Hal Turner Walks Away - Webcast and Website Gone

As such, it is with great regret that I announce the termination of the Hal Turner Show in its present form. If a new show airs at all, it will be entirely different than it is now.

I hereby separate from the "pro-White movement." I will no longer involve myself in any aspect of it.

Hal Turner's farewell to the white nationalist movement, posted on his blog on January 15, 2008.

Several years ago, I stumbled onto him on WBCQ, the short wave station in northern Maine owned by Allan Weiner, whose radio biography includes operating pirate stations in his boyhood home of Yonkers, New York; and a 1987 bust for operating one on a ship anchored off Long Island.

BCQ still is, in a way, a legal pirate. Anyone can buy time and do whatever they want. As its promos state, it's the last real free speech radio station. Hal Turner was proof of that. Blacks, gays and lesbians, Jews, illegal aliens, corrupt politicians, judges who didn't get it, all got it during his two hours. He could never be accused of bias. The wrath was evenly distributed.

The show became, for me, the bad song you listened to because it was so bad; the talk radio equivalent of the Shaggs.

Hal Turner left WBCQ because, as he explained, his dislike for Jews was so great that he could no longer justify buying time on a station owned by one. (Yet Allan Weiner still sold it to him.) The show then originated, according to its Web site, from his residence in North Bergen, New Jersey. Invective continued to flow like lava. The occasional DDOS attack ran up his bandwidth costs and forced him to temporarily shut the site down.

Late in 2007, Hal Turner announced he was converting the formerly all-free site to subscription only. After that, right out of the blue, came instructions to send all snail mail not to the North Bergen address, but to a post office box in Pennsylvania.

At the time, this struck me as curious marketing strategy. Potential buyers couldn't see the product before making a purchase. Membership wouldn't grow. He'd end up maintaining the news archive, and doing the show, for the same bunch of hard-core fans; preaching to the choir.

On New Year's Day 2008, hackers broke into the site and copied the text of e-mail messages sent between Hal Turner and someone who appeared to be an FBI agent. They were posted here.

On January 9, Hal Turner declared that night's show to be the last. On the 15th came the announcement that he was giving up the cause.

Author Dan Neiwert covered the story in his blog, as did The Southern Poverty Law Center, on whose enemies list Hal Turner had for years appeared.

And puzzle pieces began to fall into place.

Hal Turner's day job, per every source I found, was selling real estate. I needed a stretch of the imagination to believe that, in the most politically correct line of work there is (no real estate agent says bleep even if they have a mouthful), where guilt by association is reality, someone as outspoken and politically incorrect and publicized as Hal Turner could survive. Who would admit to a client that the property they were interested in was his listing, or even that they worked in the same office? You'd eat an awful lot of lunches alone.

I couldn't give exact dollar figures, but I did know that the hardware needed to run the Hal Turner Show -- fancy computers, high-speed modems, high-speed lines, server space -- isn't cheap. Throw in the cost of undoing damage from the DDOS attacks, like bandwidth fees, and operating expenses become even greater.

And how did he maintain and upgrade a web site with as much on it as his, and travel to white nationalist rallies, with a family and a time-consuming day job? How DID he manage to also find the time to act as a web host for like-minded individuals? Even one simple site with no audio or HTML took a substantial chunk of my time.

How did he say on the show, and post on the site, some of the things he said and posted, and get away with it? He advocated, on the Warren Ballantine show -- a nationally syndicated radio talk show marketed to black stations -- a return to lynching; the noose, good old street justice, as a response to soaring black crime rates. This before an offhand remark about lynching earned a TV golf commentator a suspension, and a noose on a golf magazine cover cost its editor his career.

How did he get away with calling for the assassination of certain politicians, and the forcible overthrow of the US government? That, according to the US Constitution, is treason.

No one who claims to be the spokesperson for any cause, regardless of its nature, made his or her actual street address as public as Hal Turner. In fact, he seemed proud of the fact that he lived where he lived. So why the PO box?

And why did he walk away from a cause -- forget for a moment its nature -- about which he felt such passion?

For someone who communicates in writing a lot, a writing style can become a trademark, as good as a fingerprint. The writing in the messages indicates that they're not fakes. It's him. His former allies in the white nationalist movement who've read them agree.

Conspiracy theories aren't the exclusive property of nut cases. They drive best-selling fiction. The historian's task is to review historical events, thinking: if only, what if, what if . . .

What if Hal Turner, like the dudes who found the long cool woman in the black dress, really was working for the FBI?

The Feds might have more than a casual interest in folks who would send money to someone who thought treason and the noose were the answers. They now have contact information for many people who did just that.

Maybe that was the whole idea.