A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement

Disclaimer: I have been informed from different sources that the information contained in this document is a compilation of material anthologized from over a dozen sources and writers, including the Meggido and Deguello Reports and written work by Louis Beam, the late Rick Cooper, Harold Covington, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Bill White, Maguire, the late David McCalden, and others. The actual author of the “Brief History” is unknown. It is published herein verbatim as received.

[Ad Hoc Preface: Timely synchronicity is a wonderful thing. On May 27, 2011 two events occured that folded conveniently into a current “debate” on the role and legitimacy of Amerikan “National Socialism”: a copy of “A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement” appeared in my mailbox (1) and I read Brett Stevens’ somewhat contentious and paradoxical blog post, Destroy White Nationalism (to save White Nationalism), published the previous day, May 26th. For both publications, in order to appreciate the full political context, it is necessary to read “Amerikan National Socialism” in place of “White Nationalism.”

[For myself, the “Brief History” clearly supports my position that Germanic National Socialism cannot be imported and will not be imported into an alien and decadent Amerikan psyche; all that comes of the effort is a bastardized philosophical and political abortion. Reading the “Brief History” confirmed that the mouthing of honourable political intent is a revolving hallucinatory farce and is constantly betrayed and sabotaged by actual conduct, and has been betrayed and sabotaged for 50 years. This conduct in most, but not all, White Nationalist circles seems to be prevalent still. The “Brief History” merely confirms it.

[Upon having finished reading the “Brief History” I was left with the sensation of needing to take a shower. Your mileage upon its reading may differ. It is offered herein unedited and unabridged as received. This blog post publication of the “Brief History” acts as messenger, nothing more, nothing less. – SER]

Footnote (1): On May 27, 2011, Harold Covington of the Northwest Front publically posted the following on the Renaissance Vanguard International’s Facebook page: “Okay, normally I don’t do this, but since the Usual Suspects apparently have no intention of shutting their putrescent yaps no matter what I do, what the hell? Anyone wishing to receive a copy of a fascinating document called A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WHITE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT can e-mail me at ___ and I will send it to you in MS Word attachment. I have been accused of writing this thing, which I didn’t, at least not all of it and not for this purpose–it is an anthology of internal Movement info dating back about 50 years, including some of my own material lifted from various sources. Whoever wrote it knows his shit, though. With one exception, I cannot find a single significant factual error.” I took Mr. Covington up on his offer. Upon my request to do so, he had no qualm to its blog publication.

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A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement

Introduction

This brief history of the White Nationalist Movement in America is being published for two reasons. In the first place, it is necessary to provide posterity with an insider’s view based on actual first hand knowledge of the facts. Almost all of the Movement history available to scholars, researchers, book authors, historians and sociologists is comprised of the incomplete and biased versions of government agencies such as the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and various law enforcement agencies. Most of these official groups in turn get their information directly or indirectly from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and other anti-White groups with a clear bias and a clear ideological or financial interest in defaming and distorting White Nationalism, and make no effort to verify the facts or to eliminate or fact-check the obvious bias inherent in anything obtained from such sources.

Secondly, there is a need to educate newcomers into the Movement about our history, and teach them a few basic facts about some of the people and events that have shaped the present situation. As the old axiom says, you can’t know where you’re going until you understand where you’ve been.

Defining White Nationalism

Before we decide what we will be speaking about in this report, we need clearly to delineate what we will not be speaking about.

For the purposes of this report, we will define White Nationalism as any secular, non-faith based belief in a racial nation of Aryan people in North America, separate from the narrative and institutions of the United States of America. White Nationalism may or may not entail the belief in or advocacy of a separate White Homeland somewhere on the North American continent, but it usually does. Central to the tenets of true White Nationalism is a belief in White revolution as opposed to mere reform or tinkering with the existing setup of liberal democracy, etc. White Nationalists do not want to “put things back the way they were”; White Nationalists want to level the present order and substitute something new which will restore the white man to his rightful place in the world.

This will preclude any lengthy study of many well-known organizations, events, and personalities that have long been considered part of the Movement, but whom we are excluding not only for considerations of brevity (otherwise this report would run to the length of a Tolstoy novel) but also because we consider these organizations and people to be essentially conservative and reactionary.

The prime example of this redaction will be the Ku Klux Klan in all its many permutations and mini-grouplets down through the past 50 years. Not only would any attempt to chart the ebb and flow of Klan politics be entirely too long for our purpose, but the Klan is essentially reactionary and not revolutionary. The Klan does not desire political white separatism, it simply wishes to keep the blacks and other non-whites “in their place” and bring back the world of 1900 America, a beautiful and desirable goal to be sure, but one that is simply impossible of achievement. We will therefore not mention the Klan, except briefly in connection with the career of David Ernest Duke.

Also, we will resist the temptation to examine the life, career and personality of Willis Carto. Carto is a fascinating case history of the American Right, but insofar as Carto has ever exhibited any ideological coloration beyond his own self-aggrandizement, he is in fact just a rightist, a reactionary, and a common or garden-variety anti-Semite. His often nefarious activities, as intricate and intriguing as they are, do not fall within the purview of White racial nationalism. Not to mention the fact that it would once again take a book-length exposition accurately to detail and describe Carto’s life and work. We hope that one day such a book will be written; it will make fascinating reading.

We will not discuss Skinheads and the Skinhead movement, except very peripherally. This is because Skinhead has undergone the same mutation and evolution that Hell’s Angels from the 1950s and 1960s underwent, and Skinhead is no longer a political or social or ideological movement; it has become an urban gang culture and is heading towards becoming an adjunct of organized crime.

Finally, we will avoid discussing Revisionism, which is a historical field and not a political ideology, except wherever Revisionism impinges on White Nationalism, as it did briefly in the case of Ernst Zündel. It is true that White Nationalism and Revisionism have been associated with one another in the public and official mind, but this association is not always accurate. Not all White Nationalists are Revisionists, and not all Revisionists are White Nationalists. One good example would be the well-known Revisionist historian, Bradley Smith, who is married to a Mexican woman.

Early Beginnings

Race has always been the American issue. Proper White Nationalism as we understand the term began in the post World War One era.

The primary National Socialist group in the U.S. during the 1930s was the German American Bund, led by Fritz Kuhn. The Bund staged a number of highly publicized rallies, marches, and other events, but actually wielded very little power or influence. In part this was because it was too closely associated with the German government in the public’s mind, but also because the Bund was primarily comprised of German immigrants or Americans of recent German descent, and so achieved strength only in those areas of the country which at that time had large German populations, such as New York, New Jersey, the upper Midwest in cities Like Milwaukee and Chicago, and a few other areas. The Bund was outlawed in 1941 by the Roosevelt régime, Fritz Kuhn and other leaders were interned, and the organization disappeared from the American scene.

Of more interest to us today were several native-born American proto-Fascist or proto-National Socialist movements. A group called the Silver Shirts was formed in Asheville, North Carolina on January 31st, 1933, the day after the Führer Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. The founder was an American named William Dudley Pelley, who was inspired by the success of the Movement in Germany and hoped to emulate Hitler’s accomplishments in this country. His organization flowered briefly, faltered, then disappeared, and Pelley began an aimless odyssey from tiny splinter group to tiny splinter group, prefiguring a pattern which has continued in right-wing politics until this day.

A more serious effort was a clandestine movement called the Black Legion, formed in 1935 by a man named Parker Sage. An underground patriotic revolutionary group organized on military lines, at one stage the Legion is believed to have numbered as many as 25,000 members, although one hysterical left-wing writer credited the organization with 100,000. The Black Legion functioned mainly in the central and upper Midwest, and in some Midwestern states it outstripped the Second Era Ku Klux Klan at its height in numbers and influence. Like the Klan, the Black Legion engaged in guerrilla-style attacks against Communist union agitators, blacks, bootleggers, and other elements deemed to be “anti-social”.

Unable to obtain genuine evidence of any criminal wrongdoing, Federal authorities engaged in a crackdown in late 1937 through fabricated conspiracy charges which more or less broke up the organization. In the wake of the Black Legion, Parker Sage founded the National Workers’ League in Detroit in 1938. The NWL was heavily influenced by the American National Socialist political scientist Lawrence Dennis. The NWL was a labor union which sought to organize the White working class in a struggle against capitalism and the destructive Judaic economic system of usury and interest slavery. Dennis took his cue from such German National Socialist theoreticians as Dietrich Eckart, Walther Darré and Gottfried Feder, but also from the American populist tradition of the 1890s, the Grange, the pre-Marxian socialists, and the old Populist Party.

This brief, fascinating, and now virtually unremembered Populist period In American political history produced brilliant leaders like William Jennings Bryan, Eugene Debs (in his early pre-Marxist days), and Tom Watson of Georgia. There were a series of Populist governors in the South like James Vardaman and Theodore Bilbo in Mississippi, “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman in South Carolina, and Charles Brantley Aycock in North Carolina who made the Famous statement, “There shall be no progress in the South for either race until the Negro is removed permanently from the political process.”

In 1940, Lawrence Dennis himself wrote, “Democratic and capitalist leadership in America has just one real peacetime concern, to stabilize stagnation. Thus, they hope to avert revolution. The values of democracy and capitalism are no longer credible because their mechanics are no longer workable. To defend a democracy controlled by an alien elite means to die not for your future but for theirs…. a new spirit of Folk consciousness is leading us out of stagnation along the path of revolution. The wise men and social scientists of the democracies have not understood this. Adolf Hitler has understood this.”

The National Workers’ League published a weekly paper called Nationalist Newsletter up until it was shut down in 1943 by bogus indictments against Dennis and others, which resulted in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. The evidence against the defendants was so palpably absurd that all were acquitted. (The government staged a repeat performance in Fort Smith, Arkansas in 1988, which also failed to gain a single conviction.) Lawrence Dennis remains a little-known but important pioneer in our racial cause, his works worthy of further study, but they are today virtually unobtainable except for the occasional find in obscure used bookstores and occasional library reference sections.

