George Lincoln Rockwell, the grandfather of modern American fascism, transitioned from a failed conservative publisher to the founder of the American Nazi Party in October 1959 after his previous group collapsed. Emulating Hitler's strategy of notoriety, he explicitly adopted the "Nazi" label and invented Holocaust denial by fabricating vivisection stories for pulp magazines. Despite FBI warnings about his dangerous rhetoric and distribution of hate-filled pamphlets, Rockwell developed a four-phase plan to seize power through racial tension, briefly endorsing Nixon before being repudiated. Ultimately, his actions birthed neo-Nazism in the United States, establishing a foundational model for racist organizing worldwide that persists today. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Behind The Bastards Intro00:14:49
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Woods.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's itching my rashes?
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards.
Nobody liked that intro.
Sophie is giving me the cut signal.
Everyone else just looks ashamed and horrified.
Cody's giving me the thumbs up.
I'm politely smiling.
Katie's politely smiling.
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards podcast.
Talk about bad people, the worst people, all of them in history.
What you don't know about them.
My guest today, Cody Johnston, Katie Stoll.
Hello.
Hi.
How are you guys doing?
Great.
Really, really well.
I'm doing fantastic.
What did you guys think of my intro?
I thought it was good.
I'll reiterate.
The thumbs up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That scans well for a podcast.
I'm going to do it again.
Physical comedy is great for podcasting.
I was fine with your intro.
Thank you.
It's no what's cracking my peppers, but they can't all be.
Sure.
They can't all be.
You just, you got to try stuff out.
You got to try stuff out.
That's the only way you know it works.
And it's also a great way to get rashes.
Speaking of rashes, while we're on the subject.
Speaking of a rash on our collective nation, our subject for today is a fella named George Lincoln Rockwell.
Have either of you all heard of George Lincoln Rockwell?
Minimal.
Yeah, I'm not that familiar.
I would say based off the three names, he killed people.
Not directly.
But those are always the people who wind up killing the most people.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Indirect wise.
How does that song go?
People who don't directly kill people are the killingest people in the world.
Yeah, he's got blood on his hands.
Well, yes, absolutely.
Near the end of February 2019, if you remember that far back, federal authorities arrested U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Hassen with a cache of guns and a list of liberal and leftist politicians and journalists he wanted to murder.
On April 1995, Tim McVay detonated an enormous fertilizer bomb outside the Murray building in Oklahoma City.
Last October, Robert Bowers walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue and murdered 11 people.
Between 1995 and 2019, we've seen a couple of hundred far-right terror attacks and attempted terror attacks and murders.
Behind each of these attacks and each of these deaths is an individual terrorist with his or her own journey to radicalization.
But there is one single man who shows up in the ideological chain of custody for every single act of right-wing terror in our lifetimes.
And that man is George Lincoln Rockwell.
There it is.
There we go.
I'm so excited.
Excellent intro.
In the worst way possible.
Y'all were, when I knew I was doing GLR, what we call it.
Oh, yeah, Claire.
Yeah, yeah.
I knew y'all were the only possible guest for this.
Appreciate that.
That's so touching.
You also produced regular terrified content about the horrifying things happening in our country.
Because it's our niche.
This guy makes a lot of that make more sense because he's where most of it starts.
So, this week's three-part episode is the longest podcast I've ever written by a couple of thousand words.
It started initially as a five-part special episode.
I wanted to go into detail about all the bastards behind our current wave of right-wing terrorism.
There's a fascinating, terrifying intellectual history there, and I think it's very important for people to know.
Rockwell was just going to be one part of that series, but then I wrote 13,000 words on him.
So here we are.
I am still going to put together a five-part audiobook on all the bastards who invented right-wing terror.
We'll talk about that a little bit at the end of this episode.
But Rockwell is special.
He's the grandfather of all modern American fascists.
He started the sort of fight that we're all in right now, if you consider yourself some.
It's a bad fight.
It's a terrible.
And it's a ridiculous fight.
So let's get into it.
Rockwell was born on March 9th, 1918, in Bloomington, Illinois.
So like me, he's an Illinois baby.
I see the similarities and the connections already.
Yeah, I mean, he just wait.
Now, he was the oldest of three children.
George's parents were both vaudeville performers.
His dad was somewhat famous for pretending to be a doctor in a bit that does not translate down through the decades because I've read a couple descriptions of it and I can't understand what the joke was supposed to be.
Oh, I love that kind of stuff, though, where it's like, oh, you really, you literally had to be there.
You had to be alive in the 20s.
You had to be there for 30 years before that joke was told.
Throw shit on him, though, because I feel like that's true for all old comedy.
It just does not translate.
No, I was just watching a movie I used to love, the second Astronchura movie.
And even 10 years past, like the last point I watched it, I was like, oh boy, a lot of this stuff.
It just does not age.
It does not age.
Now, his dad's nickname was Doc because of the aforementioned bit where he pretended to be a doctor.
And the biography I read of Rockwell for Race and Nation claims his dad was an egomaniac.
Quote, a nephew recalled that the son went up and down on what he was doing.
Period.
Another could not recall one instance of affection expressed by Doc towards Lincoln.
Doc Rockwell lavishly entertained show business friends who journeyed from New York to Southport for a little rest and a relaxation.
So George's parents divorced when he was young, and so he split his time between showbiz hangouts with his narcissistic dad and languishing with mom and his overbearing racist aunt.
One of his cousins described that side of the family as archie bunker types.
Anti-Semitism, racism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Italian sentiments were all common at home, but racist talk was kept inside the family.
His dad was not anti-Semitic for that fact because he was in show business stuff, so he had a lot of Jewish friends and whatnot.
So that was that seems to be his gross aunt.
His gross aunt and probably...
And probably his mom, yeah.
Probably his mom.
I mean, I guess literally everyone was racist by modern standards back then.
Yeah, I mean, you know what?
Props for them to keeping it inside the house.
Keeping it in the family.
Although they did not, because it boiled over the most it possibly could.
I remember it.
Like misleading.
Right, right.
I'm trying to, yeah, I'm forgetting where the story's going.
Although, I should note that his family expressed nothing but shock and shame at the beliefs Rockwell would peddle as an adult.
So, for whatever that's worth.
Way to go, way to go, Doc.
Way to go, Doc Rockwell.
As a teenager, George Lincoln Rockwell worked as a waiter in a tourist hotel on the coast.
He angered easily, that's a big surprise, and would regularly get revenge on female patrons who he thought had annoyed or slighted him in some way.
His favorite method of doing this was rubbing a syrup-soaked rag on doorknobs, pocketbook handles, light switches, and anything the women might touch.
What a little imp.
What an insult.
What?
They all are.
They are.
He's so resentful of being slighted by random women that he works for.
Most of what you've said, except for the stuff about the comedy that doesn't translate, is very applicable to the modern men that I know.
Oh, my God.
Except for these present.
I mean, have you touched a door handle that I've been around lately?
I haven't.
Because I got a syrup-soaked rag in my pocket at all times.
Yeah, I don't do that anymore after I slighted you that one time.
