Will Williams: Standing Strong, part 2

American Dissident Voices broadcast of April 16, 2016

by Kevin Alfred Strom

Part 1 of this interview

TODAY WE CONTINUE our interview with the Chairman of the National Alliance, William White Williams (pictured). When we left off last week, Chairman Williams had just discussed his work with Ben Klassen, founder of a religion for White people called Creativity.

KAS: Your work for the Church of the Creator eventually brought you in contact with the National Alliance and Dr. Pierce, correct?

WWW: Yes, we would exchange periodicals. We’d send him our papers and he’d send us his BULLETINs and his National Vanguard magazines. I’ll never forget the issue, I believe it was number 110, on the 100th anniversary of Mr. Hitler’s birth, and Dr. Pierce’s editorial was “The Measure of Greatness.” That really turned me around, and I began thinking of National Socialism as an idea that we really ought to look at differently from the way that we’ve been taught all our lives.

I’d read his little monthly BULLETINs, and it was about his progress on his land up there in West Virginia and it seemed attractive to me. I was working for Klassen — but I’d done my 15 months there. I’d told him I’d give him a year, and I was pretty much burned out by then. I went to the woods and I read a lot. I painted; I raised German Shepherd dogs; I hiked a lot —

KAS: You had a cabin in the woods.

WWW: Yes —

KAS: And so you retreated there for some time.

WWW: Yes. I did some work for Instauration magazine. I did art work for them, and I wrote for them. But then I got a copy of the book Hunter by Dr. Pierce. Andrew Macdonald was his pen name. When I read that book, I said, “Good night — it’s like this man wrote this book directly to me…”

KAS: How so? Why did it feel like it had been written directly to you?

WWW: He addressed Christianity, for one thing. In novel form. It was so well done. He explained the difference between strategy and tactics, and many other things. I had read The Turner Diaries, his first novel, two years earlier, and it was interesting but it didn’t grab me like Hunter did.

KAS: Hunter is a much deeper book, I think.

WWW: Yes, he spent a lot more time developing it and he did it with a purpose in mind, whereas The Turner Diaries was done in serial form; he’d have to write a chapter every time his little tabloid would come out — but it’s got a lot more notoriety; they tried to blame the Oklahoma City bombing on that book. That’s where the Southern Poverty Law Center comes in; Morris Dees would wave that book around and say it’s “the Bible of the racist right,” “the blueprint for revolution” and all this.

KAS: Yes, I think Dr. Pierce ended up raising a lot of money for Morris Dees because of the way Dees attacked that book, although Dees’ claim was preposterous.

WWW: Yes, and they’re raising a lot of money now trying to do away with our National Alliance, so it’s kind of a symbiotic relationship with these “watchdogs” — they wouldn’t be around if it weren’t for us.

KAS: So you’re reading Hunter. Basically, you’re amazed by this book. You’ve retreated to the woods to think about life.

WWW: Yes, I said to myself “I’ve got to go meet this man.” I had a friend, Gordon, who was a member of the Alliance. I said to him “I’ve got to go up there and meet Dr. Pierce.” And he said “Well, I’ll arrange my vacation so we can go up there.” And on the 4th of July weekend of 1991, we went up there and spent three days with Dr. Pierce and hit it off well. He put us to work.

KAS: What did you do?

WWW: Oh, we were chainsawing and weed-eating — [laughter] the place was rough. And there was nobody there.

KAS: This was The Land in West Virginia.

WWW: Yes. It was just Dr. Pierce and his wife. That was it. Nobody else was there. I couldn’t believe it. I said to myself “This has so much potential — and there’s nobody here. What’s wrong? Why is this?”

Well, anyway, he gave me a couple of books: The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard which you had edited way back in ’84, I believe —

KAS: That’s right.

WWW: — and Which Way Western Man? by William Gayley Simpson. He also gave me the three pamphlets on Cosmotheism. He sent me on my way and it took me a few months to read it all. Then he wrote me and told me that I had it made there, painting and hiking and reading and raising dogs and all that — but that really I should come up there and work with him — and I’ll never forget what he said — “because the Jew and his collaborators still live.”

KAS: [laughter] I remember that line. You told me that before.

WWW: I said “Oh man. I can’t turn this man down. And he really does need some help.”

So I had to sell my place and make arrangements to go on up there. I told him I’d give him two years. I only gave Klassen one year, but I told him “Dr. Pierce, I’ll give you two years — no matter what. No matter how bad things get, I’ll give you two years. Depend on that.”

Right around the first of January, I started up there. You had just done your first American Dissident Voices broadcast the week before.

KAS: Yes, literally, one week before. So that was January 1st, ’92 when you arrived.

WWW: Yes, and you had only been there — maybe since October.

KAS: Yes, at the very end of October. So I’d only been there for two months.

WWW: So then there were three of us.

