The Quiet Zone Read online

  THE FIRST TIME I’d visited the National Alliance, the entrance gate was shut, a chain wrapped around it. The second time, the gate was wide open. I drove through and parked outside the tan office building adorned with the life rune symbol. Pringle stood outside wearing faded jeans, hiking boots, a grungy T-shirt, and a gray cap. His leg was in a brace.

  He never made it to the Unite the Right rally. A week before the event, he’d been driving a four-wheeler when his foot slipped off a peg and got pulled under the wheel. He broke his tibia-fibula and badly bruised his hip from falling on a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol tucked in his pants. He was rushed to a hospital in Roanoke, Virginia, over two hours away. By the time of the Charlottesville rally, Pringle was back at the compound on a couch, his broken leg propped up as he watched a livestream of the event over patchy internet with his wife.

  “It’s like I didn’t get to go to the prom,” Pringle said of missing Charlottesville. “I was supposed to be rolling in with Matt Heimbach and the Traditionalist Worker Party.” Heimback was a rising leader in the alt-right at the time, though he later renounced white nationalism. “A big conversation we had amongst ourselves here beforehand was, are we going to open carry? And if we were, what was our threshold going to be before we did something with it?”

  Other National Alliance members had attended Charlottesville, including a man named Albert Hess, who went by Jay. As I spoke with Pringle, Hess came outside, shirtless. Stout and round-faced, he wore blue Corona-branded sweatpants and sandals. He’d recently moved to West Virginia from Florida with his cats. Decamping to Appalachia was a way to clear his head after his wife’s death, he said. He’d brought his drum kit as well as a mounted butterfly collection that he proudly showed me.

  “It was crazy,” Hess said of Charlottesville. “The police basically let everybody have at it.”

  For the National Alliance, Charlottesville was successful in at least one regard: sales of The Turner Diaries spiked afterward. Pringle estimated a “couple hundred” copies sold in the following weeks, compared with the more normal dozen a month. He claimed that new members had also joined the organization, paying the twenty-five-dollar application fee and twenty-dollar monthly dues. VICE News had inquired about visiting the compound, though Pringle turned the reporter down. He would only allow photography and video once he had everything “extra, extra, extra tidy.”

  I saw his point. The place looked as dilapidated as ever, the Appalachian forest slowly reclaiming the land, even as Pringle tried to convince me that he was making steady progress rehabbing the property and rebuilding community support. He’d recently recognized a man at the grocery store wearing a swastika belt buckle. “I call him the local Nazi diaspora,” Pringle said. The National Alliance’s former chief financial officer, Robert DeMarais, still lived close by, as did the former books division president, David Sims, among around a dozen people in the area once associated with the organization, some of them still active in the Far Right. Another former Alliance member living in the Hillsboro area, Alan Balogh, would later make news for helping start a new white nationalist political organization called the National Justice Party. He and his son, Warren Balogh, were founding council members alongside the alt-right personality Mike Peinovich. Pringle said he was still hosting monthly barbecues for locals.

  He was also keeping busy building a rifle, a “fun” project to try to replicate one of the longest-ever sniper kills, a distance of about 1.5 miles. He’d been working on the gun since I first saw him in June, and in the meantime a new record had been set for a sniper kill from just over two miles. A professional gunsmith with a degree from the Colorado School of Trades, Pringle said the parts totaled about $14,000, with the cost split with two other friends. He was recording footage of himself assembling the rifle with music from a heavy metal band called Lamb of God. “They’re total lefties but it’s got this great guitar,” he said, breaking into an air guitar solo.

  Pringle made gun-building sound like a harmless hobby, though in the same breath he described his profession as “sharpening the Grim Reaper’s blade” and said he’d once given advice to a man named Jason McGhee on what kind of gun to purchase for the “specs” he was seeking—not that he knew McGhee would go on a murderous rampage with the weapon, he added. A former National Alliance employee, McGhee in 2006 shot and stabbed four people at a youth hangout in Georgia, killing them and injuring three more people. McGhee was one of three people charged in the attack and sentenced to life in prison.

