual pilgrimages to the site where the Whidbey Island house had stood, laying flowers, candles, and photographs where Mathews had died.

The arrest and prosecution of the Order members shook the white power movement from foundation to rafter. The FBI had seized a significant amount of stolen and counterfeit money, straining the movement’s resources, and critical media attention suddenly focused on paramilitary white power activity. Aryan Nations cancelled its 1985 World Congress “due to unprecedented events beyond our resources.” Besides convictions, the government also sought forfeiture of property acquired with stolen and counterfeit money, including caches of weapons, computers, cars, electronics, the land used for paramilitary camps in Idaho and Missouri.

Beyond the Order itself, a multitude of other cells, activists, and groups continued to function. No national-level leaders such as Beam were indicted. The absence of direct ties between cells and leadership worked to stymie prosecution, and white power activists continued to carry out violence, even as the trials progressed.

In 1986, investigators for the United States Congress and Department of Defense reported growing concern in the U.S. Armed Forces over missing weapons. Hundreds of millions of dollars in military arms, ammunition, and explosives had disappeared. The military supply system had grown so large, officials told the New York Times, that matériel could be lost “without anyone knowing the items were gone.” Scrutiny quickly turned to Fort Bragg, an army post in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The command there, the Army Audit Agency found, had routinely assigned security guards for the armory without proper background checks. With large, open areas and regular comings and goings of all sorts of people, the post was easy to rob. A congressional report on Fort Bragg cited a large amount of missing ordnance recovered around the post, including 148 pounds of plastic explosives, 142 pounds of TNT, 1,080 feet of detonating cord, 13 hand grenades, and 35 antipersonnel land mines. Some of the weapons and explosives turned up in private homes.

By the time the military noticed that weapons were going missing, however, the scale of the problem was staggering. In 1986, a Pentagon official estimated, $900 million in arms, electronic components, parts, and other equipment and supplies disappeared nationwide.   

But by then, the white power movement had developed a paramilitary network so effective, sophisticated, and dedicated to war on the state that military action to resolve the missing weapons problem came too late.

The new movement used military weapons and manpower, having perfected an earlier strategy of recruiting active-duty military personnel to its cause.

An active-duty soldier from Fort Bragg had traveled to the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho to advise members on how to carry out a war on the state using explosives, assassination, sabotage, and guerrilla warfare. Active-duty personnel at Fort Bragg were photographed participating in white power rallies.

In the post-1983 movement, the overlap in membership between white power and the U.S. Armed Forces had new implications. The active-duty soldiers who had joined Louis Beam’s Texas KKKK during the fishermen’s conflict in Texas had described their actions as serving the state by continuing the Vietnam War’s anticommunist stand on the Texas coast. Active-duty personnel who joined the white power movement after 1983 could make no such claim. Instead, they joined a movement that openly advocated war on the state and the overthrow of the federal government. By becoming part of the movement, U.S. soldiers and Marines broke their induction oath to protect the United States from “enemies foreign and domestic.” As the movement organized a campaign of domestic terrorism in its war on the state, active-duty personnel who joined its ranks sought to become those enemies.

It would take until 1996—after Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building Oklahoma City in April 1995, and after the December 1995 murder of two black people by a group of active-duty skinheads at Fort Bragg—for the military to forcefully prohibit active-duty personnel from joining white power groups. Even then, the effort to bar active-duty troops from participating in the movement was not wholly successful. The reluctance of the military to take rapid and decisive action regarding either the theft of military weapons or the recruitment of active-duty personnel showed an inability to accept that the white power movement was no longer a collection of hate groups but rather an organized war on the state.

In February, someone saying he represented WAR threatened to bomb the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. By summer 1985, WAR had seen its membership increase 400 percent over the previous few months. That summer was violent in California. In May, the promised bomb—undetonated—was found in a San Francisco State classroom, set to go off during a black studies class. In September, bombs were found at the home of a rabbi and at an attached Jewish school; another bomb detonated a few hours later outside the Humanist Party offices in San Francisco. Swastikas appeared on a Berkeley synagogue. Despite all of this, Metzger would not face a trial limiting his activities until 1990, when a civil suit found him and WAR jointly liable in the murder of an Ethiopian student by skinheads in Portland.

The CSA, on the other hand, faced intensive prosecution. The group’s name—the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord—referred to the hopes of compound residents that they would become the avengers of the Christian Identity God, Yahweh, in the final stages of an apocalyptic battle.

As did the residents of the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho, they attempted in many ways to live simple, highly moralized lives. However, after the compound militarized in 1979, violence became part of their day-to-day routine. Their homes had kerosene lanterns and wood-burning stoves, but in their workshops they built silencers, converted weapons from semi- to fully automatic, and produced high-tech homemade hand grenades and Claymore-type land mines.  They also stocked light antitank weapons (LAW rockets) and military-grade explosives such as C-4. The CSA residents had thoroughly armed themselves with the weapons of the Vietnam War.

The CSA was deeply intertwined in the larger movement. It provided paramilitary training, according to trainer Randall Rader, to “several hundred” activists from other groups, including the Klan, the American Pistol and Rifle Association, and the anticommunist Christian Patriots Defense League. Aryan Nations representatives visited the CSA convocation early, in 1981. Ellison, however, openly took a second wife and declared himself the divinely ordained King of the Ozarks. This turn, along with a practice called “Plundering the Philistines” that justified robbery and theft from non-Identity Christians as permissible, caused fractures within the group.

That July the CSA firebombed a synagogue and some local Jewish businesses. The next month, the group firebombed a gay community church in Springfield, Missouri. In November, CSA member and army surplus dealer Richard Wayne Snell blew up a natural gas pipeline in Fulton, Arkansas, which he thought was a feeder line to Chicago. Snell also participated in the murder of a Texarkana pawnshop owner in 1983, and killed a black Arkansas state trooper during a routine traffic stop in 1984.

