Before leaving London, I’d read that Pastor Richard Butler, the aging führer of the Aryan Nations, would be hosting a World Congress for his fellow Aryans later in the year. It was over seven years since my visit to the headquarters and my conversation with Jerry Gruidl about his fondness for Are You Being Served?. Since then, the bits of news I heard suggested the organization was on the skids. Hate groups as a whole were being clamped down on in the post-9/11 anti-terrorism climate. In 2000 Butler had lost his compound, bankrupted by a court judgment after his bodyguards attacked a woman and her son at his gates, allegedly mistaking the sound of their car backfiring for a gunshot. Given how doddering he’d been, I kept expecting to hear that Butler had expired. He appointed a successor, a neo-Nazi called Neumann Britton, but Britton predeceased him. Butler found another candidate, Harold Ray Redfeairn. Then Redfeairn died too. Perhaps fearing a jinx, Butler stopped appointing successors. “Rasputin’s got nothing on this guy,” one hate-group expert commented.
The latest news concerned a trip Butler made to Phoenix in 2003, when a young female partisan he’d been traveling with was arrested at Spokane airport on an outstanding forgery warrant and unmasked as “Bianca Trump,” veteran of more than 180 hardcore adult movies, including Barely Legal Latinas, Brassiere to Eternity, and Little White Girl, Big Black Man. In a group for whom “race mixing” was the ultimate no-no, it was a spectacular misstep. Aryan Nations Chief of Security Rick Spring issued a press release quashing the idea that Butler’s relationship with the woman whose porno nickname had been “the Latin Princess” was anything more than platonic: “She had only been staying in Idaho a few days, helping around the house,” he said. “Nothing more, nothing less; and if anyone wants to make jokes about anything else, then they do not know Pastor Butler.”
Perhaps because of his poor health, Butler had held no World Congress in 2003, and so the 2004 event was being thought of as a last hurrah.
I found Jerry in the phone book. I called him up from Las Vegas, reaching him by coincidence on his seventy-first birthday. He sounded a little frail. “Barbara?” he said, to someone I hoped was in the room with him, “’bout how long was it that I came down from Aryan Nations? It’s been a while. Uggh! It’s close to five years.” Barbara was his daughter, he said. I told him I was following up on stories I’d covered over the years. “Well, can I be on your list of people to visit?” Jerry said. “It’s good to hear your voice. There’s been a lot of changes at Aryan Nations. Pastor Butler was sued and lost his crown . . . Have you ever had another contact with the Garsides?”
I visited him some weeks later, driving east from Reno, where I was staying at the time, turning north at Winnemucca, into Oregon. The high desert softened into prairie. Flat and empty, the land stretched on for miles to the pale brown hills in the distance, with no trees or houses in sight. Farm towns appeared, with John Deere dealerships and feed stores. After the clamorous hoardings and hotels of gambling country, these towns seemed spooky and aloof.
No longer in Hayden with Pastor Butler, Jerry lived 400 miles south, in lower Idaho in a town called Payette. I arrived late in the evening. He seemed pleased to see me: He looked as though he’d made an effort, in a smart pinstripe shirt. He still wore thick glasses, and he’d put on quite a bit of weight round the middle, quite literally “going pear-shaped.” He’d swapped his home in a neo-Nazi compound for a one-bedroom suite in Louise Garden Apartments, a singlestorey motel-shaped building, where the main corridor was decorated with cute rustic ornaments, Raggedy Ann dolls, scarecrows in dungarees sitting on chairs. The residents were mainly elderly. “The lady next door is dead. She just hasn’t laid still yet,” Jerry said.
I’d never seen inside Jerry’s home before. I’d been expecting swastikas and pictures of Hitler, but the apartment was mostly bare. There was a computer on one side, a table serving as a desk with medication on it, a bookshelf with videos, and photos of loved ones on the wall. A TV, muted, showed the History Channel. He had a couple of fish tanks with guppies in them. “They’re quite small, aren’t they?” I remarked. “Well, they’re only fifteen-cent fish,” Jerry said.
I sat on the sofa. Jerry sat at his desk. “I enjoyed the shows you sent me,” he said. “I bring them out if I have visitors. I was kinda shocked by the one where you were in the porno thing. I laughed my ass off. I thought that was really gutsy.”
He showed me photos of his family. Then he said, “I thought you were going to have your crew with you.”
“No, just me. I’m taking a break from TV.”
Jerry looked concerned. “But are you still connected?”
“I still know people in TV, sure.”
“Good, good.”
It was a little like talking to an elderly relative. I’d told Jerry I was heading up to Hayden for the World Congress. He’d been of two minds about going too, deciding against it in the end. Money was tight and he had a doctor’s appointment he didn’t want to miss. “Oh, while you’re here, have you seen the Aryan Nations homepage?”