After you slighted me that one time.
Exactly, exactly.
I mean, to be honest, most of what I use the rag for now is in case there's like a pancake emergency.
Sure, sure.
Seriously.
Obviously.
Just smart.
Just smart planning.
My favorite jam band, Pancake Emergency.
When they played at Red Rocks, that was.
Oof, oof.
I love their song, The Syrup Sensations.
That one day of that year when they played at Red Rocks.
Solid jam band humor in this Nazi podcast.
Oh, yeah.
George Lincoln Rockwell grew up mean and tall into a lantern-jawed six-foot-four-inch adult.
He had a commanding presence and an almost pathological need to impress or intimidate everyone he met.
His high school yearbook said this about him: quote: Without question, Lincoln is the loudest talker on the campus, the originator of more weird theories than anyone else, and the Academy's outstanding artist.
We have every assurance of his being successful because of his incomparable personality and originality.
Originality is important.
Originality.
That's good.
You can say a lot of things for George Lincoln Rockwell.
Most of them terrible, but he was an original thinker.
I think you'll agree with that by the time we come around to the end.
I have no issues with this guy.
I like his originality.
You like the cut of this hair jib?
I'm just on the board with this guy.
Well, let's keep cutting into the jib.
I don't know what a jib is.
George went to Brown University, but he did not enjoy it.
He was irritated by the progressive ideals of his professors.
What little political correctness existed in American universities in 1938 was too much for Rockwell.
All these PC thugs and the don't spit directly onto the black people.
You PC police.
PC culture in the 30s and 40s.
Get out of here.
Get out of here, George.
You know how it is.
According to his biography, he later claimed he never bought the idea of human equality.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah, it's not for sale, man.
Sorry.
We just think people are people.
It's not a product.
You're not.
No, you're not selling that to George.
To GLR.
He got a job at the school paper, and he drew bad political cartoons and wrote worse columns.
A lot of his work was killed by his editors before even being published.
Do you have any other political cartoons?
I mean, it's such censorship right there.
But I feel like if you just take a Ben Garrison, that's exactly what I'm thinking.
I was like, I want to see this proto-Ben Garrison.
I bet that's who he cites as an inspiration.
It's got to be.
It's got to be.
He will not be the only person.
Now, Rockwell's schoolwork was not much better.
At one point, he got an assignment to write about the factors that led to criminal and delinquent behavior in young people.
Rather than doing research and writing a scholarly article, Rockwell wrote essentially a speculative sci-fi fable about scientists in Africa.
That was the title, Scientist in Africa.
According to this fable he wrote, these scientists were, quote, studying why ants acted like ants.
They searched around until they found a lot of anthills, observed them for many years, and finally came up with the discovery that when ant eggs were hatched in tunnels in a certain kind of hill in Africa and grew up among six-legged creatures called ants, they themselves were so affected by the strong environment that they became themselves ants and waved their antenna like ants, scurried around aimlessly like ants, looked like ants, and were ants.
He's saying blacks people are dumb because they don't, they have to study ants to know that they're ants.
That's the joke.
That's the whole joke.
It's a funny joke.
I hate it.
It's terrible.
No, it's a funny joke.
The rule of threes is really on display in this.
God, George.
This is the least racist thing we'll be talking about today.
He's like, waiting, like, what's talking about culture?
Like, what's it?
Where is he going?
No.
That's the whole point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In spite of his clear talent for storytelling, Rockwell did not excel in college.
He never graduated.
And he wound up enlisting in the United States Navy slightly before we got into World War II.
He became a pilot and flew combat missions in Guadalcanal, as well as like he flew it, he flew combat missions in both the Pacific and the Atlantic theaters.
And he seems to have been a pretty good pilot during the war.
Like he was very active, flew a lot of missions, like did a lot of dangerous stuff.
Although that did not stop him from lying about his service later, he would spend the rest of his life claiming that he'd sank two Japanese submarines.
This means George Lincoln Rockwell and L. Ron Hubbard both picked the exact same lie to tell about their service in World War II.
Yes.
Oh, God.
I don't know what to do with that.
What does that mean?
You just store it away for later.
You just store it away for a while.
What do you say that you track and you know?
And someday the dots will connect.
There's two of them.
I'm waiting for that.
You need a third one to really take shape.
Waiting for Donald Trump to talk about the submarines.
Which one came first?
You know, like, who said it first?
I think it must have been right around the same time because they were both starting to be on the public scene in the 50s.
Yeah, this sort of like general, like, I wonder if that's like for a few years, just a bunch of people like, oh, yeah, I just took some submarines.
There's probably a lot of people that made that claim.
Yeah, they were both in the Navy.
And my God, I can't stop thinking about what if at some air base in the middle of World War II, the two of them wound up having a beer at some point.
I was just thinking that.
I like to think that it's true.
That's a great one-act play.
That is a hell of a one-act.
You write it, we make it.
I'm playing L. Ron.
Oh, shit.
We will make that.
I think that's a great idea.
Okay, to be continued on that.
Getting along and getting to know each other in the background, you hear like someone like, I just sank two submarines.
That's a great idea.
That's a great idea.
It just like watches over them.
Rockwell And MacArthur Origins00:07:58
They don't even realize they're like absorbing it.
Sinks in there.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
Okay.
Anyway, here's what Rockwell looked like.
Here's what Rockwell looked like during the war.
Who wants to describe him?
Oh, Katie.
Just the way that.
Oh.
Okay.
Honestly, he looks a little bit like my cousin David.
He really does.
No shade on your cousin David.
No shade on my cousin David.
Beavis?
Yes.
He looks like it.
He really does with that mustache.
And he's got that.
He's got some impressive brow work going on and a nice furrowed gaze.
Yeah, Cody, you take a whack.
God, David.
I would say he looks like if Farva joined the military.
Right?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like he gets a little more fit.
He's a very serious man now, but it's totally Farva.
Oh, he doesn't.
You know, he looks like someone who wipes syrup on handles.
Yeah, he does look like a man who wipes syrup on handles.
Yeah.
I hate to say it, but he will get way better looking as the story progresses.
Yeah, he the mustache the mustache was an error.
No, the mustache was a mistake.
That's his one mistake.
He's like, of all the things I ever did, I'm sorry about the mustache.
In general, I'd say mustaches are a mistake.
Not at all.
My dad has a mustache.
Sorry, dad.
That's going to be a lot of fun.
You're throwing a lot of shade your family's.
Hey, no, no, no.
I was just thinking that and I was regretting it.
This whole story reminds me of my shitty aunt.
Apologies to the Stoll family.
After the war, Rockwell decided to try his hand at art with the dream of working in advertising.
He was accepted by the Pratt School of Design in New York City.
In 1948, his second year, Rockwell won a $1,000 first prize in a national illustration contest.
His winning piece was an anti-smoking ad for the American Cancer Society, which is ironic because for the rest of his life, Rockwell was seldom photographed without a corncob pipe in his mouth.
Hell yeah.
I like a man with principles.
So do I.
I like advertising.
Nah, cigarettes are what's bad for you.
