NYT, Jan. 26, 2021
Lone Wolves Connected Online: A History of Modern White Supremacy
Forty years ago, Louis Beam had the idea of using the internet to drive
a movement. Today, his vision is disturbingly prevalent.
By Laura Smith
In 1982, Louis Beam drove 500 miles from a rugged patch of Texas land
near the Gulf of Mexico to another rugged patch of land in the Arkansas
Ozarks. He was headed to “the Farm,” a remote 250-acre commune of white
supremacists calling themselves the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of
the Lord. The C.S.A. was stockpiling weapons and training in guerrilla
tactics to prepare for an imminent race war.
Mr. Beam was a small man, with a meticulously trimmed mustache. A former
Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he was by the
early 1980s more concerned with networking and organizing strategies
than membership in any one group. Across the country — in Idaho,
Washington State, California and Arkansas — there were “patriots” ready
and willing to do anything for the white cause, it was just a matter of
connecting them. Mr. Beam and other white supremacist leaders wanted to
harness their followers’ racist zeal without inviting the prying eyes of
law enforcement.
The solution was in Mr. Beam’s car: a Commodore 64, one of the earliest
personal computers. Using a dial-up modem and a phone line, anyone could
sign on to a bulletin board system and read or write racist screeds. He
was traveling the country to share the good news of the early internet.
“Imagine, if you will, all the great minds of the patriotic Christian
movement linked together and joined into one computer,” Mr. Beam wrote
in one of his early online essays. “Imagine any patriot in the country
being able to call up and access these minds.”
Mr. Beam had an appointment with Kerry Noble, the second-in-command of
the C.S.A., to discuss bringing the group “online.” Mr. Noble, a
strapping and bearded man, listened as Mr. Beam brought the computer
into the C.S.A.’s “sanctuary” building and talked of all the machine
could do.
Mr. Noble, who has since renounced his white supremacist past,
remembered thinking it was a preposterous idea. C.S.A. members were
construction workers, loggers and mechanics in the rural South. Their
organization’s name evoked the crusades, not the digital abstractions of
the Commodore’s neon type. He told Mr. Beam: “This is never going to
fly. People are not going to sit there and tell the computer what to do.”
“You know, of course they did,” Mr. Noble said recently.
Noble was not alone in this skepticism. In 1985, the Anti-Defamation
League issued a report on the emergence of hate speech online, saying
“there is little to suggest that this represents a great leap forward in
the spread of anti-Semitic and racist propaganda.”
But back then, it would have been hard to imagine the power of what Mr.
Beam had in mind for connecting white supremacist cells online. Today,
he lives quietly in a suburb of San Antonio and does not speak to
reporters (including for this article), but a look back at the
strategies that he and his contemporaries set in motion reveals that law
enforcement and the general public are still battling his vision for
white nationalism. Today, the militant right has moved from PCs and
rural compounds to platforms like Gab, 8chan and Parler on smartphones
across the country.
For the past 40 years, there have been dueling narratives about white
supremacists in the U.S.: dangerous or farcical. They are alternately
seen as a hillbilly fringe with outsize ambitions for political
revolution, and a savvy movement demanding constant vigilance. While the
media, nonprofits and law enforcement have juggled these two ideas,
white-power organizers have been busy connecting, recruiting and working
at the digital grindstone — speaking to and expanding their base for
decades.
The New Radical Right
Mr. Beam was born in Lufkin, Texas, in 1946. After high school, he
joined the Army and served for 18 months as a helicopter door gunner in
Vietnam, later boasting in his writing of killing more than 50
Vietnamese. He came back in 1968 with a “Born to Lose” tattoo and an
abiding resentment of the United States government.
Mr. Beam joined the Klan and soon became a leader in the new wave of
militant white supremacists that emerged after the Vietnam War. Unlike
their predecessors of the Jim Crow era — who were often local sheriffs,
City Council members or even state governors — these new white militants
distrusted law enforcement and the government as much as they hated
Black people, Jews and immigrants.
In his 1983 book, “Essays of a Klansman,” Mr. Beam wrote: “Today there
no longer exists in this country a government for the protection and
benefit of the descendants of those who created this Nation. In place of
such a government, there now stands a powerful despotism of gullible and
sometimes evil men committed to the eventual destruction of the White Race.”