KAS: That’s right.

WWW: And, before long, Fred Streed joined us. And then things really started happening.

KAS: That’s right.

WWW: He was someone who could work on the vehicles and build things —

KAS: That place blossomed after Fred Streed came there.

WWW: Yes, and Joe Pryce and his wife Patti came. It’s kind of like what’s happening right now — in the BULLETINs we put out, people see the progress.

KAS: Tell me about your work. You arrived in the beginning of ’92. Tell me about the work Dr. Pierce gave you and about your relationship — what was it like to work with Dr. Pierce?

WWW: He had been watching me, as it turned out. He would get our papers from the church. And he saw that I had built it up pretty much from nothing to a viable movement. He’d seen some letters to the editor that I’d written. He read that paper I edited — though I wasn’t really a writer.

He created the job of Membership Coordinator. He wanted to build an organization and he hadn’t really been able to, up ’til then, other than just a few followers.

KAS: So he was trying to handle everything himself. Up until your arrival, there was no Membership Coordinator.

WWW: Oh, no. He handed me a shoebox. Inside it were about 200 of those old green membership applications. They weren’t even in order, in alphabetical order. We were just starting the database with his new computers, and I had to enter those 200 people into the database. He created the position of Membership Coordinator for me. I really started working — organizing members; creating a membership survey. I started putting pins in a map to see where all our members were located. Then I started putting little groups of our people together, networking them.

KAS: I remember you typing letters, and talking on the phone incessantly with members.

WWW: That’s what it took. Then I started travelling around the country, bringing people living in one area together for meetings; trying to find a leader for each group, and introducing that person to Dr. Pierce, usually at a Leadership Conference.

KAS: What was a Leadership Conference?

WWW: I organized the first one, in ’92, up in New York City.

KAS: So this was something where promising members would be brought together with Dr. Pierce, or with you? How did that work?

WWW: Yes, I would go meet with all these people, our members and their guests at a certain location. We’d have somebody in that area who would help organize a venue. And then magical things happen when you bring people together. They’d been isolated, for the most part. Things get sorted out. The cream rises.

We tried to encourage activism. I remember at that first meeting, I said to our members: “Dr. Pierce needs a fax machine. Your first job here is to pay for a fax machine and for a dedicated line to it.”

KAS: I remember that. This was before the Internet existed for us.

WWW: Yes, that’s right. [laughter] Of course, Dr. Pierce hadn’t had a fax machine — but once he got it, when that phone rang for the first time he wondered how he got along without it. But that project was just one thing that they could do — next thing you know, they’re organizing meetings. And we did that all over the country. Things took off, Kevin. We had those 200 members when we started at the beginning of ’92 and by the end of ’93, when my two years were up, we had about 600 members. So we had tripled membership — and the headquarters was buzzing. We had a lot of volunteers coming in — and that’s all that was needed: getting good people.

KAS: Yes, I remember visiting Dr. Pierce on The Land and — the same as your experience, there was nobody there. Just Dr. Pierce and the wind blowing through the trees. And after you arrived and Fred Streed arrived, things really did start to happen. There was a constant flow of visitors and volunteers and people coming to work for the Alliance after you arrived.

WWW: Oh, it was exciting. Credit goes to Dr. Pierce’s teachings, really — they’re just so solid. That’s what he left us. And that’s what we’re going back to.

The people who took over the Alliance after he died really frittered it all away. You know —

KAS: Yes, indeed I do. Now later you were appointed to be a Regional Coordinator for the Alliance. Tell me about that.

WWW: When I left the National Office and returned to my home, Dr. Pierce made me a Regional Coordinator for the Carolinas. I took what I’d learned at headquarters and applied it to organizing the region, concentrating on Local Units. Most of them were in North Carolina. First, each Unit would put a National Alliance telephone message online. Then we’d get a few people together and, before you know it, the Internet fell in our laps — about ’95, I believe it was. What a great tool. So I would hold seminars and bring in a computer person to teach our members how to use the Internet, which we started to use that same year, 1995.

KAS: Early days. So you’d get these people together and eventually, if you got enough of them together, you were having meetings — even demonstrations —

WWW: We’d have meetings once a month in several areas of the state, and I would travel around. I bought this place up here in the mountains, and it gave me a chance to come up here — I would go from the coast to the mountains and back again, travelling all over the place.

KAS: How many years were you working that circuit, going from the coast to the mountains through the Carolinas?

WWW: From the time I left West Virginia at the end of 1993 until 2002.

KAS: Wow.

WWW: In 2002 I didn’t like the direction the Alliance was going. It was just getting away from us. That Resistance Records deal was attracting a lot of skinheads that were undisciplined. They didn’t really understand what we were trying to do — as you remember —

KAS: Yes I do. The plan, I think, was to bring in these people who like skinhead music, many of whom were actually skinheads, and influence them so their thinking would become more sophisticated and they would be integrated into the program of the National Alliance. Unfortunately I think that toward the end the opposite was happening: The skinhead movement was affecting the Alliance — excessively.

