America’s White Power Movement, 1975–1995

The term “white power” describes a social movement that, between 1975 and 1995, brought together members of the Ku Klux Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white separatists, neo-Nazis, and adherents of racialized theologies such as Christian Identity, Odinism, and Dualism. Activists within this movement shared a commitment to white supremacist ideology and embraced “revolutionary violence” as a means of overthrowing the state and remaking society according to their beliefs.

The white power movement emerged in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, amid economic instability and growing distrust of political institutions. Many Americans lost faith in the state. Immigration legislation increased demographic change, provoking anxiety about national identity. The civil rights movements of the 1960s reshaped race and gender relations in public life and the workplace. At the same time, soldiers returned from war traumatized to a public that often viewed them with hostility. Many veterans felt betrayed by military and political leaders who, in their view, had trivialized their sacrifice. Together, these forces helped unify previously disparate strands of American white supremacism, accelerating paramilitarism and escalating violence.

This era of right-wing resistance shared attributes with earlier racist movements in the United States, but it also marked a critical departure. Unlike previous Ku Klux Klan movements and white supremacist vigilantism, the white power movement did not claim to serve the state. Historically, Klan mobilization is often divided into three waves: the first following the Civil War, the second after World War I, and the third in opposition to the civil rights movement. These earlier formations functioned largely as enforcers of racial hierarchy, operating with tolerance or support from local authorities. By contrast, white power activists framed themselves as revolutionaries. They expressed open hostility toward the federal government and increasingly declared war on the state itself.

White power activists sought to destabilize and ultimately overthrow the government through attacks on infrastructure, assassinations, and counterfeiting operations designed to undermine confidence in currency. They armed themselves extensively and pursued recruitment through the circulation of printed materials that disseminated shared beliefs, goals, and narratives. In the wake of military defeat in Southeast Asia, masculinity became a central ideological frame for the New Right. The movement targeted young white men, including civilians, active-duty military personnel, and prisoners. It adopted a strategy known as “leaderless resistance,” organizing activists into independent cells that operated without direct contact with centralized leadership. This structure shielded organizations from infiltration and prosecution by formally eliminating chains of command, while also making membership difficult to quantify.

White power activists held worldviews that overlapped with elements of mainstream conservatism, including opposition to immigration, welfare, abortion, feminism, and LGBTQ rights. Yet the movement was not oriented toward preserving an existing social order. Instead, it emphasized a radically transformed future that could be achieved only through revolution. Many activists fused this political vision with expectations of imminent apocalypse. Their religious ideology drew in part from Cold War understandings of communism as a threat to Christianity, while also embedding white supremacy within religious belief. Some groups anticipated the rapture. Others believed the faithful were divinely tasked with purging the world of the unfaithful, particularly nonwhite and Jewish populations, before Christ’s return. Preparation for this end times conflict took practical forms. Some adherents became survivalists, stockpiling food and learning emergency medical care. Others amassed weapons and trained for what they imagined as an impending race war.

A conflict of this scale and urgency demanded unity across factions. Despite wide variation in symbols and theological interpretations, most white power activists converged on two core beliefs: white supremacy and the existence of a Zionist Occupational Government, later reframed as the New World Order. Activists insisted on the necessity of a white homeland and claimed that a Jewish-led conspiracy controlled the United Nations, the U.S. federal government, and global finance. In this worldview, people of color, communists, liberals, journalists, and academics functioned as instruments in a coordinated effort to eradicate the white race and its cultural and economic achievements. A key ideological touchstone was the 1974 novel The Turner Diaries, which offered a fictional blueprint for revolutionary action. Many activists who later engaged in violence against the state, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, cited the novel as inspiration. As violence increasingly defined the movement, these shared beliefs subsumed earlier distinctions among white power factions.

The Greensboro Massacre

White power activists viewed themselves as righteous in both belief and action, including acts of revolutionary violence. The absence of accountability further emboldened perpetrators, contributing to escalating violence throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. One of the earliest galvanizing events was the Greensboro massacre. On November 3, 1979, a caravan of neo-Nazis and Klansmen opened fire on a communist-organized “Death to the Klan” rally at a Black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina. Five protesters were killed and many others wounded. Fourteen Klansmen and neo-Nazis were charged with murder, conspiracy, and felony riot. Despite extensive video evidence identifying the shooters, an all-white jury acquitted the defendants in both state and federal trials.

Movement members framed the killings as self-defense, drawing on anticommunist rhetoric to justify their actions. Jurors expressed sympathy for the defendants, with some dismissing the violence as “poor shooting” rather than murder, while others cited fears of communism. The acquittals strengthened the white power movement by consolidating Klan and neo-Nazi factions and reinforcing perceptions that their actions were tacitly supported by the state. For many activists, killing domestic communists came to be understood as analogous to killing communists abroad during the Vietnam War. The U.S. Department of Justice later identified 1979 as a particularly violent year, reporting a 450 percent increase in Klan-related violence. In the years that followed, revolutionary violence intensified.

The Movement’s Mercenaries

While some activists interpreted Greensboro as part of a domestic war against communism, others sought to participate in a global struggle. From the 1960s through the end of the Cold War, American mercenary groups fought to preserve white minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa and supported regimes opposing leftist movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. One prominent figure was Tom Posey, a Vietnam veteran and white supremacist who founded the Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) group. Composed largely of Vietnam veterans and active-duty Southern National Guardsmen, the organization presented itself as a provider of anticommunist aid in Central America, supplying both weapons and personnel.

