In 1983, George P. Dietz was working endless hours on a personal Apple IIe computer. A naturalized citizen born in Germany known to brag of his time in Hitler Youth, Dietz ran a successful anti-Semitic publishing house. Now he was trying to teach himself “computerese,” to launch a new “bulletin board system,” so he could reach a wider audience to herald the Jewish threat in America. It was, he said, “the only computer bulletin board system and uncontrolled information medium in the United States of America dedicated to the dissemination of historical facts — not fiction!”

There was so much untapped white supremacist potential: Christian caucasians nursing xenophobia in isolated corners of the country, hungry for information, but unsure of how to get it. And Dietz was, unfortunately, on to something big.

Then, in the Spring of 1984, the Grand Dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan, Louis Beam, created Aryan Nations Liberty Net, which quickly surpassed Dietz’s efforts as the premiere cyberspace venue for white supremacy. Just a year later, Tom Metzger started a similar platform, White Aryan Resistance, or W.A.R. Using 300 bps modems and two-tone personal computers like the Commodor 64, these men believed they would help birth the white ethnostate.

“Finally, we are all going to be linked together at one point in time,” Beam wrote in all caps in his first online posts. “Imagine, if you will, all the great minds of the patriotic Christian movement linked together and joined into one computer. Imagine any patriot in the country being able to call up and access these minds… You are on line with the Aryan Nations brain trust. It is here to serve the folk.’’ Dietz, Beam, and Metzger would become some of the first hate group leaders — not to mention some of the first Americans — to organize using computers. His efforts “on line” would be largely overlooked at the time. But his vision of a vast white supremacist army grown in cyberspace has come to fruition in the so-called “alt-right.” “The possibilities” Beam wrote with terrifying prescience in 1984, “have only been touched upon.”

Beam conceived of Aryan Nations Liberty Net as “a pro-American, pro-white, anti-Communist network of true believers who serve the one and only God — Jesus, the Christ … for Aryan patriots only.” It was a computer bulletin board system (known as a BBS) where users could post messages, download or exchange documents, or read racist screeds.