Setting the Record Straight

Harold Covington, Anti-Racist

2012-01-23T18:29:00.001-08:00

White Supremacy is "disreputable and unsavory," wrote Covington in
1996, shown here at a 1989 gathering in Pulaski, Tennessee.

One of those that Harold Covington defamed incessantly in the 1990s, Will White Williams, responded by filing a libel suit against Covington in Wake County, North Carolina. The pattern of libel was so clear, extensive, and well documented that Covington really had no defense.

Instead of disputing the facts of the case, Covington tried to appeal to what he presumed to be the biases of the court.

In his formal response to Williams vs. Covington in 1996, Harold Covington referred to Williams, a member of the National Alliance, as a "White Supremacist" (which in this case was not to make a distinction from White Separatism, but simply a synonym for racist in Liberalese) and asserted that "White Supremacists" and their activities were inherently "disreputable and unsavory" and that therefore he, Covington, should not be held accountable for any libel against a "White Supremacist" like Will Williams:

18. Regarding the issue of defamation of character, it is the entirely serious contention of the defendant, and will constitute a substantial portion of the defense, that the plaintiff has no character to defame. For a number of years Mr. Williams has voluntarily adopted a style of life which has involved active membership and leadership roles in a number of white supremacist organizations. This subsequently resulted in his involvement in a series of transactions, incidents, and episodes of such disreputable and unsavory nature that the standards of injury and loss of reputation which would normally apply to a normal, law-abiding citizen cannot reasonably be said to apply to him. With addressing the moral issues involved, the court will be aware that modern American society has determined, in its collective wisdom, that white supremacy and activities related to promoting white supremacy are disreputable and unsavory ‘per se.’ It is the contention of the defense that by choosing his present mode of living, in the eyes of all reasonable people he has voluntarily renounced the values and standards of character which would entitle him to bring an action for libel, against the defendant or anyone else.

Find that on page 2 of "DEFENDANT'S ANSWER TO COMPLAINT" (File #96CV 11027 – Williams vs. Covington), filed at the Wake County Courthouse, North Carolina District Court on 20 November 1996.

Page 2 of Covington's Response to Williams vs. Covington.

Dr. William Pierce on the Death of Robert Jay Mathews (1984)

2011-12-22T19:27:00.000-08:00

Response to a Lie

In a podcast of 9 June 2011, Harold Covington ridiculously claimed that Dr. William Pierce "did everything he could to distance himself from" and "publicly denounced" Robert Jay Mathews, and even accused Dr. Pierce of "denying he'd ever met" Mathews. He claimed that Dr. Pierce had tried to hide the fact that Mathews even gave the speech quoted on the first page of this National Alliance Bulletin. Covington most likely finds it hilarious to tell such outrageous lies and have people actually believe what he says. Click here to listen to the soundbite of Covington's outrageous lying.

This Bulletin really makes the case by itself, but additional details can be read here.

Tom Metzger on Harold Covington's Personal Attacks

2011-10-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

During 2010 Tom Metzger appeared on Jim Giles' Radio Free Mississippi podcast, where Giles asked Metzger his views of some prominent White racialists. When Giles asked about Harold Covington, the following was said (Click to listen):

Giles: I am just looking at the ADL list, and one other person that comes to mind that's not on the list is Harold Covington.

Metzger: Oh boy. That's like putting a cross up in front of a vampire to me. There's only one person I think I really hate in this struggle, and it's Harold Covington.

Giles: That's interesting. Why is that?

Metzger: Well, because he took it beyond politics during the trial and after the trial [in which Will Williams successfully sued Harold Covington for libel].

He got personal. He started putting things out about me, and I don't really understand why it ever got started. He said I was a drunk, and I did all this stuff, and everybody knew it wasn't true. He said when my wife was dying, I had left her in a welfare ward in the hospital. It was all lies, and he was putting out all these lies.

I think the reason for it is, I supported Ben Klassen, with the COTC. Ben and I had a stormy relationship, but I respected him highly. And Covington hated him, and he even started rumors about him killing a skinhead and all this kind of stuff, which was totally untrue. But because I supported Klassen, I think that's the reason he went after me, and he put out some terrible things.

Politically you can attack me and I can say, "Oh well," because other guys attack me and I don't get all bent out of shape. [...] But when he attacked my wife, and that I was a drunk, and all this kind of stuff, that's going beyond the line.

Letters of Praise from Famous People to Harold Covington

2011-07-28T00:36:00.000-07:00

Carlos Whitlock Porter

A letter purporting to be from Carlos Whitlock Porter, author of Not Guilty at Nuremberg and The Truth about Rhodesia, appeared in Harold Covington's free Resistance newsletter on the occasion of Hitler's birthday in 1997:

Dear "Winston",

Sorry, still have trouble with the nom de plume. In any case, my heartiest best wishes to you on this Fuhrertag*, from an ex-member of the "Wicked Winston Chorus" (used to be "Hate Harold Chorus"). I am impressed with your dedication and your indefatigable persistence in the face of all the years of harassment and abuse you have gone through, and I regret my own past contributions to your detractors. You are one of the most powerful racial presences on the Internet today.

Carlos W. Porter
Belgium ["Porter to Covington," Shofar FTP]

This piece was subsequently republished by the anti-Revisionist organization Nizkor. Porter complained bitterly to Nizkor that he had not written the letter:

I then discovered that one of the most prominent items in the Nizkoprophagic spy and lie files on me, featured very prominently and still there, 2½ years later [in 1999], is an alleged “letter” to Harold Covington dated 20 April 1997 which I did not write and had never before seen.

I complained to Nizkor immediately, denying that I wrote it, demanding a retraction and an apology. No answer. I complained repeatedly. No answer. I also pointed out certain errors in their other files on me. No answer.

I repeat: I did not write the letter in question, I complained about it repeatedly, and it is still there. [The Website of Carlos Whitlock Porter]

Nizkor has never removed the letter.

Covington's bizarre response, when Porter contacted him for assistance in convincing Nizkor that the letter was fake, was to maintain to Porter that he was an imposter and that the real Carlos Whitlock Porter had died several years earlier!**

Other such letters to Harold Covington purporting to be from prominent people should be judged with these facts in mind.
__________________
* One of the giveaways that this was a forgery is that Carlos Porter, a linguist, knew how to spell Fuehrer or Führer but Covington did not and still has not learned it. Covington made the same mistake when he forged a post on his blog that he attributed to me (as I documented in the post of 24 June 2011).
** VHO's biography of Porter indicates that he is still alive and resides in Belgium.

The Genesis of Harold Covington's Vendetta against Hunter Wallace and Robert Campbell

2011-07-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

This account was originally posted on Occidental Dissent.

Hunter Wallace says:
April 12, 2011 at 11:10 am

The incident happened about a year ago.

I was on the road traveling in North Carolina at the time. While I was gone, Jack Ryan had posted a link to a Radio Free Northwest podcast, and Harold Covington showed up here to respond to his critics (Will Williams, I think) in the comments.

Apparently, Covington was using several sockpuppets to defend himself and to make it look like he had lots of followers. The sockpuppets were all coming from the same IP address in Washington state.

Robert Campbell was an OD administrator, caught HAC using the sockpuppets, and deleted several of them. At that point, Covington created some kind of Yahoo group where he accused Campbell of being a government agent and Occidental Dissent of being a false flag operation set up by the government to discredit him.

Like I said above, I was on the road at the time and thought the whole matter was silly and hoped that it would blow over in time. I didn’t think it was a big deal that Harold Covington was using sock puppets. I also just thought he was being paranoid to assume that we were government agents out to get him.

Remember the context here: I didn’t have a problem with Harold Covington at the time, regularly listened to his show, and was allowing Jack Ryan to promote Covington on Occidental Dissent, which is why Will Williams and others were over here fighting with him.

Far from trying to discredit Covington, OD was promoting him and exposing his work to a wider audience, even if some of us had some objections to his theory. That was the status quo for months after that whole incident.

We continued to link to his podcast. Robert Campbell complained about that for months. That eventually changed when Covington continued to attack us and accuse us of being government agents for no other reason than the fact Campbell caught him using sockpuppets on OD.

As silly as this may sound, Harold getting caught using sockpuppets on this website (by someone else, no less) is what led to him writing a whole book about me being a sexual pervert and President of the United States and arch enemy of the “Northwest Front.”

I’m sorry to say that I don’t remember the names of the sock puppets he was using. Robert Campbell would know. He was the one who deleted them.

According to Robert Campbell, these are some of the posts to which Hunter Wallace refers. The IPs of "Ricky Lang," "Brad Davis," and Harold Covington speaking as himself all match. This is from March 2010:

Ricky Lang
valkyra2001@yahoo.com | 67.160.90.23
Will Williams has been obsessed with Harold Covington to the point of insanity for 20 years now, and he has filled up megabytes of internet space with nothing but attacks on HAC. Back in 1998 it got so embarrassing to Dr. Pierce that Pierce had to kick him out of his post as membership secretary because Williams was misusing NA facilities to fight his feud with Covington.
From Re: Covington — an apology, 2010/03/10 at 5:25 PM 2010/03/10 Approve | Spam | Delete
Brad Davis
http://www.northwestrepublic.com | bdavis27607@earthlink.net | 67.160.90.23
Will, could you do us all a big favor, and shut the F. up about your stupid little lawsuit? Nobody’s interested any more. Truth be told, nobody ever was, not even back when you were leeching off the National Alliance.
From Re: Covington — an apology, 2010/03/10 at 5:05 PM 2010/03/10 Approve | Spam | Delete

[Intervening post omitted.]

Harold Covington
http://www.northwestfront.org | nwnet@earthlink.net | 67.160.90.23
Ref. Mr. Rudisill’s comments, I actually make it a total of five identifiable individuals who are generating at least 90% of the Space Madness. I deeply regret to say that one of them appears to be my own brother.
From Re: Covington — an apology, 2010/03/10 at 8:32 AM

Robert Campbell announced the discovery and warned Covington at the time:

Robert Campbell says:
March 10, 2010 at 7:52 pm

Mr. Covington,

Using various pseudonyms, you have attempted several times to post derogatory comments about Will Williams to this thread. The names you have attempted to use for this purpose include Ricky Lang and Brad Davis. I know with certainty that these are your posts, because all of the comments originate from the same IP address as the user “Harold Covington.”

You came here under your own name, pretending to have moved past these petty interpersonal conflicts and seeking to mollify damage you’ve caused over the years, while at the same time you were pouring gasoline on the fire using anonymous sockpuppets. You didn’t even have the good sense to mask your IP address. Most of your comments were not allowed out of the moderation queue, nor will they be, and I will ban you if you don’t stop engaging in this counterproductive and ignoble behaviour.

You can read Campbell's full original post on Occidental Dissent.

You get an idea here of what kinds of statements Covington will make when talking through a sockpuppet, spewing insults and foul language, which he is less inclined to do when speaking in his own voice. As Campbell explains, and as you can see, Covington tends to use sockpuppets for his dirty work while pretending to be above it all.

Another reason why Covington attacked Will Williams only through sockpuppets is that he is barred by a court order from making any public statement about Williams. Covington already owes the State of North Carolina a 30-day incarceration for violating that order, which was why he packed his suitcase and hurriedly left North Carolina in 1998.

"Brad Davis" and "Ricky Lang" is clearly not a complete list of all the sockpuppets that Covington had in play on OD. Covington refers to "Mr. Rudisill," which is yet another well known Covington sockpuppet name, discovered by VNN Forum moderator Ben Vinyard in October 2004.

The confirmation that "Brad Davis" was really Harold Covington is particularly valuable, since some material attacking Dr. William Pierce ("Thirty Questions for Dr. William L. Pierce") has been published under that fictitious name of a supposed former National Alliance member.

Telltale Signs That I Did Not Write This

2011-06-24T04:29:00.000-07:00

Since last April it has been demonstrated that Harold Covington's Northwest Front blog contains posts falsely attributed to Ron Doggett and Fred Streed, which have the obvious purpose of contributing speciously to Covington's credibility. Thereafter Jerry Abbott came forth and stated that in the mid-1990s Covington had also pretended to be him, although in his case Covington was doing it to discredit him.

Recently Harold Covington has drastically increased the frequency with which he makes fake posts on his blog in my name. He first did it in January 2011 when he had "Hadding Scott" admit to being "one of Cass Sunstein’s Cognitive Dissonance operatives," which was the fiction that Covington was peddling about me at the time.

Now he is making fake posts in my name that are a bit more believable.

This fake post actually contains an argument, consisting of ironically expressed skepticism about the feasibility of Covington's secessionist project. Some people might be fooled into thinking that this is authentic. This is not obvious tomfoolery like the post from January.

Covington however was not very careful in observing certain features of my writing. For one thing, since the early 1990s, following the example set by Dr. William Pierce, when referring to our race I always capitalize White.

Covington also did not pay much attention to the correct English rendering of German words, about which I am careful.

Covington writes "national socialism" -- two separate words. As I explained three weeks ago in a post on VNN Forum, this is wrong. In all my writing on this blog and on my other blogs and in my posts on fora (at least in the past few years), you will find that I consistently render the German word Nationalsozialismus in English with a hyphen, national-socialism.*

Another mistake that Covington makes is that he has me referring to him as "Fuhrer Covington." The German word is Führer or Fuehrer. "Fuhrer" is not a word. Those two little dots over the u are not just an ornament (as in some metal band's name). They represent the letter e. You either write the two little dots (called an umlaut) or you insert an e. Otherwise it's not correct.

If you see my name attached to any post on Covington's blogs, it is not I who wrote it.
_____________________
* I make an exception when I write the name of Frank Collin's and Harold Covington's goofy 1970s "Hollywood Nazi" group, which called itself the "National Socialist Party of America." Since it's a proper noun I write it the way they wrote it, even thought they wrote it wrong.

Harold Covington Calls Dr. William Pierce a Coward

2011-06-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

This is really a draft. The final post will be more filled out and polished.

In his podcast of 9 June 2011 Harold Covington played the well known recording of Robert Jay Mathews' speech at the 1983 annual Labor Day gathering of the National Alliance. Covington described it as "a very rare recording." That may be true insofar as there are not many recordings of Robert Mathews, but this recording, with an introductory commentary by Dr. Pierce, has been freely available online, first through SolarGeneral.com and now through Archive.org, for some years now.

The speech as found online has an introductory and concluding commentaty from Dr. Pierce. (Click here to listen.)

Covington played the speech without Dr. Pierce's comments, telling his audience that Dr. Pierce had "tried to bury" the recording for years as part of a general attempt to dissociate himself publicly from Robert Mathews.

You can listen to Covington's statements by clicking here.

Covington repeats the completely unsubstantiated claim that Dr. Pierce received $300,000 from Matthews, asserting that "everybody and his dog in the movement knows," which is simply a lie. It is purely a matter of speculation as to whether Mathews really gave Dr. Pierce more than the $50,000 that he was supposed to give him by agreement with other members of the Order. Covington has claimed many times that Dr. Pierce received $300,000, even though it cannot be substantiated. The main focus here however is on the more unusual and surprising -- one might even say absurd -- accusation that Dr. Pierce for some years tried to suppress the fact that he had ever known Robert Mathews.

I knew that National Vanguard Books had been selling cassettes of the Robert Mathews' 1983 speech at least as of the early 1990s when I bought my copy from National Vanguard Books. To learn what was done with the recording in the 1980s, I had to make inquiries.

First I discovered in online newspaper archives that in 1984, when news-media were attempting to contact Dr. Pierce for comment about Mathews, Dr. Pierce refused to talk to them. Under the circumstances, this was simple prudence. The fact, however, that the media were trying to contact Dr. Pierce for comment about Mathews, means that the connection was well known.

I asked Tom Metzger for his comments on Covington's accusation. Metzger said that the recording of Mathews' 1983 speech was never "buried" but was made available by the National Alliance on cassettes at the time. Metzger said that Dr. Pierce never attempted to pretend that he did not know Mathews, and certainly never "denounced" him.

Kevin Strom also says that Mathews' speech was made available contemporaneously through the National Alliance Bulletin, and that about a hundred members of the National Alliance were present when the speech was made. Covington's claim that Dr. Pierce tried to deny that it ever happened is pure comedy.

I found that shortly after Mathews' demise, Dr. Pierce attended a couple of gatherings where Debbie Mathews (the widow, and a member of the National Alliance) and other people that had known or admired Bob Mathews were also present. Metzger says that Robert Mathews was heavily discussed by everybody at these events, especially by Dr. Pierce because he had known Mathews personally while most others had not. One of these gatherings was at Bob Miles' church and the other was at Aryan Nations, the event where Blood in the Face was recorded.

In 1989, when National Vanguard Books acquired a high-speed tape-duplicator, the Mathews speech and others were advertised for the first time in the book catalog.

Covington the Self-Aggrandizing Publicity-Hound

As always, the personal smear is a means for Covington to declare his superiority to the person attacked. First he makes the false accusation, then takes the moral pose that he, noble Harold Covington, would never do such a thing.

Covington declares that he would never try to distance himself from anybody involved in any exciting illegal revolutionary activities. There is some semblance of truth in this, insofar as Covington has gone out of his way to try to create the appearance of an association between himself and such activities, at least as early as John Hinckley's attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981.

A crucial difference here, however, is that Dr. Pierce really knew Robert Jay Mathews, whereas it is highly doubtful that Harold Covington ever really had any contact with Hinckley.

Think about it: if Covington had really known Hinckley, the smart thing to do, as chairman of the National Socialist Party of America at the time, for the benefit of Hinckley and the NSPA alike, would have been to shut up about it. The Secret Service ultimately dismissed Covington's claims about Hinckley as mere publicity-seeking. More about this in a future post.

Covington Still Putting Fake Posts on his own Blog

2011-06-16T22:16:00.000-07:00

In April it was brought to the attention of Ron Doggett and Fred Streed that Harold Covington's Northwest Front blog bore comments favorable toward Covington that were attributed to them. Both men subsequently posted on VNN Forum emphatic declarations that they were not responsible for those comments. Fred Streed referred to Covington as "Tubby" and Ron Doggett went so far as to declare: "If any 'movement' Northwest or otherwise has Covington as its main spokesperson it is doomed regardless of any other issues." (14 April 2011)

Within a few days, Covington put on a dramatic performance in which he alleged that the fraudulent posts had been made by others, whom he called "humorists." This was not a very convincing explanation, since Covington has sovereign control over the content of his blogs (with no comment appearing without prior approval) and was certainly aware before April 2011 that Fred Streed and Ron Doggett were not admirers of his.

While Covington was acknowledging that his blog contained fraudulent posts, he failed to demonstrate good faith by removing those posts. Those posts bearing the names Fred S., Ron Doggett, and Ron D., are still on the blog. Moreover, Covington continues the practice, apparently believing that his readers have a very short attention-span.

In June 2011 a new comment attributed to Ron Doggett appeared.

In addition to Fred Streed and Ron Doggett, Covington's blog also bears comments attributed to K.A.S. (Kevin Alfred Strom) and Bob Demarais, all former prominent members of William L. Pierce's National Alliance.

The obvious motive for Covington in doing this is to create the impression that he, Harold Covington, is the heir apparent to Dr. Pierce, and that remnants of the National Alliance are gravitating to him. This is a development that Covington wishfully depicted in his novel Hill of the Ravens, which he wrote immediately after Dr. Pierce's death (and in which he accused Dr. Pierce of having been a Federal informant: see my post of 17 February 2011 about that).

Covington even boasts that former members of the National Alliance are in his "Northwest Front." It is hard to imagine who those former members might be, since Dr. Pierce took the extraordinary measure of warning members against having anything to do with Covington, and all of them in my acquaintance (with the temporary exception of April Gaede, who, as a result of bad experience, has recently come to her senses) have taken that warning seriously.

Another Name that Covington Used

2011-05-07T12:42:00.000-07:00

Since Harold Covington is attempting to obfuscate after being caught red-handed using other people's names fraudulently, it should be helpful to bring forth yet more evidence.

Apparently Harold Covington in the second half of 2004 formed a Yahoo group called NotVNN, obviously in reaction to the diligent policing of VNN Forum's moderators against Covington and his endless sockpuppetry (e.g. here).* In some of his spam-solicitations for NotVNN Covington fraudulently used the name of Billy Roper. Ben Vinyard reported receiving an invitation to join that Yahoo group:

"Tired of getting kicked off VNN, banned, and refused registration?" begins the e-mail. I have received a couple of invitations from "different" sources, one of which was an e-mail account fraudulently using Billy Roper's name. [Ben Vinyard, VNN Forum, 22 October 2004]

Since Ben Vinyard was a friend and collaborator of Roper's at the time, there can hardly be any room for doubt here.

What we are seeing is a long-established pattern of behavior that continues still.

______________________

*VNN Forum was dominated by people who had been members of the National Alliance and still heeded Dr. William Pierce's warning against Covington's destructive influence.

Covington's Lame Attempt at an Excuse

2011-04-20T02:24:00.000-07:00

On 18 April 2011, after somebody sympathetic to Harold Covington asked him to explain away my accusation that he fraudulently attributes comments on his blog to various well known White Nationalists (Fred Streed and Ron Doggett), Covington came up with the excuse that he himself was not doing this, but rather some "humorists" had done this without his awareness.

On its face that seems an airtight excuse. It is airtight insofar as "Ron Doggett" and "Fred S." are concerned, if you are willing to give Covington the benefit of the doubt, overlooking the fact that the verbiage, e.g. referring to Will Williams as "Willard," is typical Covington, and the fact that these fraudulent posts were not humorous.

However, we have the statement of Jerry Abbott that Covington was hijacking identities on the Internet as long ago as 1995 (Jerry Abbott, VNN Forum, 16 April 2011). It strains credulity to suggest that Covington was being framed like this over the course of so many years.

More solid proof of Covington's will to misrepresent consists in the fact that some of the spurious comments on Covington's Northwest Front blog are based in some small degree on comments that really were submitted. Robert Campbell and Circassian (a.k.a. Ivan on MajorityRights.com) both submitted comments that Covington drastically altered.

