[2] Withrow subsequently publicly abandoned his earlier political beliefs in the late 1980s and became a regular face on television speaking out against racism and the organisation of young people by the far-right.
[1] Withrow stated that he came from a racist background and that his father made him read far-right literature and study the life of Adolf Hitler whilst growing up in Sacramento, California.
[1] Withrow joined the Ku Klux Klan at the age of 14 and with his friends set up a gang that carried out a series of muggings against Japanese tourists and gay people.
[4] Under Metzger's direction Withlow became recognised as a rising star on the far-right and neo-Nazi scene in the US, with a series of speeches delivered at the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho attracting wide attention for the fiery nature of their rhetoric.
[6][7] Withrow claimed that he advocated a cell-based organization akin to leaderless resistance, albeit one that he personally called the "100 Hitlers policy", arguing that it allowed the movement to continue to function even when individual cells were brought down by law enforcement.
[2] Withrow claimed that he renounced racism in 1987 due to the death of his father and the fact that he had fallen in love with a woman whose family had come to the United States as refugees from Nazi Germany.
Now publicly declaring his support for anti-racism, Withrow became a mainstay on daytime television and tabloid talk shows, being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Montel Williams, as well as accepting speaking engagements for groups such as the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
[9] His autobiography, Child of the Fourth Reich, was released around this time and it was praised by Anti-Defamation League regional director Richard G. Hirschhaut as "a riveting account of one person's passage through the subterranean milieu of paranoia and hatred and his ultimate redemption through love".
[1] In December 1993 he provided testimony to the Committee on Judiciary of the California State Senate about his time on the far-right and his reasons as to why young men were attracted to membership in such groups.
[1] Mike Ramsey, the Butte County District Attorney, felt that it was around the time of the release of Blink that Withrow began to move back to white supremacy, largely because the documentary presented him in a stark manner and led to a tailing off in interest from media outlets.
[1] He followed this in August 2001 by filing a lawsuit seeking to abolish all of California's hate crime laws and demanding a $1 million payment to any White person who had been convicted under existing legislation.