During the 1980s, followers of the growing movement became fixtures of
daytime talk shows like “Sally,” “Geraldo” and “The Jerry Springer
Show,” where young skinheads in swastika T-shirts and large blond men
from the K.K.K. brandished Confederate battle flags and shouted at
audiences whose reactions caromed between outrage and titillation. These
new faces of the radical right were an object of fascination and
derision, held up as cornpone bigots and ridiculous grown-ups playing
war in the woods. But sandwiched as they were between programming on
club kids and love triangles, they were never really made to look dangerous.
But off the air, and around the country, they were very dangerous. Mr.
Beam and his cohort were looking to foment a race war, which they hoped
would lead to the creation of a white ethno-state. With that in mind, he
and other movement leaders declared war on the U.S. government at the
1983 Aryan Nations World Congress at the organization’s compound in
Hayden Lake, Idaho.
According to a later memo from the Department of Justice: “Robberies and
counterfeiting were discussed as ways to finance the movement. Bombings
and assassinations were discussed as a means of achieving the desired ends.”
Between 1983 and 1985, white supremacists were behind a nationwide crime
spree. C.S.A. members bombed a natural gas pipeline in Arkansas, killed
a pawnbroker they mistakenly thought was Jewish and attempted to murder
a federal judge and an F.B.I. agent. Members of the Order, a secretive
offshoot of the Aryan Nations of which Mr. Beam was rumored to be a
part, robbed a series of armored cars in Washington and California. In
Denver, they shot a Jewish radio show host to death in his driveway.
As all of this was happening, the online proselytizing ramped up. Mr.
Beam began his Liberty Net online bulletin board system in 1984. Shortly
before, George P. Dietz had started the first white supremacist bulletin
board system, which he referred to as “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!” Then the skinhead leader Tom Metzger began his own bulletin
board network, which quickly surpassed both Mr. Beam’s and Mr. Dietz’s
sites in popularity. Before most American households even had a
computer, the white supremacist movement was highly cyberliterate,
deftly using the early internet to spread its message.
Mike German, a 16-year veteran of the F.B.I. who specialized in domestic
terrorism, said, “The first time I heard the word email was from
neo-Nazi skinheads.”
Sedition
By 1985, the Justice Department viewed the nationwide network of white
supremacists as a threat to national security. Federal prosecutors
decided to use the declaration of war at the Aryan Nations World
Congress as the basis for an ambitious and highly unusual charge:
seditious conspiracy. The U.S. penal code defines the crime as an act in
which two or more people “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy
by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against
them.” In a multistate sweep, the F.B.I. arrested Louis Beam and 13
other white supremacist leaders, and took them to Fort Smith, Ark. to be
tried.
Chaos descended on the normally quiet working-class town as the trial
began in February 1988. The K.K.K. held 15 rallies in front of the
federal courthouse, blasting “God Bless America” over loudspeakers.
Anti-Klan protesters carried signs reading, “Evil coneheads, go away.”
The galleries of the courthouse were packed, while snipers were
positioned on the building’s roof. Steve Snyder, an assistant U.S.
attorney on the case, remembered taking a handgun to court in his
briefcase every day.
Judge Morris Arnold, who now sits on the United States Court of Appeals
for the Eighth Circuit, presided over the case and carefully instructed
the jury on the complex nature of the charges. According to Judge
Arnold, he told them, “The fact that you may think it was impossible for
the defendants to overthrow the government is not a defense to the
charge.” What mattered, Judge Arnold said, was that the defendants
believed they could topple the government and took steps toward that end.
In the government’s opening statement, Mr. Snyder laid out the
defendants’ intricate plot, which involved weapons stockpiling,
paramilitary training, armed robbery, murder of government officials,
and planned attacks on infrastructure targets.
But wrapping all of those crimes up into a seditious conspiracy would be
a tough sell.
Rodney Smolla, now the dean of Widener University Delaware School of
Law, lived near Fort Smith at the time and was quoted in several
newspaper reports on the trial. He was wary of the prosecution’s legal
strategy from the beginning. “Sedition has a troubling history in this
country,” he said recently. “It has typically been used to suppress
political speech.”
The defendants and their supporters seized on the suppression-of-speech
narrative — rhetoric still heard today from the far right. Frazier Glenn
Miller Jr., then the head of the White Patriot party, said, “The whole
purpose of this is to silence the white patriot movement.” (He would go
on to kill three people in an anti-Semitic shooting in Overland Park,
Kan., in 2014.) Protesters outside the courthouse marched behind a
banner that read “Repeal the anti-free speech sedition law.” And Mr.
