Anybody familiar with right wing extremism has likely heard of The Turner Diaries. Written by William Pierce, The Turner Diaries depicts a United States enveloped by racial civil war, bombings of federal buildings and the eventual global genocide of all non-white human beings. Pages of the book were found in Timothy McVeigh’s vehicle. However, as it was written in 1978, it may seem a little dated to aspiring young race war nuts.

Here to fill that void is Harold Covington (seen above with the blue, white and green flag of his imaginary white homeland set in present day Oregon, Washingon State, Idaho and Montana)

Born in Burlington, NC, Covington set about alienating his family and classmates with his racial views and invincible arrogance. A short stint in the US Army ended when he was discharged for mental illness in the early 1970’s after he was caught distributing Nazi propaganda to other soldiers. Covington made his way to Rhodesia (sound familiar?) where his noisome personality once again made him unwelcome. (One wonders just how big a racist asshole you would have to be to get kicked out by Ian Smith’s government.) Covington spent time networking with racists in South Africa before going to the UK to collaborate with the BNP and other far right British groups off and on in the late 70’s and 80’s.

Here in North Carolina, Covington was associated with the 1979 massacre of socialist activists in Greensboro. After managing to insult and pick fights with virtually every far right group in America (usually by accusing people of having Jewish ancestry, natch), Covington retreated to the Pacific Northwest (he has an outstanding warrant for his arrest here in NC for violating court orders pertaining to a libel case) where he began his dystopic Nazi porn epic series of books, including The Brigade, A Mighty Fortress, Sons of Freedom and other books with similar preposterous titles.

I have read excerpts from the online edition of The Brigade and found it is dripping with the blood of murdered lesbian women (killed by shotgun while in bed), African American athletes, Latinos, Jewish citizens and, of course, “race traitors”. I strongly suggest nobody else bother to look at it. If the word ‘evil’ has any meaning at all, these books exemplify the term. In them, a quasi-fictional group called the Northwest Front wages a guerilla war to create a white “homeland” in the Pacific Northwest. The books serve as a recruitment tool for what Covington hopes will be an actual race war with himself as the primogenitor of a new white paradise.

The British newspaper The Guardian recently interviewed Covington:

The racist manifesto and photos apparently posted by Roof makes mention of the Northwest Front, created by Covington, a former member of the American Nazi party who traveled to South Africa and Rhodesia in order to agitate for white power. In the accompanying photos, Roof wore patches with Rhodesian and apartheid-era South African flags on them.
Covington, if you believe his website, runs a growing enclave of white supremacists near Seattle called the Northwest Front. The non-profit group is reflected in a series of sci-fi novels, authored by Covington, about a dystopian future in which a white nation is the only answer to US economic and racial woes.

Covington denied specific knowledge of the attack in Charleston, although his denunciation only went so far as to declare the killings “counterproductive”

A few hours after the interview, his podcast had this to say:

“They’ve been given a vision of a time in some imagined but possibly not too-far distant future when all of a sudden, on the street or in their office, or in some trendy fern bar, or Starbucks, or wine-and-cheese boutique on the Upper East Side or in San Francisco, they will look up, possibly from the laptop, where they are typing up their day’s quota of leftwing, liberal horseshit, and they will see a young white man like Dylann Roof standing in front of them with no steroid-pumped policemen in blue to protect their liberal candy asses from the consequences of years of their own behavior…They will see in that young white man’s eyes, that he recognizes them. That he is now beyond deception or bullying or browbeating or Twitter-shaming or intimidation, that he knows them for what they are. And they will look down and see that he has something in his hand.”

Welcome to the face of white supremacy: porcine, greasy and cowardly.