Aryan Nations (AN) was once a powerful organizing force for white supremacists that cultivated a wide spectrum of racist and anti-Semitic ideas. In its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, Klansmen and other white nationalists convened regularly at the group’s Idaho compound for its annual world congresses. In 2000, AN began to fall apart after losing a civil lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center that depleted the group’s finances. The physical decline and 2004 death of AN founder Richard Butler further devastated the group. In the latter part of the 2000s, Aryan Nations splintered into a handful of groups with several people vying for leadership of the various factions.