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National Alliance

The National Alliance had several incarnations. The group was originally established by Willis Carto, anti­Semitic founder of Liberty Lobby, as the "Youth for Wallace" campaign in support of the 1968 Presidential bid of Alabama Governor George Wallace. After Wallace lost the Presidential race, Carto renamed his organization the National Youth Alliance and attempted to recruit activists to his increasingly radical anti­ democratic cause. In 1970, William Pierce, a former American Nazi Party (ANP) officer and editor of the National Socialist World, left the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP), the successor to the ANP, to join the National Youth Alliance. According to the Washington Post at the time, the National Youth Alliance attracted several former ANP activists. These extremists ultimately led the organization away from Carto's influence.

William Luther Pierce split from the American Nazi Party and founded the National Alliance. Pierce, an atheist and scientist, was attuned to the fact that these ostentatious forms of white nationalism were deeply alienating to “normal people,” attracting recruits he described as “defective” and “crippled.”

The stated goal of the National Alliance is to secure "a racially clean area of the earth . . . no non-whites in our living space . . . a thorough rooting out of Semitic and other non-Aryan values and customs everywhere.'' To achieve this warped end, this organization of intolerance pledges ``to do whatever is necessary to achieve this White living space and to keep it White. We will not be deterred by the difficulty or temporary unpleasantness involved."

The depths of ``temporary unpleasantness'' to which the National Alliance has sunk in its pursuit of its depraved agenda, tracing numerous cold-blooded murders and other terrorist activities to National Alliance members. Declared National Alliance leader William L. Pierce: "We should not flinch from this. We should not focus on the fact that it will be horrible and bloody, but on the fact that it is necessary, and because it is necessary it is good."

By 1971, Pierce and Carto were openly feuding. Carto accused Pierce of stealing the Liberty Lobby mailing list and sending the individuals listed on it " poison pen" letters that vilified Carto's group. The hostilities between the two men have not abated. Carto currently blames Pierce for a dispute begun in 1993 between Liberty Lobby and another Carto­ founded group, the Holocaust­ denying Institute for Historical Review.

Since 1974, when the National Alliance dropped the word "Youth" from its name, Pierce ran the group and edited its magazine, National Vanguard (originally titled Attack!), as well as an internal newsletter, National Alliance Bulletin (formerly called Action). The National Alliance also publishes National Vanguard Books, a catalog of racist and anti­ Semitic literature. Unsolicited promotional materials about the catalog and extremist publications listing the catalog have been sent to high school and college students across the country. The principal books promoted by the National Alliance have been the Turner Diaries, a novel published in 1978, and Hunter, a second work of fiction published in 1989.

In 1985, Pierce relocated the National Alliance from Arlington, Virginia, to a 346­ acre farm near Mill Point, West Virginia, which he bought for $95,000 in cash. There has been some speculation over the years that at least some of the money used for the purchase had come from the proceeds of bank and armored car robberies committed by The Order. Authorities believe that of the $4 million stolen by members of the terrorist band, $750,000 was distributed to various white supremacist allies. Tom Martinez, a one­ time associate of Bob Mathews who became an FBI informant, has written that in November 1984, Mathews admitted to him that he had donated some of The Order's loot to William Pierce. That same month, Pierce bought the West Virginia farm. He converted it to a compound and called it the " Cosmotheist Community Church." Pierce then filed for federal, state and local tax exemptions. But in 1986, the "Church" lost its state tax exemption for all but 60 acres and those buildings being used exclusively for "religious purposes."

Pierce's formation of the "Church" appears to have been a last­ ditch effort to avoid paying taxes. Pierce had tried, years earlier, to acquire tax­ exempt status for the National Alliance itself by claiming that his organization was " educational." But the Internal Revenue Service denied the application in 1978. While Pierce appealed, the U. S. Court of Appeals upheld the IRS's decision in 1983, ruling that the National Alliance did not qualify as an educational organization. (The court's position was supported by amicus curiae briefs filed by ADL, the American Jewish Congress and the NAACP.) The court noted that Pierce's organization " repetitively appeals for action, including violence" to injure members of " named racial, religious, or ethnic groups," and added that National Alliance published materials that " cannot reasonably be considered intellectual exposition."

