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April 2007

Annals of Couch Potato Journalism

On the “Road” with the Ku Klux Klan
Anonymous

In my former life as an intrepid reporter, preparation for writing about America’s abundance of hate groups would have gone as follows: pack Big Silver—my old gas-guzzling Buick—and head out onto the interstate; collect leaflets from Aryan Nation and assorted white-supremacist wannabes; find troubled white men, predictably in Wal-Mart hunting apparel accessorized with shiny sharpshooters, and meet them in Circle K parking lots; pass, with my blond hair and blue eyes, for what a white-supremacist would consider “pure Aryan”; omit mention that I am a Jew; in reporter’s notebook, furiously scribble down rants about illegal immigrants and God-knows-what conspiracy theories; keep a watchful eye on sources’ body language, praying that zippers remain zipped, guns stay unloaded.

That was two decades ago. Now a risk-shy parent, I remain aware that American men—and women—continue to pledge allegiance to groups that hate Jews, African Americans, gays and the latest crop of immigrants. After reading a recent Anti-Defamation League report detailing how hate-group membership is again on the rise, I decide it’s time to revisit that vast stretch of America where tolerance is not a family value.

To track hate groups these days, there’s no need to hit the road. Now I can bring them right into my living room. So early one morning I creep down the stairs as my family sleeps. The sun is shining, the cat is stretched out on the rug and our compact, environmentally friendly station wagon is parked in the driveway. I carry a bowl of whole-grain cereal and skim milk topped with antioxidant-rich blueberries to the big comfy couch in our living room and flip open my trusty laptop.

Absent is that familiar smell of oil dripping on hot asphalt as I type “Ku Klux Klan” into the search box and the first 50 of what Google says are 1,710,000 hits blink into view. Right away, it’s obvious that the era of a single unified Klan is past: 34 discrete groups (with an estimated 5,000 members among them) now compete for the title.

I am drawn in by the citation for the Knights’ Party U.S.A. KKK group, which, along with several others, claims to be the largest. I hesitate for a second; then click my mouse.

Expecting the searing flames of a burning cross, I am instead greeted by garish white letters on a royal blue screen: “Welcome to the Ku Klux Klan!” Beneath these welcoming words is what looks like a small child’s doughy sculpture of a robed and hooded Klansman, his arm raised ominously, as if pointing through my screen to the armchair across the room. I have three choices, and two involve e-commerce: 1) “For KKK T-shirts and more”; 2) “For Jewelry and more also Klansman statue [sic]”; 3) “Here for the Main site.”

I’m a red-blooded American with a credit card, so I opt for No. 1. Instantly I’m linked to www.christianbooksandthings.com. “God Bless America! Free Shipping Inside the U.S.!” I select “Jewelry, pens, pictures and other odds and ends,” which leads me to a long list of merchandise, including Confederate-flag oven mitts and hot pads, a coaster decorated with the KKK cross and the “Christian Cross Lighting mouse pad” featuring a photograph of 20 or so robed and hooded men. I also discover the origin of the art on the opening page: The doughy figurine is actually the Klansmen “statue,” available for purchase “with or without lighted eyes.” The familiar Visa and MasterCard icons appear alongside.

This Klan’s main site is littered with patriotic standbys: Mount Rushmore, the U.S. Capitol and the American flag, plus two Civil War swords and a Civil War-era pistol atop Old Glory and the Confederate flag. It’s a busy, colorful place and a touch more professional than the previous pages. Over on the right is an ad that says “This is the Klan Show, the world’s first and only White Pride Internet TV show (5th season!),” hosted by national director Thomas Robb. In a photo he looks as ordinary as any pastor in a suit. Another ad lists law-enforcement phone numbers for reporting illegal immigrants. Farther down, a hodgepodge of articles detail the dangerous influence of the Jews on the world, including a screed against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Jewish lobbying group.

