Part Five: The Hidden Civil War details the Order, a white supremacist group founded by Robert Matthews in September 1983 to overthrow the U.S. government via a six-step strategy including $3.6 million in robberies and the 1984 murder of Alan Berg. After Matthews' death during a 40-hour FBI standoff, over 50 members were arrested, yet the ideology persisted through "leaderless resistance." Although key figures Louis Beam and William Pierce faced seditious conspiracy charges in 1988, an all-white jury acquitted them, highlighting systemic failures that allowed extremist tactics to evolve beyond the Order's collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:02
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I'm Ago Modern, my next guest.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
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.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
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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.
Taking Matters Into Own Hands00:12:35
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
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Laura, Scottsdale Police.
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What's thwarting my Sophies?
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards.
And during the break we took between this chapter and the last one, I stole back the case of Perrier, and I'm going to throw it at some point.
Sophie's standing next to me right now trying to get it back, but she's not.
She's not gonna.
Everybody's nervous.
But I need a drink.
If I open the Perrier can to get a drink to wet my throat, then when I throw it, it's just gonna do more damage.
Wait, so you're gonna take one out and you're gonna throw that one.
Well, now I'm not.
There's something of a truth happening.
There's a lot of visual visual things going on right now.
What I love about visual things is that they're the ideal thing to do on a podcast.
Famed visual medium.
We're doing great.
Chapter 5, A Hidden Civil War.
Cool.
One of the issues with discussing the history of secret organizations formed to overthrow the government is that, for obvious reasons, an awful lot is left in shadow.
We do not know the precise day or the hour that the order was founded.
We do not know its exact composition or to what precise extent men like Louis Beam and William Pierce were involved in it.
Officially, the order was not a lot.
Probably not certainly not a lot.
Officially, the order was founded in September of 1983 by Robert Matthews during a convention he attended for Pierce's National Alliance in Arlington.
While Beam and Pierce tended to approach the issue of sparking a fascist revolution rather differently, Matthews had deep ties to both men.
He was profoundly influenced by Beam's ideas and writings, and was also an obsessive fan of the Turner Diaries.
He essentially acted as a bridge between the two sides of the Vanguardist movement, tying Beam's Klansmen and Christian identity nuts together with Pierce's neo-Nazis.
William Pierce called the Order the Aryan Resistance Movement.
Robert Miles called it the Bruder Schweigen, or Silent Brotherhood.
But to Bob Matthews and most of the members, it was known simply as the Order, in direct imitation of the group responsible for organizing the fictional white nationalist insurgency in the Turner Diaries.
There were originally nine men, three from the National Alliance, four from the Aryan Nations, and one former Klansman.
So that's cool.
Now, Matthews devised a six-step strategy for his new terror organization.
He would start by recruiting a base of soldiers around the nation and train them at sundry fascist compounds around the country.
Once Matthews had a trained corps of soldiers, they would begin committing robberies and counterfeiting money.
This would fund the purchase of an arsenal, which would allow them to commit more ambitious robberies and raise millions of dollars, which they would then dispense to different fascist groups around the nation.
In essence, Bob Matthews had looked out at all the white supremacist compounds around the country, places like Elohim City, the Aryan Nations, Nehemiah Township, and various posse comitatus communities.
He decided these groups had potential if they were connected and funded more effectively.
The Order was a way to do that.
In carrying out this plan, Matthews was both working to fulfill Pierce's dream of a big tent fascist organization and actively funding Beam's plan to connect these different groups via the early internet.
Okay.
Cool?
It's just a bunch of cool buds hanging out.
Bunch of cool dudes having cool friends.
The Order's end goal was a white ethno-state in the Pacific Northwest.
Here, too, Matthews was following in the footsteps of other fascist thinkers.
The Northwest Imperative, as it is now known, first propped up in the 1970s and was initially cheered on by Christian identity pastor and Aryan nations leader Richard Butler.
In creating the Order, Matthews had since synthesized decades of far-right thinking with his love of the Turner Diaries into a serious plan for revolution.
On paper, it looked kind of silly.
It was even based off of speculative science fiction.
But Matthews quickly turned his plans into action.
On October 28th, 1983, Bob and several of his men held up an adult bookstore in Spokane, Washington, netting $300.
It was an item silly.
Seems not worth it.
Seems not worth it.
But this small-scale crime was just the start of many.
Matthews and his crew kept on robbing.
