On 11 February 2015, Craig Stephen Hicks, age 46, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina — to all appearances, a White man — killed three Muslims living in his apartment-complex, execution style, one bullet in each head.

The father of two of the victims, a psychiatrist, was quick to declare that it was a “hate crime.”

While Hicks appears to be a White man, contrary to what some might expect, he is in no way a racist.

Yahoo News reports:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a national civil rights organization, told Yahoo News that Hicks is not in its database of known extremists. According to his Facebook page, Hicks is a fan of the Alabama-based hate watchdog group. [Jason Sickles, Yahoo News, 11 February 2015]

Hicks’ wife Karen confirmed this, telling CBS News that Hicks “believed everybody was equal.” What then could have been Hicks’ motive for shooting the three Muslims, if he was not a “racist”? This does not fit the usual news-media template for such incidents. Perhaps the police have arrested the wrong man?

What we are told about Hicks is the following. In addition to being an anti-racist, he was a self-proclaimed atheist. He was a Constitutionalist. He was studying to become a paralegal. He would post rants on Facebook about what he felt were transgressions against his individual rights. All of this suggests something about Hicks’ way of dealing with the world around him.

We also know that Hicks was angry at some religion or other, or maybe at all religion. If he was specifically enraged at Islam and Muslims as the father of two of the victims believes (rather than at immigrants in general, Muslims constituting only a small fraction of the immigrant population in the USA) for an American that would most likely be a product of Zionist “war on terror” propaganda that we’ve all been hearing, especially since 2001. Rush Limbaugh recently has been ranting about ISIS, insisting that they are real Muslims (against those who say that ISIS do things that are flagrantly un-Islamic and are not real Muslims), and also has followed the lead of Charles Krauthammer in harping on Obama’s reticence to call the Charlie Hebdo shooting “Islamist terrorism.” Limbaugh has been riding that anti-Muslim hobbyhorse to the point that it becomes tedious; one wishes that he would talk instead about something relevant to the interests of non-Jewish Americans.

As I read about Hicks, I was reminded of somebody else whose life culminated in a shooting incident some years ago, Milton William Cooper. Cooper too was an extreme individualist. He was married to a Chinese woman, and in his shortwave broadcasts, amid talk about conspiracy theories and firearms, Cooper would frequently denounce racism.

Cooper was a fan of Leonard Peikoff and Ayn Rand. He liked to attack “socialism,” and to emphasize that Hitler was a “socialist.” He often repeated the false propaganda of a group called Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, to the effect that Hitler (the “socialist”) had taken away all the German people’s firearms.

He would also read from publications of the heavily Jewish Lyndon Larouche organization, which offered fanciful conspiracy-theories that diverted negative attention away from Jews (e.g., the Larouche organization’s The Ugly Truth About the ADL claims that the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith is not really a Jewish organization). In addition to being anti-racist, Cooper was anti-anti-Semitic. (He also had some kind of friendly connection to Jewish film-producer Aaron Rousso; it seems likely that Rousso was backing Cooper financially.)

An important element in Cooper’s presentations was his focus on legalism, revealing supposedly how the government was not operating strictly in accord with the Constitution (e.g., the federal income-tax, or requiring people to have drivers’ licenses). He would go on about how one could assert one’s individual rights against such usurpations simply by uttering various verbal formulae at the right moment.

Cooper’s broadcasts were often delivered in a tone of belligerent braggadocio, displaying an essentially adversarial attitude toward the world. He would often shout angrily at callers.

Legalism and extreme individualism to the point of being anti-social form a coherent syndrome. Strident opposition to “collectivism” (including racism, as Ayn Rand stipulates) means affirmation of individual rights to the extreme. For somebody who has no community and no roots, those “individual rights” take on an increased importance as a way to give meaning and definition to one’s existence.

Misanthropy can be seen as perhaps the underlying cause of extreme individualism, although it may also be true that someone finding himself, through no choice of his own, in the isolated and vulnerable condition of extreme individualism in a society where community simply does not exist (such as the largely atomized post-1960s USA), may overcompensate for his fundamental vulnerability and unimportance as an individual through strident grandstanding about his rights.

In William Cooper’s particular case, mixed racial origins likely contributed to his becoming a social misfit, although the only non-White ancestry that Cooper himself would ever admit was Amerind.