Circassian had submitted this comment:

Greetings from behind the bushes, comrades,
I don’t know who Hadding Scott is, but he sounds like a reasonable man. He does very good job at exposing Harold’s lies, and considering the nature of Harold’s lies, it’s worth the effort exposing them to as many people as possible.
Thank you, Hadding Scott.
And you, Harold, please stop lying. Lying is not good for it can hurt you, and people associated with you, in ways you cannot foresee.
Well, our time is up now. So, that’s it for this week’s edition. This is not Harold Covington, and I’ll see you next week. Until then: Sasha and de Bum - Freedom ♫

One might expect some redaction of such a comment, or perhaps an outright rejection, but by the time it appeared on Covington's Northwest Front blog, Circassian's comment had somehow metamorphosed into this:

Greetings from behind the bushes, comrades,
I don’t know who Hadding Scott is, but from what I’ve read of his postings, he seems to be insane.

The underlined part is the same. The remainder represents roughly the opposite of what Circassian was saying.

Since we know who submitted the original comment (Circassian) and who controls the blog (Covington) it shouldn't take a genius to figure out who is falsely attributing statements to people on Covington's blog.

Anybody that still wants to give Covington a way to wiggle out of this accusation is going to have to allege a fairly wide conspiracy, involving me, Jerry Abbott, Circassian, and Robert Campbell. The diehard apologist must also assume that Covington does not observe the data relating to people posting on his blog, which seems extremely unlikely for somebody diagnosed as having a "paranoid personality."

No doubt, some of Covington's supporters will choose to believe that. These are people that seem to be capable of believing anything.

Covington Will Hijack Your Identity

2011-04-14T20:10:00.000-07:00

In order to secure credibility for himself and his works, Harold Covington has fraudulently used the names of a number of well known White Nationalists. Recently the name of Ron Doggett, a longtime racial patriot, has appeared on Covington's Northwest Front blog. This screenshot was taken on 11 April 2011.

Covington also had posts on his blog more vaguely attributed to "Ron D.", and in his podcast of 18 November 2010 Covington claimed to be reading a letter from "Ron in Richmond." (Click here to listen.) All of this was clearly meant to convey the false impression that Ron Doggett was favorably disposed toward Harold Covington and receptive to his views. Ron Doggett has responded to this hijacking of his identity as follows:

It has been brought to my attention that a blog run by Covington had posts on it from a Ron or Ron D., Ron from Richmond and one even stated Ron Doggett, attacking Will Williams.

I want to make it clear I'm NOT the author of those posts (most likely Covington is), I consider Will Williams to be a long time friend and one of the best White patriot's I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. His dedication to the cause has been proven time and time again.

If any "movement" Northwest or otherwise has Covington as its main spokesperson it is doomed regardless of any other issues. [Ron Doggett, VNN Forum, 14 April 2011]

Covington did the same to Fred Streed. While the full surname was not used, it was clear circumstantially who "Fred S.", ostensibly a former member of the National Alliance staff, was supposed to be.

Fred Streed gave the following response to this unauthorized use of his identity:

I was recently contacted by someone who informed me that Tubby was posting comments on his blog from a "Fred S."

That is not me. I have never posted anything on Harold Covington's blog, or even read it.[Fred Streed, VNN Forum, 15 April 2011]

Jerry Abbott notes that Covington has a long history of hijacking identities, sometimes for the purpose of harming the person to whom the name belongs:

Sixteen years ago, in 1995, Harold Covington impersonated me on a newsgroup to arouse antagonism toward me among National Alliance posters. His deception was discovered and criticized, and to the criticism he responded with the words "Booga! Booga! Booga!" [Jerry Abbott, VNN Forum, 16 April 2011]

Some other identities that Covington is strongly suspected of using fraudulently are Keith Fulton, Joe Bishop, Oren Potito, Ward Kendall, Roger Hughes, and Billy Roper.

In addition to the use of names completely without permission, Covington has a history of drastically altering comments made by people who actually did say something to him. For example, there is a new comment on Covington's Northwest Front blog, allegedly from Robert Campbell, that according to Campbell is not at all what he said. Circassian, a.k.a. Ivan, makes exactly the same complaint. Robert Layne says that Covington also drastically altered messages that he posted on one of Covington's Yahoo groups a decade ago.

Two Covington Lies Demolished

2011-03-31T23:48:00.000-07:00

"Murders That Never Happened" is a short excerpt from my much longer treatment of Harold Covington's defamation of Ben Klassen. I have found this convenient as a brief and indisputable demonstration of Harold Covington's brazen lying. Recently I posted it on The Occidental Observer, where there seems to be a lot of confusion about Covington. Thereafter I asked Harold Covington directly if he would like to back away from these false accusations:

Covington, what do you mean you rest your case?

You have a paper trail of disgrace behind you that is not going away, especially since you yourself keep those issues alive by continuing the libels.

Let me ask you this Covington, since Chechar didn’t do it: do you still stand by the Barry Edwards and Dennis Witherspoon murder accusations that you’ve been making for decades, or do you now back away from those accusations since I contacted the relevant police agencies and they say that no such crimes occurred? [31 March 2011]

The silence from Covington was conspicuous and telling, but more shocking was the lack of concern from onlookers, many of whom may have come to the discussion from a link that Covington posted on his own blog, and seemingly could not care less about the fact that Covington has passed decades of his life propagating such vicious lies -- and continues to do so. Why do they not care? Because they enjoy the escapism of his fantasy-novels.

Nonetheless it had to be an embarrassment for them when the examples were as clear as these:

Murders that Never Happened

Harold Covington would have us believe that Ben Klassen, founder of the Church of the Creator and author of Nature's Eternal Religion, was responsible for many unpunished crimes, including a number of murders, and that although he, Covington, knew this, somehow Klassen was never charged.

Part 1. "Barry Edwards"

There is the case of "Barry Edwards," which appears in Covington's vicious obituary of Klassen in 1993, and which is visible online and was reproduced in several of Jeffrey Kaplan's books about White Nationalism. The story is perpetuated in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement (2007) as follows:

1978 - Klassen business manager Barry Edwards is murdered in what police call a “gangland style execution.” Edwards’s body is found on June 12th, 1978 in the trunk of a car parked at a public beach in West Palm Beach.

This seems to be total fiction. In a Google News Archive search through the whole decade of the 1970s you will not find reference to a murdered Barry Edwards in West Palm Beach. An inquiry was sent to the West Palm Beach Police Department as to whether any Barry Edwards was murdered in that city in 1978. On 31 August 2010 Sergeant Jim Cink of the homicide unit gave this response:

Regarding your inquiry into the death/murder of a Mr. Barry Edwards, our records show a Barry Edwards alive as of April 1984. Without any other details such as his date of birth, social security number, etc., we may not be talking about the same person. I can tell you we don't have, according to our records, a Barry Edwards murdered in the City of West Palm Beach after 1967.

Part 2. "Dennis Witherspoon"

Covington's A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement and his gloating obituary of Klassen also contain the tale of "Dennis Witherspoon," retold in the Brief History as follows:

1990 - On October 12th, 20 year-old former Skinhead Dennis Witherspoon is found dead in a rural area of Dade County, Florida. He has been bound with duct tape and shot several times in the head with a .22-caliber revolver. Witherspoon was known to have been a former COTC “Reverend” who claimed that in the summer of 1989, a year previously, he arrived in the Otto, N.C. compound and was invited to Klassen’s basement rec room for a private showing of Leni Riefenstahl’ s Triumph of the Will. He was given drugged liquor and passed out. Witherspoon then claims he suddenly awoke on the floor, doubled up nude with sofa pillows under him, while Klassen was in the act of sodomizing him, with the movie still playing. Witherspoon jumped up and assaulted Klassen, beating him very badly and extorting a promise of money. Witherspoon claims he was given $10,000 in cash next day and a used car, with which he drove to Florida. The only comment Klassen ever makes about this incident is that Witherspoon was attempting to blackmail him. Florida police write off Witherspoon’s death as a drug-related killing, which may be correct.

The details given here imply that Klassen was a suspect in this "murder" and was questioned about it, but you will find nothing about it in a Google News Archive search. "The Old Order Passeth," an article written by Harold Covington under the pen name Luther Williams, which Covington sent out to readers of his Resistance newsletter in the 1990s, has 1987, not 1989, as the date of the alleged anal rape: obviously, dates can be flexible in a story that was never based on fact anyway. According to Will Williams there was never a Dennis Witherspoon in the COTC.

For absolute verification, an inquiry was sent to the Miami-Dade Police Department:

Is there any record of a Dennis Witherspoon being found dead in rural Dade County? The claim is that he had been shot several times in the head with a .22-caliber revolver. This is alleged to have happened on 12 October 1990.

On 2 September 2010 Major Rey Valdes of the homicide bureau gave this response:

Thank you for your recent email requesting information related to the death of Dennis Witherspoon, which occurred in Miami-Dade County, on October 12, 1990.

We have researched our records and were unable to locate a homicide case involving Mr. Witherspoon, or matching the description you provided. In abundance of caution, we also contacted the Medical Examiner Department, with similar results.

Covington knows what he is doing.

2011-03-22T15:25:00.000-07:00

Recently there has been a divergence of interpretation about the likely motive behind some of the claims that Harold Covington has published. The premise that Covington issues false personal attacks is not in question; it is most clearly demonstrated, for example, by the several false accusations of murder that Covington has leveled at Ben Klassen. The only question is whether Covington himself believes what he is saying. Basically it is a question of conscious lying or delusionality.

Since Mr. Covington seems to be generally functional and coherent, I lean strongly toward the former interpretation.

It would be impossible of course to prove that Mr. Covington does not believe anything that he says, but we happen to have documentation that he has no compunction about false posturing. We have the words quoted from Mr. Covington's own mouth:

"We won't be lying to them about anything important."

This is found in section IV of the National Democratic Front's Members' Bulletin (10 December 1987), wherein Gary Gallo, chairman of the National Democratic Front, describes in general terms a meeting that he had with an unidentified racialist leader who proposes pandering to Christian sentiments "even though the real message is anti-religious."

(Click on an image to select it, then click again to enlarge it to a legible size.)

In the NDF's Leaders' Bulletin, of 11 December 1987, Gallo identifies the previously unnamed racialist leader as Harold Covington, and suggests that Covington's dishonesty reveals contempt for the White race.

A little over a year later, in March 1989, Ben Klassen gave essentially the same assessment in the COTC's Racial Loyalty newsletter:

... [T]he same fellow who condemned Christianity a few years back and even now jokingly talks about Christ as “the dead Jew on a stick,” and has openly admitted any number of times that he himself doesn’t believe in all that Christian claptrap, now makes the official statement that his “movement” is a Christian Movement and no member is to distribute any “violently anti-Christian” (read C.O.T.C.) literature. How about a race-mixing Jehovah’s Witness tract, Harold? He, himself, is now even strongly considering becoming ordained as a Christian Identity minister. Would you believe?

Covington was making a big show of Christian faith in order to cultivate White Christian followers, even though he did not believe in their religion whatsoever. The fact that Covington really had contempt for White Christians became obvious years later when he (subtly) expressed that contempt in one of his novels. Pastor Martin Lindstedt complained about this in 2003 as follows:

I ended up asking about Covington back in 1998, when I was suspicious about being 'used' by appearing on Covington's 'Whitespeak' jewhoogruppen [Yahoo group]. Katya Lane ended up predicting, "Sooner or later you will grow tired of his lies." Well, I must have been stupid because I didn't figure out until reading Covington's latest self-published novel, "Swill of the Jayhawks" [Hill of the Ravens] that Covington regarded Christian Identity soldiers as nothing but cannonfodder to be given third-rate shitizenship, if that, in Covington's 'NorthWest Republic' of covingtonistas.[Martin Lindstedt, VNN Forum, 22 December 2003]

Lindstedt here was seeing through Covington's duplicity, as Gallo called it. It means that Covington is not delusional (or at least not thoroughly delusional): he is a man who talks out both sides of his mouth and knows it.

Harold Covington Calls Dr. William Pierce a Federal Informant

2011-02-17T17:04:00.000-08:00

In Harold Covington's "Radio Free Northwest" podcast dated 17 February 2011 there are several issues that I could discuss but I am particularly concerned with Covington's attack on Dr. William Pierce, which is an aspect of Covington's rumormongering hobby that he took up in the early 1990s. As is his usual practice, Covington placed the personal attack late in the program so as to build up some trust in the listener before dropping this payload. (Click here to listen.)

Covington said, “I would never be dumb enough to do what William Pierce did and let somebody hand me $300,000 in a briefcase that I knew damned well came from an armored car robbery.”

There are three problems with this statement.

First, nobody can document that Dr. Pierce “knew damned well” that whatever money he may have received from Bob Mathews was stolen: Glenn Miller knew that he was receiving stolen money because he asked; Dr. Pierce certainly would not have asked.

Second, there is no documentation of the amount ($300,000) that Covington claims that Dr. Pierce received from Bob Mathews. As a matter of fact, mainstream sources allege that Mathews gave Dr. Pierce only $50,000. That would make Dr. Pierce a minor figure in the matter of receiving Order money, according to the testimony of Bruce Pierce, as reported by the Chicago Tribune:

One of the co-defendants in the Ft. Smith trial, Bruce Carroll Pierce, who was convicted last month in Denver in the Berg murder, told the FBI that the group planned to give $300,000 to North Carolina Klan leader Miller, $200,000 to the California racist Metzger, $50,000 to William Pierce (no relation), $40,000 to Butler and an unspecified “large sum of money” to Miles.

Another former Order member, Randall Radar, who helped train the commando squad in combat tactics, told the FBI that Matthews had told him he gave $300,000 to Miles.” [James Coates and Stephen Franklin, Chicago Tribune via the Spokane Chronicle, 29 December 1987]

Several others not mentioned in that newspaper report were also reputed to have received funds.

Third, why was it “dumb” for Dr. Pierce to accept a cash donation? Covington will most likely tell people who ask this question the lie that he incorporated into his novel Hill of the Ravens, that Dr. Pierce was trapped into becoming a Federal informant because of the money that he accepted.

There is absolutely no evidence for this. It is pure surmise, and not a very reasonable surmise when one considers how many others -- whom Covington does not accuse of having become Federal informants -- also are alleged to have received donations.

NOBODY ever faced criminal charges for receiving money from The Order. Not Bob Miles, not Richard Butler, not Louis Beam, nor anybody else.* The charges at Fort Smith were not about receiving money; they were based on the far-fetched theory that The Order, as big as it was, was only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger conspiracy, and that the real leaders were men like Miles, Butler, et al. In the Fort Smith Sedition Trial only those figures were charged against whom there seemed to be a strong case based on witnesses. Since the FBI’s case in the Fort Smith Sedition Trial fell flat, with no convictions and no useful revelations that would facilitate further prosecutions -- a fiasco for the Reagan Administration -- nothing further was pursued.

Consequently there is no basis for Covington's insinuation that Dr. Pierce had some "immunity" or "arrangement" with the government.

Robert Miles was supposed to have received the largest gift from Bob Mathews, but Covington makes no accusations toward Miles, neither in propria persona nor in his anonymous Brief History. Why then has Covington singled out Dr. Pierce from among the multitude that received Order money, to accuse him of doing something "dumb"? There are two glaringly obvious reasons, both manifestations of Covington's personal animosity. One, Covington envied the success and respect that Dr. Pierce enjoyed. Two, Dr. Pierce was closely associated with Covington’s nemesis Will Williams.

Apart from personal animosities, it is obvious in this passage from Covington's novel The Hill of the Ravens, published in 2003, the year after Dr. Pierce's death, that Covington hoped to gain some followers by attacking the reputation of Dr. Pierce and his organization, which Covington called derisively "the Pierce cult":

"It is my understanding that before you joined the Party, both of you were briefly members of the Pierce cult.”

“Yes, that’s true,” admitted Ed. “If you found that in our files then you also know that back at the turn of the century, Pierce was all there was. The Northwest Migration was only just beginning to appear on the radar screen by the middle of the first decade. We were associated with the cult for less than a year, and we both immediately resigned when it finally came out after his death that William Pierce had been a longterm Federal government informant, as did virtually everyone else involved who had any sense of decency or integrity. The day after our resignations Brit and myself called the Old Man [i.e. Covington], explained who we were, and offered our services. He accepted. We have been completely devoted to the Party ever since.” [Covington, The Hill of the Ravens, p. 253]

If any of you “people on the ground” that Covington claims to have in the Northwest can facilitate the serving of some legal documents to Covington (his precise physical whereabouts being unknown), there is a cash reward of several hundred dollars in it for you from Will Williams. Contact me and I will put you in touch.

___________________________
* The only evidence that most of them had received any money was hearsay.

Is there any reason to be circumspect about Karl Allen as a source on Rockwell, Patler, and Koehl?

2011-01-30T14:31:00.000-08:00

Rick Cooper featured in his polemic against Matt Koehl¹ an accusation allegedly based on an incident that occurred in 1960, which Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin is said to have mentioned to Karl Allen, who then told an associate of his, who then told Rick Cooper:

Years later, Crommelin told former deputy commander of the American Nazi Party (ANP), Karl Allen, that Mullins and Koehl were queers. Karl Allen later told former ANP member Christopher Bailey, and Chris then told Director Cooper in the early 1980s.

Harold Covington reproduces these sentences almost verbatim in his A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement.

There are at least two problems of credibility here.

First, the rumor is several generations removed from the original source: the accusation may have been distorted in transmission, or one of the men credited with repeating this rumor may never have said it².

Second, there is no mention of the fact that Karl Allen was a hostile source regarding Matt Koehl (for reasons unrelated to the content of that rumor). Karl Allen in 1963 had a falling out with Rockwell and was leading his own group, which was in competition with the National-Socialist White People's Party during the last three or four years of Rockwell's life. Matt Koehl was given Allen's erstwhile position as deputy commander.

I find that Frederick James Simonelli, in his book American Fuehrer (1999), where he mentions Karl Allen's view of Rockwell's assassination by John Patsalos ("John Patler"), is completely misinformed about Allen's relationship with Rockwell at the time of the assassination, and accordingly misinforms his readers:

Karl Allen, a high-ranking ANP officer and devoted Rockwell loyalist, organized a John Patler Defense Fund in the months following the murder. He initially accepted the conclusion of the police that Patler was Rockwell's killer, but he soon came to see the markings of a Jewish conspiracy in the affair -- if not in the murder itself then certainly in the arrest of Patler.... [Frederick James Simonelli, American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (1999), p. 131]

Karl Allen's concern for Defendant Patler of course could only be sincere and motivated by love of justice, if indeed Allen were a "devoted Rockwell loyalist." But this is far from the truth. Simonelli's characterization of Karl Allen's attitude toward Rockwell is completely contradicted by some other sources:

In late 1963, Rockwell fell out with his deputy, Karl Allen, who seceded and founded the American White Party. Supposedly, Allen was inspired by the works of Oswald Spengler and Francis Parker Yockey, and rejected Rockwell’s preference for Hitler. A later Nazi [NSPA, Frank Collin's group] publication called Allen "Rockwell’s mortal enemy." Allen acquired one of the ANP’s printing works in Spotsylvania and from there organised a book company and orchestrated a smear campaign against Rockwell. The actual cause for the feud is impossible to disentangle and Allen’s role continued to be disruptive until he dropped out of politics in 1967. The loss of membership and prestige as a result of the Allen schism weakened the Nazi Party. [James Saleam, American Nazism in the Context of the Extreme Right: 1960-1978, ch. 2]

Karl Allen and John Patsalos seem to have been like-minded in their criticisms of Rockwell's endeavor. This casts an interesting light on Allen's readiness to come to Patler's aid.

Although he achieved little notoriety with his American White Party, Karl Allen did not completely drop out of politics in 1967. Journalists sought his comments about the NSWPP after Rockwell's death. A newspaper item from 1968 describes Karl Allen's relationship to the NSWPP at that time:

A schism -- of a type that probably caused Rockwell more trouble than any other single thing -- has developed into a complete split within the party. Rockwell used to call it "the problem of reconciling my thinkers, my intellectuals, and my doers, my strong men of action."

An FBI agent described it as "friction between the weirdos and the rednecks³. The weirdos like to spin dreams about ruling the world. The rednecks want to go break heads."

However the two factions are characterized, the former is now grouped around Matthias Koehl in Arlington, and the latter around Karl Allen, of Alexandria, Va., late of the White Citizens Council, whose wing calls itself the "white party." The Arlington group busies itself with producing reams of literature, ranging from crude broadsides and reprints of that ancient hoax, "the protocols of the learned elders of Zion," to scholarly-looking quarterlies.

The Alexandria group is not much heard from, although Allen is doing what he can to further the presidential campaign of George Wallace. [Hank Burchard, The Windsor Star, 28 September 1968]

While this report correctly states that there was a division among men who at various times had supported Rockwell, the uninformed reader would understand this split (such as there was in 1968) to be a result of Rockwell's death, which it was not. Karl Allen had been antipathetic toward Rockwell since 1963, as he was now toward Koehl.

Karl Allen's position on the assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell and his comments about the character of Rockwell's successor perhaps should be considered in that light.
__________________________
1. Rick Cooper's A Brief History of White Nationalism is mainly an attack on Matt Koehl. It should not be confused with the anonymous work promoted and distributed by Harold Covington since Cooper's death, which incorporates some of Cooper's writing and has almost the same title, but only agrees with Cooper's presentation in certain respects.

2. Rick Cooper sent a registered letter to Karl Allen seeking confirmation of the rumor: Allen never responded

3. The FBI agent's comment seems to label Karl Allen (a native of Tallahassee, Florida) as a "redneck," which seems a bit reckless given that Allen had been described by others as "a dapper Harvard graduate" (The Miami News, 22 May 1962).

On the Murder of George Lincoln Rockwell

2011-01-22T21:22:00.000-08:00

Shortly before noon on Friday, 25 August 1967, George Lincoln Rockwell left his home, and headquarters of his National-Socialist White People's Party, at 6150 Wilson Boulevard¹ to do his laundry at the Econ-o-wash laundromat in the Dominion Hills Centre at 6013 to 6035 Wilson Boulevard. The location was described by the Associated Press as "across the busy highway from the old frame house that served as Rockwell's home -- and the barracks of his 'troopers'"(AP, 26 August 1967).

At the laundromat a witness, 60-year-old Ruby Pierce, said that Rockwell, "a tall, charming man," came in and talked about which washing machine to use. "He put his clothes in the washer and put his detergent in, and then he said, 'I forgot something,' or maybe he said, 'I forgot my bleach.'"

