I Don't Speak German, Episode 7: The Southern Nationalists
This week, Daniel introduces Jack to the febrile world of the Southern Nationalists. Warnings apply, as always * Show Notes: New Christopher Cantwell drama: https://christophercantwell.com/2019/02/11/sorry-for-spam-posts/ https://gab.com/Cantwell/posts/48424388 https://gab.com/Cantwell/posts/48500924 https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/1096910054840823809 * History resources: Hooded Americanism At The Hands of Persons Unknown Blood and Politics * Western groups: Bundyville JJ MacNab Mark Pitcavage David Neiwert Clips (Including James Edwards and Drue Lackey snippets) * Southern Nationalists: James Edwards The Political Cesspool TPC on Youtube TOQ Live James Edwards defamation lawsuit The League of the South Occidental Dissent Brad Griffin/Hunter Wallace Hunter Wallace on "the Hard Right." The Sons of Confederate Veterans Council of Conservative Citizens Sam Francis Gordon Baum * Recent League of the South drama Somewhat related: The American Freedom Party * Robert Evans and Behind the Bastards The myth of the black Confederate soldier - here, here, and here The myth of the kindly General Lee Intro to 'The Golden One' via Kevin Logan's excellent Descent of Manosphere series
OK, welcome to episode 7 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast where I talk to Daniel Harper about what he learned and heard from more than two years of listening to the American far-right talk to each other.
And this episode is going to be on some people called the Neo-Confederates.
But before we get on to them, we do need to do a little bit of a recap on the subject of our last two episodes, Christopher Cantwell.
So what's been happening in Cantwell land, Daniel?
Well, nothing good.
There's never any good news coming out of him.
Well, I mean, this is kind of good news.
He's fighting with other bullshit people, so that's always... that's a good thing.
Let them fight, you know?
Like, I feel like my whole goal is just to let them fight GIF just over and over again.
You know, that's... that's just... get them to fight each other and then they'll just fade into irrelevance.
That's the goal.
Anyway, but yeah, no, he's still making news.
He has a...
I've been continually attacked by the Boat Patrol people who I mentioned last time.
These are the stochastic terrorist little cruise missiles.
These are people who worship Dylann Roof, who think he is not going far enough now that he's trying to Do a more mainstream production and kind of be a little bit more within the kind of realms of, you know, acceptable discourse despite the fact that he's still a fucking Nazi.
You know, they think he's cucking on the message and they've just been continually bombarding this guy with prank calls for months now.
And he's finally had enough and he's decided to, he's hiring, I put that in quotes there, he's hiring a call screener, which he always swore he'd never do.
He's been very proud of his, you know, uncensored and no call screener nature of his radio show.
But he has decided to go ahead and do that because he just has no other option except to deal with these guys at this point.
So he does now have a call screener.
I put hired in quotes because he's not actually paying anyone.
He required this person.
So he has talked about the call screener.
He's saying, you know, very good job call screener.
I'm very proud of you.
I did not listen to the Friday episode yet.
I'm a little behind on my podcast listening, but I did listen to the Wednesday show where he finally got a call screener and he's He's been praising the screener for doing a good job.
So, you know, good for him.
He found somebody who was willing to give Kentwell his, his or her, I'm assuming it's a he, his or her information.
You know, actually give them, give him their real name and has access to all of Kentwell's caller info.
Meaning that this person is now a potential link to spreading everything that's destroying Cantwell's life.
So I'm really hoping this person is not trustworthy to Cantwell because Cantwell will turn on this person in a second if there's any hint of any kind of drama between them.
So I'm excited to see where this goes.
I think this is going to be amazing.
Um, so he's hired a call screener.
He's also, uh, in a big, uh, fight with, uh, he, he puts this post up on his blog, or, uh, you know, kind of on, on his Gab profile.
He's in this, uh, he thinks that Atomwaffen Division, Atomwaffen is the, uh, German word for, uh, atomic bomb.
So he thinks that this group who are, um, we will cover them later on, I think.
This is Waffen, as in Waffen, Waffen SS.
Yeah, yeah, sure, sorry, I should pronounce it with the V. The pronunciation isn't here nor there, I'm just establishing it's the same thing.
I usually just call them AWD, when I'm talking about them online, mostly because that's how they kind of acronym themselves, although that does get me into trouble.
I was talking to someone who said, oh yeah, I just call them Adam Waffle, and I'm like, that's good, I like that, Adam Waffle, that sounds fine.
So, anyway, so these guys are a basically kind of militant paramilitary, again, like openly terrorist group.
There are at least five murders that have been associated with them directly.
And they sort of have similar, they have similar reading material to these Boal Patrol guys.
And again, we're going to kind of cover both of these guys probably together in a very soon upcoming episode.
But they do have very different kind of tactics and very different sort of ideologies despite the fact they're kind of like following along kind of parallel lines.
Cantwell can't tell the difference between them and so he thinks they're all kind of one group which doesn't surprise me because he also thinks Hillary Clinton is a communist so you know so he's fighting with these guys.
But what type of communist Chris?
Is she a Maoist?
Is she a Trotskyist?
Come on, give me some fine details here.
Exactly, exactly.
Anyway, so that's kind of the drama that's happening right now.
It's just kind of continually unfolding on my Twitter feed.
I have people tagging me in on this.
I literally got news from two people via DM within ten minutes of each other last night.
And it's just like, hey, look at what's going on, and it's like, oh my god, I'm so tired of talking about Christopher fucking Cantwell.
But, uh, this was good news, so I figured, or at least, you know, kind of big important news, enough to cover on the show.
So, that's what's going on with our buddy the Crying Nazi there, but it looks like he's not actually sticking methamphetamine in his asshole anymore, so, you know, good for him, I guess.
Yeah, and you're lucky you got that, listeners.
I had to coax that, because I think Daniel's all can't weld out.
You know, my preparation for these shows is, like, I spend about an hour kind of putting notes together beforehand and kind of doing this kind of stuff.
It's also, um, but what you don't necessarily see is all the other stuff that kind of goes on behind the scenes, and it's not just listening to these guys anymore, it's like talking to other people about like different interpretations of what's going on, and I have like enough other people that I'm in contact with that I'm talking to about this stuff that it often, um, it just kind of becomes like I'm just tired of talking about like Catwell, you know, but it is important and I am very happy that people are finally starting to pay attention to him, so
Good on everyone, basically.
Yeah, and we're very happy that people are paying attention to this show.
Not huge numbers yet, but we are building an audience, and that's great.
Thanks for being here, listeners.
On the subject of Daniel's preparations, I just want to mention one thing.
A little bit of housecleaning, as Sam Harris would say.
I do have a bottle of indifferent bourbon sitting in a cabinet, and I'm going to have a little bit of that when we're done here.
Good, good.
We're staying on brand then.
Questions have been asked.
Not nasty questions, but just questions about why we don't put clips in these episodes.
And the answer is basically very simple.
It's this project is predicated on it being low effort for me, because I have, you know, I have 48 other things going on.
And this, I'm committed to this.
I think it's very important.
But I'm the one who does, I mean, Daniel does all the work, right?
And I, it's possible because I can turn up without having done any research and just ask him questions.
So I don't have to revise or research or anything like that.
I just ask him questions and then I edit it and that is literally as much.
And then I do the website page.
That is as much work as I can put into this and that, you know, if I had to put more work into it, the project would not be possible.
So that's really the plus.
You know, I do have my doubts about the value of clips, but there are clips in the links.
You can go to clips that Daniel has prepared in the links if you want to hear some of this stuff yourself.
Yeah, I don't always put, like, audio clips in the links, but there's always, like, a link to, like, who, you know, to their social media presence.
So if you do want to kind of know more, if you do want to get a sense of anything, and also feel free to reach out to me if there's something in particular you're looking for, particularly if you're another researcher, an activist, or if you're a journalist, and you need, like, some clip of something that you're, you know, if there's anything you doubt, I have Ample evidence of this.
It's just putting it together and kind of, you know, doing this, doing this in this way.
It's, you know, this podcast is meant to be sort of a, like, informative, but also fairly low effort for both of us.
It's something that we can just kind of put out there to kind of give to people, but not necessarily have to take up as much time as like kind of writing it up in kind of a formal essay or book form is.
This is the scratch pad that becomes the bigger project, essentially.