“Every Man A King, But No One Wears The Crown”

The closest we’ve ever gotten to a genuine Folkish revolutionary leader in this country was Huey Pierce Long (1894-1935), governor of Louisiana and later a United States Senator. Long is a problematic but fascinating figure to all who study his life and career.

Known as “the Kingfish,” Long was unquestionably an egotist and a power-hungry personality who ruthlessly trampled over everyone who got in his way. He was one of the most skillful machine politicians in American history, a master manipulator who became one of the greatest practitioners of the corrupt democratic system of patronage, bribery, corruption, extortion, and deception. On several occasions he called out the Louisiana National Guard to intimidate his political opponents, (who were rather In need of intimidating, if the truth be known.) When he left for the United States Senate in 1932, Huey hand-picked his own successor as governor, a flunky named O. K. Allen who was so feckless that a legend arose that he once signed a leaf which blew in through the window and landed on his desk in the State House.

But even Huey Long’s worst enemies have never denied that the Kingfish manifested throughout his whole life a profound love, respect and concern for the white Southern working class, the factory workers and sharecroppers and manual laborers who in that day, as in this, bore the brunt of taxation, conscription in time of war, cynical political exploitation, black crime, and arrogant patronizing discrimination by the wealthier classes in the South who from the time of slavery had used the black presence as a source of cheap labor to keep the white workers’ wages low, and as a potential threat to keep the poor whites in line. For the poor whites to rock the boat, to break with the Bourbons of the planter class, always risked weakening or damaging the social and legal mechanisms of control, with the ever-present danger that the blacks might be turned loose to rob and rape and kill, (as indeed occurred in the 1950s, and which situation prevails to this day in the South and throughout the rest of the country).

But in Huey Long, the white workers no longer had a boss, but a true friend in a position of power. The wealthy liberal elite, the New World Order of the era never forgave Long for it, and eventually they killed him.

Long began his battle for white rights in the 1920s when he was elected to the relatively minor position of state railroad commissioner. By raising carriage rates for large corporations, notably the all-powerful Standard Oil, and by improving pay, benefits and conditions for the railroad workers Long incurred the anger of the power structure. Twice they tried unsuccessfully to indict Long and remove him from office, but being a skilled courtroom attorney as well as a politician, Huey beat them back.

Elected governor in 1928, Long provided widespread employment through road-building and swamp drainage projects. He further enraged the rich and powerful by providing free textbooks and lunches for all Louisiana school children, in those days a positively revolutionary concept, since many white working class children could not go to school because their parents could not afford to buy books.

In the little bayou town of St. Martinsville, Long made one of the most famous addresses in American political history, the “Evangeline Speech”, one of the most searing indictments of liberal democracy ever delivered by an American political leader. Long was speaking to a crowd of French Cajuns, the despised white minority of Louisiana whom the liberal journalists of that day (as well as this) patronized, mocked, and abused, and whom the wealthy upper class of that day (as well as this) generally considered to be “lower than niggers”:

“…Here beneath this oak; Evangeline waited for her lover, who never came. It is a spot made immortal by Longfellow’s poem, but Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment. Where are the schools you have waited for your children to have, which have never come? Where are the roads and highways that you send your money to build, which are now no nearer than before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and the disabled? Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but they lasted only through a single lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak; have lasted for generations. Give me the chance at last to dry the tears of those who still weep here!” (Long won the election by a landslide.)

As a U. S. Senator Long began to widen his appeal onto a nationwide level in preparation for a presidential bid against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936. Huey built his own national organization through his books Every Man A King and My First 100 Days In The White House, and also through his Share The Wealth Clubs, whose slogan was “Every man a king, but no one wears the crown.”

Long advocated a highly revolutionary and populist program involving not just the restriction of capitalist excesses and better individual conditions for working people, but the actual redistribution of existing wealth, something only Adolf Hitler has ever been able to achieve without mass slaughter. Long’s breathtakingly simple plan was to place a legal limit of one million dollars on annual income for individuals, and as well as a cap of ten million dollars on the individual net worth of any one American citizen. By 1930s standards, and even today, this is more than enough money to maintain an individual and his family in the most magnificent luxury, nor is there really any valid reason why any one person needs more income or wealth than this. But by advocating this idea, Long signed his own death warrant.

On the night of Sunday, September 8th, 1935, Huey Long was shot dead in the corridors of the Louisiana State House by a Jewish doctor named Carl Austin Weiss. The assassin was immediately himself gunned down by a Louisiana state police detective assigned to guard the Senator. Despite several half-hearted attempts by subsequent politically correct authors to prove that Weiss was innocent, a recent exhumation and autopsy on Long’s body (1993) proved that the fatal bullet which killed Long did indeed come from Weiss’s .32 automatic and not, as has been alleged, from the weapon of one of Long’s bodyguards.

No credible motive has ever been unearthed as to why Weiss sat down and ate his Sunday dinner, played with the family dog, and then stuck a pistol in his pocket and went over to the state capital to kill a United States Senator. Born a Jew, Weiss converted to Catholicism and married into an upper-crust French Roman Catholic family. It has been lamely suggested that Weiss was upset at a insult to his father-in-law, a prominent judge, on the part of Senator Long, i.e. that the judge and hence Weiss’s wife had negroid blood in them, but no one has been able to come up with any documentary proof that any such allegation was ever made, by Long or anyone else.

The most likely explanation is that the established power structure had decided that Huey Long must die, and Carl Weiss drew the short straw. It was common knowledge in Louisiana’s elite circles that Standard Oil was plotting to kill Long and had allocated a large sum of money for that purpose. In Huey Long, white working people lost a leader who was arguably the only real friend they have had in any position of power during the past eighty years. To this day, the whites of Louisiana have exhibited a stubborn rebellious streak, such as when they cast huge vote totals for David Duke in recent years. And to this day, any mention of Huey Long’s name will bring thunderous cheers from any gathering of Louisiana working people.

The National Renaissance Party

After World War Two, the first sign of continued white resistance to the New World Order, which was even then beginning to come into being through the United Nations and assorted Judæo-Communist conspiracies, was the emergence in the late 1940s of an anti-Jewish tabloid newspaper called Common Sense, edited by a man named Conde McGinley (1890-1963). For many years in the immediate post-World War Two period, McGinley was the only one who would discuss the Jewish question openly at all. At its height, Common Sense had a circulation of about 50,000 and first published a number of seminal post-war works on the Jewish question such as Col Eugene Sanctuary’s The Talmud Unmasked and the pseudonymous booklet Behind Communism.

Also politically active in the 1950s was the brilliant if somewhat erratic philosopher and author Francis Parker Yockey (1917-1960). Yockey was a former Nuremberg prosecutor who became disgusted with the obvious unfairness and lynch-mob atmosphere of the International Tribunal, as well as the presence of judges from the Soviet Union who were guilty of at least equal if not greater atrocities than the National Socialist accused. Yockey resigned and retired to Brittas Bay in Ireland, where he wrote Imperium, one of the major works of world political theory and required reading for all White Nationalists to this day. Yockey died mysteriously of poisoning while in police custody in San Francisco in 1960, and is widely believed to have been murdered on orders from powerful figures in the American Jewish community.

The first actual White Nationalist group to emerge into public view after the war was the National Renaissance Party (NRP) in 1949, under the leadership of a certified (and certifiable) public accountant named James H. Madole. The NRP was always pretty much restricted to the New York City area, with occasional outbreaks in the Reading, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia areas, and at its height could generally muster about fifteen or twenty of the Same Old Faces for “street rallies” which consisted of the NRP people appearing in costumes and being chased down the street or pelted with garbage and missiles by Jews and Communists, thus setting a pattern of White Nationalist activity which persists to this day.

The NRP had a long and interesting history, and many interesting Movement “characters” served their apprenticeship in the NRP. The party did not disband finally until the early 1980s, some years after the death of its founder Madole. Unfortunately, the NRP milieu also initiated the long and regrettable association both between White Nationalism and homosexuality, and between White Nationalism and Satanism, connections that it would be pointless and self-deceiving to deny. Party founder Madole remained unmarried and lived with his mother in a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment until she died, when Madole was well into middle age. He is the stereotype of the “mini-Führer” who still lives with his parents into his forties. Towards the end of Madole’s life the NRP ceased all street activities, especially after the murder of Captain Andrej Lisanik, a former Czech fighter pilot who defected to the West with his plane, and who was one of the few genuine “hard men” ever attracted to the Movement. The NRP became essentially a newsletter organization reflecting the views of its founder, which had degenerated into pure occult mysticism. After Madole’s death the NRP spluttered along for a while, split into half a dozen two and three-person factions, and then disappeared. Once again, this is not an uncommon fate for White Nationalist organizations. Indeed, it seems to be rather typical.

Closely associated with the NRP was a group called the Free Ezra Pound Committee (FEPC) which was headed by three homosexuals-Eustace Mullins, who was chairman of the FEPC and an NRP member as well as a staff writer for McGinley’s Common Sense, attorney Edward Fleckenstein who was legal counsel of the FEPC whose NRP membership status is unknown, and Matthias Koehl, Jr., who was secretary of the FRPC and not an NRP member. The homosexuality of these three men was no secret, and has long been accepted as fact by all Movement old hands who are “in the know.”

Ezra Pound was an American citizen and a famed poet from the 1920s, who made pro-Axis and anti-Allied radio broadcasts in Italy during World War II. During the middle 1950s, Eustace Mullins and Matt Koehl went on tours down South, the East Coast and Mid-West area to speak out on behalf of the imprisoned Ezra Pound. The Free Ezra Pound committee was formed to work for the release of incarcerated poet who was locked up Soviet-style in St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, D.C., because he had made radio broadcasts during the Second World War denouncing the war and criticizing Roosevelt’s policies.

