Mark Potok, Southern Poverty Law Center, Spring 2007
In the latest disaster to hit the American radical right, Kevin Alfred Strom, the founder of National Vanguard and a major neo-Nazi leader for nearly 20 years, has been arrested and charged with child pornography and witness tampering.
Federal agents arrested Strom near his home in Stanardsville, Va., on Jan. 4, after he was indicted for allegedly having pornographic images of children on his computer between Oct. 17, 2005, and last Aug. 4. He was also charged with witness tampering because he allegedly “physically assaulted and mentally intimidated” an unnamed witness against him. A judge ordered him held without bond.
If convicted, Strom, 50, would face up to 30 years in prison. Strom was for almost two decades a deputy to William Pierce, who founded the neo-Nazi National Alliance and wrote The Turner Diaries, a book that served as the blueprint for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He started a radio show for Pierce and became known as the group’s second “intellectual,” after Pierce, as well as editor of its book division and magazine. When Pierce died unexpectedly in 2002, Strom, passed over to succeed his mentor, remained with the Alliance for a time, but finally broke away to form National Vanguard after a 2005 internal dispute.
Then, last July 18, Strom announced he was taking a leave of absence from National Vanguard, citing “health and family matters.” In a statement, he said he had “made mistakes, sometime serious ones,” but gave no further hint of trouble.
Kevin Strom
Strom’s arrest set off a firestorm on the radical right, which has seen a number of its key activists arrested recently for embarrassing crimes, some of them sexual in nature. “If Kevin’s genuinely guilty,” one extremist wrote on the racist Stormfront web forum shortly after the arrest, “then the credibility of his work — indeed the credibility of all intelligent White nationalist work — will be severely crippled, and we shall be reduced to apologetics for years to come.”
Bill White, leader of the American National Socialist Workers Party and a long-time enemy of Strom’s, was even blunter. “The fact is that the white nationalist movement has been littered with sexual deviants,” he wrote. “The entire reactionary wing of the white nationalist movement is corrupt and must be destroyed.”