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Dec. 13, 1995 - Bill Cooper
59:10
Floyd Cochran – Aryan Nations
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Time Text
*Piano music* and it's all.
Let's go.
I'm William Cooper.
You're listening to the Hour of the Time.
I'm William Cooper.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Thank you, dear.
You're welcome.
You're a sweet little girl, aren't you?
Yeah.
At least I think so, huh?
Mm-hmm.
But you really are.
Yes.
Are you half Chinese?
Yeah.
Are you part American Indian?
Yeah.
You have English, Scots, and Irish in you?
I don't know.
Well, you do.
Chinese, American Indian, English, Scotch, Irish.
You're pretty smart, aren't you?
Yeah.
And you have a lot of fun?
Mm-hmm.
And you would never hurt anybody, would you?
No.
In fact, mostly what we do around here is try to change the world so nobody has to hurt anybody.
Yep.
We want everybody to stay free?
Yeah.
Okay.
I just want everybody to hear that so they know it.
And you know, folks, When I get lonely, then sometimes my dad plays with me.
Yes, you do.
You're welcome.
- Yes, you do. - Well, thank you for helping me start this broadcast.
- You're welcome.
And folks, I miss you too. - I'm sure you do.
She does miss you, and that's why she came and asked me to do the pledge tonight, folks, because she hasn't done it for a while.
Now, last night, you heard a caller, and I'm gonna pop their bubble tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
Tonight you're going to hear the truth about these racist scum who, if they had their way, would simply eliminate anyone who does not look like them or believe like them.
Off the face of the earth.
By any means possible.
Like Hitler tried to do.
Or just round them up in a big field and club them to death.
Because by and large they believe in something called blood atonement.
Which means when they get rid of their enemies they have to spill as much blood as possible.
I want you to listen to this call last night.
First thing that you'll notice is that the man is just a bare faced blatant liar.
And listen carefully to this.
You can see that he doesn't own a shortwave radio, was not listening to this broadcast, and probably never has.
He was not anywhere where there's an FM broadcast at the hour of the time, because he wasn't listening to that either.
He didn't even know if we were on the air.
Not only that, folks, but he claims that I'm the one that turned him to racism, to the Aryan Nations and the Euro-American Alliance, yet he didn't even recognize my voice.
He thought I was a screener.
If he had actually ever listened to this broadcast he would know that no call on this broadcast has ever in its history been screened.
Listen very careful to this liar.
Apparently this broadcast has been targeted by racist organizations because every night for the last few nights we've had one of these callers and I suspect that they try to get through every night but since we have such a flood of calls they usually don't make it.
Good evening, you're on the air.
What's that word?
National Alliance?
Pardon?
Is this the Cooper Show?
Yes.
Okay, you're screening for him?
No, we don't screen on this show.
Oh, okay.
Hello?
Yeah, is he still taking calls?
You're on the air.
I'm on the air?
Yes.
Okay.
Well, Cooper convinced me to subscribe to the Euro-American Quarterly and the tail end of the Euro-American Alliance.
That's it.
Oh, it's another one of those righteous bullshit bigots.
And there you have it, folks.
These people, literally, except for a very few of them, do not have a brain in their head.
Tonight's broadcast is going to prove that.
A long time ago, I was sent a tape of a radio broadcast called Fresh Air.
The host is a very intelligent, very nice woman named Terry Gross, and she is interviewing Floyd Cochran, who used to be one of the elite, one of the movers and shakers, one of the higher-ups in what is known as the Aryan Nations.
He had an awful lot to do with the Euro-American Alliance, with the Christian Identity Movement, and in general, the white racist movement all across America.
He's going to tell you the truth about these people.
You see, I was going to do, because I did this a long time ago, I didn't want to do a rerun, I was going to do this myself, folks.
But you see, if I did, I would be accused of lying, of making up stories.
Well, this man found out the hard way what the racist movement is all about.
How terrible they are.
How warped their minds are.
In fact, you could even say that a great percentage of them are psychotic.
They belong in mental institutions.
What turned him around is he had worked upon him what he had been voicing about others.
You see, he had a son who was born.
with a defect, a physical defect.
One that can be cured with surgery, but nevertheless a physical defect.
His fellow racists in the Aryan nations told him that his son would have to be killed, eliminated, because he was genetically defective.
I receive letters all the time from these scum, from the Euro-American alliance, from the Aryan nations, from other racist groups around the country, telling me the same thing about my daughter, and about me, and about my whole family, in fact, because my wife is Chinese, because I'm part American Indian, and because my daughter is half Chinese, part American Indian, English, Scotch, and Irish.
They see us as some sort of threat, yet we have worked probably as hard or harder than anyone in the history of this nation for the liberty, the freedom, and justice for all people, for all Americans.
And that is a tip-off that when these people talk about liberty, and freedom, and justice, and America, and the founding fathers, and the Constitution, they are lying to you.