Rockwell exited the laundromat, got into his 1958 Chevrolet, and began to back out. Two loud shots pierced the windshield of Rockwell's car, one of them striking him in the chest. Rockwell made a brief and futile attempt to seek cover. His backward-moving car struck another car and stalled. Rockwell either lurched out or fell out of the passenger-side door, landing face-up on the pavement with feet still in the car; in one report he pointed to the rooftop before dying. Witnesses said that he had been shot in the head and chest, but the medical examiner, Dr. John Judson, found only a chest wound (AP, 26 August 1967). Here is a photo of the crime scene that appeared in the Washington Post:

Here are the bullet-holes in the windshield of Rockwell's car:

When the shots were fired² 17-year-old laundry attendant Robert Hancock looked up and saw the gunman on the 15-foot roof of the beauty salon (UPI, 25 August 1967). A barber named James Cummings saw a man later identified as John Patler, a.k.a. John Christ Patsalos, an expelled former member of Rockwell's organization, leap from the south end of the shopping center and gave chase but lost him.

Somewhere in the range of 30 to 45 minutes after the killing Patsalos was spotted by police standing at a corner bus stop at the edge of a park about one-half mile from the shooting. He tried to run away but was caught and placed under arrest by Inspector Raymond S. Cole (UPI, 25 August 1967).

Patsalos' Character

John Christ Patsalos was born in Bronx, New York. His family history is quite troubling. His father, an immigrant, served a term at Sing Sing for murdering John Patsalos' mother in 1943 when he was five years old. (AP, 26 August 1967) He fought for custody of John and his brother on being released. (AP 26 August 1967) (In 1996 the brother, Christ George Patsalos, was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida for having murdered his girlfriend in 1982.)

John Patsalos had a criminal history prior to adopting the name Patler and becoming a "Nazi." He spent time in a New York youth-detention house where Patsalos boasted that another assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had once been held. One report says that he murdered a childhood friend.

Patsalos enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1958. In July 1960 he was given an honorable discharge on grounds of "unsuitability." One report says that the discharge was due to his being arrested at an American Nazi Party event (AP 26 August 1967). He joined Rockwell's organization in 1960 and around that time he started calling himself by the German-sounding surname Patler.

In 1961 Patsalos, now "Patler," was put in charge of the American Nazi Party's "Hate Bus," which toured the South with a dozen stormtroopers. Patsalos made speeches in various Southern cities where there was notable conflict over "Civil Rights." (AP 22 May 1961)

Patsalos edited and illustrated the NSWPP's publication for members, The Stormtrooper, and drew cartoons found in Rockwell's book White Power.

In 1962 Patsalos left the American Nazi Party and in collaboration with crypto-Jew Dan Burros³ formed the American National Party. This ANP, based in Manhattan, claimed ten members and was able to muster six for public demonstrations, all clad in white shirts and black trousers. They managed to call some attention to themselves by extreme and aggressive posturing, e.g. calling for war against Russia, which provoked a public complaint from a Russian diplomat. In their magazine Kill! Patsalos accused Rockwell of being a liberal (UPI, 25 August 1967). Patsalos rejoined Rockwell's organization in 1964. Rockwell commented on the episode as follows:

"A political guerrilla band is what we are. And under such conditions, the struggle for power is almost cannibalistic. What happened is Patler rebelled against the leadership-- he thought he could do it better. He went up to New York and tried and he fell on his face. He's ashamed of what he did. He's apologized for it publicly. And he's worked his head off. He's a fine member right now."

Having tried and failed to build his own organization, Patsalos sought and received readmission into Rockwell's organization, but the incompatibility that had led to his resignation was still there.

Patsalos, in his and Dan Burros' short-lived "American National Party," had done away with all things "nazi." Patsalos objected to this aspect of Rockwell's organization even after rejoining, and had conflicts with other members because of it. As a swarthy Greek, Patsalos seems to have objected particularly to the Nordic ideal associated with National-Socialism. Blond members he called "blue-eyed devils" (NY Times, 26 August 1967).

Matt Koehl told reporters that Patsalos had exhibited "Bolshevik leanings," and, "Communist thought kept creeping up in his work." (UPI, 25 August 1967)

According to testimony given during his appeal before the Virginia Supreme Court in 1970, Patsalos said to another NSWPP member, "Rockwell is an evil genius and must be stopped." (UPI, 1 December 1970)

Police Inspector Walter E. Bell is cited for the claim that Patsalos had left the NSWPP in January 1967 (AP, 26 August 1967). A UPI story of 1 December 1970 specifies that Patsalos had been fired as editor of the party's newspaper on 30 March 1967 and expelled from the organization on 4 April.

Early in the summer of 1967, two men attempted to kill Rockwell in the driveway of his house.

One of the two men hidden in the bushes by the entrance-way fired a pistol shot at him, narrowly missing his head, he said. (George Brimmel, Calgary Herald, 25 August 1967)

Both got away. Patsalos may or may not have been one of them. There is no reason to assume that he was or was not, since attempts to harm Rockwell had been a common occurrence for years. Rockwell's Icelandic wife had left him several years earlier because of the danger.

Rockwell's father, former vaudeville and radio⁵ performer George "Doc" Rockwell, age 78 at the time, said after learning of his son's fate: "I'm not surprised at all." (AP 26 August 1967) And, "He was more afraid of his own men than people were of him."

Patsalos on Trial

At the time of the arrest, Patsalos was drenched in sweat, had roofing tar on the bottom of one shoe, and both shoes were wet, as were his pants up to six inches above the knee. A teenage girl had witnessed Patsalos hurrying away from the shopping center. (The Free Lance-Herald, 3o September 1967)

The day after the murder a C-96 Mauser "Broomhandle" was found "just below" a wooden foot-bridge under six to eight inches of water in a creek that runs through Bon Air Park, midway between the shopping center and where Patsalos was apprehended. (AP, 27 August 1967) Apparently it had rocks placed over it, since Four Mile Run is full of rocks and the prosecutor contended that Patsalos had knelt in the water while concealing the weapon.

The Annapolis Police submitted it to the FBI's crime lab for testing. (AP, 27 August 1967) Ballistics showed that this was the murder weapon. Patsalos had borrowed the unusual firearm from a party member in 1964 and never returned it. Patsalos had been seen target-practicing on his father-in-law's farm, and slugs taken from a tree there confirmed that the gun found in the creek was the one that had been in Patsalos' possession.

Based on this evidence Arlington County judge L. Jackson Embrey sent the case to a grand jury.

Patsalos loudly protested his innocence and never confessed anything. A conspiracy theory was propagated that Patsalos had been the victim of a frame-up by the ADL. Rockwell's former deputy Karl Allen was a proponent of this theory.⁴ Karl Allen also raised money for Patsalos' defense.

When the trial began on 27 November 1967, Patsalos was very well defended, with three attorneys. His attorneys' strategy all along was to draw attention to flaws in the prosecution's case or to try to create flaws by challenging the admissibility of crucial pieces of evidence, specifically the Mauser Broomhandle slugs found on his father-in-law's farm, the admissibility of which was challenged on the first day of the original trial (Free Lance-Star, 28 November 1967) and in the final appeal before the Virginia Supreme Court in 1970.

One of the defense attorneys, Thomas J. Harrigan, tried but failed to have the case dismissed, alleging that the prosecutor, William J. Hassan, had piled inference upon inference and had failed to connect Patsalos with the crime. (AP 12 December 1967)

Defense attorney Harrigan also mentioned a conflict between Patsalos and Koehl over the party's image and trappings. (AP 12 December 1967) Was this to imply that Koehl had a motive to frame Patsalos?

Patsalos claimed that he had left home just before noon and could not have been at the shopping center when Rockwell was killed. Patsalos' father-in-law Sam Ervin and wife Alice contradicted him, testifying that he had left the house at 11:10AM. (AP, 15 December 1967)The trial ended with a guilty verdict on 15 December 1967.

The Arguments of Conspiracy Theorists

As Patsalos was led in manacles into the police station on the day of the murder he shouted dramatically, "I haven't done anything!This is a nightmare!" Patsalos never admitted guilt. He and his supporters like Karl Allen claimed that he had been framed by some conspiracy, obviously because a conspiracy was the only alternative explanation for such overwhelming evidence (much like the "racist cop" argument in the O.J. Simpson case).

Oddly, some people (Covington) who have accepted that Patsalos was guilty have nonetheless retained the notion of conspiracy that was cooked up to defend him, thus creating a new version of events. It is on its face a problematic synthesis, given the supposition that the trigger-man for a vast conspiracy was left to wait on a street-corner with wet pants and wet shoes to make his getaway on the next public bus. Would a vast conspiracy not have arranged for a proper getaway and disposal of the murder weapon?

This boneheaded conspiracy allegedly included top officers of the NSWPP, and officials of the Commonwealth of Virginia (jurors too, apparently), and (sometimes) the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

I do not know the arguments for ADL involvement in the killing because Harold Covington, although he mentions a possibility of ADL involvement, so far as I know never really argues for it. Covington argues for a conspiracy involving Matt Koehl, and therewith William Pierce and Robert Lloyd, ostensibly with the connivance of the Commonwealth of Virginia. I shall address those arguments.

How did Patsalos know where Rockwell would be?

One of the arguments advanced by Harold Covington is that some accomplice within the NSWPP headquarters must have telephoned Patsalos revealing where Rockwell would be for Patsalos to ambush him there shortly after his arrival. There were only four people, Matt Koehl and three others (AP, 12 December 1967), inside the headquarters when Rockwell left. Covington particularly wants to accuse Matt Koehl.

Covington made this accusation under his own name on 25 August 2005 (the anniversary of Rockwell's death), and reposted it annually for several years after that, and also recycled it in his Radio Free Northwest podcast in 2010:

On August 25th, 1967 this authentic American hero was murdered in Arlington, Virginia, under circumstances which have never been satisfactorily cleared up but which point very heavily towards the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, and also to at least some involvement on the part of the man who seized control of the Nazi headquarters and "succeeded" Rockwell. The trigger man was later convicted and received a short prison term; his accomplices in the corridors of power and the traitor within the headquarters who made the phone call telling the gunman where Rockwell would be were never charged or punished. [Harold Covington, "Who is George Lincoln Rockwell?" (2005)]

The accusation was also repeated in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement, which Covington has denied writing, but was certainly very active in promoting and distributing (2007):

... what has never been satisfactorily explained was precisely how Patler knew where Rockwell would be and when, in order to intercept and ambush his victim. It is clear from any objective examination of the evidence that Patler had at least one accomplice inside the old Party headquarters....

A piece attributed to the late Robert Frenz makes the same argument.⁶

This agument depends for its credibility on the reader's being unfamiliar with the physical circumstances of the killing. There really was no need for Patsalos to be advised of Rockwell's whereabouts, because the laundromat where the killing occurred was only across the street from Rockwell's home and headquarters.

Here is how the Washington Post mapped the area where the killing occurred, and the sequence of events. You can see that if Patsalos had been spying on the entrance to Rockwell's property, he would have been practically in the shopping center already. It may even have been possible to use the rooftop as a point of surveillance over Rockwell's property; certainly it was possible to keep track of comings and goings from there, at least.

LOCALE -- George Lincoln Rockwell drove from American Nazi Party headquarters (A) across Wilson Boulevard to shopping center (B). The sniper on the rooftop (C) in inset) fired two shots as Rockwell backed his car from parking lot (D). Car coasted to stop (E). (Washington Post illustration and caption.)

Did the government go easy on Rockwell's assassin?

Harold Covington's A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement implies that the legal system of the Commonwealth of Virginia showed leniency and favoritism toward the assassin:

Patler [...] received the lightest possible prison sentence allowable under Virginia law, and was released after spending only a few years in comfortable, minimum-security facilities.

Patsalos was convicted in December 1967 of first-degree murder. The prosecutor had urged the death penalty. The all-White jury of ten men and two women (Free Lance-Star, 28 November 1967) recommended a sentence of 20 years' imprisonment, which was indeed the minimum sentence for First-Degree Murder in Virginia.

Under Virginia Law, the judge could not give a sentence greater than what the jury had recommended (AP, 19 December 1967). Judge Charles Russell postponed sentencing until 29 January 1968, at which time he pronounced the only sentence that he could.

Since there is an element of randomness in the selection of juries, Patsalos' lenient sentencing cannot be attributed, as Harold Covington insinuates, to some conspiracy and favoritism by government officials. The prosecutor had asked for death, and the judge gave the most severe penalty that he could give under the circumstances. Evidently Patsalos had a very good defense team who found a way to make the jury take pity on the killer.

On 31 November 1970 Patsalos' conviction and sentence were upheld by the Supreme Court of Virginia.

A piece on Patsalos attributed to Robert Frenz claims that he was released from prison after only three years. This is inaccurate.

As of 1975 Patsalos was still in prison, but he was allowed to participate in a "study release program" that enabled him to take art classes at Radford College. In August 1975, Patsalos was approved for parole.

John Patler, ambush killer of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, Friday became the first major political slayer of the 1960s -- America's "Decade of Assassination" -- to be freed. [...] He had served eight years of a 20-year sentence....

[...]

"He was a model inmate who never caused any problems... that's why he was paroled...." said Alan Brittle, of the state parole office. (UPI, 23 August 1975)

What confuses people is not really that Patsalos was treated leniently, but that they are sure that anybody who assassinated a prominent enemy of the White race would be treated with utmost harshness, which casts Patsalos' treatment in relief.

James Earl Ray is probably the most famous case of a racially motivated assassin. He died in prison after he chose, by pleading guilty and foregoing a jury trial, to avoid the risk of a death sentence. A judge sentenced Ray to 99 years.

If it was true, though, that James Earl Ray's prospects for getting a sympathetic jury after killing MLK really were not nearly as good as Patsalos' after killing Rockwell, that is certainly a bias that affects the legal process, but it is not a matter of conspiracy by government officials in that specific case: it is a matter of popular attitudes shaped by mass-media, schools, and churches.

Another important consideration is the role of the Federal Government in piling on "civil rights charges" against offenders whose crime conflicts with the Federal Government's domestic agenda. In effect, White people have no civil rights so far as enforcement of Federal civil rights laws is concerned. There was no chance that anyone would be charged by the Federal Government with violating Rockwell's civil rights; by contrast, David Lane, who was not present at the murder of Alan Berg and was not charged with murder, was sentenced to 150 years for "violating the civil rights" of the Jewish victim, in addition to 20 years for racketeering and 20 years for conspiracy. If Patsalos had murdered the leader of a some Black Power group he could still be in prison, but not because the Commonwealth of Virginia would have treated him any differently: rather because the Federal Government would have piled on so-called civil rights charges.

To determine whether Patsalos was treated leniently by the Commonwealth of Virginia after his conviction, one would have to compare to other similar cases in the same state. In 1993 it was reported that the average prison inmate in Virginia serves less than a third of his sentence. (Virginian-Pilot, 2 October 1993) At that rate, Patsalos was not given any special leniency except initially by the jury that had recommended only a 20-year sentence. That was where Patsalos got lucky.

The Succession

UPI reports that Matt Koehl announced that he had taken command of the NSWPP a few hours after the murder:

The 32-year-old Milwaukee native assumed command on his own, but nobody questioned his right.

What was Koehl's position in the NSWPP that enabled him to succeed Rockwell without being challenged?

In the 1966 Playboy interview, Koehl was identified by Rockwell as his "research chief," who had determined that some photos of alleged Holocaust victims really showed victims of the bombing of Dresden.

More to the point, Koehl was publicly known as the deputy commander. As part of his conspiracy theory, Harold Covington claims that there was no reference to Matt Koehl as the Deputy-Commander of the NSWPP prior to Rockwell's death. This is not true. On 14 April 1967, just a few months before Rockwell's death, the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia reported:

The Spotsylvania County American Nazi Party chapter is making plans to celebrate the birthday of Adolph Hitler next Thursday, April 20. [...] Principal speaker will be Maj. Matt Koehl, deputy commander of the American Nazi Party and second in command to George Lincoln Rockwell.

It was also Matthias Koehl whom Rockwell named as executor of his will (J. Goolrick, The Free Lance-Star, 8 September 1967) and to whom he willed "my mortal remains, in the event of my death for whatever disposal he may care to make of such body." (UPI, 28 August 1967) (UPI, 9 September 1967)

On the day of Rockwell's death, Koehl said, "I don't know of anyone who can fill his shoes. We cannot talk in terms of a successor to Commander Rockwell. But we'll all do everything we can to carry on." (AP 26 August 1967)

____________________________________

Notes

1. The house at 3150 Wilson Boulevard has since been razed and the property incorporated into Upton Hill Regional Park. The street address that was once Rockwell's is now farther northwest.

2. There is a great discrepancy in the reporting about what time Rockwell was shot. Robert Hancock, the 17-year-old laundry attendant says 12:20. Other reports say slightly before noon (AP, 26 August 1967). As close as the laundromat was to Rockwell's home, if Rockwell left at about 11:50 as Koehl later testified (AP 12 December 1967), the time of the killing seems unlikely to have been significantly later than noon unless Rockwell spent 20 minutes or so in the laundromat chatting before leaving.

3. Dan Burros was later exposed as a Jew and allegedly shot himself in the apartment of Roy Frankhouser on 31 October 1965 after reading an article about himself in the New York Times. (Reading Eagle, 10 October 1967)

4. Too little interest is paid to the fact that Karl Allen shared some interests with Patsalos. Allen was another disgruntled former member of the NSWPP who had quit and become a critic of Rockwell and tried to start his own group. See my article on the question of Karl Allen's perspective.

5. Doc Rockwell had been an occasional performer on Fred Allen's radio show. (AP, 26 August 1967) Here is a recording of a Fred Allen Show from February 1949 that features "Doctor Rockwell."

6. The late Robert Frenz is credited with this statement dated January-February 2002. It is suspect because while it appears on Heretical.com and VNN Forum, it does not appear on Frenz' own FAEM.com (now being maintained by somebody else):

Patler was convicted of Rockwell's murder in rather short order. This prompted someone hiring a private detective to look into the matter. The killer was on top of a tarred roof at the Laundromat. Tar-stained sneakers were found in the yard of a fellow named Niles whom Rockwell kicked out of the party. Rockwell broke his schedule to take an unplanned trip to the Laundromat. The only people who knew he was doing this were at the Arlington house: Pierce, Koehl and Lloyd. It was surmised that one of them called the killer. It looked like Niles and the fact that Patler was released after only 3 years lends more doubt as to what really happened. Patler has since vanished.

This piece attributed to Frenz agrees with Covington in using the same faulty argument to accuse Koehl, Pierce, and Lloyd of being accomplices. It differs from Covington's version in that it argues that somebody other than "Patler" was the lone gunman (which is quite a stretch given the evidence), and it is more specific and thus more clearly erroneous in its statement about Virginia's supposedly lenient treatment of Patsalos. (He served 8 years of his 20-year sentence before being paroled, not 3, and that's roughly typical for Virginia.)

Projected Autobiography in Covington's "Brief History"

2010-10-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

Some of the fictional elements in Harold Covington's A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement seem to be modeled on Covington's own experience. This is from the section titled "The Self-Promotion of David Duke":

He was also desperately seeking to find a Russian or Eastern European woman willing to marry him.... [...] Duke complained to his followers back home that while young and beautiful candidates for matrimony abounded, none of them wanted to remain in Mother Russia with him. Hard-headed and practical and every bit as mercenary as he was, those Russian beauties were all looking for a green card to come to America, not shelter a fugitive American back home in Bum****sk with no solid source of income.

Covington gave the following anecdote from his own past in his Radio Free Northwest podcast of 15 July 2010 (Click here to listen):

When I lived in Ireland back in the eighties when there was 20% unemployment, before I got married I used to have all these fine young Irish girls coming on to me all the time, in pubs and at work and in my theater group, which puzzled me, because even at 29 I wasn't exactly Brad Pitt. Then I realized that these girls thought I was a rich Yank, since any American in Ireland has to have money, right? They thought I was going back to America and they were looking for a green card. When they found out I wanted to stay in Ireland, which I did at that time, they dropped me like a hot potato.

It's rather obvious that Covington filled in his story about Duke's life in Russia by adapting this episode from his own life in Ireland. It's fiction, and it's Covington's fiction, based on his own experience. The less flattering details -- e.g. "no solid source of income" -- that Covington includes only in the passage about Duke seem to be also from his own life. According to younger brother Ben Covington, Harold Covington's father was supporting him when he lived in Ireland.

This raises the question, What else that Covington says about others is foremost true of himself?

"The Perils of Hobbyism" by Dr. William L. Pierce

2010-10-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

"The Perils of Hobbyism" is a short essay from the National Alliance Bulletin of November-December 1992.

At the time, Will Williams had recently become membership coordinator of the National Alliance. Harold Covington was continuing personal attacks against Williams which he had undertaken originally as retaliation for "The Anatomy of a Hypocrite," a polemic against Covington credited to Williams and Ben Klassen that had been published by the Church of the Creator in March 1989.

Dr. Pierce's purpose was to warn the membership against being provoked into responding to Covington's wild claims about Williams or other members of the National Alliance (which he published in his free newsletter called Resistance), since Covington would use whatever information he could gather from responses as material for fabricating even more stories, which would, by dint of containing some elements of truth, carry some credibility, and therefore be all the more destructive.

Here is the passage where Dr. Pierce describes what Covington had done to the Church of the Creator:

Before he began writing to Alliance members, Covington spent most of his waking hours during the previous two years harassing a racially oriented organization headquartered at the time in North Carolina, the Church of the Creator, led by Ben Klassen. He wrote hundreds of letters, some ten pages or more in length, to members of that group asserting that Klassen was a Jew, a homosexual, a pederast, and a murderer.

Mr. Klassen may have some ideas about diet (people should eat only uncooked fruits and vegetables), language (we should adopt Latin as a universal European language), and other matters which seem odd to many people, but he most certainly is not a Jew, a homosexual, a pederast, or a murderer.

Because the Church of the Creator had very loose membership policies and attracted a large number of hobbyists, Covington was able to elicit many responses to his mailings and eventually built up a nearly complete membership list for the group. He also was able to keep the gossip in the group boiling at a destructive level. [...]

