America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (49 page)

In the 1970s, Butler may not have been so circumspect in his support for an act of terrorism, but financial more than criminal concerns likely gave him pause in 1999. Starting in 1981, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), under the leadership of civil rights activist attorney Morris Dees, began to pursue civil actions against leaders of white supremacist groups who incited others to violence. The SPLC (and later the Anti-Defamation League) used this approach to great success against groups such as the New Order Knights, Ed Fields's successor organization to the National States Rights Party,
and Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance, of which more will be said later. These efforts virtually bankrupted both groups. In fact, in 1999 Butler faced an SPLC lawsuit stemming from an incident involving a mother and son, Victoria and Jason Keenan, who had driven through the Aryan Nations property in Hayden Lake, Idaho, on their way home from a wedding. As the SPLC describes it:

After Jason retrieved a wallet he had accidentally dropped out the car window, the two started toward home again. But something—a car backfire or fireworks—led the untrained, paranoid guards on the compound to think that they were under attack by their enemies. Within seconds, at least three neo-Nazi Aryans had leaped into a pickup truck and sped out after the Keenans, firing at them as they went and, after about two miles, shooting out a tire and forcing them into a ditch.
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One reading of Butler's comments about Buford in his 1999 interview could be that the pastor was fearful that his words would become grist for the upcoming SPLC lawsuit. (The SPLC eventually won the Keenan lawsuit and forced Butler to relinquish the Aryan Nations compound and land to the Keenan family in September 2000.)

Another interpretation of Butler's reticence could be that the Aryan Nations leader feared that any recent contact between him and Furrow could trigger an entirely new civil lawsuit. Butler may have feared that he would be accused of inciting Furrow to the 1999 community center shooting. In 1987 Butler and others had escaped criminal liability for sedition, in part because, even if they had discussed a government takeover in the presence of violent followers, it is difficult to separate political speech, however inflammatory, from an actual criminal conspiracy. But Morris Dees created a legal foundation, in
civil
court, to argue that white supremacist leaders bore monetary responsibility for instigating criminal activity. (No direct evidence shows Butler in contact with Furrow after Furrow left the Aryan Nations facility in the mid-1990s.)

A similar fear of a civil lawsuit almost certainly impacted Ben Smith's preparations for his 1999 killing spree in the Midwest over Independence Day Weekend. For the months prior to his
murder-suicide, Smith had belonged to the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC; at first called simply the Church of the Creator or the Creativity movement), the 1970s brainchild of Ben Klassen, author of
The White Man's Bible.
Klassen had expressly rejected any kind of supernatural foundation for white supremacy while simultaneously predicting a holy race war, which he abbreviated as rahowa. Klassen continued to write racist and anti-Semitic treatises from his compound in the hills of North Carolina. But he committed suicide in 1993 after an SPLC lawsuit nearly bankrupted both him and his group. Another individual, a law student from Illinois named Matthew Hale, reinvigorated the World Church of the Creator in 1995. Hale, as the so-called Pontifex Maximus, or supreme leader, of the church, continued to distance the group from Christian Identity while offering a near-duplicate proscription for America's supposed satanic Jewish problem.

Ben Smith not only joined the group; he became a devout member, distributing thousands of flyers on behalf of the WCOTC. Hale even named Smith “creator of the month” in August 1998. According to the SPLC, records show that Hale engaged in nearly thirteen hours of phone conversations with Smith in the three weeks leading up to the multistate murderous rampage, with twenty-eight minutes of conversation two days before the crime began. Yet for reasons he failed to explain or justify, Smith left a letter announcing that he had officially abandoned the church on the eve of the July killings. Many believe that Hale, privy to the upcoming violence but fearing another SPLC lawsuit, encouraged Smith to write the official letter, thereby releasing Hale and the WCOTC from civil liability for Smith's crime spree. For his part, Hale offered a mixed review of Smith's activities:

