Episode 31: 'Dynamite Nashville', with Betsy Phillips
In this fascinating new episode, Daniel is joined by Betsy Phillips to talk about her forthcoming book Dynamite Nashville: The KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control, the story of three unsolved bombings in Tennessee during the late 50s and early 60s. Content Warning TRANSCRIPT: https://idtg.net/31 FULL TRANSCRIPT LIST: https://idtg.net/ Show Notes: Betsy's Twitter Atlanta Journal-Constitution: The wicked irony behind a new Cobb County home for Democrats Killing King: Racial Terrorists, James Earl Ray, and the Plot to Assassinate Martin Luther King Jr. by Stewart Wexler Clarion Ledger: Mississippi Burning Killings: Religious Terrorism? by Stewart Wexler House Committee on Un-American Activities Ku Klux Klan
All right, and welcome to I Don't Speak German, episode 31.
Since, again, you're hearing my voice first, it means Jack is not joining us today.
He has better things to do, apparently, being on the other side of an ocean for me.
Anyway, today I do have a very special guest.
I believe the first time this person has ever appeared on a podcast.
I am joined by Betsy Phillips.
Betsy, say hello.
Hello!
It's actually the second time I've been on a podcast, but I'm still very new to it.
Well, that means we can't do this then.
Oh, it's cancelled!
Oh no!
No, thank you very much for joining us.
And we're going to be talking about Betsy... Sorry, may I call you Betsy?
Yes, please.
Okay.
Betsy here has written a book entitled Dynamite Nashville, which will also be the title of this podcast, which is going to cause all kinds of either SEO goodness or immense confusion among the people who would either listen to this podcast or read the book.
And we will find out which when the book is released.
But the book is about, it's a book about the Klan, and history, and Tennessee, and Nashville, and bombings, and really awful people.
And you and I were kind of talking about it just on Twitter DMs, and it just seemed like, yeah, you should definitely come on and chat about this.
So, just for the listeners who have not read the draft of the book as I have, kind of tell us what the book is about.
Sure, so it's called Dynamite Nashville, the KKK, the FBI, and the bombers beyond their control.
And it's about three unsolved bombings here in Nashville.
Hattie Cotton Elementary School in the fall of 57, the Jewish Community Center in the spring of 58, and then Councilman Z Alexander Luby's house in April of 1960, and those three bombings remain unsolved.
So I, three years ago, set out to solve them, because I thought it would be like Birmingham, where everybody knew they just never brought it to court.
So I just was like, I just need to fall into the right circle of gossip, and this will all become clear.
Except for that I couldn't find the right circle of gossip, like it really genuinely seemed like nobody knew.
And the other weird thing is that nobody had connected the three bombings.
So the city was treating it as if, like, we just had three random bombings and then they stopped, but they never, like, went back to suspects from the first bombing.
Like, during the second or third bombing, it was very weird.
Um, so, you know, I started digging into it, and I had a friend tell me, contact the FBI right now.
Do all your FOIA requests, anything you can think of, right now, because they will never get back to you.
Or when they do get back to you, they're gonna stonewall you, but, like, you need to start the ball rolling right now.
So, I did my FOIA requests and they told me they destroyed the file on the Luby bombing.
And I was like, this is a sitting U.S.
politician who somebody tried to kill by blowing up his house.
Why would you ever get rid of that file?
Of all of the files you'd think the FBI would keep, that would be one.
And so that kind of started me down the rabbit hole of, oh, no, what's really going on here?
Like, it just, you know, it was like just a clue that something wasn't right.
And then when I got down to Birmingham to dig in their archives, it was like, oh, OK, because JB Stoner's down here bragging to everybody here.
Like, here's the gossip circle I was missing.
Right.
And I was like, oh, and it's no real mystery to anybody down here because he's like, here's how I did it.
Here's how I set up my terror cells.
And here's how I keep them from getting caught.
And if they do get caught, well, I have a law degree.
So I'll go ahead and, you know, represent them.
I think I told you on Twitter he's like a Batman villain.
Normally, if you're just, like, you'd think if a bad guy was like, hey everybody, here's how I do things.
Here's how I accomplish them.
At some point, somebody would be like, thank you for confessing.
Here are your handcuffs.
But instead, he's just like running around.
I mean, he started bombing things.
Probably in 56 or 57 and he didn't go to prison until the 80s.
Right.
And even then it was like for two seconds, well not two seconds, but it wasn't very long.
Right.
Yeah, we're allowed to do a hyperbole here.
Although it does mean that every other fact that we stated on the podcast is therefore suspect Utterly false, you know, like I once got the length of David Duke's audiobook wrong and it means nothing else on this podcast You don't have to pay any attention to it.
It's it's it's fine, you know, so um, so yeah I mean, this is one of the things that like I've listened religiously to your podcast because I'm like This is exactly, like, nothing has changed.
Like, you could just go in and, like, change names and it'd be the exact same story.
So I was like, man, this is really fascinating to, like, be sitting there, you know, looking at stuff from the 1950s forward and then listening to your podcast and it's like, oh, wow, this, this is, these are all, you know, like, I'm studying, like, the intellectual grandparents of the guys you're studying.
Right, exactly.
Or, you know, I was reading the book and just got that nod of recognition, like, yup, yup, yup, over and over again.
Yeah, that sounds familiar, you know, these are a bunch of racist dipshits who can't get along for more than 15 minutes, but in that 15 minutes they manage to do some really awful things.
Yes, exactly!
And they found other, like, wife-fucking?
I genuinely, this is the part that I'm still like, how do you have time?
You gotta get up in the morning, fuck three other guys' wives, have lunch, bomb a school, complain about Jews.
I mean, at least, I guess because David Duke does have his nutritional regimen, I can see how he keeps up the energy.
Everybody else, I'm just like, how do you have the time for this?
Have you read Zeskin's Blood and Politics?
I would assume you're at least familiar with the book?
Yes, yeah.
Okay, yeah, I know.
One of the delights of that book is just the amount of sleeping around that David Duke is just obviously doing all the time.
And just how matter-of-fact Zeskin is about it.
Yeah, he just stepped out of this woman's hotel room and it's all personal observations.
One of the one of the really delightful things delightful it I guess for me reading about it Just kind of going like yeah, that's the side of David Duke that like he doesn't quite like to Portray quite as quite as openly but um, so yeah, let's let's back up just a little bit as much fun as I'm having I think the audience might like a little bit of background info.
So, um, let's start out.
Uh, tell me about Luby.
Who is Luby?
Okay, so Z Alexander Luby was an African American lawyer in Tennessee, and for most of the first half of the 20th century, he was the only civil rights attorney in the state.
So every advance that black people made in the state, he was usually, he was involved in.
He was one of the lawyers for the families who desegregated Clinton, Tennessee.
He worked on the desegregation of Oak Ridge.
He worked on the Nashville desegregation.
If you've ever heard of the Columbia race riots, he was the defense attorney of the black people who were arrested during those riots.
And then in 1951, he was elected to the City Council.
So, um, and, like, by the time his house was bombed, he was also the lawyer for the kids who were doing the sit-ins downtown.
So, he's a really prominent, important person.
Also one of the leaders of the NAACP.
So, like, I'm trying to think.
How people, well, for instance, whenever he did these cases and the NAACP was involved, he was regularly, you know, like working with like national level attorneys, like I'm drawing a blank on his name.
Thurgood Marshall.
Oh, yes, yes.
Yes.
And then when Luby, like, expanded his practice, Marshall's cousin came to work for him, Avon Williams.
So, you know, he's got these really prominent ties to the civil rights movement.
But interestingly enough, because he's so much older than the kids who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement, he really thought what they were doing was necessary, but he thought how they were doing it was stupid.
But he still would show up for them, you know, even when he, like, I went and read his papers, his papers are all at Fisk University, and I'm reading through and he's like, you know, complaining, like, basically, kids today, they're just going down, you know, they should be trying to do it this way or whatever.
But I really appreciated that about him, that even as much as he disagreed with them or their tactics, he was still like, but I'm gonna go, you know, I'm gonna show up for them, they need me, so that's what I'm gonna go do.
