All Episodes
Aug. 14, 2019 - I Don't Speak German
57:58
Episode 27: A History of White Nationalism in the Pacific Northwest

This week, Daniel talks to journalists Shane Burley and Alexander Reid Ross about white nationalism in the Pacific Northwest. Content warnings.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
All right, and welcome to episode 27 of I Don't Speak German, a podcast in which I talk about the terrible, terrible things that people who want to commit mass murder say to each other when they think no one like me is listening.
Today, Jack will not be joining us, as usual, because he's got a life.
But I am joined by not one, but two brilliant, wonderful journalists who have each written books on these irrelevant topics.
I'm joined by Alexander Reed Ross and Shane Burley.
Say hello, guys.
Howdy.
Hey, thanks for having us on.
Oh, no, not at all.
I mean, obviously, I always kind of feel bad about reaching out to people, mostly because I feel like nobody wants to do my dinky little podcast.
But this is definitely something nice for me, and I think the audience will appreciate it as well, because you both individually, and I presume together, know far more about the particular topic that I'm hoping we're going to kind of hover around, and that is the history of white nationalism, far-right extremism, in the Pacific Northwest specifically.
I get a lot of requests to kind of discuss these kinds of topics, and honestly, I'm just not as plugged into that as I would like to be, and so I think this is going to be kind of a casual chat, but I think hopefully we can kind of cover a lot of those issues on the show.
So yeah, I guess we should just get started.
We'll kind of do the plugs at the end, if that's okay with everybody.
Who wants to start?
What's important to know about the history of white nationalism in, say, Oregon?
To pick a state at random.
Sasha, you want to riff on Oregon?
Yeah, I mean, I think like with the, you know, the most obvious part of the history of Oregon is that it was established as a white nationalist state.
It was established as a totally exclusionary, you know, white man's utopia, partly as a way of avoiding the problems of the Civil War.
I think people who established the Constitution of Oregon were extremely racist, and they didn't want to get dragged into questions that were brought with non-white populations.
Basically, they created this state as a place where white people could go and basically commit genocide and create their kind of like new colonial, pseudo-European homeland.
Yeah, you know, I think it's really important to go back to that original situation, because it plays out into a lot of the dynamics that Oregon has today, even its kind of liberal politics.
So, like, the fact that it was intensely white and an intensely colonial experience, it meant that, like, when the West in general, but Oregon specifically, became such a home for progressive Uh, politics are what was kind of called the progressive era.
That progressivism, that kind of populism that happened in the late 1800s and early 20th century, that really ended up being wrapped up in Chinese exclusion, eugenics, the development of the Klan in the 1920s.
And so there, while there was like this image of it as developing a progressive politic, one that was kind of democratic or mass inclusionary, It was really founded on a white-specific model, and it's one that, because they maintained those demographics, never really lost that white blind spot.
And I think as it takes us up into more current times, when we have issues like gentrification and income inequality around tech and stuff in Portland and the rest of Oregon, it's actually maintained that dimension of, while it's progressive on the one hand, it's really, really racially exclusionary and kind of maintains a lot of those white supremacist undertones, even in contemporary politics now.
Right, yeah, no, I mean, and you see that, I mean, you know, there's a strong kind of nimbyism that you see kind of around these sorts of issues.
And, you know, like, you know, the sort of idea of, you know, kind of non-whites being dirty or sort of bringing in like the wrong element or whatever, which just sort of, you know, it's like history isn't really the past.
History is like physics.
It's the world in which we live is infected by that history.
And so clearly, I mean, you know, moving outside of, you know, kind of Oregon specifically, I think that, you know, people have this idea, this kind of generalized idea of sort of, you know, Portland and Spokane and Olympia and Seattle as being these kind of like bastions of kind of, you know, left Portland and Spokane and Olympia and Seattle as being these kind of like bastions of kind of, you know, left wing, you know, verging towards a kind of DSA type thought in a lot of ways and a lot of issues in this kind of a
And yet outside of the kind of major metropolitan areas, I mean, that's just really not true at all.
And in fact, But Beginning I guess of what the late 60s early 70s you start to see like really serious far-right white separatist Organizations forming in in that kind of general area in Idaho and Montana and etc if I'm remembering my history correctly Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Spokane, and that's funny, because Spokane actually typically votes Republican, even though it is the major city.
And interestingly enough, it's one of the only, if not the only, major city that does this, even in the Deep South.
Uh, cities tend to vote Democratic.
Um, and the interesting thing here is, uh, related to the districts, uh, the suburbs around the city of Spokane have perhaps more power than the city itself.
And you see a lot of this spatial differentiation and political composition throughout the Pacific Northwest, just like you do in the rest of the country, where suburban areas are more conservative than the urban areas.
Oregon specifically has the Willamette Valley, which is typically more sort of cosmopolitan.
It's west of the Cascades, gets more rain.
Similar thing with Washington, west of the Cascades you have the more liberal areas.
Then once you get out east of the Cascades, you're in the high desert.
The populations there have lived there for a long time.
They're not going to change their ways.
You know, they're pretty just sort of like stalwart sort of Christian conservative communities out there.
And I don't want to say set in their own ways, but you know, they're more traditional communities out there.
And I think that that plays into a lot of this sort of like geopolitical context of our current political crisis in the Northwest.
