God guns and sedition, p.3
God, Guns, and Sedition, page 3
We also aim to provide an important correction to the argument found in other works on this subject: that the modern iterations and characteristics of contemporary violent far-right extremism are somehow a new phenomenon. In this respect, key dimensions of this disparate movement, especially pertaining to the advent of digital technology and social media and strategies like accelerationism, have often been depicted as unique to the twenty-first-century violent extremist landscape in the United States. These developments are not, in fact, novel but are instead merely the latest manifestations of a movement and threat that have been gathering momentum since the 1970s and that have been almost hypersonically empowered by social media. Indeed, the two most consequential trends of modern terrorism—online radicalization and recruitment and lone-actor, independent acts of violence carried out by individuals or small cells in service of a broader movement (so-called lone wolf attacks)—were in fact pioneered by the American violent far right four decades ago. In this work, we show that the wave of violent, far-right extremism that swept across the Western world in 2019 and then visited the seat of America’s government on January 6, 2021, was not the successful implementation of a new strategy of political violence or some serendipitous combination of planning and luck but the culmination of a long and deliberate journey, begun by movement pioneers in the early 1980s, to develop a battle plan to overthrow the U.S. government.
This work thus provides a comprehensive, narrative account of the development of violent far-right American extremism up to, including, and beyond the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Our objective is to show that the tragedies defining the modern far-right terrorist threat—from Dylann Roof’s attack on a historic Charleston church to January 6—are just the latest flashpoints in a historical process that has been unfolding for decades. The contemporary American violent far right should thus be seen as a continuation, not as a break—but in a new and emerging trend known as “ideological convergence,” it now brings together the converging ideologies of white supremacism, hostility to government, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and vast conspiracy theories. The book also draws out many of the key themes that weave their way through the narrative history of far-right terrorism in America—including the movement’s adoption of cutting-edge communications technology, its pioneering embrace of leaderless resistance or lone wolf strategies, the tactics and targets that have come to define its ideology and violence, the personality traits exhibited by many of its adherents, its often symbiotic relationship with domestic American politics, and the recruitment and infiltration of U.S. military and law enforcement personnel. Each of these themes has profound counterterrorism implications.
Moreover, unlike many other forms of terrorism, the threat from modern American violent far-right extremism is more individually than organizationally driven. It is a movement where the parts are indisputably greater than the whole. Accordingly, we focus on a consistent succession of individuals who have always given the movement its momentum and vitality. There is a common thread between older far-right luminaries such as Louis Beam, William Potter Gale, Robert Mathews, and Timothy McVeigh and contemporary figures such as Dylann Roof, Robert Bowers, and John Earnest. Through them, the ideological trajectory of the radicalization and violence that has repeatedly surfaced in recent years is clear. Far from being an unfortunate symptom of today’s society, the development of this threat has been systematically planned by a lineage of violent, far-right extremists who have sought to project their hateful and antidemocratic views of the world into American society. By tracing this malignant lineage, we also seek to identify the countermeasures that our leaders need to implement to smother this threat. Accordingly, this work unpacks a range of short-term, medium-term, and long-term measures to counter radicalization and violence today and build resilience among generations to come. This comprehensive counterterrorism strategy will require measures to combat extremists’ free rein online, efforts to build and support longer-term initiatives to prevent new radicalization, and the establishment of new laws to counteract the challenges in prosecuting perpetrators of far-right terrorist plots.
The next four chapters of this book serve as a critical launch pad for showing the trajectory that violent far-right extremism in the United States has followed over the past four decades—and most especially the connectivity and convergence that animates this disparate movement. Chapter 2 details the emergence of the Order, a violent neo-Nazi cell, tracing its relationships with a number of white supremacist communities and organizations from year to year. In chapter 3, we outline the events leading up to the watershed 1988 Fort Smith trial, in which fourteen white supremacists were acquitted on charges of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. Chapter 4 unpacks the rapid expansion of the militia movement in the early 1990s, paying special attention to the disastrous federal raids on a small compound in northern Idaho in 1992 and on a religious cult in Texas the following year. And in chapter 5, we revisit the radicalization of Timothy McVeigh—a decorated war hero and America’s deadliest modern domestic terrorist—and assess the impact of his lethal 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City. Our intention is thus to bridge the earlier history laid out in the initial chapters with the contemporary developments that constitute the latter half of the book. Along the way, we also correct some longstanding misconceptions and falsehoods that have been inadvertently perpetuated (concerning, for instance, the dystopian, racist novel The Turner Diaries and some of the most important far-right terrorist plots of the 1980s).
Then, in chapter 6, we fast-forward to the election of President Barack Obama, analyzing its impact on violent extremism in the United States alongside the emergence of a new communications tool that abetted radicalization, recruitment, and mobilization. Chapter 7 assesses the consequences that the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president has had on the violent far right in America. And in chapter 8, we revisit the tumultuous years since 2020, which will be forever remembered for their effects on broader society as well as the violent, extremist fringes of American society. The book concludes with a number of counterterrorism policy recommendations needed to address this threat.