Well, in reading about the history of the civil rights era and kind of getting past the sort of the hagiography kind of level of this stuff, you find that, you know, like the Twitter beefs, the lefty Twitter beefs, and the sort of, you know, the arguments that we have about, you know, what kinds of tactics are most effective.
This was, you know, this is in no way unique as well, you know.
We are also still kind of like circling the same arguments over and over again because, you know, like, You know people people got a hold of Martin Luther King is you know the kind of nonviolent resistance guy, but it's like well That's mostly a tactic and there were plenty of people who disagreed with him and even like the arguments about Well, we put the the sort of the white kids answering the phones because they're gonna be better at like kind of getting money out of people but also that disempowers the the african-american kids are involved in it and you know all those all those kinds of debates and
We've been having those since the beginning of the civil rights era, and I'm sure long, long before that.
So, you know, there is something with that.
I'm wondering, just in your opinion, why do you think, I mean, you know, I'm, you know, I've revealed this on this podcast.
I grew up in Alabama.
So, you know, I feel like, When we think of the Civil Rights era, we think of, you know, kind of Alabama, Mississippi, you know, slightly less in Georgia, but Tennessee kind of gets a little bit overlooked in terms of these kinds of discussions, and I'm wondering if you have any kind of opinions about why that might be, or even if you, I mean, do you agree with that, or?
Oh, no, I completely agree, and I think, you know, it's interesting because we had the earliest desegregation in the South, in terms of schools, and there were huge protests, and like in the case of Nashville, there were these bombings, but I think that Nashville made a really concerted effort,
even during the time of the Civil Rights Movement, to portray themselves even during the time of the Civil Rights Movement, to portray themselves as, well, we're doing We are not like Birmingham, where there are all these violent yahoos, you know, like, our black kids are nice, they just Took a walk downtown and asked for desegregation and we gave it to them and like nobody really had a problem at any of the schools.
Just historically watching the way that they've kind of smoothed over everything.
And I think also because no one here died, frankly.
Right.
So it's like, You know there there's not that kind of like unsolved tragedy but like i argue in my book it's only because the bombers weren't good enough yet to kill people.
Right.
It wasn't like they weren't trying.
And it's also like the it's like, you know, you know the Nazis today, you know They'll they'll sort of make the argument like Oh lynching only killed a few thousand people over like so many decades And you know, this is really kind of a minor thing, but it's like, okay Well, you kill one and like terrorize a thousand like that's the point of lynching.
That's the way it works And so, you know you bomb one house or one prominent person, you know, you bomb one place or With the goal of putting like every other place that could be targeted by that and I guess this is the way to kind of get into stoner himself who.
You know, as someone I don't have, you know, I know the name obviously and I kind of run across it occasionally.
He's not much talked about in terms of, you know, just sort of the people I follow.
I mean, he's really never mentioned except occasionally.
You see it in some of the Identity Dixie guys, you know, will kind of bring up Stoner.
But your book kind of argues that he's in many ways kind of equal and important to even like George Lincoln Rockwell.
I mean, it really kind of perks my ears up to kind of give him a lot more attention.
I'm hoping to read a lot more about him in the near future.
Why don't you kind of lay that argument out or kind of tell us who J.B.
Stoner is?
Basically, I just want you to summarize the book in this podcast so then no one has to read it.
Right, exactly.
No, no, not at all, not at all.
No problem.
So, Stoner is an interesting guy.
I think he's, like, really fascinating in part because he's been so forgotten, whereas, like, he is, like, a one-man-behind-the-bastards episode.
Be careful, Robert Evans is gonna steal your thunder.
He's gonna listen to this.
Well, because he's gonna know who all, like, I, you know, like looking through this stuff I'm like some of these names I know are important but I don't know like How big a resonance they're gonna have, but I think Robert Evans is gonna be like, oh wait, wait, holy shit, what?
So, yeah, this part, let's just make, dedicate it to Robert and his knowledge of these old races.
So, Stoner was born in 1924 in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
And... Stone Mountain, Georgia has its own particular resonance with all this obvious... Oh, I'm sorry, not Stone Mountain, Georgia.
Lookout Mountain, Georgia.
Okay, just restate the sentence then, it's fine.
He had polio when he was a kid, and his dad died when he was really young, and his uncle, who was the police chief of the town and the fire chief of the town, kind of took it over as like his father figure.
So by 1940, Stoner was corresponding with the Nazi propagandist Lord Haw Haw.
They were pen pals, which is, you know, like straight up Nazi shit right there.
I don't have a Nazi pen pal.
Well, I'd like to say that I don't, but I have enough of them in my Twitter DMs that I probably do have Nazi pen pals at this point, but that's not because I'm friends with them.
That's not a, that's not a, you know, that's not because I agree with them.
Let's put it that way.
Right.
So Haha mentioned Stoner on his radio show, and he says, young Mr. Stoner, you are a brave lad.
I will try to see it that you get the services of a German surgeon when the war is over to help, you know, fix his polio issues, because he has one leg that's like a lot shorter than the other.
He's like 16 at this point, right?
Yeah, he's 16.
But also, to me, the funny part, in a cringy way, is that this is the height of the Nazi's T4 program, where they're killing sick and disabled children.
So like and like it was a secret but it was like an open secret right people knew that was going on in Germany so I was like I wonder how because I think to Stoner I think this was life-changing like that he felt like these Nazis care about me.
I'm gonna devote my life to it.
And I think that Haha was kind of like, I think his audience in Germany would have been like, yeah, we're gonna take care of the American haha, you know, like, So that's interesting that that like you know how's audience is a little like yeah but that american kid well.
You know so many i mean so and so many times you find like these guys who can get into this.
As teenagers because they find you know validation only find a community or they find a father figure or whatever i mean.
I mean, even David Duke.
He met William Luther Pierce when he was, I think, 17 or something similar.
James Mason wrote to, again, Pierce and was like, I'm going to shoot up a school.
Oh no, maybe just join the movement instead.
So there's a definite parallel there.
Patterns repeating over again.
Sorry, please continue.
So in 41, Stoner is a member of the America First Committee, and if that sounds familiar, that's because that's the group supported by William Regnery, and Charles Lindbergh was like their public spokesperson.
So, you know, again, he's in these Nazi groups already.
And I think Regnery's son or grandson still runs Regnery Publishing and was one of the major funders of the NPI, the National Policy Institute, which is run by Richard Spencer.
So, again, it's not like this shit goes away, right?
Sorry, we're just drawing connections here.
We're just trying to make sure that it's very clear that there is a very clear through line through all of this.
None of this is new.
Exactly.
So in 42, Stoner, at the least, joins the clan.
But most sources say that he re-charters the clan in Chattanooga.
So he is 17, 18 at the time.
A whipper to dapper, right?
Right.
In 46.
A precocious little tyke, you know.
I know.
In 46, he starts the stoner anti-Jewish party, which was his political party that was based on, you know, being anti-Jewish.
And that's how he meets Ed Fields, who is like the peanut butter to his jelly, or vice versa.
But from here on out for the rest of Stoner's life, they are inseparable.
If one of them is doing something, the other is nearby.
And there's some implication, if I remember this correctly, that there may be something more than just a professional relationship going on between these two?
Right.
Fields slept, as far as I can tell, with everyone.
Like, you might not have realized it if you were alive back then, but if you had a hole he could stick something in, he did it.
Male or female.
But I never, as much as people claimed Stoner was a womanizer, I never found any evidence of that.
But regularly, like when he would go visit Ed, they slept together.
Like in the same bed.
And while they were complaining about how gay Hoover was.
But I found this really, I didn't include it in the book because it wasn't really applicable, but they had a National States Rights Party meeting in Louisville and there were like 50 people at the meeting and five of them were FBI informants.
So like 10% of the people at the meeting are FBI informants.
And all of the FBI informants are talking about this weird event that happens where they all go over to Fields' house and his quote-unquote niece is there.
And she's furious.
And no one actually believes this is his niece, but it's clearly also not his wife.
And she is angry and drunk and trying to fist fight Stoner.
And finally it's like so bad that they have to call her dad to come get her.
Which...
