Words and deeds

A 21-year-old university student, a doctor’s son from a swank Chicago suburb, went on a rampage last weekend, shooting blacks, Jews and Asians. He killed two and wounded 12. He stole a van at gunpoint and, while being chased by police, shot and killed himself.

It would be just one more shocking story of a white male of affluent upbringing exploding in inexplicable rage but for this: Benjamin Nathaniel Smith didn’t boil over from a haphazard fusion of violent movies, bloody video games and skinhead music; he got his hate on-line, one-stop shopping at the World Church of the Creator.

This isn’t the first time the World Church of the Creator has been in the news, nor is it the first time a trail of blood has led to its electronic doorstep. A few years ago, a WCC member beat a black sailor returning home from the Gulf War to death. The group was hit with a $1 million wrongful death judgment and the elderly founder, Ben Klassen (the multi-millionaire inventor of the electric can opener), committed suicide.

Matthew Hale, a media-savvy, telegenic, blow-dried young man, revived the group. He changed its recruitment focus from the uneducated hick to computer-literate rich kid. The business of selling hate (at $35 a membership) was never better. In 1997, two members were convicted of beating a black man and his son. Last year, four members were convicted of robbing and beating a storeowner they thought was Jewish. The group also has been linked to the bombing of an NAACP office in Tacoma, Wash., and to a plot to bomb a black church in Los Angeles.

Yet Mr. Hale insists his Web-based organization merely provides an e-gathering place for white supremacists. He is proud of his racism and asserts its expression, including the kiddies pages (unfortunately, spoiled racist rich kids marry and have children, too), to be protected under the First Amendment.

In that, Mr. Hale, though tragically wrong by every measure of human decency, is legally right. If only it weren’t for the group’s constant call for racial holy war (root of the official greeting, “Rahowa”) and the advocacy of “extermination” for those founder Klassen called “mud people.” Then there are Mr. Hale’s frequent suggestions, in preaching to his congregation of the coddled, that the legal system is so corrupted by “mud people” that violence might, just might, be the only recourse.

That’s where Mr. Hale is both wrong and culpable. His electronic utterances are what the United States Supreme Court since 1942 has called “fighting words.” While that ruling, the Chaplinsky decision, held that freedom of speech ended when it was likely to spur another to imminent lawless action, the Brandenburg decision of 1969 dented the hater’s shield further by removing the “imminent” requirement. “Likely to produce such action” is all it takes.

Many groups dedicated to the protection of civil rights have been tracking these on-line hate groups, documenting the connections between the webmaster’s words and the websurfer’s deeds. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which bravely used similar tactics of documentation and litigation to bankrupt the Klan, has been especially active in this area. Unfortunately, the Justice Department hasn’t been so diligent; when it comes to Internet crime, Justice has been more interested in Microsoft and Bill Gates than in the World Church of the Creator and Matthew Hale. Preaching race war and ethnic extermination didn’t get Justice’s attention. Perhaps two dead and nine wounded will.