Creating Killers: Ten Years Later
I'll never forget the moment, ten years ago this weekend, when I first heard the news. I was winding down after a long week of work, my thoughts drifting to Independence Day holiday festivities, when my cell phone rang with word that a young white man driving a blue Ford Taurus shot up a crowd of Orthodox Jews as they were leaving Sabbath services. Six people lay seriously injured on the sidewalk outside Congregation Adas Yeshurun, not far from my Chicago apartment.
After years of researching white nationalist groups, my instincts told me that this wasn't some random shooting. Minutes later, I received a call alerting me to another shooting just north in Evanston. Those blasts left Ricky Byrdsong, an African-American family man and basketball coach, lying dead in front of his children.
As I raced back across town through rush hour traffic in the sweltering summer heat, I got another call that more shots were fired in another suburb. Thankfully, this time the perpetrator missed the young Asian-American couple. The identity of the shooter was still a mystery, and he was still at large.
By this time, my colleague and I had enough information that we were able to identify the killer. All evidence pointed to Benjamin "August" Smith of the white nationalist group, the World Church of the Creator. We had been close tracking Smith's rapid rise in white nationalist netherworld.
The next day, Smith made his way downstate to Springfield, where he fired at two black men, missing them both. A few hours later in Decatur, Smith shot and wounded African-American pastor Stephen Anderson. Near midnight he seriously wounded an Asian-American college student in Urbana.
On Sunday, July 4, exactly one year after Smith first distributed racist literature around Bloomington, Indiana, he fired into a crowd entering the Korean United Methodist Church, killing Won Joon Yoon, a University of Indiana graduate student.
As law enforcement officers were trying to stop Smith, I was spending two sleepless days trying to help figure out Smith's next move and working with the American Jewish Committee to prepare a report on Smith and the white nationalist group to which he belonged.
That report opened with the chilling quote from Smith, "To want to live in a world where blacks have power over whites, where Jews are in control, I think that's a sickness and I'd like to eradicate that sickness. In some ways it's inevitable - racial holy war."
The Smith murders came after the brutal dragging death of James Byrd Jr. by Texas Klansmen, and was followed a month later by an Aryan Nations member shooting up a Jewish day care center in Los Angeles. Suddenly, everyone was talking about the 1999 "summer of hate."
Almost as quickly as it happened, interest in the cause of these shootings faded into the distance. Over the last decade, there have been many more acts of violence committed by white nationalists, most going almost unnoticed to the general public. The Benjamin Smith killings probably didn't make the cut in Leonard Zeskind's book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, not because it wasn't an important event, but because chronicling all the killings would take volumes.
Now it appears that we're in the midst of another long, hot summer. Scott Roeder, the Kansas Freeman, walked into a Wichita church and gunned down Dr. George Tiller. James von Brunn, the Maryland Holocaust denier, killed Stephen T. Johns, a black security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. A trio of Washington State minutemen activists were recently arrested for the execution-style killing of Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter to fund their nativist activities on the Arizona border.
The tie that binds all of these murders together (and distinguishes them from random acts of brutality), is that all of the perpetrators were entrenched in the white nationalist movement for years before they decided to strike. They don't hate blindly, because of misplaced rage or unemployment anxiety, they hate with a vision. Killers like these aren't born, they're made. Blood and Politics delves deep into the social movement that provided the ideological ammunition for these shooters.
Like Zeskind, Rinku Sen's post The White Supremacist in Us" aptly reminds us of the dangers of dismissing these folks as "backwoods" or that it's just the actions of a "lone crazy white man" (or women, for that matter).
Sen also wisely lifts up the danger of dismissing racism as "isolated madness" or "isolated extremism." Zeskind's book vividly reminds us that the problem of white nationalism is not isolated, that over the past three decades it's moved from the margins to the mainstream. As Blood and Politics points out, white nationalism poses a threat to both public safety and public policy.
It's also not "extremism." Throughout Blood and Politics, Zeskind studiously avoids the term. In this context, "extremism" has no inherent meaning, conveying relationships to some continuously moving and not always middle-of-the-road version of the "center."
Sen keenly reminds us of the legacy of racism and the many "unconscious biases" that exist just below the surface of American life. Zeskind's book highlights how white nationalism does not act in a vacuum. The movement often attempts to tap into those wellsprings of bigotry to gain wider acceptance and support.
