Sometimes during a seemingly senseless shooting, when the shooter’s identity becomes known people come out of the woodwork saying, “How could this happen? He seemed like a quiet type.” Not so with accused “Heatland Killer” Frazier Glenn Miller, who The Daily Beast’s John Avlon and Caitlen Dickson note has a long — truly huge — record in the hate biz. As the subheadline on their must-read-in-full-piece notes: “The man accused of shooting three at Jewish centers in Kansas has a long résumé as a neo-Nazi and KKK grand wizard who once created a points system for murder.”
What “better” person to shoot into two Jewish community centers, kill three people (two of them a churchgoing grandfather and his teenage grandson), and yell “Heil Hitler!” one day before the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover? Here are a few excerpts from The Daily Beast’s Post, which needs to be read in its entirety:
The sole suspect in a shooting that left three dead at two Jewish community centers outside Kansas City on Sunday is a former Ku Klux Klan “grand dragon,” neo-Nazi, and ex-con named Frazier Glenn Miller….
….Miller, who also uses the alias Frazier Glenn Cross Jr., has an extensive résumé of hate. A former Green Beret who served in Vietnam, he embraced white supremacy in the 1970s, first joining the National States’ Rights Party and then the National Socialist Party of America—the Nazis.
According to his considerable dossier on the SPLC website Miller was forced to retire from the military due to his extremist connections. He bought a farm in Angier, North Carolina, where he formed the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980. He preferred wearing fatigues to the traditional Klan robe and recruited active-duty soldiers to conduct paramilitary-style training, aggressively seeking publicity and taking inspiration from Hitler, as he described in his autobiography: “I would try to emulate Hitler’s methods of attracting members and supporters…I placed great emphasis on staging marches and rallies. It had been successful with Hitler.” His stated goal was to create an all-white “Carolina Free State.”
Miller’s dark ambitions with the Carolina Knights hit a legal obstacle when the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully sued him and his organization and received a consent decree requiring that they stop all intimidation against African-Americans and paramilitary activity. In 1985, Miller formed the White Patriot Party, ostensibly trying to move into the political sphere, but he was convicted of criminal contempt a year later for purchasing weapons and explosives to fund an insurgency to create a “White Southland.” He was sentenced to a year in prison but went underground while out on bond. He mailed supporters—whom he called “Aryan warriors of The Order”—establishing a point system for each murder: “Niggers (1), White race traitors (10), Jews (10), Judges (50) Morris Seligman Dees (888).” Dees is the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
After the FBI tear-gassed Miller and four Klansman out of a mobile home loaded with weapons and explosives in Springfield, Missouri, Miller served three years in federal penitentiary, reducing his sentence in a plea deal by testifying against 14 other white supremacists.
He flopped in his tries at elective office, The Daily Beast reports. But he got his 15 minutes of widespread fame — literally:
His 2010 Senate campaign—for which his slogan was “It’s the Jews, Stupid”—landed him an interview on The Howard Stern Show. In response to Stern’s quip that Miller was the most “honest politician” in America because he made his beliefs crystal clear, Miller replied that U.S. politicians “are all a bunch of whores for Israel, they’re all corrupt to the core, and they’re all traitors to America.” Miller prominently displays a link to the interview on his low-budget website, Whty.org, dedicated to white supremacy and anti-Semitism, including photos of Klan rallies and extensive screeds about the Jewish control of the media.
There’s a lot more so read it in full.
NOTE: Avlon wrote a definitive book in 2010 about “wingnuts” and extremist groups of the left and right. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.