Yeah, I also think it's there's a certain amount of going with the trends that I think fit the Northwest really well, starting in the 60s and 70s, when there was like a really intense focus on a certain type of rural living and this narrative about protecting that rural experience.
And so that played really big in just the really early posse comitatus militia movements in the 70s.
So like in Oregon, and we just worked on kind of a paper over the last year on some of this, but you know, the silver shirt leader of Portland, so the silver shirts being like a big Nazi borderline paramilitary group in the 30s, That was coming alongside of the German-American boon.
Henry Beach, you know, he went to jail for a lot of his participation in these groups, but then re-emerged around that time, propping back up the militia movement.
He wasn't really involved in something that really mirrored that before, but he could see the writing on the wall and see that that kind of narrative and that their ability to mix kind of economic, rural resentment with racialized politics, that was like a winning formula for them.
In a lot of ways those issues that they've united those kind of the far-right cultural issues along with that kind of rural experience that's had a lot of cachet for a lot of years and it continues to happen as you see like rural parts of the state of Oregon or even Washington really getting hit economically and so crisis continues and then the militias are there to help perpetuate themselves by offering services and connections and support and that kind of thing.
So it ended up being kind of a self-reinforcing cycle.
Sure, yeah.
I mentioned Spokane mostly because I've been listening to Matt Shea's show and the Radio Free Redoubt guys.
I've been kind of plugging into that a little bit.
And just the pure venom that, what's his name, John Jacob Schmidt uses when he says the word Spokane.
It's a chef's kiss for me every time.
You know, the awful liberals in Spokane who are not real Christian patriot types.
Anyway, I guess you guys could also talk to that guy.
I've been listening for a couple of months ever since Jason Wilson published a couple of pieces on him and kind of put him on my radar.
But I do notice that a lot of the stuff that's out there...
You see, you know, we've kind of talked about this a little bit, and this is kind of a big-picture generalized thing, but a lot of the kind of major, like, quote-unquote alt-right figures that I've kind of put a lot of energy into are mostly, you know, sort of East Coast, Northeast, you know, kind of Midwestern at most.
And then you have the kind of Southern Nationalist figures who are, you know, in the Americans in the Deep South.
And then out West you see a lot more.
I mean you do see a That that's kind of like traditionally alt-right guy I mean there are alt-right figures who are in that region But that doesn't seem to be the dominant flavor to me.
It seems to be much more this kind of like Christian militant Patriot movement type It's like they haven't kind of gotten with the new paradigm to some degree and I'm kidding you would you would you disagree with that?
Or do you think that I've kind of like accurately represented it and if so either way kind of what would be the reasons for that?
I mean, I think the reason is just the less density of cities.
Like, the alt-right's really like a college city phenomenon.
I mean, you have some big alt-right folks and folks that come out here because they want a different demographic.
You know, it's whiter in Oregon than it is in You know, like Maryland or something.
But, you know, so you have, like, Greg Johnson from Counter-Currents coming up in Seattle, but formerly of the Bay Area, and you have some people in those constellations.
It gets a little weirder in that crowd out here.
There's a lot more mix of, like, eco-politics, a lot more, like, third position and stuff out here, because they don't have that history of, like, aristocracy to play on that, like, someone like Jared Taylor has with that fake accent and everything.
Um, but I think, you know, it's really, like, there are separate lineages in a lot of ways.
Like, the alt-right folks really wouldn't do as much interaction with the Patriot militia movement, I think in a way because they look down on it so much.
And particularly the fact that it tries to code its language so much that they feel like it can be harmful.
So it's not quite as I mean, they certainly there's no interaction.
That's certainly not the case.
But I think it does the emphasize.
I think it's also like the practical politics of it.
People are trying to center around D.C. and the areas around D.C. as if that's going to be some kind of power center for the alt-right.
Right.
I mean, certainly, you know, I always see sort of the alt-right as kind of growing out of that paleo-conservative, paleo-libertarian think-tank stuff, you know, tacky smag American conservative.
I mean, that's where the term was formed, ultimately.
Richard Spencer is a creature of that swamp, to use the terrible language there, but, you know, he is a creature of that particular region.
And, you know, sort of the American West just doesn't sort of interact in the same way, despite the fact that Richard Spencer obviously has a home in, you know, in Whitefish, Montana.
There's a strong kind of connection there as well.
Yeah, no, sorry, I'm babbling.
I tend to do that on my own show, it happens.
I think you need to also take into account the history of the activist right in the Northwest.
We have the history of the Wise Youth Movement here, where the Patriot groups really sprung up through the Sagebrush Rebellion, from New Mexico to Arizona to Utah.
up here and we also, we're kind of part of the Great Basin in the high desert there in eastern Oregon and the Mormon cultural region.
So there are these kinds of embedded far right-wing groups coming out of anti-environmentalist politics, coming out of like pro-industry What's that?
Anti-union politics.
Yeah, anti-union, but like you were saying, still using those kinds of like, you know, loggers for, you know, economic prosperity kind of language.
And I think that it's really kind of like the new right, you know, the sort of Paul Weyrich kind of think tanks of the 1970s.
Really kind of invested a lot in the Northwest in opposition to environmentalism in opposition to unionism And I think that that still really shows and that legacy is still really here And you saw it with after Bunkerville with the sugar pine mine occupation with the Malheur wildlife refuge occupation and And and so and you're right these are two like parallel tracks that aren't often intersecting you didn't see the alt-right showing up in
You know, in camo hats at the Malheur occupation.
