by Louis Beam, Grand Dragon in the Texas Kingdom of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, inspects the Klan’s security force in full battle gear, in Santa Fe, Texas on February 14, 1981. Credit – Ed Kolenovsky-AP
For over the course of a decade, social media platforms have been given almost free rein to a growing range of fervor that advocates violence and extremism. With sometimes tragic consequences, they easily target some of the most vulnerable individuals in society. The use of social media to radicalize and incite violence was perhaps most evident when hundreds of people who participated in the uprising on January 6, 2021 were arrested — and posted about it.
Many observers have lamented the role of social media in spreading far-right ideas and conspiracy theories, radicalizing scores of Americans. Critics called for more aggressive regulation. But few realized that the use of technology by violent American extremists is nothing new. They have long understood the importance of messages and the power of the media and entertainment to spread their ideology.
In the 1980s, in fact, racist, anti-government extremists eagerly welcomed the advent of digital technology and desktop computing as a very positive, cheap and effective means of reaching a wider constituency. These initial steps laid the groundwork for using social media platforms to revolutionize modern terrorism.
Louis Beam, the “ambassador” of the Aryan Nations in general and former Grand Dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan, devised the first large-scale use of technology to promote far-right extremism. Beam was a decorated Army veteran, grew up in a segregated town in Texas and as early as fourth grade, was crying about being a member of the KKK and trying to recruit comrades.
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A conviction in 1982 on misdemeanor charges for conducting paramilitary exercises on federal land without permission prompted Beam to resign as Grand Dragon and head to Idaho – where he would take up residence at the Nations’ Hayden Lake compound Aryan.
Then, Beam began to plot the revival of the white supremacist movement he had been forced to abandon in Texas. He succeeded in rescuing the concept of underground clandestine warfare known as “leaderless resistance” from obscurity. Beam envisioned a strong organization providing ideas and funding to loosely connected cells, allowing the white power movement to work around covert law enforcement operations.
Writing in the 1983 edition of the Inter-Clan Newsletter and Survival Alert, Beam explained that while a single cell could be “infiltrated, exposed and destroyed,” in the system he envisioned, it would have “no effect on the others.” The only obstacle was finding a way to communicate with scattered cells.
Beam revealed his solution to this problem at the 1983 Conference of Aryan Nations – the most significant and consequential gathering of the American white supremacist movement.
The meeting took place just weeks after a gun battle involving federal law enforcement officers resulted in the death of Gordon Kahl, a longtime member of the North Dakota chapter of the Posse Comitatus, an extremist movement that has not been recognized by any government authority other than the county sheriff. . Beam praised Kahl as a brave warrior – and declared that the movement was “AT WAR”. He called on the movement to “fight and live or we will soon die.” The stakes couldn’t be higher: “If you don’t help me kill the bastards,” — federal government agents — “you’re going to be asking for your child’s life, and the answer is no.”
At the conference, Beam met with 12 other white power leaders and movement veterans to formulate a battle plan. The strategy subsequently incorporated his solution to the communication problem: emerging computer networking technology. Leaderless resistance fused with bulletin board systems (BBSs) brought unparalleled advantages of both real-time and covert connectivity to the movement, effectively hiding communications from prying eyes and ears. ministers of the federal authorities.
The use of this technology was revolutionary and antiquated at a time when typewriters were still ubiquitous, fax machines had only recently entered the workplace, and computers were scarce and expensive. An Apple IIe boot system, for example, cost $1,260 in 1983—about $3,315 today. And modems for transmitting BBS data over normal telephone lines were not yet available at the time.
The “Aryan Nations Liberty Net” created by Beam arguably pioneered terrorist exploitation of digital communications for radicalization, recruitment, fundraising, and planning and execution of operations. It took Beam a year of work to get the system up and running, and even then it was text-only and slow. But in the spring 1984 edition of the Inter-Clan Newsletter & Survival AlertBeam gushed, “It may very well be that American know-how has provided the technology that will allow those who love this country to save it from a fate it does not deserve.”
As Beam argued, computers were only “the domain and possession of governments and large corporations”. But now, his system enabled “any patriot in the country” to benefit from the white power movement. Beam provided helpful advice to buyers and detailed login instructions, along with a telephone number and post office box for those with additional questions.
As announced in a later fundraising appeal, the movement saw computer technology as “our Aryan technology just as the printing press, radio, airplane, automobile, etc., etc..”
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The Aryan Nations Liberty Net served many purposes. Among them, he sought to tap into a new demographic and build a wider white upper-class constituency by appealing to young computer hackers. He also identified like-minded “patriotic groups” across the country to encourage and facilitate better networking. In addition, it was an innovative fundraising mechanism. And, finally and critically, it was an inexpensive, quick, and easy way to spread the movement’s propaganda without risking government interference, interference, or monitoring.
In perhaps the first warning about the opportunistic exploitation of new online technologies, in 1985, the Anti-Defamation League warned that the networks were “[seeking] spreading their hate propaganda among young people, they are certainly the most vulnerable to its influence.” “Even more troubling,” this embrace of computer technology coincided with “a serious increase in talk” among some far-right groups “about the necessity of committing acts of terror.”
The Freedom of the Aryan Nations network became the lead of later networks such as Stormfront and Vanguard News Network. These platforms made it possible to communicate instantly as well as share huge digital files with media and graphics. Social media has further enhanced the potential of remoteness, as it has provided greater immediacy and closeness. It also allowed individuals to curate their own community – dismissing dissenting opinions not with reasoned and fact-based arguments, but with a single click of a “follow” or “unfollow” button. The result, whether achieved by the most violent or the most innocent teenager – is to create a digital universe where only one’s own worldview is legitimate, and any debate or discourse is suppressed, excluded, and therefore silenced .
Such echo chambers have been very successful in radicalizing individual activists employed by Beam’s headless resistance strategy to violence – his digital disciples have gone from chat rooms to launching attacks in places like Oslo, Norway, and Christchurch, New Zealand. The impact of this revolutionary technology is perhaps best summed up in the latter case by the gunman, who declared in his manifesto that he developed his faith on “The Internet, of course. You won’t find the truth anywhere else.”
As Beam may have imagined, social media is at the forefront of modern terrorism and counter-terrorism. The threat can only be effectively responded to through the full-scale inclusion of a wide range of countermeasures – from content moderation to algorithm revisions to digital literacy programming.
Bruce Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University. Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and DeSales University. Together, they are authors God, Guns, and Terrorism: Terrorism Right in America.
Made with History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History by TIME here. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of TIME’s editors.
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