Racist Leader Billy Roper Shutters White Revolution, Joins Klan

Billy Roper, one of the country’s leading professional racists, says he’s closing the doors of his 9-year-old White Revolution organization, which he concedes has been a failure, and will join forces with long time Klan leader Thom Robb.

“As the leader of the organization, I am solely responsible and accept full responsibility for White Revolution’s lack of success as a membership organization,” Roper writes in “an open letter to the white nationalist movement.”

Effective immediately, Roper says, “White Revolution will cease to accept new membership applications and will suspend all recruitment activities as a membership organization while we undergo a period of reorganization and dismantlement …”

His organization may be disbanding, but he’s still a racist, Roper says. “This is not really an occasion for sadness, because I am not retiring from the movement. I am just putting aside my pride and my ego and doing what is best for my family, my race and our cause.”

There may be a gas-mileage component to Roper’s decision. He lives in Russellville, Ark., and Robb’s operation is in Harrison, Ark., just 66 miles down the road.

Roper earned his racist stripes in at the feet of the late William Pierce, founder and long-time leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, ultimately serving as a deputy membership director. But not long after Pierce died on July 23, 2002, Roper began to openly champion working with other racist groups — an anathema to the ideology of Pierce, who saw the Alliance as the only group capable of leading an "Aryan" revolution and famously called the members of other hate groups "freaks and weaklings." Roper's attitude ended in a major split, with Roper quitting the Alliance amid much acriomony later in 2002 and leaving the organization’s headquarters in West Virginia to return to his native Arkansas, where he started White Revolution.

With the collapse of White Revolution, Roper already is getting a new round of barbs from some of his former colleagues and fellow racist activists, particularly for his newly stated commitment to Christian Identity, a racist religion that argues that Jews are the offspring of Satan and Eve.

On Vanguard News Network (VNN), one poster said: “This proves that Roper is what Dr. Pierce would call a ‘hobbyist.’ [Roper] was a member of the National Alliance which at the time expressly stated that belief in a super spook in the sky was anathema to its ideology. Yet now [Roper] is joining the hooded klan klowns and spewing nonsense about God. Good luck saving the race at those Klan BBQs and prayer meetings. Dope.”

Another VNN post said Roper’s “group was so small and insignificant, he couldn’t even find a successor.”

VNN administrator Alex Linder questioned when Roper took up a belief in Christian Identity. “He surely wasn’t one at NA [National Alliance], was he?”

As usual, Roper doesn’t appear to buckle under the stinging criticism. He says he is proud of his 20-year racist career, having stood alongside Aryan stalwarts including Pierce, Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, Tom Metzger, the founder of White Aryan Resistance (WAR) and Matt Hale, the imprisoned founder of the World Church of the Creator.

“I have, admittedly, risen to the top tier of the white nationalist movement,’’ Roper boasts in his letter. “I’m infamous. If you don’t believe it, just Google me!”

But then Roper goes on to say he just doesn’t have what it takes to continue being a good racist leader.

“Thousands of white men and women have passed through White Revolution, but I feel that I lack the stamina, strength or wherewithal to effectively continue to provide the kind of leadership which would inspire a resurgence of followers in this organization,’’ he writes.

Roper cited health issues and his “financial situation,” but didn’t elaborate.

“I have enemies in the movement,’’ Roper writes, conceding some will “sneer and jeer at this decision, and say that it is a mark of my failures as a leader, or my weakness, or is the result of past failure of judgment …”

Roper says there may be too many racist organizations, competing with each other and trying constantly to “reinvent the wheel” and subdivide the movement's “scarce human and capital resources.”

The time has come to find “a better model” of a racist organization, Roper said, pointing to Robb’s Knights Party, also known as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, as just that example.

“They are saying what America needs to hear, in a way that more white Americans are willing to hear it,” Roper writes. “That is why, as a Christian Identist, I will be applying for association in the Knights Party led by Pastor Thomas Robb.”

Roper encouraged his White Revolution followers, who also share the Christian Identity beliefs that he now apparently adopts, to also join Robb’s organization.

Robb’s racial roots are with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that rose to some prominence through the work of effervescent David Duke.

Robb was a long-time confidant of Richard Butler’s and frequently spoke at the Aryan Nations “world congress” in North Idaho – an annual gathering of hate mongers from various organizations.

Robb, the national director of what he calls The Knights Party, is a gifted speaker -- a charismatic racist with a softer and gentler tone, who, like Duke, has attempted to branch out into the political world with limited success.