Suspected Pipeline Bomber Has Anti-Government Extremist Ties, Admired Joseph Stack

Anson Chi on YouTube

Anson Chi, the north Texas man authorities suspect bombed a natural gas pipeline station in Plano, Texas, on June 18, is an anti-government extremist active in the tax protest movement.

Chi, 32, a former engineer who claimed to have “retired” but was living with his parents, supported many causes, including environmental and animal rights causes, but the convictions he expressed most strongly in on-line writings were anti-government ones. He routinely posted anti-government comments to his Facebook Wall, collecting them from both the right and left.

However, statements by Chi in recent years reveal a strong connection with the right-wing “patriot movement,” especially its tax protest branch. The tax protest movement claims Americans aren’t required to pay federal income taxes and a government conspiracy is hiding this fact. “There is no law for the average American to pay the income tax,” Chi claimed in 2010, “as stated over and over again by the Supreme Court—case closed!”

In 2010, after fellow tax protester Joseph Andrew Stack flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, in a suicide attack, Chi posted a link to Stack’s suicide note while proclaiming, “Bring down the IRS!”

Chi’s postings reveal familiarity with the movement’s pseudo-legal arguments, as well as key figures. Chi easily rattled off the names of tax protest gurus and court cases involving tax protesters. Saying he was a “paralegal,” Chi claimed to be friends with tax protest movement attorneys Tom Cryer and Larry Becraft, and to have attended the trial of Sherry Jackson, a former IRS employee who joined the tax protest movement and was convicted in 2007 of failing to file income tax returns.

Chi was also familiar with the pseudo-legal arguments of the sovereign citizen movement, proclaiming in late 2010 that he knew “all about admiralty maritime law and the strawman theory.”

Chi’s other fixation was on the banking system; like many anti-government extremists, he was obsessed with “international bankers” and the Federal Reserve. “Your life is under control by greedy private bankers,” he told visitors to his Facebook page, “especially since they print YOUR money based on nothing but thin air!”

Chi liked the movie Zeitgeist, as well as other recent popular on-line movies that combined New World Order and Federal Reserve conspiracy theories with New Age concepts. Chi’s postings reflected the theories advanced by such movies. “The private central bankers like the Rothschilds—changed from Jewish name Bauer, like Henry Kissinger changed from Heinz Loeb,” he wrote in 2010, “are…a bunch of con artists, working as the financial gatekeepers…for the Vatican.”

Former Congressman Tom Tancredo to Speak at White Supremacist Conference

Former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) is scheduled to speak at the national conference of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), according to a recent newsletter distributed by the group. The conference is scheduled to take place July 6-7, 2012, in Nashville, Tennessee. Tancredo's topic will be "Multiculturalism - the Death of America."

If this announcement is correct, Tancredo, who is known for his anti-immigrant rhetoric and attacks on multiculturalism, has shown his true colors by agreeing to appear before a group that promotes racism and white separatism. The CofCC traces its roots directly to the racist, anti-integrationist White Citizens' Councils of the 1950s and 1960s. The group exploits hot-button issues such as immigration and black-on-white crime to inflame fears about minorities and the destruction of white culture in America. 

Among the scheduled speakers at the CofCC conference are Don Black who runs Stormfront, the largest and most popular white supremacist Internet forum; Derek Black, Don Black's son, who runs a radio show with his father on Stormfront, and James Edwards, whose radio show, The Political Cesspool, regularly features racists and anti-Semites. 

In the last few years, Tancredo has become increasingly strident in his view that the influx of both legal and undocumented immigrants is destroying American culture. At the Conservative Political Conference (CPAC) in February 2011, at a panel titled, “Will Immigration Kill the GOP?” Tancredo alleged that the “cult of multiculturalism” had hurt the United States and the rest of the world, particularly Western Europe. He asserted that multiculturalism was “the dagger point into the heart of western civilization.”

The CPAC panel was sponsored by Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), a far-right student group, which made Tancredo its honorary chairman. YWC has also decried multiculturalism for "destroying and dispossessing the people and culture of the West.” The term “Western civilization” has become a euphemism in far-right and racist circles to signify white European culture. During a February 2009 lecture at American University that YWC organized, Tancredo suggested that "throughout history, people who are not white Anglo-Saxon have become American by adopting a white Anglo-Saxon culture."

The Bloody Trail of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas

What’s the most violent extremist group in the United States today? The answer may be surprising: it is the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT), one of the largest white supremacist prison gangs in the country. According to ADL records, since 2000, this racist group—which has no relationship to the older, “original” Aryan Brotherhood—has killed more Americans than any other domestic extremist group.

Since 2000, ABT members and associates have committed at least 29 murders in the United States, all in Texas or neighboring states. The true number is likely considerably higher, as most murders that occur behind prison walls do not get reported by the media. The 29 known killings are all “street” killings, more evidence of the growing presence of racist prison gangs on the streets of America.

Why are there so many ABT murders? There are two main reasons. The first is that the ABT inculcates an acceptance of violence in its members; violence is as often as not the first—or even only—solution to a perceived problem.