As it armed for race war, the WPP also took up a more directly anti-government message about its intentions. “Kill the Jews and niggers, kill the President and overthrow the government,” shouted members arrested for distributing hate literature in May 1985. A message on one of the organization’s phone-in hate lines, recorded by Miller, described the group’s rejection of the “federal tyranny of Washington, D.C.,” a government which he said represented everything and everyone except white people. “The federal government abandoned the white people when they rammed blacks down the throats of white people,” Miller said on the recorded message. “[The government] forced integration, forced white boys to fight in the Viet Nam war, allowed aliens into the country, allow[ed] Jewish abortion doctors to murder children, and allow[ed] blacks to roam the streets robbing, raping and murdering.

Various sources reported that Glenn Miller planned, once racists had taken control of the United State of Carolina, to conduct “murder and treason trials of selected defendants,” including abortion providers, “ultraliberal federal judges, neo-communist congressmen and senators, communist professors and neo-communist newspaper and television magnates.” He presumed these people guilty and proposed their execution “in the tradition of the South—public hanging from a sturdy oak tree.

In seeing white power movement membership as a political statement, rather than participation in a war on the federal government, military leadership once again failed to acknowledge the danger posed by active-duty personnel in such a movement. Not only were such troops violating their oath to protect the country against enemies foreign and domestic—engaging as they were in a project of explicit domestic terrorism—but they also brought with them training, skills, and weapons. Active-duty troops, together with veterans, played instrumental roles in energizing the movement.

The indictment further stated that the WPP had planned Order-style armed robberies in order to finance its paramilitarization. It pointed to an impending crime spree, stating that Steve Miller and others had planned to rob motorists on Interstate 95.

An FBI investigation, aided by the Naval Investigative Service and the Marine Corps, resulted in the conviction of 134 Marines and weapons dealers in “a national network trafficking in stolen military gear. Despite a compelling case, the jury delivered no convictions, and white power activists proclaimed a major victory.

Attorneys presented physical evidence including stolen military weapons, extensive armament, and more.  The defendants, many of whom represented themselves, tapped into a deeply rooted and powerful rhetoric about protecting white female bodies, one that found easy traction not only in the white power movement but among many other Americans. In the purportedly colorblind 1980s, the rhetorical defense of white women from miscegenation, racial pollution, and other dangers continued to structure the worldview not only of white power movement activists but also of several jurors as well as the mainstream media coverage that shaped the trial’s public perception.

Danger to civilians, though clearly evinced, failed to move the jury as much as the rhetoric deployed by the defense. That the war on the state would be told as a love story within the white power movement is hardly surprising: narratives of the defense of white women and, by extension, white children and domestic spaces have been deployed to justify violence throughout U.S. history. That two defendants formed romantic relationships with jurors after the trial indicates that white power rhetoric held a romantic appeal for some people in broader American society.

Ideas about women, sexuality, and birth in this period were deeply intertwined with racial ideology, and not just on the fringe. American white supremacy had long depended upon the policing of white women’s bodies. In order to propagate a white race, white women had to bear white children. While white men’s sexual relationships with nonwhite women mattered less to white supremacists, especially if such activity was secretive, profitable, or part of systematic violence against communities of color, for a white woman to bear nonwhite children was tantamount to racial annihilation. The prohibition of interracial marriage has defined the world’s most entrenched racist regimes, and sexual threats to white female bodies have been used to justify the strictest anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. Such bans multiplied and intensified through the first half of the twentieth century, with legislation and enforcement peaking when their intended subjects were white women.

Social issues that were related to white women’s sexuality, reproduction, and motherhood but typically described without explicitly racist terminology—including opposition to busing, abortion, contraception, welfare, and immigration—appealed well beyond the white power movement. They extended to the mainstream New Right base and mobilized suburbanites in the political center. The continued focus on policing white women’s sexuality and reproduction in the post–Vietnam War era indicates the tacit presence of white supremacy in many social issues that remained important to the New Right in the 1980s and 1990s, and belies the idea of a colorblind mainstream.

In white power publications, social issues with implicit relationships to white women’s bodies in mainstream society were made emphatically explicit. White power activists claimed that the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) wanted to abort white babies, admit immigrants, allow people of color to have unlimited children on the government’s welfare dime, allow black men to rape white women, and encourage interracial marriages—all of this, they said, to destroy the white race. In this context,

In white power publications, social issues with implicit relationships to white women’s bodies in mainstream society were made emphatically explicit. White power activists claimed that the Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) wanted to abort white babies, admit immigrants, allow people of color to have unlimited children on the government’s welfare dime, allow black men to rape white women, and encourage interracial marriages—all of this, they said, to destroy the white race. In this context, the wombs of white women became battlegrounds.

Rather than weakening or disappearing after the legislative and social changes of the civil rights and women’s movements, ideas of the pure and chaste white female body remained powerful in the 1980s. The accompanying mythic villain, the black rapist, still appeared regularly in post–Vietnam War white power publications, even as movement rhetoric and violence increasingly used anticommunism as an alibi for racial violence

Protection of white women and their reproductive capacity represented one ideology motivating white power activists to wage war. The future of the white race, activists believed, rested with the mothers of white children. In the movement, this went far beyond anti-miscegenation to the demand that every white woman attempt to bear children. One widely circulated photograph portrayed a

Protection of white women and their reproductive capacity represented one ideology motivating white power activists to wage war. The future of the white race, activists believed, rested with the mothers of white children. In the movement, this went far beyond anti-miscegenation to the demand that every white woman attempt to bear children.

one caption in the neo-Nazi newspaper White Power declared, “If this woman doesn’t have three or more children during her lifetime she is helping to speed her Race along the road to extinction.

one Order pamphlet read, “It is recommended that no kinsman be put in combat situations, i.e. raise their sword against ZOG, until he has planted his seed in the belly of a woman. The same for kinswomen, if possible, they should bear at least one warrior before putting their own life on the line.

