LEFT OF THE RIGHT: I Spent An Evening With The Founder Of The Aryan Nations Church

I suppose I’m getting a reputation for writing some pretty controversial articles. And I’ve managed to raise the ire of some very passionate critics. So much so that they have resorted to impugning my worthiness to be a Politics Correspondent here at Gather. Some would say that answering them in this manner amounts to giving in to their personal attacks. But I think they deserve to know who is behind these articles and then judge whether we are “worthy.”

The following story is an example of how far I have been willing to go to seek truth and understand my fellow man. Except for Richard Butler, I will not use the names of the persons who afforded me this unprecedented opportunity or who were present.

Back in the mid 1970’s when I was a teenager my family moved to northern Idaho. I met two boys at the local high school who I later found out were members of the infamous Aryan Nations church, founded by Richard Butler, located just outside Hayden, Idaho. Their fathers had been recruited by Butler and moved their families to the area to join his church. One of the boys had grown up in southern California in the culture of the Posse Comitatus. The other had grown up in Wisconsin where I was surprised to learn was a thriving Nazi movement.

But instead of shunning these two young men I decided to try and convert them. Although I don’t think I was able to truly change the mind of the guy from Wisconsin, he really never had the passion for it his dad had. Now that his dad has passed and the Aryan Nations church is virtually dead as an organization, he lives a simple life of work and home.

I was able to convince the guy from California that Butler and his ilk were liars when I proved to him that Jesus Christ was a Jew, not a gentile as the Aryan’s maintained. Today this guy loathes racism and openly denounces the white supremacy movement.

But this process took years and in the meantime, through my association with these guys, I was afforded full access to their world and even the Aryan Nations compound. When I think back on it, I was really taking a big risk. I have to say it’s a lucky thing my friends never told their fathers that I was trying to convince them they were wrong. From what I’ve learned about these people since then, I could have gotten my self murdered.

I actually only visited the compound 3 times. Once was a quick stop when one of my friends dropped off a casserole his mother had borrowed from the Butlers. But the other two times were when the kid from Wisconsin got married and asked me to be his best man. The wedding was to be held in the chapel located inside the Aryan Nations compound. And it was to be officiated by none other than Richard Butler himself.

We arrived the night before the wedding for the rehearsal and had to wait in the chapel for nearly an hour for Reverend Butler to arrive. The walls of the chapel were covered with the flags and banners of several white supremacist groups. The KKK, the Skinheads, The Posse Comitatus, the Nazis, and a couple of others I don’t remember. Along with these flags and banners were various charts and graphics depicting blacks, Jews, and other “mongrel” races. These crudely drawn charts and graphs were meant to prove that certain aspects of their anatomy proved each races inferiority to whites. And among all these were carefully framed bastardized Bible verses proclaiming the Aryan races to be superior. The very air in the place seemed to be heavy with evil and it made my skin crawl. I was really freaked out when one of my friends pointed out the .38 cal pistol Butler kept behind the pulpit. It seems crazy to think about it, but at the tender age of 19 I stood in the chapel of the Aryan Nations church looking at a crude pseudo medical chart depicting “The Inferior Negroid Brain” pointing out to a member why it was bullsh*t.

After the rehearsal Butler invited us across the way to his house for coffee. It was like any other except he kept a revolver on a table next to his front door, one on the kitchen counter next to the back door, and one on the end table next to his recliner. I can only guess , but I’m pretty sure he kept one on his night stand as well. Man, talk about paranoid.

It was like I got to be that proverbial fly on the wall. Like everybody else I had heard the homogenized version of their beliefs through interviews with the media and such. Butler apparently had no suspicion about me despite the fact I had never really been there before and he didn’t know who I was except that I was a friend of these two young members of his church. I make this assumption because he spoke about things I’d never heard before then. Claims he’d made to the media that they didn’t “hate” minorities, and that they believed in the concept of “equal but separate” went out the window. There were a couple of other older members there and they exchanged stories involving acts of violence against blacks. One spoke of an acquaintance who claimed that he had once shattered his hand when he punched a black man in the head as the vehicle he was in passed by the man at 30 miles per hour knocking the man head over heal into a ditch. It seemed surreal to me as I watched these creatures that looked like human beings laugh and joke about not going back to see if the man was dead or alive.

Then they went into a tirade of dehumanizing rhetoric in what I can only say was some kind of ritual to work themselves up. Each taking turns making statements about the inferiority of blacks and Jews, the two groups the seemed to focus mostly on. “Their brains are smaller, the shape of their head denotes lower intelligence.” I remember one old guy saying that there was something about the position of their hips that proved they were not even the same species as whites. That was followed by Butler commenting that for a white to have sex with a black amounted to bestiality. And that wasn’t the end of it. The conversation in that room that night went as far as discussing the complete genocide of all races accept Aryan leaving planet earth a whites only world.

Memories of the experience make me shudder to this day. What a bizarre and dark world some humans make for themselves. I know it was probably foolish to journey that far into a dark world like that, but I’ve had that kind of curiosity about human nature every since I can remember. All through my travels as an associate highway engineer for the government for 25 years, to my time as a radio announcer and now as a traveling stand up comedian I’ve been an avid observer of human nature. This story is only the tip of the ice berg when it comes to the places I’ve been willing to go and the things I’ve been willing to do to “see for myself.” I hope I’ve shown that I’m not just talking off the top of my head. I’ve been there and I’ve seen it.

I hope I haven’t veered to far from my mandate here at Gather, but like I said, you have the right to know how the writer got his chops.

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Devin Barber, Politics Correspondent

Devin’s column, “Left Of The Right” published every Tuesday and Thursday to

Gather Essentials: Politics is a Blue Collar Democrats take on current political news.

Devin was raised by proud Roosevelt Democrats. Being the son of parents counted among the throng of Americans displaced by the Great Depression has given Devin a deep rooted passion for causes dealing with the poor and the working class.

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