Covington's technique was to mix half-truths with outrageous lies which he simply invented.

Covington has had the audacity to claim that Dr. Pierce was his source for the rumor that Ben Klassen was responsible for the murder of a "Barry Edwards." Here we have it from Dr. Pierce himself that this was bunk.

Covington has claimed that Dr. Pierce accused him in this essay of being a verifier. Careful reading will show that he does not. The verifier seems to have been mentioned simply as an example of how somebody who takes a less-than-completely-serious interest in White Nationalism might add profit to his hobby, compiling lists of names for some agency. What Covington did to the Church of the Creator, as Dr. Pierce describes it, went well beyond identifying members.

Dr. Pierce made a couple of insignificant errors: he referred to Frank Collin's defunct organization as the American Nazi Party. Mainstream media often called it that, but the legal name was National Socialist Party of America. Also, Frank Collin was not born with the surname Cohn: it was his father who had made that name-change.

Click on an image to select it, then click on it again to enlarge it to a legible size.

Covington Responds

2010-09-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

I just got an e-mail from Harold A. Covington that consists of a slightly augmented version of his blog post of 3 August 2010, which was posted the day after I discussed the lack of merit in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement and its obvious connection to Harold Covington on Jim Giles' show. I included that statement from Covington within my first post on this blog, Contra Istam Historiam Brevem.

Most likely Covington found the way to send e-mail to me through the running argument on Stormfront between one of Covington's misanthropic minions and a friend of mine who posted this blog's address.

Covington had the temerity to reproduce in his message to me today this passage from his blog post of 3 August, which antedates my extensive criticism of the material:

I used to say that I could not spot a single significant factual error in the document, but after the recent flapdoodle about the Brief History, I sat down and read it over again, and I believe I have spotted one major error--Revisionist author Bradley Smith, referred to as "the late Bradley Smith" in the Brief History, is in fact still alive. I think I'm actually the first person to notice this.

Other than that, I can't take any major issue with the facts presented in the report. It is damning, and it is true, which is why periodically certain elements within the Movement re-discover it and go into a screaming hissy fit over it, which is occurring as we speak. They cannot refute its content, and it drives them around the twist.

The fact remains that the document has been online for four years now, and other than the Bradley Smith gaffe (which I say again, I seem to be the first one to point out) no one has been able to disprove anything in it.

I would refer Mr. Covington to the Miami-Dade or West Palm Beach Police homicide divisions if he wants to know of two more absolutely, indisputably untrue claims in the Brief History. There was no Barry Edwards murder in West Palm Beach and there was no Dennis Witherspoon murder in rural Dade County. I can provide the necessary contact information for anybody that would like to confirm that. Just send me a private message.

Those two stories, by the way, have been openly credited to Harold Covington in the past. He included them in his very nasty 1993 obituary of Ben Klassen.

It really doesn't help your credibility, Mr. Covington, to go on insisting that these stories are true when the disproof has been published.

In his e-mail missive to me, the only material that Covington added to the text of his blog entry, apart from the salutation, "Mon Idiot," were two paragraphs suggesting that the only reason why anybody wants to believe that he is the author of the Brief History is that, since the arrest of Frank Collin in 1980, he, Covington, has been the target of a vast homosexual conspiracy:

Most of the accusations that I wrote the entire document itself spring from a obsessive personal hatred of myself, amounting to a form of insanity, which has been present within the Movement for the past 30 years. This deranged hatred is in my view due to my role in the exposure of a homosexual child molestor in the Movement in 1979 and his subsequent arrest and receipt of a seven year prison term. I have expounded on this bizarre phenomenon elsewhere in my article The Seabrook Theory.

A lot of the "evidence" that I allegedly wrote this work is that "only Harold can write like that." I find it amusing and bemusing that apparently, in some people's minds, I am the only person in the Movement who knows how to string a few properly spelled and grammatically correct sentences together in the English language.

Bill Seabrook
(1886-1945)

In his short essay "The Seabrook Theory" (subtitled "Why Movement Fags Hate Harold Covington"), Covington claims that he was advised of "the homosexual clique that actually runs things in this country, and not just in our Movement" by a "genuinely wealthy" "elderly gentleman" named "Bill Seabrook." Covington almost certainly had in mind William Buehler Seabrook, a famous writer and adventurer who had worked for H.L. Mencken and would have been 94 years old in 1980 -- if he hadn't killed himself in 1945. Covington says that he was at liberty to mention Seabrook as the source of the revelation "because he's long dead now" -- probably much longer than Covington realizes.

I strongly suspect that Covington could not produce the slightest evidence that anybody resents his role, whatever it may have been, in what happened to his erstwhile half-Jew paederast fuehrer, nor that any of the people displeased with Covington are homosexuals, apart from accusations that Covington himself invented. That's quite a trick, isn't it? Accuse various competitors of being homosexual rapists and murderers and then when they react, invoke the notion of a homosexual conspiracy -- which confirms the initial accusations!

Furthermore,the claim isn't that "only Harold can write like that" (notice the self-congratulation there?); it's that only Harold Covington (apart from a few people who parrot what he says) is noteworthy for these kinds of personal attacks.

Why should it be a reproach anyway, to be credited with authorship of the Brief History if it is as good as Covington claims? One obvious reason why Covington would deny authorship is that he doesn't want to risk being sued or found in contempt of court again. Another motive could be to pretend that praise of himself is coming from somebody else.

I derived the hypothesis that Covington was the author this Brief History from the fact that it contained some well known Covington material, the attacks on Ben Klassen. I approached the question of whether Covington was responsible for the entire "history" with reasonable skepticism, but the more I examined it the more obvious it became that Covington wrote it (although large sections are plagiarized). It is full of gratuitous insertions of praise for Covington, and the concluding section, which states the purpose of the whole work, is explicitly about him. The message is, Everybody else is scum. Support Harold Covington.

Now it could be that some deranged Harold Covington fan undertook to compile that 70-page "history" for the purpose of promoting Harold Covington. But that is not the obvious and simple explanation.

On "The National Alliance, Incorporated"

2010-08-21T16:20:00.000-07:00

"The National Alliance, Incorporated: A ZOG False-Flag Combat Cell" appeared on Thomas Chittum's now defunct "Firebase Skull" site on 6 October 2003 billed as "Unconfirmed info about National Alliance sent in by emailer." You can still view the original post through the Internet Wayback Machine. There is an indication that the piece appeared on OriginalDissent.com earlier, on 11 August 2003. The year 2003 is mentioned in the text, which means that the attribution of 2002 as the date of publication in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement is wrong.

The author uses the pseudonym Maguire. The prevalent speculation when this item appeared was that Maguire was some member of the Gliebe faction which was at that time trying to wrest control of the National Alliance away from the Board of Directors, since naming the directors was a way to pressure the last one appointed by Dr. Pierce who hadn't yet resigned, but had a sensitive job and didn't want public attention, to step down. It's perplexing, though, that a faction trying to take over an organization would propagate the view that the organization itself is not worthwhile.

Some people thought Maguire was Harold Covington, since he was the best-known source of scurrilous attacks against White Nationalists. The style of the writing though would be unusually spare for Covington. Furthermore, Covington seems to know the difference between principle and principal, which Maguire as of 2003 did not: principle is misused twice. On the other hand, already by 4 August 2003 in "Covington on the Gliebe Coup," Covington was referring pointedly to the National Alliance as a "for-profit, Virginia corporation," an inaccurate description lifted from Maguire's silly essay, and roughly contemporary with its debut. So, if not the author, Covington was at least an early enthusiast for this work.

Covington finds it to be flawless, as part of the anonymous Brief History which he lauds (and posts in propria persona on fora and sends out to people via email in six parts). Covington proclaims: "What I will say about the document is that its unknown author or authors know their beeswax and have done their homework. I cannot find a single significant error in fact...." * (Northwest Front, 7 February 2010)

Maguire states what he regards as the premise of his argument at the beginning:

The key to understanding the National Alliance (NA) is understanding the real structure of the NA. The National Alliance is a private for-profit corporation chartered by the Commonwealth of Virginia (not West Virginia).

The NA has stockholders, officers, directors and customers.

With these claims Maguire has established a foundation that already points toward the cynical conclusion that the National Alliance under Dr. William Pierce was really all about making money. In the highly judaized United States of America, where motives other than sex and money are not widely understood, such cynical accusations are readily believed. "Follow the money-trail," is a popular axiom.

On 2 August 2010 Jim Giles, after I told him that Maguire's premises were wrong, telephoned Virginia's State Corporation Commission to learn the truth of the matter.

Hear the essential part of the interview by clicking here.

Giles reached a woman named Ruth. First he asked Ruth to look up "(The) National Alliance, Incorporated." This is the name given in the title and throughout Maguire's essay. Ruth said, "I have a National Alliance. It doesn't have Incorporated at the end. So that would indicate that it's a non-stock corporation...."

This was not what Giles expected to hear. He asked again. Giles: "You say it's non-stockholding, so there are no stockholders? Ruth: "Right, it's like a non-profit. This is like a foundation or a non-profit."

Giles probed Ruth for the possibility that the National Alliance's corporate status had changed since Maguire wrote his piece in 2003 but according to Ruth the National Alliance had always been a non-stock corporation at least since 1982.

Dr. Pierce had chartered the National Alliance in the form of a nonprofit educational foundation because he had intended that it should get Federal tax-exempt status. An application for 501(c)(3) status was submitted to the IRS in 1977. A legal battle ensued, ending with an adverse decision of the D. C. Circuit United States Court of Appeals in 1982.**

As for the "false-flag combat cell" part of the accusation -- a description absurd on its face to anybody that was a member of the National Alliance under William Pierce -- all Maguire has to offer is surmise based on the false premise that the National Alliance was known to be a "dangerous terrorist organization." ***

Who was this Maguire person and what did he really know about the National Alliance? The title itself was blatantly wrong insofar as there was no such entity as "The National Alliance, Incorporated." If he had known that, then with his pretended expertise Maguire should also have known that it was not a for-profit corporation and that it could not have had stockholders. Despite an ostentatious pretense of expert knowledge, this author seems to have known next to nothing about his topic.
_______________________
* On 3 August 2010 Covington admitted having found an error in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement, but not in the section under discussion here.
** The National Alliance ended up with what is called "taxable nonprofit" status.
*** For a reasonable portrait of the National Alliance under William Pierce consult the works of Professor Robert Griffin.

The "Brief History" Analyzed according to its Sources

2010-08-17T00:48:00.000-07:00

On 7 February 2010 on the Northwest Front forum (taken down between 14 and 27 September 2010, but restored after a link to an internet cache of the site was posted here) Covington made this claim about the authorship of A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement:

Someone tacked together a potpourri of Movement internal stuff from the past 30 years including some writings from me, Louis Beam, Bill White, the late Rick Cooper, the late David McCalden, and some National Alliance people like Fred Streed and Brad Davis. The Glenn Miller section is pretty much mine and the Klassen section was largely mine although with some interesting new material I'd never seen before.

In his "Thoughtcrime" blog entry of 3 August 2010 (the day after an appearance by Will Williams and Hadding Scott on Radio Free Mississippi, in which Covington and the Brief History were discussed) Covington claims a larger number of other authors and seems to deemphasize his own contribution:

The lengthy article or small book A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement is divided into a number of parts or sections, each dealing with a particular movement, group, or individual personality in the Movement's past. These sections are basically "re-worked" and in some cases outright plagiarized from the written works of a large number of Movement authors and sources. These include the late Rick Cooper, Louis Beam, Bill White, Brad Davis, the late Andrew McCalden, Willis Carto, several SPLC reports, the Deguello Report, Gary Gallo, the National Alliance commentator "Maguire", Fred Streed (I think), and a number of other writers--including myself.

I did not find any evidence of most of the sources that Covington mentions. I found nothing that I could trace to Louis Beam, Andrew McCalden, Fred Streed, Willis Carto, Gary Gallo, or the Deguello Report, and Brad Davis is not a real person (as Covington surely knows). I am guessing that this multitude of names from the "movement" was introduced so as to help minimize the importance of Covington's own contribution; if you find that any sentence written by Willis Carto, Louis Beam, etc. actually did appear in the Brief History, please let me know. I have accounted for the text of the Brief History to such an extent that it seems unlikely that any statement in the work could be traced to one of those alleged sources.

The sources that I have found were copied and pasted together (with some rewriting and plenty of added comment) to create A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement include the following:

1. Harold Covington, "A Brief History of National-Socialism in North America" (1998).
2. Harold Covington, "The Frank Collin Affair," a blog post of 1 August 2005.
3. Rick Cooper, "A Brief History of White Nationalism" (1994 or slightly later).
4. The Southern Poverty Law Center: "Insatiable" (about David Duke) and "A History" (about the COTC) and, to a much smaller degree, "They're Back" (about Glenn Miller et al.).
5. Bill White, "The Facts Of Frazier Glenn Miller's Convictions" (22 February 2006, originally published, apparently, on the now-defunct Overthrow.com but still visible here.)
6. Maguire, "The National Alliance, Incorporated: A False-Flag Combat Cell"(2003).
7. Statemaster Encyclopedia.
8. Wikipedia.
9. Other online encyclopedias (AllExperts, etc.).

There is also some original writing. Through a process of exclusion, with identification of the passages that are copied and pasted from known sources, it becomes easier to identify the passages written by the compiler. Likewise, small changes made in passages that have otherwise been copied verbatim show the compiler's biases and interests. Analysis of the text into sources is a way to determine which claims have a source and which claims were inserted by the compiler, and thereupon to infer the compiler's identity.

It is abundantly obvious that the author of this Brief History, in his utterances between plagiarized passages, has a penchant for gratuitous, off-topic praise of Harold Covington (and Frank Collin's National Socialist Party of America, in which Covington was prominent) and likewise for gratuitous attacks on Ben Klassen and Glenn Miller. Those two men have in common that they lived in North Carolina where Covington also lived, and had organizations based there that completely overshadowed Covington's efforts.

Comments added and changes made by the compiler to the plagiarized passages are generally on the side of making the account more defamatory. (One exception: where Rick Cooper had referred to Matt Koehl's father as Romanian, the compiler commented that he was probably an ethnic German from Romania, but this was more than offset by the expansion of innuendos about Koehl's mother.)

The author's own very negative opinion of White Nationalism in general, and his willingness to reproduce the SPLC's material at length and without criticism, are quite remarkable considering that this work has been posted on various internet fora by individuals purporting to be in sympathy with White Nationalism.

This is the foundation for an analysis of the entire work. Each section is listed with a description of its content and sources to the right (some of which have yet to be filled in).

Introduction. Slightly rewritten from Rick Cooper.

Defining White Nationalism. Uses Cooper's operative definition (that W.N. is the movement for a White homeland) but is expanded greatly beyond what Cooper wrote. While Cooper counted current Klan groups as White Nationalist, Anonymous excludes them as “reactionary” and not “revolutionary.” This section contains a statement that very closely resembles a statement made by Covington elsewhere ("The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Honkey," 28 July 2007) under his own name: “Skinhead is no longer a political or social or ideological movement; it has become an urban gang culture....”

Early Beginnings. Almost entirely copied from Covington's A Brief History of National Socialism in North America (1998)

Every Man a King, but No One Wears the Crown. Copied verbatim from Covington's A Brief History of National Socialism in North America (1998).

The National Renaissance Party. Two paragraphs copied verbatim from Covington's A Brief History of National Socialism in North America (1998) followed by seven paragraphs rewritten from Cooper and finally a paragraph that seems to be completely original and refers to Harold Covington.

The National States Rights Party. Two paragraphs rewritten from Cooper in a way that gives much less credit to the NSRP.

The Heroic Figure of George Lincoln Rockwell. Ten paragraphs from Covington's 1998 A Brief History of National Socialism in North America, the last of them slightly rewritten.

The Fields Lawsuit. Three paragraphs rewritten from Cooper followed by one paragraph obviously composed by Covington as an allusion to the Williams v. Covington lawsuit.

The Murder of George Lincoln Rockwell. One paragraph rewritten from Cooper, followed by three paragraphs elaborating on a passage in Covington's 1998 A History of National Socialism in North America alleging that a conspiracy within the NSWPP was responsible for Rockwell's death.

The NSWPP under Matt Koehl. One paragraph drastically rewritten from Cooper, followed by two original paragraphs, one paragraph very slightly rewritten from Covington's 1998 work, then two paragraphs very loosely based on brief comments from Cooper, two paragraphs that are mostly Cooper, one that is entirely from Cooper, one that is abridged from Cooper with no addition by Covington, and one finally that is mostly Cooper but has a plug for Harold Covington's NSPA added at the end.

The Birth of the National Alliance. Four paragraphs from Cooper, with slight embellishments including a silly portrayal of William Pierce as an extreme coward.

The Long Twilight. Three short paragraphs, mostly from Covington's 1998 history, about the NSPA. Operation Skokie and the 1979 Greensboro Incident are mentioned briefly. There is no mention of the NSPA's founder and leader Frank Collin. Harold Covington, a unit leader in the NSPA when the group was attracting worldwide attention, is mentioned twice.

The Order Rebellion. One paragraph from Covington's 1998 A History of National Socialism in North America followed by 2 ½ paragraphs copied from Statemaster Encyclopedia. The last 1 ½ paragraphs have no traceable source and include a swipe at Glenn Miller.

The Self-Promotion of David Duke. This begins with two paragraphs plagiarized from the SPLC. In the second Covington added a reference to liposuction. The third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs are by Covington. The sixth and seventh are mostly from Cooper. The eighth, ninth, and tenth are from the SPLC. The eleventh is half SPLC and half Covington. The twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth are almost entirely copied from SPLC. In the fifteenth and sixteenth Covington promotes himself. The next nineteen paragraphs are almost entirely plagiarized from the SPLC, with the noteworthy exceptions of an inserted reference to liposuction and a dismissal of Duke's My Awakening, which replaces a comment from the SPLC's author that would make Duke look good from a White Nationalist perspective. In the 37^th paragraph Covington imputes to Duke in Russia a problem that he, Covington, has said that he had in Ireland: that women only wanted to marry him if he would take them to the USA. The 38^th paragraph is half SPLC but the rest, by Covington, includes accusations of Satanism and pornography against Vincent Breeding, who worked for Duke, and expands on the SPLC's mention of Duke's conviction for tax evasion and mail fraud. The remaining five paragraphs, evidently written by Covington, pontificate on the theme of David Duke's “getting away with it.”

The NSRP Falls on Hard Times. Three paragraphs, the first mostly copied from Cooper.

The Strange Case of Benny Klassen. This is typical Covington material. His libels against Klassen are well known. The tales about Witherspoon, Martell, and Edwards, and several other claims made here, appeared in Covington's gloating obituary of Ben Klassen in 1993, which has been reproduced in Jeffrey Kaplan's books. Covington now admits that he wrote "some" of this section, and that is true insofar as he also plagiarized parts from the SPLC.

The Paedophilia of Frank Collin. Eight paragraphs, of which only the sixth, containing effusive praise of Harold Covington "as an aside," seems to be entirely original. The other seven paragraphs are rewritten in varying degrees from "The Frank Collin Affair," which Covington posted on his blog on 1 August 2005.

The Drunken Shambles of Glenn Miller. Thirteen paragraphs of a memoir, obviously written by Harold Covington, about Frazier Glenn Miller's involvement with Covington's unit of the National Socialist Party of America in 1977-1980. The account is replete with anecdotes of extreme drunkenness and recklessness with firearms on Miller's part, and of course positive references to Covington. Inserted accusations of drunkenness pepper the rest of the material about Glenn Miller in the Brief History, continuing the theme that Covington sets here.

The First Morris Dees Lawsuit. The title is from a section of Bill White's 2006 report about Glenn Miller. Here there are about 3 ½ paragraphs of Bill White, and 1 ½ paragraphs of embellishment that refer to drunkenness twice.

Miller's Involvement with The Order. One and one-half paragraphs from Bill White, with half a paragraph added that includes the allegation that Miller wasted Order money on alcohol and other useless things. Information from White's report about Miller's motive for accepting Order money and how he got the nickname Rounder are omitted.

The Second Morris Dees Lawsuit. Identical title as in a section of Bill White's report. About six paragraphs written by White, plus a paragraph and several shorter embellishments added to White's paragraphs. The embellishments include several attributions of alcoholism and a proclivity toward betrayal, and a suggestion that Miller was not of sound mind.

A Drunk Declares War. In White's report this is called, "Going Underground and his Arrest." There are about eight paragraphs by White here with embellishments, plus an entire additional paragraph by Covington. This was the only part of White's report that mentioned Miller's ever being intoxicated, whereas Covington's added material makes three additional allegations of alcoholism just in this section. The entire paragraph that was added mentions Covington by name and includes a silly anecdote about Miller.

Turning Federal Informant: Miller's Testimony Against Other White Activists. Bill White was openly critical of Miller. In White's report this section, with the very same title, was the final section and stated his thesis about Miller. There are one and one-half paragraphs of White reproduced (with some omission) here in the Brief History, with half a paragraph of added material.

The Mysterious Shelby Murder Case. More attacks on Glenn Miller.

The “Peaches” Incident. Nine paragraphs attacking Glenn Miller. Two paragraphs from Covington followed by the three paragraphs copied from Bill White's report, but with Covington's embellishments inserted. The next two paragraphs contain a sentence and an independent clause lifted verbatim from "They're Back" (SPLC, 2004). The last two paragraphs, attacking Alex Linder for associating with Miller, seem to be original.

The Betrayal of Tom Metzger. A story peddled by Covington at least since 1994.

The Mind of Tom Metzger. Another story peddled by Covington at least since 1994.

The Madness of James N. Mason.

Dr. Revilo P. Oliver. This section seems to have been copied entirely from Wikipedia. Professor Oliver referred to Covington in 1988 as an "incisive commentator" based on his book The March Up Country. Oliver's assessment of Covington changed in the early 1990s but he was careful not to state it openly. This is probably why he didn't merit special attention.

The Tragedy of Richard Butler. There are a couple of online encyclopedias that have exactly this text.

