I Don't Speak German, Episode 18: Christian Identity, White Separatism, and the Militia Movement
This week, Daniel tells Jack about... well, the clue's in the title. Content Warnings apply for episode and show notes. * Show Notes: The Terrorist Next Door "Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump" Aryan Cowboys American Experience: Oklahoma City Bundyville, from Oregon Public Radio and Longreads, by Leah Sottile. Bring the War Home Blood and Politics From John Earnest's (Poway synagogue shooters) manifesto: "Plenty of people wrongfully identify with being Christian. Beyond the scope of time the Father and the Son made a covenant in eternity—that the Son would bring a people to Him that He may be glorified through them. I did not choose to be a Christian. The Father chose me. The Son saved me. And the Spirit keeps me. Why me? I do not know. And my answer to loving my enemies? Trust yids and their puppet braindead lemming normalfags to take one quote from the Bible and grossly twist its meaning to serve their own evil purposes—meanwhile ignoring the encompassing history and context of the entire Bible and the wisdom it takes to apply God’s law in a broken world." Christian Identity at Wikipedia RJ Rushdoony and Christian Reconstruction: "McVicar notes that it’s during this time period that Rushdoony discovered the work of Cornelius Van Til, author of The New Modernism and father of a doctrine called “presuppositional apologetics.” It isn’t necessary or even possible to delve too deeply into Van Til’s theology here, but a Cliff Notes version is helpful: Christians and nonbelievers alike comprehend the world based on certain presuppositions. Christians operate from a correct presupposition; nonbelievers do not, and ne’er the twain shall meet. According to Van Til, nonbelievers are incapable of accurately comprehending reality, and by extension, cannot develop a correct moral framework. Van Til’s work pulled heavily from Kant, which appealed to the intellectual Rushdoony; so did his Reformed leanings, which Rushdoony shared. Van Til’s epistemology also validated the would-be philosopher’s Duck Valley observations. But Rushdoony took Van Til’s thought a step further. If nonbelievers couldn’t be truly moral or reasonable, secular laws, based on secular reasoning, were therefore illegitimate. The answer to solving society’s problems – and to solving Duck Valley – lay in the application of biblical law." Aryan Nations at the SPLC "Butler openly admired Adolf Hitler and longed for a whites-only homeland in the Pacific Northwest. He retired as an aeronautical engineer at age 55 and moved to Hayden Lake, Idaho, in 1974. There, he bought an old farmhouse and formed his own "Christian Posse Comitatus" group. By 1977, Butler had decided to form the Church of Jesus Christ Christian at the farmhouse, and named its political arm Aryan Nations. In 1980, Butler’s church was bombed, causing $80,000 in damage. Nobody was injured or arrested. Butler responded by building a two-story guard tower and posting armed guards around his 20-acre property. In 1981, Butler hosted the first of what would be many annual Aryan World Congress gatherings on his property. It, and the confabs that would follow, attracted almost every nationally significant racist leader around. Among them: Tom Metzger, former Klansman and leader of White Aryan Resistance; Louis Beam, another onetime Klansman who promoted the concept of leaderless resistance; Don Black, the former Klansman who created Stormfront, the oldest and largest white nationalist forum on the Web; and Kirk Lyons, a lawyer who has represented several extremists and who was married on the compound by Butler." Kirk Lyons at the SPLC Lyons appeared on The Political Cesspool on 4/24/2019 The Butler Plan at the Northwest Front "Harold Covington Died a Coward" "For a time the program was co-hosted by Corinna Burt, a body builder who had a brief stint in the adult industry, under the alias “Axis Sally.” By 2013 she had left white nationalism behind, and, in an interview with the SPLC, explained that Covington’s goal was “to get a thousand alpha Aryan males to move to his neighborhood and then basically just start shooting everyone who isn’t white.” Indeed, Burt painted a portrait of a man who was unstable and paranoid. He “called nearly everyone in the [white supremacist] movement a homosexual,” was petrified of the thought that black men wanted to rape him, and his apartment was “filthy” with “layers of grime” on the walls. In her words, Covington was “pretty much the most horrible person ever.” His final years were spent making YouTube videos and podcasts for NF, much of which failed to gain traction even among other white nationalists. In the age of the alt-right, troll storms, racist memes, and torch marches, Harold’s influence had waned to practically nothing. When he was in the news, it was for calling Dylann Roof’s Charleston bloodbath “a preview of coming attractions” and speculating that The Right Stuff’s Mike Enoch was secretly Jewish. [...] "I had only ever written about this curmudgeonly racist once, but decided that he didn’t seem important enough to merit further attention. Looking back I stand by that calculation. His brother Ben probably summed it up the best, however, stating that “the bottom line here is that my brother is a coward. He has always been a coward and he will die a coward.” On July 14, 2018, Harold Armstead Covington died a coward at the age of 64. He will not be missed." * "The Rise of the Balk Right" Billy Roper Youtube Billy Roper at the SPLC Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association Sovereign Citizen Movement at Wikipedia Militia Movement at Rationalwiki Shane Bauer at Mother Jones, "I Went Undercover with a Border Militia" Hijacking America by Susan George Fundamentals of Extremism
Hello and welcome to episode 18 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast where I, Jack Graham, talk to my buddy Daniel Harper about what he learned from more than two years of listening to the far right talk to each other in their safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, etc.
And this week we are going to be talking about Christian identity, white separatism and the militia movement.
But first off, I'm going to clear my throat and I'm going to ask Daniel to talk a little bit about a little bit of listener feedback we've had.
We've had a comment, haven't we, Daniel?
Sure, well, I mean, I don't want to call anybody out by name or kind of do any... I mean, because I think that there is a little bit of a question mark in the air over the last couple of episodes, and I have gotten... you know, believe it or not, I get email from people, and not all of it is overwhelmingly positive, so I think... Is that so?
That is indeed so, and some of it comes from literal Nazis, and some of it comes from Nazi-adjacent people, and some of it comes from people who I think are kind of speaking in good faith, people on the left who are questioning maybe why I'm being mean to Nazis.
You know, in the last couple of episodes we were talking about Holocaust denial, and I kind of went a little bit aggressive on Some of the people who I know are listening and who talk about me on their podcasts and who, you know, are not on our side of these issues.
And, you know, there is a kind of a how helpful is that kind of question now?
I'm... I don't think we were that aggressive, were we?
I don't think we were.
I mean, I... The thing is, like, here's where I land on this.
Forthright, maybe, but... There are lots of organizations, Hope Not Hate, or Life After Hate, Hope Not Hate, Christian Piccolini on Twitter, you know, he's got an organization, he works with some of these guys, Light Upon Light,
Lots of organizations, lots of people are working on basically de-radicalization through empathy, giving people the resources to come out of these movements, giving people the ability to, you know, kind of reenter mainstream society by kind of shoving this off.
And I am 100% on board with their efforts.
That said, I do believe in a diversity of tactics.
And I don't think that that's necessarily what I'm temperamentally suited for.
And I don't think that's what this podcast is for.
I do consider this podcast to be, like, overwhelmingly dedicated towards people on the left or even liberals who are even liberals, even progressive types, you know, even Hillary Clinton supporters can listen to this and hopefully get something out of it.
You know, even those, even those, you know, right-of-center people who voted for Hillary Clinton, nah.
I do consider this to be a, broadly speaking, a podcast meant to educate people who are interested in this world but who are interested in opposing it.
I do consider this to be for them and for journalists and people who just want to understand or who want to be able to report on it better.
That's the primary goal of this.
Informative, non-sectarian, anti-fascist.
Exactly.
Um, the fact that we have, um, some terrible people listening, uh, gives me the ability to speak directly to them.
And, uh, I can assure you that in their safe spaces, when they speak to people like me, they are much, much more aggressive and they're a disdain for us than, than I have been towards them.
Um, I absolutely think that most of the people who are... Two wrongs.
Two wrongs don't make a right, Daniel.
Come on.
Here's my big picture perspective on this.
Okay, serious.
No, no, no.
I kind of feel silly even addressing this topic, honestly.
Although, I think criticizing the praxis and criticizing the way that we do things I think is completely valid, and I do want to answer this.
My feeling is that this acts as a splash of cold water in the face of fascists who might be listening to it.
I hope that they find this unpleasant to listen to.
