Cover Story: Hate thy neighbor

Meet the authorThe Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, a new book by Atlanta author Daniel Levitas, traces the emergence of white supremacist paramilitary groups from their roots just after the Civil War, through the segregationist violence of the Civil Rights era, to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and beyond. In the process, he chronicles the story of William Potter Gale, whose hate-filled sermons and calls to armed insurrection have fueled generations of tax protesters, militiamen and other anti-government zealots.

The former executive director of Atlanta’s Center for Democratic Renewal and the founder of the Georgia Rural Urban Summit, Levitas has written widely about racist, anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi groups, and has testified as an expert witness in American and Canadian courts. He adapted the following excerpt for Creative Loafing.

The raspy voice of “Reverend” William Potter Gale filled the airwaves over western Kansas on a summer night in July 1982. From the studios of country music station KTTL in Dodge City, Gale’s tape-recorded sermon carried into homes, diners, cars and the cabs of combines that rolled across the last unharvested fields of winter wheat. The retired Army lieutenant colonel spoke in short rapid-fire bursts:

“We’ve got a bunch of empty skulls in Washington, D.C. They’re going to get filled up or busted — one or the other — very soon. You’re either going to get back to the Constitution of the United States in your government or officials are gonna hang by the neck until they’re dead — as examples to those who don’t.”

“Arise and fight!” Gale told his rural listeners. “If a Jew comes near you, run a sword through him.”

Like Gale’s other speeches and sermons, this broadcast had a hate-filled theme: A satanic Jewish conspiracy disguised as communism was corrupting public officials and the courts, undermining the sovereignty of America and its divinely inspired Constitution. Gale, a self-proclaimed “minister” in the Christian faith, believed that white Anglo-Saxon Christians were the true descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel to whom God’s covenant belonged. Jews were children of the devil,and the nonwhites that swarmed the planet were “mud people,” incomplete renditions of the pure Aryan man that God created in Adam.

Obsessed with maintaining white supremacy, Gale railed against all forms of “race-mixing” as a violation of “God’s law.” Other sermons warned of racial Armageddon, attacked Catholics and other minorities, and advised listeners to learn guerrilla warfare so they could garrote people in their sleep.

“You’re damn right I’m teaching violence!” Gale acknowledged. “You better start making dossiers, names, addresses, phone numbers, car license numbers, on every damn Jew rabbi in this land ... and you better start doing it now. And know where he is. If you have to be told any more than that, you’re too damn dumb to bother with.”

But William Potter Gale had a secret — something that ultimately exposed the hypocrisy of all he preached.

In 1982, more than a decade before a pair of anti-government zealots Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Gale drew the attention of his followers to federal buildings as possible targets.

“You’ve got an enemy government running around,” he said. “You’ve got a criminal government running around the land. And its source and its location is Washington, D.C., and the federal buildings they’ve built with your tax money all over the cities in this land.”

Inspired by his hatred of the government, Gale created the paramilitary group known as the Posse Comitatus. Latin for “power of the county,” the term refers to the medieval British practice of summoning a group of men to aid the sheriff in keeping the peace by pursuing and arresting lawbreakers. Gale’s revision stood this ancient practice on its head: His posse was devoted to promoting armed insurrection. Under Gale’s definition, anyone could call out the Posse, not just the sheriff. If government officials attempted to enforce “unlawful” legislation, the Posse could arrest and put them on trial with a “citizens’ jury.”

Gale officially established the Posse Comitatus in 1971. And a decade later, he helped launch the Christian Patriot movement. It was through these efforts that Gale introduced the concept of private armies and the “unorganized militia,” long before the first so-called “citizens’ militias” appeared in the 1990s.

Of course, there was nothing original in a right-wing group that cloaked itself in patriotism while instructing its followers to take up weapons, enforce white supremacy, root out communist subversion and resist the evils of central government. But Gale added a new and important twist that made his Posse Comitatus novel and attractive: His message was embellished with elaborate legalistic rhetoric that invoked, among other things, the Constitution, the Magna Carta and medieval principles of British law in order to legitimize his violent call to arms.

