Northwest Ethnostate Part Of Coast Guard Officer's Terror Plot

BREMERTON, WA - A U.S. Coast Guard officer arrested for planning a domestic terror attack "on a scale rarely seen in this country" was a supporter of a white ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest, a right-wing extremist trope that has been supported by Washington neo-Nazis for decades.

The FBI arrested Christopher Paul Hasson at his Maryland home on Friday, discovering a large cache of weapons and drugs inside his home. In court filings, investigators said Hasson was planning to kill prominent Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and TV personalities like Don Lemon and Joe Scarborough.

Hasson also wrote a letter to an unidentified a neo-Nazi leader expressing his support for a Pacific Northwest whites-only state, according to court records.

“I am writing [to] you regards to your ideas behind North West migration … I am a long time White Nationalist, having been a skinhead 30 plus years ago before my time in the military,” Hasson wrote.

“We need a white homeland as Europe seems lost. How long we can hold out there and prevent n---erization of the Northwest until whites wake up on their own or are forcibly made to make a decision whether to roll over and die or to stand up remains to be seen,” he continued.

The idea of a Pacific Northwest ethnostate, called the Northwest Territorial Imperative, became popular among right-wing extremists in the 1980s.

In the 1970s, Richard Butler and his followers established a compound near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, that became the center of racist right-wing activity in 1980s. Butler eventually sold the Coeur d'Alene, but lived in nearby Hayden until his death in 2004.

Neo-Nazi Robert Jay Matthews also supported the idea - until he was killed in a shootout with federal agents in 1984 at his Whidbey Island home. But just last December, eight followers of Matthews were arrested near Lynnwood after a racist attack at a bar. They were in the area for the 34th anniversary of Matthews’ death.

Harold A. Covington, a neo-Nazi based in Bremerton and founder of the Northwest Front group, was a major supporter of the Northwest Territorial Imperative. He died last July.

"Covington spent decades attempting to further racist causes, including working in the former African nation of Rhodesia to preserve white rule and advocating a plan to turn the Pacific Northwest into a white homeland, an idea also known as the Northwest Territorial Imperative," the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote in an announcement about Covington's death.

On the less racist side of Pacific Northwest separatism, state Rep. Matt Shea, R-Spokane Valley, has spoken at the Lordship Church in Coeur d'Alene. Church leaders have expressed support for the American Redoubt movement, which seeks to create a new state out of Eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana just for Libertarian Christians and Jews. Shea, meanwhile, has introduced legislation in Olympia to create a new state out of Eastern Washington called Liberty.

Hasson has been jailed on weapons and drug charges. But federal officials have said those charges might be just the “tip of the iceberg” in Hasson’s prosecution.

You can read the charging documents here:

Christopher P. Hasson charg... by on Scribd