Bill White (neo-Nazi)

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William A. White

Bill White
Born 1977
Maryland Flag of the United States
Religious beliefs Radical Traditionalism[1]

William A. White (born 1977[citation needed]), generally known as Bill White, is the self-appointed leader of the American National Socialist Workers' Party and the administrator of the antisemitic website Overthrow.com. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups, described the website in 2003 as the "second most popular racist site on the Internet."[2]

White first came to public attention in 1996 in a front page article in The Washington Post after posting allegations about the stepmother of a girl he said was being abused.[3] He was in the news again in 1999 after expressing support for the teenage killers of 12 students and a teacher during the Columbine High School massacre.[4] In 2005, The New York Times quoted him as having "laughed" when United States district court judge Joan Lefkow's husband and mother were murdered,[5] because Lefkow had ruled against white supremacist Matthew Hale in a trademark dispute. He told The Roanoke Times that he looked forward to "further killings of Jews and their sympathizers."[6]

White is a Holocaust denier, writing that "claims that ... the gas chambers were part of a 'Holocaust' of 'six million,' were invented almost entirely by the Soviet Union, and were later adopted by the Jewish communities of the Western nations."[7]

According to Ryan O'Donnell of FrontPage Magazine White's website traffic in 2003 approached that of mainstream sites such as Rupert Murdoch's The Weekly Standard, though Overthrow's traffic rank and reach have dropped substantially since then.

Contents

[edit] Early activism as an anarchist

Utopian Anarchist Party logo
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. [1] He attended Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, where he founded the Utopian Anarchist Party (UAP) and published a magazine 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), set up Overthrow.com as the group's website where he published material from a wide range of political viewpoints, including communism, anarchism, and fascism.[2]

Also prominent in the Utopian Anarchist Party was Luke Kuhn. Kuhn and White were referred to in InformationWeek in 1998 as "[s]elf-styled anarchists, occasional neo Nazis, and erstwhile political office seekers William A. White and Luke Kuhn [who] have encouraged school pipe-bombings, threatening police, and aiding and abetting runaway teens. The pair's Anarchist News Service includes headlines such as 'Three Pigs Down in Connecticut Shootout'."[8] Kuhn, however, is not a neo-Nazi, and is still a prominent activist in the Washington, DC area. When White began to change his politics, he broke away from Kuhn, who has written on the website for DC Indymedia how the website White currently authors once promoted anarchy before 2000, but has since veered to the far right.[9]

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.[citation needed] A 2002 article in The Gazette states that, in 1997, White served seven months in the Montgomery County Detention Center on weapons, assault and resisting arrest charges. [3]

On February 14, 1996, White was featured in a front-page story in The Washington Post after posting on Internet news groups 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 stepfather were near breaking point after receiving threatening telephone calls. [3]

[edit] Columbine High School massacre

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.

Reuters wrote that White's website had published that "schools and juvenile psychiatric centers ... prescribe anti-depressants are evil and should be destroyed, and it gives a list of "Music to Shoot Your School Up By." The report continued that "[t]here are so many parallels between the Web site's message and the April 20 massacre in Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, that some police hate-crime experts say privately it is not inconceivable that the two teen-age gunmen in that case visited the site." [4] FBI officials told Reuters there was no indication that the website had any connection to the shooting.

White told Reuters that "the reason [the Columbine victims] got killed is that they are part of an authoritarian social movement and were seen by the killers as symbolic of that movement ... What the shooters were shooting at was not people but the movements they symbolized. It's a shame that authoritarian Christians, who are trying to dominate our society, don't have a clue how objectionable they are until people start shooting them."[4] He said 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.[4]

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.[10]

[edit] Move to the far right

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). [4] White also has stated that he worked with the Communist Party, USA and the Libertarian Party in 1999.[citation needed]

In 2000, White joined Ross Perot's Reform Party 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." [5]

White worked briefly as an unpaid columnist for the Russian website Pravda Online.

[edit] Business interests

White incorporated his first company, White Web Publishing Inc., in 2002, which he sold in 2003.[citation needed] He set up an eBay clone called "ShopWhite" with the aim of capturing the White Power music and paraphernalia market, but the venture failed after security and administrative problems.[11]

In late 2003, White 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 has owned nine single and multi-family properties in an impoverished black neighborhood in South West Roanoke since April 2004.[12]

White has told the Roanoke Times that he is not a racist or Nazi, describing himself as a "libertarian socialist," [6] although he admits to being an antisemite: "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."[13] He acknowledges having written of Roanoke residents that "the local nig-rats are already conspiring to test me."[13]

[edit] Recent events

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 protesters became violent and began rioting. More than 100 were arrested.[14][15]