During the early ’70s, when other right-wing organizations were collapsing, the Posse thrived by disseminating its ideas and spawning successive waves of violence. It was largely unaffected by Gale’s death in 1988, 17 years after its founding. Like children grown to maturity, the forces he shaped have fueled the radical right to the present day. From Gale’s original ideas and comparatively narrow base of tax protesters and Christian Identity believers, the message of the Posse Comitatus has spread across America, spawning crime and violence and pushing seemingly marginal ideas into the mainstream. It ultimately metamorphosed into the broader Christian Patriot and militia movements of the late ’80s and ’90s.

For decades, the Ku Klux Klan and its various allies had created social movements and sought political power based upon explicit appeals to racial purity and Christian Nationalism. Gale was no less fanatical in his devotion to “white survival” or his denunciations of world Jewry — a fanaticism that may well have grown out of a fervent self-denial of his own genealogy.

But Gale also fashioned an elaborate American-sounding ideology that married uncompromising anti-Semitism, anti-communism and white supremacy with the appealing notion of the extreme sovereignty of the people. By emphasizing the idea that white Anglo-Saxon Christians were joined together by natural and “lawful” rights that trumped those of a (racially) corrupt state, Gale’s Posse Comitatus reached a new constituency of conservatives who would’ve been reluctant to embrace an ideology that revolved solely around crude bigotry.

While many pundits regard militia groups and their progenitors as fringe extremists, many of the core values and ideas that fueled such groups were shared by the majority of Americans until the middle of the 20th century. It was not until the nation mobilized for war against Hitler’s Germany, was compelled to assert moral superiority in the face of communism and was challenged by the domestic conflict over civil rights that it began to discard the racial, religious and nativist prejudices that had dominated its politics, society and culture.

Even today, millions of Americans share the belief that the United States should be a predominantly Christian nation. That blacks breed crime and are innately less intelligent than whites. That interracial marriage should be against the law. That Jews are clannish, cunning and too powerful for the good of the country.

Added to these essential themes of bigotry — which resonate well beyond the ranks of the far right — is the vague but popular notion that the nation is on the verge of relinquishing its sovereignty to a shadowy cabal of “globalistic” forces known as “the New World Order.” Equally popular (if not more so) is the notion that citizens are obligated to arm themselves to prevent a tyrannical government from usurping their rights.

Gale initially relied on a network of Christian Identity believers and military veterans to spread the Posse message. But he soon began promoting the idea among right-wing tax protesters as well. His suggestion to form local Posse units also was greeted warmly by members of the National Association for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and other groups devoted to “Second Amendment Absolutism,” which interpreted the Constitution as conferring an unfettered right to gun ownership.

And because many of these militant defenders of the Second Amendment also shared Gale’s belief that America was already in the grasp of a communist dictatorship, they were eager to band together in preparation for all-out war. During the early 1970s, Posse groups spread rapidly from Gale’s home state of California up the West Coast and then to the Midwest.

In Idaho, Richard Butler — the future founder of the Aryan Nations — established the Kootenai County Christian Posse Comitatus and made headlines in March 1975 when he and 50 others tried to arrest a policeman who was about to testify against a Posse member accused of assault with a deadly weapon. In Snohomish County, Wash., Posse activists delighted in frequent confrontations with just about anyone — especially county officials, whom they threatened with citizen’s arrests.

In the mid-’70s, Posse chapters spread to a half-dozen counties in Oregon, where activists convened citizen grand juries, filed lawsuits against state officials, sent threatening letters to legislators, impersonated law enforcement officers, and campaigned vigorously against gun control, regional planning and the IRS. It was in Oregon that Henry Lamont “Mike” Beach, a retired laundry-equipment mechanic and salesman, plagiarized Gale’s writings and pronounced himself national leader of the “Sheriff’s Posse Comitatus.” Although he lacked Gale’s charisma, Beach played a crucial role in spreading the Posse message across the nation. From the offices of his Citizens Law Enforcement Research Committee in Portland, Beach disseminated thousands of copies of his pirated version of Gale’s Posse manifesto, which he dubbed the Posse Blue Book. He also sold hundreds of “Posse charters” to eager activists for $21 apiece, to be used by any group of seven white Christian men seeking to launch a local chapter.