He woke up his computer. The background on his screen said: “I’m out of bed and I made it to the keyboard. What more do you want?” We read the line-up of speakers: Tom Metzger, the leader of White Aryan Resistance; Billy Roper, the leader of White Revolution; some other names I didn’t recognize. “If you do go up there, plan on getting a hotel. I wouldn’t stay in a tent in the campsite with all the idiots up there. I wouldn’t trust’em. See, these people’s mindsets: news media; Jew. They’d be suspicious from the get-go.There’s nothing you could do to stop it.”
“You think they might be hostile?”
“I don’t know the people that are up there. Oh, I’ve got an email!”
I could see it had something to do with a high-school reunion.
“Friends Reunited?” I asked.
“Supposedly,” Jerry said.
Five minutes’ drive away, on Payette’s main street, a quiet few blocks of independently owned stores, we got a tuna melt and a glass of wine each at a local bar. We made chit-chat.
“You think Rodham’s not a Jew? Wake up and smell the roses!” Jerry said. “They’ve been hardcore communists since their school days, both Rodham and Clinton. And communism is Jewish. You show me a commie, I’ll show you a Jew.”
“Stalin?”
“His wife was.”
“Castro?”
“He’s one of their puppets. He’s got to be a kiss-ass to keep his job.”
“What if I was Jewish?”
“Shit! Are ya?”
“I’m not saying yes or no. Would it change your attitude?”
“Yeah, it would.”
“I bet you’ve had friends in your life that were Jewish.”
“Not that I know of. But Prince Philip has Jewish ancestry. So Prince Charles does and little Harry. And I think that’s why God’s working it around so they can’t become king . . . Are you Jewish? Tell me please you’re not. Lie to me if you have to. Please.”
I changed the subject.
Through the next couple of days, I got to know Jerry a little, finding myself in the slightly uncomfortable position of being treated in a grandfatherly way by an unabashed neo-Nazi and anti-Semite. He had grown up in East Oakland, where his father had a neon-sign company. The second of three boys, with a younger sister, Jerry had been the black sheep of the family. He’d worked as an Electrolux vacuum-cleaner salesman for twelve years, delivered Winnebagos, driving them across country, and installed neon signs. Like many on the neo-Nazi fringe, he’d started out a member of the John Birch society, a right-wing anti-communist group that wasn’t explicitly racist, then drifted into the Klan, then into the Aryan Nations. He married four times (“number two and number three were the same one: I had to go back for seconds”) though his wives hadn’t shared his beliefs.
Now he was retired, he said, having been drummed out of the Aryan Nations amid a vicious hate campaign, orchestrated by unnamed enemies within the organization. Ousted as chief of staff, he worked for a while on their web outreach. “But that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted me out of there.” One of the new members of staff put sugar in his gas tank, then challenged him to a pistol duel. “Pastor Butler can’t have that crap around the place!”
Rumors spread—that Jerry was gay, that he was a child molester. “I was being attacked from all sides. I was being smeared so bad. And I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. They’d make up anything. They had Pastor Butler hire a private investigator to do a background check on me. And he never did that to anyone else I know of. I had to sign consent slips to let the investigator do the investigation. But it didn’t stop the rumors, and the Pastor finally gave in to the pressure.”
Now, with no hate group to help run, Jerry spent his days playing mah-jongg on his computer with only the guppies for company. “I’m still waiting for Pastor Butler to have a change of heart and call me back to work.”
On our first morning, Jerry gave me a tutorial in the strange racist religious faith that underpins the Aryan Nations.
Called Christian Identity, it holds that white people are the real Israelites spoken of in the Bible and that modern-day Jews are impostors, “Edomites,” descendants of a sexual encounter between Eve and Satan. It was all there in Genesis, if you knew how to read it. The cosmic story of humanity was a kind of Star Wars saga, with Anglo-Saxon whites as Jedis, and Jews collectively standing for the Empire. Nonwhites were inferiors, “mud people,” dupes of the Jews, used to keep the white man down. But the Jews weren’t inferior: They were diabolically cunning. There was a kind of negative flattery of Jewish people in the cosmology of Christian Identity.
On his wall, Jerry had a color poster showing the supposed descent of Jews and Anglo-Saxons on different colored lines, with the relevant biblical verses. There were also predictions for the end-time, around the year 2000: growing United Nations influence, out-of-control immigration, concentration camps all over the U.S. for the purposes of imprisoning the true Israelites.
“We’ve got the United Nations already, but we’re not totally enslaved yet,” Jerry said. “America has the most prisoners incarcerated anywhere in the world. And those prisons are going to be for us. They’re not building them for the blacks. They’re telling the poor blacks, ‘You’ve been picked on too long! You go out there and take what you want from the white man that’s persecuted you!’ They’re going to turn’em on us. And we’ll have to fight’em. And if we do, then we’ll go to jail.”
I asked Jerry about nonwhites. To my surprise, he said it was possible they might be able to get into heaven. “God says that anybody that believes and obeys, can.” I asked about Jews. No, they were irredeemable. Their ultimate fate: to be vanquished by Jesus at the Battle of Armageddon. “They’ll be totally eliminated. There won’t be any left. Maybe God’ll send rattlesnakes to do it. In many cases it’s an earthquake, a flood, all kind of things that do the job. But God gets it done.”
