Behind the Bastards - Part Three: The Apostle of Fascism
Aired: 2019-08-15
Duration: 01:07:27


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (03:10) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:31]  I got you, I got you.
[00:00:36]  What's up, everyone?
[00:00:37]  I'm Ego Modern.
[00:00:38]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:00:42]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:00:45]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:00:46]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:00:53]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:00:56]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:01:03]  Yeah, it would not be right.
[00:01:05]  It wouldn't be that.
[00:01:06]  There's a lot of life.
[00:01:07]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:15]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:01:22]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:01:26]  I doctored the test once.
[00:01:27]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:01:32]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:01:34]  Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
[00:01:37]  My mind was blown.
[00:01:38]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:01:40]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:01:41]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:01:43]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:01:47]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:55]  10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
[00:01:58]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:01:59]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:02:00]  Jeffrey Woods.
[00:02:01]  A shocking public murder.
[00:02:03]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:02:09]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:02:11]  Those are shots.
[00:02:13]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:02:15]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[00:02:19]  Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:32]  What's strung out, my co-hosts?
[00:02:35]  We are speaking.
[00:02:36]  Oh, yeah.
[00:02:38]  We are all ruined right now.
[00:02:40]  I am trying my best.
[00:02:42]  I'm fascinated by it.
[00:02:43]  I just got to get more of this caffeine.
[00:02:45]  I'm doing.
[00:02:45]  I'm great.
[00:02:46]  I feel like cold brew coffees.
[00:02:50]  And sunflower seeds.
[00:02:52]  And Starbucks Spritzers.
[00:02:54]  Yeah.
[00:02:55]  I have repeatedly failed to.
[00:02:57]  I'm trying to get these throwing bagels to land and stay on top of the soundboard on the ceiling, but I can't quite arc them over the ceiling.
[00:03:05]  It's been a long time.
[00:03:07]  I don't want to say how many times.
[00:03:08]  Katie's going to take a shot.

=== Counter-Protesters in Chicago (03:40) ===

[00:03:10]  She's at a good angle.
[00:03:12]  Damn it.
[00:03:13]  Oh, yeah.
[00:03:13]  You didn't want me to keep it forever.
[00:03:15]  Don't tell anybody.
[00:03:17]  Women can do anything.
[00:03:18]  That's right.
[00:03:19]  Just let me take care of it.
[00:03:20]  You messed up those soundboards for us, huh?
[00:03:25]  So this way, if women don't win the presidential election, they at least put throwing bagels on top of the sound award.
[00:03:31]  Where they belong.
[00:03:32]  That was impeccable aim.
[00:03:33]  It really was.
[00:03:34]  It's a perfect kind of arc.
[00:03:35]  Let's talk about what a feminist icon I am for enabling you to do that.
[00:03:41]  You know what?
[00:03:41]  Robert?
[00:03:42]  Let's you and me talk about what a feminist icon is.
[00:03:45]  Yeah, I couldn't have done it without you guys.
[00:03:49]  I mean, you handed me the bagel.
[00:03:51]  I believe in you.
[00:03:53]  I want like a Rosie the Riveter poster that says, I couldn't have done it without you guys.
[00:04:00]  That's another merch.
[00:04:02]  Oh, boy.
[00:04:04]  Chapter 3.
[00:04:06]  The Apostle of Fascism.
[00:04:07]  Ooh.
[00:04:08]  Yeah.
[00:04:09]  A lot of great chapter names here.
[00:04:11]  A lot of mediocre ones, too.
[00:04:13]  Kind of a mix.
[00:04:13]  But we got to celebrate the good ones.
[00:04:15]  We got to celebrate the good ones.
[00:04:17]  If the international fascist movement has a single founding father, that man would be George Lincoln Rockwell.
[00:04:23]  George took the ideologies and the hateful, vicious drive to exterminate and dominate that Adolf Hitler established, and he found a way to let them function in a post-World War II world.
[00:04:32]  After the war, fascism had lost its ability to attract a mass audience in the United States.
[00:04:36]  It was seen as the ideology that had torn the world apart, because it was.
[00:04:40]  People wouldn't show up to Nazi party meetings or pay dues or vote as fascists, and so Rockwell instead focused on generating media attention with the few men he actually had at his disposal.
[00:04:50]  He picketed civil rights marches, wielding signs covered in racial slurs and trusting the police to defend him and his outnumbered crew.
[00:04:57]  Even if he could only get nine or ten men to march with him, the rage and violence his science inspired and counter-protesters would guarantee massive media coverage.
[00:05:04]  He spoke at colleges for the same reason, knowing that protests and attacks caused by his presence would get him in the papers and ensure a steady stream of donations.
[00:05:11]  Rockwell positioned himself as a free speech crusader, since arguing to the public about his desire for genocide would have been way less appealing.
[00:05:18]  These are all, of course, tactics that modern fascists use today.
[00:05:22]  Yeah.
[00:05:23]  And you know, I knew it sounded familiar besides the last time we were here.
[00:05:30]  But the fascist movement has evolved considerably since GLR's days.
[00:05:33]  While many of the tools he pioneered are still very effective, his obsession with Nazi imagery, and the swastika in particular, was doomed for his hopes of ever building a mass movement.
[00:05:42]  He had started to realize this near the end of his career.
[00:05:44]  In 1996, he came up with a brilliant slogan, white power, which he had printed up on t-shirts and protest placards.
[00:05:50]  He worked the phrase into his speeches in Chicago, where he arrived to counter-protest Martin Luther King Jr.
[00:05:55]  Now, we already talked about this one as well, but Dr. King was in the city to organize a protest advocating for more public housing in traditionally white and thus more affluent parts of the city.
[00:06:04]  For the first time in his career, Rockwell was able to strike a nerve with a large number of white Americans by focusing on their fear and resentment of black people.
[00:06:10]  On August 6th, 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. led a group of marchers through Gage Park.
[00:06:15]  He was met by a huge crowd of counter-protesters, organized and radicalized by George Lincoln Rockwell.
[00:06:21]  They numbered more than 2,500.
[00:06:22]  The crowd carried placards and banners and blazoned with Rockwell quotes, like, join the White Rebellion, and we worked hard for what we got.
[00:06:29]  Thousands of furious voices chanted white power at King and his comrades.
[00:06:32]  It marked the most violent and vicious reception Dr. King ever received.
[00:06:36]  It also marked the high point of Rockwell's career.
[00:06:38]  He was shot dead a year later.
[00:06:40]  His dream of fomenting a white revolution did not die with him.
[00:06:43]  It lived on in his apostles, and chief among them was a man named William Luther Pierce.

