Metzger’s organization is not your typical white power outfit. “I run an association of independent people who work in cells to the best of their talents,” he says. “I would encourage them to join the military, if they have a scratch they can’t seem to itch. Then go in to bring some training back to the US to make the federal government aware of our existence.” Metzger’s philosophy is a strange mish-mash of the far left, far right, and, in fact, everything in between. When he starts dilating it sends the unsuspecting listener into an ideological daze. One minute he’s praising left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky—“we disagree radically on race but his opinions on transnational corporations and how we are destroying the environment are spot on”—while the next he’s on to Adolf Hitler. “I used to call it White Aryan Resistance. Now I call it The Insurgents,” he says. “We are now a non-violent insurgency, but we are prepared to turn violent if the need be. It’s up to the government. There are moves to suppress free speech and it won’t be too long before they get their hands slapped . . . I’m no military general, I meet military people; there are no plans, just an insurgency that could become hot I would say by any means. Like any unconventional warfare it would involve whatever we would be capable of using. The white working class don’t have jet planes and atomic bombs, we would work along other lines.”
One veteran neo-Nazi who agrees is Billy Roper, who left the National Alliance after a power struggle in 2002 to start his own outfit, White Revolution. While in Tampa meeting Forrest I decide to call Roper. “We have some members in the military,” he tells me. “There are a few in the 101st Airborne, some at Fort Campbell, and some Marines in Iraq . . . There’s about twelve in there, some of them have tattoos, because anyone can walk in and get in the military now.” Roper tells me he knew two members who had swastikas and were barred but had them re-tattooed into sun wheels and the military allowed them back in. One group who don’t shy away from swastikas is the NSM, or National Socialist Movement. It claims to be the biggest Nazi organization in the US but activists like Forrest and Roper call them “clowns” because of their propensity to dress up in World War Two fatigues. Someone calling himself Willem Herring, their spokesman, says he doesn’t believe swastikas are a problem at all. “I do believe you can join the service with tattoos,” he says. “I’m sure you can join with a swastika. There’s a big gang problem in the armed forces right now: if you went to a recruitment station with a swastika I don’t think they would stop you; it would be noted in your record.”
The NSM is undoubtedly the most media-savvy group, in terms of their showiness and their accessibility. Through their media spokesman I am put in contact with Mark Connelly, the head of the SS division in New York, who I’m told is a college student and a “genius.” I’m not given a number but rather told I will be called. “You limey bastard” is the first I hear from Mark. He suspects me of being part of the Jewish Defense Force, a radical Jewish organization. I call up the spokesman who pledges to sort it out for me. A few weeks after I get another call from Mark and this time he is less truculent. “Sorry about that,” he says. “We just had a problem with the JDF; they were trying to mess us up.” I assure Mark that I just want to find out what’s going on with the NSM, and he seems to have the arrogance of youth, so I play to that. “I do the job pro bono,” he says of his role. “It’s something that you have to have a love for, it’s hard, it takes character for people who want to learn about history. This is about the reality of World War Two and the demonized German society, and being in support of National Socialism.” What brought him in? “I got into the movement when in high school, when I was learning things about certain events. They only tell you the victors’ side of the war; I found many discrepancies. I used to be Republican, but it comes to the point where you can’t trust the system.”
Connelly won’t give his age but by the sound of his voice he’s young. He lives in upstate New York, near the capital, Albany. “I’ve been disowned by my mother,” he says. The NSM are the most explicit Nazis in the US. They unashamedly worship Hitler, and dress up in 1940s Nazi regalia at their events. I attended their “historic” march on Congress in April 2008, billed as the biggest in decades. As the hundreds of cops and large numbers of anti-fascist protesters lined the streets before the march there was a feeling of great foreboding—until the NSM contingent arrived in a beat-up old van, containing perhaps thirty people, all waving swastikas, and dressed in jackboots. Scary it wasn’t. Metzger calls them, without irony, “right-wing reactionaries”: “They try to get in to the military covered in tattoos; my kind of people are taught to keep their mouth shut, to pretend they are race-mixing liberals; they don’t join any racial organization,” he says. “They are all nerds to me,” adds Forrest. “I fit in more with the Hammerskin agenda: they are more political, we are more for street activism. We’re skinheads, we’re not politicians, we’re street soldiers.”
Away from the NSM’s ostentatious pageants are the genuinely dangerous underground operators. One such is Dennis Mahon, who has been on the extremist scene for decades and had links with the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, although he remains coy with me as to what they were. “It drives you crazy,” he once said. “Thousands think I was involved. I’ve started to believe it myself. Maybe I was there. Maybe they brainwashed me and I forgot about it. Maybe I can get hypnotized and remember it. Everybody said I was there. Everybody said I drove the truck. They saw me.”15 Tom Metzger, an old friend of Mahon’s, puts me in contact with him, and when I get hold of him he picks up the phone panting like someone who has been doing strenuous exercise. He’s at home and it’s 2 p.m. “Now’s not a good time,” he says. “What are you doing?” I ask. “Oh, I really can’t say,” he replies. When I finally get him for the interview he talks about how he started out in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan before joining the National Alliance in 1980. “I thought they were too conservative,” he says initially. “I read a lot of books, like the Turner diaries, but then I was in Miami when we had the Haitian invasion.” Mahon is alluding to the “Mariel boatlift,” which saw an influx of asylum seekers during a seven-month period in 1980 when approximately 125,000 Cubans and 25,000 Haitians arrived by boat to South Florida. At the time Mahon was in the National Guard and was drafted in to help out. “I had to take them from federal prison; they were defecating and urinating in the back of the bus.” His ideas started to change. “I thought the National Alliance wasn’t radical enough, I went back to join the KKK in Columbia, Alabama.” Now, Mahon acts as a “lone warrior,” much like Metzger, not bogged down by the politics of petty rivalries which distract from his central mission: causing carnage in his race war against the government. “I guarantee something will happen—we’ve all got our targets. The Weathermen is a book about how to destroy America. The Achilles’ heel is the grid system: when energy is needed the most you blast the stations, and once the power goes out the cities go out. I know of a lot of vulnerable areas. I’m not going to say I’m going to do this, but there are some lone wolves. Chicago will be out for a week.”
Mahon received basic training while in the National Guard and, he says, put it to good use at the time. “I was in National Guard and I was doing some real serious shit,” he continues. “No one was ever the wiser—shootings and bombings.” He pauses. “No I can’t say, they can get you on civil rights violations, believe you me; the Klan can see what the results are, but you don’t see them.” He talks about a legendary “lone wolf” in Arizona, who goes by the code name Tom E. Gunn, a former Marine. “He does a lot of damage to people’s business and harasses people; he’s kind of nuts, I hear he’s a master of unconventional warfare, he does some damage to people and he was in the Marines. I’ve tried to talk to him,” he continues, “I talked to him one time, he is above ground; the underground guys, they are not supposed to contact me, but they send me newspaper clippings, there’s so many organizations getting busted.” Tom E. Gunn can be found attacking Tom Metzger— “Metzger, you are an old nobody, a has-been, and a never-was. Go away and nobody gets hurt. Show up with ANY of your kind and it will be your LAST mistake”—in a Phoenix New Times article about an Arizonian neo-Nazi icon named Elton Hall being hit by a vehicle while taking part in a protest,16 but that’s about the extent of the evidence of his existence. Because he goes by an alias, tracking him down