Two months later, they stole $25,000 from a Seattle bank.
Okay.
And $3,600 from a Spokane bank.
They robbed a courier after picking up the daily cash receipts from a Shoni's restaurant and made out with $8,000.
The order professionalized quickly, and within a matter of months, they'd also started counterfeiting $50 bills.
Okay, yeah.
They don't need to do that.
They're still on the money.
They really didn't need to do that.
It would turn out to have been a bad idea.
Yeah.
But the idea was that, like, by counterfeiting money, they could both damage the state by bringing down a financial collapse and that they could make money.
Yeah.
By spring 1984, Robert Matthews had proved himself to be a competent and dangerous guerrilla leader, and his order was quickly becoming the biggest new thing in American fascism.
Dozens of young militants flocked to join and do their part to further the cause.
They flooded in from other far-right groups with names like The Covenant, the Sword, and The Arm of the Lord, sundry posse comatatus groups and assorted KKK chapters.
Yeah, they're all there.
They're fucking nerds.
It always grosses me out.
Yeah, the proud boys are just one variation on a theme of terrible names for right-wing terrorist groups.
Yeah.
In order to build camaraderie and loyalty, Matthews developed rituals for his warrior elite.
I'm going to quote now from Bring the War Home.
They took their induction oath on Matthews' farm.
They stood in a circle around a white female infant who symbolized the race they sought to protect.
They raised their arms in a Hitler salute.
I, as a free Aryan man, they recited, hereby swear an unrelenting oath upon the green graves of our sires, upon the children in the wombs of our wives.
They swore that they had no fear of death or foe, but had a sacred duty to do whatever is necessary to deliver our people from the Jew and bring total victory to the Aryan race.
They pledged secrecy about all activities to follow.
They swore to rescue any of their number taken prisoner.
Should an enemy agent hurt you, they promised their silent brothers, I will chase him to the ends of the earth and remove his head from his body.
Their oath recognized them as racial warriors, but also transformed them into weapons.
My brothers, let us be God's battle axe and weapons of war.
Let us go forth by ones and twos, by scores and legions, as true Aryan men, they vowed.
We are in a state of war and will not lay down our weapons until we have driven the enemy into the sea and reclaim the land which was promised to our fathers of old, and through our blood and his will becomes the land of our children to be.
I cannot believe these nerds.
You look so disgusted through that entire thing.
I was just like, oh, I hate it so much.
Some sexist, racist, awful white supremacist bullshit.
But it's also so, they're so embarrassing is also what it is.
It's like they're so evil and they're so lame.
This is part of why I think that like making stuff like Dungeons and Dragons and LARPing more socially acceptable might reduce the number of young men who do that.
It's a healthier outlet.
Yeah, just give them an excuse to talk about axes and pretend they're political things instead of hating people.
Except gamers, you know.
Yeah, that really kind of proves me incorrect on that because they just did both.
Just do both.
They just do both.
Yeah.
In March 1984, the Order carried out their first robbery of an armored car.
They netted $43,000.
They robbed the same armored car again in April and got their biggest score yet: $230,000.
Later that month, Order members also bombed a synagogue in Boise, Idaho.
Okay.
As the summer of 1984 rolled along, Matthews and other members of his inner circle began to worry that one of their men, Walter West, might talk.
Two of Bob's men shot and buried him in the woods on June 1st.
A little more than two weeks later, on June 17th, Matthews and three of his men shot and killed Alan Berg, a Jewish radio host and anti-fascist who regularly attacked neo-Nazis on the air.
The Berg murder officially erased the order's profile and guaranteed major law enforcement attention.
The group's danger was reinforced a month later when they heisted a Brinks truck in Ukiah, California and made off with a staggering $3.6 million.
Wow.
Jeez.
Yep.
Wonder where all that money went.
Let's read the next paragraph.
Now flush with enough cash to wage a revolution.
Matthews and his order began buying up guns like they were going out of style.
That's where it went.
They also purchased a 300-acre plot of land in Missouri and 110 acres in Idaho.
Each participant in the robbery got $40,000, but the bulk of the money went to other fascists around the country.
Different organizations received grants in $100,000 increments.
Matthews also tithed.
Here's your Nazi grant.
Here's your Nazi grant.
Do Nazi research.
Yeah, look at your Nazi stuff.
Matthews also tithed 10% of his stolen money to the Aryan nations.
So that's good.
Yeah, you know, just give it out, give it back.