=== The White Rebellion Crowd (10:12) ===

[00:06:50]  Always got three names, these guys.
[00:06:52]  Always.
[00:06:53]  Pierce was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 11th, 1933.
[00:06:58]  Another 9-11.
[00:06:59]  Yeah.
[00:07:00]  His father, also William Luther Pierce, died in a car accident when he was eight years old.
[00:07:04]  His mother had to scramble to support him and his younger brother.
[00:07:07]  Leonard Zeskin, author of the crucial book Blood and Politics, suspects her background heavily influenced the fascist that Pierce would become.
[00:07:14]  Quote, Marguerite's biological father had run off when she was a child, leaving her fatherless until Marguerite's mother remarried.
[00:07:20]  The new stepfather was a Jewish man from New York who had moved south, and Marguerite had a bitter relationship with him.
[00:07:25]  William Pierce's story thus begins with his own absent father and his mother's unhappy tie to a Jewish stepfather.
[00:07:30]  Marguerite moved about the South with her two young sons in tow.
[00:07:34]  From those travails, William Pierce claimed that he learned the virtues of self-discipline and the importance of delaying immediate gratification for a greater goal.
[00:07:41]  Values, he said, that became constant themes in his life.
[00:07:44]  So Pierce worked as a child to help his mom feed their family.
[00:07:47]  He would later write that his difficult upbringing made him into the man he became.
[00:07:50]  I think this external discipline, this external control, being forced over a long period of time to do things I didn't want to do, but were necessary to do, helped me to develop self-discipline.
[00:07:59]  A lot of children these days never learn that.
[00:08:01]  It's amazing how many adults can't do that.
[00:08:02]  They can't stick at a job they don't want to do.
[00:08:06]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:08:08]  It's weird because you get the feeling from him that he kind of wanted to do the Nazism thing.
[00:08:14]  Yeah.
[00:08:15]  Which is actually, it's interesting for a couple of reasons, which we'll get to.
[00:08:18]  Because, yeah.
[00:08:20]  Young Bill was clearly a brilliant boy.
[00:08:21]  He did well in high school and went to a military academy in Bryan, Texas from 1949 to 51.
[00:08:26]  He earned a job there, cleaning the chemistry lab stockroom, and that job wound up stoking what would become a deep love of science.
[00:08:33]  William went to college and then graduate school where he studied to become a physicist.
[00:08:37]  He worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena for a year and married Patricia Jones, who was also a brilliant mathematician.
[00:08:43]  The couple moved to Boulder, and Pierce finished his doctorate in physics in 1962.
[00:08:47]  His dissertation had something to do with nuclear dipole and electric quadrupole resonance, which I do not know what that means.
[00:08:54]  Yep, no thanks.
[00:08:55]  Nazi stuff.
[00:08:56]  No, apparently not.
[00:08:57]  Apparently nothing Nazi in his physics dissertation.
[00:09:00]  Is that flat earth stuff?
[00:09:02]  No, I think it's just classic physics-y stuff.
[00:09:04]  Not classical physics, but like neoclassical physics.
[00:09:08]  Neoclassical physics.
[00:09:11]  Pierce got a job as an assistant professor of physics at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
[00:09:16]  Always go through Oregon.
[00:09:18]  He and his wife had twins, and they settled into what seemed like it would be a perfectly dull, normal, happy, healthy life.
[00:09:24]  Pierce later wrote, until I was 30 years old, I had hardly given a thought to politics, to race, or to social questions.
[00:09:31]  That changed after he started working at Oregon State University.
[00:09:34]  He began showing up at meetings of the John Birch Society.
[00:09:38]  Yeah, Cody's hissing like Nosferatu back there.
[00:09:42]  Classic John Birch response.
[00:09:44]  What is this about?
[00:09:45]  The John Birch Society?
[00:09:47]  No, no, just that area for Oregon keeps coming up in this.
[00:09:53]  It wasn't intentional, but the fascist movement in the U.S. always runs through fucking Oregon.
[00:09:59]  It's very weird.
[00:10:00]  Yeah.
[00:10:01]  It's counterintuitive for me, but there's something there, but I don't know what it is.
[00:10:04]  Yeah, I don't know why it is either, but it happens enough that it's like, what the fuck is that?
[00:10:10]  There's something to figure out about that.
[00:10:12]  Why you moved there?
[00:10:12]  Well, in the last 20 years, there's this idea of trying to make a white homeland out there.
[00:10:20]  But this is awesome.
[00:10:21]  It goes back so much further, too.
[00:10:23]  Yeah.
[00:10:24]  That's weird.
[00:10:26]  Just a fashy place, I guess.
[00:10:28]  Yeah.
[00:10:29]  Nazis love pine trees.
[00:10:31]  But I love pine trees.
[00:10:32]  I know, I love pine trees, too.
[00:10:34]  Does that make me a Nazi?
[00:10:35]  Yes.
[00:10:37]  This is the podcast where we all go.
[00:10:41]  Was I just radicalized by pine trees?
[00:10:44]  Get your swastika on.
[00:10:47]  Maybe we're just here to reclaim pine trees.
[00:10:49]  Yeah, let's take pine trees from the Nazis.
[00:10:51]  Taking them back.
[00:10:51]  String them up on pine trees.
[00:10:53]  Anyway.
[00:10:54]  Probably shouldn't advocate for violence in this episode of the podcast.
[00:10:58]  But all the other episodes.
[00:11:01]  Yeah.
[00:11:01]  Now, the John Birch Society.
[00:11:03]  Listeners may not have heard of these guys, but they're one of the most important organizations in the history of the American right.
[00:11:08]  They're named after an American advisor in China who the group's founder, Robert Welch, considered to be the first American who died fighting communists.
[00:11:17]  Yeah.
[00:11:17]  Always.
[00:11:18]  Yeah, that's who John Birch was.
[00:11:20]  Robert Welch, the guy who founded the organization, and John Birch Society publications encouraged the U.S. to withdraw from the UN, urged the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren, and accused former President Eisenhower of being a secret communist.
[00:11:34]  Yeah.
[00:11:35]  Here's a line from one of their 1960s publications, The Blue Book, which William Pierce would certainly have read.
[00:11:41]  Now, if the danger from the communist conspiracy were all we had to worry about, it would be enough.
[00:11:45]  But every thinking and informed man senses that, even as cunning, as ruthless, and as determined as are the activists whom we call communists with a capital C, the conspiracy could never have reached its present extensiveness, and the gangsters at the head of it could never have reached their present power unless there were tremendous weaknesses in the whole body of our civilization.
[00:12:03]  Weaknesses to make an advance of such a disease so rapid and its ravages so disastrous.
[00:12:09]  Weird how communism has been like right on the edge of taking over America for like 70 years forever.
[00:12:15]  Yeah.
[00:12:15]  Yeah.
[00:12:17]  It's happened in the middle.
[00:12:18]  It's got to get around to it one of these days.
[00:12:20]  Yeah.
[00:12:21]  Robert Welch always denied that the John Birch Society had any anti-Semitic leaning.
[00:12:26]  But many people suspected that some of the weaknesses Welch saw in American society were in fact Jewish people.
[00:12:32]  Okay.
[00:12:32]  This is because John Birch Society propaganda was often very similar to the Third Reich's own propaganda.
[00:12:38]  The Nazis also felt that communism was brought down on societies by hidden actors who weakened the state enough for a disease to advance upon it.
[00:12:44]  The main difference between the two is that the Nazis named the Jews explicitly and the John Birch Society did not.
[00:12:51]  And in fact, Pierce's main issue with the Birch Society became that it wasn't willing to discuss the Jews or explicitly racist issues.
[00:12:58]  The Birchers were far right, but they didn't want anyone to mistake them for literal Nazis.
[00:13:02]  Pierce later wrote, quote, I quickly found out that the two topics on which I wanted an intelligent discussion, race and Jews, were precisely the two topics Birch Society members were forbidden to discuss.
[00:13:14]  Oh, damn.
[00:13:15]  Took a quick dip.
[00:13:18]  I just want to talk about Jews.
[00:13:22]  Race.
[00:13:23]  The Jews.
[00:13:25]  Oh, Jesus.
[00:13:27]  William Pierce maintained a successful career as a physicist while he devoured more and more John Birch propaganda.
[00:13:32]  In 1965, he left the university and got a job in Connecticut, working for the Pratt  ⁇ Whitney Aircraft Plant as a senior research associate physicist.
[00:13:40]  He made good money and did well, but his coworkers described him as a real loner who worked poorly with others and seemed almost unable to manage subordinates.
[00:13:48]  Okay.
[00:13:50]  Pierce's political leanings were kept more or less under wraps until the plant's workers went on strike.
[00:13:54]  This face-to-face contact with what Pierce considered communism infuriated him so much that he tried to drive his crowd through a picket of a thousand union men.
[00:14:03]  Wow.
[00:14:07]  Excuse me?
[00:14:09]  We have questions?
[00:14:11]  Is everything communism?
[00:14:15]  Yes, College.
[00:14:16]  Everything is communism.
[00:14:17]  And the proper response to communism is to hit it with your car.
[00:14:20]  Okay.
[00:14:22]  I just wanted to clarify it.
[00:14:23]  Presumably they were protesting in a way that would have benefited him, right?
[00:14:26]  These were like his co-workers?
[00:14:28]  No, I think as a physicist working there, he was at a different level of these guys who were like stuff.
[00:14:34]  Yeah.
[00:14:35]  We hit him with your fucking car.
[00:14:36]  Yeah.
[00:14:38]  That seems, that's a pretty big through line, too.
[00:14:40]  Yeah, yeah, hitting cars.
[00:14:42]  There's a lot of memes out there about a lot of people over the car.
[00:14:45]  Yeah.
[00:14:45]  Yeah, that has not changed at all in the last several decades.
[00:14:48]  Ban all cars.
[00:14:49]  Nope.
[00:14:50]  Wrong answer?
[00:14:50]  Okay.
[00:14:52]  It's not wrong.
[00:14:53]  It's not wrong.
[00:14:54]  Ban all cars except for mine.
[00:14:55]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:56]  And mine too.
[00:14:57]  Wait, wait, wait.
[00:14:58]  Can I get mine in?
[00:14:58]  I keep too much stuff in my car.
[00:15:00]  Can I borrow your car?
[00:15:01]  Yes.
[00:15:02]  Okay.
[00:15:02]  And I'm fine.
[00:15:03]  It's fine.
[00:15:05]  I think I should be the only one with a car.
[00:15:07]  I think I should be the only one with a gun.
[00:15:10]  And then I could just make myself king.
[00:15:12]  Just tooling around in a Prius with a rifle.
[00:15:14]  Yeah.
[00:15:15]  The one thing I know about Robert Evans, he loves kings.
[00:15:18]  I'm a big fan of kings.
[00:15:20]  Big king advocate.
[00:15:22]  I mean, if I'm the king.
[00:15:24]  Yeah.
[00:15:25]  See, this is the problem.
[00:15:26]  Yeah.
[00:15:27]  That's how it happens.
[00:15:28]  That's how it is.
[00:15:29]  That is how it happens.
[00:15:31]  But if I, but if I solve the problem instead.
[00:15:35]  All right.
[00:15:36]  Back to the episode.
[00:15:38]  Chapter.
[00:15:39]  It's a chapter when it's the audio.
[00:15:41]  Back to the chapter.
[00:15:42]  Yeah.
[00:15:43]  So, yeah, Pierce tried to run down a thousand people with his car.
[00:15:47]  Sure.
[00:15:48]  That did not work, and he soon had to move on from his job.
[00:15:52]  Which, yeah.
[00:15:55]  What a kind way to say that.
[00:15:57]  Yeah.
[00:15:58]  So, since Pierce had moved out to the East Coast, he'd used it as an opportunity to start visiting the American Nazi Party headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
[00:16:06]  He met a fella named George Lincoln Rockwell, and William and GLR got along quite well.
[00:16:11]  Pierce found National Socialism to be a good fit with the beliefs he'd been developing since his move to Oregon.
[00:16:16]  His only issue with Rockwell and the Nazis was, you know, all the Nazi stuff.
[00:16:21]  Pierce thought that old-fashioned fascia uniforms and swastikas made them look like they were LARPers rather than serious revolutionaries.
[00:16:27]  He didn't use the term LARPer, but he accused them of Hollywood antics, which is essentially the same thing.
[00:16:33]  In May of 1966, Pierce resigned from his factory job and moved his family to Virginia.
[00:16:37]  His wife, Patricia, started teaching university math so she could support her husband in his Nazi efforts.
[00:16:43]  Weirdly enough, Patricia wasn't a Nazi and later divorced her husband for his beliefs.
[00:16:47]  But for a time, she seemed willing to like, like humor him, maybe.
[00:16:51]  Right.
[00:16:52]  Yeah.
[00:16:52]  Well, it's hard to pin down at first.
[00:16:55]  Yeah, she probably didn't know exactly what it was.
[00:16:57]  You know, because like obviously you're hiding your power level and also you married the person so you love them.