The group contributed mercenaries to the Contra forces in Nicaragua, which at the time received covert CIA support. Domestically, the CMA conducted vigilante patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border, unlawfully detaining undocumented immigrants and forcibly deporting them. Posey viewed himself and his organization as defenders of the nation, carrying out actions the government was either unwilling or unable to pursue. Official responses reinforced this perception. Despite investigations into civil rights violations, neither county nor federal authorities pursued prosecution.

The federal government also failed to fully reckon with the connections between mercenary activity and the white power movement. Operation Red Dog illustrates this pattern. On April 27, 1981, FBI and ATF agents arrested ten men in New Orleans and seized a cache of weapons and supplies. Investigators determined that the group planned to overthrow the government of Dominica and establish a puppet regime that would channel millions of dollars to the Klan in the United States. Charged under the Neutrality Act, which prohibits American citizens from engaging in combat in countries with which the US had not declared war, most defendants pleaded guilty. One walked free after claiming ignorance of the plot, stumbling into mercenary action by accident. Public and institutional responses minimized the significance of the event. The Los Angeles Times described it as “a tragicomedy of errors,” while the ATF labeled it “the Bayou of Pigs.” Two years later, the acquitted defendant joined the Order, a terrorist organization that carried out armed robbery, counterfeiting, and assassination in pursuit of race war.

Bringing the War Home

At the 1983 Aryan Nations World Congress, white power leaders formally declared war on the state and the Zionist Occupational Government. This marked a decisive transition from activists to violent revolutionaries. White supremacist movements had long maintained a complex relationship with state power, often seeking to dominate local institutions or resist federal intervention. This moment was different. For the first time, the movement openly committed itself to overthrowing the federal government.

The Order, also known as the Silent Brotherhood, became the most violent organization to operationalize this vision. Like other groups, it treated The Turner Diaries as a practical guide. Members pursued paramilitary training, financed operations through robbery and counterfeiting, acquired weapons, distributed illicit funds, assassinated targeted individuals, and expanded into autonomous cells to evade prosecution. Their long-term goal was the creation of a white separatist nation in the Pacific Northwest, eventually expanding across the United States and Canada.

The movement achieved many of these objectives. Paramilitary camps operated in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Armored car robberies generated more than four million dollars, of which the FBI recovered only a fraction. Weapons were purchased or stolen from military bases, often with the assistance of active-duty personnel. Order members assassinated Jewish liberal radio host Alan Berg in Denver. Although a Seattle jury failed to convict the defendants for murder, members were found guilty on federal charges related to the violation of protected civil rights resulting in death. Even so, most participants remained free, and the broader movement continued to operate. Leaderless resistance proved effective. Leadership remained insulated from prosecution, and infiltrated cells could be abandoned without jeopardizing the organization as a whole.

Failures within the criminal justice system did not go unnoticed. Some federal agents expressed frustration that prosecutions reached only low-level participants, while leaders evaded accountability. White power activists interpreted courtroom victories as validation, using them to refine underground operations and broaden their appeal. The movement was further radicalized by the deaths of white separatists at Ruby Ridge and the violent conclusion of the Waco siege. These events reinforced apocalyptic expectations and intensified hostility toward the federal government, shaping the worldview of figures such as Timothy McVeigh.

Apocalypse

On April 19, 1995, McVeigh parked a Ryder truck filled with a 7,000-pound fertilizer bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The explosion killed 169 people, including 19 children, and wounded more than 500 others. The bombing represented the culmination of decades of white power organizing. McVeigh intended the attack as a message to the New World Order, demonstrating that white American men could still wage war against the state. The bombing triggered an immediate wave of militia violence and a sweeping federal crackdown.

McVeigh claimed to have acted alone in his “military action”. The continued success of leaderless resistance ensured that movement leaders could not be directly linked to the attack. As a result, the white power movement itself remained largely invisible, its coordinated violence mischaracterized as a series of disconnected acts carried out by lone terrorists.

The history of the white power movement demonstrates how failures of public understanding, effective prosecution, and state action created the conditions for sustained extremist violence. By treating white power attacks as isolated crimes rather than expressions of a coherent ideology, institutions repeatedly underestimated both the movement’s reach and its ambitions. In doing so, they allowed revolutionary violence to masquerade as an aberration rather than a long-term vision.

What sustained the white power movement was not simply hatred, but the absence of a compelling alternative vision of the future. In moments of political dislocation, movements that promise clarity through exclusion and meaning through violence gain power. When democratic life offers no credible account of national purpose, extremism fills the void.

The persistence of antisemitism, isolationism, sexism, and anti-immigration sentiment today suggests that the conditions that once sustained the white power movement have not disappeared. Countering them requires more than surveillance or prosecution. It demands a public vision of America that does not depend on enemies, and a political language that affirms belonging without promising purity. The alternative to extremist violence is not silence or repression, but a shared civic project capable of channeling grievance toward democratic ends rather than revolutionary destruction.

Author’s Note

Much of the historical analysis and factual background in this article is drawn from Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by historian Kathleen Belew. The book provides a foundational account of the development, ideology, and violence of the white power movement in the United States during the late twentieth century.