Nearly a month after a gunman opened fire at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh killing 11 Jewish worshipers, we spend the rest of the hour looking at the rise of neo-Nazis in America.
Synagogue gunman Robert Bowers had a long history of openly railing against Jews and immigrants on social media sites, circulating racist memes and asserting Jews are the enemy of white people. In his posts, Bowers made specific and repeated threats against Jews, including one just before allegedly attacking the Tree of Life synagogue. He wrote, “HIAS”—he was referring to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—”HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people”—referring to the caravan and the immigrants on the border.
On the same day that Bowers opened fire in the Pittsburgh synagogue, a neo-Nazi named Edward Clark that Bowers had been communicating with took his own life in Washington, D.C. The man’s brother, Jeffrey Clark, has since been arrested on weapons charges. The brothers were both linked to the violent white supremacist group Atomwaffen.
A.C. Thompson talking:
This is a fascinating, fascinating aspect of this story and disturbing. So we all know what happened in Pittsburgh. We have Robert Bowers. We have a man who was spewing anti-Semitic racist invective online. He was using the platform Gab to network with other white supremacists. He is accused of going into the Tree of Life synagogue and killing 11 worshipers, attacking police and so forth.
The story that comes out after that is really bizarre, fascinating and disturbing. And this is the story. We have two brothers in Washington, D.C. They are part of the white nationalist scene, and they start out sort of hanging out with Richard Spencer and that crew and they gravitate more and more and more to the full Nazi fringe. They get involved with Vanguard America, which is one of the groups that marched in Charlottesville, one of the groups tied to the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.
And then what we know after that, looking through the chat logs of the extreme neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, we know that one of the brothers shows up in those chat logs as somebody who was hanging out with Atomwaffen’s Northern Virginia contingent. His online handle shows up in there, communicating with other northern Virginia people, people from his area.
Police go to the scene of—to the house that the two brothers shared recently, and they find Atomwaffen literature as well. By this time, one of the brothers, Edward Clark, has committed suicide. He committed suicide on the morning of the synagogue massacre, right around the time of the synagogue massacre. And the other brother, Jeffrey Clark, gets arrested for weapons charges, for having high-capacity magazines, ammunition magazines. And they find all this racist literature and Atomwaffen literature.
So now what we’re looking at is this Atomwaffen Division, extreme neo-Nazi group, being tied to this incredible act of violence in Pittsburgh. And we’re really not sure where the story is going to go from here, but it is a really interesting, disturbing development.
– neo-Nazi Devon Arthur in his police interview after allegedly shooting and killing two fellow members of Atomwaffen.
It is a really interesting story. Atomwaffen develops the way a lot of these groups develop now, out of the online world. It starts with young men conversing on a fascist forum called Iron March. And on that forum, Devon [sic] Russell would post memes about how he loved school shooters, about how he loved Adolf Hitler. He posted a picture of himself carrying a Mossberg shotgun with a t-shirt that said “Natural Born Killers” and a Nazi eagle below it.
And at one point in 2015, he said, “Hey, I’m starting this group. I have been thinking about it for a long time. If you want to get involved, contact me. We’re going to be about the militant stuff. We’re one to be about sort of armed struggle for the fascist cause to take over the government and start a race war and impose our fascist ideas on this country.” And that’s how he got followers. People joined up with the group that way.
And it networked using the internet, using modern communications tools, so that there have been nodes of the group created all over the country that are all sort of linked using encrypted chats, using various tools to keep them in communication. We now think there are somewhere between 50 and 80 members of the group. We know there’s members in Canada. We know people in Australia have gotten involved. And we know that the group is linked to five different murders.
James Mason was kind of an obscure figure in the neo-Nazi movement. He had been involved with the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell, he had been involved with other neo-Nazi groups but he was not really a main player. Mason’s deal is he says, “Hey, we’re not going to create Nazism, fascism in America through the ballot box. We’re not going to do it through politics. We’re not going to do it through political protest. We’re going to do it through the gun. And the way that we’re going to do this is terrorism, assassination, acts of hyper-violence and just general chaos. We’re going to collapse the system and then we will take charge.”