What they really want to establish is a fourth Reich.
They want to elevate to a throne another Hitler.
They would love to establish concentration camps where people like me and Pooh and my new daughter Allison and Annie and many of you out there listening to this broadcast would be sentenced to perpetual slave labor until we became so weak or so sick that we could not produce anymore, and then they would just murder us.
That is their solution, you see.
These people think that they are the master race, some sort of superman, and we will expose them during the next 50 minutes of this broadcast from the mouth of one of them who was in the highest echelon of the Aryan nation movement in this country finally discovered the truth about what he was mixed up in and about his own beliefs.
And he's going to tell you the truth tonight.
Don't go away.
You don't want to miss this for the world.
Thank you.
The End
The End
He became their national spokesperson and recruiter.
In 1992, he organized the Aryan Nation's youth fest.
But later that year, he left the group.
Now he's speaking against hate groups, sharing his inside knowledge about how white supremacist groups operate.
I asked him why, as a long-term neo-Nazi, he decided to leave Aryan Nation two years ago.
He told me about the turning point.
I had been told by the leadership, the people above me, the Aryan Nations, when they found out that my son was born with a cloth palate and a cloth foot, that he was a genetic defect, and that he would have to be euthanized, which is a polite word for murdered or killed, because he was a genetic defect.
Now, I don't want to tell you, Terry, or the listeners, that in that very instance, I stopped being racist.
It took me two months from that point.
To build up the courage to leave the compound and also to examine, is this what I want to do?
But I couldn't get beyond that stumbling block.
Were there other things that were giving you doubts about Arianation?
Not serious doubts.
I mean, those days, like any other individual, be it work, be it play, be it whatever, you have those doubts.
But they don't stay very long because they're fleeting or whatever.
So I never seriously questioned what I was doing.
I never seriously doubted what I was doing.
But after that was said about my son and I had time to reflect, think, examine how I felt, I couldn't get past that wall that what was said about my son was wrong, but then how was it alright for me to say the same thing about people who were born different than I was because of their skin color or because of their faith?
Would that be hypocritical?
And again, I don't want to convey to the listeners that getting over racist ideas and political thoughts and organized racism is something that a person does in 48 hours or 24 hours.
It's been a year and a half now.
And I still struggle with racist ideas.
I still struggle with sexism.
But unlike what I was doing in the past, I confront it.
I confront it by the people I associate with today.
I confront it internally, not hiding behind something.
The group that you were a member of and national spokesperson for Ovarian Nation What separates Aryan Nation from other organized racist groups?
What's their focus?
Well, for instance, the claim was white sheep and the Aryan Nation is a warm blue shirt.
There's really no difference.
Both are part of this, are becoming part of the Christian identity network.
And it's the Christian identity that people in this country really need to start concerning themselves with.
The Christian identity is the name of a religious movement.
Right.
It is the religion that the racists have developed.
It gave me a higher justification for my hatred.
It also imbued me and other people to go out and commit crimes in the name of God.
If people would like to think, well, this is just an offbeat religion, you don't have to worry about it.
This is a religion that teaches that white people are the sons of God, and that it is their duty to exterminate Jewish people and people of color.
And again, it's more than just sitting around and talking about these things and reading the Bible.
I'll point out that since 1982, 20 people have been shot and killed because of Christian identity believers.
Numerous crimes have happened.
Armored car robberies, the shooting death of Alan Byrd, the Jewish talk show host, bombings of synagogues, churches, Catholic priests.
Attempted bombings of NAACP buildings, shootouts, law enforcement officials.
These are all the things that are associated with Christian identity.
How large would you say the Christian Identity Movement is?
About 50,000 people.
Is there a founder of that movement?
Well, there would be many people who would be considered a founder.
Dr. Swift, a former Ku Klux Klan rifle instructor who is now dead, pretty much is considered a founder.
Christian identity, like any other religion, organized religion, has its two separate factions.
Both factions teach racism.
This is how they approach that racism.
One faction teaches that God created everybody but the Biblical commandments, and the Bible words for white people and white people only, and God will deal with his enemies when he returns.
The preceded line, Christian identity teaches that as a white person, you are commanded to go out and kill Jewish people and black people today, here on earth and in the heavens.
Also, Two Seed Line Christian Identity teaches that Adolf Hitler was a biblical prophet of God.
I mean, I would use the Bible to show that it was a biblical prophet.
You will find swastikas, you will find all the neo-Nazi paraphernalia that is associated with Nazism at Christian Identity compounds.
This said, when you're preaching identity that preaches telling Jews and people of color, you call this the two seed line.
What does two seed mean?
Well, it comes from the Biblical passage in the Bible, Genesis 3, verse 15, where God told Adam, thou shalt have enmity between your seed and my seed, your seed being the seed of man.
To fully explain that, I have to back up a little bit, and almost give you the identity doctrine, but identity teaches that he, instead of eating an apple, That she had sex with Satan.