  Pringle invited me inside to see the rifle, retrieving it from a metal cabinet. A gigantic scope mounted to the barrel could aim to within an inch of accuracy from a mile away, he claimed. This was no hunting gun. He handed it to me. Cold to the touch, the thing weighed at least twenty pounds. In the moment, I tried not to think about the weirdness of the situation: me with a neo-Nazi, handling his sniper rifle, leaving my fingerprints everywhere before it was used for God knows what.

  Since we were inside, Pringle offered to show me William Pierce’s former study. He led me through a couple of doors. “We referred to it as the Sanctuary,” he said, pointing to where there once sat a large desk, a shelf of research books, and a giant leather-bound dictionary. The room was now mostly empty, scattered with old metal furniture, scrap paper, and some decades-old National Alliance trucker hats that Pringle had heard were created by former member Bob Matthews, who had led the Order, the deadly white nationalist gang. About two decades earlier, 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace had interviewed Pierce in this very room and inspected his first edition copy of Mein Kampf, the autobiography of Adolf Hitler. By then, Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries had sold almost two hundred thousand copies and become, according to Wallace, “the bible of Far Right militiamen like Timothy McVeigh, who is now awaiting trial for the Oklahoma City bombing.”

  McVeigh had been obsessed with The Turner Diaries, gifting it to friends, selling it at gun shows, and always carrying a well-thumbed copy. Pages from the book were found in his getaway car from Oklahoma City. A copy that he’d given his cousin was the government’s exhibit no. 1 in United States of America v. Timothy James McVeigh. He’d also called a National Alliance hotline seven times the day before the bombing. When McVeigh was later put to death, Pringle sent a mass email in defense of the mass murderer, saying McVeigh “should have a monument erected in his honor.” Pringle added that he personally felt no “sympathy for the families of the 168, not the children, not the secretaries, and definitely not the federal pigs.” He seemed to feel some shared history with McVeigh, as they’d both been first exposed to organized white nationalism while serving in the army in the late ’80s.

  While Pierce repeatedly argued to the press that The Turner Diaries could not be seen as a blueprint for McVeigh, he still credited the young army veteran with drawing new recruits to his organization. The National Alliance, which had three hundred associates when Pringle joined in 1992, reportedly amassed twenty-five hundred dues-paying members in the years after the bombing, although that may be an overestimate. Former deputy membership coordinator Billy Roper told me membership peaked at 1,274 people in 2001.

  By all accounts, at the turn of the century, the National Alliance was one of the world’s most influential white power organizations. Pierce commanded forty-three units in twenty-six states, plus another five units in Canada, according to Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics, a history of white nationalism in America. The National Alliance had expanded into a hate media empire, with twenty staff and $1 million in annual sales. Along with publishing a monthly magazine and broadcasting a weekly radio show called American Dissent Voices to one hundred thousand listeners, Pierce operated a music label called Resistance Records that sold albums by bands with names such as Angry Aryans and White Wash. He also launched Resistance magazine—called “the Rolling Stone of the hate music world”—and branched into video games. In one, called Ethnic Cleansing, a city-roving protagonist must kill Blacks, Latinos, and Jews, with the game�
��s final challenge being to kill the Israeli prime minister. National Alliance ads were appearing on billboards and buses around the country.

  Pringle, who led units in Albuquerque and later in Anchorage, first met Pierce in 2000 when he attended a leadership conference at the compound. During one event, Pierce cut off Pringle’s ponytail as part of a fund-raising drive.

  “I still have it,” Pringle said of his severed lock of hair. “I’ll show it to you if you want.”

  “Sounds gross,” I said.

  “It’s kind of a weird thing,” he admitted.

  We returned to the front of the building, where Pringle kept a small office. The phone rang. He limped behind his desk to pick up the corded handset. It was his dad—a reminder to me that the guy was still human after all. I glanced around. A bookshelf held copies of Pierce’s personal Bible, of Mein Kampf, and of My Awakening, by David Duke, the former Louisiana state congressman and KKK leader. There was a beer koozie with the words “David Duke U.S. Senate.” Duke was a personal friend, Pringle explained when he got off the phone. Pringle seemed to have a lot of infamous friends.

