Free Blood and Politics by Leonard Zeskind Page A

affirmative action, it was unlikely they would vote for a resolution sponsored by an outfit advocating a white revolution.
    Why would Pierce and National Alliance bother with such a misguided scheme? A
National Vanguard
magazine article describing the resolution process reminded readers that they believed “equality is adespicable goal.” Not much news in that statement. So an additional rationale was invoked: “The aim is to take the offensive against the enemies of White America, to show what can be done with the weapons at hand, and to inspire others to take them up and join the fight.” 25
    Pierce soon abandoned this experiment with stockholders’ resolutions. At that point, mass organizing—even among the rough-and-tumble skinheads, much less ordinary white stockholders—was still beyond the National Alliance’s ken. A few years later, however, that changed.
    If William Pierce dressed once or twice in Willis Carto’s more mainstream costume, then Carto did the reverse, putting on Pierce’s vanguardist clothes for an occasion or two. Carto made a stab at promoting the skin scene in the 1980s, when his
Spotlight
tabloid published a three-page photo and text spread glorifying skinheads. “They live by a macho creed of two-fisted values such as personal courage and fighting skills,” it gushed.
    “[They] represent a total rejection of the system by a still small, but possibly pace-setting, element of today’s youth . . . In increasing numbers they are turning to the struggle to replace this order with one that will truly care about their race and their nation . . . given the toughness, determination and fearlessness of the skinheads, they are certainly prepared to do their part to bring a new social order to America,”
The Spotlight
marveled. The spread had been written and photographed by Robert Hoy, a middle-aged American who had published a magazine spread of photographs on British skinheads. 26 (In a most ironic twist, Hoy later was on the receiving end of that macho creed, much to his regret.)
    At that time Carto did not follow Hoy’s heroic photo display with any initiatives aimed specifically at recruiting the young subculturalists to his enterprises. The established British far right racist parties had already tried and failed to turn violence-prone dance hall drunkards into semirespectable electioneering Tory look-alikes. Americans like Carto were to have had even less success than their British counterparts.
    There was one established leader, however, who had a loyal following among skinheads as the decade ended: Tom Metzger. More than anyone else, Metzger churned the skinheads’ raw power into usable ideological steam. Metzger had long ago forsaken the electioneering model he had adopted immediately after leaving Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He now sneered at both Duke and Carto. Like Pierce, he had little more than contempt for ordinary white people, chained as they were to their television sets and conservative values. Unlike Pierce, however, Metzgerexalted spontaneity over discipline, small “wolf packs” over large organizations, and street action in metropolitan centers over mountainside retreats. And his prescient reading of white youth subcultures and freewheeling approach transformed him into the skinheads’ godfather. “White revolutionaries have no dogmas,” he proclaimed. 27
    Compared with Carto’s weekly
Spotlight
or Pierce’s glossy
National Vanguard
magazine, the tabloid Metzger published looked like an amateur effort. But the cartoons, polemics, and sloganeering were the envy of comrades such as Louis Beam. “You are producing the kind of publication others have only dreamed about,” Beam wrote to Metzger. 28
    During the early 1980s Metzger’s closest associates had pushed him toward the skinheads. Perhaps most important among them was Wyatt Kaldenberg, a former New Leftist who claimed to have campaigned for Tom Hayden and had once joined a Marxist sect. 29 The