They're really hurting for cash.
Yeah.
You know who else is hurting for cash?
Oof, that's a bad ad transition, Sophie.
Yeah, talking about like Nazi welfare.
Here's one.
You know who else wants your cash?
And is better than Nazis?
Yeah.
The advertisers for this show.
For this show.
Yeah.
That's good.
That's what you hope.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Boy, I am not doing great today.
I do have Chekhov's case of carrying.
No, not yet.
I just, I feel like I have to really build it up because my heart stops.
Definitely going to be the last thing I get to throw in this room.
You're locked in now.
Sophie's just giving me a look.
Anyway, products!
10-10 shots, five.
City wall 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 scream, 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 allegedly 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.
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You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
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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.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
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How are you doing, Sophie?
Yeah, you should make sure the dog's on the other side of the room.
Because who knows when I'll throw this Perrier?
Just look for the dog.
I will.
Now, members of the Order developed code names and acquired fake IDs.
Matthews even had silver medallions crafted to act as proof of membership.
Yeah, oh, it's about to get cooler, Katie, because they had nicknames.
What?
Yep, yep.
Nicknames like Lone Wolf.
Field Marshal.
Yosemite Sam.
Did you say Veal Marshal?
Field Field.
Field Marshal.
Oh, these are bad.
Yeah, Yosemite Sam.
All of them.
That's like...
Yeah.
One member was nicknamed Mr. Closet for his love of assaulting gay men.
Oh, my God.
No!
It makes it sound like he's in the closet, which he probably was.
He probably was.
Louie Beam was codenamed Jolly and Lone Star.
Pierce was codenamed Brigham after Mormon leader Brigham Young.
Postmen had medallions.
The only good nickname there is Jolly.
Man, they are showing themselves.
First of all, it's super lame to pick your own nickname, and you know they all picked their own nicknames.
Except for maybe Mr. Closet.
I feel like somebody gave him that nickname.
Yeah, but they're so bad.
They're so lame.
They're so lame.
Okay.
And bad.
They're silly.
And you get it all.
It's like lone wolf.
All right.
No, you're not.
You're like a bunch of Nazis.
You got your law enforcement field officer?
No, Field Marshal.
Field Marshal Arshi.
Yeah.
There's some cops that are Nazis.
Well, no, no, that's not a field marsh.
That's not a cop thing.
Or like law enforcement.
No, no.
Field Marshal's like a general level rank, but it was like the Germans had a lot of field marshals.
Not only Germans.
But it's a military gathering.
Yeah, it's a military rank.
Yeah, but the same idea.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then you got Yosemite Sam, which is silly.
Yep.
You got all the things that they got all the things that they are.
Yeah, it's silly.
I know exactly who they are.
Yeah.
In nine months, Bob Matthews had turned his dreams and the theories of men like Beam and Pierce into a real revolutionary movement.
He'd made the Turner Diaries real.
New recruits to the Order were reportedly handed copies of the book.
And for a while, law enforcement seemed powerless to do anything to stop them.
According to Bring the War Home, quote, even if federal agents and a few journalists were aware of the white power movement, the mainstream public continued to see most white power violence as the work of errant madmen.
The phrase lone wolf, previously used to describe criminals acting alone, was employed increasingly in the 1980s and 90s to describe white power activists.
This played into the movement's aim to prevent anyone from putting together a cohesive account of the group's actions.
Yep.
That all checks out, doesn't it?
And they're also silly.
So why take them seriously?
The history of how we don't call white terrorists.
But you know who we should call terrorists?
Antifa.
The group that doesn't kill anybody.
Wade zero people?
Yes.
Are you suggesting that they're not?
I'm just saying, like, of the groups I'm willing to consider terrorists, Al-Qaeda, death toll thousands.
Right?
Yeah.
Antifa, death toll zero.
The KKK, death toll, thousands, but they're not actually a terrorist group in the U.S. That's what's white nationalist terrorism.
It doesn't seem to be treated as seriously.
That's because they're a bunch of lone wolves in a pack together.
Yeah, you can't fight lone wolves.
But they're a pack, but they're alone.
Yeah, they're a lone pack.
A pack of lone wolves, which you can't defend against.
An oxymoron is what it is.
Okay.
Good times.
So, the order's undoing came from a member of the group and a former National Alliance goon named Tom Martinez.
Matthews had brought Martinez in to help pass counterfeit bills around his home in Philadelphia.