I hope that it makes them reconsider their beliefs, and maybe go reach out to some of those organizations that will be welcoming and comforting.
And I have enormous sympathy for the people on the bottom level, for the kids who have this poison poured into their heads.
I do have sympathy for them, and I have expressed that sympathy on many, many occasions in this show.
And if some Nazi kid starts listening, And thinks that I'm being mean or whatever and doesn't want to keep listening, but that's kind of ultimately an excuse.
That's kind of ultimately that person deciding that, giving a reason why they don't have to listen to the completely valid critiques I have for their worldview.
That's kind of the perspective.
I had this proud boy email me and accuse me of being morally superior to the people I cover.
I don't think it's a bad thing to feel morally superior to people advocating for ethnic cleansing.
I don't know.
I don't think that's a bad thing.
Maybe you need to listen a little bit more closely to what I'm saying.
So yeah, I did want to cover that.
I am, again, perfectly willing to have conversations with people.
You can email me.
I'm daniel.e.harper at pearlchildmail.com.
That's the email address I'm using for the correspondence for this podcast.
Please feel free.
Email me.
I will be happy to have a conversation if you think that I'm being counterproductive.
I don't think that I am being counterproductive, and that's kind of all I have to say about that for now.
OK.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And so with that, let's move on to the main topic of the episode, which is, as I say, our title this week is Christian Identity, White Separatism and the Militia Movement.
And as mentioned in last week's show, there is a direct connection between the Poway synagogue shooter and Christian identity, isn't there?
And I think you wanted to use that as a way in to the topic.
Sure.
No, absolutely.
And in fact, you know, kind of two stories we covered because we covered the Matt Shea, the Radio Free Redoubt guy, kind of Christian Patriot type, who was, some of his chat logs got leaked and he was talking about kind of like violently attacking Antifa.
Uh, you know, the need to be, uh, well-armed, and, uh, he had put out some flyers that had some Christian identity connections, and, um, it just sort of, like, highlighted to me that, um, this is something that I think is not well understood, and that does have, uh, some sort of direct connections to the modern-day, um, movement, um, and some very profound ones, um, and I think it's, it's worth kind of discussing it.
Um, this is a little segment.
So, this is from the kid John Ernest, the 19 year old who killed a person in the Injury Forum War at the Poway Synagogue a few days ago.
This is a bit from his manifesto.
Obviously this is a bit from a racist manifesto, so just be aware, but I'm gonna go ahead and read it.
There are a couple of slurs in this, but I think it's important to quote this in its entirety.
He's referring to the idea of, like, isn't Christianity supposed to be about loving thy neighbor?
And this is his response.
Plenty of people wrongfully identify with being Christian.
Beyond the scope of time, the Father and the Son made a covenant in eternity that the Son would bring a people to Him that He may be glorified through them.
I did not choose to be a Christian.
The Father chose me, the Son saved me, and the Spirit keeps me.
Why me?
I do not know.
And my answer to loving my enemies?
Trust the Yids and their puppet braindead lemming normal fags to take one quote from the Bible and grossly twist its meaning to serve their own evil purposes.
Later on in his manifesto, he chooses a Bible quote that includes the term Synagogue of Satan.
This is pretty overtly Christian identity ideology.
I mean, he doesn't identify it as such.
that includes the term synagogue of Satan.
This is a pretty overtly Christian identity ideology.
I mean, he doesn't identify it as such.
He doesn't kind of clarify that, but this is directly connected to Christian identity.
This long predates the modern alt-right, and I think it's worth highlighting how that works.
Christian identity grows out of the late 19th century British Israelites in England.
I don't know, do you know anything about this group?
I can't say I do, no.
Okay.
So the basic idea that they had was that the British people, and this is kind of a French religious belief.
It's a French religious group.
So the idea there was that the Anglo-Saxon people, the British people, were descendants of 10 of the 12 lost tribes of Israel, that the modern-day Jews were one of the others.
I forget the exact details of how this theology works, but basically that the Britons, the ethnic Britons, were the descendants of the Israelites.
And so the real Jews were the British people.
Now, in the early days, in the 19th century, the British Israelites were broadly philosomatic.
They were broadly like the Jews.
They just thought they were kind of part of the larger nation of Israel.
And let me be clear, all of this has been completely refuted by anything that looks anything like real archeology.
There's absolutely no evidence for this and plenty of evidence disconfirming this, but as a religious belief, I think it's fairly harmless in that form.
As it kind of crossed the pond in the kind of late 20s and early 30s, you start seeing groups in the United States start to kind of refine this into something called Christian identity.
Um, and then, uh, that kind of, uh, becomes, uh, much more overt in post-war and as the civil rights era gets started.
I mean, imagine how that works, you know, that, that...
Racism starts after the Civil Rights Act.
Funny how that happens, but... So, Christian Identity is sort of taking that same basic idea that the British people, and they kind of broaden that to mean all of the white race, broadly defined, are the descendants of the actual Israelites, and that the Jews, the ethnic Jews, the people of Israel, are not so much descendants of that original tribe.
They are not properly saved by God, but are instead the descendants of Satan, created by Satan, to subvert white people and to destroy them, ultimately.
Right.
Yeah.
So...
So less harmless in this form, then?
Much, much less harmless.
So the Christian identity, again, just as a sort of a thing that existed might have been just kind of like, oh, a hateful ideology, but not so important.
But, uh, these people started to kind of act on these beliefs.
So, uh, starting in the late 70s, or actually the early 70s, late 60s, early 70s, you have, uh, the, uh, Posse Comitatus, uh, start to form.
Now, the Posse Comitatus, I've got sort of links to, like, Wikipedia, um, and, uh, some other, some other places, but, uh, this, uh, developed, it starts out, it does have strong ties to the Christian Identity Movement, um, and, uh,
It starts to really gain a foothold in places like Texarkana, in places in the kind of Mountain West and places in the kind of Upper Midwest, where there were a lot of farm closures in the 60s and 70s.
As the sort of the nature of capitalism started crushing small farms out of their Small landowners out of their farms and basically giant agribusinesses started eating everything up.
Farm foreclosures are a huge, huge thing.
You start to see more and more of this as the 60s and 70s and moving into the 80s goes on.
And this becomes a major source for this sort of strongly anti-government, violent resistance movement.
Certainly, we on the far left are in no way trying to say that tyrannical government doesn't exist and that that shouldn't be resisted.
Or that people shouldn't have the right to own their farms and feed themselves.
That's certainly not the thing.
But when you combine that with this kind of overtly Christian identity movement, and it starts to turn into the Jews who are on the banks who are controlling the currency, and that this Zog, Zionist-occupied government must be destroyed by force, By any means necessary because they're taking our farms away and people can become more and more radicalized as the kind of time goes by.
Posse Comitatus kind of leads into this thing, the Aryan Nations, which was formed in the early 80s and that's in the Pacific Northwest in Idaho, I believe.
And this thing called the Butler Plan.
So here I'm going to read just a little bit from the beginning of a chapter in Blood and Politics, which I've recommended many times over the course of this podcast, and kind of gives you this highlight.
So this takes place on July 11th, 1982.
28 men affixed their names with seals, another 30 signed on, and a notary made it officious, if not official.
In a six-page charter, an imagined community, Nehemiah Township, was dedicated to the proposition of Christian self-government and the preservation, protection, and sustenance of our Aryan race.
Among the signatories were personalities from organizations across the white supremacist spectrum.
This township was not a plan for local control.
Neither did it imply that just the government in Washington, D.C.
was illegitimate.
Instead, it was conceived as an alternate to all forms of existing governments, local, state, and federal.
Here was a white Christian nation state, free of all non-Aryans and race traitors.
It kind of goes on to talk about this Nehemiah township and how it exists as a state within a state, as this sort of like parallel government structure.
Something that's designed to not so much kind of take over the kind of the U.S. federal government or the kind of official operating capacity, but as a something that's going to sort of exist in parallel and that over but as a something that's going to sort of exist in parallel and Basically, the system itself, the government, starts to become more and more mongrelized and becomes more and more unable to function.
That it will exist as this sort of, like, existing kind of survivalist thing that's going to allow the white race to continue on.
And this kind of becomes the nature of the Butler Plan.
The Butler Plan is named after, or it's created by this guy, Richard Butler.
who founds the Aryan nations, openly Christian identity.
He was actually originally attending a Christian identity church.
