It turns out that 24-year-old Matt Buschbacher already had experience leading underground groups of men when he moved out to Colorado and started the Denver Pick Up Artists Lair earlier this year. He'd also been a leader of the hate movement.
Buschbacher had dropped off the radar of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights watch group, after he left the Navy SEALs with an honorable discharge in 2005, but he came into focus again when David Holthouse, an investigator with the nonprofit center and a former Westword writer, recognized his name and photograph from our June 1 cover story, "Game On." Holthouse had other photos of that face, but instead of showing Buschbacher posing with a single red rose, he was seig-heiling with a burning swastika towering in the background. The image plays prominently in the SPLC's recent report on neo-Nazi extremists infiltrating the U.S. military, which can be found at www.splcenter.org.
"Under pressure to meet wartime manpower goals, the U.S. military has relaxed standards designed to weed out racist extremists," reads the introduction to Holthouse's July 7 story. "Large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the armed forces."
The SPLC's first example of a potentially violent neo-Nazi was Denver's very own self-proclaimed ladies' man, who has a business training lonely guys how to pick up women. The story outlines Buschbacher's affiliations with the hate movement, starting when he was ordained as a reverend in the World Church of the Creator as a teenager in 1998. By 1999 -- the same year World Church member Benjamin Smith went on a three-day shooting spree targeting Jews, Asians and blacks -- the young Buschbacher was leading his own chapter of the hate group in Cincinnati. After Smith killed two people, Buschbacher was quoted calling him "a dedicated activist for our racial cause" in the Cincinnati Enquirer. "We have pride in our race, heritage, and culture, and we will do anything to prevent it from being destroyed," he said. "White man is the creator, the creator of civilizations."
Buschbacher says he was "blown away" that the SPLC report on extremists included him, playing down his connection to the hate movement as "one of those kid things."
"My brother was into it," he says. "I was following him around. I wasn't even active in it, really. I haven't even talked to any people like that for years." As Buschbacher explains it, the only reason he was the "leader" in Cincinnati was because he was the only person there; the closest organization member lived in the next state: "It was a waste of time, a waste of money and a waste of energy. I don't believe in it, and I was filling my time with it more because I was bored and had nothing better to do than actually cared about it."
Buschbacher says he joined the military not to recruit other soldiers for a race war, as the SPLC report suggests, but simply because he'd dreamed of being a Navy SEAL since he was a little kid. "When I joined the military, nobody [in the movement] knew what happened to me, because I left all that stuff behind and was moving into a positive direction in my life," he says.
The SPLC, however, claims that Buschbacher violated military regulations for years by staying active in the neo-Nazi movement after becoming a SEAL. The law center even notified military officials of this while Buschbacher was stationed in Baghdad, the report notes, but no action was taken.
According to the report, the photo of Buschbacher and the flaming swastika was taken at a skinhead festival in 2000, just before he joined the Navy. Then, in 2002, while an active-duty SEAL, he attended an invite-only National Alliance leadership conference. The group's founder, the late William Pierce, had written about the military as a recruitment opportunity for the National Alliance, and also authored The Turner Diaries, a novel on revolution and race war that inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. After the conference and while still in the military, the report continues, Buschbacher used the screen name Mattiasb88, (the 88 stands for "Heil Hitler") to distribute National Alliance fliers and post messages on white-supremacist websites.
"Most of what they have in there is not only bullshit, it's completely a lie," Buschbacher says. "That picture they have of me was taken when I was sixteen, and not in 2000."
He doesn't deny that Mattiasb88 was his screen name, but he says the center's report overstates just about everything else. He claims he only "stopped by" the 2002 National Alliance conference because he was skiing at a resort eight miles away, and his brother had asked him to pick up some things he had left behind when he quit the organization. Military investigators did contact him after they were notified of his ties to the movement, Buschbacher adds, but they determined he was no longer involved.
"I'm good friends with people of all races and don't have time to waste with petty and trivial racial stereotypes and anger," he says. "I've got much more important things going on with my life and find it insulting and petty that the SPLC would waste their time writing a story on someone who hasn't been involved in that stuff for several years."
