Aryan Nations Is Recruiting In Oregon Goal Is To Have `Thousands’ Of Converts In Quest For White `Homeland’

In its drive to make the Pacific Northwest a “homeland” for whites, the supremacist group Aryan Nations has launched an Oregon recruiting drive based in Josephine County.

A meeting of white supremacist groups is scheduled for an undisclosed location in Grants Pass Saturday, the Grants Pass Daily Courier reported.

“Our goal is to have a strong organization of thousands in Oregon. Not hundreds, but thousands,” Tim Bishop, an Aryan Nations staff leader, told the newspaper from the group’s headquarters in Hayden Lake, Idaho.

The state leader in Oregon is Dennis L. Hilligoss, who reportedly moved to the southern Oregon town of Merlin with his family early last year from Southern California.

Hilligoss said his recruiting efforts in southern Oregon “are going quite well,” but referred all further questions to Bishop.

Bishop said Aryan Nations is just a church, and added, “We have nothing to hide.”

Still, he said the Feb. 25 Grants Pass gathering is closed to the media and would not disclose the meeting site.

Bishop estimated the group’s Oregon membership is in “the hundreds.” The group aims to establish an all-white “homeland” covering Oregon, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming, he said.

There are also several other supremacist groups in Oregon, Bishop said, but he would not name them.

“We work like glue to pull all these organizations together,” he said, “just like the civil rights movement of the ‘60s.”

Bishop, 37, compares his group’s Oregon recruiting effort to ones to save the spotted owl.

“It needed a territory imperative to survive. Well, the white people need a territory imperative also to survive,” he said, adding that blacks, Asians and “brown people” each have their own “national state,” but that white people don’t.

“There’s no such thing as racism when you only have one race in that state,” he said.

Area police say they are worried about the Aryan Nations’ presence in the Rogue Valley and fear the group may be violent. Bishop bristled at the suggestion, insisting the group is law-abiding.

“Put it this way: If a white woman and black man are walking down the street, it makes me sick,” he said. “But those two people are not worth going to prison over.”

However, he added, “If we are out putting out our word and obeying the law and spreading the word and witnessing for our Christian beliefs and values and are attacked, then by all means we’ll defend ourselves.”