White Supremacists Fantasize That Obama Will Help Them Recruit

By Max Blumenthal, The Daily Beast. Posted October 31, 2008.

David Duke and white supremacists are grappling with arrests for an Obama murder plot, while hoping an Obama presidency will be good for them.

On October 27, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms announced the arrest of two young neo-Nazis, Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman, who allegedly plotted to assassinate Barack Obama. The strange event suggests that a criminal element within the white supremacist movement is hell-bent on racial violence if Obama becomes president.

On the other hand, key leaders of the movement's organized front see a potential Obama administration as a rising tide that will lift their sagging boats. They hope to leverage white resentment against Obama's presidency to generate unprecedented funding, bolster membership rolls, and influence the political mainstream.

According to the ATF, Cowart and Schlesselman planned to suit up in white tuxedoes and top hats and then massacre 88 black people, 14 by decapitation, including Obama among their targets. The numbers 88 and 14 are signifiant in neo-Nazi culture: "H" is the 8th letter of the alphabet; "HH" stands for "Heil Hitler." Fourteen symbolizes the 14-word pledge of the neo-Nazi group, The Order.

Initially portrayed in media accounts as "lone wolves" without institutional affiliations, new information about the would-be assassins suggests deeper connections into the subculture of neo-Nazi thugs united by an adulation of Adolf Hitler and desire for vigilante violence. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the would-be assassins, Daniel Cowart, was a "probate member" of an incipient youth group of the neo-Nazi movement, Supreme White Alliance...