Far-right violence could influence the controversial 2024 U.S. presidential election, a prominent FBI informant who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan for years explains in a new book.

For years, Joe Moore was tasked with infiltrating Ku Klux Klan chapters in Florida to investigate long-standing ties between law enforcement and the white supremacist group.

This mission also included Joe Moore foiling an attempt by three Klansmen who worked as prison guards to kill each other.

In his recently published book, White Robes and Broken Badges, the former U.S. Army sniper describes his experiences in detail and applies the lessons learned to an upcoming election fraught with concerns about the influence of far-right and white supremacist organizations.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in May, two-thirds of Americans said they feared political violence could occur following the November 5 election.

“Unfortunately, I think this is relevant to any time in our country’s history, not just this election,” Moore says. Far-right ideology has two origins, he has learned. “One is geographic, if you grow up in an area where that ideology is simply part of a belief system. The second is a generational origin, where it’s passed down.”

The story begins with Moore, who lived near Gainesville in the 2010s, joining white nationalist groups in Florida, rising to become Grand Knighthawk, the Ku Klux Klan’s security guard, and foiling a plot by members of the group, all of whom were prison guards, to kill a former black inmate. Moore also brought down two prominent KKK figures, Grand Dragon Jamie Ward and Exalted Cyclops Charles Newcomb.

“On my first assignment within the KKK – the country’s first domestic terrorist group, founded over 150 years ago – I thwarted an assassination attempt on then-candidate Barack Obama, but witnessed the Klan use his election as a rallying cry and recruiting tool, igniting a firestorm within the white nationalist right,” Moore writes in the book.

He continues: “I have served in authoritarian countries, and nothing I have experienced in any of those countries scares me as much as what we are experiencing now at home. Should we be afraid? With the 2024 election looming and democracy itself on the ballot, the answer is yes, we should be very afraid.”

Moore described his meeting with a regional Klan leader, the “Grand Dragon,” who lived near Rosewood, Florida, where a racist massacre of dozens of blacks had been committed in 1923 and the town destroyed. “After an evening at the Grand Dragon’s house, I went to the remains of Rosewood and realized that I had the power to prevent the next Rosewood,” he says.

Moore’s extraordinary story was already told in 2021 – both in an Associated Press article backed up by court records and trial transcripts and in the documentary “Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK.” But Moore’s new account carries an immediate political message.

Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin, who spoke to Democratic convention attendees in Chicago last week about his experiences during the January 6 incident, wrote the foreword. “Mobilizing homegrown violent extremist groups as shock troops on the front lines of the attack,” is how Raskin puts it in his book.

Moore, writes Raskin, “shows how the KKK remains a central entry point and organizing force for violent white nationalism in America.”

Moore says he tried to remain politically neutral to avoid making mistakes, but it proved difficult to find the right people to report the corruption he uncovered because, he claims, Florida officials had no interest in his claims about the Ku Klux Klan infiltrating law enforcement.

“It was far more common and had greater consequences than officials were willing to admit, so much so that state officials came forward and said there was no information that the problem was more extensive than the case they had. But I had a list of officers who were active members and were actively recruiting other people and sending active Klan members into the law enforcement hiring process.”

Even though the Ku Klux Klan is no longer as powerful as it once was, other white nationalist groups have embraced its message and adopted its membership, including militias and movements such as the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers.

Moore estimates that in 2014, a third of all Klan members belonged to another comparable group and that the organization’s leaders supported this change.

“The fact is that geographic origins and generational origins are widely scattered. So if there were to be another civil war in America, it would not be a war between North and South, but would pit families and geographic locations against other families and geographic locations.”

White racists moved to the North of the United States for economic prosperity – and joined racists already living there. “But they brought with them the origins of racism that had developed over generations and laid the foundation for a cross-generational spread of racism in various parts of the North,” he adds.

Jon Land, the author of numerous mystery thrillers, the teen comedy Dirty Deeds and the insurrection thriller Murder at the CDC, ghostwrote White Robes. The result is a discrepancy between message and style.

Be that as it may, when it comes to infiltration of law enforcement, Moore has an important point: 20 percent of those arrested in the Capitol incident on January 6 are said to have some connection to U.S. law enforcement.

“Criminal organizations of all kinds want to gain access to police powers, whether in prisons, local or state police. They want information to control their environment,” Moore emphasizes. “But the Ku Klux Klan is not interested in controlling its environment to make money, but to fulfill an ideology that will establish a new government or system.”

As a result, he claims, later generations with racist ideologies will also join the police force. It all comes down to propaganda, an ideological cycle of survival that feeds on itself. They are afraid that their philosophy will be lost.