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  Over the years, Duke had developed a tough hide. Like many of his compatriots, he was inured to the difficulties of representing what most Americans considered repulsive, backward, and wrongheaded racist ideologies. KKK groups could march in public, but were almost always surrounded by police and groups of counter demonstrators many times their size. It was hard to sell and distribute their literature or advertise their events.

  This was exactly what had happened in Memphis. Duke's original bookings had been canceled after resort staff discovered the nature of his event. Or, perhaps more accurately, after local anti-racist activists found out about the white supremacist convention and informed the hotel. There was, however, a place where hateful extremists weren't confronted by public repulsion and protest: the internet, with its rapidly expanding number of websites, chat rooms, and other virtual venues.

  Back in the 1980s, the fledgling internet's potential to spread widely the message of the marginalized had been quickly seized on by the pioneers of hate sites, as researcher Chip Berlet explains in “When Hate Went Online.”3 In 1984, a publisher of racist and anti-Semitic literature named George Dietz used a 5MB Apple IIe computer and a dial-up connection to launch a small computer bulletin board system (BBS) blandly named “Info International.” In doing so, Dietz had achieved a dubious milestone: the first white supremacist in cyberspace.

  Digital bulletin board systems, crude precursors to the World Wide Web popularized in the 1990s, allowed people to post messages and documents for other members of their communities to access. Dietz's BBS carried sections entitled “The Jew in Review” and “On Race and Religion”—as well as a more commercially focused section titled “WVA Real Estate Bargains.”4 Because he had been printing hard copies of neo-Nazi material for over a decade, Dietz also used the new medium as an opportunity to republish back issues.

  Dietz was a pioneer, but only by a few months. Later in 1984, thirty-eight-year-old Louis Beam launched the Aryan Liberty Net from Richard Butler's Aryan Nations compound in northern Idaho. Beam was a fiery apostle of the radical racist right. During his 1983 address to the Aryan World Congress, he warned: “If you don't help me kill the bastards, you're going to be required to beg for your child's life, and the answer will be no.”5

  Beam was equally adamant about the promise of new computer-enhanced telecommunications, speaking of the technology with an evangelical zeal. “American know-how,” he prophesized, “has provided the technology which will allow those who love this country to save it from an ill-deserved fate.”6

  At the time, the future of what would become today's omnipresent internet was still uncertain. The first personal computers had been widely available for only a few years, while BBS's were just emerging from the domain of universities, computer clubs, and hobbyists. But Beam was euphoric that these early advances in telecommunications had allowed him to get around other countries’ bans on his literature.

  In August of 1984, he had circulated a flyer inviting people to access his white supremacist material. A year later, he was bragging that he had effectively ended Canadian censorship of his materials. He was even more convinced that “those who love God and their Race and strive to serve their nation will be utilizing some of the advanced technology available heretofore only to those in the ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government] government and others who have sought the destruction of the Aryan people.” Soon, other extremists wanted in on the technology, too.

  Tom Metzger, the neo-Nazi who had a falling out with David Duke in the late 1970s, also believed the internet would have a prominent role in his cause. Metzger never shied away from publicly advertising his extremist politics. In 1980, for example, the forty-two-year-old had led his own renegade group called the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan into an armed brawl with anti-Klan protestors. Later that same year, he won the Democratic nomination for Congress in a conservative California district.

  But, after he was trounced in the general election, Metzger began focusing on adopting various new technologies to spread his message. At the time, local cable access stations were required to allow local programming. Metzger was soon hosting a show called “Race and Reason,” which eventually reached sixty-one cities in twenty-one states. He also created a telephone hotline with recorded messages like “…advocate more violence than both world wars put together.”7

  Soon thereafter, Metzger jumped at the chance to get online. In 1985, he set up his own network in Southern California on a Commodore 64. Metzger's board joined Beam's Aryan Nations Bulletin Board System (BBS) in Idaho, and Klan systems in both Dallas, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina. With nothing more than mid-80s Radio Shack technology, the telecommunications pioneers could link all of the networks together. A June 1985 message on Aryan Liberty Net system heralded the event in all caps: “ALL OF THE GREAT MINDS OF THE PATRIOTIC CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT LINKED TOGETHER AND JOINED INTO ONE COMPUTER.”8

  Beam and Metzger had become among the first non-academics to organize not just an extremist group, but any national group via BBS. These early steps gave a leg up to the racist radical right, which has long been “[w]idely recognised as being amongst the first to exploit the transformative organisational and recruitment potential of the internet.”9

  Beyond being able to bypass national borders and network remotely, the radical right's leadership in this area had another advantage: most Americans didn't see the internet as a serious threat. Home computers were becoming more commonplace, but few Americans had a modem—much less the knowledge or desire to access a BBS. As a result, extremists could circulate their materials without much pushback. It took a full year for a website to be set up to challenge the message of a growing number of right-wing extremist BBSs.

