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The American radical right has produced more than its share of violence. Nonetheless, the last few years have seen key groups making pronouncements in favor of legality. David Duke's latest organization has pledged to use nonviolence. Groups like Mississippi's Nationalist Movement routinely lecture others on the perils of violence. Even the current leaders of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group whose founder spoke of murdering Jews by the thousands, have said that theirs is a legal struggle.
Not Hal Turner. Always given to racist histrionics, the New Jersey shortwave radio talk show host has in the last year come to openly advocate murder.
Turner's descent seemed to really begin after the husband and mother of Joan Lefkow, a federal judge in Chicago, were murdered in February, not long after neo-Nazi leader Matt Hale was convicted of soliciting Lefkow's murder. While many right-wing extremists cowered, fearful of the federal agents who were investigating the possibility that a Hale follower had carried out the killings, Turner went on the air to say that murdering judges could be a very good thing for America. He was quickly denounced in neo-Nazi Web forums as a provocateur, and two of them actually kicked him out.
In July, Turner gave listeners of "The Hal Turner Show" a lesson on his views, and an offer. "There is a leadership vacuum in the pro-white movement and it looks like I'm going to have to step up and fill the position," he said. "I'm ready if you'll have me. Because the people who have been saying, 'Oh violence, you can't talk violence,' you're fags. You have achieved nothing. Get out of the way.
"If you want social change in this country, if you want the homos shoved back in the closet, if you want the border with Mexico sealed, if you want the illegal aliens rounded up and deported out of the country, if you want the niggers and the spics to stop beating up, raping, robbing white people; well, guess what folks, it's going to take violence. ... That's the reality. It is going to take violence."
Does Turner mean what he says? Answering a recent E-mail from an activist criticizing his pro-violence rhetoric, Turner declared that he had walked the walk.
"I advocate what I am willing to do," he wrote as he defended his statements about murdering judges. "What keeps me out of jail is that I do things alone and, unlike so many others, I don't tell anyone I've done something illegal."
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