 History is the story of what we remember and what we forget. Take, for example, the Oklahoma City bombing, the wreckage 168 people killed in an act of domestic terrorism. This belongs on a short list of comparable events, which include Pearl Harbor, 9-11, and we know what those were. We teach those in school. We remember them. We even have to teach 9-11 now because my undergraduates don't remember or weren't yet born. But this is not true about Oklahoma City. Most people remember this as a tragedy, the work of a lone wolf, the work of a few bad apples or disaffected radicals. If you take one thing away from this talk today, it is this, when it comes to domestic terrorism, there is no such thing as a lone wolf. I'm Kathleen Ballew, I'm a historian, and the field is history of the present. And by that I mean that I'm interested in using history to understand where we are, how we got here, and what solutions history might offer to us that might not be apparent without that context. Things that we might know if we didn't study complexities and near-misses, roads not taken, and other paths that we did not follow. My research started from the need to understand how America was so unusual, and I'm about to use a couple of terms that I will just quickly define, and then I'll get back to it. When I say white supremacy, I am talking about not only individual belief, which is no longer present in many of our systems, but I am also talking about those systems themselves that bear in them the long histories of our imperfect founding. We can look at things like maternal health outcomes, incarceration rates, educational outcomes, and see that we don't have an equal playing field in our country. That's not always about racist belief, but racist belief is still around. And within the group of people who are racist, capital R, people who believe in the inherent supremacy of white people above others, I'm talking today about the white power movement, which is a small subset of racism. A small, violent subset of racism that has in the recent past come into our mainstream politics. So white supremacy, big web of problems, white power, one small part of it. So my research starts from this question of why America is so unusual, and by that I mean there are a lot of nations that have histories of white supremacy, racial inequality, and racial injustice. But where America is unusual is how little we have done together historically to come to terms with that history. I started my dissertation way back in 2005, in which time I have not built hearts. I did write this book, but I didn't build working models of human hearts, so that's okay. I suppose I am the lone humanist here in this panel anyway. In other nations we've seen events like Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, where people have come together to share their stories and talk about what happened. Things like big national museum building projects that involve a broad public conversation, school curricula projects that involve broad public consensus. We know even today after the founding of the National African American Museum on the Washington Mall, after the construction of the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, we know that these are not settled issues, and I don't have to tell you that in Florida where this school curriculum question has come back into the news once again. So in 2005, I wanted to know if there were any examples of communities trying to do this. And this took me to a grassroots Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Greensboro, North Carolina. Some of you might remember this. In 1979, a caravan of Klansmen and neo-Nazis had opened fire on the leftist anti-Klan march in Greensboro, killing five people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission about this had no subpoena power. It had no punitive power. It had no national or state government support. It did not even have the support of the city council. It couldn't really do anything. It's not empowered by anything except the community itself. But people showed up because they wanted to tell their stories, and because the history mattered to them. People from both sides showed up. And this is where my first book came from, because the people from the Klan and Nazi groups who came to tell their stories kept saying something like this. Well, I killed communists in the Vietnam War, so why wouldn't I kill them here in North Carolina? Now this is the kind of claim that as a historian you cannot stop thinking about, because it mixes up so many things. This collapses battlefront and homefront. It mixes up wartime and peacetime. It lumps together a whole bunch of different kinds of others into one killable group identified as communist. And it attempts to paint the gunmen, who again are card-carrying members of neo-Nazi and Klan groups in this example. It attempts to paint them as morally equivalent to soldiers fighting in a war. This felt all wrong to me as a historian too, because 1979 seemed very late for an act of Klan violence of this nature. I had been taught this was all about the civil rights movement, very late for that. And it was also strange because it's Greensboro, the city of the first war sit-in. This is not where this was supposed to be happening. So as it turned out what happened is that this took me to a voluminous archive that no one had put together before. Three major university collections had just opened with ephemera from these groups. And I was also able to get thousands of pages of previously classified government documents, trial cases and a whole bunch of other kinds of documents. And together this revealed a surprise. What people had dismissed as a scattered mess of actors and groups turned out to be a coordinated social movement, the white power movement. It had also the hallmarks of any social movement of this era, meaning it had leadership, ideology, membership criteria, uniforms, slogans, regular meetings, publications. And it was also a revolutionary movement. And by that I mean that it was not interested simply in what we might think of as vigilante violence. And I'm happy to talk to you after this session about the