0:00

Hmm, what's

0:03

talking too much about? Come my Cody's

0:11

part two of my reading to my friends

0:13

of the war on everyone. I

0:15

have armed myself additionally with

0:17

a fistful of plastic

0:20

silverware packets. Sophie, No, I have to

0:22

throw the cans. She's trying to take

0:25

my cans, my pressure.

0:30

I need all of these to throw now. Katie

0:32

commented during the show break

0:34

that the oranges I have are

0:37

very soft and almost certainly

0:39

bad. You're ready to burst you you

0:41

could touch it, lightly needed explode. I'm

0:43

so excited to throw those at the wall. So

0:47

if you just give me a withering look,

0:50

that's her excited look. That's her

0:52

excited look. Look. Well, speaking of excitement,

0:56

it's time for part two, Chapter

0:58

two. Because this is an Adeo book, which

1:01

is different from a seven part podcast for

1:05

reasons. I'm glad that I'm finally recording an audio

1:07

book. Maybe this will start my audiobook career, I

1:09

think so. Thank you for narrating the

1:12

Katie parts that I wrote ahead of time, he

1:14

thought out loud.

1:18

Chapter two, An American Fascist

1:20

Faith. At nine fifty

1:23

a m. On October eighteen,

1:25

Robert Bowers entered the Tree of Life Synagogue

1:27

in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He carried a cult

1:30

a R fifteen three glock handguns,

1:32

chambered in three fifty seven six body

1:34

armor, and a substantial amount of ammunition.

1:37

Bowers proceeded to open fire during a Shabbat

1:39

morning service. He killed eleven of the seventy

1:41

five people worshiping at the synagogue that morning,

1:44

and the hours and days that followed, journalists and researchers

1:46

in the countering violent extremism community began

1:48

to dig into Mr. Bowers's social media

1:50

presence and Internet footprint. If

1:53

you read or listen to any coverage about this,

1:55

it probably focused on his use of the social

1:57

media website gab, which is essentially

1:59

Twitter for Nazis. Gab earned

2:01

a lot of attention because it's where Bowers chose to

2:03

announce his attack and his belief that a Jewish

2:06

conspiracy was responsible. Sounds like

2:08

a teen girl magazine. It is. Yeah,

2:10

yeah, it should be

2:13

in a sane world. Uh so, Yeah.

2:15

Gab earned most of the attention, Like the media

2:17

coverage in the wake of that attack. Gained

2:20

attention for that attack mainly because it was seen as like the

2:22

place that radicalized him um and it

2:24

was, of course the place where he announced the start of his attack.

2:26

But in addition to announcing the start of his attack on

2:29

gab Robert Bowers said other things on the

2:31

site stranger things. In various

2:33

posts, he claimed that people of Anglo European

2:35

descent were the chosen people, with Jews

2:37

as their ancient enemy. He warned his

2:39

fellow racists of a coming false flag

2:42

attack that would be quote one of the final desperate

2:44

attempts by the Jewish international oligarchy

2:46

to maintain power in the face of collapsing public

2:48

trust in the media, which he believed

2:51

they controlled. On the profile page

2:53

for his account, Bowers included a quote Jews

2:55

are the children of Satan. A little

2:57

more than two weeks before his rampage, he reposted

3:00

to link to the Wikipedia page for Christian

3:02

identity. Have you ever heard of Christian identity?

3:06

Yeah? Exactly, that's what we're getting into

3:08

today. Uh So, he reposted

3:11

a link to the Wikipedia page for Christian identity and

3:13

wrote if the Jews hate it, then it must be

3:15

truth. Now, if you haven't heard

3:17

much about Christian identity, don't worry. Neither

3:20

had I before Bowers went on his rampage.

3:22

Um A friend of mine, actually a

3:25

woman named Sarah, who's a CV researcher,

3:27

is the person who like first said

3:29

that you should start looking into this ship, and as soon

3:32

as I did, I found that it connected to basically

3:34

everything that's ever happened in American

3:36

fascism after World War Two and

3:39

kind of before it. Uh now. Christian

3:41

identity theology is not widely

3:43

known in modern America, and in fact, the

3:45

vast majority of people who have been influenced by it

3:47

have probably never actually heard the term. Bowers

3:49

is sort of a rare figure in that he was

3:51

aware of it. Um it's been around

3:54

for so long and embedded itself so deeply in the

3:56

consciousness of the far right that it's woven itself

3:58

into the DNA of American facis M.

4:00

Christian identity, however, did not begin

4:03

in America. The origin of this philosophy

4:05

traces back to Britain, in when

4:08

a crazy person and retired navy man named

4:11

Richard Brothers started having visions.

4:13

Rather than writing these visions off as the result

4:15

of bad can sardines or or got poisoned

4:17

bread, he decided that these visions were God

4:19

telling him that he had to lead the Jews back

4:21

to Palestide. Now. He

4:24

also decided that he was a descendant of the biblical

4:26

King David, for reasons which are slightly

4:28

less clear. Revelation followed revelation,

4:31

as they often do for people with this sort

4:33

of thing going on in their brain,

4:35

and by the time Richard Brothers was done, he had

4:37

concluded that the majority of Jewish people were

4:39

actually hidden in Britain. This hidden

4:42

Israel, as he called it, became one of the central

4:44

tenets of British Israelism.