And so I'm just happy that people are listening and enjoying.
The other thing I'll just mention as long as we're on housecleaning is that I do know that some people can't listen to podcasts or don't like podcasts.
I have access to a...
I pay for a certain amount of auto-transcription service and I have started doing auto-transcriptions of these episodes and I will start providing them to Jack.
The thing is that the auto-transcriptions are pretty terrible because I'm not very good at speaking in complete sentences and complete paragraphs.
Because this is not a pre-written thing, it's just sort of a conversation.
The quality of these is not necessarily the best, but again, going through and doing the hand editing on them to make them cleaner, It's time that I could be spending doing another thing that's equally useful, right?
So, ultimately, I am very aware of the sort of accessibility problems that come along with doing a podcast, and sort of some of those criticisms.
I do take that to heart, and we are kind of working on that.
If there is someone who wants to volunteer to transcribe these, believe me, I can't pay you, but I will appreciate it to the end of the earth, because it is not something that I want to spend, you know, ten hours a week transcribing myself talking.
Yes, indeed.
And again, if anybody does want to get in touch with either of us, I mean, Daniel's the man to talk to, but I can always send you his way, you know, if there's some sort of problem, please do reach out to us.
I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore on Twitter, and Daniel is at Daniel E. Harper on Twitter.
We will be delighted to hear, you know, information or questions from you.
One final bit of housecleaning is I know I'm behind on turning these into YouTube videos.
I will get caught up.
We're not getting huge views on YouTube, stunningly, since it's just sort of the sound with a static picture.
It's not exactly thrilling cinema, but I'm committed to carrying on doing that and I've just gone behind, but I will get caught up.
Okay, so shall we move on to the subject of this episode, the Neo-Confederates?
Really, I'm thinking of this as the Southern Nationalist episode, which is sort of the same thing, but sort of different.
But, you know, they tend to call themselves the Southern Nationalists at this point.
Okay.
Sorry, listeners, I didn't get the memo.
It's the Southern Nationalists.
Same fucking difference.
It's fine.
So, Daniel, tell me about the, whatever the fuck they're called, the Southern Nationalists.
Sure.
So, That means I can't do my joke now as well about it.
You know, we're doing the Neo-Confederates.
That doesn't mean Trinity and Morpheus.
You could.
I mean, that's fine with me.
I'm not gonna complain.
That's exactly the reaction that that joke deserved.
So one of the things that I think we're going to do in the next few of these is step away from people who have previously or would generally consider themselves quote-unquote alt-right.
One of the things that I mentioned in the very first episode is, you know, this kind of definition is that using the term alt-right sometimes obscures more than it clarifies for a lot of complicated reasons.
The thing that I think gets overlooked a lot of times in terms of talking about this kind of larger online white nationalist movement, this kind of resurgent fascism, is that it's composed of, in a lot of ways, hyper-regionalist groups.
Most of the figures that we think of as alt-right, people like Richard Spencer or Mike Enoch or other kinds of figures tend to be coastal figures.
They tend to be people who either live in New England or California, Oregon, Washington.
They tend to live in those kind of on the coasts, but almost always in New England or in something like that.
Cantwell lives in New Hampshire.
I mean, everybody that we've covered, everybody who kind of fits into that kind of, like, was radicalized sometime after 2009, derives from this sort of paleo-conservative, paleo-libertarian movement.
These figures who kind of fit into that alt-right framework are almost always kind of like rich kids from suburbs and somewhere near cities who move to cities or go to school in the city or whatever are disgusted by the fact that brown people exist and then end up becoming fascists.
But that's not really the case for a lot of other people who kind of would be considered fellow travelers.
For instance, out West, you find some sort of the more sovereign citizen anti-government movements, these kind of like more kind of traditionally militia types.
If you remember the Malheur Wildlife Reserve and the Yal-Qaeda figures who took over that, the Bundy clan basically.
Are you familiar with those?
Does that make sense or do I need to kind of describe that a little bit?
No, I remember them.
I remember Cliven Bundy being the hero of Fox News and then suddenly becoming embarrassing when he was caught on video saying about how black people were happier picking cotton and so on and so forth.
And then this group of people connected to him took over a federal nature reserve or something, didn't they?
And they were treated with extraordinary forbearance and kindness by the FBI.
I know one of them got killed, but he was sort of driving at them at high speed with a weapon.
He pulled a gun.
He was fleeing.
He pulled a gun.
There's some contested history there.
I'm not going to get completely on the side of the FBI in this case.
They definitely pulled some bullshit with these guys.
But they were certainly treated with more kindness than an African-American teenager with a bag of Skittles gets treated.
Indeed.
Yes, indeed.
Um, These figures, and these are not Southern Nationalists, but this kind of, like, anti-government, kind of explicitly anti-government, anti-Bureau of Land Management, BLM, so there's two BLMs that these people hate, Black Lives Matter and the Bureau of Land Management, so you just have to kind of keep that straight sometimes.
These figures, for instance, tend to be, you know, the West tends to kind of like take those guys and that kind of ideology, because out West there, a lot of the concerns are things like ranching rights and water rights.
And there's this kind of overriding concern that, you know, the federal government owns like a huge percentage of the land that's out there.
And so if you're kind of a, you know, states rights, quote unquote, kind of person, and you're kind of in that kind of noxious ideology, You tend to have a very jaundiced view towards the government in that way.
I put this in here just to say that there are some great resources for following these guys, but I don't do a lot of it myself.
So I'm going to give you a few of them here so that people can kind of look into this.
There is a set of essays and a podcast.
Unlimited run series podcast called Bundyville, which is excellent, which covers like the Bundy clan and some of their issues and some of their origins and that sort of thing.
So I do highly recommend that if people are interested in that.
And if you want to kind of follow the more day-to-day of the militia movement, you want to follow two people, both of whom are actually paid professionally to do this, which I am not, because Mark Picab Mark Pickavage works for the ADL and I think you and I can have our issues with the way the ADL treats certain nation states on this planet and also kind of recognize that they do basically good work in terms of covering far-right extremism.
This is someone who's been covering this stuff for 20 years.
Go follow him on Twitter.
I've got his link in the show notes there.
And also J.J.
McNabb, who is supposed to have a book out this year, but I haven't seen, and I think it was already supposed to be out, but she has also been covering these people for 20 years, and those are the gold standard for trying to understand the militia movement, and nothing I could do if you want to know the day-to-day of that.
I just don't follow it so that's that's kind of my recommendation there.
I put this here partly because I've had people like ask me To cover the militia movement.
I think I will kind of do something on like in the history of the militia movement because it is kind of important kind of going back to The late 60s up to you know up to like the Oklahoma City bombing But all that's just kind of like previous research as opposed to something that's kind of happening now, so yeah I'm just kind of putting that out there and also David Newhart who we mentioned all the time on this show and who I Actually chat with a bit here and there.
He's a great guy, and he's also very very knowledgeable so Check that out.
Check out his blog.
All three of these people, I put their links in the show notes.
So if you want to know about that day-to-day, those are the people to follow.
Those are the people I look to for information, frankly.
Anyway, you know, it's really important to direct people to the right people, I find, because it's it's one thing for the information to be there.
But of course, if you don't know where it is, you don't know.
And it's so I've certainly I found, you know, somebody say, check out this person, check out this writer, check out this blog, etc.
It's so handy.
So, yeah.
I think that's a really valuable thing to do, to just say, you know, I can't speak to this in huge detail, but this person here knows their stuff.
Go listen to them.
I've benefited from that so many times.
So thank you.
Sure.
Yeah, and again, it's not that I consider this unimportant.
I consider the militia movement hugely important, and some of their kind of modern manifestations.
I mean, it's just, it's not something that I have any kind of, like, particular, you know, kind of detailed expertise on, you know.
Do they, I mean... Sorry, go ahead.
Do they not have podcasts and... They really don't communicate... These guys are mostly older.
These guys are mostly kind of, you know... That's what I thought.
Gen X and older.
They do use YouTube, but they don't produce shows.
It tends to be more a guy cleaning his gun and talking about how BLM is awful.
There is a community out there.
It's less that there aren't resources out there as much as I'm only one person, and I can only cover so much of it, right?
And again, I also just know that there are people who have been doing this for decades who can do that better than I can, and I would much rather just kind of stay in my lane a little bit on this, you know?