Apparently the reason that she was pissed off as finally comes out, like one of the informants was at the event long enough to figure out what the problem was, is that when Stoner would show up at Fields' house, she had to sleep on the couch so that Stoner and Fields could sleep together.
Oh, well, you know.
Right?
I guess, you know, you're like, but I'm the mistress!
Mistress outranks gay lover, right?
At least in, you know, I just love the idea that, like, you know, your parents have to come pick you up from Nazi camp.
I do not want to play that game of capture the flag, personally.
I'm like, I'm trying to imagine this guy having to come get his daughter.
This is just not a proud moment.
Again, you know, just one more way that the patriarchy is gonna fuck with these people.
And I think we'll get to that towards the end of this podcast.
Another very specific instance of that.
So yeah, so Stoner and Fields meet up and hook up.
Ed Fields is living in Atlanta.
the sexual piccadillos aside you know whatever like we're more interested in the fact they're nazis so we should we should move on into that you know friends who support each other yes um so we love the friendship we don't like the the bombings right that's yeah yeah so so ed fields is living in atlanta
he becomes a colombian so that's a racist group in atlanta famous for blowing up a black person's house and getting in a fist fight with a different black person before atlanta was like okay you guys are stupid that's That has to stop.
But in the Columbians was also Emery Burke.
And his name is going to come back up because he was like this.
Well, he wasn't just in the Colombians.
He was the leader of the Colombians.
And then he goes on for the rest of his life.
He's like right wing, kind of like the godfather of the right wing.
He's like constantly supporting people and giving them his blessing.
And then Also giving boring speeches.
So, 1948, Stoner runs for Congress as the Stoner anti-Jewish-ish candidate.
I don't know how you would, like, make that into an adjective.
And he receives 541 votes, so good for Georgia for, like, not turning out for that.
And then he gets kicked out of the Klan.
Um, because of his anti-Jewish activities.
Right.
Which at first I was like, what?
But then I looked into it, you know, I studied it some more because I was like, why would the Klan have problems with somebody being anti-Jewish?
But right at this time in 48, 49, Klan leaders are by and large World War II veterans.
Right.
So the last thing that they want to be associated with are Nazis.
Because they've just fought the Nazis and the Nazis have killed their friends.
Yeah, that's one of the things that we kind of ran across in the David Duke episode that we did in episode 2 was, you know, the idea that like, and I get this claim from Zeskin and there are other sources for it, but that Duke, like, Nazi-fied the Klan, but it's probably more accurate to say that Duke re-Nazi-fied the Klan.
Right.
Ultimately, and of course there are many different clans and they had different kind of organizational structures, but, you know, the Klan is not always throughout its history As deeply anti-semitic, you know, at times it's downright, you know, welcoming to, to, to, well, I mean, maybe not welcoming, but at least... Well, to that one Jew in Georgia that they kept turning to, like, all throughout the 50s, in all their propaganda, there's like, everyone is welcome in the Klan.
There's even a Jewish Klan member in Georgia, and I'm like, he's like the Bigfoot.
This book, like, everyone claims to have seen him, but nobody can, like, nail down exactly who he is or get a picture of him.
No, and I guarantee you the Nazis listening to this, because, again, there are Nazis listening to this, they're going to, they're basically going to respond to that and be like, well, that is just a sign the Klan was always controlled by them.
And, you know, it's ultimately a, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Anyway, we should.
So.
So, yeah.
So Stoner believed The specific conspiracy theory that Stoner believed was that Jews ran black people.
So if you could kill off the Jews, black people would go back to being happy and subservient.
Right you see this again that the today I mean this is very very common among the people that African Americans and other non white people are the pets of you know like both sort of white liberals and white leftists and the Jews ultimately and so you know like it's.
You know you get rid of the Jewish problem and you know it's not that the blacks quote-unquote the blacks will stop being violent as much as you can kind of like put them off in their in their like segregated areas and they just they won't be so much of a problem because they won't get uppity and demanding their rights and all that sort of thing.
Exactly.
Again, wheels within wheels here.
Right, right.
And one of the things that Stoner did and I He and John Casper both did this, but they both seem to have started it kind of on their own, so they may have been influenced by somebody farther back who I just don't know about, but so they start making this argument that Jews are secret communists, right?
So opposing Jews doesn't make you a Nazi, it makes you a good American standing up against the Reds.
Right.
So, but you can pretty easily trace Stoner's influence on Southern clans by who is openly and like virulently anti-Semitic.
That's like a huge flag of Stoner's influence because that was his hobby horse.
It's like a meme.
You just track the meme through the clans.
Yeah, exactly.
So by 1949, Stoner is back in the clan.
So that was like short-lived.
Um, which then pissed, I think Samuel Green was the leader of the Klan, like, of the, what would become the U.K.A.
Um, so he got so pissed by this that he kicked Chattanooga's Clavern 317 out of the Klan.
The whole Clavern.
Which is pretty impressive.
Right.
Like, um, so... About how many people are we talking about?
You know, it's funny because they claimed hundreds, but I... So, like, dozens.
Yeah, yeah.
Um, and then the Klan let them back in once Stoner moved to Atlanta.
So it was, you know, really clearly just about purging Stoner from this one clabber.
Um, so, but at this time, like in 1950, is when Stoner pops up on the FBI's radar for real.
And they're asking around town about him, and he, because he is a campy Batman villain, um, just shows up at the Chattanooga field office and tells them his backstory!
And, like, I'm reading through that!
Did he start?
Does the file start with, we're not so different, you and I?
I'm just, like, you can tell that, like, the poor agent who's, like, writing the report is, like, what the fuck?
What?
Like, because, you know, when you're pursuing people, you're not really used to them, like, knock, knock, knock, here I am, and, you know, and he admits everything, like, yes, I'm an anti-Semite, I'm in this group, I'm in that group, I did this, and then he's, like, what are you gonna do about it?
And the guy's, like, um...
Nothing, I guess.
So off he goes to Atlanta, where he and Emmett O'Neill Morris start the Christian Anti-Jewish Party, which is, as you might guess, very similar to the Stoner Anti-Jewish Party, except for, I guess, that you need to be Christian.
So the members that we know of for sure were Ed Fields, of course, and Richard and Robert Bolling, who, like, go around the South blowing everything up later.
So this is like the first moment that we kind of know that they are on the scene, these two brothers.
And people I suspect may have belonged are Emery Burke, who was in the Columbians with Fields, Wallace Allen and George Bright, who were both suspects in the Atlanta Temple bombing in 58, And Asa Carter, who we can talk a little bit about because he's scary and hilarious, and Kenneth Adams.
So Kenneth Adams is, a lot of people know him because he is the Klan leader who attacked the Freedom Riders in Alabama.
Right.
First in Anniston and then over in Birmingham.
That was him and his group.
Now Asa Carter was a radio disc jockey for a while.
He was anti-rock and roll, so he's well known for running around giving speeches about the evil of rock and roll.
And he was just a virulent racist.
He had also left the Klan because they weren't violent enough and started his own renegade offshoot Klan.
They attacked Nat King Cole on stage once when he was performing.
When Asa was up here helping bomb the or Allegedly, or maybe, helping bomb Hattie Cotton Elementary.
Yeah, we can just put an allegedly in front of everything on this podcast.
You know, this is, you know, but yeah, please continue.
But when he was up here helping organize the bombing of Hattie Cotton Elementary School, his men were kidnapping a black World War II veteran and castrating him.
Lovely.
Leaving him for dead, but because ASA's people are, in general, fuck-ups, they failed to kill him.
Yeah, so, terrible, right?
He becomes George Wallace's speechwriter.
Which is how I know him.
He wrote the Segregation Forever speech, didn't he?
Exactly!
Exactly.
Now, after all that, he decides he wants to be a novelist.
Please tell me he writes florid romance novels under like a name like, you know, like a Daniel Steele type.
Please tell me that that's what he writes.
Oh, no, are you?
No, it's it's better slash worse.
OK, please continue.
He invented Josie Wales.
Oh, I did not know that detail.
He wrote the Josie Wales books.
Right, I did.
I had run across that at some point.