Right.
But you do see them west of the Cascades.
You see them west of the Cascades in their, you know, Discord chat rooms and, you know, promoting These somewhat isolated politics of bioregionalism and national socialism as opposed to anti-environmentalism and anti-unionism.
So you kind of have these two contending generations of New Right.
There's the old's new right, and then there's the new new right, and they're not necessarily compatible.
Yeah, and Drake Johnson used to have this term, I think it was West Coast White Nationalism, which was like if you were, you know, if you had purple hair and you were vegan and you cared a lot about, like, animal rights, but you also were a white nationalist.
You know, that was like his kind of thing you wanted to build up with.
It's kind of erudite in a way, but it's artsier.
It's more kind of like based in that particular region, but it's also this thing that, um, That Richard Spencer would talk about a lot would be like swivel culture just stuff white people like things that he thinks are like implicitly white which in a lot of ways are sort of like hallmarks of like a liberal wealthy urban area craft beers and like It's a scooter culture.
Right, right.
Those sorts of things that he thinks are actually racial signifiers.
I think we would, on the left, actually talk about those things as being kind of, you know, signals of gentrification or class conflict in a way.
But they kind of pick up on that, too, and say, oh, actually, there's an implicit whiteness to it.
Oh, yeah, the implicit whiteness stuff is always fascinating because it's ultimately like, well, you know, when you think about a grunge band, you think about a white guy.
And so, therefore, you know, these things are ultimately, it's just, it's white.
You know, Enoch is someone that, everybody listening to this knows I have spent a lot of time on Mike Enoch.
He talks about that all the time, probably not as much today, but like a year ago, he was just all in on that.
You know, everything was implicitly white, and it's a way of kind of reaching out to people who would call themselves at least sort of like vaguely anti-racist.
It was like, oh, I'm not racist, but, you know, I like my clean suburbs as opposed to, you know, the dirty inner city, etc, etc.
I've heard it called, like, crunchy nationalism, you know, the crunchy con stuff where, you know, where it's a little bit more, um, you know, the stuff that gets associated with hippies, ultimately, but it's like, no, we're the white, clean, white nationalist hippies, you know, who carry AK-47s or AR-15s.
That's who we are.
And they're kind of picking up on something real, which is the implicit racism in a lot of these liberal spaces.
You know, that's a very real dynamic that they're not being untrue about.
They just obviously see it differently.
They don't want to challenge it.
They want to stoke that and use that as a seed point.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Well, no, I mean, it's also relatively ahistorical, right?
I mean...
If these people knew history, they wouldn't be white nationalists.
Right, right.
I mean, the United States, you know, the basis of, you know, our culture here in the United States is steeped in, you know, multi-racial, multi-ethnic cooperation and solidarity, oftentimes, or in a lot of instances on pure cultural appropriation.
And they love to sort of cling to that and say that, you know, everything is cultural appropriation of white people.
If you're going to use that language, we can use it too.
But in so doing, they just sort of water down or completely annihilate the meaning behind everything.
And that's basically, you know, what Sartre observed in The Anti-Semite, just basically reversing everything until the absurdity is just brought to such a head that There's nothing anybody can do except for violence, because the rational discourse has been completely depleted by this kind of over-emotional and hysterical self-absorption.
So, I think that, you know, it's important to discuss what the white nationalists are talking about, what the fascists are saying, where they're coming from, but it's also important to recognize that You know, debating them on those terms is always a losing game.
You know, it's always getting increasingly into debt in these, you know, in the impoverishment of their ideas.
The only thing that they have to back it up is pure force and violence against people who are more vulnerable than they are.
So, yeah, I think here in the Pacific Northwest, you hear a lot of this kind of, the rationality for their hate, and it just, you know, it's only there to drive you crazy.
That's all Joey Gibson ever really does, apologizes for the hatred of white nationalism.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, there's always a lie at the course of these arguments.
To start presenting those kind of simple arguments is to suggest that any kind of multiracial community actually has an implicit, like, white nationalist motivations underlying, and that it would actually be smarter and more accurate to kind of stoke those and realize them.
And it's a way of kind of reframing every moment of progress so that they have that control of the narrative.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
It does seep into the culture to a certain degree.
We do have to acknowledge that implicit gentrification, that implicit white racism that goes into building a lot of these structures and the way that that influences the way that they can use this rhetoric to push people ever further into
You know, an overt fascism, an overt white nationalism, even as far as, you know, kind of genocidal exterminationist rhetoric, and that that's just kind of seen as okay, as long as, you know, we can sort of, like, dehumanize the other two to that degree, and we're not, we're not getting rid of, we're not genociding Mexican people or Hispanic people, we're just, you know, they broke the law, and we're just gonna put them outside of our purview.
Moving on from that, I think that one of the interesting things historically is the overt white separatist movements, the movements like the World Aryan Congress, people like the Northwest Imperative, which we've covered a bit on this podcast in the past, but I think we can kind of go over that ground in a little bit more detail if anybody has any kind of Thoughts about that particular kind of segment of the history of white nationalism in the Pacific Northwest?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a center in the Aryan Nations compound, or what was the Aryan Nations compound in northern Idaho, which was essentially a center of Christian identity, kind of a racist reinterpretation of Christianity with white people as the lost tribes of Israel and non-white peoples as not being equally human and Jews being literally descended from the devil.
