* He would fly into sudden violent, volcanic rages, to the point that he even killed the only two living things he truly loved, our sweet Siamese cats. The only time he was truly happy was when he could lock himself in his study with his books and Nazi paraphernalia, to write about the race wars to come that he hoped to organize and orchestrate. When he wasn’t writing or addressing fund-raising rallies for his neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance, he liked to experiment with chemicals and explosives in the basement of our home or in the woods behind it. He had me help him produce nitroglycerine and showed me how to make bombs. To my mother’s terror, he hid weapons and other dangerous stuff in the crawl space of our house until a few days before the FBI came sniffing around. Sometimes he used me as a guinea-pig, once knocking me flat on my rear from a powerful electric shock. While I was frightened I was happy, too, because I was spending time with him…
* I would have done anything for a word of praise, a hug, or a kiss from him, but in the end, I always failed him. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t become the little Aryan he wanted and so he abandoned his attempt to mold me. As for my brother, Erik, he didn’t even try with him. The only time I saw him display any affection toward either of us was after his death, when I found among his belongings a photograph of us as babies, sitting on his lap. He was smiling. It wasn’t until I left for college and met the outside world that I realized what a monster he was. When he left my mother, he wrote her a letter saying he was going because he loved his political party more. He went on to marry four other women, mostly mail-order brides. He died at his secluded compound on a West Virginia mountaintop before he had the chance to wed a sixth woman that he had squirreled away out of sight of his fifth wife. He spent his last days restructuring the National Alliance to make sure it survived him and gave no thought to us at all – his Nazi acolytes didn’t even know our names or that we existed, although they did try to recruit me a few days after his death, like some sort of prized trophy to hang on the wall.
* I had spent most of my life hating Dad, and he surely hated me. He hadn’t spoken to me in seven years and never acknowledged the adoption of my two baby girls from Eastern Europe six years earlier. I had sent him pictures and letters about them, but he never bothered to reply. I strongly suspected that he didn’t approve of them because they weren’t white enough for his tastes. When I finally stopped blubbing, I realized why I was so upset. I had wanted him to love me and be proud of me, and for us to be able to talk and enjoy each other and have a normal relationship.
* After I got myself together I called my twin brother, Erik, and told him the news. “He evidently died from cancer but I don’t know much more than that,” I said. Erik said he didn’t really care — Dad was a complete jerk and he didn’t give a damn about any memorial service. I suggested that it might give us closure to attend and we’d be able to see Uncle Sandy, too, but he was adamant. “That bastard didn’t give a damn about me or my kids, and there is no damn way I’m going to his service,” Erik said. “He was a horrible father and nothing will change that!”
* “Well, your father had cancer,” said Charles. “It was adenocarcinoma, a cancer of the adrenal glands. Several months ago he began losing weight and had lost quite a bit before his secretary finally insisted he go see a doctor. He resisted because he didn’t trust the doctors, but eventually made an appointment. He said he didn’t feel particularly sick but had lost about 30 pounds and wasn’t sure why.” After a series of tests, Dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. He was admitted to the hospital and started treatments. After about two weeks, he was told that the treatments were helping and his progress was so promising that he could go home and continue on an outpatient basis. But he quickly got worse and within a few weeks was back in the hospital. This time they told him the prognosis was dire and that he needed to stay in the hospital. “That’s when I went to see him,” Charles said. “He phoned and said he didn’t trust the doctors. I spoke to them and decided that he did, indeed, have Stage 4 cancer. After discussing his options with me he decided to go home and discontinue further treatment.” Once home, Dad declined rapidly, to the point where he couldn’t get out of bed any more. Soon, he refused to eat or drink anything at all. “I suspected he knew the end was near and did not want to prolong it any longer than necessary,” said Charles. “Without taking in any fluids he became very weak and for his last few days he was so weak that he couldn’t speak. He passed a few days later. Your father was a very strong man and he went out on his own terms.”