“So you haven’t changed your beliefs since I interviewed you in 1996?”
“No, the only thing I’ve changed is some of the people that I was around.” He paused. “Where did all these Jews come from that are running our government? Every school’s full of Jews. Every college is full of Jews. Our medical profession is full of Jews! Our legal profession is full of Jews! Our politicians are almost all Jews! The Jews are occupying this country. Now if Hitler killed’em all—”
“Jerry, Jerry, Jerry,” I interrupted. “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.”
“Listen to this point! Listen to this point!”
“Something weird happens to you when you talk about this.”
Jerry chuckled. “May-bee.”
“What is that?”
“Well, ah.” Jerry fumbled and looked away. Then his manner became sinuous and knowing. “You wanted to find out about me. I guess you’re finding out about me, huh?”
“Where does that come from? What are you thinking about when you think about Jewish people?”
Jerry paused. He looked down. “The Devil. Satan. That’s where Jews come from. They’re the ones that are oppressing us. They’re our enemy.”
“They’re just people, Jerry. Just like anyone else.”
“Not true.”
When he spoke about Jews, it was as though a sickness came over him. His whole manner changed. We went back and forth on this several times. Had Jerry ever actually met any Jews? What did Jews mean to him?
“It’s so obvious!” he said, pointing at the chart. “Jews are those people following the red line! It’s the opposite of those following the blue line!”
And yet, as hateful as they were, his views somehow didn’t shock me as much as they should have, maybe because they were couched in religious terms—it was all about what God was going to do, not what Jerry was going to do—maybe because it was hard to imagine Jerry himself physically hurting anyone. None of it seemed quite real. A little later, he started foraging in a small storeroom in the back of his apartment. He dug out some of his old certificates of rank from his Klan and Aryan Nations days. On being made a “Kleagle.” An “Exalted Cyclops.” Photos of Jerry receiving a trophy for his work as a door-to-door salesman of Electrolux vacuum cleaners. In his younger days, Jerry wasn’t bad-looking. Finally, he came out holding some sacks.
“You know, since you’re going to Aryan Nations,” he said, “would you do me a favor and give these to Pastor Butler?”
“Okay. What are they?”
“Burlap sacks.”
“Okay.
“They’ll use them for the cross-lighting ceremony. I never got around to mailing them. And I never had the opportunity to go up there.”
“Is he expecting them?”
“No, but it’s hard to find them anymore. Especially up there. Anybody that does have them won’t give them to’em, because they know what they’re going to use them for.”
I took them and put them in my car.
Why did I take the sacks? In hindsight, it was the wrong thing to do. But I was blindsided. I’d agreed to take them before I knew what they were for. Then once I found out, it wasn’t exactly too late, but it would have been a little awkward to give them straight back. So I thought I’d say yes for now, and figure out the right thing to do later. And maybe I was enjoying the irony of his entrusting the sacks to me, a liberal journalist, figuring it would be “good material” for the book.
A little later, we went out to a Mexican restaurant called Fiesta Guadalajara. I asked Jerry about Butler. “I like him but he’s getting old. And I think he’s going a bit senile. Sometimes when he’s speaking he’ll be in the middle of a story and he’ll forget what he was saying.”
“What if he gets so senile that he forgets who he’s supposed to hate?” I said. Jerry ignored this remark.
“I suppose there won’t be any Mexican food in the whites-only homeland,” I said.
“Hmmm, I’d never thought of that possibility,” Jerry said. He paused. “They wouldn’t be allowed to vote, but they could cook and clean for us. After all, we’re not extremists.” Jerry paused again. He made a Benny Hill face of coy mock-seriousness. Then he giggled: “Hee hee hee hee.”
I asked about Jerry’s kids. Did he see his son, forty-six-year-old Jerry Junior?
“Not very often. Sometimes I run into him at the grocery store.”
“He’s not listed, is he?” I knew because Jerry was the only Gruidl in the Idaho phone book.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Me. He doesn’t want anything to do with it. He’s got a kid in high school, and he doesn’t want him getting grief from other kids. We’ve been fishing a few times, but we’ve got less and less to talk about. He’s going left and I’m going right. I feel sorry about it, but I gotta do my thing and he’s gotta do his thing.”
What about Velma, his eldest daughter? “I haven’t spoken to her in years. She won’t let me have her phone number . . . She knows my views on race and she’s dead set against it.” Janet, the youngest? “No, but I’ve been over at Barbara’s house when she’s called and I’ve spoken to her. We get along. She’s just distant . . . I’m right and some day they’ll understand.”
That evening, I dropped Jerry off at his apartment. The other apartments were dark. “They’re all asleep,” Jerry said. “I feel like I’m in a mausoleum here.” Then he said, “Thanks for a great day.”
