If it whines like a Demon-KKK-Rat, it must be a Nazi Aryan

Jim Oliphant. Legal Times. 2002/05/23.

The FBI says the National Alliance is a domestic terror group. William
Pierce says he's in the communications business.

It is much easier to find William Pierce than it is to see him.

His work, that's everywhere. The radio. The Internet. Leaflets on
Fairfax County mailboxes. Protests at the Israeli Embassy. Video games.
CDs. In that sense, he and his National Alliance -- the White Power,
neo-Nazi organization that Pierce personifies -- surround you, even if
you aren't aware of it.

But a face-to-face meeting is trickier.

You travel six hours out of the District of Columbia, and three hours
into the journey you leave behind any trace of a highway. Instead, you
adopt unsteady two-lane blacktops that snake through despairing West
Virginia hill towns, looking for an anonymous dirt road that you'll
probably never find.

The SUV is a good thing, because you will need it. For the roads, for
the rain, and especially for the rocky path that, if you do find it,
leads to Pierce's compound.

Compound. A word that should bring uneasiness, but a word that everyone
uses to describe Pierce's mountain hideaway. Compounds make you think of
David Koresh, or Manuel Noriega. And a compound it is. A secluded lot.
Multiple buildings on acres of land. Fences.

He sounded small on the telephone. He gave you directions like your
Uncle Al. But to hear him on his weekly radio and Internet broadcast is
to hear someone else entirely.

"As long as the Jews who control America's mass media are permitted to
continue teaching our women that frolicking with Blacks is fashionable,
and as long as they are permitted to continue teaching our men that
being thought a 'racist' is a fate worse than death, we will not be able
to avoid the future the media bosses have planned for us," is an example
of Pierce's usual didactic. "The governmental structure is in place that
will annihilate our race and our civilization, and the masters of the
mass media are at the controls of this structure."

The dirt road leads to a gate. You pass a house. There are other
buildings. Then, you see it, a barn-like structure adorned with a huge
circular symbol, something that looks like an anorexic version of the
United Way logo. You will find that it adorns Pierce's headquarters in
multiple forms. It's raining hard. You get out of the car. Your portable
phone can't grab a signal. You realize no one knows where you are.

A man emerges, one of as many as 20 people who live on the property.
"You're here to see Dr. Pierce?"

You nod. You are led into the building. There is a small auditorium. At
the front stands a podium with the National Alliance symbol.

William Pierce, whom hate-monitors such as the Anti-Defamation League
have labeled one of the most dangerous racists in America, whose
organization the Federal Bureau of Investigation places at the forefront
of potential domestic terrorists, is waiting in a small room at the rear.

He looks like an aging tenured college professor who has been stashed in
a windowless office writing tracts no one will read. And then you notice
one thing that throws you.

He has a cat.

The cat, of course, is white.

Despite his age, the 69-year-old Pierce is a high-tech spin doctor of an
age-old yarn. Over the Internet, through music CDs, with books, he
repeats his dusty motifs: Jews control American government. Jews control
the media.

The Anti-Defamation League calls the National Alliance "the largest and
most active neo-Nazi organization in the nation" and estimates it has 16
active cells nationwide and a membership of more than 1,500. The
Southern Poverty Law Center, which also monitors hate groups, says the
National Alliance's membership has increased 30-fold since 1990.
Although Pierce denies advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S.
government, he frequently makes use of the phrase "white revolution."

Because of that, the FBI considers the National Alliance to be a
domestic terrorist organization. In testimony before Congress in
February, the bureau's senior counterterrorism expert, Dale Watson, told
a Senate panel that the Alliance represents "a continuing terrorist
threat."

Pierce and the Alliance were allegedly tied to a 1980s white supremacist
gang named The Order whose leader died in a shootout with federal agents
in 1984.

"The organization is openly revolutionary," says Mark Pitcavage,
director of fact finding for the Anti-Defamation League. "They say now
is not the right time for organized violent action, but maybe down the
road."

Pierce's Alliance, of which he is the unquestioned philosopher-king,
seems of late emboldened. On May 11 it organized the most recent in a
series of demonstrations in Washington, D.C., this time in front of the
Israeli Embassy. The event drew an estimated 300 people, almost 10 times
more than a similar protest last year.

"Only in the last year did [the Alliance] really come out with this kind
of public action," says Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty
Law Center.

There is one clear reason for that. To Pierce, the attacks of Sept. 11
were validation of his anti-Black, anti-Israel platform.

