America’s fraught 2024 election could be hit by far-right violence, warns a high-profile FBI informant who spent years infiltrating the Klu Klux Klan in a new book.
Joe Moore spent a decade tasked with infiltrating KKK chapters in Florida to investigate enduring ties between law enforcement and the white supremacist organization, an assignment that included disrupting a murder plot by a trio of Klansmen who worked as prison guards.
Now the former US army sniper is out with a book, White Robes and Broken Badges, detailing those experiences – and applying the lessons he learned to an approaching election freighted with fears of the impact of far-right and white supremacist groups.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll in May reported that two out of three Americans said they were concerned that political violence could follow the 5 November election.
“Unfortunately, I think it’s relevant to any time in our nation’s history, not just this election,” Moore says. Far-right ideology has two origins, he has come to learn. “One is geographical, where you are raised up in an area where that ideology is simply a part of a belief system. The second is a generational origin in which it’s handed down.”
And so begins a story of how Moore, living near Gainesville in the 2010s, became involved with white supremacists in Florida, rose to the position of Grand Knighthawk, the klan’s security official, and disrupted a plot by Klansmen, all prison guards, to murder a Black former inmate, and of bringing down two major KKK figures, Grand Dragon Jamie Ward and Exalted Cyclops Charles Newcomb.
“In my first tour inside the KKK – the nation’s first domestic terrorist group, founded more than 150 years ago – I foiled a plot to assassinate then candidate Barack Obama, only to witness the Klan use his election as a rallying cry and recruiting tool that ignited a firestorm within the white nationalist right,” Moore writes in the book.
After serving in foreign authoritarian countries, he continues, “nothing I witnessed in any of them scares me as much what we’re facing at home now. Should we be afraid? With the 2024 election looming, and democracy itself on the ballot, the answer is yes, we should be very afraid.”
Moore described meeting a regional Klan leader, or Grand Dragon, who lived near Rosewood, Florida, the site of a racist massacre of dozens of Black people and the destruction of the town in 1923. “After an evening at the Grand Dragon’s home I walked over to remnants of Rosewood and realized that I had the power to stop the next Rosewood,” he says.
Moore’s extraordinary tale has been told previously – both as an Associated Press story in 2021 corroborated using court records and trial transcripts, and as a documentary, Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK, but Moore’s new account comes with an immediate political message.
The foreword is written by the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, who last week described his experience during the January 6 riot to Democratic conventioneers in Chicago. In the book, Raskin describes the “mobilization of domestic violent extremist groups to act as the frontline shock troops in the assault”.
Moore, Raskin writes, “shows how the KKK remains a central entry point and organizing force for violent white nationalism in America”.
Moore says he tried to remain politically neutral, for doing otherwise would mean risking mistakes. But finding the right people to report the corruption he had uncovered was more difficult – Florida officials, he claims, didn’t want to hear his message of KKK infiltration into law enforcement.
“It was far more prevalent and consequential than officials were willing to admit, so much so that state officials came out and said there was no information that the issue was any more broad than the case in front of them. But I had a list of officers that were active members and actively recruiting other people and sending active Klan members into the law enforcement hiring process as well.”
The KKK may not be the force it once was, but other white nationalist organizations moved in to adopt the messaging and the membership, among them militia groups and movements like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.
Moore estimates that by 2014, one-third of all Klan members were also members of another similar organization and the transition was being encouraged at the highest levels of the organization.
“It just so happens that geographical and generational origins are dispersed, so if America was to have another civil war it would not be north versus south, but it would be families and geographical locations against other families and geographical locations.”
White supremacists moved north in the US – joining homegrown ones already there – for reasons of economic prosperity “but they brought with them the generational origins of racism and seed different areas of the north for racism to grow generationally”, he adds.
White Robes is ghost-written by Jon Land, author of the insurrectionist thriller Murder at the CDC, dozens of mystery-suspense novels and the teen comedy film Dirty Deeds, that produces a clash between style and message.
No matter. Moore has an informed point when it comes to the infiltration of law enforcement – some 20% of those arrested during the January 6 Capitol attack are believed to have some relationship to US law enforcement.
“Criminal organizations of all kinds want to gain access to police powers, be it prisons, local police or state police. They want information to have control of their environment,” Moore points out. “But the KKK is not about controlling their environment to make money but to fulfill an ideology to bring about a new government or system.”
That in turn seeds generations below who also join law enforcement with racist ideology, he says. “It comes down to propagandizing, a self-fulfilling cycle of ideology and survivability. They fear for the loss of their ideology.”