The second relates to the nature of racist prison gangs in general and the ABT in particular: the ABT is an organized crime group as well as a white supremacist group. The ABT constitution even acknowledges that it can be a “hindrance” to put ideological beliefs before “business transactions” and that the group has to generate income to further its “mission and growth.” The result is that many ABT murders take place in connection with their “traditional” criminal activities, such as methamphetamine trafficking, home invasions, and identity theft.

Even more ABT murders are actually internal murders, in which gang members kill their own, usually because they believe or suspect the victim has become an informant or broken gang rules, but also sometimes due to factional or other internal fights. It is almost as dangerous to be an ABT member as it is to encounter one.

Ironically, only 3 of the 29 known murders linked to this white supremacist group in the past 12 years were actually hate-related, though there have been other hate-related crimes by ABT members, ranging from assaults to arsons of African-American churches.

There is no doubting, however, the viciousness of the ABT killings, some of which were torture-murders while others were execution-style killings, in which the victim’s body was burned, decapitated or otherwise dismembered in order to make identification difficult.

Neo-Nazi Bill White Arrested in Mexico

Authorities arrested neo-Nazi Bill White in Mexico on June 8, after he allegedly spent nearly a month on the run.  He is reportedly back in the United States and being held in Miami, Florida.

A federal arrest warrant was issued for White after it was discovered that he was no longer in Virginia, where he was on probation.  A federal jury had convicted him in December 2009 on four counts, including making threats on the Internet and witness intimidation. White, who served over two years in prison, was released in April 2011.

White may have feared being sent back to prison. His appeal of his conviction on First Amendment grounds led a federal appeals court to uphold the conviction in March 2012. However, the court also ruled that White should have received a stiffer sentence on one of the counts involving intimidating letters he sent to the African-American residents of a Virginia Beach housing complex who were filing a discrimination suit against their white landlord. The U.S. government, which had originally indicted White, asserted that because at least one of the tenants had young children, White should have received an enhanced sentence for targeting an especially vulnerable population. The appeals court agreed with the government’s argument. White had been scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, Virginia, in May for resentencing in the case.

Since his release from prison in April 2011, White had been writing for two anti-Semitic publications, the conspiracy-oriented American Free Press (AFP) and The Barnes Review (TBR), a Holocaust denial publication. Both are published by long-time anti-Semite Willis Carto.

More recently, in March 2012, AFP announced that it was hosting a book release dinner in honor of White’s new book, Centuries of Revolution: Democracy, Communism, Zionism. The event was co-hosted by TBR and the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens.

White is the former head of the now-defunct American National Socialist Workers Party, and a former leader in the National Socialist Movement.

Brutal Racist Skinhead Assault in Philadelphia Results in Victim’s Blinding

Racist skinheads have a long track record of brutal and vicious assaults and murders in the United States. Usually, they direct their extreme violence at perceived “enemies,” such as ethnic or religious minorities, members of the GLBT community, or anti-racist activists.

However, the racist skinhead subculture is an inherently violent one. When they have a mind to, racist skinheads can be just as brutal towards their own, as a recent shocking attack in northeast Philadelphia graphically demonstrated.

According to police reports, the attack occurred on May 6, 2012, when a racist skinhead, David Phillips, 43, was assaulted by two fellow white supremacists, Stephen Masten, 29, and Frank Casiano, 28, who allegedly kicked in the door to Phillips’ home and began beating him with sticks and a blackjack while threatening to kill him.

The police report states that the assailants repeatedly punched, kicked and stabbed Phillips—but that was not all. According to the victim, Masten tried to smother Phillips with a pillow, then gouged out the victim’s eyes with his bare hands, ripping them from their sockets. Phillips suffered multiple stab wounds and lacerations on his face and head, as well as broken eye sockets, and was permanently blinded by the assault. He remains hospitalized.

During the initial investigation, Phillips told police that the perpetrators were white supremacist comrades of his, while a fourth white supremacist who witnessed part of the assault allegedly identified the attackers as Masten and Casiano. The witness claimed the violent assault was an act of retaliation against Phillips because of a prior incident involving Phillips and Masten’s girlfriend while Masten was incarcerated on theft charges. Masten left prison on parole about two weeks prior to the assault.

A few days after the assault, Joshua Steever, founder of the small racist skinhead crew Aryan Terror Brigade (ATB) and currently living in New Jersey, began posting about the attack on the ATB’s on-line forum. Identifying Phillips as ATB’s Pennsylvania state representative, Steever asked forum members to donate money to help with his recovery.

Police arrested the two suspects on May 22, 2012, charging them with attempted murder, aggravated assault, conspiracy to commit murder, burglary, criminal trespassing, possession of an instrument of crime with intent, making terroristic threats with intent to terrorize another, simple assault, reckless endangerment to another person, and criminal mischief.

Masten and Casiano remain incarcerated with bail set at $3 million and $1 million, respectively. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for June 12, 2012.

May Not So Merry For White Supremacists

April ended with a shock to the racist world, as prominent Arizona white supremacist and border vigilante J.T. Ready fatally shot four people before turning his gun on himself.   White supremacists would not be given a chance to catch their breaths, however, as the month of May continued to serve them setback after setback.