There was that kind of revolutionary motivation, particularly around moving people out to the Northwest.
I'm being involved in what were increasingly violent movements around the Aryan Nations compound which led to a lot of terrorist actions like the order and eventually the development of the Aryan Brotherhood of prison gangs and things like that.
I mean the the Aryan Nations compound was destroyed through a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center after some of their members attacked someone that was driving by and that really took Take a major hit on that kind of sector of it, and I don't see it as quite as organized and developing that kind of militancy, and they're also really disconnected from a few other sectors.
They were very connected to the militia movement, and so there was that increased radicalization happening there, but they're not nearly as connected to the alt-right or the more kind of pseudo-intellectual forms of white nationalism.
So in a lot of ways, it kind of went out of vogue, but that didn't mean it disappeared.
And in Northern Idaho, you still have a lot of these enclaves, both along with that and also like radical traditionalist Catholics and other kind of separatists that have maintained that kind of those dense communities in Northern Idaho.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think about where white separatism really comes from, right?
Because when we were doing our research on the Silver Shirts and the Bund, I mean, these groups were really talking about a white republic, and they were talking about exterminating Jews.
I mean, let's be clear about that.
But, you know... This is in, like, the 30s and 40s, effectively.
Right.
Well, especially the 30s.
And so we're talking about what Nazis wanted to do in this original form, and I'm not entirely sure it was white separatist in the way that The Aryan nations was I think what happened was when the United States went to war against Japan and Germany, they felt even more sort of isolated from the power centers of the US government.
And after World War Two, the same people who were put up on sedition charges for supporting Nazis, were then, you know, basically released into the wilds of the Northwest, and they thought, you know, as, you know, they were the inheritors of the anti-interventionist America First tradition, They thought that the United States' intervention against the Nazis was criminal.
They thought that the creation of the State of Israel was absolutely off the wall.
And they were, you know, determined to overthrow what they saw as the Zionist-occupied government.
And I think that's really the turning point in the 50s and 60s where you have these the first generation of fascists sort of handing off the baton to this next generation of fascists as a militant.
Revolutionary nationalist project to overthrow the government of the United States and instate a kind of, you know, a kind of confederation where, you know, in the case of the Aryan nations, the Pacific Northwest would become a kind of territorial imperative for the preservation of the white race in the world.
Yeah, I think there's a certain kind of process of increased radicalization from what, like Sasha was saying, the 1930s up to the 1960s, 70s, and then especially in the early 80s.
Kathleen Belew just wrote a book on this called Bring the War Home about the white power movement.
I have recommended that book in at least five episodes of this podcast.
But there's an interesting process by which, being on either side of the civil rights movement, beforehand, the rhetoric is fundamentally different.
It's about re-influencing the federal government, taking it back in a certain sense, influencing the public, using certain kinds of rhetoric.
And after it, it's increasingly revolutionary, about as if this institution of the federal government can no longer be saved.
It has to be overthrown and replaced.
And so you have this increasingly radical white power movement in the 80s that's based fundamentally around the idea of terrorism as the only act that can perceive change.
And so I think there is what we see in the Aryan Nations is that kind of, well, at least the peak of that particular movement.
And so I think there is what we see in the Aryan Nations is that kind of, well, at least the peak of that particular movement.
But that kind of modality moved up through the 80s.
But that kind of modality moved up through the 80s.
You know, like one thing, another besides the militia movement, another kind of working class white nationalist movement that was really heavy in Oregon were like white power skinheads in the 80s and early 90s.
Which is, I think people, in a way, kind of forget how heavy it was.
I was talking with some anti-racist activists from the 80s that were there in the early 80s.
And they were talking about how entire blocks were controlled by them, entire like buildings, like gangs were numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands in parts of Portland.
And so we're talking about a really major, major, major violent force.
And this was entirely based around the idea that violence was sanctified as the only potential way forward to reclaim whatever, like, internalized ideologies that they had.
And so I think, like, the way that that movement, they kind of culminated in the 80s and 90s, it's really that process of seeing the kind of failures of their movements before and feeling as though they've lost something really profound.
And then doubling down on that.
And in a lot of ways that process plays itself out again and again.
Right now we're seeing a huge rash of lone wolf attacks that come right after a slightly more mainstream version of their movement has declined.
The alt-right hit a point of decline and that leads to increased instability and therefore impulsive violence seems to make sense within their ranks.
Yeah, I think that's a really excellent point, and just putting it in context in the Pacific Northwest of economics, I think that you can often find variations of the form that white nationalism takes with different economic trends that are located just prior to or concurrently with the transformations.
So, like, when you talk about the rise of Posse Comitatus in the 1970s and early 80s, we have also, you know, the oil shocks, the debt crisis, and the farm crisis.
And if you look, for example, at Ruby Ridge, The person who was sort of hold up in Ruby Ridge had been a tractor dealer in, you know, I think it was Iowa or something like that, maybe Indiana, and then moved west because, you know, the farms went belly up.
And so there's a direct connection between the farm crisis and people moving out to the Northwest in order to create their kind of like live-off-the-land white utopia after the collapse of the agricultural sector and the small farms during that period.
Similarly, the white nationalist skinheads in Portland and in the urban areas in the Northwest, you have the post-Fordist sort of collapse of the factory economies throughout the United States.
