Harold Covington

Harold Covington
Covington in 1977
2nd President of the National Socialist Party of America
In office Template:En dash range
Preceded by	Frank Collin
Succeeded by	Organization disbanded
Personal details
Born	Harold Armstead Covington Burlington, North Carolina, U.S.
Died	Bremerton, Washington, U.S.
Occupation	Author

Harold Armstead Covington (September 14, 1953 – July 14, 2018) was an American neo-Nazi activist and writer. In his later years, he advocated the creation of a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest and was the founder of the Northwest Front (NF), a white separatist political movement that sought to establish a new nation to that effect. He was a controversial figure even within the neo-Nazi movement; academic Jeffrey Kaplan described him as having "always raised more ire than virtually anyone in the fissiparous world of American National Socialism".

After high school he joined the United States Army and joined the neo-Nazi group the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP). After being discharged from the army, Covington moved to South Africa, then Rhodesia, before being deported from Rhodesia for harassing members of a Jewish congregation. Upon his return to America, he joined the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA), becoming its leader. Following the Greensboro massacre that involved the NSPA, Covington was accused by both the Nazis and the Communists involved of being involved and possibly having informed on the far-right to escape consequences, which he denied. He wrote and self-published several fiction novels to mixed reception within the white nationalist movement.

Early life

Black and white photo of Covington as a teenager

Covington's 1971 yearbook photo

Harold Armstead Covington was born on September 14, 1953, in Burlington, North Carolina, the eldest of three children. His father was a folk singer. He was the grandson of A. B. Glass, the founder of the Greensboro Dixie Bedding Company; from this company Covington received a large inheritance. His younger brother Ben Covington later disavowed him and his views, and said several of his claims about his life were made up. According to Ben Covington, Covington's beliefs devastated their parents.

He attended Chapel Hill High School. His racist views were largely born out of his experiences with racial integration in school in the 1960s, which he described in negative terms. He was described by teachers as a gifted student and won a place at the annual Governor's School for Gifted Boys. One of his teachers at the time said that he was a "bright, creative boy. But his intelligence should be channeled—before he does something destructive to society." He briefly wrote for his high school's newspaper in an activities column, but was kicked off shortly after for using it to express his complaints, particularly about the school's black students.

Political activities

Covington was a contentious figure on the far-right, and would often take the blame for many negative events that befell the movement. Academic Jeffrey Kaplan described him as having "always raised more ire than virtually anyone in the fissiparous world of American National Socialism". Similarly, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Covington had launched "endless attacks on most of the leaders of the extreme right, to the point where he is today almost totally isolated from the organizations that make up the white supremacist movement". Other neo-Nazis nicknamed him "Weird Harold".

NSWPP, South Africa, and Rhodesia

In 1971, he graduated from high school and joined the United States Army. He claimed he was honorably discharged from the army two years later due to his racism. He joined the Franklin Road chapter of the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP) about that time. He was posted to its Californian branch in El Monte, California, where he was led by local leader Joseph Tommasi. Initially, the NSWPP's leader, Matt Koehl, seeing Covington as a quality propagandist, moved him to the party's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to edit their White Power periodical. Covington grew to despise Koehl and became one of his foremost in-movement enemies. Numerous other neo-Nazis also hated Koehl; what set Covington apart from the rest was the sheer extent of his loathing, which would persist for the rest of his life, and extended to accusing him over the decades of homosexuality, financial impropriety, and being involved in the murder of the NSWPP's original founder, George Lincoln Rockwell.

After his discharge from the U.S. Army, he moved to Johannesburg in South Africa in December 1973, where he worked as a payroll clerk, before moving later to Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Covington was a founding member of the Rhodesian White People's Party and later claimed to have served in the Rhodesian Army as a mercenary. According to his son and official records he only worked as a filing clerk for a brief time, and according to the Rhodesian government had never served in their army. He was deported from Rhodesia in early 1976 due to his racism. This came after Covington sent hostile letters to the Bulawayo Hebrew Congregation that caused them to fear for their safety. After leaving the NSWPP, he affiliated with George Dietz, and then returned to his home state of North Carolina.

National Socialist Party of America

Covington moved to Raleigh, North Carolina and joined the National Socialist Party of America, then rising in popularity among the neo-Nazi movement. The party was led by Frank Collin, and Covington rose quickly in the organization's ranks, to its leadership. Covington tried to build the party up in North Carolina. Jeffrey Kaplan described his involvement in the NSPA as "one of the greatest disasters of Covington’s long career—and that is saying much, given Covington’s unfortunate organizational history." The North Carolinan branch of the NSPA was known for its unusual array of members, who Covington tried to organize, to no avail.