That that was the forbidden truth.
And as a result produced Cain.
And Cain is considered the father of all Jews.
And Satan, let's say, was the grandfather.
Using selected biblical passages to reinforce that.
So that would make all Jews the children of Satan?
Yes, and that is why it's taught at Christian identity compounds around the country and at churches.
There are 300 identity churches in the country.
There's an identity college in Grants Pass, Oregon.
There are numerous compounds, Pennsylvania, Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma.
The goal of Aryan Nation is to create a separate nation.
Within, yes.
For white.
Yes, we would take that.
It's called a territorial imperative.
We want to take the five states of the Pacific Northwest and turn them into an all-white country as a starting point.
It certainly was not the cure-all or that was the final answer or whatever.
The final answer is culturally equated to the final solution that was implemented in Nazi Germany, and that was exterminating people based on their race, based on their faith, based on if they were genetic defects or not.
You had no problem when you were a member with the idea of exterminating people?
No, no.
At Aryan Nations you can purchase literature that denies the hollow thoughts but you can also purchase materials that prove or show for the Aryans in a way that they were always just doing God's work.
Let's take a remarkable lack of empathy to think that extermination would be okay and that some people aren't really people.
Yeah, there's a whole trust is when you no longer consider someone to be a person, and then that person is liable or open to any type of humiliation and or death.
But the other thing is when you are having constant liable indoctrinations, like to go out and kill people.
This is a thing to do, or it is done in the name of God.
I mean, I can think of a Bible verse that was used repeatedly to justify killing.
Oh, okay.
It's in the book of Jeremiah, the Old Testament book of Jeremiah, I believe it's chapter 50, verse 21.
And it's about Bible acts and weapons of war, where they will break into pieces the nations and the kingdom of the world.
And so, there again was that biblical justification.
In Luke, it says, if you do not own a sword, so your foe can buy one.
Well, today that is an M16.
So again, there is biblical justification to hate people.
You can hate anyone.
Down through the ages we've used the Bible to justify our hatred in the events of social agenda.
Could you join us, my guest is Floyd Cochran.
He's a former national spokesman and youth recruiter of the white supremacist group Aryan Nation.
He left that group about a year and a half ago and is now speaking nationally against organized hate and racist groups.
What inspired you to actually move to the Aryan Nation compound?
Well, a bunch of events came together.
The fact that in 1889 I became divorced, so that I'm no longer married, I'm no longer... I mean, I have children, but they're my ex-wife.
The reason I picked the Aryan Nation is, let's say, versus the claim, was the fact that the Aryan Nation is coming to teach property.
They had a definitive idea about the borders.
We're going to build this country, and mom is going to stay home, and dad is going to work, and there's going to be small farms and businesses.
For a person who is very unstable in their own personal life, here is stability.
I grew up in crossroads all over the state of New York.
Here was something very stable.
I might have failed marriage.
Here was something very stable.
So not only with myself, but with lots of young people, that is an attraction.
And within the racist movement, that has not gone unnoticed among the younger people.
That is a propaganda technique.
That is a tool to recruit other young people.
Creating a family for them.
Creating a family, giving you self-esteem, giving you a uniform, giving you a title, giving you God.
It's a very powerful inducement, especially when you're 18 years old.
Can you describe something about what the compound is like and what living there is like?
Well, the compound I live down in North Idaho is the national headquarters of four area nations.
And that particular compound has 20 acres of land.
It has a bunkhouse, it has a guard tower, it has a guard shack.
It does have a place of worship.
There is showers, facilities, things of that nature.
Places for people to bring their tents and their camping equipment and things.
Do you live in a tent?
No, but I lived in a small camper at the time.
Because I was an officer, it was allotted to me.
In the spring is the annual Hitler Youth Festival, so upwards of 150 young people will show up from around the country and Canada.
To be indoctrinated, to learn how to hate people based on the Bible, to practice martial arts training that women would have separate courses in, and child-rearing.
I think an area that we haven't covered, that I would very much like to cover, and it's a relatively new area of the racist movement, very few people have taken a look at it, and that is the number of young women entering the racist movement today, in record numbers.
What is it?
In the past, women would join with their husbands and their boyfriends.
Today the women are not only joining, but some of them are even forming their own organizations.
The Aryan Women's League, for instance.
Oh, lots of reasons.
I noticed that the overwhelming majority of these women came from single-parent homes, where there was a lack of authority or structure.
And that plays a big role in the development of a young person.
The other was pushing those buttons.
When I would go and talk with people, when I would go and try to recruit people, if it was a young lady, I would talk about, in an Aryan society, a man will take care of his children.
If you're a single mom, that's a powerful thing.
In an Aryan society, that is going to work, and you're going to be put on the pedestal.
There are still millions of people who have that traditional idea of mom and dad.
The Aryan society has a racial context to it.
