Bill White (neo-Nazi)

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Bill White
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Bill White

Bill White (formally William A. White) (born 1977) is the leader of the American National Socialist Workers' Party [3] and administrator of the anti-Semitic website Overthrow.com, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center, as the "second most popular racist site on the Internet." [4] He is the former spokesman of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) [5] and led its Roanoke, Virginia chapter.[6] He is also a Roanoke, Virginia landlord and real estate developer holding over $3 million in assets in the City.

White is a National Socialist, and a former Communist and Anarchist, who has acted as spokesman for a number of organizations prior to his involvement in the National Socialist Movement, including the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party and the Utopian Anarchist Party. White also receives much public criticism from anti-racist groups such as Citizens Against Hate, the One People's Project, Anti-Racist Action, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

White came to public attention in 1996 in a front page article in the Washington Post where he was assisting a girl whose parents were abusing her. He made national news again in 1999 after expressing sympathy for the teenage killers of 12 students and a teacher during the Columbine High School massacre. He was in the news again in 2005 when the New York Times quoted him as having "laughed" when the husband and 89-year-old mother of United States district court judge Joan Lefkow were murdered. Lefkow had previously ruled against white supremacist Matthew Hale in a trademark dispute. The paper quoted White as having written on his website: "Everyone associated with the Matt Hale trial has deserved assassination for a long time. I don't feel bad that Judge Lefkow's family was murdered today. In fact, when I heard the story, I laughed." [7]

White has also drawn attention for other activities, including working as a columnist and corporate officer for Pravda Pravda, [8], leading a gun rights group in Montgomery County, Maryland, and working on a number of election campaigns.

According to Ryan O'Donnell of FrontPageMagazine.com, in 2003, White's website traffic approached that of mainstream sites such as Rupert Murdoch's The Weekly Standard, and White's website claimed over 4,000,000 visitors in the year 2006. [citation needed]

He is a Holocaust denier, referring to the Holocaust as "fairy tales,"[9] and writing that "claims that ... the gas chambers were part of a 'Holocaust' of 'six million,' were invented almost entirely by Soviet Russia, and were later adopted by the Jewish communities of the Western nations." [10]

Contents

[edit] Early activism

Utopian Anarchist Party logo
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Utopian Anarchist Party logo

White was raised in the Horizon Hill neighborhood of Rockville, Maryland. According to an April 1999 interview with the Washington Times, he began to drift toward anarchism after reading the Communist Manifesto at the age of 13. [11] He attended Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, where he founded the Utopian Anarchist Party (UAP), publishing a zine that focused on opposition to the education system, psychiatry, and the police.

After graduating in 1994, White studied psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where, in 1995, he started another political group called the Bill White Student Group, a continuation of the UAP, setting up Overthrow.com as the group's website, and publishing material from a wide range of political viewpoints, including communism, anarchism, and fascism. [12] White gained a lot of attention around campus by putting up hundreds of flyers advertising his political views. White's student group has 118 members registered with the campus office at the time of his departure from the University. [citation needed] Also prominent in the Utopian Anarchist Party was Paul Lucas "Luke" Kuhn, a gay activist who is currently a DC Indymedia editor [13]. Kuhn and White were even referred to as "occasional neo Nazis" in Information Week for their activities in encouraging school pipe-bombings, threatening police, and aiding and abetting runaway teens. [14].

In 1995, White faced criminal charges of possessing deadly weapons — a knife and a club — distributing obscene material, and attempting to escape from police custody, arising out of the distribution of political leaflets, though Montgomery County declined to prosecute the case.

