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

by Kathleen Belew

White power should have been legible as a coherent social movement but was instead largely narrated and prosecuted as scattered actions and inexplicable lone wolf attacks motivated not by ideology but by madness or personal animus. It might have been treated as a wide-reaching social network with the capacity to inflict mass casualties, but was too often brushed off as backwardness or ineptitude. It should have been acknowledged as producing, supporting, and deploying a coherent worldview that posed radical challenges to a liberal consensus around racial and gender equality and support of institutions including the vote, courts, the rule of law, and federal legislative bodies. Instead, the disappearance of the movement in the years after Oklahoma City—engineered by white power activists but permitted and furthered by government actors, prosecutorial strategies, scholars, and journalists alike—left open the possibility of new waves of action. Even as prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan shaped a new generation of white power activism, this new activity would largely continue to evade public understanding, despite the warnings of watchdog groups, until it broke into mainstream politics in the 2016 presidential campaign and election.