But there are really, really great resources out there, and those are three of them there, so I highly recommend it.
The reason I kind of include that is because it demonstrates the degree to which there are various factions within this far-right movement.
I mean, one of the things that Ammon Bundy, who's one of the Bundy children, he came out and he's against Trump's border wall, right?
And people are kind of tweeting about this.
This is something that happened a few months ago.
He kind of actively went against the border wall and people are kind of responding.
People who know this stuff very well, aren't they supposed to be super racist?
It's like, yeah, but they're racist in a different way.
And I think that's the key.
This is one of the things that I find, just briefly, I'll say this, can disorient people when they look at this stuff because people who aren't super steeped in it will see something like that and it will really disorient them.
And it's understandable why that happens, but I think you have to understand that these sorts of ideologies, firstly, they're inherently incoherent.
You know, if you look for consistency, internal sort of consistency inside their heads, sure, but actual ideological consistency just doesn't exist on the far right.
And the other thing is, it's really the politics is incredibly aesthetic.
Rather than actually political in sort of the proper nitty-gritty sense of politics.
So they can disagree about all sorts of things and they're still all basically fascists because they share the fascist aesthetic.
I think that's something people need to know.
Right and in particular with those guys there's a kind of particularly kind of American West kind of aesthetic.
There's an American West kind of fascism where And this is something I've been kind of thinking a little bit more about as I've been looking a little bit more into some of the some of the German, you know, some of the stuff that happened in Germany in the 20s and 30s, and kind of thinking about the way that the kind of aesthetic differences, they don't.
They don't unite behind a leader in the same way in terms of kind of a nation state that they they're looking more for, you know, this sort of like vision of a homestead, this vision of, you know, the sort of a sort of a localized control, which kind of feeds into kind of more that kind of neo reaction kind of very tiny city states kind of in the, you know, kind of thing.
I'm not quite prepared to discuss that in detail here, but there is a very particular American form of fascism that has at least three ongoing forms right now.
One of which is this sort of nebulous alt-right, which drew out of that paleo-conservative movement.
One of which is this sort of militia movement.
The Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, they all kind of fit into that same thing, which is less overtly racialized.
Also has a kind of a – it does have a racial tinge, but it tends to be kind of like more pro-Western as opposed to sort of like overtly white.
Sorry, there's a fourth one because there's also kind of the overt National Socialist movements.
So we're going to do them next week, so I'll just leave them there for now.
But the ones that we're here to talk about today, I think we're about 30 minutes in, and I apologize for kind of spending that much time on that.
The ones we're kind of talking about today are the Southern Nationalists, and all of these groups – and I hate to speak to a Marxist about this in too much detail because I know you know this better than I do – but it's almost as if these groups have particular material needs that they're meeting with a racist ideology.
It's almost as if the Western guys who are deeply concerned with things like land use rights and water rights because it's very, very dry and arid in the desert, ...have very particular needs in terms of their ability to have their ranches and have their farms and have their cattle that they feel are encroached upon by an overarching federal government that's basically just giving all their resources to non-white people.
And while the New Englanders, the more intellectual suburban kids, are basically responding to, we just want to keep our white suburbs white, the Southerners have a very long, dedicated history of this.
Literally to the 17th century, but in particular to the loss of the Civil War.
And while a lot of the groups that you kind of see as kind of more overtly alt-right, even the ones that have a little bit kind of further heritage, a little bit kind of further background than 2009 when Richard Spencer coined the term, with the Southerners, you're really talking about – you actually do have groups that have gone back to the 19th century.
You really do have, you know, this sort of like in the bones, blood and soil kind of Southern nationalism and these sort of deep resentments that they have against having essentially lost that war.
And that plays off in really interesting, dynamic, complicated ways that feed into Everything about U.S.
politics for the last 150 years, and in particular the last 50 years, and in particular the last 40 years.
I mean, you can't talk about U.S.
politics and not understand that the South resents the Yankees, essentially.
And I say this as someone who, you know, I think most of the listeners probably know this.
I grew up in the American South.
I grew up in Alabama.
I had a Confederate flag and a U.S.
flag on my bedroom wall when I was a kid.
Before I was, I mean, you know, like my parents put it up.
And my parents are not, I mean, my father's no longer with us.
My parents are not kind of overt, like, Klan members or anything like that.
I didn't grow up in that household.
Some of the people who do the work that I do did grow up in those kind of precise, you know, environments where my daddy was in the Klan and I'm not going to let that stand any longer.
This isn't my background, so I want to be clear about that.
But, you know, There are, you know, there is a kind of conversation about, like, kind of the Confederate flag and these kind of symbols, and like, well, I never saw that as really racist, and I'm sympathetic to that.
While I agree that the symbol is, you know, it was put up as a sign of, you know, this kind of implicit white supremacy, I think that some nuance gets lost when we don't differentiate between a sort of, like, this kind of appreciation of sort of a regional heritage versus a, you know, a kind of overt, like, kind of clan or kind of white nationalist, ethno-nationalist kind of background.
And this isn't meant to sort of apologize for implicit racism, it's just meant to kind of understand it and explain it, if that makes sense.
So I want to be very careful that I'm not trying to defend these guys in this moment, right?
No, absolutely.
And of course, the Civil War was, you know, well, we won't go into the history of the Civil War, but it was, shall we say, at the very least, complicated.
Oh, yes.
Not, you know, in the essentials.
Let's be clear, the essentials are crystal clear.
When you get constitutions for the southern states where literally all they've done is just imported the US Constitution and said, oh, and by the way, slavery is absolutely 100% legal always, they've just added, oh, and then we get to have slaves.
You don't get to say we don't.
It's pretty clear what they're really doing here.
I mean, I don't want to.
And you can listen to speeches by like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis and all of these figures.
And it's very, very obvious that the Civil War was about kind of maintaining slavery as an institution.
And indeed, you know, the hope of sort of imperialistic spread southwards to create a vast slave empire linked up with the, you know, the slave states in South America.
This was an explicit project.
We're not historians here, and I have definitely not prepped to get into the details of that, but I think it's important to note that there is a long history here, and there is a really compelling history.
and that the fact that this is in the air, that this sort of, again, like implicit white supremacy is much more just in the air and in the water in the American South in a way that it's just not in most other parts of the country.
How can it not be when you look at the history?
Oh, no, absolutely.
I mean, and that said, I want to be clear that, you know, the northern states would, you know, that the plenty of people turn their nose up at slavery, but we're happy to kind of take advantage of the profits from those slave industries that Wall Street is built on, you know, insuring slaves in many ways and insuring slave ships and, you know, taking cotton shipments.
And, you know, like this is the history of like it's it's It's not just a southern phenomenon.
Part of what frustrates people in the South, particularly People with some kind of knowledge who do have a sense of the history but feel like they're being kind of, they feel like they're being inadvertently blamed or kind of unnecessarily blamed for something for kind of where they're born and yet like you know.
The, you know, the liberal elites, the northern elites, all those people from New York City, and you can kind of add parentheses if you choose to, tend to, you know, kind of not take their own responsibility for this.
I mean, white supremacy is something that is absolutely endemic to the entire, you know, like, settler colonial project, and we all inherit that, regardless of where we're born, and it is kind of the nature, the nature of doing this is, you know, we do need to fight against this, like, You know, in as overt ways as we possibly can.
But a lot of people in the South feel, what you're saying, at least I think is what you're saying, that a lot of people in the South continue to feel, and the details of, you know, what they think is being done to whom, by whom, and why might be wrong in a lot of cases, but the overarching sentiment is, there's a lot of justice to it, that there's a lot of hypocrisy.
Oh, absolutely.
You said it much more succinctly than I did.
That's unusual.
No, I mean, they feel there's a lot of hypocrisy, and this is something I did.
I was kind of reaching for a little bit of this in the David Duke episode, talking about kind of the feelings of people who live in the South towards that kind of larger project and, you know, this feeling of we lost and then we got kind of fucked over.
And I mean, again, I don't want to I really don't want to try to get into the details of the history, but there is a lot to say about this kind of feeling of resentment in the way that the aftermath of the Civil War went.
A lot of that was overtly racialized, and some of it wasn't.
There was a lot of debate about, well, was Sherman's march to the sea really necessary?
