James Von Brunn may have acted on his own, but he's hardly alone.

Newsweek has the story Really A Lone Wolf? that references a previous deeper look into some of the hate groups out there and some of the reasons why they think they are on the increase.

One point written there I wanted to explore:

Are attacks like this simply desperate one-time acts?
Within the white-supremacist movement there is a strong notion of leaderless resistance. The notion is this: look, we can take over the country just by having small cells or lone wolves commit key acts of violence because the rest of the country, at least the whites, will then go along with you. It's called the "propaganda of the deed"—you know who the enemies are, you go out yourself and hopefully people will take notice and act together in resistance.

These ideas were promoted by Louis Beam, a KKK member, and published in The Seditionist, his newsletter, in the early '90s. It came out around 1991, but the idea has been pushed in the white-supremacist movement for a long time since. He has been a big influence on the white-supremacist movement. He's a very scary guy. He was noteworthy because he was also part of the militia movement in the '90s. He's not the inventor of leaderless resistance, but he's remembered for being the most important modern proponent of leaderless resistance in the neo-Nazi world.

I've actually read some of Louis Beem's work, including Leaderless Resistance where he credits who was the original person who came up with the premise. He's been in the background and he hasn't been openly involved in the past few years. Though as pointed out in 2002 he's been known to disappear then re-appear.

According to Hatewatch:

Von Brunn runs the website holywesternempire.org, which was listed in 2008 as a hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Von Brunn has a long history of associations with prominent neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. In the 1980s or early 1990s, von Brunn was employed by Noontide Press, a part of the Holocaust denying Institute of Historical Review, which was then run by Willis Carto, one of America’s most prominent anti-Semites.

Von Brunn is the author of the 1999 book, “Kill the Best Gentiles,” a racist and anti-Semitic tome that argues that whites are seeing “today on the world stage a tragedy of enormous proportions: the calculated destruction of the White Race and the incomparable culture it represents. Europe, former fortress of the West, is now over-run by hordes of non-Whites and mongrels.” A raging anti-Semite, von Brunn blames “The Jews” for the destruction of the West. The book is dedicated to prominent neo-Nazis and racists including Revilo Oliver and Wilmot Robertson.

What's also interesting is the rush for many sites to pull information, from the Free Republic to Yahoo to Wikipedia, comments made by Von Brunn are disappearing at times temporarily other times permanently. It's as if trying to hide some of the public comments he made makes them go away. They don't...