Yeah, because a corncob pipe, that fills up your Q zone better than a cigarette.
Oh, yeah.
I've only read medical textbooks from the late 1940s.
But according to those, the Q zone is really critical to keep filled with smoke.
The Q zone.
The Q zone.
That's what you got to keep smoke filled.
Is it shaped like a Q or is it a stand for quality air?
Quality.
Quality zone.
Quality air.
Quality zone.
You fill with more smoke, and that makes the quality of all the air in your body better.
Oh, yeah.
That's makes perfect sense.
Anyway, sponsors, Philip Morris, have been.
I would totally sell cigarettes.
Wouldn't you?
Everyone knows at this point.
Sure.
Well, right.
If I had that option, I'd be like, yeah, I'll sell these cigarettes, but I get to say, by the way, they're going to kill you in their bad.
That would be my whole action.
I'm getting paid to say that these are available.
You want to die sooner?
Because the world's a nightmare?
Try these cigarettes.
They will age you quickly.
And lie to you for decades about it.
Not me, baby.
I'm telling you the truth.
I'll sell you honest poison.
Smoke and die.
Speaking of honest poison, George Lincoln Rockwell opened up an advertising agency with two partners in Portland, Maine.
This business came to an end with the Korean War started, and Rockwell was recalled to active duty.
He didn't fight this time, though.
Instead, he trained people at the Coronado airbase and eventually got involved in politics.
His chosen candidates were Senator Joseph McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur.
Yeah.
He loved both men for their violent resistance to the spread of communism, with which he agreed fervently.
In 1951, deep in this anti-communist obsession, Rockwell decided to read the autobiography of the greatest anti-communist of them all, Adolf Hitler.
He would later claim that reading Mein Kampf was the most powerful moment of his spiritual life.
Quote, word after word, sentence after sentence, stabbed into the darkness like lightning bolts of revelation, tearing and ripping away the cobwebs of more than 30 years of darkness, brilliantly illuminating the heretofore obscure reasons for the world's madness.
I hate him so much.
Okay.
Big Hitler stand here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
To put that in a little bit of context, China had gone communist in 1949, and by 1951, the Russians had officially got the bomb.
The Korean War was seen, particularly by conservatives like Rockwell, as a crucial stand against the violent spread of communism over the globe.
Rockwell didn't jump straight into being a Nazi.
His first political goal was to organize a rally urging Douglas MacArthur to run for president.
MacArthur, by the way, was the guy who got fired by Truman for trying to nuke China.
Koo guy.
Koo guy.
Good fire.
Good fire.
Solid fire.
Yeah, also the guy who made, well, he's debatable how well he did in the Korean War.
We could argue about that a lot.
Now, according to Rockwell, he was stopped from renting a hall in San Diego for a MacArthur rally when a local pro-MacArthur activist told him that the Jews hated MacArthur and would not let such a rally happen.
What did he do about that?
He did not develop positive feelings towards Jewish American citizens.
What's this Mein Kamp fan going to do about it?
That's what we're...
Yeah.
After some time in Coronado, Rockwell was sent back to Rhode Island on Navy business.
His wife picked him up at the airport and, according to Rockwell, told him that in his absence, she'd learned to be, quote, independent and no longer wanted to sleep with him.
We have no way of knowing if this is how the conversation actually went down, of course.
Of course, it didn't go down that way.
No, I know it did not go down that way.
Rockwell would later use this story to claim that his first wife, Judy, had been inflicted by what he called the common insanity of modern education, which made women feel their lives were lacking if they became homemakers rather than sought out careers.
Rockwell claims he realized his wife had basically been ruined by modernity and that the marriage was over.
This is great.
Everything you're saying, like, yep, yep, that adds up.
Yeah, I've seen, I know those people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know prominent figures who would relate to this guy.
Yeah, this is the guy who invented a lot of that.
Unfortunate, her name was Judy.
What?
You feel like maybe that pushed him over the edge?
You're not a fan of the name Judy?
It's just like it rhymes with.
My aunt's name is Judy.
My mom's name is Judy.
I mean, if you're a guy who is suddenly very resentful of Jews and then you're like, oh my God.
Yeah, you needed to see that.
By the way, that name sucks.
It's like really coming down to the middle of the day.
Katie and I on team the name Judy.
Name Judy's fine.
If you're not this guy.
Yeah, if you're not.
No, that makes sense, though.
Yeah, yeah.
I can see how he might have some issues with that.
I withdraw my connections.
Now, thankfully, Rockwell was immediately sent to Iceland next, and during a party in Reykjavik, he met Margaret Thora Halgrimson, a 23-year-old niece of the Icelandic ambassador.
He started flirting with her, and they eventually struck up a relationship.
In 1953, he asked his wife formally for a divorce, and she was happy to agree to that.
He married Halgrimson soon after.
After his second stint with the Navy was done, Rockwell would turn to the United States, Halgrimson in tow.
They moved to D.C., where he put together a magazine for the wives of U.S. servicemen called U.S. Lady.
It was not a success.
Rockwell became convinced, however, that it was his mission to create a popular new conservative newspaper that could galvanize what he called the splintered and squabbling right wing into an effective political movement again.
You might say his goal was to unite the right.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He pitched his idea to the American Federation of Conservative Organizations, giving it the title The Conservative Times.
Tragically, he was unable to find investors for this surely fantastic idea.
Eventually, Rockwell met a guy named Harold Arrowsmith, the scion of a wealthy family who had become obsessed with poring over the Library of Congress's microfilms to find evidence of a Jewish communist conspiracy to overthrow the nation.
Since no actual scholarly publications were willing to publish his findings, Aerosmith went to Rockwell and basically said, if you help me get my theories out there, I'll pay to print the shitload of propaganda.
Uncovering Disturbing Patterns00:03:48
Yeah.
So that's hyper-familiar, too.
Yeah.
So everybody's like, if you print my bench and stuff, I'll pay you money.
It gets bat shittier.
But before we cover what happens next on the amazing journey of George Lincoln Rockwell, speaking of which, Katie, can we do a free plug for your water bottle?
Because I am loving the look of that water bottle.
What is that?
It's called an SLM.
I'm assuming that's for Slim.
It's got like a little wood grain.
My favorite part is that it has a little straw that pops up.
It has a little straw that pops up.
If you want a bottle that looks like it's made of wood, buy you a Slim.
They've got lots of different colors.
Lovely.
And if you want another fine product and or service, purchase commerce units in here.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
Golden Rules Of Men00:15:15
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out a mostly human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back.
Back in not the USSR, because Rockwell was terrified of communism.
He would not have liked that song either.
Probably wouldn't have liked anything they said.
Probably would not have liked most rock and roll.
Probably wouldn't have liked their manager.
He might have liked Rocky Raccoon or something.
Might have liked Rocky Raccoon.
Would not have liked the Rolling Stone song painted black.
No, no, that would not have been.
Or brown sugar.
Or brown.
You do not want to play brown sugar to George Lincoln Rockwell.
Oddly enough, big fan of Hey Jude.
That was the key side for back in the USSR, I believe.
Okay.
