Projected Autobiography in Covington's "Brief History"

Some of the fictional elements in Harold Covington's A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement seem to be modeled on Covington's own experience. This is from the section titled "The Self-Promotion of David Duke":

He was also desperately seeking to find a Russian or Eastern European woman willing to marry him.... [...] Duke complained to his followers back home that while young and beautiful candidates for matrimony abounded, none of them wanted to remain in Mother Russia with him. Hard-headed and practical and every bit as mercenary as he was, those Russian beauties were all looking for a green card to come to America, not shelter a fugitive American back home in Bum****sk with no solid source of income.

Covington gave the following anecdote from his own past in his Radio Free Northwest podcast of 15 July 2010 (Click here to listen):

When I lived in Ireland back in the eighties when there was 20% unemployment, before I got married I used to have all these fine young Irish girls coming on to me all the time, in pubs and at work and in my theater group, which puzzled me, because even at 29 I wasn't exactly Brad Pitt. Then I realized that these girls thought I was a rich Yank, since any American in Ireland has to have money, right? They thought I was going back to America and they were looking for a green card. When they found out I wanted to stay in Ireland, which I did at that time, they dropped me like a hot potato.

It's rather obvious that Covington filled in his story about Duke's life in Russia by adapting this episode from his own life in Ireland. It's fiction, and it's Covington's fiction, based on his own experience. The less flattering details -- e.g. "no solid source of income" -- that Covington includes only in the passage about Duke seem to be also from his own life. According to younger brother Ben Covington, Harold Covington's father was supporting him when he lived in Ireland.

This raises the question, What else that Covington says about others is foremost true of himself?

"The Perils of Hobbyism" by Dr. William L. Pierce

"The Perils of Hobbyism" is a short essay from the National Alliance Bulletin of November-December 1992.

At the time, Will Williams had recently become membership coordinator of the National Alliance. Harold Covington was continuing personal attacks against Williams which he had undertaken originally as retaliation for "The Anatomy of a Hypocrite," a polemic against Covington credited to Williams and Ben Klassen that had been published by the Church of the Creator in March 1989.

Dr. Pierce's purpose was to warn the membership against being provoked into responding to Covington's wild claims about Williams or other members of the National Alliance (which he published in his free newsletter called Resistance), since Covington would use whatever information he could gather from responses as material for fabricating even more stories, which would, by dint of containing some elements of truth, carry some credibility, and therefore be all the more destructive.

Covington Responds

I just got an e-mail from Harold A. Covington. Most likely Covington found the way to send e-mail to me through the running argument on Stormfront between one of Covington's misanthropic minions and a friend of mine who posted this blog's address. 

Covington's missive consists of a slightly augmented version of his blog post of 3 August 2010, which he posted the day after I discussed the lack of merit in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement and its obvious connection to Harold Covington on Jim Giles' show. I included that statement from Covington, that attempt to deny what I said on 2 August, within my first post on this blog, Contra Istam Historiam Brevem.

On "The National Alliance, Incorporated"

"The National Alliance, Incorporated: A ZOG False-Flag Combat Cell" appeared on Thomas Chittum's now defunct "Firebase Skull" site on 6 October 2003 billed as "Unconfirmed info about National Alliance sent in by emailer." You can still view the original post through the Internet Wayback Machine. There is an indication that the piece appeared on OriginalDissent.com earlier, on 11 August 2003. The year 2003 is mentioned in the text, which means that the  attribution of 2002 as the date of publication in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement is wrong.

The author uses the pseudonym Maguire. The prevalent speculation when this item appeared was that Maguire was some member of the Gliebe faction which was at that time trying to wrest control of the National Alliance away from the Board of Directors, since naming the directors was a way to pressure the last one appointed by Dr. Pierce who hadn't yet resigned, but had a sensitive job and didn't want public attention, to step down. It's perplexing, though, that a faction trying to take over an organization would propagate the view that the organization itself is not worthwhile.

Some people thought Maguire was Harold Covington, since he was the best-known source of scurrilous attacks against White Nationalists. The style of the writing though would be unusually spare for Covington.  Furthermore, Covington seems to know the difference between principle and principal, which Maguire as of 2003 did not: principle is misused twice.  On the other hand, already by 4 August 2003 in "Covington on the Gliebe Coup," Covington was referring pointedly to the National Alliance as a "for-profit, Virginia corporation," an inaccurate description lifted from Maguire's silly essay, and roughly contemporary with its debut. So, if not the author, Covington was at least an early enthusiast for this work.

Covington finds it to be flawless, as part of the anonymous Brief History which he lauds (and posts in propria persona on fora and sends out to people via email in six parts). Covington proclaims: "What I will say about the document is that its unknown author or authors know their beeswax and have done their homework. I cannot find a single significant error in fact...." * (Northwest Front, 7 February 2010)

Maguire states what he regards as the premise of his argument at the beginning:

The key to understanding the National Alliance (NA) is understanding the real structure of the NA. The National Alliance is a private for-profit corporation chartered by the Commonwealth of Virginia (not West Virginia).

The NA has stockholders, officers, directors and customers.

With these claims Maguire has established a foundation that already points toward the cynical conclusion that the National Alliance under Dr. William Pierce was really all about making money.  In the highly judaized United States of America, where motives other than sex and money are not widely understood, such cynical accusations are readily believed. "Follow the money-trail," is a popular axiom.

On 2 August 2010 Jim Giles, after I told him that Maguire's premises were wrong, telephoned Virginia's State Corporation Commission to learn the truth of the matter.

Hear the essential part of the interview by clicking here.

Giles reached a woman named Ruth. First he asked Ruth to look up "(The) National Alliance, Incorporated." This is the name given in the title and throughout Maguire's essay.  Ruth said, "I have a National Alliance. It doesn't have Incorporated at the end. So that would indicate that it's a non-stock corporation...."

This was not what Giles expected to hear. He asked again. Giles: "You say it's non-stockholding, so there are no stockholders? Ruth: "Right, it's like a non-profit. This is like a foundation or a non-profit."

Giles probed Ruth for the possibility that the National Alliance's corporate status had changed since Maguire wrote his piece in 2003 but according to Ruth the National Alliance had always been a non-stock corporation at least since 1982.

Dr. Pierce had chartered the National Alliance in the form of a nonprofit educational foundation because he had intended that it should get Federal tax-exempt status. An application for 501(c)(3) status was submitted to the IRS in 1977.  A legal battle ensued, ending  with an adverse decision of the D. C. Circuit United States Court of Appeals in 1982.**

As for the "false-flag combat cell" part of the accusation -- a description absurd on its face to anybody that was a member of the National Alliance under William Pierce -- all Maguire has to offer is surmise based on the false premise that the National Alliance was known to be a "dangerous  terrorist organization." ***

Who was this Maguire person and what did he really know about the National Alliance? The title itself was blatantly wrong insofar as there was no such entity as "The National Alliance, Incorporated." If he had known that, then with his pretended expertise Maguire should also have known that it was not a for-profit corporation and that it could not have had stockholders. Despite an ostentatious pretense of expert knowledge, this author seems to have known next to nothing about his topic.
_______________________
* On 3 August 2010 Covington admitted having found an error in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement, but not in the section under discussion here.
** The National Alliance ended up with what is called "taxable nonprofit" status.
*** For a reasonable portrait of the National Alliance under William Pierce consult the works of Professor Robert Griffin.

