The Northwest Territorial Failure
A Case Study in Abortive Far-Right Movements
On December 1st, 1996, a Sunday morning, I stepped out of the door of my apartment in North Carolina, and almost stepped right into a mound of clearly human feces. I know to a moral certainty that this act was committed by the National Alliance, and since then I am told that a certain individual living in Raleigh was responsible. I happen to believe that as disgusting as it is, this is one of the most vitally significant experiences I ever underwent. It was, for me, a kind of epiphany.
There before me under my poised shoe was twenty-five years of my life. From 1971 until 1996 I served The Movement with my entire being, and there waiting for me to step forward was the cosmic commentary on my whole adult life. What I had been risking my life, my freedom and my future for was indeed the Movement—the Bowel Movement[…] I knew then—and I know now—that if I stay with this, it will always be the Bowel Movement. There will be no change. It is NOT going to get better. Twenty-five years later, in the year 2021. when am 68 years old, I will one day step out of my door and find curds placed on my doorstep by deranged, dysfunctional morons who claim to speak for the Aryan race.
[…] But I can't leave. Because the IDEA—the SPIRIT—the SOUL of National Socialism is a thing of such beauty, such intense power, such glory, that it is to me the very essence of life. That's how crazy I am, people. I am willing to accept the turds on the doorstep in order to continue even the most tenuous, faintest contact with that wonderful, unspeakably beautiful and life-giving ideal of Adolf Hitler.
Harold Covington, 1998
It’s been just under 7 years since Harold Covington, the enigmatic American Goebbels for a number of National Socialist movements across the country, passed away in his new home in Bremerton, WA. A continent's distance from his estranged family in North Carolina, his body was discovered days later when a fan no longer got responses to his emails. He died there dedicated to his latest, and final, attempt and failure to ignite the flame of National Socialism in the American mind.
This effort was known by many names and organizations: the Northwest Front (NF), Northwest Territorial Imperative, or the Butler Plan. In essence they were all the same, seeking to encourage Whites to move en-masse to the Pacific Northwest and secure a racial homeland in anticipation of the inevitable collapse of the American state, or even to begin an insurrection against it.
Either a quick or careful eye would see that the several decades behind this effort have produced virtually nothing, doubly indicated by Covington's thought that he had given up everything only to be rewarded with a pile of shit on his front porch. 50 years have gone by since Richard Butler began this movement in Coeur d'Alene, and what little could be said about the state of Hitlerism in the Pacific Northwest could only involve its total rout. Decades of that involved the project of Covington, and years after his death, the entire movement has gone silent. Just 2 months before his death, Covington posted online, “Unless something changes, we ain’t going nowhere.” What is left today consists only of those romantics wishing to pick up where was left of, as others refuse to do so.
Selected in part by Southerners for its relatively promising racial makeup, Washington state has declined from 95% White since the launch of the NF to just 66% in 2023—essentially tied with Alabama and Louisiana. Oregon slipped similarly from 97% to 73%, and even isolated red state Idaho declined from an essential ethnostate outside its American Indian population to 82%.
The evidence of failure extends further than mere demographic trends. Dissident right-wing groups generally have completely failed to infiltrate politics and succeed at institutional capture across the entire region. Look no further than Butler's promised land in Coeur d'Alene, where a Republican sheriff arrested, unmasked, and essentially paraded members of (the relatively milquetoaste) Patriot Front. 50 years of activism, and not even the home base of operations isn’t dangerous enemy territory. If this effort ever even got off the runway, it has quickly found itself grounded—abandoned, and impotent.
On his metaphor more than anything, I agree with Covington. This Bowel-Movement is indeed incredibly illuminating, and much can be discussed in hindsight of it. The story of the failure of the Northwest movements (and many others like them!) tells us much about the nature of radical right-wing movements, why they fail, and what can be done to avoid similar mistakes. We can additionally analyze why contemporary efforts to revive the NF will likely fail.
In an autopsy of Covington's dream, we will detail two individual causes of death: purity spiraling, and a neglect for the need of local support. While each could be lethal, many right-wing groups subject themselves to all of them at once. Covington's life and his involvement with the NF will serve as a valuable case study for this phenomenon.