He was involved in the Greensboro massacre of 1979, which killed five members of the Communist Workers' Party. While it was a conflict between the CWP and the Ku Klux Klan, two of the sixteen accused were also NSPA members. Despite being a key organizer of the demonstration that led to the massacre and a leader of the NSPA, Covington was not actually present at the event. Additionally, the violence was likely kicked off by a federal informant who Covington was accused of having brought to the group. The Federal Bureau of Investigation attempted to track him down so he could disprove allegations made by the Nazis and the Communists involved in the massacre that he was a CIA or FBI operative. The FBI failed to find him, having lost his trail after tracking him to South Africa. There is a widespread belief among the neo-Nazi movement that Covington escaped consequences for his involvement in Greensboro by informing on them. Covington denies this. Separately he was accused by other neo-Nazis of secretly being Jewish, or gay. In 1980, while a leader of the National Socialist Party of America, he lost a primary election for the Republican nomination for candidates for attorney general of North Carolina, winning 56,000 votes.

Afterwards, members of the North Carolinan NSPA branch, in what was probably an effort to distract from Greensboro, plotted to bomb a shopping center. This was probably planned without Covington knowing, and he was horrified upon learning, fearing white people would be harmed. The plot was thwarted due to the high rate of infiltration by informants, which only furthered the rumor that Covington himself was an informant. At the same time, it was revealed that the leader of the national NSPA, Frank Collin, was half-Jewish; several neo-Nazis, including Covington, then searched Collin's home, whereupon they found a collection of homosexual child pornography. Covington and several other neo-Nazis engineered a coup and turned Collin over to the police, and he was sentenced to several years in prison. Unlike other neo-Nazis, Covington refused to accept that Collin was partially of Jewish descent.

Covington became leader of the NSPA, but became embroiled in a leadership dispute and was forced to resign in 1981. That same year, Covington alleged that would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr. had formerly been a member of the NSPA. Law enforcement authorities were never able to corroborate this claim and suggested the alleged connection "may have been fabricated for publicity purposes". Faced with criticism, in 1982 he fled the country to Ireland and the United Kingdom. He married an Irish woman and got dual citizenship.

In the late 1980s, Covington was a neighbor and friend of North Carolinian white supremacist and Church of the Creator member William White Williams; they collaborated in an effort to broadcast Tom Metzger's white supremacist broadcast show Race and Reason. However, Covington had a lengthy feud with the COTC and its leader Ben Klassen, which extended into a feud with Williams; Covington accused Williams of only being out for Klassen's money. The COTC's paper Racial Loyalty issued harsh criticisms of Covington, (alleging that he was "a government agent, a closet rabbi, an agent provocateur of the Greensboro Massacre, an ADL informant, and a Mossad agent") and Covington sued the COTC, Klassen, and Williams for libel, though Covington later dropped the case. Williams and Klassen then got Covington fired from his job. Covington claimed that Williams disguised himself as an FBI agent and contacted his employer, saying the Jewish Defense League had a plot to assassinate Covington.

Internet propagandizing and the Northwest Territorial Imperative

File:Northwest American Republic flag.svg

A proposed flag of the Northwest Territorial Imperative used by white separatists such as Covington's Northwest Front

In 1994, Covington started an organization called the National Socialist White People's Party, using the same name of the successor to the American Nazi Party, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

He launched a website in 1996; using the pseudonym Winston Smith (taken from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four), Covington became one of the first neo-Nazi presences on the Internet. Covington used the website and the Winston Smith pseudonym to disseminate Holocaust-denial material. Online, Covington and his followers had what was described as a "vituperative online feud" with neo-Nazi leader William Luther Pierce and his followers over "the future of the white internet". Covington complained that "the Net is being viciously and tragically abused by a shockingly large number of either bogus or deranged 'white Racists' [...] I think it is too early just yet to quantify how the lunacy interacts with, counteracts and affects the impact of the serious political work". Beginning in 2005, Covington maintained a political blog titled "Thoughtcrime".

In 1998, continuing their previous feud, Will Williams sued Covington for libel and won $10,000; in what several commentators described as an effort to avoid paying Williams, Covington then moved states to Olympia, Washington. There, he advocated the creation of a "white homeland" in the Pacific Northwest (known as the Northwest Territorial Imperative). He founded the Northwest Front, a movement devoted to creating a white ethnostate. Covington was mentioned in the media in connection with the Charleston church shooting, whose perpetrator Dylann Roof discussed the Northwest Front in his manifesto, and was critical of its means and objectives. According to Covington, the shooting was "a preview of coming attractions", but he also believed it was a bad idea for his followers to engage in random acts of violence, instead supporting organized revolution.

Writing career

Template:Neo-Nazism sidebar In addition to his leadership of various neo-Nazi organizations, Covington was also a prolific writer in the form of both blogs and books, publishing 11 novels in total. Academic Jeffrey Kaplan noted his writing ability, saying he was perhaps the most skilled propagandist ever produced by American neo-Nazism; he further said that "even the writings of the Commander himself, George Lincoln Rockwell, were but candles in the wind before the blast of Covington’s purple prose." Kaplan noted his body of work as "voluminous", with an "unusual capacity for self-analysis" for a neo-Nazi.

