God guns and sedition, p.4
God, Guns, and Sedition, page 4
But in point of fact, Mathews had long previously held these views.30 And his attraction to this region of Washington where he settled was not simply a product of its isolation or rugged beauty. The region’s silver mines—where Mathews found employment—for instance, had once attracted settlers from the former Confederate States of America, whose descendants still subscribed to the same racist and seditious sentiments that had led to America’s civil war over a century earlier.31 The area was in fact a magnet for other hardcore white supremacists—including a fifty-six-year-old retired aeronautical engineer and ordained cleric from California, the Reverend Richard Girnt Butler.32
A lifelong anticommunist—whose father blamed global Jewish conspirators for that ideology’s malignant propagation—Butler had served in the Army Air Corps during World War II before settling in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Montebello.33 There in the early 1960s he fell under the influence of two fellow Californians: a retired U.S. Army colonel named William Potter Gale and Dr. Wesley Swift, a former Methodist minister turned leader of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian.34 Gale had served on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff directing anti-Japanese guerilla operations in the Philippines during World War II. Like Mathews and Butler, Gale’s hostility to communism had led him to the John Birch Society but more significantly to founding in 1970 the loosely organized, militant antigovernment movement known as Posse Comitatus.35 Latin for “power of the county,” Posse adherents disavow any form of government above the county level, advocate a return to the gold standard, oppose federal and state income taxes, reject the existence of the Federal Reserve system, and decry the supremacy of the federal judiciary over local courts.36
Gale introduced Butler to Swift, who is today recalled on his church’s website as “the single most significant figure in the early years of the Christian Identity movement in the United States.”37 A fanatical anticommunist and reputed former Ku Klux Klan organizer, Swift preached a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of scripture derived from the nonviolent, philo-Semitic, Anglo-Israelism movement that emerged in Britain during the mid-nineteenth century.38 Swift transformed its core tenet, that the ten lost tribes of ancient Israel were composed of Anglo-Saxons and not Jews, into an aggressively antisemitic, white supremacist dogma.39 Adherents to Christian Identity claim:
Jesus Christ was a Christian not a Jew;
the United States and not Israel is the Promised Land;
white Aryans are the true descendants of the biblical tribes of Israel and are therefore the true Chosen People, not the Jews;
Jews are imposters—literally Satan’s progeny—put on earth to undermine white Christendom through Jewish control of the global economy and media as well as the empowerment of persons of color;
a perpetually Manichean struggle must therefore be waged between good and evil by Aryans against Jews that will someday lead to a climacteric apocalypse.40
Under Swift’s tutelage, Butler was ordained as a Church of Jesus Christ Christian minister and succeeded him as its leader after Swift’s death in 1970.41 Like his mentor, Butler was a zealous exponent of the “two seed” theory. This mix of traditional Calvinism combined with some aspects of Mormonism and core Identity tenets holds that Adam and Eve begat Abel but that later that day Eve had sex with Satan (in the guise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden), which produced Cain—and in turn the Jews. The Jewish people, according to Identity theology, are not the children of God but are Satan’s emissaries. They are thus the anti-Christ. Indeed, all the universe’s nonwhite races are descended from the Jews—the “beasts of the field” referred to in Genesis 2:8.42
Just a year after relocating to Idaho in 1973, Butler founded the Aryan Nations to serve as an umbrella organization for the entire white supremacist movement.43 The religious and racial purification of the United States that The Turner Diaries details was a central feature of its ideology. Article 8 of the “Aryan National State Platform,” for instance, states that “a ruthless war must be waged against any whose activities are injurious to the common interest.”44 As Butler explained in an Aryan Nations brochure from the 1980s: “We will have a national racial state at whatever price in blood is necessary. Just as our forefathers purchased their freedom in blood, so must we.” Titled This Is Aryan Nations, the treatise goes on to decry “the leadership of malicious, bastardizing politicians … [in] modern, decadent America [where] millions of whites watch in abject dismay and hopelessness as their great culture, heritage and civilization evaporates in the steaming stinking, seething milieu of so many alien races, cultures and gods.”45