This is a bit from the SPLC about the Aryan nations.
Butler openly admired Adolf Hitler and longed for a whites-only homeland in the Pacific Northwest.
He retired as an aeronautical engineer at age 55 and moved to Hayden Lake, Idaho in 1974.
There, he bought an old farmhouse and formed his Christian Posse Comitatus group.
By 1977, Butler had decided to form the Church of Jesus Christ Christian at the farmhouse and named its political arm Aryan Nations.
In 1980, Butler's church was bombed, causing $80,000 in damage.
Nobody was injured or arrested.
Butler responded by building a two-story guard tower and posting armed guards around his 20-acre property.
In 1981, Butler hosted the first of what would be many Aryan World Congress gatherings on his property.
It, and the concepts that would follow, attracted almost every nationally significant racist leader around.
Among them, Tom Metzger, former Klansman and leader of the White Aryan Resistance, Louis Beam, another one-time Klansman who promoted the concept of Little Distant Resistance, and Maia Seide, who we discussed in great detail in the Christchurch Massacre episode.
Don Black, the former Klansman who created Stormfront, the oldest largest white nationalist forum on the web, and Kirk Lyons, a lawyer who has represented several extremists and who was married on the compound by Butler.
Kirk Lyons, believe it or not, actually appeared on the political cesspool last weekend promoting his ACLU kind of
Basically an anti-aclu fighting for the rights of white supremacists around the globe or in around the country fight their legal battles Kirk Alliance is still very much active in this movement today, and I just thought that was interesting that yeah, he was at this thing basically at the birth of What we can call the militia movement of this this kind of white nationalist militia movement, and he's still very much out there Still kind of doing his thing and still getting drifting money from the from the movement
In order to pretend he's defending white nationalists in court, although I don't think he does a whole lot of that these days.
And so what we see is, in this kind of arena in the early 80s, we see this nucleus of the white separatists.
We see this moving away from the sort of political mainstreamers, moving away from this idea of like using some kind of concrete political action in order to sort of move Ideology in terms of moving politics in their direction and you see a a much more kind of Implicitly and explicitly violent sect that was organized and that was explicitly anti-government And it's mostly anti this sort of Jewish run government.
It's mostly anti this this sort of system moving off and kind of forming their their compounds and this becomes basically the the nucleus of a All of the kind of far-right ideology and all the far-right activity between about 1980 and certainly in 1996.
Timothy McVeigh, who did the Oklahoma City bombing, was deeply connected to this movement and to the various strands of it.
And after Oklahoma City, it sort of morphs into a slightly less overtly racialized movement.
Uh, and it becomes a little more of a kind of exclusively anti-government.
Um, one of the difficult things in discussing this is that, um, while the militia movement began as like an overtly, uh, anti-Semitic, uh, racist, anti-black, uh, pro, like, kind of white national idea, I mean, it's literally called the Aryan Nations, right?
Yeah.
Um, despite the fact that it starts this way, it, uh, kind of has, Vaguely, it becomes much more implicit and even in some cases kind of like, I don't want to say actively anti-racist, but certainly, you know, not particularly racist within these kind of things.
The militia groups often have non-white members.
They often have, you know, particularly kind of border patrol.
Some of those groups are, you know, have plenty of Hispanic people and such kind of working within them.
Um, the militia movement becomes sort of a larger umbrella thing that sort of encompasses a whole lot of different ideologies and that sort of works against them because they find a difficult time to sort of work together because they don't agree on much.
But the one thing that they do agree on is you gotta hate the leftists, which does make them at least a sort of proto-fascist kind of movement.
And one of the things that's really kind of scary about them is that, you know, I spent a lot of time looking at the kind of explicit white nationalist, like, thread of this.
And the best estimates that I've seen are that there are something like 300,000 open white nationalists in the United States.
The militia movement is about 10 times that.
About 3 million people broadly consider themselves part of the militia movement, or the Patriot movement, as it's sometimes called.
And this movement has had enormous political effect in terms of kind of moving politics further and further right.
Another person who is kind of closely connected to this Christian identity, but in a different, more mainstream way, is R.J.
Rushdoony.
Are you familiar with that name at all?
Ah, I've found his name in the index of a book I have, Hijacking America by Susan George.
Wonderful.
So yeah, no, it's it's not surprising that I mean he's kind of a big name, but he's kind of a little bit of an underground name.
I'm familiar with him from just... Here he is in the index of another book I have, The Fundamentals of Extremism.
Yep.
He's a really important figure that a lot of people don't know his name.
So I'm gonna quote from a review by Sarah E. Jones of a Book called Christian Reconstruction, R.J.
Rushduni and American Conservatism.
I've not read this book, but I might have to check it out.
It's only 231 pages, apparently.
So, I do have this quote here.
Vicar notes that it's during this time period that Rushduni discovered the work of Cornelius Van Til, author of The New Modernism and Father of a Doctrine called Presuppositional Apologetics.
It isn't necessary or even possible to delve too deeply into Van Til's theology here, but a Cliff Notes version is helpful.
Christians and non-believers alike comprehend the world based on certain presuppositions.
Christians operate from a correct presupposition, non-believers do not, and there the twain shall meet.
According to Van Til, non-believers are incapable of accurately comprehending reality, and by extension, cannot develop a correct moral framework.
Van Til's work pulled heavily from Kant, which appealed to the intellectual Rushduny, so did his reformed leanings which Rushduny shared.
Van Til's epistemology also validated the would-be philosopher's Duck Valley observations.
But Rushduny took Van Til's thought a step further.
If non-believers couldn't be truly moral or reasonable, secular laws, based on secular reasoning, were therefore illegitimate.
The answer to solving society's problems, and to solving Duck Alley, lay in the application of biblical law.
Duck Alley there is a reference to Rostuni was working near an Indian reservation, a Native American reservation, where there was a lot of drunkenness and such that was brought upon by poverty.
And Rostuni thought, like, no, it couldn't be like centuries of oppression and genocide of poverty that's causing this.
No, they're just not Christian enough.
That's the problem.
And what we need is a Christian biblical law.
So Rostuni is considered a kind of far right extreme figure, even among kind of Christian conservatives and the religious right, etc.
That said, this basic ideology that only through imposition of a kind of harsh Christian moral value could society be righted ends up becoming a kind of fundamental and foundational force in the creation of the religious right in the early 80s, the late 70s and early 80s.
And it ends up very deeply informing sort of like Reagan administration politics and that has stretched even to today.
These ideas of this sort of like larger militia movement and of this sort of Christian supremacism become basically, you know, they get watered down and then just become sort of like what the Republican Party pushes for.
What's interesting here then to me is the way that this sort of extreme, really extreme kind of like far-right ideology that the Jews are the agents of Satan and that sort of thing ends up being foundational to like huge swaths of politics in the most powerful country in the world and actually start informing things like military policy and
You know the fight against abortion is in a lot of ways kind of kind of comes from this Religious right kind of idea it comes out of this You know that that the that the state should basically be run across Christian supremacist values and ultimately the account of Christian supremacy ends up being just kind of another way of kind of
decoding the Explicit white supremacy that you weren't allowed to do after the Civil Rights Acts were passed So yeah in a lot of ways Christian supremacy this kind of Christian theocracy stuff ends up being just a kind of another code for for white supremacy I bring up Rush Juni here because he's not really connected to the militia movement He's not really connected to but I bring him up here because this is what I'm seeing Happening in terms of the kind of broader political movements around the alt-right around the kind of modern forms of white nationalism
No one in Donald Trump's orbit or no one in that world is taking Richard Spencer completely seriously.
They're not actively pushing for an all-white ethnostate and putting brown people in ovens or whatever.
They are pushing for a watered-down version of that.
And what I'm seeing and what I think is happening is we're seeing a kind of a hard right white nationalist position, which is rejecting those kind of earlier values.
I mean, you know, the major figures in the alt-right basically laugh at You know, oh, you're, you're, you're, you're, uh, you know, you're, oh, my Israel, and oh, you know, Christian theocracy, and all that sort of thing.
They kind of laugh at that as being, like, their dad's version, that is sort of the cucked out version, and instead, we should just go back to overt white supremacy.
Um, but then, the civic nationalists, quote-unquote, who, uh, believe in, in a sort of, like, robust national, nationalism, or robust, uh, Border policy, robust, you know, all that thing.