=== Pierce's Hollywood Antics (16:14) ===

[00:17:03]  You love who they used to be.
[00:17:04]  And you're like, what is it?
[00:17:06]  Are you slowly turning into a Nazi?
[00:17:07]  Also, a divorce is just so hard to deal with.
[00:17:11]  Power level always gets me.
[00:17:12]  It does sound like a video game or a D ⁇ D.
[00:17:16]  I mean, it's that's they're all they're all of it, I know.
[00:17:19]  That's just fantasy bullshit.
[00:17:21]  That's the fantasy bullshit is exactly where this story leads.
[00:17:24]  I was hoping so.
[00:17:25]  Oh, yeah.
[00:17:25]  Yeah.
[00:17:25]  But you know where this story is going to lead right now.
[00:17:28]  To an advertise!
[00:17:30]  Yeah, to an advertisement.
[00:17:32]  You did win.
[00:17:32]  You did win.
[00:17:33]  And you know what?
[00:17:34]  As celebration for your victory, I'm going to try to throw this bottle of apple juice up onto the ceiling with the throwing bagels.
[00:17:40]  It's a good idea.
[00:17:41]  Great idea.
[00:17:43]  Ooh, that didn't look like it.
[00:17:45]  I overshot it right over the rainbow.
[00:17:47]  Several feet.
[00:17:48]  The one thing I like with six bagels, a tiny bottle of apple juice.
[00:17:54]  Products!
[00:18:00]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:18:04]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:18:08]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:18:11]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:18:14]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:18:18]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:18:22]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:18:24]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:18:29]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:18:30]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:18:32]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:18:34]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:18:37]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:18:39]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:18:41]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:18:46]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:18:47]  Trust me, babe.
[00:18:48]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:18:59]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:19:04]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:19:11]  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.
[00:19:18]  From power to parenthood.
[00:19:20]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:19:23]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:19:25]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:19:27]  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.
[00:19:32]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:19:38]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:19:41]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:19:47]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:19:49]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:19:52]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:20:00]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:20:06]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:20:11]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:20:16]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:20:26]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:20:31]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:20:34]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:20:37]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:20:39]  That's so funny.
[00:20:40]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:20:49]  Say you love me.
[00:20:52]  You know I.
[00:20:53]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:21:01]  What's up, everyone?
[00:21:02]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:21:03]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:21:10]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:21:12]  Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:21:17]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:21:22]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:21:25]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:21:26]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:21:29]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:21:34]  Yeah.
[00:21:34]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:21:37]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:21:38]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:21:47]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:21:49]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:21:55]  Just hang in there.
[00:21:56]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:21:58]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:21:59]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:22:01]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:22:10]  We're back from maybe the best dad pivot in the podcasting game.
[00:22:14]  It was so good.
[00:22:15]  Sophie's shaking her head.
[00:22:16]  Yes.
[00:22:17]  Frame it.
[00:22:18]  Classic yes gesture.
[00:22:19]  Dip it in gold.
[00:22:20]  Side to side.
[00:22:22]  I wish I had a gold-covered bagel.
[00:22:25]  Do you?
[00:22:25]  Yes.
[00:22:26]  What do you do with it?
[00:22:27]  Throw it.
[00:22:28]  Yeah.
[00:22:29]  That costs me.
[00:22:30]  I can't be holes in the walls.
[00:22:32]  Just chugging 20 pounds of gold across the room.
[00:22:38]  You are out of touch with the working man.
[00:22:40]  I am definitely out of touch with the working man.
[00:22:42]  Yeah, you want to be king and throw gold around?
[00:22:45]  Okay, seeing a different sign of Robert Evans.
[00:22:47]  Yeah, this podcast has gone to my head.
[00:22:49]  Now I've lost my classic Robert Evans working man's touch.
[00:22:54]  Robert, now you're the bastard.
[00:22:56]  I've always been the bastard.
[00:22:59]  Fair.
[00:23:00]  And I'm almost out of things to throw.
[00:23:02]  Hey, we'll get you.
[00:23:03]  We'll figure that out.
[00:23:04]  We'll find something.
[00:23:05]  Maybe I can just throw recording equipment.
[00:23:08]  Sophie didn't shake your head.
[00:23:10]  Yeah, we're good to do it.
[00:23:11]  That's approval.
[00:23:12]  How about you throw that nice pillow?
[00:23:14]  No.
[00:23:16]  Okay.
[00:23:16]  So, now William Luther Pierce was kind of a hard guy to get along with, which is probably not super surprising.
[00:23:24]  He's not reported to by either of his kids showing much emotional connection to them.
[00:23:28]  His wives say that he was like also distant.
[00:23:31]  The only thing he ever really seemed to love effusively were his Siamese cats and Nazism.
[00:23:38]  So big fan of cats, big fan of Hitler.
[00:23:41]  Okay.
[00:23:42]  Yeah, go figure.
[00:23:43]  Except Siamese cats are like the worst cats.
[00:23:46]  That's not true.
[00:23:46]  They're fine.
[00:23:47]  They're fine.
[00:23:48]  You can cut them.
[00:23:48]  They're fine.
[00:23:50]  ACAG.
[00:23:52]  All cats are good.
[00:23:55]  All cats are good fans of Behind the Bastards.
[00:23:58]  Yes.
[00:23:58]  Yeah, they would like this podcast.
[00:24:00]  We didn't mean it.
[00:24:01]  No, we know.
[00:24:02]  We know.
[00:24:03]  Siamese cats are fine.
[00:24:04]  They're just.
[00:24:04]  I was originally picturing, instead of Siamese cats, the Persian cats, the one with the pushed-in faces.
[00:24:09]  Oh, those are terrible cats.
[00:24:11]  That's what I was picturing as I was saying.
[00:24:14]  Like a beanbag chair somebody threw a rock.
[00:24:16]  And so it would be like, yeah, I figured you'd like those cats.
[00:24:19]  Yeah, okay.
[00:24:20]  That's not Persian cats.
[00:24:21]  That's fake.
[00:24:22]  It's not what you said.
[00:24:23]  We're going to really offend some Persian cat owners today.
[00:24:26]  Well, I'm sorry.
[00:24:28]  Yeah, they shouldn't have made that mistake.
[00:24:29]  You don't sound sorry.
[00:24:31]  It sounded like you were being sarcastic when you said that.
[00:24:33]  Well, I'm sorry.
[00:24:34]  That's what you perceived.
[00:24:35]  Okay, but now what do I think?
[00:24:38]  I think we're derailing the story.
[00:24:40]  Interesting.
[00:24:41]  So Rockwell and Pierce embarked on a publishing venture together, putting out six issues of a Nazi magazine.
[00:24:47]  But William refused to actually join the American Nazi Party until Rockwell changed its name from the American Nazi Party to the National Socialist White People's Party.
[00:24:55]  He just needed it covered up a little bit.
[00:24:57]  Like, that's just no terrible word.
[00:25:00]  It's the white people's party.
[00:25:02]  Almost making it worse.
[00:25:03]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:25:05]  When Rockwell was gunned down in the parking lot of that laundry.
[00:25:09]  What a transition.
[00:25:11]  I love that he died that way, shot down next to a fucking laundry hat.
[00:25:16]  Rockwell.
[00:25:16]  That's the way most Nazis should go.
[00:25:18]  It is.
[00:25:18]  The movement he had spent his entire life crafting began to fracture.
[00:25:22]  Nazis were, then, now, and always, catty bitches.
[00:25:26]  GLR had kept his party together by sheer force of will, and even he hadn't done a very good job of that since he was murdered by one of his own men.
[00:25:34]  Pierce stuck with an NSWPP, which retained the most members after Rockwell's death.