Miles wrote that the Northwest had everything the movement required: space free of “hostiles, indifferents or aliens,” a coast, mountains, water, vacant land, a definable border, and “the warmth of the temperate zones but the cold which our Folk require in order to thrive.” He believed that Mexicans were overrunning the Southwest in a peaceful but “total and final” invasion, and that the South was already lost—too racially mixed and too close to the Jewish- and politician-dominated East Coast. Meanwhile, a territory in the center of the country would be  militarily indefensible, with no outlet to the sea. The Northwest was not just the white separatist homeland of choice, then, but the movement’s last hope.

the movement focused on largely white areas like northern Idaho. Butler built the Aryan Nations compound in Kootenai County, where, according to the 1980 U.S. Census, the population of 59,770 people included only 39 black residents, 197 Asians, 753 Hispanics, and 467 Native Americans.

White power migrants worked as loggers, in mines and cement plants, and in the small economy of publication, recruitment, and armament generated by the Aryan Nations compound itself.

We will flood the Northwest with white babies and white children so there is no question who this land belongs to. We are going to outbreed each other.” Miles added that this strategy should allow “as many husbands and wives as required” for each white woman to bear five to ten white children.

In some ways, the white power movement’s emphasis on motherhood mirrored similar currents in both mainstream New Right conservatism and American culture at large.

The Turner Diaries also offered a template for white power women’s activism within a cell-style organization and race war. The novel described a role of subservience and purity for white women, often by drawing on familiar tropes. One pivotal scene—the public lynching of men and women in interracial relationships, the women marked with “race traitor” signs—emphasized the violent policing of sexually transgressive white women.

Sexual danger to white women is the force that drives the Organization to race war. At one point, a black man accosts and nearly rapes Katherine. Her monogamy and her protection by white men mark Katherine as a good woman; she remains safe from assault,

Even when women donned their own camouflage fatigues and marched for themselves, as they did in the White Patriot Party, leaders still viewed them as “the mothers of future Aryan warriors” and objects of sexual reward.

The league strongly emphasized the support of white infants. One flier showed a white child in pajamas, standing on top of a tiny Earth, holding a teddy bear in one hand and giving a Nazi salute with the other. The flier had blank spaces in which to write the name of a newborn white child and his or her parents, and instructed supporters to send them a dollar, thus creating a network of economic support for new families.

In the war on the state, women were expected to bear future white warriors, train as nurses to heal the wounded, prepare stores of food and other supplies to sustain white people through apocalyptic race war, and carry out support work. Women attended—and even co-owned—paramilitary camps, but while the men trained in weapons, urban warfare, and demolition tactics, most of the women learned survivalist strategies such as canning, making their own soap and shampoo, and how best to prevent radiation poisoning in the event of nuclear war.

Christian Patriot Women opposed the ERA and abortion and defined good womanhood through Proverbs 31, a biblical passage that outlines the attributes of a submissive, godly wife and emphasizes obedience.

In 1985, the Department of Justice began Operation Clean Sweep, a massive investigation with the goal of a major court case against white power movement leaders.59 In recognizing the linkages between seemingly disparate white power groups, Operation Clean Sweep had several early victories. These included stopping a 1985 plot by an Aryan Nations member to kill an informant; arresting Posse Comitatus leader William Potter Gale in 1986 and convicting him of plotting to attack the Internal Revenue Service; and arresting eight members of the Arizona Patriots on gun and conspiracy charges related to a planned bank robbery in 1986 and preventing imminent acts of violence by that group.

The Arizona Patriots had blueprints for two major dams and a power station, as well as a cache of weapons and explosives.

The Fort Smith trial represented the only attempt at prosecuting white power as a coherent social movement, and the scope of the proceedings reflected this goal. Fourteen men faced indictment on charges of interstate transport of stolen money, conspiracy to manufacture illegal weapons, conspiracy to murder federal officers, and seditious conspiracy. The extensive indictment listed 119 acts to establish grounds for seditious conspiracy, including the 1981 attempted invasion of Dominica by white power activists; the firebombing of a Jewish Community Center in Bloomington, Indiana, in August 1983; the CSA destruction of a natural gas pipeline in Fulton, Arkansas, in November 1983; the theft of more than $4 million by the Order in 1983 and 1984; the purchase of guns and explosives in Oklahoma and Missouri; bank robberies in Illinois, Missouri, and North Dakota; and Liberty Net, Beam’s computer network that linked white power groups and listed the names and addresses of their enemies.

An FBI affidavit on October 2, 1986, revealed ongoing plots to “rescue” white supremacists from incarceration at various prisons—another strategy taken from The Turner Diaries. Eleven friends and family members of movement leaders, recruited as FBI informants, stood ready to testify that “the top echelons had developed a plan to set off bombs at federal buildings in five cities”—including Denver, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Kansas City—“and then threaten to bomb more buildings unless several members of The Order were released from federal prisons.”

One juror would later go on record saying he admired Beam’s racist views and that the Bible prohibited race-mixing. The court completed a rushed jury selection process in one day, rather than the two to three weeks customary for similar trials. In a jury pool narrowed by peremptory challenges to eliminate six black prospective jurors—the same strategy used to ensure all-white or majority-white juries in the Greensboro trials—the judge questioned jurors himself, rather than allowing the usual practice of scrutiny by attorneys. He quickly appointed an all-white, working-class jury.

