The man accused of killing three people at two Jewish community sites in Kansas made his first court appearance Tuesday by video conference. Frazier Glenn Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, has been charged with capital murder for killing 14-year-old Reat Underwood and his grandfather, William Corporon, outside a Jewish community center Sunday. He also faces a first-degree murder charge for killing Terri LaManno, who was visiting her mother at a nearby retirement complex.
Miller is a notorious white supremacist who had openly railed against Jews and African Americans for decades. He is the founder and former “grand dragon” of the paramilitary-style Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1986, after forming the White Patriot Party, he was convicted of violating the terms of a court order settling a lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He disappeared while out on bond and was later caught with other Klansmen and a stash of weapons. Miller went on to serve three years in prison on weapons charge and for plotting the murder of Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. He reached a deal with federal prosecutors to testify against other white supremacists in a 1988 sedition trial.
Mark Potok talking:
I would say he was one of the best-known white supremacist activists in the country for a very long time. He has been active for more than 40 years in the movement. He joined as a very young teenager, joined things like the National States’ Rights Party, a descendent of the American Nazi Party, and some other groups, as well. So he was an important player, but, as you mentioned, he testified in a sedition trial in 1988 in Fort Smith, Arkansas, against most of his comrades, some 13 leaders of the white supremacist movement. That very much put him, of course, on the outs. He was seen as a snitch, derided very widely. He’s been banned right up to this day on certain racist web forums.
So there are, I think, mixed feelings in the movement about him. He has, in some ways, worked his way back into the good graces of his former fellows, in the sense that he’s written an autobiography describing himself as an aggrieved white man. This was back in 2002. Since 2005, he has been publishing a newspaper called The Aryan Alternative. So, there are mixed feelings about him out there on the scene. It is even conceivable that Miller engaged in this mass murder, if in fact he is proven to have done so, as a way of showing that he really wasn’t a snitch, he was really in it for real.
Frazier Glenn Miller went on to praise Joseph Paul Franklin, a serial killer who was executed last year for the sniper killing of a man outside a synagogue in 1997. He killed a number of other people, including an interracial couple and two black teenage boys, and firebombed a synagogue. And he famously tried to kill Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and civil rights activist Vernon Jordan Jr.
Miller saw Morris as his mortal enemy. At that point, Morris and the center were becoming well known. We were just starting our first major lawsuits against Klan groups. The first one was against the United Klans of America, based here in Alabama. And so, you know, this idea was going around that Morris Dees was the absolutely number one enemy of white supremacy in America, and he needed to be taken out. Miller, in fact, created a “point system,” quote-unquote, where people like Joseph Paul Franklin would get one point for killing black people, 10 points for killing Jews, 50 points for killing judges and 888 points for killing Morris Dees. So, you know, and I think that reflected more or less the way other people in the white supremacist world saw Morris. You know, at another point, there was another plot which involved scourging Morris. They wanted to tear the skin off his body. So there’s a lot of hatred there. And that’s, of course, one of the reasons why I work in a building that is just surrounded by immense security.
what happened was that he was initially charged with conspiracy, very serious charges, in 1987, that could have sent him to prison for 20 or 30 years. But he did in fact cut a deal with the federal government and agreed to testify in Fort Smith against his comrades. That wound up meaning a mere five-year sentence for him, and he served only three years. As you’ve noted, the Kansas City paper has now reported that in fact he did change his name legally. It’s clear that he was in the witness protection program. he wrote about it in his autobiography. And, you know, perhaps if he had been in prison all those years rather than a witness in this trial, which collapsed spectacularly, we wouldn’t have experienced what we saw in Kansas City the other day.
David Pakman talking:
Initially we were in touch because Craig Cobb, another white separatist, who was trying to create a whites-only community in one of the Dakotas, was friends, I guess, of—or that’s at least what they would describe each other—with Glenn Miller. Glenn Miller put me in touch with Cobb and then was trying to insert himself back into my program, asking that I interview him. When I explained that I have nothing against interviewing him in principle, but that there’s really no news or there’s no reason to interview him right now, he kind of resorted to the same anti-Jewish statements and rhetoric.
I interview a lot of extremists—anti-gay extremists, religious extremists, many, many extremists. The one difference with Miller versus all of the others is that the others, while their rhetoric is incredibly discriminatory and hateful against huge groups of people, they’re usually very nice to me, and sometimes they say they want to save me or they want to help me in some way. In their internal logic, that’s what they want to do. As you saw, Miller told me very directly that he hated me. And that was an outlier.
I’ve released these emails. They’re on DavidPakman.com. The full transcript is there, so people can kind of judge for themselves. If I were to speculate a little bit and kind of characterize them, there was a desperation for attention, seemed to be the main priority, just really wanted attention, wanted to be on. When I said, “Well, why would I have you on now?” he said, “Well, I think I’m going to run for something again soon.” And I said, “Well, let’s talk at that time.”
One of the emails said, “As you know, your listenership, including the archive, skyrocketed after having me on your show. So don’t say I’m not interesting. Since I’ll be a candidate next year for US Congress, 7th district of MO, you can use that as a reason to have me on.”
this was kind of a running thing with him, where before the interview in 2010, he said I would never run it, because he would so badly embarrass me. Immediately after the interview—we recorded it earlier in the day before it aired—he said, “You’re not even going to publish that, because I so embarrassed you.” Of course, we did publish it, as it’s now been widely disseminated. And that idea continued, that we were scared to have him on.
