Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

“While white power activists held worldviews that aligned over overlapped with those of mainstream conservatism—including opposition to immigration, welfare, abortion, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights—the movement was not dedicated to political conservatism aimed at preserving an existing way or life, or even to the reestablishment of bygone racial or gender hierarchies. Instead, it emphasized a radical future that could be achieved only through revolution […] the founding of a racial utopian nation.”

Kathleen Belew generally avoids the term “right-wing,” even “right-wing extremist,” to make clear that she is talking about something quite separate from the conservative movement, much less the Republican Party. Political ideology is a limited spectrum, so partisans and even moderates are likely to have some sliver of overlap with extremists, but Belew wants to clarify that she is talking about a social movement that operates in its own ecosystem.

“The story of white power as a social movement exposes something broader about the impact of state violence in America. It reveals one catastrophic ricochet of the Vietnam War, in the form of its paramilitary aftermath. It also reveals something important about war itself. War is not neatly contained in the space and time legitimated by the state. It reverberates in other terrains and lasts long past armistice. It comes home in ways bloody and unexpected.”

Exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr., warned that the Vietnam War and racism at home were mutually reinforcing systems of domination and violence. Belew’s book is in many respects a validation of that thesis, as the extraordinary violence that the US inflicted abroad, with an army of conscripts disproportionately drawn from the ranks of the poor and non-white, could not possibly have limited itself to faraway theaters.

“[Beam] brought many things home with him: his uniform, virulent anticommunism, and hatred of the Viet Cong. He brought home the memory of death and mutilation sealed in heavy-duty body bags. He brought home racism, military training, weapons proficiency, and readiness to continue fighting […] indeed, he brought home the war as he fought it, and dedicated his life to urging others to ‘bring it on home.’”

In a likely nod to Tim O’Brien’s classic Vietnam War novel, The Things They Carried (1990), Belew discusses the things that Louis Beam and other veterans brought back from Vietnam, rather than what they carried over the course of the war itself. Just as O’Brien’s men carry sacks and weapons along with memories and fears, Beam brought home a set of skills and, no less importantly, a set of grievances and traumas that he would work out at the expense of the government he blamed for his troubles in the first place.

“While military service could foster opportunities for soldiers to encounter people from different backgrounds, leading to friendships that would outlast the war, it could also harden prejudices and set the stage for racial violence. After Beam returned home, his invocation of the Vietnam War for the organization of white power activism built upon the racial tension of his military service, and upon the mounting resentment of some white Americans who believed their opportunities were being curtailed by the advance of civil rights.”

In the United States, there is a tendency to treat war as a progressive enterprise in breaking down social barriers, often seen in World War II movies where stereotypical characters from different regions learn to work together. This was of course in a racially segregated army, and as Vietnam was the first war fought with a genuinely integrated army, it inflamed racial tensions just as often as it ameliorated them. Particularly after the American defeat, those racial tensions became one more piece of evidence for a subset of white veterans that they had been betrayed.

“This new, domestic front of Beam’s war collapsed wartime and peacetime, battlefield and home front. ‘Over here, if you kill the enemy, they give you a medal,’ Beam said. I couldn’t see the difference.”

In addition to epitomizing the condition of so many veterans who fought on behalf of the US in Vietnam only to turn against it, Beam here echoes another veteran of a later war who would take his message and bring it to its deadliest effect. Timothy McVeigh was a veteran of the First Gulf War who won several medals, which proved all the more shocking after his turn to terror. In later interviews, McVeigh echoes Beam’s sentiments nearly word for word, once again conflating enemy soldiers killed in an actual war and civilians murdered on behalf of a war that existed primarily in the white power movement’s imagination.

“Klansmen were not the only ones to understand this conflict as part of the Vietnam War. News coverage across the nation, and in major daily newspapers, described the events this way, too. The New York Times characterized the Klan harassment of refugees as ‘one of the last pitched battles of the Vietnam War.’ The Houston Chronicle pitted the Vietnamese fishermen against their harassers as the ‘Viet-Klan proceedings’ […] However, these media portrayals fundamentally misconstrued the situation, in which the violence went in only one direction, from white fishermen and Klansmen to the Vietnamese refugees.”

Mainstream media outlets are almost never openly sympathetic to the Klan and other white power organizations, but their approach to certain stories played into the Klan’s narrative, however unintentionally. Major journalistic outlets in the US often thrive on conflict, and represent themselves as neutral arbiters between the adversaries. This makes for good copy, but depicting the fight between the fishermen (and their Klan allies) and the Vietnamese as an extension of the Vietnam perpetuated the Klan’s myth that the Vietnamese were both foreigners and enemy combatants. 