[00:25:39]  For a while, he tried to take Rockwell's place, acting as the functional head of the party, writing all of its propaganda, and even speaking at university campuses.
[00:25:46]  He did not have Rockwell's talent for drawing media attention.
[00:25:49]  His only real success was saying that Nixon should be, quote, dragged out of his office and shot, which drew some coverage and got the FBI to start looking into him.
[00:25:57]  It was also the truest thing he would ever say.
[00:25:59]  That's great.
[00:25:59]  Like, wow.
[00:26:01]  That abbreviated it as NSW.
[00:26:04]  It's not safe for work pee-pee.
[00:26:06]  That's not a joke.
[00:26:11]  You have the pee-pee's that are safe for work and the ones that aren't.
[00:26:14]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:26:15]  Yeah.
[00:26:16]  I guess I just like pee-pee.
[00:26:18]  That's funny.
[00:26:19]  Also funny that, I mean, yeah, even a Nazi clock is going to be right once a day.
[00:26:24]  Wait, so wait, why did he want Nixon to be.
[00:26:27]  Because Nixon was soft on the juice.
[00:26:29]  Yeah, there it is.
[00:26:31]  Oh, gosh.
[00:26:32]  Which if you'd told Nixon, he would have said, no, I'm not.
[00:26:36]  What can I do to fix that?
[00:26:38]  Oh, thanks, I'm soft on the drews.
[00:26:40]  Oh, my God.
[00:26:41]  As we state this, that audio has just leaked out of Donald Reagan saying horrible things about black people to Richard Nixon.
[00:26:47]  And the most amazing thing about that is Richard Nixon's clearly uncomfortable with it on the line.
[00:26:52]  You can hear him being like, don't say, like, he doesn't bring it up, but it's like, ah.
[00:26:59]  Yeah.
[00:27:01]  Say that out loud.
[00:27:02]  Yeah.
[00:27:02]  You can't call them monkeys.
[00:27:04]  Jesus Christ.
[00:27:05]  Man, the reaction to that is so, oh, God, it's pathetic.
[00:27:09]  Oh, I can't imagine anyone would even address it who would.
[00:27:12]  I mean, they're like Reagan sites and people are just like, why do we have to judge him on this?
[00:27:17]  Like, well, if you have a person who's been called racist for decades and then proven that he's racist, maybe you should think about what about why you're defending that guy.
[00:27:30]  Oh, whatever.
[00:27:31]  It doesn't matter who you are.
[00:27:33]  We're talking about the people who need to be dragged out of his office and shot.
[00:27:36]  Yeah, and Pierce would also have issues with Reagan for not Not saying that kind of stuff.
[00:27:41]  Killing all the juice.
[00:27:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:44]  So, now, during this period of the 1970s, Pierce became something of a tutor and a mentor to a fellow named James Mason.
[00:27:56]  Young James had joined Rockwell's American Nazi Party back in 1966 when he was 14.
[00:28:01]  Two years later, at age 16, James got in trouble at school.
[00:28:04]  He was disciplined by his principal and, in retaliation, started planning to go on a shooting spree and murder multiple members of his school's administration.
[00:28:11]  Before carrying out his plan, the NSWPP's headquarters wound up on the horn with William Pierce.
[00:28:18]  Or sorry, he called the NSWPP's headquarters.
[00:28:20]  This kid plans to go on a school shooting, and he calls the party before he starts shooting.
[00:28:25]  Oh, so he called the party and was like, hey, I want to do this.
[00:28:27]  Yeah, I want to do this.
[00:28:28]  I want to shoot up this school.
[00:28:29]  And William Pierce talks him down.
[00:28:32]  And Pierce instead convinces James Mason to move to Virginia and start working for the party and learn how to run a printing machine instead of committing a school shooting.
[00:28:41]  Oof.
[00:28:42]  Ooh.
[00:28:43]  Yeah.
[00:28:44]  Given what's happening.
[00:28:47]  But actually, debatably, given what comes later from James Mason, it might have been better for the world if he'd shut up his school.
[00:28:53]  Okay, tell me what kind of thing.
[00:28:54]  Well, right, because you're like, you're taking this kid and you're not de-radicalizing him.
[00:28:58]  You're funneling.
[00:28:58]  You're channeling his anger and his Nazism into a different way.
[00:29:03]  A propagandist.
[00:29:04]  Yeah, and James Mason would go on to write a book titled Siege, which would provide the nuts and bolts inspiration for the terrorist group Adam Woffen and a whole shitload of other school shooters.
[00:29:14]  Sure, sure.
[00:29:14]  Points.
[00:29:14]  Between those two Canadian kids who are currently on the run in the middle of the wilderness.
[00:29:18]  Right.
[00:29:19]  Siege heads, as we call them.
[00:29:21]  Yeah.
[00:29:21]  So that's James Mason starts out wanting to be a school shooter, gets convinced by William Luther Pierce, no, I know what you're good at.
[00:29:29]  I mean, you're either doing school shootings.
[00:29:32]  God.
[00:29:33]  What if instead you made a hundred school shooters?
[00:29:36]  Right.
[00:29:37]  Yeah.
[00:29:39]  Yeah.
[00:29:40]  As the 1960s wound to a close, William Pierce started to get frustrated with the NSWPP, mainly about the fact that it, again, was just too darn Nazi-ish.
[00:29:49]  He believed fascism needed an authentically American character and movement if it was going to have any chance of taking over the country.
[00:29:56]  Just dressing up as Nazis was not going to cover it.
[00:29:58]  He quit the party in July of 1970 and published a paper titled Prospectus for a National Front, which he circulated around neo-Nazi circles.
[00:30:08]  Here's how it opened.
[00:30:09]  America today, and more specifically, the American people, face the most serious and deadly menace which has arisen in their entire history.
[00:30:16]  This menace far overshadows that posed by any war we have fought, any economic catastrophe through which we have passed, or any previous domestic strife which has torn us.
[00:30:24]  For today, we are faced not just with a threat to our territorial integrity or to our material possessions or to our way of life or even to our own lives, but to something far dearer.
[00:30:33]  Today, all that we have ever been and all that we ever might be, our race itself, is threatened with extinction.
[00:30:40]  Yeah, right on, man.
[00:30:42]  Yes, famously doomed people, white Americans in 1970.
[00:30:48]  Yeah, you've had a lot of people.
[00:30:49]  That was a really tough decade for white people.
[00:30:52]  Yeah, the dark ages.
[00:30:54]  Yeah, under attack and threat.
[00:30:57]  I just, oh, the whole thing is like, just under attack means like, just who cares?
[00:31:02]  Other people, too many other people get more rights.
[00:31:05]  But I mean, fucking black people were moving on up.
[00:31:09]  Exactly.
[00:31:09]  That's a threat.
[00:31:11]  That means that white people are moving on down.
[00:31:12]  Exactly.
[00:31:13]  It's the only way that it works.
[00:31:15]  Only way.
[00:31:17]  He went on to complain that none of the existing radical right-wing organizations in the U.S. had the ability to turn into a, quote, large-scale revolutionary movement.
[00:31:25]  Quote, their long-established and unbroken record of failure is the best evidence of this fact.
[00:31:30]  It's not an inaccurate statement.
[00:31:31]  Yeah.
[00:31:32]  He attacked the movement for being filled with overgrown children and said, in essence, we need to stop waiting around for a new Hitler to rise up and unify all of our different little fringe groups.
[00:31:42]  Instead, sort of like unite the right.
[00:31:45]  Ah, there it is.
[00:31:47]  Instead, Pierce suggested America's fascists take a leaf out of communism's book and create a National Front, a large umbrella organization that could combine and coordinate all of the different far-right groups and allow them to recruit people more easily without the baggage of swastikas and clan robes.
[00:32:02]  Towards this end, William Pierce established the National Alliance in 1974.
[00:32:07]  We'll talk more about it throughout the book, but obviously the National Alliance did not wind up being the trick to create a mass fascist movement in the United States.
[00:32:14]  It was objectively more successful than Rockwell's American Nazi Party, though, drawing in thousands of members over the years and generating millions in income.
[00:32:22]  But it proved no more capable of creating a popular revolution than the ANP had been.
[00:32:27]  However, buried in Pierce's prospectus was a very important paragraph that contained a realization far more critical than his National Alliance could ever become.
[00:32:35]  Quote, About the only good thing which can be said of all these little groups is that they do generate quite a flood of pamphlets, leaflets, bulletins, newsletters, and other printed materials which express some excellent sentiment.
[00:32:46]  But even here, it is largely an incestuous sort of affair in which the propaganda and the sentiment are circulated largely within the same vaguely defined movement in which they were born.
[00:32:54]  Any real contact or rapport with the general population is absent, and this lack of contact with the public is not due simply to the problems of distribution or a lack of access to the mass media.
[00:33:04]  Most movement literature would fail to evoke a sympathetic response from the masses even if it could be placed regularly in their hands.
[00:33:11]  It is, for the most part, too esoteric, too introverted, and too kooky to strike a responsive chord among the general public.

