The Real Terrorist Group that Inspired The Order

Warning: This post contains spoilers from The Order.

The Order, in theaters today (Dec. 6), stars Jude Law as a fictional FBI agent who leaves his family to track down a gang of white nationalists robbing banks and counterfeiting money. The Order was a real terrorist organization that existed briefly in the 1980s, led by Bob Mathews, who is played in the film by Nicholas Hoult. The Order's goal was for the Pacific Northwest states to secede and form a whites-only nation, free of Jewish people.

Here’s what to know about The Order. 

How The Order got started

The Order began operations in September 1983. At the time, many white nationalists in the 1970s and 1980s were disillusioned by the U.S. failure to win the Vietnam War and wanted to exact a kind of revenge. Some veterans tried to use their military experience to fight what they saw as a race war at home. Though Mathews, The Order’s founder, was not a veteran, The Order used U.S. Army training manuals and books about U.S. military strategy to train its members.

Like many white nationalists, Mathews was influenced by the 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, about a white nationalist character Earl Turner who attempts to overthrow the U.S. government and plots to fly a plane with a nuclear warhead into the Pentagon. Mathews also had strong ties to the Aryan Nations group, and several Order members came from that organization.

Mathews set up remote training camps in Idaho and Missouri. The group raised money for its activities through robberies and counterfeiting cash and distributed the counterfeited bills to other white power groups. Funds were also used to stock-pile weapons and purchase surveillance equipment. 

Order members took an oath by standing in a circle around a white infant "who symbolized the race they sought to protect, according to the book Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew, a historian of right-wing extremism. They articulated “a sacred duty to do whatever is necessary to deliver our people from the Jew and bring total victory to the Aryan race.”

As Kevin Flynn, who wrote the book that inspired the film The Order: Inside America's Racist Underground, explained the ultimate goal of the group, “they wanted five Northwestern states—Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming— to be a whites-only nation.”

The Order’s most nefarious acts

The terrorist group’s activities mainly consisted of robberies, counterfeiting money, and one brutal murder.

In December 1983, Mathews robbed a Seattle bank of $25,952. "Order members understood bank robbery—and later, armored car robbery—as a way to both fund their war on the state and to target what they saw as corrupt, Jewish-controlled banks,” Belew writes.

They also robbed pornography stores, which they saw as immoral and in April 1984, they bombed an adult movie theater in Seattle.

The movie’s most dramatic scene is a reenactment of a July 1984 armored car robbery. In real life, a dozen order members, decked out in white t-shirts and red bandanas, robbed an armored car near Ukiah, California. The men fired shots at the car and then displayed a sign reading “Get out or Die.” Two pickup trucks surrounded the vehicle and forced it to park on the shoulder of the road. The thieves made out with about $3.6 million in cash.

It was the 1984 murder of Denver DJ Alan Berg, an outspoken critic of white nationalist groups, that led to the Order’s downfall. As Belew writes, “Berg was the kind of prominent Jewish and liberal voice that the Order sought to silence.” At one point, Order member David Lane even phoned into Berg’s show to rant about a Jewish plot to take over the world. As the movie portrays, on June 18, 1984, at 9:15pm at night, Berg pulled his car into his driveway, got out, and was shot dead by Order member Bruce Pierce.

The murder brought worldwide publicity to the group and FBI surveillance that led to its unraveling. 

What happened to The Order

The organization dissolved in December 1984. Mathews died in a fiery standoff with the FBI on Dec. 8, 1984, at his compound on Whidbey Island, Washington. Many of the key members—like Bruce Pierce—died in prison.

While the organization no longer exists, its ideas and beliefs still have many followers today, spread by social media and modern communications. Reports of anti-semitic incidents in the U.S. are at a record high, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

As Flynn puts it, “White nationalism, again, is on the rise. Be vigilant. Pay attention to it. Don't ignore it.”