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

by Kathleen Belew

Government agents, too, were keenly aware of the organization of the white power movement and its continued capacity for violence. In a 1995 New York Times piece, the FBI special agent in charge of the Coeur d’Alene office, Wayne Manis, called the Order “without a doubt the best organized and most serious terrorist threat that this country has ever seen.”

Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, the militia movement was repeatedly portrayed as a novel development. By eliding its continuity with the white power movement, these observers missed the significance of the militia movement in historical context. Far from a new groundswell, it represented a move toward the mainstream, perhaps the most successful of many such attempts to broaden recruitment. In the militia movement, the war on the government went public.

A shift in language worked to broaden the appeal of the militias. Leaders and activists had begun to replace the idea of Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) with the phrase “New World Order,” which signaled an alignment of malevolent internationalist forces, including the United Nations, global finance, nations, and technology, that conspired to take over the world and would soon face the righteous in Armageddon.

The increasing prevalence of New World Order conspiracy belief among evangelicals, together with the rising importance of social issues held in common between mainstream and fringe—opposition to immigration, gay rights, and especially abortion—indicate a narrowing gap between white power activism and a large segment of the mainstream evangelical right.

This is one of the most terrifying phenomena, but how new is it in a country founded on genocide, slavery, lynching, legal segregation, terrorism, police brutality, and mass incarceration—all directed primarily at black people?

In other words, the white power movement activists who had rallied around Vietnam War veterans, symbols, weapons, and uniforms and had formed their movement from the paramilitary spillover of the war now recognized that a similar circulation had militarized state enforcement mechanisms. In the 1990s the paramilitary white power movement would face the full force of militarized civilian policing.

conspiracist subculture.

In addition to the long-held strategy of targeting veterans and active-duty military personnel for recruitment, and a more successful appeal to the mainstream through militias, white power activists also deliberately modified some of their cultural standards in order to appeal to a new pool of recruits. Beginning in the late 1980s, a large number of young people became involved in the skinhead movement, which blended racial violence with a cosmopolitan white supremacy revolving around an urban concert and drug scene. On one level, the presence of skinheads signaled the frustrations of working-class white youth at a moment of profound economic transformation that seemed to threaten their life chances. In another way, skinheads represented an increasingly strong link between white power paramilitarism and prison culture.

more than one observer concluded that the movement had withered. But, using the same adaptability and opportunism that had long characterized Klan activity, the movement recalibrated to the prevailing public sentiment. The new advance guard was in militias: paramilitary groups that frequently claimed not to be racist despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The continued use of underground cells meant that many white power activists didn’t define success as the recruitment of large numbers of new members and were content to remain small.

Significantly, the arresting officers and the skinheads were wearing the same camouflage fatigue uniforms, representing the clash of two distinct paramilitarizations: white power and civilian policing.

Commentators nationwide, left and right, saw Ruby Ridge at best as a public relations disaster and at worst as a rampage by a militarized superstate. As the New York Times argued in an editorial: Randy Weaver was a white supremacist. He lived as a heavily armed recluse in a cabin on a ridge in rural Idaho. Neither of those things is against the law in the United States.… There are a lot of lunatics out there in the woods. But it is not the job of Federal law enforcement agencies to behave in a way that seems designed to confirm their paranoia—especially when there is no proof they have violated any laws.… [There was] no indication Mr. Weaver did anything illegal until Federal agents invited him to.44 The idea of lunatics in the woods impeded an understanding of the complex social movement that had placed the Weavers on the mountaintop in the first place, and supported their existence there.

His disingenuous claim to be newly radicalized by Ruby Ridge appealed to a broad audience of horrified observers, and used the momentum of the incident to further the formation and organization of local militias without overtly tying them to the white power movement.

Peters exemplified the new turn in the movement: a more overt paramilitarism, one that could openly march against the state by letting racism, anticommunism, and antisemitism move to the background.

Indeed, the white power movement had evolved far past anything so easily recognizable as a hooded, white-robed Klan march on Main Street. At Estes Park and in the militia movement in general, Ruby Ridge codified an alliance of tax protestors, radical anti-abortionists, militiamen, racists, Identity Christians, survivalists, conspiracy theorists, and those who simply believed the U.S. government had grown too large. As anti-abortion fervor, resistance to gun control laws, and anger over big government grew among mainstream conservatives during the 1990s, the white power movement leveraged these issues for recruitment.

In the first phase, they would form an alliance with people of color to overthrow the government.

What in the world would this look like???

Something new happened at Estes Park: the summit rearticulated white power tactics in such a way that they became widely available to the purportedly nonracist militia movement.

Waco and Ruby Ridge did more than inflame the movement; for its members, they became the standard of atrocity associated with the New World Order, by now synonymous with the federal government.

However, in no sense was the bombing of Oklahoma City carried out by one man. The hell McVeigh described represented the culmination of decades of white power organizing.