But it wasn’t the end of the day. Back at my motel, I realized my laptop was missing. The last place I’d had it was Jerry’s apartment. It was only a few months old. More to the point, it contained numerous irreplaceable photographs and documents. I went back to Jerry’s. He was solicitous and concerned. “First thing to do, file a police report,” he said. An officer named Sergeant Jack Hart came round to Jerry’s apartment. I filled out a form, describing the computer in detail. I explained about the photographs and the documents. Sergeant Hart said, “My wife does little books when we go on vacation, so I know how upsetting that can be.”
One of my first thoughts, oddly, was that it was karma for the sacks. In that self-flagellating mode people sometimes go through after they’ve made a blunder, I blamed myself for toying with the idea of bringing them—flirting with ideological obscenity for the sake of a piquant comical moment. Not that I imagined Butler would be burning crosses on anyone’s front lawn—not that I would ever have really brought the sacks, for that matter—but still.
If the loss of the computer had given me some moral clarity in one way, it had also thrown Jerry and me together. He now wanted nothing more than to be helpful.
“I’ve had a couple of ideas,” he said the next morning. He suggested printing up flyers and leafleting door to door. Jerry said locals would be unlikely to call a long-distance number, so he said to use his. He also presented me with a brand new microcassette recorder, and some maps of Idaho and neighboring states for a detour into Yellowstone Park he was encouraging me to take. We asked around his apartment building. One of his neighbors said she’d seen me driving off with a computer bag on top of the car, where I must have absentmindedly left it. We made a tour of the town, retracing our route from the previous day. Jerry was being so helpful, it crossed my mind that we were getting into a Pastor Butler type of relationship: He was acting as my chief of staff.
Another day passed, and no sign of the computer. By now, Jerry’s casual anti-Semitism was routine. Most of the time I ignored it, but I was aware of the unseemliness of having a virulent neo-Nazi as the contact person for my lost computer. I wondered if I could trust him—didn’t the monstrousness of his beliefs suggest a fundamental dishonesty? But I was fairly sure I could rely on Jerry, and found it all the more odd that, for all his hatefulness, Jerry could also be thoughtful and decent.
On our last morning together, at his apartment, I asked Jerry if he’d ever thought of trying to be less racist.
He looked serious for a moment.
“If I had my choice, my ultimate choice, if I had all power and all immunity, I would exterminate them. Every last one. And anyone that had any traits of it. Because for as long as there are any left, they’ll grow and multiply and there’ll be more discord.”
Jerry looked at me. His tone changed.
“Straight-up question. Are you Jewish?”
“Is that really important to you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because if you were, I would feel that all this time you were deceiving me and stringing me along. It never crossed my mind until you asked if it would bother me. But even if you said yes, I’d think you were lying, just to test me. You’re not Jewish, I know you’re not.”
“I just don’t see the big deal. When I think of Jewish people, I think of people like Woody Allen and Bob Dylan and Marcel Proust. People I admire.”
Possibly these weren’t the examples most likely to bring Jerry round. “The Devil is beautiful,” he said. “Lucifer was an angel of light. So yeah, they’re good at beguiling you. You’ve got to understand, Jews have this satanic seed and they cannot overcome it.”
“You must see that there’s good and bad in all people, so why not try not to be racist?”
“Because I am racist.”
It was hopeless. With Jerry, the alleged “satanic” qualities of Jews were not something that could be proved or disproved. It was simply an article of faith. It was hard to believe he was serious. But he was. I told Jerry I hoped he wouldn’t be offended that I didn’t want to bring the sacks up to Pastor Butler for the cross burning. “It’s not a cross burning, it’s a cross lighting,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Jerry, I know I owe you a favor, but let it be something else, not this.”
“Okay, no problem,” Jerry said. Then he took a stack of flyers advertising the lost computer and said he’d keep handing them out around town.
I drove up Highway 95, the same road that had brought me all the way from Las Vegas, and that stretched south from there to Needles, California, past Yuma, Arizona, and into Mexico. I was heading north. On my folding map of Idaho, I was only a few centimeters from Canada. Coeur d’Alene was a genteel tourist town situated on a lake. Population 34,514. Because it was tourist season, rooms were expensive. I booked into a horrible overpriced motel next to a gas station, among a cluster of other corporate motels and chain restaurants. I called Jerry and thanked him for his help. “I feel so sick about your’puter,” he said. I’d never heard the word “’puter” before. Its cuteness lodged in my head.
The next morning I shaved off the beard I’d grown, leaving a handlebar moustache. I was hoping to look less Jewish. Though I’m not, I’ve been told I look Jewish, and tanned and bearded and wearing glasses and my leather flip-flops, I looked like I’d just stepped out of a yeshiva. If nothing else, with the moustache and contact lenses instead of glasses, I looked a little less bookish. But driving to the march from my motel, the contacts started irritating my eyes. The package said they expired in 2001, which may have had something to do with it. I took them out. I checked my mirror. Glasses/handlebar moustache appeared to be the worst of all combinations. I looked like a German sex tourist.
