Background Metzger's first group was known as the White Brotherhood, which he led in the mid-1970s until he joined
David Duke's
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1975. By 1979 he had risen to the rank of
Grand Dragon of the California realm. During these years the California realm conducted unofficial border patrols on the Mexican border. The realm also kept a blackshirted security detail which engaged in skirmishes with anti-Klan demonstrators and police. In
Oceanside, California, in the spring of 1980, an incident involved 30 members of this squad and left seven people injured. In the summer of 1980 Metzger left the national organization and founded his own organization, the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The show caused much controversy, and its guests included
anti-abortion speakers,
Holocaust deniers and
pro-segregation lawyers. In 1988 Metzger, recorded this message on his "WAR Hotline", You have reached WAR Hotline. White Aryan Resistance. You ask: What is WAR? We are an openly white-racist movement. Skinheads, we welcome you into our ranks; the
federal government is the number one enemy of our race. When was the last time you heard a politician speaking out in favor of white people? ... You say the government is too big; we can't organize. Well, by God, the
SS did it in Germany, and if they did it in Germany in the thirties, we can do it right here in the streets of America. We need to cleanse this nation of all nonwhite mud-races for the survival of our own people and the generations of our children.
Murder of Mulugeta Seraw and civil prosecution of the Metzgers On November 13, 1988, three white Aryan supremacists who were members of East Side White Pride, which allegedly had ties to WAR, beat to death
Mulugeta Seraw, an
Ethiopian man who had moved to the United States in order to attend college. In October 1990, the
Southern Poverty Law Center won a
civil case on behalf of the deceased man's family against Tom and John Metzger and WAR, for a total of US$12.5 million. The Metzgers did not have millions of dollars, so the Seraw family only received assets from the Metzger's $125,000 house and a few thousand dollars. The Metzgers declared
bankruptcy, but WAR continued to operate. WAR continued to publish their newspaper despite the verdict. Metzger launched a website in 1997 and had an Internet radio program. The cost of trial, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, was absorbed by the SPLC and the
Anti-Defamation League, according to
Morris Dees, founder of the SPLC. In 1993, the group expanded into
Canada.
Threats against video stores by a WAR member WAR was mentioned in the press when it was revealed that one of its members threatened video stores in
Rhode Island because they carried
Jungle Fever. In 1994, Richard Campos, a WAR sympathizer, was convicted of racially motivated bombing plots. Calls were made in which it was stated that the bombings were perpetrated by an organization called the Aryan Liberation Front, of which Campos was the only member. In early 1995, Campos was sentenced to the maximum term of 17 years in prison. ==See also==