Beam called the charges “the McCarthyism of the ’80s.”
Judge Arnold remembered reporters swarming Mr. Beam as he was brought to
the courthouse. “Louis, did you aspire to overthrow the United States
government?” a reporter called out. He responded with swaggering
sarcasm, “What else would a country boy do on a Saturday night?”
The government’s key witness in the seven-week trial was Jim Ellison,
the head of the C.S.A. who had turned state’s evidence. A dark-haired,
barrel-chested man, Mr. Ellison rattled off a litany of criminal
activity, including a plot to kill a federal judge and the obtaining of
30 gallons of cyanide to poison the water supply of New York and
Washington, D.C. He also corroborated the defendants’ exchanging of
information and resources with the intent to overthrow the government.
But under cross-examination, Mr. Ellison’s credibility withered. He
admitted that he had appointed himself “King of the Ozarks,” believed
himself to be a direct descendant of King David of Israel and had
declared one C.S.A. member to be “spiritually dead” so that he could
marry his wife.
Rodney Bowers, a reporter who covered the trial for The Arkansas
Gazette, said he had no doubt that the men were dangerous and that “they
wanted to kill.” But he also thought “that kind of crazy testimony that
just didn’t go over well with the jury.”
“How are these guys going to pull off what the Soviet Union hasn’t been
able to?” Mr. Bowers added.
After four days of deliberating, the jury found the defendants not
guilty not only of sedition, but also of the conspiracies to kill
government officials and of transporting stolen money across state lines.
Judge Arnold was surprised. “I would have convicted them,” he said.
But the jury could not see past the question of plausibility. The idea
that a bunch of blue-collar workers and religious zealots from Arkansas,
Oklahoma and Texas could topple the most powerful government on earth
had seemed absurd.
After the verdict, Mr. Beam and his supporters marched over to the
Confederate statue across the street from the courthouse and declared
victory over the “Zionist Occupationist Government.” As he spoke, his
wife, Sheila, who stood beside him barefoot and in a flowing white
dress, fainted. Mr. Beam scooped her up in his arms and carried her off
into the distance.
“After the trial,” she said, “many in the movement felt emboldened by
the government’s failure to convict.”
She added that for law enforcement, the embarrassment of the verdict
“led to institutional policies not to investigate the white power
movement, but rather to limit prosecutions to individuals. This is the
policy that would limit the prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombing.”
Lone Wolf
Louis Beam’s tract “Leaderless Resistance” had originally been printed
in samizdat editions in the early 1980s, but in February 1992 he put the
text on the internet, and its reach increased exponentially.
In the 3,400-word essay, Mr. Beam channeled a guerrilla warfare
sensibility, arguing that, in order to avoid government infiltration,
the white supremacist movement should organize in cells of five or fewer
people — what would come to be known as “lone wolves” were best. “It
becomes the responsibility of the individual to acquire the necessary
skills and information as to what is to be done,” he wrote. Each
“patriot” would have to make “a private decision in the quietness of his
heart to resist: to resist by any means necessary.” Once the act was
committed, the leaders of the groups could publicly disavow the violence
— and avoid prosecution.
“No one need issue an order to anyone,” Mr. Beam wrote.
According to Stephen Jones, Timothy McVeigh’s defense lawyer, McVeigh
told him that he had read “Leaderless Resistance” and that “clearly
Louis Beam was someone that was very important to him.”
The widely accepted narrative of McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, is that he was a loner
Army veteran with a venomous disdain for the government. But it is not
generally known how connected he was to the white supremacist movement.
In their book, “American Terrorist,” based on a series of death row
interviews with McVeigh, Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck wrote that McVeigh
briefly was a member of the Klan, owned a white supremacist T-shirt, and
sold at gun shows copies of the “The Turner Diaries,” the apocalyptic
race-war novel foundational to the white power movement.
The Murrah building had long been a potential target for white
supremacists. Kerry Noble had cased the premises with other C.S.A.
members as early as 1983. They had even begun building bombs, but one of
them exploded in a C.S.A. member’s hand, which the group considered a
sign from God to wait. When McVeigh did carry out the bombing, Mr. Noble
was working as a vacuum cleaner salesman in Texas. He saw the news on
television and recognized the plot instantly. “They did it,” he
remembered thinking. “They finally have done it.”