Yes, yes, I do remember that now.
And, under his pseudonym, he wrote The Education of Little Tree.
Right.
Which Oprah then picked as one of her Oprah's Book Club books.
Right.
Before people in Alabama were like, wait, wait, time out!
Maybe, maybe, maybe not.
Maybe not someone we should be supporting with, you know, like the biggest brand and book selling right now.
Yeah, probably.
And it's funny because, you know, like the book, which is supposed to be autobiographical, is like, my Cherokee grandpa raised me in the hills of Tennessee and everybody in Alabama is like, we know Asa Carter's grandparents.
They live right here, they're not Cherokee.
But what's interesting is that the Clavern that Stoner had belonged to in Chattanooga, that Clavern 317, was led by the Brown Brothers.
And they actually did have a Cherokee grandma.
So I think Asa stole their story.
Cast it off as his own because what they were but well they're dead and like what's their family gonna do like hi we're a bunch of white supremacists and we're also secretly Cherokee like so I think he knew he had a good story he could steal because no one was gonna complain about it.
Okay, so back to Stoners early.
The other thing, so in 54 he and the Bowling Brothers go to D.C.
and picket outside the White House, and I think that's where he met John Casper, who is like a thorn in the side of Nashville throughout the end of the 50s.
But in 57, and this is really important even though this just existed for like two seconds, Stoner and Fields organized the United White Party.
And in that were founding members were Emery Burke, so the Colombian leader again, Dan Kurtz, who was in the Christian Front in New York, National Renaissance Party, and then the National States Rights Party.
Wallace Allen, again, one of the suspects in the Temple bombing.
Ned Dupes, who was just a Knoxville racist.
John Casper, who was an acolyte of Ezra Pound.
Right.
And Pound's publisher in the United States.
Um, Matt Cole, who goes on to lead the American Nazi Party, and Fields and Stoner.
Right.
So, like- So, like, the all-stars of, you know, American racism at that point.
Yes!
Exactly!
Everybody!
And then, like, by the end of 58, George Lincoln Rockwell is down in Tennessee helping organize the National States Rights Party, which comes out of this United White Party.
Um, so this is all before he hits the big time.
He's, like, already made all these connections with, like, a who's who of racists, and then he decides that, like, we should start blowing things up.
Now, just, doesn't, I may be misremembering this, so my apologies if I, doesn't the National States Rights Party eventually transmute into the American Third Position Party, which is now the American Freedom Party, or am I getting my details mixed up there?
I'm not sure because the National States Rights Party, there have been at least two of them.
Okay, so there may be another one that sort of, okay, yeah.
One of the issues you run into, and I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast has sort of gotten the sense of this, and I know you do, but I'll just reiterate it now.
So many of these names run together.
Yes.
Because, you know, there's American Vanguard, there's American Guard, there's Vanguard America, There's the National Vanguard.
These are all completely separate organizations with completely separate leadership.
And trying to keep track of them, even now, is a giant challenge.
And once you go back, like, two decades, it's like you just forget about trying to, you know, you have to diagram this stuff in order to keep track of it half the time.
Anyway, sorry, just wanted to, I was curious if there was a direct connection there.
Like, I feel like a little bit like I'm cheating, because back in the day that I'm looking at, they all legally incorporated this stuff.
Oh, well that's nice.
So you can just, like, find, you know, like, oh, who's this?
I'll pull up their incorporation papers.
Okay.
I'm also like, why is the state helping these people, like, form these It's almost as if the states had their own racism problems or something like it's almost as if white supremacy is just endemic to this Like not just that time and place but today I mean, I can't imagine why I would say that's just silly We should we should just you know, not even entertain that notion.
So yeah, let's let's continue We haven't even gotten to the bombings yet.
And I know we want to describe the right.
Okay, so here we go let's um September 10, 1957, Hattie Cotton blows up, that's an elementary school here in Nashville, where one black girl went for one day, and then Stoner bragged about blowing that school up.
Mid-September 1957, Clavern 317 gets kicked out of the clan again.
So if we're wondering, who helped Stoner in Mashville?
Where did he get the dynamite?
I'm deeply suspicious his old Chattanooga buddies helped him.
Sure.
And then somebody finds out about it and they kick him out.
Yeah, no.
You rascally kids!
I just imagine like a guy in a Klan hood with like a rake, you know, like shaking it at, you know, the younger... Sorry, I'm doing like the little Klan or something in my head, like a cartoon, but yeah.
Dennis the Menace, but you know.
November 11th, 1957, there's an attempted bombing at Temple Beth-El in Charlotte, North Carolina.
February 9th, 1958.
There is an attempted bombing at Temple Emanuel in Gastonia, North Carolina, which is very nearby to Charlotte.
March 16th, Beth El Temple in Miami and the Jewish Community Center in Nashville both blow up.
Beth El Temple is in the morning and then Nashville is at night.
April 27, 1958, a black high school and a Jewish synagogue in Jacksonville, Florida, blow up.
And then the next day, the Temple Beth El in Birmingham, someone tries to blow that up.
And then in mid-May, the Southern Conference on Bombing convenes because Southern states had been like, help us, FBI, help us.
We think all these bombings are related.
And the FBI is like, we don't have any legal grounds to get involved.
And so the Southern law enforcement had this conference to try to share information.
And they basically at that time, say J.B.
Stoner is behind all these bombings.
But this to me is like, This is my favorite story of this whole mess because at the conference they are sharing names of known violent racial terrorists in each state and Bull Connor is on the list of Alabama racists who are known to be violent and Bull Connor is also Alabama's delegate to the conference.
Right.
Again with that, there's no issue with these people being in positions of power at all.
But this really hurts Connor's feelings.
He's just so hurt that they would put him on that list just because he's a violent racist who does terrible things to African Americans.
So he comes home and he's like, I am gonna catch a racial terrorist so that I can prove that I'm not one.
So he sets out to catch J.B.
Stoner.
The one thing no one has been able to do.
So his brilliant plan is to have two undercover police officers approach Stoner and posing as local businessmen who are tired of the Klan, the local Klan, not being able to get shit done in Birmingham.
Sure.
And then they'll pay him to blow up Reverend Shuttlesworth's church.
And Reverend Shuttlesworth, at the time, was one of the biggest civil rights proponents in Birmingham.
He was the guy who told King to either shit or get off the toilet in terms of activism.
And Shuttlesworth is a lunatic badass.
He single-handedly integrated Birmingham schools.
He regularly got beat up by the Klan.
Like one of the things, one of the reasons that Bobby Cherry was finally convicted of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombings is because they were able to show him beating up Shuttlesworth and thus prove he was a racial activist.
Right.
Yeah, so these undercover cops meet up with stoner and they offer him i forget i think like 200 to blow up this church and he's like okay throw in another 800 and i'll kill martin luther king which is interesting because it proves that even that early in 58 stoner had his eye on king sure yeah
um so they're like okay we want you to blow up this church in july But of course, like, Stoner isn't a moron.
He is a supervillain.
A stupid, like, a silly, silly supervillain, but he's a supervillain.
Right.
So he comes to Birmingham from Atlanta the week before they're expecting him and dynamites the church.
And the only reason it's not blown up is because, like, a passerby sees the bomb and is able to move it out into the street before it explodes.
But he, like, he succeeded in... Right, he succeeds in bombing the thing.
He outsmarts the... I mean, there is a Keystone Cops element to that, right?
Like, you know, a couple of guys wearing, like, Groucho disguises walk into his office and go like, We would like you to bomb this particular church.
Here is money.
Right?
And especially because, like, Stoner had connections to all, like, he and Bob Chambliss were friends.
Dynamite Bob.
So, like, the big red flag it had to be for Stoner when people from Birmingham were like, we have nobody to blow things up in Birmingham!
Like, of course he's gonna see through that, right?
Right.
This is also about the time when Stoner calls the FBI again because Stoner is just like, oh wait, isn't it time for me to taunt the feds?
And he tells the FBI like, hey, here's a list of license plate numbers of cars that have been following me.
I know it's you because the GBI can't afford cars that nice.
And they're like, uh, and he's like, so back off or I'm suing you.