The Oklahoma City bombing represented the triumph of the white power paramilitary violence that had reverberated through the American home front in the years following the Vietnam War.2 The bombing became popularly understood as the work of one man, or a few men, through several processes that eroded contextual understanding.

Indeed, the Bureau had institutionalized a policy to pursue only individual actors in white power violence, with “no attempts to tie individual crimes to a broader movement.”4 This strategy not only worked to obscure the bombing as part a social movement but, in the years following McVeigh’s conviction, effectively erased the movement itself from public understanding.

McVeigh wanted the bombing to send a message to the New World Order: that white American men could still wage war on the state.

Imagine being a white American man and thinking the state owes you any more than it's already given you.

Meanwhile, most reactions to the bombing within the white power movement fell into two categories: those who condemned the act and believed McVeigh was an innocent scapegoat, and those who approved of the bombing as violence necessary in the war on the state.

Indeed, the bombing launched an almost immediate and widespread wave of violence as the militia movement, and the broader white power movement, took action around the country.

including bombing a Planned Parenthood clinic, a U.S. Bank branch, and a suburban bureau of the Spokane-based Spokesman-Review.

As I read this book, I keep being amazed that I didn't hear about this stuff. Did it not make national news? We didn't talk about it in the faculty lounge. Why did this stuff remain off my radar?

Furrow was a longtime Aryan Nations member with a history of violent activity. In an earlier court appearance for assault, he had said he fantasized about committing a mass killing: even so, he was able to obtain an Uzi and carry out further crimes.

The Oklahoma City bombing, as Beam foretold, resulted in a federal crackdown that dampened the white power movement somewhat in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The successful strategy of leaderless resistance meant that movement leaders could never be linked to the bombing—and that even the white power movement itself could become invisible, its coordinated violence misunderstood as disconnected acts carried out by lone terrorists.

Such descriptions of absence serve as an apt metaphor for the way the bombing distorted, or even destroyed, what had been a popular awareness of white power activity. From Klan paramilitary camps to the Greensboro shooting, from the Order to the Fort Smith sedition trial, white power actions made the news. Although the connections between such episodes were not always made clear, they nevertheless appeared in mainstream newspapers, on morning newsmagazine and afternoon talk shows, in movies and television miniseries, and even on the late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live.2 But Timothy McVeigh’s execution cemented a perception of the bombing as unconnected to the events that came before, as an inexplicable act of violence carried out by one or a few actors. This idea threatened to occlude the white power movement altogether. Leaderless resistance had triumphed as a strategy to hide the broader movement in the bombing investigation and prosecution, and in the journalistic and scholarly accounts as well. They have portrayed white power movement violence as isolated, rather than a series of coordinated acts, and its activists as madmen rather than as part of a movement.

This seems like a more important take-away than the Vietnam thing.

That the Oklahoma City bombing, which stood as a singular event of mass-casualty terrorism on American soil—deliberate violence at a scale unsurpassed, at that time, since the bombing of Pearl Harbor—did not solidify a public understanding of the white power movement and its capacity for violence is remarkable.4 Smaller-scale violent events earlier in the twentieth century, such as the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, had played a role in galvanizing public opinion against the Klan and in favor of the civil rights movement.5 Certainly such events helped tip the scale of public opinion away from overt racism and the outright support of racial violence, such that in their aftermath, even politicians who pursued policies with racial implications increasingly framed these in coded terms.

What was left unfinished, unexplained, and unconfronted about white power meant that it could resurge in the years following 1995.

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.

In the late 1990s, the movement largely relocated into the online spaces it had begun to build more than a decade earlier.

Consciously or not, all of these actions referenced decades of white power movement history, and several continued to employ movement networks.

Because of the Internet, Roof never had to meet another activist to be radicalized by the white power movement, nor to count himself among its foot soldiers.

One activist climbed a flagpole to remove the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina state capitol.

Bree Newsome = HERO!!!

But this attention provoked a substantial backlash and may have further galvanized and emboldened a segment of the electorate that identified more closely with white power ideologies around such symbols, and around white supremacy, revanchist notions of gender roles, belief in the inherent corruption of the federal government, and an apocalyptic future. The rise of the self-proclaimed “alt-right” from the websites and forums founded by white power activists and the explosion of such views into mainstream politics during the presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump show that—in a sense—Dylann Roof did participate in a chain of events that measurably decreased opportunity for and unleashed violence against people of color in myriad ways.

Roof wrote in a manifesto that he wanted to provoke race war; in the most abstract sense, he might have gotten what he was looking for.

This seems to give him too much credit, given all the other white supremacist vectors.

What is inescapably clear from the history of the white power movement, however, is that the lack of public understanding, effective prosecution, and state action left an opening for continued white power activism. The state and public opinion have failed to sufficiently halt white power violence or refute white power belief systems, and failed to present a vision of the future that might address some of the concerns that lie behind its more diffuse, coded, and mainstream manifestations.