54. The Order
The Northwest is known as a haven for extremists. It should also be known for rejecting extremists.
SPOILER ALERT: If you’re worried about reading spoilers about the new film, The Order, you should skip this edition of the newsletter!
On October 28, 1983, three men entered World Wide Video Adult Book Store on a seedy part of Spokane’s East Sprague Avenue, slugged the owner in the face, held a gun to his head and demanded he hand over the $369 in the cash register. Later, the owner would describe his assailants to police as “dark complected.”
The men were, in fact, white.
Robert Mathews, Bruce Carroll Pierce and Randolph Duey, the robbers, were members of The Order: a Neo-Nazi terrorist group whose murders, bombings of synagogues and porn shops, and robberies of armored vehicles throughout the western United States are the subject of the new film starring Jude Law, The Order. Before entering the store, the men had “darkened their faces,” according to journalist Kevin Flynn’s book on the group (which the film is based on.). Mathews glued a phony mustache to his upper lip.”
The story of The Order is a Northwest story. In the early 1980s, the group’s campaign of terror left a trail of blood around the region. They stole millions in an effort to fund a race war like the one laid out in William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries1. The members of the group found common cause with others in the congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ-Christian in Hayden Lake, Idaho, where Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler preached his doctrine of hatred from the pulpit.
This loose history of The Order comes together in a pulse-raising heist thriller by director Justin Kurzel. (His brother Jed Kurzel, known for his musical work on The Babadook, composed a brilliant and haunting soundtrack to accompany the film.)
The Order is a good movie. I liked it. But like any Hollywood film, there are some fabrications,2 which were to be expected, and a questionable portrayal of Butler as a gentlemanly old preacher disappointed in the members of his flock who’d chosen violence.
Before I went to the movie, I reviewed an interview I did with Bill Morlin in April 2019, the legendary Spokesman-Review reporter who covered the region’s extremist groups until his death, who was also my good friend, about The Order.
In that interview, Morlin told me the story of a 1983 cross-burning at the Aryan Nations that he and a photographer reported from, all the while shadowed by armed guards. Afterward, the attendees of the cross-burning held a ceremony called "The Blessing of the Weapon,” presided over by Ku Klux Klan leader Bob Miles.3
“Each person in the circle would walk up with his weapon,” Morlin told me, pausing to point out that this ceremony was attended only by men. “They would have knives or handguns or long rifles. And each of them would be blessed by the master of ceremonies. The ceremony was to signify that these people were committing to the white cause and the fight for the white race that they envisioned was coming any day.”
Why was that significant, I asked Morlin.
“The others who were there, it turns out, were followers of Richard Butler and Miles who would end up forming The Order,” he said.
I forgot to bring a notepad with me to the movie theater, but grabbed a pile of napkins from the concession stand just before the theater went dark. I took six napkins of notes on the film as I watched.
Some moments didn’t need notes — like the first time the words “Spokane, Washington” and “Coeur d’Alene, Idaho” came up on the screen, and I felt my heart drop into my feet, and could see the shadow of Joe holding his head in his hands in the seat next to me.
This story of The Order is an integral part of the history of the Inland Northwest. So is the Aryan Nations, and the violence of the Phineas Priesthood, and the attempted bombing of the 2011 Martin Luther King Parade by Kevin Harpham, and so many other racist acts. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I grew up in Portland, which had its own violent history of Neo-Nazi activity. But I became a real person in the 14 years I lived in Spokane, and I became a journalist there. I take this history very, very personally. And it still hurts to know that a place that you’ve loved, where you found yourself, is also a place others associate with so much hate.
In an early scene, a character portraying a Kootenai County Sheriff deputy snaps at Jude Law’s FBI agent, “you know, not everyone around here was born under a white bedsheet.” The agent seems not to understand his point.
I admit I hoped the resistance to the Aryan Nations and their wider orbit would be portrayed — that Morlin would be a plucky reporter in a tucked-in shirt in the film, or that the citizen protests of the Aryan Nations in Spokane and North Idaho would make it to the screen.