And then they do!
This is a big question and you know like far be it for me on this podcast to criticize the Federal Bureau of Investigation or law enforcement more generally We are very good people who draw within the lines on on these things and have no suspicions of law enforcement That was a sarcasm that was sarcasm For those who may not have tuned into that, is this incompetence or is this complicity at this point?
And I understand that's a difficult question to answer concretely, and that's a difficult question for... We're just gonna, again, put a legend over all of this, but what's your feeling on some of this?
Is this just a Keystone Cops routine, or are they looking the other way?
I think it's kind of two-fold.
My suspicion, and this is based on nothing, like I haven't seen this in any FBI files, but I think Stoner had a law enforcement mole.
Because, like Stoner knew those were FBI cars, now he claimed it was because they were nicer than GBI, but That seems kind of, yeah.
Right.
He knew a lot of names of informants and tried to warn other white supremacists about them.
And they never touched, like the FBI never touched him.
So I think there is like a level of complicity Complicity of course, but I also suspect that there was some nervousness because they did not know how much he knew about them.
Right.
But anyway, so then Connor, right, is like, oh shit, I accidentally paid someone to blow up this church.
So then he runs to the FBI and is like, help me, help me catch J.B.
Stoner.
And they're like, nah, no thanks.
Which I'm like, dude, the whole point of the stupid conference was the FBI won't help the conference you went to that has led to this whole stupid Now was Connor wanting to get J.B.
Stoner out of it?
It almost feels like a professional getting rid of his competition sort of thing.
As opposed to a real desire to see justice done because of what we know about him.
Connor had been embarrassed at the conference.
And wanted to prove he could do what other law enforcement hadn't been able to do.
And then he got embarrassed again.
But that's it.
Like, you know.
And I'm sure at that point then, Stoner became his enemy, but that was just about embarrassment.
It wasn't, you know.
Otherwise, I'm sure Connor would have been like, please go forth and blow many more things up.
Right.
And then on October 12th, 1958, Stoner and his buddies blow up the temple in Atlanta, which was like the big one.
And the reason that that, like, touched a lot of nerves is because, like, regularly, like, the group that was behind the Jewish bombings, the group, and by that I mean Stoner and his friends, would call up and identify themselves as the Confederate Underground.
And, you know, say we've just blown up your temple or your center of integration or whatever.
And after they blew up the temple, they said that's the last empty building we're blowing up.
Right.
So that was like when people were like, oh, oh, shit.
And it is true.
Like after that, like Luby was in his house.
Stoner had always claimed that he brought in the Birmingham for the 16th street baptist church bombing and you know that clearly was a full building Um, so it wasn't really until they started, like, really enforcing, like, they finally were like, we're gonna have a database of people who buy dynamite.
And once they really started enforcing that, then white supremacists had to, like, start shooting their victims instead of blowing them up.
But, oh, and I forgot, um, Stoner was also, his crowd was also involved in blowing up the Clinton Tennessee High School.
Um so right so he's like so this is I mean just just to I feel like a lot of this history even people who have sort of read books on the civil rights era I mean even for me kind of like with with the level of depth I've kind of like absorbed this stuff even in growing up in the south the level the number of bombings that were happening in such a is just It's just kind of unheard of.
It's just huge.
This is not just a handful of people doing a couple of things.
This is a sustained, years-long terror campaign, ultimately.
Right.
And the thing about Stoner too is like, which we've been able to piece together because like the Birmingham Bombers have talked about it and the Temple Bombers have talked about it, is that like Local clans could basically bring Stoner in as their terrorism, like, teacher.
So if you were like, hey, you know, we're really angry, we want to bomb a black church, but we're not very, you know, like, none of us have dynamite experience, we don't know what to do, you can call Stoner in.
He comes in, he'll, like, he, We'll identify, like, basically the psychopaths in your group, like, who will hurt somebody and not care about it.
If you don't have any, he'll bring his guys in, usually the Bowling Brothers, because they're psychopaths.
And so then all he needs is somebody to drive them where they need to go.
So, you know, you can usually... I just imagine with business cards, like, you know, Dynamite Consultant, you know, the Klan, you know?
Right?
But he ran classes where he would teach you how to make bombs!
Is that something you can learn at the Y, I wonder?
her you know like it like it like it like an annex like an annex like an annex course you know like you know um and then you know if you got arrested he would be your lawyer which Right.
Which is, and, and he, you know, he said like he liked to use brothers in his terror cells because he thought it was less likely that they would dark on each other.
Sure.
So you can see, you know, like in Chattanooga with Clavern 317, which he was involved in on and off, that was led by the Brown brothers.
He had the Bowling brothers who helped him bomb things.
The guys who are later on suspected of the Atlanta child murders are a pair of brothers who know J.B. Stoner.
And this is one of the reasons...
He's kind of like the big epicenter of this huge, decades-long...
Yes here campaign which is again gets and just to just to kind of you know put a little point on this or underline it.
You know again gets interpreted as just sort of like a series of kind of local quote-unquote normal tax you know and so the pattern gets lost because you know it's.
Even though there's a guy literally like traveling around and being a consulting bombing expert right and even though there's this guy who's well known to everyone for doing this stuff.
There never seem to go into this in your book and we don't have to get into the details here but you know about the method to use is to essentially sort of like a lay suspicion.
Um, like, you know, they're always looking for a group of three instead of two, you know, kind of local guys and that sort of thing.
And so, um, and, and there, there is he, he, he's very clever in the way that he does this, but, but he ends up kind of working around the sort of the blind spots of, uh, the law enforcement agencies.
And so like nobody really ever puts the, the pattern together and it just becomes this, this series of like, Oh, they're just a bunch of like crazy nut cases out here.
And that's why that sort of crazy nut case.
You know, sorry to be ableist there, but that's why the Crazy Nutcase stuff is so dangerous in talking about this, because it absolves any kind of sense of looking for the larger pattern.
Exactly, exactly.
And this is one of the reasons that if you talk to old timers in Tennessee, like old time law enforcement, They have, many of them are convinced that Stoner was involved with the King assassination, not only because he had started gunning for King back in 58, but because while he was representing James Earl Ray, because of course he was, Ray's brother lived with him.
Right.
So he knew the family.
Right, and of course that's not like actionable in and of itself.
It's just like hey, you know, we're all in this like, you know, it's this very small tight-knit community, right?
It's a small like group of people who all kind of hang out together and maybe there's complicity and maybe there isn't and you know, you can you can draw like you can you can do the like the the you know, the always sunny board, you know, you know, you can do that all all day long and you can you just kind of look like a Yeah, right, exactly.
a conspiracy theorist you know but also but ultimately you know if you put the pieces together there's a really compelling case and you know ultimately today 70 years later 60 years later you know what are you going to find but you know but that's this is why somebody could have should have been looking at it at the time right right yeah right exactly and it's also another reason like you mentioned that he seemed to so well know law enforcement's blind spots
that that's another reason i suspect that he had an informant or or somebody somebody was talking too much to stoner Right?
Because as much as like the FBI did very very very many sketchy things during this time period, they have thousands of pages In Stoner's file.
I haven't even been able to get it all at so many.
Right.
Sometime around 2050 we'll get it all and somebody will solve this, right?
But I just believe if there wasn't some other mitigating factor, they would have got him for something.
Because he was making them look like fools, right?
Like, I'm running all over the South doing all this bombing.
Everybody knows I'm doing it.
The only people who can stop me are you.
Ha ha, you're not doing it.
Right, because you just never put the, I mean, you're just lazy.
You never put the pieces together for whatever reason, whether that's laziness or complicity or whatever.
Yeah, no.
I mean, I just, you know, you say this sort of thing and I just can't help but think that, like, The two, the Clark Brothers, who were arrested late last year.
One of them went by, like, DC Bowl Gang, which comes right from, if you listen to the last two episodes, you know.
That's obviously, they were very active in the Bowl Patrol, like, Discord chats, and, you know, they were very, you know, interacting with all these people on Gab and all that sort of thing.
And also, like, worked as, like, camera operators or something for, like, Jack Posobiec.