By linking Identity theology to the Aryan Nations goals and objectives, Butler sought to unite racists, antisemites, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militant tax resisters, antifederalists, and survivalists into one coherent movement.46 “The principles of Identity Christianity provide the divine justification for acts of violence against the government, non-Whites, homosexuals, and Jews,” the University of Toronto’s Tanya Telfair Sharpe explains. “It further holds that our democratic foundations of governance are the product of a global conspiracy orchestrated by Jews, capitalists, and other elites designed to control and manipulate American society for their own evil ends. Identity Christianity [sic] thus uses religion and scripture to sanction violence against persons who are not White, Anglo-Saxon Christians.”47 Or as Danny O. Coulson, the founding commander of the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team and a former deputy assistant director, recalled, “Identity was terrifying because it transformed hate into a religious duty and sanctified murder itself as an act of faith.”48
The Aryan Nations’ political agenda was further justified by the Church of Jesus Christ Christian’s interpretation of scripture. Additional legitimization was provided by Butler’s authority as its preeminent cleric. “Scripture says, ‘There shall be bloodshed’ … Therefore there should be war,”49 he argued from a pulpit adorned with multiple Nazi swastikas and resurrection Christian crosses beneath a red, blue, and white stained-glass window with the Aryan Nations symbolic cross fashioned from a sword and crown.50 In a membership form distributed during the 1980s and 1990s, Butler further explained the spiritual base of Aryan Nations’ beliefs. “Aliens are pouring over as a flood into each of our ancestral lands, threatening dispossession of the heritage, culture, and very life blood of our posterity,” he wrote. “We know that as we return to our Father’s natural Life Order, all power, prosperity, and liberty again comes to us as our possession, to establish justice forever on earth.”51 This Is Aryan Nations articulated the religious foundations of the Aryan Nations political program:
WE BELIEVE that there is a battle being fought this day between the children of darkness (today known as Jews) and the children of light (God), the Aryan race, the true Israel of the Bible. Revelations 12:10–11.
WE BELIEVE in the preservation of our race individually and collectively as a people as demanded and directed by God. We believe a racial nation has a right and is under obligation to preserve itself and its members.… As His divine race, we have been commissioned to fulfill His divine purpose and plans.…
WE BELIEVE that there is a day of reckoning. The usurper will be thrown out by the terrible might of Yahweh’s people as they return to their roots and their special destiny. We know there is soon to be a day of judgement and a day when Christ’s Kingdom (government) will be established on earth, as it is in heaven. “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms and it shall stand forever. The saints of the Most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey Him.” Daniel 2:44; 7:18; 7:27.52
An article from that period of time published in the Aryan Nations’ newsletter emphasized the divinely ordained dimension of its raison d’être. In “An All White Nation?—Why Not?” Reverend Roy B. Masker explains how white American Christians “are in disobedience to our Father and God, Yahwey, for allowing the Nation He gave us to become the mongrelized cesspool in which we now find ourselves.… Indeed, it is incumbent upon us to BUILD A NEW, ALL-WHITE NATION! We are under command to do so! All scripture demands it! Woe to those who stand in the way of the Aryan juggernaut!”53
This, accordingly, was the amenable environment that from 1975 Mathews called home—a fitting backdrop to establish what Nazi Germany had called lebensraum and the National Alliance had similarly termed “White living space.”54 A likeminded community of Church of Jesus Christ Christian congregants and retirees had already settled there a few years before. Land was relatively inexpensive, at around two hundred dollars per acre;55 taxes were low; the region was sparsely populated; and best of all, it was desirably homogeneous.56 Butler purchased a twenty-acre site at the edge of the Coeur d’Alene National Forest, off Rimrock Road, just north of Hayden Lake.57 As befits “the international headquarters of the White race,”58 he