The Call of the Weird

by Louis Theroux

  I was waiting at the starting point when a van pulled up and Butler hobbled out with four bodyguards, young men in combat boots and dark glasses. Now aged eighty-six, he looked stooped and oblivious, a hearing aid in his ear, as he sat on a bench by the side of the road. It was hard not to feel the customary indulgence that one extends toward the elderly, even the racist elderly. I sat down next to him and said: “Hi, Pastor Butler, I’ve been staying with Jerry Gruidl in Payette. I think he may have emailed you about me.” His reaction was hard to read. Could he hear me? I asked him how it was going. “It’s been pretty rough, but we get by,” he croaked.

  The route of the parade ran down Coeur d’Alene’s main shopping street, with fancy streetlights, flower baskets, and a parade of smart shops. Later I was told Butler had hoped for 300 marchers, to represent the 300 fighters chosen by Gideon in the Old Testament. (Given that experts put the group’s membership at about 200, this was optimistic.) I counted thirty-three marchers. They were spaced three abreast, thirty or so feet behind each other, to take up more room. The permit from the town was for an hour; with only a few blocks to cover, the marchers made frequent stops to fill out the time. Butler, too feeble to walk, was seated on a deckchair on the back of a pickup truck, like a May Queen, looking back on the parade.

  The marchers began by taking turns stomping on an Israeli flag. “Kill! Kill! Die! White race!” The flag was then dragged by the pickup truck. Onlookers and reporters were kept behind the barriers. A talkative old gentleman wearing a neckerchief remarked to no one in particular: “I’m trying to figure out what type of people are drawn to this.” Then, out of the side of his mouth, he said: “I think they’re a little screwy.”

  A dark-haired man with a broad Midwestern accent, aged fortyfive or so, herded the marchers. He wore the Aryan Nations uniform, modeled on the old Nazi one: pale blue shirt, twin breast pockets, blue necktie. I was pleased to see he also had a handlebar moustache, so I hadn’t misjudged the grooming code too badly.

  With a few exceptions, the marchers fell into two main categories: skinheads and religious eccentrics. The eccentrics tended to be older, with beards and/or dirty T-shirts. One, in straw hat, little dark glasses, and Nazi armband, looked exactly like the Gestapo villain in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  An Old Testament–looking patriarch carried a placard that said: “Jews will not repent for the cross.” This was Ken Gregg of the “Knights of Yahweh.” A chubby, geeky guy, who I later found out was Billy Roper, a rising leader in the movement, had a poster that said “Keep your brown hands off our white children.”

  A bystander shouted: “God created them that way!”

  “He also created yeast infections. You treat those,” Billy Roper shouted back.

  With Butler so aged and feeble and the organization bankrupted, anti-racism groups had for the most part elected to stay away. One local spokesman called it the Aryan Nation’s “swan-song.” there were a few protesters with their own placards, locals and out-of-towners, with signs saying: “Jesus is colorblind” and “Hate is a bad lifestyle. Get out now!” The gaggle of protesters shuffled alongside in an impromptu and untidy counterparade.

  “Are you going to reimburse the city for the cost of hiring all these extra police, Butler?” shouted an aging hippie in tie-dye shirt and ponytail.

  “Hey, dude, Jesus wasn’t white!” a black bystander shouted. “Give me a break! Get real!”

  “He was a direct descendant of Adam, and Adam was a white man!” said the Knight of Yahweh.

  “Please do not feed the nonwhites,” Billy Roper said.

  “Where are your fucking clothes made? Taiwan?” said one protester.

  “Get the fuck out of my town!” said another.

  “Why don’t you come here so I can sock you!” said a third.

  One or two onlookers expressed support for the parade. “God bless ya!” said a woman carrying a Confederate flag. “Thank you!” A big, strapping, bearded blond-haired guy, who had a young daughter on his shoulders, Sieg-Heiled. “White Power! Right on, man! Keep this town real!”

  The most vocal of the protesters was a middle-aged woman who appeared to be deranged. She denounced the marchers as “white negroids.” She held two densely worded placards, which were impossible to make out.