In July 2006, White left the NSM and formed the American National Socialist Workers' Party (ANSWP). On April 19, 2007, two ANSWP members were arrested when they unveiled a swastika flag during a speech by President George W. Bush in Tipp City, Ohio.[16] On May 23, 2007 White mailed letters and copies of National Socialist, the ANSWP magazine, to the residents of an apartment complex in Virginia Beach, Virginia where tenants had complained about discriminatory behavior by their landlord.[17][18]

[edit] Access to White's websites in Canada

In 2006, Canadian human rights lawyer Richard Warman and the Canadian Jewish Congress asked the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Canada's telecommunications regulator, to block access in Canada to White's websites. Warman said the websites contained material intended to incite violence against him that caused him to fear for his life.[19]

[edit] Publishing Jena 6 addresses and phone numbers

On September 22, 2007, the FBI opened an investigation of Overthrow.com because it listed the addresses of five of the Jena Six and the telephone numbers of some of their families "in case anyone wants to deliver justice." The Jena 6 were charged with a racially motivated attack on a 17-year old white student. According to an FBI spokeswoman, the website "essentially called for their lynching"."[20]

Al Sharpton has stated that some of the families have continuously received threatening and harassing phone calls. Many of the protesters wore t-shirts, chanted and held signs that called for the release of the Jena Six and all charges associated with the crime they committed.[20]

Bill White's response to this is "nigger activists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson intervened to demand he be given the "right" to assault white people." He goes on to say "Sharpton has previously defended nigger criminals in New York who have been killed by victims defending themselves, and Jesse Jackson is a former associate of Chicago's El Rukn gang who has ordered at least two political opponents killed and two Chicago newspaper reporters who criticized him assaulted."

[edit] Roanoke attack

In October of 2007, Bill White was attacked by Aries Brown and Lattoria Minnis, both of whom were convicted of assault after a judge rejected their claims that White had assaulted them.[21][22] During the trial, White testified that he choked Brown unconscious during the incident[23], and later published an essay "Transcendence and the Killing of the Wicked" describing the experience.[24] Brown was photographed holding a beer and grabbing his crotch during the incident.[25]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ White Homes In Negotiation To Seize Roanoke's Black Churches - Vanguard News Network Forum
  2. ^ "Landlord denies allegations of sinister agenda", Roanoke Times, July 9, 2004.
  3. ^ a b Shields, Todd & Bowles, Scott. "Over the Line On-Line: Family Put Under Siege", The Washington Post, February 14, 1996.
  4. ^ a b c d Tippet, Sarah. "Web Site Asks Youths To Carry Weapons, Build Bombs", Reuters, May 3, 1999.
  5. ^ Wilgoren, Jodi et al. "Shadowed by Threats, Judge Finds New Horror", New York Times, March 2, 2005.
  6. ^ a b Cramer, John. "White supremacist comments on case", The Roanoke Times, March 3, 2005.
  7. ^ White, Bill. "The Argument against the Holocaust", Overthrow.com, April 3, 2005.
  8. ^ Gallagher, Sean. "InternetView: Think Before Picking Virtual Partners", InformationWeek.
  9. ^ Kuhn, Luke"DC Indymedia: Racist Nazi website still posting Jena 6 addresses, FBI "investigation" all BS"
  10. ^ "Interview With Pravda.ru's Bill White", Pravda online, January 10, 2002.
  11. ^ "Some additional responses", Overthrow.com, July 2, 2005.
  12. ^ SPLCenter.org: Bigots in Business
  13. ^ a b Landlord denies allegations of sinister agenda
  14. ^ Wireless
  15. ^ http://www.splcenter.org/intel/hatewatch/item.jsp?hid=831
  16. ^ Gettys, Travis. "Neo-Nazis Arrested At Bush Speech In Ohio", wlwt.com, April 19, 2007.
  17. ^ White-supremacy group sends hate mail to Beach complex | LOCAL NEWS | WVEC.com | News for Hampton Roads, Virginia
  18. ^ Beach apartment residents receive mass hate mailing | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com
  19. ^ Sullivan, Sean Patrick. "Ottawa lawyer asks CRTC to block access to US-based hate websites", Canadian Press, August 23, 2006.
  20. ^ a b Becky Bohrer (2007-09-22). FBI Probes Anti-Jena 6 Web Page. The Associated Press. Retrieved on 2007-09-25.
  21. ^ William White Wins in Court | WSLS 10
  22. ^ White acquitted of assault charges - Roanoke.com
  23. ^ Supremacist acquitted of assault - Roanoke.com
  24. ^ Overthrow.com
  25. ^ William White Wins in Court | WSLS 10

[edit] References

[edit] External links


Persondata
NAME White, William A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES White, Bill
SHORT DESCRIPTION American Neo-nazi political activist
DATE OF BIRTH 1977
PLACE OF BIRTH Maryland
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH