Alex Linder

A former member of the National Alliance, once the nation's premier neo-Nazi organization, Linder angrily split with his fellow comrades after that group failed to provide funding for the defense of an arrested state leader. More recently, Linder has attempted to organize neo-Nazi protests of black-on-white crimes, at one of which he was arrested in 2007.

In his own words

"If you're White — Aryan — your people created this country, its Constitution, and the First Amendment that protects political speech, including the speech Jews hate and call hate speech. Don't accept any guilt, and don't take a back seat to anybody. No matter what the professors-afraid-of-being-fired tell you in class. No matter what the writers-afraid-of-being-fired say in a Controlled Daily. No matter what you see on the Electronic Jew. For you, Aryan reader, have interests. And The Aryan Alternative represents them."
— The Aryan Alternative, No. 1

"Katrina flashed whites an eternal truth: 'African-American' is pretty for 'jungle savage.' The question is: why do we pretend it is otherwise? The answer is: we don't. We normal whites move away from these jungle creatures whenever we can. But the murderous hands of government, guided by Big Jew, again and again and again push us back in with the savages. And that, my friend, is genocide by integration- a man-made disaster far worse than any natural."
— "Disasters Natural and Man Made," The Aryan Alternative, No. 3

Criminal history

Arrested on May 26, 2007, in Knoxville, Tenn., after attacking a police officer during a neo-Nazi rally, and charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, vandalism and assault on a police officer. In August, he reportedly pleaded guilty to resisting arrest and was sentenced to six months of probation. Linder also reportedly agreed to pay $250 for a police officer's phone that was damaged during the incident.

Background

According to an interview he gave to neo-Nazi journal National Vanguard, Linder grew up in a middle-class suburb, earned a bachelor's degree from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and then worked for two leading conservative media outlets in Washington, D.C., where he was driven to despair because "racist satire of Jews and minorities" could not be published. He ran a trade publication in Germantown, Md., from 1993 until 1997, when he moved to Missouri to fulfill his "true interest, writing satire to hasten White revolution."

In the late 1990s, Linder joined the National Alliance (NA), then the country's most active and important neo-Nazi group. Linder was so committed to the cause that he even considered a move to the NA's compound on a mountaintop near Hillsboro, W.Va., to edit the organization's magazine, National Vanguard.

In 2000, Linder and an associate, Regina Belser (who apparently later left the operation), created Vanguard News Network (VNN), a website he hoped would grow into a "White Viacom" composed of "an integrated global media and services company getting out the White message and serving the White market in a thousand forms." While the site has proven relatively popular in neo-Nazi circles (in 2008, there were 2,945 registered users), what VNN turned out to be is remarkably vulgar, offending even many of the most extreme racists and anti-Semites with Linder's potty humor, untrammeled misogyny (Linder says women should "make everything happy and smooth running by providing offspring and sex and cookies and iced tea") and swaggering self-importance. Its motto is "No Jews. Just Right," and it includes an archive of racist and anti-Semitic articles, links to Linder's Aryan Alternative newspaper, podcasts from VNN Broadcasting, and a popular online message board, VNN forum.

In March 2003, after federal agents arrested Georgia NA leader Chester Doles on weapons charges, Linder grew disgusted with the NA's reluctance to fund or even help fund Doles' legal defense. To the severe embarrassment of NA leaders, and using an anonymous donor's offer to match up to $25,000, Linder managed to raise $79,464 that Doles' wife used to hire former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) as a defense attorney. As a result of his fundraising campaign and his open criticism of the NA on his VNN website, Linder fell into disfavor with some of his colleagues and most leaders of the NA. Since then, VNN has become a favorite internet home for movement criticism, much of it vicious, of the NA. It has also welcomed comments attacking Stormfront.org, the nation's largest hate site run by a crew of activists close to former Klan leader David Duke. A part of Linder's hatred of Stormfront relates to that site's attempts to downplay Nazi language and imagery.

After leaving the NA, Linder worked closely with other hard-line racists, in particular Bill White, who once ran the hate site Overthrow.com and was the leader of the American National Socialist Workers Party. In 2005, Linder announced his intention to set up the White Freedom Party, but that effort never came to fruition. Linder also runs the racist website Kirksville Today, named after his hometown in Missouri.

More recently, Linder has focused on protesting instances of what he terms anti-white "hate crimes." On May 26, 2007, he led a group of about 30 neo-Nazis gathered in Knoxville, Tenn., for a "Rally Against Genocide" organized in the names of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, a white couple who had been violently assaulted and then murdered by three black assailants. Although Knoxville authorities repeatedly stated that the crimes were not racially motivated, Linder and his companions insisted that it was a race-based attack and that the media was covering up "black crime" motivated by anti-white hatred. At least one of the demonstrators wore a swastika T-shirt. They held signs reading "Diversity = White Death" and "Murdered By M---, Covered Up By Jews." Linder was arrested after he crossed police lines at the demonstration and fought with officers. He was charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, vandalism and assault on a police officer. In August, he pleaded guilty to resisting arrest and was sentenced to six months of probation.

In 2008, Linder and other VNN activists attempted to organize and publicize a similar protest campaign on behalf of a teenage shooting victim they assumed was a "pure-blooded" white. When it turned out that their race-war martyr, Daniel Cicciaro, was half Puerto Rican (a "mud" in racist terminology), the campaign so diligently taken up a few days earlier was rapidly canceled.

In June 2009, when 88-year-old anti-Semite James von Brunn shot and killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Linder praised the shooter for sacrificing himself “to show his people that the Holocaust is a Big Lie: a deliberately concocted atrocity myth being used by Jews and their running dogs at Fox News and CNN to browbeat whites into submission to the Jewish Tyranny known as the New World Order.”