* Charles put his hand on my shoulder. “Your father and I spoke several times before his death and he told me near the end that one of his only regrets in life was in regards to you and your brother. He said he sincerely regretted not having a better relationship with you two,” Charles said.
* I remember as a kid Dad devouring history books, particularly tomes on European history, culture and morals, and he knew that a movement built around a single person would not survive once that person died. The clearest example of that was his former boss George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party, which tore itself to shreds within three years of his assassination in 1967. Dad witnessed it all, yet when it came to his own demise 35 years later he totally ignored the principle that he had believed in for so long. When he learned that he was dying, he gave no thought to Mom, my brother or me, or our future, which makes me angry to this day. Instead, he set about trying to organize the Alliance’s affairs to ensure a smooth transfer of power. He had refused further treatment at the hospital and returned home to meet with each staff member to discuss their work and outline a plan for when he would no longer be there. Six days after his death, the Alliance’s 17-strong professional staff announced they had chosen Erich to be their new leader, in accordance with his wishes.
* At the time of his death, Dad presided over a racist empire that produced revenue of about $1 million a year, which I suppose should be considered quite a success for a man who lived almost entirely off my mother’s earnings for 20 years. He ruled his empire from his roost on a 346-acre hilltop compound near Hillsboro, W. Va. He is said to have purchased the land with money donated by “The Order,” a gang of mostly Alliance members and supporters who stole $4 million by robbing armored cars, and shot dead Alan Berg, a liberal Jewish talk-show host, on the streets of Denver. The Order was led by Robert Mathews, a young West Coast Alliance member who Dad had been grooming for great things. Mathews died, aged 31, in an explosion at a house on Whidbey Island, Wash., in 1984 after a three-day standoff with the FBI. Dad liked to portray the Alliance as a group dedicated to the welfare and salvation of the white race, and not the lucrative hate business that it became. He had various streams of income, apart from membership fees and donations from deluded donors. There was a high-brow glossy magazine called National Vanguard, which was meant to rouse intellectuals and professionals to join his cause. In addition, he had a crude monthly publication, the members-only National Alliance Bulletin, filled with venom and calls for action against the Jews and others whom he believed were undermining the white race and secretly controlling the government. He also operated National Vanguard Books, a mail-order firm offering racist and anti-Semitic literature, along with tapes of his weekly half-hour radio show, “American Dissident Voices,” which broadcast over shortwave stations that could be heard in New England, Florida, California and several states in the South. Later, it could also reach some places in Europe.
Then, there were the sales of his book “The Turner Diaries,” which inspired Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The Turner Diaries, and his subsequent offering, “Hunter,” were designed to appeal to poor, grievance-nursing whites and became the how-to manual for The Order and subsequent rightwing spin-offs. Both books featured protagonists who work to halt what Dad called the “degeneration” of the white race and allowed him to ‘kill’ all the people he hated —in no particular order, Jews and rabbis, blacks and interracial couples, Communists, intellectuals and academics, gays, reporters and feminists, of course, Hollywood actors, talk show hosts, state governors, congressmen, a cardinal and a couple of bishops. They all died in gory attacks: there were exploding skulls, flying brain tissue, slit throats, knifings, shotgun blasts, hangings and bombings. Dad wrote other books, non-fiction treatises, but it was his crude fiction that earned him the big bucks and the infamy he so richly deserved. I don’t know how many copies have been sold, but in 2000, Britain’s The Guardian newspaper put the number at more than 500,000 just for The Turner Diaries.
* Dad was born in September, 1933, to an alcoholic father and a domineering mother who had trouble showing affection. When he was a young boy, his mother would pay him a small fee to find the bottles of booze his father had hidden around the house. His father died when Dad was still a youngster. Drunk, he was struck by a car…
* He spent the last two years of high school in a military-style boarding school after his mother embarked on a disastrous love affair that left her heart-broken. Dad never really experienced the warmth and emotional support that comes from having a loving home. He would entertain himself for hours, reading reams of science fiction, and play around with model rockets and chemistry sets, for which he had an extraordinary aptitude.
