# White Power **George Lincoln Rockwell's** 1967 manifesto — the founding document of organized American neo-Nazism and the text that established the template for every subsequent white supremacist organization in the United States. Published the same year Rockwell was assassinated by a disgruntled follower (August 25, 1967), the book lays out the [[American Nazi Party]]'s ideology, strategy, and vision in Rockwell's characteristically confrontational prose. ## The Author George Lincoln Rockwell (1918–1967) was a Navy veteran and advertising executive who founded the **American Nazi Party** in 1959 — the first openly neo-Nazi organization in the United States. Rockwell understood that American fascism required American packaging: where earlier American fascists (the German-American Bund, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts) had imported European aesthetics, Rockwell created an explicitly American brand of Nazism that drew on native white supremacist traditions while openly embracing Hitler's legacy. Rockwell was a media-savvy provocateur who understood that outrage generates attention. He staged confrontational public appearances — picketing civil rights events, heckling Martin Luther King Jr., showing up at Nation of Islam events (where he found common ground with Black separatists on the desirability of racial separation). His assassination in 1967 by John Patler, a former ANP member expelled for creating internal dissent, elevated him to martyrdom status in the white supremacist movement. ## The Argument *White Power* synthesizes several strands of far-right ideology into a single program: **1. White racial consciousness as political identity.** Rockwell argues that white Americans must recognize themselves as a racial group with collective interests — interests under threat from racial integration, Jewish influence, and communist subversion. The book explicitly names "White Power" as the counter to "Black Power" — appropriating the civil rights movement's identity-politics framework for white supremacist ends. **2. The Jewish conspiracy.** Consistent with classical Nazi ideology, Rockwell identifies Jews as the primary enemy — orchestrating racial integration, communism, and cultural degeneration as tools to weaken and destroy the white race. This is the Protocols-to-Ford-to-Hitler lineage transplanted onto American soil. **3. Racial separation, not just supremacy.** Rockwell's public position evolved over time from crude supremacism to an argument for complete racial separation — sending Black Americans to Africa, establishing racially homogeneous nations. This "separatist" framing (shared with the Nation of Islam) became the template for how subsequent white nationalist organizations would present themselves as advocating "self-determination" rather than domination. **4. The mass-movement strategy.** Rockwell believed white supremacism could become a mass political movement through confrontational public action, media manipulation, and the recruitment of working-class whites who felt threatened by integration. This strategic vision — radicalize the white working class through cultural grievance — anticipates by decades the playbook that Bannon, Trump, and the MAGA movement would deploy far more successfully. ## Legacy and Influence Rockwell's organizational legacy was fragmented — the ANP splintered after his death — but his ideological and strategic influence permeates the white supremacist movement: **[[William Luther Pierce]]**, author of [[The Turner Diaries]], was a Rockwell follower who joined the ANP's successor organization (the National Socialist White People's Party) before founding the [[National Alliance]]. **[[James Mason]]**, author of [[Siege]], began his career in Rockwell's orbit through the ANP and its successor organizations before breaking with the organized-politics model. **[[Tom Metzger]]** (White Aryan Resistance), **[[David Duke]]** (Klan, later political candidate), and virtually every significant American white supremacist leader of the 1970s–1990s either passed through Rockwell's organizations or was directly influenced by them. The **organizational template** — openly racialist party, uniformed members, public confrontation, media manipulation — was Rockwell's creation and has been adopted (with varying levels of Nazi aesthetic) by every subsequent WN organization from the Klan revival to [[Patriot Front]]. ## KB Significance **1. The ANP as incubator.** Rockwell's American Nazi Party was the organizational incubator for the entire post-1960s white supremacist movement. Pierce (Turner Diaries, National Alliance), Mason (Siege, Atomwaffen lineage), Duke (Klan, political mainstreaming) — all trace their organizational origins to Rockwell. *White Power* is the text that defined what these successors were building on. **2. The "White Power" brand.** Rockwell coined the specific framing — "White Power" as mirror to "Black Power" — that became the movement's identity. The phrase, the raised-fist salute, the American-packaged Nazi aesthetic — all Rockwell. **3. The media-manipulation template.** Rockwell's understanding that outrage generates attention, that confrontation creates recruitment opportunities, and that mainstream media can be weaponized by giving it irresistible content — this is the template that runs from Rockwell through Metzger's public-access TV through the alt-right's meme warfare to Trump's Twitter strategy. Different scale, same mechanism. ## See Also - [[American Nazi Party]] — Rockwell's organization - [[National Alliance]] — Pierce's successor organization; direct ANP lineage - [[The Turner Diaries]] — Pierce's novel; the next-generation WN text from the Rockwell lineage - [[Siege]] — Mason's accelerationist break from Rockwell's organized-politics model - [[Imperium]] — Yockey's philosophical fascism; different approach, same era - [[White Nationalist Radicalization Pipeline]] — The system Rockwell helped build