That's something we have to start examining because women, by their very nature, their very fact, bring stability and infrastructure to the racist movement that has never happened before.
Infrastructure, the women have developed programs to, if a white supremacist is arrested, the women send clothes and birthday cards and money to the kids.
They take up that collection.
The women are in much more contact with one another from various organizations than the men are.
Women are a great recruiting technique.
I would use attractive women to stand in front of the camera.
Because, again, it's a great recruiting technique.
Also, women... Recruiting for men and women.
Is it good for men to become a waiter?
Like, meat cheeks or something?
Well, much like to sell cars with them.
I mean, is there any correlation between a woman in a bikini and a new car?
Are there any fact that a woman in a bikini helps us car a little bit faster?
So, again, in terms of selling propaganda techniques, it's still the same.
I'm wondering if there was an initiation that you had to go through.
No.
Or if your loyalty was tested in any way before you were allowed to live there?
In various ways.
Not so much as far as being allowed to live there.
First of all, because of the paranoia throughout the racist movement, everyone was watching you all the time.
It didn't matter how long you'd been there.
They were always watching you.
The other thing was, your loyalty wasn't tested so much, like they say, as you do this and this will prove that you're loyal.
What was tested more was your mental.
I mean, TTLE.
I was given different jobs to do and then watched CLR handle them.
Like what?
Well, at first it was as simple as mowing the lawn and chopping wood.
Then it was doing garden duty.
And then it was being put in charge of people who were mowing the lawn and chopping wood.
And then at the first time that Idaho celebrated Dr. King's holiday in January of 1991, I was put in charge of seven skinheads to go down and attend the Martin Luther King celebrations.
And that turned out, as far as the aliens were concerned, so well that I was according to the propagandists.
And what was so successful about it?
Well, I'm still trying to debate as, other than the fact that we walked into the place and sat down, and it totally disrupted everything.
They wouldn't let the people out of the room when we left.
The next day when I picked up the newspaper, out of 14 paragraphs covering Dr. King's holiday, I have 11 of them.
Just the fact that it's showing up there, and I kept everything, the people that were with me under control and so forth, and got very favorable press.
Favorable press in that the newspapers reported I was personable.
That I was educated, that I was kind of fun to be around.
Those type of things gave me all kinds of credibility within the community.
Was all press seen as good press because it was a sign of your power?
Well, for myself it was.
Instinctively, most races will refer to the press as being Jewish-controlled.
Of course, it's very hostile.
Being a person who was raised on television and watching people sell whatever it was when you saw it on TV and radio, I realized that The camera has replaced the pen as being which one is the mightier.
That if I smiled and I gave reporters coffee notes when they come to visit, and I asked them about their family, that they were one much more relaxed around me.
The questions weren't quite so hard.
And what they didn't realize was I had spent hours rehearsing in front of the camera over and over again.
And that in two interviews I realized the reporters were going to ask basically the same 25 questions.
So the responses would seem to be spontaneous.
And then again, I went from milking cows in upstate New York, and then in 1991 I'm in Newsweek magazine.
Because I was a pretty good spokesman.
I didn't allow myself to be trapped into the situation.
I didn't shout racial avatars.
I came across as the appearance of a reasonable person.
My guest is Floyd Cochran, a former spokesperson and recruiter for the white supremacist group Aryan Nation.
I want to talk with you more about your recruiting techniques.
You were recruiting young people for Aryan Nation.
Tell us a little bit about what you do.
Would you go to, I don't know, a college campus or an area where there are young people and talk very explicitly about how Jews were the offspring of the devil and blaspher mud people?
It would all depend on the circumstances.
For instance, I went to Oregon to talk about the spotted owl issue.
On surface, the spotted owl issue didn't appear to be a racial issue, but I made it one.
By pointing out that this was just another example of a government set-aside program.
Setting aside the white water in favor of a bird.
Another affirmative action program.
Another government set-aside program.
And then from there, I had the whole field to myself.
Lots of times, if I went into a community, first of all, I would look to media.
Because media was one of the most, if I'm not mistaken, the most successful outline I had in recruiting people.
Even if it was bad media, it was still media nonetheless.
The other was I would just sit and listen to young people.
First of all, I wasn't interested in people over the age of 40.
And people in the racist group aren't interested in recruiting people over the age of 40.
Why not?
Well, first of all, you don't have that youthful ambition, that restlessness, that idealism.
You're so much cynical.
You have children.
You're checking your wage.
You've got a job.
Things of that nature.
Also, it's not so easy to mold your mind when you're 40 years old.
But a 14 to 25 year old kid, you can do all kinds of things.
And the racist movement has shown that in the last 20 years, the last 10 years.
So again, I would sit and listen to what the young people understand.
Were they having problems at home?
Were they having problems at school?
And maybe work on that.
If it was, if I noticed it was more of a religious type thing, then I would pull out the Bible.