But they kind of coded it as like, well, yeah, but if you're black and you're like, yeah, you pull your pants up and you're, you know, kind of, well, yeah, you get to be a part of it too.
You just got to support, you know, the kind of mainstream American values and, you know, don't, you know, speak with the right language and do all that sort of thing.
And so civic nationalism is certainly less toxic than white nationalism, but it's still a overtly horrible ideology.
And I think that's what we're basically seeing, that places like Turning Point USA and these other places that do get huge amounts of money, like Ben Shapiro basically supports this sort of civic nationalist idea.
Candace Owens supports this civic nationalist idea.
They're not anti-black and anti-Jewish, etc., because, you know, Ben Shapiro was Jewish and Candace Owens is African American, but they, although they could be, I mean, I'm just saying, They're not kind of actively on that like let's gas all the like non-white people, but they're espousing the same basic kinds of ideas, just coded slightly differently and kind of like with more carve-outs to it.
I think this is this the way that the the US politics is basically going at this point I think I think in 10 years It's just gonna be white nationalism is just gonna be the kind of the the ugly stepchild of Stuff that's being said openly in the in the Congress and by you know I mean it's kind of already going that way, but I think it's just gonna get more and more profound as this As the nation gets more and more post-Christian and as the sort of the failures of the Christian right become more and more overt.
Just wanted to highlight one more detail there.
One of Roshaduni's, RJ Roshaduni's, one of his kind of followers, one of his acolytes.
Sky Gary North Gary North in the work for Ron Paul and is the very likely the author of the racist newsletters that Ron Paul put out under his name is the.
Yeah I'm in Morocco but Gary North is also in that and so like it's it's basically either Rockwell or North.
So it shows you just kind of how these connections are very profound because then Ron Paul ends up being one of the kind of inflection points one of the nucleation sites for the creation of this more overt white nationalist movement and you know ultimately a book that I've been Not necessarily avoiding, recommending, but one that I think is, that most people kind of know about if you're kind of clued into those stuff enough to listen to this podcast.
David Newhart's Alt-America is very good on this topic.
I have some difficulties with the book just because I think, and I don't want to put words in David Newhart's mouth here, I mean, he's been covering this stuff for, you know, nearly 40 years at this point.
Alt-America kind of posits that the alt-right is largely just a sort of rebranding of stuff that was kind of already present in the militia movement, and it's kind of like encoded white supremacy.
I don't necessarily disagree with that as much as I think that's kind of an improper focus.
I think that the alt-right, the thing that we're talking about, this overt white nationalism, is trying to be something that's distinctly different, that it's sort of drawing from the same kind of poisonous well of misinformation and conspiracy theory and bullshit that's kind of been going on.
But I do think there is something Kind of new happening here that there is something there.
This is kind of a bold new direction for white nationalism, white supremacy in the United States, and that it's worth discussing kind of separately from the militia movement, whereas I think Newark kind of sees it as more just kind of the new face of it.
And ultimately it's not necessarily so much as I disagree as much as I think that you know it's kind of a Different it's a subtly different question because I think that in terms of dealing with it properly I think we have to understand it as something kind of fairly new but ultimately You know the idea that it's like thoroughly disconnected from that because while the movement leaders are kind of rejecting This kind of Christian supremacy and the kind of militia movement and that sort of thing certainly the followers of it the people on the ground a lot of them have been around long enough and
And they really are just rebranding themselves from one thing to the other.
It's not so much that I disagree as much as I'm trying to highlight a different kind of aspect of this.
Yeah.
There's a fairly substantial section about Rush Dooney in Susan George's Hijacking America, which I suppose it dropped out of my head because it's about 10 years ago since I read it.
But she goes into the relationship with Gary North, Yep.
And yeah, it's quite an interesting section.
Maybe I'll post a link to that.
Yeah, no, sounds good.
I haven't read that book, but maybe I should.
She calls him perhaps the scariest of the Reconstructionists.
I don't know that brother the the scariest of the reconstruction is to the followers of the late pastor R.J.
Rushdoony etc etc.
Rushdoony he kind of becomes marginalized and Gary North kind of takes over the.
It's kind of the public face of this thing.
I'm a few years before Roshini died.
I think Roshini dies in like 2001 or something like that.
It's interesting to hear this stuff about Gary North.
He's apparently he runs something called, or ran when this was written, the Journal of, sorry, no, he runs the Institute for Christian Economics.
Which is interesting because in my study of the Austrian school of economics, I encountered at least one modern day Austrian who is also a biblical presuppositionalist and links the two things together.
So that's interesting.
Susan George talks about how Rush Dooney actually cites Hayek at one point in his statement of what his foundation, the Chalcedon Foundation, believes.
That's an interesting connection as well, especially with regards to what you're talking about, Gary North ending up working with Ron Paul, who of course is famously a libertarian and admires the Austrian economists.
Right, well, ultimately what I find, and just, again, the highlight from the John Ernest Manifesto, you know, where he says, I did not choose to be a Christian, the Father chose me, the Son saved me, and the Spirit keeps me.
This is overtly Calvinistic.
This is overtly, you know, that there's a pre-elect that is just sort of like the wheat and the chaff get separated in the process of life, but that ultimately you were chosen before you were born, and that, you know,
Most yeah that some some percentage, but usually it's like almost all of humanity is just destined for hell by definition that that and that there's something sort of Special in us that that's something special in me as a Calvinist Christian that I've accepted the Lord not through my own actions not because I'm particularly good, but just because I'm elect I've been chosen by my blood and
And, um, it's very easy from that point to then sort of connect into, uh, well, maybe it's just my genetics.
Maybe it's my white skin that makes me, uh, extra special.
And, uh, maybe that comes with less of a sort of overtly religious angle, and it just kind of becomes, well, yeah, my IQ is high because, uh, because of my white skin and because there's, it's just in my blood.
I can't help it, but I, you know, what am I supposed to do about it?
Like, not be white?
This is kind of what I wrote about, because I wrote about how libertarianism kind of has this inheritance from the Austrian school of economics, amongst other things, and it does draw on the sort of Calvinist doctrine of the elect you've just been talking about, because it's a wonderful way of squaring predestination with the idea that you also deserve.
It's a way of saying that you get The only thing you know you get in life the only thing you could ever get that you were destined to get it but also you deserve it because the doctrine of the elect kind of joins the idea of predestination to the idea of you finding out your predestined position through struggle.
Um, so yeah, that does that links up quite satisfyingly for me.
Oh, yeah, no, absolutely.
And just to sort of connect it into sort of libertarian economics or kind of like market based economics, quote unquote.
All of this comes with heavy layers of irony because obviously these terms are.
Largely nonsensical, but it's kind of worth highlighting.
You do get this sense that, you know, a lot of these sort of like the ethos of, well, I'm a successful person and therefore I have money and that I've earned this and this is just because I'm good and if all the poor people out there were better people and had higher agency or higher IQ or just more capable of getting along in society, then they would do so.
And the fact that they don't is just kind of prima facie evidence that maybe they just deserve to die or at least not breed.
And if we are going to kind of support their They're breeding by like giving them welfare money and allowing them to eat they're just gonna make more stupid people who were just gonna have to support down the line so it ends up being this kind of support for for eugenic idea as well that that that the money in my bank account is just sort of like like that this hierarchy of people that this sort of that it's natural that it comes about just.
By happenstance that we just sort of all just sort of get into the place in the world that we're supposed to be and that if you start mucking around with that too much then you're just sort of encouraging the wrong kinds of people to be in our society.
And I mean you know and again this completely ignores any kind of sense of like the history of like how did you Get into the place where you were able to sort of make that money or how did you get into the place to where you had the advantages or you know to go to school and you know what about people who didn't have those and the entire structural conceit or the entire structural critique goes out the window and it becomes just about like let's just start at the place that I was born and not make me look at any of that and I can just say like well obviously I'm superior because just look at me and look at them.
Yeah, well, we've talked in previous episodes about how this idea that, you know, when you have hierarchies in society, the people on the lower rung are there because of cultural problems that they have.
And we've talked about how that gets it the wrong way around, you know, and how the whole discourse about Cultural problems with the minorities and the poor etc etc it's just kind of a restatement in in different language of the old idea of.
You know racial destiny you you are where you where you always going to end up because you know some people that you know and it gets expressed.