The judge also greatly constricted the case planned by the prosecution, in part because of Beam’s flight. He quickly excluded half of the prosecution’s 1,200 pieces of evidence and half of its 200 witnesses. Beam had been arrested in Guadalajara with forty-eight pieces of evidence, but these were excluded because Mexican officers had not followed U.S. protocol.

Evidence ruled inadmissible included Beam’s deliberate attempt to falsify his identity with multiple blank and partially blank Texas birth certificates; false identification and military documents in the name of his alias, Jerry Wayne Clinton; a passport application; two Texas death certificates for Louis R. Beam Jr.; a California driver’s license application; and instructions for filling out false identification papers. Inadmissible, too, was a medallion proving that Beam was part of the Order.

Ellison, the star witness for the prosecution, delivered large quantities of incriminating and alarming information including details of a plot to poison the public water supply of a major city. Successful delivery of those thirty gallons of cyanide to the water supply of Chicago, New York, or Washington would have killed almost half a million people, according to the FBI and independent reports.

Marriages were an important way of forging alliances between groups and of reaffirming loyalty within factions.

Limiting such examples to those immediately pertinent to the sedition trial: The daughter of the Order’s chief counterfeiters, Robert and Sharon Merki—who, with her parents, had attended the LaPorte Church of Christ—married an Order member and received some of the Order’s ill-gotten funds. After members of the Order assassinated their own Walter West for talking too much, another Order member, Thomas Bentley, married West’s widow. Carl Franklin Jr., the leader of the Pennsylvania branch of Aryan Nations, married Order member David Lane’s adopted sister, Jane Eden Lane, before becoming heir apparent to Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler; Butler officiated at their wedding.

On April 8, 1988, after three days of deliberation, the jury found all the defendants not guilty on all counts. This meant that Butler, Beam, and Miles, along with Order members Bruce Pierce, Barnhill, Lane, Scutari, and CSA member Richard Wayne Snell, were found “not guilty of attempting to overthrow the government.” It meant McGuire and three other CSA members were found “not guilty of plotting to kill a federal judge and FBI agent.” Most incredibly, it meant that Barnhill and Scutari were found not guilty of transporting the money stolen by the Order and using it to finance the white power movement. The men walked free and, with the government consenting, the judge ordered “the firearms in question returned to the person who turned them over to the government.

Immediately after the acquittal, jubilant white power leaders touted this victory loudly and movement-wide. Miles said the verdict “restore[d] my faith in the people.”112 FBI agent Knox resigned in frustration.

In the post-1988 period, the movement would incorporate new legions of skinhead members, reemerge as the purportedly nonracist militia movement, and guide a new generation of activists, including Timothy McVeigh, to white power movement violence.

Within and beyond the white power movement, the siege at Ruby Ridge—along with the 1992 Los Angeles riots that preceded it and the fiery, catastrophic end to the Waco standoff that followed in 1993—inflamed a renewed apocalyptic imaginary, a worldview characterized by intensifying urgency that would eventually lead to the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City.

If guerrilla war on the state characterized white power movement activity in the 1980s, spectacular state violence defined the early 1990s. White power activists reacted to these events with ideas of apocalypse on their minds.

Significantly, the apocalyptic imaginary of the early 1990s coincided with the end of the Cold War, a historical shift that rendered obsolete much of the anticommunist rhetoric that had structured white power activism through the previous decades. Apocalyptic rhetoric augmented violence and separatism within the white power movement, but also worked as a bridge issue with the evangelical right, creating opportunities for recruitment. Both constituencies had been preoccupied with the idea of apocalypse following Soviet nuclear attack. People in both groups after the end of the Cold War were, in a way, in search of a new enemy to fight in their foretold end-times battle.

White power activists used antistatist currents from earlier formations to refine the idea of a Jewish-controlled Zionist Occupational Government, increasingly referring instead to a “New World Order”—an alliance of malevolent internationalist forces—as an agent of the coming end times.3 Their apocalyptic vision motivated and shaped white power violence, using the symbols and strategies of the post–Vietnam War moment in new ways. White power activists experienced apocalyptic threat both through the perceived peril of racial extinction and through catastrophic, violent events at Ruby Ridge and Waco that reaffirmed the state as inherently evil, supplanting communism as an irredeemable enemy and giving rise to a new surge of militia organizing.

In confrontations with separatists at Ruby Ridge and Waco, hundreds of federal agents outfitted in military gear descended upon a remote Idaho mountaintop

The white power activists enthralled by the Vietnam War now confronted another sphere in which the spillover of wartime violence had militarized domestic life: paramilitary civilian policing.

Before Ruby Ridge, the state had wielded military strategies and weapons against American citizens countless times. The civilian-targeted violence that became a feature of combat in the Vietnam War had been generated, at least in part, by policing tactics in urban communities of color. After the war, military training of police departments and paramilitary units such as Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams brought violence home once again and disproportionately targeted the same communities.

Paramilitary police units, implemented in Los Angeles to quell racial protest after the Watts riots in 1965 and used repeatedly to suppress dissent, would grow exponentially, even as federal police agencies, including the FBI, ATF, and DEA, militarized along the same lines. Almost 90 percent of cities with 50,000 or more residents would have paramilitary police units by 1995. The use of such units would grow 538 percent for “call-outs” (responses to emergency service…  

Civilian policing increasingly bore the same markers of paramilitary culture that defined white power activism: the presence of both veterans and active-duty soldiers in training and patrols, secrecy about operations, and, as sociologists have documented, “changing uniforms, weaponry, language, training, and tactics.” Paramilitary police wore “battle dress uniforms” and the combat boots and body armor of soldiers. They defined themselves as “heavy weapons units”—a military term—and armed themselves with military-grade weapons, including submachine guns, M16s, grenades, C-4 plastic explosives, and armored

The vast majority of SWAT team and other paramilitary police deployments responded with military force to nonviolent drug crimes. Weapons and money seized during such actions often went toward the purchase of illegal weaponry.