The Congress was in two phases, a parade through the heart of Coeur d’Alene followed by speeches at a campground forty miles out of town. Several blocks were cordoned off for the parade. Police officers stood at junctions directing traffic. I parked and walked across the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant called Zip’s where I saw twelve or so beefy men in smart-casual clothes discussing something. One was chomping a cigar. Too well-fed and smug-looking to be regular people, they’d have been recognizable as federal agents even if they hadn’t been having their staff meeting in the parking lot.
I was waiting at the starting point when a van pulled up and Butler hobbled out with four bodyguards, young men in combat boots and dark glasses. Now aged eighty-six, he looked stooped and oblivious, a hearing aid in his ear, as he sat on a bench by the side of the road. It was hard not to feel the customary indulgence that one extends toward the elderly, even the racist elderly. I sat down next to him and said: “Hi, Pastor Butler, I’ve been staying with Jerry Gruidl in Payette. I think he may have emailed you about me.” His reaction was hard to read. Could he hear me? I asked him how it was going. “It’s been pretty rough, but we get by,” he croaked.
The route of the parade ran down Coeur d’Alene’s main shopping street, with fancy streetlights, flower baskets, and a parade of smart shops. Later I was told Butler had hoped for 300 marchers, to represent the 300 fighters chosen by Gideon in the Old Testament. (Given that experts put the group’s membership at about 200, this was optimistic.) I counted thirty-three marchers. They were spaced three abreast, thirty or so feet behind each other, to take up more room. The permit from the town was for an hour; with only a few blocks to cover, the marchers made frequent stops to fill out the time. Butler, too feeble to walk, was seated on a deckchair on the back of a pickup truck, like a May Queen, looking back on the parade.
The marchers began by taking turns stomping on an Israeli flag. “Kill! Kill! Die! White race!” The flag was then dragged by the pickup truck. Onlookers and reporters were kept behind the barriers. A talkative old gentleman wearing a neckerchief remarked to no one in particular: “I’m trying to figure out what type of people are drawn to this.” Then, out of the side of his mouth, he said: “I think they’re a little screwy.”
A dark-haired man with a broad Midwestern accent, aged fortyfive or so, herded the marchers. He wore the Aryan Nations uniform, modeled on the old Nazi one: pale blue shirt, twin breast pockets, blue necktie. I was pleased to see he also had a handlebar moustache, so I hadn’t misjudged the grooming code too badly.
With a few exceptions, the marchers fell into two main categories: skinheads and religious eccentrics. The eccentrics tended to be older, with beards and/or dirty T-shirts. One, in straw hat, little dark glasses, and Nazi armband, looked exactly like the Gestapo villain in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
An Old Testament–looking patriarch carried a placard that said: “Jews will not repent for the cross.” This was Ken Gregg of the “Knights of Yahweh.” A chubby, geeky guy, who I later found out was Billy Roper, a rising leader in the movement, had a poster that said “Keep your brown hands off our white children.”
A bystander shouted: “God created them that way!”
“He also created yeast infections. You treat those,” Billy Roper shouted back.
With Butler so aged and feeble and the organization bankrupted, anti-racism groups had for the most part elected to stay away. One local spokesman called it the Aryan Nation’s “swan-song.” there were a few protesters with their own placards, locals and out-of-towners, with signs saying: “Jesus is colorblind” and “Hate is a bad lifestyle. Get out now!” The gaggle of protesters shuffled alongside in an impromptu and untidy counterparade.
“Are you going to reimburse the city for the cost of hiring all these extra police, Butler?” shouted an aging hippie in tie-dye shirt and ponytail.
“Hey, dude, Jesus wasn’t white!” a black bystander shouted. “Give me a break! Get real!”
“He was a direct descendant of Adam, and Adam was a white man!” said the Knight of Yahweh.
“Please do not feed the nonwhites,” Billy Roper said.
“Where are your fucking clothes made? Taiwan?” said one protester.
“Get the fuck out of my town!” said another.
“Why don’t you come here so I can sock you!” said a third.
One or two onlookers expressed support for the parade. “God bless ya!” said a woman carrying a Confederate flag. “Thank you!” A big, strapping, bearded blond-haired guy, who had a young daughter on his shoulders, Sieg-Heiled. “White Power! Right on, man! Keep this town real!”
The most vocal of the protesters was a middle-aged woman who appeared to be deranged. She denounced the marchers as “white negroids.” She held two densely worded placards, which were impossible to make out.
“You are filth! You white negroids are subhuman!” she shouted at the Knight of Yahweh. “Jesus Christ was true God and true man!” “You don’t know your Bible, lady!” the Knight of Yahweh said. “You shut up and listen like a man!”
“I am,” he said mildly.
“You can go down to the free health clinic and get some estrogen injections,” Billy Roper said.
“The general public calls you nitwits!” she shouted at Billy Roper. “You call the Jews subhumans! That’s what you are, mister! You are white negroid black race! You’re no different from animals!”
Even Billy Roper, who’d managed a few lighthearted rejoinders, had no comeback to this observation, demonstrating, perhaps, that the most effective antidote to the racist marchers wasn’t rational argument but to be even crazier and more obscurely bigoted.