The "Brief History" Analyzed according to its Sources

On 7 February 2010 on the Northwest Front forum (taken down between 14 and 27 September 2010, but restored after a link to an internet cache of the site was posted here) Covington made this claim about the authorship of A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement:

Someone tacked together a potpourri of Movement internal stuff from the past 30 years including some writings from me, Louis Beam, Bill White, the late Rick Cooper, the late David McCalden, and some National Alliance people like Fred Streed and Brad Davis. The Glenn Miller section is pretty much mine and the Klassen section was largely mine although with some interesting new material I'd never seen before.

In his "Thoughtcrime" blog entry of 3 August 2010 (the day after an appearance by Will Williams and Hadding Scott on Radio Free Mississippi, in which Covington and the Brief History were discussed) Covington claims a larger number of other authors and seems to deemphasize his own contribution:

The lengthy article or small book A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement is divided into a number of parts or sections, each dealing with a particular movement, group, or individual personality in the Movement's past. These sections are basically "re-worked" and in some cases outright plagiarized from the written works of a large number of Movement authors and sources. These include the late Rick Cooper, Louis Beam, Bill White, Brad Davis, the late Andrew McCalden, Willis Carto, several SPLC reports, the Deguello Report, Gary Gallo, the National Alliance commentator "Maguire", Fred Streed (I think), and a number of other writers--including myself.

I did not find any evidence of most of the sources that Covington mentions. I found nothing that I could trace to Louis Beam, Andrew McCalden, Fred Streed, Willis Carto, Gary Gallo, or the Deguello Report, and Brad Davis is not a real person (as Covington well knows). I am guessing that this multitude of names from the "movement" was introduced so as to help minimize the importance of Covington's own contribution; if you find that any sentence written by Willis Carto, Louis Beam, etc. actually did appear in the Brief History, please let me know. I have accounted for the text of the Brief History to such an extent that it seems unlikely that any statement in the work could be traced to one of those alleged sources.

The sources that I have found were copied and pasted together (with some rewriting and plenty of added comment) to create A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement include the following:


1. Harold Covington, "A Brief History of National-Socialism in North America" (1998).
2. Harold Covington, "The Frank Collin Affair," a blog post of 1 August 2005.
3. Rick Cooper, "A Brief History of White Nationalism" (1994 or slightly later).
4. The Southern Poverty Law Center: "Insatiable" (about David Duke) and "A History" (about the COTC) and, to a much smaller degree, "They're Back" (about Glenn Miller et al.).
5. Bill White, "Frazier Glenn Miller: A Biography Up Through His Convictions" (22 February 2006, originally published on the now-defunct Overthrow.com and still visible here.)
6. Maguire, "The National Alliance, Incorporated: A False-Flag Combat Cell"(2003).
7. Statemaster Encyclopedia.
8. Wikipedia.
9. Other online encyclopedias (AllExperts, etc.).

There is also some original writing.  Through a process of exclusion, with identification of the passages that are copied and pasted from known sources, it becomes easier to identify the passages written by the compiler. Likewise, small changes made in passages that have otherwise been copied verbatim show the compiler's biases and interests.  Analysis of the text into sources is a way to determine which claims have a source and which claims were inserted by the compiler, and thereupon to infer the compiler's identity. 

It is abundantly obvious that the author of this Brief History, in his utterances between plagiarized passages, has a penchant for gratuitous, off-topic praise of Harold Covington's and Frank Collin's National Socialist Party of America, and likewise for gratuitous attacks on Ben Klassen and Glenn Miller.  Those two men have in common that they lived in North Carolina where Covington also lived, and had organizations based there that completely overshadowed Covington's efforts.

Comments added and changes made by the compiler to the plagiarized passages are generally on the side of making the account more defamatory.  (One exception: where Rick Cooper had referred to Matt Koehl's father as Romanian, the compiler commented that he was probably an ethnic German from Romania, but this was more than offset by the expansion of innuendos about Koehl's mother.)

The author's own very negative opinion of White Nationalism in general, and his willingness to reproduce the SPLC's material at length and without criticism, are quite remarkable considering that this work has been posted on various internet fora by individuals purporting to be in sympathy with White Nationalism. 

This is the foundation for an analysis of the entire work.  Each section is listed with a description of its content and sources to the right (some of which have yet to be filled in).

Introduction. Slightly rewritten from Rick Cooper.

Defining White Nationalism. Uses Cooper's operative definition (that W.N. is the movement for a White homeland) but is expanded greatly beyond what Cooper wrote. While Cooper counted current Klan groups as White Nationalist, Anonymous excludes them as “reactionary” and not “revolutionary.” This section contains a statement that very closely resembles a statement made by Covington elsewhere ("The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Honkey," 28 July 2007) under his own name: “Skinhead is no longer a political or social or ideological movement; it has become an urban gang culture....”

Early Beginnings. Almost entirely copied from Covington's A Brief History of National Socialism in North America (1998)

Every Man a King, but No One Wears the Crown. Copied verbatim from Covington's A Brief History of National Socialism in North America (1998).

The National Renaissance Party. Two paragraphs copied verbatim from Covington's A Brief History of National Socialism in North America (1998) followed by seven paragraphs rewritten from Cooper and finally a paragraph that seems to be completely original and refers to Harold Covington.

The National States Rights Party. Two paragraphs rewritten from Cooper in a way that gives much less credit to the NSRP.

The Heroic Figure of George Lincoln Rockwell. Ten paragraphs from Covington's 1998 A Brief History of National Socialism in North America, the last of them slightly rewritten.

The Fields Lawsuit. Three paragraphs rewritten from Cooper followed by one paragraph obviously composed by Covington as an allusion to the Williams v. Covington lawsuit.

The Murder of George Lincoln Rockwell. One paragraph rewritten from Cooper, followed by three paragraphs elaborating on a passage in Covington's 1998 A History of National Socialism in North America alleging that a conspiracy within the NSWPP was responsible for Rockwell's death.

The NSWPP under Matt Koehl. One paragraph drastically rewritten from Cooper, followed by two original paragraphs, one paragraph very slightly rewritten from Covington's 1998 work, then two paragraphs very loosely based on brief comments from Cooper, two paragraphs that are mostly Cooper, one that is entirely from Cooper, one that is abridged from Cooper with no addition by Covington, and one finally that is mostly Cooper but has a plug for Harold Covington's NSPA added at the end.

The Birth of the National Alliance. Four paragraphs from Cooper, with slight embellishments including a silly portrayal of William Pierce as an extreme coward.

The Long Twilight. Three short paragraphs, mostly from Covington's 1998 history, about the NSPA.  Operation Skokie and the 1979 Greensboro Incident are mentioned briefly.  There is no mention of the NSPA's founder and leader Frank Collin.  Harold Covington, a unit leader in the NSPA when the group was attracting worldwide attention, is mentioned twice.

The Order Rebellion. One paragraph from Covington's 1998 A History of National Socialism in North America followed by 2 ½ paragraphs copied from Statemaster Encyclopedia. The last 1 ½ paragraphs have no traceable source and include a swipe at Glenn Miller.

