Following the White Rabbit
Tim Murdock sits atop an online cult, spreading fears of ‘white genocide’ that have fueled violence and terrorism
For the past three years, a mysterious figure calling himself Horus the Avenger has operated White Rabbit Radio, an online community of racists dedicated to spreading a message called the “Mantra” far and wide.
The 221-word Mantra, written by a curmudgeonly segregationist with a history of drug abuse named Robert Whitaker, is an attack on multiculturalism that largely blames immigration for a “genocide” facing white people. This notion has, apparently, motivated far-right extremists to commit heinous acts of violence, including the 2011 terrorist attack in Norway that left 77 people dead.
“Anti-racist is code word for anti-white,” the Mantra reads in part. Its widespread presence on the Internet is due to a small but highly dedicated group of activists who call themselves the “swarm” and furiously propagate it online. In essence, they comprise an online flash mob, spending hours posting the Mantra in the comments section of YouTube videos, tagging it to news articles on race, and reprinting the Mantra in full on most white nationalist websites of note.
But until now, little was known about the energetic propagandist known as Horus. He has had no known membership in any racist group and has gone to great lengths to hide his identity. In his first podcast, in 2009, he boasted, “You don’t know who I am. You’re never going to know.”
That ended in June, when an investigation by the Intelligence Report uncovered the identity of Horus the Avenger.
His real name is Timothy Gallaher Murdock, 43, of Dearborn Heights, Mich., though he sometimes appears online and in radio interviews as Tom Worth. An avowed anti-Semite and one-time day trader, he is single and lives in the basement of his parents’ home, where, he says, he cares for his terminally ill mother and dedicates his time to building up “Horus the Avenger’s Follow the White Rabbit,” an online allegory designed to expose “white genocide” and patterned after Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The basic idea of the Mantra and its proponents — that white people, far from ruling most of the developed world, are actually being subjected to a genocide that will ultimately wipe out their race — is not new. It has been developing since the racist right essentially lost the civil rights battles of the 1960s, and racist writers like Wilmot Robertson began adopting the language of the civil rights movement to depict whites as increasingly “dispossessed.” In the last 20 years, the idea that the white race is facing mortal attack has become the norm on the extreme right, with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, for instance, repeatedly describing whites as “Earth’s Most Endangered Species.” Such fears have picked up speed in recent years thanks in large part to the U.S. Census Bureau, which has predicted that non-Hispanic whites in this country will lose their majority by about 2043.
Murdock, Whitaker and the “swarm” of their enthusiasts have reduced their message of fear to a few sentences and sent it out to the world via thousands of web postings.
Over several hours of cordial interviews with the Report, Murdock acknowledged his identity and elaborated at great length about the Mantra, how he entered the radical right and what he hopes to achieve.
“What I am is a provocateur,” Murdock said. “My job is to provoke a conversation using the very charged concept of white genocide to create a paradigm change. I’m not interested in creating a national socialist state.” He added, “I’m doing things intentionally to provoke a reaction.”
And provoke a reaction he has. Since Murdock’s appearance in the movement, lines from the Mantra have proliferated across the racist right. His website features a subscription podcast called Endgame Exotica that provides commentary on the news, as well as a host of animated cartoon shorts to point out the supposed contradictions of multiculturalism. He has also become a galvanizing figure in the movement. He appeared last year at the Practical Politics Seminar conference hosted by Stormfront, the largest white supremacist online forum, where he talked about controlling the message about race. His allegiances in that message management lie undoubtedly with the Mantra and Whitaker, his partner in the messaging effort. “I’ve always been interested in Bob’s particular writings,” Murdock said. “I think he’s the future.”
If the future is with Whitaker and his Mantra, it is a future envisioned by a recovering drug addict who once claimed to have had an amphetamine habit that dropped his IQ below 100.
A Mantra is Born
Though he claims on his blog to have been the message man in the Reagan administration responsible for crushing communism, bringing down the Berlin Wall and saving the Hubble Space Telescope, Whitaker is seen by many in the movement as a hard-drinking though harmless, grandfatherly Forrest Gump.
James Edwards, host of the racist “Political Cesspool” radio show, wrote, “The next time anyone talks with Bob, ask him about the time we closed down that bar in Charleston.” To his disciples, though, Whitaker is nothing short of a propaganda “genius,” a word that can be found more than 600 times on his blog.
“There is not a modest bone in my body,” Whitaker wrote in 2004. “I AM a genius. I was born with one hell of a brain, and I scare our enemies because I am so smart I can laugh them to shame. I am at so high a level that a PhD or a big-time news anchor doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
A far-right propagandist for more than a half-century, the former economics professor and Reagan appointee to the Office of Personnel Management has been linked to radical, often racist, populist campaigns for most of his career. He once claimed to have a swastika poster on his wall when he was young to protest desegregation. In fact, his advocacy of segregation and racist ideology seems rooted in his opposition to America’s early civil rights struggles.
According to Whitaker’s followers, he’s a former clandestine CIA agent and a mercenary in Rhodesia who helped craft the propaganda message that ended the Soviet Union — claims for which there is no known historical record.
The Mantra first appeared in 2006 on Whitaker’s blog and on the Internet forum for National Vanguard, a breakaway group from the neo-Nazi National Alliance. Unlike David Lane’s succinct “14 words” (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.”), the Mantra reads like a rambling tirade on U.S. immigration policy.
In part, it reads: “Everybody says there is this race problem. Everybody says this race problem will be solved when the third world pours into every white country and only into white countries. ... Everybody says the final solution to this race problem is for every white country and only white countries to ‘assimilate,’ i.e., intermarry, with all those non-whites. ... But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the white race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews [sic].” The Mantra ends with its most often quoted phrase: “They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white. Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.”
