Virginia Developer is USA’s Loudest Neo-Nazi
By Brentin Mock and Mark Potok
Roanoke, Va. — Last Sept. 20, the eyes of America turned to Jena, La., where more than 20,000 people had gathered to protest what they saw as racism in the disparate criminal treatment accorded black and white students at a local high school. For many, it was an uplifting moment, signaling what they hoped would grow into a renewed striving for racial justice, a reborn civil rights movement for a generation that didn't remember the first one. For one real estate developer in this city in the Blue Ridge Mountains, however, it was an occasion to vent feelings about six black teens in Jena facing harsh criminal penalties for a schoolyard fight.
"Lynch the Jena 6!" Bill White wrote in a screaming headline on his website even before the demonstrators had left tiny Jena. Then he got down to business.
"If these niggers are released or acquitted, we will find out where they live and make sure that white activists and white citizens in Louisiana know it, we'll mail directions to their homes to every white man in Louisiana if we have to in order to find someone willing to deliver justice," White wrote. Next, after some research, he appended home addresses and phone numbers for five of the teenagers.
Within hours, White's amazing statements were all over the Internet and the news. Officials expressed shock such comments could be legal, and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco ordered police protection at some of the boys' homes. Called by a reporter, the FBI said it was investigating White's threats for criminal content.
It was a classic Bill White moment.
William Alexander White may be the loudest and most obnoxious neo-Nazi leader in America. Currently the chief of the American National Socialist Workers Party, White is a former left-wing anarchist who is best known for his name-calling, threats and incessant gossip — not to mention embarrassing pleas of love for women who then publicly spurn him. He is a man who often seems incapable of separating truth from fiction, but also a skilled computer programmer who has built some of the radical right's more important websites. By his own account, White has a juvenile record that includes 22 arrests as a teenager, but he is also a businessman who in the last four years has bought 24 inner-city properties valued at $1,063,000 — most of them apartments he acquired as part of his "ghetto beautification project." Above all, White, now 30, is an angry, resentful and narcissistic loner — a misanthrope.
A Bully is Born
Bill White describes himself as a bright child who got interested in politics in junior high school, where he became what he called a "utopian anarchist" and began reading Freud and Marx at 13. The next year, he put out his first issue of the Utopian Anarchist Party newsletter. In it, he railed against juvenile psychiatrists, among other things, who had diagnosed him as particularly paranoid and aggressive.
That was reflected in his high school career, which included bouncing between three high schools due to an extensive record of disruptive and threatening behavior toward students, teachers and a principal, according to a psychological evaluation administered by the Montgomery County, Md., public schools.
That same evaluation may be the most sympathetic rendering of White, then 16, known. "Let us not forget that the world needs William White," it said. "And William White needs the world." But, in language that describes well White's career over the coming years, the report added this: "What he hasn't learned is tolerance, patience, foresight, wisdom, cooperation, respect and compassion. He has learned how to be rude, to challenge authority, to denigrate and despise others."
White has written that he was arrested 22 times between the ages of 15 and 19 on charges of "assault, weapons, explosives, property destruction, graffiti and use of false identification." He says he served a short sentence for attacking police at the age of 19. Although some of these arrests were noted in newspapers, they could not be independently verified because they are part of a sealed juvenile record.
