Much of the hate group activity online focuses on recruitment. A former skinhead, T.J. Leyden, described the process and the appeal: “We have a generation of MTV kids, and for them, visuals are just as important as audio, and these websites have dripping blood, they have things that come popping out at you.”23 Once someone is hooked, Leyden observed, the recruiting process becomes self-perpetuating, as the new recruits constantly reinforce each other’s views in the online echo chamber: “When you had a kid in Sioux City, Iowa, a kid in Lincoln, Nebraska, a kid in Billings, Montana, these kids if they were lucky got together once a year at an Aryan festival or got together once in a great while at a concert. These kids now get together constantly, every night on the Internet.”24
The rapid expansion in the number of hate groups that create websites suggests that the approach has increased either membership or sources of revenue. The sites themselves have expanded into fields like e-commerce, notably selling the types of digital music that have become the soundtrack for white supremacy since the mid-1980s. White power music, often punk or heavy metal in style, is sold on many websites. William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries and leader of the National Alliance, went so far as to develop his own music studio and production company, Resistance Records.
Matthew Hale helped turn the WCOTC into a national brand using the Internet. The WCOTC even produced a “creativity for kids” website “that offers downloadable coloring book pages and crossword puzzles about ‘white pride’ in a subtle ‘kid-friendly’ format.” Hale became particularly effective at marketing the WCOTC to women through the Web. Leadership positions in the WCOTC were fully open to women, and the organization developed the Women’s Frontier, a website just for women, run by information coordinator Lisa Turner.
As it turned out, its marketing focus ultimately undid the World Church of the Creator. In changing the name of Klassen’s Church of the Creator to World Church of the Creator, Matthew Hale unwittingly encroached on the naming rights that belonged to the Te-Ta-Ma Truth Foundation, a New Age spiritual organization. In the ultimate of ironies, a group that favored the “family unification of mankind” successfully sued Hale and the racist World Church of the Creator for copyright infringement. Hale then became his own worst enemy. He openly ridiculed judge Joan Lefkow’s ruling (it did not help that she was Jewish) and then quietly arranged to have her killed. But Hale’s choice of contract killer turned out to be an FBI informant. A jury convicted Hale for conspiracy to commit murder in 2004, and he is presently serving a forty-year sentence in federal prison. Some suspected that Hale, in failing to kill Lefkow, ultimately arranged for the murder of her husband and mother in Lefkow’s Chicago home. But investigators later identified the killer as Bart Ross, who resented Judge Lefkow for a ruling in a medical malpractice case and confessed to the crime in a suicide note. With Hale in prison, the World Church of the Creator withered into irrelevance.
One might get the sense, from stories like Hale’s, that the government and anti-racist organizations have become incredibly effective at combatting religious terrorism. The Williams brothers and Buford Furrow went to prison; so did Walter Thody, Charles Barbee, Robert Berry, and Jay Merrell. When hate groups were not being undone in criminal court, the SPLC and the ADL were bankrupting them in civil court.
There is no doubt that by 1999, local and especially national law enforcement were becoming increasingly more sophisticated in recognizing and understanding the nuances of domestic terrorism, with an increased focus on the religious component that motivates at least some of the violence. With the new millennium approaching, the FBI became noticeably concerned about apocalyptic terrorism. Director Louis Freeh commissioned one of the first major analyses of religious terrorism that focused on something other than Islamic jihadism. The FBI named its study Project Megiddo, after a hill in Jerusalem, the site of many Old Testament battles and the place that many fundamentalist Christians believe will host the final battle of Armageddon. “The Hebrew word ‘Armageddon,’” the FBI prefaced its strategic assessment, “means the hills of Megiddo… . The name ‘Megiddo’ is an apt title for a project that analyzes those who believe the year 2000 will usher in the end of the world and who are willing to perpetrate acts of violence to bring that end about.”25
The FBI report explained,
Adherents of racist belief systems such as Christian Identity and Odinism, and other radical domestic extremists are clearly focusing on the millennium as a time of action. Certain individuals from these various perspectives are acquiring weapons, storing food and clothing, raising funds through fraudulent means, procuring safe houses, preparing compounds, surveying potential targets, and recruiting new converts… .
Christian Identity … believes in the inevitability of the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ. It is believed that these events are part of a cleansing process that is needed before Christ’s kingdom can be established on earth. During this time, Jews and their allies will attempt to destroy the white race using any means available. The result will be a violent and bloody struggle—a war, in effect—between God’s forces, the white race, and the forces of evil, the Jews and nonwhites. Significantly, many adherents believe that this will be tied into the coming of the new millennium… .
After the final battle is ended and God’s kingdom is established on earth, only then will the Aryan people be recognized as the one and true Israel.