  Chip Berlet, the chronicler and activist opponent of the extremist right, recalls traveling to his public speeches in the 1980s lugging around a computer, printer, and a hundred feet of telephone line. During his speeches, he would download and print the material from white supremacist BBSs in real time. Afterward, he'd ask people to grab a few feet of the print-outs and go home and read it to their kids. That, Berlet said, finally made people aware about the volumes of vile messages available to anyone on the early internet.10

  Through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, white supremacist sites continued to spread, communicate, and share information via BBS from sites all across the country. Decentralized, low-cost, and anonymous, the technology had huge advantages for child molesters, pornographers, extremists—and any other group forced by law or society to keep a low profile. But the pioneers of online hate weren't even close to leveraging this architecture to its full capacity. To them, the technology was primarily about cyber flyering and teleconferences. Hate hadn't yet migrated to the much larger and accessible World Wide Web, but it soon would.

  The co-host of the ill-fated 2008 white nationalist conference in Memphis was a fifty-five-year-old man named Don Black. He had succeeded Duke as Grand Wizard of the Knights of the KKK in the 1980s and remained his close friend, as well as marrying Duke's former wife, Chloe.11 In March of 1995, Black registered a new website, stormfront.org. Although the racist far right had been pioneers in developing the technology, Black was disappointed with the quality of other sites at the time. “I could only find three worthwhile sites to link to,” he recalled.12 Change, though, was waiting right around the corner.

  The mid-1990s was when the impact of internet-based companies began reverberating loudly throughout the economy. Amazon sold its first book in mid-July of 1995, but the startup got the attention of consumers and massive competitors soon thereafter. In 1997, Barnes & Noble sued Amazon for claiming it was the world's largest bookstore. The following year, Walmart sued the company for allegedly stealing trade secrets.13 None of that slowed Amazon's growth. In 1999, CEO Jeff Bezos was named Time's Person of the Year.

  As the value and glamor of the web grew, so did its dark side. The same era that the technology came to be seen as essential for business growth was also the tip
ping point for online extremism. In September 1997, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported that there were over six hundred hate sites worldwide, a 100 percent increase from the year before. By March of 1999, that number had more than doubled again to 1,400 hate sites.14

  It wasn't just right-wing groups taking their message to the internet. In 1998, fewer than half of what the US State Department classified as foreign terrorist organizations—primarily jihadist groups—had websites. By the end of the following year, nearly all of them had an online presence.15 This expanding footprint of online hate, combined with growing public use of the internet, finally sounded alarm bells in the media.

  A study published in 2000 illustrated how the widely praised democratizing impact of the net also meant that a relatively tiny group of hate-mongers would gain “a voice disproportionate to the numbers.”16 In some cases, the sudden realization that vicious racist and anti-Semitic screeds were readily available online led to panic. Experts in the late 1990s claimed “the internet is the greatest thing to ever happen to hate.”17 After ten years of being mostly ignored, online hate sites’ rapid emergence resulted in a “near continuous flow of stories” of articles about online hate.18

  But even after the presence of hateful extremist material on the net was exposed for everyone to see, no one seemed to know quite what to do about it. A representative for AOL suggested that some software could be developed, but it would only impact the company's own customers, about half of America's internet users at the time.

  What's more, though the mainstream publicity galvanized activism against the sites, it also advertised their existence. Some sites began to encourage media outrage. The neo-Nazi site World Church of the Creator, for example, built a kid's page with the intention of getting mainstream coverage about a site that was “targeting your children.”19

  David Goldman, perhaps the number one authority on the subject of online hate in the late 1990s, didn't buy into the handwringing. In 1995, the Harvard Law School librarian had begun monitoring the phenomenon on his site Guide to Hate Groups on the Internet. After cataloging hundreds of such sites over the next five years, he determined that, though the internet did provide advantages in cost and accessibility, it was not, as David Duke claimed, going to be the number-one tool for white revolution.20

  By the turn of the millennium, the websites of both hate groups and mainstream businesses were plagued by the same problem: engagement. “It is difficult,” said Goldman in 2001, “for any organization to get people to come back and to participate in its website.”21

  By then, many extremist groups had invested in flashy graphics and audio components for their sites, but even though the websites looked good, they functioned more like brochures for people who were already committed. Most Klan and neo-Nazi groups were unable to use their web presence to create communities or increase their user numbers. And, without offering the same kind of engagement or community found at Bill Riccio's WAR House or Richard Butler's Idaho compound, they remained relatively ineffective tools for radicalizing new members throughout the 1990s.

  As with many other of the most infamous extremists of the 1990s, the early internet played practically no role in the radicalization process of Timothy McVeigh. Sources said that McVeigh was an ideal tenant,22 so fastidious that he even fixed up the messes left by previous occupants of his various apartments and trailers. He was often the only one of his housemates who prepared food—and always the only one who cleaned up. McVeigh liked the order of neatly stacked dishes, which was likely one of the things he had enjoyed about the military. McVeigh was also very bright, winning a scholarship in high school. However, he never attended a university and dropped out of a local computer school. He was polite, although his classmates described him as unmemorable and quiet. He adored his sister but deeply resented his mom, who had left the family when McVeigh was a child. He once told a friend she was a “no-good whore.”23 His other biggest grievance was being quickly dropped from Special Forces training after serving in the First Gulf War.

