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

by Kathleen Belew

Immediately after the acquittal, jubilant white power leaders touted this victory loudly and movement-wide. Miles said the verdict “restore[d] my faith in the people.”112 FBI agent Knox resigned in frustration. Beam founded a new publication, The Seditionist, and published a second edition of Essays of a Klansman.113 White power activists used the trial victory to enhance and encourage further underground operations and hone their appeal to the mainstream. In the post-1988 period, the movement would incorporate new legions of skinhead members, reemerge as the purportedly nonracist militia movement, and guide a new generation of activists, including Timothy McVeigh, to white power movement violence. And the work of white women, both as symbols and as activists, continued unabated. Indeed, when the movement used the federal sieges of two separatist compounds to fuel its militia groundswell, the stories it told to new recruits would be about women. Louis Beam would rehash the story of Sheila Beam’s arrest and detention to relaunch his writings on leaderless resistance and widen the appeal of the strategy in 1992, both before and after the federal siege of a white separatist family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.114 The death of another martyred white woman there—this time killed by a federal sniper—would inflame the white power call to arms.