1980-1982: Anti-Government Organizer Joins White Supremacist, Separatist Groups

Young anti-government organizer Robert Jay Mathews, currently living on a rural property in Metaline Falls, Washington, joins the National Alliance, a white-supremacist group founded by author and activist William Pierce. Mathews is profoundly affected by Pierce’s book The Turner Diaries (see 1978) and other books, including Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Louis Beam’s Essays of a Klansman, and William Simpson’s Which Way Western Man? which tells of a plot by Jews to destroy “the White Christian race.” In early 1982, Mathews joins the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, located in the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, and also joins the Aryan Nations. Both the church and the organization advocate the necessity of creating a “white homeland” in northern Idaho. Mathews then founds the White American Bastion, a splinter group designed to bring Christian families to the Northwest. [Kushner, 2003, pp. 222; HistoryLink, 12/6/2006] Mathews will go on to found The Order, one of the most violent anti-government organizations in modern US history (see Late September 1983). He will die during a 1984 standoff with FBI agents (see December 8, 1984).