By Marta Ilyich, Fighting Words, July 1, 2025
On June 29, 2025 a 20 year old gunman named Wess Roley shot and killed two firefighters with a high powered sniper rifle. He had lured them into his ambush with a brush fire. This took place in the general region of the former neo-Nazi Aryan Nations compound. 24 years ago to the day, on June 29, 2001, firefighters took part in a training exercise in which the Aryan Nations Security House Compound was torched.
Aryan Nations was formed in 1977 as a “Christian Posse Comitatus.” Members of this group shot up a Jewish community center, fired at people from indigenous nations, and was generally violent and terroristic. Over its history, the Aryan Nations compound was infamous for hosting ‘Aryan World Conferences’ wherein white supremacists from all over would come, make connections, and plot.
One regular attendee was Louis Beam, who is directly tied to Timothy McVeigh, Dylann Roof, Don Black (who created the neo-Nazi website “Stormfront”), and Robert J. Matthews (whose organization The Order assassinated Jewish talk show host Alan Berg and stole millions of dollars from an armored car to start a “race war”).
Coeur d’Alene being central to all of this is seen as a jewel to the U.S. fascist movement even after the group was bankrupted by a lawsuit. It disbanded, although residents of the region note that members remain in the community to this day. It is seen as central to the U.S. white supremacist aspiration to create a “white homeland” in the Northwest, and local radio carries white supremacist content regularly.
Wess was raised in Arizona, California, and Idaho by his mother and an abusive father. When he was 10, his parents divorced after his father assaulted his mother. Court documents reveal that she claimed, “He threatened to sit outside my house with a sniper rifle or burn my house Down.” Classmates from his middle and high school years in Arizona recall his interest in Nazism and general frightening presence, noting that his notebook was filled with swastikas and drawings of Guns.
In a Tiktok video, Roley said he was selling human organs on the black market, a claim unverified at the time of this writing. Roley returned to Idaho to live with family in Coeur d’Alene about a year ago. Little is yet known about the time between his return and the shooting. Family has claimed that he revered firefighters, even with the lie revealed in his assassination. As is ever the case when white men commit mass shootings, his mental stability has been called into question. One Coeur d’Alene resident said, “This has never happened here, but it goes to show that no-one is safe from this kind of mental sadness.”
But, as noted above, the like has indeed happened or has been plotted there. Whether Wess felt “mental sadness” is irrelevant. This is entirely in keeping with the history of the town, generations of neo-Nazi organizing in a state and country with a deep history of white supremacy and genocide. It is in the context or a fascist moment, wherein floundering U.S. capitalist structures require governmental bailouts to continue to exist. Wall Street turns to government. The presidential administration is filled with billionaires to seamlessly merge state and capital.
Masked and unidentified secret police carry out a project of ethnic cleansing, terrorising migrant communities with abductions regardless of documented status. Fascism is thick in the air. The rhetoric of the Red Scares of the past whip up fear of socialism, always a fascist tactic to try to suppress labor and people’s movements. And into this atmosphere a young man, fascinated with Nazi imagery, led firefighters to their death 24 years to the day after that department burned the compound so revered by white supremacists.
There are still emerging details. What is certain is that white supremacy and fascism rages through the United States from the White House to the streets of Los Angeles and beyond. It is found in public schools, plotted on shady websites and lurks beneath and throughout. The project is vast, it is gathering steam, and it requires a militant united front from poor, working, and oppressed peoples to crush it into dust. Here in the United States, the time for anti-fascist militancy has never been greater.
We can do it, we will do it, and those reading this can help us do it. To victory!
A previous series on this journal about the history of Coeur d’Alene’s hate movement can be
Read at Fighting-Words.net and searching for Coeur d’Alene.
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