Aryan Nations. One paragraph copied from AllExperts or AbsoluteAstronomy, one paragraph from Wikipedia, two paragraphs probably by Covington that include a swipe at Glenn Miller, another paragraph from Wikipedia with a sentence added to the end that Covington may have written, a paragraph cobbled together from Statemaster Encyclopedia's entry on Aryan Nations, and finally a paragraph by Covington about how Butler lost his property: “Butler actually kind of walked into this situation because towards the end his Hayden Lake home became less of a political and racial headquarters and more of a halfway house for drunken Skinheads and derelicts.”

The Great Man Himself. "The Great Man Himself," an ironically over-reverent way of referring to Dr. William Pierce, is a Covingtonism; for example, in Covington on the Gliebe Coup (4 August 2003) it appeared twice.

Thirty Questions for Dr. William L. Pierce (2000). Elements in the piece strongly suggest that it was written by Harold Covington, e.g. a vicious swipe at Ben Klassen and the innuendo that a National Alliance officer was "John Doe Number Two" in the Oklahoma City Bombing case, one of the libels for which Covington was successfully sued by Will Williams.

Why I Broke With William Pierce by L. Bradford Davis (2001). There was never an L. Bradford Davis in the National Alliance. The author displays very little accurate internal knowledge of the organization: already in 1993 membership exceeded 500 and rose to about 1800 at the time of Dr. Pierce's death; it was certainly far beyond "200" circa 2000 when Sam Van Rensburg was membership coordinator. The organization's funding mostly came from National Vanguard Books, a very successful business, not from fifty wealthy benefactors. The several references to a "mysterious Pierce associate" in North Carolina are about the National Alliance's North Carolina regional coordinator, Will Williams, whom Covington was defaming incessantly and to whom he now owes a substantial libel judgment. This was clearly written by Covington. What cinches it is that an earlier version of this piece, dated December 2002, mentions Covington by name: "I was ordered by then NA cyber-czar Vincent Breeding to devote all of my activities towards attacking Harold Covington, a well-known critic of Dr. Pierce on the Internet, to the exclusion of all racial matters."

The Political Persecution of Chester Doles. Extracted from Maguire's ill-conceived "The National Alliance, Incorporated."

The National Alliance, Incorporated: A ZOG False Flag Combat Cell by Maguire (2002). Maguire. The date attributed by Covington is wrong, as he would have realized if he had read the text when he pasted it in.

E-mail Dated 26 July 2003.

The National Alliance is Finished.

The "Inappropriate Relationship."

The National Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith: A Symbiotic Relationship. Maguire.

Failure of the "Non-Movement." Maguire.

Enter Vanguard News Network and ShopWhite. Maguire.

The Slapstick of Andrew Greenbaum.

The Weenie. About Kevin Alfred Strom. The first three paragraphs are rewritten from AllExperts or some other online encyclopedia (since several have the identical text). The first and third paragraphs have derogatory comments added; the second is slightly abridged with no added comment. The rest seems to be written entirely by Covington. The fourth and fifth paragraphs present Strom as sexually immoral and the sixth expands into the familiar theme that the White Nationalist movement in general is sexually immoral with the notable exception of Harold Covington: "and no one bothered to protest in public except, of course, for Harold Covington, who was right as always, and who was completely ignored, as always."

The Present Status of the White Nationalist Movement. A forum post from 9 September 2007 by 6Killer (a Christian Identity adherent and subscriber to Covington's e-mail list who, more than once, has posted Covington's material on fora) alleges that this section was written by Oren Potito. That claim is absent from the PDF version of the Brief History. If any part of it was written by Potito, it is very unlikely that all of it was, since it has an entire paragraph praising Harold Covington in the usual manner.

What the Hell is Wrong With White Nationalists? Eight paragraphs in which Harold Covington's name appears four times. This section was not copied but was composed specifically as the conclusion to this "history." It restates a theme repeatedly injected throughout A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement, that Harold Covington is the only virtuous leader in White Nationalism.

Typical Elements of a Covington Smear

2010-08-15T19:46:00.000-07:00

Harold Covington.

Covington's additions to Rick Cooper's attack on Matt Koehl are very similar to the smears that Covington aimed at Ben Klassen. On that basis we can begin to catalog the elements typical of a Covington smear.

1. Self-Promotion. The whole point of the Brief History is promotion of Harold Covington. In the final section, "What the Hell is Wrong With White Nationalists?", immediately after a paragraph in which Covington places his name at the head of a very short list of only four commendable White Nationalists, (the other three of which, when the Brief History appeared in 2007, did not lead organizations and therefore offered no competition to Covington), this passage appears, which quite frankly summarizes the whole purpose of the Brief History as promotion of Harold Covington:

Right now, the only actual plan or strategy which exists in the White Nationalist movement is Northwest Migration, advocated by Harold Covington but also by many others. The Movement as a whole has responded, not with support for the Northwest or by producing an alternate plan or plans, but by intensifying the already unspeakably vicious personal smear campaign directed against Covington. This behavior will either change, or the White race will perish from the face of the earth within the lifetime of infants now born. It is time for serious people in White Nationalism, what few such people there are, to either A) Quit talking shit about Covington and get behind Northwest Migration, or B) Produce a viable and realistic alternate plan.

There are only two additional paragraphs at the end of the Brief History. Those last two paragraphs support the promotion of Covington by emphasizing the need to shun all the "kooks and assholes," which means people other than Covington.

Other examples of gratuitous self-promotion are peppered throughout A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement, in sections where Harold Covington was not the subject:

Harold Covington has been subjected to years of vicious persecution, slander, and vilification because of his constant refusal to maintain a discreet and respectful silence over acts of perversion and skullduggery within the Movement, and his demands for the imposition of some kind or moral standards or code of conduct on the Movement’s self-appointed “leaders."

Where Cooper mentions the formation of breakaway factions from the NSWPP, Covington adds:

Foremost among these was the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) centered in Chicago, of which more will be related at the proper time.

Covington seems to consider himself the leading figure in the NSPA. His "A Brief History of National Socialism in North America" (1998) discusses the NSPA only in terms of Harold Covington and does not even allude to the existence of Frank Collin, who had founded the NSPA in 1970 and although nefarious was obviously the important figure in that group. The failure even to mention him in that context is stalinesque. Covington led the NSPA for two years after Collin's 1979 arrest then chose a BATF informant as his own successor.

Covington seems unable to resist injecting positive references to himself in his attacks on others. It's fundamentally all about him anyway. The smears are directed against people who have crossed Harold Covington, and the purpose is to elevate Harold Covington relative to them.

2. Foibles that make the smear-target seem silly and unworthy of respect. Covington added these tidbits to Rick Cooper's attack on Matt Koehl:

In addition, some of Koehl’s fund-raising practices were controversial and alienated many people, notably his auctioning off of small matchbox-sized increments of Commander Rockwell’s ashes under the slogan “Get Your Piece of the Rock.”

Now aged 72, in recent years Koehl has apparently become senile, and developed a bizarre mystical obsession with the number 8; much of his correspondence consists of dissertations on the number 8 and strange origami-like designs drawn by hand or computer using the number 8.

Rick Cooper was critical of Dr. William Pierce for not supporting his vendetta against Matt Koehl, but Covington adds this silly embellishment:

Since Pierce was well known as a physical coward who was afraid of being struck or threatened or shouted at in a loud voice, he crumpled and handed over all of the Koehl material. Thus was born the National Alliance.

These brief anecdotes are actually humorous, like the liposuction smear in "The Self-Promotion of David Duke."

The goat-dance story about Ben Klassen could be in this category, if you are not one of those primitive Christians that is prone to take such stories at face value. However, the way Covington solemnly refers to the COTC even in 2010 as "Goat Dancers" suggests that he expects his podcast audience to take it seriously.

3. Accusations that the smear-target is a sexual pervert -- and a dangerous one at that. The Brief History has both Klassen and Koehl involved in anal rape. (COINTELPRO, and the fact that it ended in 1971, may be the reason why there was a pre-existing rumor of this sort about Koehl and not about Klassen, since the Church of the Creator was only founded two years after COINTELRPO ended.)

This smear has the convenient attribute that it automatically insinuates the same accusation against anybody that doesn't ostracize the targeted person, as in this passage from "The Self-Promotion of David Duke." This is one of the few passages in that section that Covington did not plagiarize from the SPLC:

Why [David Duke] would wish to maintain the secret of a highly placed homosexual in the Movement is unknown. After visiting Dr. Pierce, Duke visited Matt Koehl at the NSWPP headquarters.

4. Conspiracies that commit heinous crimes without ever being punished. What makes Covington's conspiracy-theorizing unusual is that he aims his lurid accusations of conspiracy not at Jews, who have cohesion and an ethos that facilitate conspiracy against non-Jewish society, but at voluntary associations of White people concerned for their race.

The obvious question is how it could be possible that Harold Covington would know of such crimes without the police also knowing and making an arrest. So that this dubious proposition may seem credible, it is necessary to create a cloud of mystification. There is a tendency in these stories to rely heavily on what is not known or not knowable. "Rumors" (surely invented by Covington) are cited to suggest to the reader how to fill the void.

Here Covington offers spurious confirmation of his innuendo that a conspiracy within the NSWPP had killed Rockwell:

Koehl later claimed to be Rockwell’s hand-picked successor and “Deputy Commander,” but no official appointment to this particular post over Rockwell’s signature has ever been produced and so far as anyone recalls, Koehl never used such a title when Rockwell was alive.* The reference to Koehl as “Deputy Commander” on the last page of White Power is a later addendum which does not appear in first editions of the book. There have been persistent rumors down through the years that on the night of Commander Rockwell’s murder, Captain Robert Lloyd and Dr. William Pierce broke into Commander Rockwell’s safe and destroyed his political testament. It is not known what this document contained.

One of Covington's favorite variations on this theme is the accusation of getting away with fraud. Covington has this several times in his smear of Klassen. In the cases of both Klassen and Koehl, Covington insinuates that the culprit is able to escape consequences or cover up the history of his fraud because he has privileged connections or is secretly favored by the powers that be.

Cooper accused Koehl of corruption in the way he managed the NSWPP and its resources but that was not enough for Covington, who added this:

Koehl later managed to escape investigation and indictment for securities fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling something he called “Victory Bonds” payable after “the day of National Socialist victory.” An SEC investigation is usually something impossible to shake off or divert; with all their wealth and power, big Jew stock swindlers like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken and tycoons like Conrad Black were unable to do so. Yet the SEC investigation against Koehl was quietly dropped. It is not known why, but anyone who can make an SEC investigation go away obviously has some pretty heavy juice working for him somewhere along the line.

5. Insinuation that the smear-victim is a Jew. Cooper very briefly, with a single subordinate clause, insinuated that there might be something questionable about Koehl's lineage.

Whether Koehl's actions are based on genetic background (His father is Rumanian and his mother's maiden name is Bierbaum) ...

That is the full extent of Cooper's speculation about Koehl's racial heritage. Covington took that one tin drum and built a whole marching band around it. The paragraph below is clearly an expansion of Cooper's brief comment because the parenthetical clause from Cooper reappears in pieces, and the rest of the paragraph is an attempt to answer the question "Whether Koehl's actions are based on genetic background" with a yea that will seem credible due to the large amount of verbiage devoted to it.

In the mid-1980s Rick Cooper was able to get hold of a copy of Matt Koehl’s birth certificate, and he discovered that while his father was Romanian, probably of German descent (there are many Saxon Germans in Romania) his mother’s maiden name was Ruth Bierbaum, which is about as Jewish-sounding a name as it’s possible for a woman to have. Since Ruth Bierbaum was presumably born in Romania as well, at a time when the country was almost one third Jewish, it has been impossible to establish Koehl’s actual racial antecedents, but his swarthy skin and greasy hair were always noteworthy within the Movement. There is an excellent probability that Koehl’s mother was Jewish, which would make him Jewish under rabbinic law, since descent is determined on the female side because “no one can truly know the father save the mother.” (A fancy Talmudic way of saying that Jewish women are such sluts that the mother is the only parent who can be reliably determined.) Plus there was the strong suspicion, never completely dissipated, that Koehl was somehow involved in Rockwell’s murder, as well as the constantly hovering rumors about the 1955 New York buggery case, and the well-known fact of Koehl’s open aversion to women.

Note that Cooper did not say that Koehl's mother's name was Ruth; he only gave her surname, Bierbaum, which is quite German. Covington added the Hebrew given name Ruth. Even if that is accurate, there is no reason why a woman named either Ruth or Bierbaum must be Jewish, and the other allegations to which Covington refers as forming a coherent picture with this allegation of Jewishness are not proven either. This is a lot of nothing being made to look like something simply by talking it up.

Covington pulled out all the stops in attacking both Matt Koehl and Ben Klassen. According to Covington's anonymous Brief History, both men are Jewish swindlers, homosexual rapists, and murders who got away with multiple serious crimes, and even when caught escaped conviction and had the public records destroyed, without any indication of any of their nefarious activities ever appearing in newspapers. And Harold Covington is the lone voice of decency.

________________________________

* In my research on the death of George Lincoln Rockwell I found documentation that Koehl had indeed been publicly known as the Deputy Commander. On 14 April 1967, just a few months before Rockwell's death, the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia reported:

The Spotsylvania County American Nazi Party chapter is making plans to celebrate the birthday of Adolph Hitler next Thursday, April 20. [...] Principal speaker will be Maj. Matt Koehl, deputy commander of the American Nazi Party and second in command to George Lincoln Rockwell. [Free Lance-Star, 14 April 1967]

Harold Covington's Defamation of Ben Klassen

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Young Ben Klassen with lifelong spouse Henri. (1950s)

Ben Klassen was a former Florida legislator who founded the Church of the Creator in 1973. He was the author of Nature's Eternal Religion, The White Man's Bible, and several other books.

The section about Klassen in the Brief History is called "The Strange Case of Benny Klassen." A substantially identical screed was posted in February 2007, several months before the first appearance of the entire Brief History, on "Jack88_2005's blog," where the following authorship is alleged:

Based very loosely on the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report, Montgomery, Alabama November 2002, with additions to the Klassen bio and COTC early years sections provided by Slim Deardorff, Matt Hale, Matt Hayhow, Gary Gallo, George Burdi, Carl Messick, and the late Harry Kelly as well as many former COTC members who wish to remain anonymous. - RD

It is noteworthy that initially Covington was not mentioned as a source, whereas on 3 August 2010, in an attempt at damage control (since he was being publicly identified as the author of the Brief History), Covington admitted that "a lot of the Klassen material (although not all of it) is either plagiarized directly from my past writings or re-worked from my stuff."

In fact the Brief History's section on Ben Klassen is a very heavily "re-worked" article from the SPLC's Intelligence Report, Summer 1999, titled "A History." Covington's "The Strange Case of Benny Klassen" retains that article's format and much of its text.* It is not apparent that any source named on "Jack88_2005's blog" other than the SPLC was used.

You would expect the SPLC as an anti-racist organization to be among the harshest critics of Ben Klassen, but their material is quite innocuous compared to what was added to it. The SPLC never accused Ben Klassen of rape, fraud, or murder -- apart from civil liability in the case of a Negro that was shot dead because he threatened to kill COTC minister George Loeb with a brick, a case which the SPLC won by default because Klassen was dead and his successor neither responded to the suit nor appeared in court.

If there were some verifiable revelations of impropriety about Klassen from former associates, such as appear in this Brief History, one would expect the SPLC to publicize them, but they do not. As Craig Cobb ("Chain") commented in 2007, "Likely the SPLC knows not to publish such disprovable lies on its website...." It stands to reason that the wild allegations that do not appear in the original SPLC piece -- allegations of sexual perversion, Jewish heritage, weird religious rituals, and a multitude of concealed crimes ranging from fraud to murder -- have no demonstrable basis in fact.

These stories were simply invented by Harold Covington. There is nobody else known for the kinds of bizarre accusations against Ben Klassen that Harold Covington makes, and he has a history of making these and similar accusations at least since 1989. Several of Covington's anti-Klassen smears which appear in the Brief History were also contained in his very nasty essay gloating over Klassen's death in September 1993 (which is substantially or entirely reproduced in all three of Jew Jeffrey Kaplan's books on White Nationalism).

Klassen had a few words to say about Covington too while he was alive, although nothing so bizarre as what Covington has been promulgating about him. "Anatomy of a Hypocrite" from the March 1989 issue of Racial Loyalty can easily be found online.

From that essay one gets a hint of the basis of this conflict: Covington had tried to discourage Klassen relocating to North Carolina because that was his own home state and he didn't want competition. This interpretation is confirmed in a letter written by Covington on 5 November 1992 wherein he complained that Will Williams was "trying to deliver the entire racialist movement in North Carolina to Old Benny Buttf-ck on a silver platter."

These smears don't seem to be entirely a matter of unscrupulous competition, though: to continue making false attacks on a man's reputation after he is dead, as Covington has done, seems more an expression of psychopathology than of calculating evil.

Following publication of "Anatomy of a Hypocrite," Covington retaliated by publishing highly imaginative libels against Ben Klassen and his right-hand man of the time, Will Williams, and subsequently against anybody (e.g., William Pierce, Tom Metzger) that seemed to be other than hostile toward them. That is the origin of the smears against Ben Klassen and several other of the people attacked in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement.

Klassen's life before the COTC

The format of the SPLC's "A History," which was retained in "The Strange Case of Benny Klassen," is a chronology, a series of dates with a list of events next to each. While the SPLC's "A History" concerns itself little with Klassen's life before the COTC was founded in 1973, Covington's Brief History contains added material, all of it defamatory, for the years 1948, 1966, and 1968.

The malicious bias of the author of the Brief History toward Ben Klassen is evident in the fact that the most noteworthy fact about Klassen prior to founding the Church of the Creator, that in 1955 he had invented an improved form of electric can-opener, marketed as Canolectric, is not even mentioned. There are several references to Klassen's can opener in online news archives. The Hartford Courant of 8 December 1957 mentions that Canolectric was developed by Klassen Enterprises, Inc. The Miami News of 28 July 1958 contains the following note about the product:

A new entry in the field of electric can openers is the Canolectric, made by Robbins & Myers, Inc., Memphis, Tenn., which claims that it is the only fully automatic can opener. It requires no manual piercing of the can lid or manual release of the cutting blade. You just push the button, says the firm, and that's all.

Instead of presenting verifiable information like this about Klassen's life before the COTC, the author of the Brief History confines himself to innuendos that Klassen was a Jew and had been prosecuted for fraud, none of which is documentable. The claims are as follows:

1. that Ben Klassen's origins are a great mystery, and that he has stated different dates and locations of his own birth (and birth-names) on different occasions. No examples are given to support that claim. I found a newspaper item that somewhat addresses this alleged confusion about Klassen's country of origin:

Klassen, former Republican state representative from Pompano Beach, protested vigorously when the board denied his application to register for sale Palms and Pines Ranchos, a Collier County development.

[...]

"I don't want to appear contentious," said Klassen. "But I have lived in four countries and I am a refugee from communism and the only nation I chose to live in was the United States. Jabbing his finger at his Constitution he continued, "I contend that when I can't sell my land due to some bureaucratic edict, my constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment have been abridge." "Board Eyes All Isolated Land Sales," from the St. Petersburg Times, 2 November 1968.

This is consistent with what Klassen later wrote in his autobiography, Against the Evil Tide, as is evident even from the table of contents. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times had no difficulty putting the pieces together:

Ben Klassen was born in Ukraine to German-speaking Mennonite parents. His family, described in his books as "early victims of Jewish Communism," lived briefly in Mexico and then moved to Canada, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering and a bachelor of arts. In 1945, Klassen settled in the United States and became a citizen three years later. (Sarah Henry, "Marketing Hate", Los Angeles Times, 12 December 1993.)

2. that Klassen was indicted in 1948 along with several others (with Jewish names) for "mail fraud, bankruptcy fraud, and theft from interstate commerce by a Federal grand jury in New Orleans." The author admits however that he really knows of no such indictment when he says, "Details are sketchy." Grand jury indictments are a matter of public record, and it would have been reported in newspapers. A news archive search for 1947-1949 turns up nothing relevant.

3. that there was a "bankruptcy fraud probe" circa 1966 involving Klassen and two partners with Jewish names in an alleged Palm Beach real estate firm. If you do a Google News Archive search on the terms Klassen and Shapiro and Weinleben you will find absolutely nothing. Likewise for "SKW Realty" in the 1950s and 60s.

4. that Klassen's "religious affiliation is listed in the 1968 Florida State Government Who’s Who as Jewish." There is no book called the Florida State Government Who's Who. There is Who's Who in Government, and there is Florida Lives: The Sunshine State Who's Who. The title that Covington gives is one that nobody will be able to find on the reference shelf of any library.

5. that in 1968 Klassen was a member of “Jews for Wallace.”

Here is an article about a dispute between two factions of Wallace supporters, about who was really in charge of the Florida campaign. On one side, Miami realtor Thomas H. Hart, on the other side Dr. William Campbell Douglass and Ben Klassen. Douglass and Klassen were both members of the John Birch Society, which Hart apparently regarded as political poison. Since this article discusses the character and connections of the men on both sides of this dispute, you might expect "Jews for Wallace" to be mentioned, but it is not.

Vice-chairman of Dr. Douglass' Wallace organization is Ben Klassen, a Palm Beach Republican, the only member of the Florida Legislature to identify himself as a member of the John Birch Society. ("Wallace Men Feud in Florida," by Charles F. Hesser, from The Miami News, 7 December 1967.)

There is plenty of mention in old newspapers of Ben Klassen's involvement in the 1968 Wallace for President campaign, but no mention of "Jews for Wallace" anywhere.

The only curve in the state's new election law is that no more than 2458 signatures can come from any one county. And there must be petitions from at least 34 different counties in the state with a minimum of 61 signatures on them. But Broward County's Wallace chairman, Ben Klassen, has said this requirement can be easily met and will actually be an aide to Wallace workers in stimulating voter action. ( Wallace Builds Election Machine in Kirk County," from the St. Petersburg Times, 18 January 1968.)

NO. 2 man on the Wallace-For-President Committee is former Rep. Ben Klassen, a Palm Beach Republican who lost out in an attempt to move from the House to the Senate. ("Wallace Supporters In State Gear For January," St. Petersburg Times, 6 December 1967.)