In a different form in the in the whole thing about iq you know iq is real and some people have lower iqs and certain types of people have higher iqs and you just end up in.
You know the place in the hierarchy of society where you deserve to be because of your IQ and all of this really is just a it's a restatement of the idea that.
There is no injustice in hierarchy if there is a hierarchy and you're at the bottom or near the bottom that's not an injustice it's where you deserve to be.
And that is, you know, that is something again, another expression of it is this Calvinistic idea of divine predestination or spiritual predestination, which kind of gets taken up and reformed and restated in these various forms of libertarianism.
It's all ultimately, I mean, it's all ultimately like, like I've spent a lot of time studying this stuff and kind of trying to understand the arguments, but At a certain point, it's just sophistry just to sort of defend the status quo.
Yes.
To just defend my place within this world.
And like, if I'm not doing so well, if maybe I'm poorer than I think I should be, but I'm a bright guy and that I have, you know, I end up working in a job that's kind of shitty and like I should really be more comfortable in society, it becomes a way of not sort of
Blaming the sort of capitalist structure that is taking your labor and not compensating you for it, but it becomes a, or kind of recognizing your, you know, basic human dignity and the, that you should have, you know, just fundamentally you shouldn't starve to death because you're human and we care about that.
No, it becomes, well, the system itself is made in a way that other people, that other lesser people are benefiting and I'm not.
Uh, you listen to these guys for ten minutes and you start hearing about, like, oh, uh, you know, the welfare system.
If you look at, like, the, sort of, how the races, uh, get, well, who gets welfare and who pays out, you know, it's like, oh, all these white people are paying out money, and then it's all these, like, brown and black people are, like, leeching off of the system, and they're having bigger families than we are, and this is just getting worse and worse, and, like, ultimately it's a competition between us as white people and them as brown and black people, and there's, and there's no sense of, like, uh,
Looking at that more systematically and kind of like finding those dividing lines and saying, well, yeah, but why is it that black people are poor, or why is it that black and brown people are poorer on average than white people?
No, it's just about like taking that and drawing this kind of artificial distinction around that.
And it just kind of becomes, again, just sophistry, just justification for baseline bigotry.
And ultimately, yeah, the capitalist class is laughing its ass off by, you know, the people who work as bricklayers are angry at brown people for things that the capitalist class did.
I mean, it's just...
It's just disgusting.
And again, it's this poisonous ideology that I feel deeply sorry that people believe this because, like, wake up!
Become a socialist!
Be one of us!
You're being fooled.
It's incoherent.
It's not just disgusting.
The red pill is the wool over your eyes, you know?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
It's not just disgusting it's incoherent cause when you look at what these people say, the injustices that afflict other people are always natural and inevitable and they're either genetic or they're cultural or they're IQ or they're, you know, God's judgment or in advance or whatever.
Always in some way they are inevitable and they're nothing to do with society.
They are asocial.
They are pre-social if you like.
And the injustices that the person talking feels that they are affected by, they are always social.
You know, it's always the government doing something to them or it's this minority doing something to them or something.
And if we just change, you know, to address the injustices, of course, they would say they're not really injustices, but the inequities or whatever, you know, afflicting
Those people over there those people want me know that's wrong we shouldn't try to adjust society to account for to remedy those problems because we can't it's impossible that they're baked into human society or human genetics or god's plan or whatever but the the things that i don't like about my life yeah we should absolutely reorient society to try to do do away with them because they are
They are artificial they're not in the jeans or god's judgment or anything they're made by society so we can just change the government or get rid of the government or whatever to you know and there's that central incoherence in all these ideas always right the way down the line whenever you look at them always self-serving incoherence.
It's, it's a, you know, you, there is this sort of sense of, you know, it's all about sort of justifying why none of this is ever my, a white man's fault, right?
Yeah.
And, you know, it's sort of, you know, I love the, I love the, you know, okay, so, so all these poor black people and brown people, they're coming into our country or they're existing and they're like stealing resources from us and they're dirty and, you know, violent and all this kind of stuff.
And so all the problems of like crime are ultimately On them because they're poor and they commit more crimes on than we do on average because we're like kind of white middle class people who you know have the other classes to do our crimes for us so that's fine but also we're not responsible for things like wage theft.
And, uh, you know, financial crimes and all that kind of stuff, because, like, oh, you know who's really in charge of that?
The people in charge of the financial system, with parentheses.
You know, it's the Jews.
The Jews are the ones doing all that stuff.
They're the 1%.
They're the wealthy people in our society.
We actually live in a Jewish supremacist society, not a white supremacist society, because...
You know, the bankers, they're the ones doing all the really awful stuff, and they're also victimizing us poor white people, and they're siccing the brown people on us by saying it's our fault.
And so it's just this way of resolving any sort of sense of responsibility.
I mean, and look, I...
I'm not here to sit and say that I'm a white person.
I don't feel responsible for the crimes of my country that happened centuries before I was born or that even are happening now.
I don't feel responsible for Bombing Iraq and all those sorts of things.
I feel responsible for trying to stop them because I think they're moral atrocities and I feel responsible for trying to like be better than that but there is this sort of sense you hear over and over again and this is slightly off topic but I think it's worth kind of highlighting here that over and over again like we did we talked about the Holocaust you know in the last couple of episodes and I hear from these guys like the Jews are just trying to make me feel guilty With all this talk about the Holocaust.
Why are they trying to make me feel like... I don't feel guilty.
I feel... I feel horrible.
I feel like this needs to never happen to anyone.
Ever.
When I hear about the Holocaust.
Have you ever felt guilty about white supremacy?
No, I do not feel guilty about white supremacy.
It was here when I came into the world.
I didn't set it up.
I feel responsible.
I don't feel guilty.
I feel responsible.
And I don't mean responsible for things that were done by people other than me.
I mean responsible for myself.
I feel responsible for doing You know what i can or what i should you know within the bounds of what's reasonable to expect of anybody to do something about it that's the difference you know i don't feel guilty about the crimes of the british empire i feel responsible to talk about them when i know about them.
Right and it's just but it just it just seems like I mean over and over again I hear this from these guys that oh they're just trying to make you feel guilty and we'll get into this when we talk about like Kevin Macdonald down down the line I mean that he he he has lots of pseudo intellectual justifications for it which are hilarious but um It's, I don't know, it just comes up over and over again and it's just one of those things.
Getting slightly back on topic, I was, again, this kind of religious justification, this sort of religious, you know, this kind of conflation of whiteness and Christianity and etc.
plays all through kind of the modern The modern, uh, you know, kind of Christian talk radio and that kind of stuff.
You, you hear kind of coded versions of it.
And Pat Robertson, the 700 Club, you hear, you know, it's all over the place.
Um, I was going to say is very, you know, it's not Christianity as a whole.
It's very particular.
It's certain particular types of Christian.
And it's, and it's this weaponized politicized Christianity.
That's, that's the, I think that's the key.
It's not even just say it's Protestantism or anything like that, or even just say it's evangelicalism.
You, you have to, Take into account the fact that, you know, certain strands of these denominations have been very deliberately politicized.
Well, it's the Christian right kind of knew that they could get Christians to vote for them if they pushed a lot of buttons on these quote-unquote cultural issues like, you know, like homosexuality and gay marriage and, you know, abortion, etc, etc.
And, you know, and that if you, you know, if we just turn these into wedge issues, We can get all these kind of Christian conservative people to never stray from the field and to support whatever else we wanted to do in terms of oppressing people.
I mean, you know, I'm not here to argue that, for instance, if you believe, if you're a Christian believer and you believe that, you know, gay marriage is wrong, don't have a gay marriage, you know?
No one is trying to force you to be gay married and no one is trying to force you to be gay.
But gay people exist and they've always existed.
It's a natural thing.
And they have every right to exist in this society the same way that you do.
It's not about oppressing Christians for gay people to exist.
Christians are, you know, this kind of right-wing, this oppressive form of this politicized Christianity, wants to be hegemonic, and that's the part that we're fighting against.
And again, it's not – nobody hates you, nobody wants to see you defeated politically because you're white.
There's nothing wrong with being white.
I agree.
It's okay to be white.
Congratulations!
It's not okay for, like, white hegemony and for, like, keeping all of the people outside of society over nonsense, pseudoscience.
The problem we have with the statement, it's okay to be white, isn't that we disagree with the statement in and of itself.