It was like a street theater version of The Jerry Springer Show, with the same intrusive, kitchen-sink atmosphere of being granted access to something private, unseemly, and almost trivial. The most surprising thing, in the end, was the heavy presence of burly federal agents, in dark glasses, snapping photographs with big cameras, and riot police crammed into SUVs. Was it really possible that this cavalcade of windbags constituted a national-security risk? After the march, fire engines extended their ladders and police snipers climbed down from the roofs.
The last remaining protesters converged on a car with a lone skinhead sitting inside it. “Would you do this by yourself?” a protester asked.
“You bet.”
That afternoon, using directions I had downloaded from the Internet, I drove forty miles out of Coeur d’Alene for the speeches and post-parade get-together at a campground. I passed a clump of federal officers standing in the woods like birdwatchers with their huge cameras. It may be that I’m now on file as an “unknown sympathizer” in some FBI office in Washington, D.C. At the campground office, I said, “I’m here for the, ah . . . ”
“Church group?” the manager said.
The campground sat in the lap of pine-covered mountains, a beautiful grassy clearing. The Aryan Nations had colonized the near end with a scattering of nylon tents, some cars and vans, a barbeque area, a small tent with folding chairs for the speeches. By the tent, books were laid out for sale on tables: copies of Mein Kampf in English and German; The True History of the Holocaust: Did Six Million Realy [sic] Die?; Might is Right; Creed of Iron: Wotansvolk Wisdom; books on Norse mythology, the Knights Templar, and the Third Reich, especially the Nazis and the occult.
One of the organizers, a young woman, told me all the attendees were supposed to buy raffle tickets. I bought one.
The speeches started. Forty or fifty people sat in the tent. Butler was sitting in a van off to one side. A generator chugged in the background. The speeches were amplified, but the speakers were also under instruction from the owner of the campground not to be audible from his veranda. For a rabble-rousing hate group, this was a challenge.
The MC was the guy with a handlebar moustache who’d organized the marchers.
“I’m Mike McQueeny from Wisconsin,” he said. “I’d like to tell you a little about my story. When my daughter was fifteen years old, she started listening to rap music. When she was seventeen years old, she was mixing with spics. At eighteen years old, she had a nigger baby. And I disowned her. And I haven’t seen her since. She had a boo baby. I haven’t seen her in ten years. And I don’t care. You are my family. I want to introduce you to the greatest man in the world today, Pastor Richard Butler.”
Butler was barely audible over the generator. He said something about National Socialism. Something about America and the Founding Fathers. Something about Christianity.
“I want to thank each and every one of you,” he rasped. “You are my kindred. You are my family. Hail victory!”
He creakily raised his arm in a Nazi salute. Then he climbed back into the van.
Next up was Tom Metzger, leader of White Aryan Resistance. After frail old Butler, Metzger was loud and vigorous. Too loud and vigorous for one old man near the front who, mindful of the campground owner’s instruction, interrupted Metzger mid-flow.
“They’ll shut us down,” the old man said.
“You obviously haven’t heard me speak before,” Metzger said, with barely disguised irritation.
Metzger’s theme was that the white race was being destroyed— not by anti-white racism but by global economics.
“‘Make the world safe for democracy.’ I want to destroy democracy, not make it safe! Democracy is a euphemism for capitalism. Always has been! When they say we’re going into a country to give them democracy, that means finance capitalism . . . The only thing you can do now is cheer when there’s terrorism. Terrorism is like defending yourself. You know why those guys hit the World Trade Center? I didn’t cry over it! The World Trade Center is the New World Order economic headquarters. If it was the ragheads, they knew exactly what they were after and I liked it!”
Applause.
“Go tell the FBI!” he added, for effect.
Whatever the merits of his position, Metzger at least laid out a consistent worldview, and did so with some passion. He’d even thrown in a little economics, instead of putting everything down to Jews and other races. But this would prove the high point of the speeches. A young man dressed in khaki shorts and shirt, looking a little like a scoutmaster, spoke next. He’d brought props: photos of prominent media moguls mounted on small placards. The presentation was so liberally peppered with racial slurs—kike, hebe, Jew-boy, mud person, subhuman ape—that it quickly found favor with the audience. Next to this guy, Metzger had sounded like John Maynard Keynes.
“Our world is sick and Hitler gave us the cure. But the Führer’s plans cannot be implemented until America removes these media Jews from their temples of corporate power and gives the mass media back to whites.” His delivery became urgent. “For blood, for honor, for the glory of the Reich!” he said in the weirdly throttled voice of someone trying to shout without making too much noise. “We salute thee, o Aryan martyr Hitler! Offering our lives to your sacred cause, we shall march forth to victory!”