He was a selfless man who gave his life in the resistance to Jewish/ mud tyranny—a man who for whatever reason ultimately decided that violence was the way to strike back against the enemies of our people—enemies who had used violence against our people for centuries. He was loyal to the core and who always put the interests of his Race before his own. . . . That the Church does not condone his acts does not affect the reality that when a people is kicked around like a dog, someone might indeed be bitten. . . .
Our Brother August Smith will continue to live on in all of us. His actions resulted in Creativity being brought to the attention of the world. Now it is up to us to utilize the attention Creativity has received and ride the wave of publicity which his actions either intentionally or unintentionally created for us. This is what he would have wanted, and what we must indeed do. RAHOWA!
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Throughout the 1990s, the WCOTC became, along with forms of neopagan Odinism, a popular choice in the ideological “buffet” for white supremacists. Smith, for instance, started his religious journey as a racist Odinist in 1997 and converted to Creativity months later. From 1995 to 2002, according to the SPLC, Hale increased the number of chapters from fourteen to eighty-eight, “making it the neo-Nazi group with the largest number of chapters in America” during its peak.
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For a white supremacist, Hale became something of a media darling. He “appeared repeatedly on NBC's ‘Today' show and other national TV news programs.” He also built his organization by staying on the vanguard of another media trend that became key in sustaining white supremacist terrorist groups, the World Wide Web. As early as 1995, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported,

Many extremist groups are on the web; the neo-Nazi National Alliance, and a covey of supporters, racist skinhead purveyors of “Aryan” music, some rabidly anti-Semitic “Identity” churches, groups sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan and several Holocaust deniers have sites. These efforts represent a well-thought out campaign to reach more people than these groups ever could have contacted through traditional mailings, handouts and demonstrations. The World Wide Web, the newest Internet technology, is an effective merchandising tool.
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By 1997 the SPLC had identified 163 hate group sites on the World Wide Web; by 1999 that number had grown by 60 percent to 254. By the spring of 2001 almost four hundred hate group sites carried racist and anti-Semitic messages to anyone who could find them in a search engine. At last count, in 2014, the SPLC had
identified 926 hate sites. This figure includes only group-based sites. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which uses a special algorithm to count both group-based and individual hate sites, puts that total number at more than ten thousand. As to specific Christian Identity websites, the number is hard to tally, but an anonymous CI adherent with the screen name of Obadiah listed fifty-nine Identity sites in 2012. More telling statistics come from an analysis of two of the most well-known Identity websites,
Christogenea.org
and Kingdom Identity Ministries. Analytics data on the former, which prominently features transcribed sermons by the Reverend Wesley Swift, show that from 2010 to 2014, the site welcomed 417,111 unique visitors. Kingdom Identity Ministries, one of the oldest Identity websites, receives an average of 2,487 visits per month. To be fair, neither site directly advocates terrorism.

But many hate sites indirectly promote such violence, according to technology experts Beverly Ray and George Marsh II. These sites include links to guerrilla warfare manuals and to how-to books like
The Anarchist Cookbook.
Several sites offer guidance to potential lone-wolf terrorists. For instance, the Aryan Underground and sites like it link directly to Louis Beam's essay on leaderless resistance. Other sites, hoping their viewers will self-radicalize, speak directly to would-be isolated terrorists. Per Ray and Marsh, the Christian Identity hate site run by the Aryan Nations links to a page run by the Ayran Underground, which includes the following advice:

