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These ideas are mild compared with those Robb expressed in the past. Before remaking his image, he castigated blacks and Jews, embraced Hitler and endorsed killing homosexuals, calling for "the death penalty to the faggot slime." His newspapers (the Torch and White Patriot) have featured racial slurs including a cartoon showing a hanging of a black man and a bigoted ditty, The Negro National Anthem. Despite his toned-down persona, he still hawks copies of Mein Kampf and swears the Holocaust is a hoax.
Like an infectious virus, the Klan has learned to mutate and survive, and that's just what Robb is doing. "It's the shadow side of the American character, and it's not going to go away," explains Wyn Wade, author of The Fiery Cross, an excellent study of the Klan. "The power is their history. We can never forget their potential to do it again."
Robb's ultimate goal is to hang a WHITES ONLY sign at America's borders. He fears his race will soon disappear beneath a tide of nonwhite immigrants and homegrown minorities. It is a stance that appeals to poor, alienated whites, especially males, who feel they have been forgotten. While militant racists talk freely of conflict, even of race war, one thing the white-supremacist movement agrees on is the preferred color of this nation. "From my perspective, America is a white nation," Robb says.
This concept springs from Robb's Christian Identity theology, an obscure faith shared by many white supremacists. Descended from a shadowy 19th century creed known as Anglo-Israelism, Identity interprets the Bible to mean that white Europeans, and thus their American descendants, are God's true chosen people. Though not endorsed by all believers in this anti-Semitic faith, the use of violence has been linked to the Order, a radical fringe underground group that sought unsuccessfully to overthrow the government in the mid-1980s.
While the natural inclination is to dismiss Robb as merely another member of the lunatic fringe, one cannot so easily dismiss the forces that drive his crusade or its impact. His updated rhetoric provides a paper-thin layer of respectability to a noxious creed that appeals to alienated white youths like Shawn Slater, whom Robb is grooming as a future Klan leader. An ex-skinhead, Slater now heads the Klan's chapter in Aurora, Colo. Like his mentor, Slater has mastered the art of attracting publicity by staging events that draw the wrath of protesters. In Denver last January, he orchestrated a Klan rally on Martin Luther King Day that turned violent when anti-Klan protesters threw bottles, overturned a police car and battled police. The incident allowed Slater to score a publicity coup on CBS'S 48 Hours.
Today a crew-cut Slater walks Denver's streets in a gray wool suit with a small Klan pin on his lapel. He carries a cocky attitude and a black Samsonite briefcase; inside is a copy of American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell's White Power. His favorite slogan -- "Equal Rights for Everybody; Special Privileges for Nobody" -- even shows a gift for glib phrasemaking.