Christopher Brooks of American Front

On the heels of the Ready murder-suicide came a high profile incident in Florida in early May, in which law enforcement officers rounded up almost the entire Florida contingent of the hardcore racist skinhead group American Front on weapons, paramilitary training, and hate crimes charges.  To date, authorities have made 14 arrests.  According to court documents, the group allegedly conducted paramilitary training to prepare for an “inevitable race war” and discussed possible acts of violence ranging from shooting at a house to attacking an anti-racist group.

This just set the stage for a wave of arrests and setbacks to the white supremacist movement in May, including:

• In mid-May, Virginia neo-Nazi Bill White became a fugitive, announcing that he had “left the country,” though authorities think otherwise.  White, who had been released from prison in April, missed a re-sentencing court hearing and possibly feared he might be sent back to prison.

•  On May 17, court documents revealed that a Minnesota white supremacist, Joseph Benjamin Thomas, arrested with another white supremacist a few weeks earlier on drug and weapons charges, respectively, had allegedly planned to attack the Mexican consulate in St. Paul.

• On May 19, anti-racist activists crashed a Chicago-area white supremacist event billed as an “economic summit,” attacking attendees and sending three to the hospital.  Police arrested five anti-racists on charges related to the attack.  Adding insult to injury, police also arrested two of the attendees of the white supremacist event—one for child pornography and the other for unlawful possession of weapons by a felon.

• On May 30, Joliet resident Brian Moudry, a long-time Chicago-area white supremacist associated with the Creativity Movement, was arrested on federal arson and civil rights charges in connection with the 2007 arson of an African-American family’s house a few doors down from Moudry’s.

• Also on May 30, agents from the Washington, D.C., Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested Virginia white supremacist Douglas Howard Story for allegedly attempting to obtain a fully automatic AK-47.  Story had a track record of on-line comments about responding with violence to encounters with police and about how President Obama might be assassinated.

Virginia White Supremacist Arrested On Weapons Charge

Douglas Story at 2010 Aryan Nations
rally in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Agents from the Washington, D.C., Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested a Virginia white supremacist, Douglas Howard Story, 48, on May 29, 2012, on charges that he had illegally attempted to obtain an automatic AK-47.

According to authorities, Story met with undercover informants and requested them to convert an AK-47 assault rifle to full-auto for $125. Story reportedly said that he knew it was against the law, but that he could “claim mental issues because of a motorcycle injury.” Law enforcement officers arrested Story after he accepted delivery of the ostensibly modified gun.

Story, who used to work for the Virginia Safety Service Patrol, a state agency that helps stranded motorists and removes debris from the highways, is a long-time white supremacist. “Now,” he wrote in 2007 on a white supremacist message forum, “if I see an accident involving a negro or other kind of brown filth, I just drive on by. Screw ‘em, let ‘em die.” According to his Facebook page, Story is still employed by the Virginia Department of Transportation.

In 2010, Story received a brief flurry of publicity after Virginia authorities revoked his personalized license plates, which read “14CV88.” While the “CV” stood for “Confederate Veterans,” the “14” stood for a white supremacist slogan, the so-called “14 Words” (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”), and the 88 stood for “Heil Hitler” (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet). For several years, Story has been a member of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations and he participated in a 2010 Aryan Nations rally in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Story has often combined his racist and anti-Semitic beliefs with conspiratorial anti-government beliefs stemming from the anti-government “patriot” movement. In 2007, Story wrote that housing subdivisions existed so that the “powers that be” could easily herd people to “jew controlled concentration camps.” These feelings intensified as it became clear that Barack Obama would be elected president. He urged other white supremacists to stock up on ammo, food, and supplies, and often referred to his AK-47 as his “homeland defense rifle.” According to the criminal complaint, Story believed that martial law would be enacted in the United States, and that if this happened, he would ambush any law enforcement officer who stopped him on the street. His views were disturbingly close to those of another white supremacist and anti-government conspiracy theorist, Richard Poplawski, who ambushed and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in April 2009.

Story also frequently wrote about Obama, whom he loathed, being assassinated, often adopting a coy tone, such as one November 2008 posting in which he claimed that “I’m not advocating violence against him, I’m just saying there are White folks out there that are none to[o] happy with his ‘election.’”

FBI Arrests Chicago-Area White Supremacist For Hate-Motivated Arson



Photo credit:  Will County Sheriff’s Department

FBI agents on May 30, 2012, arrested long-time Chicago-area white supremacist Brian James Moudry, 35, for allegedly setting fire to the home of an African-American family in Joliet near Moudry’s own home in 2007. Nine people were in the house at the time, eight of them children, but they escaped the fire without injury.

Prosecutors have charged Moudry with arson, using fire to interfere with housing rights on the basis of race, and using fire to commit another felony. If convicted, Moudry could face up to 40 years in federal prison.

Moudry has a lengthy history of both arrests and white supremacy. By his own admission, he spent most of his teenage years in juvenile institutions. By the time he was 18 he was already a white supremacist. In 1996, he wrote a fan letter to the white power music magazine Resistance in which he talked about how much he and his father enjoyed the articles and ended his missive with the cry of “WHITE UNITY and WHITE POWER!!” Within a few years, he was arrested for aggravated assault and hate crimes for assaulting two African-American men in a restaurant parking lot and spent some months in the county jail for the assault.