Or I'd ask them, let's use your Bible.
because Christian identity is a faith that uses the same Bible you'll find in any Protestant church.
Not the Bible, but the areas you grew up are a clansman.
It's just the interpretation.
When I went to Seattle, for instance, I went and looked at the demographics and saw that Seattle had a large gay and lesbian population.
And that's just the target subject.
When I was in California, it was illegal Mexicans.
When I was in Tennessee, it was African Americans.
So, again, it requires studying on my part.
From a propaganda point of view, anything that worked.
Much times I would use what I had perceived to be my enemies, their own words against them.
Thank you.
For instance, the head of the Northwest Coalition, against Melissa's harassment, they said that all races were transparent if you hold them up to the right.
You can see that.
I submitted an application to join the Human Rights Commission as a racist, and I used those very words.
You know, the Human Rights Commission talks about two sides of every issue, fairness and so forth, democracy.
Well, we'll see if those are transparent words.
Again, playing board games.
So how much would you talk explicitly about hate, about how Blacks and Jews aren't humans?
In public settings, would you do something like that?
Or did you find a kind of euphemism?
I usually use euphemism.
Crime and welfare.
You know, I talk about crime and welfare.
They own the media.
Is that saying who they are?
Right.
Until the person, if the person came back for a second visit, then it's very explicit.
But for an opening If a young person showed a lot of interest and came up to the compound, that person was made the focus of everything for two weeks.
We would tell them that we loved them.
We would give them hugs.
We'd give them uniforms.
We'd give them some responsibilities.
The fact that I was an adult, even though young people may not like to admit it, there's still that desire to please adults.
I think the biggest thing, probably one of the most successful, was we're family.
We work together and we play together.
But I think what the young people need to know is that once they get arrested, the adult leadership disappears.
And I can point to numerous incidences where young people have committed crimes thinking that they were going to please the adult leadership.
And the adult leadership simply said, we don't want you.
I want to get back to the language that you use when recruiting people.
What are some of the other, like, code words?
Zog.
Which is Zionist, which is euphemism in the racist movement for Zionist occupational government.
The belief that Jewish people control the government.
Within Christian identity, not referring to God as, let's say, Jehovah, but referring to Him as Yahweh.
Again, it's a different word that people are used to.
We've talked about crime and welfare.
We've talked about drugs a lot.
And again, in more of a racial context.
There are very few racists today who will stand on the street corner and say, let's go out and kill people.
It's a personal argument, but generally.
Second of all, realizing that propaganda effect, that doesn't work.
And again, that's what makes the race more dangerous, because they have realized these things, and they're becoming slicker.
In public, I would tell people that I was a white separatist.
Sounds much softer in the ears, much more palatable, because I just have different ideas.
But on the compound, we discussed all that.
We talked exclusively about killing people.
I sent in a conversation talking about what to do when a dead body falls out of an oven.
Do you pick it up, put it back in yourself, or do you go find someone to do it for you?
In the conversation, we talked about hanging filthy lying politicians and preachers.
We talked about killing gay and lesbian people.
But in public, no.
With the exception of gay and lesbian people.
Was it easier to get away with that?
Not only easier, society appreciated it.
But I don't know if appreciated isn't the right word.
To give you an example, if I walked outside this door here in Philadelphia, and I made anti-black remarks, I'd have to duck.
Politicians would attack me.
Clergy would attack me.
People walking down the street would attack me.
I'd go out here and say homophobic remarks.
And I would automatically have jumped into the 35-40% of the population would agree with what I'm saying about gay and lesbian people.
Blake Cochran is a former spokesperson and recruiter for the white supremacist group Aryan Nation.
I remember I once interviewed a former Klansman who had gotten involved in politics.
And when I asked him if he thought of himself as a racist, he said, well, no, you know, that he'd never really exactly been a racist, and the Klan isn't really a racist group.
And I was wondering, like, when you interviewed somebody, a reporter or anybody else said, are you a racist?
How would you respond to that?
That I was a racialist.
That I was proud of my heritage and culture and wanted to maintain it.
And then I would move to another subject, not allowing the reporter.
It's time to come up with another question or to think that one through.
Why couldn't you say, since it's so clearly a racist group, what would be the harm in admitting that you were racist?
I think I did by saying I am a racialist.
So you're avoiding, you're saying I have pride in my group as opposed to saying I hate other groups.
There are very few people in this country, very few people in this country, who even if they are haters, want to publicly admit that they hate.
It's not a human trait.
Sent them to say, I hate them.
Again, that was one of the problems I had with Aryans, in that I was more of a positive and they were negative.
And racism doesn't thrive in a positive atmosphere for very long.
But I was looking at angles of what can we do for the population, not what we are against.
What would we gain by electing an Aryan Nation official?
Not, this is what I'm against, this is what I'm for.
And again, it's just a simple switching of words.
