Mark Pitcavage Profile picture
Mar 2 9 tweets 2 min read
The other day, trying to answer a reporter's question, I came across someone I hadn't thought of in ages. Today, doing unrelated research in my old Idaho files, I came across my records of him.

Because he's one of the nastiest persons I've encountered, I thought I'd share.
I'm talking about white supremacist Keith Gilbert and his long, awful extremist career. In the 1960s he served time in California for receiving stolen explosives & for assault with a deadly weapon. He later claimed he had gotten dynamite so he could try to kill MLKjr.
By the 1980s he was a follower of Richard Butler's Aryan Nations, living in Post Falls, Idaho.He later formed his own tiny groups, such as the Social Nationalistic Aryan People's Party and the Restored Church of Jesus Christ Aryan Nations
He occasionally tried to run for local office or contrive publicity stunts. He was a member of the white supremacist Liberty Bell network of computer BBSs.

One of his followers killed three perceived minorities in Cleveland in 1982.
In 1983, Gilbert himself was convicted of threatening to kill a multiracial teen; in 1985 he was accused of spitting on a 5-year old mentally disabled black girl (the family decided not to press charges). That year he was also charged on 35 counts of felony welfare fraud.
He was convicted--the jury took only two hours--and sentenced to nine years in prison. The federal government also opened up a civil rights investigation into allegations he had interfered w/an adoption agency for minority children. In 1988 he got an 18-month sentence for that.
After getting out of prison, Keith Gilbert moved to Seattle and generally avoided the public spotlight, though his views hadn't changed (he named his dog after Hitler's dog, for example; years earlier he had named a different dog "N_____ Eater").
In 2005, federal agents raided his property and arrested him for his huge stash of guns--over 70 of them, many of them full auto (and all of them illegal for him, a convicted felon, to have). He also had 20,000 rounds of ammo. It turned out he was part of an illegal gun ring.
He ended up being sentenced to 8 years in prison (he was 66 at the time) on 11 counts of conspiracy, machine gun possession, possession of unregistered firearms, and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

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More from @egavactip

Feb 21
Today I thought I'd share another thread-profile on a historical American right-wing extremist. Up this time is Linda Thompson (1953-2009), a key pioneer in the militia movement and an unfortunately significant influence on Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Some extremists are active for decades, but Linda Thompson was different, suddenly rising from obscurity to become a national figure, then disappearing from the scene after only a few years. But her timing was unfortunately impeccable.
Thompson grew up in Georgia, served in the U.S. Army from 1974-1978 (allowing herself subsequently to call herself a "Vietnam-era veteran) as a clerk/stenographer, and graduated from law school in Indiana in 1988. She opened a law practice, first in Georgia, then Indiana.
Read 25 tweets
Feb 20
There's a conversation going on elsewhere about a long dissertation; I'm not linking to it because I don't like the post that started it. But I don't mind talking about long dissertations more generally, and even using mine as an example.
My own personal opinion is that many individual dissertations are actually too short, and some entire fields allow remarkably short dissertations, considering that dissertations are supposed to be a substantial contribution in original research.
Having said that, there is such a thing as dissertations that are too long. Arguably, my own dissertation was one such. It was 820 pages long (that's dissertation-formatted pages, double-spaced and with generous margins, but still).
Read 9 tweets
Feb 19
I was looking at some old-emails today and came across an interesting 1999 communication from a staff member of the John Birch Society that is kind of interesting, so I thought I would share it. The context of his e-mail is that in 1998 I had published a report on a certain type
of scam both aimed at & propagated by anti-gov't extremists. In that report, I discussed the problem of warnings by the gov't of a scam marketed to people distrustful of the gov't, and suggested that some fringe pubs, like the JBS's New American, might be approachable to warn.
In 1999, the then-research director for the JBS saw my comment and wrote me an e-mail about it, essentially gently pushing back at my suggestion--for interesting reasons. This e-mail I reproduce here. I have not included the name of the research director, who is still alive and
Read 6 tweets
Feb 17
My sharp-eyed colleague has a point about these Canadian "No trespassing flyers" directed at law enforcement. The language on them is not specifically sovereign, but it was quite possibly inspired by similar sovereign notices.
People can download these flyers online and print them out (not sharing the link). Here's an example from last September: Image
For decades, American sovereign citizens have been creating special "no trespassing" signs directed explicitly at police & government officials. In fact, this particular sign below, which is being sold online, actually has a history dating back to the 1980s (or even 70s). Image
Read 4 tweets
Feb 15
I'd like to share in this thread some of the interesting findings in our new report, "Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2021."

adl.org/murder-and-ext…
We were able to identify at least 29 people killed in the U.S. in 2021 by domestic extremists. This is 6 more than in 2020, but still less than in previous recent years. The main reason? Those years had more extremist shooting sprees, which cause death totals to rise. A lot.
Extremist shooting sprees were behind all the highest yearly death tolls except 1995, the year of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Read 12 tweets
Feb 4
The earliest murder I can point to being connected to the militia movement is an interesting story. I propose to tell it in this thread.
One of the pioneers of the militia movement was Mark "Mark from Michigan" Koernke, the mustachioed bundle of braggadocio who became popular in the early 1990s with his pass-around VHS tapes and his shortwave radio program. His sign off? "Long live the Republic. Death to the
New World Order. We shall prevail."

Though the big militia group in Michigan was the Michigan Militia, w/units around the state, Koernke had his own little militia of followers, which he called by various names, ranging from the Michigan Militia-at-Large to the Colonial Marines.
Read 16 tweets

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