Personally, I think burn fucking slavery to the ground.
I've got no emotional issue with that.
But there is a lot of...
Question about kind of the long-term social effects of that, right?
Yeah, and it's costing me a lot to, you know, really, because I'm fascinated with the American Civil War.
Maybe we could do a full episode on the American Civil War one day.
But you know, Sherman, this is not a simple angels and demons narrative.
Yes, absolutely slavery, absolutely evil, needs to be burnt to the ground.
Sherman, also a genocidal racist who went and slaughtered Native Americans.
You know, come on, let's not pretend that any side here has the monopoly.
On morality.
You know, one side is clearly the one that needs to be beaten.
Again, don't misunderstand me, but... Well, both sides need to be beaten by the rise up of the working class, ultimately.
Well, of course.
Yes, ultimately.
But yeah, one side was definitely worse than the other.
We're just going to leave it at that.
So, all that is kind of a lengthy preamble to sort of like...
I'm trying to get the big picture and I will kind of talk about some of these, some of the kind of organizations, some of the people that I just kind of follow day to day and kind of give you a sense of kind of who they are and kind of what they say.
I think that's probably where I want to go now if that works for you.
Right.
Yes, please.
I would like to, first of all, I just want to, I did put a link to the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
This is the SCV.
This is one of these kind of old organizations that was founded, I believe, in 1896.
There's also the Daughters of the Confederacy.
I don't have the date of their founding, but they're a similar organization.
They kind of were essentially the children of the actual, you know, as the old Confederate war veterans started to die, you sort of have these, like, you know, preserving our heritage kinds of groups.
Again, the kind of quite complicated legacy of the history of the Civil War and the way that that kind of intersects with our pop culture.
I mean, ultimately, if you want to... Once I beat the Nazis, I'm going to start talking about the Western as a form, and what it has to say about the Confederacy, because it's this deeply fascinating thing.
Um, but I gotta, I gotta finish this first, right?
Um, but, um, there's a ton of that, that kind of, like, stuff going around.
Now, today, um, the SCV is really, um, you know, you see myths like, um, you know, kind of the myth of the, uh, Black Confederate soldier.
Like, they're, they're actively, particularly after, um, the Civil Rights era, they spend a lot more time kind of, like, uh, emphasizing this sort of, like, Ultimately false history in which like, no, the Confederacy is not really about, you know, kind of racial heritage.
It's not really about like kind of white black.
It's not really about slavery.
So what was about defending our homelands from this like encroaching north?
I mean, you hear a lot the, you know, this line, you know, the Civil War is when the United States was invaded by the Yankees, essentially, you know, this, this kind of idea that the that the South was kind of the more authentic United States and that there's these kind of interlopers came in and invaded.
With an army, and ultimately one.
The SCV tends to be sort of more that organization.
Today, they basically just want to kind of, you know, wave the battle flag.
They're kind of protecting monuments and that sort of thing.
But they do so in a way that is not overtly racialized.
A lot of the groups that you see sort of in the post-civil rights era, a lot of that stuff drives out of a frustration with groups like the SCV for getting their racial heritage, if that makes sense, right?
And so essentially – and I want to be clear that the myth of the kind of black confederate soldier is itself – it is very much a myth if you kind of look into this.
The handful of cases where you can find sort of black confederates are universally people of – who were servants to soldiers fighting in the war.
So they were slaves.
Not actually fighting on the side of the Confederacy that they are slaves, essentially making meals and doing domestic labor for soldiers, wealthier soldiers who are on the front lines.
As far as I know, I don't think there's a single instance of an actual black Confederate soldier.
I haven't seen one that's been authenticated in that way, and the handful of cases that you see sprung about tend to all, when you look into the history, it's something a lot more sinister there.
But they kind of ride on this myth as a way of Santa saying, oh, we're actually not racist.
And again, what happens is that these groups, the more kind of overtly racist groups and these more overtly racist figures, rise up in opposition to that.
And in a weird way, they're kind of telling a more authentic version of US history.
They're saying, yes, this is a country built on white supremacy and that's the way it should be.
Whereas, you know, we on the left are saying, yes, America is a country founded on white supremacy and we're trying to move past that.
But both of us can sort of agree on the actual history is not this sort of like, you know, melting pot of immigrants kind of story that kind of gets told through this sort of like neoliberal consensus you know, pop culture and education, et cetera, you know.
And I think that a failure to sort of, like, I think that the sense of trying to move past the sort of racial, the race hatred in kind of the mainstream since the '60s, I think it comes from a fundamentally the race hatred in kind of the mainstream since the '60s, I think it comes from a fundamentally reasonable place of like, you know, But it also masks a kind of deep inequality that was never really dealt with in any kind of real way.
Ultimately that's, you know, reparations is going to be necessary if we're ever going to actually solve this.
There's just no other option.
That's my political position on that.
Absolutely.
It turns out that, you know, problems of injustice can only really be solved by redistributing some of the stuff that was unfairly taken and giving it back to the people it was taken from.
Who'd have thunk it?
It's almost like you can't, like, start from, you know, like, make things incredibly unfair and unjust, and then just go, oh yeah, I'm sorry, and then just start, well, from now on we're gonna be fair, I promise.
Yeah.
Turns out it doesn't work very well.
The mainstream understanding really doesn't help.
My introduction to the whole issue of the Civil War as a kid was watching the Ken Burns documentary series, and although that's a fine series in many respects, from watching that you would come away, and indeed I did at the time, with this impression that the United States was fine, except that it had this problem of slavery.
And it got sorted.
It was a terrible tragedy on both sides, and it was all this terrible sort of misunderstanding, but it got sorted.
That's the impression you come away from so many mainstream accounts with.
I mean, certainly on the specific question of Robert E. Lee, I came away with a very mistaken impression of that man from that series that I held for quite a long time, I'm embarrassed to have to admit.
Yeah, no, there was a great piece, I think a year or two ago, that I think you and I both retweeted at the time that was, you know, kind of challenging the myths of Robert E. Lee, right?
Well, it wasn't all that long ago that I was still sort of repeating the basic position that I'd gotten from the Ken Burns documentary, you know, and people very kindly, for the most part, said, yeah, you need some more info here, Jack.
Which is, which is, I mean, you know, none of us, you know, we're all stumbling around in the dark on this stuff, and we're all kind of like struggling against a bigger picture, you know, propaganda machine that's producing, that's built on white supremacy, and can't we all just get along?
You know, let's do as little as possible to redress the wrongs of the past, like, you know, can we just keep people from revolting?
And he's still at it!
Ken Burns, he's still at it, starting his Vietnam documentary with, oh, you know, it was started in good faith.
Oh, thanks, Ken.
Anyway, that's another digression.
That's another digression.
There is some interesting stuff about the post-Vietnam veterans that we'll do in a future episode, I promise.
Let's get into some of these figures.
What I've tried to do is set up the context for this and try to help you to understand the audience or just give you some knowledge that you didn't necessarily have about the background and some of the divisions here.
The SCV and organizations like it also have like these deep roots within sort of, you know, mainstream Southern political organizations.
There are all kinds of, you know, you can find photos of like Mitch McConnell standing in front of a Confederate flag and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
And this is absolutely mainstream, you know, Republican and even Democratic to a certain degree, you know, politics all through the American South.
It's just sort of you go, they give you a little bit of money, you oppose taking down a statue.
And it's just sort of the way it is.
And it's kind of enforcing this implicit white supremacy.
Now, what these other kind of more overtly racist organizations then see is that, well, you'll say things that are kind of about us, but you've forgotten the real thing, or you're not actually for white people, or you're actually kind of cucking on your message, or you're doing whatever.
You're not really kind of being an explicitly kind of like, quote-unquote, pro-white organization.
And you see this kind of most clearly in this organization called the League of the South.
Now, the League of the South really started off, from what I understand, as a – and there's a lot of contested history on this, and there's a lot of propaganda that I haven't had a lot of chance to sort of like pick through the details on this.
But from what I understand, the League of the South started out as a little bit more of a kind of overtly SCV, Sons of Confederate Veterans-like organization.
It's kind of more about a kind of like a heritage, not hate kind of idea about kind of protecting statues and kind of flying the flag and kind of Southern pride, but without that kind of overtly racial element. - Yeah, that's a good point.
