Among the many wannabe führers of Aryan
Nations are Dennis McGiffen (top left),
August Kreis (bottom left) and Morris Gulett
(far left), who recently praised South Carolina
mass murderer Dylann Roof (middle left).
24 splc intelligence report
“The group that produced some of the
nation’s worst racial terrorists is finally
dead,” Potok said.
In an odd twist, one of the men who
once claimed to lead the Aryan Nations
agrees, more or less, with these sentiments. “For all intents and purposes,
the Aryan Nations Pastor Butler created
in the mid-seventies is dead and gone,”
Gulett said in his Nov. 17 posting, which
came 23 years after he was “ordained”
as a pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ
Christian by Butler.
All that remains, Gulett said, “are a few
good dedicated souls and a good many
malcontents who wrongfully call themselves Aryan Nations, but will never be
anything but degenerate prison gangsters
and filthy unwashed wanna be bikers.”
That is an apparent reference to
McGiffen and the Sadistic Souls. Gulett
also had a falling out marked by similar
name-calling earlier this year with Shaun
Patrick Winkler, another former Butler
protégé who failed in his 2012 attempt
to build a new Aryan Nations compound
in North Idaho. Winkler now lives in
Mississippi and says he’s affiliated with
the International Keystone Knights of
the Ku Klux Klan.
“The Aryan Nations name has such a
negative stigma attached to it these days
because of these types of people that it has
no real value to it any longer,” Gulett said.
Released from federal prison in 2010,
Gulett said he has spent the past five
years and “countless thousands of dollars [trying] to rebuild Aryan Nations to
its former glory with the same Christian
[Identity] standards Pastor Butler always
demanded of the membership. But in
these the last days, it is futile.”
“Therefore today,” Gulett said in
his final public announcement, “I
am announcing my retirement from
Aryan Nations.”
“I will never lose respect for the noble
and honorable organization that Pastor
Butler created 40 years ago,” Gulett said,
“but our Holy White Race has evidently
lost the will to live.”
Gulett added that a “race war is swiftly
approaching [and] most of the white race
will without a doubt perish.”
“No doubt some will continue to
haul Aryan Nations through the mud by
atta ching its Christian standard to their
filthy unwashed lives,” Gulett said.
The Sadistic Souls responded in
kind, calling Gulett a Jewish “rabbi”
and saying that neither he nor Kreis
possessed the skills needed to succeed Butler.
“Many have failed Pastor Butler,
August Kreis III being the latest,” the
Sadistic Souls said of the pair on the club
website. “WOW!! Pastor Butler must be
proud of you two.” s
YOUTUBE (GULETT); AP IMAGES/BRIAN BOHANNON (MCGIFFEN); AP IMAGES/CHARLESTON COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE (ROOF); LEXINGTON COUNTY DETENTION CENTER (KREIS)
fraud, has bounced all over the racist world in the past two decades —
from the Ku Klux Klan to the neo-Nazi
National Socialist Movement to various
Aryan Nations splinter factions — without establishing a real foothold or track
record anywhere.
Even as the flames of the Aryan
Nations’ burning cross seem to have flickered out, the group’s name still is revered
and bandied about, particularly in prisons and on racist websites and forums.
But the organization’s emblem — a Nazi
swastika superimposed on a Christian
cross — and a storefront no longer are
easily found.
The downhill slide began with the
SPLC’s 2000 civil suit against the group,
which resulted in a $6.3 million judgments against it that led in turn to its filing for bankruptcy. It accelerated greatly
with Butler’s death in 2004.
SPLC Senior Fellow Mark Potok
said the Aryan Nations was for decades
“probably the best known, if not the most
important, neo-Nazi group in America.”
“Now, 38 years after its founding, after
it was brought to its knees by [the SPLC]
suit, embarrassed by revelations about
the pornographic habits and extreme violence of some of its principals, and gutted by the deaths of its most charismatic
leaders, the group is essentially defunct,”
Potok said.