  Another acquaintance was Dylann Roof, the young man awaiting execution for killing nine congregants at a historic Black church in South Carolina in 2015, including the pastor and a state senator. From prison, Roof wrote a letter to the National Alliance asking for reading material for a “political prisoner.” Roof said he’d already read The Turner Diaries, so Pringle mailed him some issues of National Vanguard and was now planning to send him a copy of The Lightning and the Sun, by Savitri Devi Mukherji, a French-born convert to Hinduism and Nazism who believed that Hitler was an incarnation of the god Vishnu. The book was published by the National Alliance. Pringle was including a self-addressed stamped envelope so Roof could write back. “I’m a nice guy, you know?” Pringle laughed. “And he’s a limited-time pen pal.” (Roof was also in contact with Roper, who had started another white nationalist organization in Arkansas; Roof asked for details about what it was like to work with Pierce, underscoring the young man’s fascination with the hate leader.)

  Pringle quickly added that he didn’t approve of Roof’s actions. As a roundabout way of explaining himself, he cited the book Essays of a Klansman, by Louis Beam, a strategist of the white nationalist movement who created a point system for how to become a so-called Aryan Warrior. It entailed killing either one thousand Blacks or other nonwhite persons, twelve journalists, five members of Congress, or one U.S. president, among a number of murderous combinations. Pringle’s conclusion was that “clearly, running around and shooting Blacks is not the way to power.”

  “Moral justification and tactical justification are two different things,” Pringle said.

  I asked, “So what Dylann Roof did wasn’t bad because he killed Blacks but because it wasn’t tactical?”

  “Right, he gave in to indiscipline . . . Is it at a point where Roof needs to get his Glock 21 Slim Frame and go into the room and kill everybody? No. Will we be there eventually? That’s not for us to decide. The Blacks will decide that.” He spoke over a din of crickets.

  AFTER PIERCE’S DEATH IN 2002, Pringle became the membership coordinator for the entire organization, considered the second-in-command. He quit in 2004 amid interorganizational squabbling and over the next decade started a website called White Wire and migrated through various contingencies in the “alt-right milieu,” as he described them. After attending the 2016 funeral of a Utah rancher named LaVoy Finicum, who died while participating in Ammon Bundy’s armed occupation of a national wildlife refuge in Oregon, Pringle felt motivated to reengage with the National Alliance, which had gone through a leadership change.

  His return to Pocahontas in May 2016 coincided with the political rise of Donald Trump, which didn’t seem coincidental. Trump’s presidency was endorsed by white nationalists, including David Duke. After the Charlottesville rally, Trump claimed there were “very fine people on both sides,” essentially giving a pat on the back to the white supremacists. I assumed that Pringle was optimistic about the National Alliance’s future under the new president.

  Instead, Pringle said Trump was giving disgruntled white people less motivation to join the movement. “His election makes people think that the solution is simply getting the right people in office, and it’s not,” Pringle said. Which was why he was working to recruit new members by distributing outreach pamphlets around the country. He called it “cadre development.” He gave me a copy of a flyer, which had an image of an angelic white woman with the words “Love Your Race.” Pringle had such canvassing down to a science.

  “Don’t take this personally, but most journalists are really lazy,” he said. “They like things to land in their lap. I’ll put out some flyers and then call in a complaint.” The tactic ginned up free media coverage. He said he’d done it for years and at all kinds of events, including the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

  More ambitiously, Pringle said he was planning an alt-right festival in Pocahontas County for April 20, 2018, on Hitler’s birthday. He planned to invite prominent white supremacists such as Duke who could pull in a crowd and show the potential economic benefits of a thriving National Alliance. Or at least that was his thinking.

  Before I left, he gave me copies of The Turner Diaries and another Pierce novel, Hunter, about a white racist who murders interracial couples and spurs copycat acts of violence. Pierce had dedicated Hunter—which has sold more than a half million copies since 1989—to an American Nazi Party member named Joseph Paul Franklin, who had roved the country killing Jews, Blacks, and people in interracial relationships. Franklin also attempted to murder the magazine publisher Larry Flynt for displaying interracial sex in Hustler, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Franklin was executed in 2013 in Missouri after being convicted of eight murders between 1977 and 1980, but he claimed responsibility for at least a dozen more killings—including two in Pocahontas, not far from the National Alliance compound.