That bedsheet quote grabbed me because it tipped a hand to the fact that this part of the Northwest is lesser-known, or misunderstood. Just as long as there have been racists in the Northwest, there have been people organizing and resisting that racism.4 But we aren’t known for that.
The Order — if you strip away the racist ideology and the real-life history — is a literal cops-and-robbers action movie where the heroes are the men of the law.
Shot in Alberta, Canada, it captures the strange truth that hateful ideas, historically, have germinated in close proximity to the vast wild lands of the West. On screen, and in real life, The Order printed counterfeit bills and plotted its crimes inside a nondescript shop with metal siding up a gravely dirt road near Metaline Falls, Washington. Like so many garages around this region, from the outside, you can’t know what’s inside. It’s only evident that a Confederate flag, or a Nazi flag, or a white power banner, hangs inside if the owner feels proud enough, and accepted enough, to work with the door up.
In one scene, Jude Law’s tortured FBI agent blows off steam hunting moose along a raging river that winds into a brawny, jagged mountain range, much like the Selkirks. From the trees, the fictional Mathews watches.
I doubt this scene is based in reality, but it is dripping with metaphor — Mathews hunting a federal agent like a silent cougar eyeing prey and deciding if it is up for a chase; the FBI agent out of his element, unaware. Scores have been written over the decades about the federal government’s slowness to take action on white domestic terror groups over the last fifty years. This felt like a nod to that unsettling reality.
The beauty of the film is these metaphorical touches. In a scene inside Butler’s Aryan Nations church, Mathews — played by Nicholas Hoult — stands up and shares his testimony. The crowd listens as he lectures of yeoman farmers working the land, of the United States as a country that had been stolen and conquered by white men, but that was being poisoned by racial integration. “I, for one, am tired of just talk,” he says, eyeing Butler, silent at his pulpit, before leading the congregation in a chant of “white power.”
The scene is effective. It shows that The Order was a project of white men wanting to retain power and control in a world they were told was theirs, and that they were losing an iron grip on. The viewer is hit repeatedly with this message.
Kurzel, the director, goes to great effort to portray Bob Mathews not as a brooding terrorist, but a flawed family man: he hosts backyard barbecues, teaches his young son to shoot, reads The Turner Diaries to the boy like a bedtime story. He has a pregnant mistress — which is one of our only hints at Mathews’ real-life view of women.5
Mathews went by Robbie as a kid and spent his formative years in Arizona, where he joined the ultra-conservative hyper paranoid John Birch Society at age 11, and converted to Mormonism in high school.
In Flynn’s book6, the author writes about the struggle in Mathews’ childhood home between his parents, Johnny and Una Mathews, as their son expressed interest in ultra-conservative ideas, then racist ones. An excerpt:
Una jumped in to defend her son. After all, it was the 1960s, a pretty precarious time in terms of the Soviet threat. It was popular for true-blue Americans to look for reds behind the bushes. If this is what Robbie heard on the news and talked about in school, they shouldn't stifle his interest. She thought it was a healthy sign that Robbie was taking an interest in world events.
Johnny relented, and Robbie became a young member of the John Birch Society as the group was peaking in Arizona during the Goldwater campaign. In many ways, Una thought as her son went through his teens, it was a good influence on Robbie. At a time when the hippie culture was blooming, he kept his hair cut short. He never touched drugs, never even took a drag from a cigarette. He didn't get into trouble with girls. In fact, he didn't even date until after high school.
Soon, Robbie went on a health kick. He took up wrestling and weightlifting in an earnest effort to shed his perpetual chubbiness. He stopped eating hot dogs after reading the ingredients that went into them. And when her teenage son got to be overbearing while expressing his beliefs, Una consoled herself by deciding she was lucky.
… In the years since he had joined the John Birch Society, Robbie had moved beyond simple anticommunism. He was forming a more complete conservative philosophy and now had a religion to go with it…
The year after he failed to graduate from McClintock High, Robbie made a lot of new friends [including] several young men with an intense fascination with firearms. Those friendships, plus events on the world stage that were troubling to Robbie, convinced him he should prepare for the endtime struggle. Robbie formed the Sons of Liberty, a group dominated by fellow Mormons and survivalists. He'd met some of them hanging around gun shops and motorcycle shops in south Phoenix. Robbie was easily the most intelligent one in the group, but he was fascinated with the netherworld. He was acting out a fantasy, imagining he was the last bulwark between decent society and communistic chaos.
