Kelvin Pierce - Sins of My Father: Growing Up with America’s Most Dangerous White Supremacist

SINS
OF MY
FATHER

GROWING UP WITH AMERICAS MOST
DANGEROUS WHITE SUPREMACIST

SINS
OF MY
FATHER
GROWING UP WITH AMERICAS MOST
DANGEROUS WHITE SUPREMACIST

BY

KELVIN PIERCE

WITH

CAROLE DONOGHUE

Copyright 2020 by Kelvin Pierce

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Kelvin Pierce

208-A Dominion Road NE

Vienna, VA 22180

me2cloudbase@yahoo.com

Book Layout: TheBookMakers.com

Sins of my Father - GROWING UP WITH AMERICAS MOST
DANGEROUS WHITE SUPREMACIST / Kelvin Pierce. 1st ed.

Print ISBN: 9798609361912

Contents

Preface

This book is about my father, William Luther Pierce III. Those who know the history of white nationalism in our country will recognize his name and know his infamous book, The Turner Diaries, which he wrote in 1978. It was the blueprint for the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh that stole the lives of 168 men, women and children and injured 684 others, and it is still mandatory reading for many right-wing extremist groups in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

On April 19, 2020 it will be 25 years since McVeighs atrocity, for which he was executed in 2001. My father, who claimed to have helped prepare McVeighs defense, died of cancer a year later, but even now he remains an icon of the white supremacy movement. I have spent the last few years trying to understand what made him what he was, a task that to me has become more urgent as the carnage of mass-shootings by white nationalists spreads from city to city. For most of my life I loathed him as much as I longed for him to love me, but he was just not capable of doing so. His private side was every bit as twisted as the public side people saw on TV or read about in the papers when he ranted about swarthy hooked-nosed Jews and sold guns as Negro control equipment, but only my mother knew the extent of the abuse that my twin brother Erik and I endured at his hands.

Dad was all about hate. He lived it, breathed it, 24/7. He tried hard to teach us to do the same, and for a while succeeded, at least with me. He got so good at hate that he assumed the mantle of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party assassinated in 1967. Today, my father would be on a domestic terror watch list, if not in prison for child abuse and endangerment, and other crimes. He most certainly was on the radar of the FBI, U.S. Secret Service, and other major law enforcement agencies for years but they never managed to nail him.

I lived much of my early life fearing that people would find out that I was his son. Dad had dedicated his life to saving the whole white race from Jews, niggers, Communists, feminists and gays, and all others whom he believed were contaminating his country and culture. And the more press he got, the more I was terrorized at home, beaten up in school and out, and ostracized as that Nazi kid. I shrunk inward and hid in my own world, the only place it was safe, but my imagination got me into all kinds of trouble with my father as a result.

The Southern Poverty Law Center branded my father as one of the most influential and dangerous ideologues of the white nationalist movement for the 30 years before his death. He was all that, and more. He would fly into sudden violent, volcanic rages, to the point that he even killed the only two living things he truly loved, our sweet Siamese cats. The only time he was truly happy was when he could lock himself in his study with his books and Nazi paraphernalia, to write about the race wars to come that he hoped to organize and orchestrate.

When he wasnt writing or addressing fund-raising rallies for his neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance, he liked to experiment with chemicals and explosives in the basement of our home or in the woods behind it. He had me help him produce nitroglycerine and showed me how to make bombs. To my mothers terror, he hid weapons and other dangerous stuff in the crawl space of our house until a few days before the FBI came sniffing around. Sometimes he used me as a guinea-pig, once knocking me flat on my rear from a powerful electric shock. While I was frightened I was happy, too, because I was spending time with him. I thought that Id earn his love and respect, if only I could play my part well, but I was wrong.

I would have done anything for a word of praise, a hug, or a kiss from him, but in the end, I always failed him. No matter how hard I tried, I couldnt become the little Aryan he wanted and so he abandoned his attempt to mold me. As for my brother, Erik, he didnt even try with him. The only time I saw him display any affection toward either of us was after his death, when I found among his belongings a photograph of us as babies, sitting on his lap. He was smiling.

It wasnt until I left for college and met the outside world that I realized what a monster he was. When he left my mother, he wrote her a letter saying he was going because he loved his political party more. He went on to marry four other women, mostly mail-order brides. He died at his secluded compound on a West Virginia mountaintop before he had the chance to wed a sixth woman that he had squirreled away out of sight of his fifth wife. He spent his last days restructuring the National Alliance to make sure it survived him and gave no thought to us at all - his Nazi acolytes didnt even know our names or that we existed, although they did try to recruit me a few days after his death, like some sort of prized trophy to hang on the wall.

I never fully discovered what turned him from being a physics professor at a small Oregon college into a hate-spewing bigoted man who could beat his kids until they bled, or why he feared minorities and fantasized about killing them in the most bloody way he could.

It wasnt until my 30s that I felt safe enough to confide in a few friends about my father and how he affected my life. What finally forced me from the silence of the sidelines was the 2016 presidential election campaign and the hate in the streets of Charlottesville, Va., that killed a young protester, Heather Heyer, during Unite the Right rally. The swastikas and the flaming torches brought back so many memories, such visceral feelings, that I knew I had to speak out about the racism still so deeply rooted in our society.

As my wife and daughters pointed out, it was time I stopped hiding. I have now started to share my story in public in talks to anti-hate groups and other organizations and at first I was taken aback when I saw some people in the audience cry. They told me later how healing it was for them to hear my story, given current events in our country.

About the same time I started writing this book, hoping to exorcise my fathers ghost and to set down on paper some of the events of my childhood growing up with Americas leading neo-Nazi. It is based on my memories, conversations with my mother and others who knew him, and private family papers. I have tried to add some historical context to my story. It is not meant to be a full historical record, but it has played a vital part in my healing process, which continues to this day.

When I see how our president, Donald Trump, uses immigration, national security and his Deep State conspiracies to stoke the fires of the same fascist forces that my father used to incite and exploit people, I feel more compelled than ever to tell my own story and paint a picture of the real Bill Pierce, not the man that his followers have idolized to this day.