* While Dad earned his Ph.D at Colorado in the summer of 1962 and Mom earned her B.A. in mathematics, I continued to rock on my horse. At bedtime, I would rock with my pillow. I was about two years old when Dad started to change. From being a fun, care-free man he slowly turned into a monster. Mom says it was like a psychological switch had been thrown.
* According to Dad, he had been “an ideological virgin” until he was 30…. He said he’d hadn’t thought much about non-whites and had very little experience of them as he was growing up. “If anything, I was inclined toward the liberal position on the race question.” He recalled during a dormitory bull session as an undergraduate how he had supported the right of a person to marry or cohabit with anyone who would have him, black of white.
* He was bored with his life. He feared he was destined to work every day at something that had no real meaning and, at the same time, was fast-formulating the belief that Jews were having a massive and negative influence on America. He was convinced that they were the masterminds behind the Civil Rights Movement, and were plotting to mix blacks with whites as part of a plan to dilute the white race and create a society of half-breeds because they feared the idea of a strong white race.
* Rockwell’s views about Jews and how they were encouraging whites and non-whites to mix particularly resonated with Dad and he decided then and there that he had to help save his people from this Jewish scheme. It was more important to him than anything else — even us. He had finally found the meaning of life that he had been searching for. Rockwell’s views solidified the conclusions Dad had reached through all his hours of reading and his hatred of Jews mushroomed until he came to believe that Hitler’s final solution, the mass extermination of the Jews, was the only answer. He used to fantasize about slaughtering Jews and anyone else who supported them and their secret mission to destroy us all. It was an all-consuming malignancy that took root in his psyche and he would spend every hour from that moment until his death waging war on the Jewish people, and the blacks and left-wing students that he believed the Jews were manipulating.
* His inner rage at events in the outside world would explode into our home in the form of regular beatings that left us bruised and scarred, and in a lot of pain — he’d use a wire coat hanger, an electric razor cord, a belt, or a 2-by-4, or whatever was closest to hand. As he became more violent, I became more detached, hiding inside my head in an imaginary world where I felt safe. Sometimes, I’d reach out into the uncomfortable outer universe, looking for a sign that I was loved and lovable, but I’d always be reminded of my unworthiness and would retreat again.
* Rockwell told Dad that he had tried appealing to what he called “the winners” — the teachers and professors, doctors, lawyers and engineers, to the writers and artists, businessmen and craftsmen, and to his fellow military officers, to everyone that he considered to be “careful, responsible men and women with steady employment and stable families.” While he found that many agreed with him in principle, “almost none had the moral courage to stand up and be counted among the righteous.” In short, while they shook his hand after his speeches, Rockwell said, they would scurry away in fright when he talked about taking America back from the Jews.
* I knew beyond all doubt that there was something seriously wrong with me. I was simply bad to the core, and nothing could save me, which is why my Dad never loved me.
* One summer’s day, while Dad was out of town, I was playing down by the stream behind our house. I’d found a book of matches from somewhere and decided to entertain myself by setting individual leaves on fire and then blowing them out. It was grand fun and I did it several times until suddenly a couple of adjacent leaves caught fire and I could no longer blow them out. In a few moments the fire spread to the point that it was out of control. I got up and ran back to my house and shortly after one of our neighbors noticed the blaze and called the fire department. There was quite a large blaze raging behind the house by the time the fire truck arrived. I just stood there, watching all the commotion, in rapt fascination.
* Rockwell called publicity the “lifeblood of any political movement.” He knew that without it, no one would know that he and his Nazis existed. His publicity stunts included sending Stormtroopers dressed in ape costumes to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., carrying placards demanding “Free our Brothers” and “We Equals Want Civil rights.”
* He pulled a similar stunt at a gay rights’ convention, pretending to be a delivery man and rushing on stage with a box labeled as an emergency shipment of 24 quarts of Vaseline.