Purity Spiraling
All social groups and political movements decide for themselves to what extent they will enforce the ideological barriers to entry, to what degree they will compromise with other movements, and when the principle of exile is necessary. A problem can arise if this pruning becomes excessive, where allies are outcasted for minute disagreements. Those who are doing the outcasting are rewarded with the image of ideological purity, until one out-does them, and the cycle repeats indefinitely. It's a vicious, fully-automated game of Russian roulette with a Glock 19. Unless everyone agrees to put the gun down, no one will survive the race to the bottom.
Leftist psychology is particularly known for this phenomenon, as it relentlessly regulates its internal belief system and messaging. While a Republican might get away with being anything from a gay weed libertarian to a Christian nationalist, no one could last in a gathering of progressives if they remained standing when it came time to kneel in the memory of George Floyd. In fact, “cancel culture” is a problem within leftist circles more than it is for external victims of its projection. See this case study where a simple online knitting forum destroyed a leader for insinuating her upcoming trip to India would evoke a “primitive” feeling.
But for the far-right, things are particularly high-octane. The right-wing lives and dies by one of its most essential desires and ends: purity. Be it racial, sexual, moral, ideological—perhaps *the* point of the modern right is to identify and preserve elements of purity. And more than anyone else, it is the dissident right that has grown the most angered by the nation's failure to do so, a failure it places particularly on the mainstream right. When they question, What have conservatives conserved?, it’s no mere pejorative, they are alluding directly to this loss of purity.
Due to the failure of mainstream politics to preserve the moral and cultural framework of the nation, dissidents inevitably fracture on the grounds that new organizations must be more pure. By consequence, right-wing movements soon face the problem of purity spiraling. More ideologically pure positions are rewarded, while positions which seek to moderate or compromise are cast out as insufficient, breadcrumb-seeking vestiges of the mainstream who don’t know when to move on. The race to to bottom begins, until eventually even the most radical and hard-headed of movements can’t agree on a single thing. They commit an automatic suicide, dissolving into a million splinters over an over, like a reactor meltdown experiencing a run-off.
The far-right “scene” is rife with this problem. It is incredibly fractious, and tends to feature more internal brawling than external success. I am assured those involved in its daily discourse (of even alt-right flavor) need few examples outside of their own experiences. Gang warfare rules the day in these circles, as its been 80 years since it has had a confident Caesar.
Indeed, Covington himself was chiefly guilty of purity spiraling, and eventually a victim of its reciprocal nature. This bitter insistence on internal strife is his legacy. In an already fractious far-right scene, Covington earned himself the ire of contemporaries due to his incessant criticism and bad-mouthing of adjacent organizations, such as William Luther Pierce's National Vanguard. Researcher Jeffrey Kaplan writes:
That said, Covington has always raised more ire than virtually anyone in the fissiparous world of American National Socialism.
The explanation for this remarkable distinction is probably the fact that Harold Covington has a rare talent with a pen, which he wields like rapier. Even William Pierce did not have Covington’s lethal facility with prose. No one on the receiving end of Covington’s bombastic wit emerged unscathed, and none would ever forgive the Nazi Bard. The widespread anti-Covington animus may be a big part of the explanation for why his Northwest Trilogy has not, despite its comparative literary merit, met with a greater movement response.
Kaplan, America’s Apocalyptic Literature of the Radical Right
As it turns out, spending two decades doing nothing but writing scathing attacks against your close ideological neighbors—these were all ardent supporters and contending heirs of George Lincoln Rockwell—garners little support. As a result, Covington spent nearly his entire adult life fleeing from place to place, movement to movement, until he was simply moved on from. So vicious was Covington's purity spiraling that many were convinced he was a federal agent or informant. One early-age internet meme spread mocking “Weird Harold” Covington with a bubble quote from Bill Clinton remarking, “I promise to pay Harold Covington on time and to help him destroy White resistance”.
