Hella Nation - Evan Wright [54]
In 1983, nearly a dozen of Pastor Butler’s followers put the Aryan Nations on the map by forming a secret paramilitary group they called “The Order” to start the prophesied conflagration of the races. The war began in an adult bookstore in Spokane, Washington, where members of the group burst in with guns, sucker-punched the clerk and made off with $379.10. It was not an auspicious beginning. The pipe bomb they set off at a local synagogue failed to kill anyone, and the counterfeit money they had printed on the Aryan Nations printing press—normally used to run off their raving, mispelled hate literature—was spotted as bogus as soon as they tried to pass it.
The Aryan Christian soldiers had better luck murdering a Jew. They ambushed Alan Berg, a Denver talk-radio personality famous for belittling the far right on the air, and shot him dead outside his home with multiple rounds from a MAC-10.
The white supremacists successfully robbed a series of armored cars and filled their coffers with enough loot to buy land for paramilitary training camps, purchase weapons and supplies and donate $40,000 to Pastor Butler’s Aryan church. One Aryan Nations member was sentenced to death for boasting about the group’s exploits in a local bar. His Christian Identity brothers lured him into the woods, beat him with a sledgehammer, then shot him in the back of the head.
The crime spree—or “race-war operation,” as the perpetrators saw it—came to an end when the FBI traced a gun used in a Brinks truck heist to one of the members. Twenty-two race-warriors were hunted down and arrested. One was burned to death in a shoot-out with the FBI.
The government was unable to prove any direct connection between Pastor Butler and the crimes committed by his acolytes. He was charged with sedition, but was acquitted after a lengthy trial—saved by the First Amendment.
Butler’s Aryan Nations compound in Idaho thrived, pumping out hate tracts for distribution in prisons and offering sanctuary, paramilitary training and race salvation for homicidal white men from around the nation. Among Butler’s most prominent followers were Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols.
THE 1996 ARYAN NATIONS WORLD CONGRESS begins on a warm July day in Hayden Lake, an astonishingly beautiful land of crystal lakes, blue mountains, golden fields and world-class golf club resorts, for which it is famous. Down Rimrock Road, an unpaved track marked by shot-up “Do Not Discharge Firearms” signs, FBI agents sit in unmarked vans watching the entrance to the Aryan Nations compound.
Screened off from the road by pine trees, nestled in a woodsy clearing, is the small steepled Church of Jesus Christ Christian Aryan Nations, with attached offices and outlying cabins. An ominous guard tower, hung with a swastika banner, gives the place the feel of a concentration camp—or the set of Hogan’s Heroes.
A “Whites Only” sign is posted on the guard shack at the entrance to the parking lot. Two teenage sentries stand outside, checking IDs. One of the sentries is a sullen fifteen-year-old boy named Clinton Matthews; his father led the original band of Christian Identity race haters who launched the 1983 murder and crime spree that put Aryan Nations on the map. Matthews’s father is the “Aryan martyr” burned to death in the shoot-out with the FBI.
The other sentry is a scarred, tattooed skinhead with a broken-tooth, checkerboard grin. “Welcome to the one place in America you can be free and white,” he greets a visitor.
Members of the Aryan Nations security detail, paunchy, middle-aged men in blue storm trooper uniforms, display equal good cheer. “Hey, we’re white people,” a grinning swastika saluter implores. “We’re not rabid, we don’t bite.”
“Once you see what’s going on,” drawls a stringy southerner with yellow hair and brown, tobacco-stained teeth, “it’s kind of catching.”
A wooden platform is set up on the lawn for Pastor Butler