There are those who contend that the white nationalist vision is created out of the fears of economic distress. Declining wages and bleak working-class prospects, they say, create a cycle of violence and scapegoating. Amongst many of my progressive friends, the economic argument is almost a reflexive response.
Zeskind tackles this issue head on in Blood and Politics. His analysis of the voting patterns for David Duke and various racially charged ballot measures help remind us that there is little correlation with individual economic circumstance among white voters. The data shows that foremost it is the issue of race the drives white voters to support bigoted ballot measures and candidates. Zeskind's book also reminds us how over the past several decades horrific acts of racist violence committed by white nationalists happen in good economic times and bad economic times. White nationalism is a phenomenon that operates independently of individual economic conditions.
It's hard to argue that any of these horrific acts was motivated by economic downturn. If it were economic circumstances that lead to acts of racist violence or an increase in white nationalism, then the spate of high profile murders in 1999 should serve as a good point of comparison to the current situation.
In 1999, unemployment was at a low 4.3%. The Dow soared to achieve its first close above 11,000. Yet we still experienced the summer of hate and an increase in white nationalist activity around the country.
A closer look at the specific example of Benjamin Smith also weakens the individual economic circumstance argument. He was clearly not driven by economic anxiety. He was solidly middle class, well educated, and his prospects were good. Yet, he still felt compelled to kick off his version of a racial holy war.
As Sen points out, we must move past "the unspoken assumption that since we criminalized such hatred through civil rights laws, there's nothing else we can do as a country." We can and should be working across the color line to address issues of race, gender and inequality. But more is needed, including the creation of a movement-wide impulse to tackle head on racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry for what they are -- racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry.
Moreover, we need a firmly-held vision of ourselves as a multiracial nation, a clearly articulated alternative to the fantasies of white nationalism. Such an impulse needs to address both the structural and institutional bigotry and the threat of white nationalism, in good times and in bad, before more killers are created. After all, it's what we do between the shootings that really matters.
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Devin Burghart is the associate director of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (www.irehr.org). He now lives in Seattle.
Mr. Burghart, have done any research into the work of Professor Kevin B. Macdonald? If so, what do you think of it?
July 3, 2009 8:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hi Tintin,
Yes, I’m quite familiar with Kevin B. MacDonald, a professor of psychology at California State University-Long Beach, and one of the leading figures among today’s white nationalist intelligentsia. MacDonald sits on the editorial advisory board of racist and anti-Semitic journal, The Occidental Quarterly (and served as director of the TOQ parent company), and used to be on the advisory board of the white nationalist think-tank the National Policy Institute (best known for their report “The State of White America.”) He’s one of the key voices trying to bring anti-Semitism back to the ideological forefront of American white nationalism.
With the institutional backing of The Occidental Quarterly, MacDonald has become a force for anti-Semitism, inside and outside the academy. There’s been plenty written discussing MacDonald’s work elsewhere so I won’t waste a lot of time here on it. The prominence of Kevin MacDonald in white nationalist circles, however, highlights a growing fissure within the movement around the question of anti-Semitism. In Blood and Politics, Zeskind vividly reminds us that the white nationalist movement is not monolithic.
Since the emergence of American Renaissance as the flagship intellectual voice amongst white nationalist mainstreamers in the early 1990s, the “Jewish question” had been in movement stasis. From its first conference in 1994, American Renaissance leader Jared Taylor included Jewish speakers at the biennial event, and there has been a small but consistent presence of Jewish white nationalist activists in the crowd. To protect the peace, Taylor also banned discussion of the “Jewish question” from conferences. Taylor was backed up by widely respected white nationalist philosopher general Sam Francis, who once denounced what he viewed as a “monomaniacal obsession with the omnipotent Jew."
The first blow to the uneasy truce was the death of Francis in 2005. His death created a vacuum that national socialists like David Duke and anti-Semites MacDonald were eager to fill. It didn’t take long for things to completely implode.
As described in The Forward, at the 2006 American Renaissance conference, David Duke seized the opportunity and the microphone to declare to the crowd that, "There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and spirit."
"Tell us, tell us," someone in the back yelled.
"I'm not going to say it," Duke replied. Laughter began to fill the room, until Dr. Michael Hart, leapt from his seat. Hart is a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton and is known in white nationalist circles for his proposal for a racial partition of the United States. He is also Jewish. Hart stormed up to Duke and began to curse, "You f--king Nazi, you've disgraced this meeting!"