In 1955, Mullins, Koehl and Fleckenstein were arrested in Middletown, New York on a charge of forcible sodomy, the victim being a teenage boy in the back seat of a car on a county road. This incident is highly obscure, but it had ramifications for the Movement that extend into the present day. Whether by design, through drunkenness or whatever, the three men picked up a hitchhiker, a boy of fifteen, then drove to an isolated spot where they forcibly stripped and cornholed him. In one version of this story recounted by the late Rick Cooper (1946-2006) Fleckenstein was the aggressor, Mullins the observer, and Koehl the driver. After the buggery was finished, the boy was dumped off on the side of the road, but he noted the car license number and reported the incident to his parents.

Here is where odd things start popping up. The parents supposedly filed a police report with the Middletown police and the three queers were arrested, but no one has ever been able to produce conclusive evidence that this incident ever occurred, because all the paperwork and police records have vanished. Eventually, the parents “decided not to press charges.” The incident does seem to have actually occurred; it was sufficiently well known at the time so that National Renaissance Party leader James Madole expelled Eustace Mullins from the NRP due to the embarrassment he caused.

Down through the years, copies of the written police files on this case have been rumored to exist here, there, and everywhere in a kind of Movement Da Vinci Code type of scenario. Mostly these mysterious police files are offered as explanations for the often bizarre and inexplicable behavior of Matt Koehl. Anyone who ever worked with Koehl for any length of time came away with the distinct and ineradicable impression that he was being blackmailed, that certain subordinates seemed to “have some kind of hold on him,” notably a man named David Martin Kerr. There doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for certain illogical and counterproductive things that Koehl did during his tenure as head of the NSWPP, decisions which were clearly at odds with his duty as head of a National Socialist organization and with the ideology he claimed to espouse.

Koehl and Mullins apparently maintained their connection, pardon the expression. In 1959 and 1960, both Mullins and Koehl volunteered to assist Retired Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin in his electoral bid for the office of Vice President of the United States. Crommelin allowed Mullins and Koehl to stay in the basement of his Wetumpka, Alabama, farmhouse as they helped work on his campaign. One day in 1960, Crommelin apparently walked in on Koehl and Mullins engaged in a sodomitic act, and he ordered them off his property. Years later, Crommelin told former deputy commander of the American Nazi Party (ANP), Karl Allen, about the incident. Karl Allen later told former ANP member Christopher Bailey, and Chris then told Rick Cooper in the early 1980s.

Crommelin never made any secret of this incident and willingly discussed it with whoever was interested, and yet it stands as yet another example of the odd veil of secrecy that seems to shelter these early Movement figures such as Koehl, Mullins, and Benny Klassen when it comes to their perverse sexual predilections. Anyone who discusses these things, or attempts to discuss them, can never seem to get any traction on the issue and is usually silenced or victimized shortly thereafter in some odd way or another. Harold Covington has been subjected to years of vicious persecution, slander, and vilification because of his constant refusal to maintain a discreet and respectful silence over acts of perversion and skullduggery within the Movement, and his demands for the imposition of some kind or moral standards or code of conduct on the Movement’s self-appointed “leaders.”

The National States Rights Party

During the 1950s, the National States Rights Party (NSRP) was formed by Georgia attorney Jesse B. Stoner and chiropractor Dr. Edward R. Fields. First headquartered in Savannah, Georgia, the group later moved to Marietta, Georgia where Dr. Fields resides to this day. This party was a strongly reactionary, Christian fundamentalist and segregationist group that advocated total geographic separation of the races and an all-White America, but it eventually became radical enough to be classed as properly White Nationalist. The organization published a tabloid newspaper called The Thunderbolt, the name of which was later changed to The Truth At Last, which became the most influential tabloid in the history of the White Nationalist movement.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the NSRP became the largest White Nationalist organization in the country.J. B.Stoner and other NSRP members often ran for political office, mainly in the South. The Thunderbolt had the largest circulation of any White Nationalist paper in the country and probably the world, except for Willis Carto’s Spotlight, which was more reactionary and conspiratorial in its outlook. The NSRP has had more dues-paying members in its history than all other White Nationalist groups put together. Many well-known Movement figures first got their start in the NSRP.

The Heroic Figure of George Lincoln Rockwell

After the catastrophic defeat and destruction of National Socialist Germany in 1945, there were a small band of activists who kept the NS spirit alive in this country throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. But post-war American National Socialism owes its existence to one man: U. S. Navy Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. One of the few genuinely heroic figures the American racial nationalist movement has produced, Rockwell formed the American Nazi Party in 1958 after years of floundering around the traditional “right wing” and becoming disillusioned with everything he found there.

Rockwell’s method was simple. A supporter gave Rockwell a large Swastika wall banner taken from National Socialist Germany during the war, and one day in 1958, Rockwell simply pulled side the curtains of a picture window in his home on Williams Street in Arlington, Virginia to reveal the flag with its ancient Aryan symbol to the passing world. That night a gang of drunken hoodlums pulled up outside and hurled bricks and bottles through the picture window, the first in a long series of acts of persecution and terrorism which have been directed against American National Socialists. In the coming years Rockwell would be arrested, jailed, beaten, shot at, fined, and confined in a mental institution because he dared to stand up for his constitutional rights as an American citizen to express dissenting viewpoints on unauthorized subjects.

Commander Rockwell established for the American Nazi Party the first Four Phase Program. For a political plan developed in 1958, it showed remarkable prescience, and had Commander Rockwell lived and been better served by those who claimed to be his friends and supporters, it is possible that his program would have taken the Party much farther than anyone thought possible.

Phase One was the most spectacular and in many respects the most misunderstood phase, a misunderstanding that persists to this day. It involved a series of flamboyant and sometimes downright bizarre publicity stunts such as dressing Rockwell himself and small numbers of supporters in quasi-Third Reich style uniforms and then picketing the White House; trying to conduct chaotic open-air rallies on the Washington Monument grounds; starting a riot when Rockwell tried to speak in Times Square in New York to a mob of thousands of screaming, frothing Jews; dressing up in gorilla costumes and riding around New York posing as the “Lower Volta delegation” to the United Nations; donning gorilla suits again and running through the 1964 Democratic convention yelling “Ah’s de Mississippi delegation and ah demands mah seat!”; riding through the South in a Swastika-spangled “Hate Bus”, etc. When you hear Movement people today speak of “Phase One tactics”, it is this kind of rambunctious and amusing but not really productive activity that is meant.

Briefly stated, Rockwell was faced in the 1950s and early 1960s with an urgent need to break through the news blackout of all pro-White activity, the media boycott of all pro-White viewpoints, at any cost-even the cost of making the Party look ridiculous through blatant publicity stunts.

It is sometimes difficult for older comrades to remember, and of course younger comrades never knew, that as bad as the left-wing liberal bias in the news media is today, in Rockwell’s day it was even worse. Whereas today the technological developments such as the internet, computer bulletin boards, CB radios, fax machines, cable access etc. have to a certain degree undermined the power structure’s grip on the nation’s communications, in those days there were only three networks and the major newspapers were even more completely Jewish-owned and controlled than today. The entire communications industry marched in grim lockstep, the Great Society ruled, the State of Israel was the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and could do no wrong, blacks were a noble and sensitive race of persecuted paragons, and anybody who suggested differently simply was not allowed to be heard. It was essential that Rockwell smash this paper curtain of silence.

However, it must not be thought that George Lincoln Rockwell was nothing but street theater. He was also a brilliant writer and organizer. In 1960 he wrote his seminal work In Hoc Signo Vinces, the first National Socialist polemic in the English language since 1945. In 1962 he co-founded the World Union of National Socialists and co-authored the Cotswolds Declaration, the fundamental statement of the National Socialist world view in post-war times. His books This Time The World and White Power are today just as fascinating and instructive reading as they were when they were written.

Rockwell was also a riveting and charismatic speaker, as can be heard to this day in recordings of his famous addresses at Brown University and taped excerpts from his interviews, many of which are available from various Movement sources. Today collectors pay fabulous sums for original copies of his magazine, The Rockwell Report, and his “Boat Ticket Back to Africa” is the single most popular racial nationalist item ever created by any right-wing or racialist group; millions of copies have been printed and distributed down the years.

By 1966 the ANP was at last beginning to break through to large numbers of white people. In that year the Party’s Chicago unit organized massive white resistance to a physical invasion, massively backed by organized liberalism, which Martin Luther King spearheaded into the various ethnic neighborhoods on the city’s South Side. Mobs of young men wearing White Power T-shirts and Swastika armbands battled against the NAACP monkoids and their police protectors. The resistance was so fierce that it caused King to remark that “he would rather lead ten marches into Selma, Alabama than one march into Gage Park in Chicago.”

In early 1967 Rockwell obtained major funding from a cartel of wealthy right-wing businessmen, including the Hunt brothers in Texas, and he used this money to print and publish the book White Power and also the newspaper of the same name. In a historic staff conference held in Arlington in June of that year, Commander Rockwell inaugurated a new direction which would take the Party out of the “Hollywood” phase and more into the American mainstream. The plan was eventually to jettison the uniforms and the Phase One activity. Even Rockwell recognized that they were a temporary tactic, and they had served their purpose.

The Fields Lawsuit

In 1961, in an event that would have a lethal effect on Rockwell’s legacy, Matthias Koehl, Jr. joined the ANP, resigning from the NSRP of which he was a member at the time.

The NSRP was losing members and financial contributors because of the ANP, and Rockwell’s high public profile was discerned as a threat to the NSRP’s income and stature within the Movement. The resentment of the NSRP leaders built up until finally Dr. Ed Fields, with the backing ofJ. B.Stoner, attacked Rockwell in The Thunderbolt of August 1962 as being some sort of FBI collaborator, being on the Jewish payroll, being a phony patriot and being a Communist. Rockwell demanded a retraction from Fields but Fields refused. Consequently, Rockwell filed a lawsuit against Dr. Edward R. Fields for slander in late 1964 or early 1965, CIVIL ACTION NO. 64-570. Letters went back and forth between Rockwell and Matt H. Murphy, Ed Fields’ attorney in the case.