“White power activists bound by paramilitarism also developed a cohesive social movement managed through intimate social ties. Intermarriages connected key white power groups, and Christian Identity and Dualist pastors provided marriage counseling. White power activists, who often traveled with their families, stayed at each other’s homes and cared for each other’s children. They participated in weddings and other social rituals and depended on others in the movement for help and for money when arrested. They founded schools to teach their ideas.”

Ideological kinship, and a sense of common purpose, may have been the primary source of alignment among various white power factions, but as a social movement, they shared far more than revolutionary tracts and military tactics. They developed real networks of kinship and affinity, which became all the more important as these groups cut themselves off from mainstream society, and in many cases went underground to evade authorities.

“Despite compelling evidence, the jury, which this time included one black member, delivered only partial justice. In June 1985, it found some of the absent policemen and some of the white power gunmen […] jointly liable for one of the five deaths and two of the many injuries. Significantly, the only death found wrongful was that of Michael Nathan, the only one of the five people killed who was not a card-carrying CWP member. It might be wrong to shoot bystanders, the decision confirmed, but there was nothing wrongful about gunning down communists. The city of Greensboro paid the full amount of the settlement, covering the costs for Klansmen and neo-Nazis.”

Belew points out that in spite of its reputation for violence and bigotry, the KKK has often found popular support when there was sufficient overlap between their agenda and widespread prejudices. In the wake of the Greensboro massacre, when Klansmen and neo-Nazis killed four members of the Communist Workers Organization (and a bystander), the jury proved receptive to the Klan’s message that their lives had no value. 

“Increasingly, America’s attempt to protect democracy at home by preventing communism from approaching its borders resulted in the violent suppression of democratic and popular political change abroad. This contradiction employed a definition of democracy that broke a long bond between the notions of liberty and social responsibility. Instead, liberty was linked with free enterprise. Revolutions for self-determination were often deemed communist, and thus threats to be contained.”

The white power movement may have been extreme, but its fundamental concerns were hardly uncommon in mainstream society. After a period of relative calm between the US and Soviet Union known as détente, the Reagan administration rekindled a ferocious anti-communism and full-throated support for brutal right-wing regimes so long as they pursued a hard anti-communist line. As white power movements defined democracies in narrow ways that obviously suited their interests, they were in part following the example of their own government.

“Conservative and white power ideologies alike linked fears of communism abroad—especially in the Western Hemisphere—with threats to the southern border of the United States that included rising immigration. In addition to warning about communism potentially moving up through Central America and Mexico toward the United States, Reagan had also expressed concerns about a wave of Nicaraguan refugees coming into the United States across the southern border. ‘If the Communists consolidate their power, their campaign of violence throughout Central America will go into high gear, bringing new dangers and sending hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming toward our 2,000-mile long southern border’ […] here, Reagan interwove anti-immigration rhetoric with fears about communism and race.”

In many cases, extremists take positions firmly within the mainstream and turn them into fixations. Reagan’s Republican party was anti-immigration, fearful of communism, and eager to link the two issues to advance their agenda. White power activists took these positions and rendered them into absolute truths. This meant that the administration would overlap, and sometimes find common cause, with white power activists in Central America, but would also regard them as an embarrassment when their fanaticism upset the government’s more delicate calculations.

“In 1983 the white power movement declared war on the state. This marked a tectonic shift for the movement, which until then had featured populist and reactionary Klan mobilizations and vigilante violence. Rather than fighting on behalf of the state, white power activists now fought for a white homeland, attempted to destabilize the federal government, and waged revolutionary race war.”

The modern white power movement has almost always had a hostile relationship with the federal government. Prior to the Vietnam War, the FBI dismantled the Ku Klux Klan chapters that were attacking the civil rights movement, and after Vietnam, the government took the blame for betraying its soldiers on the battlefield and then on the home front. Even so, 1983 marked a decisive break when the white power movement decided to name the government itself as the enemy, rather than deride them as obstacles to the defeat of the true enemy (Black voters, communists, etc.), and that the entire system would have to be destroyed in order for the white race to survive.

“They thought people of color, race traitors, Jews, communists, journalists, academics, and other enemies were lost causes. But they hoped that they could sway a white public in their favor, make small territorial gains, and eventually seize movement objectives ranging from a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest, to a white America, to a white world secured by the annihilation of all people of color.”

