Ex-Skinhead Leyden on Supremacist Motivation, Threat

TJ Leyden, 43, spent 15 years as a leader in the white supremacist movement. He covered his body with Nazi tattoos and advocated violence against Jews and other minorities. And then the scales fell from his eyes, and Leyden realized he’d been living a lie and dragging others into it.

Since his transformation more than a decade ago, Leyden, who grew up in Fontana and wreaked havoc in Los Angeles, has promoted not hatred but tolerance. He wrote a book, “Skinhead Confessions” (Cedar Fort Inc., 2008), and worked at the Museum of Tolerance in West L.A. until moving last year to southern Utah, where he hopes to open a ranch for troubled youth. In the wake of last week’s fatal shooting of a museum guard by James von Brunn, an 88-year-old U.S. Navy veteran, at the United States Museum of the Holocaust, Leyden talked to The Journal about the thinking behind such actions.

Jewish Journal: How do white supremacists see the world?
TJ Leyden: It’s pretty much black and white. The white race and everybody else. Jewish people technically are white; Asians have light skin. But they say they technically are not white because of features and religion.

JJ: Why is there so much overlap between white supremacists, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists?
TL: If people start to buy them and believe them, conspiracies are a good recruitment school. The government was behind Sept. 11 and all this other stuff. Who’s really in control, and who really planned this whole thing was the government, who is controlled by Israel. And the person will say, ‘Wow, you know even more than most people.’

JJ: The Jews always are the ones at the root of the problem, right?
TL: As far as they are concerned, yes. That is pretty much how it boils down.

JJ: Do you think most white supremacists have any interaction with Jews?
TL: They have absolutely no interaction. I think they have no clue about Judaism; I don’t think they have any clue about the different types of Judaism that are out there. They basically think all Jews are the same. All Jews are wealthy; all Jews are money-grubbers; they all have the hooknose — all the old stereotypes that you saw from Nazi Germany. But they also will say that you’ve got to be careful, because some Jews will pretend to be Christian; some will pretend to be conservative; some will pretend to be liberal. But they think they are all the same, that they all are in this cabal together.

JJ: How did you get involved in the skinhead movement?
TL: I got involved back before it had any racist overtones whatsoever. We had just come out of the Carter era; everybody was loving the flag; we had just gotten the hostages back. We all started to become ultra-nationalists, and then we started to hear from England that if you want to protect your country, look at who the problem is. That’s when the racism started to come in. Oh, it’s the blacks, it’s the Hispanic gangs that are dealing dope to white kids at school. Then we started to hear that it wasn’t them — it was the Jews who were in control, and if the Jews weren’t in America, America would be all white. They got you to hate so many groups first, and then once you got a good hatred base, they brought in the Jewish question.

JJ: What was your reaction Wednesday to the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum?
TL: When it happened I was waiting to find out whether it was a radical Muslim or a white supremacist. I knew it had to be one or the other, and when I found out it was a white supremacist, I wasn’t surprised. Sadly, I don’t think this is going to be the last situation. I’ve worried about the Holocaust museum there in D.C. I worry about the Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. These are public venues, and sadly these guys look at these places as propaganda tools instead of historical places trying to educate people so we don’t go through this mass genocide again.

JJ: James von Brunn, the suspected shooter, considered himself a lone wolf. Do such so-called rogues really operate on their own, or are they part of a bigger movement?
TL: They do these actions on their own, but the ideology they did not get on their own. The idea of the lone wolf was an offshoot of Louis Beam’s leaderless resistance. He’s a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas. He came up with this thing saying you’ve got to go into a cell program, six guys max. And when you get more than six, you break into two groups. That way, if you get busted for a crime they only bust three or four, and your unit can keep going. So these guys started figuring out that if it works that way, why don’t we break it down smaller into one- and two-man groups. That’s how we got lone wolfs. These guys go out and do these acts, but then the groups they belong to say, “He doesn’t belong to us.” And if he’s not part of the group, you can’t go after the group civilly or monetarily.

JJ: How surprised would most Angelenos be to learn about the supremacist currents that run through Los Angeles and its surrounding communities?
TL: They would be shocked if they knew that California is No.1 for white supremacy groups. California has 88 white supremacy groups. The closest state to California is Texas, which has 66.

JJ: Do they pose much of a threat, or are they more prison gangs at this point?
TL: They pose a very vehement threat. They are not going to overthrow the U.S. government tomorrow. Their goal is to divide, to disrupt, to create animosity and division among people. Their main goal isn’t full revolution, because they don’t have the numbers and power they are looking for at this time. So they are looking to build that animosity and division.

JJ: What should the community, Jewish and greater, do? Both to protect itself from attacks like those on the Holocaust Museum last week or from the kinds of divisions you’re talking about?
TL: The more proactive the community can be, the better. If the community knows where these guys are and what they are up to, that is a good start. But we all know that if someone wants to commit an act of terrorism, they can probably do it.