Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

White power activists struggled with the fact that they were claiming to uphold American traditions and values, yet consistently found themselves at odds with their own government, to the point where they believed it necessary to use violence against it. A concept that helped reconcile this contradiction was to conclude that the government itself had fallen prey to a shadowy group of (usually Jewish) elites plotting to enslave the US population and impose a tyrannical world government. Through this lens it became permissible to view all governments agents, even the humblest, as enemy agents of an evil and foreign power, and that war on them was absolutely justified.

Popularized by white power leader Louis Beam in 1983, this term refers to the white power movement’s strategy of waging war against the federal government. After several high-profile white power activists (including Beam) became targets of federal prosecution, Beam called for a vast network of autonomous cells operating with minimal contact and obeying no superiors. This would make it impossible for the federal government to investigate or charge more than a handful of cells at a time, while doing minimal damage to the network. Beam’s strategy was aided by early developments in internet technology, leading Beam to found Liberty Net, an online database and forum permitting rapid communication among different cells. Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City is widely seen as an example of leaderless resistance, as McVeigh was fully integrated into the white power network but was ostensibly acting alone, so the government only prosecuted him and his immediate co-conspirators.

A 1978 novel by the neo-Nazi National Alliance’s William Pierce (written under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald), this book became one of the most important texts in the post-Vietnam white power movement. The main character, Earl Turner, joins a terrorist organization bent on destroying the US government after the 1993 “Cohen Act” effectively suspends the Second Amendment. Turner’s organization seizes nuclear weapons and precipitates a war that destroys all the world’s governments, after which the surviving white peoples commit genocide against non-white peoples around the world. Its plot points have eerily reoccurred in instances such as the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, September 11 (Turner dies by piloting a plane into the Pentagon), and the January 6 insurrection.