So you'd never say, when you were with Aryan Nation, You know, you'd never say to a reporter or to even a recruit that Yes, I'm a racist.
No, not at that point.
Well, to recruit, yeah.
And if I'm standing there in my uniform, it'd be very hard to... But again, there was... I found with reporters, the ones I worked with anyway, and partially because racism sells, was that as long as I could have a friendly smile and didn't frighten them as a person, they would report exactly what I said, word for word.
So it was up to me, is how I looked at it.
And I was, I believe, fairly successful.
I was in the paper all the time, I don't know.
And it was funny.
As a racist, I could come into a town, and I'd be on the front page of the newspaper, and I'd be one of the top leading stories.
So yeah, I traveled all over the country, and it's page three and four.
Again, because racism sells newspapers.
Racism sells TV advertising and things like that.
You've described yourself as a self-taught racist.
When did you start becoming a racist?
As a kid, I was always interested in history and politics.
I remember at the age of 10, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Inside the Third Reich.
And Hitler was a hero to you?
Yeah, I was very fascinated.
I mean, here was this person that rose himself from the gutter, the flags, the marches, the parades.
I was very fascinated with that.
That, and coupled with what I was learning from society, from schools, from my parents, from foster homes, with really no understanding, I'm saying, no, that's wrong.
I mean, this was in the 60s, 70s.
An observation I would kind of like to point out.
If you watch and read most of the things covering the young people in the racist movement today, you will see them all with a fascination for a uniform.
Be it skinheads, or the Klan, or Aryan Nations, or whatever, that fascination with some type of uniform.
As an individual, I intellectually continue to grow.
But on a very personal and emotional level, I stopped at about the age of 13.
And when you think about it, that's the age when young boys are into being, you start that development of being macho and playing with, you know, the board games or the guns and being pesky with Rambo type of things.
But I saw numerous, despite everyone I ever met in the racist universe, On an emotional level.
Somewhere between the ages of 13 and 15.
You said you grew up in a lot of foster homes.
In upstate New York.
How did you end up in foster homes?
Yeah, my parents put me in one when I was 10.
Well, it was a combination.
It was my parents and the state.
Yeah, I was having problems.
I was running away a lot.
I had to go to schools.
So that was very bright.
I didn't get along with family members.
So at the age of 10 I went into a foster home.
For myself, in that regard, it was my brothers and sisters.
They all got to live at home.
I was the only one that went into the classroom.
And that had a big, a big whatever.
And your neighbor, too?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, there was nothing a kid could do at the age of 10 that I would say, just, here, you know, go away.
The only time I ever saw my parents after that was for a funeral or a wedding.
Since you grew up knowing very few black individuals and not being close to them, where did your stereotypes come from?
I grew up in a farming community and the first thing that you hated in upstate New York was New York City for a wide variety of reasons.
And I would listen to people talk about all the welfare people in New York City, all the crime being committed, and every image I ever saw come across to me was a person of color.
George Bush validated everything I ever thought about people of color, which is really ordinary.
Until you became a member of Aryan Nation, and you rose to the top, and you had a leadership position, and you were recognized there.
Do you want me to get you something?
That's exactly, but no one has ever said that before.
Well, I'll take that back.
Two nights ago I spoke at Colgate University.
Uh, but I told them, I said, you know, well, to me, one of the things that's most gratifying is the fact that here I am with no education and I can come here and talk to your political science classes, your religious and race and ethnic studies classes, your communications classes.
I meet with the smartest people you have on campus and realize that there isn't any difference between your intellect and mine and that I am just as That was exactly one of them.
Because I was constantly told, as a young person, by my parents, by foster homes, by psychologists, because I was a foster kid, that one, I would never amount to anything.
Two, I wasn't very bright.
I remember they tried to put me into an alternative school because I wasn't very smart.
I wasn't disciplined.
I mean, I could sit down.
I would, for instance, in ninth grade until I got out of high school, I never took any notes.
But they couldn't understand why I got 90s on tests.
Because if I heard it, saw it, or watched it, it was there.
I didn't do homework.
I didn't, you know.
There was that discipline.
But there was that feeling of somehow I was less than educated.
Somehow I was dumb.
And I used to play that all the time in talking with reporters, you know.
I'm just a racist.
What would you expect?
I was invited to go and speak to colleges as a racist.
And again, they weren't expecting much.
That automatically gave me the advantage.
So this must have been one of the real appeals to you of actually remaining in R.A.
And picking up a newspaper and reading that I'm far more dangerous because I was educated and articulate.
I was far more dangerous than the average classmate because I was educated and articulate.
That did all kinds of things.
All kinds of things.
And almost the point of even driving me more, I'd say.
You really knew how to play the media when you were spokesperson with the R.A.
Nation.
And so of course you can imagine there's a part of me wondering now if you really know how to play me.
The only reason, a year and a half ago I would like to understand that.
