William Luther Pierce III (September 11, 1933 – July 23, 2002) was an American neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and far-right political activist.

Born in Atlanta to a Presbyterian family of Scotch-Irish and English descent, Pierce was a descendant of Thomas H. Watts, the Governor of Alabama and the Attorney General of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War.

In 1966, Pierce moved to the Washington, D.C. area and became an associate of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, who was assassinated in 1967.

Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries (1978) depicts a violent revolution in the United States, followed by a world war and the extermination of non-white races.

In 1985, Pierce relocated the headquarters of the National Alliance to Hillsboro, West Virginia where he founded the Cosmotheist Community Church to receive tax exemption for his organization.

His mother was born in Richland, Georgia in 1910, with her family being part of the aristocracy of the Old South, descendants of Thomas H. Watts, the governor of Alabama and attorney general of the Confederate States of America.

[7] Pierce's father once served as a government representative on ocean-going cargo ships and sent reports back to Washington, D.C.;[8] he later became manager of an insurance agency but was killed in a car accident in 1943.

[15][18] When Rockwell was murdered in 1967, Pierce became one of the leading members of the National Socialist White People's Party, the successor to the ANP.

[19][14] Among the founding members of the board of the National Alliance was a University of Illinois professor of classics, Revilo P. Oliver, who was to have major impact of Pierce's life both as an adviser and friend.

Pierce intended the organization to be a political vanguard that would ultimately bring about a white nationalist overthrow of the United States Federal Government.

[21][better source needed] In 1978, claiming the National Alliance was an educational organization, Pierce applied for and was denied, tax exemption by the Internal Revenue Service.

[14] Around the same time, he was interviewed by Herbert Poinsett on Race and Reason, a public-access television cable TV talk show co-hosted by former Klansman Tom Metzger.

[22] An anti-Zionist, he attempted during the Yom Kippur War to force McDonnell Douglas into canceling military contracts that sent armaments to Israel by buying shares of the company's stock and putting forward the motion at the national shareholder's meeting.

Some of Pierce's later speeches on American Dissident Voices concerning the Arab–Israeli conflict were reprinted in Muslim publications and on websites, including that of the Lebanese Shia Islamist group Hezbollah.

[25] He later participated twice on a public-access television cable TV live talk show hosted by Ron Doggett, Race and Reality and aired from Richmond, Virginia.

[14][2][35] The book is a graphically violent depiction of a future race war in the United States, which includes a detailed description of the "Day of the Rope" mass hangings of many "race traitors" (especially Jews and those in interracial marriages or relationships) in the public streets of Los Angeles, followed by the systematic ethnic cleansing of the city, and eventually the entire world.

The story is told through the perspective of Earl Turner, an active member of the white revolutionary underground resistance, called The Organization, led by the secret inner circle known as The Order (a reorganized SS).

The part most relevant to the McVeigh case is in an early chapter, when the book's main character is placed in charge of bombing the FBI headquarters.

When McVeigh was arrested later that day, pages from the book were found in his car, with several phrases highlighted, including "But the real value of all of our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties" and "We can still find them and kill them.

"[36][37] The Turner Diaries also inspired a group of white revolutionary nationalists in the early 1980s who called themselves the Silent Brotherhood, or sometimes simply The Order.

The Order was connected to numerous crimes, including counterfeiting and bank robbery, and supposedly gave money to the Alliance.

"[30] A year earlier in a telephone interview with The Washington Post, he was quoted as saying: "the Oklahoma City bombing didn't make sense politically.

The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center both allege that Pierce utilized cosmotheism in order to acquire tax-exempt status for the National Alliance after he had failed to do so earlier.

[14] Preferring immigrant women from Eastern Europe,[13] in 1986 Pierce married a Hungarian woman named Olga Skerlecz.