And that message, which he promulgated in a newsletter called Siege throughout the ’80s, has been adopted by this new generation of white supremacists who say, “Yeah, that’s what we want to do. That’s the most extreme thing we can do. Let’s do it.” And they have sort of adopted him as their guru, as their intellectual eminence.
– when President Obama first came into office, this report on the threat of white supremacy and domestic terrorists that was squelched by right-wing congressmembers who demanded it not be released.
This is exactly what they were tracking. I think we should say also it was retracted eventually by the Obama administration. Yeah, that is when this whole thing starts ticking up–2008, 2009. You see resistance to the first African American president in this country. You see dissatisfaction from veterans coming home from wars that have been very hard on them, and they’re returning to a disastrous economy and having difficulties fitting in, in some cases. And you see anger about potential gun control legislation.
What has happened since then is all of these things have ticked up, they’ve escalated and now we’re in a much more dangerous place than even Daryl Johnson at DHS was predicting at that time. One of the things that he predicted is he said, “Look, I’m concerned that these returning veterans will get involved with these groups. We have seen it in the past. It may happen again.” And that is exactly what has happened.
The vast bulk of service members are decent, wonderful people. My father served in the Army; my grandfather served in the Army. I can tell you this. But there has consistently been this small, hard-core of members who get involved with these white power groups like Atomwaffen and and up doing pretty serious damage to the country.
that’s actually what we hear from the veterans who have gotten involved with the white power movement. They say, “Perpetual war.” They say, “We have been sent of these wars that have been disastrous, that have ruined our friends, that we’ve seen horrible, horrible things happen. And now we feel broken and we feel damaged, and we’re looking around for answers.”
And where they’re finding answers—honestly, some of them are finding answers in progressive politics, in really decent causes, and some of them are finding answers in neo-Nazism. I was just reading chat messages sent by one member of Atomwaffen who served in Afghanistan. He said, “The small moral part of me that still exists has nightmares about the people I know being blown up, about seeing them blown up in combat.”
And he says,”And I feel guilt because I was a squad automatic gunner with a belt-fed machine gun, and I remember killing women and children inadvertently, accidentally, and I feel great guilt about it.” And the thing that happens then is this guilt and anger is being channeled into this obviously incredibly noxious neo-Nazi ideology. But you’ve nailed it, exactly. This perpetual war is having damaging effects back here.
– a current group called the Atomwaffen Division, and they are actively recruiting military members.
Kathleen Belew talking:
That’s a strategy pioneered by the white power movement in the period of my study and continued throughout the post-Vietnam period. One thing to understand is that throughout American history, there is always a correlation between the aftermath of warfare and this kind of vigilante and revolutionary white power violence. So if you look, for instance, at the surges in Ku Klux Klan membership, they align more consistently with the return of veterans from combat and the aftermath of war than they do with anti-immigration, populism, economic hardship or any of the other factors that historians have typically used to explain them. Nationalist fervor, populist movements—those are all worse predictors than the aftermath of war.
Postwar periods tend to correspond then with an upsurge in white power, white supremacist activity
– Below outlines a long history of military men who became key figures in the white power movement. George Lincoln Rockwell, World War II veteran and founder of the American Nazi Party; Richard Butler, World War II veteran and founder of the Aryan Nations; Louis Beam, Vietnam veteran and grand dragon of the KKK; Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran and Oklahoma City bomber.
It’s important to remember, too, that returning veterans that join this movement, and active duty troops, we’re talking about a tiny, not even statistically significant percentage of veterans. But within this movement, those people who did serve are playing an enormously important role in instruction of weapons, in creating paramilitary activist mentality and training.
– When we speak to people involved in this movement today, they talk about leaderless resistance.
Leaderless resistance is basically what we would understand today as self-styled terrorism—the idea that you can recruit a small number of committed activists, organize them and then they will behave on their own in a cell without direct ties with movement leadership.
The military response to white power activism, like the court response to white power activism and the police response to white power activism, reflects the many ways that our society has not been prepared to deal with this kind of movement.
– why is it then that the military and the federal government in its counterterrorism efforts places so little attention, of the billions of dollars that they spend on counterterrorism, in dealing with home-grown, right-wing extremist terrorism?
A.C. Thompson talking:
That’s a great question, and I don’t think anybody really knows the full answer to that. I think one thing that we should say is that there has been more aggressive action from the FBI and the Department of Justice recently on this front. So we saw eight white supremacists involved in the Rise Above Movement who were active in Charlottesville and at other protests recently get arrested on rioting charges. We see the FBI looking at this connection between Atomwaffen and the Pittsburgh massacre.
But I think in general, there has been this massive turn towards focusing on 9/11-style terrorism and this sort of sense that the white supremacist, anti-government terrorism embodied by people like Tim McVeigh, embodied by people like Wade Page—who was a neo-Nazi who went into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and killed six worshipers—that that is not that important.
And I think that there has been a sort of loss of the expertise on white supremacist terrorism within the federal government. That everything now is jihadi-style terrorism, and that’s what people focus on, and so people don’t remember, don’t have the institutional knowledge to go after the white supremacists.
A member of Atomwaffen, John, talking:
So Atomwaffen Division, it’s a Nazi extremist group seeking to spread terror. The main thing is lone wolf activity.
They don’t see themselves as terrorists, rather they see the United States as the ultimate terrorist. Like what Adolf Hitler said, “How do you meet terrorism? You meet it with stronger terrorism.” Atomwaffen is made up of about 60 guys, and then you have what is called initiates, that guys were in the process of becoming members. And in order to become a member you have to prove yourself.
when I left, there was more initiates than there were members, it that tells you anything.
All it takes is one guy to just snap and to do something like this. That’s what Dylann Roof said: “I’m tired of seeing nothing done in the white nationalist community, so I’m going to take a stand and I’m going to go into a church and I’m going to kill all these black people, because no one else is doing anything.” Who knows? There could be another Dylann Roof in Atomwaffen.
– Dylann Roof, of course, is the young man who opened fire in the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, gunning down African American worshipers as well as their minister.
A.C. Thompson talking:
What I should say about John is the reason that John’s voice is disguised, his identity is disguised, and same with the other former Atomwaffen member that we interview in the field, is they’re not scared of the authorities, they’re not scared of the public; they’re scared of other current Atomwaffen members coming after them or their families and killing them. That’s why they’re disguised. And that’s the sort of fear that people have about talking about these groups when they have been inside these terror organizations.
We went out to Texas because Atomwaffen is currently sort of driven from a cell of people in Texas. Houston, Texas. There is a man named John Cameron Denton. He goes by the online handle “Rape.” Everyone in the group calls him “Rape.” And we confronted him out at a black metal, heavy metal festival in Houston and said, basically, like, “Hey, you’re talking about killing people all of the time. You’re making threats to people online. You’re celebrating mass murder. We would love to interview you about your views.”
He didn’t want to talk, but we did eventually get the guy, James Mason, who has sort of been the inspiration for this group, who is an advisor to the group, to talk to us. And what he said was pretty fascinating.
We expected that he would say, “Overthrow the government, smash the state, impose fascism.” And he did celebrate Tim McVeigh. He celebrated James Alex Fields, the man accused of killing Heather Heyer. He did say “I welcome the chaos.” But the thing that he said that surprised us is he said, “But you know, I’m sort of reconsidering these days. We have Trump in office now, and I really see Trump as an ally, so I don’t really know where things are going to go from here, and I’m sort of rethinking my philosophy a little bit.” And that surprised us. That was a little bit of a shock to us.
– Thousand Oaks killing of 12 people; that man served in the military. Parkland, he was in JROTC. The yoga studio killing in Tallahassee, he was in the military.
I think one key thing is that we need military authorities to really keep an eye on the types of people coming into the service and the things that they’re doing in the service, and we need sort of general thoughtfulness and vigilance on this.
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A.C. Thompson
correspondent for FRONTLINE PBS and reporter for ProPublica. His investigation, “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis,” premieres tonight on PBS stations and online.
— source democracynow.org | Nov 20, 2018