Because of his noble hard-headedness and love of the circular firing line, Covington rarely had friends, and the Northwest movement recruited few colonists. No in-person headquarters was established, no party structured or staffed, and more importantly—he simply could not transition his newsletter readers into willing residents of his coming republic. He openly admitted all of this, but simply couldn’t let go.
Evidently, the new annual wave of Northwest believers haven’t learned a single thing from Covington's life, or even his own direct warnings. They have doubled down on ideological absolutism, expending most of their energy on threatening those adjacent and sympathetic but unwilling to take a leap of faith. In one post responding to me on this issue, a NF proponent remarked, “deradicals and reactionaries will fill the same holes as the rest of our enemies”. They have continued to be fissiparous, labeling Covington's successor Andreas Donner a “fucking traitor”.
Speaking of Donner and the topic of purity spiraling, how about his response to Radio Free Northwest, which he inherited after Covington's death, not raking in enough financial support? Predictably, he attacks his own:
“It looks like it was a massive amount of our supporter base deciding Donald Trump was more important than actually ending white genocide. I will make it quite plain that the entire Northwest Front is rather disappointed in every single one of you that engaged in that decision-making process.
[…] Since our efforts towards demonstrating that have been met with, well, a yawn at best, we’re simply going to take care of what we need to take care of, because we are tired of putting on a show for people that can’t be bothered to participate anyway.”
Donner, RFN, 2016
There is much to say about the problems of trying to generate a Republic merely from contemporary ideological maxims—much—something radicals of all flavors, including Christian nationalists, have yet to understand. But particular to this case, they will not even progress to the stage where this realization occurs, because purity spiraling will prevent the very formulation of that ideology in the first place. One minor disagreement, and the entire house of cards falls. Perhaps it will be, as it was before, disagreement over the idea of a “Republic”. Perhaps it will be, as it was before, due to the general stature of a far-right dissident who is too drunk in his love for purity to let his mind think before he insults. The gang wars will go on in either case.
What is hilarious about this entire ordeal is that individuals who are banking their lives and renown on earning the trust and favor of the simple locals of the Northwest and convert them to White identitarianism can’t even swallow their pride in conversation with the already converted. If they want to kill and “bury” a Buchananite or far-too-moderate Bronze Age eugenicist, what makes them think they will ever develop amicable terms with the soccer moms of Spokane? Oh don’t worry, we’ll just bury those whores, too. Do you think they understand the problem yet? Evidently not, and they never will. Because they don’t actually want a nation, they want a cult posed as an ideological vanguard. But for this vanguard, no reserves will be available.
Eventually you're going to have to decide if you want to build a cult or if you want to build a nation. The latter entails providing and indeed protecting the downtrodden, the low IQ, the disease-prone, and the simple. Is your obese Fox News great aunt not your people? No? Well, 20 people it is then. Until some level of grace (and indeed, deradicalization) is entertained, Covington's final warning will ring true—”We ain’t going nowhere”.
A Lack of Local Support
Immediately following the withdrawal of German forces from Greece in 1944, the country was thrust into a brutal civil war between the communist guerrilla forces (KKE) who occupied the vacuum, and the liberal government-in-exile, eager get back to running their homeland. Eventually pushed back by British forces, the KKE were stuck in the mountainous northern strip of the peninsula. However, communist nations of Yugoslavia and Albania offered refuge to the KKE, allowing them to occupy a safe base of operations to launch raids into the Greek interior.
The communists, faced with an increasingly learned and armed conventional Allied enemy, resorted to terror and intimidation to secure the support of local Greek villages in an effort to push the lines south. This would turn out to be their undoing. Throughout the war, communists did the typical communist acts of murdering officials, razing towns, and even kidnapping children—some 30,000 of which were taken by communist forces, and shipped off to Albania and Yugoslavia for re-education.
The locals were understandably infuriated, and quickly leapt back into the arms of the Allies. The KKE was deprived of local support: no friends, no secret bases, no village willing to help. Worse, the Yugoslavians responded to international pressure concerning the brutality and closed their border to their communist peers. Naked, the insurgency was effectively over, and the last holdouts were squashed within the year.