I think I've done a lot of things in the last year and a half that the only thing I can do is, and honestly I've testified at congresses, About what?
In a test like Montana State Senate to include sexual orientation, the malicious harassment law, the remunerative sodomy law, a public program, a scheme head here in Philadelphia.
I've worked with umpteen law enforcement agencies, numerous.
I've gone to high schools, I've gone to jails, I've gone to churches and synagogues.
In terms of getting paid or anything, the only place I get paid is colleges.
Everything else comes out of, I use that college money to do all these other things.
I also am writing materials that are sent out free of charge to people.
Do you face a lot of skepticism or do you really?
Not so much now.
But early on?
Yes.
Because what proof do I have?
Right.
And the thing is I'm not standing up and saying to people I changed because I had a born again experience.
It would be so easy to do that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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Look!
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It's a bird!
It's a plane!
Oh!
Oh!
I was wrong.
It's a skinhead!
Look, look, up in the sky.
It's a bird.
It's a plane.
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And the skin hit.
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You've got diarrhea!
I changed because I'm a Christian now.
I wouldn't have to ridicule for any proof.
And I know enough of the Bible that I could convince them.
I wasn't under arrest, so I didn't have a jailhouse conversion.
I was a rising star in the racist movement and walked off.
People don't understand that.
That just isn't... people want proof.
But I've built up a good solid fact record.
In fact, we're getting ready to start an organization for parents whose children have become racist.
That's probably within next month, April 15th, of parents.
It's good because there's no place to turn.
If you're 18 years old and I leave the racist movement, where are you going to go?
Are you going to give up your friends?
Are you going to go live in a tent?
No.
Not when you're 18.
If your child gets involved with a racist group, where are you going to go as a parent?
I work with hundreds of parents across the country.
Who don't know what to do.
I mean they're totally devastated.
They didn't raise them to be Nazis.
They didn't raise their kid to become a skinhead.
Go join a group.
Cut off yourself and the rest of your family.
So what do you want to do with your life in the future now?
I mean it's been a couple of years.
Do you have like political or professional ambitions?
Someday I'll be milking cows again.
Yeah, why did I say that?
Well, I'd like to go to school because if I have found out anything that when I can talk and everyone is out, it's a semblance of teaching when I come and speak to your class or communicate with your class.
I'm fairly good at it.
Do you feel you have to protect yourself against people who might want to... Kill me?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I've got a Red Doberman.
I've made a point of him and I being on some national TV shows.
When I'm at home, I don't stay too far from a gun.
I brought somebody with me when I came here.
Bodyguard somebody?
Well, not such a bodyguard, but just have somebody with me.
I'm getting all kinds of numerous threats and so forth, so I've got to be careful.
I don't let it get to me because the paranoia would drive me crazy.
I try to make a joke out of it or something.
I'm sure the racist know where I live.
I change my phone number about every three months, but I've had the same address.
And I write articles on women in hate groups, how hate groups recruit young people, things like that that is mailed out.
So that's super well known.
My guest is former white supremacist Floyd Cochran.
I have another recruiting question.
It seems that some of the people, it seems to me that some of the people who'd want to join organized hate groups would be Kind of not.
Some of the potential recruits might be a little on the cathartic side.
Oh very much.
And out of your control after you recruited them.
Very much.
I used to have to, it used to be nightmares for several reasons.
First of all, because I made myself an outcast by my choice from society.
People who would be an outcast in most societies, be criminal minded or mentally whatever, most people need a place to hang out.
So they go to the extremist party, both left and right.
It's something strictly a phenomenon of the extreme right.
And those people, out of that feeling of wanting to do something, to prove themselves, of getting fired up because they are mentally unstable, would go out and commit a crime.
And I would spend all this time, let's say, in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, working and building up a lot of credibility and stuff.
And there's somebody who I'd never seen before, and we'd only stay for two weeks and go away, would come along and throw a rock through the window or whatever.
And there they got.
Or go downtown and attack a Jewish person or a black person or whatever.
And everything I'd worked on would have been gone.
So yes, there are the psychotic.
What would you do with them?
How would you handle them?
They would simply leave.
Once they leave... You'd get rid of them?
Yeah.
You'd take them downtown, say, here's a bus ticket, go away.
Go join someone else or go do whatever it is you do.
I have one last question for you.
Being in any cult group or organized hate group, it gives you a sense of certainty.
You know what you believe in.
You know what's right and what's wrong.
You know who the good people are and who the evil people are and how you're going to do away with evil.
You're out of that now.
It kind of leaves you in this more ambiguous world.
Like a vacuum sometimes.
Yeah.
How have you been dealing with the ambiguity of not having the physiology that you can absolutely believe in?
Knowing that what I'm doing is right.
Believing what I'm doing now is right.
I find it a struggle with that.
There were times a couple months ago, a combination of a lot of pressure and Living things are of wondering, and what I'm doing, is it making any good?