And what that did was that it really stimulated this kind of anger, this white rage among the young working class who were sort of half in, half out, or mostly outside of the punk movement, you know, and were sort of interested in creating like white unions and
Uh, getting power for the working class at the expense of immigrants who they believed were taking the jobs and really driving the post-Fordist, uh, transformation, structural transformation of the, uh, United States economy.
And at the same time, blaming Jews for being behind the whole thing, right?
For being the elitists, pulling the strings and deracinating people by moving immigrants around and that sort of thing.
And so I think in in both of these cases, you have this demand for control and and power, right?
This this need to seize kind of autonomy in the case of moving out into the wilderness and creating your own kind of compound or a kind of white sort of ethnic identity as a form of solidarity to combat global economic processes.
Well, it's a response to a very real precarity that...
That's kind of the thing that ultimately you kind of can't ignore with this stuff.
I mean, the farm crisis of the late 70s and early 80s leads directly into people feeling a need to take back what's theirs, and they blame the easily scapegoated.
I mean, you know, bankers turns to Jews.
Ultimately, the bank took my land.
I can't, like, you know, my only option is to go and blame, blow up a synagogue or, you know, whatever.
Which obviously I'm not I'm not encouraging that I mean I'm but but that's the that's the kind of the thought process that we see and I and I do I do find yeah I didn't know that Randy Weaver was it was a tractor salesman in the in the Midwest that's that's a really interesting detail that he just you know like literally his own personal finances just collapsed due to the farm crisis and that that led to Him moving out there and the whole process that became Ruby Ridge and that whole, like, fucked up situation.
Anyway, sorry Shane, go ahead.
I was saying, you know, it's it's I think it's kind of what fascism scholar Robert Paxton called like the motivating passions.
In a lot of ways, those are some of the same features that the left, the organized left would draw on, talking about economic precarity, economic inequality, serious issues and working class survival.
We're talking about the industrialization, but also a period with an attack on unions.
So wages are dropping and stable living is dropping.
Yeah, and then you also mentioned war, right?
Oregon's costs are starting to increase as people start to become more aware of it in different sectors.
So we're actually talking about a space in which also left-wing movements are growing really, really rapidly, and then playing a direct contrast to the far right, which are using a lot of the same rhetoric so that they're racializing it and playing on resentment rather than a larger liberation framework.
- Yeah, and then you also mentioned war, right?
Bring the war home, I think, a lot of that is about veterans, isn't it?
- Yeah, yeah, definitely.
- Yeah, people coming home from Vietnam, So people who had experienced war, but also kind of experienced the crisis that was Vietnam.
Particularly the crisis of faith in the federal government.
It centers around Louis Beam and his role in the leaderless resistance kind of stuff.
Yeah, and Timothy McVeigh.
Timothy McVeigh was in the military.
Yeah, he described in his diaries, he described being out in the heat and seeing the horrors of the first Gulf War and finding it senseless and meaningless and that very much was the experience he described being out in the heat and seeing the horrors of the Finding it senseless and meaningless, and that very much was the experience that radicalized him.
And even now, even in the alt-right, you see a lot of the figures, prominent figures, are people who have served in our current occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, you know, this is certainly not a phenomenon that went away.
But McVeigh is sort of an interesting figure, at least the place to go with this.
Because it does strike me that a lot of the turn away from the overt kind of white separatist white nationalist stuff not that it went away but the the sort of like the the way that the the the Patriot movement kind of rebranded was sort of a response to McVeigh that they had to stop being quite so openly racist and so they suddenly started kind of rebranding themselves as kind of a Libertarian types.
Libertarian patriots and that sort of thing.
If we have any thoughts on that general process or they personally.
Well that transformation had been a long time coming.
I mean you started to see changes in the tone and approach of.
The far right, you know, even after World War II, the kind of, I want to say like one of the architects of modern conspiracy theories, Pedro Del Valle was, interestingly enough, a decorated military officer who fought in the Pacific Theater, and he was also Puerto Rican.
But if you go down to the University of Oregon and look through his archives, he's In touch with all literally all of the of the Nazi leaders of the 60s.
And while he is sort of attempting to present a kind of moderating presence on the right with his newsletter Task Force, which Strom Thurmond contributed to regularly.
He's also talking about, you know, we need to reestablish the White Republic or else we'll all be slaves of Zionism.
He recommends that his readers in Task Force, he recommends that his readers read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is obviously a very anti-Semitic conspiracy theory tract.
And he goes into all of the same kinds of neighborhoods that Alex Jones does in terms of, you know, Identifying the One World Government as the new world order of, you know, evil and destruction.
So, you know, you have this transformation in the post-war period, I'd say from, like Shane was saying, from the, you know, 30s to the 60s, where people start to adjust to sort of Conceal vitriolic racism, white nationalism, ethno-separatism within conspiracy theories.
And the conspiracy theories become this vector by the 70s through which Posse Comitatus and Militia of Montana later on can really kind of try to operationalize racism without explicitly using it.
And so by the time we get to Timothy McVeigh, he was actually sort of kicked out of a couple of militias, if I'm not mistaken, because he was recommending everybody read the Turner Diaries, you know, a Nazi, extremely violent novel.
And the militias by that time had kind of taken a step back, even though they were still organizing, you know, with people like Louis Beam or Tom Metzger from White Aryan Resistance.
