Dies the day after Trump was bounced out of office. Is 2020 trying to make up with the world after the past ten months or something?

Tom Metzger, one of the most prominent White Supremacists in America until a lawsuit filed against his organization White Aryan Resistance brought that organization down and made him a shell of his former self, died last week at the age of 82.

According to a death notice on his website, Metzger died in Hemet, California on Nov. 4, the cause of death not immediately known.

Born on April 9, 1938 – sharing a birthday with Paul Robeson – Tom Metzger started out as a Republican Party worker in the sixties trying to get Barry Goldwater elected. He became more and more radical after that, joining groups such as the John Birch Society, the American Independent Party, and eventually David Duke’s Ku Klux Klan, where he found himself in several scuffles with anti-Klan opposition. In this position, he and Duke founded the Klan Border Patrol, a precursor to the Minuteman Project founded in 2005, where they searched for Mexicans crossing the border. He eventually broke from Duke and founded the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He later formed White Aryan Resistance (W.A.R.) after breaking from the KKK.

The positions of W.A.R. were as follows: Their race is their religion, and the White race’s protection and advancement was their number one issue. Warfare for any other reason to protect the White race is self destructive. They supported state-sponsored abortion for non-Whites but will oppose non-White abortion. Neither Marxism or Capitialism were desirable economic systems, as both fed off the White race. “The right wing is dead, Metzger said during Aryan Woodstock in 1989. “The Marxists are dead. It’s a white revolution.” Homosexuals and interracial sex limits the White gene pool. They denied the existence of inalienable rights.

Among the things that W.A.R. did was publish a newspaper of the same name, and a public access television program called Race and Reason that has seen it share of opposition from cities that objected to the broadcasts on their cable outlets. They were able to beat back that opposition citing the first amendment they work to dismantle for everyone else.

Metzger in 1980 won a three-person Democratic Party primary for Congress in San Diego’s 43rd District while still leading the Klan. This led the party to disavow his candidacy and endorse his opponent, Republican Clair Burgener. Metzger lost by 87% to 13% in the heavily Republican district. Among those who was openly vocal against him was then-Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, who herself would go to Congress in 1991.

Tom Metzger was often joined by his son John who came into the scene as the president of W.A.R. Youth when Greg Withrow, then head of the White Student Union renounced his racist ideologies. For this, Withrow was attacked by youth loyal to John and nailed to a plank of wood. Withrow has since rejoined the White Power movement, saying that all of this was just a ruse to infiltrate the left, but his efforts have gained no traction.

The Metzgers traveled around the world promoting white supremacy and was barred from entering Germany for this. They were incarcerated in Canada, when they went to that country to promote their ideals. Tom and John have often appeared on an Oprah Winfrey’s program with was so volatile, Oprah decided never to have white supremacists on her show again. They have also seen heated appearances on radio show host Wally George’s program and on Donahue. John Metzger was the person the late Roy Innis was choking on that infamous Geraldo episode where the trash talk-show host had his nose broken.

This Friday will be the 32nd anniversary of the death of Ethiopian student Mulugeta Seraw who was murdered by members of the neo-Nazi group East Side White Pride, an organization loyal to W.A.R. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against W.A.R. on behalf of the Seraw family and the Metzgers were found liable to the tune of $12.5 million. Tom Metzger lost his home, TV repair shop and trailer that he used as a meeting hall. When he lost he said it didn’t matter in a press conference held immediately after the trial because he planted his seeds and that they are “imbedded now.”

Tom Metzger became the latest charcoal briquette in Hell last week, but as you can see from this video featuring Proud Boy Joe Biggs last year, the more things change, the more things stay the same. pic.twitter.com/63gmjAVFiG

— Idavox (@IdavoxOPP) November 10, 2020

Things went downhill for Metzger himself after the trial however. In 1991, he was jailed in Los Angeles County for unlawful assembly after attending a cross burning in 1982. He served 45 days of a six-month sentence before he was released early to attend to his dying wife. He soon moved back to Warsaw, Indiana where he was born and appeared in a 2003 documentary titled Louis and the Nazis, hosted by Louis Theroux where Metzger was shown attempting to maintain his racist viewpoints while singing in a largely non-white karaoke bar and going on a day trip to Mexico during the documentary. “It had been a long, and in some ways, depressing day,” Theroux said in the documentary. I’d found Tom’s attitudes exhausting and I was still more confused when the karaoke bar he took me to turned out to be largely non-white. I could only assume that, for Tom, karaoke sometimes took precedence over racism.”

In 2009, Metzger’s home was searched in connection with the arrest of Dennis and Daniel Mahon, who were accused of carrying out a mail bomb attack that injured an Arizona diversity director. Dennis Mahon, who had been WAR’s Oklahoma coordinator, was convicted of three felonies, including conspiracy, distribution of information about explosives, and using explosives to attack a building. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Daniel was acquitted on a single conspiracy count.

The terrorist group Atomwaffen posted a video on YouTube last year where Tom Metzger promoted the book Siege written by their advisor James Mason, who appeared on Metzger’s public access program in the 1990s.