That said, as with all of these organizations, despite what the leaders think, despite what the people on top think, there are really overt racists all over the place in these organizations.
And when it came to the League of the South, after a few years, there was this sort of battle for control of it, and this guy, Michael Hill, ends up taking... actually, Dr. Michael Hill, who has a real doctorate, not like David Duke's doctorate, but has a real doctorate, and I think...
Scotch-Irish history.
He wrote a really phenomenal book about Scotch-Irish warfare.
It's about how these tribes actually conducted war.
It sounds like this total badass read, but then it's like, oh, but you're a horrifying racist and anti-Semite.
Holocaust denier and like I don't know that I really want to read your book but it's a shame when you can't read like a really cool book because oh it just turns out he's a total fucking Nazi right?
Also we we don't say scotch that's that's a big no-no.
You'll get in trouble with it with any Scots listening.
Okay well I deeply apologize but it is something it's something we say in the south so you know give me some give me some uh What am I supposed to say?
Scott?
Scott Irish?
Scott Irish.
That's probably my error and not actually the error of the PhD I'm referring to.
I do apologize to all of our Scott's listeners for that.
I will do better, I promise.
So the League of the South, I'm not going to talk too much about them.
The League of the South was headquartered 20 minutes from where I lived for like 15 years.
They're very close to my hometown.
They have had a lot of issues since.
At the right, we did kind of talk about some of their legal issues since then.
They are, I believe they are defendants in the kind of Sines v. Kessler case.
I mean, there are some still kind of continuing legal action.
They had a podcast for a while where Michael Hill and this guy, Brad Griffin, Who is also Hunter Wallace, who I've mentioned before, who is a terrible, terrible human being, would do a weekly podcast for a while.
That podcast has been completely wet from the internet.
Thankfully, some of us have all those archives ready and willing to share for anyone who needs them, just in case anybody's curious.
I do have that complete podcast archived, but it's kind of vaguely unlistenable radio when it was around.
Hunter Wallace, Brad Griffin, would kind of like go on walks and kind of be outside and then talk on his phone.
And so you'd hear him kind of doing the kind of thing and, you know, kind of breathing heavily and it's kind of, yeah, well, you know, lots of that kind of stuff.
And, you know, I'm in no, you know – People can give me shit for the way I talk on podcasts all you want, but at least I know enough to sit in a fucking chair and have a reasonable professional conversation.
With my podcast co-host and I'm not, I'm not, you know, kind of quite breathing into a microphone in quite the same way.
Vaguely unlistenable radio.
Very, very dumb man.
Also, a really overtly racist bullshit artist.
He was the one who kind of collected the evidence about Heather Heyer, quote-unquote, the land whale who died next to a car accident.
He is truly despicable, kind of vaguely pro-slavery.
One of those guys who, you know, not just, well, it was kind of unfortunate, but it was something that, you know, he's a lot more on the, you know, Jim Crow was meant to correct – well, slavery and Jim Crow were meant to sort of correct the natural inclination of African Americans and black people and the Negroes, quote unquote, and to commit crimes and do terrible things and it's a civilizing influence on them.
He's a little bit more kind of vaguely in that direction.
He's also the one who kind of coined or at least sort of popularized within certain circles this term hard right, which I mentioned in, I think, our first episode.
I mentioned that that's kind of one of the terms that they use.
This is Brad Griffin.
I'm giving you a link where you can go and kind of look at this and kind of like his argument.
His argument is, you know, the alt-right, this sort of like the Richard Spencer types basically, are these kind of effete intellectual, you know, guys who don't want to get their shoes dirty.
And the hard right are more people who are willing to kind of go out there and a commit acts of, you know, violence in the streets, who are, you know, kind of willing to get their knuckles bloody, who are, you know, kind of more in that working class aesthetic who have more of that kind of You know, earthiness to them, and who have a real – and again, I want to be clear here.
Richard Spencer, you know, he has – his family comes from Louisiana plantation owners.
Richard Spencer is not an effete Washington intellectual in terms of – he's not a blue blood in that sense.
He's got deep roots in the plantation system, but he's not sort of wedded to an area and a piece of land in the way that the Southern Nationalists are.
When you talk to, when you listen to the Southern Nationalists, they're much more about, I want to live on this piece of property because this is where I grew up, and this is my thing, and this is my family's land, and like, there is a sense of being much more kind of like overtly rooted in the soil.
And so that blood and soil concept really is mostly a catchphrase, I think, for kind of the more kind of overt alt-right types.
I mean, there's a little bit more of a kind of pseudo-intellectualism involved.
For these Southern guys who have been kind of shit on by economics for 150 years, I think there's a lot more of a sense of, you know, this is my daddy's land and I'm not giving it up to no n-word or whatever.
You know, there is a kind of more, again, I don't want to defend it, but there is a little bit more of a kind of legitimate need for that.
But, um...
That said, Brad Griffin is still a horrifying racist, and I don't care if he loses his lab because, like, fuck that guy.
But I do have a link about the hard right so you can kind of get his justification for that.
And I do have a link to the League of the South website.
I mean, they have pretty much disappeared from social media.
They were planning on, after Unite the Right, they were planning on doing a whole lot of events.
They had a big schedule planned for 2018 and I think they just kind of disappeared and that's largely because of the the lawfare Operations that have kind of gone against them.
I just haven't really heard much from these guys.
I do have a link again in the notes here of this Lawsuit against you know, Michael Hill.
Dr. Michael Hill who I mentioned is the the chemical leader of the League of the South and He is kind of – they lost their property in Alabama, their kind of main meeting hall.
They kind of lost access to that because apparently they didn't own it.
They were leasing it from this guy, and this guy kind of – I guess – I don't know.
They're out of money, but they are kind of seeking money for this lawsuit.
They are kind of fighting that.
They're kind of circling the drain a little bit, which is a good thing.
Although a lot of their members are kind of now moving into sort of other organizations and sort of kind of organizing in different ways.
But yeah, I think the League of the South is not going to be too much longer.
I do want to mention one other kind of major figure who He's one of my favorite people to listen to on this because he is so dumb and he is so obsessed with his own wonderfulness.
I kind of mention this guy occasionally on the Discord server and I mention this guy a little bit and people don't believe me when I tell some of these stories.
He is just so entertaining to me.
This guy is James Edwards.
That doesn't narrow it down as much as you'd want it to.
political candidate in the u.s who cheated on his wife while she was dying of cancer not that guy um and uh not the guy that doesn't narrow it down as much as you'd want it to really no it doesn't also not the i speak to dead people uh cold reader guy not that guy either um there's an even worse james edwards if you can believe it if you can believe it um he is my age he is He is 38 years old.
Um, he was, uh, born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, uh, apparently from a very wealthy family.
At one point he said, uh, you know, uh, you know, I went to a, uh, like $20,000 a year, uh, private school, you know, uh, very wealthy guy.
As far as I know, I can't tell that he has a real job.
He's just a radio host, but what's interesting and what's important here is that he's just a, it's just a professional racist.
That's just his job.
It's just a professional racist.
Although employment racist.
There's not that much.
I mean, it's hard to know because this gets into a really complicated question because one of the big questions that everybody has is like, so where's the money?
How do these guys make a living?
And when you do the math, I mean, when you kind of make reasonable guesstimates based on what you think their audience is, versus what percentage of them will support versus how much money they give and what a reasonable operating cost is.
It's one thing if you're a little shitty podcast like this one and you're just recording in your living room and putting it out.
Well, I'm not comparing us to...
But a $50 a month podcast in fees of time and effort is not the same as having a professional radio studio in...
And, you know, like, you and I both have full-time jobs, and some of these guys produce enough content that there's no possible way that they can be, um, Yeah, it's just some of these guys you know have not had a job in two or three years at this point.
And so the question of like where the money comes from is a really interesting open question.
There's a lot of kind of like the Regnery people again I mentioned in the Richard Spencer episode.
There is some money sloshing around, some people kind of dropping five grand to some of these guys.
But you know as far as I know on these kind of overt alt-right kind of white nationalist groups, You're not seeing, like, nobody's bankrolled by billionaires, you know?
You don't have, like, Peter Thiel, like, tossing the money or anything like that.
It's not, it doesn't, it doesn't work in quite that way.
And if they have to have some kind of, like, outside money access that's not just coming from, you know, kind of donations just because, like, they're...