The Self-Promotion of David Duke. This begins with two paragraphs plagiarized from the SPLC. In the second Covington added a reference to liposuction. The third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs are by Covington. The sixth and seventh are mostly from Cooper. The eighth, ninth, and tenth are from the SPLC. The eleventh is half SPLC and half Covington. The twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth are almost entirely copied from SPLC. In the fifteenth and sixteenth Covington promotes himself. The next nineteen paragraphs are almost entirely plagiarized from the SPLC, with the noteworthy exceptions of an inserted reference to liposuction and a dismissal of Duke's My Awakening, which replaces a comment from the SPLC's author that would make Duke look good from a White Nationalist perspective. In the 37^th paragraph Covington imputes to Duke in Russia a problem that he, Covington, has said that he had in Ireland: that women only wanted to marry him if he would take them to the USA. The 38^th paragraph is half SPLC but the rest, by Covington, includes accusations of Satanism and pornography against Vincent Breeding, who worked for Duke, and expands on the SPLC's mention of Duke's conviction for tax evasion and mail fraud. The remaining five paragraphs, evidently written by Covington, pontificate on the theme of David Duke's “getting away with it.”

The NSRP Falls on Hard Times. Three paragraphs, the first mostly copied from Cooper.

The Strange Case of Benny Klassen. This is typical Covington material. His libels against Klassen are well known. The tales about Witherspoon, Martell, and Edwards, and several other claims made here, appeared in Covington's gloating obituary of Ben Klassen in 1993, which has been reproduced in Jeffrey Kaplan's books. Covington now admits that he wrote "some" of this section, and that is true insofar as he also plagiarized parts from the SPLC.

The Paedophilia of Frank Collin. Eight paragraphs, of which only the sixth, containing effusive praise of Harold Covington "as an aside," seems to be entirely original. The other seven paragraphs are rewritten in varying degrees from "The Frank Collin Affair," which Covington posted on his blog on 1 August 2005.

The Drunken Shambles of Glenn Miller.  Thirteen paragraphs of a memoir, obviously written by Harold Covington, about Frazier Glenn Miller's involvement with Covington's unit of the National Socialist Party of America in 1977-1980.  The account is replete with anecdotes of extreme drunkenness and recklessness with firearms on Miller's part, and of course positive references to Covington.  Inserted accusations of drunkenness pepper the rest of the material about Glenn Miller in the Brief History, continuing the theme that Covington sets here.

The First Morris Dees Lawsuit. The title is from a section of Bill White's 2006 report about Glenn Miller. Here there are about 3 ½ paragraphs of Bill White, and 1 ½ paragraphs of embellishment that refer to drunkenness twice.

Miller's Involvement with The Order. One and one-half paragraphs from Bill White, with half a paragraph added that includes the allegation that Miller wasted Order money on alcohol and other useless things. Information from White's report about Miller's motive for accepting Order money and how he got the nickname Rounder are omitted.

The Second Morris Dees Lawsuit. Identical title as in a section of Bill White's report.  About six paragraphs written by White, plus a paragraph and several shorter embellishments added to White's paragraphs.  The embellishments include several attributions of alcoholism  and a proclivity toward betrayal, and a suggestion that Miller was not of sound mind.

A Drunk Declares War. In White's report this is called, "Going Underground and his Arrest." There are about eight paragraphs by White here with embellishments, plus an entire additional paragraph by Covington. This was the only part of White's report that mentioned Miller's ever being intoxicated, whereas Covington's added material makes three additional allegations of alcoholism just in this section.  The entire paragraph that was added mentions Covington by name and includes a silly anecdote about Miller.

Turning Federal Informant: Miller's Testimony Against Other White Activists. Bill White was openly critical of Miller.  In White's report this section, with the very same title, was the final section and stated his thesis about Miller.  There are one and one-half paragraphs of White reproduced (with some omission) here in the Brief History, with half a paragraph of added material. 

The Mysterious Shelby Murder Case. More attacks on Glenn Miller.  

The “Peaches” Incident. Nine paragraphs attacking  Glenn Miller. Two paragraphs from Covington followed by the three paragraphs copied from Bill White's report, but with Covington's embellishments inserted.  The next two paragraphs contain a sentence and an independent clause lifted verbatim from "They're Back" (SPLC, 2004).  The last two paragraphs, attacking Alex Linder for associating with Miller,  seem to be original.

The Betrayal of Tom Metzger. A story peddled by Covington at least since 1994.

The Mind of Tom Metzger. Another story peddled by Covington at least since 1994.

The Madness of James N. Mason.

Dr. Revilo P. Oliver. This section seems to have been copied entirely from Wikipedia.  Professor Oliver referred to Covington in 1988 as an "incisive commentator" based on his book The March Up Country. Oliver's assessment of Covington changed in the early 1990s but he was careful not to state it openly.  This is probably why he didn't merit special attention.

The Tragedy of Richard Butler. There are a couple of online encyclopedias that have exactly this text.

Aryan Nations. One paragraph copied from AllExperts or AbsoluteAstronomy, one paragraph from Wikipedia, two paragraphs probably by Covington that include a swipe at Glenn Miller, another paragraph from Wikipedia with a sentence added to the end that Covington may have written, a paragraph cobbled together from Statemaster Encyclopedia's entry on Aryan Nations, and finally a paragraph by Covington about how Butler lost his property: “Butler actually kind of walked into this situation because towards the end his Hayden Lake home became less of a political and racial headquarters and more of a halfway house for drunken Skinheads and derelicts.”

The Great Man Himself. "The Great Man Himself," an ironically over-reverent way of referring to Dr. William Pierce, is a Covingtonism; for example, in Covington on the Gliebe Coup (4 August 2003) it appeared twice.

 

Thirty Questions for Dr. William L. Pierce (2000). Elements in the piece strongly suggest that it was written by Harold Covington, e.g. a vicious swipe at Ben Klassen and the innuendo that a National Alliance officer was "John Doe Number Two" in the Oklahoma City Bombing case, one of the libels for which Covington was successfully sued by Will Williams.


Why I Broke With William Pierce by L. Bradford Davis (2001).  There was never an L. Bradford Davis in the National Alliance. The author displays very little accurate internal knowledge of the organization: already in 1993 membership exceeded 500 and rose to about 1800 at the time of Dr. Pierce's death; it was certainly far beyond "200" circa 2000 when Sam Van Rensburg was membership coordinator. The organization's funding mostly came from National Vanguard Books, a very successful business, not from fifty wealthy benefactors. The several references to a "mysterious Pierce associate" in North Carolina are about the National Alliance's North Carolina regional coordinator, Will Williams, whom Covington was defaming incessantly and to whom he now owes a substantial libel judgment. This was clearly written by Covington. What cinches it is that an earlier version of this piece, dated December 2002, mentions Covington by name: "I was ordered by then NA cyber-czar Vincent Breeding to devote all of my activities towards attacking Harold Covington, a well-known critic of Dr. Pierce on the Internet, to the exclusion of all racial matters." (Since I wrote this analysis, Covington was caught using the name "Brad Davis" on Occidental Dissent.)


The Political Persecution of Chester Doles. Extracted from Maguire's ill-conceived "The National Alliance, Incorporated."


The National Alliance, Incorporated: A ZOG False Flag Combat Cell by Maguire (2002). Maguire. The date attributed by Covington is wrong, as he would have realized if he had read the text when he pasted it in.


E-mail Dated 26 July 2003.  


The National Alliance is Finished. 


The "Inappropriate Relationship."

The National Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith: A Symbiotic Relationship.  Maguire. 

Failure of the "Non-Movement." Maguire.


Enter Vanguard News Network and ShopWhite. Maguire.

The Slapstick of Andrew Greenbaum.