  “You are filth! You white negroids are subhuman!” she shouted at the Knight of Yahweh. “Jesus Christ was true God and true man!” “You don’t know your Bible, lady!” the Knight of Yahweh said. “You shut up and listen like a man!”

  “I am,” he said mildly.

  “You can go down to the free health clinic and get some estrogen injections,” Billy Roper said.

  “The general public calls you nitwits!” she shouted at Billy Roper. “You call the Jews subhumans! That’s what you are, mister! You are white negroid black race! You’re no different from animals!”

  Even Billy Roper, who’d managed a few lighthearted rejoinders, had no comeback to this observation, demonstrating, perhaps, that the most effective antidote to the racist marchers wasn’t rational argument but to be even crazier and more obscurely bigoted.

  It was like a street theater version of The Jerry Springer Show, with the same intrusive, kitchen-sink atmosphere of being granted access to something private, unseemly, and almost trivial. The most surprising thing, in the end, was the heavy presence of burly federal agents, in dark glasses, snapping photographs with big cameras, and riot police crammed into SUVs. Was it really possible that this cavalcade of windbags constituted a national-security risk? After the march, fire engines extended their ladders and police snipers climbed down from the roofs.

  The last remaining protesters converged on a car with a lone skinhead sitting inside it. “Would you do this by yourself?” a protester asked.

  “You bet.”

  That afternoon, using directions I had downloaded from the Internet, I drove forty miles out of Coeur d’Alene for the speeches and post-parade get-together at a campground. I passed a clump of federal officers standing in the woods like birdwatchers with their huge cameras. It may be that I’m now on file as an “unknown sympathizer” in some FBI office in Washington, D.C. At the campground office, I said, “I’m here for the, ah . . . ”

  “Church group?” the manager said.

  The campground sat in the lap of pine-covered mountains, a beautiful grassy clearing. The Aryan Nations had colonized the near end with a scattering of nylon tents, some cars and vans, a barbeque area, a small tent with folding chairs for the speeches. By the tent, books were laid out for sale on tables: copies of Mein Kampf in English and German; The True History of the Holocaust: Did Six Million Realy [sic] Die?; Might is Right; Creed of Iron: Wotansvolk Wisdom; books on Norse mythology, the Knights Templar, and the Third Reich, especially the Nazis and the occult.

  One of the organizers, a young woman, told me all the attendees were supposed to buy raffle tickets. I bought one.

  The speeches started. Forty or fifty people sat in the tent. Butler was sitting in a van off to one side. A generator chugged in the background. The speeches were amplified, but the speakers were also under instruction from the owner of the campground not to be audible from his veranda. For a rabble-rousing hate group, this was a challenge.

  The MC was the guy with a handlebar moustache who’d organized the marchers.

  “I’m Mike McQueeny from Wisconsin,” he said. “I’d like to tell you a little about my story. When my daughter was fifteen years old, she started listening to rap music. When she was seventeen years old, she was mixing with spics. At eighteen years old, she had a nigger baby. And I disowned her. And I haven’t seen her since. She had a boo baby. I haven’t seen her in ten years. And I don’t care. You are my family. I want to introduce you to the greatest man in the world today, Pastor Richard Butler.”

  Butler was barely audible over the generator. He said something about National Socialism. Something about America and the Founding Fathers. Something about Christianity.

  “I wan
t to thank each and every one of you,” he rasped. “You are my kindred. You are my family. Hail victory!”

  He creakily raised his arm in a Nazi salute. Then he climbed back into the van.

  Next up was Tom Metzger, leader of White Aryan Resistance. After frail old Butler, Metzger was loud and vigorous. Too loud and vigorous for one old man near the front who, mindful of the campground owner’s instruction, interrupted Metzger mid-flow.

  “They’ll shut us down,” the old man said.

  “You obviously haven’t heard me speak before,” Metzger said, with barely disguised irritation.

  Metzger’s theme was that the white race was being destroyed— not by anti-white racism but by global economics.

  “‘Make the world safe for democracy.’ I want to destroy democracy, not make it safe! Democracy is a euphemism for capitalism. Always has been! When they say we’re going into a country to give them democracy, that means finance capitalism . . . The only thing you can do now is cheer when there’s terrorism. Terrorism is like defending yourself. You know why those guys hit the World Trade Center? I didn’t cry over it! The World Trade Center is the New World Order economic headquarters. If it was the ragheads, they knew exactly what they were after and I liked it!”