Other speakers followed: Billy Roper; then the Knight of Yahweh; then a man in a baggy, ill-fitting T-shirt, with terrible teeth and thick nostril hair: the Aryan Nations state leader for Washington. Much of the chit-chat at the Congress had been about evolution, but the speakers seemed to be devolving into ever more primitive life forms. I reflected that if I were a white racist, this would be a chastening experience. It’s a pretty wacky gathering when a skinhead with a swastika tattoo on his head is one of the more presentable attendees. In its geeky quality, its hobbyism, the event felt oddly English, like a group campaigning for the preservation of steam locomotives, everyone pretending to have a good time, making the best of it, plodding on with their crusade.
“It’s depressing,” said a skinhead in a Support Your Local Klan T-shirt.
The last speaker was possibly the kookiest of the bunch. Named Arch Edwards, he was the one who looked like the baddie in Raiders. For a while he’d been promoting an Aryans-only homeland called New Celtica, which would be built in underground hill forts. The prospectus had floor plans that looked as though they’d been done by a child for a school project. It was for northern Europeans only; southern Europeans were allowed if they were “indistinguishable from an average north European.”
“I encourage everyone to learn Sanskrit,” he began, with a distracted, professorial air. I looked at the skinheads in the audience, who were presumably making a mental note to start those Sanskrit lessons post-haste. “It looks like a washing line hung with wriggly worms . . . In Sanskrit, the word ‘human’ comes from ‘hu’ meaning ‘divine.’ So we’re not, in fact, all human.”
The next morning I returned to the campground expecting more speeches, but there was no sign of Butler or any of the luminaries— Roper, Metzger, et al.—who were staying at Butler’s house in Hayden. A few skinheads were sitting around a campfire. One of them named Oregon was making a burger on the barbeque. He was twenty-eight; one of his pupils was permanently dilated, giving him an odd look. “So what’s it like in England? You got a Jew problem over there?”
“Not as far as I know,” I said. “But I’ve always got on with Jewish people.”
Oregon was the Aryan Nations state leader for Oregon. I asked if he’d enjoyed the weekend. “Not really. This is all fictitional reality. None of this exists.”
“You’re getting a little philosophical for me.”
“This doesn’t exist,” he said again. “You go downtown, you don’t see Nazis and swastikas. You don’t see skinheads out in the streets in New York. It’s all fictitional. We’re created by the media to scare people. But we don’t really exist. First time I went to the Aryan Nations headquarters, I was expecting machine-gun turrets and rifle ranges and guys training and shit. But it was just a bunch of houses. I was disappointed. I liked the Jewsmedia version better.”
“Why don’t you leave the movement?”
He rolled up a sleeve to show a swastika tattoo. “See this? If I ever covered this up I’d be a traitor. Now I know the truth, I can’t ever go back. I see everything racial now. Anytime I look at a crowd of people, I’m noticing what race everybody is. I can’t even help myself.” Oregon had a friendly manner; a wry distance from his beliefs, as though he himself was a little baffled that he held them.
Jim Ramm, the guy who’d given the speech about Jewish media moguls, wandered up. “What’s your ancestry?” he said.
“Half English, quarter French, quarter Italian,” I said.
“There’s a rumor going round that you’re Jewish.”
“People tell me I look Jewish.”
Jim squinted at me doubtfully. He had a soft, suspicious demeanor, an oddly sing-song voice, almost as though he was trying to sound like an oddball—or maybe he was just suspicious of me. Apropos his “awakening” in his twenties, he said: “At first I had a little nagging sense of guilt. Because for so long everyone’s been telling me this is wrong.”
“How are your parents with it?” I asked.
“They don’t like it. That’s pretty much standard in the movement. So you learn to get along, avoiding certain subjects . . . Not talking about stuff . . . I work with a Mexican and he thinks I’m his best friend. And he has no idea I hate his guts. It’s called acting. Because one day the feds are going to ask him about me, and he’ll say, Jeem nice man! He my friend! I like heem!”
The raffle was held. The prizes were CDs by Nazi bands, copies of Mein Kampf, plastic swastikas. I was relieved not to win anything.
A few days later, having made an appointment by phone, I visited Butler at home. His house stood on a quiet suburban lane of singlestorey houses with sprinklers and U.S. flags and barking dogs, next to a golf course. A skinhead was sitting on the front porch when I arrived. He was smiley and polite, which wouldn’t be worth remarking on if he hadn’t been a skinhead. He said his name was Jerald. He’d lost his job the day before, when his boss spotted his picture in the Spokane Spokesman-Review Sieg-Heiling at the parade. “It’s a moving company. They have a lot of military contracts.”
A pair of Alsatians met me at the door. Inside, the house was doggy-smelling and disheveled, like a student crash pad but for neoNazis. A blanket and pillow were on one arm of the sofa. There was a piano against one wall. A cat padded around, and cat hairs were ground into the carpet. Above the fireplace hung a painting of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse. A bust of Hitler was on the mantelpiece, next to a picture of Butler’s deceased wife. The sense I had, from the young people I’d seen around, was that Butler was an icon and mentor to a certain class of confused white youth. A little like the late Jerry Garcia, the lead singer of the Grateful Dead, who presided over generations of kids passing through their hippie phase, Butler was a “Captain Trips” for budding racists, a cool old dude who “totally gets it,” an ideological puer aeternus.