=== Discrediting the Civil Rights Movement (06:18) ===

[00:33:17]  I'd add too racist, too terrible, too awful.
[00:33:22]  I hate that you're not right.
[00:33:26]  The racism wasn't the problem.
[00:33:27]  The racism wasn't the problem.
[00:33:29]  No, yeah, it was, it was, it was, we'll get to what we'll get to what works.
[00:33:34]  So you see, he started to realize that, like, our propaganda is not cutting it.
[00:33:39]  We need to find a way to make Nazi propaganda that doesn't feel like Nazi propaganda so it can hit a broader chunk of the populace.
[00:33:47]  You need to be to fight harder in the meme wars.
[00:33:52]  Yeah.
[00:33:52]  Yeah, that's just smart.
[00:33:53]  And Pierce is going to go on to be the guy who strikes the greatest blow in the meme wars.
[00:33:59]  So Pierce correctly understood that to really make progress, American fascism was going to have to craft propaganda that could infect the hearts and minds of normal white Americans.
[00:34:07]  It would take years for Pierce to translate this insight into action, but when he did, the result would quite literally shake the world.
[00:34:14]  First, however, came his dalliance with a sprightly gentleman named Willis Cartow.
[00:34:19]  Now, Cardo is one of the very few individuals in this story whose commitment to fascism precedes the activism of George Lincoln Rockwell.
[00:34:25]  Willis started a monthly paper in 1955 called, revealingly, The Entitled Right, the Journal of Forward-Thinking American Nationalism.
[00:34:37]  The Untitled Right.
[00:34:38]  Yeah.
[00:34:38]  Yeah, a little on the nose.
[00:34:42]  Yeah, it was basically just like a bunch of anti-communist, anti-Semitic, segregation-like articles.
[00:34:47]  In 1957, Cardo first wrote openly about his idea to create something called the Liberty Lobby, which he promised would, quote, lock horns with minority special interest pressure groups in order to support the needs of white people who were, you know, suffering in the 1950s.
[00:35:02]  Cardo wrote that, quote, to the goal of political power, all else must be temporarily sacrificed.
[00:35:08]  He spent his life embodying that creed.
[00:35:10]  Now, Cardo was not an out-on-the-street bullhorn and placards activist, nor was he an armed revolutionary, clutching a rifle and calling for racial holy war.
[00:35:17]  Instead, he sought to bring anti-communists and segregationalists together and craft a thoroughly American fascist movement.
[00:35:23]  In 1962, he started to publish a magazine, Western Destiny, dedicated to inculcating these ideas among the American right.
[00:35:31]  He wrote about culture creators, aka white people, and their eternal battle against culture destroyers, aka black people.
[00:35:39]  Tolerance, Carto wrote, can often be a culture-retarding and culture-distorting weakness.
[00:35:45]  This is the good stuff right here.
[00:35:47]  Yeah, it's like 80% of the way through here, but it's real close to being fucking, what's that fake university they have now?
[00:35:55]  It's Prager U. Prager U.
[00:35:57]  It's for Western civilization fetishism.
[00:36:00]  It's all that stuff.
[00:36:02]  Let's cover up the racism a little bit more.
[00:36:04]  An ancestor of Prager year, for sure.
[00:36:06]  Yeah.
[00:36:06]  Now, Western Destiny began to attract a dedicated audience of budding extremists, including a teenager named David Duke.
[00:36:12]  It's possible that Willis Carto is the man who red-pilled Duke.
[00:36:16]  Yeah, so that's who we're with now.
[00:36:18]  Thanks, bud.
[00:36:19]  Throughout the late 1960s, as William Pierce was coming up with his idea for a national front, Willis Carto built the Liberty Lobby into a moderately large mailing list for the distribution of far-right, but not openly fascist propaganda.
[00:36:30]  He latched onto the 1968 presidential bid of a fellow named George Wallace.
[00:36:35]  Now, Wallace was the 45th governor of Alabama and one of the leading voices against the civil rights movement.
[00:36:41]  His most famous line is probably this.
[00:36:43]  In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod the earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny.
[00:36:50]  And I say, segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
[00:36:55]  Gosh.
[00:36:56]  Throwing the gauntlet at the feet of tyranny.
[00:36:58]  Yeah.
[00:36:59]  Keep black people and white people in different schools.
[00:37:02]  Yeah.
[00:37:03]  God.
[00:37:04]  You tyrants.
[00:37:05]  Yeah.
[00:37:06]  He was the first guy to use the liberal media term.
[00:37:11]  Yeah.
[00:37:12]  Yeah.
[00:37:12]  George Wallace.
[00:37:14]  Groundbreaking.
[00:37:15]  Yeah.
[00:37:16]  Sounds like a real keeper.
[00:37:17]  It's to discredit the civil rights movement, so it's different from today.
[00:37:23]  Yeah.
[00:37:24]  Unreal.
[00:37:25]  Yeah.
[00:37:25]  So Carto turned the Liberty Lobby to the cause of getting Wallace elected president.
[00:37:30]  He was, of course, unsuccessful in this goal, but the campaign was an incredible success for the Liberty lobby.
[00:37:35]  By its end, they'd become home for almost but not quite Nazi politics in the United States.
[00:37:40]  Their newsletter, The Liberty Letter, had 170,000 subscribers.
[00:37:44]  Now, when Wallace's campaign fell apart, Carto was able to swoop in and acquire a mailing list with the names of an additional 230,000 people, members of the group Youth for Wallace.
[00:37:54]  Willis felt that the failure of George Wallace to win the presidency was no good reason to let the movement of young fascists he's inspired go to waste.
[00:38:00]  Under Carto, Youth for Wallace molded into the National Youth Alliance.
[00:38:05]  According to Zeskin's Blood and Politics, quote, In the subsequent months, the National Youth Alliance sponsored several regional meetings, including a January 1969 event at Conley's Motor Hotel in Monroeville, outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
[00:38:17]  It was here that the youth organization first began to unravel.
[00:38:20]  Several officers in the new group objected to the content and tenor of the meeting and an attendant social at a supporter's home.
[00:38:26]  They claimed that the affair was a wash in Nazi heraldry, including women who wore swastika jewelry and men who sang the Horst Wessel Lied, a Nazi Party anthem from the 1930s.
[00:38:35]  The host and MC promoted a new booklet by Carto's West Coast Enterprise, Noontide Press, Myth of the Six Million.
[00:38:41]  It argued that the Nazi genocide was a figment of the Jewish imagination.
[00:38:45]  One of the formal presentations was entitled Plato the Fascist.
[00:38:49]  So this breaks apart the movement into two chunks.
[00:38:53]  There's the people who really were just very far-right conservatives, but once he starts talking about Holocaust and they're like, oh shit, I accidentally wound up in a Nazi Nazis.
[00:39:03]  And I don't want to be a Nazi.
[00:39:05]  Right.
[00:39:05]  I just want liberty.
[00:39:06]  I just want liberty.
[00:39:07]  And you know, good for them.
[00:39:09]  Good for them for at least being like, oh, shit, this is Nazis.
[00:39:11]  Yeah.
[00:39:12]  I got to get out of here.
[00:39:14]  Yeah, it's like you go to the Unite the Right Rally and you're like, oh, wait, this Nazis have everyone.
[00:39:17]  You would hope that would provoke some real thinking, like some soul-searching.
[00:39:21]  It never happens, man.
[00:39:22]  So it's like, you know.
[00:39:26]  If I was part of a political organization and I showed up at a house party thrown to celebrate it and everybody was wearing swastikas, I would really sit down and reconsider.
[00:39:35]  How did I get here?

=== Accidentally Becoming a Nazi (04:31) ===

[00:39:36]  You take a moment.
[00:39:37]  Yeah.
[00:39:37]  You take a moment.
[00:39:38]  At least a moment.
[00:39:39]  Yeah.
[00:39:40]  Speaking of taking a moment.
[00:39:42]  Pivot.
[00:39:42]  Ad pivot.
[00:39:43]  Oh my goodness.
[00:39:44]  If we did Snickers ads, this would really have been a good time for one.
[00:39:47]  Yeah.
[00:39:48]  There's like need a moment.
[00:39:50]  That's a Snickers ad.
[00:39:52]  Like you show up at like a National Youth Alliance meeting and everybody's dressed as a Nazi and it's like need a moment.
[00:39:58]  Snickers, are you listening?
[00:40:00]  This is gold.
[00:40:01]  This is a gold covered bagel.
[00:40:04]  Distance yourself from Nazi Snickers.
[00:40:06]  Yeah.
[00:40:07]  Jeez.
[00:40:08]  Take a break.
[00:40:09]  Snickers, the distance yourself from Nazis stand.
[00:40:12]  I'd buy one.
[00:40:14]  Products.
[00:40:21]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:40:25]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:40:29]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:40:31]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:40:35]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:40:39]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:40:42]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:40:44]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:40:49]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:40:51]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:40:53]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:40:55]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:40:58]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:41:00]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:41:02]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:41:07]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:41:08]  Trust me, babe.
[00:41:09]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:41:19]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:41:24]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:41:29]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:41:35]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:41:44]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:41:49]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:41:53]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:41:56]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:41:57]  That's so funny.
[00:41:59]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:42:07]  Say you love me.
[00:42:10]  You know I.
[00:42:12]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:42:19]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:42:25]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:42:32]  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.
[00:42:38]  From power to parenthood.
[00:42:40]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:42:44]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:42:46]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:42:48]  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.
[00:42:53]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:42:59]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:43:02]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:43:08]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:43:10]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:43:13]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:43:21]  What's up, everyone?
[00:43:22]  I'm Ego Mode.
[00:43:24]  Next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:43:32]  Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:43:38]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:43:43]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:43:45]  I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:43:49]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:43:54]  Yeah.
[00:43:55]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:43:57]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:43:59]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.

