Arnie Lerma
NEO-NAZIS, WHITE SUPREMACISTS AND ANARCHISTS
Lerma’s fanaticism led him to Holocaust denier Willis Carto and his Liberty Lobby, where Lerma served on the Board of Policy. At the time, Carto was described as having strong ties with the neo-Nazi movement. The main aim of the new Nazis was to establish a Fourth Reich, successor to Hitler’s Third Reich, according to Yaron Svoray of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Svoray, a former Israeli detective turned investigative reporter, spent nine months undercover investigating the neo-Nazis movement in Germany, uncovering its patterns of hatred and violence. In one horrifying example, a group of neo-Nazis Svoray infiltrated had a film of a woman being raped by eight men, then brutally murdered on camera. None of it staged. The film was shown to other members of the group as sadistic “entertainment.” In 1994, Svoray told the Hartford Courant the neo-Nazi movement was “much more violent, more numerous and more dangerous” than anyone then realized.
Right wing extremist Willis Carto was a leading figure in that movement. According to Svoray, “The most notorious Nazi in the world is not German but Willis Carto.” With a thirst of his own for racism and violence, Arnie Lerma supported Carto and once spoke at the 40thanniversary convention of Carto’s Liberty Lobby, addressing 175 people from around the United States. The Liberty Lobby publication Spotlightin September 1995 gave Lerma’s speech favorable coverage, describing his activities as a copyright terrorist as the work of a “freedom fighter.”
Lerma himself stated, “We have the full support of Willis Carto and the ‘patriot’ movement in the United States,” at the same time adding, “I suggest that we don’t promote my relationship with Willis Carto."
Lerma had a long history of involvement in anti-government militia groups and was a regular contributor to the alt.conspiracy newsgroup. Among the most notorious of his militia connections was William White, the onetime public relations mouthpiece of the Utopian Anarchist Party (UAP) that targets government and law enforcement agencies. Described in his own bio as a neo-Nazi, White participated with Lerma in hate demonstrations against the Church of Scientology.
White was arrested for threats to a federal juror in 2008, found guilty on four counts in 2009 and imprisoned. He was released in 2011 when the conviction was overturned; the prosecution appealed the decision and White fled the country. He was later arrested in Mexico.
In March 2005, after the murder of the husband and mother of a federal judge who had ordered a white supremacist group to stop using the name “World Church of the Creator,” White wrote on his website, “I don’t feel bad that Judge Letkow’s family was murdered. In fact, when I heard the story I laughed.”
In his hate writings about the Church of Scientology, Lerma encouraged other extremists in their attacks by stating, “we must continue our work until done and then sow the ground with salt.”