Rockwell took a shine to this rich guy, Aerosmith, immediately, calling him the most violent Jew hater he'd ever met, which in Nazi circles was quite a compliment.
It is.
He agreed to work on the project if Aerosmith would provide a home for his new wife and her children.
Aerosmith agreed on the grounds that their project must use the name he'd settled on, the National Committee to Free America from Jewish domination.
Thank you.
Rockwell did not like the name, but agreed to do it for the money.
On July 27th, 1958, the National Committee officially announced itself to the world with a picket of the White House.
Rockwell printed out large placards covered in slogans.
Don't fight another war to save the Jews.
He was talking about Israel at this point and the wars they were fighting.
Nasser, the president of Egypt, has jailed his Reds, but Jews lie that he is red.
Communism is Jewish.
One of the placards just said the slur, kike.
Sure.
Yep.
I mean, if you're going to do a thing that sucks, why not be a piece of shit about it?
Why not be a piece of shit about it if you're going to do a thing that sucks?
Rockwell marched with a small number of young racists he'd gathered.
Almost no one came to see them.
The crowd that did show up was a mix of journalists and ADL photographers.
Anti-defamation league.
The National Committee marched, and then Rockwell took everyone to a local motel to drink beer.
Motel?
Motel.
Yeah, that is specified in the biography.
To be clear, it was not a hotel.
It was a motel.
There were cars within feet of them.
Everybody had to pay for their own drinks.
Everybody had to pay for their own drinks.
The bed's head penny slot.
Those windows were right next to each other.
Tragically, this would prove to be the high watermark for the National Committee because Rockwell had actually sort of screwed over his wealthy benefactor, Aerosmith.
He'd printed only a few of the leaflets showcasing Aerosmith's research and used most of the committee's resources to print off his own propaganda for a completely different organization called the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, or Woofins.
That's bad.
He's losers.
My God.
I mean, tragically, he gets better at the branding.
Yeah, yeah.
Woofins.
It's a process.
You have to understand, neo-Nazis didn't exist yet.
Woofins sounds like a cute little pup name.
Woofins is a music.
You're right.
No, and parenting is important.
And like, yeah, you're building up United Right.
We're like, we're all together.
We're woofins.
We're one big family.
Yep.
Not you.
We're one actually much smaller family than the family other people want to exist.
On October 12th, 1958, a racist named Wallace Allen detonated 50 sticks of dynamite inside the Hebrew benevolent congregation synagogue in Atlanta.
Thankfully, he did this in the dead of night and no one was killed.
But suspicion almost immediately turned to George Lincoln Rockwell because when police searched Alan's home, they found letters between the bomber and Rockwell.
One of Rockwell's letters from July mentioned a big blast, although he claimed this was a reference to a woofin's picketing march he had planned and not any terrorist attack.
It's a very remote party.
Like a blast in, like, we're going to have a blast.
We're going to have a blast.
It's going to be a big blast.
It's going to be a big 50-stick dynamite-sized blast.
Rockwell was not charged with any crime in the wake of the bombing.
But that attack marked the beginning of a national conversation that we're all still having today.
What do we do with people who inspire terrorism but don't actively urge it in a legally actionable way?
What do we do about that?
I don't know.
Last December, I lectured a room full of aspiring and current federal law enforcement people about this, and nobody seemed to have a real clear answer.
Oh, good.
Oh, good.
I'm going to hear more about that at some point.
Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that.
Now, the rabbi of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Synagogue was a dude named Jacob Rothschild, which is an unfortunate last name to have if you are one of America's earliest white advocates for school integration and civil rights.
He was a major, major, like early civil rights advocate, and the members of his synagogue were unusually active in being white people who are like, we should all be less shitty to black people.
Good advice.
Good advice.
Why they also got bombed.
Bad result of good advice.
Yeah, that's how it goes.
Thankfully, no one died.
In a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial for the Atlanta Constitution, Ralph McGill called the bombing, quote, the harvest of defiance of courts and the encouragement of citizens to defy law on the part of many southern politicians.
It is not possible to preach lawlessness and restrict it.
To be sure, none said go bomb a Jewish temple or a school, but let it be understood that when leadership in high places in any degree fails to support constituted authority, it opens the gates to all those who wish to take the law into their hands.
Yup.
Well said.
Agree.
Would have been great if people had listened back in 1958.
Why would we listen to what things happened in the past that might be directly related to Christianity?
Why would we think about that?
Rockwell had been a French figure before the bombing.
After it, he was completely abandoned by the mainstream American right.
Aerosmith abandoned him too, and his naval reserve status was canceled in December.
This left Rockwell destitute without even the money to keep the lights on.
As 1959 dawned, Woofins only had nine fully initiated members, with 12 more waiting to attain full membership status.
I bet you guys are wondering what it takes to become a full member of Woofin's.
I was just thinking you were thinking about that.
You too, Cody.
Okay, well, there's a ceremony.
Oh.
There's a ceremony.
It's described in For Race and Nation as, quote, pricking the cheek with a razor blade, dripping a large drop of blood on the border of a swastika flag, and swearing allegiance to the party with the trooper's oath.
All these fucking nerds.
Get out of here.
These fucking nerds.
Go away with this stuff that happens.
I'm going to read the trooper's oath.
Oh, please do.
Oh, yeah, I gotta.
In the presence of the great spirits of the universe, all capitalized, and my loyal party comrades, all capitalized, I hereby, all letters capitalized, irrevocably pledge to Adolf Hitler, also capitalized, the philosophical leader of the white man's fight for idealistic and scientific world order against the atheistic and materialistic forces of Marxism and racial suicide.
I pledge my reverence and respect to the commander of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Movement.
I pledge my faith, my courage, and my willing obedience.
To my party comrades throughout the world, I pledge my absolute loyalty, even unto death.
To myself, as a leader of the white man's fight, I pledge a life of clean and manly honor.
To the United States of America, I pledge my loyalty and my careful compliance with its constitution and laws until those which are unjust can be legally changed by winning the hearts of the people.
To my ignorant fellow white man who will hate and persecute me because they have been so cruelly brainwashed.
I pledge my patience and my love.
To the traitors of my race and nation, I pledge swift and ruthless justice.
That is a cool oath for a great bunch of really cool.
Koo guys.
Koo kids.
It's almost like what, even if you take out the race stuff, it's like what unites the right is they all fear the same things and they all like really, really want the same kind of thing.
It's almost like it is really civil.
There's an ASMR here.
This is what history does to me.
It's just really frustrating.
Troopers were given code names, which had to be related to their real names, but also make them sound like total badasses.
So a recruit named Birchard became Trooper Oak because Burchard sounded sort of like Birch, but George Lincoln Rockwell didn't think Birch was a badass enough tree.
Oh my God.
This is so good.
All about the oak.
It's like that George W. Bush thing where it's like he sees you eating a burger, so he calls you Burger.
Or I don't know.
Tim Apple?
You know what?
I'm not going to go on.
That's funny.
It is funny.
If I was the president, that's how I would refer to every business leader.
Well, it's super hilarious and cool and great if he did it on purpose.
Yeah.