Who has like straight up connections to at least this sort of like fringe of the Republican Party sort of, you know, media apparatus.
And so, you know, it's like, well, does that mean that Jack Posobiec is in some way like connected to all, you know, does that, is that, is that a connection or is that just sort of like guys going off and doing things, you know, or the other example is, I mean, there's this photo that I put up on, on the, uh, you know, the, the guys are the TRS guys, the, the right stuff, the, the daily show at three hosts of that show standing.
Inches away from James Alex Fields, who murdered Heather Heyer, and Taylor Wilson, who was convicted of a terrorist attack on a train in the Pacific Northwest.
I forget exactly where.
I think Washington.
So, and they're like all right there.
And it's like, well, they were all kind of at this one big event.
Maybe that's a coincidence.
Right.
You know, I'm not trying to suggest, you know, I'm not trying to make like a kind of an accusation there because there's no, but it's also like, How do you how do you put those pieces together and they sound like a crazy person, you know suggesting it But ultimately it's it's kind of right there.
Um, anyway so What's the you know, I feel like God we could I feel like we could go on for another two hours on this I'm trying to we try to keep these less than 90 minutes.
Um what's the What's the rest of the story, I guess, on the stoner bombings?
Like, what haven't we covered so far?
And then I think we have to end with GLaDOS.
Right, right.
Well, this is a thing that I wanted to, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, just because I'm really interested in your opinion, is, like, watching how, again, to go back to him being a Batman villain, is kind of watching How the FBI's response to this activity changed the white supremacist activity in ways that then made it harder for the FBI?
Okay, so for instance, at first the FBI is like, we're going to infiltrate the Klan.
So we're going to find a Klan member and basically get him to nark on his friends.
So that was Kind of the strategy throughout the early 50s was like well just you know um but like when I talked to Gladys because I was like Gladys it seems like everybody was an FBI informant and you know when you watch like Hollywood movies you think like oh my god if you're an informant and they find out they're going to murder you but Gladys told me everyone was an informant at one point or another because you didn't have to pay taxes on the money.
Right.
So, and everybody, you know, being white, like, that they're, you know, they don't have great day jobs if they're, like, so... They don't have, like, a big funding organization.
Right.
Funneling.
There's no Peter Thiel funding them.
Right.
Ultimately, right?
You know?
Right.
So they never held it against you for taking the FBI's money.
They only held it against you if you told the FBI stuff they couldn't otherwise find out.
Right.
So, but then, you know, so then the Klan knows that there are people talking to the FBI, so then they start forming what they called action committees, which we would call terror cells that were made up of, like, much smaller, like, Maybe 10 people.
And those folks all knew each other, and those were the people that if they found out someone in that group was talking to the FBI, they would kill you.
Right right and note that this is before or not again not for you, but for the audience This is prior to kind of Louis beam writing down the leaderless resistance concept.
This is way prior to like Mason writing siege And so like in a sense I mean you can you can definitely from this suggestion make the argument that you know ultimately Louis beam is just sort of codifying and and making explicit something that was sort of already happening and
That's a way of kind of getting away from from law enforcement, uh, you know from from prying eyes right from le and um That's certainly something that I mean, you know see just is you know James Mason makes it explicit like it's not like this is the best strategy because we just want to do this it's like this is the way to like not get arrested and spend your life doing this stuff and
In that sense, you know, Stoner is both sort of George Lincoln Rockwell's, you know, sort of compatriot, but sort of a pre-Mason in a lot of ways.
Although he was much more actively, you know, kind of pursuing his things as opposed to just kind of writing it down in a newsletter.
So, yeah, I know.
So in 1960, you have the FBI puts Gary Rowe in the Klan in Alabama.
So Gary was not in the clan.
So this is different, right?
Because this isn't like they flipped a clan member.
This is a guy who would not have been in the clan except the FBI was like, go do this.
Except it turns out that Gary Rowe was also a racist psychopath.
Right.
Well, Eric Stryker, who I promise we'll eventually do an episode on Eric Stryker, he's one of the high TRS guys.
He's kind of not the main tier, but second tier.
We did a whole talk about C.V.
doing a debate with him, etc.
etc.
He's a total shithead.
He uses the presence of Gary Rowe in this bombing, which we're going to get to shortly, as evidence that the FBI was just instigating that bombing all along.
It's another sign that the infiltration of the Klan, like this is all the Klan making white supremacists and white nationalists look bad ultimately.
You know, right?
Because, you know, it's never our fault.
It's never like, oh, he was in the FBI and he was a horrible racist who agreed with all this, you know?
It's just, you know, like, oh, the FBI was involved.
Clearly, you know, we're no longer responsible for it.
Right, right.
So Gary Rowe admitted to shooting a black guy in a riot in Birmingham and the FBI covered it up.
Right.
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombers claimed that Roe was on their bomb crew.
And I have not been able to substantiate that, but I do know that when they first arrested, like for the first time, Bob Chambliss, When Bob's lawyers found out that Gary Rowe was on the federal witness list, he started laughing, which caused the state to go back to the FBI and say, uh, why is the defense attorney so excited about this?
And the FBI's like, uh, hold on, we'll call you back.
And then they're like, uh, yeah, no, we're not gonna put Gary Rowe on the stand anymore.
Right.
And, um, And then he was in the car when Viola Liuzzo was killed.
And he is the only person in that car who had ever murdered a black person before.
Right.
So it's hard to not say, yeah, he was doing this because he won.
This isn't like, oh, I fucked up, whoops, you know, wrong place, wrong time.
This is pretty explicit.
And this isn't like, I mean, you know, it's again hard to say, you know, at the orders of the FBI, like it's not like, you know.
You know, for all the terrible things the FBI does, I don't think that, you know, like starting terror cells and killing black people is the, you know, they're not, they're more complicit or, you know, kind of like looking the other way to these things as opposed to, you know, sort of making an explicit, you know, terror organization.
But I think this is the way that they thought that they could know what was going on.
Like, I really think from their perspective, it was like, It is a shame that people, like a few people have to die, but we're keeping many more people safe.
Right.
Which is always the, you know, the greater good.
That's always the argument they make.
Right, yeah.
You know, there's a great, I mean, the Bundyville Season 2.
Yes, yes.
Lea Soteli interviews, I forget the guy's name, but she interviews a guy who was, you know, the FBI went after this guy for like two years.
Right.
They infiltrated his, like, he had a little militia, it was like four people or something, and they put like three FBI agents on him and paid informants and stuff.
Right.
Like, they surrounded him with people, they egg him on for literally for years, And finally they give him a fake bomb and he like, you know, like presses this fake button and then they they try to like Convict him for it I mean and so I mean this is something that again the Nazis listen to this kind of go like all he admits the FBI is the FBI absolutely entraps people like we're not disagreeing with you know, it's and and it is like well would this guy have done this, you know, otherwise and you go back to
No, there are legitimate, like, things about the Ruby Ridge incident, like, it's not that, like, Randy Weaver was, was, like, a great guy, but, you know, like, there's, there's, I mean, you know, this is, this is ultimately, and, and also just the, the questions of, um,
You know the the escalation of tactics and this this kind of like paramilitarization of both sides of this kind of white supremacist conflict and then the the FBI the law enforcement agencies get more paramilitary and kind of go after them and then they escalate and it really is sort of this sort of this Batman Joker blowback kind of concept.
I mean so and like by the time we get oh I'm sorry but but you know by the time we get to Gladys in 81 um you know like There weren't standing terror cells.
You had to put your terror cell together and hope that there wasn't an FBI person in it.
Right.
And then now, like, they just don't have cells.
Yeah, they're just, I mean, all these, and there's always a question, I mean, you know, there's even, like, sort of, you know, the FBI releases, like, chat logs from, like, 8chan and 4chan, which indicate that, you know, the person making the post is the, like, the person making the, sort of, the Fed posting post is The person sharing the screenshot meaning that it's very possibly an FBI person who was like typing all that.
And you know like is this is kind of being done and I mean the level of complicity of the level of you know in terms of kind of the modern guys I mean you know we got after the El Paso shooter we had so many of the like 40 of these people got kind of rolled up all at once.