The Greek communists made an error that is fatal to any insurrection: they pushed the common folk into the arms of the government they were attempting to topple. Effectively, they were no longer liberators at the tails of retreating panzers, but foreign enemies seeking to establish tyrannical rule.
Does this sound familiar? To a reader of American National Socialist literature, it should be immediately.
The apocalyptic literature of the far-right rarely deals with the nuances of ringing doorbells, running for office, or, ironically, writing a newsletter… what a bore! Rather, it engages in dreams of brutal, civilization-ending violence, a fire so bright and hot that it incinerates the rotting flesh of Western civilization off the bone—nothing short could save us. For example, in Pierce's Turner Diaries, race-traitors are mass-executed, and a nuclear missile is launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base onto the Pentagon.
Covington's “Northwest Novels” were little different, with special added emphases on civilians and dissenters. In The Hill of the Ravens, a mole is captured and publicly executed, and supporters carve racial slurs into his hanging body as a warning for the locals. In Freedom's Sons, a liberal professor is crucified in a town square to cheering and entertained tricoteuses. Covington's portrayal of graphic violence is, in fact, the point: this is a propaganda work (an art he excelled at) intended to desensitize the reader to the brutal but necessary actions required to achieve the preconceived ends.
But what Covington—nor anyone in this sphere of literature—never seemed to understand, is that a lack of public support is not simply overcome by super-dedicated and super-competent guerilla forces; the local population is not simply overwhelmed by fear and intimidation into compliance. Attempting it quickly makes you a foreign enemy, as the Greek communists eventually learned the hard way.
In fact, from the onset, it seems that the Northwest supporters have already declared the locals their enemy. They have internalized a vengeful mission of retribution against not just the government in Washington, but every tier and degree of American life and society. This compounds with the problem of purity spiraling, as the lack of purity within the average American justifies further violence, which itself pushes the average American further away from the NF's ideal.
So develops a vicious cycle which ends disastrously for them; and it should. It is no wonder that a sphere with literature such as this, following the erotic fantasies of men like Covington, has produced absolutely nothing but acts of random, senseless, and counterproductive violence.
A movement with such visions for the American people will get nowhere, nor should it. We want a nation, not a school shooting. Revolutionaries should learn fast that, no matter what they believe, the mob still rules supreme; and if you are to inherit this people, you better learn how to love them rather than how to bomb them.
As Joseph P. Martino puts it:
“The object of any resistance movement is, ultimately, to cause people to quit believing in the existence of, and giving support to, the existing state. The focus of any resistance movement must be on the minds of the people. Armed resistance is simply a means of getting people to change their minds. The people must start looking at the state as “them,” and the resistance movement as “us.” History shows this can be done. When it is done, the task of the resistance movement is essentially finished, except for mopping up.”
Resistance to Tyranny, 2010
A Rude Awakening
We have beaten around the bush for too long regarding the most obvious critique of this movement and its supporters. It is flatly delusions of grandeur, nonsensical; in fact, it is outright mastubatory. In no reality will anything like this ever happen and in no scenario will the most tangible benefit be procured from it. And indeed, that was Covington's life, his bag of shit on his front porch.
The reasoning for this extends beyond the bare observation of this movement’s output, as even in theory it is wholly impractical, contradictory, and to someone not suffering from a mental illness, completely silly. Scratch the surface just a little and you will uncover that this is not a serious plan of action, it’s an ideological goon session. It’s a 14 year old's list of travel destinations for when he runs away and totally owns his mudshark stepmom.
Let us look at “the plan”: the Butler Plan as a short exercise. Step 1: Relocate like-minded White patriots to the PNW. Nevermind that for reasons shown earlier we will never be able to define what type of person we want in the first place. But even in the Plan itself, Butler seems fairly convinced that getting people to buy in will be impossible:
We understand and accept that many White people desiring to Come Home will be little short of destitute, but we simply do not have the resources to provide assisted passage like Israel does today and Australia used to do. People who Come Home to the Northwest must do so like the old Western pioneers, completely off their own bat and on their own dime. They must load up all of their worldly goods into a Conestoga wagon (or Ryder truck, these days) and set off into the unknown. Let’s consider this a test of character.
