Driving through a recent morning rain in the mountains of West Virginia, 60-year-old Kelvin Pierce grew nervous as he approached a gate in the middle of a mud-caked dirt road. “To be honest, I have an awful lot of stuff going through my mind as I think about going up to this property,” Pierce confessed
Driving through a recent morning rain in the mountains of West Virginia, 60-year-old Kelvin Pierce grew nervous as he approached a gate in the middle of a mud-caked dirt road.
Though Pierce’s father died in 2002 and the National Alliance’s position in the white power movement has since faded, the hatred and bigotry behind it all have not. In fact, counterterrorism officials warn that, after years of decline, hate groups are once again proliferating inside the United States – an unnerving reality mirrored by what Pierce saw that rainy morning on the West Virginia compound.
“There's hope that is engendered by a story like [mine],” he said. “If I could overcome that hatred, and that depression, and that feeling of unworthiness, then maybe somebody else could too.”Like so many other American children, when he was young he often dreamed of visiting the nation’s capital – but his dreams were far different than those of most kids.
When Pierce was in college, his father published the novel “The Turner Diaries,” which experts describe as the white power movement’s “bible” with its depictions of a violent campaign against the U.S. government and a global race war that leads to the eradication of Jews, Black people and other non-whites.
Pierce said he’s sure his father “absolutely” approved of the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people – including 19 children in a daycare center – and injured nearly 700 others. What Pierce does know is that his father was a “very intelligent man” with a PhD in physics, who became somewhat lost professionally – that’s when his father began voraciously consuming racist literature and books such as Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” Pierce said during hours of interviews.
“I believed a lot of the stuff that [my dad] taught me,” Pierce recalled. “I wanted him to acknowledge me. I wanted him to be proud of me. I wanted him to love me.” For the first time, as a student at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., he was “starting to experience people from all over the world … people from every kind of race and religion that you can think of,” he said.He said he had been feeling depressed – even worthless – for “a long, long time,” so around 2004 he sought help: “Therapy. Counseling. Spiritual studies. A lot of reading.”
Now what helps Pierce feel better is his work as a contractor and time with his wife and two children. “Watching those people march, and carrying those torches, and singing … that, ‘You will not replace us,’ that immediately transported me back to my childhood, and to my father, and to everything that he believed in and everything that he was trying to accomplish,” Pierce said.
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