← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Howard Campbell, Jr.
Thread ID: 17137 | Posts: 12 | Started: 2005-03-06
2005-03-06 08:32 | User Profile
WHITE POWER'S NEW FACE Shocking murders of judge's husband and mother point up Internet's potential for breeding 'lone wolf' supremacists - Stacy Finz, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, March 6, 2005
Without Matt Hale, the white supremacist who sits in a Chicago jail cell awaiting sentencing for plotting to kill a federal judge, his once-prominent hate group has splintered and dwindled in size.
But authorities say the white-power movement doesn't need Hale, who once held rock-star status among skinheads, to be dangerous. It has the Internet.
"Someone with a computer and a DSL line who starts following this stuff thinks he's going to be a hero if he kills someone," said Pat Webb, a former San Francisco FBI agent who investigated the Aryan Nation in 1984. "It would be a mistake to underestimate these people's potential for violence."
The Web was where white supremacist groups posted a barrage of hateful information about the judge Hale plotted to kill, Joan Humphrey Lefkow, before her husband and mother were slain last week in her home in Illinois.
Hale's now rag-tag group, the World Church of the Creator, has been linked to some of the most vicious and brutal hate crimes in recent years, including a spate of synagogue fires in Sacramento and the murder of a gay couple in Shasta County six years ago.
The California crime spree started after two brothers, Benjamin and James Williams, read the group's Web site and became followers. They shot Winfield Mowder and Gary Matson in their Happy Valley home in 1999 because homosexuality is abhorrent to white supremacists. After Benjamin Williams committed suicide in jail, his brother pleaded guilty to the murders.
The Williams brothers also caused more than $3 million in damage when they torched three Sacramento synagogues in 1999. When they were arrested, police found they had compiled a list of prominent Jewish leaders who authorities believed may have been future targets.
Some question whether other Internet followers of the World Church of the Creator read the online postings about Lefkow, which included her address in Chicago, and were inspired to kill her husband, Michael, a lawyer and leader in the local Episcopal Church, and her 89-year-old mother, Donna Humphrey.
Lefkow found them shot to death in her basement Monday evening. She and her four daughters remain under federal protection while police try to solve the crimes.
"It's quite likely that the killers in the Lefkow case were followers or sympathizers of Hale's who came by the judge's address and pictures of her family online," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which collects information on hate groups. "The Internet has given rise to the lone wolf. And with the lone wolf comes the potential for greater violence."
Judge labeled a traitor
Hale was convicted last year of soliciting Lefkow's murder and is awaiting sentencing. The man he approached to be the hit man was an FBI informant.
The white supremacist had gone before Judge Lefkow on a trademark case. A religious group from Oregon was suing the World Church of the Creator, saying it had the name first. Lefkow originally ruled in favor of Hale, but an appeals court overruled her and the judge was forced to order the white supremacist group not to use the title.
Almost immediately after her ruling, the World Church of the Creator branded Lefkow a "probable Jew" and a "kike- and nigger-loving" traitor who was trying to destroy the group and its Web site, according to Potok. Then other white supremacist Web sites printed the judge's address.
Although Hale has not been named as a suspect in the killings, police have reportedly interviewed him in jail and are looking at white supremacist groups.
Hale denies any involvement, calling the killings a "heinous crime" that "only an idiot" would think he had ordered, according to a statement he released through his mother to the Associated Press.
"I totally condemn it and I want the perpetrator caught and prosecuted," he said.
In the meantime, the World Church of the Creator, now called The Creativity Movement, is leaderless. During the group's heyday, the organization had 88 chapters across the country, according to Potok. Now, he said, it has 16.
Hale took over as leader in 1996, when he was just 25 years old. Bill Klassen, who had invented an early version of the electric can opener, founded the then-Church of the Creator in 1973. But by the '90s, the organization was floundering, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which also tracks hate groups. Several of its members had been convicted of violent crimes, including the murder of a black Gulf War veteran in Florida and the bombing of an NAACP office in Washington. The group had been successfully sued by the veteran's family, and Klassen had committed suicide in 1993.
Internet savvy
Hale, an avowed racist since reading Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" when he was 12, was named the group's "pontifex maximus" by other members and took over the operation. He ran it from a bedroom in his father's house in East Peoria, Ill., surrounded by his stuffed animals, swastikas and an Israeli flag he used as a doormat.