But it's just his broken brains.
I would call Jeff Bezos Jeff O packages.
Jeff O.
That would be.
You know, Jeff Bookstore over here.
You know, Jeffy Books.
Jeff Bookso.
Oh, God.
It would be great if he called Mattis Jim Marines.
Yeah, David Armey over here.
These are great names.
Great names.
Also, it's crazy that we actually had a guy in that job whose literal name was almost David Armey.
Oh, my God.
It was even silly.
It was so close.
It would have worked out so well for him.
Oh, that's amazing.
Wolfens carried out several picketing actions, which were basically protests in public areas where Rockwell and his stormtroopers would carry incredibly racist signs attacking the Jews or black people.
They also published anti-Semitic pamphlets and books with titles like Battle Call, Fight on Your Feet with the World Union of Free Enterprise Socialists or Live on Your Knees with the Jews.
Okay.
Not great at titles.
I mean, Battle Call is a fine title, but that subtitle, not clicking on it.
I love all these stories, whenever you tell stories like this, and then there's like a title that has the word Jews in it, there's always like implied, like you put a little stank on it.
Yeah.
And like it's always there.
You can always feel it.
Even just reading it, just the way the rest of the sentence is constructed.
It's like how they wrote it.
Like, oh, man, I know how you're hearing this word when you write it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
I know how you're saying it in your head as you typed it.
Now, it's important to note that Wolfens was not yet a totally Nazi party, at least not explicitly.
That oath was a private oath to troopers.
Okay, so you just mean like they weren't like, by the way, we're Nazis.
Not super out in Paris.
We're swirling around it.
I mean, they were calling themselves National Socialists, but they were up to that point avoiding being super explicit about the Nazi thing.
I mean, nationalism and socialism.
Those are two things.
Those are two great games.
What are you going to do?
And Rockwell did not consider himself a fascist.
He said he wanted an authoritarian republic, which is totally different from fascism.
I don't know that many fascists want to call themselves fascists.
He said fascism got in the way of free enterprise.
Now, while Hitler had been a racial nationalist, Rockwell sought to spread what he called international racism.
He believed that millions of Americans and Europeans were, quote, only a synapse away from discovering that they were national socialists and never knew it because they have never been allowed to know what national socialism is.
Okay, maybe.
He felt that most conservatives were really national socialists.
They were just scared of the word itself because of all the bad press the original Nazis had received for some inexplicable reason.
All the bad press.
All the bad press.
They got a bit of a bad rap.
The media.
The media loves to stir up controversy.
Liberal media.
Just can't stop attacking us for a couple of more than 10 million dead in death camps.
A couple of more than 10 million, 20 million killed on the Russian front.
It's just, you know, overblind.
Bias in the media.
You kill 30 or 40 or 50 million people.
And then you get liberal media all of a sudden.
Now, Rockwell knew that his first step towards making National Socialism palatable to the general public was to convince them that the Holocaust wasn't real.
This was revolutionary at the time.
There was no such thing as organized Holocaust denial in 1959.
It did not exist.
Tens of thousands of Americans had seen the death camps for themselves in person.
Everyone had watched the newsreel footage from camps liberated by the American army.
That was like one of the things Eisenhower had done as soon as we found it.
He was like, oh, everybody's seeing this shit.
Like, this has, like, the world has to see.
Yeah, this real thing.
Yeah.
So that people don't do what Rockwell's about to do.
Right, like 1959.
1959.
Yeah.
There are 30-year-old Holocaust survivors.
Right, like, that's so recent to start like.
16-year-old Holocaust survivors.
Yeah.
God.
Yeah.
So, in order to accomplish his goals, George Lincoln Rockwell had to invent the idea of Holocaust denial.
Here's how For Race and Nation describes that process.
George.
Quote, to establish a Holocaust was a hoax theme, Rockwell fabricated a story for a CD men's pulp magazine called Sir with that exclamation point.
The story, quote, by a former corporal in the SS as told to Master Sergeant Lou Corr, which is Rockwell spelled backwards phonetically, related how the Nazis conducted vivisection on Jewish concentration camp inmates.
The article was accepted and Rockwell received $75 in payment.
When it was published, the editors used concentration camp photos alongside his story to enhance its appeal.
To Rockwell's way of thinking, since the publisher had used bogus photos for a bogus story, the Holocaust must be a Jewish fabrication.
Rockwell was to use the magazine article as proof of a Holocaust hoax for the rest of his life.
Okay.
Yeah, there's what do you, what do you say to that?
He invented Holocaust denial.
By like pretending to like fake it.
By writing a fake story.
Real stuff.
The Nazis cut up Jewish prisoners in the Holocaust.
Right.
Some of the doctors who did it admitted it later.
He just wrote a fake article.
A fake article that could be like debunked to be like, see, they're lying about the thing that has actually.
Oh my God.
And he got paid 75 bucks for it.
He got paid 75 bucks.
Inventing Holocaust Denial00:04:52
Wow.
What a.
You could argue that modern Holocaust deniers, I mean, they're bad people, but maybe they're just what they're saying.
But this is somebody that what's so evil about it is he knows that he fought in World War II.
Yeah.
Right.
Like doing that in the late 50s, because then, yeah, you have people now who are like, oh, it's like 60 years later after this conspiracy theory even started, so it makes sense that you can fall down that rabbit hole and like get convinced.
You could talk to 25-year-olds with numbers on their arms.
Right.
Yeah.
At this point.
Man, what a bad person.
I'm sorry.
I'm starting to change my mind about this George guy.
Really?
Yeah.
On board for the first six pages, but then it's too much.
This would be the first great innovation in Rockwell's life as the most influential racist in American history.
But it was not enough to save the terribly named Woofins.
Without the backing of their millionaire patron and without any kind of mass popularity whatsoever, Rockwell's dream of a National Socialist Party quickly fizzled out.
By June of 1959, he had only three troopers left and the lease was up on their headquarters.
Rockwell left the United States for Iceland, where his wife and kids had fled because it turns out they didn't like being with the guy who was trying to revitalize National Socialism less than 20 years after his left.
This is his second wife?
Yeah.
When he arrived in Reykjavik, his wife wanted nothing to do with him.
The police escorted him from her home.
He got shithouse wasted and cried for a while, and then he decided that he must use the pain of his emotional loss to galvanize him into being an even greater fighter for the cause of white people, who, let me tell you, were really hurting in 1959.
He would later say that his wife leaving him had given him a, quote, priceless armor of fearlessness.
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
Who doesn't kill us makes us Nazis.
There we go.
Yeah, sometimes.
George Lincoln Rockwell returned to the United States with his new armor of fearlessness and began making the changes he believed would be necessary to cause National Socialism to catch fire in the American heartland.
The first step, he decided, was to stop calling it National Socialism.
You might expect that this would be his first move towards embracing a more moderate label for his organization, but Rockwell actually went the opposite direction and started calling himself a Nazi.
Yeah, here we go.
Counter in the oven.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh.
His strategic considerations were based entirely around what would gain him the most public renown.