Little about this site alarms me until I click on the section for young people interested in becoming associates of the “Knights’ Party Youth Corp”:

After all you were primed right from the get go with shows like Sesame Street telling you how great it was to go to an integrated school. But you soon learned the truth when you saw the hatred for white people in your school. It didn’t just come from nonwhites. It was in the text books and your teachers talked about it. It seems they would have us believe that white people are stupid, uncaring, uncool, hateful oppressors who can’t dance. Is it any wonder so many young people are experimenting with interracial dating? Who wants to date a loser and if white people are the bafoons [sic] they are made out to be… then it would make perfect sense to go out with the more desirable black guy or the cute little Asian girl, wouldn’t it? It’s sad. So many white people have lost their racial instinct.

My laughter draws the attention of family members, who, stumbling downstairs in search of breakfast, notice me hunched over my laptop. “What’s so funny?” I shoo my oldest away and tell him to get dressed for school. This is no place for children, at least not mine, although the “Youth Corp” does welcome members from ages 12 to 17.

While cozy breakfast noises emanate from the kitchen, I get back to work, alone again with the Klan. I decide to ratchet things up a notch. I click “Join.”

I can mail in a membership form with the $35 annual fee, but it’s faster if I pay by credit card. If I do, I can immediately receive my Klansman or Klanswoman certificate (a résumé builder?), ID card, orientation video, and information about how to move up in rank to Page, Squire and Knight. “It couldn’t be easier!” I have to agree.

All mailings, I am assured, will arrive in a plain envelope. But when I click on the application form, it’s clear I won’t be meeting the requirements anytime soon. “I am white and not of racially mixed descent,” I would have to pledge. “I am not married to a nonwhite. I do not date nonwhites no [sic] do I have nonwhite dependents. I believe in the ideals of Western Christian civilization and profess my belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.”

Unlike other truly risk-taking journalists, I never infiltrated a hate group, even in my younger days. I open a new window to research Stetson Kennedy, author of I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan. Going undercover in the 1930s, he provided the Klan’s secrets—code words, symbols, protocols—to the writers of the popular Superman radio program in the hope of stripping away its mystique and trivializing its rituals. Kennedy’s example is inspiring, but I decide against joining the Knights’ Party. Instead I continue down the Google rankings in search of more sites.

Next I encounter the Web home of the White Camellia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—a small group based in Cleveland, Texas. Knowing the name of the town, someplace real and specific, reminds me of how we tend to think the whole world resembles our own neighborhood. A brief search on “Cleveland,” some 50 miles outside of Houston, reveals that most of the town’s 9,500 residents are white, but there are plenty of blacks and Hispanics to boot. This must stick in the craw of White Camellia’s “grand dragon,” a man named Charles Lee, who has dedicated himself to solving “the terrible problems that white Christians find themselves in.” Trawling around this sparse, unfriendly site, I learn it does not accept members via the Internet. “The White Camellia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is not a mail-order group.” To join, I would have to use snail mail and personally meet the grand dragon.

I find these added steps oddly reassuring. But again, I’m unlikely to make the cut. “Anyone joining the White Camellia Knights would have to prove themselves to be 100% White,” he explains. “We do not accept race-mixing in any form that includes being part black, brown, yellow or any other racially mixed breed. Including Indians and Jews.” Christians only, the site decrees, and not “the Jewish version of Christianity.”

While I’ve been clicking away, an adult family member has waltzed into the living room. Aware of my “travels,” he’s cradling his own laptop, which serenades me with the adolescent hate band Prussian Blue. Some of the lyrics are “Aryan man awake, how much more will you take, turn that fear to hate, Aryan man awake.” I lean over to look at the band’s web site on his screen. It’s filled with the sultry, long-limbed, blonde 14-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx. The “liner notes” explain that through their music, the girls hope to “help fellow Whites come to understand that love for one’s race is a beautiful gift that we should celebrate.”
Uninspired by Lamb and Lynx’s desire “to nurture one’s love for the white race,” I head off for something more hardcore in the hate-site universe: the Aryan Nation.