"In many ways, what 9/11 did most was dramatize the revolutionary nature
of the radical right today," Potok says. "[They were] standing back and
applauding."

The cat has relocated to a warm spot on top of Pierce's computer. His
cramped office is jammed with books with titles like "A History of the
Jews" and "The Jewish Lists." It feels like a bunker.

Pierce is talking about Sept. 11.

"My initial reaction was, 'Wow! Spectacular!' " he says. "This really
was the most televised terrorism event, the most televised act of war
ever."

For Pierce, there are two ready answers for any equation: Israel and
Blacks. At the time, the most recent issue of Free Speech, the
newsletter he publishes, carried an article titled "Send Them All Back."
He is not subtle.

"The September 11 attack is a very minor consequence of bad immigration
policy if you consider that most of the people involved were people who
shouldn't have been here," Pierce says. "The loss of life, the damage,
is trivial to the damage that has been done to our changing
demographics."

Pierce had already written "The Turner Diaries," the novel about an
American race war that allegedly inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the
Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

Pierce denies that the book served as McVeigh's muse for his terrorist
act, but Pierce says he understands why McVeigh did it. "He didn't have
any other way of expressing his anger," he says. "If you are some little
guy that doesn't have any other way, doesn't have any money, no powerful
friends, no medium to express yourself, you may well use terrorism.

"One cannot beat the government at this stage. The government has too
many secret police, too many guns," he says. "It may be later on that
the balance of power will shift."

A few years ago, Robert Griffin, a professor of education at the
University of Vermont, became so intrigued by Pierce that he moved to
Pierce's West Virginia stronghold and lived there for a month.

"I found him the most fascinating human being I've ever been around in
my life," says Griffin, who describes himself as "right-of-center."
"He's a very honorable man of the highest character. People can't get
beyond 'The Turner Diaries.' He has to grab people by the lapels and get
their attention through elevated language and heated talk."

Griffin attended National Alliance leadership conferences at the
compound, where, he says, as many as 70 leaders of chapters nationwide
would attend. He followed Pierce on a speaking tour in Germany. He wrote
a book about Pierce and then shopped it around. He called it "The Fame
of a Dead Man's Deeds." There were no takers.

After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, more Americans seemed to know
about "The Turner Diaries" than "Anna Karenina." Pierce wrote the book
in 1978 under a pseudonym, and followed it up with "Hunter," a book that
serves as a guide to assassination.

In recent years, however, Pierce has gone multimedia. Three years ago,
he bought a struggling white-power record label called Resistance
Records ("The Soundtrack to the White Revolution") for $250,000, a
transaction consummated at the University Club in the District.

The label and its Web site feature skinheaded-and-tattooed bands.

Earlier this year Pierce released his first video game, Ethnic
Cleansing, which, he says, gave his record label "a big boost." The
label describes the game like this: "Run through the ghetto blasting
away various blacks and spics in an attempt to gain entrance to the
subway system, where the Jews have hidden to avoid the carnage."

Griffin says Pierce is conscious that, at almost 70, he is running out
of time. He seems to be making a late-in-the-game push to stretch his
influence.

Using his anti-Israel rhetoric, Pierce has been cozying up to extremist
Islamic states. He was interviewed on Iranian radio last year. And the
Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which tracks neo-Nazi groups,
claims Pierce has ties with Ahmed Huber, a Swiss banker and Islamic
right-wing activist. Huber reportedly financially backed a Holocaust
denial conference featuring Pierce that was scheduled to be held in
Beirut last year before the Lebanese government put a stop to it. "From
a global point of view, there are two names: his and David Duke's," says
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center. "In terms of
transnational hate, he is the most sophisticated global thinker."

Locally, besides organizing demonstrations, the National Alliance has
been littering Northern Virginia communities such as Herndon, Reston,
and Great Falls with propaganda. "We started seeing them last year,
before September 11," says Lt. Mike Ditmer, bias crimes coordinator for
Fairfax County. "They would go to a neighborhood and do a mass
leafleting."

Brittanie Werbel, the assistant director of the Anti-Defamation League's
Washington office, says the National Alliance "is making a strong effort
there. As far as success, that's what we don't know. They're very frank
about trying to draw people in."

Pierce says most of the demonstrators at this month's rally came from
this area. "It used to be hard to organize in Washington, "he says. "But
the attitude is shifting now. If I keep working, if I do the best job I
can, I can do good things. Other people will come along."
* * *
Like the Demon-KKK-Rats' "Dixie" Dean, KKKlanman Kucinich, and John
"Flipflopper" KKKerry.