The rift surfaced again in 2007 at a flashy National Press Club tribute to Sam Francis. A day designed to have the white nationalist intelligentsia posthumously praise Francis' intellectual prowess (and promote a new book of his writings to the CSPAN audience) was tarnished thanks to an anti-Semitic monologue.
The Hart-Duke blow-up reverberated throughout the movement, creating a schism forcing most the influential organizations to take sides in the dispute. Earlier this year, Hart and a considerable faction of American Renaissance attendees held their own Preserving Western Civilization conference (which I’ve written about here ).
The conference was an attempt to create a new ideological pole friendlier to Jewish participation, but within the broader white nationalist movement. They would bind Islamophobia and nativism with scientific racism. The proceedings pointed to the direction at least one part of the movement will take in the near future.
It’s too early to tell if this schism will become permanent, or if a new organization rises out of the meeting. We will be watching. It is an important lesson from the pages of Blood and Politics. The white nationalist movement is constantly changing and adapting to conditions - both internal and external. As we create a movement-wide impulse to tackle bigotry head on, we should also be developing the capacity to quickly identify, adapt, and respond to these changes.
July 4, 2009 4:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
I remember living briefly in Rogers Park a year after that happened, on the same block as one of the murders, I believe.
Also, that family man and basketball coach was the men's basketball coach of Big Ten Conference Northwestern University.
And here's another example of a madman driven by hate. His terrorist plan occurred after 9/11, and if he had been Muslim instead of Jewish, his plot not only would have made the national news for more than 2 minutes, but it would have been correctly labeled a terrorist plot, and he'd probably still be in Gitmo after years of torture.
Instead, he got 12 years in prison:
"Robert J. Goldstein planned the massacre of Muslims in minute detail.
The Seminole podiatrist would attack the mosque like a commando, using Napalm and grenades, guns and knives, booby traps and bolt cutters. Muslims who fled the smoking building would die tripping over a mine in the parking lot. If necessary, he would kill them face-to-face."
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/06/20/Tampabay/Bomb_plot_sentence__1.shtml
July 3, 2009 9:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bill writes: "And here's another example of a madman driven by hate. His terrorist plan occurred after 9/11, and if he had been Muslim instead of Jewish, his plot not only would have made the national news for more than 2 minutes, but it would have been correctly labeled a terrorist plot, and he'd probably still be in Gitmo after years of torture."
How do you know it was his Jewishness that kept him out of the news and gave him a short sentence? What proof is there of that fact? Jonathan Pollard made huge news and is still in prison.
July 5, 2009 12:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why is the murder of an abortion-provider listed here? Is there any evidence of this being motivated by white nationalism or other racial feelings?
July 4, 2009 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent question!
Scott Roeder, who is being held in the murder of Dr. George Tiller, has become infamous for his anti-abortion fanaticism. As a result, he’s often thought of as emanating from the so-called right-to-life movement -- which is almost always considered part of the Christian right, motivated by a fundamentalist theology and a literal reading of Biblical scripture. A closer look, however, reveals a much more complex picture.
Lost in the rush to try to explain such a horrific act has been Roeder’s connection to the so-called Christian common law courts and the militia movement. There is also mounting evidence that Roeder may have been influenced by the racist and anti-Semitic theology known as Christian Identity.
In the mid-1990s, Roeder associated regularly with both Kansas militiamen and he declared himself a "sovereign" citizen, immune from the responsibilities of paying taxes or driving with a registered license plate. While active with a group of "Freemen" in Kansas in 1996, Roeder was arrested in Topeka after law enforcement stopped him for not having a license plate. In his car, officers said they found ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder and two 9-volt batteries, with one connected to a switch that could have been used to trigger a bomb.
Judy Thomas, an investigative reporter at the Kansas City Star and co-author of the fantastic Wrath of Angels: the American Abortion War, also discusses Roeder’s involvement in the white nationalist netherworld here and here.
Blood and Politics author, Leonard Zeskind, also has an article more fully answering your question here.
July 4, 2009 3:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
A very thoughtful TPM Cafe reader sent me over links to a couple of very moving articles about ten-year memorial services for Won Joon Yoon in Bloomington, Indiana. A special section of the Bloomington Herald Times is available here and and the Indiana Daily Student has coverage here. Thanks to LP for the heads up!