  Taken as a whole, McVeigh shared many broad similarities with Dylann Roof, Micah Johnson, and Muhammad Abdulazeez. He was intelligent but angry and a disillusioned army vet. He had a troubled family background, a loss of faith in religion, no future goals, and often no fixed address or job. But, unlike Dylann, Micah, and Muhammad, McVeigh's road to radicalization in the 1990s had virtually nothing to do with the then-emerging web. In fact, his external radicalizing factors looked an awful lot like they had for decades.

  In 1989, for example, twenty-one-year-old McVeigh attended a KKK rally and bought a “White Power” shirt to protest the “Black Power” shirts of his fellow African American servicemen. In 1992, having served in the first Gulf War, McVeigh left the army and, once home, began writing letters to local newspapers citing federal taxes as preconditions for a bloody civil war.

  After that, McVeigh spent two years marinating in extremist circles. He traveled through forty states, attending gun shows, and fraternized daily with other anti-government extremists, forming at least two close, personal relationships. He also sold copies of The Turner Diaries, a novel in which the lead character detonates explosives at the FBI's headquarters.

  Like many right-wing extremists in the 1990s, McVeigh was deeply affected by the deadly encounter between federal law enforcement and the Weaver family in the mountains of northern Idaho. In August of 1992, federal agents surrounded the cabin of white supremacist Randy Weaver, who was wanted on a federal firearms charge. In a horrible series of events, Weaver's wife and son were killed, as well as a federal marshal.

  An eleven-day standoff ensued. Because the Weaver cabin was only an hour from Richard Butler's Aryan Nations compound on Hayden Lake, neo-Nazis arrived to protest what they saw as federal government overreach. Eventually, another well-known anti-Semite, decorated Vietnam Vet and militia leader Bo Gritz ventured up from Almost Heaven, his Idaho housing community, and negotiated an end to the standoff.

  Widely covered by national media at the time, the event entered popular culture as a 1996 TV movie starting Randy Quaid, Laura Dern, and Kirsten Dunst. But most importantly, the showdown became one of the founding moments of the modern militia movement. After what became as “Ruby Ridge,” McVeigh began passing out literature promoting the idea of killing Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper who had killed Vicky Weaver.

  McVeigh's mobilization toward violence was also accelerated by the other seminal event of the 1990s for Patriot and militia groups: the siege of the Branch Davidian compound. On February 28, 1993, a botched weapons raid on the religious cult's buildings on a farm outside of Waco, Texas, resulted in the deaths of four federal agents and six Branch Davidians.

  The FBI then set up a siege of the property, but negotiations went nowhere. The lack of progress in convincing the Branch Davidians to leave was somewhat predictable since they believed they were living in the End Times prophesied in the Bible. First, that meant they had stored a lot of food and water. Second, they thought the FBI and ATF were part of the Satanic End Times Antichrist system. As such, surrendering to the government didn't just mean risking jail time, but surrendering their everlasting souls to eternal damnation.

  In mid-April, after fifty-one days, the FBI had decided to try and force the Davidians out by launching huge amounts of tear gas into the building where they were holed up. McVeigh traveled to the site in time to see its fiery end, watching as government law enforcement used the same Bradley tanks he had operated during the First Gulf War to launch chemical weapons at Americans. Tragically, the siege only ended after the main building caught fire, killing seventy-six members of the sect. The events at Waco triggered McVeigh to plan a horrific retaliatory attack against the Feds, the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

  In short, the external forces that encouraged McVeigh's radicalization largely consisted of involvement and direct personal contact with extremists, their literature, and activities over a period of years. For the
most part, they had nothing to do with the internet. The World Wide Web did exist in the mid-1990s, of course, but its relative importance is summed up by a 1995 New York Times article detailing how McVeigh's path to radicalization included access to a “radical new information network of videotapes, short wave radio, computer networks, newsletters.”24

  Even though McVeigh had shown early interest in computers, videotapes seemed to play a much bigger part in his radicalization than anything he might have found online. McVeigh repeatedly watched Red Dawn, the 1980s film about a group of high school students who fight back against a surprise Soviet invasion of the United States. He was also a fan of the dystopic film Brazil. McVeigh even used “Tuttle,” the name of a heroic protagonist played by Robert De Niro, as an alias during the planning stages for his attack.

  So while the broad process of McVeigh's radicalization has similarities to those of other extremists, future and past, the specifics of the external radicalizing forces that played a role in the process seem light years from the internet-mediated process experienced by Dylann, Micah, and Muhammad.

  Future Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph kept a regular schedule when staying at his brother's house in Tennessee in the early 1990s: sleeping all day and staying up all night smoking pot, eating pizza, and watching movies by 1970s stoner-comedy act Cheech and Chong. His sister-in-law described the spectacle of the three Rudolph brothers hanging out in the living room as “like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure”—the 1980s movie about dim-witted, slacker teenagers.25