He was caught by the FBI and he turned informant to avoid prison.
The FBI used this information to track Matthews to Portland, Oregon, where they engaged him in a short gun battle.
Bob was wounded, but managed to flee to Whidbey Island in Washington with several of his most loyal soldiers.
The FBI surrounded the house, and eventually all of Matthews' men surrendered.
But Robert Matthews refused to give up.
Alone, he fought the FBI off for an astonishing 40 hours.
The Bureau eventually burned the cabin down around Matthews, killing him on December 8th, 1984.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's a bit of a hero to these guys to this day.
Yeah, I bet he is.
Yeah.
With their leader dead, the order eventually crumbled, proving, by the way, that Louis Beam had been right to emphasize leaderless resistance.
After five months of arrests around the country, more than 50 members of the order had been arrested.
The FBI recovered a great deal of cash, but millions remained unaccounted for.
They found what some of that money had bought, though, when they raided the heavily armed Ozarks compound of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord.
Law anti-tank rockets and machine guns were found hidden on the property.
The CSA were not the only group who had bought rocket launchers with the Order's ill-gotten gains, however, and not all of those weapons were recovered.
This is part of why it became illegal for U.S. servicemen to be members of extremist groups because all these fucking weapons kept getting into their hands.
And that's the only reason.
Yeah, that's the only reason you do it.
It used to be really easy to get military-grade weapons.
They did some reforms that have made that harder, apparently.
Well, good bully for them.
Kudos the military.
I mean, they're actually, of all the government organizations, they're the only one with any kind of effective long-term response to any of this.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's true.
Yeah.
Now, the first trial associated with the order took place in Seattle and included several members of the CSA.
They pled guilty on weapons charges and were convicted of racketeering.
Next, the U.S. attorney brought a 93-page indictment against 23 members of the Order.
Robert Miles, Louis Beam, and William Pierce were not indicted.
In the months leading up to the trial, members of the order rolled over on their comrades with unusual regularity.
By the time the trial rolled around in September 1985, only 10 of them actually faced trial.
This hardened core of loyal racists included David Lane, the man who would years later coined the 14 words that neo-Nazis still use today as a calling card.
Right on.
Yep.
During the case, prosecutors specifically noted that the Turner diaries had acted as a blueprint for Bob Matthews.
According to Blood and Politics, quote, In an opening statement, a defense attorney acknowledged that his client was a Klan member and an avowed white supremacist, or white separatist.
Now, I say white separatist, he continued, because there is a significant difference in an individual who professes to be a white supremacist as opposed to a white separatist.
What was that difference?
The white separatist is nothing different than a black nationalist who advocates a separation of races, wants to live only with those members of his race.
He advocates the fact that when races are mixed together, they cannot survive because of their division in their cultural backgrounds, their upbringing, and their history.
The Seattle jury did not buy this distinction between white supremacy and white separatism in 1985 any more than the Supreme Court was willing to ignore separate but equal doctrine in 1954.
Neither did the jury believe defense efforts to impugn the credibility of Aryans who became prosecution witnesses, nor did jurors accept contentions that the defendants' beliefs were unrelated to the enumerated crimes.
After four months at trial, all were found guilty.
Okay.
So that's good.
That's good.
That's good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, in death, Bob Matthews and his order became a symbol for fascists around the country.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, hundreds of Nazis rallied under banners that said, We love the order.
In Idaho, a group called Order 2 set off several bombs in Cordeline.
The date of Matthews' death, December 8th, became Martyr's Day to many neo-Nazis.
Some of them started carrying out memorial camping trips near where he had been killed on Whidbey Island.
But still, the order had failed in its goals, and that failure had come at a substantial cost.
William Beam and Louis Pierce had not been indicted or charged as a result of Matthews' activities, but they now found themselves at the center of much more FBI attention.
In an operation named Clean Sweep, the Bureau began seeding white supremacist organizations around the country with undercover operatives.
Later in 1985, they stopped an Aryan nation's plot to kill a government informant.
Another terrorist associated with the group was stopped after bombing a federal building, several businesses, and a rectory in Cordeline.
In 1986, the feds busted William Potter Gale, founder of the Posse Comitatus in Nevada.
Gale and several allies were convicted of planning to bomb the IRS.
Kind of sounds like an insurgency.
Yeah, it kind of does sound like an insurgency.
Yep.