=== Unintended Consequences of Fiction (15:21) ===

[00:44:07]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:44:10]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:44:17]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:44:19]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:44:20]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:44:22]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:44:31]  We're back.
[00:44:32]  Now I want a Snickers.
[00:44:33]  Yeah, I want a Snickers.
[00:44:34]  We all want a Snickers.
[00:44:35]  We do all want to Snickers.
[00:44:37]  So, the National Youth Alliance quickly alienated the majority of its potential membership, mainly because Carto had revealed his power level a little too early.
[00:44:45]  So every time it makes sense, yeah.
[00:44:49]  It's never not stupid.
[00:44:50]  Yep.
[00:44:51]  It's a fucking Dragon Ball Z reference.
[00:44:53]  How did that turn into Nazism?
[00:44:56]  Syncretism.
[00:44:56]  Meme dork shit.
[00:44:57]  Yeah, it's all whatever.
[00:44:59]  So, Cardo's work attracted some new blood, however.
[00:45:02]  William Pierce and a sizable herd of National Socialists.
[00:45:05]  They'd started hovering around the Liberty lobby like flies on the rotting corpse of George Wallace's presidential ambitions.
[00:45:11]  They worked together for a while, but it was an acrimonious pairing, and the straight-up National Socialists conflicted with Carto's old guard, who were basically fine towing the Nazi line, but didn't want other people to call them Nazis.
[00:45:22]  Carto and Pierce wound up breaking apart, and after a complex series of bureaucratic battles I don't care to recount, William Pierce wound up in charge of the National Youth Alliance.
[00:45:30]  He reincorporated it in Virginia in October of 1970.
[00:45:34]  This is the group that would go on to become the National Alliance.
[00:45:37]  So that's where it came from as George Wallace's youth movement becomes the National Alliance' largest Nazi organization in the U.S.
[00:45:43]  Okay.
[00:45:45]  It's really cool and not upsetting how clear the path from Republicans to straight Nazis was.
[00:45:53]  Yeah.
[00:45:54]  Now, Carto accused Pierce of stealing the Liberties lobby's mailing list, which was probably true.
[00:45:59]  Pierce accused Carto of embezzling $55,000 from his own organization, which was also probably true.
[00:46:08]  Cardo accused Pierce's faction, who were again literal Nazis, of being Zionists.
[00:46:12]  Pierce responded by calling Carto swarthy, which was racial code.
[00:46:18]  Well, you're not white enough.
[00:46:19]  Oh, my gosh.
[00:46:20]  Nazis.
[00:46:21]  The fighting between Pierce and Carto just underscored how unsuccessful Pierce's efforts to build a national front had been.
[00:46:27]  His plan had been to start by recruiting more students, starting in the D.C. area, but this was a miserable failure.
[00:46:32]  When he was invited to speak at George Washington University in February of 1972, Pierce couldn't gather more than two dozen students.
[00:46:39]  Anti-fascists showed up and threw raw eggs at him and his men, which I think is fun, just because we talk a lot about the long-standing traditions among fascism, and it's neat that a long-standing anti-fascist tradition is eggs.
[00:46:52]  Eggs.
[00:46:53]  Yeah.
[00:46:55]  No milkshakes, just some eggs.
[00:46:56]  Just some eggs.
[00:46:58]  Yeah.
[00:46:58]  It's nice.
[00:47:00]  Yeah, that egg boy.
[00:47:01]  Yeah, that egg boy who hits him, what's his name, Frasier, the Frazier Anning, the Australian fascist politician.
[00:47:09]  Christchurch stuff.
[00:47:10]  Give him a good egg.
[00:47:10]  Classic.
[00:47:11]  Tale is old as time.
[00:47:12]  Yeah.
[00:47:12]  Egging fascists.
[00:47:13]  Egging fascists.
[00:47:15]  On February 26th, 1974, William Pierce decided to revamp the National Youth Alliance into a new organization, the National Alliance.
[00:47:23]  He continued to publish the organization's newsletter, ATTACK, which included guides for how to bomb movie theaters and articles on firearms worked best for...
[00:47:31]  What?
[00:47:32]  You don't like bombing movie theaters, Katie?
[00:47:33]  I don't like it.
[00:47:34]  No, I don't like it one bit.
[00:47:36]  I thought you were a big movie theater bombing though.
[00:47:38]  No, How did I get that wrong?
[00:47:42]  Oh, you like movies.
[00:47:43]  I'm a movie goer.
[00:47:45]  So you're comfortable putting yourself on an anti-bombing movie theater list.
[00:47:49]  Yeah.
[00:47:50]  That sounds a little extreme to me, but okay.
[00:47:52]  This is how we get radicalized.
[00:47:54]  Yeah.
[00:47:54]  We're all taking a journey towards radicalization.
[00:47:56]  I mean, if you're forcing me to take a stance, then yeah, sign me up.
[00:47:59]  I'm just saying it's radical to be in favor of bombing movie theaters, but it's equally radical to be against it.
[00:48:05]  I posit that, no, it isn't.
[00:48:07]  They're equal.
[00:48:08]  They're equal.
[00:48:09]  The anti- of another thing is just as radical as that thing, always.
[00:48:14]  If you're anti-extreme, then you are extreme.
[00:48:16]  Exactly.
[00:48:17]  You're drowning me in logic, guys.
[00:48:18]  Both are equally bad.
[00:48:20]  You can just take your radical anti-movie theater bombing opinions elsewhere while I stay in the middle and say maybe it's fine to bomb movie theater sometimes.
[00:48:30]  You just got reasoned.
[00:48:32]  Logic.
[00:48:36]  I've got nothing to say to that.
[00:48:38]  That's right.
[00:48:39]  Because you got destroyed.
[00:48:42]  Robert Evans breaks Katie Stoll on the wheel of logic.
[00:48:46]  It's so much more pathetic in person.
[00:48:48]  You got destroyed.
[00:48:50]  No.
[00:48:52]  I didn't.
[00:48:53]  Yeah.
[00:48:54]  So, yeah, ATT ⁇ CK included a lot of the fare that Nazi newsletters had always focused on.
[00:49:01]  But the next year, 1975, William Luther Pierce introduced his first truly great innovation into the annals of right-wing terror.
[00:49:09]  He started publishing a book in ATT ⁇ CK.
[00:49:12]  A book titled The Turner Diaries.
[00:49:15]  Oh, there it is.
[00:49:16]  I was wondering where they'd come in.
[00:49:19]  Published in sections across several issues of ATT ⁇ CK.
[00:49:21]  The book is presented as a series of diary entries from a revolutionary.
[00:49:24]  You might compare it to a Nazi answer to a handmaid's tale.
[00:49:28]  And in fact, it was partly probably inspired by.
[00:49:31]  I think it actually predates that by a little bit.
[00:49:33]  There were other books it was inspired by.
[00:49:35]  There's a long tradition of books in this line that Turner Diaries is.
[00:49:39]  Yeah, present itself like inspired by, yeah.
[00:49:43]  I don't know, I haven't read it.
[00:49:45]  Zombie story?
[00:49:48]  The Turner Diaries were meant to take place in a near-future America in which a Jewish-dominated liberal government had taken over and forcibly instituted such horrors as multiculturalism and gun control.
[00:49:58]  Pierce presents those things from a Nazi point of view.
[00:50:01]  So multiculturalism is presented as feral, animalistic black people raping white women at will, and gun control is portrayed as the forcible confiscation of all privately owned firearms.
[00:50:10]  There are equality police in the book, to give you an idea of its tenor.
[00:50:13]  God, these losers.
[00:50:14]  These idiot losers.
[00:50:17]  Yeah.
[00:50:18]  The quality police.
[00:50:19]  God, you fucking fight.
[00:50:21]  It's just really on the nose and obviously embarrassing.
[00:50:23]  It's so embarrassing for that.
[00:50:25]  Earl Turner is a normal white man who gets swept up in a secret terrorist organization led by a group called the Order, who organize their insurgency in a series of small cells and carry out vicious terror attacks, including the bombing of an FBI headquarters.
[00:50:38]  The goal of these attacks is to destabilize the American government and provoke a vicious race war.
[00:50:42]  The Order funds its operations by robbing banks and armored cars, which allows them to buy weapons and explosives to carry out more attacks and gradually to tip the country into a nightmare.
[00:50:51]  The book launched a number of concepts into the fascist mindset, not the least of which is the idea of the day of the rope.
[00:50:58]  Cool idea.
[00:51:00]  Day of the rope?
[00:51:01]  Yeah.
[00:51:01]  I'm going to quote now from the Turner Diaries.
[00:51:03]  Quote, Today has been the day of the rope.
[00:51:06]  A grim and bloody day, but an unavoidable one.
[00:51:08]  Tonight, from tens of thousands of lampposts, power poles, and trees throughout this vast metropolitan area, the grisly forms hang.
[00:51:14]  In the lighted areas, one sees them everywhere.
[00:51:16]  Even the street signs at intersections have been pressed into service.
[00:51:19]  And at practically every street corner I passed this evening on my way to HQ, there was a dangling corpse.
[00:51:23]  Four at every intersection, hanging from a single overpass only about a mile from here is a group of 30, each with an identical placard around its neck bearing the printed legend, I betrayed my race.
[00:51:33]  Two or three of that group had been decked out in academic robes before they were strung up, and the whole batch are apparently faculty members from the nearby UCLA campus.
[00:51:41]  The first thing I saw in the moonlight was the placard with the legend in large block letters, I defiled my race.
[00:51:46]  Above the placard leered the horribly bloated, purplish face of a young woman, her eyes wide open and bulging, her mouth agape.
[00:51:52]  Finally, I could make out the thin vertical line of rope disappearing into the branches above.
[00:51:56]  Apparently, the rope had slipped a bit, or the branch to which it was tied had sagged until the woman's feet were resting on the pavement, giving the uncanny appearance of a corpse standing upright of its own volition.