* Mom told me later that she considered leaving him many times but he threatened to go to the dean at Mary Washington and say that she was heavily involved with his work with Rockwell, although that was a lie.
* To my delight as a kid, Dad actually did sleep with a gun under his pillow. I used to creep into his room to play with it when he was away.
* Our neighbors saw the stories and soon Erik and I were being harassed and beaten up by local kids. We became known as the “Neighborhood Nazis” and people told their children not to mix with us. Some of the papers also printed our address.
* Dad took over the operation [of the National Youth Alliance]. It was to consume the rest of his life, stealing all that he had left to give and leaving not a shred for his wife and kids. Even when he died, the only reference to us was a line in his will acknowledging that he had had two sons.
* I remember being puzzled by the two men in Dad’s office because they didn’t seem to be all that intelligent. Over the years, I would see similar people at Dad’s gatherings. It was as if he were surrounded by weirdos, mostly young men who had nothing better to do than hang out with other small-minded thugs, making themselves feel better by putting down other people.
* Dad married five times in all, but there was only one woman he truly cared about and to whom he was loyal to the end: his mother, Marguerite Pierce. She wasn’t terribly affectionate in return, which perhaps is one reason why he was never able to show love to Erik and myself. My mother was terrified of her but, to her credit, Grandma did urge Dad to think again when he told her he was dumping us for his new, all-consuming love — National Socialism.
* Alcohol played a prominent and tragic role throughout Grandma’s life. For some reason, she seemed strangely attracted to heavy drinkers — her father and stepfather were both alcoholics, and so was her first husband and her last…
* Grandma never liked Mom. When Mom and Dad were courting, she advised him to bed my mother if he must, but, for God’s sake, don’t marry her. For once, Dad didn’t listen to her. She was hard on Mom all the years I knew her. She would sweep in and immediately start criticizing Mom’s housekeeping, her personal appearance, her weight, and how the house wasn’t up to her standards of cleanliness, always upsetting Mom…
* Dad should be writing a book telling the story of “Jewish conniving from beginning to end — or present,” she said. “Tell it in an interesting, readable style. Don’t be too intellectual for the general public, but, principally, DON’T ADOPT THE STYLE OF ROCKWELL by haranguing and trying to arouse the ignorant….”
* She became interested in creative writing while in Texas and spent two years as a student at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1964, she moved to Odessa, 30 miles west of Midland, and founded a monthly social magazine called “Odessan.” I was in high school and had gone to visit her but she had nothing planned for me to do when I got there, so I ended up helping her as she chronicled the social life of influential people in and around Odessa. She would go around and visit small businesses, attend social affairs and take pictures, documenting the happenings around town and selling advertising for the magazine as a way to fund it. She edited and published the magazine for 14 years. She also managed to write two novels and a number of short stories, but she was never able to get them published.
* Dad sharing stories with me and laughing like that was the closest I ever felt to him and, in all honesty, it is the only memory I have up to that point when he interacted with me in this way. I really admired him but was also very afraid of him. He still never touched me unless it was to hurt me and never said how he felt about me, except to explain to me why he was going to hit me. The only other thing he would talk about were the racist facts of life.
* I remember another neat experience with Dad when he decided to teach me how to make a bomb.
* I think in his own way Dad wanted to have a relationship with me but just didn’t know how.
* In the summer of 1971, he had embarked on an extraordinary series of articles that delivered detailed diagrams and instructions on how to make weapons that could kill and maim, explaining patiently in a professorial tone how to use each one efficiently. The articles, under the title “Revolutionary Notes” and “Patriot’s Notebook,” appeared in “Attack!” his publication aimed at high school and college students. He wrote that they were part of a new phase in the development of the Alliance that would involve “intensive organizing using the most radical and aggressive methods we can devise.”