distinction between these two. But it was interested in an outright attack on American democracy and the government and its institutions. It was also populated by activists. People prepared to take action, often violently. And it was in every way but race an incredibly diverse social movement. Men, women and children. People in every region of the country. It had felons and religious leaders. It had people of different class backgrounds, people in suburbs, cities and rural areas. It had high school dropouts and people with advanced degrees. It had civilians, veterans, and active duty military personnel. And it also brought together several groups that before the 1970s had been feuding with one another. Including Klan, neo-Nazi, radical tax-resister, Christian identity, white separatists, and later on, skinhead and militia activists. These groups came together because they shared an explicit and declared war, a goal of waging war on American democracy. Now, analysts have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how big each of these groups is. Thinking about things like which slogan goes with which ideology. How many skinheads and how many clansmen. Which tattoo should I expect in my community if there is a problem? It turns out this is not how this worked at all on the ground. Because people had overlapping membership. People moved between groups based not only on their beliefs but also on much more mundane things like changing jobs or moving or falling in love with somebody in a different part of the movement. And the movement itself had groups with multiple ideologies operating at one time. So, what brought all these people together? White power activists united in the late 1970s around a shared narrative that they told each other and themselves about the Vietnam War. This story operationalized their violence. It focused their anger and sense of betrayal on the federal government. Many of them traded robes and hoods for camouflage fatigues in this period and adopted the weapons and tactics of the Vietnam War. They were motivated too by an immediate sense of emergency because they thought of a number of social issues that we might think of as capital C conservative such as opposing immigration opposing abortion, opposing racial integration opposing interracial marriage. They espoused those beliefs because they thought that they were a threat to the white birth rate. And that this would lead eventually to the end of the white race completely. In other words, they took what most people were thinking about as a soft demographic change. A county or a city or the nation would no longer be majority white. They saw this as an apocalyptic threat to their existence. For many people in this movement, this sense of apocalypse was not only social but based in faith. Christian identity which was a widely held political theology among these activists claimed that the white race was the true lost tribe of Israel and that everyone else in the world was either descended from beasts or from Satan. They believed that there was a coming apocalyptic end of days but unlike evangelicals they did not believe in the rapture when the faithful would be peacefully transported to heaven before the violence of the end times. They believed that their goal and their holy purpose was to survive the coming tribulations and to clear the world of all enemies before Christ could return. So, to recall, all enemies means all non-white people and race traders. So, what this does is transmute their cause into a holy war. So, white power bound together the Greensboro gunmen. This is the gunmen fundraising in front of the local Vietnam War Memorial and also gave them the story that made the killing of leftist activists make sense in court and in the press. And this worked very well. They were equated on state and federal charges even though there are multiple news cameras that captured the full shooting on film. And a later civil trial found them to be only partially liable and the city of Greensboro ended up paying their settlement. The movement saw all of this as a green light for further action. In 1983 they gathered as they did every summer at the Aryan Nations World Congress, which was the coming together of leadership and the rank and file of the white power movement in Hayden Lake, Idaho. The movement changed everything in 1983 because this is the meaning where they had a secret convocation of leadership and they declared war on the federal government. From 1983 forward, this movement is interested in growing the United States. This is part of the reason that I think we should call it white power instead of white nationalist. A lot of people think of white nationalist as simply overzealous patriotism, but the nation implied here is not the United States. The nation is the Aryan nation. It's envisioned as the worldwide body politic of white people. It is fundamentally opposed to the operation and tenets of the United States. With this work, we're talking about a problem of how can a very small group of extremist activists try to overthrow the most militarized super state in world history. They had a plan for this and it's illustrated in these two books, which you definitely should not buy, please, because sometimes the money still goes back to these groups. So if you would like to read them, I'm happy to help you find a non profiting these groups copy. What they come up with is an idea called leaderless resistance. It's what we would now call cell style terrorism. The idea is that one or a few activists could work towards common goals either on their own or in cells without any demonstrable ties with other cells or with leadership. And so to be totally clear, there are leaders in a movement set up around leaderless resistance. There just aren't paper trails connecting them to the crimes carried out by their followers. Leaderless resistance was designed to foil federal informants that had become a problem for the Klan particularly during the Civil Rights movement and also to make it harder to prosecute activists in court. But today we have to deal with its much larger and more catastrophic outcome, which is that leaderless resistance made the