Beginning in the early 1990s, the 1033 Program of the National Defense Authorization Act arranged for the free or low-cost transfer of surplus military weapons, gear, and other equipment such as vehicles to local police departments. Tanks, military assault rifles, grenade launchers, body armor, and more became routinely used in policing civilians at home. The war on drugs also promoted collaboration between the military and civilian police forces.  

White power activists understood the sedition trial acquittals as a green light for future violence, just as they had understood previous acquittals such as those in Greensboro. Indeed, the archive indicates continuous momentum from the sedition trial to the Oklahoma City bombing, revealing the militia movement as the outward growth of the paramilitary white power movement. The militia movement shared its leaders, soldiers, weapons, strategies, and language with the earlier white power mobilization.

Government agents, too, were keenly aware of the organization of the white power movement and its continued capacity for violence. In a 1995 New York Times piece, the FBI special agent in charge of the Coeur d’Alene office, Wayne Manis, called the Order “without a doubt the best organized and most serious terrorist threat that this country has ever seen.”18 Jack Knox, a career agent involved in trying to prosecute white power activists—white power activists had unsuccessfully tried to assassinate him, and he retired in frustration after the Fort Smith acquittals—made similar comments.19 Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, the militia movement was repeatedly portrayed as a novel development.

By eliding its continuity with the white power movement, these observers missed the significance of the militia movement in historical context. Far from a new groundswell, it represented a move toward the mainstream, perhaps the most successful of many such attempts to broaden recruitment. In the militia movement, the war on the government went public.

For many militiamen, antigovernment paramilitarism was rhetorically distinct from overt racism. A recruit could, theoretically, participate in a local militia without deliberately participating in the white power movement.

A shift in language worked to broaden the appeal of the militias. Leaders and activists had begun to replace the idea of Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) with the phrase “New World Order,” which signaled an alignment of malevolent internationalist forces, including the United Nations, global finance, nations, and technology, that conspired to take over the world.

The increasing prevalence of New World Order conspiracy belief among evangelicals, together with the rising importance of social issues held in common between mainstream and fringe—opposition to immigration, gay rights, and especially abortion—indicate a narrowing gap between white power activists and eangelicals.

Movement activists saw the New World Order as a rising global super-state, endowed with unlimited power and armaments and ready to crush white citizens under the heel of its black boot.  The idea of the New World Order drew upon the old symbols of the Vietnam War, mixing fear of internationalism with the certainty that Huey helicopters—no longer the jungle green of the Vietnam War era, but now black—signified an impending invasion by United Nations troops and foretold the herding of white people into concentration camps. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and his compatriots deeply feared such camps.

Butler, on the other hand, saw the Gulf War as a manipulation designed to benefit Jews, and expressed particular displeasure that the military had changed the uniforms of the 1980s to desert hues. His disapproval highlighted the continued reference point of the Vietnam War as the primary cultural marker in the white power movement and its militia outgrowth, in which members continued to wear the tiger-stripe and woodland patterns of Vietnam War camouflage or the four-color pattern implemented in all branches of the military in the late 1970s.

Beginning in the late 1980s, a large number of young people became involved in the skinhead movement, which blended racial violence with a cosmopolitan white supremacy revolving around an urban concert and drug scene. On one level, the presence of skinheads signaled the frustrations of working-class white youth at a moment of profound economic transformation that seemed to threaten their life chances. In another way, skinheads represented an increasingly strong link between white power paramilitarism and prison culture.

Longtime white power leaders, most particularly Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance, successfully drew skinheads into the unified white separatist movement by overlooking previously insurmountable cultural differences. Many skinheads lived in urban areas and were largely uninterested in rural survivalism and social conservatism. They typically used alcohol and drugs, both of which had been decried as immoral distractions by an earlier generation of white power activists. Skinheads often had tattoos, anathema to the teachings of Christian Identity. Despite their differences, opening the movement to include skinheads generated a new pipeline of youth recruitment that helped sustain white power movement momentum. Skinheads became regular attendees at movement meetings such as the Aryan Nations World Congress.

The new advance guard was in militias: paramilitary groups that frequently claimed not to be racist despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The continued use of underground cells meant that many white power activists didn’t define success as the recruitment of large numbers of new members and were content to remain small. Many underground groups worked instead to recruit and train small numbers of committed activists. So while the Center for Democratic Renewal estimated that between 1992 and 1996 there were around 25,000 “hard-core white supremacists” and an additional 150,000 to 175,000 “active sympathizers who buy literature, make contributions, and attend periodic meetings,” these figures could not measure the formation of innumerable paramilitary cells, nor forecast their future violence.

Nowhere was the horror of Ruby Ridge more acutely registered than in the white power movement. Even before Randy Weaver walked down from the mountaintop and the public learned of Vicki Weaver’s death, Louis Beam and others in the white power movement mobilized around the family’s martyrdom. Beam used the incident to rally not only the core of the white separatist movement but also the burgeoning militias. As Beam put it, “Ten thousand Randy Weavers are spread out from one coast to another.”

In October 1992, white power leaders convened an emergency summit in Estes Park, Colorado, to discuss strategies for responding to Ruby Ridge. Pete Peters, the pastor of the tiny Christian Identity LaPorte Church of Christ near Fort Collins, Colorado, led the summit.  Peters intended to expand his flock: by the early 1990s, his Scriptures for America was running radio “outreach” broadcasts in twenty-seven cities and small towns, following a strategy used by local white power groups in North Carolina and California.

