In 1983, the Grand Dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan, Louis Beam, began quietly circulating an essay among white supremacist groups in America. “Those who love liberty, and believe in freedom enough to fight for it are rare today,” he wrote. “We are a band of brothers, native to the soil gaining strength one from another as we have rushed headlong into a battle that all the weaker, timid men, say we can not win.” Beam wanted to restructure the white supremacist movement, and believed “it will become necessary to consider other methods of organization — or as the case may very well call for: non-organization.”

Beam was a new kind of white supremacist: media-savvy, militarized, and ambitious. Cross burnings and white robes were great, but given the climate of government scrutiny after the civil rights era, he argued for stealthier modes of violence. Building this new movement might take decades, but, he wrote, “Let the coming night be filled with a thousand points of resistance.”

His theory of “leaderless resistance” quickly became a central strategy for white supremacists nationwide, and one that defines the operating sensibility of the racist right even today. Once described as “one of the most dangerous men in the world,” Beam’s ideologies, tactics, and “career” would come to define the militant American fringe. Without him and his theories, there would be no “alt-right.”

Beam was born in 1946 in Lufkin, Texas, a small manufacturing town near the Louisiana border. As a child, he had been obsessed with Southern history, playing Civil War games with friends in which he was always the Rebel soldier announcing that the South would rise again. According to interviews with his childhood friends, he was a born Ku Klux Klan recruiter, claiming to be a KKK member in the fourth grade and attempting to wrangle likeminded classmates.

A young Beam (left) in Klan garb. Beam’s essays have been highly influential in the white supremacists movement since the 1980s.

He has told reporters that he earned a bachelor’s degree in history, and done some master’s work at the University of Houston. (Though the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has tracked Beam for 40 years, claims he never finished college). By 19, he was an average-looking white man, of below-average height, who spoke in a measured Texan drawl. He volunteered for the Army and ended up a helicopter gunner in Vietnam. There, he experienced “the joys of killing your enemy,” as he put it, and later bragged of gunning down as many as 51 people. He returned from the war in 1969, with a “Born to Lose” tattoo on his arm and the idea in his mind that the government had made a joke of the military by not allowing them to win the war — a sentiment shared by tens of thousands of aggrieved vets.

Not long after he came back, he watched as “pro-Viet Cong communist sympathizers” burned the flag at a demonstration in Washington D.C. and experienced a vivid flashback to the war. “As I sat there watching the flag disintegrate, rage and bitterness engulfed me,” he later wrote. “The cheers of the demonstrators became the screams of a nineteen year-old soldier over his radio as he burnt to death.” He could hear M-60 machine guns ringing in his ears. “Finally, at last, came the laughter of those demonstrators as they spit on the ashes at their feet, blending in my mind with the sobs of grown men as I remembered the armored personnel carrier disappearing in a ball of orange flame.” This was his enemy now. He decided that although “the battlefield had changed and the rules were different, THE WAR CONTINUES.”

After returning from the war, Beam shuttled among various white supremacist groups. What he actually did for a living, before becoming a full-time hate monger, is unclear. Some have described him as a former salesman, and he has referenced work as a computer consultant. In 1981, he was fired after four months as a safety engineer at a Houston construction company, but it’s unclear whether he’s held traditional employment since. At one point, his mother told him, “Junior, quit this and get a good job.”

The whole time, he was developing the theory of leaderless resistance, which would be his real legacy. The strategy—a version of which had long been practiced by communists, though Beam attributed it to a CIA intelligence officer—argued that groups should essentially organize into two levels. The first would be a network of militant, underground “phantom cells” that carry out violence individually or in small groups. The second would be the public-facing, political arm of the movement that claims not to be affiliated with the violence. “Most groups who ‘unify’ their disparate associates into a single structure have short political lives,” Beam wrote. Every white supremacist would make “a private decision in the quietness of his heart to resist: to resist by any means necessary.” The public groups would blend in “with mainstream ‘kosher’ associations that are generally seen as harmless.” And when one individual or cell got caught committing a crime, they would be disavowed as lone wolves, so as to not compromise the the movement and its public figures.

Most importantly, no one on the outside would be able to see or understand what they were doing because, as Beam pointed out, “Showing one’s hand before the bets are made, is a sure way to loose [sic].”

It was in many ways a perfect formulation, the ultimate seditious boogeyman. Every lone gunman would make the American public wonder if there was an army of white supremacists lurking behind him, while the leaders, when there were any, managed to avoid direct implication. By outlining the strategy, Beam had either created a veneer of unity where there was none, or the movement was becoming the hydra that he hoped. As his career in hate progressed, the latter looked to be the case.