The Nazis Among Us

Who is Matt Hale, and what does he have to do with Virginia Beach? It’s a long saga, but worth exploring.

Matt Hale

Matthew Hale, now 37, called himself the “supreme leader” of the World Church of the Creator, now known as the Creativity Movement,

a religious group that worships the white race as creators of civilization.  The church believes that a ‘racial holy war’ is necessary to attain a ‘white world’ without Jews and non-whites and to this end they encourage their members to ‘populate the lands of this earth with white people exclusively.’

From 1990 to 1992, Matthew Hale chalked up convictions for flag burning, littering, mob action, obstruction of justice, criminal trespass, resisting arrest, aggravated battery, and carrying a concealed weapon, all crimes committed in pursuit of his white supremacist beliefs.  Despite the number and severity of his crimes, Hale managed to avoid jail except for a brief stint on house arrest.

In 1990, Matt Hale was expelled from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, after the school newspaper published his white separatist editorials and he organized a KKK rally.  However, Hale somehow managed to re-enroll in the school, and graduated in 1993.

Hale was then accepted to law school at Southern Illinois University and graduated in 1998.  Ordinarily, a law school applicant with a criminal record would have no chance of acceptance.  It is not clear why Southern Illinois, whose motto is “Established in the Public Interest, Serving the Public Good,” made an exception for Matt Hale.

In 1998, Matthew Hale passed the Illinois bar examination and applied for a license to practice law in Illinois.  However, the application for a law license was denied for lack of requisite character and fitness. Hale’s appeal of that ruling was denied on June 30, 1999.

Benjamin Smith

Two days later, in retaliation, World Church of the Creator member Benjamin Smith went on a three-day shooting spree, randomly targeting minorities in Illinois and Indiana. From July 2nd to 4th, 1999, Smith shot six Orthodox Jews walking to and from their synagogues in Chicago, two people in Evanston, Illinois, including former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong and an African-American minister, and a Korean graduate student on his way to church in Bloomington, Indiana, as well as nine others.  Smith ended his shooting spree by committing suicide.

Murders in Chicago

In 2003, white supremacist Matt Hale was arrested for soliciting and plotting the murder of a federal Judge who had ruled against him in a trademark suit involving the name of his “church.”

On February 28, 2005, the Judge’s mother and husband were murdered at their Chicago home by Bart Ross, who shot and killed himself when stopped by police a few days later.

On April 6, 2005, Matt Hale received a sentence of forty years in the federal penitentiary for soliciting and plotting the murder of the Judge.  Hale is now a prisoner at a maximum security federal prison in Florence, Colorado, with a release date of December 6, 2037.

On May 18, 2005, the Judge testified before Congress about the problem of providing security for judges, blaming the murder of her family in part on rhetoric against judges from people like Virginia Beach televangelist Pat Robertson.

William White

This month William White, age 31, a Roanoke, Virginia white supremacist and real estate developer who describes himself as the commander of the American National Socialist Workers’ Party, was ordered held without bail in Chicago on charges of threatening the foreman of the jury that convicted Matthew Hale of plotting to murder the federal Judge.

According to federal prosecutors, White posted the name, photograph, address and phone numbers of Hale’s jury foreman on a website amid phrases like “kill, kill, kill,” speculation that he might go on a “murderous rampage,” and a photo of Barack Obama with a superimposed swastika and a racist diatribe that concluded

‘He should not be allowed to take office by any means necessary.’

In one of the milder passages on his website, White explained his beliefs:

All the ‘repressive’ acts whites have conducted towards Negroes throughout our history together are justified, from the whippings of slavery through modern ‘police brutality.’ … The only healthy mode of existence for the Negro in white society is a state of complete subjugation… . I no longer doubt that the expulsion and extermination of the black race on the American continent by their white betters is an inevitability that whites can no longer turn their heads from.

White weighed in on the Jena 6 last year in more typical fashion:

Lynch the Jena 6!

If these n@##*rs are released or acquitted, we will find out where they live and make sure that white activists and white citizens in Louisiana know it, we’ll mail directions to their homes to every white man in Louisiana if we have to in order to find someone willing to deliver justice.

He later added the home addresses and phone numbers of five of the Jena 6, “in case anyone wants to deliver justice.”  Like Hale, White has a long history of such threats and arrests on at least twenty-four charges, including charges of assault, weapons and explosives violations, property destruction, graffiti, use of false identification, and assaulting police officers, but has spent only a few months in jail and incurred a single $250 fine.

On Thursday, a federal grand jury in Roanoke indicted White on seven counts of threats and intimidation, charging him with targeting a series of victims by telephone, e-mail, on his website, and in chat rooms frequented by white supremacists.

Virginia Beach Connection

White’s victims included a group of tenants in a Virginia Beach apartment complex involved in a discrimination case, a bank employee in Kansas City, a Canadian lawyer, a Maryland newspaper columnist, a Delaware university administrator, and a New Jersey mayor.

The Virginia Beach victims were tenants of an apartment complex at 15 1/2 Street who sued their landlord, John Crockett Henry, for a long pattern of racial discrimination.

According to the residents, Henry used racial slurs against them and their children, and placed restrictions on black residents and not white residents, including a curfew.

After the lawsuit was filed, William White sent threatening letters to the Virginia Beach tenants along with Nazi propaganda material. White also posted a message on a white supremacist blog listing the name, home address and phone number of the tenants’ attorney.

White specifically targeted the tenants and their attorney, stating that

‘After we are done with our legal dispute, they are open game.’

‘Do not send them `hate fliers’ or nooses. Do not call and record them and place those phone calls on YouTube. Do not open credit cards in their name, empty their bank accounts by Internet, hack their emails.’

In April 2008, a Norfolk federal magistrate heard a motion for sanctions against White, withheld judgment for almost four months, and then in late July 2008 issued a 76 page opinion denying the request and siding with White:

‘Seated at his computer, at a safe remove from the actual conflict, he strikes out randomly with inflammatory rhetoric, targeting individuals whom he has never met.’

‘The delivery of these messages using the Internet makes them less threatening by their very nature,’ [the magistrate] wrote, noting the threats were directed not at an individual, but to anyone who might come across them in cyberspace.

‘Thus, to the extent that White’s postings are available for viewing on a variety of publicly-accessible websites, and thus by potentially an endless number of people, that fact makes it less likely that the information posted on the Internet rises to the level of a true threat.’

Unanswered Questions

Since the filing of the Chicago charges, William White has finally been indicted by a Roanoke grand jury for the same threats and actions that the Norfolk magistrate was so willing to ignore.

White’s long pattern of threats and intimidation, coupled with the behavior of his associates, raise some disturbing questions. Why did it take a Chicago indictment and arrest to spur Virginia authorities to action? Do Nazis really have a First Amendment right to issue credible threats over the internet (or the telephone, or e-mail, or in chat rooms, or in person)? How many times does a Nazi have to get arrested before authorities are willing to take him at his word as to his violent intentions? Must we wait until people actually die to respond to such threats?  And what responsibility does the president and chancellor of a “christian” university and law school have to temper his language, encourage obedience to the law, and support the rule of law and the judiciary?