After The
Lavender Scare KPBS ran a Frontine episode called “Documenting Hate: New American
Nazis,” a follow-up to a 2018 special produced by Richard Rowley and written
and reported by A. C. Thompson on neo-Nazi activists in the U.S. in general and
one particularly nasty group in particular: the “Atomwaffen” (German for
“nuclear weapons”), a Florida-based group of about 60 “made” members (like the
Mafia, the Atomwaffen requires you to commit some sort of crime — the more
brutal, the better) and a few hundred “initiates” who claim some sort of
affiliation with the group, keep up with it via its Internet presence, and are
ready and willing to commit terrorism to promote the group’s goal of an
all-white America.
“New American
Nazis” was made by Rowley and Thompson as a follow-up to their earlier Frontline show about the 2017 confrontation in
Charlottesville, Virginia between white supremacist demonstrators and
anti-racist counter-protesters, one of whom was killed when a driver from the
white supremacist camp deliberately ran her down with his car. This was the
incident of which President Trump famously said “there were good people on both
sides — on both sides,” and this, along with his opposition to immigrants and
proclamation of a “new American nationalism,” has made Trump an unlikely hero
to America’s white supremacists despite his Jewish son-in-law and friendship
with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The organizers
of Atomwaffen had a very different idea of how to run a white supremacist
movement from the people who staged the protests at Charlottesville. According
to “John,” a former affiliate of Atomwaffen Thompson interviewed, the
Charlottesville actions led to a rise in the number of people expressing
interest in joining Atomwaffen. “C-ville had a huge part in that, of the
influx, applying in, asking in because they're like, ‘Oh, C-ville, wow, this
didn’t work. Huge rallies don't work.’ All that happens is people get arrested,
people lose jobs, and you get put on some FBI watch list.” According to “John,”
Atomwaffen’s alternative strategy was to “go underground” and organize
individuals to commit acts of terrorism.
Atomwaffen’s
inspiration came from a white supremacist author and editor named James Mason —
not to be confused with the late British actor whose closest connection with
Nazism was playing Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in a 1952 biopic, The Desert
Fox. The American James Mason edited a
neo-Nazi newsletter called Siege
in the 1980’s and the members of Atomwaffen followed his strategic guidelines.
“There's a huge passage in Siege
about terrorism — dropping out of the system so that you can conduct lone-wolf
activity,” the pseudonymous “John” explained. “The group followed James Mason’s
Siege like a Bible. It was like a
Bible to them. It’s the handbook on how to operate.”
What Mason came
up with for a strategic and tactical guideline is the so-called “leaderless
cell” model of organization. It’s a system that has been used by other groups,
both in the U.S. and worldwide. Al-Qaeda adopted it after the U.S. toppled
their allies, the Taliban, from power in Afghanistan. ISIS used it from the
start, though it also relied on a more conventional guerrilla-war strategy.
It’s also been used by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation
Front (ALF) in the U.S. to advance environmentalism and animal rights, though
strictly speaking those groups are saboteurs rather than terrorists. They
destroy property but, unlike white supremacists or Muslim radicals, carefully
plan their actions to avoid taking human or animal life.
Though the
leaderless-cell model of organization predates the Internet, the Internet’s
existence has facilitated it. Many of the actions attributed to ISIS have been
carried out by people totally unknown to the group’s leaders in Iraq and Syria.
They simply post onto the group’s Web site, proclaim their allegiance to it,
and announce what they’re going to do and how it fits into ISIS’s ideology.
Likewise, ELF and ALF function as Web sites to which people can post, attribute
their actions, and explain how they advance the causes of environmentalism or
animal rights. Atomwaffen appears to be a bit more centralized than that, but
it still draws the distinction between “members” who take orders from a central
authority and “initiates” who mount free-lance actions on behalf of the group and
its white supremacist ideology.
Atomwaffen first
registered on law enforcement’s radar in 2015 when police in Tampa, Florida
arrested 18-year-old Devon Arthurs for killing two of his three roommates,
22-year-old Jeremy Himmelman and 18-year-old Andrew Oneschuck. Arthurs told
police that he and his victims had been part of a new neo-Nazi terror group
organized by their fourth roommate, Brandon Russell. Arthurs demanded to talk
to an FBI agent and explain what Russell was up to. The four met as teenagers in
Junior ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) classes in school — establishing
a running theme through the show: how neo-Nazis and other white supremacists
are infiltrating the U.S. armed forces and essentially letting the federal
government train them in how to fight the U.S. government.
Devon Arthurs
told police he had killed Himmelman and Oneschuck because, though he shared
their white supremacist beliefs, what they and Russell were planning was too
much for him. “Atomwaffen Division is a, is a terrorist organization,” Arthurs
explained to the Tampa police who’d arrested him. “It's a neo-Nazi organization
that I was a part of. But the things that they were planning were horrible.
