America's Looking Glass
By Judith Bolton-Fasman
There once was a small band of very unmerry men (and they were all men) who started a religion which sanctified opinion as belief and confused hatred with faith. They housed this new religion in a place they called the Church of the Creator. They thought that uttering the unthinkable, validating the unbelievable could pass as credo. This group of fermented individuals worked very hard to create an aura of war. There was even an accompanying battle cry: RAHOWA! It sounded like the stiff Indian-speak in a spaghetti western. But those in the know realized that RAHOWA was an acronym for RAcial HOly WAr. These days the Church of the Creator is run by 27-year-old Matt Hale. Hale is ardent, passionate and thoroughly racist. He's a would-be lawyer who has passed the Illinois Bar, but has been repeatedly refused entry because of his prurient views. He runs the Church of the Creator out of his boyhood bedroom in E. Peoria Illinois.
Speak about right wing extremists and the terms mad man or mad woman become double entendres. These are not only crazy people but very very angry persons as well. Which came first--the madness or the anger--is a chicken and egg question. At various points I felt as if the double entendre applied to me during the five years I researched right-wing extremism. I waded through bad grammar and violent sentiment in the Manhattan offices of a Jewish civil rights organization. It was a busy place, filled with collegial people. But most days I despaired as I read through thin newspapers, homespun newsletters, hate mail, and self-published books. This was pre-Internet; nobody had a clue about what I really did. My boss tried to make me feel special. "You're one of the few experts in the world on right-wing extremism." I was momentarily aloft. And then I fell, with a thud, back into my pile of papers.
But I stayed at the right-wing desk because I was fascinated by pretzel logic, the limits to which human beings would push. On a good day, a day with perspective, my job had a sort of jokey quality to it. On a bad day humor gave way to surrealism. Through the looking glass I went. And then a young white supremacist named Benjamin Smith made everyone in America stand in front of the same mirror. Welcome to my world, finally.
Although I haven't monitored right-wing extremists for almost eight years, I've never forgotten them. I followed the Benjamin Smith story intently--a white supremacist randomly shooting African-Americans, Jews and Asians. I have a good idea of what made him pull the trigger and then turn the gun on himself. The racist junk that he read simply drove him beyond reason. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was a buffet racist. He took a little from here, a little from there. But even in the midst of monitoring domestic right-wing extremism, the Benjamin Smiths and Timothy McVeighs were abstract to me. Maybe it was some sort of unconscious protection in the same way people jettison traumatic pain. I told myself that these guys were too busy, writing, collating and stamping. Propaganda took up too much time to do anything else.
But it didn't. Propaganda held out the promise of violence to the roving bands of disaffected, disenfranchised teen-agers who made up the neo-Nazi skinhead movement. Benjamin Smith had a solid middle class upbringing, he was educated, he was one of us. If they could get to him, the whole nation was at risk. But Benjamin Smith was not the first racist with a college education. During my research days, David Duke was trying to swim in the mainstream. Granted he never had a chance as a presidential candidate. He was however, elected to the Louisiana State legislature. Duke had made it to the shore, and then onto solid respectable ground.
I think back further to David Duke's ridiculous days as a Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard in the late 1970s. He was a one-man freak show not because of his Klan robes and dunce cap, but because he was unexpectedly articulate, handsome and almost sensible. The media loved the "button-down Klansman" who attracted more than a few followers during his late night television appearances. He seemed to have the answers that a young, frustrated white man wanted to hear. David Duke was slick, he was effective. Hardly anyone noticed how well he cast blame for all of society's ills on African-Americans and Jews.
Matt Hale could have been the next David Duke, but he was not willing to play by any of the rules. Like Duke, Hale's family has no idea from where his racism originated. There's also a touch of the misfit in Hale that Duke never had. Maybe that's why Hale was less influential. That is until recently. Suddenly he was sought after for interviews and sound-bites. He was articulate. Exceedingly articulate. National Public Radio gave him more than a few minutes of air-time.
Under those circumstances Hale could convince a prospective recruit to say RAHOWA with a straight face. He has already proved that he can influence someone like Benjamin Smith to die for a most unholy cause.
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