At first, Moudry was primarily active on the white power music scene, editing a white power music fanzine dubbed Hatemonger and playing in a white power band called Xenophobia while calling himself “Warhead von Jewgrinder.” Xenophobia performed songs such as “Vomit on the Rabbi” and “Delenda Est Judica,” and appeared on a compilation CD along with Flammable Hebrews, with which Moudry also performed.

In the early 2000s, Moudry met Matt Hale, then leader of the Illinois-based World Church of the Creator (WCOTC; now known as the Creativity Movement), and became an active member of the group, styling himself a “Reverend” and organizing WCOTC rallies and protests and passing out white supremacist literature in northern Illinois. Moudry quickly became the “state leader” of the WCOTC for Illinois. The WCOTC collapsed in 2004 following Hale’s arrest and subsequent conviction for soliciting the murder of a federal judge; in subsequent years Moudry was part of a small band of Hale loyalists trying, largely unsuccessfully, to keep the group alive following Hale’s arrest.

In July 2010, FBI agents paid Moudry a visit to question him about an alleged threat by Moudry to an African-American postal carrier; no charges were filed, but according to authorities he was “encouraged to behave.” However, not long after, in August 2010, local police arrested Moudry for allegedly threatening a youth with a weapon. That case is still pending.

Violent Clashes at “Other” Chicago Summit

Event announcement on Stormfront

The extreme right and the far left clashed violently in the Chicago area over the weekend of May 19, with police making arrests on both sides. The scene, however, was not the high-profile NATO Summit hosted by the city of Chicago that weekend. Rather, the clash occurred at a small restaurant in Tinley Park, Illinois, where a group of white supremacists were holding their own confab, a “White Nationalist Economic Summit.”

Around 15 white supremacists from around the country attended this “economic summit,” only to have it crashed by a roughly equal number of left-wing and anarchist activists associated with the Chicago-based Southside Anti-Racist Action (ARA), a group that has disrupted past white supremacist events in Chicago, and the Indiana-based Hoosier Anti-Racist Movement (HARM). The left-wing activists allegedly attacked the white supremacists with baseball bats, hammers, and metal chains, causing injuries that led three people to be taken to the hospital with head injuries. Police subsequently arrested five of the activists (all from HARM), charging them with mob action, aggravated battery and criminal damage to property.

The Tinley Park event was the fifth white supremacist “economic summit” organized since 2010, four of which have occurred in the Midwest. It was organized by white supremacists from Illinois and South Dakota under the auspices of the “Illinois European Heritage Association.” Most attendees were members of the racist Stormfront website, and some had associations with other extremist groups, such as the National Socialist Movement and the Knights Party. The events are something of an outgrowth of a white supremacist concept known as the Pioneer Little Europe (PLE) movement, which seeks to establish mutually supportive white supremacist enclaves throughout the United States.

Police also arrested two of the attendees at the “summit.” Steven Eugene Speers, 33, of Grand Forks, North Dakota, was arrested on a child pornography warrant from Texas, while Francis John Gilroy, Jr., 65, of West Palm Beach, Florida, was charged with unlawful possession of weapons by a felon.

Left-wing activists and white supremacists alike have been angered and energized by this violent confrontation, opening the possibility of future violent clashes or acts of retaliation. The organizers of the summit, meanwhile, are planning a future event in Omaha, Nebraska.

American Front Members Arrested on Hate Crimes, Conspiracy Charges

Patricia Faella

Federal, state and local authorities arrested much of the core membership of the Florida contingent of the white supremacist American Front this past weekend on hate crimes and conspiracy charges.   The American Front is one of the oldest hardcore racist skinhead groups in the United States, with a membership concentrated primarily in northern California and central Florida.

At least seven people, all from the greater Orlando area in central Florida, have been arrested; additional arrests may ensue.  Members picked up so far include Marcus Faella, 39; Patricia Faella, 36; Mark McGowan, 29; Jennifer McGowan, 25; Diane Stevens, 28; Kent McLellan, 22; and Paul Jackson, 25.   The Faellas have played something of a leadership role within the American Front since the shooting death of its previous leader, David Lynch, in California in 2011.

Marcus Faella

Prosecutors have charged the Faellas and the McGowans with criminal conspiracy and a hate crime.  McGowan and his wife Jennifer have reportedly also been charged with illegal paramilitary training—providing firearms or explosives training with the intention of committing civil disorder. Diane Stevens was also charged with criminal conspiracy and committing a hate crime.   Charging details for the others arrested are not yet available, nor has the nature of the alleged conspiracy yet been made public.

A number of Florida American Front members have been involved in criminal activity.  It was only in 2010 that McLellan was sentenced to a year in prison after being convicted of vandalizing a local restaurant and church with white supremacist graffiti in 2008.   In May 2010, another Florida American Front member, Christopher Brooks of St. Cloud, pleaded guilty in Virginia for his role in a synagogue vandalism there in 2009.  That same year, Florida American Front member Richard Adam Stockdale served time for battery charges.

