Yesterday I posted an entry where I mentioned the White Supremacist who lamented that the White Nationalist movement couldn’t get “normal leaders”.  Here’s that quote, because it’s just so emblematic of the “reasoning” of this group of people I have to quote it again:

"Why can't we have so much as one single leader who is just simply NORMAL? Why must there always be these weird little kibbles and bits, these little oddities, these little bits of quirky behavior lurking in the background of everything we do?" the E-mail from "Peter Dromgoole" to Bill White's website asks plaintively. "Why do we even bother? Is this really, truly, THE BEST WE CAN DO?"

     My implied answer is that in order to be a member of their movement, you have to be completely divorced from reality.  In order to become a LEADER in that community, you have to put yourself forward enough to stand out and attract followers in a community of fanatically individualistic people with a paranoia against any kind of authority.  Which means that you have to have, in addition to a deluded view of the world, a megalomaniacal streak a mile wide.  The next thing you need is tons of charisma.  How is it that anyone could hope for a “normal” leader who is delusional and megalomaniacal?

     In fact, what kind of person is this a psychological profile for?  To recap:  Delusional and paranoid view of the world.  Delusions of grandeur and persecution.  Tons of charisma. 

     It is practically a definition that you cannot have a “normal” leader rise to the top of that population.  They HAVE to be sociopathic.  So yes, Mr. Dromgoole, this is the best you can do.  Your community self-selects for sociopaths, and only the “best” ones get to the top.  And Pedophiles are the poster children for that particular disorder.  That and serial killers.

     In order to promote your world view, you have to re-write history (these are just a few examples from the “mainstream” of what I’ve seen while looking into it):

·         Christian Identity white Supremacists like the KKK believe that they are the “true” lost tribes of Israel, and that modern day Jews are actually descendants of the devil.

·           They also believe that the U.S. was founded as a “Christian” nation.  In order to support this, they use falsified (“unsubstantiated”, or strategically ellipsed, or out-of-context) quotes from various founding fathers.  One famous source of these types of quotes is David Barton.  ( He claims that when he spoke to Christian Identity groups in the ‘90’s, he didn’t know that they were racist and anti-semitic.)

·         Holocaust denial, ranging in scope from denying that it happened at all, to claims that it was exaggerated, to claims that Jews themselves were actually responsible for the atrocities (engaging in “anti-German” behavior, making it necessary to exterminate them in “defense” of the German people).

·         Claim that the right to privacy, the right to habeas corpus, and separation of Church and State were never intended as effects of the constitution because they were never specifically mentioned as being guaranteed.  These claims also have variations where they were never meant to apply to non-whites or non-Christians.

·         Claim that African slaves brought in bondage to America were better off in America as slaves than they were free in Africa.

     You have to re-write religion.  While White Supremacists can belong to a variety of religions, they have in common the tendency to pervert or distort those religions almost beyond recognition.  Those that subscribe to the Christian Identity movement believe:

• White people (Aryans) are the “real” descendants of Adam and Eve.
•  Modern Jews are the descendants of Eve and “the serpent” (i.e. Satan).
• Adam and Eve were, the first white people.  All non-Whites are the offspring of Cain (son of the serpent, with Eve) and the people mentioned in the Bible, to whom Cain fled after God put his mark on Cain and banished him.  Christian Identity followers refer to non-whites as “mud people”.
• The Armageddon spoken of in Revelations will be a race war where “real Christians” will triumph over “false Christians” and non-whites.
• Christian Identity subscribes to the idea of a theonomy, or a ruling body based on Biblical Law.  Their idea of Biblical law is Mosaic law, or Old Testament Law.  This is why they are so rabid to push the Ten Commandments into the courtrooms.  But it would not stop there.  The whole of Old Testament law would be followed, including the death penalty for homosexuality and adultery.
• One of the most vocal CI voice boxes, R.J.Rushdoony asserts that slavery is part of the natural Biblical order.
• That the message of Jesus was one of conquest and vengeance.  That Jesus wants those who bear false witness and follow false doctrines to be executed.
• Believe that Jesus was not a Jew, but was Aryan.

     You have to re-write science:

• Misappropriating concepts of Evolutionary Biology as indicating the “superiority” of races or ethnicities where there is no information supporting such ideas, and such ideas are in direct conflict with the scientific consensus.
• Or (in the case of Christian Identity) just flat-out denying science even has any validity and subscribe to the idea that God made White people superior to begin with.
• Misappropriating and reinterpreting social science data to reflect poorly on other races, blatantly ellipsing out or inappropriately dismissing data that disproves their desired conclusions.
• Attacking science and medical consensus as a government plot to bring down the “white” race.  Denouncing the use of birth control as “ethnic cleansing” against whites.  Denying the link between inoculations and the elimination and control of disease epidemics.  Denying that sex education is more effective at reducing teen pregnancy than abstinence-only.
• Fluoridation is a government plot to poison us all and give us cancer, and has no bearing whatsoever on tooth enamel.

You have to believe that the whole of our modern society is the result of a liberal Jewish communist plot to destroy you and people like you.

• Feminism is supposedly a plot against White supremacy because it causes women to identify with their gender rather than their race, distracts them from their primary purpose of having white babies, and because it removes the necessary social controls for women’s behavior, opening the door for a loss of “sexual purity”.
• Immigration is supposedly a plot to swamp White Americans in a sea of brown faces so that the White Race can be destroyed.
•  Tolerance and multiculturalism is supposedly part of the plot as well.  If White people accept others, it is just opening the door for destruction, because other races are out to demean and destroy us.  Or worse, perpetrate “mongerlization” with us.
• The “homosexual agenda” is supposedly a plot to destroy the White Race, because we need white women to marry white men to have more white babies.
• Our federal government is supposedly in the clutches of the black police and the Jewish bankers.  Eventually, that government will turn on white people and try to eradicate them.

They have to home-school their children just to keep them in a bubble tight enough for the world-view to hold together.

With this level of reality denial, paranoia, and sense of complete divorce from the thoughts of the mainstream of humanity, it is incredible to me that anyone could possibly be surprised that the “leadership” of these groups are destructive, mentally ill, and criminal people.  And yet, as more and more and more of them are arrested, exposed, and found out, the membership continue to either be surprised, or to reject the charges as being part of the “conspiracy”.

If you want to do your own research on this area, here are some places to start: Chalcedon (Christian Reconstructionism); Christian Identity.

I compiled a list of select quotes from people connected to this movement here.  Some of them are from Randall Terry, who you might recognize as the head of Operation Rescue, and also as the spokesman for the family of Terry Schaivo.  While Randall Terry dos not have any direct affiliation with the Christian Identity movement, he exposes many of their ideas, and pushes a large portion of their agenda.

This is why these people bother me.  If they were just a fringe group who caused the occasional abortion clinic bombing or assassination of an abortion doctror, or the tragic events of Waco or Ruby Ridge, that would be one thing, but many of their issues and arguments have achieved mainstream promotion.  Worse, people arguing against these ideologies have been demonised and mischaracterised by voices from the "mainstream" right.