Near the end of 1986, the FBI busted eight members of a new group, the Arizona Patriots, before they could carry out their goal of following in Bob Matthews' footsteps.
The group had planned to rob banks to finance a domestic insurgency.
All around the U.S., white supremacists continued to plot and launch attacks.
One of these men was Glenn Miller, formerly the leader of a group called the White Patriot Party.
He'd received at least $75,000 in order money from Bob Matthews.
As the FBI busted more and more of these guys, they found more and more evidence of the order's influence and money.
And gradually, they pieced together the story of what had really happened and came to realize that Matthews' group had sought nothing less than the complete overthrow of the federal government.
In mid-1986, Louis Beam, Richard Butler, Robert Miles, and several other ideological leaders of the fascist movement were finally indicted for their role in the order.
So that's cool.
Wow.
Yeah.
And we're going to hear about what happened next after ads.
I'm just incapable of doing a good ad transition.
That was great.
Thank you.
But it's a lie.
You know, it's not a lie.
Wait a minute.
I'm not going to throw it yet.
I'm just building tension.
Every time you bring it up.
This is how you screenwriting 101, Katie.
It's Chekhov's case of Perrier.
I just, my heart stops.
That's the idea.
But I'm cool and laid back.
So, whatever you're going to do.
You know, the reality of the situation is as soon as I started really getting a sense for the heft of this case, I started regretting the fact that I've talked this up so much.
But now it has to happen.
What about taking one out?
No.
Throwing it.
That actually might make it more dangerous because then it'll fall out the back like a scatter bomb.
If you open it, it's more likely that it'll cover us.
It'll probably still.
What if we taped pillows all around it?
I don't think we can do that.
I think I have to throw it.
You could subvert the narrative and not throw it.
But the best thing to do with narratives is not to subvert them.
Sure.
You could just give it a gentle.
We tell stories the way we do.
But you could redefine what throwing is, make it like a gentle toss.
I mean, a head and toss.
I'm not going to go 110% because I don't feel like that's necessary given the extremity of what this case of Perrier represents.
But I am going to throw it.
I mean, those are the cans, correct?
Yeah.
Okay, that's something.
Yeah, it's several pounds.
Ten slim cans, as the package states.
How are we doing, Sophie?
Ads.
It's not even 12.
Products!
10-10 shots fired in the 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.
Hooded.
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 ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, 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 are 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 that, 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.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app.
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I'm Laurie 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.
Revolution Without Precedent00:05:13
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 on Mostly Human.
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.
We're back.
Okay.
We hadn't come back yet.
I started talking about Perrier.
So, yeah, Robert Miles, Richard Butler, Louis Beam, and several other fascist ideologues had gotten indicted for their role in the order.
Getting all of these guys together was quite a task.
And at one point, Louis Beam's wife shot a federal agent who came for them.
But eventually, they all got found out.
Yeah.
They all wound up under trial.
So, the Justice Department charged these men with a number of crimes, including seditious conspiracy to, quote, overthrow, put down, and destroy by force the government of the United States and form a new Aryan nation.
Oddly enough, William Pierce was not indicted.
Seditious conspiracy was a crime numerous communists and Puerto Rican nationalists had already been successfully convicted of committing, but no Nazis or white supremacists had ever been convicted of the crime.
Despite the order's shocking violence and well-documented goals, this fact did not change.
The trial convened in February of 1988, and the fascist defense attorneys managed to exclude any black people from the jury.
The trial was almost instantly a shit show and served more to allow Louis Beam to preach his views to the nation than to guarantee justice.
In his opening statement, he told the jury, The only reason I'm here is because I said what I think.
If the Constitution is still alive, I'm innocent.
Beam admitted that he had set up computer bulletin boards for different fascist groups around the country, but denied that these boards were used for any illicit communication.
He told the jury he'd been changing his daughter's diaper when the purported meeting that created the order had occurred.
So he dubbed the government's case the baby diaper conspiracy.
Wait a minute.
For the whole meeting?
Yeah, that's what he said.
An outrageous diaper.
Like, take her to the doctor, man.
Doesn't hold up.
You're doing more to pick this story apart than anyone in the court of law did.
Beam ended one speech in his defense with an almost word-for-word recitation of something he'd written in Essays of a Klansman about his anger at protesters he'd supposedly encountered after returning home from Vietnam.
Quote from Beam.
As I sat there watching the flag disintegrate, rage and bitterness began to engulf me.