A bunch of men wearing swastikas, calling themselves Nazis, and goose-stepping around at demonstrations would gain more notoriety than a few weirdos ranting about National Socialism.
In making this call, Rockwell was consciously pulling inspiration from a passage in Mein Kampf.
Quote, from Hitler.
Whether they laugh or swear at us, whether they present us as fools or as criminals, the main thing is that they mention us, that they occupy themselves with us again and again, and that gradually, in the eyes of the workers, we appear actually as that power with which alone one has to reckon at the time.
Yep.
There it is.
There it is.
There's that.
Oh, there's yet another just piece of the frustrating puzzle in which we all live.
Which we all live in.
So, like, bad attention is good attention.
I know.
Attention is currency.
Maybe attention is currency.
He would have loved Twitter.
Maybe that's.
George Lincoln Rockwell would have dominated.
Yeah.
He would have probably eventually gotten banned and then used that to sort of push forth.
He would have then screenshot his name trending and then posted it on Instagram.
I'm trending.
And that's good, no matter what.
I got to say, like, I get the joke, but I think he's smarter than that.
I think he, knowing that he would have written it, I think he would have used it way better.
I don't think he would have been like, fuck, I don't think, I think he would have done in this day a thousand times better than Richard Spencer or Jacob Rohl or any of the failed people.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, they're like dopes that have stumbled into what they are.
This guy is like, he's a genius.
Right.
He's a terrible genius.
Yeah, he's an intelligent man.
He's just fucking stupid.
He's just a monster.
But in October 1959, George Lincoln Rockwell officially formed the American Nazi Party.
With this action, he gave birth to the concept of neo-Nazism.
So, invented Holocaust denial and neo-Nazism within a year of each other.
Heidi Barak, who tracks hate groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said this in an interview with the WAMU Radio: Quote, He was the first person after World War II when the knowledge of the Holocaust became known and the horrors that had happened under Hitler's regime to take an overtly pro-Hitler position.
Really, he's responsible for creating neo-Nazism in the United States.
It's entirely possible that without Rockwell, Nazism would be dead as a political concept, at least in the United States.
That is debatable.
What isn't debatable is the foundational role Rockwell played in the concepts behind racist organizing in this country and worldwide.
On Christmas Day, 1959, a synagogue in Cologne, Germany was defaced with swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti.
This sparked a rash of attacks on synagogues across Europe.
Rockwell joyfully took credit for inspiring the violence.
He added, quote, I deplore the avenues some of them have chose.
I would not permit my troopers to paint swastikas on synagogues or churches.
It's not necessary here.
It is in Europe, where there's no other way.
You know what?
Foundational Role In Racism00:04:17
This is a terrible time for.
But we're pivoting.
Pivoting.
Spend your money.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Ellis, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Olespi and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
FBI Shocked By Violence00:15:00
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back!
Thank God.
Thank God.
You guys, I could tell you were like shaking from Rockwell withdrawals.
Yeah, I felt lost during that ad break.
I know, I know.
That's what Nazism does.
During the 1960 election, George Lincoln Rockwell caused controversy by publicly endorsing Richard Nixon.
This move would be echoed decades later by the decisions of former KKK leader David Duke and racist asshole Richard Spencer to endorse Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
To his credit, Nixon immediately told ABC, I completely repudiate him and all the evil he represents.
Thank you.
Good job, Nixon.
Thanks.
Thank you, Nixon.
Thanks, Nixon.
Thanks, Nixon, for not waffling on whether or not to disavow a literal Nazi.
Yeah, yeah.
Also, thanks for the EPA.
Yeah, okay.
And opening up trade with China.
There you go.
Nixon, good guy.
Nixon.
Not thank you for extending the Vietnam War.
That has been tens of thousands of additional deaths, but it wasn't a zero-sum thing.
Also, all that race.
Also, all that racist stuff.
At least he's...
Yeah.
Let's stop talking about Nixon.
We'll do the nine-parter on Nixon another day.
Rockwell was not just a blind ideological hate monger.
He was a serious racist thinker with serious racist goals and a fairly logical way of looking at the world.
He developed a set of four phases that he believed were necessary for his party and its racist ideas to gain power in America.
These rules were based not just on what Hitler had done, but on the strategies successfully employed by communist political movements in the East.
Phase one, become known.
This includes getting in the headlines, rallies, and promotional material.
Phase two, develop leadership cadres, teaching about white rights, the anti-white movement, miscegenation, and party tactics.
Phase three, mass recruitment.
This includes public relations, toning down the party in order to become more mainstream, recasting the party as legitimate, instigating tensions that increase party membership, i.e. racial riots.
And phase four, taking of power, mass action.
A crisis situation leads to rapid expansion.
Paramilitary substrata of the movement begins to take control by force, and using direct confrontations with the government and the security apparatus of the state.
I assume you saw those chat logs from Identity Europa.
Actively trying to infiltrate the Republican Party and influence it.
He is the founding father of American active fascists.
Not sure if you're going to get to that or not, but flashed in my brain a little bit.
The third episode is just about what he inspired.
I cannot wait.
Oh, it's going to be horrible.
I hate it.
Rockwell was, above all else, a creative political thinker.
On June 25th, 1961, he took nine members of his new revitalized American Nazi Party to a Nation of Islam rally in Washington, D.C.
The Nazis marched right into the Ulin arena, outnumbered 800 to 1, and took their place among the otherwise almost entirely black audience.
They were not there to protest, but to show support.
The Nation of Islam's leader, Elijah Muhammad, and his right-hand man, Malcolm X, were at the time, black separatists.
Malcolm X's speech that night was literally titled Separation or Death.
Despite repeated shocking statements of racism, Rockwell also regularly expressed admiration for Malcolm X.
He backed the Nation of Islam because he saw them as having the same essential goal as the ANP, racial separation of black and white people.
At one point during his speech, Malcolm X admonished the white members of the audience, telling them they should really donate to the Nation of Islam if they supported its cause.
Rockwell was among the first to whip out a $20 bill and hand it over.
Life photographer Eve Arnold, who was there to shoot the event, took a picture of this.
She was Jewish, and when Rockwell saw her photographing him, he yelled, I'll make a bar of soap out of you.
She replied, as long as it isn't a lampshade.
Solid rejoiner.
What a girl.
What a girl.
All right, okay, okay.
Yeah, that's a good comeback.
I just locked eyes with all the women in the room, and we were all like nodding.
Yeah.
The Nation of Islam event was great PR for Rockwell.
Esquire magazine attacked him in his ideas, but couldn't avoid describing him in weirdly positive tones.
How much taller he is than Hitler, and how much better looking.
And how much better looking.
To be fair, they weren't wrong.
By this point, he'd shaved his mustache, and he looked a lot.
I mean, look at that.
He's the guy in the middle.
And...
Okay, yeah, it's an improvement.
Who does he look like to me?
He's got some cheekbones going.
A little bit Carrie Grant in there.
A little bit Carrie Grant.
A little bit Kerry Grant.
He is much taller than Hitler.
Oh.
I mean, this isn't a side-by-side between him and Hitler, but you can just say that.
He can tell.
I mean, he looks like a leading man.