As far as I can tell, not only is there no mention in the online newspaper archives of any connection between Ben Klassen and Jews for Wallace: the organization may have never existed. It certainly doesn't turn up in a newspaper archive search for the 1960s. In a Google Web search, it only appears in the context of this smear of Ben Klassen. Anybody can prove that to himself by doing a search on this term:

"Jews for Wallace" -Klassen

From all the books, all the newspapers, all the articles online, you will get zero results, which implies that "Jews for Wallace" probably never existed except as a fictional element in this attack on Ben Klassen.

In the next section you will see confirmation that the detail about "Jews for Wallace" was simply made up.

Altered Material from the SPLC

The first entry in the SPLC's chronology of the Church of the Creator, on which "The Strange Case of Benny Klassen" is very loosely based, is dated 1973 and reads as follows:

1973 Be[r]nhardt "Ben" Klassen, a former Florida state legislator and state chairman of George Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign, announces the formation of the Church of the Creator (COTC) in Lighthouse Point, Fla.

That happens to be slightly incorrect; Klassen was the vice-chairman for Florida and the chairman for Broward County. In his COTC chronology, Harold Anonymous Covington has changed SPLC's sentence to this:

1973 - Benny Klassen, a former Florida state legislator and state chairman of "Jews for Wallace" during Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign, announces the formation of the Church of the Creator (COTC) in Lighthouse Point, Fla.

Covington simply replaced "George" with "Jews for Wallace during" and replaced the respectful form of Klassen's name with the insulting diminutive, "Benny." (Covington also does this to his younger brother Benjamin Covington, referring to him as Benjie.)

In addition to the altered passages from the SPLC's chronology, there are claims that have no basis in it, like this one:

Circa 1973 - At some point in this time period, Klassen is arrested for something, no one is quite sure what.

With no date, no location, and no specific crime, the author is referring to nothing. Covington adds verbiage to the mystery, including a gratuitous reference to himself. The alleged basis for this nebulous rumor that some arrest had occurred is another rumor, that "Klassen needed to get the court’s permission to leave the state [Florida] in 1978, according to the vengeful Oren Fenton Potito who spent a lifetime stalking Klassen...." Oren F. Potito was an early Christian Identity preacher who died in 1995 and is thus (conveniently for the author of the Brief History) unavailable for comment.

Harold Covington would have us believe that Ben Klassen was responsible for a number of murders, and that although he, Covington, knew this, somehow Klassen was never charged:

1978 - Klassen business manager Barry Edwards is murdered in what police call a “gangland style execution.” Edwards’s body is found on June 12th, 1978 in the trunk of a car parked at a public beach in West Palm Beach.

Regarding your inquiry into the death/murder of a Mr. Barry Edwards, our records show a Barry Edwards alive as of April 1984. Without any other details such as his date of birth, social security number, etc., we may not be talking about the same person. I can tell you we don't have, according to our records, a Barry Edwards murdered in the City of West Palm Beach after 1967.

The Brief History has two entries for 1978. The SPLC's entry for 1982 became the first two sentences of the Brief History's second entry for 1978. Why? Probably to make Klassen's relocation to North Carolina conform to a canard under Covington's "Circa 1973" heading that he "needed to get the court’s permission to leave the state [Florida] in 1978." The underlined portions were added by Covington:

1978 - In March, Klassen moves COTC headquarters from Florida to 22 acres of land he has purchased in Otto, N.C., building a personal residence, a three-story church, a small warehouse and a “School for Gifted Boys.” Later in the year, COTC is granted an exemption from state taxes based on its status as a church. This exemption is later lifted by the state and an investigation for mail fraud and fraudulent conversion of funds is launched by the State of North Carolina around 1990. These investigations are eventually dropped without any charges or indictments, and neither the Southern Poverty Law Center, who investigated this incident as part of the Bryson City lawsuit (q. v.) nor anyone else was ever able to obtain any information as to why.

One of Covington's specialties is conjuring a cloud of mystery and suspicion where there is no basis for it. The state tax exemption granted in 1984 (not 1978 as Covington says nor 1982 as the SPLC says) was indeed later taken away (with a review in 1989 leading to revocation in 1991 according to the SPLC and the Wilmington Morning Star, although Covington moves it to 1992), but it was not related to any accusation of "mail fraud" or "fraudulent conversion of funds" as the context here implies. (It had everything to do with the new county tax assessor, Richard Lightner.) Mail fraud is in any case a federal offense: it would not have been investigated by the State of North Carolina as Covington alleges. Unlike Covington's Brief History, the SPLC's history of the COTC doesn't even contain the word fraud.

Here Covington alleges that Klassen and the COTC had friction with their North Carolina neighbors in 1980 when in fact the COTC didn't relocate from Florida to Macon County, North Carolina until 1982. This is 100% fiction:

1980 - Klassen stages quasi-Roman Goat Dance rituals on his property, resulting in complaints from Shouting Baptist neighbors to whom these offensive rituals are visible from the highway and from their homes. The Goat Dance is apparently an attempt to invoke the Graeco-Roman god Priapus, also known in mythology as Pan. The ritual involves Klassen dressing in toga-like vestments with a wreath of leafy greenery on his head, and a number of young men or boys dancing around a bonfire largely nude except for loin cloths of some kinds, thong type bathing trunks or athletic supporters. A goat is also present, presumably because of the animal’s connection in myth to Pan, etc. Macon County Sheriff Homer Holbrooks visits Klassen and informs him of the neighbors’ complaints, and the Goat Dance ritual is discontinued, or at least moved indoors.

The allegation that the Church of the Creator engages in "goat dance" rituals with scantily clad boys has been a favorite Covington smear, one that he still uses in 2010. It's not a very likely accusation toward a religion that disavows belief in "spooks," which is how Klassen disparagingly referred to deities.

However, this kind of accusation is calculated to induce a reaction in primitive Christians, who are prone to believe that anybody who is not a Christian is worshiping the Devil and involved in all kinds of perversion. One of the original reasons for friction between Klassen and Covington, as described in "Anatomy of a Hypocrite," was that Covington posed as the leader of a Christian movement even though he was known to refer to Jesus as "the dead Jew on a stick." Klassen called Covington's cozening of Christians in 1989 "the ultimate in two-faced hypocrisy," and Covington has continued to manipulate Christians with this goat-dance story.

The SPLC's entry for 1981 is plagiarized verbatim.

For 1983, where the SPLC simply notes, " Klassen begins publishing a monthly newsletter, Racial Loyalty, in June," Covington uses that fact as a springboard for bizarre accusations about the content (the nature of which you can imagine, since this is Covington), and even about the quality of the paper on which it was printed, which he calls "squamous and greasy."

In Trials, Triumphs, and Tribulations Klassen writes that for some years he had attempted to get Tom Metzger to become affiliated with the Church of the Creator, either as hasta primus or as a regional leader of the church. He believed that Metzger needed COTC and that COTC needed his flamboyance and ability to get media exposure, but he'd had no success at bringing him under the COTC's umbrella. According to Tom Metzger (responding to an inquiry on 25 August 2010), Ben Klassen traveled to California to participate in Metzger's Race and Reason TV show in 1988, and while there, invited him (for the last time) to become his hasta primus, i.e. his assistant.

The son, John, Metzger had submitted an application to become a minister in the COTC in July 1984, when he was 16, and was accepted. Klassen perceived the son as more receptive to COTC's doctrine than his father. According Klassen's own account, during his 1988 visit he intended to discuss with John Metzger, then age 20, the possibility of his taking over the church. The SPLC's entry for 1988 (the part not underlined below) thus appears to be correct.

1988 Klassen, now 70, travels to California to ask John Metzger, son of neo-Nazi White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger, about taking over COTC. Metzger, saying he "wouldn't want to be affiliated with a church," declines. Klassen begins lengthy smear campaign against both Metzgers. The Metzgers reply with pointed comments about Klassen’s sexual orientation. John Metzger tells Skinheads, “If you go to [Klassen’s ashram at] Otto, make sure you sit down and keep your mouth shut.”

The underlined part was added by Harold Covington. Klassen did not accomplish what he had hoped on this visit and left very disappointed. As a result there was some friction between Klassen and Tom Metzger, but Covington has exaggerated it. The claim that the Metzgers made any comment about "Klassen's sexual orientation" is a lie, according to Tom Metzger. Referring to Covington as "Tubby," Metzger sets the record straight:

[Ben Klassen] did say some unkind words about his stay in California at my home in his book. At the time whoever was editing the paper attacked us pretty hard. We never talked about Klassen's sexuality and doubted Tubby's smears very much.... Anyhow after a few nasty statements it smoothed out and I always supported him against unwarranted attacks. Ben had money and was upper-middle class. His my way or the highway is common among that class.

John Metzger continued to be a minister in the Church of the Creator and Tom Metzger calls Creativity his religion today.

The following entries that appear in the Brief History have no connection to anything in the SPLC's "A History." You will note that all three have the element of sexual perversion, and that two insinuate murders for which nobody was prosecuted.

1991 - Skinhead Steve Martell commits suicide after leaving note describing homosexual liaison with COTC “Reverend” Jerry Michael Pace. Martell’s brother Dave vows homicidal vengeance against Pace. Pace disappears; later believed to have re-surfaced in the Movement under several different pseudonyms.

A Google news archive search shows nobody named Martell committing suicide in August 1991. Since no city, county, or state is specified for this alleged event it is impossible to investigate further. "Jerry Michael Pace" the "known homosexual" makes two appearances in the Brief History.

1989 - In July, “Reverend” Harry Kelly is found dead in his New York City apartment of a heroin overdose. Kelly, a former drug user, was believed to have been clean for some time. The last person to be seen with Kelly alive was an unknown white male whose physical description bears a resemblance to known homosexual COTC “Reverend” and suspected government informant Jerry Michael Pace.[...]

According to the obituary in Racial Loyalty (July 1989) Harry Kelly had been COTC's "chief organizer for New York City and beyond." He did die of a heroin overdose after having been clean for some time, on 1 July 1989, after reestablishing connection with old acquaintances who were drug users.

As for the mention of a "known" homosexual in the COTC, this seems practically impossible on its face. The Church of the Creator exalted Nature (e.g. Klassen's book Nature's Eternal Religion), and point 10 of "salubrious living" as outlined in The White Man's Bible (p.61) is "Healthy expression of our sexual instincts." COTC's position on homosexuality would echo that of Thomas Aquinas, that homosexuality is contra naturam. If any "known homosexual" had been tolerated within COTC it would have caused serious dissension.

Covington didn't dare claim that Ben Klassen was a known homosexual, because this would have been recognized on its face as a lie; therefore Covington always accused Klassen of being a secret homosexual. But regarding some obscure figure like "Jerry Michael Pace," it was possible to say everybody knew and be believed by some people, because very few of the readers would have had any knowledge of that person apart from what Covington told them.

Actually, there is no way that anybody could know anything about Jerry Michael Pace apart from what Covington told them. W.W. Williams, who was the number two man in COTC at the time, says that he never heard of any Jerry Michael Pace. That would seem to put this name in the same category as some of Covington's other fictional characters that appear in Covington's Brief History.

1989 - Alabama Klan leader Roger Handley is arrested by the Alabama State Police on gun charges in a nighttime raid. He is found in bed with 17 year-old male COTC “Reverend” Will Satterwhite, thus adding to the general air of homoeroticism surrounding the original Klassen COTC.

This is a distorted reference to something that did happen, not in 1989 but in 1992.** According to The Tuscaloosa News of 24 June 1992, the Invisible Empire's Grand Dragon for Alabama, Roger Handley, was arrested for first degree sodomy of "a male less than 16 years old," and in May 1995 he was found guilty. This incident had absolutely no connection to Ben Klassen or the Church of the Creator.

1990 - On October 12th, 20 year-old former Skinhead Dennis Witherspoon is found dead in a rural area of Dade County, Florida. He has been bound with duct tape and shot several times in the head with a .22-caliber revolver. Witherspoon was known to have been a former COTC “Reverend” who claimed that in the summer of 1989, a year previously, he arrived in the Otto, N.C. compound and was invited to Klassen’s basement rec room for a private showing of Leni Riefenstahl’ s Triumph of the Will. He was given drugged liquor and passed out. Witherspoon then claims he suddenly awoke on the floor, doubled up nude with sofa pillows under him, while Klassen was in the act of sodomizing him, with the movie still playing. Witherspoon jumped up and assaulted Klassen, beating him very badly and extorting a promise of money. Witherspoon claims he was given $10,000 in cash next day and a used car, with which he drove to Florida. The only comment Klassen ever makes about this incident is that Witherspoon was attempting to blackmail him. Florida police write off Witherspoon’s death as a drug-related killing, which may be correct.

The details given here imply that Klassen was a suspect in this "murder" and was questioned about it, but you will find nothing about it in a Google News Archive search. "The Old Order Passeth," an article written by Harold Covington under the pen name Luther Williams, which Covington sent out to readers of his Resistance newsletter in the 1990s, gives (on page 3) 1987, not 1989, as the date of the alleged anal rape: obviously, dates can be flexible in a story that was never based on fact anyway. According to Will Williams there was never a Dennis Witherspoon in the COTC.

For absolute verification, an inquiry was sent to the Miami-Dade Police Department:

Is there any record of a Dennis Witherspoon being found dead in rural Dade County? The claim is that he had been shot several times in the head with a .22-caliber revolver. This is alleged to have happened on 12 October 1990.

On 2 September 2010 Major Rey Valdes of the homicide bureau gave this response:

Thank you for your recent email requesting information related to the death of Dennis Witherspoon, which occurred in Miami-Dade County, on October 12, 1990.

We have researched our records and were unable to locate a homicide case involving Mr. Witherspoon, or matching the description you provided. In abundance of caution, we also contacted the Medical Examiner Department, with similar results.

This means that they could find neither any record of a homicide involving a Dennis Witherspoon, nor any killing of a similar description on or about the specified date.

Major Valdes says that further information, if anybody has any, or further inquiries about the alleged Witherspoon homicide (which evidently never occurred) should be directed to Sergeant Miguel Tabernero of the Homicide Bureau, Miami-Dade Police Department.

The examples given above are typical of the stories that Harold Covington was peddling about Ben Klassen and the Church of the Creator in 1989-1993.

The SPLC's entries for 1997, 1998, and 1999 are reproduced in the Brief History without alteration or addition, probably because Ben Klassen by that time had been dead a few years, so that it was not practical to change those entries in a way that would make them defamatory to him.

Some of the unaltered information from the SPLC has its own problems, affecting people other than Klassen:

1990 - Declaring that church leadership would change "at the top of every decade, on the decade," Klassen announces that Rudy "Butch" Stanko-then serving a six-year sentence for selling tainted meat-will take over once he is released from prison.

According to Rudy Stanko the meat was not tainted. Stanko was the owner of Cattle King Meat Packing , a very large meat-packing business that had been in his family for three generations. Meat-packing is now owned mainly by Jews and Stanko says that they determined to eliminate him as a non-Jewish competitor. The Score is Stanko's book about his ordeal. A real, good-faith history of White nationalism would have given Stanko's side of the story instead of just reproducing the SPLC's hostile summation without comment.

Covington on using the SPLC as a Source

On the discussion page of the Wikipedia article about himself, Harold Covington complained bitterly about the use of SPLC material:

Nor can anything whatsoever from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a private organization which raises millions of dollars by assaulting and destroying the civil rights and liberties of Americans of European descent, be considered in any way a legitimate source of information or validation. Trashing people like me is how Morris Dees makes his millions.

That is just so sad, Harold! Here you are, trashing people with no millions to show for it. But then you are using SPLC material to do it.

The title of Ben Klassen's and Will Williams' 1989 polemic against Harold Covington, "Anatomy of a Hypocrite," was very well chosen.

____________________

* It is possible to find sites maintained by Klassen's admirers that also use altered forms of the SPLC's "A History," but their alterations have a pro-Klassen bias, whereas the alterations in this Brief History are consistently hostile.

** Handley had been in the news in 1989 but it related to a conviction for "civil rights violations" committed ten years earlier. Handley was sufficiently noteworthy that if he had been arrested for sodomy in 1989 it would have been in the newspapers.

Harold Covington (the presumed author) plagiarized most of his attack on David Duke from the SPLC

2010-08-09T13:57:00.001-07:00

On the discussion page of the Wikipedia article bearing his name, Harold Covington has complained bitterly about the fact that the SPLC is used as a source of information about himself.

Nor can anything whatsoever from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a private organization which raises millions of dollars by assaulting and destroying the civil rights and liberties of Americans of European descent, be considered in any way a legitimate source of information or validation. Trashing people like me is how Morris Dees makes his millions.

How unfair, then, that "The Self-Promotion of David Duke" from A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement is mostly copied from the SPLC (Martin A. Lee, "Insatiable", Intelligence Report, Spring 2003).

There are, however, a few noteworthy differences.

The most memorable addition by Anonymous is the twice-stated claim that Duke had liposuction to his buttocks, a claim which appears nowhere in the SPLC's report and does not seem to be in any other source that I can find. It seems to be an invented detail. The closest thing that I could find was a rumor from 1991 that, as part of his facial improvement, Duke had undergone liposuction to his lower lip (People, 18 November 1991). Duke denied it.

The anonymous compiler of the Brief History redacts sections from the SPLC's article that refer to the SPLC (thus concealing the source of the plagiarism) or that would be, from a White Nationalist perspective, complimentary to Duke. For example, the SPLC's reference to Duke as "a neo-nazi true believer" is omitted.

In place of that omitted paragraph that gives Duke credit for appearing as a true believer with his book, My Awakening, this appears:

The book, which Duke enthusiastically predicted would “change the course of history,” did nothing of the kind One reviewer said of My Awakening, “It’s all right, the political and racial parts of it, although it’s all been said before and better by others. Large sections of it are basically just narcissistic bullshit with Duke breaking his arm patting himself on the back. It certainly doesn’t justify or ameliorate the harm Duke has done to the Movement with his constant financial and sexual misbehavior. ”

And who is that "one reviewer"? Well, that review of Duke's book appears on a site offering free book downloads, and that site just happens to have Harold Covington's fingerprints all over it. Note the blue, white, and green flag from the cover of one of Covington's novels. Note the nw (northwest) in the address. Note the reference to the webmaster as "the Old Man" and above all note the defamation of Ben Klassen that Covington couldn't resist attaching to On the Brink of a Bloody Racial War.

In addition to quoting from Covington's review of Duke's book, the anonymous author adds two mentions of Harold Covington by name to the SPLC's short biography of Duke, in a passage about the 1981 White racialist plot to invade Dominica. Covington is mentioned first because members of his NSPA unit allegedly participated in the plot, and again by way of contrast to the "shameful and treacherous" conduct of David Duke during the ensuing trial:

Duke slithered out of this one by co-operating fully with federal prosecutors and testifying fully and extensively before a grand jury, spilling his guts under a grant of immunity.

[...]

(Conversely Covington, who was only peripherally implicated and who had advised strongly against the whole hare-brained thing from the beginning, took a far more honorable course when he refused immunity, took the Fifth Amendment on all questions, and at a good deal of personal risk to himself refused to testify even to his own name when he was subpoenaed by the New Orleans grand jury.)

This gratuitous praise of a relatively obscure person such as Harold Covington, extraneous to the narrative about David Duke, would really be hard to understand if Covington were not the author of this Brief History.

With this awareness that the author almost certainly is Harold Covington and that therefore I should be on the alert for outrageous lies, on 10 August 2010 I contacted David Duke to ask for his side of the story. I asked if he had been involved in the 1981 Dominica caper and he said, "No." I further asked, "What was the nature of your involvement in the ensuing legal process?" Duke answered as follows:

Since I did know the principals, specifically Don Black, I was called before the Grand Jury and refused to say anything, using the provisions of the 5th Amendment. Didn't make them too happy obviously but I think that is the only course that true activists should take in these kinds of matters. Say nothing, because anything you say could harm others or yourself.

Duke's answer is validated by Tyler Bridges, The Rise of David Duke (1994), page 99. According to Bridges Duke escaped indictment, not as Covington alleges "by cooperating fully," but because he refused to testify.

How Much of it is SPLC?

The parts plagiarized from the SPLC are in red below. Blue font indicates plagiarism from Rick Cooper. The rest is presumed to be what Harold Covington added.

The Self-Promotion of David Duke

“David Duke has been a professional racist for his entire adult life,” wrote Tyler Bridges, author of The Rise of David Duke, a biography of Duke’s early years. “He deeply believes his anti-Semitic political philosophy, but it has also been a way for him to get money from his followers. It is how he makes a living.”

Duke has spent virtually his entire career living off the kindness of strangers-people who mistakenly thought he was championing their cause for no other reason than a desire to help whites. He sold and resold supposedly secret mailing lists, raised money under false pretenses, and lived off the proceeds of fund-raising for at least 10 different political campaigns. He womanized shamelessly and spent thousands on cosmetic surgery for himself, including liposuction to his buttocks.

From his formative years as a supposed National Socialist right up to the present, David Duke’s foremost concern always has been David Duke. For 30 years now, America’s best-known white supremacist has engaged in a striking pattern of financial chicanery and self-serving rip-offs.

Duke Ernest Duke has one paramount skill which he has exhibited throughout his whole life: an incredible ability to re-invent himself. He does it every few years. From National Socialist, to Klansman, to suit-and-tie- racist, to state legislator and political wheeler-dealer, to quasi-intellectual author, to globe-trotting celebrity collecting meaningless honorary degrees from Eastern European universities no one ever heard of, to “prison martyr” to “elder statesman of the Movement,” Duke has packed a dozen lifetimes of bushwah into one.

Duke’s refusal to be fettered by any considerations of truth or honesty, combined with a total, complete, and utter shamelessness unparalleled even in the notably shameless White movement, have made him the Movement’s premier operator and public figure. Along with Dr. William L. Pierce, Duke can probably be considered as being one of the Movement’s success stories in the purely personal sense. He has lived a life of excitement, adventure, and luxury, and all on somebody else’s dime. Unlike Ed Fields, who practiced as a chiropractor for some years, and Dr. William L. Pierce who at least did a couple or years as an assistant college professor in the 1960s, at age 57 David Duke can honestly say that he has never worked a single day in his life. Duke has been in more tight corners than a feather duster. He has stolen what has to be millions of dollars down through the years, and he’s only done one short prison sentence. No one else in the Movement can match that record except for Pierce, who may have stolen slightly less but who never did a day behind bars.