Before the trial date, Murphy realized that Fields’ case was weak and so told Fields that if the case went to court, it would cost Fields $2,500 minimum, even if he won the case. Rockwell, however, offered to settle the case out of court by asking that Fields print a retraction of his (Fields’) attack on Rockwell in a future issue of The Thunderbolt and pay Rockwell $1,000 which was even a bargain in those days. Fields capitulated, gave Rockwell the $1,000 and printed a retraction in The Thunderbolt of October 1965. During these legal proceedings, J. B. Stoner backed Dr. Fields against Rockwell.

This case is interesting because of the lessons learned, in bad publicity and expense. Both Rockwell and Dr. Fields later admitted that it was both unethical and bad tactics to take Movement disputes into the courtrooms of the very Zionist system that the Movement is supposedly dedicated to destroying. Ever since then, the use of malicious and baseless private lawsuits in order to pursue Movement feuds and private agendas has always been considered one of the earmarks of the government or Jewish agent provocateur.

The Murder of George Lincoln Rockwell

On January 1, 1967, George Lincoln Rockwell changed the name of the American Nazi Party (ANP) to the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP) because the old name pertained to American workers whereas the new name pertained to all White people. He also wanted to remove the controversial and much-misunderstood word “Nazi” from the name of the organization, replacing it with the more accurate and dignified term “National Socialist.” Rockwell and the NSWPP had reached their highest peak to date at this time. There was a lot of activity to report in the NSWPP’s publications White Power and NS Bulletin, donations were good and Rockwell was booked well in advance for speaking engagements at colleges and universities throughout the country.

Commander George Lincoln Rockwell was murdered in Arlington on Friday, August 25th, 1967, under circumstances which have never been satisfactorily cleared up, but which point to at least peripheral involvement on the part of Matthias Koehl, the man who succeeded him as leader of the Party.

Rockwell’s death was unquestionably the result of a conspiracy and was not the act of the usual “lone gunman” who mysteriously appears on cue to remove public figures whom the Jewish power structure finds inconvenient. While it is likely that the individual convicted of the murder, a former Party member named John Patler, was indeed the trigger man who shot down the Commander in an Arlington shopping center, what has never been satisfactorily explained was precisely how Patler knew where Rockwell would be and when, in order to intercept and ambush his victim. It is clear from any objective examination of the evidence that Patler had at least one accomplice inside the old Party headquarters on Wilson Boulevard, called “Hatemonger Hill”. Patler was convicted after only the most cursory police investigation, received the lightest possible prison sentence allowable under Virginia law, and was released after spending only a few years in comfortable, minimum-security facilities.

The whole murder case has been buried for years, and several journalistic and literary attempts to re-open it have been met with a stonewalling and in some cases with outright threats and intimidation from official sources, which have frightened the would-be authors into silence.

The NSWPP Under Matt Koehl

The events immediately surrounding the death of Commander Rockwell are very murky. The NSWPP members allegedly went through the protocol of selecting a new leader, but many key members were not consulted. The majority of the members present in Arlington selected Major Matthias Koehl to succeed as the new NSWPP leader.

Koehl later claimed to be Rockwell’s hand-picked successor and “Deputy Commander,” but no official appointment to this particular post over Rockwell’s signature has ever been produced and so far as anyone recalls, Koehl never used such a title when Rockwell was alive. The reference to Koehl as “Deputy Commander” on the last page of White Power is a later addendum which does not appear in first editions of the book. There have been persistent rumors down through the years that on the night of Commander Rockwell’s murder, Captain Robert Lloyd and Dr. William Pierce broke into Commander Rockwell’s safe and destroyed his political testament. It is not known what this document contained.

Koehl managed to keep the NSWPP in existence for another fifteen years, but his tenure is now generally recognized as a disaster for American National Socialism, due not only to his introverted and bureaucratic personality, but also due to the fact that it became apparent down through the years that Koehl had a number of distasteful skeletons in his closet.

During his tenure with the NSWPP, Dr. William L. Pierce published several issues of the theoretical journal National Socialist World; generally considered the best post-1945 NS ideological publication, reprints are still circulated in the Movement to this day. The Party under Koehl played a minor part in the Watergate affair when it was revealed by then NSWPP Lieutenant Joe Tommasi that the unit members had been hired by the Nixon re-election committee to re-register Wallace voters and thus get Wallace’s American Party knocked off the ballot in California. In the last hurrah of the old Rockwell spirit, a wild attack on a left-wing rally at the 1972 Republican convention in Miami added to the Party’s roll of daring exploits when 24 Stormtroopers seized the platform and prevented Jane Fonda from speaking for over an hour. The Party also lent practical help to the Irish-American community in South Boston during the 1974 school busing crisis.

If Koehl’s personality was not enough to cause massive discontent and resignations, Koehl’s homosexual background was, and Koehl’s background was no secret within the NSWPP membership, especially among the old timers. In addition, some of Koehl’s fund-raising practices were controversial and alienated many people, notably his auctioning off of small matchbox-sized increments of Commander Rockwell’s ashes under the slogan “Get Your Piece of the Rock.” Koehl later managed to escape investigation and indictment for securities fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling something he called “Victory Bonds” payable after “the day of National Socialist victory.” An SEC investigation is usually something impossible to shake off or divert; with all their wealth and power, big Jew stock swindlers like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken and tycoons like Conrad Black were unable to do so. Yet the SEC investigation against Koehl was quietly dropped. It is not known why, but anyone who can make an SEC investigation go away obviously has some pretty heavy juice working for him somewhere along the line.

In the mid-1980s Rick Cooper was able to get hold of a copy of Matt Koehl’s birth certificate, and he discovered that while his father was Romanian, probably of German descent (there are many Saxon Germans in Romania) his mother’s maiden name was Ruth Bierbaum, which is about as Jewish-sounding a name as it’s possible for a woman to have. Since Ruth Bierbaum was presumably born in Romania as well, at a time when the country was almost one third Jewish, it has been impossible to establish Koehl’s actual racial antecedents, but his swarthy skin and greasy hair were always noteworthy within the Movement. There is an excellent probability that Koehl’s mother was Jewish, which would make him Jewish under rabbinic law, since descent is determined on the female side because “no one can truly know the father save the mother.” (A fancy Talmudic way of saying that Jewish women are such sluts that the mother is the only parent who can be reliably determined.) Plus there was the strong suspicion, never completely dissipated, that Koehl was somehow involved in Rockwell’s murder, as well as the constantly hovering rumors about the 1955 New York buggery case, and the well-known fact of Koehl’s open aversion to women.

On Labor Day of 1979, Koehl disbanded the NSWPP Stormtroops, a decision which Koehl knew would cost the Party activists and supporters. The White Power newspaper was published more and more infrequently, until its last issue of #109 in 1984. To make a long story short, Koehl embezzled all the NSWPP money, liquidated the Party’s once extensive real estate holdings in the form of headquarters buildings, kept the money from the property sales and liquidated the gold stocks and certificates of deposit accounts in order to finance a personal retirement estate in New Berlin, Wisconsin, which he placed in fanatical supporter Arthur Beneker’s name.

Currently, Koehl lives on the aforementioned 80-acre (not 88-acre) estate described by Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Sentinel staff writer Tim Cuprisin as “quite nice.” There are two structures on this property, a smaller house (21288 Barton Road, West) that can be seen from the road and then Koehl’s private domain (21200 Barton Road, West) which is the larger house which cannot be seen readily from the road but which is reached by following a gravel road past the smaller house, both of which are reportedly uninsured wooden structures. Now aged 72, in recent years Koehl has apparently become senile, and developed a bizarre mystical obsession with the number 8; much of his correspondence consists of dissertations on the number 8 and strange origami-like designs drawn by hand or computer using the number 8.

Ironically, it was one of Koehl’s most loyal supporters, former NSWPP Tracy-Stockton Unit leader Paul Raymond, who, almost 15 years ago, stated that he suspected Koehl would one day “close down the NSWPP, take all the money and go retire somewhere.”

To rationalize Koehl’s destruction of the NSWPP to Party supporters, Koehl insisted that the Leader never meant for the Movement to be political after World War Two, which according to Koehl is why the NSWPP under his leadership failed. The NS Bulletin, a special newsletter for members and supporters, was expanded to include propaganda for the masses and is still published infrequently.

Koehl was cordially loathed by a good number of NSWPP people, and when he was “elected” a good percentage of the Party’s members, Stormtroopers, activists and financial supporters refused to have anything to do with him and dropped out. Many of the loyal NSWPP members resigned and dropped out totally from the White Nationalist Movement, preferring not to align themselves with any phony White Nationalist group or any “sneaky Nazi” group such as the NSRP. However, some dedicated NSWPP members resigned to form their own National Socialist groups or similar groups with different names. Foremost among these was the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) centered in Chicago, of which more will be related at the proper time.

The Birth Of The National Alliance

During the summer of 1970, a man named Wilfried Kernbach approached Dr. William L. Pierce and gave Dr. Pierce incriminating evidence against Matt Koehl, evidence that was stolen from the home of an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) associate or member who had infiltrated the National Renaissance Party over 10 years previously. This evidence is believed to have been photocopies of the 1955 sodomy arrest file from New York. (Madole always claimed he had copies but for whatever reason, would never make them public.)

While Koehl was leader of the NSWPP, he expelled any member who spoke of his homosexual background on the grounds of “character assassination” and “rumor mongering.” However, there still remained a few members, supporters and other associates of the NSWPP who kept silent about Koehl’s homosexual background so as to not damage the NSWPP any more than had been done already. It was suggested to Dr. Pierce that he present this evidence to Koehl and then ask Koehl to resign due to health or some other reason, so as to not cause suspicion about the NSWPP in the public eye. Koehl said he would sleep on the matter.

Dr. Pierce went to his house that evening but, when he returned to the NSWPP headquarters building the next morning, Koehl had instructed the duty officer to ban Dr. Pierce from the building permanently. A short time after that, two of Koehl’s blindly loyal backers, Richard Biedermann and Captain Chris Vidnevich, confronted Dr. Pierce at his house, informed him that he was expelled from the NSWPP, and demanded with threats of violence that Dr. Pierce return the things that he had “taken” from the NSWPP headquarters. Since Pierce was well known as a physical coward who was afraid of being struck or threatened or shouted at in a loud voice, he crumpled and handed over all of the Koehl material. Thus was born the National Alliance.

