Kevin Alfred Strom | |
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| Born | 8/17/1956 |
| Home Base | 316 Owen Dr, Johnstown, PA 15904316 Owen Dr, Johnstown, PA 15904 |
| Published By | OPP HQ |
| Published On | November 12, 2015 |
Kevin Alfred Strom was a very miserable child it seems. Ever since high school he has been outspoken for his hatred of non-whites. You can attribute it to getting beat up one too many times or just bad potty training, but the simple fact is Kevin was a miserable child. Nothing has changed in adulthood either. Strom these days is known best as the guy who killed the National Alliance (or Annoyance, depending on how you feel), bolting from the group he was a part of for years to form National Vanguard, and putting himself in the leadership position he wanted for himself for so long. His old lady Elisha Strom was always by his side – well maybe not always – and the two made quite the name for themselves in the WP scene. Much of them were bad names, but they didn’t seem to care. The two were just having the time of their lives as they chipped away at the final vestiges of the neo-Nazi scene they were a part of.
Strom was born in 1956 in Anchorage, Alaska and raised in a Lutheran household near Washington, DC. It was a broken home with a verbally abusive alcoholic father who hanged himself by the time Strom entered his 20s. As he entered high school, little Kevin was quite the anti-communist, a stance that a teacher who was a hardline right-winger took notice of. The teacher recruited him into the John Birch Society, and it was there that Kevin found members of the National Annoyance who turned him on to that organization as well. He had been attending regular Sunday evening meetings since 1975, but he did not officially join the NA until 1982. He was real tight with National Alliance founder and leader William Pierce and spent the next few years laboring for him, setting up the telephone and alarm systems of the NA compound when they moved in back in 1985. He also started the NA radio program American Dissident Voices from which as the program host he really made his name. In 1987, Pierce introduced Strom to Kristen Kaiser. She was married, but that didn’t matter to Strom, although the following year, that marriage fell apart. Strom and Kaiser were married by Pierce in 1990, and the couple had three kids. They were married for five years, and you know it must have been a hell of a time for Kaiser, because soon after the marriage fell apart, she was talking to the Southern Poverty Law Center about the experience!
Kevin Strom became public in the early 1990s doing the radio show for the National Annoyance. He also got a little bit of notoriety when in 1990, when Nelson Mandela visited Washington, DC he was arrested outside the South African Embassy for assaulting a police officer during a pro-apartheid rally. When they searched Strom, officers found detailed sketches of Techworld, a downtown office building that happened to be adjacent to the Washington Convention Center, where Mandela was scheduled to speak. Eventually the assault charge was dropped and the sketches were forgotten, but it is doubtful Strom had the balls to pull anything off. To give one an idea of how much of a punk ass he is, Strom quit abruptly in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing fearing that the FBI was going to raid the National Annoyance compound in West Virginia and that he would be arrested. Years later after a messy divorce from Kaiser, Strom returned again to work with NA and its founder William Pierce. Unlike any other staffer though, Kevin and his new wife Elisha chose not to live on the compound but in Stanardville, VA.
In 2002 it was off to the bowels of Hell for William Pierce, and his death caused tremendous turmoil for the NA. Many people speculated that Strom would be Pierce’s successor but the board of directors chose Erich Gliebe to run the National Annoyance, a move they would later regret as Gliebe then proceeded to mismanage the organization into oblivion. Before that, Strom continued his radio work for the Annoyance along with running a NA news site, but Strom was bitter and pretty tired of being in everyone’s shadow. He and Elisha decided to split off from the NA and form their organization National Vanguard. Of course this was after he and some other members were bounced out of the NA when they tried to mount a coup on Gliebe and Shaun Walker, the other NA leader at that time. Strom took the name “National Vanguard” from the magazine he had edited for years for the NA. Meanwhile, no one else seemed to like Gliebe and Walker either, so several other units from the Annoyance left the group and followed Strom, leading to a bitter feud between both organizations. National Alliance is hardly an alliance of anything these days because of this, and in September 2014, Gliebe shut down the group. There is a rather haphazard attempt to revive the organization underway, however.