set about building a hundred-seat chapel, a combined meeting hall and communal dining room, an outdoor reviewing stand at which speakers could address large gatherings, a print shop, and a barracks—overseen by a security watchtower with armed guards, surrounded by a six-foot-high barbed wire fence, and patrolled by attack dogs. Nearby was Butler’s own, simple home with its pretty flowers.59 Surrounded by intimidating, tall Ponderosa pines and other evergreen trees, a gatehouse and raiseable barrier marked the entrance to the compound—with a prominent sign warning “White Kindred Only!”60 Its seclusion was intended to prevent snooping from law enforcement, the media, civil rights, and other nongovernmental organizations as well as the curious public.61
The apple of Butler’s eye and most tangible manifestation of the Aryan Nations’ unification mission was what in the 1980s was advertised as its annual “Summer Congress and [N-word] Shoot.”62 Held in July,63 the typical event, according to the University of Chicago historian Kathleen Belew, “was part organizing meeting, part church service, part summer picnic,” where participants moved easily from the racist diatribes issued during the conference’s plenary sessions to more casual conversation and networking over heaping plates of spaghetti served family style.64 At its heyday in the early 1980s, perhaps as many as five hundred attendees from over a dozen different Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi organizations enrolled in workshops on various aspects of white supremacy, acquired survivalist skills, or undertook paramilitary training courses.65 One obstacle course reportedly concluded with participants firing automatic weapons at a poster of Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister, as they proclaimed, “For God, nation, race!”66 But the real highlight for many was the climactic “SACRED CROSS LIGHTING”67—a fixture of Ku Klux Klan gatherings since the early 1900s.68 The Aryan Nations’ variant included the traditional tall cross, denoting “the light of this world, which is Jesus Christ,” along with four smaller ones signifying for them the points of the compass and the ubiquity of the white race’s historical dominance and heritage.69
The 1983 congress proved to be the most significant—and consequential—both for the Aryan Nations and for the American white supremacist movement more generally. This meeting laid bare the movement’s violently seditious character and the actual terrorism threats it posed.70 The killing only weeks earlier of Gordon Kahl, a sixty-three-year-old farmer and longstanding member of a North Dakota chapter of the Posse Comitatus, was the ostensible flashpoint for what an insider would later describe as “the first and only armed revolt against the government in this century”71—led by Robert Mathews.
Kahl reflected the uniquely multitudinous dimensions of violent, far-right extremism. Another decorated World War II veteran, Kahl had grown up in rural Heaton, North Dakota. From an early age he was taught that whites and blacks and Jews and Christians were separate peoples with whom one should not associate or mix. The fact that there were likely few opportunities to do so in tiny Heaton in the middle of that sparsely populated state during the 1920s and 1930s only reinforced his segregationist convictions. Kahl’s wartime service as a turret gunner flying B-25 bombers in both Europe and the Pacific did little to modify or alter his views. Indeed, by the time Germany surrendered in 1945, Kahl had come to believe that the war he had just fought had been avoidable. Instead, a shadowy cabal of bankers, Jews, capitalists, and others had drawn President Franklin D. Roosevelt into their conspiracy to profit from the fighting. Kahl’s close reading of Henry Ford’s antisemitic 1920 screed The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which promoted the Russian Czarist-era seminal antisemitic conspiratorial text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (also known as The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion), further reinforced this malignant worldview. By the 1960s, after a brief dalliance with the John Birch Society, Kahl became involved with the grassroots militant tax protest movement that would eventually crystallize as the Posse Comitatus.72 In 1967 he sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service that would become the source from which all his future travails would flow. From this time forward, Kahl swore, he would not “pay tithes to the Synagogue of Satan under the second plank of the Communist Manifesto.… Never again will I give aid and comfort to the enemies of Christ.”73
