Jamie Kelso

Kelso joined the neo-Nazi group National Alliance in 2003. He then spent two years living in former Klan leader David Duke’s house while working as his personal assistant, all the while serving as a moderator for hate web guru Don Black’s forum, Stormfront. In 2010, Kelso joined the racist political party American Third Position (American Freedom Party as of 2013), where he is a key behind-the-scenes operative.

In His Own Words

“By age sixteen in 1965, I had long known that I possessed an incredible mind. I knew I was more intelligent than any of the teachers at Palisades [High School], or any two of them. I suffered enormous stress trying to make sense of the nonsense peddled at that government brainwashing pen.”
— Interview with Michael Medved and David Wallechinsky published in the 1975 book, What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?

“[If] I were part-White or fully non-White I would not reproduce my racial type … I would be doubly, triply, and quadruply [sic] sure not to finagle a gullible White person into permanently cancelling [sic] the White genotype of their White genes by breeding mixed-race children with me. That would be a crime against that White person, against any children so produced, and against every other member of the White race.”
— Stormfront.org posting, June 21, 2003

“Sadly, some other easily observable sociobiological aspects of our Nature appear to be our undoing now. For example, our very high altruism, which was a great survival trait when we evolved in lands that were all White. But now, in a mixed-race environment, altruism towards other sub-species, like Jews, Mestizos, Blacks, and Asians, is always damaging to our own kind's survival … The non-Whites, who don't share these White traits, must be doubled-over with laughter at times as they watch, in astonishment, as we help them in every way we can to give away our lands, our women, our savings, our safety, our happiness, and our lives for their benefit.”
— Stormfront.org posting, July 23, 2006

Background

Jamie Kelso was born on June 8, 1948, in New York City. He eventually moved to California, where he attended Palisades High School near Los Angeles. Classmates describe him as a very bright loner who was young for his year: he had skipped two grades in elementary school. Kelso was profiled in a Time Magazine article on the class of 1965 at Palisades High School, and later in a 1975 book, What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?

Although Kelso was at one point a member of MENSA, he never graduated from college, having briefly attended the University of California, Los Angeles. In the following years, Kelso became deeply involved in a number of religious sects. For a while, he was a devoted practitioner of transcendental meditation. He then moved on to a Japanese religion called Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism. While proselytizing for Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism, he ran into a Scientologist who convinced him to join them.

By 1971, Kelso was a member of the “Sea Organization,” a group of elite Scientologists who devoted all of their time and energy to working for the organization and recruiting new members. Kelso lived in a house with dozens of other co-religionists and was paid nothing for his work. In 1973, he ran away.

Two years later, he joined the John Birch Society (JBS), a conspiracy-minded outfit that has been around for decades and is perhaps best known for accusing President Eisenhower of being a secret communist. In the mid-1960s, the group worked to oppose the Civil Rights Movement. JBS ran two campaigns against the movement: “Support Your Local Police” and “Expose The 'Civil Rights' Fraud.” Kelso was convinced that the JBS had all of the answers. He told a reporter, “It is an educational army, and its only weapons are facts.”

In 1975, Kelso was sharing a house with his brother, a blacksmith, near Kansas City, Mo. Kelso made etchings and sold them to support himself. In 1976, he ran for a Missouri House of Representatives seat as an independent. Kelso campaigned on the following positions: abolishing the income tax, ending Social Security, getting the U.S. to withdraw from the U.N., and ending government control of education. In the next decade, Kelso did some minor organizing for the JBS, but was otherwise inactive. He lived in Missouri for several years and then moved back to California sometime in the 1980s.

While a member of the JBS, Kelso ran into a book called The Dispossessed Majority, which argued that minorities and multiculturalism were insidiously undermining the power of white Americans. This book led him to conclude that the JBS lacked a proper focus on race, and he sought out extreme white nationalist groups.

But it was ultimately the Web that launched Kelso into the white nationalist movement. In the mid 1990s, Kelso found likeminded people online who reinforced his racist worldview. In July 2010, Kelso told the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “What happened to me … is that I found my family, so to speak.”

In 2002, Kelso became a moderator at the online hate forum Stormfront. Stormfront was founded by Don Black, a white supremacist and longtime David Duke associate, in 1995. Stormfront was a fairly small forum when Kelso joined it in February 2002, having only about 5,000 members. But Kelso brought a relentless energy and enthusiasm to his position and took to posting on the forum several times a day. He tried to make Stormfront more friendly and accessible, by changing the site to show members’ birthdays and encouraging new members to contribute.

Under Kelso’s supervision, Stormfront grew at an exponential rate. From 1995 to 2002, Stormfront grew to only 5,000 members. But in 2003, Stormfront had 11,000 members, and in 2004, the number doubled again to 23,000. By June 2005, Stormfront had 52,000 registered members. In July 2010, Stormfront had 203,000 members. Not all of these members regularly post on Stormfront, or even visit it with any frequency, but the numbers are a good indicator of interest in the site.

Since signing on with the white nationalist movement, Kelso has been a full-time racial activist, working in various capacities for prominent white nationalists like former Klan leader David Duke. He currently hosts a radio show, “The Jamie Kelso Show,” which runs on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network, and for a time Kelso had a show on Stormfront Radio.