They were planning bombings and stuff like that on, on countless people. They
were planning to kill civilian life.” Arthurs said the specific targets the
Atomwaffen members discussed were “power lines, nuclear reactors [and]
synagogues.”
Indeed, Thompson
began and ended his program with coverage of the mass shooting at the Tree of
Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018. Though there’s no evidence
that the alleged shooter in Pittsburgh, Robert Bowers, was a member or
affiliate of Atomwaffen, he left behind a manifesto explaining his actions in
similar white-supremacist terms. Among Atomwaffen’s other heroes are Charles
Manson (the show describes the group making a sort of pilgrimage to the cave in
Death Valley where Manson told his followers they would wait out the
apocalyptic race war he allegedly committed his murders to spark), Oklahoma
City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black
parishioners at an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina on
June 17, 2015. “There could be another Dylann Roof in Atomwaffen,” defector
“John” warned Thompson.
“It’s unclear
what the authorities did in response to Arthurs’ plea to investigate
Atomwaffen,” Thompson said — though the FBI did arrest Russell and he’s currently in prison. “The FBI won’t talk to me
about its handling of the case. But here’s what I do know: Atomwaffen continued
to operate and its violence didn’t end. Seven months later in Virginia,
Atomwaffen follower Nick Giampa allegedly killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents.
They had objected to his Nazi views. Giampa has yet to stand trial. But the
17-year-old appeared to be fascinated with Atomwaffen. His social media
accounts were full of its propaganda.
“Weeks later, in
California, Sam Woodward was arrested for allegedly killing Blaze Bernstein, a
Gay Jewish college student. Shortly after the arrest, I published a story
identifying Woodward as a member of Atomwaffen. Woodward has pleaded not
guilty. But in a cache of confidential chat logs I obtained, Atomwaffen
celebrated the slaying. They referred to Woodward as a ‘one-man Gay Jew wrecking
crew.’”
Arthurs also
told authorities that Atomwaffen and similar white supremacist groups have
infiltrated the U.S. military and enlisted more than once in order to learn
military strategies and tactics. They’ve also helped themselves to weapons,
explosives and other service materials in order to wage their own private war.
And, in a frightening possibility even Thompson and Rowley didn’t explore, the
ability of Atomwaffen and other white supremacists to infiltrate the U.S.
military — and what the reporters describe as the military’s slipshot and
desultory policy towards getting rid of them — raises the possibility that they
could stage a military coup, especially
if a U.S. President who’s either a white supremacist himself or a sympathizer
wants to set aside the Constitution and make himself a fascist dictator.
What’s more,
many white supremacists believe that in Donald Trump they have exactly that
sort of President. After 15 years of public silence, James Mason, Atomwaffen’s
guru, agreed to give an interview to Thompson in which he said, “With Trump
winning that election by surprise, and it was a surprise, I now believe
anything could be possible.” After decades of attacking the U.S. as run by what
they called a “Zionist-Occupied Government,” America’s white-supremacist whites
see Trump as a new hope. Mason cited Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great
Again,” and added, “In order to make America great again, you’d have to make
America white again.” (Ironically, that echoed the criticism by Trump’s
Democratic opponent in 2016, Hillary Clinton, who said “Make America Great
Again” was code for “Make America White Again.”)
The result of
white supremacist violence, as well as mass shootings committed by others, is
that America is slowly turning into an armed camp. The Frontline episode ends
with Brad Orsini, an ex-FBI agent hired by the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh
as their security director in the wake of the Tree of Life massacre, describing
preparations for their weekly services similar to those a military unit undertakes
before a battle: “We have put casualty bags in each one of our synagogues and
schools. There's tourniquets. There are compression pads. There's wound-packing
material.”
It’s somewhat
ironic that San Diego’s PBS affiliate, KPBS, ran the Frontline episode “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis” right
after the film The Lavender Scare.
Both are, in a sense, about small, tight-knit groups of people who came
together to fight what they consider evil and injustice. The difference is that
the people who stuck their necks out for the rights of Queer people to work in
the federal government were seeking to expand the rights of Americans as citizens and human beings,
while the white supremacists profiled in “New American Nazis” are seeking to contract rights and remake the U.S. as either an all-white
country or one in which Jews, people of color, Queers and others on their hate
list are treated as what Adolf Hitler called Untermenschen — literally “below human.”
Organization and commitment are
value-neutral: the same tactics people like Frank Kameny used to break the
power of homophobia over American society in general and the federal government
in particular can be used by people like Brandon Russell to carry out a
hate-filled agenda in which only people like him are regarded as “real
Americans.” With the U.S. military now a volunteer service that directly
involves only about 1 percent of the American population, the real danger of
people like Russell and Atomwaffen is the possibility that they might build a secret
center of power within the U.S. military and ultimately turn it from an
institution protecting the U.S. Constitution to one really out to destroy it
and install a white-supremacist dictatorship in its place.