Hale immediately made use of cyberspace, saying the Internet "has the potential to reach millions of white people with our message and we need to act on that," according to the ADL.
The World Church of the Creator's main site contained information ranging from how to join to tips on how to spread the word to commandments such as, "You shall keep your race pure. Pollution of the White Race is a heinous crime against Nature and against your own race."
The ADL says in addition to that site, the group had more than 30 subsidiary sites.
When not conducting chat rooms on the Internet, the young law student Hale preached the gospel of white superiority in libraries across the nation. Unlike his skinhead followers with their steel-tipped boots and T-shirts, Hale wore a suit and tie. He had a penchant for attracting press and appeared on a number of network news shows.
"Hale was certainly a driving force and still has a number of sergeants around the country," said Jonathan Bernstein, the Northern California director of the ADL.
In 1999, even before the Williams brothers went on their rampage, the World Church of the Creator was making headlines. After the Illinois State Bar refused to give Hale a license to practice law, his friend and follower Benjamin Smith singled out Jews, African Americans and Asian Americans in the Midwest. He killed two people and wounded nine others.
"After the Ben Smith killings, some members of the group were forced underground," Bernstein said. "Others, like the Williamses, may have been emboldened by it."
Booted in Wyoming
After Hale's arrest two years ago, Thomas Kroenke, a fired Wyoming corrections officer, announced that he was taking over the World Church of the Creator and moving its headquarters to that state in Riverton.
But, according to Potok, the locals didn't take kindly to Kroenke and his Aryan movement.
"The banks wouldn't open checking accounts for him and delivery boys refused to bring him pizzas," Potok said. Kroenke left town and hasn't been heard from since.
During his incarceration, Hale has been unable to keep the group cohesive. Some followers suggested in 2003 that the group change the way it does business by becoming a leaderless resistance, making itself less vulnerable to "disruption or destruction," according to the ADL.
ADL officials said Hardy Lloyd, a Pittsburgh member of the Creativity movement, announced that the days of "memberships and street rallies" were over and that "the time of the lone wolf is drawing ever nearer."
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é2005 San Francisco Chronicle
2005-03-06 09:58 | User Profile
[QUOTE]"Hale was certainly a driving force and still has a number of sergeants around the country," [u]said Jonathan Bernstein, the Northern California director of the ADL. [/u]
[/QUOTE] Enough Said!
Mind you, I don't agree with Hale, he is way to extreme - even for me. But the ADL putting away Whites, that must be their fav past time :angry:
2005-03-06 14:31 | User Profile
The leaders of the World Church of the Creator have always been a bunch of nuts. Anyone dumb enough to take them or their foolishness seriously should wake up.
Could you really take someone like this seriously? [img] http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/images/hale.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.briansmale.com/Images/matthale450.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.islamdenouncesterrorism.com/images_ritual_of_devil/image68.jpg[/img]
[size=4]LOL![/size]
2005-03-06 15:18 | User Profile
FTT,
Gabrielle,
Damn! I actually agree with you on this. They do look silly as hell.
[IMG]http://cerberus.gamershell.com/img/noscreenshots.gif[/IMG]
2005-03-06 15:38 | User Profile
Note that the focus of the article is Internet use by "lone wolf" supremacists. I think what this piece is doing is laying the groundwork for increased Internet restriction & surveillance of anyone or anything deemed a threat by anti-white hate groups such as the ADL and SPLC. :disgust:
2005-03-06 16:06 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Stuka]Note that the focus of the article is Internet use by "lone wolf" supremacists. I think what this piece is doing is laying the groundwork for increased Internet restriction & surveillance of anyone or anything deemed a threat by anti-white hate groups such as the ADL and SPLC. :disgust:[/QUOTE]
Good point. I think this election proved just how powerful the Internet can be as far as dispelling lies.
2005-03-06 16:10 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Without Matt Hale, the white supremacist who sits in a Chicago jail cell awaiting sentencing for plotting to kill a federal judge,[/QUOTE]
The plot: "I'm staying legal. You do what you want."
2005-03-06 16:14 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]FTT,
Gabrielle,
Damn! I actually agree with you on this. They do look silly as hell.
[IMG]http://cerberus.gamershell.com/img/noscreenshots.gif[/IMG][/QUOTE]
Sertorius, that certainly is a grumpy looking little devil.