David Ernest Duke began his racial career while a college student, as a member of Matt Koehl’s NSWPP for a brief period of time. Duke has always tried to disavow or deny this period in his life, but his enemies still to this day glory in publishing a photo of Duke taken in 1971 while he was picketing the student union at LSU, wearing a brown shirt and Swastika armband. When confronted with this photo in circumstances where he can’t slither out of it, Duke harrumphs and says his Nazi period was a “youthful mistake.”

During one of his trips to Arlington, Virginia, in about 1971, Duke stopped by to visit Dr. Pierce of the National Alliance across Interstate 95 from the NSWPP headquarters. According to Rick Cooper, Dr. Pierce offered to give David Duke the information regarding Matt Koehl’s homosexual background if Duke would publish this information in his Klan publication at the time, The Crusader. Duke refused, for reasons which remain obscure; why he would wish to maintain the secret of a highly placed homosexual in the Movement is unknown. After visiting Dr. Pierce, Duke visited Matt Koehl at the NSWPP headquarters.

Subsequently, Duke spoke with an NSWPP duty officer, James N. Mason, and told Mason of Dr. Pierce’s offer. Jim Mason, years later, told this to Cooper who then wrote to Duke, asking for an account, confirmation or denial that Dr. Pierce made such an offer. Duke never replied.

David Duke first got caught with his hand in the till in 1972, shortly after he temporarily dropped out of Louisiana State University to devote himself to full-time neo-Nazi activism, according to Bridges’ book. Police arrested Duke and three others for allegedly raising $500 for George Wallace’s presidential campaign and pocketing the money. The charges were dropped after an influential Duke mentor convinced Wallace campaign officials to change their story.

By 1974, Duke had founded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and it wasn’t long before he became the media’s favorite Klan leader. Vowing to modernize the Klan, he urged his acolytes to “get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms.” After appearing on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow talk show, he was able to use his newfound celebrity to recruit Louis Beam, Don Black and Tom Metzger, who each went on to play key roles in America’s White Nationalist movement.

During this same period, starting with a failed 1975 bid for the Louisiana state senate, Duke began a series of political campaigns. It appears certain they were at least partly funded with money taken from his Klan group’s coffers.

Before long, several of Duke’s most intimate allies began to grow weary of his self-serving personality and his constant, unquenchable greed for money. William Pierce, who Duke had begun corresponding with when the Louisianan was still a teenager, admonished Duke to quit taking credit for an important Pierce pamphlet, Who Runs the Media? Others in the racist movement angrily responded to [...] Duke’s notorious womanizing, which was almost pathological. Duke hit on any female he saw, literally within a matter of minutes of meeting her-single women, married women, female reporters, waitresses, women he saw on the street, it didn’t matter. His sexual obsession approached the medical condition known as satyriasis. Word soon got out that no one could trust their wives, daughters, sisters, or for that matter mothers alone in David Duke’s presence, and many Duke functions to this day turn into an elaborate dance or game to try and keep Duke away from any attractive females present.

Duke’s shady financial dealings grew harder and harder to conceal as well. As the 1970s drew to a close, with growing numbers of followers deserting his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Duke was accused by several Klan officials of stealing his organization’ s money. “Duke is nothing but a con artist,” Jack Gregory, Duke’s Florida state leader, told the Clearwater (Fla.) Sun after his boss allegedly refused to turn over proceeds from a series of 1979 Klan rallies to the Knights.

In 1979, after his first, abortive run for president (as a Democrat) and a series of highly publicized violent Klan incidents, Duke quietly incorporated the nonprofit National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP) in an attempt to leave the baggage of the Klan behind. But before he made it public, he contacted Bill Wilkinson, a former Duke underling who now headed a rival Klan group.

Duke invited Wilkinson to a remote Alabama farmhouse where he offered to sell for $35,000 his secret membership list-a cardinal offense for a Klan leader who had promised to keep his members’ names secret at all costs. Wilkinson had feigned interest, but secretly invited two reporters to witness the transaction. Duke and his disciple, Don Black, were caught on video and audiotape as they handed a brown paper bag filled with index cards with his members’ names to Wilkinson. Three days later, after Duke’s sellout had received national publicity, he publicly announced the formation of the NAAWP, attacking Wilkinson as he did so. He said he was trying to get away from “the Hollywood image” of the Klan.

Tyler Bridges, who was then an investigative reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper, revealed in 1989 that Duke secretly owned two companies. The first, Americana Books, sold racial books from his legislative office, in the basement of his home, which was technically illegal, although admittedly Louisiana legislators have always had a very laid-back attitude on legal matters. The second, Business Consultant & Enterprises (BC&E), was set up by Duke in 1978. Tax returns filed by the NAAWP showed that it had paid BC&E $119,625 from 1983 to 1988 for “mailing list maintenance. ”

Duke's short-lived 1979-1980 campaign for president, Bridges revealed, also had paid BC&E $19,900 to rent space in Duke’s home. “In sum,” Bridges writes in his book, “BC&E - i.e., Duke - from 1983 to 1988 [when Duke ran for president on the far-right Populist Party ticket] received $141,000 from the NAAWP and Duke’s [two] presidential campaigns.” The arrangement was apparently legal.

In 1987, Duke and Don Black traveled to Forsyth County, Ga., to take advantage of simmering racial tension between blacks and the Klan. After they were arrested and charged with reckless conduct during a shouting match with a black man, Duke set up a defense fund for himself that had an almost identical name to another fund set up to aid 62 white supremacists who’d been arrested earlier. After raising at least $8,000 from backers who mistakenly believed they were helping the 62 men arrested with Duke and Black, Duke ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge. He was fined a grand total of $55.

It was in the late 1980s that Duke began a series of more serious campaigns for political office. He had enough political savvy to understand that parading around with a swastika armband, as he had done during his college days, would be counterproductive. So he toned down the vitriol and avoided the crudest rhetoric. He also dyed his hair blond and visited a plastic surgeon to reduce the size of his nose. A chin implant altered his profile and chemical peels removed bags and wrinkles around his eyes. On at least two occasions, Duke also had liposuction to his buttocks, since obviously we can’t have a Great White Leader with a fat ass, now, can we?

Duke’s 1988 Populist Party presidential campaign was a miserable failure, with him taking just 48,267 votes - 0.05 percent of the total. But he was not discouraged. And in 1989, masquerading as a born-again Republican, Duke ran for a seat in the Louisiana state legislature and narrowly beat a complacent incumbent. Up to then, a nose job was the only job that Duke had ever had. It was the beginning of David Duke’s heyday, the period when he would come to the attention of millions of people worldwide as he ran a series of high-profile political campaigns. In late 1989, just months after winning his state campaign, he announced his candidacy in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. Over the course of the next year, he would raise a remarkable $2.4 million, part of it through a political advertisement that asked supporters to call a fee-charging 900 number.

In the end, he won 607,391 votes, or almost 60 percent of the white vote, but lost the primary. Duke regrouped almost immediately, running for Louisiana governor against Edwin Edwards in a campaign marked by one of the most remarkable bumper stickers in political history: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important,” devised by anti-Duke forces urging a vote for Edwards. Running in a crowded field, Duke, came within two percentage points of Edwards, forcing him into a run-off. In the run-off, Duke captured 671,009 votes, but lost to Edwards by 22 percentage points.

During the gubernatorial campaign, Duke held rally after rally, passing large plastic buckets through the crowds to raise cash-a method of fund-raising that is illegal under both Louisiana and Federal law, which requires that officials issue cash receipts and keep records of donations. After a lengthy investigation, Duke was fined $1,111.

Next, Duke announced with great fanfare that he would seek the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 1992. But his campaign fizzled as most potential supporters backed right-wing commentator Patrick Buchanan, who espoused many of the same positions as Duke without carrying his baggage. Of course, Duke never stood a chance, but that wasn’t the point-he came out ahead no matter how he fared at the ballot box. According to Bridges’ book, Duke told an assistant that by running for president he hoped to double the size of his computerized mailing list, which by now included 125,000 names. The list would be the source of future income.

Over the years, Duke would run for political office no less than 10 times. After a while, the spectacle of Duke as a perennial candidate-a man who seemed more interested in campaigning, and living off his campaigns, than in actually winning-started to wear thin on voters. But he still wielded considerable influence in Louisiana politics. In some cases, merely dipping his toe into a political campaign gave him leverage and bargaining power with other candidates.

After briefly entering the Louisiana governor’s race in 1995, Duke dropped out and endorsed Mike Foster, a candidate who would go on to win the election. Duke’s endorsement may well have given the edge to Foster, who had cut a back-room deal with the former imperial wizard, ostensibly to rent his mailing list for some $152,000. One Duke aide, Kenny Knight, told Talk magazine that he had met Foster secretly to work out details of the deal. Knight claimed that Foster agreed to Duke’s three conditions: to switch from the Democratic to the Republican Party; to make his first act as governor the abolition of the state affirmative action program; and to never attack Duke. Knight said that Foster agreed to all three conditions. For his part, Foster did switch parties when he announced his candidacy, and then went on to eliminate the affirmative action program shortly after taking office.

Foster, who never used the list during his 1995 campaign, had attempted to hide his payment to Duke, routing it through intermediaries. After it was finally disclosed in 1999, the state Board of Ethics fined Foster $20,000 for failing to disclose the deal. Duke, meanwhile, was confronted by federal agents who asked him why he had failed to pay taxes on the income. Duke claimed his accountant had made a mistake, and hurriedly paid up his long-overdue taxes and penalties.

The high price of the mailing list-newspapers pointed out that it sold for much more than such lists normally do-raised suspicions about what it was that Foster had actually bought. Some critics suggested Duke was being paid off to stay out of the race. In any event, a federal grand jury looking into Duke’s finances queried him two times in 1999 about the mailing list he had sold to Foster. Instead of answering, Duke took the Fifth Amendment.

Duke, realizing he was a target, was worried. He confided to Lori Eden, his girlfriend at the time, that he had lost at least $50,000 at the gaming tables. “I would ask him if he wanted to go to the casino,” Eden told the Intelligence Report, “and he would say, ‘No, I can’t, because the FBI may see me, and they’re on me.’ “He knew way ahead of time that he was going to get in trouble. He made a comment to me once, ‘I do love you, but I’m going to jail.’ He also tried to hint that he wouldn’t be around. What he meant was that he was going to Russia,” added Eden, who at the time was a 33-year-old swimsuit and lingerie model with her own adult Web site. “He knew they were coming after him. So he made sure to get the hell out of here before they actually picked him up to question him.”

Eden, who would break up with Duke when he left for Russia, said that at one point in the relationship she had a pregnancy scare. Duke, a self-described pro-lifer who has railed publicly against abortion for whites for years, suggested that they travel to Paris to get her the abortion pill that was then illegal in America. “He said, I know, I’ve been through this before,’” she recounted. “He also said that it would kill him politically. ”

It was during the 1990s, specifically between 1993 and 1999, that Duke was engaged in a long-running rip-off of his followers. FBI agents reported that Duke and his colleagues cooked up a series of false excuses for beseeching the faithful for evermore funds. In one letter, for instance, he claimed he was facing financial ruin and the loss of his home. In fact, he sold his Metairie home at a profit shortly after that letter and bought a larger residence in Mandeville, La. His staff “would laugh at the often untruthful excuses Duke concocted,” an FBI affidavit said.

Some of the proceeds from these bogus direct mail appeals were deposited in a bank account that was under the name of an ex-girlfriend, but controlled by Duke, who maintained “in excess of 30 credit cards,” according to the FBI. During just one 16-month period, Duke collected $230,000 in small checks from his supporters.

Duke was simultaneously undergoing something of a political metamorphosis- or more accurately, a dropping of the mask. Since leaving the Klan, he had worked endlessly to put his Klan and especially his National Socialist past behind him. But in 1998, he self-published his autobiography, entitled My Awakening. The book, which Duke enthusiastically predicted would “change the course of history,” did nothing of the kind. One reviewer said of My Awakening, “It’s all right, the political and racial parts of it, although it’s all been said before and better by others. Large sections of it are basically just narcissistic bullshit with Duke breaking his arm patting himself on the back. It certainly doesn’t justify or ameliorate the harm Duke has done to the Movement with his constant financial and sexual misbehavior. ”

This did not preclude Duke from starting in early 2000 the National Organization for European American Rights (NOFEAR), which purported to be a group devoted to pursuing “civil rights” for whites, not to hating anyone. The next year, after a sporting goods company sued Duke over the use of its name, NOFEAR would be renamed the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO).

On Nov. 16, 2000, a dozen federal agents raided Duke’s two-story home in Mandeville and carted away 22 boxes of papers, computer discs, credit card records and other documents. Roy Armstrong, his long-time bodyguard and chauffeur, was there during the search and termed it a mere “fishing expedition.” But Duke wasn’t about to be reeled in-he was in Russia on his fourth visit, and he would not return to the United States until reaching a plea agreement in December 2002.

From a safe distance, Duke insisted on his innocence. “Make no mistake about it,” he would write in a NOFEAR newsletter, “this probe is nothing more than a political assassination on the part of government officials who are seeking to silence my voice on our European heritage and rights.” In the meantime, he said, he was moving to Moscow “to struggle against people of other colors and Jews.”

It is clear that Duke understood perfectly that he was in trouble back home. That’s why he spent the next two years traveling in Russia and throughout Europe, giving speeches and hobnobbing with other extremists. For some reason which was never explained, the government never issued a Federal fugitive warrant or asked the State Department to cancel his passport. Overall, he sought to give the impression that he was devoted to building a transnational movement. The reality, however, was that Duke spent most of his time selling his books, meeting privately with prominent rightists, and giving talks.

He was also desperately seeking to find a Russian or Eastern European woman willing to marry him, in order to obtain permanent citizenship in Russia or some other Eastern European country, before his passport expired and he was forced to either return to the United States or commit a clear federal felony by being abroad without a valid travel document, thus handing the government a handle on him and allowing them to issue a Federal fugitive warrant. However, for once, Duke’s magnetic sex appeal seems to have failed him. Duke complained to his followers back home that while young and beautiful candidates for matrimony abounded, none of them wanted to remain in Mother Russia with him. Harfd-headed and practical and every bit as mercenary as he was, those Russian beauties were all looking for a green card to come to America, not shelter a fugitive American back home in Bum****sk with no solid source of income.

By late 2002, with his passport almost expired, Duke’s attorney was negotiating a plea agreement for his client, who had grown tired of being a nationalist without a nation. When news of the plea became public, Vince Breeding, national director of EURO, said Duke was pleading because he would surely lose in court at the hands of a mostly black jury. This is probably true. It is also certainly true that Duke was guilty as sin of embezzlement and monumental deceit and dishonesty, and he would have been convicted by an all-White jury as well. EURO communiqués painted the group’s founder as “a living martyr for our cause.” (Breeding, the former lead guitarist in a Satanic rock band called Acheron, was later expelled from Duke’s EURO organization when he was caught running an internet porno operation off the group’s servers-and not giving Duke a cut.)

On Dec. 14th, 2002, Duke slunk into a federal courthouse in New Orleans and pleaded guilty to tax evasion and mail fraud -- ripping off hundreds of thousands of dollars from earnest white supremacist donors who thought they were helping Duke to save the white race. Instead, as Duke admitted in the allocution for his guilty pleas, he had cynically raised money by using a series of lies-and then blown it at casino craps tables. Under the terms of his plea bargain, he received a slap on the wrist sentence of 15 months in a low security prison.

It is a testament to the enduring quality of David Duke’s hokum that while he was in prison, he continued to raise money by mail. (This is what the Jews call chutzpah, and Duke has enough of it for a dozen rabbis.) When he was released in May of 2004, it was ostensibly to a halfway house which he apparently never even bothered to check into, and no one knows how he got away with that.

David Duke hit the ground running, and in one of the most ghastly and surreal episodes in Movement history, he was welcomed back into the fold with open arms at a gala event by 400 supporters, hosted at a New Orleans luxury hotel, while some of the biggest names in the Movement gathered around this self-admitted thief on the speaker’s platform and eulogized him to the stars. He was also spotted in a riverboat casino barely a month after his release, a dizzy blonde on his arm and rollin’ dem bones like there was no tomorrow.

How does he get away with it? It is difficult not to speculate that Duke’s surgically-enhanced handsome good looks have something to do with it, appealing to the homoerotic dimension that always lurks beneath the surface of the White Nationalist movement. It’s like an abused spouse who refuses to leave her abuser. He beats her, she sees the lipstick on his collar and smells the liquor on his breath, she knows he’s cheating on her and drinking up the rent money, but she just keps on bleating “But he’s my husband! He’s promised me he’ll change, and this time I believe him!” The man’s arrogance and his contempt for his supporters is nothing short of breathtaking- and they lap it up like candy and beg for more.

David Duke has been globetrotting around Europe again for almost two years now, living off donations he receives from the United States, sale of his books, etc. Precisely how a convicted Federal felon managed to obtain a passport from the State Department is a question which the Movement has apparently decided not to examine to closely. Or examine at all, in fact.

Once again, David Ernest Duke is doing what he does best. He’s getting away with it.

Rick Cooper's "Brief History" and the Defamation of Matt Koehl

2010-08-09T13:55:00.001-07:00

Generally when I use the words Brief History on this Web log I am referring to an anonymous work.

However, before this anonymous work titled A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement, there was another, much shorter work, with a very similar title, A Brief History of White Nationalism, written by Rick Cooper. Cooper at one time had been a member of Rockwell's National-Socialist White People's Party, and had some acquaintance with most of the people that his history attacks. Cooper was the NSWPP Business Manager from 12 August 1978 to 5 February 1980, under Matt Koehl.

When was this written? Cooper's reference to the former Church of the Creator property "recently sold" by Dr. William Pierce (in 1994) suggests that his Brief History was composed mainly in the mid-1990s. The final section called "Current State of the Movement" may have been written later. Cooper died in 2006.

Cooper's Thesis

Rick Cooper in his Brief History states a constructive purpose. He describes a transition from the Old to the New Movement. He sees this as progress and he wants to caution newcomers against being influenced by figures from the Old Movement.
The Old Movement, according to Cooper -- especially its uniform-wearing "nazi" aspect -- had started with financial support fr0m Jews and was laden with homosexuals. Cooper alleged that Jews were able to control the Old Movement (after the death of Rockwell) because it was led by immoral people with skeletons in their closets.

Cooper sees 1979-1984 as a transitional period, beginning with the Greensboro Incident and ending with the death of Bob Mathews. This was a period of financial difficulty for the existing White Nationalist organizations, but it was also a period in which more radical elements appeared.

During this 5-year period, most of the White Nationalist Movement activity was done by five groups, and most of the Movement activists were active with one of these five groups - the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP) under Matt Koehl, the National States Rights Party (NSRP) under J. B. Stoner and Dr. Edward R. Fields, the National Alliance under Dr. William Pierce, the New Christian Crusade Church (NCCC) under James K. Warner, and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK) under David E. Duke.

[...]

All of the above group leaders know each other, and each of these, except for Dr. Pierce, has something to hide in his personal life and/or background about which he is very sensitive and fears exposure to his supporters and general public as he knows such would cause him to lose his current relative position of prestige within the Movement - not to mention a significant decrease in financial support.

Only Dr. William Pierce, among the five members of the "clique" of "dinosaurs" left over from the Old Movement, had no such skeleton in his closet, but Cooper dismissed Dr. Pierce's activities as of little value.

The New Movement, as Cooper saw it, consisted of skinheads* and generally more adventurous people, who, he thought, could not be controlled by the Jews.

The vast majority of Movement activists today are Skinheads and other young people who know nothing about the con-artists who await them. It is unfortunate that many of our new activists and various supporters will learn about these dinosaurs (because they are outdated) and mossbacks (because they accomplish little) through bitter experiences. We hope to save a lot of people a lot of trouble.

To keep things in perspective, we must give credit where due. The Clique all contributed to the earlier stages of the Movement in their own ways. In fact, many of us entered the Movement through The Clique's organizations. Today, some of The Clique still contribute to the Movement and are worthy of support in some ways. We will not tell you whom to support, but we advise that you carefully weigh the pros and cons of those whom you plan to support before you make a final decision.

Cooper portrays the Old Movement as a rude beginning that should be surpassed with new leaders. In his addendum, "Current State of the Movement," Cooper identifies as "outstanding" figures Pastor Richard Butler, Tom Metzger, Gerhard Lauck, and George Dietz.

Cooper's Bias

One might disagree with Cooper as to the worthlessness of Dr. Pierce's work in the 1990s. Many people were brought into White Nationalism through Dr. Pierce's weekly radio broadcasts. The SPLC's Mark Potok has acknowledged that at the time of Dr. Pierce's death in 2002 the National Alliance was by far the most significant force in White Nationalism.

Cooper's disenchantment with Dr. Pierce may have been due to the fact that he refused to be drawn into any conflict with Matt Koehl. Cooper seems to have felt as if he were an outsider looking in on an old boys' club, which he resented and called "the Clique."

Some of Cooper's contentions, particularly the alleged homosexuality of Matt Koehl, seem to be beyond reason. Cooper maintains that contention even though he could find none of the documentation that he sought and even in spite of testimony to the contrary.

Cooper's main stated reason for believing that Koehl was a homosexual (apart from rumors about alleged incidents that Cooper could never confirm) is that Koehl, in spite of his high intelligence, was a weak leader who avoided dealing with problems. Since anybody who is intelligent (one might suppose) should be a good leader, Cooper explained Koehl's ineffectiveness as due to blackmail from Jews about his closeted perversion. Obviously this is quite a leap.

The rumor about Koehl, however, apparently had already existed.

Early in his Brief History, Cooper presents us with an alleged case of forced sodomy of a minor from 1955 where the alleged evil-doers were the three leaders of the Free Ezra Pound Committee: Matt Koehl, Eustace Mullins, and attorney Edward Fleckenstein, allegedly a Jew. That horrific incident sets the stage for Cooper's tale of progress.

But did it even happen?