  Applause.

  “Go tell the FBI!” he added, for effect.

  Whatever the merits of his position, Metzger at least laid out a consistent worldview, and did so with some passion. He’d even thrown in a little economics, instead of putting everything down to Jews and other races. But this would prove the high point of the speeches. A young man dressed in khaki shorts and shirt, looking a little like a scoutmaster, spoke next. He’d brought props: photos of prominent media moguls mounted on small placards. The presentation was so liberally peppered with racial slurs—kike, hebe, Jew-boy, mud person, subhuman ape—that it quickly found favor with the audience. Next to this guy, Metzger had sounded like John Maynard Keynes.

  “Our world is sick and Hitler gave us the cure. But the Führer’s plans cannot be implemented until America removes these media Jews from their temples of corporate power and gives the mass media back to whites.” His delivery became urgent. “For blood, for honor, for the glory of the Reich!” he said in the weirdly throttled voice of someone trying to shout without making too much noise. “We salute thee, o Aryan martyr Hitler! Offering our lives to your sacred cause, we shall march forth to victory!”

  Other speakers followed: Billy Roper; then the Knight of Yahweh; then a man in a baggy, ill-fitting T-shirt, with terrible teeth and thick nostril hair: the Aryan Nations state leader for Washington. Much of the chit-chat at the Congress had been about evolution, but the speakers seemed to be devolving into ever more primitive life forms. I reflected that if I were a white racist, this would be a chastening experience. It’s a pretty wacky gathering when a skinhead with a swastika tattoo on his head is one of the more presentable attendees. In its geeky quality, its hobbyism, the event felt oddly English, like a group campaigning for the preservation of steam locomotives, everyone pretending to have a good time, making the best of it, plodding on with their crusade.

  “It’s depressing,” said a skinhead in a Support Your Local Klan T-shirt.

  The last speaker was possibly the kookiest of the bunch. Named Arch Edwards, he was the one who looked like the baddie in Raiders. For a while he’d been promoting an Aryans-only homeland called New Celtica, which would be built in underground hill forts. The prospectus had floor plans that looked as though they’d been done by a child for a school project. It was for northern Europeans only; southern Europeans were allowed if they were “indistinguishable from an average north European.”

  “I encourage everyone to learn Sanskrit,” he began, with a distracted, professorial air. I looked at the skinheads in the audience, who were presumably making a mental note to start those Sanskrit lessons post-haste. “It looks like a washing line hung with wriggly worms . . . In Sanskrit, the word ‘human’ comes from ‘hu’ meaning ‘divine.’ So we’re not, in fact, all human.”

  The next morning I returned to the campground expecting more speeches, but there was no sign of Butler or any of the luminaries— Roper, Metzger, et al.—who were staying at Butler’s house in Hayden. A few skinheads were sitting around a campfire. One of them named Oregon was making a burger on the barbeque. He was twenty-eight; one of his pupils was permanently dilated, giving him an odd look. “So what’s it like in England? You got a Jew problem over there?”

  “Not as far as I know,” I said. “But I’ve always got on with Jewish people.”

  Oregon was the Aryan Nations state leader for Oregon. I asked if he’d enjoyed the weekend. “Not really. This is all fictitional reality. None of this exists.”

  “You’re getting a little philosophical for me.”

  “This doesn’t exist,” he said again. “You go downtown, you don’t see Nazis and swastikas. You don’t see skinheads out in the streets in New York. It’s all fictitional. We’re created by the media to scare people. But we don’t really exist. First time I went to the Aryan Nations headquarters, I was expecting machine-gun turrets and rifle ranges and guys training and shit. But it was just a bunch of houses. I was disappointed. I liked the Jewsmedia version better.”

  “Why don’t you leave the movement?”

  He rolled up a sleeve to show a swastika tattoo. “See this? If I ever covered this up I’d be a traitor. Now I know the truth, I can’t ever go back. I see everything racial now. Anytime I look at a crowd of people, I’m noticing what race everybody is. I can’t even help myself.” Oregon had a friendly manner; a wry distance from his beliefs, as though he himself was a little baffled that he held them.

