Free Blood and Politics by Leonard Zeskind

the skinhead scene. 20 Hardly the story of angry unemployed working-class youth so often told to explain the skinhead phenomenon in the United States.
    What skinheads did provide one another was intense comradeship and a set of family-like relationships. They often lived communally, eagerly defended one another, and physically attacked outside groups. By the late 1980s the line between punks and skinheads had been firmly demarcated. One white power skinhead group in Cincinnati, obviously annoyed at the confused identities, distributed a crude handwritten leaflet: “We are
not
idiotic punk rockers and do not wish to be associated with such left-wing scum . . . We are the exact opposite in ideals . . . We are part of a world-wide white nationalist movement of youth.” 21
    This internationalist version of white nationalism was bred into the subculture by its origins as an imitation of British styles, music, and political sensibilities. At Pulaski the appeal to neo-Confederate nationalism or Pete Peters’s theology was less powerful than the thudding magnetism of electric guitars and growling calls for blood and soil. Although a small segment of skins did embrace Christian Identity doctrine, most found their religious icons in Norse mythology, Viking history, and runic symbols. While Peters and his Identity kinsmen regarded America as a special promised land, for skinheads it was just one more landmass, like Europe, on which the white gene pool reproduced.
    Even if William Pierce was paying scant attention to skinheads at that time, his own dogma closely paralleled theirs, particularly regarding Christian Identity’s claims to historical accuracy. In
Hunter
, his second novel after
The Turner Diaries
, published in 1989, Pierce has one of his mouthpiece characters remark on Christian Identity’s claim that the biblical people Israel were Aryans: “They have this completely nutty version of history, which no one who’s paid attention in his high school history class can believe.” 22 If Pierce had been out in the cow pasture that night, he might have whooped and hollered Pete Peters off the stage along with the rest.
    But Pierce was not at Pulaski in 1989 or any other venue where he might rub shoulders with the undisciplined minions that made up the vanguardists’ new rank and file. He spent the year ensconced in his West Virginia camp, installing a new computer system and preparing the text of
Hunter
for publication. He noticed that “more and more people [had] become receptive to the message” and were buying his magazines and books. But more sales did not translate easily into new recruits. “It’s still very difficult to find more good people for our team,” he complained. “The fact is that we need more people involved in our work, and we need more money to support those people.” 23 Apparently, Pierce did not draw the simple conclusion that sitting on the side of a mountain and writing a novel would not build the kind of cadre organization he wanted.
    Pierce and National Alliance made one attempt in those years to reach out to mainstream white people, a stockholders’ initiative like that used by consumer groups. 24 In 1986, the same year he had moved his headquarters from a Washington, D.C., suburb to West Virginia, National Alliance bought one hundred shares of AT&T stock. A year later it submitted a proposal against affirmative action for a vote by stockholders. AT&T’s management responded by not submitting the proposal to a vote, but a Securities and Exchange Commission ruling placed it on the agenda for an April 1988 vote. Amid great controversy and protests, the resolution was voted down. National Alliance resubmitted a similar resolution for the 1989 meeting, but that too was voted down. As skinheads were marching around Pulaski’s town square, Pierce’s cadres were preparing still another resolution for the 1990 AT&T stockholders’ meeting. Whatever stockholders actually thought of