* Dad had been stockpiling explosives in the crawl space of our house, in readiness for the race war he hoped would start soon. Mom knew about the cache and wanted it gone. She begged him time and again to get rid of it but, as usual, he ignored her. Then something happened, I don’t know what, but suddenly Dad gathered up all the explosives and dumped them in the Potomac River. Less than a week later, while he was at work, the doorbell rang. It was the FBI with a search warrant. Luckily for Dad, there was nothing to be found.
* Dad carried a terrible rage inside him and it didn’t take much to light his fuse. He would cuss like crazy when things went wrong, which was often. The smallest thing set him off, even having to replace a light bulb would spark a blue cuss-storm. But when he was discussing his beliefs, he never raised his voice. He was thoughtful with his choice of words, articulate and persuasive. When he explained things to me I was certain that he was right because he always seemed to make perfect sense.
* His favorite tipple was Black Label beer and he would buy it in quart-sized bottles. I guess his habit was becoming pretty expensive because I remember him trying his hand at brewing his own beer at home. He had saved at least 100 empty Black Label bottles and filled them with his homemade hooch. That didn’t last long, though, because one night he came home terribly drunk and threw up all over their bed. Not surprisingly, Mom was furious and perhaps he felt some shame, because after that night, he never had another drink, at least as far as we could tell.
* Dad’s political principles waxed and waned, depending on his needs at the time… When it suited his pocket, he portrayed himself as a revolutionary who would lead the White Race to the promised land and wouldn’t hesitate to use violence to wipe his enemies from the earth.
* Dad was flexible when it came to the media, too. Like an early Donald Trump, he reviled every journalist who ever drew breath, but courted their coverage at every turn. He would eagerly take calls from print reporters, play his part in documentaries and sit for interviews — especially if there were TV cameras present. It was as if he needed the attention, like some kind of validation of his value and his views. At the same time, he’d claim that the media was controlled by Jews bent on destroying the White Race and its culture, and fulminated mightily on the matter every chance he got.
* If there is one person who could readily believe Dad’s “seeker of truth” fantasy, it was Robert S. Griffin, a tenured professor of education at the University of Vermont. He wrote a hugely controversial book on Dad, which I have cited several times in this book, and quoted verbatim large tracts of my father’s venomous views. He was rebuked by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his “tedious regurgitation” of Dad’s words, and for being nothing more than a “fawning admirer” who let my father to get away with asserting that the Alliance was not a hate group, but simply “dedicated to the welfare and progress of our people.” I found the book almost impossible to finish, although it was amusing in parts to hear Dad spin his version of events and try to justify his behavior and beliefs. However, I cannot allow Griffin get away with his portrayal of my father as some benign, absent-minded professor with a fascinating insight into how the world really is…
Griffin contacted Dad in 1997, saying he wanted to write a book exploring where “culture and society” were headed and the role my father and his views played in it. Dad let Griffin stay with him at the compound for six weeks in the summer of 1998 while Griffin asked him softball questions for 30 hours and taped his answers for posterity. The result was a book titled “The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds,” taken from a line in an old Norse poem, which Griffin self-published in May, 2001. It was all a matter of ego for my father, but Griffin thought Dad saw him as a fellow academic who understood his views. For a while, Griffin claimed to be “simply a conduit” for Dad’s views and dismissed the idea that he was a racist himself. He said he was only an objective observer painting a portrait of my father and called his approach “cultural anthropology,” but as time has passed, his racist colors came shining through. Or, as Griffin calls it, his “ethnic pride.” Griffin has a website on which he promotes his articles, books and random thoughts. On watching white supremacists and neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 to chants of “the Jews will not replace us” and the old Nazi slogan of “Blood and Soil,” Griffin said his first reaction was “elation and gratitude” at how white people had organized, “standing up for their heritage and race, standing up for people like me, standing up for me.” It didn’t seem to matter to him that the marchers wore khaki uniforms and carried flaming torches and Nazi flags. He lauded their leadership, and their “remarkable dedication and courage,” and for putting themselves in “physical peril” where “they could have been shot,” he said…
But even in his adulation of Dad, he spotted “a menacing quality” about him. “There seems to be a pressure inside him, something brewing just beneath the surface, an anger perhaps,” Griffin wrote. “There is a hardness, a coldness, a potential for violence that I feel in him, and it makes me uneasy and uncomfortable.” His discomfort clearly didn’t last long. Two months before Dad died, Griffin spoke glowingly of his attributes. “He’s the most fascinating human being I’ve ever been around — ever,” he said. “Whatever you think of him, I found him to be a man of integrity and courage and dedication. And in his eyes he is doing the most important thing he can think of with his life. Those have become standards that I’ve applied to my own life.” (4) The SPLC called on the University of Vermont to condemn his writings and investigate his classroom activities. The university declined to do so. It said it had an obligation to protect “our faculty’s right to academic freedom and freedom of speech.” Griffin sees himself in a favorable light. Anyone who says he is a neo-Nazi is merely “name calling.” He describes himself as “curious and perceptive and thoughtful…an honorable person, persevering and courageous.” His tenured position at the university, he wrote on his website, “gives me more protection from attack than anybody I can think of.”