The American Front is one of a large number of hate groups with a presence in Florida.  It includes subgroups such as the Valkyrie Corps for female members and the American Patriot Brigade for new members, referred to as “probates.”

A Hater Until The End: The Last Messages of J.T. Ready

White supremacist and anti-immigration extremist J. T. Ready took his life in horrific and tragic fashion on Wednesday, killing four others, including an infant, before shooting himself in the Phoenix, Arizona, suburb of Gilbert. Though the investigation is ongoing, police believe that Ready initiated the murderous spree of domestic violence. 

The Anti-Defamation League has uncovered Ready’s final on-line messages, revealing that, even in the final hours before he took his own life and the lives of those closest to him, he was busy spewing hatred and anti-Semitism. Early in the morning of Wednesday, May 2, the day of the massacre, Ready posted a steady stream of messages to the video hosting site YouTube as well as to the white supremacist message forum Stormfront.

These messages from Ready drip with heavy-handed racism and anti-Semitism. “Hitler was right,” Ready responded (posting under his screen name of USBorderGuard) on YouTube to a comment from a British user. “And if you are too stupid to see that then you deserve to get pushed off your island into the sea by a bunch of foreigners. Jews like Jack Straw have sold you down the river[,] mate.”

In another post, he opined, “Too bad traitors from within are selling the UK down the drain and letting Pakis in at home to destroy the British race once and for good. I hope the soldiers revolt and take back their island from the scum.”

In response to a video of journalist Mike Wallace interviewing Morgan Freeman about Black History Month, Ready asserted that “Jews are not White. They hate White people. [T]hey genocide Whites from the planet.” He also repeated this opinion in another post in response to a different video: “The Jew parasites want to genocide Whites from the planet in order to enslave the rest of the races. All races should unite against this evil.”

Ready also posted to the hate site Stormfront at this time, though after the shooting spree that site’s moderators deleted his account. However, through Google caches or in responses from other posters who subsequently quoted Ready’s messages, his final comments on Stormfront could still be unearthed.

Not surprisingly, these posts also revealed his obsession with anti-Semitism. In them, Ready responded to news that five anarchists had been arrested in Cleveland for allegedly attempting to destroy a bridge. Ready seemed convinced that Jews were involved, either as perpetrators or as plotters in the government creating a set-up. “Have [the anarchists] not yet figured out,” he asked, “that they are both just tools in the same globalist tyranny toolbox?”

To another poster, who expressed doubt as to whether or not the anarchist suspects were Jewish, he responded: “Learn what a Jew looks like[,] then you won’t be so Jewblind. Calling a Jew a ‘hipster,’ [C]hristian, atheist, Buddhist, communist, capitalist, liberal, conservative, traitor, patriot, criminal, saint, democrat, republican, or anything else…still does not change the racial fact that a JEW is a JEW!”

Arizona White Supremacist And Border Vigilante J.T. Ready Identified As Perpetrator In Mass Shooting

Update: The Anti-Defamation League has uncovered Ready’s final on-line messages, revealing that, even in the final hours before he took his own life and the lives of those closest to him, he was busy spewing hatred and anti-Semitism. 


The Arizona Republic reported on May 2 that the perpetrator behind a shocking mass shooting in Gilbert, Arizona, was J. T. Ready, a prominent neo-Nazi and border vigilante activist.  Ready reportedly shot and killed four people, including his girlfriend and an infant child, before killing himself as well.

Information is still emerging about the shooting incident itself, which will make headlines in the Phoenix area for weeks to come, but what is certain about J. T. Ready is his notorious past.  For almost a decade, J. T. Ready has been significant as a key nexus between the white supremacist movement and the extreme wing of the anti-immigration movement, able to move freely within both spheres.

J. T. Ready stepped onto the public stage in 2004 as an anti-immigration activist, associated with Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce as well as the border vigilante Minuteman Project. His ability to gain mainstream support suffered considerably after April 2007 when the Phoenix New Times and the Anti-Defamation League outed Ready as a white supremacist and neo-Nazi. Following this, he became openly involved with the National Socialist Movement, a prominent neo-Nazi group.

More recently, Ready parted with the NSM to concentrate more on anti-immigration and border vigilante activities, forming his own group, the U.S. Border Guard, which conducted numerous armed vigilante patrols along the Arizona-Mexico border.  These patrols attracted neo-Nazis from as far away as California. 

The Border Guard’s web page prominently quotes Ready as saying “Some of us have our fingers on the triggers; Soap box. Ballot box. Ammo box. These were given to us by our founding fathers and mothers.  We have just about depleted the first two options.”

FBI Arrests Minnesota White Supremacists on Weapons, Drug Charges

Following a nearly two-year undercover investigation, the FBI arrested two Minnesota white supremacists last week on weapons and drug charges, respectively, in connection with what authorities have suggested was an embryonic plot to attack the U.S. government, minorities, and “left-wing” targets. 

Samuel Johnson, 31, from Austin, Minnesota, was charged with being a convicted felon in possession of weapons.  Johnson, who had several convictions on charges such as robbery and attempted robbery, was allegedly found to be in possession of at least five firearms.  Joseph Thomas, 42, of Mendota Heights, was indicted on drug charges related to alleged possession of methamphetamine. Both men face the likelihood of lengthy prison sentences if convicted; it is possible more charges may follow.