movement itself disappear. This is where we get the fiction of the lone wolf. Now let me be perfectly clear, there are crimes carried out by individuals. We have a number of mass shootings that we have to contend with in this country, only some of them fit what I'm talking about right now. There are mass shootings that are carried out by lone actors who are not affiliated with the political ideology. That's not what we're talking about right now. When we are talking about white power shootings, however, we're talking about something with a specific social network, with a coherent political ideology and a whole bunch of other people who we might want to think about in terms of culpability or at least creation of opportunity. Now leaderless resistance allowed the movement to organize around differential levels of involvement. So we can consider this in concentric circles. This is the 1980s, not today, but we would expect something similar today, although I would bet that these numbers are quite a bit larger. Experts who are trying to tally in the 80s come up with about 25,000 people in what they call the Hardcore Center. These are people who live and breathe the white power movement. They marry other activists, they go to white power churches, they homeschool their kids with white power materials, they pick each other up from the airport, they stay with each other when they drive across the country. Every part of their life becomes contained within this circle. Outside of that we have an additional 150 to 175,000 people. These are people who contribute money and resources who might turn out for a major action, whether it's an underground event or a march down Main Street, and people who subscribe to publications and join lists. Outside of that are another 450,000 people. These are people who don't contribute money but do read the newspaper regularly, who don't go in uniform to an event but might go and sit across the street and support and shout. What we have is a model where levels of involvement are structured such that extremist views can be pushed from that Hardcore Center out into our political mainstream and people who can be radicalized are pulled from the outside in towards that Hardcore Center. We might also want to think about what to do about the larger circle around this 450,000 which has hardly been studied at all, but this is where the friction has happened in our politics lately, I think, because outside of this would be a circle larger than 450,000 people. People who would never pick up a newspaper that says official newspaper of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but who might agree with some of the articles that are presented in that newspaper, especially if those ideas come to them through a social relationship or at the hairdresser or from a family member. So these are built to manipulate our existing social relationships for recruitment and radicalization. Now, when we think about radicalization, this is one of the places where the scholarship is really rushing to catch up to the problem of white power violence. We have some sort of stereotypical beliefs about the sort of a person who might end up in that Hardcore Inner Circle. Beam and Glenn Miller are both very famous activists in this movement. Beam was a segregationist in high school. He worked on a George Wallace campaign tour. He deployed to the Vietnam War. He was already racist before he went. He was much more racist after he came back. He started a Klan group and eventually worked for Aryan Nations. Glenn Miller served 20 years in the Army, but was radicalized by his own father in a neo-Nazi publication. He then started his own white power group on Fort Bragg and was eventually dishonorably discharged but continued his paramilitary activity. Gary Lee Yarbrough, so those are two examples of people radicalized through family relationships and combat. Gary Lee Yarbrough was a member of a terrorist group called the Order. This is the one that was responsible for the murder of the Denver area radio personality Alan Berg in 1984, and he was recruited from prison. But Michelle Party, she fell into the movement sideways because she needed childcare for her toddler and her husband's friends would provide it for free. And she was useful because she knew how to dye hair and there were some people trying to escape from federal informants who needed to disguise themselves quickly. And she ended up being the Inner Circle mostly by happenstance. All of these people were important to the functioning of the movement. I'm going to take you just quickly through the things that happen after this declaration of war. First, the white power movement used the proto-internet to spread its sort of wish list to its cells and operatives through a network called Liberty Net beginning in 1983-84. Liberty Net had assassination lists and information about belief. It also had personal ads and recipe accounts. We should think about this as Facebook before Facebook, creating the social network that bound together these activists so that they could become violent later. They immediately created paramilitary groups and violence through groups like the Order, the White Patriot Party and White Area Resistance. And then in 1987 the federal government attempted a major prosecution of this movement. This was a prosecution for 13 activists on charges including seditious conspiracy. And the DOGA really threw a lot at this including plea bargains from a number of other trials through the 80s. Now this movement, there is no question historically was absolutely engaged in seditious conspiracy. They had conspired to overthrow the federal government and the DOJ had the wiretaps to show the calls proving that. They met and spoke through documented calls and meetings. They shared money and weapons and personnel and explosives. And they armed themselves not only with the semi-automatics that you might expect but also with things like anti-tank rockets, surface-to-air missiles, homemade napalm and claymore mines and machine guns. They trained in urban warfare as private armies. But the outcome of that trial was not a conviction. The outcome was this picture. This is