However, a 2002 article in The Gazette (a paper local to Montgomery County, and owned by The Washington Post) states that, in 1997, White served seven months in the Montgomery County Detention Center on weapons, assault and resisting arrest charges. [15]

On February 14, 1996, White featured in a front-page story in The Washington Post after posting, on 11 Internet news groups devoted to civil liberties, child welfare, and left-wing politics, the name and telephone number of a woman he thought was abusing her daughter. The supposed victim had allegedly told a university counseling group that her parents would not allow her to use the telephone or see friends; someone from the group spread the story, and White posted it, asking readers to telephone the mother and "tell her you are disgusted and you demand that she stops." The Post reported that the mother and step-father were near breaking point after receiving threatening telephone calls, though White received and published on his website a number of thank you letters from the girl's other relatives. [citation needed]

[edit] Columbine High School massacre

White as a Pravda columnist [1]
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White as a Pravda columnist [1]

On April 20, 1999, two teenage students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School, killing 12 students and a teacher, before committing suicide. On the day of the massacre, White posted a tribute to the gunmen on his website, calling them "two young men who had the courage to strike back against the system, even if their strike back was somewhat misguided in its aims." He wrote that the massacre was an expression of Friedrich Nietzsche's "will to power," and that: "[h]ad this shooting occurred outside a police station, or outside the NATO conference, or outside the White House, it would have been much more effective." [16]

These statements brought White to the attention of the media again, leading to interviews with the Washington Times and the Reuters news agency. Reuters reported that White's website was "urging young people to carry weapons, build bombs, blow up their schools, kill the football team and laugh while doing so ..." White told Reuters he would neither confirm nor deny that what he called a "Colorado cell" of his Utopian Anarchist Party had been in contact with the teenagers before the shooting. [17]

The news coverage of White's response to Columbine led to a friendship, according to White, with Robert Stacy McCain, the national assistant editor of the Washington Times, and the publication in that newspaper of several of White's articles. White also told Reuters that visits to his website increased after the shootings from 4,000 hits a day to around 50,000.

White later clarified his position on Columbine in an interview with Jack Ross for Pravda:

People were predictably outraged, and let me be clear that I sympathize with what they did — I don't support it or think it was necessarily the "right" thing to do. What I said was that the public school system is actively involved in hurting youth, that it is psychologically destructive to them, and that the necessary effect of the evil violence the public schools do on a massive scale is evil violence directed back at them and the people and institutions which symbolize them. [18]

[edit] Move to the right

A still from a video shows White being wrestled to the ground by security guards at a September 1998 demonstration against an Air Force Association arms bazaar. [2] The video can be viewed here.
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A still from a video shows White being wrestled to the ground by security guards at a September 1998 demonstration against an Air Force Association arms bazaar. [2] The video can be viewed here.

White says that in 1997-8 he became briefly involved with the Revolutionary Communist Party's (RCP) Refuse and Resist and Coalition against Police Brutality, as well as the International Socialist Organization (ISO). [19] White also has stated that he worked with the Communist Party, USA and the Libertarian Party in 1999.

White has said he later became disillusioned with leftists and denounced communists and anarchists as "fake leftists" for what he saw as their anti-working class positions.

In 2000, White joined Ross Perot's Reform Party, though Ross Perot was no longer involved in it at the time, and the campaign to elect Pat Buchanan, who was running for president on a Reform Party ticket. However, White later told American Free Press that he resigned from the Buchanan campaign after a few months out of concern for what he called the campaign's "dishonest practices." [20] He also managed the campaign of Constitution Party congressional candidate Brian Saunders, who won 2.7% of the Montgomery County vote.

In 1998 and 2000, White ran as a ballot qualified candidate for an at-large position on the Montgomery County school board, winning 10,000 vote in 2000 (about 7.6%) and placing fifth in a nine-way spread, leading to a number of remarks chiding the other candidates in the Montgomery Gazette. [citation needed]

White worked for the Russian website Pravda Online. He also wrote briefly for Willis Carto's American Free Press, and the Libyan/Pan-African publication Mathaba.

[edit] Business interests

White incorporated his first company, White Web Publishing Inc., in 2002, which he sold in 2003. He then set up an eBay clone called "ShopWhite" with Alex Linder of the neo-Nazi Vanguard News Network, with the aim of capturing the White Power music and paraphernalia market, estimated to be worth around $4 million a year, but the venture collapsed due to security and administrative problems and a falling out between White and Linder.