WWW: Yes. They should have accommodated themselves to the Alliance. But instead the Alliance changed. There were too many of them. Erich Gliebe was running Resistance Records and he was surrounded by all these skinheads. Don’t get me wrong, some of them are pretty good folks. We were there for them to graduate to. Dr. Pierce wanted to take Resistance Records and expand it into other genres of music — Celtic, bluegrass, classical, German marches, whatever — White music. But it just never happened.

KAS: It did seem to be getting out of control. Perhaps he would have gotten it under control had he lived. But he didn’t live. And then Erich Gliebe brought Shaun Walker in and promoted him to high positions in the Alliance. Walker had come up through that subculture. And it was a disaster.

WWW: Yes. So the Alliance went down, down, down —

KAS: You couldn’t endorse that path that Dr. Pierce’s successors, Gliebe and Walker, took. What changes did they institute that you really felt were wrong?

WWW: Walker wanted to make the Alliance a political party, as in running people for office — and Dr. Pierce never wanted that.

KAS: Yes, and he wanted to register Alliance members as lobbyists, too.

WWW: Neither Walker nor Gliebe understood the spiritual aspect of the Alliance, the Cosmotheist underpinnings of our work. That’s what we’re trying to get back to.

KAS: They changed the Membership Handbook.

WWW: Oh, yes. The first thing I noticed was that they took out the five pages that named Christianity as an opposed ideology to that of the Alliance. They wanted the Alliance to be Christian-friendly and have a “broader outreach” to bring in more people — and that’s not at all what I joined.

You and I had influence in writing the Handbook.

KAS: Yes we did.

WWW: And what they removed was a very important part of the “Opposed Ideologies” section. They completely undercut the whole organization. Some of the old-timers just said “Enough of this!” and left. And they were left with a bunch of skinheads and terrible management. And they got rid of the Board of Directors and got rid of all the staff members that Dr. Pierce had built up. They went from over 1200 members when Dr. Pierce died, down to — when I finally inherited it at the end of 2014 — just 24 members.

KAS: Wow. So their “broader appeal” didn’t work after all.

WWW: Didn’t really work out that well, did it?

KAS: What did you do during the Gliebe-Walker years? Were there efforts made to gain control of the Alliance by you and other Pierce loyalists?

WWW: The Internet was going full force by then. I would go out with some of the other National Alliance expats and we would expose what was going on. Erich Gliebe and his crowd didn’t like it, but that’s the beauty of the Internet — you can get your message out.

KAS: Some people have called you Erich Gliebe’s most persistent critic. You were at it for many, many years.

WWW: Yes. It just disgusted me, what they had done. We organized a little group — in about 2007, 2008. We were trying to mount a legal challenge, because they’d broken laws. We thought we could do that. There were a dozen or so of us, maybe 15 at one time. We raised a bunch of money to hire lawyers, but it just didn’t work out. It wasn’t time. So we returned the money and waited it out.

I went to Russia and got married. I said it was a good time to try and get a life. That was in 2003. Thank goodness I did.

KAS: So at the age of 50-plus, you decided to start to get a life…

WWW: My politics didn’t change. I would still go on the Internet and write and promote the Cosmotheist viewpoint — Dr. Pierce’s teachings. One thing to note: Everybody who has a computer can type. So I took the bound National Vanguard magazines that I had and took them apart and I started typing old National Vanguard articles — digitizing them.

KAS: By hand?

WWW: Yes. As I said, we can type. We can put them on the Internet. People can share them. Pass them around. These are great writings that need to be shared.

I got a friend to start a blog — Hadding, you know Hadding —

KAS: Hadding Scott.

WWW: Yes. And he set up a blog — the William Pierce legacy blog. And I got some volunteers to type up articles, pre-Internet articles. Now there’s over a hundred of those articles out there, so at least we did that much. Through that, I networked with a lot of the old-line Alliance members. We were really looking to take the Alliance back at some point.

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Next week we’ll continue our interview with William White Williams, the Chairman of the National Alliance, right here on American Dissident Voices. Thank you Will!

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You’ve been listening to American Dissident Voices, the radio program of the National Alliance, founded by William Luther Pierce in 1970. This program is published every week at Whitebiocentrism.com and nationalvanguard.org. You can join and support us by visiting natall.com — or write to National Alliance, Box 4, Mountain City, TN 37683 USA. We welcome your support, your inquiries, and your help in spreading our message of hope to our people. Once again, that address is Box 4, Mountain City, TN 37683 USA. Until next week, this is Kevin Alfred Strom reminding you to keep on thinking free.

Part 1 of this interview