Yeah, I think we shouldn't ignore the fact that political rhetoric in the 80s and early 90s went through a really dramatic transformation on the right in general, and the development of things like the Southern Strategy into the 80s and the use of strong code words by the moral majority and the Reagan-Reid coalitions and things like that, especially the development of paleoconservatism,
And so there was a really strong era of like there's no need to use explicitly racialized language when we have coded racialized language that will signal to people the same thing and develop the exact same narratives.
And then we used a lot of those racialized narratives then to mobilize people against all kinds of institutions.
You know, the narratives of parasites was used to destroy unions, particularly public sector unions.
It was used to motivate people against social services.
It was, you know, motivated to get people motivated against I guess tax increases on the rich.
And so there was a really intense effort on changing the way that those were discussed.
And now we're talking about, you know, 20 years past that, in which different generations of the militia movement exist today, that were raised not on the explicit racial rhetoric of Posse Comitatus, but the more muted rhetoric that developed in the 90s.
And so, like, they are talking in racialized terms, but they weren't kind of Uh, raised on that explicitness of it.
And so it's been a few steps removed on how that's happened, but I think it should be important to say that, you know, make no mistake, this is absolutely a racialized discourse from start to finish.
It's just been so well, thoroughly metaphorized, um, that it's not always immediately obvious and it has a lot of plausible deniability, which has allowed it to continue to have certain political footholds in different parts of the country, particularly with, like, local politicians at the county level.
Yeah, and I think that this is really important in context of the alt-right, you know, because the alt-right is the group that says, why don't we just come out and say what we've been meaning this whole time?
And, you know, on one level, they're not wrong that this is what those sort of code words and dog whistles have been meaning.
But on the other end of that, they then try to claim everything as a dog whistle, right?
So they try to saturate discourse with this kind of ever-present and neurotic sense that, you know, dog whistles are happening and you're not understanding what people really think and that kind of stuff.
Even as they say everything, you know, that they mean fully publicly.
And I think that by doing that, they have helped to, they have tried to shift the Overton window and make these kinds of, you know, racist, sexist, ableist sentiments more palatable, in a way, for a mass audience.
And unfortunately, I don't think that mainstream media has been equipped to recognize this process.
And often, you know, you find people like Jake Tapper just sort of rolling out a red carpet for the whole thing to seem very normal.
Yeah, it's almost as though, like, the militia movement and other far-right people spent 30 years sneaking white nationalist ideas into the mainstream and the alt-right just pulled the sheet off of it and said, see, this is what you've already accepted, you should take it now, and started to validate it.
And I think, I mean, I think that's had mixed effectiveness on their movements as movements, but I think it's been pretty clear that they've influenced public discourse and also public policy in a lot of ways, even if their movements are dwindling as, you know, specific organizations.
Well yeah, I mean, you know, it's kind of like the joke of, you know, Ben Shapiro kind of comes out, I can't be alt-right, I'm Jewish.
And look, I agree, Ben Shapiro is not alt-right.
In fact, there's no one the alt-right hates more than Ben Shapiro, I think.
You know, certainly in 2017, it was, I don't think anyone got more hate from the sectors I was following.
I'm sorry, what's that?
Wasn't there a daily show, a skit, every week about Ben Shapiro?
Oh yeah, no, no, Sven would do, like, Ben Shapiro, he does a pretty good Ben Shapiro impression, and so he would, you know, constantly do, you know, just do a little bit about, he'd pretend to be Ben Shapiro for a three minute
Comedy sketch so yeah, I know that that's really and that's really common I could I could cut all that I can't cut a bunch of those together if anybody ever wants to listen to that like terrible thing, but but yeah, no and then but but the Ben Shapiro then gets to claim, you know, I'm not a far-right figure because these other guys who I like wholeheartedly reject White supremacy and white nationalism.
I'm just saying that Arabs like to live in sewage, and therefore I'm not as far right as those guys are.
And so there is this kind of push-pull that happens within the discourse, within our sort of mainstream discourse, despite the fact that ultimately the alt-right is very tiny in terms of numbers.
But they have this huge kind of outsized influence online and because they're able to like kind of code their language in certain ways and because they're exposing very real flaws and movement conservatism, you know, they do they are able to shift things and I find that that that push and pull.
Between these kind of more mainstream quote-unquote mainstream groups and the kind of beyond the pale daily showotypes to be kind of a really interesting dynamic that I'm not sure how that plays in sort of the Pacific Northwest kind of local politics necessarily.
Yeah, I think like, you know, white nationalism in general tends to be a good critique on conservatism by saying explicitly what they only signal at, and then being able to effectively call them on implicit racism.
I mean, Richard Spencer may be the most adept person to call Republican politicians saying, nope, that was actually racially coded language.
They were actually saying this, and his entire career is built on differentiating himself From the conservative movement that he thought operated too much within the bounds of, you know, respectful leftist discourse of equality and multiracialism.
And so, like, in a way, they've built their entire brand and their appeal on the inconsistencies in the conservative movement.
But actually, in doing so, what they've done is just push the level of extremity out more so that the conservative movement itself actually has more ability to recruit and more ability to follow the terms that the white nationalists have set for them.
Yeah, but you also see them, you know, appropriating left-wing critiques of liberalism as well as conservatism.
You know, I think that they pay very close attention to what the left is saying so that they can, you know, stay up on the discourse and intercede in ways that feature white nationalism alongside.