July 6, 2009 1:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
Also, not to pick nits, but it's Indiana University there in Bloomington (not the "University of Indiana").
-- ARG
July 6, 2009 3:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're absolutely right. My bad. Thanks for the correction. I've been back in PAC 10 country for less than a year and already my BIG 10 knowledge is eroding. When people say UW these days, I no longer immediately think of Badgers. Before you know it, I'll be forgetting to call that school in Columbus THE Ohio State University.
July 6, 2009 7:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hi Devin,
Great post but a couple of quibbles, one I think is pretty major.
You cite low unemployment and a soaring stock market in 1999 as evidence against the "economic anxiety" thesis. But, the truth is, most people don't own an appreciable amount of stock (even through mutual funds) and the national unemployment rate, even when it's very low, masks a lot of pain. I think those, like myself, who give some credence to the economic anxiety thesis would argue that 4.3% unemployment was a low national total but that outsourcing, especially in the manufacturing sector, created much higher numbers in the heartland. Also, while wages grew overall under Clinton, the growth was heavily skewed so that even with low inflation people in manufacturing jobs who kept them were losing purchasing power. I think we need to remember that though the 90s were prosperous that the rising tide didn't lift all ships -- technology and globalization improved many lives and disrupted many others.
I also feel like I have to answer your contention that white supremacist thought is "mainstream" or part of our broader culture. It's scarily close, and we need to be vigilant, but I think that if "extremist" is the wrong word that "fringe" is pretty accurate.
That's important, I think, because as you say, "white nationalism poses a threat to both public safety and public policy." But to me, "white nationalism," until it becomes a violent act, is just an example of ill-informed and ignorant expression, which is something we have to protect. So I'm with the ACLU when they defend the rights of Klansmen to have parades on public property because freedom of expression is paramount to me. When I hear talk of public safety and policy, along with the notion that a fringe group actually has mainstream influence, I worry that well-intentioned people like yourself are about to stomp on some civil rights and liberties.
July 6, 2009 11:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hi,
Thanks for the compliments and for your thoughtful reply. I’m very glad we’re having this discussion. You raise some interesting points that I’d like to address more thoroughly. Let’s examine your key quibbles around the economic anxiety thesis, white nationalism and the “fringe,” and concerns about civil rights and civil liberties.
1. Economic Anxiety Thesis
I’d encourage you to read Leonard Zeskind’s book Blood and Politics, so you can get a better look at the mountain of data Zeskind examines when addressing this pivotal question. From examinations of voting patterns where white nationalism has gone mainstream, to a look at white nationalist memberships, etc. the data overwhelmingly indicates little relationship to individual economic circumstance. I certainly don’t think I could do justice to the extremely compelling argument which runs throughout the book by attempting to boil it down to a paragraph or two, so please pick up a copy and take a look.
Moreover, it seems to me that the burden of proof should fall upon on those make the claim that there is a relationship between individual economic anxiety and white nationalism. You’re absolutely right that most people don’t own an appreciable amount of stock and that the national unemployment rate masks a lot of pain, but if we don’t use the unemployment rate or the market as indicators of economic distress, what should we use? Poverty rate? Income level?
The country’s poverty rate dropped to 11.8 percent in 1999, the lowest rate since 1979 and real median household income reached $40,816, the highest level ever recorded (household income data were first recorded in 1967), according to the Census Bureau. The poverty rate for non-Hispanic Whites, 7.7 percent, equaled its measured low reached in 1988-1989 and did not differ from the rates recorded during the 1973-1974 and 1976-1979 periods. Between 1998 and 1999, the number of poor non-Hispanic Whites dropped from 15.8 million to 14.9 million, a decline of 900,000.
The 1999 median income level for the nation's households rose, in real terms, by 2.7 percent, from $39,744 in 1998 to $40,816. The 1999 median income was the highest ever recorded for non-Hispanic White households ($44,366). Based on comparisons of two-year average medians (1997-1998 versus 1998-1999), real median household income did not decline for any state and increased significantly for 14 states, including the heartland states of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
Further at odds with the “angry white man” thesis is the data showing that the real median earnings of men who worked full time, year-round increased by another 1 percent in 1999. On the other hand, the earnings for comparable women remained statistically unchanged that year (yet we didn’t see a surge in women joining white nationalist groups in 1999).