Christian Identity adherents believe that God will use his chosen race as his weapons to battle the forces of evil. Christian Identity followers believe they are among those chosen by God to wage this battle during Armageddon and they will be the last line of defense for the white race and Christian America. To prepare for these events, they engage in survivalist and paramilitary training, storing foodstuffs and supplies, and caching weapons and ammunition. They often reside on compounds located in remote areas.26
The report added that only a small fraction of Identity believers favored a proactive effort to instigate a race war. It noted that Identity radicals were part of a movement more than a centralized organization and that the movement’s decentralized character could lead to lone-wolf terrorism. But it also noted that the galvanizing nature of the approaching millennium was engendering a greater level of cooperation among groups. It astutely observed that while “the radical right encompasses a vast number and variety of groups,” these “groups are not mutually exclusive and within the subculture individuals easily migrate from one group to another.” Yet “Christian Identity is the most unifying theology for a number of these diverse groups and one widely adhered to by white supremacists. It is a belief system that provides its members with a religious basis for racism and an ideology that condones violence against non-Aryans.”27
The assessment may just as well have been describing the white supremacist milieu from 1957 to 1968—and that is the problem. While it acknowledged the Reverend Wesley Swift as the seminal figure in the development of radical Christian Identity, the Megiddo report failed to consider the full and accurate context for domestic, religious terrorism. It begins its discussion of actual Identity terrorism with the Order, not with the Confederate Underground, the National States Rights Party, or the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. A longer-term perspective on Christian Identity terrorism would yield a greater appreciation for the determination of these zealots and also for their adaptability. Their optimism at the prospect of a race war may ebb and flow according to external events, but the goal of waging war against “the Synagogue of Satan” and “the mud people” never changes for Identity radicals. Sam Bowers and J.B. Stoner were as determined to provoke an ethnic Armageddon as any Identity terrorist eyeing the coming millennium. A smarter approach to combatting Identity terrorism, one informed by history, would consider how Identity terrorists adapt and operate when they do not have the benefit of a galvanizing event to spur recruitment and incite their members to violence.
In that sense, studying Stoner’s or Bowers’
s modus operandi would be just as valuable as studying contemporary Identity terrorists such as Robert Mathews. Indeed, in missing the earlier antecedents for the situation in 1999, the report looked past a key element of how the early Identity terrorists worked: by ascending to positions of leadership in secular racist or antigovernment groups, manipulating rank-and-file members, and coopting said groups’ agendas. The report acknowledged the danger of the Identity movement but downplayed the threat posed by the KKK, failing to see how one movement can influence another. Men like Thomas Robb and Dennis Mahon, who share strong Christian Identity influences, ran major KKK organizations into the 1990s. Thankfully, the report’s oversight did not have an immediate impact on domestic security, and the country avoided any major attacks when the ball fell in Times Square on January 1, 2000.
But the report may well have undermined an investigation into a wave of firebombing and arson attacks that plagued the United States from 1995 to 1999. Segments of the public, especially those in the African American religious community, became alarmed at a sudden spike in arson activity in 1995, when fifty-two houses of worship, including several black churches (as well as synagogues and Hindu temples) suffered damage. The entire nation became concerned when that number grew to 297 in 1996 and began to include an increasing number of synagogues, Sikh temples, and even white churches. On the surface, the crimes seemed to be concentrated in regional clusters, raising the specter of a wider conspiracy.
The media picked up on that angle, and soon President Bill Clinton organized the National Church Arson Task Force, unifying what had been separate investigations by the BATF, the FBI, the Department of Treasury, and the Department of Justice. The first series of reports, published in 1997, raised major questions about a conspiratorial explanation for the attacks. As more and more arrests began to be made in these crimes, no evidence of an interstate or even an intrastate criminal conspiracy materialized. Even when investigators could link two or three fire bombings in the same community to one source, the perpetrator was almost always one person or a very small group. In more than one instance, the arsonist turned out to be a disgruntled ex-congregant rather than an outsider. Some criminologists suggested that the extensive media coverage of the church fires actually inspired other alienated loners to target religious institutions. Seeing this, the media began to question its own initial reporting, which had raised the specter of a wider conspiracy. More and more, reporters and pundits pushed the opposite narrative: that the spike in attacks resulted from self-perpetuating mass hysteria that encouraged copycats.
There may be a great deal of truth in that assessment, but in reversing the course of its coverage, the media may well have made a premature assessment. Given the decentralized nature of the far right in the 1990s and the ubiquitous presence of government-paid informants, the idea of a regional or even statewide white supremacist conspiracy seems farfetched. Such coordination is not unheard of—Stoner managed a multistate bombing campaign, using the Confederate Underground, in 1958. But almost every white supremacist group, during the time of Stoner’s campaign and immediately after, already operated as a multistate organization, with a central headquarters and many state chapters. In the 1990s, few groups, and few leaders, enjoyed much influence outside of their narrow regional bases.
