December 18, 2009: Nazi Leader Convicted of Issuing Death Threats

ANSWP leader Bill White giving a Nazi salute. [Source: SPLC / Roanoke Times]Bill White, the leader of the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP), is convicted in Roanoke, Virginia, of issuing death threats to several people, including Citibank employee Jennifer Petsche, a university administrator, and a human rights lawyer, and of intimidating tenants in Virginia Beach who had filed a lawsuit against their landlord. A judge will dismiss the charge of threatening the lawyer, but will uphold the other convictions. On March 22, 2007, White left a voicemail message for Petsche on her home phone informing her of his identity and saying that he had sent her an email concerning a credit card dispute he was having with Citibank. The email contained her current and former address, including the location of her parents’ home, and compared her to Chicago judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, whose husband and mother were murdered (see February 28, 2005) after a neo-Nazi had posted Lefkow’s home address on a Web site. “I must admit I have run out of patience with you and your smug attitude,” White wrote. “I hope the fact that I’ve obviously paid someone to find you conveys the seriousness with which I take your current attitude.” Petsche informed authorities and White was placed under surveillance. White was arrested in October 2008; his arrest forced the shutdown of the ANSWP blog and led to the collapse of the entire organization, which in 2008 had 35 chapters in 28 states. Before his trial, White complained that “the federal government has launched a massive effort to ‘decapitate’ white organizations.” During his trial, White was found to have posted personal information on a large number of persons on the ANSWP Web site, in many cases calling for his followers to track them down and attack them. Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism says: “We live in a world where rhetoric is increasingly tilting toward violence, where extremists are becoming adept at going up to the line but not crossing it. The law is struggling to untangle protected hate speech from unprotected violence and threats, which often come in the same package. These trials put hate-mongers on notice: If they target their venom too narrowly, too violently, and too explicitly, they run the risk of crossing from political discourse to prison.” White has used the Internet to harass and threaten people since 1996, when he posted the name and phone number of a woman whom he believed was abusing her teenage daughter. “You should be able to write what you want on the Internet, whether it’s true or not,” he told a reporter at the time. For years, White ran Overthrow.com, a popular neo-Nazi Web site. In September 2007, after six black teenagers beat a white teenager in Jena, Louisiana, he posted five of their addresses and phone numbers under a banner that proclaimed, “Lynch the Jena 6!” He advised his readers to “get in touch and let them know justice is coming.” Local police provided the teens’ families with protection. White has long posted virulently racist material on his Web site, frequently using racial slurs and calling African-Americans “nig-rats” and “vermin.” White did not restrict his rhetoric to blacks; in 2007, he advocated the assassination of George W. Bush, writing that “a well-placed bullet can solve a lot of problems,” and has advised that “we need to start SHOOTING AND KILLING Mexicans as they cross the border.” [Southern Poverty Law Center, 3/2010]