Scary white people

(NOTE: I wrote this two years ago. Since I'm pretty sure only about 10 people read in then anyway, I thought I would post it again, as it has become relevant in light of last week's events.)

Sitting in a local bar with my buddy Tim, the state trooper, was a bit like one of
those Miller Lite ads where people swap interesting stories (or imagine hot babes mud wrestling).

Tim was, indeed, drinking Lite. I was having a pale ale — a shade fitting for the occasion.

Tim just returned from Alabama, where he goes every January for a meeting with the Southern Poverty Law Center on hate crimes. He teaches classes on that subject to
cops across the country. He also keeps tabs on groups that specialize in such activities. This includes groups like the World Church of the Creator, whose leader — the pride of East Peoria, Matt Hale — is in jail awaiting trial for soliciting someone to kill U.S. District Court Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow.

Lefkow was overseeing a civil case in which an Oregon-based religious organization claimed Hale’s group infringed its trademark by using the name Church of the Creator. The Hale fellows are supposed to destroy anything with that name on it.

At the Dirksen Federal Building, Hale’s churchgoers were ranting that Lefkow was married to a Jewish man and had mixed-raced grandchildren. Not that either
point should matter to anyone with a brain, but neither claim was true.

Tim didn’t get to see Hale being hauled off, so I filled him in. In turn, he gave me a hate group update. While there are about 650 such organizations, Tim says most
of them are both small-minded and small. Hale’s group is considered one of the three most organized and potentially dangerous of the lot. But even it isn’t as big as some might like you to think.

According to Daniel Levitas, author of The Terrorist Next Door (Thomas Dunne Books, $27.95), Hale has never had more than several hundred followers. While he is
in jail, the other two groups haven’t been faring too well lately, either.

A couple of summers ago, the Aryan Nations did something dumb that cost them, big time. Two people had the misfortune of their car backfiring near the group’s Idaho
compound and were attacked. The Southern Poverty Law Center got involved and helped the victims successfully sue the Aryans for all they are worth. The white guys
wound up selling their Idaho property.

The group, which has many factions and is led by octogenarian Richard Butler, is split between locating headquarters in Pennsylvania and California. The lawsuit crippled the Aryans, and internal bickering is hurting the 28-year-old National Alliance. The rift started after leader William Pierce, who died last year, made some backstabbing remarks on Hitler’s birthday.

(Aside: If you see anyone with an “88” tattoo, if it aint' for a NASCAR driver, it could stands for “Heil Hitler.” H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Pretty clever, eh?)

For those not up on their radical-right lore, Pierce is the author of Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh’s favorite book, The Turner Diaries. Before he took the
voyage to Valhalla, Pierce made comments attacking members of ther hate groups as freaks and weaklings, specifically Aryan Nations and World Church of the Creator folks.

Pierce wanted his successor, Erich Giebe, to build a kinder, gentler version of the white power movement, a la David Duke. Others, including deputy membership
coordinator Billy Roper said, “Hey, wait a minute. We are all brothers under the sheets.” Or something like that.

These posses didn’t take kindly to being labeled “dorks” — especially since they
buy a lot of skinhead music put out on the Alliance’s label, Resistance Records. (I’d suggest they all get together and sing “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” But I
don’t think they like ’70s soul.)

Tim’s most colorful story involved a guy named Leon Felton. In 2001, Felton and his Cape Cod-bred girlfriend were arrested in Boston after an off-duty cop caught them trying to pass funny money at a doughnut shop. (Who’d have thought you’d find a cop at a doughnut place?)

Turns out Felton and a pal had robbed a bank and were planning to blow up the New
England Holocaust Memorial. Felton is no stranger to prison. It’s where he firmed up his ties to white supremacists.

Only thing is, according to the law center’s intelligence
report, Felton’s dad is a light-skinned black architect. His mother, a former nun with a Jewish grandparent, raised him with her lesbian partner. When all that came to light, Felton lost all his racist buddies and tried to kill himself with a safety razor.

It was enough to make me order another round. Stories like this are why there’s “Miller Time” in the first place.