Of course it's okay to be white.
The problem we have with the statement is that it is used disingenuously.
It is used to mean other things.
And that's a very open thing that was very much in the, you know, when that was created, there are like chat logs and there are podcasts where they talk explicitly about, oh, yeah, we're just going to make people, we're going to, quote unquote, trigger people about this phrase.
And then we're going to just, oh, all we said was it's OK to be white.
I mean, what, you think it's not OK to be white?
And so it's a deliberate provocation.
It's designed to be that.
And it was always that.
It was never anything but that.
And you know perfectly well that Black Lives Matter doesn't mean that anybody's saying that, you know, non-black lives don't matter.
Come on.
You know that's not what's being said.
Some of them I think are actually that clueless.
But it's because one of the episodes we're definitely going to have to do is to discuss sort of the broader media apparatus and sort of like the history of Fox News and kind of where that kind of comes from.
Because I think it's important to kind of understand that there is this like sea of misinformation and bullshit, what David Neewer calls Alt-America, that informs all of this.
And that there's this kind of larger media superstructure that is feeding into this.
While Sean Hannity is not sort of an overt white nationalist.
He doesn't have to be, though.
Right, it's the rejection.
Sean Hannity becomes sort of the baseline standard voice of reason, which makes nationalism more likely.
A brick is not a house.
Right, exactly.
I did want to highlight a couple of other things while we're here.
I did – so I did mention the Matt Shea thing and the – who was the kind of Republican state lawmaker, I believe, in the state congress of the state of Washington.
I listened to a little bit of his podcast, which I had not done the last time we recorded.
and He has a podcast and then there's this this radio free redoubt, which is a podcast He was sort of like associated with and he's kind of buddies with the guy that does that I forget that guy's an actual name, but he goes by John Jacob Schmidt And he says, you know, call me John Jacob.
You can call me John Jacob Schmidt.
That's my name too.
Whatever.
It's it's a pseudonym anyway and these are
Basically, you can take that kind of the white nationalist stuff and you can Recode it as is patriot Christian and just change some of the words around and it's essentially the same kind of thing Um, it's also connected deeply with the the sort of like survivalists the the prepper communities And that stuff kind of goes back to well, it goes back to the Depression But I'm sort of like after World War two and sort of the atomic age and the threat of nuclear war and these kind of like overtly anti-communist
You know, propaganda, and, uh, you know, you gotta build your fallout shelter, and you gotta have, uh, you know, all- you gotta be prepared to be, you know, without, uh, food and water when the- when the national government kinda comes down.
And, um, I mean, it is just kinda funny how all this stuff, like, those kinds of ideas just kinda pop up over and over again in this stuff, and that there's- there's this sort of like a, uh, like a tasting menu of- of, uh, Various ideologies and various kind of schemes and various sorts of, you know, pseudo-science and pseudo-legal ideas that just sort of kind of get, you know, you get to pick and choose in these kind of later movements.
So, you know, there are, you know, kind of survivalist sects within the, within sort of the broader alt-right.
You see a lot of the stuff of kind of like believing that the system's about to collapse and that the You know, the best thing to do is choose to be prepared, you know, and that survivalism stuff goes into kind of feeding into this, you know, Aryan nation stuff, the kind of separatism, this, you know, we're going to build society outside of regular society, that when the system collapses, we're going to be safe, because we're white people only prepared.
Yeah, the whole sort of survivalist prepper thing strikes me.
I mean, I could be completely off base here, so, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels to me like a confluence of kind of, you know, the myths of the West, you know, self-reliance, and I know it doesn't necessarily happen in the West, but you know what I mean?
The myths of manifest destiny, expansion, and self-reliance, and settler colonials, and stuff like that, that in confluence with You know you have to say in some ways very well founded distrust of you know the big american government the national security state etc etc and the other thing of course is millenarianism which ties back into the the the the the christian movement.
No, absolutely.
In fact, there's a book that I already put in the show notes that was going to mention it, so I'll just use this as the excuse.
There's a book called Aryan Cowboys, which is sort of about the less so about the kind of material history of the militia movement in the American West and more about sort of the ideological and the sort of the way that the myth of the West and the myth of, you know, kind of that kind of self-reliance.
We don't need a larger society and that kind of myth of whiteness.
Then got kind of twisted into this, you know, kind of white nationalist, white supremacist sort of ideology.
It's a good book.
It does have some nice stuff about the history of the militia stuff.
One of the things about the history of the militia movement is that it's written about a ton.
There was a ton of like kind of research and writing that happened in the late 90s, early 2000s when it was at its peak.
And so I don't feel the need to go through it all in detail, just because there are a lot of other great sources out there.
That is definitely one that I'd recommend, particularly if you want something that's an academic text, which is kind of about masculinity and the way that Western masculine culture feeds into that stuff.
I thought that was a really interesting book.
One book that came highly recommended to me Honestly, I'm not finished reading it yet.
I'm maybe 20% all the way through the book, but it's excellent so far.
It's this book, The Terrorist Next Door.
This is basically the book that explains the militia movement, and it's excellent reading so far.
I have not finished it yet, but it's absolutely worth a read, I think.
That's actually the very first thing in the show notes, so definitely go check that one out as well.
I do want to highlight one other thing.
Again, I've mentioned this on the show before, but as long as we're kind of talking broadly about the militia movement, the Bundy clan, Ammon Bundy, Cliven Bundy, you'll kind of remember these as being the Y'all Kata guys who took over the Mollier Wildlife Reserve.
a few years ago uh there's a podcast slash um it's basically a podcast and an essay project called bundyville uh it is one of the best things i have read slash listened to about any of this kind of stuff we've linked to this before i've linked i've linked to it before but i'm just going to highlight it again i've listened to this probably three or four times and i've read it through it a couple of times um it's been a long time ago and i've been a long time ago It's excellent, excellent work.
Really outstanding journalism that I just want to highlight one more time because it really does get at some of this stuff and some of the, you know, it is not about the alt-right, it's about the Bundys and about their sort of like this kind of broader perspective, but it will really give you a very good sense of sort of What the wants and needs of the kind of Western militia movement really are and how they are not explicitly racialized, although they're kind of explicitly racialized.
One of the things that you mentioned, Black Lives Matter, a second ago.
It's funny that, like, if you're kind of researching the alt-right, this kind of explicitly white nationalist right, BLM means Black Lives Matter, but when you're kind of doing the militia movement, and particularly the western states, BLM is the Bureau of Land Management, and they have equal hatred.
Both of these BLMs have equal hatred, depending on which version of the far-right you're following on any particular day.
One of the things that a lot of people don't realize about the Western states is that huge chunks of them are owned by the U.S.
federal government.
I think something like 95% of the state of Nevada is actually not run by the state of Nevada, it's run by the U.S.
federal government and it's essentially Kind of, you know, military bases and, you know, kind of wild land that they were kind of using.
Also, because so much of that area is a desert, like water use rights and land use rights end up being hugely important.
And the kind of the self-sufficiency arguments that like, oh, I'm just a rancher and I'm going to go out there and I'm going to be self-sufficient.
And really, you've got like major government programs that are designed in support of your ability to do that.
And ultimately, you're not really pulling your own weight, regardless of, you know, how hard you work.
That the government is supporting your lifestyle because they think it's important to allow you to do that But ultimately, you know, that's you know That becomes invisible to a lot of these people and they hate the BLM the Bureau of Land Management Because it tells them where when and where they are allowed to like graze their their cattle No, and all of this is covered like in some detail in the Bundyville stuff.
And again, it's just it's just you know, I Very highly recommended there.
But it becomes, it's very basic.
Again, it kind of comes back to that whole idea of, you know, I don't have to look at the major systemic factors.
I don't have to look at the history.
I don't have to look at anything like that.
I want to graze my cattle here, and I should be able to do that because it's a free country.
Yada, yada, yada.
And I don't want to pay my taxes.
Yada, yada, yada.
Yeah.
This is where the actual nature of settler colonialism crunches up against the ideology that is used to legitimise settler colonialism, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And just that kind of like, in some cases, willful blindness.
And again, nobody wants to take away your ability to roam your cattle.
Like, that's not the point.
The point is, like, we all have to share this fucking planet, you know?
And it's just like, be a good neighbor.
Isn't that supposed to be like a conservative Christian, you know, white value or whatever?
