Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

The white power movement in America wants a revolution. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent & deeply troubling worldview made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, & apocalyptic faith. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the history of a movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War & made tragic headlines in Waco & Ruby Ridge & with the Oklahoma City bombing & is resurgent under President Trump.

Returning to an America ripped apart by a war they felt they were not allowed to win, a small group of veterans & active-duty military personnel & civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, & white separatists to form a new movement of loosely affiliated independent cells to avoid detection. 

The white power movement operated with discipline & clarity, undertaking assassinations, armed robbery, counterfeiting, & weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place & put them in charge of brokering alliances & birthing future recruits.

Belew's disturbing & timely history reminds us that war cannot be contained in time & space: grievances intensify & violence becomes a logical course of action. Based on 10 years of deep immersion in previously classified FBI files & on extensive interviews,Bring the War Home tells the story of American paramilitarism & the birth of the alt-right.

Kathleen Belew is a historian, author & associate professor of History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. She specializes in the history of the present.