What Wilfried Kernbach told Rick Cooper in 1982 was that Dr. Pierce was given a man’s job to do, and he handled the situation like a boy scout. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last.

The Long Twilight

Every political movement has low points. The years that followed the death of George Lincoln Rockwell was such a low point in the history of American White Nationalism.

There were some bright spots, to be sure. In 1978 the National Socialist Party of America, a breakaway faction of the old NSWPP comprising the more dedicated members who had tired of the corruption and incompetence of the Arlington leadership, orchestrated and carried to a successful conclusion the famous “Operation Skokie”. This resulted in worldwide publicity and eventually a United States Supreme Court decision that specifically protected National Socialist insignia and speech under the First Amendment.

Harold A. Covington of the NSPA received 34% of the vote in the 1978 Republican primary for North Carolina State Senate. In 1979 NSPA members were involved with the Ku Klux Klan in the Greensboro incident where a mob of Communist Workers’ Party members attacked a White motorcade on a public street in Greensboro, North Carolina. A gun battle broke out in which five of the Reds were slain, yet all the Klan and NS defendants were eventually acquitted. In 1980, Covington polled 43% of the vote in the 1980 Republican primary for the office of North Carolina Attorney General.

The Order Rebellion

During the 1980s the tragic and heroic saga of the Order took place, The first armed insurrection against the United States government since 1865, which culminated in the death of Robert Mathews on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. The Order were heavily influenced by National Socialism and the works of Commander Rockwell, as well as the Christian Identity religious message and the Northwest independence idea.

The Order was founded Robert Jay Mathews in late September, 1983 at Mathews’ farm near Metaline Falls, Washington. A fundamental goal of The Order was revolution against the government of the United States and the establishment of a White Homeland in the Pacific Northwest. Their first effort at armed struggle was admittedly unspectacular, the robbery of a sex shop which netted them less than $400. Afterwards, the Order were much more effective, committing several lucrative bank robberies as well as bombing some porno theaters and synagogues. The Order ran a large counteoperation, and executed a series of armored car hesists, including one in Ukiah, California that netted $3.8 million.

After being arrested on counterfeiting charges, the infamous informer and traitor Thomas Martinez informed FBI agents of the group’s membership roll and its methods. Based on this information, authorities were able to track down Mathews in December, 1984. He was living in a cabin on Whidbey Island, Washington and he refused to surrender. During a shootout, the cabin became engulfed in flames and Mathews perished.

Ultimately, ten members of The Order were tried and convicted under Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statutes. In a separate trial, three other members of The Order were tried and convicted of assassinating the obnoxious Jew talk show host Alan Berg in Denver, Colorado, on June 18th, 1984. Berg a vile liberal even by Jewish standards who made a practice of baiting “white supremacists” and who had it coming in spades.

The Order also provided, for the first time, some serious financing for established racial groups. Robert Mathews delivered approximately $300,000 apiece in money stolen from an armored car robbery to Dr. William L. Pierce of the National Alliance and Frazier Glenn Miller of the North Carolina-based White Patriot Party. Pierce used the money to buy a 345-acre plot of land in rural West Virginia and build himself a traditional “right-wing racist compound” on it, eventually the most extensive and well-appointed example of its kind. Miller used the money to buy uniforms and thousands of Confederate flags for his groups’ street activities, huge arsenals of guns and ammunition which were never actually directed against the racial enemy, and huge volumes of whiskey and beer to keep himself and his “staff” (his hard core of drinking buddies) intoxicated at all times.

The Self-Promotion of David Duke

“David Duke has been a professional racist for his entire adult life,” wrote Tyler Bridges, author of The Rise of David Duke, a biography of Duke’s early years. “He deeply believes his anti-Semitic political philosophy, but it has also been a way for him to get money from his followers. It is how he makes a living.”

Duke has spent virtually his entire career living off the kindness of strangers-people who mistakenly thought he was championing their cause for no other reason than a desire to help whites. He sold and resold supposedly secret mailing lists, raised money under false pretenses, and lived off the proceeds of fund-raising for at least 10 different political campaigns. He womanized shamelessly and spent thousands on cosmetic surgery for himself, including liposuction to his buttocks. From his formative years as a supposed National Socialist right up to the present, David Duke’s foremost concern always has been David Duke. For 30 years now, America’s best-known white supremacist has engaged in a striking pattern of financial chicanery and self-serving rip-offs.

Duke Ernest Duke has one paramount skill which he has exhibited throughout his whole life: an incredible ability to re-invent himself. He does it every few years. From National Socialist, to Klansman, to suit-and-tie-racist, to state legislator and political wheeler-dealer, to quasi-intellectual author, to globe-trotting celebrity collecting meaningless honorary degrees from Eastern European universities no one ever heard of, to “prison martyr” to “elder statesman of the Movement,” Duke has packed a dozen lifetimes of bushwah into one.

Duke’s refusal to be fettered by any considerations of truth or honesty, combined with a total, complete, and utter shamelessness unparalleled even in the notably shameless White movement, have made him the Movement’s premier operator and public figure. Along with Dr. William L. Pierce, Duke can probably be considered as being one of the Movement’s success stories in the purely personal sense. He has lived a life of excitement, adventure, and luxury, and all on somebody else’s dime. Unlike Ed Fields, who practiced as a chiropractor for some years, and Dr. William L. Pierce who at least did a couple or years as an assistant college professor in the 1960s, at age 57 David Duke can honestly say that he has never worked a single day in his life. Duke has been in more tight corners than a feather duster. He has stolen what has to be millions of dollars down through the years, and he’s only done one short prison sentence. No one else in the Movement can match that record except for Pierce, who may have stolen slightly less but who never did a day behind bars.

David Ernest Duke began his racial career while a college student, as a member of Matt Koehl’s NSWPP for a brief period of time. Duke has always tried to disavow or deny this period in his life, but his enemies still to this day glory in publishing a photo of Duke taken in 1971 while he was picketing the student union at LSU, wearing a brown shirt and Swastika armband. When confronted with this photo in circumstances where he can’t slither out of it, Duke harrumphs and says his Nazi period was a “youthful mistake.”

During one of his trips to Arlington, Virginia, in about 1971, Duke stopped by to visit Dr. Pierce of the National Alliance across Interstate 95 from the NSWPP headquarters. According to Rick Cooper, Dr. Pierce offered to give David Duke the information regarding Matt Koehl’s homosexual background if Duke would publish this information in his Klan publication at the time, The Crusader. Duke refused, for reasons which remain obscure; why he would wish to maintain the secret of a highly placed homosexual in the Movement is unknown. After visiting Dr. Pierce, Duke visited Matt Koehl at the NSWPP headquarters.

Subsequently, Duke spoke with an NSWPP duty officer, James N. Mason, and told Mason of Dr. Pierce’s offer. Jim Mason, years later, told this to Cooper who then wrote to Duke, asking for an account, confirmation or denial that Dr. Pierce made such an offer. Duke never replied.

David Duke first got caught with his hand in the till in 1972, shortly after he temporarily dropped out of Louisiana State University to devote himself to full-time neo-Nazi activism, according to Bridges’ book. Police arrested Duke and three others for allegedly raising $500 for George Wallace’s presidential campaign and pocketing the money. The charges were dropped after an influential Duke mentor convinced Wallace campaign officials to change their story.

By 1974, Duke had founded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and it wasn’t long before he became the media’s favorite Klan leader. Vowing to modernize the Klan, he urged his acolytes to “get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms.” After appearing on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow talk show, he was able to use his newfound celebrity to recruit Louis Beam, Don Black and Tom Metzger, who each went on to play key roles in America’s White Nationalist movement.

During this same period, starting with a failed 1975 bid for the Louisiana state senate, Duke began a series of political campaigns. It appears certain they were at least partly funded with money taken from his Klan group’s coffers.

Before long, several of Duke’s most intimate allies began to grow weary of his self-serving personality and his constant, unquenchable greed for money. William Pierce, who Duke had begun corresponding with when the Louisianan was still a teenager, admonished Duke to quit taking credit for an important Pierce pamphlet, Who Runs the Media? Others in the racist movement angrily responded to Duke’s notorious womanizing, which was almost pathological. Duke hit on any female he saw, literally within a matter of minutes of meeting her-single women, married women, female reporters, waitresses, women he saw on the street, it didn’t matter. His sexual obsession approached the medical condition known as satyriasis. Word soon got out that no one could trust their wives, daughters, sisters, or for that matter mothers alone in David Duke’s presence, and many Duke functions to this day turn into an elaborate dance or game to try and keep Duke away from any attractive females present.

Duke’s shady financial dealings grew harder and harder to conceal as well. As the 1970s drew to a close, with growing numbers of followers deserting his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Duke was accused by several Klan officials of stealing his organization’s money. “Duke is nothing but a con artist,” Jack Gregory, Duke’s Florida state leader, told the Clearwater (Fla.) Sun after his boss allegedly refused to turn over proceeds from a series of 1979 Klan rallies to the Knights.

In 1979, after his first, abortive run for president (as a Democrat) and a series of highly publicized violent Klan incidents, Duke quietly incorporated the nonprofit National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP) in an attempt to leave the baggage of the Klan behind. But before he made it public, he contacted Bill Wilkinson, a former Duke underling who now headed a rival Klan group.

Duke invited Wilkinson to a remote Alabama farmhouse where he offered to sell for $35,000 his secret membership list-a cardinal offense for a Klan leader who had promised to keep his members’ names secret at all costs. Wilkinson had feigned interest, but secretly invited two reporters to witness the transaction. Duke and his disciple, Don Black, were caught on video and audiotape as they handed a brown paper bag filled with index cards with his members’ names to Wilkinson. Three days later, after Duke’s sellout had received national publicity, he publicly announced the formation of the NAAWP, attacking Wilkinson as he did so. He said he was trying to get away from “the Hollywood image” of the Klan.