As leader of National Vanguard Kevin Strom was a prominent speaker at National Vanguard events. The most notable are the Tampa Bay Summer Solstice festival in 2005 as well as the National Vanguard Conference in Elmwood Park, NJ on May 13, 2006, which brought out a number of well-known WP dirtbags like Paul Fromm of the Canadian Heritage Alliance and David Duke. Strom had strong ties not only with Duke and Don Black from Stormfront. In fact, Stormfront had become so much of a vehicle for National Vanguard that detractors had taken to calling it Stromfront!
Of course, if Strom had detractors, one could surmise that things had not been going as smooth as Strom would have liked. Since forming National Vanguard, several internal memos and applications have been leaked from within and put on a blog. There was eventually been a split within National Vanguard, as member Roger Williams and much of the Denver crew split to start up yet another group. Strom had also pissed off folks who were getting tired of him using their stock footage and intellectual property to push some neo-Nazi message. On his website were golden age ads for Cadillac which were altered to promote white supremacy. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, stock video from an Ocala, FL firm called Digital Juice which was used in a recent promotion for an Alabama TV station ended up being a part of an online ad for National Vanguard. Although Digital Juice deals in royalty-free professional animations, stock footage, music, layered graphics, clip art and templates, the NV ad is an apparent violation of its end user agreement, which says images may not be used in a “defamatory” or “scandalous” manner. The SPLC notes that Calgary, Alberta’s iStockphoto was also a victim of this stupid routine by Strom. When The Truth at Last publisher Ed Fields bolted National Annoyance to join up with Strom, the announcement on the National Vanguard website featured a middle-aged man reading his anti-Semitic publication. In truth, it was an iStockphoto picture altered to insert the magazine, again a violation of the company’s end user agreement requires that its images not be used in a “defamatory” way or to discuss “potentially sensitive” social issues.
And then the bottom really fell out. In January 2007, Strom was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography and witness tampering, the witness being Elisha Strom. According to court records, federal agents found pornographic pictures had been on Strom’s computer hard drive between October 2005 and last August 2006. He was also charged with trying to entice a ten-year-old to perform sex acts. All of this killed National Vanguard, Strom disbanding the group amid his newfound pariah status and a ton of scorn from his former comrades. In January 2008, he took a plea deal, admitting to the child pornography possession charge and getting a bunch of other charges related to receiving the pornography dismissed. He was sentenced to 23 months, but by that time he had already served a year, and by September of that year he was out of jail.
Strom is still on probation as of this writing. He is serving 15 years of supervised release and is currently living in Johnstown, PA in a home supplied to him by a supporter from New Jersey. Needless to say, Elisha is no longer with him, and the last time we heard from her, she was getting herself in trouble for stalking a federal agent in 2009. He was also getting involved with the neo-Nazi scene and was even trying to hook up with the latest incarnation of the National Alliance. There seems to be some contention around that, as there was a plan to move Strom and his “mid-twenties girlfriend” into a newly built apartment on the National Alliance grounds in Mill Point, WV. And the reason why that is a problem? Because Strom is a registered sex offender, and as one NA-related website pointed out, “If in fact Kevin Strom does move from PA to WV, is the WV Megan’s Law website now going to have a picture of the NA Main Office in WV shown for Strom’s new domicile?” There were other complications regarding Strom’s involvement with the NA, but according to another article on the site, they might have been rendered moot by the West Virginia office of the Dept. of Homeland Security, which reportedly denied him a visit to the compound.
Strom still does American Dissident Voices, the show he started while a National Alliance member. He also maintains his innocence, making himself out to be the victim of a vindictive and jealous ex-wife and a federal government that wanted to silence him. But if he is as radioactive a presence as the contentions with the people trying to rebuild the National Alliance show, he’s not going to have much of the say he used to have back in the day.