EXTREMISM IN AMERICA: PART 1 

THE ORDER  

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Domestic terrorism from white supremacists is the most lethal terrorist threat in the homeland. 

MARK POTOK, Senior Fellow, Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right: Why is the radical right growing? Why are these ideas resurging in such a dramatic way?   

TEXT ON SCREEN: Demonstrators: You will not replace us! 

PETE SIMI, Assoc. Professor, Chapman University; Author, “American Swastika”: We’ve been unwilling to really grapple with our history. We have to understand where this problem has been in the past and what’s kept us from addressing it.

TEXT ON SCREEN: RICHARD BUTLER, Aryan Nations: Hate is our law.

POTOK: In the 1980s, The Order became one of the most remarkable terrorist groups in the history of this country.

BILL MORLIN, Journalist (1946-2021): This was a new breed of animal. I mean, this was a group that was bent on war with the United States government.  

 

EXTREMISM IN AMERICA 

THE ORDER  

 

Text on Screen: 

JUNE 18, 1984 

DENVER, COLORADO 

Radio Announcer: You’re listening to Alan Berg on KOA. 

MORLIN: Alan Berg was a very famous talk show personality. And he was really outspoken and would love to take on racists.

Alan Berg : You’re not a Christian, you’re un-American, is that your point, sir? 

Caller: That’s right. 

MORLIN: He was driving back to his condo alone in his Volkswagen Beetle. And somebody gunned him down in his driveway.

News Reporter: Police say Berg’s body was riddled with bullets. 

Police Video: Shell casings on the driveway…   

MORLIN: It was a huge story throughout the country. Here’s a Jewish talk show host who was assassinated. Who could carry out such a horrible crime? 

News Reporter: Police in Denver say they have no firm leads yet regarding the murder of a radio talk show host. 

The story behind Alan Berg’s murder starts with an ideology that took root a thousand miles from Denver in a remote corner of northern Idaho, at the Aryan Nations headquarters. 

Text on Screen: Men: Heil Victory! Heil Victory! 

The 20-acre compound was home to Richard Butler, who preached to his followers that white people were under threat from racial minorities, immigrants and Jews, whom he believed controlled the federal government. 

Richard Butler: We are faced with extinction. We have a right to do whatever we can do to preserve ourselves.

Butler soon attracted the attention of FBI agent Wayne Manis.  

WAYNE MANIS, Former F.B.I. Agent: The most significant thing that Richard Butler did is he would have a gathering of people from all these different organizations. 

POTOK: They might be Klansmen. They might be skinheads.  

Text on Screen: Men: What do we need? White power! 

POTOK: All of these people would come together for the Aryan World Congress. 

Robert Mathews was one of them.   

Text on Screen: Mathews: You Jews get the heck out of here!

Mathews gathered some of the men from the Aryan Nations and other groups and formed a secret splinter cell that broke off from the Aryan Nations. They pledged their lives to create a whites-only nation. They were called The Order, a name taken from a novel.

POTOK: The Turner Diaries depicted a group of people who made war on the federal government, culminating in the blowing up of the FBI headquarters and the nuclear bombing of the state of Israel.

MORLIN: They thought, why should this be fiction? Why don’t we take up arms and start a race war? And that’s what they set about to do. 

POTOK: The Order wanted to fund the rest of the radical right to create essentially an army of white men.

To fund their plan, The Order attacked an armored truck on a highway in California in broad daylight, in a brazen robbery.

TOM MCDANIEL, Former F.B.I. Agent: This was the middle of the day. People going by thought that they were filming, uh, Hollywood is, like, filming a movie. 

MORLIN: They opened the back of the armored truck and helped themselves to $3.6 million dollars. They made one mistake, however. They left behind a handgun.

MANIS: And when they leave, we have the pistol and that opens up a whole avenue of investigation.

MORLIN: That handgun was traced to a member of The Order.

News Reporter: Scores of FBI agents were shipped onto this rural island in Washington state, prepared to do battle.

MORLIN: The FBI finally finds out that Matthews is holed up in a cabin on Whidbey Island and that he’s heavily armed.

MANIS: Bob refused, refused to surrender. We were met with gunfire. I took about seven rounds just over my head.

After a 36-hour standoff, a flare ignited the cabin, and Mathews burned to death. The other members of The Order were quickly arrested. During its investigation, the FBI uncovered plans to poison major water supplies and threats to hang members of Congress. And they found the gun used to murder Alan Berg.

MCDANIEL: I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that had we not stopped them, there would’ve been federal buildings that would’ve been blown up. These guys were for real.

MORLIN: Prior to The Order, domestic terrorism was like, what’s that? Klansmen had killed civil rights workers and so forth. But this was a new breed of animal. I mean, this was a group that was bent on war with the United States government.

It was a wakeup call that the white supremacist movement was a growing danger. The federal government believed The Order was not acting alone, and that their crimes were part of a larger plot orchestrated by the leaders of several far-right groups, including Richard Butler.

News Reporter: Were you the leader of this conspiracy? 

Richard Butler: No, I was not.

In a bold move, prosecutors brought nine of them to trial on charges of seditious conspiracy, or plotting to overthrow the government.

News Reporter: Prosecutors hope that in convicting the godfathers of organized racial hatred, they’ll have finally broken the back of the white supremacist movement.

POTOK: The idea was that they could wipe out this movement in one fell swoop.

James Ellison: And I’m just doing my duty.

The government’s key witness was James Ellison, a former extremist leader. He testified that he attended secret meetings at the Aryan World Congress – meetings he described to his deputy, Kerry Noble.

KERRY NOBLE, Former Member, The Covenant, The Sword and the Arm of the Lord: Jim said most of the plans included counterfeiting money, robbing armored cars to help finance the right-wing movement.

Noble: You know, just all the men are on alert.

Noble, who also testified for the government, says Ellison claimed movement leaders were in on The Order’s plan to overthrow the government.

NOBLE: It was a declaration of war. This was real, a real ideology, a real goal, uh, for people.

But Ellison also had credibility problems. He liked to call himself “King James of the Ozarks,” contradicted himself on the witness stand, and was trying to get a reduced sentence. His testimony wasn’t enough. 

News Reporter: A stunning verdict this afternoon in the trial of 13 white supremacists.

POTOK: The defendants were acquitted of all charges, every single one of them. The government, uh, had simply overreached. ​​It really didn’t have the evidence.  

U.S. Attorney: We thought we proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. But apparently we hadn’t. 

MORLIN: The defense attorneys said how on earth could this ragtag group of people possibly overthrow the U.S. government? And that was the question that the federal prosecutors could never overcome.

News Reporter: The defendants left the courtroom triumphant and defiant. 

Defendant: One, I want to praise Yahweh’s holy and precious name. Two, I want to say, to hell with the federal government.

POTOK: To kind of add insult to injury, one of the jurors actually married one of the defendants. The government had tried to destroy the radical right in America, and it failed abjectly. 

NOBLE: Everybody knew it would be a long time before the government would ever try that kind of thing again. That emboldened the right-wing movement a little bit more.

To avoid the attention of law enforcement, some in the movement embraced a different tactic – operating in small cells.

NOBLE: Three to five people. Even stronger is the lone wolf that communicates with nobody and can go out autonomously and do whatever he wants to do to further the goals of the right-wing movement.

MANIS: We managed to dissolve The Order. However, we didn’t make any impact on the ideology. The ideology still existed all across this country.

 

END