Despite the ultimately successful certification of the 2020 presidential election and subsequent unimpeded transfer of power; the arrests of over one thousand rioters who participated in the January 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol building, which has resulted in guilty pleas or convictions of at least half of those charges; and the mostly peaceful events surrounding the 2022 midterm elections, the threat from far-right terrorism in contemporary America continues unabated.43 Given the long historical trajectory documented in this book, which culminated in the events of January 6, the continued proliferation and pervasiveness of conspiracy theories and the growing racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia that have entered the mainstream of political and social discourse in the United States, the potential for new acts of politically motivated violence—including mass shootings, attacks on critical infrastructure, bombings, and other attacks—cannot be dismissed or ignored.
2
BATTLE PLAN
September 16, 1991. Today it finally began! After all these years of talking—and nothing but talking—we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words.
—Earl Turner, in The Turner Diaries
Over the past four decades, advertisements for The Turner Diaries have repeatedly asked an apocalyptic question: “What will you do when they come to take your guns?” Its author, however, was not simply a zealous exponent of Second Amendment rights. Rather, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the hate-monitoring organization based in Montgomery, Alabama,1 as founder and leader of the National Alliance—“a group whose members included terrorists, bank robbers and would-be bombers”—William Luther Pierce was “America’s most important neo-Nazi for some three decades until his death in 2002” and “the movement’s fiercest antisemitic ideologue.”2
Defying the prevailing stereotype of American white supremacists as crude country bumpkins or uneducated “rednecks,” Pierce graduated from Houston’s prestigious Rice University in 1955 and subsequently worked at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory before studying at Caltech and obtaining his doctorate in physics from the University of Colorado. He taught at Oregon State University for a time. But Pierce’s strident anticommunism and racist and antisemitic beliefs increasingly pulled him toward a career of full-time advocacy and hate-mongering. In 1974, Pierce founded the National Alliance.3 Its goal continues to find supporters today: “We must have no non-Whites in our space and we must have open space around us for expansion.… We will do whatever is necessary to achieve this White living space and to keep it White. We will not be deterred by the difficulty or temporary unpleasantness involved, because we realize that it is absolutely necessary for our racial survival.”4
The Anti-Defamation League (or ADL, formerly known as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith), the organization founded over a century ago to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and … secure justice and fair treatment to all,”5 described the National Alliance in 1998 and again in 2000 as “the single most dangerous organized hate group in the United States today.” The National Alliance earned this distinction largely as a result of Pierce’s pseudonymous authorship of The Turner Diaries as Andrew Macdonald.6
No other book has had so pervasive or sustained an influence over violent far-right extremism in the United States as The Turner Diaries.7 Within five years of its publication, the New York Times would report that Pierce’s dystopian treatise of race war and revolution had become “the bible of an anti-Semitic movement” that in 1984, as we shall see, actually declared war on the U.S. government.8 An apocryphal claim appeared on the back of the 1985 edition that similarly noted how the FBI “has labeled The Turner Diaries ‘the bible of the racist right.’ ”9 Often repeated, it was most likely penned by Pierce for publicity purposes.10 Nonetheless, a prescient 1991 FBI memorandum described The Turner Diaries as “a significant work and foundation document closely embraced by the leadership as well as rank and file members of the Right-wing, White Supremist [sic] Movement, also known as the ‘Christian Identity Movement.’ ”11 By the time of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which The Turner Diaries inspired,12 at least two hundred thousand and perhaps as many as five hundred thousand copies of the paperback had been sold.13 Distributed by National Vanguard Books, the National Alliance’s publishing arm,14 it could occasionally be found at book shops,15 but more often The Turner Diaries was hawked by individual sellers at gun shows and venues such as the annual Soldier of Fortune Convention in Las Vegas as well as by mail order through advertisements placed in Shotgun News and other gun magazines as well as the now defunct Soldier of Fortune magazine.16
The book recounts the eponymous hero’s two-year struggle after he and his “fellow patriots” are forced to go underground to defend themselves when a predatory government imposes the “Cohen Act” to seize all legally held firearms. After more than eight hundred thousand of his fellow citizens are arrested, a thirty-five-year-old electrical engineer named Earl Turner joins “The Organization,” the movement spearheading this revolution-cum–race war, and embarks on a concerted terrorist campaign that includes the assassination of public officials, journalists, and prominent Jews; the wholesale murder of African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities; shooting down commercial airliners; poisoning municipal water supplies; and bombing public utilities. Among the more noteworthy incidents is the “Day of the Rope,” when the Organization carries out a public mass execution by hanging an expansive category of alleged “race traitors,” including “the politicians, the lawyers, the businessmen, the TV newscasters, the newspaper reporters and editors, the judges, the teachers, the school officials, the ‘civic leaders,’ the bureaucrats, the preachers,” and others.17 In addition, chapter 6 recounts a truck bombing of the FBI’s downtown Washington, DC, headquarters. “All day yesterday and most of today we watched the TV coverage of rescue crews bringing the dead and injured out of the building”—a particularly important passage in the book given its chilling similarity to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. “It is a heavy burden of responsibility for us to bear,” it continues,
since most of the victims of our bomb were only pawns who were no more committed to the sick philosophy or the racially destructive goals of the System than we are.