Traditional white supremacist violence unsurprisingly targets various minority groups in order to terrorize them out of seeking greater social and political power. Such actions never disappeared from the white power movement, but its modern incarnation made a major shift in emphasis to the white enablers of nonwhite political power. Attacks on so-called race traitors would help to mobilize the broad masses, which the white power movement had to assume were naturally predisposed to support them, or else their efforts would be in vain.

“Although the white power movement organized around the symbols and legacy of the Vietnam War and deployed notions of paramilitary masculinity, the revolutionary turn that necessitated cell-style organizing—the use of social networks and relationships to connect and coordinate activists—relied on the work of female activists.”

Reactionary movements such as white power frequently encounter a paradox where they must utilize the methods of the modern world in order to restore a more traditional one. Their ultimate goal might be to relegate women to the role of wives and mothers, but in order to arrive at that point, they had no choice but to empower them to spread their message and build up the social networks that might then allow them to model their chosen lifestyle on a smaller scale.

“The reluctance of the military to take rapid or decisive action regarding either the theft of military weapons or the recruitment of active-duty personnel showed an inability to accept that the white power movement was no longer a collection of hate groups but rather an organized war on the state.”

Just as veterans formed the core of the white power movement after Vietnam, it received support from many active-duty soldiers and officers through the 1980s and 1990s, a problem that is still persistent in the modern era. According to Belew, commanders are not necessarily blind to the problem, but they draw arbitrary liens of what constitutes illicit behavior in part because they fear that too broad a criteria will impact so many people as to create a huge bureaucratic headache and hamper military effectiveness. This, of course, leaves the problem more or less unchecked.

“In seeing white power membership as a political statement, rather than participation in a war on the federal government, military leadership once again failed to acknowledge the danger posed by active-duty personnel in such a movement. Not only were such troops violating their oath to protect the country against enemies foreign and domestic—engaged as they were in an explicit project of domestic terrorism—but they also brought with them training, skills, and weapons. Active-duty troops, together with veterans, played instrumental roles in energizing the movement.”

Belew finds that the armed forces were either slow to recognize the problem of white power activism within their own ranks, or recognized it but were slow to act due to the sheer scope of the problem. This problem has persisted into the present day, with troops and veterans making up a disproportionate percentage of membership in militias such as Patriot Front and actions such as the January 6 insurrection

“In the early 1980s, a key development in movement strategy would intensify the emphasis on the reproductive capacity of white women. Activists and leaders called for a ‘Northwestern Imperative’ urging white separatists to migrate to the Pacific Northwest and establish an all-white homeland there by producing a large white population. The idea of separatism attempted to appeal to a broader audience. People could say they were ‘separatist,’ rather than use older, volatile labels such as ‘segregationist’ or ‘white supremacist,’ just as they could replace ‘racist’ with the pseudo-scientific ‘racialist.’”

White power activists opposed immigration in part because they feared immigrants had a greater reproductive capacity than native-born (especially white) citizens. In the quest for demographic supremacy, white power activists undertook a campaign to intensify their efforts at reproduction. At the same time, they imagined a part of the country where they would not have to compete with other races.

“In addition to running their own organizations and producing their own printed materials, women in the white power movement worked extensively in the social sphere, contributing to the building and maintenance of social networks, recruitment, the production and circulation of family-oriented cultural products like recipes and homeschooling materials, and the social normalization of young activists.”

An all-male leadership and a staunchly anti-feminist ideology severely circumscribed the role for women in the white power movement, but their role was still revolutionary insofar as they leveraged traditionally domestic labor such as childrearing and education into overtly ideological tasks. The men of the movement might see such tasks as beneath them, but they were undeniably necessary if they were going to actually achieve their task of securing a future for white children.

“In the mainstream press, too, Sheila Beam became a sympathetic figure in local newspapers and major publications alike. A series of articles in the Galveston Daily News focused on her injuries, stating as fact that she had been ‘severely beaten’ and raising the possibility that she ‘may have been sexually assaulted.’ The same reporter uncritically repeated white power claims that FBI agents had refused to arrange her release to the United States and described ‘physical and psychological coercion’ during her ten-day imprisonment. Other articles linked her faith in God to her hopes for the acquittal of all the trial’s defendants, and mentioned her pain and injuries with no mention of the reason for Louis Beam’s arrest or Sheila Beam’s actions in shooting and wounding the officer.”

Mainstream media is a target of frequent criticism for valorizing white women, especially as victims of violent crime. As Belew points out, this trend extends to the much-younger fourth wife of a major white power leader. Sheila Beam’s tale of mistreatment at the hands of Mexican authorities was almost certainly exaggerated if not fraudulent, but it fit neatly into a prefabricated narrative of foreign “savages” besmirching the honor of an innocent white woman, possibly playing a part in the exoneration of Beam and other white power leaders in the Fort Smith sedition trial. 

