The Ku Klux Klan reached its heyday in Colorado politics in the 1920s, but the racist dogmas that drove the organization continued to fuel true believers over the following decades.
On June 18, 1984, a terrorist cell with Colorado connections, inspired by the violently racist novel “The Turner Diaries,” murdered Alan Berg, then a provocative KOA radio host, outside his Denver home. Why? Berg called out racists on the radio. And Berg was a Jew. The same organization conducted spectacular armed heists intended to finance their campaign of political insurgency and assassinations and their establishment of a White Bastion in the northwest.
Back in 1989, local reporters Kevin Flynn (now a Denver city councilor) and Gary Garhardt came out with a book documenting the rise and fall of this terrorist organization. Now, thirty-five years later, on December 6, a feature film based on the book, “The Order” starring Jude Law, is coming to theaters. Publisher Simon and Schuster has reissued the book, originally titled “The Silent Brotherhood,” under the title matching the film. The terrorist organization referred to itself by both names. Earlier this year, Craig Silverman interviewed Flynn about the book and other matters.
Along with the Order’s first political victim, one of its major participants also had local ties. David Lane, believed to have driven the getaway vehicle for Berg’s murderer, led local KKK and Aryan Nations groups in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The Wikipedia page on Lane is based partly on Flynn and Gerhardt’s book.
Lane, who died in prison in 2007, remains infamous among white racists for coining the so-called “Fourteen Words” and “88 Precepts” calling for a white ethnostate. The Southern Poverty Law Center also maintains a biography of Lane. One of the quotes from lane that SPL includes illustrates the potential dangers of conspiracy mongering. Lane, basically detached from reality, said, “The real problem was sharply delineated in my mind. The Western nations were ruled by a Zionist conspiracy . . . [that] above all things wants to exterminate the White Aryan race.” After members of the Order murdered Berg, they set their sights on SPL founder Morris Dees. Thankfully, federal agents busted up the terrorist ring before it killed again.
Another Colorado connection to the Order was the LaPorte Church of Christ, which promoted white identity ideology. There, Lane met a woman whom he would later introduce to Robert Matthews, leader of the Order, after which the two became a romantically involved. At that church Lane also met Robert Merki, who with Lane engaged in counterfeiting operations for the Order.
The murder of Alan Berg
Flynn and Gerhardt devote a chapter to Berg’s murder (and with library access you also can still pull up some of Flynn’s old newspaper articles for the Rocky Mountain News on the subject). After Matthews sent his girlfriend’s mother to Denver to conduct surveillance of Berg, Matthews dispatched several members of his group to kill the man.
The conflict started when the Primrose and Cattleman’s Gazette out of Fort Lupton published the anti-Jewish screed “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” As Flynn and Gerhardt relate, Rep. Pat Schroeder got Marine ads pulled from the publication over the racist articles.
Interestingly, the authors relate, Berg got the paper’s publisher on the radio to discuss how Schroeder supposedly had violated the paper’s First Amendment rights. But Berg seemed most interested in thrashing the publisher, telling him, “You have no facts. You have made them up and you have inferred a thought like all fanatics, like John Birchers, like Klansmen, like all of these folks! . . . It’s kind of sickening. It really is.”
After more advertisers pulled out, the newspaper in question folded. David Lane, who had been working security for the offices, lost his job. Flynn and Gerhardt write, “Because of Berg [at least in Lane’s eyes], Lane lost his job just weeks before driving to the 1983 Aryan World Congress . . . and hearing all those speeches calling for war against the Jews.” Lane himself once tangled with Berg on the radio.
Further, Matthews knew of the newspaper affair and discussed it in “his September 1983 speech to the National Alliance convention in Arlington, Virginia,” the duo write. “The Jews are coming down hard on this brave little newspaper,” Matthews reportedly said.
One of Matthews’s goons wanted to pull the trigger on Berg in order to earn “points” for murdering people, Flynn and Gerhardt write. After staking out Berg’s home, the perpetrators shot down Berg in his own driveway. Matthews later worried that he’d turned Berg into a martyr. Indeed, we still celebrate his memory.
In a June 18, 2004, Rocky article Flynn writes of the Order, “They established a terrorist training camp in the remote Idaho panhandle woods and formulated a plan to break up into small cells to fan out and commit various acts of terrorism.
“The FBI cracked the case before much more happened, killing The Order’s leader, Robert Jay Matthews, during a 36-hour standoff on Whidbey Island, in Washington’s Puget Sound, on Dec. 8, 1984.”
As Flynn relates, Judith Berg, Alan’s ex-wife who was with him shortly before he was murdered, called the racism that motivated Berg’s killers a “disease of hate.” Flynn and Gerhardt’s book offers an implicit warning, one we need continue to take seriously.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