[00:52:05]  I shuddered and quickly went on my way.
[00:52:07]  There are many thousands of hanging female corpses like that in this city tonight, all wearing identical placards around their necks.
[00:52:12]  They are the white women who are married to or living with blacks, with Jews, or with other non-white males.
[00:52:18]  What a quote.
[00:52:19]  The Turner Diaries, everybody.
[00:52:21]  I mean, like, yeah, that's awful.
[00:52:25]  Not a fan, huh?
[00:52:26]  No.
[00:52:26]  I thought you guys were going to really enjoy that passage.
[00:52:30]  Zero stars.
[00:52:31]  So they're glad that all those people are hanging.
[00:52:34]  Yes.
[00:52:35]  The day of the rope is a good thing.
[00:52:36]  You would be like, I'm like, okay, a sci-fi novel.
[00:52:39]  That's the...
[00:52:40]  Whoever did that are the bad guys.
[00:52:42]  No, not in this.
[00:52:42]  No, no.
[00:52:43]  In this, they are the ones to be emulated.
[00:52:46]  Now, Earl Turner dies in the book, carrying out a suicidal but successful assault on the Pentagon.
[00:52:51]  But the order is victorious.
[00:52:53]  The book is essentially framed as a historical document, with researchers from Earl's Future commenting on it.
[00:52:58]  They note that after the U.S. was purged of all non-white people, the same thing was done to the rest of the planet, using a series of nuclear and chemical weapons attacks to cleanse Asia.
[00:53:06]  What?
[00:53:07]  Yeah.
[00:53:08]  Wait a minute.
[00:53:08]  Yeah, it's a total global genocide of all non-white people.
[00:53:11]  Yeah, but it's treated like a history?
[00:53:13]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:53:14]  It's like written as like, oh, in the perfect white future, we found this, the diaries of this revolutionary who helped us establish our Utah.
[00:53:22]  Here's how we got here.
[00:53:23]  And here's how we got here.
[00:53:25]  Yeah.
[00:53:25]  Yeah.
[00:53:26]  Do they believe that they're just preemptively writing a historical stuff?
[00:53:33]  Here's what we want.
[00:53:33]  Here's.
[00:53:34]  I was just clarifying some words here.
[00:53:36]  Okay.
[00:53:37]  So, the Turner Diaries took off like gangbusters among the American far right.
[00:53:40]  It was eventually published as a book, selling as many as 500,000 copies.
[00:53:44]  The Turner Diaries, yeah, way too many.
[00:53:47]  It did not sell the traditional way in a Barnes and Noble.
[00:53:50]  Instead, it proliferated virally on the gun show circuit, at survivalist conventions and in tiny small-town shops owned by racists.
[00:53:56]  500,000 copies is, of course, a sizable success even by mainstream standards.
[00:54:01]  I found a good article in The Atlantic by J.M. Berger, who authored a scholarly paper titled The Turner Legacy.
[00:54:07]  It notes, The Turner Diaries is notable for its lack of ideological persuasion.
[00:54:12]  At one point in the novel, its protagonist, Earl Turner, is given a book to read.
[00:54:15]  Turner claims the book perfectly explains the reasons for white supremacy and the justification of all the order's actions.
[00:54:21]  Importantly, this magical tome's contents are never specified.
[00:54:24]  Although the novel's epilogue broadly hints at a Nazi orientation, the book never explicitly identifies the order with a specific movement.
[00:54:31]  Due in part to Pierce's desire to appeal to normal people, as well as the novel's limited initial circulation among neo-Nazis, Turner assumes its readers are already racist and do not need to be recruited to that mindset.
[00:54:41]  The abandonment of why empowers a singular narrative focused on what and how, the necessity of immediate violent action, and concrete suggestions about how to go about it.
[00:54:50]  This is part of why the book has been so often associated with violence and terrorism.
[00:54:55]  Now, the Turner Diaries would go on to become the most influential single piece of fascist propaganda since Mein Kampf.
[00:55:01]  It has inspired more than 200 murders since its inception, but it's also inspired a hell of a lot more than simple murder.
[00:55:07]  The Turner Diaries became the ideological underpinning of a vicious American insurgency, which eventually led to hundreds and hundreds of armed men around the country working actively towards the establishment of a white supremacist state, a problem that continues to this day.
[00:55:21]  Now, the Turner Diaries inspired more than that, though, because it also inspired a whole new genre of terrible right-wing fiction.
[00:55:29]  So, have you guys heard about a little book called Unintended Consequences?
[00:55:35]  I don't think so.
[00:55:36]  It was published in 1996 by a guy named John Ross, and it's best described as the Turner Diaries, but all of the racism is whispered.
[00:55:45]  So, like, a little bit more subtle.
[00:55:47]  The cover of the copy I have features a burning copy of the Constitution with a black-clad cop attempting to sexually assault Lady Justice in front of him.
[00:55:54]  Subtle, huh?
[00:55:55]  Very subtle.
[00:55:55]  Oh, gosh.
[00:55:56]  Have you read these books?
[00:55:58]  Yeah, I've read Unintended Consequences.
[00:56:00]  I've only read parts of the Turner Diaries.
[00:56:02]  It's just not very entertaining.
[00:56:04]  Right, not good and kind of hard to get through.
[00:56:06]  But I came across Unintended Consequences, not like I came across it at like a gun store.
[00:56:11]  Was it an Unintended Consequence?
[00:56:13]  Yeah, of you being an extra part of this, where it's like all these things just sort of pop up in gun stores.
[00:56:19]  Yeah, and underbelly of all this stuff.
[00:56:22]  Yeah.
[00:56:23]  And the main innovation from the Turner Diaries and Unintended Consequences was that it switched the focus of the revolutionaries away from race war and gun rights towards just gun rights.
[00:56:32]  So that was a factor in the Turner Diaries.
[00:56:35]  Unintended Consequences makes it the center of the whole thing.
[00:56:38]  The plot focuses around a guy named Henry Bowman, who winds up being framed by the ATF for some dumb reason related to their desire to steal American guns.
[00:56:46]  He kills all the ATF agents and then brutally tortures one who he captures.
[00:56:50]  Bowman and a small group of gun rights advocates then carry out a terror campaign, brutally murdering gun control advocates around the nation until the president repeals all gun control laws.
[00:56:59]  Alex Jones has mentioned multiple times on Infowars that Unintended Consequences is one of his favorite books.
[00:57:04]  Yeah, he did.
[00:57:04]  Yeah, he sure should.
[00:57:05]  Yeah, he does.
[00:57:07]  Now, in more recent years.
[00:57:09]  Has he ever mentioned the Turner Diaries?
[00:57:11]  No.
[00:57:12]  He's never.
[00:57:12]  Okay.
[00:57:13]  That seems like a little too.
[00:57:14]  He's read them, though.
[00:57:15]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:57:16]  He's a big fan.
[00:57:18]  I wonder if there's ever been audio or moments where he's slipped it in.
[00:57:22]  Yeah.
[00:57:23]  But I believe he's too smart to mention that outright.
[00:57:26]  Yeah.
[00:57:26]  That's one that you can't mention.
[00:57:28]  Right.
[00:57:28]  Because then you're definitely a non-then you know, yeah.
[00:57:30]  Yeah.
[00:57:31]  But Unintended Consequences separate enough.
[00:57:34]  A little safer.
[00:57:35]  Another thing that's separate enough.
[00:57:37]  Have you ever heard of Matt Bracken?
[00:57:38]  No.
[00:57:39]  Well, he wrote a book series called Enemies Foreign and Domestic.
[00:57:43]  Like Unintended Consequences, this book is basically Turner Diaries with less racism.
[00:57:47]  In it, the liberal government creates a false flag mass shooting to take away everyone's guns.
[00:57:52]  The ATF is the bad guy, and brave patriots beat them via terrorism.
[00:57:56]  Now, Bracken's innovation was to have the cast of his books include numerous non-white people.
[00:58:01]  The idea seems to be that if most of the characters are non-white, then the book can't be accused of being racist.
[00:58:07]  Okay.
[00:58:07]  On an unrelated note, the second book in the series is Domestic Enemies, The Reconquista.
[00:58:13]  Oh, my God.
[00:58:14]  Yeah, one guess as to where that goes.
[00:58:16]  The evil liberals orchestrate an invasion of America using Mexicans with the goal of having them ban English in the Southwest and then secede from the United States.
[00:58:24]  What year were these?
[00:58:25]  These are coming out now.
[00:58:26]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:58:27]  Yeah, these are recent.
[00:58:28]  Bracken is like a special forces veteran and like a right-wing activist and stuff.
[00:58:33]  This is all coming out now.
[00:58:35]  J.M. Berger, the guy who wrote the Turner Legacy, also wrote an article about these books for The Daily Beast.
[00:58:41]  He identified some similarities between Bracken's third book and The Turner Diaries.
[00:58:45]  Quote, After an earthquake demolishes Memphis, black refugees turn into a seething mob of gang rapists and cannibals, characterizations that feature memorably in the Turner Diaries, while urban blacks loot a path from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., where they demand and receive a new socialist constitution engineered by a thinly veiled caricature of President Obama.
[00:59:03]  The narrative disclaimers continue.
[00:59:05]  One character condemns white racist killings in the chaos after the quake, and a battle-weary white racist girl near the end of the book accepts a hand of comfort offered by a black army medic.
[00:59:13]  But these and other moments of individual race grace are hard-pressed to counterweight the vivid, lengthy depiction of African Americans en masse as cannibal rapists directly responsible for destroying America's Constitution.
[00:59:24]  This is so upsetting.
[00:59:25]  Yeah.
[00:59:25]  It really makes me angry.
[00:59:27]  It's a great rubric, though.