The Weenie. About Kevin Alfred Strom. The first three paragraphs are rewritten from AllExperts or some other online encyclopedia (since several have the identical text).  The first and third paragraphs have derogatory comments added; the second is slightly abridged with no added comment.  The rest seems to be written entirely by Covington.  The fourth and fifth paragraphs present Strom as sexually immoral and the sixth expands into the familiar theme that the White Nationalist movement in general is sexually immoral with the notable exception of Harold Covington: "and no one bothered to protest in public except, of course, for Harold Covington, who was right as always, and who was completely ignored, as always."


The Present Status of the White Nationalist Movement. A forum post from 9 September 2007 by 6Killer (a Christian Identity adherent and subscriber to Covington's e-mail list who, more than once, has posted Covington's material on fora)  alleges that this section was written by Oren Potito. That claim is absent from the PDF version of the Brief History. If any part of it was written by Potito, it is very unlikely that all of it was, since it has an entire paragraph praising Harold Covington in the usual manner.


What the Hell is Wrong With White Nationalists? Eight paragraphs in which Harold Covington's name appears four times. This section was not copied but was composed specifically as the conclusion to this "history."  It restates a theme repeatedly injected throughout A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement, that Harold Covington is the only virtuous leader in White Nationalism. 

 

Typical Elements of a Covington Smear

Harold Covington.

Covington's additions to Rick Cooper's attack on Matt Koehl are very similar to the smears that Covington aimed at Ben Klassen.  On that basis we can begin to catalog the elements typical of a Covington smear.

1. Self-Promotion. The whole point of the Brief History is promotion of Harold Covington. In the final section, "What the Hell is Wrong With White Nationalists?", immediately after a paragraph in which Covington places his name at the head of a very short list of only four commendable White Nationalists, (the other three of which, when the Brief History appeared in 2007, did not lead organizations and therefore offered no competition to Covington), this passage appears, which quite frankly summarizes the whole purpose of the Brief History as promotion of Harold Covington:

Right now, the only actual plan or strategy which exists in the White Nationalist movement is Northwest Migration, advocated by Harold Covington but also by many others. The Movement as a whole has responded, not with support for the Northwest or by producing an alternate plan or plans, but by intensifying the already unspeakably vicious personal smear campaign directed against Covington. This behavior will either change, or the White race will perish from the face of the earth within the lifetime of infants now born. It is time for serious people in White Nationalism, what few such people there are, to either A) Quit talking shit about Covington and get behind Northwest Migration, or B) Produce a viable and realistic alternate plan.

There are only two additional paragraphs at the end of the Brief History.  Those last two paragraphs support the promotion of Covington by emphasizing the need to shun all the "kooks and assholes," which means people other than Covington.

Other examples of gratuitous self-promotion are peppered throughout A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement, in sections where Harold Covington was not the subject:

Harold Covington has been subjected to years of vicious persecution, slander, and vilification because of his constant refusal to maintain a discreet and respectful silence over acts of perversion and skullduggery within the Movement, and his demands for the imposition of some kind or moral standards or code of conduct on the Movement’s self-appointed “leaders."

Where Cooper mentions the formation of breakaway factions from the NSWPP, Covington adds:

Foremost among these was the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) centered in Chicago, of which more will be related at the proper time.

Covington seems to consider himself the leading figure in the NSPA. His "A Brief History of National Socialism in North America" (1998) discusses the NSPA only in terms of Harold Covington and does not even allude to the existence of Frank Collin, who had founded the NSPA in 1970 and although nefarious was obviously the important figure in that group.  The failure even to mention him in that context is stalinesque.  Covington led the NSPA for two years after Collin's 1979 arrest then chose a BATF informant as his own successor.

Harold Covington (right) with Frank Collin (left)

Covington seems unable to resist injecting positive references to himself in his attacks on others.  It's fundamentally all about him anyway.  The smears are directed against people who have crossed Harold Covington, and the purpose is to elevate Harold Covington relative to them.

2.  Foibles that make the smear-target seem silly and unworthy of respect.  Covington added these tidbits to Rick Cooper's attack on Matt Koehl:

In addition, some of Koehl’s fund-raising practices were controversial and alienated many people, notably his auctioning off of small matchbox-sized increments of Commander Rockwell’s ashes under the slogan “Get Your Piece of the Rock.”

Now aged 72, in recent years Koehl has apparently become senile, and developed a bizarre mystical obsession with the number 8; much of his correspondence consists of dissertations on the number 8 and strange origami-like designs drawn by hand or computer using the number 8.

Rick Cooper was critical of Dr. William Pierce for not supporting his vendetta against Matt Koehl, but Covington adds this silly embellishment:

Since Pierce was well known as a physical coward who was afraid of being struck or threatened or shouted at in a loud voice, he crumpled and handed over all of the Koehl material. Thus was born the National Alliance.

These brief anecdotes are actually humorous, like the liposuction smear in "The Self-Promotion of  David Duke." 

The goat-dance story about Ben Klassen could be  in this category, if you are not one of those primitive Christians that is prone to take such stories at face value.  However, the way Covington solemnly refers to the COTC  even in 2010 as "Goat Dancers" suggests that he expects his podcast audience to take it seriously.


3. Accusations that the smear-target is a sexual pervert -- and a dangerous one at that.  The Brief History has both Klassen and Koehl involved in anal rape.  (COINTELPRO, and the fact that it ended in 1971, may be the reason why there was a pre-existing rumor of this sort about Koehl and not about Klassen, since the Church of the Creator was only founded two years after COINTELRPO ended.)

This smear has the convenient attribute that it automatically insinuates the same accusation against anybody that doesn't ostracize the targeted person, as in this passage from "The Self-Promotion of David Duke." This is one of the few passages in that section that Covington did not plagiarize from the SPLC:

Why [David Duke] would wish to maintain the secret of a highly placed homosexual in the Movement is unknown. After visiting Dr. Pierce, Duke visited Matt Koehl at the NSWPP headquarters.

4. Conspiracies that commit heinous crimes without ever being punished.  What makes Covington's conspiracy-theorizing unusual is that he aims his lurid accusations of conspiracy not at Jews, who have cohesion and an ethos that facilitate conspiracy against non-Jewish  society, but at voluntary associations of White people concerned for their race.  

The obvious question is how it could be possible that Harold Covington would know of such crimes without the police also knowing and making an arrest. For such a dubious proposition to seem credible, it is necessary to create a cloud of mystification.  There is a tendency in these stories to rely heavily on what is not known or not knowable. "Rumors" (surely invented by Covington) are cited to suggest to the reader how to fill the void.  

Here Covington offers spurious confirmation of his innuendo that a conspiracy within the NSWPP had killed Rockwell:

Koehl later claimed to be Rockwell’s hand-picked successor and “Deputy Commander,” but no official appointment to this particular post over Rockwell’s signature has ever been produced and so far as anyone recalls, Koehl never used such a title when Rockwell was alive.* The reference to Koehl as “Deputy Commander” on the last page of White Power is a later addendum which does not appear in first editions of the book. There have been persistent rumors down through the years that on the night of Commander Rockwell’s murder, Captain Robert Lloyd and Dr. William Pierce broke into Commander Rockwell’s safe and destroyed his political testament. It is not known what this document contained.

One of Covington's favorite variations on this theme is the accusation of getting away with fraud.  Covington uses this several times in his smear of Klassen.  In the cases of both Klassen and Koehl, Covington insinuates that the culprit is able to escape consequences or cover up the history of his fraud because he has privileged connections or is secretly favored by the powers that be. 