“A shift in language worked to broaden the appeal of the militias. Leaders and activists had begun to replace the idea of Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) with the phrase ‘New World Order,’ which signaled an alignment of malevolent internationalist forces, including the United Nations, global finance, nations, and technology, that conspired to take over the world and would soon face the righteous in Armageddon. The phrase had long circulated among fundamentalist Christians, a group that included Identity Christians who understood the righteous as including only white people.”

The white power movement evolved frequently, especially as it developed new patterns of cooperation. Christian Identity became an important part of their social network, and since they viewed themselves as the real Jews of the Old Testament, they felt a profound kinship to Israel and the concept of Zion, even if they regarded the inhabitants of that land as subhuman imposters. The term “New World Order”—a conspiratorial repurposing of a phrase used in a 1991 speech by President Bush—helped to secularize and internationalize the enemy, framing white power activists as the righteous few fighting off the evil forces of the world.

“Ruby Ridge codified an alliance of tax protestors, radical anti-abortionists, militiamen, racists, Identity Christians, survivalists, conspiracy theorists, and those who simply believed the US government had grown too large. As anti-abortion fervor, resistance to gun control laws, and anger over big government grew among mainstream conservatives during the 1990s, the white power movement leveraged those issues for recruitment.”

For years, the white power movement had been building alliances among its factions, but with Ruby Ridge, its network expanded to include other groups that, while similarly fringe, did not necessarily harbor a racist agenda or seek war against the federal government. Even so, these groups were sufficiently fearful of government overreach that they were willing to cooperate with the white power movement to advance their own agenda.

“McVeigh, trained as a combatant by the state, belonged to the white power movement. He acted without orders from movement leaders, but in concert with movement objectives and supported by resistance cell planning. The plan for the bomb came directly from The Turner Diaries, the book that had structured the activity of the white power movement since the late 1970s. The choice of target came from an earlier white power movement incident […] the Oklahoma City bombing represented the triumph of the white power paramilitary violence that had reverberated through the American home front in the years following the Vietnam War.”

McVeigh was not just a member of the white power movement—he was its ultimate product. He was a veteran cast adrift in civilian life, a follower of the principle of leaderless resistance, a gun obsessive who could quote The Turner Diaries from memory, a member of the Klan and militias who had decamped to a Christian Identity church. He had ties to practically every trend within the movement, yet was seen as a lone actor.

“In the months leading up to the 1995 bombing, the government received specific warnings about Elohim City. Undercover informant Carol Howe reported ‘dangerous, apocalyptic statements’ from Millar, Ellison, and others. Although the government dismissed this information—the ATF and FBI said Howe was ‘deactivated’ as an informant in March 1995—Howe said she warned the agencies that something big was coming, and her warning was substantial and specific.”

It is impossible to establish with complete certainty whether anyone at Elohim City had specific foreknowledge of McVeigh’s plot, or whether the government could have averted the attack by acting on Howe’s tips. Nonetheless, the fact that they did nothing indicates that they were not taking white power violence seriously—even with the recent examples of the Order and the Fort Smith trials.

“McVeigh would even carry the messages of the white power movement on his body during the attack. He bombed the Murrah Building wearing a T-shirt that depicted the tree of liberty with the slogan, ‘the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ It was nearly the exact phrase Beam had used to rally the movement after Ruby Ridge, at the 1992 Estes Park summit of white power leaders and activists.”

If the government and media failed to establish a connection between McVeigh and the white power movement, it was not because he kept it concealed. His T-shirt also said “sic semper tyrannis” with a picture of Abraham Lincoln, referring to the slogan shouted by white supremacist John Wilkes Booth after he killed the president at Ford’s Theatre (Daniel Immerwahr, “A Fire Started in Waco. Thirty Years Later, It’s Still Burning.” New Yorker, 1 May 2023).

“Timothy McVeigh’s execution cemented a perception of the bombing as unconnected to the events that came before, as an inexplicable act of violence carried out by one or a few actors. This idea threatened to occlude the white power movement altogether […] they have portrayed white power movement violence as isolated, rather than a series of coordinated acts, and its activists as madmen rather than as part of a movement.”

Defenders of the death penalty claim that it sets an example that will deter others, but in McVeigh’s case the opposite is probably closer to the truth. McVeigh’s high-profile execution, the first federal execution in nearly 40 years, concluded the story just as it began, with McVeigh as the principal figure with next to no discussion of his associations with the white power movement.