According to a search warrant affidavit, the two white supremacists may have had violent plans.  The affidavit alleges that Johnson was trying to form a new group, the Aryan Liberation Movement, with the goal of committing violent acts against government or minority targets.  It also claims that Thomas told the undercover officer that he had tried to obtain explosives and automatic weapons in order to “conduct attacks on left-wing individuals.”

The Anti-Defamation League had been tracking Johnson for several years, ever since he and another white supremacist, Robert Hester, formed a small southern Minnesota chapter of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement and began holding a series of local anti-immigration protests in 2009. 

Johnson has previously expressed that violence is a viable tactic.  In an on-line post he made in December 2010, he asked “Why don’t we stand up and save ourselves?  Why will we not make the first attack?”  He finished his screed with “Are you ready to fight for your Race and Nation?  THEN WHY ARE YOU STILL SITTING HERE?  GATHER YOUR ARMIES!!!!!”    In July 2011, Johnson began trying to recruit for his would-be Aryan Liberation Movement, posting on one white supremacist site that “we are trying to get some good actions going in this state.”

After Johnson's arrest, Hester posted an angry message to a social networking profile created by the undercover officer:  “Did your dirty work and took a brother, [expletive] u agent.”

Georgia Passes Tougher Bogus Lien Law

A new measure came into force in Georgia this week, when Governor Nathan Deal signed into law HB 997, making it a felony to file bogus liens against public officials and law enforcement officers. The act amends the Georgia code to create a new crime, that of making false lien statements against public officers or public employees, and provides a punishment of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $10,000.

The bill had originally been sponsored by a group of Republican state representatives and received strong bipartisan support in both the Georgia House and Senate. The aim of the bill was to help counter the growing problems caused by the sovereign citizen movement, an extreme right-wing anti-government movement whose adherents believe that current governments are illegitimate and have no authority over them. Though the movement has existed since the 1970s, in the past few years it has experienced a surprising resurgence, including a growth of violent and criminal activity.



Portion of document filed by Robert Eugene Stephens
attempting to copyright his own name,
a common sovereign citizen tactic


Though the sovereign citizen movement has a strong association with violence, it has an even stronger association with what has come to be called “paper terrorism”—the use of bogus legal filings or documents or the misuse of actual ones in order to harass, intimidate, or retaliate against perceived enemies.

For 30 years, bogus liens have been one of the most popular paper terrorism tactics, often used to harass police officers, prosecutors, officials, and judges with whom sovereign citizens come into contact. To give one recent Georgia example, in October 2011 Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents arrested sovereign citizen Robert Eugene Stephens of Mineral Bluff on 12 criminal counts related to a series of bogus liens Stephens allegedly filed against a variety of local and state officials, including a county clerk, a local judge and her secretary, the county tax commissioner, and even the Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives (which probably didn’t hurt the chance the subsequent law had of passing).

A number of states still don’t have bogus lien laws on their books, while the laws of other states make the crime only a misdemeanor and some states with bogus lien laws have been lax in enforcing them. The result has been a flood of bogus liens across the entire country in the past several years.

The Georgia law could still be strengthened further, as it does not protect private citizens and businesses, who also can be the victim of bogus liens filed by sovereign citizens.

American Nazi Party Seeks Attention with “Lobbyist” Publicity Stunt

Nobody can squeeze fifteen minutes of infamy out of the Internet like a neo-Nazi group can, a fact demonstrated recently by a flare-up in the blogosphere after South Carolina neo-Nazi John Taylor Bowles registered as a Congressional lobbyist on behalf of the tiny American Nazi Party (ANP).

Within a few days of the April 10 filing, Bowles’ name appeared in dozens of newspaper articles and thousands of blogs as the “first ever” Nazi lobbyist. That it was merely a publicity stunt seemed to have occurred to relatively few observers. However, the ANP is miniscule even by neo-Nazi standards, with only around two dozen active members. Led by Rocky Suhayda of Michigan, the ANP holds few events and does little more than publish a crude newsletter.

The lobbyist stunt might have been out of character for Suhayda, but was typical of Bowles, who has frequently sought the spotlight over the past decade. Bowles is a long-time neo-Nazi who first became involved with the National Socialist White People’s Party as a teenager in Baltimore in the 1970s. In the 1980s he reportedly spent four years in prison on an arson conviction, something that didn’t prevent him from subsequently working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a meat inspector.

Bowles eventually returned to neo-Nazism by joining the National Socialist Movement in 2003 and becoming one of its more active members. By 2005, Bowles was the group’s Virginia state leader; he subsequently became state leader for South Carolina. It was there he orchestrated his first major publicity stunt, issuing a press release in December 2006 announcing that he was running for president.

Over the next year and a half he used this position as “presidential candidate” to help him get attention from both within the white supremacist movement as well as from the media—even though his name was not on any ballots and Bowles himself was ineligible to run (by virtue of his conviction). During this time, Bowles also exploited anti-immigration sentiment for publicity by organizing an anti-immigration rally in South Carolina and announcing a trip to the Texas-Mexico border he dubbed “Operation Throw Back the Wetback.”