Always start off small. Many small victories are better than one huge blunder (which may be the end of your career as a Lone Wolf). Every little bit counts in a resistance. . . . The less any outsider knows, the safer and more successful you will be. . . . Communication is a good thing, but keep your covert activities a secret. This will protect you as well as others like you. . . . Never keep any records of your activities that can connect you to the activity. . . . The more you change your tactics, the more effective you will become. Random chaos is never predictable. . . . Have a “rainy day” fund set aside in a safety deposit box (out of your local area and not in a high activity area), complete with new ID just in the event that something unexpected goes wrong.
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Much of the hate group activity online focuses on recruitment. A former skinhead, T.J. Leyden, described the process and the appeal: “We have a generation of MTV kids, and for them, visuals are just as important as audio, and these websites have dripping blood, they have things that come popping out at you.”
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Once someone is hooked, Leyden observed, the recruiting process becomes self-perpetuating, as the new recruits constantly reinforce each other's views in the online echo chamber: “When you had a kid in Sioux City, Iowa, a kid in Lincoln, Nebraska, a kid in Billings, Montana, these kids if they were lucky got together once a year at an Aryan festival or got together once in a great while at a concert. These kids now get together constantly, every night on the Internet.”
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The rapid expansion in the number of hate groups that create websites suggests that the approach has increased either membership or sources of revenue. The sites themselves have expanded into fields like e-commerce, notably selling the types of digital music that have become the soundtrack for white supremacy since the mid-1980s. White power music, often punk or heavy metal in style, is sold on many websites. William Pierce, author of
The Turner Diaries
and leader of the National Alliance, went so far as to develop his own music studio and production company, Resistance Records.

Matthew Hale helped turn the WCOTC into a national brand using the Internet. The WCOTC even produced a “creativity for kids” website “that offers downloadable coloring book pages and crossword puzzles about ‘white pride' in a subtle ‘kid-friendly' format.” Hale became particularly effective at marketing the WCOTC to women through the Web. Leadership positions in the WCOTC were fully open to women, and the organization developed the Women's Frontier, a website just for women, run by information coordinator Lisa Turner.

As it turned out, its marketing focus ultimately undid the World Church of the Creator. In changing the name of Klassen's Church of the Creator to
World
Church of the Creator, Matthew Hale unwittingly encroached on the naming rights that belonged to the Te-Ta-Ma Truth Foundation, a New Age spiritual organization. In the ultimate of ironies, a group that favored the “family unification of mankind” successfully sued Hale and the racist World Church
of the Creator for copyright infringement. Hale then became his own worst enemy. He openly ridiculed judge Joan Lefkow's ruling (it did not help that she was Jewish) and then quietly arranged to have her killed. But Hale's choice of contract killer turned out to be an FBI informant. A jury convicted Hale for conspiracy to commit murder in 2004, and he is presently serving a forty-year sentence in federal prison. Some suspected that Hale, in failing to kill Lefkow, ultimately arranged for the murder of her husband and mother in Lefkow's Chicago home. But investigators later identified the killer as Bart Ross, who resented Judge Lefkow for a ruling in a medical malpractice case and confessed to the crime in a suicide note. With Hale in prison, the World Church of the Creator withered into irrelevance.

One might get the sense, from stories like Hale's, that the government and anti-racist organizations have become incredibly effective at combatting religious terrorism. The Williams brothers and Buford Furrow went to prison; so did Walter Thody, Charles Barbee, Robert Berry, and Jay Merrell. When hate groups were not being undone in criminal court, the SPLC and the ADL were bankrupting them in civil court.

There is no doubt that by 1999, local and especially national law enforcement were becoming increasingly more sophisticated in recognizing and understanding the nuances of domestic terrorism, with an increased focus on the religious component that motivates at least some of the violence. With the new millennium approaching, the FBI became noticeably concerned about apocalyptic terrorism. Director Louis Freeh commissioned one of the first major analyses of religious terrorism that focused on something other than Islamic jihadism. The FBI named its study Project Megiddo, after a hill in Jerusalem, the site of many Old Testament battles and the place that many fundamentalist Christians believe will host the final battle of Armageddon. “The Hebrew word ‘Armageddon,'” the FBI prefaced its strategic assessment, “means the hills of Megiddo. . . . The name ‘Megiddo' is an apt title for a project that analyzes those who believe the year 2000 will usher in the end of the world and who are willing to perpetrate acts of violence to bring that end about.”
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