Cooper accused Koehl of corruption in the way he managed the NSWPP and its resources but that was not enough for Covington, who added this:

Koehl later managed to escape investigation and indictment for securities fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling something he called “Victory Bonds” payable after “the day of National Socialist victory.” An SEC investigation is usually something impossible to shake off or divert; with all their wealth and power, big Jew stock swindlers like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken and tycoons like Conrad Black were unable to do so. Yet the SEC investigation against Koehl was quietly dropped. It is not known why, but anyone who can make an SEC investigation go away obviously has some pretty heavy juice working for him somewhere along the line.

5. Insinuation that the smear-victim is a Jew.  Cooper very briefly, with a single subordinate clause, insinuated that there might be something questionable about Koehl's lineage. 

Whether Koehl's actions are based on genetic background (His father is Rumanian and his mother's maiden name is Bierbaum) ...

That is the full extent of Cooper's speculation about Koehl's racial heritage.  Covington took that one tin drum and built a whole marching band around it.  The paragraph below is clearly an expansion of Cooper's brief comment because the parenthetical clause from Cooper reappears in pieces, and the rest of the paragraph is an attempt to answer the question "Whether Koehl's actions are based on genetic background" with a yea that will seem credible due to the large amount of verbiage devoted to it.

In the mid-1980s Rick Cooper was able to get hold of a copy of Matt Koehl’s birth certificate, and he discovered that while his father was Romanian, probably of German descent (there are many Saxon Germans in Romania) his mother’s maiden name was Ruth Bierbaum, which is about as Jewish-sounding a name as it’s possible for a woman to have. Since Ruth Bierbaum was presumably born in Romania as well, at a time when the country was almost one third Jewish, it has been impossible to establish Koehl’s actual racial antecedents, but his swarthy skin and greasy hair were always noteworthy within the Movement. There is an excellent probability that Koehl’s mother was Jewish, which would make him Jewish under rabbinic law, since descent is determined on the female side because “no one can truly know the father save the mother.” (A fancy Talmudic way of saying that Jewish women are such sluts that the mother is the only parent who can be reliably determined.) Plus there was the strong suspicion, never completely dissipated, that Koehl was somehow involved in Rockwell’s murder, as well as the constantly hovering rumors about the 1955 New York buggery case, and the well-known fact of Koehl’s open aversion to women.

Note that Cooper did not say that Koehl's mother's name was Ruth; he only gave her surname, Bierbaum, which is quite German. Covington added the Hebrew given name Ruth. Even if that is accurate, there is no reason why a woman named either Ruth or Bierbaum must be Jewish, and the other allegations to which Covington refers as forming a coherent picture with this allegation of Jewishness are not proven either.  This is a lot of nothing being made to look like something simply by talking it up.


Covington pulled out all the stops in attacking both Matt Koehl and Ben Klassen.  According to Covington's anonymous Brief History, both men are Jewish swindlers, homosexual rapists, and murders who got away with multiple serious crimes, and even when caught escaped conviction and had the public records destroyed, without any indication of any of their nefarious activities ever appearing in newspapers.  And Harold Covington is the lone voice of decency.

________________________________

* In my research on the death of George Lincoln Rockwell I found documentation that Koehl had indeed been publicly known as the Deputy Commander. On 14 April 1967, just a few months before Rockwell's death, the Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia reported:

The Spotsylvania County American Nazi Party chapter is making plans to celebrate the birthday of Adolph Hitler next Thursday, April 20. [...] Principal speaker will be Maj. Matt Koehl, deputy commander of the American Nazi Party and second in command to George Lincoln Rockwell. [Free Lance-Star, 14 April 1967]

Harold Covington's Defamation of Ben Klassen

Young Ben Klassen with lifelong spouse Henri. (1950s)

Ben Klassen was a former Florida legislator who founded the Church of the Creator in 1973. He was the author of Nature's Eternal Religion, The White Man's Bible, and several other books.

The section about Klassen in the Brief History is called "The Strange Case of Benny Klassen." A substantially identical screed was posted in February 2007, several months before the first appearance of the entire Brief History, on "Jack88_2005's blog," where the following authorship is alleged:

Based very loosely on the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report, Montgomery, Alabama November 2002, with additions to the Klassen bio and COTC early years sections provided by Slim Deardorff, Matt Hale, Matt Hayhow, Gary Gallo, George Burdi, Carl Messick, and the late Harry Kelly as well as many former COTC members who wish to remain anonymous. - RD

It is noteworthy that initially Covington was not mentioned as a source. This is a significant omission, because on 3 August 2010, in an attempt at damage control (since he was being publicly identified as the author of the Brief History), Covington admitted that "a lot of the Klassen material (although not all of it) is either plagiarized directly from my past writings or re-worked from my stuff."

In fact the Brief History's section on Ben Klassen is a very heavily "re-worked" article from the SPLC's Intelligence Report, Summer 1999, titled "A History."   Covington's "The Strange Case of Benny Klassen" retains that article's format and much of its text.*  It is not apparent that any source named on "Jack88_2005's blog" other than the SPLC was used. 

You would expect the SPLC as an anti-racist organization to be among the harshest critics of Ben Klassen, but their material is quite innocuous compared to what was added to it.  The SPLC never accused Ben Klassen of rape, fraud, or murder ( apart from civil liability in the case of a Negro that was shot dead because he threatened to kill COTC minister George Loeb with a brick, a case which the SPLC won by default because Klassen was dead and his successor neither responded to the suit nor appeared in court).

If there were some verifiable revelations of impropriety about Klassen from former associates, such as appear in this Brief History, one would expect the SPLC to publicize them, but they do not. As Craig Cobb ("Chain") commented in 2007, "Likely the SPLC knows not to publish such disprovable lies on its website...." It stands to reason that the wild allegations that do not appear in the original SPLC piece -- allegations of sexual perversion, Jewish heritage, weird religious rituals, and a multitude of concealed crimes ranging from fraud to murder -- have no demonstrable basis in fact.
 
These stories were simply invented by Harold Covington. There is nobody else known for the kinds of bizarre accusations against Ben Klassen that Harold Covington makes, and he has a history of making these and similar accusations at least since 1989. Several of Covington's anti-Klassen smears which appear in the Brief History were also contained in his very nasty essay gloating over Klassen's death in September 1993 (which is substantially or entirely reproduced in all three of Jew Jeffrey Kaplan's books on White Nationalism).

Klassen had a few words to say about Covington too while he was alive, although nothing so bizarre as what Covington has been promulgating about him. "Anatomy of a Hypocrite" from the March 1989 issue of Racial Loyalty can easily be found online.

From that essay one gets a hint of the basis of this conflict: Covington had tried to discourage Klassen relocating to North Carolina because that was his own home state and he didn't want competition. This interpretation is confirmed in a letter written by Covington on 5 November 1992 wherein he complained that Will Williams was "trying to deliver the entire racialist movement in North Carolina to Old Benny Buttf-ck on a silver platter."
 

These smears don't seem to be entirely a matter of unscrupulous competition, though: to continue making false attacks on a man's reputation after he is dead, as Covington has done, seems more an expression of psychopathology than of calculating evil.

Following publication of "Anatomy of a Hypocrite," Covington retaliated by publishing highly imaginative libels against Ben Klassen and his right-hand man of the time, Will Williams, and subsequently against anybody (e.g., William Pierce, Tom Metzger) that seemed to be other than hostile toward them. That is the origin of the smears against Ben Klassen and several other of the people attacked in A Brief History of the White Nationalist Movement.