Meanwhile, Pierce continued to invest in unusual real estate ventures. In 1992, he paid $100,000 to Ben Klassen, founder of the racist, anti­ Semitic and anti­ Christian Church of the Creator (COTC), for a 21­ acre compound in Macon County, North Carolina. Klassen undersold the property, possibly in an attempt to unload his assets and avoid a civil lawsuit holding his organization vicariously responsible for the murder of an African­ American sailor by a COTC member.

Pierce put the North Carolina property up for sale again almost immediately after he bought it from Klassen, with an asking price of nearly three times what he had paid. A buyer unconnected to the white supremacist movement purchased the land a year later for $185,000. The Southern Poverty Law Center, representing the sailor's family, filed suit against Pierce, arguing that the original sale had been a fraudulent pretest to avoid paying the family damages in their claim against Klassen. On May 19, 1996, a federal jury ruled against Pierce and ordered that he gave the murdered sailor's family the $85,000 profit he made from the land sale.

In 1986, the National Alliance purchased 100 shares of AT& T stock, which enabled the group to place resolutions on the ballot of the corporation's annual shareholders meeting. The first such resolution, proposed in 1987, called for an end to AT& T's minority hiring program, on the grounds that Black people are intellectually inferior to whites. With the explicit condemnation by company officials, the resolution received 8.6 percent of shareholders' votes. The National Alliance resubmitted this proposal over the next three years, with no appreciable change in support. In 1991, the NA group submitted a new resolution calling for AT& T to stop doing all business with Israel. Following a vigorous campaign against the resolution, it was voted down by 96 percent of shareholders. The following year AT& T blocked the National Alliance from resubmitting the anti­ Israel proposal; the Securities and Exchange Commission upheld their effort against Pierce's group.

The computer game "Ethnic Cleansing" was produced by National Alliance and sold on a CD-ROM for $14.88 a pop. It is promoted by the group as the "most politically incorrect video game ever made." The game -- based on the Genesis 3D open-source software ~- takes place in an urban setting where the protagonist kills Blacks and Latinos on city streets before descending into a subway to slay Jews, and ultimately Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. When a dark-skinned player is killed, a monkey sound is played; Jewish characters shout “oy vey" when they are shot.

The right-wing movement is organized and technologically sophisticated. They have the capability of instantly contacting large numbers of members through the Internet and organized fax networks, which increases the risk of reinforcements arriving in siege situations. Survival expos and gun shows present opportunities for militaristic groups to arm and supply themselves. People motivated by their religious beliefs can be doubly dangerous, since they are confident that the groups they have targeted for violence are enemies of God. Infiltration and intelligence-gathering involving these groups and individuals will become increasingly difficult. People involved in right-wing groups, including militia groups, have been arrested on weapons' charges and bombing conspiracies. Infiltration by police has been the means for most of the arrests involving right-wing groups.

The NA sprang to national attention several years ago, when it was discovered that a fictitious incident in The Turner Diaries, a violent and racist novel written by the NA's leader, might have been used as a model for the Oklahoma City bombing. Convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh was a devoted reader of The Diaries, which features a bombing scenario that is eerily reminiscent of the April 19, 1995 blast. The book was also the blueprint for The Order, a revolutionary terrorist group that robbed and murdered its way to fame in the early 1980s. The ringleader of The Order was an organizer for the NA.

The National Alliance's membership base had experienced dramatic growth by 1998, with its numbers more than doubling since 1992. The group, headquartered near Hillsboro, West Virginia, was led by former University of Oregon physics professor and veteran anti-Semite William L. Pierce. With 16 active cells from coast to coast, an estimated membership of 1,000 and thousands listening to its radio broadcasts and browsing its Internet site, the National Alliance was the largest and most active neo-Nazi organization in the nation.