The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right

Front Cover
Macmillan, 2002 M11 23 - 520 pages
September 11, 2001, focused America's attention on the terrorist threat from abroad, but as the World Trade Center towers collapsed, domestic right-wing hate groups were celebrating in the United States. "Hallelu-Yahweh! May the WAR be started! DEATH to His enemies, may the World Trade Center BURN TO THE GROUND!" announced August Kreis of the paramilitary group, the Posse Comitatus. "We can blame no others than ourselves for our problems due to the fact that we allow ...Satan's children, called jews (sic) today, to have dominion over our lives."

The Terrorist Next Door reveals the men behind far right groups like the Posse Comitatus - Latin for "power of the county" -- and the ideas that inspired their attempts to bring about a racist revolution in the United States.

Timothy McVeigh was executed for killing 168 people when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, but The Terrorist Next Door goes well beyond the destruction in Oklahoma City and takes readers deeper and more broadly inside the Posse and other groups that comprise the paramilitary right. From the emergence of white supremacist groups following the Civil War, through the segregationist violence of the civil rights era, the right-wing tax protest movement of the 1970s, the farm crisis of the 1980s and the militia movement of the 1990s, the book details the roots of the radical right. It also tells the story of men like William Potter Gale, a retired Army officer and the founder of the Posse Comitatus whose hate-filled sermons and calls to armed insurrection have fueled generations of tax protesters, militiamen and other anti-government zealots since the 1960s.

Written by Daniel Levitas, a national expert on the origins and activities of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, The Terrorist Next Door is painstakingly researched and includes rich detail from official documents (including the FBI), private archives and confidential sources never before disclosed. In detailing these and other developments, The Terrorist Next Door will prove to be the most definitive history of the roots of the American militia movement and the rural radical right ever written.

From inside the book

Contents

Hells Victories
Family Roots
9
Hollywood Bolsheviks
22
The Enemy Within
30
Black Monday
36
Philosophy Statesman and Chief
41
The Little Rock Crisis
45
Vicious and Desperate Men
50
Tax Protester
190
Civil Disorder
199
AAM Split
208
Kahl and His Courier
216
Snake Oil for Sale
221
Jim Wickstroms Main Man
230
A Domestic Dispute
236
Neoconservatives and the Grand Wazir
241

Legislating Redemption The Posse Comitatus Act Becomes Law
55
From Jew to Reverend Gale
59
Birchers and Minutemen
64
Flags Tents Skillets and Soldiers
72
AngloSaxons Triumphant
77
The Ministry of Christ Church
90
The Conjurers Circle
95
Volunteer Christian Posses
106
The Posse Blue Book
111
The Posse Rides Wisconsin
119
The Posse and the FBI
128
The Spirit of Vigilantism
137
Badges and Stars
147
The Hoskins Estate
152
Spud Shed
157
Farm Strike
166
Tractorcade
175
No Substitute for Knowledge
181
Softpedaling Hate
254
The Deadfall Line
263
Farmers Abandoned
276
An Enemy Government
282
Militia Madness
299
The Road from Oklahoma City
315
Epilogue
333
Acknowledgments
341
Ancestors and Descendants of William Potter Gale
345
Readers Timeline
347
The Posse Comitatus An Annotated Bibliography
381
Suppression of Insurrection and Civil Disorder From Shays Rebellion to the Civil War
387
Congressional Approval of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878
390
Abbreviations to Sources
395
Endnotes
397
Index
507
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Daniel Levitas has written widely about racist, anti-Semitic, and neo-Nazi groups, and has testified as an expert witness in American and Canadian courts since 1986. His expertise includes such areas as racist violence and the Ku Klux Klan, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, the Skinhead movement, Aryan prison gangs, crossburning, and the rural Posse Comitatus. Levitas has also worked throughout the United States with civil rights, religious, and community groups, as well as law enforcement agencies seeking to respond to bias crimes and hate group activity.

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