Once, hate groups in America hid their identities behind white hoods. They plotted their strategy at secret meetings and passed along their racist message by word of mouth.
Today, they've gone electronic, using computers, sophisticated phone systems and cable TV to openly vent their views and gain recruits.Take Ryan Wilson, a former Ku Klux Klan member who now runs the United States of America Nationalist Party, an umbrella organization for white separatists, based in Philadelphia.
Wilson operates four automated dialing lines that call numbers at random and encourage people to join the movement for "white rights."
He keeps in touch with other hate groups across the country through a computer network. These groups use their network to update each other on rallies, marches and law enforcement investigators.
One of the Nationalist Party's members now is hooking up the group to NaziNet, a computer bulletin board for white supremacists.
The party also runs telephone message lines. A recent one urged callers to "take the country back for white people."
"If you're tired of seeing (racial slur) mauling white women," it said, "join us, we're going to do something about it."
By the end of October, Wilson's group will have its own public-access show on Lower Bucks (County, Pa.) Cablevision, which reaches 38,000 homes. The program is to include a pre-taped talk show called "Race and Reason," produced by Tom Metzger of Fallbrook, Calif., founder of a group called White Aryan Resistance (WAR). The cable company said there's nothing it can do to keep programs off the air, since they are not obscene.
Wilson's and Metzger's groups, and others like them, resemble the more traditional hate groups in their basic beliefs - a hostility toward minorities, homosexuals and immigrants, and an overriding, virulent hatred of Jews and the Jewish religion.
But unlike hate groups of the past, which often shied from public scrutiny, these groups are just a dial tone away.
They're also in your mailbox, inside library books and in school lockers, in the form of pamphlets and newsletters produced with lightning speed on computers and laser printers.To reach lonely, troubled teenagers, the new hate leaders use rock bands with names like No Remorse, Aggravated Assault and Nordic Thunder. These groups play in clubs and outdoor "Aryan-fests," singing lyrics that recall Hilter's Final Solution.
Harry Heriegel, 33, a member of Wilson's USA Nationalist Party, said he first joined the white supremacy movement while in high school.
Heriegel, of Bucks County, Pa., said his job is to stir up trouble and thereby get publicity for his group. He usually does this by going to court and forcing municipalities and cable stations to let the USA Nationalist Party on the streets and on TV.
"Before, there were rallies and cross burnings. Now, there are court cases," Heriegel said. "Now people will be able to turn on the TV and see us in the privacy of their own house."
There are about 300 active hate groups in the country, with about 25,000 active members - a record high - according to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Klanwatch Project, based in Montgomery, Ala., which monitors hate groups.
Pennsylvania alone has 37 active hate groups, operating in 56 communities, according to the state's Human Relations Commission. Pennsylvania also has the highest Klan membership, between 250 and 350, of any Northern state.
Experts say the fastest-growing hate groups of all are the skinheads - loosely organized, mostly male gangs of teenagers and young adults. Some skinheads, known as SHARP (Skinheads Against Racism and Prejudice) are anti-racist, but the majority belong to neo-Nazi gangs.More and more, experts say, established hate groups such as the Klan and Aryan Nations are using skinheads as their front-line soldiers, sometimes training them in the use of weapons.
"It used to be that Klan, Nazi and skinheads didn't mix. Now we don't care. We want them all," Heriegel said. "Skinheads make great security people. People have a great fear of them."
With reason.
From June 1990 to July 1993, 22 murders were committed by neo-Nazi skinheads, according to an Anti-Defamation League report.
In July, federal and local law enforcement officials in Los Angeles thwarted what they said was a plot by the Fourth Reich Skinheads to start a race war by bombing a black church, spraying its members with machine-gun fire and killing Rodney King and other widely known blacks.
The FBI arrested eight people and seized a large arsenal of weapons, Nazi paraphernalia and pictures of Adolf Hitler.
The most common method of recruitment remains literature - racist pamphlets, newsletters and bumper stickers distributed at schools, shoved in mailboxes and inserted in library books.
But, increasingly, hate activists are discovering more sophisticated ways to reach young people. Telephone hotlines. Cable access TV. Computer bulletin boards. And music.
Heriegel said he often visits heavy metal and alternative music clubs, looking for likely recruits. "If we get to kids who are 17 or 18, they can pass it down faster than we can," Heriegel said. "That way we work down to younger ages."
Tapes and CDs produced by hate groups are available in many smaller record shops, often those that carry alternative music or used records. Others are available through mail order, often directly through the hate groups them-selves.
Many groups have recorded on the Rock-O-Rama label, a West German record company that was recently raided by police. Hate literature, military-style weapons and explosives were found at the record company.
A Detroit-based label, Resistance Records, was founded by a leader in the white supremacist Church of the Creator.
"It's a great way to recruit people," noted Floyd Cochran, who defected from a white supremacist group in 1992 and now works for the anti-racist Center for Democratic Renewal.For two years, Cochran worked as political coordinator for Aryan Nations, which is based at an Idaho military compound. One of his main duties was recruiting young people.
He would go after the most vulnerable, neediest kids and offer them whatever was missing in their lives. Offer a homeless child a place to stay. Offer a scared, pregnant teenager a sympathetic ear.
Offer an insecure, very young adult a lot of responsibility and a big title.
In each city, Cochran would zero in on the hot local issues. In Seattle, his main target was gays. In Tennessee, it was blacks. In California, immigrants. It is a common hate group recruitment technique.
"They are following the lead of people like David Duke who have exploited legitimate issues that the U.S. people have struggled with and that there are no easy answers for," the ADL's Tom Halpern said. "They provide easy answers. They see an opening, an opportunity to gain exposure and converts."
Mark Thomas, the founder of a group called the Christian Posse Comitatus, is very much a part of the hate movement's high-tech revolution.
He "interfaces" with other leaders through fax, computer and an underground lecture circuit. He runs a mail-order business selling newsletter subscriptions and racist sermons on cassettes.
He has appeared on syndicated talk shows and on a Fox TV special called "Face the Hate." He rarely turns down an interview request.
Thomas considers whites the only true descendants of Adam. Jews, he said, descend from Cain and are "seeds of Satan," responsible for all the ills of civilization.
Thomas' goal, he said, is: "To teach as many white people who will hear that we are the true Israelites. To raise up as many people to establish government the way it should be. Peacefully if possible. Forcefully if not."