You know, like, how do you live otherwise, right?
So James Edwards feels like, and it's hard to kind of get details on his, like, family history, kind of where he comes from, but he seems very much like kind of a Southern Trust Fund kid to me.
He got his start working on the Pat Buchanan presidential campaign in 2000.
He was basically just a canvasser.
He went around and did that work when he was 20 years old.
Apparently met Pat Buchanan at least once then.
Kind of made a name for himself.
The Pat Buchanan campaign went fucking nowhere because it was Pat Buchanan and this was the year 2000.
In case you forgot your history, Pat Buchanan did not become president in the year 2000.
No, it wasn't quite that bad.
It wasn't quite that bad, no.
Although, you know, given the Bush years, I sometimes wonder, like, maybe that would have been the better option, but no.
Yeah, indeed, yeah.
Given that the Bush administration killed about 2 million people at a conservative estimate.
No.
Yeah, no.
Given the Iraq War, would Pat Buchanan have gone into war in Iraq?
Probably not.
Might have almost justified it by itself.
Anyway, so James Edwards gets his start there, literally as a college kid.
I don't even know that he was really ever finished college.
He runs for office.
He runs for, I think, local state legislature in 2002.
He's not able to, you know, he wins a few thousand votes or something.
He makes a fairly decent showing for himself, enough to sort of draw the attention of some people, but doesn't actually win elected office.
By 2004, he's hosting a, I think at that point it was a five-night-a-week radio show on a low-power, but like a professional radio network.
This is something that you see a lot on the right is kind of finding these young kids.
Charlie Kirk, for instance, is basically billionaire backers, and he's about that age now.
And he's been kind of in the public eye for a few years now.
This is not really all that unusual.
What is unusual is that he's working on this explicitly kind of neo-confederate, southern nationalist – this is long before the alt-right was ever a term, right?
This is that kind of paleoconservative.
The advertisement for the show now is, you know, they'll say, you know, America's foremost populist conservative radio program.
Meaning, like, we're a bunch of fucking racists and, you know, isn't that great?
So, but this show is called The Political Cesspool, and it still runs.
So, there is...
It is now on the Liberty Radio Network, which kind of reruns a whole bunch of other kind of more traditionally conservative shows.
The network is owned by this guy Sam Bushman, who is I believe a Mormon, who has at least, I forget how many, at least seven children, and who is blind.
And he just runs this radio program, so I have no idea where the money to do that comes from, but he hosts a daily, five days a week, two hours a day, news of the week radio program himself on that network, and then a whole bunch of other shows are also run or syndicated on this program.
Filters a lot of content from other providers who are not working directly with Liberty News.
James Edwards works directly for Liberty News.
Sam Bushman, the owner of the network, actually runs the board.
He actually does the technical work to run the program every night.
James Edwards runs this show.
Now it's a Saturday show, three hours every Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m.
three hours a week, or three hours every Saturday, from 6:00 to 9:00 PM Central Time.
And it is, they run ads.
They run ads for, like, the LDS Church, the Church of Latter-day Saints.
They run ads for, you know, perishable food, non-perishable food.
They run all kinds of, like, kind of religious Christian ads.
They run all kinds of stuff like this.
And they literally break into their regular programming.
So your typical segment is James Edwards comes on, he talks about himself and how great he is for about two minutes.
Then he talks about whatever topic he wants to do and how terrible, like, whatever this thing that's happening in the news, you know, the Catholic Covington kids, you know, talk about that for a minute.
And then he'll say, and then I've got my guests to come on and talk about this.
And then he introduces the guests and always gives the guests a glowing introduction of their own.
And then says and asks like one question which is very leading and then about 45 seconds into the answer it's time for another commercial break and then you run three minutes of commercials and then you come back and then just redo the entire process over and over again for the three hours that the show runs.
So, it's astonishingly low in terms of actual content, but it's very long on hilarity.
If you like listening to this bumbling fool, you know, just talk about himself constantly and, you know, in the most overt language.
In the show notes for the first Unite the Right episode, it did include some clips because Jason Kessler went on the show and a lot of the reason that I think he's important is that he kind of knows everybody.
He's kind of been involved with a lot of this stuff going back to 2004.
He was one of the first people that kind of met Richard Spencer back in 2009.
There's some videos on the internet.
They have a YouTube channel where videos have been up for years.
You can go and watch these guys go to different places.
There's video of Richard Spencer in 2009 chatting with James Edwards, which is kind of a fascinating image to see what Richard Spencer looked like back before he got his shit together and became the Dapper Nazi.
Pat Buchanan has been on the show several times.
He doesn't ask him back all that often anymore.
He says, well I just don't want to smear Pat with us necessarily.
But Pat Buchanan has been on the show many, many times.
Almost every figure.
Brad Griffin has been on the show.
This guy Kevin Macdonald is kind of an old friend.
Kevin Macdonald is the guy who wrote The Culture of Critique, which is one of the big books that we're definitely going to have to cover.
We will do a Kevin Macdonald episode that's kind of the scientific basis for anti-semitism and why the Jews are awful.
Like, let's use evolutionary psychology to describe this, you know, to describe why the Jews should all go away.
Everybody has been on this show.
James Edwards has connections to people like, back in the day, Sam Francis is one of these kind of paleo-conservative, paleo-libertarian intellectuals who died in 2005.
He wrote a paper in the 90s which was kind of a Gramscian view of white nationalism, trying to kind of push this sort of white nationalist agenda through cultural means as opposed to sort of more overtly political means.
Sam Francis is one of the kind of leading intellectual lights of this stuff back in the 90s and 2000s.
This is somebody that, to my knowledge, James Edwards knew, you know, before he died, at least in that kind of last year or so.
Sam Dixon, who's this major, like, Klan lawyer who's defended the Klan in many, many various legal activities.
He's been on the show many, many times.
The Institute for Historical Review.
People like Mark Webber was on just a couple of weeks ago.
Not even talking about how the Holocaust didn't happen, because they won't really quite go that far on broadcast radio, but he will absolutely kind of talk about, like, how Trump is not Kind of going far enough in terms of pushing the wall and he should declare an emergency declaration.
They'll literally bring out Holocaust deniers just to, like, talk about the news of the day.
And one of the things that I find really useful is just kind of getting this kind of variety of voices and kind of getting all these people.
Some people who, you know, Edwards finds them really quickly, you know, when they're just kind of these little, like, YouTubers and suddenly, you know, he invites them on the show and then they get kind of a more prominent kind of role later on.
Sorry, go ahead.
Is there any YouTubers I might have heard of?
Probably not ones that... I mean, obviously Richard Spencer has been on the show quite a few times.
He doesn't have a connection to the TRS, the Right Stuff, the Mike Enoch guys.
I haven't seen any connection between them.
But there is a... Sorry, I'm trying to think of any that I know of.
Okay, don't worry.
I just wondered if it was like any that crossed over with like, you know, the Kevin Logan Descent of Manosphere sort of lot or anybody like that.
Oh, yeah.
Well, they definitely have attended events together because the American Renaissance Conference, American Renaissance's An organization that's founded by Jared Taylor, who's kind of a white nationalist organization, an overtly racist organization, but they don't hate the Jews, and so they get a little bit more kind of mainstream street cred.
They've been around since 1990.
They've been doing conferences since 1994.
Their conferences are, I believe, always held in Nashville, Tennessee or outside Nashville, Tennessee.
They have been at least for the last few years.
And James Edwards has spoken at those conferences many times, alongside, at one of those conferences, and I don't know if Edwards spoke at the same conference, but the Golden One spoke at one of those conferences.
Ah, right, yeah.
That's the sort of person I was thinking might have cropped up, yeah.
So, the Golden One has not appeared on the political cesspool, at least not that I know of.
David Duke is a personal friend of James Edwards.
Like the kind of Identity Europa guys will kind of show up there from time to time.
David Duke is a personal friend of James Edwards.
Like they have been friends going back decades.
James Edwards brings David – I think David Duke – I haven't listened to yesterday's show yet.
But I believe David Duke was on yesterday's show.
So I can't wait to listen to what David Duke has to say about whatever is going on.
Most of my time listening to David Duke is actually listening to him on James Edwards' show, because he's actually... Most of the time, a guest will come on for a segment or two, but David Duke will actually do a full hour with David Duke, because he just loves this guy.