Anyway.
And that also connects us into the sort of – some of these kind of kookier far-right ideologies, things like the – so this Christian identity movement and the Posse Comitatus, that stuff feeds directly into – so the Posse Comitatus, essentially what these sort of external compounds, what these kind of white separatists were really trying to say is that the form of government that we respect is a kind of local government.
And that the local sheriff is ultimately the highest form of authority in the – In this region and so like basically it becomes sort of this anti-government The the federal government can't tell us what to do and it's it's it's like an even more extreme version of like the state's right stuff and again Originally, this is explicitly racially coded.
This is Aryan nations.
This is straight-up Nazi shit.
There's swastikas all over the place and Nobody ever doubted that this was racially, that this was openly racist.
Over time, it becomes much more sort of an anti-government sort of thing, and the militia movement gets coded more and more as just kind of anti-government in general.
One of the things that you kind of run into are the things called sovereign citizens.
Sovereign citizens, some of them kind of support this sort of like county level government thing.
Some of them kind of start to believe that I myself and my family and my quote unquote homestead are independent from the government.
And like they have like these weird pseudo legal theories where they can file a certain kind of paperwork at the local office.
And suddenly they don't have to pay federal taxes anymore.
And they become like tax resistors and tax protesters.
And again, I am not one to say that you are morally obligated to support the imperialist war machine that is the U.S. government.
At the same time, you're a political kook and you're trying to pretend that you're kind of off on your own when in reality you have the support of large sections of history and society that have allowed you to do that.
And maybe you have – maybe you should have broader implications than just like I don't want to pay my taxes because fuck you.
um uh that also gets into the uh i've also got a link to the constitutional sheriffs and peace officers association the cspoa uh donald trump has uh kind of retweeted some of this stuff from time to time um he has a kind of affinities for some of these people uh joe arpaio who was the uh racist uh sheriff of maricopa county and uh anyway i'm sure everybody knows broadly who he is um he
He is a major figure in that constitutional sheriff movement, and this is where, you know, kind of that kind of hyperlocalism gets you.
If the sheriff is essentially a little tinpot dictator who doesn't have to abide by the rules of, like, civil rights, etc., you end up putting brown people in pink underwear out in 120 degree heat with no water.
That's something that happens.
That's what that sort of reactionary regionalism is always basically about.
It's about wanting the people that run this little fiefdom to be able to do whatever the fuck they like.
And that's always about, you know, enforcing the unjust hierarchy that they're sitting on top of.
Exactly.
Another piece I just wanted to highlight, this is something again, probably something that people have read.
There's a link to a piece at Mother Jones by Shane Bauer who went undercover with a border militia.
This was published back in 2016 and it's a really good piece kind of exploring some of this stuff.
Kind of the on-the-ground realities of these guys.
Now, as we mentioned in the David Duke episode, the border watches were born with David Duke in the early 70s.
Like, literally, David Duke was the very first kind of person to go down and start doing armed, you know, border watches as political stunts.
And this has a kind of a long history.
Sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly racialized and if you read this piece There are a couple of people who are pretty overt Nazis But they tend to kind of downplay their beliefs and certainly the kind of the leaders of the militia Don't or don't sort of code themselves as explicitly racialized and I don't know if it's a big complicated topic It's a good piece.
Go check it out.
Um, I didn't want to highlight a couple of other Figures just while we're kind of finishing up the the show here Because, believe it or not, I do listen to some of these actual podcasts that some of these characters are involved with, and we've kind of done more of a broad sweep.
And I just wanted to highlight two figures, one of whom is now dead, and we'll get to that.
So I mentioned the Butler Plan, or I mentioned Richard Butler and the Butler Plan, I think, in passing.
So the Butler Plan is also called the Northwest Imperative.
And there is a link to this in the show notes.
You can go check it out.
But the Northwest Imperative is the idea of carving an all-white ethnostate out of portions of the Pacific Northwest.
There's essentially Washington, Oregon, parts of Idaho, and Montana.
I think they've got some parallels drawn there.
Essentially a big square area and they're trying to all the Northwest imperative The idea is like we're all gonna move into this one little region of the country and then when the whole system collapses We're gonna have our guns and we're gonna have our you know Constitution our overtly National Socialist Constitution and we're all gonna and we're going to defend this area and it's gonna become our white homeland That's the point
Um, this was, uh, you know, originally started out by this guy, uh, Richard Butler, um, and then, uh, broadly, uh, this guy, uh, Harold Covington.
Uh, Harold Covington, who, uh, made lots of claims about his, uh, kind of war record, and et cetera, which is, uh, almost entirely bullshit.
Uh, there's a, uh, he died in, uh, uh, April of last year.
He had a podcast called Radio Free Northwest, and, um, Sad to say he was one of the more entertaining figures to listen to he actually had a pretty good radio voice And he was you know just batshit enough to be worth following and he was he did not he did not brook any Any fools although he was a fool because he's a white nationalist and these people were all fucking Silly.
But he was also one of those guys who was old school enough and kind of did not see any point in the alt-right.
He really was bitter about the fact that, you know, Richard Spencer and Mikey Enoch, etc.
were getting more attention than he was.
And instead of people Doing the thing they're supposed to do, which is come and move to the Northwest and be a part of our organization and be a part of our future white homeland.
People were not doing that and just kind of complaining on the internet.
He's a deeply, deeply hateful man, open national socialist, connected to some really violent people.
And he died.
And I'm going to read a little bit from... So there's a blog.
Yeah, there's a blog that I don't talk about nearly enough written by someone who calls themselves Eyes on the Right.
They're pseudonymous.
I don't know their gender.
I'm not, you know, I'm just going to say they.
I know very little about this person.
I mean, we're mutual followers on Twitter and stuff.
I mean, we follow a lot of the same people.
If you're listening to this and you don't know about this blog, Angry White Men, you should definitely be checking it out on a regular basis because I do and they're doing great work.
So this piece is called Harold Covington Died a Coward.
It is a delightful read, and I highly recommend if you get nothing else from this podcast and going and reading that, you should.
I'm going to quote from the end.
And this is talking about Radio Free Northwest.
Which started in 2010 and has actually continued after Covington died.
His much, much less talented associate, Andy Donner, is now running the podcast and it's become borderline unlistenable.
But still kind of fascinating and just kind of watching them fumble around and trying to be entertaining and trying to kind of keep this thing going when the guy who ran the thing for 40 years has now passed on.
So anyway, I'm going to quote from Ingrid Whiteman's coverage of Covington's death.
And, um, talking about the program, this is the program Radio Free Northwest.
For a time, the program was co-hosted by Corinna Burt, a bodybuilder who had a brief stint in the adult industry, under the alias Axis Sally.
By 2013, she had left White Nationalism behind and, in an interview with the SPLC, explained that Covington's goal was to get a thousand Alpha Aryan males to move to his neighborhood and then basically just start shooting everyone who isn't white.
Indeed, Burke painted a portrait of a man who was unstable and paranoid.
He called nearly everyone in the white supremacist movement a homosexual, was petrified of the thought that black men wanted to rape him, and his apartment was filthy with layers of grime on the walls.
In her words, Covington was pretty much the most horrible person ever.
His final years were spent making YouTube videos and podcasts for the NF, much of which failed to gain traction even among other white nationalists.
In the age of the alt-right, trolls, storms, racist memes, and torch marches, Harold's influence had waned to practically nothing.
When he was in the news, it was for calling Dylann Roof's Charleston bloodbath a preview of coming attractions and speculating that the Right Stuff's Mike Enoch was secretly Jewish.
Again, I'm sorry for the language here, but he would routinely call Mike Enoch Mike the Kike Pinovich.
Pinovich is Mike Enoch's real name.
Anyway, Whenever he calls to mention Enoch, that's what he would call him.
This is the very end of that piece, and I'm going to read it here.
I had only ever written about this curmudgeonly racist once, but decided that he didn't seem important enough to merit further attention.
Looking back, I stand by that calculation.
His brother Ben probably summed it up the best, however, stating that the bottom line here is that my brother is a coward.
He has always been a coward, and he will die a coward.
On July 14, 2018, Harold Armstead Covington died a coward at the age of 64.
He will not be missed.
That is some delightful writing that you can check out.
I've got a link in the show notes.
Go check out Angry White Man.
It's great.
Yeah, so that's Harold Covington.