  Pringle mentioned that he’d looked up my name and read my blog. A lump formed in my throat as I realized I’d posted photos online of hikes with Jenna, who is Korean. Was Pringle hinting that he knew I was in an interracial relationship? In The Turner Diaries, on something called the Day of the Rope, tens of thousands of people are hanged from lampposts, power poles, and trees, each with a placard around the neck that says “I defiled my race.” In Pierce’s nightmarish vision, Jenna and I would both be strung up. In Franklin’s real rampage of terror, he simply used a rifle to achieve the same end. What kind of danger had I exposed myself and Jenna to? She never wanted me to visit the National Alliance. Now we both had fallen under its gaze. The moment made me recognize that I know nothing about the insidious threats that Blacks and other minorities endure on a daily basis.

  It struck me that Pringle was assembling a gun that Franklin could only have dreamed of deploying. How many more people might Franklin have killed with the right weapon? And could the chatty, limping man before me carry out the same type of violence?

  Chapter Eleven

  “Command the Evil to Be Gone”

  I WAS TOLD TO NOT WORRY about the National Alliance. They’re harmless, people said. They’re mostly gone. Don’t focus on them. I didn’t want to give oxygen to a hate group. But I also felt I couldn’t ignore the flame of racism that had burned in Pocahontas County for so many years. If William Pierce had thrived in the Quiet Zone, what was to stop his organization from mounting a comeback?

  Not unlike David Pringle, Pierce had presented himself as likable enough, well-read and occasionally eloquent, which could mask the vileness of his beliefs. Tall and lanky at six feet four inches, often dressed in jeans and a cardigan, with a trim haircut and thick spectacles, Pierce considered himself an academic and preferred to be called “Dr. Pierce.” Originally from Georgia, but raised in Alabama and Texas, he held a doctorate in physics from the University of Colorado and was formerly a tenured professor at Oregon State University. He dismissed the Na
zi salutes and Klan costumery of his predecessors as clownish and unserious, and he tried to remake the white supremacist movement into a more palatable, mainstream organization through the National Alliance (itself a bland and unassuming name). His unthreatening manner bought him some breathing space in Pocahontas.

  When Pierce first arrived, there was some local pushback. I found a 1985 letter to the Pocahontas Times written by a church congregation near Green Bank that read: “Racism, bigotry, violence and methods aimed at intimidation are contrary to the values of Christianity and to the values of most of the residents of West Virginia and Pocahontas County . . . We ask the leaders of our state and county government to take whatever actions that are constitutionally right and proper to encourage those in the Cosmotheist Community and the Neo-Nazi National Alliance to leave our county and state.”

  Alarmed that dangerous people were coming into the county, Sheriff Jerry Dale spearheaded state legislation to curb paramilitary training in West Virginia, which he saw as a way “to prevent the Mill Point group from starting a terrorist training camp here in Pocahontas County,” as he wrote in 1988 in the Pocahontas Times.

  Over time, however, Pierce ingratiated himself in the community. He shopped locally. He dined out. He exchanged pleasantries. He dated a hippie from Lobelia. His associates also dated locally. Will Williams, who lived on the compound in the ’80s and ’90s, went out with a woman from Green Bank who showed him around the observatory. In turn, he brought her to a gathering at the compound, where Pierce often walked around with a Siamese cat perched on his shoulder.

  “He was just a gentleman,” recalled Joseph Smith, president of the county’s historical society and a former mayor of Marlinton, who worked at a meat shop that Pierce frequented. “If you didn’t know who he was and what he was connected with, you wouldn’t think any more about him.” Sam Felton, the current mayor of Marlinton, recalled greeting Pierce when they passed each other at French’s Diner in town. “A lot of people that had no knowledge [of the National Alliance] would say ‘Oh they’re good people, they’re just like us,’” Felton said. Eugene Simmons, the longtime county prosecutor, bumped into Pierce at the Hillsboro Post Office, which saw a huge increase in incoming and outgoing mail because of the National Alliance. “Pierce was a pretty sharp fella,” said Simmons. “He stayed in his own area and nobody bothered him.” Pierce wanted it that way. Most people “leave us alone as long as we don’t bother them,” he wrote in a 1988 news bulletin to members. To many locals, Pierce was simply minding his own business up on the hill.