Actually, he doesn't look like a leading man.
He looks like the villain, but the hand is a very good thing.
He looks like the Nazi.
He looks like the Nazi.
But he's like, kind of in the way that you're like Billy Zayn.
Part of you was like, go with Billy Zayn, you know?
He's got a hell of a jawline.
So, Cody.
Yes.
I'm really excited.
Yes.
The American Nazi Party was chronically low on funds the entire time Rockwell ran it.
His fundraising strategy then relied entirely on ginning up controversy in his public appearances and using that to solicit donations.
He had a variety of ways of accomplishing this, but his most reliable tactic was getting invited to speak at colleges.
Oh, interesting.
There would inevitably be protests and often fight him, which would lead to publicity that would convince hidden neo-Nazis to mail him checks.
Interesting.
Well, those protesters seem like the real Nazis.
Those protesters because they're trying to shut down free speech.
In San Diego, the Committee for Student Action invited Rockwell to speak at the state college.
He gave a speech to a group of 3,000 students, introducing himself by saying, If I had wanted trouble, I could have worn my uniform with my Nazi armbands and the whole works.
Believe me, I know how to stir people up if I want to.
Rockwell then railed against homosexuality in California.
He talked about seeing men holding hands in the streets of Hollywood and told the students, if there's one thing I'd rather gas than communists, it's queers.
At one point, 22-year-old Ed Cherry, a Jewish student and hero, took the stage and demanded Rockwell hand him the microphone.
When Rockwell refused, Cherry punched him in the face repeatedly and broke his sunglasses.
Punch a Nazi.
The rest of the speech was canceled.
Next, Rockwell and his men were scheduled to give a talk to journalists at the school newspaper.
During the walk from the auditorium to the paper's offices, they were surrounded by students and pelted with eggs.
Here's how for Race and Nation described what he said when he finally talked to the baby journalists.
Rockwell told the journalism students that there was a conspiracy to discourage his speaking invitations.
The attack by Cherry was part of a plan to keep other colleges from inviting him.
He put the attack in perspective, calling it a minor skirmish.
Such violence hurt his cause in the short run, but helped it in the long run because people finally realize what is happening that's ruining this country.
It's terrorism.
In other words, there is no free speech.
For a man who preaches what I do, they try to kill you.
I'm so mad.
Rockwell would speak at dozens of colleges over the course of his career.
We'll talk about this more in part two, but I can't overstate how critical they were for the ANP's financial independence and how he literally invented the blueprint that every right-wing grifter uses today.
Yeah, we just keep coming back to that.
I'll just go speak at a college.
People will yell and throw stuff at me and then I'll get more money.
And then I'll be the guy who got shouted out of the school for speaking to the children.
Speaking of violent leftists.
Yeah, the violent leftist Nazis because that's the real, that's the real situation.
Did he debate kids?
And how?
Oh, yeah, he did.
Love debating.
Now, Nazis are good.
Change my mind.
God.
The hundreds of dollars brought in by the honorariums paid by colleges literally kept Rockwell's lights on.
Soon there were ANP HQ buildings in Virginia, California, and Texas.
The actual number of stormtroopers was rarely higher than, you know, a few dozen to maybe like a hundred or two at the most.
But the presence of these buildings gave Rockwell's movement street credit and also provided an opportunity for him to make the news and thus solicit more donations.
ANP headquarters buildings were bedecked with signs that said stuff like, white man fight!
Smash the black revolution now!
The black revolution to go to the same schools as everyone.
Use the same water.
Revolution.
Revolutionary idea there.
Those of you who know me and my relationship with law enforcement know that I am not exactly a big fan of the FBI.
To be honest, I have not forgiven them for the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1918.
But I am, above all else, a fair man.
And for all of his many, many, many, many, flaws, J. Edgar Hoover was not on the wrong side of this particular issue.
The Bureau instantly recognized Rockwell as a threat.
His file described him as, quote, a professional bigot, a con man, a malcontent, and a chronic failure who will stop at nothing to gain notoriety and even power.
He is a man whose tongue and pen are jagged weapons of slow destruction, a shrewd, small mind inflated into a national nuisance by undeserved publicity.
He is a braggart and a bully who tries to delude his maladjusted followers into believing they are crusaders.
Well said.
Gone.
Yeah, pretty good writing for the FBI.
They did not, however, write him off as a harmless crank because the FBI knew something about Nazis that I really wish the modern FBI would catch on to.
Quote, though small in numbers and influence, the ANP is a dangerous organization of misfits who are psychologically and physically capable of perpetrating acts of violence.
If this organization is ever in a position to do so, these American Nazis, like the Nazis of Hitler's Germany, will follow through with their obnoxious objectives of liquidating all whom they consider inferior.
It is well to remember that in his early days, Adolf Hitler, like Rockwell, was ridiculed and scorned.
We would do well to heed the American Nazi Party and to remember that history is replete with incidents where a nucleus of an organization and the right conditions merged to shake the foundations of the world.
What is a stronger word than obnoxious?
Oh my God, that's like good, good job.
Good job, the FBI.
Being aware of history and how things happen.
Being aware of 20 years ago.
Right, right.
Wow, that's...
I really wish any figure with the power of any amount of power would say something like that.
Wouldn't that be nice?
It would be.
Wouldn't that be great?
But instead, they could like target.
They could yell at people for yelling at people for speaking at college campuses.
And then target like left-wing activists and ignore that like all their organizations in the military are being sort of infiltrated by white supremacists.
Why would that be important, Cody?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I would just care about that.
I'm just saying stuff out loud.
It doesn't matter.
It is not like there are any incidences where, say, a military combat veteran built a 6,000-pound bomb and destroyed a federal building and killed 168 people.
If something like that had happened, I'd say you should be worried.
Okay, okay.
Well, I'll keep my eyes open for something like that.
But in the meantime, I'm going to go take a couple of naps.
Perfect.
Just like our national security apparatus.
That's interesting.
Well done.
The FBI report on Rockwell included summaries of the ANP's major publications.
Quote, The Rockwell Report, which appears monthly or every two months, is a pseudo-newspaper in which Rockwell comments on and makes predictions regarding national and international occurrences, lashes out at hecklers and enemies, and discusses ANP business.
The Stormtrooper, a bi-monthly magazine, contains articles regarding aspects of national and international Nazism and features articles containing scurrilous squibs about Jews and Negroes.
Scurrilous squibs.
Really like the writing shops of the old-time FBI.
Yes, the illiteration.
Yeah, it's much more colorful.
It's good.
It's good.
Also, a little bit of poetry.
Definitely would have had a podcast.
Oh, my God.
Oh, yeah.
So would Hitler.
So would Hitler, yeah.
I mean, it wouldn't even be a podcast.
It'd be just like he'd have a radio show.
He'd be like a daily.
Well, I know, but I think it would probably get canceled and somehow they'd, you know, he'd go to.
I mean, I think he'd probably have taken Tucker Carlson's job, to be honest, because he's way smarter.
Maybe selling gold.
Yeah, oh, so much gold.
A lot of gold and brain pills.