Around the time of the summit, he published a pamphlet titled The Bible: Handbook for Survivalists, Racists, Tax Protestors, Militants and Right-Wing Extremists. The cover showed a man in camouflage fatigues, bandoliers, and combat boots, with an AK-47 on the ground by his feet and a cowboy hat on the pack beside him. The pamphlet made a case that the Bible featured tax protestors and racists as its “heroes and even role models for our children.” Peters wrote that Noah was a survivalist, Samson a vigilante, and Christ himself a militant who urged people to arm themselves—even if they had to sell the clothes off their backs to do so.

For the first time in the 22 years that I have been in the movement, we are all marching to the beat of the same drum! … The two murders of the Weaver family have shown all of us that our religious, our political, our ideological differences mean nothing to those who wish to make us all slaves. We are viewed by the government as the same: enemies of the state. When they come for you, the federals will not ask if you are a Constitutionalist, a Baptist, Church of Christ, Identity, Covenant Believer, Klansman, Nazi, homeschooler, Freeman, New Testament believer, fundamentalist, or fiefkeeper. Nor will they ask whether you believe in the Rapture or think it is poppycock!

Beam concluded with an idea of liberty popular among the militiamen. He spoke of the tree of liberty and the need for continued white power violence: “If you think that this generation of men will maintain its present freedoms without also having to fertilize the tree of liberty with the blood of both patriot and tyrant, then you are mistaken,” he said. With this call to war, Beam sought to expand the unified white power movement to include not just a coalition of overt racists, but also a new wave of sympathetic militiamen. Again, he concluded with family and the apocalyptic threat of racial extinction: “My children and your children have the right to a place under the sun.”

The white power movement had evolved far past anything so easily recognizable as a hooded, white-robed Klan march on Main Street. At Estes Park and in the militia movement in general, Ruby Ridge codified an alliance of tax protestors, radical anti-abortionists, militiamen, racists, Identity Christians, survivalists, conspiracy theorists, and those who simply believed the U.S. government had grown too large. As anti-abortion fervor, resistance to gun control laws, and anger over big government grew among mainstream conservatives during the 1990s, the white power movement leveraged these issues for recruitment.

The long-term goal remained war on the state, one that they hoped would end in the deportation or genocide of populations of color as framed by The Turner Diaries. The idea of cell-style organizing with no orders issued from central leadership, which had long permeated the established white power movement, now rippled through the newer skinhead and militia factions.

Waco, Texas. A long undercover operation by the ATF went wrong after federal agents stormed the Mount Carmel compound. The confrontation ended in a massive fire after a months-long siege; seventy-six compound members died, including twenty-one children. The worshippers at Mount Carmel—Branch Davidians—belonged to a paramilitary cult organized around charismatic leader David Koresh. While their multiracial community focused more on imminent apocalypse than on politics, Waco, Texas, had a history of white power movement activity and a population sympathetic to separatism. It had an active Klan chapter that had been founded in 1986, in the heat of the war on the state, and which was aligned with the burgeoning skinhead movement.

In the months before the siege, workers at a local United Parcel Service facility noticed a torn package on its way to Mount Carmel; inside, they could see a hand grenade canister. At one point, undercover agents got inside the compound and discovered “a trove of semi-automatic weapons, AK-47’s, AR-15’s, M16’s, 9-millimeter handguns, Israeli assault rifles and other weapons that cult members had been collecting for years.”

The residents were also converting semiautomatic weapons to illegal automatics, as had white power separatists belonging to the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord a decade earlier in Arkansas.

When the ATF and FBI began running drills at a nearby army post, Fort Hood, to prepare for the raid, someone tipped off the Branch Davidians. The Mount Carmel flock had long prepared for war. One survivor would later testify that Koresh regularly told his followers, “There was going to be a confrontation, a battle … if you can’t kill for God, you can’t die for God.” An undercover agent reported that the compound members were watching a video by Larry Pratt—former mercenary leader of Gun Owners of America—on the ATF as a threat to liberty. The compound’s arsenal included “at least one tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun, which is illegal for civilians to possess and may have been stolen from a military supply depot,” as the New York Times would later report. Mount  Carmel was a paramilitary encampment prepared for battle.

The siege would drag on for 51-one days, with spectators and sympathizers turning up to watch.

McVeigh also made the trip to bear witness, and to sell bumper stickers with slogans such as “When Guns Are Outlawed, I Will Become an Outlaw.”  The white power movement in general, and McVeigh in particular, understood Waco as a massacre carried out by a rampant super state and its corrupt agents.

Waco and Ruby Ridge did more than inflame the movement; for its members, they became the standard of atrocity associated with the New World Order, by now synonymous with the federal government.

In their aftermath, the militia movement surged to more than 50,000 members in forty-seven states, and focused increasingly on taking violent action to stop the rampant federal government. One SPLC analyst estimated that some five million people considered themselves part of the “patriot movement”—militias and militia sympathizers—in the mid-1990s.

Meanwhile, the Michigan Militia, where McVeigh was attending meetings, had grown to 12,000 members. When police stopped leader Mark Koernke and three members of his security team in September 1994, they were carrying three military assault rifles, three semiautomatic pistols, and a revolver—all loaded—as well as 700 rounds of armor-piercing ammunition, twenty-one magazines, and six knives and bayonets. This armament revealed a continuing paramilitary fixation on weapons, paired with increasing rage. As militia leader John Trochmann said that December, “The battle lines are drawn.”

