A good rule of thumb for hard-right, Nazi or Nazi-adjacent groups is that one-third of its members are petty criminals, one-third are gay, and one-third are informants. The nature of such groups makes it hard to come up with firm numbers, so you’ll have to trust me. Comprised of often no more than a dozen or so individuals, from which people are constantly drifting in and out, makes attempting an actual count difficult if not impossible, but there is abundant evidence that this breakdown is closer than not to the truth. It is certainly true for now-defunct groups like the American Nazi Party and the National Renaissance Party, and nothing in the mountains of post-Charlottesville coverage and doxxing has given me any reason to update the general assumption for hard-right groups today.
Many individuals fall into more than one category. Patrik Hermansson, the most recent alt-right infiltrator, has a bit of a honeypot vibe. It’s probably not a coincidence that the most revealing scoop he produced pertained to Greg Johnson, editor of the rather gay-friendly fascist imprint Counter Currents. There are some individuals that fall into all three categories. Frazier Glenn Miller is now awaiting execution in El Dorado Prison outside of Wichita, for killing three outside a Kansas Jewish Community Center in 2014. Miller turned state’s evidence to testify in the Fort Smith Trial in 1988, a botched attempt by the Department of Justice to apply a seditious conspiracy charge to a slew of racist groups, some of which had never had any contact with one another prior to the trial. In exchange, he was rewarded with a reduced sentence and probably admission into a witness protection program (the government neither confirms nor denies this, but he was assigned a new Social Security number). Some years earlier Miller, an alcoholic and deeply troubled man, was arrested after being caught in flagrante with a male transvestite prostitute. He is an instructive example, because despite his informing, there is no reason to doubt he believed in what he was doing.
The phenomenon of the true-believing informant, strange as it may sound, is relatively common. George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, regularly telephoned the ADL’s man in Washington, Jason Silverman, to update him on party activities. Guy Banister, a former FBI agent-turned activist who was involved in Louisiana’s White Citizens Councils and the Minutemen, was regularly in touch with his former colleagues, which may have helped to shield him when a man who rented space in a building he owned, one Lee Harvey Oswald, came under posthumous scrutiny…
One interesting example that bears mentioning in relation to the Republic of Florida debacle is Roy Bullock, the ADL’s West Coast fact-finding director, who worked for the organization for about four decades. Bullock nearly kicked off an espionage scandal in the early 1990s when it was revealed that he had been handing over information on anti-apartheid activists to the South African government, and being paid for his services. When his houseboat was raided, authorities found files on hundreds of organizations and almost ten thousand individuals, some of which had been stolen from the San Francisco Police Department after they shut down their political intelligence operations. (There is also circumstantial evidence that his files on Palestinian activists were ending up in the hands of the Israeli government.)
The ADL settled several lawsuits out of court with people who had been spied upon, though they claim no wrongdoing. Bullock is germane to today’s case because, in the course of infiltrating a wide variety of Arab-American groups, he was accused of doing things like leaving holocaust denial literature on their tables. This is a common theme of watchdog activities: they will try to equate, tarnish, or otherwise associate a legitimate disagreement with bigotry. It would be useful to the ADL to associate Palestinian rights with holocaust denial, and if there isn’t enough evidence to actually support the connection, what’s a little ratfucking for a good cause?
From 1991 to 1993 the FBI briefly was involved in infiltrating militia groups in Texas, setting up a front organization called the Veterans Aryan Militia which was used to make inroads in the Texas Light Infantry, among others. The VAM was intentionally modeled after The Order, a white nationalist criminal organization famous for several robberies and the assassination of Denver radio host Alan Berg, and according to J.M. Berger’s report for the New America Foundation, it consisted of at least one agent provocateur, and worked to strengthen links between militias and groups like the Aryan Nations, which, up to that point, had been virtually nonexistent…
By organizing the Charlottesville white nationalist rally that turned deadly last fall, former Occupy activist Jason Kessler provided the watchdog organizations their greatest fundraising coup in years. And now, the Robespierre of the Republic of Florida seems to think it would be good PR to associate his group with a school shooter.