Klassen's life before the COTC

The format of the SPLC's "A History," which was retained in "The Strange Case of Benny Klassen," is a chronology, a series of dates with a list of events next to each. While the SPLC's "A History" concerns itself little with Klassen's life before the COTC was founded in 1973, Covington's Brief History contains added material, all of it defamatory, for the years 1948, 1966, and 1968.   

The malicious bias of the author of the Brief History toward Ben Klassen is evident in the fact that the most noteworthy fact about Klassen prior to founding the Church of the Creator, that in 1955 he had invented an improved form of electric can-opener, marketed as Canolectric,  is not even mentioned.  There are several references to Klassen's can opener in online news archives.  The Hartford Courant of 8 December 1957 mentions that Canolectric was developed by Klassen Enterprises, Inc.  The Miami News of 28 July 1958 contains the following note about the product:

A new entry in the field of electric can openers is the Canolectric, made by Robbins & Myers, Inc., Memphis, Tenn., which claims that it is the only fully automatic can opener.  It requires no manual piercing of the can lid or manual release of the cutting blade.  You just push the button, says the firm, and that's all.

Instead of presenting verifiable information like this about Klassen's life before the COTC, the author of the Brief History confines himself to innuendos that Klassen was a Jew and had been prosecuted for fraud, none of which is documentable. The claims are as follows:

1. that Ben Klassen's origins are a great mystery, and that he has stated different dates and locations of his own birth (and birth-names) on different occasions. No examples are given to support that claim.  I found a newspaper item that somewhat addresses this alleged confusion about Klassen's country of origin:

Klassen, former Republican state representative from Pompano Beach, protested vigorously when the board denied his application to register for sale Palms and Pines Ranchos, a Collier County development.

[...]

"I don't want to appear contentious," said Klassen. "But I have lived in four countries and I am a refugee from communism and the only nation I chose to live in was the United States.  Jabbing his finger at his Constitution he continued, "I contend that when I can't sell my land due to some bureaucratic edict, my constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment have been abridge."   "Board  Eyes All Isolated Land Sales," from the St. Petersburg Times, 2  November 1968.

This is consistent with what Klassen later wrote in his autobiography, Against the Evil Tide, as is evident even from the table of contents.  A reporter for the Los Angeles Times had no difficulty putting the pieces together:

Ben Klassen was born in Ukraine to German-speaking Mennonite parents. His family, described in his books as "early victims of Jewish Communism," lived briefly in Mexico and then moved to Canada, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering and a bachelor of arts. In 1945, Klassen settled in the United States and became a citizen three years later.  (Sarah Henry, "Marketing Hate", Los Angeles Times, 12 December 1993.)

2. that Klassen was indicted in 1948 along with several others (with Jewish names) for "mail fraud, bankruptcy fraud, and theft from interstate commerce by a Federal grand jury in New Orleans." The author admits however that he really knows of no such indictment when he says, "Details are sketchy." Grand jury indictments are a matter of public record, and it would have been reported in newspapers. A news archive search for 1947-1949 turns up nothing relevant. 

3. that there was a "bankruptcy fraud probe" circa 1966 involving Klassen and two partners with Jewish names in an alleged Palm Beach real estate firm. If you do a Google News Archive search on the terms Klassen and Shapiro and Weinleben you will find absolutely nothing. Likewise for "SKW Realty" in the 1950s and 60s.

4. that Klassen's "religious affiliation is listed in the 1968 Florida State Government Who’s Who as Jewish." There is no book called the Florida State Government Who's Who. There is Who's Who in Government, and there is Florida Lives: The Sunshine State Who's Who. The title that Covington gives is one that nobody will be able to find on the reference shelf of any library.

5. that in 1968 Klassen was a member of “Jews for Wallace.” 

Here is an article about a dispute between two factions of Wallace supporters, about who was really in charge of the Florida campaign. On one side, Miami realtor Thomas H. Hart, on the other side Dr. William Campbell Douglass and Ben Klassen.  Douglass and Klassen were both members of the John Birch Society, which Hart apparently regarded as political poison.  Since this article discusses the character and connections of the men on both sides of this dispute, you might expect "Jews for Wallace" to be mentioned, but it is not.

Vice-chairman of Dr. Douglass' Wallace organization is Ben Klassen, a Palm Beach Republican, the only member of the Florida Legislature to identify himself as a member of the John Birch Society.   ("Wallace  Men Feud in Florida," by Charles F. Hesser, from The Miami News,  7 December 1967.)

There is plenty of mention in old newspapers of Ben Klassen's involvement in the 1968 Wallace for President campaign, but no mention of "Jews for Wallace" anywhere.

The only curve in the state's new election law is that no more than 2458 signatures can come from any one county.  And there must be petitions from at least 34 different counties in the state with a minimum of 61 signatures on them.  But Broward County's Wallace chairman, Ben Klassen, has said this requirement can be easily met and will actually be an aide to Wallace workers in stimulating voter action.  ( Wallace  Builds Election Machine in Kirk County," from the St. Petersburg  Times, 18 January 1968.)  

NO. 2 man on the Wallace-For-President Committee is former Rep. Ben Klassen, a Palm Beach Republican who lost out in an attempt to move from the House to the Senate.   ("Wallace Supporters In State Gear For January," St. Petersburg Times,  6 December 1967.)

As far as I can tell, not only is there no mention in the online newspaper archives of any connection between Ben Klassen and Jews for Wallace: the organization may have never existed.  It certainly doesn't turn up in a newspaper archive search for the 1960s.  In a Google Web search, it only appears in the context of this smear of Ben Klassen.  Anybody can prove that to himself by doing a search on this term: 

"Jews for Wallace" -Klassen

From all the books, all the newspapers, all the articles online, you will get zero results, which implies that "Jews for Wallace" probably never existed except as a fictional element in this attack on Ben Klassen.

In the next section you will see confirmation that the detail about "Jews for Wallace" was simply made up.

Altered Material from the SPLC

The first entry in the SPLC's chronology of the Church of the Creator, on which "The Strange Case of Benny Klassen" is very loosely based, is dated 1973 and reads as follows: 

1973 Be[r]nhardt "Ben" Klassen, a former Florida state legislator and state chairman of George Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign, announces the formation of the Church of the Creator (COTC) in Lighthouse Point, Fla.

That happens to be slightly incorrect; Klassen was the vice-chairman for Florida and the chairman for Broward County. In his COTC chronology, Harold Anonymous Covington has changed SPLC's sentence to this:

1973 - Benny Klassen, a former Florida state legislator and state chairman of "Jews for Wallace" during Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign, announces the formation of the Church of the Creator (COTC) in Lighthouse Point, Fla.

Covington simply replaced "George" with "Jews for Wallace during"  and replaced the respectful form of Klassen's name with the insulting diminutive, "Benny." (Covington also does this to his younger brother Benjamin Covington, referring to him as Benjie.)

In addition to the altered passages from the SPLC's chronology, there are claims that have no basis in it, like this one:

Circa 1973 - At some point in this time period, Klassen is arrested for something, no one is quite sure what.