  Jim Ramm, the guy who’d given the speech about Jewish media moguls, wandered up. “What’s your ancestry?” he said.

  “Half English, quarter French, quarter Italian,” I said.

  “There’s a rumor going round that you’re Jewish.”

  “People tell me I look Jewish.”

  Jim squinted at me doubtfully. He had a soft, suspicious demeanor, an oddly sing-song voice, almost as though he was trying to sound like an oddball—or maybe he was just suspicious of me. Apropos his “awakening” in his twenties, he said: “At first I had a little nagging sense of guilt. Because for so long everyone’s been telling me this is wrong.”

  “How are your parents with it?” I asked.

  “They don’t like it. That’s pretty much standard in the movement. So you learn to get along, avoiding certain subjects . . . Not talking about stuff . . . I work with a Mexican and he thinks I’m his best friend. And he has no idea I hate his guts. It’s called acting. Because one day the feds are going to ask him about me, and he’ll say, Jeem nice man! He my friend! I like heem!”

  The raffle was held. The prizes were CDs by Nazi bands, copies of Mein Kampf, plastic swastikas. I was relieved not to win anything.

  A few days later, having made an appointment by phone, I visited Butler at home. His house stood on a quiet suburban lane of singlestorey houses with sprinklers and U.S. flags and barking dogs, next to a golf course. A skinhead was sitting on the front porch when I arrived. He was smiley and polite, which wouldn’t be worth remarking on if he hadn’t been a skinhead. He said his name was Jerald. He’d lost his job the day before, when his boss spotted his picture in the Spokane Spokesman-Review Sieg-Heiling at the parade. “It’s a moving company. They have a lot of military contracts.”

  A pair of Alsatians met me at the door. Inside, the house was doggy-smelling and disheveled, like a student crash pad but for neoNazis. A blanket and pillow were on one arm of the sofa. There was a piano against one wall. A cat padded around, and cat hairs were ground into the carpet. Above the fireplace hung a painting of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse. A bust of Hitler was on the mantelpiece, next to a picture of Butler’s deceased wife. The sense I had, from the young people I’d seen around, was that Butler was an icon and mentor to a certain class of confused white yout
h. A little like the late Jerry Garcia, the lead singer of the Grateful Dead, who presided over generations of kids passing through their hippie phase, Butler was a “Captain Trips” for budding racists, a cool old dude who “totally gets it,” an ideological puer aeternus.

  Butler was seated in an easy chair by the window, wearing a clean white shirt. There, speaking in a dry, faltering monotone, occasionally yawning, he spelled out his beliefs as Jerald the skinhead kept watch from the sofa. With no great show of malice, he outlined the vast religious space opera, of Jews against Gentiles: a final war leading to the total elimination of Jews from the Earth. Matter-of-factly, he croaked: “The Jew has always been our enemy. He’s God’s enemy. But he couldn’t be our enemy as effectively if we hadn’t allowed him to do it . . . The Jew is only the tool of our iniquity. We are the ones that have to straighten up, fly right. And he wouldn’t give us any trouble.

  “I don’t have any animus—you know, personal animus—with them. I know what they are and they know what I am.”

  He pointed out the painting of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse. A spectral detail of a pale face was just visible between two of the horses’ heads. “That’s the white race,” Butler said. “The white man was sent to the Earth to conquer the Earth and put God’s law into effect.”

  “Is there a way of avoiding the war?” I asked.

  Butler pointed at a book on his shelf called You Gentiles by Maurice Samuel. “It’s by a prominent Jew of the twenties. Read the chapter entitled ‘We the Destroyers.’” I glanced at it. (Later I bought and read this book, a weird little extended essay by a Romanian-born intellectual and translator of Yiddish, full of quirky insights into the differences between Jews and non-Jews, which, boiled down, says that Jews are more interested in God and Gentiles prefer sports, and that this will lead to everlasting conflict.) That it was written by a Jew seemed, for Butler, to make it irrefutable: condemned out of their own mouths! “So that pretty well answers your question.” Yes, inevitable war.