Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

by Kathleen Belew

While the Vietnam War story as lived experience and cultural force receded with time, the war remained relevant. New generations of activists participated in a movement with direct genealogical through-lines to the post-Vietnam white power unification, sharing organizational strategies, ideologies, resources, and personnel with the 1979–1995 groundswell. Stormfront, for instance, was founded in 1995 by Dominica mercenary Don Black; much of the contemporary “alt-right” posture was modeled on earlier political campaigns by David Duke; the acquittal of militants at Malheur Wildlife Reserve in Oregon at their 2016 trial echoed the 1988 Fort Smith sedition trial, and the action of those militants may have been an attempt to provoke federal violence reminiscent of Ruby Ridge. Consciously or not, all of these actions referenced decades of white power movement history, and several continued to employ movement networks.