That egregious crime, if we are to take the story at face value, was never prosecuted despite the arrest of the three culprits. Cooper could find no documentation even about the arrest despite visiting the police department where the arrest supposedly occurred and being allowed to view their arrest files. One of the three alleged homosexual rapists, Fleckenstein, is a well known attorney who was never disbarred.

I checked Google News Archives and found nothing. You can find news items from the 1950s mentioning Eustace Mullins, Matt Koehl, and Edward Fleckenstein, but nothing about this alleged incident. No news report about a homosexual rape by three "nazis"? I think that would have been reported in the New York Times. In 1955 they would have been lucky not to be lynched for such a crime.

This all seems highly unlikely.

Then Cooper recounts this rumor about something that allegedly happened in 1960:

Years later, Crommelin told former deputy commander of the American Nazi Party (ANP), Karl Allen**, that Mullins and Koehl were queers. Karl Allen later told former ANP member Christopher Bailey, and Chris then told Director Cooper in the early 1980s.

That story lacks credibility on its face simply because it is several generations removed from the source. Cooper was never able to verify that this incident occurred. Neither Admiral Crommelin nor Karl Allen responded to Cooper's registered letters about the matter in the early 1980s, nor was he able to find any court record of a restraining order that Crommelin had allegedly filed against Koehl and Mullins. Cooper left no stone unturned, and still came up empty-handed. J.B. Stoner also did not answer. Ed Fields did answer, but the answer that he gave wasn't what Cooper wanted to hear:

Director Cooper wrote to Ed Fields on February 28, 1982, asking specific questions about what happened to cause Admiral Crommelin to boot Eustace Mullins and Matt Koehl off his Wetumpka farm in late 1959 and 1960, as well as what he knew about Koehl's homosexual background.

At least Fields answered the letter, but his statement that he had heard nothing bad about Koehl is not believable - these guys all know each other going back at least 2 decades!

At some point you have to face the fact that what "everybody knows" might not be true. It might just be a rumor! People love their rumors.

Furthermore, the propagation of rumors as a means of fragmenting and demoralizing dissident groups had been standard practice for the FBI under COINTELPRO, 1956-1971.

The bottom line about Cooper's Brief History is that it is an expression of personal opinion, and Cooper really makes no secret that it is a biased opinion. Cooper says that Matt Koehl had "double-crossed" him 14 years earlier, although he does not explain how. We can infer from the fact that Cooper only quit working for Koehl in 1980 that he probably had ignored any rumors about Koehl until then.

While Cooper's history is biased and impeachable in its own way, the man at least took responsibility for what he wrote. Cooper specifically disapproved of anonymous rumormongering:

This report is not a continuation of Deguello, which is an anonymous 54-page report published in the 1970s and which contained a mixture of truth and lies about many prominent people in the White Nationalist Movement at the time. There is nothing sneaky or anonymous in this report.

Cooper vs. Covington

Behind Cooper's stated benevolent purpose of cautioning newcomers lurked a vendetta against Matt Koehl, and to a smaller degree against others like William Pierce and David Duke who didn't support that vendetta. From this personal motive he derived the generalization that the Old Movement was essentially bad. (The basic concept of the Old Movement, New Movement distinction probably comes from Richard Butler, who made some statement about the new, more radical generation of racial activists in the early 1980s.)

Covington (making use of Cooper's material in 2007) had gripes against Koehl too. Covington attacked Koehl under the pseudonym "Luther Williams" circa 1994 (and probably on other occasions too); thereafter Koehl supplied a packet of information to Will White Williams for his successful libel suit against Covington. Covington also had grudges against some of the other people that Cooper criticized, because some of the same people that had not cooperated with Cooper's vendetta also supported Ben Klassen and W.W. Williams in their conflict with Covington.

Moreover, it is a major theme in Covington's rhetoric that practically all White Nationalist leaders are unspeakably rotten (with the noteworthy exception of Covington himself). Cooper's generalization about the corrupt old guard vs. the idealistic newcomers therefore appears to support some but certainly not all of Covington's position.

Cooper's complaints thus provided convenient material for Covington. Large parts of Cooper's Brief History were incorporated into Harold Covington's anonymous Brief History without credit. Some parts were rewritten or augmented with commentary that twists the meaning. As usual, the changes made by Covington to his source material are almost entirely on the side of making it more defamatory. Covington also removes the indications of questionability that Cooper left in.

Since Cooper was recently (November 2006) deceased, nobody could consult him about the accuracy of these expanded attacks (appearing in 2007). We hear the protest that Rick Cooper wrote a lot of the material in the anonymous Brief History, and the similarity of titles between Cooper's work and the anonymous work adds to the confusion. Some careful reading will show that there are very significant differences between Cooper's work and what Covington did with it.

Removing Cooper's Expressions of Doubt

Covington plagiarizes Cooper's repetition of the rumor that Admiral John Crommelin had caught Matt Koehl and Eustace Mullins doing perverted acts in his basement in 1960, but he redacts Cooper's honest admission that he was never able to get confirmation and replaces it with this vague declaration:

Crommelin never made any secret of this incident and willingly discussed it with whoever was interested, and yet it stands as yet another example of the odd veil of secrecy which seems to shelter these early Movement figures such as Koehl, Mullins, and Benny Klassen when it comes to their perverse sexual predilections. Anyone who discusses these things, or attempts to discuss them, can never seem to get any traction on the issue and is usually silenced or victimized shortly thereafter in some odd way or another. Harold Covington has been subjected to years of vicious persecution, slander, and vilification because of his constant refusal to maintain a discreet and respectful silence over acts of perversion and skullduggery within the Movement, and his demands for the imposition of some kind or moral standards or code of conduct on the Movement’s self-appointed “leaders.”

Thus the fact that the whole account is questionable, which Cooper was sufficiently conscientious to let us see, is hidden from us by Covington, who furthermore cannot resist injecting a swipe at his favorite target, Ben Klassen, and an ironic promotion of himself as the only virtuous man in the movement.

Unreasonable Elaboration and Addition of Fictitious Confirmatory Details

Cooper very briefly, with a single subordinate clause, insinuated that there might be something questionable about Koehl's lineage.

Whether Koehl's actions are based on genetic background (His father is Rumanian and his mother's maiden name is Bierbaum) ...

That is the full extent of Cooper's speculation about Koehl's racial heritage. Covington took that one tin drum and built a whole marching band around it. The paragraph below is clearly an expansion of Cooper's brief comment because the parenthetical clause from Cooper reappears in pieces, and the rest of the paragraph is an attempt to answer the question "Whether Koehl's actions are based on genetic background" with an aye that will seem credible due to the large amount of verbiage devoted to it.

In the mid-1980s Rick Cooper was able to get hold of a copy of Matt Koehl’s birth certificate, and he discovered that while his father was Romanian, probably of German descent (there are many Saxon Germans in Romania) his mother’s maiden name was Ruth Bierbaum, which is about as Jewish-sounding a name as it’s possible for a woman to have. Since Ruth Bierbaum was presumably born in Romania as well, at a time when the country was almost one third Jewish, it has been impossible to establish Koehl’s actual racial antecedents, but his swarthy skin and greasy hair were always noteworthy within the Movement. There is an excellent probability that Koehl’s mother was Jewish, which would make him Jewish under rabbinic law, since descent is determined on the female side because “no one can truly know the father save the mother.” (A fancy Talmudic way of saying that Jewish women are such sluts that the mother is the only parent who can be reliably determined.) Plus there was the strong suspicion, never completely dissipated, that Koehl was somehow involved in Rockwell’s murder, as well as the constantly hovering rumors about the 1955 New York buggery case, and the well-known fact of Koehl’s open aversion to women.

Note that Cooper did not say that Koehl's mother's name was Ruth; he only gave her surname, Bierbaum, which is quite German. Covington added the Hebrew given name Ruth. Even if that is accurate (which it is probably not, given Covington's general recklessness) there is no reason why a woman named either Ruth or Bierbaum must be Jewish, and the other allegations to which Covington refers as forming a coherent picture with this allegation of Jewishness are not proven either. This is a lot of nothing being made to look like something simply by talking it up.

As for the alleged "open aversion to women" (offered as evidence for Koehl's being a Jew) it seems that Koehl enforced a rather old-fashioned moral code within the NSWPP that brought him into conflict with members (e.g. Joe Tomassi) who had embraced the looser morals of the 1970s, and who may have made some extravant accusations in response. Koehl has been married for several decades to the NSWPP's former office secretary, Barbara von Goetz.

Disagreement about Rockwell's Death and Why Koehl Succeeded Him

Regarding how and why Matt Koehl came to succeed George Lincoln Rockwell as leader of the NSWPP, Cooper writes this:

On August 25, 1967, George Lincoln Rockwell, Commander of the NSWPP, was assassinated in a laundromat parking lot in Arlington, Virginia, by John Patler [Patsalos].

The NSWPP members went through the protocol of selecting a new leader. The majority of the members present selected Major Matthias Koehl, Jr., to succeed as the new NSWPP leader.

[...]

Some of you people may wonder why anybody supported Matt Koehl at all but you must consider that many of these dedicated people were faced with the choice of NSWPP under Koehl or no NSWPP at all so, since there was no "proof" of Koehl's homosexuality or background, they backed Koehl.

Considering the other high ranking NSWPP members at the time, Dr. William Pierce, the NSWPP National Secretary, told Director Cooper personally that he often viewed Koehl as an "island of sanity amid a sea of insanity."

Compare the corresponding passage from the anonymous Brief History, which is not from Cooper but is an elaboration of a passage from Covington's 1998 "A Brief History of National Socialism in North America." The first sentence quoted below is verbatim from Covington's acknowledged work, except for the insertion of the name Matthias Koehl.*** Note the rumor-mongering and conspiracy-theorizing that is not found in Cooper:

Commander George Lincoln Rockwell was murdered in Arlington on Friday, August 25th, 1967, under circumstances which have never been satisfactorily cleared up, but which point to at least peripheral involvement on the part of Matthias Koehl, the man who succeeded him as leader of the Party.

[...]

The whole murder case has been buried for years, and several journalistic and literary attempts to re-open it have been met with a stonewalling and in some cases with outright threats and intimidation from official sources, which have frightened the would-be authors into silence.

[...]

The events immediately surrounding the death of Commander Rockwell are very murky. The NSWPP members allegedly went through the protocol of selecting a new leader, but many key members were not consulted.

[...]

There have been persistent rumors down through the years that on the night of Commander Rockwell’s murder, Captain Robert Lloyd and Dr. William Pierce broke into Commander Rockwell’s safe and destroyed his political testament.

Although Cooper hated Koehl, he represents the process whereby Koehl became the leader of the NSWPP as honest, and he admits that in some ways Koehl may have been the best man available for the job. Cooper does not insinuate that Koehl and some accomplices were involved in Rockwell's assassination. Those are embellishments that appear in Covington's anonymous Brief History but not in Cooper.

Cooper does give vent to a suspicion that there was more to the Rockwell assassination than just the lone nut "Patler," but he thinks that it was a Jewish conspiracy that put Patler up to it and not a conspiracy among leading members of the NSWPP.

The anonymous Brief History augments and twists Cooper's account of how Koehl succeeded Rockwell in order to convert it into a broad and lurid innuendo of conspiracy within the movement. Based on what? Based on completely vague claims and "persistent rumors" conveyed to us from an anonymous source who doesn't even say where he got it. We can say however that he didn't get it from Rick Cooper.

Cooper's View of Covington as a Source

Using the Wayback Machine I found this passage attributed to Rick Cooper. It was posted on Harold Covington's late 1990s "NSWPP" site by somebody calling himself John Hammer:

For a number of years now, our associates have questioned Harold Covington's sincerity in the Movement versus his psychiatric status after reading his allegations against other people and groups. Any investigation into this area would be merely academic. The important thing to understand is that Harold Covington, for whatever reason, is neither a reliable source of information nor competent to critique the Movement. (Rick Cooper, Editor, NSV Quarterly, Vol. 13, January-March 1995)

_____________________

* The anonymous Brief History differs with Cooper's Brief History about the auspiciousness of the skinhead phenomenon, dismissing it as "an urban gang culture." Harold Covington just happened to use exactly those words in a 2004 essay, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Honky": "The one exception to the Protocols is Skinhead, which has wandered away from its origins and mutated into an urban gang culture, and now operates under those anthropological canons." This was probably an easier assessment to make in 2004 than in 1994.

** Assuming that Karl Allen really did pass on such a rumor -- which may not be true -- there is reason to be circumspect about Allen and his associates as sources of information about Koehl since their relationship with him and the rest of the post-Rockwell NSWPP (and indeed with Rockwell himself after 1964) was inimical for other reasons. A newspaper item from 1968 describes Karl Allen's relationship to the NSWPP at that time:

A schism -- of a type that probably caused Rockwell more trouble than any other single thing -- has developed into a complete split within the party. Rockwell used to call it "the problem of reconciling my thinkers, my intellectuals, and my doers, my strong men of action."

An FBI agent described it as "friction between the weirdos and the rednecks. The weirdos like to spin dreams about ruling the world. The rednecks want to go break heads."

However the two factions are characterized, the former is now grouped around Matthias Koehl in Arlington, and the latter around Karl Allen, of Alexandria, Va., late of the White Citizens Council, whose wing calls itself the "white party." The Arlington group busies itself with producing reams of literature, ranging from crude broadsides and reprints of that ancient hoax, "the protocols of the learned elders of Zion," to scholarly-looking quarterlies.

The Alexandria group is not much heard from, although Allen is doing what he can to further the presidential campaign of George Wallace. [Hank Burchard, The Windsor Star, 28 September 1968]

This report accurately states that there was a division among men who at various times had supported Rockwell, but the uninformed reader would understand this split to be a result of Rockwell's death, which it was not. Karl Allen had left Rockwell's organization and founded his American White Party three years before Rockwell's death. One would expect a certain amount of resentment between two such groups, and criticisms of the leadership of the post-Rockwell NSWPP attributed to Karl Allen should be considered in that light. To be fair however, the FBI agent's implied characterization of Karl Allen (a native of Tallahassee, Florida) as a "redneck" seems unfair given that Allen had elsewhere been described as "a dapper Harvard graduate" (The Miami News, 22 May 1962).

*** Covington avoided all mention of Koehl's name in A Brief History of National Socialism in North America, which is rather like avoiding any utterance of Goering or Goebbels in a history of the NSDAP. That work was openly connected to Harold Covington, unlike A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement, wherein Covington libels Koehl from behind a thin camouflage of anonymity.

The Deguello Report

2010-08-09T13:53:00.001-07:00

This kind of mass-smear is not a new phenomenon. In 1976, in the days before e-mail spam, some anonymous source mass-mailed a booklet called the Deguello Report, which purported to be produced by some former members of intelligence agencies of various Western nations hoping to set straight patriots in the United States. Parts of the Deguello Report were very well written. It begins with a discussion of Communism, which Deguello presents as the main conspiracy, and ostensible facets of that, Socialism, Judaism, and "Homosexualism." Deguello goes on to explain that the patriotic cause in the USA has been infiltrated with members of these three sub-conspiracies of Communism, and the bulk of the report is occupied with telling us who these worms are.

Some of the accusations in Deguello were true. For example, what it said about right-wing Christian leader Billy James Hargis was true: he was sodomizing boys and girls at American Christian College, of which he was president; this was a fact documentable from mainstream news reports. Most of the accusations in Deguello, however, were neither documented nor documentable. This was probably why the report was attributed to foreign intelligence agents, to explain how the authors would have information that nobody else could find out -- as if the intelligence services of Spain or France would have found it worthwhile to investigate the sexual habits of political nonentities in the United States.

It has been suggested, credibly I think, that the purpose of the Deguello Report was to destroy competition for donations in the patriot milieu by defaming the competitors. Oddly enough, one group that only gets slight criticism from Deguello that is more than offset by high praise is Frank Collin's Chicago-based National-Socialist Party of America. Deguello says: "Although somewhat confused ideologically, members of this group are generally high caliber individuals." What a telling omission! Frank Collin was a homosexual pedophile, whose father was a former concentration-camp inmate born with the name Cohn, as was later documented by mainstream news sources. Furthermore, if I recall correctly, there was scuttlebutt about Collin's ethnic origin already in the late 1960s before he broke with the organization that Rockwell had founded. But these alleged former intelligence agents, the authors of the Deguello Report, somehow missed that.

Contra istam "Historiam Brevem"

2010-08-09T13:50:00.001-07:00

I recently parted company with Jim Giles and his Radio Free Mississippi forum because, after I had been invited to take charge of his forum and was made a "Super Moderator" of it, Giles posted on the front page something that I considered extremely irresponsible. That was the anonymous work called A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement.

Giles' position, based on the advice of somebody that he calls The General, was that this was a history that could be improved through some modifications. My position is that the Brief History is not some good-faith effort at a history that just contains some errors that need to be corrected: it is fundamentally a work of defamation. It contains what are clearly deliberate attacks on a number of well known White Nationalist personalities.

I am not opposed to airing a fraud as long as it is done with some care about not helping the deceiver. In other words, I am not opposed to airing frauds if it is for the specific and immediate purpose of exposing them.

When I first glanced at the Brief History, to determine authorship I checked to see what it said about Ben Klassen, because a certain kind of nefarious attack on Ben Klassen is typical of longtime chronic defamer Harold A. Covington. Sure enough, those attacks were there, marking the Brief History as probably his work. For his own part, Covington has had this to say:

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement

[I apologize for this GUBU interjection. When I am accused of something by the Goat Dancers, if there is any substance to it at all, it is my policy to issue one definitive statement of the facts. After that, if anyone is not satisfied, they can go commit an unnatural and anatomically impossible act with themselves. This is such an occasion. - HAC]

About four years ago, if memory serves, a document entitled A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement appeared on the internet. I believe it has also been hand-circulated in printed form as well.

I have been accused by the Usual Suspects of being the author of this document. This is untrue--well, not completely true, anyway. The facts are as follows:

The lengthy article or small book A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement is divided into a number of parts or sections, each dealing with a particular movement, group, or individual personality in the Movement's past. These sections are basically "re-worked" and in some cases outright plagiarized from the written works of a large number of Movement authors and sources. These include the late Rick Cooper, Louis Beam, Bill White, Brad Davis, the late Andrew McCalden, Willis Carto, several SPLC reports, the Deguello Report, Gary Gallo, the National Alliance commentator "Maguire", Fred Streed (I think), and a number of other writers--including myself.

The document is essentially an anthology or compilation, and whoever compiled it had access to a lot of dusty old Movement gossip and archive stuff, including what must have been stacks and stacks of old pre-internet Movement publications and internal newsletters. My own archives are nowhere near that extensive, just a few file folders, in fact. I have moved around too often in the past 30 years to be lugging filing cabinets full of research material with me.

I will say this, though--whoever put this thing together knew his Movement beeswax. Whoever the unknown author/compiler is, he is definitely and for sure an "old hand."

I used to say that I could not spot a single significant factual error in the document, but after the recent flapdoodle about the Brief History, I sat down and read it over again, and I believe I have spotted one major error--Revisionist author Bradley Smith, referred to as "the late Bradley Smith" in the Brief History, is in fact still alive. I think I'm actually the first person to notice this.

Other than that, I can't take any major issue with the facts presented in the report. It is damning, and it is true, which is why periodically certain elements within the Movement re-discover it and go into a hissy fit over it, which is occurring as we speak. They cannot refute its contents.

The fact remains that the document has been online for four years now, and other than the Bradley Smith gaffe (which I say again, I seem to be the first one to point out) no one has been able to disprove anything in it.

Regarding my own unwitting participation, I concede that the section on Glenn Miller was lifted almost in toto from an article I wrote called L'Affaire Glenn Miller; that a lot of the Klassen material (although not all of it) is either plagiarized directly from my past writings or re-worked from my stuff; and that the Huey Long section is plagiarized from me as well.

I have no idea on earth who did in fact write (or compile) A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement. I know several men who could have done it, in that they have the requisite background, access to archives or people who remember, and epistolary skill to write the report. However, I have no evidence that any of these men did write it.

If I had to conjecture, I'd say it's most likely someone closely affiliated with the National Alliance, unknown to me, but that is just an educated guess.

The world now has the truth, or such infinitesimal part of the world that gives a rat's ass. What you do with that truth is a matter of complete indifference to me.

-HAC

So, Harold Covington would have us believe that there is only one significant error in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement and that he could only guess who the anonymous author was, except that it was somebody who "knew his movement beeswax." I already have compiled sufficient evidence that, if Harold Covington were an honest man, he would eat those words.

The Brief History is peppered with gratuitous praise and no criticism of Harold Covington. This omission of criticism is quite remarkable in a work heavily focused on revealing personal faults and vices, especially since there is no shortage of such material about Covington.  Also, he has been promoting the work for several years, for example on Martin Lindstedt's forum. Covington mentions there that the work normally has to be sent out in six parts via e-mail, which implies that he has been doing that too.

The earliest appearances of the anonymous Brief History that I could find on internet were from 2007.  It can hardly be older than that, since it refers to "the late Rick Cooper," who died in November 2006.

Ricky Lang valkyra2001@yahoo.com \| 67.160.90.23 Will Williams has been obsessed with Harold Covington to the point of insanity for 20 years now, and he has filled up megabytes of internet space with nothing but attacks on HAC. Back in 1998 it got so embarrassing to Dr. Pierce that Pierce had to kick him out of his post as membership secretary because Williams was misusing NA facilities to fight his feud with Covington. From Re: Covington — an apology, 2010/03/10 at 5:25 PM	2010/03/10	Approve \| Spam \| Delete
Brad Davis http://www.northwestrepublic.com \| bdavis27607@earthlink.net \| 67.160.90.23 Will, could you do us all a big favor, and shut the F. up about your stupid little lawsuit? Nobody’s interested any more. Truth be told, nobody ever was, not even back when you were leeching off the National Alliance. From Re: Covington — an apology, 2010/03/10 at 5:05 PM	2010/03/10	Approve \| Spam \| Delete
[Intervening post omitted.]
Harold Covington http://www.northwestfront.org \| nwnet@earthlink.net \| 67.160.90.23 Ref. Mr. Rudisill’s comments, I actually make it a total of five identifiable individuals who are generating at least 90% of the Space Madness. I deeply regret to say that one of them appears to be my own brother. From Re: Covington — an apology, 2010/03/10 at 8:32 AM