* My first real interaction with a black person came in 4th grade. I was sitting in my seat in Mrs. Carden’s class when she told us to go to the back of the room to retrieve our mid-morning snacks and then stepped out for a minute. I had just gotten my snack when I felt a staggering blow to my right jaw. I saw stars and my knees buckled. Clarence, a much bigger and older black boy in my class, threw the punch. I was terrified. I just stood there crying, my jaw throbbing, trying to process what had happened. Clarence was a trouble-maker and had been held back a couple of times but I’d never had a run-in with him and had done nothing to incite him…
It turned out that Clarence lived in “the ghetto” and I started seeing him a lot as I explored our neighborhood. I was scared to death of him and was always on the lookout for him, wherever I went. But sometimes that wasn’t enough. I would run into him while I was alone and far from home, then he would chase me and beat me up. He seemed to delight in terrorizing me. I started to hate blacks, just like Dad, but I kept my mouth shut.
* Another data point in my view on blacks was added when my bike was stolen after I ran home one day to get a snack during my paper route. Mom said she thought she knew where it was. We got into the car and she drove straight to “the ghetto.” She drove around slowly for a few minutes and then I saw a small black kid riding my bike on the sidewalk… Afterwards, I was amazed at how Mom just knew where my bike would be and how easy it was to get it back. Maybe Dad was right? Perhaps blacks were to be feared because of how they behaved?
* Dad was always coming up with new rules. One day he decided we couldn’t have Christmas anymore because he wasn’t going to have us worshipping some Jew. Mom pitched a fit.
* He also banned sports. Mom knew we were both terribly shy and sheltered and decided it would be good for us to be involved in a team sport, to expose us to other kids our age outside of our school activities.
* Dad was still beating me in seventh grade. I hated him for it and regularly fantasized about his death. By now, I knew many people loathed and despised him because of his beliefs and activities and I often prayed that someone would murder him, but no-one ever obliged me.
* Lying was my only way of dealing with him, despite the fact that it never worked.
* For a long time, Mom had been a reluctant participant in Dad’s work. She did all of his accounting and all of his typing. He wrote a lot and it was all hand-written. Whenever he needed anything typed, he would bring it home and ask her to do it for him, and she did it straight away, despite being exhausted from her full-time teaching job and being completely responsible for keeping the house clean and handling all family affairs.
* She put on the last bandage, then said quietly, “Never again!” Mom confronted Dad and said simply that he had beaten us for the last time. He said if he ever laid a finger on either of us again, she would leave and he would never see us again.
* Dad somehow derived strength from beating us up. He was like all the bullies at school, I realized. And, just like a bully, when Mom finally stood up to him, it sapped him of his strength, much as I had found out for myself at school… It was as if he no longer felt responsible for making us into what he was not, the perfect Aryan male. We were no longer his hunk of clay for molding, and he was no longer the creator.