The Aryan Nation’s preoccupation with Jew-hating practically jumps off the screen. Hitler is on hand, along with all the classic Nazi propaganda: Cartoons portray Jews as predators with enormous noses and sinister grins; “Brigadier General says Israel is the problem, not Iraq,” screams a headline; there’s talk of “Aryan jihad,” the “hydra-headed beast of Jewish cultural hegemony” and the dream of “worldwide kristallnacht.” All this and T-shirts, too, plus Aryan Nation flags and “quality Adirondack furniture.”

Jew-hating at the National Alliance Web site is even more up-to-date. Couldn’t get to Tehran? No worry, the alliance has its own “2007 International Holocaust Revisionist Conference” coming up in Hillsboro, West Virginia. The conference promises to present some of the world’s most prominent voices on “Holocaust revisionism and related matters,” including Arthur Butz, author of Hoax of the 20th Century, and Joseph McGinnis, a well-known attorney and defender of ex-Nazis. Tickets are available on the Web.

I know I can’t skip the American Nazis——but all of this hate is making my head spin. Craving sustenance, I get myself an all-American tall glass of milk and a handful of chocolate-chip cookies. Back on the couch, I plunge into the Nazi opening page. It’s Nazi multimedia, with sound effects! Is that a flag whipping in the wind or muted machine-gun fire I hear?

Once inside, it’s all Americana—Nazi-style: reds, whites and blues with the addition—of course—of swastikas. The content is chilling but predictable. “Why we Burned the Talmud” explains that according to the Talmud, Jews believe that “only Jews are humans... a Gentile girl who is three years old can be violated... A Jew is permitted to rape cheat and perjure himself—so long as he is not found out... Jews may not give fair evidence in a court of law against another Jew.”

Like most of the other sites I’ve been to, this one markets music, obviously the most direct path to a fanatic’s heart. Not Wagner, though. There’s an invitation to a concert with Brutal Attack, Achtung Juden and Total War, at a “secure location” in Laurens, South Carolina.
In fact, NSM88 Records has much to offer the young consumer in search of “the best of the best of the White Power Movement.” Here’s a snippet from the company’s note to their customers:

“Racial Greetings from NSM88 Records…. Be sure you look over all of our new Stock. Including a one of a kind shirt that will surly make the kikes cray Oi veh! Nuke Israel T-Shirts. You love the website, now own the shirt. Get yours today!”

The Talmud misquotes and lapses into Yiddish put me over the top. It’s now late afternoon, and I haven’t yet made it to the sites of either the skinhead “World Church of the Creator” or the “White Revolution Arkansas.” Nor have I visited the more insidious anti-Israel or Holocaust-denial sites where Eric Hunt, the 23-year-old New Jersey kid who stalked and assaulted Elie Weisel in February, found inspiration.

School is out, and the kids safely home. My youngest wanders over to the couch to tell me about the day at school—a refreshing change in topic. I think I’m blocking the screen, but I’m outsmarted. This kid has never read a hate-group newsletter or heard of Skokie, and is understandably alarmed by the sight of red, white and blue swastikas.

“You mean there are people in America who really believe this stuff?” is the question. What can I say but yes? Although science, I gently explain, has revealed a total absence of difference beneath our skins, there are those who continue to insist on seeing the world through the lens of race. “Why are they allowed on the Web?” I’m asked. I talk about freedom of speech and how it’s smart to be aware of what fanatics are thinking.

“Are there people who hate us who live around here?” is the next query. I promise that our neighborhood is unlikely to harbor such hate, but while that may be true, I know I’m “white”-washing the truth. As my day’s foray has made all too clear, modern-day hate-group aficionados need not wear robes and hoods to hide their identity. They can remain invisible and never leave their homes. Who really knows who they are or where they live?

I make dinner and help the youngest with homework. That night we both have nightmares. In mine, we are forced to flee our house, and I race through the upstairs hall frantically rounding up the family.

The next morning, our nightmares come up over cereal topped with fruit. My child asks whether it is wise to publish my online journey under my real name. My days as an intrepid reporter at the Circle K parking lot behind me, I promise I will not. And so I sign off, yours, Anonymous.