Look, you’re going to be broke. We’re going to put you in a dusty apartment. Actually, we don’t technically exist yet, so you will put yourself in a dusty apartment. That one—the one in the 67% black part of Tacoma. Welcome Home, White man. By the way, get ready to cough up some money so we can start saving the White race.
An interesting metaphor of the pioneers. Weren’t they coming for, I don’t know, land? Troves of gold? A free and lawless frontier? None of these things exist today, he even admits as much that the opposite is to be expected. Come to enemy territory, to be broke, to be chattel; and one day—fingers crossed—we’ll get there. Anyways, where are normal civilizational activities in this arrangement? Marriage? Families? Jobs? That's something the pioneers had settled, you don't.
There's a reason why Butler, in a hilarious twist of irony, compares this movement to British Israelism and Zionism. The future heirs of White Utopia are called to be Jews seeking the promised land of Israel, dropping everything, leaving their homes, and preparing for a war of conquest against the native Arabs and the humanitarian regimes of the West. Unfortunately, this idea shares little in common with the historical Zionist project aside from loose conception. There is nothing to spur White racial exodus to the PNW: no religious fervor, no “push” of the Holocaust and Soviet imperialism, no British Empire to help facilitate the transition.
I don’t doubt that a few will heed the call anyways. Like Covington, for them stepping in a pile of shit is worth a connection to the ideal of the Führer. But they should understand that their plan requires mass appeal, a mass Exodus to a promised land, and the current incentives for all but a couple hundred people is exactly zero.
Conclusion
The far-right scene—its people, its movements, its organizations, and its ideas—have been incompetent, idiotic, and reprehensible for decades. Is anyone surprised at all that it has garnered nearly zero appeal, and has collapsed entirely from what little the American public entertained it in the 50s-80s? It wasn't merely America's distaste for Nazism in the midst of the post-war consensus, this mindset was validated and reinforced by the actions of these groups, and the words of people like Covington.
As if that wasn't enough, the far-right tendency to collapse into internal strife through the social phenomenon of purity spiraling all but guarantees an organization capable of the reforms necessary to tame these problems will never arise. In fact, I am certain that if this article is lucky enough to be circulated, a common response will be heard: You don't have what it takes, or more simply, You're Jewish. In translation, I'm more noble than you, more pure than you, and my ideas are so true that we don't need you at all. So echoed every single right-wing organization for the last hundred years.
No rebuttal of suggestions of political activity is complete without offering more promising ones. There are two problems we have to get over.
First, the purity spiraling. If you are unwilling to take a single trench because it's not Paris, you're never even going to cross the Meuse. This problem has defined the static pouting of dissidents in the Trump era. Because J.D. Vance has an Indian wife, they can't celebrate the southern border being effectively closed for the first time since the Calhoun presidency. Because Trump kissed the Wall, they will quite literally buy campaign billboards for race Marxists. Purity spiraling leads to violent accelerationism, where because no one can agree to take a single win, these types just pout and wait for a nuclear holocaust—then they can get to work on Utopia. If anything is to ever happen, this sentiment has to die.
This ties into the second problem. Because they hate this presidency for example, they hate the average prole dumb enough to cheer for it even more. For a White nationalist circle, these types can't seem to get over their utter hatred for the White commoner and the American nation. More than anything, these are their two greatest enemies. Therefore, the plan to simply relocate oneself away from his Presbyterian family in North Carolina for a mannerbund of shooting buddies in the outskirts of Seattle makes more sense. People aren't his metric, the health and wellbeing of the nation are irrelevant, what matters is finding and surrounding oneself with fellow ideologues. It is a (hopefully) permanent online meet-up. The scorn for the common man, the neglect of one's duties to his native soil and his family, leads inevitably to a mindset that neglects the need for support from these people. And just like every other failed revolution, they will find themselves completely isolated. Pure, all in agreement, all loyal, and all defeated.