Let’s recap the economic “anxiety” of 1999: Individual income levels, across the board, up. Poverty rate, down. Unemployment level, down. Market, up. Real earnings (for men), up.
Going back again to burden of proof, where’s the evidence that says that the folks joining white nationalist groups back in 1999 were one’s who’s lives had been disrupted by technology and globalization?
The individual anecdotal evidence clearly points in a different direction. The only “globalization” Benjamin Smith, Buford Furrow, et al. gave a damn about was the international Jewish conspiracy they saw around them. They could care less about disruptions by technology and globalization.
2. The “Fringe” on top.
I’ve very glad to hear that you agree that white supremacist thought is “scarily close, and we need to be vigilant.” But I’m not convinced that the term “fringe” helps describe the problem. Zeskind has a post on contextualizing the white nationalist “numbers” here. As Zeskind notes elsewhere, “Today the white nationalist movement is the motor inside the anti-immigrant movement; and that movement has blocked comprehensive immigration reform in Congress, and it has successfully enacted dozens of draconian measures at the state and local level.”
Indeed, it would be difficult to describe the white nationalist powered anti-immigrant movement as anything but fringe. At the Institute, we presently monitor around 15 different national nativist groups, who have an active donor base of 1,036,741 (down slightly from the 1,111,942 in 2008), and combined budgets of over $15 million. They’ve helped develop nearly 400 state and local groups. And they have unfettered access to the ninety Congresspersons in the House Immigration Reform Caucus (HIRC) and the eight members of the US Senate Border Security Caucus. Does that sound “fringe?”
They’ve prevented comprehensive immigration reform. They’ve even reintroduced legislation to eliminate birthright citizenship, eviscerating the 14th Amendment and cornerstone civil rights protections.
Here’s a quote I like to read during presentations:
"Every new immigrant adds to our crime problems, our welfare rolls and unemployment of American citizens. In two or three years, the majority in our most populous state - California - is expected to be non-white. That's incredible. It is said that whites will eventually become a minority in Texas. New Mexico is literally becoming a new Mexico. We are being invaded in the southwest as if a foreign army were coming over the border ... They're going to take more and more hard-earned money from the productive middle class in the form of taxes and social programs. This massive immigration will change the face of American politics."
OK, who said it? (no fair Googling the answer or reading ahead!). And when did they say it?
At presentations, people almost always guess Lou Dobbs, (former) Rep. Tom Tancredo, Glenn Beck, or some other current politician or pundit. Some guess John Tanton or one of the other nativist leaders. Some get as close as white nationalist standard bearer Pat Buchanan. The answers aren’t surprising, since I could give you a long list of startlingly comparable quotes from those sources.
But it didn’t come from any of them. It came from none other than former Klansman and national socialist David Duke. He didn’t say it recently. In fact, he said it way back in 1981, just a few years after staging the first Klan “border patrols” near San Diego.
I use the quote to help illustrate the white nationalist conveyer belt of ideas. White nationalists have incubated, nurtured, and introduced arguments like these into the mainstream. Ideas that were completely unacceptable three decades ago have become all too commonplace, Immigration is just one of the racially charged issues white nationalists have successfully introduced into the mainstream. Another hot one is “reverse racism” - a term popularized by Duke and his followers decades ago that’s now part of the mainstream conversation around a Supreme Court nominee. We also shouldn’t forget the success they’ve had mainstreaming scientific racism, with the success of works like The Bell Curve.
3. Civil Liberties Concerns
As for your concerns, I, too, am extremely concerned about the protection of civil rights and civil liberties. I am reminded that the corollary to the freedom of expression is the responsibility to speak out against views that are reprehensible. As individuals, and as a movement, I hope we will do this loudly and proudly in the future. I’m not calling for government intervention. As I spelled out in my initial post, there is the need for a sustained movement impulse to tackle head on racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry for what they are -- racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry – not merely the bi-product of economic anxiety.
Such a movement impulse, in civil society, is essential to making a difference before more killers are created. Should we choose not to act, we allow the situation to worsen. If we wait for another long, bloody summer, before taking this problem seriously as a movement, we risk government intervention and more erosion of civil rights.
Thanks again for posing these challenges. I look forward to continuing this very important line of discussion.
July 8, 2009 3:54 PM | Reply | Permalink