In May of 1981, David Duke became involved in one of the most bizarre episodes in the history of the White Nationalist movement, and considering the incredible profusion of bizarre incidents in our Movement, that’s saying a lot. This was the abortive invasion of the Caribbean island of Dominica by a team of “mercenaries” recruited from Canadian organized crime, as well as from Harold Covington’s North Carolina NSPA unit, all of whom were arrested on the word of an informer while passing through Duke’s New Orleans turf on their way to the “invasion.” Duke’s exact role in this bizarre fiasco has never been completely explained, but Duke was apparently the liaison between former [black] Dominican Prime Minister Patrick John and the “hit team.” John was seeking to overthrow the government of Eugenia Charles, and in exchange for the band of hired guns provided by Duke agreed to build a casino on the island for the Canadian mob. Presumably, somewhere along the line, Duke would have gotten a cut, or at least a line of credit. Duke’s fascination with Caribbean casino gambling appears to have roots a lot farther back than the incidents he eventually went to prison for.

Duke slithered out of this one by co-operating fully with federal prosecutors and testifying fully and extensively before a grand jury, spilling his guts under a grant of immunity. Afterward, as with so much else that is shameful and treacherous in Duke’s past, this episode was simply air-brushed out of the picture.

(Conversely, Harold Covington, who was only peripherally implicated and who had advised strongly against the whole hare-brained thing from the beginning, took a far more honorable course when he refused immunity, took the Fifth Amendment on all questions, and at substantial personal risk to himself refused to testify even to his own name when he was subpoenaed by the New Orleans grand jury.)

Tyler Bridges, who was then an investigative reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, revealed in 1989 that Duke secretly owned two companies. The first, Americana Books, sold racial books from his legislative office, in the basement of his home, which was technically illegal, although admittedly Louisiana legislators have always had a very laid-back attitude on legal matters. The second, Business Consultant & Enterprises (BC&E), was set up by Duke in 1978. Tax returns filed by the NAAWP showed that it had paid BC&E $119,625 from 1983 to 1988 for “mailing list maintenance.”

Duke’s short-lived 1979-1980 campaign for president, Bridges revealed, also had paid BC&E $19,900 to rent space in Duke’s home. “In sum,” Bridges writes in his book, “BC&E – i.e., Duke – from 1983 to 1988 [when Duke ran for president on the far-right Populist Party ticket] received $141,000 from the NAAWP and Duke’s [two] presidential campaigns.” The arrangement was apparently legal.

In 1987, Duke and Don Black traveled to Forsyth County, Ga., to take advantage of simmering racial tension between blacks and the Klan. After they were arrested and charged with reckless conduct during a shouting match with a black man, Duke set up a defense fund for himself that had an almost identical name to another fund set up to aid 62 white supremacists who’d been arrested earlier. After raising at least $8,000 from backers who mistakenly believed they were helping the 62 men arrested with Duke and Black, Duke ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge. He was fined a grand total of $55.

It was in the late 1980s that Duke began a series of more serious campaigns for political office. He had enough political savvy to understand that parading around with a swastika armband, as he had done during his college days, would be counterproductive. So he toned down the vitriol and avoided the crudest rhetoric. He also dyed his hair blond and visited a plastic surgeon to reduce the size of his nose. A chin implant altered his profile and chemical peels removed bags and wrinkles around his eyes. On at least two occasions, Duke also had liposuction to his buttocks, since obviously we can’t have a Great White Leader with a fat ass, now, can we?

Duke’s 1988 Populist Party presidential campaign was a miserable failure, with him taking just 48,267 votes – 0.05 percent of the total. But he was not discouraged. And in 1989, masquerading as a born-again Republican, Duke ran for a seat in the Louisiana state legislature and narrowly beat a complacent incumbent. Up to then, a nose job was the only job that Duke had ever had. It was the beginning of David Duke’s heyday, the period when he would come to the attention of millions of people worldwide as he ran a series of high-profile political campaigns. In late 1989, just months after winning his state campaign, he announced his candidacy in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. Over the course of the next year, he would raise a remarkable $2.4 million, part of it through a political advertisement that asked supporters to call a fee-charging 900 number.

In the end, he won 607,391 votes, or almost 60 percent of the white vote, but lost the primary. Duke regrouped almost immediately, running for Louisiana governor against Edwin Edwards in a campaign marked by one of the most remarkable bumper stickers in political history: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important,” devised by anti-Duke forces urging a vote for Edwards. Running in a crowded field, Duke, came within two percentage points of Edwards, forcing him into a run-off. In the run-off, Duke captured 671,009 votes, but lost to Edwards by 22 percentage points.

During the gubernatorial campaign, Duke held rally after rally, passing large plastic buckets through the crowds to raise cash-a method of fund-raising that is illegal under both Louisiana and Federal law, which requires that officials issue cash receipts and keep records of donations. After a lengthy investigation, Duke was fined $1,111.

Next, Duke announced with great fanfare that he would seek the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 1992. But his campaign fizzled as most potential supporters backed right-wing commentator Patrick Buchanan, who espoused many of the same positions as Duke without carrying his baggage. Of course, Duke never stood a chance, but that wasn’t the point-he came out ahead no matter how he fared at the ballot box. According to Bridges’ book, Duke told an assistant that by running for president he hoped to double the size of his computerized mailing list, which by now included 125,000 names. The list would be the source of future income.

Over the years, Duke would run for political office no less than 10 times. After a while, the spectacle of Duke as a perennial candidate-a man who seemed more interested in campaigning, and living off his campaigns, than in actually winning-started to wear thin on voters. But he still wielded considerable influence in Louisiana politics. In some cases, merely dipping his toe into a political campaign gave him leverage and bargaining power with other candidates.

After briefly entering the Louisiana governor’s race in 1995, Duke dropped out and endorsed Mike Foster, a candidate who would go on to win the election. Duke’s endorsement may well have given the edge to Foster, who had cut a back-room deal with the former imperial wizard, ostensibly to rent his mailing list for some $152,000. One Duke aide, Kenny Knight, told Talk magazine that he had met Foster secretly to work out details of the deal. Knight claimed that Foster agreed to Duke’s three conditions: to switch from the Democratic to the Republican Party; to make his first act as governor the abolition of the state affirmative action program; and to never attack Duke. Knight said that Foster agreed to all three conditions. For his part, Foster did switch parties when he announced his candidacy, and then went on to eliminate the affirmative action program shortly after taking office.

Foster, who never used the list during his 1995 campaign, had attempted to hide his payment to Duke, routing it through intermediaries. After it was finally disclosed in 1999, the state Board of Ethics fined Foster $20,000 for failing to disclose the deal. Duke, meanwhile, was confronted by federal agents who asked him why he had failed to pay taxes on the income. Duke claimed his accountant had made a mistake, and hurriedly paid up his long-overdue taxes and penalties.

The high price of the mailing list-newspapers pointed out that it sold for much more than such lists normally do-raised suspicions about what it was that Foster had actually bought. Some critics suggested Duke was being paid off to stay out of the race. In any event, a federal grand jury looking into Duke’s finances queried him two times in 1999 about the mailing list he had sold to Foster. Instead of answering, Duke took the Fifth Amendment.

Duke, realizing he was a target, was worried. He confided to Lori Eden, his girlfriend at the time, that he had lost at least $50,000 at the gaming tables. “I would ask him if he wanted to go to the casino,” Eden told the Intelligence Report, “and he would say, ‘No, I can’t, because the FBI may see me, and they’re on me.’ “He knew way ahead of time that he was going to get in trouble. He made a comment to me once, ‘I do love you, but I’m going to jail.’ He also tried to hint that he wouldn’t be around. What he meant was that he was going to Russia,” added Eden, who at the time was a 33-year-old swimsuit and lingerie model with her own adult Web site. “He knew they were coming after him. So he made sure to get the hell out of here before they actually picked him up to question him.”

Eden, who would break up with Duke when he left for Russia, said that at one point in the relationship she had a pregnancy scare. Duke, a self-described pro-lifer who has railed publicly against abortion for whites for years, suggested that they travel to Paris to get her the abortion pill that was then illegal in America. “He said, I know, I’ve been through this before,’“ she recounted. “He also said that it would kill him politically.”

It was during the 1990s, specifically between 1993 and 1999, that Duke was engaged in a long-running rip-off of his followers. FBI agents reported that Duke and his colleagues cooked up a series of false excuses for beseeching the faithful for evermore funds. In one letter, for instance, he claimed he was facing financial ruin and the loss of his home. In fact, he sold his Metairie home at a profit shortly after that letter and bought a larger residence in Mandeville, La. His staff “would laugh at the often untruthful excuses Duke concocted,” an FBI affidavit said. Some of the proceeds from these bogus direct mail appeals were deposited in a bank account that was under the name of an ex-girlfriend, but controlled by Duke, who maintained “in excess of 30 credit cards,” according to the FBI. During just one 16-month period, Duke collected $230,000 in small checks from his supporters.

Duke was simultaneously undergoing something of a political metamorphosis-or more accurately, a dropping of the mask. Since leaving the Klan, he had worked endlessly to put his Klan and especially his National Socialist past behind him. But in 1998, he self-published his autobiography, entitled My Awakening. The book, which Duke enthusiastically predicted would “change the course of history,” did nothing of the kind. One reviewer said of My Awakening, “It’s all right, the political and racial parts of it, although it’s all been said before and better by others. Large sections of it are basically just narcissistic bullshit with Duke breaking his arm patting himself on the back. It certainly doesn’t justify or ameliorate the harm Duke has done to the Movement with his constant financial and sexual misbehavior.”

This did not preclude Duke from starting in early 2000 the National Organization for European American Rights (NOFEAR), which purported to be a group devoted to pursuing “civil rights” for whites, not to hating anyone. The next year, after a sporting goods company sued Duke over the use of its name, NOFEAR would be renamed the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO).

