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WASHINGTON: Far-right violence may affect America’s contentious 2024 presidential elections, a prominent FBI informant who spent years infiltrating the Klu Klux Klan says in a new book.
For years Joe Moore was assigned to infiltrate Florida’s KKK chapters in order to look into long-standing connections between the law enforcement and the white supremacist group. Part of this mission included Joe Moore foiling three Klansmen who were employed as prison guards in their attempt to kill each other.
In his recently published book White Robes and Broken Badges, the former US Army sniper describes his experiences in detail and applies the lessons he learned to an upcoming election that is fraught with concerns about the influence of far-right and white supremacist organizations. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in May reported that two out of three Americans said they were concerned that political violence could follow the 5 November election.
“Unfortunately, I think it’s relevant to any time in our nation’s history, not just this election,” Moore says. Far-right ideology has two origins, he has come to learn. “One is geographical, where you are raised up in an area where that ideology is simply a part of a belief system. The second is a generational origin in which it’s handed down.” The tale then begins with Moore, who lived close to Gainesville in the 2010s, joining white nationalist groups in Florida, rising to the rank of Grand Knighthawk, the KKK’s security official, and foiling a plot by members of the group, all of whom were prison guards, to kill a former Black prisoner.
Moore also brings down two prominent KKK figures, Grand Dragon Jamie Ward and Exalted Cyclops Charles Newcomb.
“In my first tour inside the KKK – the nation’s first domestic terrorist group, founded more than 150 years ago – I foiled a plot to assassinate then candidate Barack Obama, only to witness the Klan use his election as a rallying cry and recruiting tool that ignited a firestorm within the white nationalist right,” Moore writes in the book.
After serving in foreign authoritarian countries, he continues, “nothing I witnessed in any of them scares me as much as what we’re facing at home now. Should we be afraid? With the 2024 election looming, and democracy itself on the ballot, the answer is yes, we should be very afraid.”
Moore described meeting a regional Klan leader, or Grand Dragon, who lived near Rosewood, Florida, the site of a racist massacre of dozens of Black people and the destruction of the town in 1923. “After an evening at the Grand Dragon’s home I walked over to the remnants of Rosewood and realized that I had the power to stop the next Rosewood,” he says. Moore’s extraordinary tale has been told previously – both as an Associated Press story in 2021 corroborated using court records and trial transcripts, and as a documentary, Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK, but Moore’s new account comes with an immediate political message.
Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, who spoke to Democratic conventioneers in Chicago last week about his experiences during the January 6 incident, wrote the foreword. “Mobilization of domestic violent extremist groups to act as the frontline shock troops in the assault” is how Raskin puts it in the book.
Moore, Raskin writes, “shows how the KKK remains a central entry point and organizing force for violent white nationalism in America”.
Moore states that he aimed to stay politically neutral to avoid making errors. However, locating the appropriate individuals to report the corruption he had discovered proved challenging, as Florida officials, he asserts, were uninterested in his claims about KKK infiltration within law enforcement.
“It was far more prevalent and consequential than officials were willing to admit, so much so that state officials came out and said there was no information that the issue was any more broad than the case in front of them. But I had a list of officers that were active members and actively recruiting other people and sending active Klan members into the law enforcement hiring process as well.”
Although the KKK is no longer as powerful as it once was, other white nationalist groups have stepped in to take up its message and membership, including militias and movements like the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers.
Moore thinks that by 2014, a third of all Klan members belonged to another group that was comparable, and the organization’s top brass supported the shift.
“It just so happens that geographical and generational origins are dispersed, so if America was to have another civil war it would not be north versus south, but it would be families and geographical locations against other families and geographical locations.”
White supremacists moved north in the US – joining homegrown ones already there – for reasons of economic prosperity “but they brought with them the generational origins of racism and seed different areas of the north for racism to grow generationally”, he adds.
Jon Land, the author of numerous mystery-suspense novels, the teen comedy picture Dirty Deeds, and the insurrectionist thriller Murder at the CDC, ghost wrote White Robes. The result is a mismatch between message and style.
Whatever. Regarding the infiltration of law enforcement, Moore makes a valid point: 20% of those detained in the Capitol incident on January 6 are thought to have some connection to US law enforcement.
“Criminal organizations of all kinds want to gain access to police powers, be it prisons, local police or state police. They want information to have control of their environment,” Moore points out. “But the KKK is not about controlling their environment to make money but to fulfill an ideology to bring about a new government or system.”
As a result, he claims, generations later would likewise enter law enforcement carrying racial ideologies. It all boils down to propagandizing, which is an ideological circle of survival that feeds itself. They worry that their philosophy may be lost.