In late 2003, he sold his home near Washington, D.C., and moved to Roanoke, Virginia, where he began trading as White Homes and Land LLC. According to The Roanoke Times and the Southern Poverty Law Center, White owned nine single and multi-family properties in an impoverished black neighborhood in Roanoke's West End since in April of 2004. [21] Since then, according to the Roanoke GIS system [of Roanoke], his company has grown to include thirty three houses and apartments in the area, and, according to the Roanoke Times, holds approximately $3 million in overall assets.

His business interests in the town came to light when a former girlfriend, Erica Hardwick-Hoesch — and once a member of the National Alliance headquarters staff — distributed leaflets about White around the neighborhood entitled "Meet your local racist." White initially was convicted of assault for punching Hardwick-Hoesch in the face in connection with the leaflets, but the conviction was overturned on appeal when the alleged victim failed to appear in court. [citation needed]

White told the Roanoke Times that he was not a racist, although he admitted to being an anti-Semite: "I wouldn't be out here buying and fixing up houses if I had some agenda against the black community ... The Jews, I despise. They hate me. I hate them." [22] However, he acknowledged having written of Roanoke residents on his website that: "the local nig-rats are already conspiring to test me". [23]

In 2005, White said he had acquired rights to a quarter acre of land in downtown Roanoke with the stated intention of turning it into an outdoor shrine to the Norse god Thor. [citation needed]

[edit] Recent events

In March 2005, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that White had threatened a reporter who was investigating a local neo-Nazi and leading member of the NSM, Michael Blevins, also known as Vonbluvens.

In the summer of 2005, the director of a commission investigating the 1979 Greensboro massacre complained to police after White posted commissioners' addresses on the Web. White hinted he would like to shoot the commission members, a comment he later claimed was meant in jest. [citation needed]

In August 2005, White sent the following letter to a Philadelphia Daily News columnist:

Don't worry about being ashamed you're white.
You're not.
Go don a yarmulke, dance a seder and drink some small child's blood. You belong with the Jews.

[citation needed]

Aside from the fact that a seder is not a dance, the reference to drinking blood is a typical example of blood libel.

On October 15, 2005, White organized what was to be a neo-Nazi march and rally in Toledo, Ohio. The march was cancelled by police when White and around 20 supporters were outnumbered by several hundred anti-racists and members of the largely African-American neighborhood in which the rally was to take place. White, NSM Dayton leader Mark Martin, and the rest of the NSM supporters began to taunt the crowd with racial epithets. Some of the protestors became violent and more than 100 were arrested. [24] [25] According to Citizensagainsthate.com, White publicly claimed that it was his intent to incite violence during the march. [26] White has announced that he intended to return to Toledo and resume the march.

On December 10, 2005, White and the National Socialist Movement did return to Toledo to rally with about thirty Nazis showing up. The police erected a fence keeping all protestors and the general public about 200 feet from the demonstration. The NSM did want to march on the streets, but a lawsuit filed by the city of Toledo prevented that. Unlike the first failed rally that led to rioting and violence, this rally led to very little violence. [citation needed]

On April 22, 2006, White and seventy-five White supremacists rallied in Lansing, Michigan at the state capitol, but they were met by a much larger crowd of counter-protesters. About 500 police officers, some in helicopters and some on horseback, patrolled the area and kept members of the National Socialist Movement and those against the Nazi group away from each other. Metal detectors and six-foot-high chain-link fences were set up to help keep the peace. State and city police report sixteen arrests, mostly for disorderly conduct and other misdemeanors among the hundreds kept at bay from the neo-Nazis. Three people suffered minor injuries in scuffling between protesters and neo-Nazi supporters. Police say rocks were thrown at some officers as protesters left the rally site, and windows of a police van were smashed, but there were no police injuries. [citation needed]

In July 2006, White left the NSM due to an internal dispute between himself and the present leader of the NSM. White has since gone on to form his own organization, the Amerian National Socialist Workers' Party (ANSWP), and is gaining membership from a number of sources, including dissaffected members of the NSM and various White Power groups.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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