* Dad was down in the dumps. It seemed no matter what he wrote or how he wrote it, he couldn’t stir the masses to revolt, he moaned over lunch with Revilo P. Oliver. It was 1974 and they were sitting in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Oliver was a controversial classics professor at the University of Illinois, a leading white supremacist, and a founder of the John Birch Society, until he was expelled for his racist views.
* After listening to Dad complain, Oliver asked if he had ever tried writing fiction. Dad admitted that it had never occurred to him. Oliver opined that Dad would never be able to get his message across to the masses because most of the people he was trying to reach occupied “the lower rungs of society” and simply did not read non-fiction. But they might well read light, action-packed fiction, he said, and promised to send Dad an example of what he was talking about. (1) A little later, Dad received by mail a book called “The John Franklin Letters,” which Oliver is believed to have penned under a pseudonym years before. It was published in 1959 by the Birch Society and detailed the bloody deeds of one John Franklin, who forms an underground military group called the Rangers dedicated to killing bureaucrats, whom he called “Buros.” (Oliver shot himself in 1994, at age 86, suffering from leukemia and emphysema).
Skimming through Oliver’s book, Dad realized how easy it would be for him to write something similar.
* The two books were products of my father’s feverish mind, his sick, secret fantasies laid bare upon the page, but he didn’t have the courage to use his real name, instead writing under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald. He dreamed that his writings would spark a race war and he often fantasized about walking the streets at night, quietly, efficiently dispatching mixed-race couples, Jews, gays, and anyone else who didn’t fit his Aryan mold, mentally mapping out the route he would take each night.
* Strangely, I never picked up Dad’s loathing of Jews. They didn’t spark fear inside me, though I’m not sure why, given Dad’s all-consuming hatred of them. Perhaps it was because I’d had no personal interaction with Jewish people up to this point. While I was certainly brimming with hate, I chose to focus it on blacks, gays, and any type of authority figure who tried to exercise control over me.
* [FBI] Agents had watched Dad for years, but in February 1985 they got approval for a pen register that allowed them to log, but not record, all calls made from and received by a specific phone number — my father’s. With the trove of numbers they collected, agents fanned out to look into the lives of scores of people who had been in contact with the Alliance. Some couldn’t be traced but others were watched and questioned, their vehicle descriptions and license plate numbers noted, and their records scoured for any trace of criminal or suspicious activity. Enquiries expanded to Seattle, Birmingham, Charlotte, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Little Rock, Philadelphia, San Diego and San Francisco and Tulsa and scores of other cities and, at one point, agents from several field offices attended a meeting in Denver to set their investigative targets, priorities and goals.
* Dad was scouring magazines, looking for a new mountain mate. He could not live without a woman for long. She didn’t need to love him, and he certainly didn’t need to love her. His requirements were simple: sexual services, cook, clean and do whatever he needed to keep his writing flowing and the Alliance operation moving forward.
* He cited as an example one of Gliebe’s more memorable merchandise purchases — $50,000-plus on boots made in China with swastikas imprinted on their soles. Gliebe called them “a great investment.” (3). He also commissioned a calendar that was supposed to highlight Aryan female beauty but actually featured strippers from a club he patronized. Alliance members were further scandalized upon learning that he had married a former stripper. Another of my father’s favorites was Kevin Strom, the sound-engineer who recorded Dad’s white separatist broadcasts. Strom supervised the building of the compound’s sound and video studios and the installation of its phone and alarm system, which was buried underground to keep it safe from government attack. Dad trusted Strom and Strom liked Dad — his own father had hanged himself when Strom was in his 20s…
* Things started to unravel for Strom when he was arrested in 2007. Police had found images of child porn on his computer, with hundreds of photos of naked girls in “sexually suggestive positions.” He was charged with possessing child pornography. Two other charges of enticing a minor to perform sex acts and intimidating a witness were dismissed at trial.
* Now I know that we are more a product of our environment than the product of our genes.