Really terrible guy.
Vaguely entertaining radio host.
Interestingly, some of his followers are kind of more involved in the kind of broader movement than maybe he was, and in future episodes we'll kind of talk about that, but there are some connections to this thing called The Base, which is a kind of openly a kind of militia movement kind of thing that's explicitly white nationalist that I'm still kind of researching in some of the background on, so we're not going to cover here.
We will kind of do more on these kind of general topics in future episodes.
It's kind of a big overview.
And one other figure I wanted to mention, because he kind of connects right back to the beginning of this thing, is this guy, Billy Roper.
Now, Billy Roper runs a podcast called The Roper Report.
He is in his 40s.
I think he's 47, 47, 48.
He got started in white nationalism when he was, I think, 17 or 18, very, very young, and was a personal acolyte of William Luther Pierce, who wrote The Turner Diaries, which was kind of the basis of The Order, the group of violent white nationalists who went around robbing banks and killing people.
And also the Oklahoma City bombing was explicitly patterned after an event that happened in the Turner Diaries.
So this is William Luther Pierce.
Billy Roper got his start working for that guy in the 80s when he was a kid.
So, his big term is the Bulk Right.
So, as opposed to the Alt Right.
The Alt Right, those guys are cucks.
Those guys are basically losers.
We're going to be the Bulk Right.
We're going to be so far to the right that there is no further right.
You touch us, you touch the wall.
That's how far right we are.
This is a statement that he says over and over again on his show.
He has about three good lines and he just repeats them over and over again.
It's kind of, again, vaguely unlistenable radio.
I have a link to his YouTube page, I have a link to him at the SPLC, and a link to this kind of rise of the balk-right thing.
What this comes down to is the idea that the United States is going to balkanize.
So, for instance, someone like Harold Covington is building a, or was building, this sort of idea of having an all-white ethno-state in a particular area and getting people to all move in his direction.
He believes in kind of the upcoming violent civil war that's going to split the country racially.
There's going to be a race war and then at the end white people are going to have to have a piece of the pie, as he would say.
Billy Roper is kind of pushing that overtly.
He's trying to make it move even faster.
You know, what isn't good should fall and what is falling should be made to fall faster.
That's one of his kind of signature lines.
He's kind of actively calling for more and more civil war.
He's one of those guys who openly fantasizes on his podcast about seeing African-American judges hanging from trees after the government breaks down, and he gets to do that.
He is a very frightening man.
I know people who have met him in person, and there's some...
He's scary in ways that a lot of these other figures just aren't, frankly.
And yeah, that's Billy Roper, and that's the Bulk Right.
So if you ever see kind of the Bulk Right sitting around, this is Billy Roper's kind of fantasy of the ongoing Balkanization of America, and that term kind of comes from him.
You also see he runs something called the Shield Wall Network.
Those guys were in Charlottesville at Unite the Right, and they did commit various acts of violence against protestors and African-American people, etc.
So yeah, that's Billy Roper.
Pretty prominent figure.
He has kind of his own thing, but he's actually kind of a little bit even more radical than most of the other guys in the movement.
So he doesn't kind of guest on other people's stuff unless it's kind of Openly National Socialist like he is so which is an interesting thing when he's too far, right?
For even like Richard Spencer and Mikey not to really take seriously What is there?
I mean that obviously we've talked about various people in various groups and you can't Lump them all together.
But what is the the general attitude within the broader?
far-right towards this sort of tendency of people towards the kind of the balk write guys or the the violence of the war types and Yeah, I mean the whole thing generally, the sort of Christian, dominionist, survivalist fringe.
It's interesting in that I think people I mean a lot of people think well you know that's probably something you know you should be self-reliant and you should be able to kind of do this stuff and you know there's there's a deep kind of like gun culture that's just sort of endemic in this stuff I mean one of the things that all of these guys support is like that that you know the quickest way to create an actual civil war in America is to do like a a really aggressive gun confiscation regime you will see actual like revolution at that point Um from they they will actually start shooting people.
I mean a lot of these guys who are in this thing you know when uh you know some some cop knocks on their door because they're not allowed to have guns anymore because they've committed like atrocities against their wives or whatever um a lot of them do go out shooting because it's like government tyranny to take my guns away.
I mean this is very very very serious uh stuff when it comes to that stuff but um you know it's interesting that like the the more kind of yeah I mean, I'm sure it's great.
It's good to just live around white people and stuff, but ultimately, you know, the feeling is, well, this isn't going to save us.
We need kind of political action on this.
This kind of feeds back into the sort of mainstream versus Vanguardist thing, which is kind of at the core of this and that.
They sort of each rely on the other in terms of having something to push against, but they're all kind of meaningfully working within the same movement.
They just sort of disagree on tactics.
They all agree that white people are the best and that white people are really all that we need to care about.
It's just that increasingly sort of the mainstreamers, the people who want to work within something that looks like traditional politics, you know, are kind of grasping for straws and more and more people are kind of moving in this direction of, well, the only way this is going to happen is if we start shooting shooting up the place and if we start actually going out and killing people and creating tension.
And you hear this over and over again within this You know, kind of explicitly, kind of violent rhetoric stuff.
I mean, they say, like, look.
If you're not going to listen, if we don't have a voice in the political process, you're just going to get more and more violent actions.
You're just going to get more and more people going out and doing things like the Poway shooting and like the Christchurch massacre.
You're going to see more and more of this.
And you either have to deal with us, who are reasonable, urbane types, who just want to have our concerns, like the existence of black people, discussed, or more people are just going to go and kill people.
It becomes this becomes this thing where, you know, that's that's the relationship that these that these kind of groups have with one another.
I mean, there's a term there's a LARPing is kind of what a lot of them will say is that, oh, you're going to go off and live in the woods and you're just going to LARP as a militia or as a white ethno state and really like, you know, the US government is just going to come and crush you the second, you know, you really step out of line.
You're allowed to do this because you're not really a threat to the system or whatever.
Um, and so, you know, this is something that people have kind of differences of opinion on, but, um, you know, it's, it's, it's definitely all kind of part of the same broad movement.
And I think that, again, that's, that's something that is highlighted quite well in, in Dave Newitt's work, um, Alt America, and, uh, his earlier work, The Eliminationist, also kind of covers a lot of, uh, some of that same stuff, but in a slightly different way.
That's kind of more about how the media enforces some of this, uh, kind of white supremacist, uh, violent rhetoric, but.
Yeah, no.
I don't know.
Did that answer your question?
Yeah, yeah.
That's about it.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
I think, I mean, God, I'm kind of talking about it now, and I'm just realizing that this was definitely kind of a big picture, big sweep kind of episode.
Something that, you know, we did not really even begin to touch on all the stuff that's important about this.
But we did what we could do in 90 minutes, and I think it's a good conversation.
I think it's Worthwhile.
There are a lot of links in the show notes where you can go and learn more about this, and we will come back to more of these topics in the future as they come up.
So hopefully this was worthwhile for people.
Yeah, hopefully.
And what are we doing next week?
So next time, I'm looking at possibly getting a guest for next week, and that's kind of something that's kind of always happening, and anytime we may have a guest, I've got some people I've been talking to, so we'll see if we can do that.
If not, the plan is to do less of the kind of overt violence stuff, and we're going to do kind of the earliest of the mainstreamers, kind of the proto-alt-right.
We're going to do Jared Taylor and American Renaissance next week.
Oh, that'll be interesting.
OK, right.
I had a request to do that one.
It's been on my list for a while, but I had a request to do it and it's definitely worth doing.
So the other option is if some horrible thing happens that obviates that we need to cover something else.
But the plan is to do Jared Taylor in American Renaissance next week, so.
OK, so I am at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore.
Daniel is at Daniel E Harper on Twitter.
You can find all our stuff there and you can find us there and you can contact us there and we'd love it if you do.
If you're nice.
If you're not nice, we'd hate it if you did.
I mean, I get people who aren't nice emailing me, and I just kind of, you know, I'm not nice back.
That's kind of the way it goes.
But, you know, that's life, right?
Well, you're alienating them.
You should... You get what you give.
It's kind of the, you know, like, come and be nice, and I'll be nice.
You can be a racist and be nice to me.
And I will actually be nice back.
I will actually take your concern seriously.
I will mock your, like, stupid ideas because, as we know, fascism is a loser ideology.