The Jewish motive for supporting a mouthpiece like William Cooper was fairly obvious. It often seems to happen among unorganized rightwing movements that whoever talks the loudest and most aggressively becomes the de facto leader, and sets the direction for others. Before becoming a “patriot broadcaster” Cooper was peddling conspiracy-stories about gray aliens making pacts with the United States Government, and claiming that he had seen a UFO the size of an aircraft-carrier while an intelligence-officer in the navy. William Cooper was a man who could say anything and pretend to believe it. On shortwave, nobody talked louder and more aggressively than William Cooper with his anti-government, anti-socialist, and anti-racist rants five nights a week. It is impossible to measure his effect, but it was obvious that he made an impression on some people. His goal was obviously to discourage disgruntled White people from talking candidly and overcoming the inhibitions that have allowed the racial situation in the United States to become as bad as it is. Kosher patriots like Cooper insisted that White people, instead of overcoming their inhibitions and talking about things that really matter, should focus only on affirming individual rights under the Constitution, as if this would solve every problem. To discourage White people from venturing outside the Constitutionalist play-pen, as it were.

While the ADL and SPLC liked to portray the militia/patriot movement as some kind of anti-Semitic threat — all the better to motivate Jews to circle the wagons and send in donations — there is no doubt that Jews had a substantial involvement in generating this bogeyman. I can only guess how far the Jewish involvement in the whole militia and patriot phenomenon of the 1990s really went. There seemed to be an inexplicable taboo against overt discussion of race or Jews in almost all “patriot” broadcasts. The fact that there were a few exceptions to this (e.g. Pete Peters’ Scriptures for America) showed that it was not the station exerting this censorship.

I recall two men who had a daily broadcast on the same station as Peters, who in private discussions would agree with me on everything, but on the air they suddenly knew nothing about race and the Jews, and talked only about Constitutional rights, “Illuminati,” and the threat of the UN. I believe that the cause of this was that they had a Jewish financial backer, because there was this certain individual of obviously questionable antecedents to whom they would always refer in reverential tones.

Chuck Harder, who featured topics of interest to rightwing conspiracy-theorists and was called by Morris Dees the “king of the grassroots airwaves” (and who set the example for patriot broadcasters by being the first to purchase time on shortwave) used to become very vague in the 1990s when the question of his own ancestry came up, but in the new millennium has openly proclaimed his Jewish ancestry — along with his support for the State of Israel.

One “patriot” network was overtly run by a Jew named Norm Resnick, who used to have Irv Rubin as a guest on his own show. Alex “I will never join the White supremacists” Jones, a blatant imitator of William Cooper who now has much more notoriety than Cooper ever had, is married to a Jewish woman. There has been a lot of more or less hidden, or in some cases overt, Jewish involvement in the groundwork of so-called “anti-government extremism.”

Moreover, I noticed that in most cases there seemed to be an inverse relationship between, on the one hand, belligerent talk about resisting the government or resisting the United Nations or upholding the Constitution by force of arms, and, on the other hand, honest talk about race and Jews. I came to the conclusion that fiery talk about violence was an attempt to compensate for, and distract attention from, a basic lack of substance — the failure to think and talk about things that really matter. But then, from time to time, one of these big talkers, or one of their listeners, would finally add action to the pose and the rhetoric, and live out the violent fantasy that they had been verbally rehearsing for so many years.

Extreme individualism and “Constitutional patriotism” and a fixation with firearms are not at all the same as White racial activism, despite what the ADL, SPLC, and a plethora of leftist authors would have had people believe.

Milton William Cooper met his end as the result of a pattern of chronic threatening behavior toward his neighbors in Eagar, Arizona, culminating in a gunfight with sheriff’s deputies, in which Cooper critically wounded one:

Authorities said the gun battle ensued when Apache County deputies tried to arrest Cooper on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and endangerment stemming from disputes with local residents in July and September. A handgun-toting Cooper fled when the deputies identified themselves. He opened fire as two deputies closed in, [police spokesman Steve]Volden said. The charges stemmed from run-ins with residents who drove up to his home atop a butte and stopped nearby, only to be confronted by a gun-toting Cooper, who demanded that they leave, Volden said. [Los Angeles Times, 7 November 2001]

Compare the behavior that led to the demise of anti-racist individualist William Cooper, with that anti-racist individualist Craig Stephen Hicks:

For now, Chapel Hill police say they are still investigating and have no evidence of a hate crime. Instead, they believe Tuesday’s killings were sparked by a long-standing dispute over parking spaces at the condominium complex where Hicks and two of the three victims, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, and his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, were neighbors. Abu-Salha’s sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, was also slain. [Jason Sickles, Yahoo News, 11 February 2015]

It is the same pattern of behavior by two rootless, unhinged, anti-racist individualists. Was war-on-terror propaganda a contributing factor in Hicks’ case? Maybe. In any case we know that it was done by an anti-racist who admires the Southern Poverty Law Center. Jewish-inspired “patriots” can be dangerous.