His books were all self-published and print on demand, outsourcing the production and distribution to an unrelated company. Covington promoted this approach and said it helped him avoid the publication pitfalls and censorship that befell other far-right extremist literature like The Turner Diaries. Genres he wrote in included occult, medievalist, gothic, crime, and historical fiction; Covington claimed that there was "a political and racial message somewhere" in all of his books. He is best known for his series of four Northwest Independence novels that began in 2003, the Northwest series: A Distant Thunder, A Mighty Fortress, The Hill of the Ravens, The Brigade. The series focuses on a white separatist insurgency that overthrows a defective American government in the Pacific Northwest. Within this series Covington had a self-insert character as the "Old Man" who advises the main characters.

Kevin Hicks writing for Southern Poverty Law Center criticized his occult novels as "cheesy" and "confused", saying that Covington's failure to translate his "dubious talent" for propaganda writing into fiction writing was "a small gift for which the human race can feel truly grateful". Kaplan said he had "a rare talent with a pen" and that "no one on the receiving end of Covington’s bombastic wit emerged unscathed, and none would ever forgive the Nazi Bard". He attributed the "widespread anti-Covington animus" within the neo-Nazi movement to this. He further described the Northwest series as "in many ways the best of the American post-apocalyptic literature of the radical right". The reaction to the Northwest series within the White nationalist movement itself was mixed. One writer for the white supremacist publication Vanguard News Network praised it as a better work than The Turner Diaries and "the most authoritative treatment of White separatism in the English language". Other white nationalists criticized the strategy promoted in the book as too minimalist in its aims, failing to take over the whole nation.

Death and legacy

Covington died in Bremerton, Washington, on July 14, 2018. His ideas influenced some far right groups, including the Atomwaffen Division and The Base.

Publications

Nonfiction

• The March Up Country (1987)
• Dreaming the Iron Dream (2005)
• The Northwest Front Handbook (2014)

Fiction

• Vindictus: A Novel of History’s First Gunfighter (2000)
• Fire and Rain (2000)
• Slow Coming Dark: A Novel of the Age of Clinton (2000)
• The Stars in Their Path: A Novel of Reincarnation (2001)
• The Black Flame (2001)
• Revelation 9 (2001)
• Rose of Honor (2001)
• The Renegade (2001)
• Bonnie Blue Murder: A Civil War Mystery (2001)
• Other Voices, Darker Rooms: Eight Grim Tales (2001)

Northwest series

• The Hill of the Ravens (2003)
• A Distant Thunder (2004)
• A Mighty Fortress (2005)
• The Brigade (2007)
• Freedom's Sons (2013)

References

Works cited

• Back, Les (January 1, 2002). "Aryans reading Adorno: cyber-culture and twenty-first century racism". Ethnic and Racial Studies. 25 (4): 628–651. doi:10.1080/01419870220136664. ISSN 0141-9870.
• Boucher, Geoff; Young, Helen (February 2023). "Digital books and the far right". Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. 37 (1): 140–152. doi:10.1080/10304312.2023.2191905. ISSN 1030-4312.
• Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2002). Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity. New York University Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-3124-6.
• Kaplan, Jeffrey, ed. (2000). "Harold Covington". Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. pp. 76–90. ISBN 978-0-7425-0340-3.
• Kaplan, Jeffrey (July 2018). "America's apocalyptic literature of the radical right". International Sociology. 33 (4): 503–522. doi:10.1177/0268580918775583. ISSN 0268-5809.
• Michael, George (2009). Theology of Hate: A History of the World Church of the Creator. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ISBN 0-8130-3350-0.
• Michael, George (January 21, 2010). "Blueprints and Fantasies: A Review and Analysis of Extremist Fiction". Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. 33 (2): 149–170. doi:10.1080/10576100903488451. ISSN 1057-610X.
• Wheaton, Elizabeth (2009). Codename Greenkil: The 1979 Greensboro Killings. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-3148-5.
• Young, Helen; Downes, Stephanie (2022). "Popular fiction and white extremism: Neo-Nazi ideology and medievalist crime fiction". Literature Compass. 19 (11): –12684. doi:10.1111/lic3.12684. ISSN 1741-4113.

Further reading

• Atkins, Stephen E. (2002). "Covington, Harold (1953– )". Encyclopedia of Modern American Extremists and Extremist Groups. Westport: Greenwood Press. pp. 76–77. ISBN 978-0-313-31502-2.
• Newton, Michael (2014) [2007]. The Ku Klux Klan: History, Organization, Language, Influence and Activities of America's Most Notorious Secret Society. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-9559-7.

External links

• Harold Covington Part 01 on the FBI Vault