This guy lived 64 years too long.

Harold Covington, a longtime neo-Nazi activist with a history spanning four decades and has been seen as both a leader and a pariah within those circles, died July 21 at the age of 64.

“It is with a heavy heart I must inform you all that Harold Armstead Covington, founder of the Northwest Front, passed away last week in his apartment in Bremerton, WA,” a post read on the website of the group he founded to facilitate the “Northwest Imperative” an attempt to make the Pacific Northwest a Whites-Only homeland. “Thankfully, preparations were made and the Party continues to operate in service of the Northwest Imperative.”

Born in Burlington, North Carolina, Covington served in the U.S. Army and in 1972 while still enlisted, joined the National Socialist White People’s Party. He eventually moved to apartheid South Africa, and later to Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), where he became a founding member of the Rhodesian White People’s Party, only to be deported in 1976 after threatening a Jewish congregation. Upon his return, he joined the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA), a Chicago-based organization founded by Frank Collin that is best known for their 1977 legal battle stemming from their plans to march in the Chicago suburb of Skokie. Covington, served as Colin’s second-in-command and would routinely deflect attention away from Colin’s Jewish ancestry, but Colin would eventually be ousted after being convicted for molesting two 10-year-old boys. Frazier Glenn Miller, who is currently on death row for the 2014 murder of three persons in the Overland Park Jewish Community Center and the Village Shalom retirement home, both in Overland Park, Kansas, was a member of Covington’s North Carolina unit of the NSPA. Covington became president of the NSPA and in 1980 lost a Republican primary run for attorney general of North Carolina. He resigned his presidency in 1981 and eventually moved to the United Kingdom, helping to organize the neo-Nazi terrorist organization Combat-18. Returning to the United States, he started the National Socialist White People’s Party, but had to stop using the name when he was sued for copyright infringement by the George Lincoln Rockwell Foundation, Inc.

By this time Covington had begun to be seen by others within neo-Nazi circles as a government informant and secretly Jewish. Some blowback came because of unsubstantiated claims by him such as saying he served in the Rhodesian Army and how he had a connection with John Hinckley, the attempted assassin of President Ronald Reagan, but especially because of his penchant to attack other leaders within those circles, particularly those who attacked him.

Still, Covington managed to influence those like mass shooter Dylann Roof, who cited him as such in an online manifesto found after he shot and killed nine Black church goers at Emanuel African Methodist Church. Covington, in turn, referred to the shooting as  “a preview of coming attractions”.

The Northwest Front blog had not been updated since Thanksgiving until today, when the announcement of Covington’s death was announced.