But there is no way we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people—no way. It is a cancer too deeply rooted in our flesh. And if we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us—if we don’t cut this cancer from our living flesh—our whole race will die.18
Turner is later inducted into a more elite unit within the Organization known as “The Order.” That unit has seized control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and launches missile attacks that obliterate New York City and Tel Aviv but fails to destroy the former Soviet Union. The Soviets then launch a retaliatory strike against the United States that Turner describes as “horrendous, but spotty. They fired everything they had left at us, but it simply wasn’t enough. Several of the largest American cities, including Washington and Chicago, were spared.” Turner, accordingly, is ordered to carry out a kamikaze attack on the Pentagon in a small airplane containing a nuclear weapon. An “epilog” records the consequences of Turner’s martyrdom: the final defeat and collapse of the United States. The Organization eventually conquers Europe and, unleashing an array of chemical, biological, and radiological weapons, defeats China and “effectively sterilize[s] … some 16 million square miles of the earth’s surface, from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific and from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean.” The “dream of a White world finally became a certainty,” the book concludes—with Turner having “helped greatly to assure that his race would survive and prosper … and that The Order would spread its wise and benevolent rule over the earth for all time to come.”19
Pierce denies that his intention in writing The Turner Diaries was to provide any kind of a blueprint or model for the violent race revolution it recounts.20 But on numerous occasions the novel has done exactly that: inspiring emulation and imitation—with often tragic results. Among those who adopted the battle plan delineated in The Turner Diaries was a lifelong militant anticommunist and antigovernment firebrand named Robert Mathews. Mathews was just one rising star in a white supremacist universe that embraced The Turner Diaries’ core tenets of racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and sedition; it also included such prominent figures as William Potter Gale, Richard Girnt Butler, Gordon Kahl, James Ellison, Kerry Noble, and Louis Beam, who all played key roles in the emergence of this movement during the 1980s.
Born in rural Texas in 1953, Robert Mathews grew up in an otherwise unremarkable lower-middle-class household in Phoenix. He joined the militantly anticommunist John Birch Society at age eleven, became a member of the Young Republicans, and converted to Mormonism five years later. While still a teenager, Mathews cofounded the Arizona Sons of Liberty21—which the authoritative Encyclopedia of White Power, edited by Jeffrey Kaplan, one of the preeminent scholars in the field, describes as “a paramilitary underground of constitutionalist fundamentalists composed of far-right Mormons and survivalists, dedicated to counter what they perceived as the corruption of true Americanism.”22 The group’s mostly low-level violent antics went unnoticed until they staged a commando-like assault on a local television station. The publicity that the barricade-and-hostage incident was designed to generate also caught the FBI’s attention. Mathews was convicted of tax evasion in 1973 and after serving six months’ probation left Arizona to build a new life in Washington State.23 “I maintained then as I do now,” Mathews explained in 1984, “that our people have devolved into some of the most cowardly, sheepish, degenerates that have ever littered the face of this planet.” He moved to Metaline Falls,24 a town in northeastern Washington State, and with his father’s help eventually purchased eighty acres of land.25
Mathews paints a picture of the archetypal American frontiersman. He claims to have arrived in Washington State with only twenty-five dollars in his pocket and a desire to “work hard and be left alone, and the dream of someday acquiring my own small farm.” His family subsequently followed him from Arizona to this unspoiled northern woodland paradise. Mathews got a job at a mine and a cement plant, married, and kept to himself. His spare time was devoted to learning about the malignant influences destroying Western society. Mathews cites Oswald Spengler’s post–World War I lamentation on the decline of the West and William Gayley Simpson’s Which Way Western Man? as seminal resources.26 The Simpson book is especially noteworthy in this respect. Published by William Pierce’s National Vanguard Books, it is described on Amazon as having been written by “an exceptionally deep thinker [who] traced the sickness that has overtaken the White man’s world in the twentieth century to its roots in Jewish world conspiracy and its coordinated aggressive moves against us.… Every racially White person,” the summary posted on Amazon continues, “will want this book in his collection, as it is very possibly the best book of racial philosophy originally written in the English language.”27 Mathews was by this time also a devotee of Pierce and was captivated by the National Vanguard press’s other bestseller—Pierce’s The Turner Diaries.28
Mathews admits to having drunk deeply from this well of white supremacy, racism, and antisemitism. The adoption of a blond-haired, blue-eyed son supposedly brought about a startling epiphany, he later recalled:
I realized that White America, indeed my entire race, was headed for oblivion unless White men rose and turned the tide. The more I came to love my son the more I realized that unless things changed radically, by the time he was my age, he would be a stranger in his own land, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan in a country populated mainly by Mexicans, mulattoes, blacks and Asians.… I came to learn that this was not by accident, that there is a small, cohesive alien group within this nation working day and night to make this happen.29