So, The Order was, in fact, not simply white men aggrieved in the face of a changing world, scrambling to hang on to power. It was white men who, like Mathews, were steeped in hyper-conservative projects that were viewed by polite society as more acceptable than having long hair.
In a country like the United States, which was founded in the white supremacist project of Indigenous extermination, generations of white people had been — and continue to be — fed false promises, false hopes, false stories of victory and entitlement. And when that story starts to crumble and break, they have nothing to hold them up anymore. They fight and kill to make the story they were taught true.
At the end of the film, just before the credits, the viewer sees why this story is being told again. The Turner Diaries inspired Timothy McVeigh to carry out the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. It inspired January 6. This is true.
But the whole truth of all those moments in America is that they sprang from a long history of acceptable hatred. When that cop said that not everyone here grew up under a white bedsheet, the point was to say that the Aryan Nations’ racist ideas are not ours. Not everyone in the Northwest is a racist, right?
Here is the fatal flaw in that line of thinking: it suggests that wearing KKK hoods, or burning crosses, is what makes someone an extremist. And if we’re not doing that, we must not be on board.
But there’s a reason, though, that so much hate has flourished in our region. It’s because people have gotten away with it here, and they continue to. The main players in The Order were transplants. Richard Butler was from California. Even today, Northwesterners often point out that their loudest and most extreme residents are from out of state.
But they keep coming — and they keep coming because the region’s organized resistance to hate is the story that never quite breaks through.
A few more notes:
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I have a new story out in High Country News this month about the inspiring story of Exponent II: a Mormon feminist magazine that has been making the LDS Church hierarchy squirm for 50 years, and has no plans to stop: “The Passion of a Mormon Feminist.”
While we’re talking about journalism, please read my pal Ryan Haas’ new story about an Ashland, Oregon news outlet that is actually run by AI bots, and no one knew it until he started reporting. Amazing investigative journalism: “AI Slop is already invading Oregon’s local journalism.”
More from the ambitious local journalism department: freelance journalist and HCN contributor Theo Whitcomb has an excellent new story about a white supremacist trying to buy part of Coos Bay’s Port.
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll direct you toward Two Minutes Past Nine, the podcast I made with the BBC, for more reporting on the oft-cited novel. For that show, I spoke at length with Pierce’s son, as well as other prominent militia figures from the 1990s.
The most egregious fictions I could count were two. First, Walter West’s body has, actually, never been found. Secondly, in the film, Mathews shoots and kills a police officer. If I’m interpreting the film correctly, I think this hints at the notion that Mathews may have been involved in a shooting that wounded an FBI agent in Oregon just weeks before his death. But this has never been proven.
Important to note that before Miles was blessing weapons for The Order, he had been a part of a plot to blow up school buses that had been used in desegregation efforts.
Just as recently as 2020, when racial justice protests exploded in Portland in response to the murder of George Floyd, few reporters who flew in to cover those events put together why, exactly, those protests were so virulent. They reported on broken windows and mass arrests, but fewer, if any, connected the protests to the wider movement of resistance to racism here. For example, there wasn’t much interest in understanding why so much ire was pointed toward police officers; reporting by OPB in 2021 found that Portland ranked fifth-worst in the country for racial disparities in its policing.
Flynn reported in his book that Mathews did bring up plural marriage to his mistress. “Polygamy is alright,” he said. “It’s biblical.”
The Silent Brotherhood is out of print, but an updated version of the book came out today under the title The Order: Inside America’s Racist Underground.
My sister-in-law was a new Special Agent with the FBI in Seattle at the time. One of her assignments was to act as if she were beachcombing in front of the known hideout(house). She told me she was sure they had guns aimed at her the entire time.
I'm not sure if I'm up to see the movie.
Excellent piece as always. I can just see you taking six napkins of notes! ❤️