And it's like this didn't happen because suddenly you notice 36 hours ago This is even you keep it on these guys and you rolled up like the easy guys You could get on like easy weapons charges and things and who knows like how many of those charges are gonna stick?
But I mean we're still even now getting like more and more like atom waffling guys or sort of like, you know ending up arraigned on charges I mean almost every day it seems like there's another one of these guys and I You know it's kind of hard to keep track of everything in terms of just I just don't keep track of the details of the legal proceedings it's right it's not something that's in my head all the time but.
Yeah no I mean and it is it is really unclear about like what I you know my I mean look I'm a I'm a lefty I'm a socialist you don't have to agree with that necessarily but you know.
I think you have to like confront the kind of the roots of white supremacy where it you know culturally I think that it's you know obviously you need something to like prevent people from bombing or from doing mass shootings or from threatening people and you know like kind of doing that you know you have to do something immediate about that but ultimately you can't just rely on a sort of a law enforcement framework or even sort of a sort of a you know kind of a combat them in the streets framework this is bigger than that and it has to be
You know cultural has to be political has to you know actually we have to find ways to kind of meeting the material needs of people that are.
suffering through these economic conditions and people feel alienated and that's being fed onto by these, you know, kind of propagandists.
Ultimately, the people that I follow, you know, are absolutely just taking them in and radicalizing them and turning them into, you know, if not actual terrorists, they're turning them into people who are going to push memes or are going to go and threaten people or who are going to, you know, push this, push more of this kind of white nationalist, white supremacist narrative.
And, you know, you've got to reach people where they are, you've got to reach people and like give them something else in their life.
And ultimately, Right, exactly.
know part of the complicity there is also you know this kind of larger media apparatus which you know feeds into that just just you know calls it instead of white they call it western and then beyond that it's like it's not it's not the jews it's the liberals and all that sort of thing and i mean this is also the whole you know kind of the thing i've been working on so we're not i'm not going to kind of go into that but i mean it does have to be a bigger solution than just sort of you know let's get these handful of guys that the who are actually doing this stuff it has to be bigger than that right exactly well
and because like at this point you know like when you have one lone gunman well Like, I can't imagine how they're gonna top that, but now there's pressure on them to top it.
You know, like... Well, I mean, they're gonna start... I mean, I already hear people joking about, like, Ryder truck nationalism.
Like, essentially repeating the Oklahoma City bombing, you know?
We're gonna fill up a Ryder truck with explosives.
I mean, that's obviously harder, but... I mean, what has ISIS been doing in Europe?
Or at least they were doing it for, you know, you just drive into a crowd.
You know, it's James Alex Fields.
What's the, you know...
And if you're willing to kill yourself while you do it, it makes it really fucking hard to combat.
And I don't think any of us want white supremacist suicide bombers.
Right, and not only that, but you get the blowback to that, the law enforcement that has to go in to respond to that.
And that's ultimately what terrorists want.
People they want things to get stricter.
They want people to come and take all the guns They want this to happen to increase tension to increase sort of the pressure on the kind of quote-unquote normies So that they will lash out and do more and you know It doesn't have to create like massive nationwide race war where the streets run with blood for this to get really really nasty I mean, you know and You know, I say this a lot to people, and it's hard to get away from this.
I really was trying to make this a little bit lighter, but this is going to get worse before it gets better.
I don't have any solution for it.
We've just got to keep digging in our heels on this and just keep doing the work.
That's the answer I've got.
Also, I feel like we need to encourage Like, if you are a racist, but you are not a psychopath, like, consider the Juggalo.
Because, like, Juggalos are also in a small group that people make fun of, but, like, they have parties, and they get laid, and they, like, have joy in their lives, and- Far, far better to embrace the Faygo than the Boogaloo.
Yes!
You know, that's- And it's, like, I mean, I would just say, like, if you're not happy, it's not the Jews.
It's like, go to a therapist or find a subculture that's not evil.
Join, like, your local, like, food bank.
Like, go and feed people.
Go and, like, there are places to find meat.
Like, join the left, ultimately!
You know, like, look, if you're racist and you want to join, there are places for you, you know?
And I guarantee you, if you, if you, if you, like, actually start doing the work and you actually kind of learn, like, solidarity, and you learn, like, community self-defense, and, like, You're gonna end up working with people who are, like, different than you in a lot of different ways, and you're going to find these, like, multiracial communities, and you know what?
I'll bet you're gonna find out, you know, it turns out that maybe all the things that I believed about the world are wrong, and, you know, like, I, you know, that's, that's my plea, you know, anyway, to, to, to...
I have gotten emails from people saying I was on the path to maybe committing one of these murders, one of these shooting sprees, and then I heard your podcast.
I have gotten emails like that, just to be clear.
If you are sorry, I'm not trying to make the plea to you know, but I know there are people like that listening and if you are like if you are looking to get out of this thing, I can I can set you up with people who will help you.
I promise.
So please, you know, if you're if like the alternative you're being offered is like, let's all go live in Polk County up in the mountains where there's no cell reception and we all are on dial up.
And the only grocery store is Dollar General.
I mean, just look at what you're being promised.
Versus if you go out and find people who actually care about you and want you to have a good life.
Being dirt poor in Polk County, Tennessee is not a good life.
Whereas I think Daniel and I both would like for you to have a job you like.
Have friends who you're not afraid that one of them is going to call you a Jew and that makes all your other friends turn their backs on you.
Yeah, exactly.
You can have happy lives.
You can have... it's not just about race, I promise you.
There's more to life than the color of your skin and, you know, the shape of your whatever.
Anyway, I do want to, like, I do want to finish off.
I do want to talk about GLaDOS here.
We got a little bit maudlin a little bit, a little bit sincerity posting there, but you... so Tell us a little, just give us the like 10 second rundown.
Who is Gladys?
Okay, so Gladys Gergente was a clan, well she's a clan member, wanted to be clan leader, but because she was a woman she got shuttled off to being like head of the kitty clan here in Tennessee in the 70s.
And then she tried to kill her clan leader because She couldn't be, like, he wouldn't promote her.
Because of, like, ingrained sexism in the clan, right?
Right.
As much as I do not believe in murdering your boss if he won't give you a promotion, I kind of admire her willingness to do it.
Well, and if your boss is a clan leader, you know, like, you know, it's kind of complicated, right?
Your boss is a clan leader.
Maybe he does deserve a little bit of, like, physical punishment, you know, there, but also then you're trying to become a clan leader, so it's kind of a wash, right?
You know, like, you know, let's Yeah, kind of difficult.
Morally there, but you know.
So, Gladys gets kicked out of the clan.
Right.
As has now become a refrain in my story.
Right.
And she sets up... My version of that is like, and then they left the Proud Boys.
That happens a lot, you know, with the personally, like the ground level people.
Yeah, no.
Right.
So, Gladys forms a group called the Confederate Vigilantes.
And they go to bomb the temple here in Nashville.
And I was like, wait a second, the Confederate underground after they bombed our JCC said, and next we're going to bomb the temple.
And now here 20 years later is the Confederate vigilantes and they go to bomb the temple.
I wonder if Gladys knows any earlier bombers.
So I wrote her a letter.
Right.
I was like, I asked her a list of questions and I was like, do you know J.B.
Stoner?
And she's like, yes, but I don't write so well.
Come talk to me.
So I did.
I went and talked to her.
This is this is it's a very good book.
This may be my favorite portion of the book, honestly.
So so please tell us what this meeting was like.
So, Gladys, she is now an old woman.
She's pushing 90.
She lives in an old folks home like 15 minutes from my house.
It's like old but clean and she has a cat that's like twice as long as a normal cat should be.
She was charming and funny and I was like, Kind of taken aback because I have a list of crimes I know she's been accused of.
Many of them she's been accused of killing people.
She's not a wallflower in the racist circles.
She was David Duke's mentor for a while.
She told me this hilarious story about how David was staying at her house and there were FBI agents in a car parked across the street and they'd been following them everywhere.
So she and David were gonna get up early to go do a TV interview, so she went out to the FBI agents with two cups of coffee and were like, do you need me to set an alarm for you or you got your own?