In a legal irony, McVeigh’s defense team essentially argued what the
prosecution in the Fort Smith trial had argued: that the bombing was
orchestrated by a complex network of white supremacists and far-right
militia members. According to Mr. Jones, three weeks before the bombing,
McVeigh called someone living in Elohim City, a far-right compound in
Eastern Oklahoma with connections to the C.S.A., the Aryan Nations and
the Order. “His supply chain plus his travels indicated a fairly
sophisticated group of people,” Mr. Jones said. “It was our opinion that
most of the ones that he associated with were either the Midwest bank
robbers or people at Elohim City.”
He added: “I was convinced after talking to him, analyzing carefully
what he said through numerous interviews, that he was trying to protect
others, and assuming all the responsibility himself.”
But only McVeigh and one immediate accomplice, Terry Nichols, were
convicted in the bombing. The government’s case, Mr. Jones argued,
missed a big part of the story.
“They never referred to Tim McVeigh as a terrorist,” Mr. Jones said. “It
was a murder case. And so they avoided the political connotation.”
Social Sharing
In the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, vast law-enforcement
resources were brought to bear on terrorism, but relatively little went
toward investigating or tracking domestic terrorism. “Most of the people
who call themselves terrorism researchers became terrorism researchers
after 9/11 focusing specifically on Al Qaeda,” said Mr. German, the
former F.B.I. agent.
In 2009, Daryl Johnson, a senior homeland security intelligence analyst,
wrote an internal report raising the possibility that the recession, the
election of the first Black president and disaffection among veterans
returning from Iraq and Afghanistan “could create a fertile recruiting
environment for right-wing extremists and even result in confrontations
between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the
past.”
Over the next 10 years, Mr. Johnson’s warning went largely unheeded. A
2018 report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University
Law School said, “Domestic terrorism is a blind spot in the Justice
Department’s counterterrorism strategy,” an assertion that Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein agreed with publicly.
During those same 10 years, social media reached near ubiquity. On
platforms like Twitter and Facebook, extremists could organize and share
information, often in plain sight. Instead of thousands of people
reading online bulletin boards, tens of millions were seeing racist Pepe
the Frog memes, “white genocide” rhetoric and conspiracy theories about
Democrats running child trafficking rings.
In 2017, during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., an
event that was largely organized online, the 20-year-old James Alex
Fields drove his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing Heather
Heyer and injuring 19 others. A little more than two weeks later, an
article titled “You Just Got a Promotion within the Alt-right” appeared
on the website run by the alt-right leader Richard Spencer. The article,
which promoted Mr. Beam’s theory of leaderless resistance, read in part:
“You have to take action yourself. No other way around it.”
Dr. Belew, the University of Chicago history professor, said, “I think
you might be surprised by the continuing relevance of, and references
to, Louis Beam as a central figure in the white power movement today.”
She added: “It’s critical to understand that we should not understand
acts of mass violence carried out by the white power movement as ‘lone
wolf’ attacks. The white power movement is continuous, today’s
paramilitary groups and lone-wolf gunmen trace their ideological and
organization heritage across decades.”
Today, as extremist groups are expelled from Facebook and Twitter, they
migrate to social networks like Gab and encrypted chat platforms like
Signal. In the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, anti-government
groups like the Oath Keepers coordinated their movements over the
walkie-talkie app Zello, for instance. And the goals can sound
chillingly similar to those envisioned by Mr. Beam and his cohort. The
F.B.I. recently arrested members of The Base, a network of
white-nationalist cells, for plotting a series of attacks — including on
drinking water supplies — that the militants hoped would lead to a race
war. The scale of it all makes Mr. Beam’s Commodore 64s look
disturbingly prescient.
According to Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale University
and the author of “How Fascism Works,” the evolution of the American far
right is similar to that of other such movements, both in the past and
elsewhere in the world.
“You spend some period of time steeped in the rhetoric,” he said. “The
violent language gets you used to the idea of violent action. There’s
several years of uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinners. And then you get
the violence. This is what we’ve seen in Europe, in the United States
and India. All over the world the far right has gone mainstream.”
Louis Beam has never been convicted of a felony. He has not given a
public speech since 1996, but his website is still up.
“In a way, his work is sort of done,” said Heidi Beirich, head of the
Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “He got his message
out there.”
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