ON APRIL 19, 1995, a Ryder moving truck filled with fertilizer exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast ripped through its glass façade and damaged its concrete columns, collapsing much of the edifice and rendering the rest structurally unstable. The explosion wounded more than 500 people and killed 168, including 19 young children in the building’s day care center.

Timothy McVeigh gave an interview saying that he acted alone. He called the dead children “collateral damage” of a military action, and would later tell a fellow inmate that he found it ironic to be imprisoned because “in Desert Storm I got medals for killing people.” McVeigh said he bullied his co-conspirators into helping him by threatening them and their families, and he stridently denied his connection to any movement.

He said he was not racist.

For a wide variety of reasons, most journalists and law enforcement officers alike failed to follow leads about additional suspects in the bombing. McVeigh appeared to be a lone madman, acting in concert with only a few co-conspirators, and easily dismissed as a mad outlier.

McVeigh, trained as a combatant by the state, belonged to the white power movement. He acted without orders from movement leaders, but in concert with movement objectives and supported by resistance cell organizing. The plan for the bomb came directly from The Turner Diaries, the book that had structured the activity of the white power movement since the late 1970s. The choice of target came from an earlier white power movement incident: members of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), closely affiliated with the Order and Aryan Nations, had cased the Murrah Building and attempted to blow it up with rocket launchers back in 1983 but failed.

Gulf War also produced a new generation of combat veterans, and a militarization of American society more broadly, that white power could exploit as it pursued its new iteration of paramilitary mobilization through militias.

Another erosion of meaning arose from the lack of convictions in the 1988 Fort Smith sedition trial, after thirteen white power activists were acquitted of charges including seditious conspiracy despite overwhelming evidence of their war on the state. This failure, along with the even more damaging public relations disasters of Ruby Ridge and Waco, caused the Department of Justice and some agents in the FBI to be reluctant to portray the Oklahoma City bombing as the work of a movement and hence reluctant to pursue investigative and prosecutorial strategies based on that view. Indeed, the Bureau had institutionalized a policy to pursue only individual actors in white power violence, with “no attempts to tie individual crimes to a broader movement.”4 This strategy not only worked to obscure the bombing as part a social movement but, in the years following McVeigh’s conviction, effectively erased the movement itself from public understanding.

While staying and working on James Nichols’s farm, Terry Nichols and McVeigh experimented with explosives and attended Michigan Militia meetings. Terry Nichols sent a letter to the government renouncing his right to vote, participating in a widely used white power and militia movement strategy called “severation” in which members broke their official ties to the state by destroying Social Security cards, birth certificates, and other documents.

Between Howe’s information, which gave the nature, date, and origin of the threat—and even went so far as to specify the details of a truck bomb and a federal building in Tulsa or Oklahoma City—and the descriptive example of the bombing given in The Turner Diaries, state agencies did have substantial and historical information about what was about to happen. McVeigh was carrying out a planned and logical act, one that drew directly on the resources and strategies of the white power movement and targeted a building that had been at the forefront of the movement’s collective conscience for more than a decade.

The Turner Diaries gave a very specific example of a truck bombing of the sort McVeigh was planning. In the novel, Turner and his cell unit bomb the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. They use a truck bomb with around 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer with blasting gelatin and dynamite, and they drill holes so that the driver can light the fuse from the cab of the truck. They plan to drive the truck into the freight area, set the fuse, and walk away. They are fully aware that their action will hurt or kill the people who work in the building. In the novel, the bomb detonates at 9:15 A.M., catching people at the beginning of their workday and killing more than 850.

Even as Turner stops to help the iconic injured white woman, he insists that innocent civilians—including white women and children—must die in order to “cut the cancer” of the federal government out of the “living flesh” of white society. While Turner considers the deaths of civilians a “heavy burden of responsibility,” he still sees the “pawns” killed in the bombing as unavoidable collateral damage in the cause of race war and in preventing the apocalypse of racial extinction. McVeigh would describe the civilians he killed in much the same way.

The number of deaths in Oklahoma City exceeded the 148 Americans who had died in combat during the Gulf War.

The envelope that held them was sealed; perhaps McVeigh carried them in case he was apprehended and unable to tell his story for himself. One of the items in the packet was a quote from The Turner Diaries: More important, though, is what we taught the politicians and the 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, and they can hide behind the concrete walls of their country estates, but we can still find them and kill them. McVeigh wanted the bombing to send a message to the New World Order: that white American men could still wage war on the state.

Vidal pointed out that the jury forewoman, after reporting a hung jury, told the press, “Decisions were probably made very early on that McVeigh and Nichols were who they were looking for, and the same sort of resources were not used to try to find out who else might be involved.… The government really dropped the ball.” The forewoman received bomb threats soon after saying so. Some jurors, Vidal wrote, believed that other conspirators were still at large. Vidal also wrote, “I unearthed evidence that the FBI did not follow up on solid leads, or, if they did, failed to turn those over to the defense. I uncovered information provided to the FBI by Kansas law enforcement, and by very reliable eyewitnesses who were apparently disregarded,” including the story of the five men at Geary State Lake. He also “found evidence that the FBI may have withheld certain information from the defense teams during discovery, potentially tainting the verdicts against both McVeigh and Nichols.” Indeed, the FBI deliberately withheld such evidence in its strategic pursuit of a single perpetrator. Attorney General John Ashcroft would delay McVeigh’s execution by a month, at the end, to allow the defense to review materials not disclosed during the trial.