The flames consuming the flag changed to flames enveloping an armored personnel carrier in the hobo woods north of Saigon.
The cheers of the demonstrators became the screams of a 19-year-old soldier over his radio as he burned to death, trapped inside what was fast becoming his coffin.
The clapping of hands as the flag fell to the ground became the deafening roar of my M60 machine gun as I literally melted the barrel in an attempt to pin down the enemy long enough for the dying soldier's friends to reach him.
Finally, at last, came the laughter of those demonstrators as they spit on the ashes at their feet, blending in my mind with the sobs of grown men as I remembered the armored personnel carrier disappearing in a ball of orange flame.
Okay.
The prosecution just lets him say this shit.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The judge just lets him say this shit.
Yeah.
Upsetting.
After seven weeks of trial, Louis Beam and his fellow defendants were all found not guilty of seditious conspiracy.
They were released, presumably free to return to their lives in the movement.
Of doing nothing, though.
Of doing nothing.
Harmless lives of being harmless.
The Justice Department had taken its shot at the intellectual center of the white supremacist movement.
They had failed.
And ultimately, their failure came not from law enforcement's unwillingness to prosecute Nazis, but from ordinary white Americans and the sympathy they held for men like Beam who build themselves as warriors against communism and patriots.
Beam's racism and his desire to overthrow the government simply weren't seen as that bad by a jury of his peers.
Sure.
The leaders of the white supremacist movement had gotten off, more or less, scot-free, but the court battle and the months many of them had spent on the lamb before being arrested had aged them all.
Richard Butler's influence would gradually fade after he returned home to Idaho.
Louis Beam continued to be an influential mind within the movement, but he would be more careful and much quieter from now on.
The heat brought on by the crackdown forced Beam to retire his beloved inter-clan newsletter and survival alert.
The last issue contained an essay by an unknown author, probably Beam.
In it, he wrote, The second American Revolution will be a revolution of individuals, a revolution without exact precedent in recorded history, because individuals can accomplish complex acts of resistance without peril of betrayal or even detection by the most advanced snooping devices.
Missions formerly assigned to groups may be undertaken by individuals equipped to fight alone.
It would not be long before a young man named Timothy McVeigh would prove these words prophetic.
Individualistic.
Next Episode Teaser00:04:42
Yeah.
It's collective, but they're lone wolves.
Yeah, lone wolves.
But they are lone wolves.
Individual crazy people like the guy who shut up the Gilroy Garlic Festival.
Right.
Not connected to a larger movie.
What was the manifesto or the book that you've been reading?
It was by a guy named Ragnar Redbeard, and it's one of a number of books that appears regularly in full.
He was writing in the 1890s about white nationalism and kind of eco-fascism, like kind of a really early eco-fascist text.
Yeah, it's what a fucking guy, that piece, dumb piece of shit said.
Yeah.
And it's one of a number of books that circulates a lot on 8chan, actually.
Like they send around PDFs for this stuff.
Like it's stuff that people wouldn't have been able to get before the internet, which is why Louis Beam was 100% right to start doing this.
We will talk more about that later.
I think I'm going to wait until next episode to really launch this Perrier, but that's what we call foreshadowing.
Or stating your intentions, I guess.
Yeah.
Kind of like the Nazis did.
And like the Nazis, I expect to not get in trouble no matter what happens.
I would say that that's actually foreshadowing that you won't throw the Perrier.
Like you're talking yourself up about it.
You're bringing it up.
You're reinforcing it in a really obvious way.
No, no.
And so that might be foreshadowing to us that you're not, you're going to change your mind.
Oh, I've got to throw them.
Until I said this.
You keep on it.
Yeah.
Anywho.
Then he said that.
We've talked about it too much.
Well, you guys want to plug your pluggables?
Yeah.
You know what?
We do.
We have a show called Some More News.
That's the YouTube show.
And a podcast called Even More News.
Cody.
I agree.
And a Patreon.
Twitter.com.
And a TeePublic.
And a TeePublic.
And we're on Twitter.
Yeah.
You can buy t-shirts from TeePublic.
You can find us on the internet somewhere.
Yeah, you can.
I'm going to throw these cans in the next episode.
Oh, no.
I scooted it all the way away.
I know.
I love making you flinch.
Just listen to the sound.
That's foreshadowing.
That's halfway.
Ominous.
No.
Under no circumstances.
Episode over.
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.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
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.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad 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.
Ray Gillespie and Michael Manchini.
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 Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.