That being said, law enforcement was solving far too few of the cases to commit to either a pro-conspiracy or no-conspiracy narrative. By 1999, of the 827 arson and firebombing attacks reported since 1995, more than 60 percent remained unsolved. (Most still remain unresolved as of 2015.) That hate groups did not contribute to any of these attacks is hard to believe as a blanket assertion. Consider that from 1995 to 1999, investigators solved only two of eleven firebomb or arson attacks on black churches in Chicago, headquarters for the World Church of the Creator; only seven of twenty-two firebomb or arson attacks on black churches in Georgia, the home state of Ed Fields and J.B. Stoner (released from prison in 1986); and only seven of nineteen firebomb or arson attacks in North Carolina, where Creativity’s original founder, Ben Klassen, sold his compound to National Alliance leader William Pierce.28
The leaders of these organizations need not have plotted the details of the crimes or even recruited the foot soldiers. Through appeals to emotion and the power of their charisma, they fostered a mind-set that made such attacks more likely. Pierce’s Cosmotheist National Alliance, Butler’s Christian Identity–based Aryan Nations, Hale’s Creativity-based World Church of the Creator—all of these groups included impressionable members whose mind-sets could be geared toward violence. For his study The Racist Mind, Harvard ethnographer Raphael Ezekiel spent considerable time with white supremacists and observed and interviewed several hate group leaders. He described the archetypical hate group leader as
a man who is clever, who is shallow, and who does not respect people. He thinks almost all people are dumb and easily misled. He thinks almost all people will act for cold self-interest and will cheat others whenever they think they will not be caught. His disrespect includes his followers. He respects only those, friend or foe, who have power. His followers are people to be manipulated, not to be led to better self-knowledge.29
One finds in Ezekiel’s observation echoes of college-educated Sam Bowers and his contempt for Mississippi “rednecks.” Such sentiments can also be found in statements by Pierce, the former college professor, who referred to others as lemmings. One is also reminded of Matt Hale’s suspicious relationship to Ben Smith in the lead-up to the latter’s shooting spree on Independence Day Weekend.
With people like Smith and Furrow in mind, former FBI agent Mike German, who infiltrated supremacist groups for the Bureau from the 1990s through the turn of the millennium, argued in a Washington Post column that “‘Lone extremism’ is not a phenomenon; it’s a technique, a ruse designed to subvert the criminal justice system.”30 He added,
Imagine a very smart leader of an extremist movement, one who understands the First Amendment and criminal conspiracy laws, telling his followers not to depend on specific instructions.
He might tell them to divorce themselves from the group before they commit a violent act; to act individually or in small groups so that others in the movement could avoid criminal liability. This methodology creates a win-win situation for the extremist leader—the violent goals of the group are met without the legal consequences.31
German insists that “these aren’t the type of conspiracies cooked up by a few guys in a back room. But they are conspiracies nonetheless because they involve conscious discussions, decisions and encouragement for others to break the law by destroying property or taking lives. By providing both the motive and method for violence, these leaders become part of the conspiracy.”32 Recognizing the legal hurdles involved in prosecuting these cases, German argued that the Justice Department, like the SPLC, should pursue civil litigation against hate groups, in much the same way the Justice Department uses the courts to get financial restitution from white-collar criminals.
The SPLC demonstrated that this was possible, yet again, in the church arson cases. It won the largest lawsuit ever against the KKK, suing the South Carolina Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for its role in instigating arson fires at the Mount Zion AME Church and the Macedonia Baptist Church on June 20 and June 21, 1996. Horace King, the SCCKKKK leader, did not initiate, directly order, or plot the attacks, but the two men who burned the churches down said that they had discussed their general plans with the Grand Wizard weeks before the event. In the interim period, King made frequent references, in general rallies, to burning black churches. “If we had this garbage in South Carolina, we would burn the bastards out,” he said at one. He told a KKK member who turned out to be an undercover reporter for the South Carolina Star Reporter, “The only good nigger church is a burned nigger church.”33
King predicted to the reporter that a race war would come in 2000. In his trial testimony, King claimed, “I never told no one to go out there and fight blacks or do any ha
rm to blacks. But I have said this in the past: Be prepared. If a race war ever did come, then you should be ready.”34 Lest there be any doubt that the race war reference emerged from Christian Identity theology, Tim Welch, one of the men who set the fires, testified, “They use the Bible to say that blacks aren’t human, Jews aren’t human … whites, whites, that’s it. So … if you allow blacks, you can’t be Christian. The only Christian thing to do was to get rid of them.”35
Despite the involvement of Justice Department and FBI officials in the Church Arson Task Force investigation, the insights from the Megiddo analysis never found their way into task force reports. When the task force published its fourth report in 2000, it only hinted at the Klan affiliations of the arsonists in the South Carolina affair, never even mentioning the lawsuit.
It is thus no surprise that the task force also failed to consider an even less direct kind of conspiracy, one in which a hate group creates a social climate that maximizes the chances that disparate and unconnected individuals and small groups will, independently of one another, throw firebombs at churches. Here again, the failure of law enforcement to fully consider the historical roots of domestic, religious terrorism impoverishes the current approach to similar crimes. The Megiddo report deserves credit for recognizing Wesley Swift as the pivotal figure in popularizing radical Christian Identity theology. But the FBI diminished his influence by failing to understand how Swift encouraged the violence of his era. Swift certainly did not coordinate or directly manage Identity-based violence in the 1960s, but by force of personality he created a subculture and offered a compelling message that perpetuated and inspired such violence during his lifetime and even afterward.
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