So you get like what the El Paso shooter had in his alleged manifesto, which is basically, you know, we need to carve out Separatist enclaves for different, you know, races, and have all white, you know, state.
And, and this is kind of like a discourse that can function alongside the like, different sort of black nationalists or ethno separatists from that are sometimes accepted by, you know, odd sects of the left.
Right, you know, there is a sort of, you know, where, you know, who gets along with the Ho-Teps better than, you know, the Skinheads in some ways, because they both kind of want the same thing.
It's just separation, but, you know, with obviously different kinds of power dynamics involved, and, you know, there's a long discourse there.
Don't worry, we're going to be covering a, we're going to be doing a Nos Bowl episode pretty soon, which will kind of cover a lot of the, a lot of those kinds of figures.
I know we're kind of reaching close to an hour and I do want to talk a little bit about the Redoubt movement and Matt Shea, if you guys have any particular thoughts about that kind of stuff.
I don't know if you, I assume you guys have both listened to the second season of Bundyville?
Yeah, I just started listening to it.
I haven't gotten through a bunch of it yet.
Yeah, Matt Shea is featured pretty heavily in one of the episodes of that show, which I thought both the first season and particularly the second season were really very well done, so I'll put a link to the show notes here, but do you have thoughts about that particular kind of group or that particular sect?
Anything that I should know in terms of me following them around?
Well, I think actually one thing that's really important is that while Matt Shea doesn't tend to make national news, It is an intensive battle in the Spokane area and organizations in the Spokane area have been counter organizing and really aggressive for a long time.
It's also in a lot of ways presented a cover for what is explicit white nationalists in the area have gotten into like the Whitman County Republican Party and tried to shake things up, use basically the fact that a lot of these local parties aren't well guarded.
And so it's in a way like Matt Shea has created an entry for parts of the militia movement, but it's not just Matt Shea.
There's a whole kind of constellation of people really trying to use local Republican office around there to push a much more extreme politic.
And a lot of ways, I think the question we should be asking is, are they trying to affect politics, or are they using political institutions as a way to affect mass movements?
And I think that's think that's an important question to actually present about white nationalists in general when they kind of flirt with the public office or with the legal institutions.
I don't know, Sasha, you got thoughts on Matt Shea?
Yeah, I got a few.
I mean, yeah, throw them at me.
Well, I think Matt Shea is, you know, he has to be thought about in terms of larger transnational networks as well.
um Him and ALSEP, right?
I think that we need to think about... No, James ALSEP is the member from Identity Europa that took over a Whitman County Republican Party seat.
Right.
Yeah, precinct officer or something, right?
Like, yeah, some low-level administrative position.
But, yeah, we've done an episode on Allsep and Fuentes already.
Allsep is closely connected to The Right Stuff, the Daily Show, those kind of guys.
He's absolutely, like, in that group, but he pretends not to be, and has a half million subscribers on YouTube, which is just amazing.
So, yeah, he's someone I follow around pretty well already.
But, yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, I think that, you know, we need to think about those two together in a way.
I think that Shay connects more with the sort of hinterland breed of the white separatists and the Patriot movement, also being more of the sort of coastal alt-right type.
But at the same time, they're both, you know, entering the Republican Party in ways that are completely unacceptable.
And while Shea has only had his sort of committee rights revoked, he probably poses more of a danger, given his place in the party, which is higher than
Also, as well as his, it appears his commitment to literally promoting direct violence against activists in Spokane.
The biblical basis for war is effectively a Christian identity, race war argument.
It's almost explicitly that.
Right, right.
I'll go ahead.
No, I mean, I was just going to say, I know that activists in Spokane are doing everything that they can to intervene here, but this is like one of the biggest sort of problems in the entire country.
It's not given enough attention, and as we saw most recently, it appears that this very violent, ultra-nationalist group, The Base, Is going to the Spokane area in order to conduct some kinds of military training.
So, yeah.
Lovely!
Yeah, we have a serious issue here in Eastern Oregon, Eastern Washington with the potential of fascist training camps.
Yeah.
I think with Matt Shea and also represent kind of an issue that happens in a lot of GOPs, particularly in otherwise kind of blue states, whereby it's hard to create a real strong groundswell of support, particularly with like a GOP that's kind of faltering in its ideology.
You know, we had the The Bush years and then a lot of inconsistency about what the party was going to be.
And even now with Trump is still a kind of internal squabble, even though he's clearly winning the ideological war internal to it.
But where you get a groundswell of conservative energy is around things like the militia movement in those areas.
And so in a way, you have to actually appeal to that to have any energy in primaries and to make a name for yourself as a minority party and politicians that are leaders in minority parties.
So, for example, recently in Oregon, There was an issue where a bunch of Republican, like local politicians, walked out of the state legislature and refused to meet quorums so that legislation could be passed.
And so what happened in Oregon is there was a supermajority of Democrats.
They wanted to pass a bunch of progressive legislation.
The Republicans left the state because otherwise they would be legally compelled to return by the police.
And then basically put out a bunch of communique saying things like, you know, if you want to send the police for us, you better send bachelors and basically intimating that they were going to murder a bunch of police officers, that kind of thing.
And then you get the militia movement to offer protection for them and stage public rallies and stuff.