With no date, no location, and no specific crime, the author is referring to nothing.  Covington adds verbiage to the mystery, including a gratuitous reference to himself.  The alleged basis for this nebulous rumor that some arrest had occurred is another rumor, that "Klassen needed to get the court’s permission to leave the state [Florida] in 1978, according to the vengeful Oren Fenton Potito who spent a lifetime stalking Klassen...." Oren F. Potito was an early Christian Identity preacher who died in 1995 and is thus (conveniently for the author of the Brief History) unavailable for comment.

Harold Covington would have us believe that Ben Klassen was responsible for a number of murders, and that although he, Covington, knew this, somehow Klassen was never charged:

1978 - Klassen business manager Barry Edwards is murdered in what police call a “gangland style execution.” Edwards’s body is found on June 12th, 1978 in the trunk of a car parked at a public beach in West Palm Beach.

This seems to be total fiction.  In a Google News Archive search through the whole decade of the 1970s you will not find reference to a murdered Barry Edwards in West Palm Beach. An  inquiry was sent to the West Palm Beach Police Department as to whether any Barry Edwards was murdered in that city in 1978. On 31 August 2010 Sergeant Jim Cink of the homicide unit gave this response:

Regarding your inquiry into the  death/murder of a Mr. Barry Edwards, our records show a Barry Edwards alive as of April 1984.  Without any other details such as his date of birth, social security number, etc., we may not be talking about the same person.  I can tell you we don't have, according to our records, a Barry Edwards murdered in the City of West Palm Beach after 1967.

The Brief History has two entries for 1978.  The SPLC's entry for 1982 became the first two sentences of the Brief History's second entry for 1978.  Why? Probably to make Klassen's relocation to North Carolina conform to a canard under Covington's  "Circa 1973" heading that he "needed to get the court’s permission to leave the state [Florida] in 1978."  The underlined portions were added by Covington:

1978 - In March, Klassen moves COTC headquarters from Florida to 22 acres of land he has purchased in Otto, N.C., building a personal residence, a three-story church, a small warehouse and a “School for Gifted Boys.” Later in the year, COTC is granted an exemption from state taxes based on its status as a church. This exemption is later lifted by the state and an investigation for mail fraud and fraudulent conversion of funds is launched by the State of North Carolina around 1990. These investigations are eventually dropped without any charges or indictments, and neither the Southern Poverty Law Center, who investigated this incident as part of the Bryson City lawsuit (q. v.) nor anyone else was ever able to obtain any information as to why.

One of Covington's specialties is conjuring a cloud of mystery and suspicion where there is no basis for it.  The state tax exemption granted in 1984 (not 1978 as Covington says nor 1982 as the SPLC says) was indeed later taken away (with a review in 1989 leading to revocation in 1991 according to the SPLC and the Wilmington Morning Star, although Covington moves it to 1992), but it was not related to any accusation of "mail fraud" or "fraudulent conversion of funds" as the context here implies.  (It had everything to do with the new county tax assessor, Richard Lightner.) Mail fraud is in any case a federal offense: it would not have been investigated by the State of North Carolina as Covington alleges.  Unlike Covington's Brief History, the SPLC's history of the COTC doesn't even contain the word fraud.  

Here Covington alleges that Klassen and the COTC had friction with their North Carolina neighbors in 1980 when in fact the COTC didn't relocate from Florida to Macon County, North Carolina until 1982.  This is 100% fiction:

1980 - Klassen stages quasi-Roman Goat Dance rituals on his property, resulting in complaints from Shouting Baptist neighbors to whom these offensive rituals are visible from the highway and from their homes. The Goat Dance is apparently an attempt to invoke the Graeco-Roman god Priapus, also known in mythology as Pan. The ritual involves Klassen dressing in toga-like vestments with a wreath of leafy greenery on his head, and a number of young men or boys dancing around a bonfire largely nude except for loin cloths of some kinds, thong type bathing trunks or athletic supporters. A goat is also present, presumably because of the animal’s connection in myth to Pan, etc. Macon County Sheriff Homer Holbrooks visits Klassen and informs him of the neighbors’ complaints, and the Goat Dance ritual is discontinued, or at least moved indoors.

The allegation that the Church of the Creator engages in "goat dance" rituals with scantily clad boys has been a favorite Covington smear, one that he still uses in 2010. It's not a very likely accusation toward a religion that disavows belief in "spooks," which is how Klassen disparagingly referred to deities.

However, this kind of accusation is calculated to induce a reaction in primitive Christians, who are prone to believe that anybody who is not a Christian is worshiping the Devil and involved in all kinds of perversion. One of the original reasons for friction between Klassen and Covington, as described in "Anatomy of a Hypocrite," was that Covington posed as the leader of a Christian movement even though he was known to refer to Jesus as "the dead Jew on a stick." Klassen called Covington's cozening of Christians in 1989 "the ultimate in two-faced hypocrisy," and Covington has continued to manipulate Christians with this goat-dance story.

The SPLC's entry for 1981 is plagiarized verbatim.

For 1983, where the SPLC simply notes, " Klassen begins publishing a monthly newsletter, Racial Loyalty, in June," Covington uses that fact as a springboard for bizarre accusations about the content (the nature of which you can imagine, since this is Covington), and even about the quality of the paper on which it was printed, which he calls "squamous and greasy."

In Trials, Triumphs, and Tribulations Klassen writes that for some years he had attempted to get Tom Metzger to become affiliated with the Church of the Creator, either as hasta primus or as a regional leader of the church. He believed that Metzger needed COTC and that COTC needed his flamboyance and ability to get media exposure, but he'd had no success at bringing him under the COTC's umbrella. According to Tom Metzger (responding to an inquiry on 25 August 2010), Ben Klassen traveled to California to participate in Metzger's Race and Reason TV show in 1988,  and while there, invited him (for the last time) to become his hasta primus, i.e. his assistant.

The son, John, Metzger had submitted an application to become a minister in the COTC in July 1984, when he was 16, and was accepted. Klassen perceived the son as more receptive to COTC's doctrine than his father.  According Klassen's own account, during his 1988 visit he intended to discuss with John Metzger, then age 20, the possibility of his taking over the church. The SPLC's entry for 1988 (the part not underlined below) thus appears to be correct.

1988 Klassen, now 70, travels to California to ask John Metzger,  son of neo-Nazi White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger, about taking over COTC. Metzger, saying he "wouldn't want to be affiliated with a  church," declines. Klassen begins lengthy smear campaign against both Metzgers. The Metzgers reply with pointed comments about Klassen’s sexual orientation. John Metzger tells Skinheads, “If you go to [Klassen’s ashram at] Otto, make sure you sit down and keep your mouth shut.”

The underlined part was added by Harold Covington. Klassen did not accomplish what he had hoped on this visit and left very disappointed.  As a result there was some friction between Klassen and Tom Metzger, but Covington has exaggerated it.  The claim that the Metzgers made any comment about "Klassen's sexual orientation" is a lie, according to Tom Metzger.  Referring to Covington as "Tubby," Metzger sets the record straight:

[Ben Klassen] did say some unkind words about his stay in California at my home in his book. At the time whoever was editing the paper attacked us pretty hard. We never talked about Klassen's sexuality and doubted Tubby's smears very much.... Anyhow after a few nasty statements it smoothed out and I always supported him against unwarranted attacks. Ben had money and was upper-middle class. His my way or the highway is common among that class.

John Metzger continued to be a minister in the Church of the Creator and Tom Metzger calls Creativity his religion today.

The following  entries that appear in the Brief History have no connection to anything in the SPLC's "A History." You will note that all three have the element of sexual perversion, and that two insinuate murders for which nobody was prosecuted.