Does it make any sense?
Or am I just a little sideshow type of thing?
I actually received a bunch of letters from a bunch of high school kids from Pittsburgh who liked work, who told me that some of the things I told them helped motivate them to fight against racism, nor that it moved them or whatever.
But yeah, I'm like anyone else.
I have those days, and I wonder is it really all worth this kind of thing?
Because it's more than just Giving some talks.
And I go and do these talks where again I spoke with Colby.
The talk lasted three and a half hours and then I talked for an hour and the rest of the time was questions.
When you answer questions from two hundred people that run the gauntlet of everything who I slept with to let's talk about the most abstract idea in political science, it's really like you might really need this because I don't have much of a let's say a personal life.
It's hard to find time around divorces.
It's hard to find friends because you're afraid that someone's going to come kill me.
Right.
The other is, I'm very serious.
Yeah.
It's hard to find a date because of that, almost that same factor.
First of all, the baggage is, I'm a racist, this guy must be, you know, he's going to beat me or do this or whatever.
But the other thing is, someone's going to come shoot you, kill you or whatever.
So in terms of having a personal life, I don't.
This is my personal life.
traveling and talking.
It's very easy for me to talk to 300 people or 400 people or 800 people than it is about 991.
It's much easier for me and you to talk because it's going to sit in front of us.
With the microphone.
Right.
Thank you a lot for talking with us.
Thank you for having me here.
That's a good time.
Lloyd Cochran is a former spokesperson for the white supremacist group Aryan Nation.
Fresh Air, senior producer is Danny Miller.
Ladies and gentlemen, you've been listening to Fresh Air.
The host is Terry Gross.
And the guest was Floyd Cochran, a very high level member of the Aryan Nation white supremacist movement in the United States of America.
So.
I hope what you heard tonight is enough to shock you into understanding these people are the most unmitigated liars and deceivers.
They're no better than the people who want to enslave everybody in the New World Order.
They're part of the Hegelian dialectic of all of this, the divide and conquer thing.
Most of these people have met with some unfortunate circumstance in their life, usually at a young age, and as you heard Floyd Cochran talk about the method of recruiting in these organizations, they prey upon young people who
have problems in their life, who have psychosis, who probably need a lot of counseling and maybe treatment, who have come from single parent families, who are striking out at the world, and they deceive them by pretending that they love who are striking out at the world, and they deceive them by pretending that they love them and that they're their family and that they're going to take
And in this new Aryan nation that's going to be formed, they're going to have, you know, a lot of privileges and get their own land and everything is going to be perfect, just like the Utopians teach.
There's nothing different about it.
It's all lies.
You heard Floyd Cochran talk about the way they sit around.
and plan and explore ways to kill people, Jews and blacks and orientals and American Indians, Native Americans, anybody, in fact, who does not look like them or believe what they believe or who opposes them or who believes in another religion.
They even change the words of the religion and pick out specific quotes out of context from the Bible to support Their view.
They pretend to be the real Israel.
And anyone who's really studied history and understands the truth of the real ancient Israel and the real Bible knows that nothing could be farther from the truth.
They claim the Jews are of Satan, yet Jesus Christ was a Jew.
He attended the same temple.
He attended the same religious ceremonies.
He argued with the rabbis in the temple.
I mean, you know, if there's anything in the world that is probably more of a sin than anything else, it's lies, deception, and manipulation of people by twisting and bending the truth.
It is by preying upon people who need help and guiding them in the wrong direction so that their lives are insured to be a failure and they lose all hope of ever succeeding in this life and in this society.
Great change is coming, ladies and gentlemen, but I can assure you that these people The people that you heard Floyd Cochran talk about tonight, the people that he used to be a part of, the person that he used to be, are not going to win this battle.
In the first place, there aren't enough of them to even make a dimple on an anthill.
So, you fall into that trap at your pearl.
I feel sorry for these people because they've short-circuited their lives.
When they speak you can hear the hatred in their voice.
And you don't even know where it comes from.
Because generally the people they hate have never done anything to harm them.
And they have had this tenet in their teaching and in their belief ever since I was a little child I can remember hearing racists talk about the fact that they were being forced to marry and breed with other races.
And that also is a lie.
I've never met anyone in my life who was ever forced to marry or breed with anyone outside their race.
And this tells me, and psychologists have also informed me, that this indicates that there is a sexual dysfunction with these people.
They are afraid, and I mean sincerely afraid, of the sexuality of people of other races.
Good night, ladies and gentlemen.
I hope that you have found this broadcast educational.
I hope it helps you in your life to make decisions for the future.
Good night, and God bless each and every single one of you, and even those of you out there who have been misdirected or are participating in these things that can only bring misery to yourself and millions of other people.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm William Cooper.
The Hour of the Time is brought to you by Swiss America Trading.
Superman was a comic strip character.
Tonight's broadcast was a dose of kryptonite.
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