KILLER 666 would love that little guy. :tongue:
2005-03-06 17:23 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Stuka]Note that the focus of the article is Internet use by "lone wolf" supremacists. I think what this piece is doing is laying the groundwork for increased Internet restriction & surveillance of anyone or anything deemed a threat by anti-white hate groups such as the ADL and SPLC. :disgust:[/QUOTE]Certainly, that's always been what they wanted to do anyway of course. And that's why we always have to take scrupulous care in excluding certain types of people, who make or refuse to renounce their right to make, certain types of comments.
Its not that they don't have ever have anything intersting or even valuable to say. And its not even that the claim often made by them, that eventually people would like to try and shut down all pro-white or even remotely pro-white websites eventually, and measures such as these are only temporary anyway, don't have some merit.
The point is for the time being we have been given a certain amount of liberty provided we follow certain rules, some rules of which are not entirely unreasonable, and we operate under the premise that we want to make as good use of this liberty as possible, and have valid means to legitimately protest when this liberty is challenged (and who knows, from the sounds of this article, that time may be getting closer, even for sites such as this, Liberty Forum, the Phora, etc.) Let's not jeopardize it - at least for the time being - its stil a useful commodity.
2005-03-06 20:20 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Stuka]Note that the focus of the article is Internet use by "lone wolf" supremacists. I think what this piece is doing is laying the groundwork for increased Internet restriction & surveillance of anyone or anything deemed a threat by anti-white hate groups such as the ADL and SPLC. :disgust:[/QUOTE] Interesting how White Nationalists are all painted with the same "lone wolf" and "hate group" brush. Not one word about Jew tribalism or Jew supremacy. Not one word about "sayanim" or AIPAC wrong doing.
What is shocking is that law enforcement is using ADL documentation to track White Nationalist groups. HAH! The ADL should be back on the official terrorist group list along with the JDL!
:caiphas: :thumbd:
2005-03-06 22:22 | User Profile
Gabrielle,
You are very Right. The is good at making himself look foolish. And yes the marxists are always looking to take away our freedom of speech.
2005-03-08 05:03 | User Profile
[QUOTE]I think this election proved just how powerful the Internet can be as far as dispelling lies.[/QUOTE]
Just because Matt Hale is a nut doesn't mean I was gonna let this one squeak by on its coat-tails.
It is a fait accompli that there will be policing/censorship on the Internet within a few short years. Both the Left and the Right are compiling their dossiers of Why It Must Come To Pass.
The most compelling reason why it shouldn't - the fact that there is plenty of online material to offend and alarm both sides - will be swept away under the rug. As they currently exist, the Left and Right have far more in common with each other than they have with any of us and they will agree to shake hands to prevent that reality from being even more widely-perceived than it already is. One good indicator is the flow of media commentary. Whereas, a few years ago, the general tenor of most media opinion was [I]positive [/I] - egalitarian venue for open dialogue, powerful tool for education, built-in preventative against 'managed' news, media of/by/for the people, etc - for the past two or three years, the general tenor has become uniformly negative - haven for haters and losers with 'no life', only idiots believe what they read on it, potential terrorist bulletin-board, pedophile's playground, etc, etc, etc.
[B]Beware[/B]. Because the manufactured 'gestalt' of uniformity and repetition is like a cut of tough meat being relentlessly pounded by a tenderizer; they are softening your resistance to the day when the first Congressional lawmaker goes "Enough is enough" and proposes [I]HR-whatever [/I] locking down the Web......and the same boobs who now insist [I]this election proved just how powerful the Internet can be as far as dispelling lies[/I] begin murmuring about pedophilia and Bin-Ladin and "irresponsible speech".
After all, what will they care? Having cleared out the cloven-hoofed Klintoons to make way for the angel-trumpets of the Bushcons and their trailing neo-seraphim, the Internet has served its purpose, ie, theirs. The people who embody the worst uses of the Internet - the Karl Roves and David Horowitzes and Jeff Gannons - will [I]lead the charge [/I] to emasculate it.
And they will have many voices seconding them on the illusory other side of the aisle. What will be interesting is seeing how many of us, over time, begin internalizing their arguments. We got a good taste of how wobbly the ground underneath us can get right after the Lefkow killings. It is gonna get [I]a lot [/I] wobblier.