Which is literally a scene in Goodfellas, right?
Right?
And then she gave him the coffee and I'm like, DO NOT DRINK ANY COFFEE GLADYS GURGENTI GIVES YOU.
What are you doing?
Her son was there when I first got there, and he told me how JB Stoner never wore matching socks.
I don't know if he was colorblind or if he got dressed in the dark or what, but they were both laughing about the fact that no matter how impeccably dressed he was, he Didn't have matching socks on and that she said like one the one time she saw him in matching socks The one sock had a hole in the toe Um, but right, so she's talking about all these folks that I, you know, have been researching.
They're like her friends.
She knew them for ages.
Um, that was also really, like, because she's, you know, she told me that the thing about the FBI that, like, it's fine to be an informant, just don't tell them anything that they can't find out elsewhere.
And when I got home, I was like, well, goddammit, she did that to me!
Yeah.
She didn't give you anything you didn't already know.
She just, yeah.
And I was like, ah.
But I also, you know, like I wanted to be honest in the book about the fact that I did really like her.
And I found her charming and smart.
A lot of these guys are.
I mean, you know, I listen to their podcasts.
And I'm like, hey, it's funny.
Like I do this and like, I very much approached it almost like a fan of these people would like, you know, to just kind of like listen around and just kind of, you know, follow them or, you know, and just kind of know the world through, you know, the content they produce.
And like a lot of these guys are charming and you know like it's horrifying racist humor but you know it's I would be lying if I'm not saying like occasionally you get a chuckle like okay that's racist but you know it's clever at least I mean a lot of times it gets grating and it's terrible I'm not trying to like
Give them any like, you know, you know, head pats on this or anything, but like it's it's it's so much of the stereotype of like, you know, white supremacist and clan people and all that is like that they're, you know, kind of bucktooth hillbillies, you know, kind of, you know, and dumb and.
No, these are clever people.
These are people with motive and drive and motivation and charm.
How do you get 10 people together to form a terror cell to do a bombing?
Well, you gotta be a leader.
How do you make a podcast that does 500 episodes?
You've got to have charm, you've got to have personality, you've got to know how to produce content and go out there.
You can't discount that, ultimately, and I feel like that's something that I'm at least trying to get across in this project at large.
You know, this isn't, this isn't, these aren't the stereotypical, you know, like, Southern Inbred Redneck people.
Right.
Like, yeah.
You know, like, a thing about Gladys, too, that, like, really shook me is she pointed out, like, though she blamed the FBI, but I think it was actually an ATF, like, person who had infiltrated her terror cell, but she was like, I couldn't find a bomber.
Right.
So if they hadn't given her a bomber, like even though the bomb he had was fake.
Right.
She couldn't have gone to the temple and planted it.
Right.
And like, from her end, it was actually, like she terrorized the Jews.
Yeah.
Right?
Right, yeah.
Which she would not have been able to do had the feds not given her a bomber.
Because that was the hang up in her plot, is that she could not find somebody who could make a bomb.
Right.
And then she said to me, like, if you want justice, look in the dictionary, because that's the only place it exists.
And that has stuck in my head so, and I'm like, I know we're coming at this like, from different perspectives because she's like, I've been wronged by the feds, whereas I'm like, why isn't anybody catching more people like her?
Like, you know?
Right, yeah.
But i'm also like you know having worked on this project i'm like she is right there is no justice like well like don black like invaded the the the island of dominica as far as you know like.
Was it like an acolyte of David Duke in these circles?
Literally worked on a paramilitary operation, you know, goes to prison for a couple of years and gets out and starts Stormfront and is still podcasting his tiny little shitty podcast today.
Right, you know and it's like they don't leave these guys don't go like there's not yeah again There's not really any it's just like trying to isolate them as sort of the you know Almost the you know, make sure they can't reach out to people, you know again changing the cultural conditions and changing the soil in which they're able to find converts is kind of almost the the deep problem, but Yeah, no
The Gladys chapter of that book and it does have a stinger and I'm actually gonna not give that away I'm gonna make people buy the book for that one because it's you know, it's it's I Had a moment reading it.
I was like no exactly.
That's exactly what what she would say.
So we're just gonna leave that there We're gonna make people buy the book which unfortunately is not out yet It's so so when when is the book supposed to be available?
Oh Okay, well, I am, of course, uh, waiting on an FBI file.
Because, of course, I am.
Because you're gonna be doing it for the rest of your life now, you know.
Lord.
Second editions, third editions, you know, like, you know.
Um, so my hope is...
Well, so I had to get my congressman to write a letter to Christopher Wray demanding to know why the Luby file had been destroyed.
Right.
And Congressman Cooper wrote the nerdiest and most badass letter I have ever read.
It was just, like, I saw a copy of it and I was like, this is both great and terrifying.
Which then did get the FBI to admit that they hadn't actually destroyed that file.
That it was at the National Archive.
So, which then caused the National Archive to say, yes we have it, but has to go through a review before we'll hand it over to you.
So I'm supposed to get that in May.
If I'm...
If I've guessed right about what's in it, then the book will be out at the end of 2020, maybe early 2021.
I mean, I'm gonna write those chapters as fast as I can.
But if I'm wrong, If it turns out that Martin Luther King blew up the house or aliens blew up the house or J.B.
Stoner was secretly from Guatemala this whole time or something, then I don't know what I'll do.
Right, right.
Yeah, that would that would be ironic, you know turns out it turns out the real Guatemalans were in our heart all along Okay, so so hopefully so hopefully in either late late next year like a year year and a half most like hypothetically, okay, so And assuming this podcast is still out, we hope you'll come back and talk to us more when that happens.
We never thought it would last as long.
This was always kind of a marginal product, so I don't know how much longer we have to do this podcast, but I do hope that you will let us know as things go on.
You are on Twitter.
Do you want people to come and find you and follow you on Twitter?
It's mostly dogs and me complaining about people from the Taft administration.
That's delightful as well.
Honestly, I've been enjoying your Twitter feed.
It's just me being angry about history.
It's me being angry about the Taft administration.
Dude, I gotta tell you.
Judge Dickerson.
There is this picture of him with Taft.
And Dickinson is like he because he's he's fatter than Taft and he is like just standing as if he's got a horse cock like just and whenever I'm bummed I'm just like that's the energy I need like yeah okay he's a huge racist he tried to move the Polks after they were dead
He sold off many Nashville, but like, if I ever get a tattoo, it's gonna be of that motherfucker just standing there like, yes, I am taking up all this room, and I dare you to move me.
Well, it sounds like there's another, there's a Taft book in you, and uh, you know what I mean?
Oh lord!
All seven people who care about Taft will read it.
Oh, well, and if that happens, you should come back and talk about Taft.
I think that would be delightful as well.
Thank you so much.
So, yeah, where?
Oh, yeah.
Your Twitter, your Twitter handle.
Where can we find you?
It's at Ant B, just the letter B.
Okay, there'll be a link in the show notes for sure.
And any references you have that people who might want to know more about this, please, I hope you'll give me some of that so I can stick it in the show notes.
We always like to have plenty of show notes on this.
And we will definitely promote your book in whatever way we can as soon as, if and when it is released.
Excellent, excellent.
You can find me on Twitter.
I'm at Daniel Lee Harper if you want to follow me, although I would definitely recommend you follow Betsy here instead if you're going to follow one of us, but yeah, that was episode 31.
Next time we're going to do something a little bit more fun.
We're going to talk about Nazis and pop culture, and in particular we're going to use the lens of the Marvel movies and how they absolutely despise talking about them.
And we're going to do a little discussion, Jack and I are going to do a little discussion about Captain America, the first Captain America film.
I'm sorry, you have to then go back and watch the Blues Brothers!
Well, maybe that's something.
People want us to do more movie reviews, and it's something that Jack and I would love to do that, but it's kind of off-brand for talking about... There are Illinois Nazis in the Blues Brothers!
I'm aware of that.
No, definitely.
So we're going to do that next week, just to kind of give people a break from all the Siegeville stuff, and yeah, so that's the plan.
Thanks for listening, thanks Betsy for being on the show, and we'll see you next time.