Now, whether or not they are one in the same, the militia movement and the GOP there, I think is in a way not as important as the fact that the GOP has adopted the kind of gravitas of the militia movement because it plays so well in those areas.
And they can such huge heroes for doing this in different parts of that, likely securing most of them their primary seats in the next election.
So there's a certain kind of far rightization of local parties, and it makes it incredibly easy to mobilize people.
Because in a lot of ways, centrist Republican language, that doesn't motivate anyway.
I mean, I don't think centrism really motivates anyone anytime.
But what really does motivate people in those areas is far right rhetoric that speaks exactly to the angst that they're having.
So they're able to do that incredibly well in eastern Oregon and eastern Washington.
In a lot of ways, in northern California, it has some of that as well.
Yeah, I know.
It makes sense. - Yeah, I've got a lot of reasons.
Uh, so yeah, we're kind of getting close to an hour.
I mean, you know, we're having fun, but I just kind of, uh, I would like to, uh, just kind of give you guys, uh, the chance to, uh, kind of put anything out there that you'd like to, um, that maybe we haven't, uh, talked about.
Also, um, there's a big, uh, kind of gaping hole here.
We have not discussed, uh, Patriot Prayer and the, uh, kind of the street violence in Portland.
There's a whole episode that's coming up on that, so we're just gonna table that for now.
It's a big, important thing, and I apologize we're not covering it yet.
There's always another episode of this podcast coming, so Is there anything that either of you would like to kind of add or to kind of point out or to ask me about or whatever before we kind of wrap up the show here?
I think, you know, just using this kind of framework of the relationship between the far right and the GOP in Washington and in Oregon, we can also look at the history of the Pacific Northwest and see that this is not, like, novel or unique.
And in fact, in the 1930s, there were fascist supported groups, groups that supported fascism that were very much above ground, and that were functioning very much with the support of politicians from, you know, the mayor of Portland up to the governor of Oregon.
So we do have this record, going back into the, from say, 35 to 41, of Significant fascist groups in Portland supported by major politicians.
And this wasn't, you know, your KKK mass movement of the 1920s.
These were groups that were relatively secretive and that functioned on kind of an elitist level.
So, you know, I think what we're seeing right now in terms of the participation of the conservative right with The fascist movement, in some cases, is not far away from what was going on in the late 30s during the peak of interwar fascism in the United States.
Yeah, I think also, like, we didn't really talk about the Klan in Oregon in the 1920s, but Oregon was the second largest Klan population in the country.
And I think what people oftentimes mistake the first era Klan, shortly after the Civil War, and the third era Klan that was kind of marked by, like, paramilitary terrorism in the 60s, and then later, like, the fourth era David Duke Klan.
The second era Klan really, in a lot of ways, was a mass kind of populist right-wing movement.
Right.
that had a lot of above ground features and a lot of connections in mainstream institutions, mainstream politics.
In a lot of ways, what we have with things like Patriot Prairie, as you mentioned, but really kind of the diaspora of right wing groups all across the state and in these western states is a lot closer to the 1920s clan and how they develop communities, particularly around economically aggrieved white communities in eastern and southern particularly around economically aggrieved white communities in eastern and southern parts of the state.
And so I think that dynamic that was presented earlier in Oregon's history never really went away, and I think in a lot of ways it's continued to perpetuate itself.
Because there's an unanswered question about how people kind of address the implicit racialism of the economically damaged parts of rural, the rural parts of the state.
I think we should remember like the all the politics of Oregon is driven by about three towns that are very close to one another along one freeway and the rest of the state feels very aggrieved by that and that dynamic continues to play itself out over and over again the same way it does with Northern California being kind of pissed off by Southern California things like that.
Yeah, no, that's certainly not something we know a lot about in my state of Michigan.
So yeah, if we don't have anything else, I mean, again, we can kind of keep going, but I feel like I've taken enough of you guys's time for the day.
I do appreciate you coming on.
Tell me where you want people to find you on the Internet.
I know you've both written books.
You should probably tell people how to find those, etc.
Alex?
Well, I think both of our books are available through akpress.org.
Is that right?
That's right.
Yeah, akpress.org.
Mine is called Against the Fascist Creep.
And mine is called Fascism Today, what it is and how to end it.
Wonderful.
I will admit, I apologize, I have read neither of these books, but they're on my list.
I'm sure, as you know, there are so many books, so much listening material and watching material, and there are only so many hours in my day, unfortunately.
They both come highly recommended, and I will get on that very quickly.
I do apologize for that.
Where can we find you on Twitter?
I'm at Shane underscore Burly One on Twitter.
I'm just at A-R-E-I-D-R-O-S-S.
Awesome.
You seem really excited for people to come follow you on Twitter.
You're a Twitter guy.
Yeah, I'm more of a Twitter guy.
No, I think if you want to come follow me, you're more than welcome to do it for the week or two before I piss you off and you block me.
It's true, you will.
What's that?
It's true, you will.
Yeah.
It happens all the time, anyway.
Yes, again, thanks both of you for coming on.
This has been a great conversation.
I hope you'll each or both come back at some point in the future and we can talk about some other issues.
Definitely keeping an eye out for the recent revelations about the base.
We'll try to put some links in the show notes to a lot of that stuff.
Next time, I always say we're not going to announce what we're doing anymore, but we are going to be doing the Siege Pillars next time because That's a relevant topic of conversation that it is time to finally discuss.
Export Selection