He even did an hour talking about health food one time.
It was kind of amazing.
Like, hey, you want to just come and talk about health food?
Yeah, let's do that!
Yeah, no.
James Edwards is one of the few people who actually considers David Duke a friend and thinks David Duke is a not-complete bore, as I think most of the rest of the group does, which tells you a lot about both Edwards and Duke.
Yeah, I was just going to say.
But again, I'm kind of fascinated by just the number of people who are on there.
For a while I was kind of live tweeting.
I would kind of listen and just like – listen to this bullshit.
I mean it's just constant nonsense.
It's hard to even sum it up.
I realize that I'm kind of talking about this guy.
I mean he wrote a book called Racism Schmacism.
Uh, back in 2007.
I own this book.
I actually bought a used copy.
I did not give him any money, but I did.
I found a copy for $5.99, and I'm like, I've gotta, I've gotta own this book.
And it's got this guy's, like, fuckin' face on it.
And, uh, it's just, uh, it's just this, it's literally just kind of a list of, like, you know, well, they're just gonna call you racist anyway, so you might as well just, you know, um, you know, embrace the label and then ask them to make a point.
And this is, again, something that you hear over and over again from a lot of these different figures.
Um, But I find Edwards fascinating in terms of the depth of his connections.
He'll talk about Gordon Baum.
Gordon Baum is this guy, I've got a link to his SPLC page.
He's one of the guys who founded the Council of Conservative Citizens back in the day.
Kind of called the white collar clan group like once the clan stopped being, you know, kind of more overtly, you know, popular when the the basically got to put the hoods away and they started embracing this kind of other image.
And the Council of Conservative Citizens is absolutely kind of one of those one of those groups.
They will disavow any connection to the Klan whatsoever.
They still exist.
They still do a conference.
Edwards has spoken at those conferences.
But Gordon Baum is one of those guys.
He'll talk about Louie Beam.
I believe he was one of these kind of old, old school clan guys who actually advocated open violence.
He was kind of the creator of this leaderless resistance concept, which we're going to come back to in the future.
Sometimes people call it stochastic terrorism.
And so one of the kind of intellectual antecedents to these, like, AWD Bowl Patrol guys that we're talking about at the beginning of the episode.
While there is a kind of difference in terms of this sort of like southern nationalist ideology, these kind of southerners and what they want, because ultimately what differentiates them is that sort of these major alt-right personalities want either kind of a political migration into some kind of smaller portion of the United States, which they can then take over and run as a white-selling ethnostate, or they want sort of the whole of the United States, the whole of like North America to be Free of brown and black people, you know, some something on that order.
The southern nationalists are much more kind of like they want kind of a return to the Confederacy.
They want like the southern state to kind of be its own thing.
And that's that's sort of the big ideological difference in terms of You know, kind of what their kind of end goal is.
Like these southern nationalists don't necessarily want to be associated with New York City or Michigan or Nevada.
They want to be our thing, and they really kind of think that the succession should have just been the way it was back in 1865.
So there is that kind of thing.
But there are also kind of larger ideological connections to all these groups.
They all kind of work together, and I guess they're just sort of agreeing to disagree at the end.
They're going to work together for now, and then eventually everybody's going to have to kind of figure out what the final state's going to look like.
But they're kind of agreeing for now.
But it is kind of, I don't know, an interesting dynamic.
There's a note in the – about James Edwards' defamation lawsuit.
Do you want to do that next?
Yeah, sure.
So again, kind of more details on James Edwards, just kind of more ridiculousness.
So I have – so he claimed defamation.
So the Detroit Free Press published an article in 2016 about this kind of rising white nationalism that was kind of like – Going to kind of support the Trump phenomenon.
A fairly decent article.
I mean, I've read it.
There's nothing really wrong with it.
It's not quite super detailed, but it has a nice piece.
But it mentions James Edwards.
And so I'm going to read the offending statement here.
Of particular note to some of the Jewish community is the unprecedented support the Trump campaign has received among white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and its leaders like James Edwards, David Duke, and Thomas Robb, the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas, he wrote.
That's the offending passage.
And the thing that James Edwards actually filed this lawsuit over was the use of the words, its leaders.
So, the clause here, White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and its leaders like James Edwards, yada yada yada.
And then he names two people who actually were previously or currently active leaders of the Ku Klux Klan.
Edwards demanded a retraction.
Uh, they looked it over.
They removed the words, it's.
So, then it said, the Ku Klux Klan and leaders like James Edwards, David Duke, and Thomas Robb.
Uh, they didn't consider that good enough.
They, uh, continued to, uh, push for, um, push the lawsuit through, and they essentially got laughed out of court.
It was, uh, pretty remarkable.
They raised a ton of money off of this, because it's like, dude, you're best friends with David Duke.
Like, you're clearly a leader of, like, white nationalism.
You know, like, you're clearly a white supremacist.
There's no, If you read the actual legal opinion, it's pretty remarkable in that they basically just laughed him out of court.
It was pretty delicious.
But Edwards whined about this.
Edwards still whines about it sometimes, but he whined about it for like six months.
He was just constantly – they'll reference because there was a – in the preamble to the decision, they're using some flowery language and it's like – According to Aesop's fables, a man is known by the company he keeps, and James Edwards keeps such and such company, yada, yada, yada, and then goes on to describe the actual legal rationale.
But suddenly, all the people in the political cesspool – and it's not just Edwards.
I'll kind of describe some of the other figures to you in a moment.
But they do have an actual lawyer who's like, suddenly, Aesop's fables are legal documents that we abide by in the United States.
You fucking idiot.
I mean, I'm not even a liar and I know that's not the whole thing.
It's a literary reference in the preamble.
Fucking idiots.
It's just a casual reference to something that they're using to just... I mean, yeah, it's nonsense.
Whatever.
Oh, man.
Well, it proves how persecuted they are, doesn't it?
By establishment.
They love it when they get press.
I swear, James Edwards, I think he literally names, you gotta have a Google alert for his name, and he just put anytime that any person, anywhere in the press, he may find this podcast.
I would love, James Edwards, play a segment from this podcast on your show.
I will listen, I promise.
It will be delicious.
If you do that, we will actually play the segment of you playing this segment on this podcast.
I promise you.
He is so completely sane.
Any reference to himself in the mainstream media at all, and suddenly they just can't stop talking about how wonderful we are and how we're fighting the good fight against the terrible globalists, etc.
etc.
It's just constant refrain.
of how great they are that anybody anywhere references them.
Edwards was, he had a local church and that church was disfellowshipped by the Southern Baptist Convention precisely because the SBC decided we don't need like overt racists in our church, especially very prominent, you know, racists.
We like our racism more covert.
One of the kind of... I can say too, right wing for the Southern Baptist Convention.
Well, they call – the harshest words they have to say is about this guy Russell Moore, who is the head of the SPC, who is a virulently anti-gay, terrible right-wing figure.
But the dirty little secret of the Southern Baptist Convention is that – or at least in terms of their kind of right-wing politics – is that a significant portion of their membership is African-American churches.
And so they can't be as racist as they probably want to be.
Because they're trying to also, like, placate their significant minority African American membership, you know?
This keeps coming up.
These people, they are far more slavish about base and superstructure than I would want to be.
I'm a fucking Marxist.
Sorry, go on.
There's just a heart of ridiculousness to all of these guys.
He gets disfellowshipped from the church.
I can't find a mainstream news piece about this.
All I know is what they said about it, and I don't believe them as far as I can throw them.
But their version of the story is they were approached by, like the pastor of this church was approached by the SBC and said, like, you've got to kind of kick out James Edwards or we're going to remove you from our, we're going to disfellowship your whole church.
And the pastor, who is like, James Edwards is not a racist, he's just a man who loves his own people.
And James Edwards is a total fucking racist.
There's, I have myriad examples of this.
I hope I've provided myriad examples of this, even in this episode.
And James Edwards is absolutely a racist.
So he says, no, we're not going to do that.
And then they kind of disfellowship the whole church.
And then James Edwards talks about this for like three episodes.
They go on and on.
He talks constantly about, we have so much news to cover.
We have so much news to cover.
So many current events we've just got to get to.
But before we do that, let's talk about the fact that I got some news coverage now that I got kicked out of the SPC.