On Nov. 16, 2000, a dozen federal agents raided Duke’s two-story home in Mandeville and carted away 22 boxes of papers, computer discs, credit card records and other documents. Roy Armstrong, his long-time bodyguard and chauffeur, was there during the search and termed it a mere “fishing expedition.” But Duke wasn’t about to be reeled in-he was in Russia on his fourth visit, and he would not return to the United States until reaching a plea agreement in December 2002.

From a safe distance, Duke insisted on his innocence. “Make no mistake about it,” he would write in a NOFEAR newsletter, “this probe is nothing more than a political assassination on the part of government officials who are seeking to silence my voice on our European heritage and rights.” In the meantime, he said, he was moving to Moscow “to struggle against people of other colors and Jews.”

It is clear that Duke understood perfectly that he was in trouble back home. That’s why he spent the next two years traveling in Russia and throughout Europe, giving speeches and hobnobbing with other extremists. For some reason which was never explained, the government never issued a federal fugitive warrant or asked the State Department to cancel his passport. Overall, he sought to give the impression that he was devoted to building a transnational movement. The reality, however, was that Duke spent most of his time selling his books, meeting privately with prominent rightists, and giving talks.

He was also desperately seeking a Russian or Eastern European woman willing to marry him, in order to obtain permanent citizenship in Russia or some other Eastern European country, before his passport expired and he was forced to either return to the United States or commit a clear federal felony by being abroad without a valid travel document, thus handing the government a handle on him and allowing them to issue a federal fugitive warrant. However, for once, Duke’s magnetic sex appeal seems to have failed him. Duke complained to his followers back home that while young and beautiful candidates for matrimony abounded, none of them wanted to remain in Mother Russia with him. Hard-headed, practical and every bit as mercenary as he was, those Russian beauties were all looking for a green card to come to America, not shelter a fugitive American back home in Bumfucksk with no solid source of income.

By late 2002, with his passport almost expired, Duke’s attorney was negotiating a plea agreement for his client, who had grown tired of being a nationalist without a nation. When news of the plea became public, Vince Breeding, national director of EURO, said Duke was pleading because he would surely lose in court at the hands of a mostly black jury. This is probably true. It is also certainly true that Duke was guilty as sin of embezzlement and monumental deceit and dishonesty, and he would have been convicted by an all-White jury as well. EURO communiqués painted the group’s founder as “a living martyr for our cause.” (Breeding, the former lead guitarist in a Satanic rock band called Acheron, was later expelled from Duke’s EURO organization when he was caught running an internet porno operation off the group’s servers–and not giving Duke a cut.)

On Dec. 14th, 2002, Duke slunk into a federal courthouse in New Orleans and pleaded guilty to tax evasion and mail fraud–ripping off hundreds of thousands of dollars from earnest white supremacist donors who thought they were helping Duke to save the white race. Instead, as Duke admitted in the allocution for his guilty pleas, he had cynically raised money by using a series of lies-and then blown it at casino craps tables. Under the terms of his plea bargain, he received a slap on the wrist sentence of 15 months in a low security prison.

It is a testament to the enduring quality of David Duke’s hokum that while he was in prison, he continued to raise money by mail. (This is what the Jews call chutzpah, and Duke has enough of it for a dozen rabbis.) When he was released in May of 2004, it was ostensibly to a halfway house that he apparently never even bothered to check into, and no one knows how he got away with that.

David Duke hit the ground running, and in one of the most ghastly and surreal episodes in Movement history, he was welcomed back into the fold with open arms at a gala event by 400 supporters, hosted at a New Orleans luxury hotel, while some of the biggest names in the Movement gathered around this self-admitted thief on the speaker’s platform and eulogized him to the stars. He was also spotted in a riverboat casino barely a month after his release, a dizzy blonde on his arm and rollin’ dem bones like there was no tomorrow.

How does he get away with it? It is difficult not to speculate that Duke’s surgically-enhanced handsome good looks have something to do with it, appealing to the homoerotic dimension that always lurks beneath the surface of the White Nationalist movement. It’s like an abused spouse who refuses to leave her abuser. He beats her, she sees the lipstick on his collar and smells the liquor on his breath, she knows he’s cheating on her and drinking up the rent money, yet she just keeps on bleating “But he’s my husband! He’s promised me he’ll change, and this time I believe him!” The man’s arrogance and his contempt for his supporters is nothing short of breathtaking–and they lap it up like candy and beg for more.

David Duke has been globetrotting around Europe again for almost two years now, living off donations he receives from the United States, sale of his books, etc. Precisely how a convicted federal felon managed to obtain a passport from the State Department is a question which the Movement has apparently decided not to examine to closely. Or examine at all.

Once again, David Ernest Duke is doing what he does best. He’s getting away with it.

The NSRP Falls On Hard Times

J. B. Stoner, chairman of the NSRP, was convicted in 1980 and was imprisoned for 3.5 years for supposedly attempting to bomb a black church back in 1958. Just prior to his imprisonment, Stoner had been keeping peace at the NSRP headquarters building in Marietta, Georgia, between those who were supportive of Dr. Edward R. Fields and those who were against Fields. After Stoner went to prison, warfare erupted among the NSRP staff. A faction headed by Jerry Dutton briefly took over the NSRP office building and “expelled” Dr. Edward R. Fields on grounds of financial finagling. Fields responded by emptying all the NSRP bank accounts through made-out-to-cash checks endorsed by himself.

This internecine battle dragged on for some months and then suddenly disappeared off the radar when Dutton appears to have become completely disgusted and chucked it all in, a not uncommon Movement phenomenon. Fields got his building back, but all semblance of the NSRP as an organization was over, and some time later it was quietly disbanded.

Fields continued to publish The Truth At Last newspaper for another 20-odd years, including a brief flirtation with the Gliebe/Walker National Alliance in the mid-2000s. In early 2007 Fields finally seems to have run out of money as his increasingly elderly financial donors died off one by one, and he lost his tabloid format. The Truth At Last is now an 8-page foldover newsletter printed on ordinary 20-lb bond paper, and apparently hand-set by Fields himself on a word processor. Thus ended the longest-running tabloid newspaper in Movement history.

The Strange Case of Benny Klassen

It is now time to discuss the bizarre and highly dysfunctional “Creativity” faction of the Movement. “Creativity” is a significant development in a negative way. To make a long story short, it has marked the descent of the Movement into pure and simple insanity, in tandem with the general degeneration of the White male character under the influence of MTV and drugs and the internet, etc. which has taken place since the 1980s.

Many Movement leaders, up until about 1980, where crooks and con men and frankly, in some cases, white trash. Few were outright lunatics, and the homosexuality was always kept in the closet. The story of the “Church of the Creator” is one of fraud, dementia, crime, violence, drunkenness, perversion, suicide and murder, and all of it pretty much out in the open as America went madder and madder. If the Movement as a whole is to real politics what professional wresting is to real sports, then the “Church of the Creator” is the Movement’s version of Jackass, only with real blood and prison and death.

In the early 1970s, one of the oddest and most controversial figures ever to become involved in the Movement made his appearance. This was a man whose very name is uncertain. It was (choose any or all of the following):

A) Bernhardt Klassen

B) Benyamin Avroham Klass

C) “Ben” Klassen

He was born in:

A) 1914

B) 1917

C) 1918

D) 1919

at

A) Vilna, Lithuania;

B) Somewhere in the Ukraine;

C) Pressburg, Austria-Hungary;

D) A remote area in Polish Galicia;

E) A remote area in Ruthenia province, Austria-Hungary

It is virtually impossible to discover the true facts about Benny Klassen’s early life. Klassen made a number of conflicting statements at various times in his life naming all of the above dates and places for his birth. No documentary evidence of his birth has ever been presented for public inspection and authentication. Klassen at one stage produced some grainy photocopies of what purported to be his family’s Canadian immigration documents from about 1926. Klassen’s U.S. immigration records are unavailable. They have apparently been “mislaid” by the INS. It’s not even known for certain if Klassen was in this country legally.

To be fair, in view of the time and place of his ostensible birth (and assuming that there is at least one of Klassen’s multifarious accounts are somewhere within shouting distance of the truth) documentation would be very hard to obtain in view of that fact that at that point in time, that part of the world was being fought over by about five contending armies in the heat of World War One and the Bolshevik Revolution. It has been incredibly difficult even to piece together a hypothetical timeline from his many vague and conflicting accounts, but the Klassen chronology appears to go something like this:

Circa 1920s.

Klassen claims to emigrate as a child from

A) Russia

B) Germany

C) Canada

D) Brazil

E) Romania

F) Lithuania

to

A) Canada

B) The United States

C) An alleged Mennonite colony in Mexico

During his lifetime Klassen made all the preceding conflicting statements both verbally and in writing. No documentation of any kind is available. FOIA records searches with the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service reveal no records of any kind anywhere for either a Bernhardt Klassen, a Benyamin Avroham Klass, or a “Ben” Klassen. It is completely impossible to determine the country of birth, the nationality or race, the religious affiliation, or the date of entry into the United States of the man who called himself Benny Klassen.

1948 – In November Benny Klassen, Howard Katz, Esther Pollak Katz, and Martin Weissman are indicted for mail fraud, bankruptcy fraud, and theft from interstate commerce by a Federal grand jury in New Orleans. Details are sketchy but some kind of fraudulent patent or patent infringement apparently was involved. Katz and Weissman serve 20 months in prison, Klassen and Esther Katz are fined and place on probation. Case is known because Klassen had to have his citizenship rights restored before he could run for office. This was done by special grant from President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1965. This is not as unusual as it sounds; presidential restorations such as this happen all the time. It was probably done on private petition of a member of Congress, and no assertion is implied that Klassen and LBJ knew each other.

1966 – Klassen is elected to a single term as a Florida state legislator. This is the first recorded instance of his using the name “Ben” Klassen. His religious affiliation is listed in the 1968 Florida State Government Who’s Who as Jewish.