Whitaker, who spoke several times with the Report, claimed to have crafted the message “over years and years and years of arguing with anti-Whites.” While he claimed to have no working relationship with Murdock — in fact, he seemed upset at the suggestion that the two worked in concert — he remains proud of his Mantra.
“I’ve been in this business for 55 years, but I just got a little tired of the usual line,” Whitaker said. “I wanted to concentrate on the actual point, which is when the anti-whites talk about mixing races, it’s only in white countries.”
Down the Rabbit Hole
Murdock went further than Whitaker could have imagined in spreading the Mantra. With a weekly podcast and an onslaught of racist cartoons, his White Rabbit project is slick and professional — glossy racism that pulls liberally from Egyptian mythology. (Horus is the Egyptian god of war.)
Murdock and his animators created an allegorical cast of characters meant to reduce the modern world to racial archetypes. In fact, a large part of his appeal with younger racists lies in the iconography and detailed storyline of characters, each meant to symbolize a particular aspect of the “race problem.”
“White Rabbits,” which Murdock has said represent genetic perfection, are people of European descent and are depicted as vicious-looking creatures with Nazi lightning bolts in their eyes and crooked, dangling ears. “Red Hippos” represent Jews, or evil in the world. And “Pink Rabbits” are white rabbits infected by the Red Hippos. (Pink Rabbits, according to the allegory, are actually soaked in the blood of Red Hippos.) The cast of characters goes on, and Murdock’s website displays pictures of sneering White Rabbits swinging sledgehammers emblazoned with the words “The Mantra” at Pink Rabbits.
While Murdock has repeatedly said he dismisses violence as a tactic that will work in “illuminating” whites as to the state of race relations, the same cannot be said for all of those who carry the Mantra and fears of “white genocide” onward.
Murdock’s work, for example, attracted the attention of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who slaughtered 77 people two years ago in his home country.
In Breivik’s manifesto, he complains about “blood thirsty genocide committed by hate-filled, anti-white, racist immigrants” and seems particularly obsessed with the word “genocide.” He mentions it frequently in his manifesto, as he does the terms “anti-white” and “anti-racist.” Breivik sent his manifesto to Murdock and more than 1,000 others the day of the attack.
There are others, too, who have acted violently, seemingly animated by the fear of white genocide.
In 2009, on the day after Barack Obama was inaugurated as the country’s first black president, a man named Keith Luke murdered two black people in Brockton, Mass., and raped a third before shooting and wounding her. After police captured him, Luke reportedly told them that he acted because he had been studying Internet pages and learned that whites were being subjected to a genocide.
In September 2011, eight months before he was accused of torturing and dismembering a Chinese immigrant in Canada, an act caught on film, Canadian model Luka Rocco Magnotta wrote about his white nationalist beliefs on racist message boards under several pseudonyms. “[E]very country in the world was able to have their heritage protected, blacks get their own countries, chinese [sic] get their own countries. ... However if white people want their own countries then we are denied that right.”
It was more than a petty gripe penned by a racist. The idea of a white homeland has long been a pipe dream of the racist right.
“The message is up for grabs regarding race,” Murdock said. “I’m doing what has been done for decades, from a verbal perspective. White people have to be able to defend themselves somehow verbally when called a racist.” s
The Rabbit Unmasked
Murdock’s entire purpose, he said, is to raise awareness of white genocide in any way possible. But will he continue now that his anonymity is gone?
“Sure. Why not?” he said. “I held to that model as long as possible. ... But if you have 30 million people wearing the Guy Fawkes mask [a symbol adopted by a number of populist movements], it doesn’t matter if they wear the mask anymore.”
Murdock may seem cavalier about the loss of anonymity, but the fact remains that he has gone to great pains to protect it.
Along with Whitaker’s acolytes — they call themselves BUGSers, because they are part of what is called “Bob’s Underground Graduate Seminar”— Murdock has played a cat-and-mouse game with Internet service providers and website administrators, hoping to slip the racist Mantra as deeply into the public sphere as possible.
For example, last March, according to Whitaker’s website administrators, the Mantra was posted 7,187 times across the Web, up more than 100% from the previous month, when the Mantra was posted 3,565 times. The people posting it include racist ideologues such as Michael Rudolph, aka “Beefcake,” who runs online seminars on how to spread the Mantra, and Albert Durrette, 72, of Berkeley, Calif., who has started a White House petition asking that the Mantra be taught in schools as part of core education standards.
Murdock said he plans to release more animated content, including a 3-D version of every character in the cast, as well as a second part to his wildly popular video “How Whites Took Over America,” which reimagines the history of the European explorers who “discovered” the Americas.
Perhaps his most famous animated cartoon yet is the “Anti-Racist Hitler,” in which Adolf Hitler returns from Argentina, where he has been hiding since the end of the war — except this time he is working as an anti-racist.
In the 10-minute animation, which has been viewed about 180,000 times on YouTube, Hitler arrives in Israel, arguing that it is racist for the Jews to want to preserve their homeland to the exclusion of others. When a Jewish man stops Hitler on the streets and says, “I think we have a right to preserve our culture, and our people,” Hitler responds, “So you believe you are God’s chosen people? Some kind of master race? That just reminds me of the brown shirts in the ’30s.”
Murdock laughed when mentioning the video. “Every single thing Hitler says to the Israelis has been said basically to someone white,” he said.
The video was released on April 20, Hitler’s birthday, a deliberate appeal to racists and white nationalists who revere the day. With that, it is impossible for Murdock to claim he is not working with the hardline racist right.
Not that he makes much of an effort to deny that anyway.