4:48

Yeah, all of the Jews are secretly British.

4:50

Yeah, that's British Israelism in a nutshell.

4:54

Now, Brothers was eventually declared insane

4:56

by the state, which is probably fair.

4:59

He was stuck in an institution, which is probably

5:01

unfair, from sevent to eighteen

5:03

o six. But in the four years before he got

5:05

locked up, he earned himself some followers,

5:07

and although his flock didn't stick together until

5:09

he got out of the asylum, some

5:12

of his ideas persisted for years amongst

5:14

the fringes of British society. In

5:16

eighteen forty, a writer named John Wilson

5:18

wrote Lectures on Our Israelitish

5:20

Origin and began lecturing across

5:22

England and Ireland about the theory that the real

5:25

Jews were basically everyone but actual

5:27

Jewish people. According to the book Religion

5:30

and the Right by Michael barkun quote, the

5:32

lectures depended less on the interpretation of Biblical

5:34

prophecy than on Wilson's attempt to demonstrate

5:36

empirically that the Lost Tribes had in fact

5:38

migrated from the Near East to Europe. Like

5:40

many writers after him, one of his favorite techniques

5:43

was to look for words in different languages that sounded

5:45

the same, assuming, usually erroneously,

5:47

that if the words sounds were similar in the languages

5:50

and their speakers had to be connected this

5:54

stuff. Yeah, yeah, since

5:56

similar sounds often crop up in otherwise unrelated

5:58

languages, they allowed Wilson claim and to believe

6:01

that he had proved that quote, many of our most common

6:03

English words and names of familiar objects are

6:05

almost pure Hebrew. Yeah.

6:10

It's one of those things when you when you read like early arguments

6:12

as to why the Bible shouldn't be printed, like back

6:14

when like they wouldn't give out copies of the

6:17

Bible to people, like only the priest would have a copy

6:19

of the Bible. The Internet makes

6:21

me have a little bit more respect for those arguments.

6:23

It's like, oh yeah, maybe just letting everyone read everything

6:25

is a bad Maybe

6:28

maybe human beings naturally look

6:31

for patterns and not

6:33

all those patterns actually exists. Are irrelevant.

6:36

I took a sip of tea and started laughing, though,

6:38

And Sophie, can I have one

6:40

of my Canada drives? I

6:43

promise I won't throw it. I

6:48

love professionalism. That's

6:50

the best thing about podcasts is the professionals.

6:53

And this one specifically is the most professional.

6:55

This one specifically is the most professional. And

6:58

as a mark of my professionalism, I'm gonna

7:00

throw the sack of clement Clementine's

7:04

everywhere ads We're

7:12

back, We're back.

7:14

There's oranges all over the floor, h

7:17

Cody or any of them oozing. No,

7:20

that's a shame, that's unfortunate. I'm gonna stomp

7:22

on. Well, let's

7:25

not remove them in the hopes that they get forgotten

7:27

and begin to rot and dan All finds them.

7:29

That's the dream, and it's a dream

7:31

that could be a reality. Just leave it

7:33

for a month and then you come back and there'll be a

7:35

bunch of flying at like

7:38

what happened at our office last night. I

7:40

don't know if y'all remember but months ago when

7:43

we did the Rockwell episodes, I tossed

7:45

the coffee mate up on the

7:47

ceiling of the poison rooms. Still

7:49

there are you guys looking forward

7:51

to making some coffee with that next year.

7:54

So yeah, it's going to be a laxing,

7:58

one pump, one shit cottage

8:02

cheese. Alright,

8:05

we're talking about British Israelism,

8:08

the normal same concept

8:10

of British realism. Yes, the idea

8:12

that the British people are the Jews and

8:15

the Jews are not the Jews all

8:18

makes sense. Well, at this point the

8:20

Jews are still the Jews, but also British people

8:22

are secret Jews. That's British is Realism

8:24

in a enough shehell. So British

8:26

Israelism continued to evolve over the

8:28

course of the eighteen hundreds. Fella

8:30

named he and added the assertion that Germans

8:32

were really Assyrians because apparently those people

8:35

had gotten lost to and wound up in Germany

8:37

somehow. Hein claimed that the United States

8:39

was also full of Israelites. Now,

8:41

at this point, actual Jewish people, like

8:44

real Jewish folks, were not seen as

8:46

bad guys. They were considered part of a greater

8:48

community called all Israel,

8:50

which was made up of the House of Israel, which

8:53

was Europe, and the House of

8:55

Judah, which is actual Jewish people.

8:57

Now, there was no evidence for any of this at

9:00

any point in time. This was this

9:02

was and I'm not using this was slow.

9:04

It was all just the result of a guy's mental illness like that.

