Billy Roper

A non-sectarian hater, Roper has worked, albeit with little success, to unify hate groups of many kinds.

In his own words

"Every non-White on the planet has to become extinct. We need to remove these minor-league amateur races out of the game, and refine the playoff brackets a bit, if you get my meaning. The whole world is ours, and the only part of the earth that non-Whites should inherit is however much it requires to cover them."
— January 2005 interview on Blood & Honour Radio

"I'm a biological racist. I'd rather have the entire species become extinct except for one white boy and one white girl who were raised by a pack of wild wolves, than our race go under and the world [be] inherited by Asians and mulattos who can play the classical violin and recite Shakespeare."
— June 2003 essay in White Revolution Report

"The enemy of our enemy is, for now at least, our friends. We may not want them marrying our daughters, just as they would not want us marrying theirs. We may not want them in our societies, just as they would not want us in theirs. But anyone who is willing to drive a plane into a building to kill jews [sic] is alright [sic] by me. I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude."
— Sept. 11, 2001, E-mail to National Alliance membership celebrating Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center just minutes earlier

Background

Billy Roper was born into the world of organized hate. The son and grandson of Klansmen, Roper joined a racist skinhead gang in Arkansas as a teenager in the 1980s, then became a high school history teacher there before launching his adult career as a full-time white nationalist.

In the 1990s, Roper joined the neo-Nazi National Alliance, then led by former physics professor William Pierce, and rose to become Arkansas unit leader in 1999. Around the same time, he joined the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils that battled desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. (Roper gave a speech to the CCC Arkansas chapter in 2000.)

Inside the National Alliance, which at the time was the leading neo-Nazi organization in the Western Hemisphere, Roper rose fairly quickly, moving from Arkansas to its West Virginia headquarters compound in 2000. There, he became deputy membership coordinator — there was no membership coordinator, and his "deputy" title reflected Pierce's lack of complete trust in him — and began to organize a series of very public Alliance events. Most notably, he worked to build bridges to racist skinhead and other radical groups, a move that was foreign to the history of the "elite" Alliance, which had always sought to keep itself apart from other hate groups and in fact disdained them. His outreach efforts were applauded by some in the group, but Pierce and many others were never convinced.

Roper may have reached his pinnacle of infamy on Sept. 11, 2001, when he sent out an E-mail, publicized by the Southern Poverty Law Center, to the Alliance's membership of some 1,400 people even before the World Trade Center towers had collapsed: "The enemy of our enemy is, for now at least, our friends. We may not want them marrying our daughters, just as they would not want us marrying theirs. We may not want them in our societies, just as they would not want us in theirs. But anyone who is willing to drive a plane into a building to kill jews [sic] is alright [sic] with me. I wish our members had half as much testicular fortitude."

Roper's outreach efforts within the Alliance involved building links to hate groups around the country, including the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC, now known as the Creativity Movement), David Duke's European-American Unity & Rights Organization, the now-defunct American Friends of the British National Party, and various racist skinhead groups. Even though this brought much-desired publicity to such Alliance enterprises as anti-Israel rallies in Washington, D.C., it was irritating to Pierce, who always described the Alliance as a "vanguard" organization that, like Lenin's Bolsheviks, sought to lead the "sheep-like" masses in a one-party dictatorship. Pierce most clearly lost his patience with Roper after Roper helped organize a January 2002 rally in York, Pa., with WCOTC leader Matt Hale and others. After the racist demonstrators engaged in pitched street fights with anti-racist activists in the streets of York, Pierce wrote in the National Alliance Bulletin that the Alliance "certainly will not become stronger by 'uniting' with weak or defective organizations, and that includes virtually every 'movement' group." Even so, Roper was allowed that May to organize a white power concert that drew 250 neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and other unaffiliated white supremacists. 

Pierce died unexpectedly on July 23, 2002, of cancer. Roper, who had some friends but many enemies in the Alliance, stayed on for a short while after his mentor's death. But that September, under fire by many in the group, he left over what he later termed "tactical as well as personal differences." He was apparently ready for his dismissal, however. Within days, Roper had moved back to Arkansas and founded White Revolution, envisioned as a big-tent group uniting all activists dedicated to the "14 Words" famously coined by the late terrorist David Lane: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children."

Roper is the main writer for the White Revolution website and the author of the irregularly produced White Revolution Report. He also claims to have written a "book-length" master's thesis entitled "Paleo-American Ethnic Diversity," which argues that white people have been in North America for millennia. (This also was the thrust of his 2000 address to the CCC's Arkansas chapter.)

Overall, White Revolution has turned out to be a small and relatively inactive group. Although Roper has had flurries of propaganda activity, these have not generally been accompanied by any other real actions. Roper occasionally attends the events of other white supremacist groups, but he does not appear to have been even slightly successful in building any coalition, let alone a unified "Aryan" movement. 

Roper does continue to write provocative web postings. After President Obama's election, Roper predicted that "more and more white Americans [would be] waking up" and instructed followers to be prepared. "[W]e are on the crest of [the storm's] wave. People will be coming forward, shaking the cobwebs from their numbed minds, and they will need us to lead them."

In September 2011, Roper shut down White Revolution. “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 wrote in “an open letter to the white nationalist movement.” Effective immediately, Roper said, “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.” Roper also announced that he would not be leaving the movement and would join forces with longtime Klan leader Thom Robb, who lives less than 70 miles from Roper in Harrison, Ark.

In February 2012, Roper reportedly led a Little Rock, Ark., rally as part of a series of small protests in 11 states against the “genocide” of white South Africans under majority-black rule. The protests’ national organizer, the South Africa Project, denied allegations of racism, but the first quote featured on its website was from Morris L. Gullet, an infamous neo-Nazi leader and former Aryan Nations official. A few inches below that was a video of David Duke, the neo-Nazi and former Klan leader, bemoaning the fate of whites in post-apartheid South Africa. “The killing is only going to stop,” Duke said, “if we hit back and make a few examples out of them.” Since 1994, some 3,000 white farmers have been killed, according to a 2010 BBC article, although in 2009 The Economist put the figure at 1,650 since 1991. The magazine reported that the primary motive of the killings was robbery, not racial hatred or any attempt to carry out an anti-white “genocide.”