In October 2003, Kelso joined the neo-Nazi group National Alliance just as it was beginning to fall apart, attending the group’s leadership conference that same month. For years, the National Alliance was the most important neo-Nazi group in America. That all ended when the group’s leader, William Pierce, died in 2002. The group quickly descended into anarchy, suffering several splits and attempted coups.

Kelso’s involvement in white nationalist causes accelerated rapidly. He helped to organize the “International Zündel Revisionist Conference” for the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a holocaust denial group, in April 2004. It was held in Sacramento, Calif. The conference was dedicated to Ernest Zündel, a German Holocaust denier who was at the time being detained in Canada for promoting anti-Semitic views. Kelso worked on Stormfront to help people purchase tickets, arrange carpools, and find roommates. The conference was cancelled at the last minute when the planned venue learned about the nature of the conference and its organizers. A main organizer of the event E-mailed all of the ticket holders to tell them that it had been cancelled, but Kelso coordinated with the other organizers to find a new venue and inform the ticket-holders that the conference was still on. Speakers at the relocated conference included Canadian white nationalist Paul Fromm, IHR director Mark Weber, IHR board member Harvey Taylor, anti-Semite and racist lawyer Edgar Steele, and Holocaust denier Bradley Smith.

Soon after the conference, Kelso started working for David Duke. Duke had taken note of Kelso’s proactive organizing of the conference in Sacramento, calling him afterwards and offering him a position as his assistant. Prior to Duke’s call, the two had never spoken. In 2004, Kelso moved from California to David Duke’s house in Louisiana, where he would live in 2004 and 2005.

In May 2004, Kelso organized a conference near the New Orleans airport put on by David Duke’s outfit, the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO. It drew around 300 attendees. Speakers included former Klan attorney Sam Dickson, Council of Conservative Citizens member and future Political Cesspool radio host James Edwards, Populist Party founder Willis Carto, and several other movement icons. Kelso also organized the same group’s 2005 conference, which also featured a full roster of racists and white supremacists. Around 425 people attended that event.

In 2007 and 2008, Kelso became an active devotee of Ron Paul. He traveled to eleven different cities during this time to see Paul speak. One of the reasons why Kelso was so attracted to Ron Paul is that he felt Paul’s fans could be susceptible to his white supremacist views. In his July 2010 interview with the SPLC, Kelso described Ron Paul rallies as “implicitly white,” that is, almost entirely white in composition, but not explicitly committed to any racial ideology or involved in discussions of race. To reach out to these groups, Kelso organized Ron Paul events, and participated very actively at those events. “Let’s appreciate this big audience that’s overwhelmingly white. This is our audience, this is our public. These are the people. If we can’t persuade these people of the rightness of our cause, then we’re finished!,” Kelso told the SPLC.

In February 2009, Kelso started a new online forum. Called “White News Now,” it aims to create an environment free of the infighting that has characterized similar websites and groups. In July 2010, White News Now’s forum was the second most popular white supremacist forum, behind Stormfront, according to Alexa, which ranks the popularity of websites and forums.

By January 2010, Kelso had joined the American Third Position (A3P), a white supremacist political party that changed its name in 2013 to American Freedom Party (AFP). Kelso describes himself as executive assistant to the party chairman. In April 2010, Kelso attended an A3P invitation-only event held at the Institute for Historical Review’s offices. He later suggested that Don Wassall, a longtime activist in the racist Council of Conservative Citizens, would be a good A3P director, leading the group to put Wassall in that position in May 2010. In July 2010, Kelso claimed that he did some work every day for the A3P. He described A3P with the same word he used to describe himself: as a “bridge” between the white supremacist movement and more mainstream conservative groups.

In the Spring of 2010, Kelso married a woman, Linda Falla, who posted as “Sigrid” and served as a senior moderator of White News Now. The couple share the same racist views. Kelso’s wife has posted statements on White News Now such as, “blacks hate most things that they can't relate to, even on the most basic level” and “Jews have always been extortionists, since the dawn of time.” In a July 2010 interview with another prominent racist, Kelso reflected on the perks of a white nationalist marriage saying: “a white patriot marriage has this entire additional layer which gives resilience to the marriage … the wife isn’t looking at the husband like a cash cow, she’s looking at him going, you know, he’s got great genes.”

Early in February 2012, A3P was targeted in an anti-racist hacking sweep dubbed “Operation Blitzkrieg,” conducted by the hacktivist collective Anonymous. Several white supremacist and neo-Nazi sites in Europe and the U.S., including Stormfront and A3P, were disabled and defaced, and personal emails and forum messages were released. In a statement Anonymous posted on the A3P website, the collective had put “extra effort” into targeting Kelso, including the acquisition of his credit card number, with which they claim they made some “lulzy” (laughable) purchases and donations.

Regardless, Kelso has stayed active with AFP. He is listed as a director and the membership coordinator on the group’s site. In the spring of 2013, his AFP radio show, “The American Freedom Party Report,” launched on the Patriot-steeped Republic Broadcasting, which is the former venue for James Edwards’ white nationalist “Political Cesspool” radio show. The AFP Report’s description says it brings the latest news from AFP leaders and candidates, and calls the party “unique as the only national political party explicitly working for the preservation of European American heritage.”