So, the general framework is simple. First, far-right groups need to, quite literally, deradicalize. It is safely guaranteed that they will not only be unable to find friends, but continue to make enemies across every corner of the political spectrum. Whether or not they develop a long-haul ploy to increasingly radicalize back as more victories buys more breathing room is irrelevant until they decide to make the decision to settle in earnest to begin with.
Secondly, for the love of God, they desperately need to learn to love their people again. The musings of violent terror against the suburbs stops. The mastubatory fantasies of putting crosshairs on any detractors ends. Your fentanyl-addicted trailer park neighbor is your countryman. When you win, you're going to get them clean, you're going to get them a cozy landscaping job, you're going to build a community instead of a DMZ; because these are your countrymen, and you're going to learn to fulfill your obligations to them rather than making Hyperborea edits of how to kill them—understand? In time, they will pay you back. Their children will help yours. This is how nations are actually sustained.
It is specifically because they hate their hometown, specifically because they want to be around ideologically pure peers, that this migration to a concentrated location is proposed in the first place. The central thesis and desire of the movement is a failure, and has been a failure.
I urge people to be a little more thoughtful and tactful, and to pick better heroes than Covington, Pierce, Koehl—any of these guys. The number of young men they have destroyed by convincing them into terrorist acts or just wasting their time on nonsense.
Who knows what could be accomplished if people established a dedication to their communities and families currently at hand, rather than electing to abandoning them for an American ISIS. Who knows what could be accomplished if they attempted, first, to influence and dominate existing institutions before musing about which of their doors to put pipe bombs at.
Indeed, in 1980, a little-known 26 year-old Nationalist Socialist ran to be the Attorney General in North Carolina under the Republican ticket. He held effective rallies, wrote rousing articles urging North Carolinians to “embrace barbarism”, and secured nearly 47% of the vote in a narrow defeat. That 26 year old man was Harold Covington. What could have been, we will never know.
Please be more judicious with your lives, and avoid the mistakes of priors.
For an ideology so taboo as National Socialism, it was pretty much impossible in the pre-internet era for a movement centered around it to result in anything but disaster. The amount of lumpens outweighs the amount of intellectually curious dissidents enough for the former to comprise the bulk of self-identifying Nazis. They are interested in it because they're disagreeable and misanthropic, but most of them would have a hard time even giving you a consistent definition of National Socialism that doesn't float off into vibe-world. An ethnostate of these "Wignats" would possibly be as dysfunctional as Black Africa, not because of the failures of Nazism but because of the lack of human capital. But people would interpret it as the product of Ideology.
I think today, with the internet, it is less of a problem. Nazis went from being seen as blond beasts with thick accents and combovers, to tatted up meth-addicted prison skinheads, to edgy teenagers. People are easier exposed to taboo information on the internet. There's still a lumpen element in the radical scene, but most people come into the far-right because they got "redpilled". But this is both a blessing and a curse, because the online right-wing space has basically taken that position of fantasy world that hypothetical post-apocalyptic ethnostates. Social media is basically an MMORPG at this point. Being racist online is a way a lot of guys like to wind down and relax after a long day at school or at the office. It allows for a lot more well-adjusted people to participate in far-right movements but makes real-world action less likely. You don't have to have nothing to lose anymore to get involved in these movements, you just have to be willing to live a bit of a double life.
I know some people are going to soyrage over "deradicalize" because they think it means throwing away your beliefs, but the purpose of NS was never to be the most radical. If you want to be the most radical, stop showering and become a black schizophrenic fentanyl addict, you can't get more radical than that. If your goal is instead to save your country no matter what, then you are going to have to start liking some of your countryman. Liking people is genuinely hard, because of how far gone most people are and on some level I still want the apocalypse option, but with zero signs of a civil war brewing in our life time (at least on true pro-white grounds) I think we have no choice but to get away from the violent retard image the purity spiraling right has been cultivating. I saw some groyper shot his parents in Wisconsin because he was going to try to kill Trump and "save the white race" how do you save the white race by killing 3 white people?