Butler was seated in an easy chair by the window, wearing a clean white shirt. There, speaking in a dry, faltering monotone, occasionally yawning, he spelled out his beliefs as Jerald the skinhead kept watch from the sofa. With no great show of malice, he outlined the vast religious space opera, of Jews against Gentiles: a final war leading to the total elimination of Jews from the Earth. Matter-of-factly, he croaked: “The Jew has always been our enemy. He’s God’s enemy. But he couldn’t be our enemy as effectively if we hadn’t allowed him to do it . . . The Jew is only the tool of our iniquity. We are the ones that have to straighten up, fly right. And he wouldn’t give us any trouble.
“I don’t have any animus—you know, personal animus—with them. I know what they are and they know what I am.”
He pointed out the painting of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse. A spectral detail of a pale face was just visible between two of the horses’ heads. “That’s the white race,” Butler said. “The white man was sent to the Earth to conquer the Earth and put God’s law into effect.”
“Is there a way of avoiding the war?” I asked.
Butler pointed at a book on his shelf called You Gentiles by Maurice Samuel. “It’s by a prominent Jew of the twenties. Read the chapter entitled ‘We the Destroyers.’” I glanced at it. (Later I bought and read this book, a weird little extended essay by a Romanian-born intellectual and translator of Yiddish, full of quirky insights into the differences between Jews and non-Jews, which, boiled down, says that Jews are more interested in God and Gentiles prefer sports, and that this will lead to everlasting conflict.) That it was written by a Jew seemed, for Butler, to make it irrefutable: condemned out of their own mouths! “So that pretty well answers your question.” Yes, inevitable war.
Butler’s other bits and pieces of “evidence” for his worldview were even more shaky: a supposed remark by Ben Franklin that Jews should be excluded from the Constitution—a well-established hoax, as I later found out. He cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in which prominent Jews reveal their secret plan to take over the world (also a fake created by anti-Semites). “Jews said it was a forgery. How can you have a forgery unless you have an original?” was Butler’s bizarre logic. What good did it do to try to explain? He claimed that the word “America” came from German—not from the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, as commonly believed—and means “heavenly empire.” And so it went on, all of it unadulterated nonsense.
As a final thought, I asked about Jerry and why he had left. “I don’t know. He had trouble with some of the people. It’s a problem with our race. We have too many factions. We always commit . . . fratricide, almost. The so-called right wing is the hardest thing in the world to get together. But I like Jerry. We talked on the phone last night.”
“He didn’t say anything about a computer, did he?”
Butler quickened. “Yes! He said he’s got it!”
“I—have—your—computer.” Jerry’s voice in the message was clear and enunciated. Then he said it again: “I—have—your— computer.” A couple, a headmaster and his wife, had handed it in. I picked it up from Jerry a couple of days later.
I drove back down to Reno, where I stopped for a few days to get my car fixed. With some downtime, I decided to send Jerry a gift to thank him for his help getting the computer back. What do you give a neo-Nazi? I bought him a humorous anti-Bush quiz book. Then I drove to Las Vegas.
Less than two months after I interviewed him, Butler died at his house in Hayden. It was weird to read an obituary where no one had anything good to say about the deceased. A prominent antiNazi hailed his death as the end of the “big compound era” of white supremacism.
A New York Times article noted that Christian Identity was on its way out as the religion of choice for neo-Nazis. Skinheads and prison racists were now increasingly turning to Odinism, the worship of Norse gods, which had the bonus of not including that whole turn-the-other-cheek business, which was always a little tricky for Nazis to explain. The article ended by saying: “On Wednesday, after Mr. Butler’s body was taken away for an autopsy, his relatives moved the belongings of his Aryan Nations roommates out of the house in Hayden Lake and placed them on the doorstep . . . Then they took down an Aryan Nations flag from a window.” The funeral would be a private affair. No new leader was announced.
After I heard the news of Pastor Butler’s death, I called Jerry. An answering machine said in a robotic voice: “I’m sorry but ‘Hi, this is Jerry Gruidl’ is not here to take your call.” It flashed through my head that Jerry might have been so anguished by Butler’s passing that he had killed himself.
A short while later, he called back.
“You caught me at home,” he said. He sounded forlorn. “Oh, I’m not doing too bad, I guess. I’m recovering. I just got out of the hospital.”
“What happened?”
“A real act of stupidity.”
But it was nothing to do with Butler’s passing, which he regarded with equanimity. He’d had a car accident. He’d been working on his van, checking the rear lights with the handbrake on. Absentmindedly, standing outside the van, he’d revved the engine with his hand on the pedal. The door was open and it knocked him down as the van lurched backward, dragging him along the ground.
“You ran yourself over?” I said.
“Yeah. Dumbest thing I ever did in my life. Do you have any more tapes? I’d sure like some more of your adventures. If you happen to have any around, I sure would appreciate it.”