1991 - Skinhead Steve Martell commits suicide after leaving note describing homosexual liaison with COTC “Reverend” Jerry Michael Pace. Martell’s brother Dave vows homicidal vengeance against Pace. Pace disappears; later believed to have re-surfaced in the Movement under several different pseudonyms.

A Google news archive search shows nobody named Martell committing suicide in August 1991.  Since no city, county, or state is specified for this alleged event it is impossible to investigate further. "Jerry Michael Pace" the "known homosexual" makes two appearances in the Brief History.

1989 - In July, “Reverend” Harry Kelly is found dead in his New York City apartment of a heroin overdose. Kelly, a former drug user, was believed to have been clean for some time. The last person to be seen with Kelly alive was an unknown white male whose physical description bears a resemblance to known homosexual COTC “Reverend” and suspected government informant Jerry Michael Pace.[...]

According to the obituary in Racial Loyalty (July 1989) Harry Kelly had been COTC's "chief organizer for New York City and beyond." He did die of a heroin overdose after having been clean for some time, on 1 July 1989,  after reestablishing connection with old acquaintances who were drug users.   

As for the mention of a "known" homosexual in the COTC, this seems practically impossible on its face. The Church of the Creator exalted Nature (e.g. Klassen's book Nature's Eternal Religion), and point 10 of "salubrious living" as outlined in The White Man's Bible (p.61) is "Healthy expression of our sexual instincts." COTC's position on homosexuality would echo that of Thomas Aquinas, that homosexuality is contra naturam.  If any "known homosexual" had been tolerated within COTC it would have caused serious dissension.  

Covington didn't dare claim that Ben Klassen was a known homosexual, because this would have been recognized on its face as a lie; therefore Covington always accused Klassen of being a secret homosexual.  But regarding some obscure figure like "Jerry Michael Pace," it was possible to say everybody knew and be believed by some people, because very few of the readers would have had any knowledge of that person apart from what Covington told them.


Actually, there is no way that anybody could know anything about Jerry Michael Pace apart from what Covington told them.  W.W. Williams, who was the number two man in COTC at the time, says that he never heard of any Jerry Michael Pace.  That would seem to put this name in the same category as some of Covington's other fictional characters that appear in Covington's Brief History.

1989 - Alabama Klan leader Roger Handley is arrested by the Alabama State Police on gun charges in a nighttime raid. He is found in bed with 17 year-old male COTC “Reverend” Will Satterwhite, thus adding to the general air of homoeroticism surrounding the original Klassen COTC.

This is a distorted reference to something that did happen, not in 1989 but in 1992.**  According to The Tuscaloosa News of 24 June 1992, the Invisible Empire's Grand Dragon for Alabama, Roger Handley, was arrested for first degree sodomy of "a male less than 16 years old," and in May 1995 he was found guilty. This incident had absolutely no connection to Ben Klassen or the Church of the Creator.

1990 - On October 12th, 20 year-old former Skinhead Dennis Witherspoon is found dead in a rural area of Dade County, Florida. He has been bound with duct tape and shot several times in the head with a .22-caliber revolver. Witherspoon was known to have been a former COTC “Reverend” who claimed that in the summer of 1989, a year previously, he arrived in the Otto, N.C. compound and was invited to Klassen’s basement rec room for a private showing of Leni Riefenstahl’ s Triumph of the Will. He was given drugged liquor and passed out. Witherspoon then claims he suddenly awoke on the floor, doubled up nude with sofa pillows under him, while Klassen was in the act of sodomizing him, with the movie still playing. Witherspoon jumped up and assaulted Klassen, beating him very badly and extorting a promise of money. Witherspoon claims he was given $10,000 in cash next day and a used car, with which he drove to Florida. The only comment Klassen ever makes about this incident is that Witherspoon was attempting to blackmail him. Florida police write off Witherspoon’s death as a drug-related killing, which may be correct.

The details given here imply that Klassen was a suspect in this "murder" and was questioned about it, but you will find nothing about it in a Google News Archive search. "The Old Order Passeth," an article written by Harold Covington under the pen name Luther Williams, which Covington sent out to readers of his Resistance newsletter in the 1990s,  gives (on page 3) 1987, not 1989, as the date of the alleged anal rape: obviously, dates can be flexible in a story that was never based on fact anyway. According to Will Williams there was never a Dennis Witherspoon in the COTC.

For absolute verification, an inquiry was sent to the Miami-Dade Police Department:

Is there any record of a Dennis Witherspoon being found dead in rural Dade County?   The claim is that he had been shot several times in the head with a .22-caliber revolver.  This is alleged to have happened on 12 October 1990.

On 2 September 2010 Major Rey Valdes of the homicide bureau gave this response:

Thank you for your recent email requesting information related to the death of Dennis Witherspoon, which occurred in Miami-Dade County, on October 12, 1990.

We have researched our records and were unable to locate a homicide case involving Mr. Witherspoon, or matching the description you provided. In abundance of caution, we also contacted the Medical Examiner Department, with similar results.

This means that they could find neither any record of a homicide involving a Dennis Witherspoon, nor any killing of a similar description on or about the specified date. 

Major Valdes says that further information, if anybody has any, or further inquiries about the alleged Witherspoon homicide (which evidently never occurred) should be directed to Sergeant Miguel Tabernero of the Homicide Bureau, Miami-Dade Police Department.

The examples given above are typical of the stories that Harold Covington was peddling about Ben Klassen and the Church of the Creator in 1989-1993.

The SPLC's entries for 1997, 1998, and 1999 are reproduced in the Brief History without alteration or addition, probably because Ben Klassen by that time had been dead a few years, so that it was not practical to change those entries in a way that would make them  defamatory to him.

Some of the unaltered information from the SPLC has its own problems, affecting people other than Klassen:

1990 - Declaring that church leadership would change "at the top of every decade, on the decade," Klassen announces that Rudy "Butch" Stanko-then serving a six-year sentence for selling tainted meat-will take over once he is released from prison.

According to Rudy Stanko the meat was not tainted.  Stanko was the owner of Cattle King Meat Packing ,  a very large meat-packing business that had been in his family for three generations.  Meat-packing is now owned mainly by Jews and Stanko says that they determined to eliminate him as a non-Jewish competitor.  The Score is Stanko's book about his ordeal.  A real, good-faith history of White nationalism would have given Stanko's side of the story instead of just reproducing the SPLC's hostile summation without comment.

Covington on using the SPLC as a Source

On the discussion page of the Wikipedia article about himself, Harold Covington complained bitterly about the use of SPLC material:

Nor can anything whatsoever from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a private organization which raises millions of dollars by assaulting and destroying the civil rights and liberties of Americans of European descent, be considered in any way a legitimate source of information or validation. Trashing people like me is how Morris Dees makes his millions.

That is just so sad, Harold! Here you are, trashing people with no millions to show for it. But then you are using SPLC material to do it.

The title of Ben Klassen's and Will Williams' 1989 polemic against Harold Covington, "Anatomy of a Hypocrite," was very well chosen.

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*  It is possible to find sites maintained by Klassen's admirers that also use altered forms of the SPLC's "A History," but their alterations have a pro-Klassen bias, whereas the alterations in this Brief History are consistently hostile.

** Handley had been in the news in 1989 but it related to a conviction for "civil rights violations" committed ten years earlier. Handley was sufficiently noteworthy that if he had been arrested for sodomy in 1989 it would have been in the newspapers.