Bowles’ exploits did garner him publicity, but also the negative attention and jealousy of fellow NSM members, who kicked him out of the group in late 2007. In response, Bowles formed his own splinter group, the National Socialist Organization of America, which never had more than a handful of members and fell apart about eight months later, after Bowles suffered a heart attack.

After recovering, Bowles joined his fourth neo-Nazi group, the American Nazi Party, in 2009, writing for its newsletter, the White Worker, and organizing events in South Carolina. His lobbyist stunt seems to have been an attempt to regain the “glory” of his faux presidential bid—the only lobbying issue he even put on his registration form was “ballot access laws.”

Members of Florida White Supremacist Biker Club Arrested



Kavallerie Brigade logo

Six bikers, some of whom were members of a white supremacist biker gang, were arrested in Florida and Chicago on drugs and explosives charges following a three-year undercover police investigation by a variety of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.

Arrested were Leah Klose and Brian Klose of St. Cloud, Florida; Ronald Cusack of St. Cloud; Deborah Plowman (arrested in Chicago); Carlos Eugene Dubos of Orlando, and Harold Johnson Kinlaw of Orange County, Florida. Brian Klose, Cusack, Dubose, and Kinlaw were charged with threatening to throw a destructive device, while several suspects were charged with trafficking in prescription drugs and other offenses.

Kusack and several other suspects were members of the 1st Kavallerie Brigade of Aryan Nations, a white supremacist biker club started in early 2008 by white supremacist August Kreis, who also headed a faction of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations at the time. A small group, its members mostly came from South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee. Ron Cusack was the “brigade commander” for the Kavallerie Brigade.

The remaining suspects arrested were members of the far larger Outlaws Motorcycle Club. This club, one of the major outlaw biker gangs in the United States, has had strong ties with white supremacists in Florida.

The arrests are likely to lead to the demise of the Kavallerie Brigade, especially since its founder Kreis pleaded guilty in 2011 to federal fraud charges and is in ill health.

The Anti-Defamation League recently profiled the Kavallerie Brigade in its major report, Bigots on Bikes: The Growing Links between White Supremacists and Biker Gangs, which also describes other similar white supremacist biker crews.

Hutaree Militia Verdict Shows Sedition Charges Risky

In a rebuke to federal prosecutors, U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts on March 27 threw out seditious conspiracy charges against seven Michigan militia members whom the government had accused in 2010 of plotting to start a war with the U.S. government.

Only weapons charges remained against two defendants--David Stone, Sr., the leader of the so-called Hutaree Militia, and his son, Joshua Stone—and they pleaded guilty the following day to possessing a machine gun. According to Roberts, though there was evidence to conclude that “something fishy” was going on, the government did not present enough evidence to prove that defendants had “reached a concrete agreement to forcibly oppose the United States government.”

The Hutaree case illustrated vividly how problematic the very issue of sedition—currently defined in U.S. law as a conspiracy to overthrow or destroy the U.S. government, to oppose by force its authority, or to delay by force the execution of U.S. laws—is in the United States. From the very first sedition law, the Sedition Act of 1798, such acts have been highly controversial. One of the major problems has always been distinguishing between speech and conduct—it is for this very reason that current sedition law specifies “by force,” though it has not made attempts to implement the law much easier.

In recent decades, another reason why sedition trials are often problematic is that increasingly jurors find it difficult to believe that defendants could have possibly thought they could successfully wage war against the government. After the Hutaree trial, one of the jurors told a reporter that “I was shocked by their effort to bring the defendants to trial…Do you think a group that small can go up against the mighty U.S. government?”

The modern track record of sedition cases in the United States has been relatively poor. In 1941, the federal government indicted 28 union activists and left-wing extremists for violations of the Sedition Act and a related act, the Smith act, but the jury acquitted all of the defendants of the sedition charge. In 1944, 30 right-wing extremists and Nazi sympathizers were accused of violating the same acts, but their lengthy trial ended in a mistrial. In one of the few successful sedition cases, a number of radical Puerto Rican liberation activists were convicted of seditious conspiracy in the mid-1980s for an extensive terrorist campaign.

However, in 1987, 14 prominent white supremacists charged with seditious conspiracy were acquitted in what came to be called the “Fort Smith Sedition Trial.” In 1995, Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh,” and nine other Muslim extremists were convicted of seditious conspiracy for plans to commit a variety of terrorist acts in the greater New York area, as well as other violent acts actually committed.

The history of sedition cases in the United States suggests that other types of conspiracy or other criminal charges might well be a better prosecution strategy when dealing with extremist-related plots and conspiracies.

Radical English Defence League To Form Political Party

The English Defence League (EDL), a UK-based right-wing, anti-Islamic and self-described “Counter Jihad movement,” announced plans to form a new political party in the coming months. EDL’s foray into politics is influenced by the success of other similar political parties in Europe, most notably the Dutch Freedom Party, the political party led by radical Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders.