Let's do that for an hour instead of covering the actual news and cut into all these other segments and bring on guests and just talk about what do you think about the fact that I got kicked out of the SPC?
Isn't that terrible?
Bring on Richard Spencer and ask him those kinds of questions.
It's remarkable.
He's so self-focused.
He's so – and look, I have enormous respect for anyone who does live radio, who does talk to a microphone, who does have to deal with things like station breaks, et cetera.
You know, it is.
It is a skill, and I have respect for that.
James Edwards is not all that good at it, and you learn how not good he is at it when you find the Sam Bushman character who runs the Liberty News Radio show.
When he guest hosts, like if James Edwards is out of town, he'll bring in a guest host.
And oftentimes, this guy, Sam Bushman, will just kind of run the third hour himself.
And he's actually good.
He actually gets through talking points and doesn't talk over his guests and doesn't talk too much about himself and is able to keep his questions short and concise and, you know, actually knows how to run a radio show.
So that's...
Yeah, James, if you're listening to this, you're not very good at this.
I promise you.
Sorry.
This is a vendetta from a man who's listened to a lot of your content.
This is how you've made him feel.
I actively hate you.
He's just so amusing to me that it's kind of hard to...
It's kind of hard to hate him too much.
I just find him – he's just such a vain little man.
He does have his own YouTube channel now, which he is doing with this guy Kevin MacDonald.
I wonder what that's about.
It's not really as much – it's really – it's still – it's funny that like Edwards himself is actually not – when he's not wedded to the radio format, he's a better host.
Like when you don't have to stop him every 7 minutes and play an ad break.
Which apparently a lot of those ads aren't even paid, they're just ads for whatever.
He's actually kind of better on YouTube and when he has kind of a co-host who can kind of like veer him into kind of things, but he still talks about himself constantly.
He just repeats the same talking points over and over.
So there's no, there's no...
There's a difference there, but he does have this, so Kevin McDowald, who again we will talk about, we'll do a whole episode on him, he runs this magazine, this quarterly magazine called the Occidental Quarterly.
And guess what that's about?
It's basically, again, one of these kind of paleo-conservative, paleo-libertarian rags that is all about Jewish people subverting society, etc.
Well, they now do a YouTube show called TOQ Live.
And that's like a monthly show and they run for a couple of hours and they take comments.
And through this show, James Edwards is appearing on some of the other kind of broader, this kind of new vanguard of YouTube shows, like the Hillturn shows that Richard Spencer is heavily involved with.
He's appeared on those.
He's appeared on a number of people who are sort of peripheral to that.
And if you want to know all the places that he's gone, I put a link to his Twitter in the show notes, and he advertises every one of them.
Believe me.
He makes sure you know all the things that he's doing for the white race, and it's mostly sitting and talking ad nauseum about nonsense for as long as humanly possible.
There is one more thing I do want to just mention about Edwards, and I think we can start to kind of wrap up here about this topic, at least for now, because we will kind of come back to some of the kind of broader pictures and some of the other figures.
But I did want to bring up that in the show notes, there is a link to a kind of a Google Drive link, and there is some audio in that.
One of those is an interview with this guy Drew Lackey.
Now, Drew Lackey was the police chief in Montgomery, Alabama during the Civil Rights era.
There's a very famous photo of Rosa Parks being arrested.
And the arresting officer, the person in that photograph, is Drew Lackey.
Drew Lackey.
Drew Lackey.
D-R-U-E Lackey.
L-A-C-K-E-Y.
God is a hack writer.
Sorry, go on.
So circa 2008, Drew Lackey, who at that point was in his 80s I think, I mean he's a very very old man, appeared on the show back before they were kind of on the current network and they had the same kind of like schedule of calls to deal with.
Drew Lackey appeared on the political cesspool and was interviewed.
They did about a 30 minute interview.
I found out about it when Drew Lackey died.
They re-aired that episode, but then they had to insert the commercial breaks and it was terrible.
So I managed, because I am a masochist for this stuff, I actually found the original version of it.
But they don't have just an easy to download version of it.
You have to play it through a web player, meaning that I had to play it through a web player and then, like, capture that through my inboard audio sync stuff and, like, did some, like, tech... So I literally had to play the three-hour thing just to kind of get the episode and then, like, pull the little 25-minute segment out of it.
But I have provided it to people because I legitimately think it's important to have this guy's voice not in a place that is easier for people to access, but not for the reasons that James Edwards thinks it is.
Because James Edwards thinks, oh, you're just telling the true history of the Civil Rights era.
He calls it the Swindle Whites era is his name for the Civil Rights era.
You're just telling the truth about these things.
I mean literally what Drew Lackey at one point is talking about.
They give him leading questions, and Edwards is kind of involved in that conversation, but it's actually one of the previous members of the show who has since passed on.
He's kind of the main host there, he's kind of the main questioner.
But this guy will ask kind of leading questions like, so, were there any problems that the outside agitators brought into your town, you know?
Was there any violence that was coming?
From the civil rights people?
Was Rosa Parks actually the first person to be arrested for this?
It's all these leading questions.
But then you listen to this 80-year-old man who basically spreads the same memes that you're hearing from the modern alt-right.
At one point he even says, all these African Americans were relieving themselves in people's lawns when they were waiting for the bus and that sort of thing.
You know, African Americans don't know how to use the toilet properly, and you hear that over and over again if you listen to a bunch of this racist stuff, and there's Drew Leckie, there's Drew Leckie just saying it right out.
I mean, not that I needed that, even at that point, that I kind of heard this audio to realize that, but it is kind of one of those, none of this is new.
None of this is at all new.
And I would really recommend, I mean, if you play it, download it and play it at like 2x speed or something, because he talks very, very, very slowly.
I don't blame an old man for being an old man.
I do blame an old man for being a fucking racist.
Yeah, it's actually really worth... I really think people should hear this, should have access to this.
And I would really love for this audio to be more widely known than it is, because I think... I would like for the world to remember not just Rosa Parks and the heroes of the movement, but also the people they were fighting against.
And I think that's really useful and important.
Thank you, James Edwards, for conducting that interview so that we have that for all time.
Yeah, you accidentally did something useful.
You did something useful for the worst possible reason.
Congratulations.
So yeah, I think that, I mean, God, there's so much more that we could cover, but that kind of gets through at least kind of my notes for today.
I don't know if you have anything else you'd like to kind of talk about before we wrap up.
There was one little bit of housecleaning that I forgot to mention, which is I wanted to thank Robert Evans of the Behind the Bastards podcast for boosting us on Twitter.
He tweeted about liking this podcast and it gave us a noticeable bump In download numbers.
So yeah, thank you, Robert Evans.
And I have since then, I hadn't heard of it before, but I've since then listened to a couple of episodes of Behind the Bastards, and that's a good podcast.
I've been mainlining Behind the Bastards.
One of the reasons I'm behind on my Nazi podcast is that I've been listening to Behind the Bastards.
It's very, very good, and it makes you want to eat a bunch of fucking Doritos, which you will understand that joke when you start listening to the podcast.
Okay, that's great.
That's another episode down.
So what are we doing next time?
Next time, we're going to do another one a little bit more like this.
We're going to talk broadly about the National Socialist Movement in the United States.
We'll get into a little bit of skinhead culture and where that is today.
And we'll also, I believe, cover the Traditionalist Workers' Party, which is Matthew Heimbach's big thing.
And Matthew Heimbach is one of those big names that People would have heard of if you've been following this at all.
So, yeah, that's kind of our next thing is the, you know, basically the National Socialist Movement.
Great.
Well, look forward to that.
And a bit of inside information for you listeners.
National Socialists, not really socialists.
I know it's confusing.
Oh, really?
What?
Yeah, no, I know.
I know, because they use the word, don't they?
Because I heard they were socialist, but somehow not nationalist.
I thought that was the thing, yeah.
Well, I mean, according to Candace Owens, the problem is when they go international, isn't it?
It turns out the real problem was when they went out to another country and did something bad, but anything done within their own country is fine.
Yeah, that's right.
That's the, you know, great, great anti-imperialism message there, Candace Owens.
But also, no, no, no.
Not really.
A little bit muddled, I think, let's say, your messages there, Candace.
Might want to have another look at that one.
Who am I kidding?
You've never looked at anything twice in your life.
