Among the many wannabe führers of Aryan Nations are Dennis McGiffen (top left), August Kreis (bottom left) and Morris Gulett (far left), who recently praised South Carolina mass murderer Dylann Roof (middle left). fraud, has bounced all over the racist world in the past two decades — from the Ku Klux Klan to the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement to various Aryan Nations splinter factions — without establishing a real foothold or track record anywhere. Even as the flames of the Aryan Nations’ burning cross seem to have flickered out, the group’s name still is revered and bandied about, particularly in prisons and on racist websites and forums. But the organization’s emblem — a Nazi swastika superimposed on a Christian cross — and a storefront no longer are easily found. The downhill slide began with the SPLC’s 2000 civil suit against the group, which resulted in a $6.3 million judgments against it that led in turn to its filing for bankruptcy. It accelerated greatly with Butler’s death in 2004. SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok said the Aryan Nations was for decades “probably the best known, if not the most important, neo-Nazi group in America.” “Now, 38 years after its founding, after it was brought to its knees by [the SPLC] suit, embarrassed by revelations about the pornographic habits and extreme violence of some of its principals, and gutted by the deaths of its most charismatic leaders, the group is essentially defunct,” Potok said. “The group that produced some of the nation’s worst racial terrorists is finally dead,” Potok said. In an odd twist, one of the men who once claimed to lead the Aryan Nations agrees, more or less, with these sentiments. “For all intents and purposes, the Aryan Nations Pastor Butler created in the mid-seventies is dead and gone,” Gulett said in his Nov. 17 posting, which came 23 years after he was “ordained” as a pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian by Butler. All that remains, Gulett said, “are a few good dedicated souls and a good many malcontents who wrongfully call themselves Aryan Nations, but will never be anything but degenerate prison gangsters and filthy unwashed wanna be bikers.” That is an apparent reference to McGiffen and the Sadistic Souls. Gulett also had a falling out marked by similar name-calling earlier this year with Shaun Patrick Winkler, another former Butler protégé who failed in his 2012 attempt to build a new Aryan Nations compound in North Idaho. Winkler now lives in Mississippi and says he’s affiliated with the International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “The Aryan Nations name has such a negative stigma attached to it these days because of these types of people that it has no real value to it any longer,” Gulett said. Released from federal prison in 2010, Gulett said he has spent the past five years and “countless thousands of dollars [trying] to rebuild Aryan Nations to its former glory with the same Christian [Identity] standards Pastor Butler always demanded of the membership. But in these the last days, it is futile.” “Therefore today,” Gulett said in his final public announcement, “I am announcing my retirement from Aryan Nations.” “I will never lose respect for the noble and honorable organization that Pastor Butler created 40 years ago,” Gulett said, “but our Holy White Race has evidently lost the will to live.” Gulett added that a “race war is swiftly approaching [and] most of the white race will without a doubt perish.” “No doubt some will continue to haul Aryan Nations through the mud by attaching its Christian standard to their filthy unwashed lives,” Gulett said. The Sadistic Souls responded in kind, calling Gulett a Jewish “rabbi” and saying that neither he nor Kreis possessed the skills needed to succeed Butler. “Many have failed Pastor Butler, August Kreis III being the latest,” the Sadistic Souls said of the pair on the club website. “WOW!! Pastor Butler must be proud of you two.” s YOUTUBE (GULETT); AP IMAGES/BRIAN BOHANNON (MCGIFFEN); AP IMAGES/CHARLESTON COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE (ROOF); LEX<strong>IN</strong>GTON COUNTY DETENTION CENTER (KREIS) 24 splc intelligence report
After years of avoiding conspiracy theories, anti-Indian activists now see a global communist plot behind a UN plan BY RYAN LENZ ILLUSTRATION BY STEVEN WILSON spring 2016 25
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