An EDL spokesman stated that the organization’s party will be named the Freedom Party, and its official launch will take place in May at the EDL Luton demonstration, an annual protest that began with the organization’s founding in 2009. In the past, EDL demonstrations have been marked by violence, with some bordering on full riots resulting in numerous arrests, property damage and injuries to law enforcement.

Members of the Welsh Defense League raising their hands in a Nazi salute

The group has also been accused of being a haven for right-wing racists, a charge the group denies. However, EDL has been linked to various racist English groups, such as the Welsh Defence League, an EDL division that has many local white supremacists in its ranks.

According to the organization’s mission statement, EDL’s mission is “to oppose what it considers to be the spread of Islamism, Sharia law and Islamic extremism in England.” Stephen Lennon, head of the EDL, said that the Freedom Party will be an anti-Islamist political party “that gives everyone an option in a non-racist way.”

Alleged Cop-Killer May Be Anti-Government Extremist

Source: Ogden Standard-Examiner

In the latest twist to a deadly shootout that stunned the residents of Ogden, Utah, a recently revealed search warrant affidavit provides evidence that suggests the defendant, Matthew David Stewart, 37, may have been an anti-government extremist.

The shootout began on January 4, 2012, after police launched a raid on Stewart’s residence to execute a search warrant—an informant had alleged he was growing marijuana (16 plants were reportedly later found).  According to police, Stewart hid, opening fire on officers as they searched his residence.  Six officers were hit, some more than once, and Ogden police officer Jared Francom was wounded fatally.  Stewart allegedly continued firing as the officers fled the residence.  Police eventually wounded and subdued him in a backyard shed. 

Stewart was charged with aggravated murder, seven counts of attempted aggravated murder, and production of a controlled substance in a “drug free zone,” along with a dangerous weapons enhancement.

In March, authorities released an affidavit explaining the results of the search.  According to the affidavit, Stewart’s former girlfriend said that Stewart was “into” conspiracy theories and that he believed the federal government had no right to collect taxes (the primary belief of the anti-government extremist tax protest movement).  She claimed that he had not paid his own federal or state taxes since 2005 and that, if he were “forced” to pay taxes, he would “kill IRS employees.”  According to the girlfriend, Stewart claimed that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was “misunderstood.”

The affidavit further claimed that police recovered “computer-generated documents” related to anti-government extremism, anti-police Web sites, Oklahoma City bombing Web sites, instructions for making potassium chloride (used in explosives), and a map to the closest IRS building (where Stewart once worked as a security guard), among other items.  According to the affidavit, police also discovered “what appeared to be the makings of a bomb,” which were later removed and detonated by the bomb squad. 

Last summer, according to police, Stewart had allegedly told someone that if police ever raided him, he would “go out in a blaze of glory and shoot to kill.”  After the release of the affidavit, a neighbor of Stewart’s told a local television station that Stewart had allegedly talked about moving to Montana and “get[ting] myself a compound.”

Officer Francom was the first police officer to have been killed by a suspected domestic extremist since May 2010, when two West Memphis, Arkansas, officers were killed by anti-government “sovereign citizens.”  Since 2000, 27 police officers have been killed in the United States by domestic extremists. 

White Supremacist Arrested for 2005 Arizona Murder

Source:  Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office

On March 9, 2012, Maricopa County authorities formally “arrested” Toby Ray Gaspard, a member of the Vinlanders Social Club (VSC), a violent racist skinhead group, for the 2005 murder of another racist skinhead, Cory Simpson.  The arrest gave notice that detectives had finally cracked a murder case nearly seven years old.

Simpson, 31 at the time of his murder, had been released from prison nearly a year earlier after serving four years on an armed robbery charge. He was one of the leaders of the Canyon State Skinheads (CSS), a local racist skinhead crew. The skinhead scene in Arizona in 2005 was complicated, thanks to the rise of the VSC and its growth through adopting members of local racist skinhead crews, including members of the Canyon State Skinheads.   

On December 24, 2005, Simpson attended a party in Mesa for local racist skinheads, held at Gaspard’s home. Gaspard was also a high-ranking CSS member.  The party turned ugly when other skinheads confronted Simpson. One of them repeatedly stabbed Simpson, leaving him bleeding on his front lawn. Simpson’s wife and another racist skinhead, Christopher Gromberg, took Simpson to a hospital, but he had been fatally wounded.

Gaspard became a suspect in the murders. However, witnesses, generally white supremacists who hated the police, were not exactly willing to talk.  Some may have also feared retaliation, which turned out to be a justifiable fear in April 2006, when Gromberg was shot to death, execution-style, with two shots to the back of the head (in November 2011, VSC member David Bounds was indicted for the murder of Gromberg).  

Mesa and Phoenix police (especially Phoenix’s Career Criminal Squad) did not give up on the case. In 2008, Gaspard was extradited from Oklahoma to Arizona to face questions about the Simpson murder (he would later be convicted on unrelated weapons charges and given a five year prison sentence, insuring his future availability). Finally, in January 2012, an indictment was handed down that charged Gaspard with second-degree murder, assisting a criminal syndicate, and misconduct involving weapons.  The formal arrest—a transfer from state prison to the Maricopa County Jail—occurred in March. 

ADL assisted Mesa and Phoenix police in the investigation from the day of the murder onwards.