Louis Beam again who we just saw a second ago. He's carrying his young wife Sheila. When I teach this photo I like to ask where are her shoes? This is the photo that ran on the front page of one newspaper covering the acquittals. And it ran under the headline jubilant racist swim trial. So the DOJ needed a clean sweep. It had called this operation clean sweep and instead it got jubilant racist swim trial. Now what happened? There were a lot of different issues with this trial including things like chain of custody problems excluded evidence. The jury never saw those weapons, for instance. There were also some things that I think reasonable people can agree were a problem like two defendants had romantic relationship with jurors during the trial. I think we can all agree that is not an impartial jury. So what happens is that this is a huge failure of a prosecutorial effort. Not only are these defendants not contrite about having stood trial, this guy Louis Beam immediately starts a publication called The Seditionist and they get their guns back. The government returns these weapons to the defendants who immediately relocate to the Pacific Northwest, change their name to militia groups, and continue operating exactly as they have been. This brings us up to Ruby Ridge and Waco in 1992 and 93 which I am skipping over for time but suffice it to say that they are both understood by the movement as a profound overreach by the federal government that ends up with separatists being killed. This is a galvanizing event for the movement and a humbling event for the Department of Justice. And what happens is as one journalist finds the FBI has a policy change that they are no longer going to try to tie these crimes to a movement. No more tying crimes to a broader movement they say, we are going to prosecute individual actors only. This is the policy in place when Timothy McVeigh helps to bomb the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995. People think of it as the work of a lone wolf. Sometimes the work of a few bad apples if we think about the co-conspirators who also stood trial. But the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming and it's not at the level of conspiracy theory. There is a full chapter about this in my book with all the footnotes you would like to have. Just a quick run through right now. A few highlights include his choice of a building that had been a target of this movement since 1983. The use and distribution of the Turner Diaries, the novel we talked about earlier. His presence as a high level security guard for the Michigan Militia. His contact with the Klan chapter, his contacts and attempted contacts with groups like the Arizona Patriots, the National Alliance, and a white separatist compound in Elohim City. And the date of the bombing, not only on the anniversary of Waco, and you can see him here distributing bumper stickers to protest the Waco siege as it was happening, but also on the execution date of a white separatist who was convicted of crimes who had once attempted to blow up the same building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh's life places him as a soldier of leaderless resistance without any question historically. We lost the story of the white power movement's long lead up to Oklahoma City. We lost the story of the bombing, and with them we lost our chance at holding accountable the many people involved in that attack on our nation. The Oklahoma City bombing did not reduce the ambitions of the white power movement, nor did the government crackdown on the white power movement that was currently followed, and in fact, militia groups increased in activity after that bombing. But the idea of the lone wolf remains with us. We know this because this is how we get stories about the Charleston and Buffalo shootings as anti-Black, and the Tree of Life shooting as anti-Semitic, and the El Paso shooting as anti-Latino Christ Church as anti-immigrant. They are all those were perpetrated by white power shooters with shared ideology supported by a broad and active social movement with public facing elements. They all used the same coded language on their weapons when they scrawled the messages on those weapons. They have even cut and pasted text from each other's manifestos, which you can find using the plagiarism tools we have developed for AI. If we see these attacks as simply the work of lone wolves, then they are separate. They're tragedies, but they are separate. What we have to think about is how they are interconnected, because that is how we see not only the broad ground swell of perpetrators that are involved in this movement, it's also how we join together these impacted communities. These communities don't have equal access to resources, both material and media. They don't have equal access to sympathies, but they have all been attacked by the same movement and it is a movement that is attempting also to overturn American democratic institutions. Thank you very much and I appreciate the time. Can I ask you a quick question? Yes. You explained in some ways how people get recruited into or some of it's by family, some of it's by the people they hang out with. Have I got that basically right? Now let me ask you question number two. Where do the proud boys fit in this spectrum of anti-government, white nationalist movements? The proud boys are part of the white power movement. This is true based on both the investigative reporting that has gotten into the belief system. They claim they're not. They claim they're not privately, but their actions and their underground communications place them in the movement privately. One way we can think about this is the historical context teaches us that the white power movement works both with a public facing above ground contingent and with a paramilitary underground. We only get to see the above ground machinations in real time, but when we get glimpses into the underground such as private text channels, exposés and then contact with other kinds of groups, we see the interconnections. You see the connections and you learn that. Kathleen, thank you very much for educating us. Thank you. Appreciate it very much.