=== Vanguardists and Terrorist Inspiration (02:26) ===

[00:59:28]  Got to give Pierce credit.
[00:59:30]  I mean, it works.
[00:59:32]  It's upsetting.
[00:59:36]  This bastard.
[00:59:37]  Yeah, credit is a piece of shit, but a piece of shit who was very effective.
[00:59:42]  Yeah, but a lot of very effective pieces of shit.
[00:59:44]  Yep.
[00:59:44]  That's kind of depressing.
[00:59:46]  Yeah.
[00:59:46]  In writing the Turner Diaries, William Pierce ignited a movement within the far right that is still very much present and relevant today.
[00:59:52]  The next chapter will discuss in depth the generation of terrorists who were inspired by his words to take horrifying bloody action.
[00:59:58]  Like Christian identity theology, the Turner Diaries have influenced many people who may never have even read the book.
[01:00:04]  In his manifesto, the Christchurch mosque shooter wrote about his hope that his attack would spark renewed calls for gun control in the United States because he believed that this would inevitably spark a new civil war.
[01:00:14]  The Poway Synagogue shooter repeated the same desire.
[01:00:17]  Both of these desires are based, whether unconsciously or not, on things written out in the Turner Diaries.
[01:00:23]  They just want conflict to spark the...
[01:00:26]  And they think that guns will be central to it.
[01:00:28]  William Luther Pierce died in 2002, but his ideas live and kill to this day.
[01:00:33]  The struggle between William Pierce and Willis Carto would prove to be a microcosm of a greater struggle within the fascist right itself.
[01:00:39]  On Cardo's side are the mainstreamers.
[01:00:42]  Their goal is to gain political power by pushing the Overton window further and further right and convincing more and more of their fellow Americans to adopt hardcore fascist politics.
[01:00:50]  Carto supported political parties and candidates, most notably David Duke's successful run for the Louisiana State Senate and unsuccessful run for governor, who was also a backer of Pat Buchanan.
[01:01:00]  Carto and other mainstreamers believe that the majority of white Americans can be converted to their political ideals, so gaining power is just a matter of properly propagandizing to their fellow whites.
[01:01:10]  William Pierce, on the other hand, was a vanguardist.
[01:01:13]  Vanguardists believe that politics is hopeless, and the only way for their side to win is to, as in the Turner Diaries, form small, dedicated groups and bring on the collapse of society in order to take control.
[01:01:24]  George Lincoln Rockwell himself is hard to pin down.
[01:01:26]  He had elements of both mainstreamer and vanguardist in his writings and in his activism.
[01:01:30]  But his most direct descendants, men like William Pierce and James Mason, became two of the most influential minds in the Vanguardist movement.
[01:01:37]  But in the late 1970s, a new wave of fascists and neo-Nazis began to rise, popping up around the countryside like mushrooms on a rotting log.
[01:01:44]  For more than a decade, they would build a potent insurgency, armed with missiles, machine guns, and bombs, utterly dedicated to a single dire mission, turning the Turner Diaries into a reality.

=== Politics of Collapse and Control (04:54) ===

[01:01:55]  As we're going to talk about in the next chapter.
[01:01:58]  That was a good chapter.
[01:01:59]  I mean, they've all been good chapters, but that was fascinating.
[01:02:02]  That was better than the other poop ones.
[01:02:04]  Yeah, the other ones I was saying.
[01:02:05]  Yeah.
[01:02:06]  But you did.
[01:02:06]  You said it with how you said it.
[01:02:08]  No, I only said this is a good chapter.
[01:02:11]  Ooh.
[01:02:13]  Aw, his garbage fell from the ceiling.
[01:02:15]  I threw my garbage on the ceiling, but then it fell off.
[01:02:18]  Yeah.
[01:02:18]  It stayed on for a second.
[01:02:20]  It's not the best place to keep your recycling.
[01:02:22]  How are we doing, Sophie?
[01:02:24]  Okay, you guys got to plug things, Sophie says.
[01:02:26]  Yeah, You know, we have a show, too.
[01:02:28]  It's called Even More News.
[01:02:30]  That's the podcast.
[01:02:30]  We've got a YouTube show called Some More News.
[01:02:33]  That's the YouTube show.
[01:02:34]  We got a Patreon.
[01:02:35]  Go to patreon.com slash some more news.
[01:02:38]  Cody, talk about merch.
[01:02:40]  We have merch now.
[01:02:42]  I believe it's not TeePublic.
[01:02:43]  Probably tpublic.com slash user slash some more news.
[01:02:46]  Or just searched a bunch of those words together.
[01:02:48]  You got stuff to buy.
[01:02:50]  I'm Katie Stoll on Twitter.
[01:02:51]  Yeah, I'm Dr. Mr. Cody on Twitter.
[01:02:53]  Nerd.
[01:02:54]  I got Some More News Twitter as well.
[01:02:57]  Robert, what about you?
[01:02:59]  There is no place that you can currently purchase T-Search themed after this podcast.
[01:03:03]  But maybe one day.
[01:03:04]  Sophie, could we get that set up?
[01:03:06]  Oh, ouch, Sophie.
[01:03:08]  She whispered something about the money going to him, but not her, so she doesn't care.
[01:03:13]  Well, you can buy a shirt.
[01:03:18]  I recommend Target.
[01:03:21]  Ross is good too, if you want the shirt to be stained.
[01:03:25]  Not always.
[01:03:25]  And then you gotta get it.
[01:03:26]  Sorry, that's Marshalls.
[01:03:27]  That's Marshalls.
[01:03:28]  And you can always say, I got it at Ross.
[01:03:29]  I got it at Ross.
[01:03:30]  TJ Maxx.
[01:03:31]  Love TJ Maxx.
[01:03:31]  TJ Maxx.
[01:03:32]  I got it at TJ Maxx.
[01:03:34]  Does not have the same ring to it.
[01:03:35]  No, it's a different.
[01:03:36]  It's a different kind of ring.
[01:03:37]  Cool.
[01:03:38]  You ruined this show, Cody.
[01:03:39]  Oh, if I bring up TJ Maxx?
[01:03:42]  Unbelievable.
[01:03:43]  Anytime you bring up TJ Max, it ruins.
[01:03:45]  I ruined the Nazi show by bringing up TJ Maxx.
[01:03:48]  How many times have I said don't talk about TJ Max?
[01:03:52]  I think we can all agree that TJ Maxx is the Nazism of discount clothing outlets.
[01:03:57]  Yeah, Cody.
[01:03:58]  Wow.
[01:03:59]  I've been radicalized.
[01:04:02]  We all are going to be radicalized at one point or another throughout this.
[01:04:06]  Shots fired, TJ.
[01:04:08]  Max.
[01:04:08]  It stands for Turner Juice.
[01:04:12]  No, this is a bad lie.
[01:04:16]  We're juice.
[01:04:17]  I said juice.
[01:04:17]  Juice.
[01:04:19]  Turner juice.
[01:04:20]  Turner.
[01:04:21]  Turner.
[01:04:22]  Why are we trying to do this, though?
[01:04:24]  I think all is gold.
[01:04:26]  I want to make it worth bringing up TJ Maxx.
[01:04:28]  It's never worth bringing up TJ Maxx.
[01:04:30]  It might be.
[01:04:31]  It might be this time.
[01:04:34]  Gracefully edit the end of this.
[01:04:36]  Nope.
[01:04:36]  Turner.
[01:04:39]  Katie, the foundational ethos of this show is that nothing can be graceful.
[01:04:44]  Well, that's good.
[01:04:45]  We're a bunch of tired conks.
[01:04:46]  Graceless behind the bastards.
[01:04:48]  Behind the bastards.
[01:04:50]  America's most graceless of podcasts.
[01:04:59]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:05:07]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:05:10]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:05:12]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:05:14]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:05:18]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:05:20]  Trust me, babe.
[01:05:21]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:05:30]  What's up, everyone?
[01:05:31]  I'm Ago Modern.
[01:05:32]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:05:36]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:05:39]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:05:41]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:05:48]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:05:50]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
[01:05:57]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:05:59]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:06:00]  There's a lot of life.
[01:06:02]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:06:09]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:06:17]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:06:20]  I doctored the test once.
[01:06:22]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:06:27]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:06:29]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
[01:06:31]  My mind was blown.
[01:06:32]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:06:34]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:06:35]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:06:37]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:06:42]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== The Bachelor Hoax Pattern (00:37) ===

[01:06:49]  10-10 shots five, city hall building.
[01:06:52]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[01:06:54]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:06:55]  Jeffrey Woods.
[01:06:56]  A shocking public murder.
[01:06:57]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:07:03]  I screamed, get down, get down, those are shots.
[01:07:07]  A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[01:07:14]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:07:23]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:07:25]  Guaranteed human.