Kahl formally joined the Posse Comitatus in 1973. He was appointed its coordinator for Texas the following year. The IRS finally caught up with him three years later. Kahl was arrested, tried, and convicted of failure to pay income tax.74 His appeals denied, Kahl served eight months of a year sentence at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. The terms of his parole were that Kahl would henceforth agree to pay his income tax as well as refrain from involvement with either the Posse or any other organization similarly opposed to federal and state laws. He had absolutely no intention of submitting to any of those conditions. The stage was thus set for another confrontation, especially after the IRS attached a lien to eighty acres of his land—a quarter of the family farm. In March 1981, the IRS put the seized acreage up for auction; that same month, a warrant was issued for Kahl’s arrest. Income taxes were a Satanic commandment that he could not abide, Kahl declared before leaving town. Kahl and his wife stayed mostly in Arkansas, where they visited the compound of a Christian survivalist group known as the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA). They returned to North Dakota in 1982. It was only a matter of time before his cat-and-mouse game with federal authorities would turn violent.75
By the early 1980s, local chapters of the Posse Comitatus had been established in almost every state in the country. The movement had also become increasingly violent, especially in the Midwest, where farmers had been hard hit by foreclosures. Posse adherents attacked local, state, and federal law enforcement officers attempting to serve subpoenas for firearms or land-use violations and enforce property seizures.76 That some members like Kahl routinely found scriptural justification for their militant opposition to taxes and governmental authority above the county level77 is clear from the sixteen-page letter that he sent to Richard Butler and various other friends, supporters, and journalists while on the run again in 1983. Describing himself as a “Christian patriot” intent on “put[ting] our nation back under Christian Common Law, which is another way of saying God’s Law as laid down by the inspiration of God, through his prophets and preserved for us in the Scriptures,” Kahl recounted how on February 13, 1983, he, his wife, his son Yorie, and three friends were “ambushed on our return to our homes.” At a roadblock just north of Medina, North Dakota, a tense standoff unfolded as Kahl and Yorie, each armed with semiautomatic .223 Ruger Mini-14s, confronted four U.S. marshals—accompanied by a county deputy sheriff and a local police officer—who had come to arrest Kahl. “There was a lot of screaming and hollering going on [and] a shot rang out,” the farmer-turned-militant recalled.78 More shooting erupted. When the smoke cleared, Ken Muir, the U.S. marshal for North Dakota, and a deputy marshal, Robert Cheshire, lay dead. Another deputy marshal was wounded, as were the deputy sheriff and a police officer. Yorie had been shot in the stomach and was arrested shortly afterward at a nearby clinic. Kahl went home, changed clothes, collected some ammunition, climbed into his 1966 AMC Rambler, and disappeared.79
His supporters subsequently repackaged Kahl’s letter into a circular to raise funds for his defense if he was captured. This was wishful thinking. Kahl was fully prepared to die for his beliefs. The killing of the marshals, his letter argued, was no different from the killing he had done during the war to protect himself and fellow crewmen. “I would have liked nothing other [than] to be left alone,” Kahl reflected, “so I could enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which our forefathers willed to us. This was not to be after I discovered that our nation had fallen into the hands of an alien people.” He saw himself as persecuted by a predatory government, in league with powerfully odious forces, and therefore as a reluctant warrior-patriot, cast on the defensive by the “enemies of Christ [who] have taken their Jewish Communist manifesto, and incorporated it into the Statutory Laws of our country, and threw our Constitution and our Christian Common Law (which is none other than the Laws of God as set forth in the Scriptures) into the garbage can.” To Kahl’s mind, the United States was a “conquered and occupied nation, conquered and occupied by the Jews.” White Christians, accordingly, were enmeshed in a life-or-death struggle “between the people of the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of Satan.” He placed his faith in the Lord’s hands. “I have no idea where I’m going,” Kahl concludes the letter, “but after some more prayer, I will go where the Lord leads me, and either live to carry on the fight, or die if that be the case, and for the present at least, I bid you all good-bye.”80
