Richard Girnt Butler

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Aryan Nations current leader August Kreis III, left, with Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler

Richard Girnt Butler (February 23, 1918-September 8, 2004) was an American aerospace engineer for Lockheed turned neo-Fascist leader of Aryan Nations, a movement built around Christian Identity. He was of English and German descent.[1]

1 Education and career
2 Aryan Nations
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Education and career

Butler, who was educated in southern California, including Aeronautical Engineering at Los Angeles City College, was a co-inventor for rapid repair of tubeless tires and held both U.S. and Canadian patents thereon.^{[citation needed]}

A member of a Presbyterian Church, Butler was a pilot and during World War II was in the U.S. Army Air Force.^[1] He married his wife Betty in 1941 (died in 1995) and had two daughters.^[1]

In 1946, Butler organized and operated a machine plant for the production and precision machining of automotive parts and engine assemblies for commercial and military aircraft in the USA, Africa, and India.^[1] Butler was a marketing analyst for new inventions from 1964 through 1973. Butler then became a senior manufacturing engineer for Lockheed Aircraft Co. in Palmdale, CA.^[1]

[edit] Aryan Nations

In the 1970s, he moved from California to North Idaho, where he founded the Aryan Nations, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ–Christian, whose ideology is a mixture of Christian Identity and Nazism. The organization operated from a 20-acre compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, a suburb of tourist town Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, which became the center of a U.S. neo-nazi network with worldwide links. Butler was implicated in plots to overthrow the U.S. government in the 1980s, and had ties to the domestic terrorist group The Order. His group often blanketed the community with hate flyers and mass mailings, and held an annual parade in downtown Coeur d'Alene, but was never welcomed by the town or its residents, becoming a major pariah. Locals responded almost immediately by forming the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. Legal battles often overshadowed the parade.

In 1987 Butler was "indicted for seditious conspiracy", but "prosecutors failed to convince an Arkansas jury that Butler and several other prominent racists had conspired to start a race war."^[2]

In 2000, Victoria and Jason Keenan, two Native Americans who had been harassed at gunpoint by Aryan Nations' members, successfully sued Butler.^[3] Represented by local attorney Norm Gissel and Morris Dees' Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, they won a combined civil judgment of $6.3 million from Butler and the Aryan Nations' members who attacked them.^[4] Butler then sold the compound. In the fall of 2000, fellow Sandpoint, Idaho millionaire Vincent Bertollini provided Butler with a new house in Hayden, Idaho.^{[citation needed]} The house was troublesome for neighbors; police were forced to respond to at least one domestic disturbance call. Two Aryan members were quarreling on the lawn.

In 2003 his reputation within AN suffered when Bianca Trump, an interracial pornography actor, was arrested in his company at an airport.^[5]

At the time of his death Aryan Nations had 200 members, Butler's World Congress in 2002 drew fewer than 100 people, and when he ran for mayor, he lost by about 2,100 votes to 50. ^[1]