Mark Potok talking:
VNN is essentially the second-largest white supremacist web forum in the country—really, in the world. The largest is one called Stormfront. Miller was actually banned from Stormfront, which is run by a former Alabama Klan leader—and as I said, it’s the largest—because of his informing against other leaders. But what he did, essentially, was land on VNN, where he’s posted close to 13,000 times in recent years.
we have recently completed and will very shortly release a report showing that, for instance—how these forums really help to create killers, or at least nurture killers. We found that at Stormfront, over the last five years, registered members of that forum have been responsible for almost 100 murders. There are also many people who have become murderers who post on VNN. So these are sort of Petri dishes, breeding grounds for people like Glenn Miller. You know, VNN is a particularly vicious site. They use language that you won’t even find on Stormfront that’s rather similar to the clips you played from Glenn Miller. It’s run by a guy named Alex Linder, another old-time neo-Nazi. And, in fact, Linder is the guy who writes The Aryan Alternative that Miller published.
Nevada rancher who is declaring victory after hundreds of armed supporters backed his standoff with the federal government. The Bureau of Land Management began seizing Cliven Bundy’s cattle this month, saying he owed more than a million dollars in fees for grazing his cattle on federally controlled land. Bundy refused to comply, saying he doesn’t recognize the federal government. And hundreds of people from right-wing, anti-government and pro-gun groups flocked to his site. Just this past weekend, they shut down Interstate 15, leading to a standoff that ended with the government backing down and releasing the seized cattle.
Cliven Bundy is stealing from the government. He is stealing from you and me. This is a guy who simply refuses to pay over a million dollar in grazing fees that every other person who grazes cattle on public lands in this country must pay. So, you know, that’s the context. It’s hardly about defending the Constitution or anything like that.
It is true that hundreds and hundreds of militiamen and others, members of the very groups you referenced at the very top of the show, have flocked to Bundy’s ranch. I have seen really terrifying pictures, photographs of some of these militia types sitting on a highway overpass with their sniper weapons trained on law enforcement officials. Really, it was a terrifying situation. We had a reporter out there. It seemed obvious that at any moment we could have seen gunfire and, really, blood in the desert. You know, this is the latest iteration, really, of the kinds of conflicts that we’ve seen perenially over the last 15, 20 years with the militia movement—the idea that somehow the government has no right to, you know, impose any kind of law on people, particularly in the West, where there is so much resentment directed at Washington.
far-right violence has been increasing, or at least very much up, since Barack Obama came into office. It was in fact rather quiet during the Bush years, between 2000, 2008. But pretty—even before Obama took office, as a matter of fact, immediately after he was inaugurated [nominated] in the summer of 2008 in Denver, we began to see plots, various attempts at domestic terrorism, really proliferate. So, the Glenn Miller murders, or alleged murders, are not unique at all. There are a number of—for instance, in June of 2009, after Obama took office, I’m sure many people will remember another well-known neo-Nazi, James von Brunn, shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. A couple of years after that, another neo-Nazi—again, fairly well known—tried to bomb a parade with a very powerful IED he built on Martin Luther King Day in Spokane, Washington. Yet a third neo-Nazi invaded a Sikh temple in August of 2012 and murdered six people. And these are only a few examples, but we really have seen quite a number of these. There’s no question that we’re seeing more violence from the domestic, non-Islamic radical right than we are at this point from jihadists.
number one on the domestic terrorism list, according to a top FBI official, is eco-terrorism, is the animal rights movement. We don’t hear very much about white supremacists except when something horrific like this happens.
the idea that eco-terrorists, so-called, are the major domestic terror threat, which was in fact said to Congress a couple of times by FBI leaders during the Bush years, I think is just patently ludicrous. You know, no one has been killed by anyone in the radical animal rights movement or the radical environmentalist movement. There are certainly groups out there that are involved in things like burning down SUV dealerships and so on, but no one has been killed yet. And that is in just, you know, wild contrast to what we’re seeing from people like Glenn Miller. You know, we’ve also had a real problem with the Department of Homeland Security, in the sense that ever since a particular report on the right wing was leaked to the press in April of 2009, DHS has sort of cowered, in a sense. They essentially gutted their non-Islamic domestic terrorism unit and really have not been putting out very important reports.
The report did things like say the extremists are interested in recruiting returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq. There was a hue and cry on the right wing, the political right wing of this country, that DHS had characterized all military people, all veterans, as white supremacists and extremists and so on. And that’s not at all what the report said. But Janet Napolitano, then the head of DHS, withdrew the report, apologized, and ultimately the unit fell apart.
David Pakman talking:
First I heard about the shooting. And much later—it was Sunday night—I started getting tens and dozens of tweets from people saying, “The shooter is the guy you interviewed.” Of course, the interview was four years ago; it didn’t immediately click. It was Kansas, when I associated Miller with Missouri. Once I figured out what this was, initially I was just shocked, and then realized that this is—this was the guy who spoke to me in one way, and then took what he said and it now became real-world violence, which, of course, was horrifying.
if I were giving him a platform in the way that corporate news gives non-science-based climate change ideas an equivalent platform as if there is a 50/50 view, that would be wrong. That’s not what I do. I have an opinion program. I bring these people on. It’s abundantly clear that what I’m doing is exposing their views. And that’s really why. Imagine if we had no video. We had—you know, often we have these crimes, and then people say, “We never heard anything. There’s nothing. We don’t know who this person is.” Now we know.
— source democracynow.org
Mark Potok, senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been tracking Frazier Glenn Miller for years.
David Pakman, host of The David Pakman Show. He interviewed Frazier Glenn Miller in 2010.