By the mid-’70s, the Posse had leapfrogged across the Rocky Mountains and established a foothold in Wisconsin, where it gained notoriety for its aggressive encounters with the IRS and the state Department of Natural Resources. As the Posse spread, so, too, did Gale’s Identity message, sparking greater militancy. The resulting threats and violence prompted the United States Department of Justice to launch a full domestic security investigation of the Posse in 1976. The IRS also began a crackdown, targeting key tax protest leaders affiliated with the Posse.

The Posse’s base of support had always been predominantly rural, and in the late 1970s a devastating combination of high interest rates and low farm prices provided fertile ground for growth. Through newsletters, meetings and hundreds of activists sprinkled across dozens of groups, Posse leaders broadcast their message to a growing audience of debt-ridden farmers, blaming an international Jewish banking conspiracy for the rash of foreclosures and business failures that ravaged the Midwest. The Posse’s fanciful interpretations of the monetary and legal system caught on among some members of the fledgling American Agriculture Movement, which mobilized tens of thousands of farmers during several years of vigorous protest, beginning in 1977. Meanwhile Gale and other Posse leaders crisscrossed the heartland, telling farmers to prepare for the coming battle of Armageddon.

By the mid-’80s, the Posse had metamorphosed again, becoming a national movement of some 12,000-15,000 hardcore activists and seven to 10 times that number of more passive supporters. Politically and demographically diverse — though still predominantly rural — it included farmers, laborers, small-business men and the unemployed, as well as former and current tax protesters, old-line Christian Identity believers, hardcore Posse traditionalists, former Republicans and Democrats, longtime right-wing activists, and soon-to-be-indoctrinated fresh recruits.

Violent incidents like the 1983 killing of two federal marshals in North Dakota by tax protester and Posse activist Gordon Kahl had prompted many to drop the Posse label and call themselves “Christian Patriots” instead. But the name change was purely cosmetic. The movement still embraced the Posse’s extreme interpretations of the Constitution as well as its hatred of the banking system, the income tax, national government and the welfare state. It focused on contemporary hot-button issues, like high interest rates and debtors’ rights, yet remained fixated on age-old myths about Jewish plots for world domination and the inherent supremacy of white Anglo-Saxon culture. Most of the movement’s members shunned the overtly racist symbols and rhetoric of groups like the Klan, even as they embraced Christian Identity theology and aspired to vigilantism. Klan politics had too much historical baggage and was more vulnerable to criticism, while the legalistic rhetoric of Christian Patriotism was intriguing and easier to justify.

Over the past three decades, the Posse Comitatus has embraced Identity theology, preached its unique form of constitutional fundamentalism, opposed taxes, government and gun control, promoted countless conspiracy theories, and reveled in all things racist and anti-Semitic. Unlike most other right-wing groups that shared similar beliefs, the Posse succeeded at joining its conspiracy theories, bigotry and zest for violence to more mainstream issues, such as banking, land-use planning, environmental regulation, property rights, gun ownership and race.

The Posse also flourished by transplanting its ideology into many different groups, which then spread Posse beliefs even further, creating a political climate that supported its future growth. This happened less by conscious design than through a process of opportunistic evolution, with the Posse regularly adapting and reinventing itself to fit changing times and conditions. Its most recent incarnation has been through the militia movement of the 1990s, which attracted tens of thousands of followers by emphasizing mainstream issues like gun control and American sovereignty in a changing world. Attracting new followers became exceedingly difficult after the Oklahoma City bombing. But by then, many of the ideas the Posse had promoted in the preceding decades had reached the mainstream.

But the story of the Posse Comitatus begins not with a litany of its failures and achievements, or with the Oklahoma City bombing, or with manifestos and sermons, or with violent altercations that made headlines and left lawmen and others dead. It starts at a personal level, a century earlier, with the ancestors of William Potter Gale and their arrival in America. Like other 19th-century immigrants, they were fleeing tyranny and seeking freedom.

And remarkably, the Gale family was Jewish.

Over his three decades of right-wing activism, Gale successfully hid the secret of his Jewish roots, even as he preached the anti-Semitic theology of Christian Identity, claiming that Jews were satanic and white Anglo-Saxon Christians were the true descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Ironically enough, Bill Gale was a Jewish anti-Semite who spent a lifetime trying to convince Christian anti-Semites that they, too, were Jews.??