The bombing launched an almost immediate and widespread wave of violence as the militia movement, and the broader white power movement, took action around the country. Four militiamen were arrested in Oklahoma, where they were allegedly planning to bomb several buildings. Federal documents said that they had planned to practice at Elohim City; while Millar admitted that he knew one of the men, he said he knew nothing about their plan. Three members of the Georgia Republic Militia were convicted of stockpiling bombs. Militia members from West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were accused of planning to blow up the FBI’s national fingerprint center, another idea taken directly from The Turner Diaries. A federal mine inspector and his wife were injured in a copycat bombing in Vacaville, California.

There was an Oklahoma-based conspiracy to blow up the Anti-Defamation League offices in Houston. Bombings, bomb threats, murders, and armed protests plagued gay bars in the South and abortion clinics there and in the Midwest. Confederate Hammer Skins—skinheads armed with assault weapons—chased law enforcement officers away from a “White Man’s Weekend” in Dawsonville, Georgia. In 1995, seven Militia of Montana members stormed the sheriff’s department to demand the return of confiscated property;

In 1999, Buford Furrow—who had married Debbie Mathews, the widow of Bob Mathews—opened fire on a Jewish community center and killed a Filipino postal worker in Los Angeles, California. Furrow, who was using an Uzi, also wounded three children, a teenager, and an old woman. In his van, police found 2,000 rounds of ammunition and an Army Ranger handbook; he was also armed with other weapons, including hand grenades. Furrow may have been attempting to get into the Phineas Priesthood, a Christian Identity group that required its soldiers to wage acts of race war in order to gain membership.

On July 27, 1996, Eric Rudolph bombed Atlanta’s Centennial Park in the middle of the Olympics. Because the bomb had shifted, orienting its explosion vertically rather than horizontally, its shrapnel wounded only 111 people and killed two; the bomb had been intended for a much higher death toll. Rudolph, escaping arrest, followed with three more bombs in 1996 and 1997, targeting two abortion clinics and a gay bar. Those blasts injured another six people and killed two more.

All four bombs, the FBI would later confirm, were “powerful antipersonnel devices, containing nails, that were designed to kill and maim,” with secondary blasts or advance warning phone calls calculated to target rescue workers.

Rudolph, an experienced woodsman, disappeared into the mountains of western North Carolina, where he remained on the run—and on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, with a reward of $1 million—for five years. He chose a region, reported the New York Times, where white separatist organizations were known to take refuge. And indeed, the locals did little to help authorities catch Rudolph. FBI director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno made impassioned pleas, describing the horrific details of the Olympic Park bombing, to attempt to generate help finding Rudolph. When Rudolph was apprehended near Murphy, North Carolina, he had buried four caches of dynamite around the town, including a twenty-five-pound bomb across the road from the Army National Guard armory that served as the base for the FBI manhunt.

The Arizona Patriots plotted to blow up abortion clinics in the mid-1990s. In 1999, Benjamin Smith, linked with the white power World Church of the Creator, went on a shooting spree in Illinois and Indiana, wounding six Jews and killing two people of color before killing himself.

The Oklahoma City bombing, as Beam foretold, resulted in a federal crackdown that dampened the white power movement somewhat in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Timothy McVeigh’s execution cemented a perception of the bombing as unconnected to the events that came before, as an inexplicable act of violence carried out by one or a few actors. This idea threatened to occlude the white power movement altogether. Leaderless resistance had triumphed as a strategy to hide the broader movement in the bombing investigation and prosecution, and in the journalistic and scholarly accounts as well. They have portrayed white power movement violence as isolated, rather than a series of coordinated acts, and its activists as madmen rather than as part of a movement.

Even as prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shaped a new generation of white power activism, this new activity would largely continue to evade public understanding, despite the warnings of watchdog groups, until it broke into mainstream politics in the 2016 presidential campaign and election.

white power activism underwent an inescapable shift after 1995. In the late 1990s, the movement largely relocated into the online spaces it had begun to build more than a decade earlier.

While the Vietnam War story as lived experience and cultural force receded with time, the war remained relevant. New generations of activists participated in a movement with direct genealogical through-lines to the post-Vietnam white power unification, sharing organizational strategies, ideologies, resources, and personnel with the 1979–1995 groundswell. Stormfront, for instance, was founded in 1995 by Dominica mercenary Don Black; much of the contemporary “alt-right” posture was modeled on earlier political campaigns by David Duke; the acquittal of militants at Malheur Wildlife Reserve in Oregon at their 2016 trial echoed the 1988 Fort Smith sedition trial, and the action of those militants may have been an attempt to provoke federal violence reminiscent of Ruby Ridge.

The symbolic universe of the post-Vietnam movement endured in white power action. In his 2015 shooting of nine black worshippers at a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, Dylann Roof undertook an action that followed the movement’s teachings in an attempt to foment race war. He also used symbols that derived from the 1979–1995 period of white power activism.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle, activists, and citizens, engaged in a renewed debate about the flag, and some attempted to remove it from the places where it still flew:

But this attention provoked a substantial backlash and may have further galvanized and emboldened a segment of the electorate that identified more closely with white power ideologies around such symbols, and around white supremacy, revanchist notions of gender roles, belief in the inherent corruption of the federal government, and an apocalyptic future. The rise of the self-proclaimed “alt-right” from the websites and forums founded by white power activists and the explosion of such views into mainstream politics during the presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump show that—in a sense—Dylann Roof did participate in a chain of events that measurably decreased opportunity for and unleashed violence against people of color in myriad ways.

There is, of course, insufficient historical distance or archival material to offer large-scale interpretations of the present moment. What is inescapably clear from the history of the white power movement, however, is that the lack of public understanding, effective prosecution, and state action left an opening for continued white power activism. The state and public opinion have failed to sufficiently halt white power violence or refute white power belief systems, and failed to present a vision of the future that might address some of the concerns that lie behind its more diffuse, coded, and mainstream manifestations.