Yeah, yeah.
It also included...
Sorry.
The FBI report also included descriptions of the ANP's pamphlets, which are just about the most hatefully racist things that I can imagine.
The 1960s FBI agents writing about them were shocked by the level of racism.
1960.
The same group that was urging Martin Luther to kill himself were shocked by the racism of the ANP stuff.
Quote, leaflets, pamphlets, brochures, throwaways, stickers, and other types of easily disseminated messages are the more common types of ANP propaganda.
One repugnant pamphlet disseminated by the party advertises a Brotherhood Inward Talk Dictionary.
They did not use the phrase Inward.
Okay.
Compiled by the ANP as a public service for parents whose children are attending the integrated schools.
There is even a section of this handy Brotherhood dictionary explaining how to be tactful about interracial love.
Inside this pamphlet is a drawing of a familiarization kit whose contents include such odious items as selected rocks carefully balanced and weighted for breaking out school windows, pack of marijuana reefer cigarettes for smoking at interracial orgies, etc., switchblade knife, lightning fast, extra long blade for stabbing students, and Spanish fly, powerful aphrodisiac for slipping into girlfriends whiskey or wine.
Great.
Great.
All the tools a person needs.
You know how with like the KKK stuff, it was racist, but it was so dumb and baddy that you could laugh at like the Cool Coast camp a little bit.
This is the opposite.
There's just nothing.
Yeah.
It's just horrible.
So, Cody, I would like you to describe this next pamphlet, which the FBI provided as an example of the ANP's typical humor, which they put, and I put in quotations.
Humor, I love humor.
Please don't actually read the science.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, don't read that.
I will be putting most of this stuff up on the site.
I'm not going to put the stuff with slurs on it up on the site.
I'll put the things where you can find it, but yeah, I don't.
And then there's a picture of a book called How to Be a Jew.
Yeah.
I think you've gotten it across.
Yeah, there's a lot of writing on this.
Oh, wait, let me finish the joke.
Hold on.
Gonna read it okay.
Ha ha ha.
That's me reacting to the funny joke.
The N-Word Exclamation Point00:05:46
Is that a full number of ha's that deserves?
It's awful.
Get that out of my sight.
I'm gonna burn this script after reading.
Yeah, I mean, this can't feel good to type up.
No, no, it did not.
That's hideous.
I do think it's necessary for everyone to hear because I want to contrast those publications with how Rockwell presented himself.
Well, this is like memes.
It's like the memes.
It's like memes that you see right now.
I want to contrast those publications that we've just gone through with how Rockwell presented himself when he was in front of cameras and microphones addressing students.
I'm going to play you an excerpt from a speech that Rockwell gave very close to here at UCLA in 1967.
Sylvie?
Thank you very much, Mr. Raff.
And let me first say how grateful I am for this opportunity to speak on the academic community.
It's the only opportunity left to me in this country to speak in a way that the American people get to hear and judge me for themselves.
In every other forum, every other place I attempt to speak out in the street, the people who loudest claim to love free speech and demand free speech for themselves usually insist on using physical violence to try to stop me from enjoying my free speech.
Oh my God.
And when I try to speak in the streets, I need troops.
It's the only place where I can speak.
I can't even hire a hall.
When I hire a hall, they usually threaten the owner.
There's bomb threats and so forth.
So this is the last refuge of free speech left in the country.
And I'm sorry to say it is usually accorded to me by the liberals.
And I must confess I admire their courage and their sincerity in granting this opportunity to me.
Brave liberals.
Congrats, liberals.
Classic lives.
Surprise.
Classic liberals.
Let's be fair.
That is classic liberals.
Classic liberals.
Literal Nazis speak at your college.
Wow.
This clip was from, you say, decades ago?
1960s.
Oh, interesting.
Half a century in the past.
I was wondering why the quality of the audio wasn't as good.
If it wasn't that, I would have thought we were listening to C-Packet.
Like last weekend.
Yeah.
Not the liberal part, but.
Yeah.
No, not the.
No.
There was, of course, ample racism in Rockwell's lectures and speeches to college, but nothing so hateful, crass, and crude as the things in ANP literature.
It was a shallow veil, but one that fooled a number of Americans.
Now, that is all I have to say for today, for part one.
Okay.
When we come back on Thursday, or Wednesday, actually, for part two, we're going to talk about the Jewish community's reaction to the American Nazi Party and the first attempts by activists, you might call them anti-fascists, to respond to Rockwell's truly innovative trolling.
It's going to be just a whole bunch of stuff that seems eerily familiar despite being more than half a century old.
Tune in.
I can't wait.
You guys got some pluggables.
Well, actually, I want to do a quick thing first.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So as I mentioned at the start, this was originally going to be part of like a five-part audiobook on the origins of American right-wing terrorism.
I'm now doing that audiobook as a totally separate thing because Rockwell roundup being a full thing itself.
So if you go to GoFundMe and look up The War on Everyone, that's the working title of the audiobook.
Yeah, GoFundMe, The War on Everyone.
If you want to donate some money, you know, that audiobook will come out.
And the money that I make for it, I will use to further the conflict journalism work, the stuff that I've got done in Portland and over in D.C. on the East Coast, like going to these rallies.
If we get enough, I might even be able to go somewhere like Royaba again or do more of the foreign conflict reporting.
So you're going to definitely get an audiobook and you'll get more stuff too in the future.
GoFundMe, The War on Everyone.
Now, do you guys want to plug your pluggables?
Yeah.
Check us out online.
Online, though.
We don't have what you just said.
No, but we've got a thing that produces stuff every week.
Some more news.
Yeah, Google Some More News in YouTube, our show basically weekly.
We do stuff there.
We also have a podcast called Even More News.
We talk about the news.
It's all on, you can go to the app.
You can Google the things.
Wherever you want to go.
Yeah, I would say our patreon.com/slash some more news.
That's where our patrons go to support us and make sure we do most kind of also like makes more episodes.
We try to give as much as we can.
You guys give a lot and produce a ton of really good stuff.
Thank you.
It takes a lot.
Some of the best news that you can get at this moment in American history.
With jokes.
I do have a question.
Would you ever let, say, the commander of the American Nazi Party speak on your podcast?
Because I thought you loved free speech.
And if you don't let Nazis have a platform, you don't love free speech.
I'd have to do a pre-interview, I think.
I would.
Yeah, with my fists.
I would probably do something like this, maybe, where I sort of talk about that person and delve into their ideology and sort of represent them accurately.
But this already exists.
But it seems like an audience.
You've done a bunch of that.
Well, some more news.
Patreon, the YouTube podcast.
We're on Twitter.
Dr. Mr. Cody is with Dr. Mr. Cody.
I'm IRIRITOK on Twitter, where you can find me yelling about Nazis.
Even more, if that's something you like.
You can find us on the internet, this podcast, at BasketPod.
You can also find us on Instagram, aka the Graham, by the same name.
You can buy a t-shirt, a cup, a sticker, a literal horse and buggy, all branded with our special content, behindthebastards tpublic.com.
And behindthebastards.com is our website.
Tomorrow we're back.
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