1966 (?) – Around this time there are more undetermined legal problems with a bankruptcy fraud probe by the FBI, U. S. Attorney’s office, and Florida State Banking Commission involving the liquidation of SKW Realty, Inc. in Palm Beach. SKW are the initials of the partners–Arthur Shapiro, Benny Klassen, and Joseph Weinleben. Interestingly, this is one of the few things in Klassen’s shady past that he is ever forced or tricked into discussing or accounting for. When confronted with a series of news clippings on the SKW affair accumulated by the late Dr. Oren Fenton Potito, Klassen wrote in a letter to the NSWPP’s William Grimstad that “this experience taught me about the treachery and dishonesty of the Jews” or some such blather. This reference to the SKW scandal was later redacted from The Klassen Letters but can still be found in the first edition.

1968 – Klassen’s career in conservative and right-wing politics begins with his involvement in a local American Party political action committee called “Jews for Wallace.” His involvement with right-wing politics results in his losing the backing of the powerful Florida Jewish community, and he accordingly loses his legislative seat. This begins his alienation from Judaism and from his ancestral racial heritage, an alienation which subsequently turns to hatred.

1973 – Benny Klassen, a former Florida state legislator and state chairman of “Jews for Wallace” during Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign, announces the formation of the Church of the Creator (COTC) in Lighthouse Point, Fla. The tenets of Klassen’s race-based “religion,” called “Creativity,” are detailed in his book Nature’s Eternal Religion. Among its “16 Commandments”: “It is our sacred goal to populate the lands of this earth with White people exclusively.” The group’s war cry will be “Rahowa,” short for RAcial HOly WAr.

Circa 1973 – At some point in this time period, Klassen is arrested for something, no one is quite sure what. There are rumors ranging from everything to more financial shenanigans to an arrest for homosexual solicitation in a public toilet, but it is known that this incident eventually entails court-appointed psychiatric examinations and some kind of probation or parole. We know this because Klassen needed to get the court’s permission to leave the state in 1978, according to the vengeful Oren Fenton Potito who spent a lifetime stalking Klassen as a Jew in the Movement. Harry Kelly found out about this arrest while he was searching Klassen’s private office in Otto, and discussed it with Harold Covington and also with COTC members, claiming Klassen was arrested for soliciting an undercover police officer in a public toilet in Pompano Beach and allegedly appeared in court with his Jewish psychiatrist at his side and wearing a yarmulke. These alleged documents have not surfaced since. These documents may be one of the reasons for the murder of Harry Kelly in 1989.

1978 – Klassen business manager Barry Edwards is murdered in what police call a “gangland style execution.” Edwards’s body is found on June 12th, 1978 in the trunk of a car parked at a public beach in West Palm Beach. Edwards has been severely beaten, his throat has been cut, and an attempt had been made to mutilate his fingertips and his face with sulfuric acid in order to prevent identification. Klassen is questioned by police detectives but no charges are ever filed due to lack of evidence. No one is ever arrested or charged in the Edwards homicide.

1978 – In March, Klassen moves COTC headquarters from Florida to 22 acres of land he has purchased in Otto, N.C., building a personal residence, a three-story church, a small warehouse and a “School for Gifted Boys.” Later in the year, COTC is granted an exemption from state taxes based on its status as a church. This exemption is later lifted by the state and an investigation for mail fraud and fraudulent conversion of funds is launched by the State of North Carolina around 1990. These investigations are eventually dropped without any charges or indictments, and neither the Southern Poverty Law Center, who investigated this incident as part of the Bryson City lawsuit (q. v.) nor anyone else was ever able to obtain any information as to why.

1980 – Klassen stages quasi-Roman Goat Dance rituals on his property, resulting in complaints from Shouting Baptist neighbors to whom these offensive rituals are visible from the highway and from their homes. The Goat Dance is apparently an attempt to invoke the Graeco-Roman god Priapus, also known in mythology as Pan. The ritual involves Klassen dressing in toga-like vestments with a wreath of leafy greenery on his head, and a number of young men or boys dancing around a bonfire largely nude except for loincloths of some kinds, thong type bathing trunks or athletic supporters. A goat is also present, presumably because of the animal’s connection in myth to Pan, etc. Macon County Sheriff Homer Holbrooks visits Klassen and informs him of the neighbors’ complaints, and the Goat Dance ritual is discontinued, or at least moved indoors.

1981 – Klassen publishes his second book, The White Man’s Bible, which he markets as a “program for the survival, expansion, and advancement of the White race.”

1983 – Klassen begins publishing a monthly newspaper, Racial Loyalty. The paper is printed on a very old offset press owned by Klassen, with very poor ink that invariably stains the hands of the reader black, and on some kind of peculiar pulp paper that always had a squamous and greasy feel to the touch. The paper becomes noted for soft porn and homoerotica, including photos of ancient Greek male nude statuary, drawings of women being flogged on the front page, and hand-drawn cartoons of muscular young “Creators” wearing nothing but white cowboy hats with WCOTC emblems and cowboy boots vanquishing assorted enemies. The text consists mostly of Klassen’s long and turgid “religious” exposition but also contains such things as lectures on ancient Greek mythology and quickie Latin lessons. What this bizarre material has to do with White Nationalism is never fully explained. Hundreds of thousands of copies of this repulsive sheet are distributed by Klassen’s followers and also by people he hires to do so.

1979-early 1980s – Klassen employs as his first “Hasta Primus” a man from Greenville, North Carolina named Richard Becker. Becker is a peripatetic among right wing and racial groups. He is known as a practicing homosexual. Becker was expelled from Harold Covington’s Raleigh-based National Socialist Party of America in 1978 when Covington was tipped off by a local contact that Becker was committing homosexual acts at the local YMCA. Covington searched Becker’s room at the Nazi headquarters at 1217 Pierce Street in Raleigh and discovered homosexual pornography, whereupon Covington and several associates removed Becker’s belongings from the premises and awaited his return, informing him he was no longer welcome in the NSPA. After a short stay with his parents in Greenville, Becker next appears in Otto as “the Reverend Richard Becker”. This is the first open association between the Klassen organization and homosexuality, although there have been numerous, frequent, and persistent rumors down through the years, largely due to the Goat Dance.

1986 – The COTC has its first open brush with criminality in June, when security chief Carl Messick fires 19 shots at the car of a Georgia couple who strayed onto the COTC grounds. The COTC “reverend” is later sentenced to seven years in prison. This incident is eerily reminiscent of the incident which led to the loss through malicious civil litigation of the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho (q.v.) but for some reason, in this case Morris Dees does not file a lawsuit. Throughout his entire career, Klassen will enjoy a strange immunity from Morris Dees’ quasi-legal attentions enjoyed by no other major Movement figure.

1988 – Klassen travels to California to ask John Metzger, son of neo-Nazi White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger, about taking over COTC. Metzger, saying he “wouldn’t want to be affiliated with a church,” declines. Klassen begins lengthy smear campaign against both Metzgers. The Metzgers reply with pointed comments about Klassen’s sexual orientation. John Metzger tells Skinheads, “If you go to [Klassen’s ashram at] Otto, make sure you sit down and keep your mouth shut.”

1989 – In July, “Reverend” Harry Kelly is found dead in his New York City apartment of a heroin overdose. Kelly, a former drug user, was believed to have been clean for some time. The last person to be seen with Kelly alive was an unknown white male whose physical description bears a resemblance to known homosexual COTC “Reverend” and suspected government informant Jerry Michael Pace. Interestingly, the witnesses to Pace’s presence, the last independent witnesses to see Kelly alive, are Jeff and Gina Krause, who many years later are involved in Andrew Greenbaum’s (q.v.) bizarre internet virtual Nazi Party, the “Knights of Freedom.”

1989 – Alabama Klan leader Roger Handley is arrested by the Alabama State Police on gun charges in a nighttime raid. He is found in bed with 17 year-old male COTC “Reverend” Will Satterwhite, thus adding to the general air of homoeroticism surrounding the original Klassen COTC.

1989 – A review by Macon County tax officials concludes that COTC’s North Carolina property does not qualify for religious tax exemptions. (see comments above.) In May, two Milwaukee COTC members are arrested during a brawl with “anti-racist activists.”

1990 – On October 12th, 20 year-old former Skinhead Dennis Witherspoon is found dead in a rural area of Dade County, Florida. He has been bound with duct tape and shot several times in the head with a .22-caliber revolver. Witherspoon was known to have been a former COTC “Reverend” who claimed that in the summer of 1989, a year previously, he arrived in the Otto, N.C. compound and was invited to Klassen’s basement rec room for a private showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. He was given drugged liquor and passed out. Witherspoon then claims he suddenly awoke on the floor, doubled up nude with sofa pillows under him, while Klassen was in the act of sodomizing him, with the movie still playing. Witherspoon jumped up and assaulted Klassen, beating him very badly and extorting a promise of money. Witherspoon claims he was given $10,000 in cash next day and a used car, with which he drove to Florida. The only comment Klassen ever makes about this incident is that Witherspoon was attempting to blackmail him. Florida police write off Witherspoon’s death as a drug-related killing, which may be correct.

1990 – Declaring that church leadership would change “at the top of every decade, on the decade,” Klassen announces that Rudy “Butch” Stanko–then serving a six-year sentence for selling tainted meat–will take over once he is released from prison. In August, COTC Ohio leader Matthew Hayhow, 23, is arrested after robbing two banks and ultimately is sentenced to a 25-year prison term.

1991 – COTC “Reverend” George Loeb shoots black Navy enlisted man Harold Mansfield Jr. in a Florida grocery store parking lot after Mansfield insults and threatens Loeb’s wife. Loeb features on America’s Most Wanted during his time as a fugitive, and he is ultimately arrested in Buffalo, New York while trying to shoplift a packet of cold cuts, thus earning the Movement sobriquet of “Benny Buttfuck’s Baloney Bandit.” Fellow COTC member Steve Thomas, who will later edit Racial Loyalty, is charged with aiding Loeb’s initial flight from Florida. Thomas had earlier served eight years for raping a Vietnamese woman, an incident upon which the movie Casualties of War was based. In November, Macon County, N.C., officials r