9:06

That's what was going on, is this was a sick

9:08

man who had a dream about

9:12

leading the juice back to Palestine and read

9:14

too much into that. Um, so

9:17

that's where this starts. Now, A fellow

9:19

named Joseph Wilde was the very first

9:21

American British Israelite, or

9:23

if he wasn't the first, he's the first guy who tried to popularize

9:26

it here in the first one we have any records of. Wild

9:29

was a pastor at the Union Congregational

9:31

Church in Brooklyn. At this point, the

9:33

theory or whatever you would call it, was

9:35

fundamentally pretty harmless. But as

9:37

it drifted through the United States from

9:39

the frigid East to the also frigid Northwest,

9:42

something funny happened. British

9:44

Israelism turned racist as fuck.

9:48

That's weird, weird,

9:51

you know, weird weird that would happen surprising,

9:53

Yes, surprising indeed now The

9:55

man most responsible for this turn was

9:57

an Oregonian named Reuben eight

10:00

Sawyer. In the late nineteen teens,

10:02

he started writing for a monthly magazine

10:05

called The Watchman of Israel,

10:07

which was dedicated to the idea that quote,

10:09

the English speaking peoples of today are the lineal

10:11

descendants of the lost ten tribes of Israel

10:14

and must fulfill in these latter days the responsibilities

10:16

decreed for them through the patriarchs and the prophets.

10:20

So Reuben was the pastor

10:22

of the East Side Christian Church in

10:24

Portland, Oregon, and over the years

10:26

he built up a sizeable British israel group

10:28

in the city of Roses. In fact, he

10:30

was so successful at this that he left his job

10:33

as a pastor in nineteen twenty one to lecture

10:35

and write about British Israelism full

10:37

time, well not

10:39

quite full time. He did have one

10:42

other side gig as a member

10:44

of the Oregon Ku Klux Klass. There

10:47

we go,

10:52

and you know, I love talking about the nineteen Clans,

10:55

that one beautiful wacky clan before

10:57

I got back to being terrorists,

11:01

back when they were still hanging out at the cool Coast

11:05

hilarious losers

11:07

dangerous. Yeah, not the

11:09

mass murderers, um,

11:11

although they still killed a lot of people. We probably

11:14

shouldn't laugh at them as often as we do. But I mean the Cool

11:16

Coast Camp and the

11:19

christ Can

11:22

you imagine the pitch meeting for the Cool Coast Camp.

11:27

I can now that you mentioned, I

11:30

think someone mentioned, someone suggested, and everyone

11:32

else like, that's a great idea,

11:35

idea we shouldn't so.

11:39

Reuben was big into the clan for

11:41

several years, and in fact he helped

11:43

sell his fellow Portlanders on it, addressing

11:45

six thousand of them on December two the

11:48

municipal auditorium. He told them

11:50

the KKK saw it quote a cleansed

11:52

and purified Americanism, where law abiding

11:54

citizens will be respected and their rights

11:57

defended, irrespective of race, religion,

11:59

or color. So long us they make an honest effort to be

12:01

Americans and Americans only, So

12:04

that's nice, regardless of race or color.

12:06

Yeah, and that at this point

12:08

this wasn't totally bullshit. The twenties clan was

12:10

more of a pyramid scheme than a terrorist organization.

12:13

It was racist, but not more racist than mainstream

12:15

American society. When it came to skin

12:17

color. They were, however, more

12:20

racist than mainstream Americans about

12:22

certain things. They hated the Catholic,

12:24

the foreign born Asians, and

12:27

of course Jews.

12:30

This presented an issue. Yeah, like

12:33

we were great on a curve in the twenties. Yeah,

12:36

so suggesting that like, when you create like a

12:38

big group, inevitably

12:41

you'll have a bunch of a bunch of our groups

12:44

an increasing number of outs. Interesting

12:48

now, Uh. The effect that KKK

12:50

hated the Jews presented an issue for Reuben Sawyer

12:53

because British Israelism loved

12:55

the Jews, at least it traditionally did, right,

12:57

Like that was part of the whole idea, was this kind of like veneer

13:00

ration of Judaism that like all these British

13:02

people wanted to be Jews as well. Um.

13:05

So Reubens started out as like kind

13:07

of being you know, on the side of Jewish people and like

13:09

liking them, but over time and exposure to other

13:11

anti Semites and the KKK, Reuben

13:14

radicalized. In his first speech

13:16

about the clan, he brought up the Jewish

13:18

question, but made a point of noting that

13:20

some Jews were of ancient and honorable

13:23

faith, while only a few were objectionable

13:26

according to the book Religion and the Right Quote.

13:28

By ninety two, however, this inu window

13:30

had been replaced by full blown anti Semitism

13:33

that was as crude as it was open. Quote.

13:35

Jews are either Bolshevists undermining our government,

13:38

or are shylocks and financeer commerce

13:40

who gained commanded control of Christians as borrowers

13:42

or employees. It is repugnant to a

13:45

true American to be bossed by a sheeny.

13:47

And in some parts of America the Kikes are so thick

13:49

that a white man can hardly find room to walk on

13:51

the sidewalk. And where they are so thick,

13:53

it is Bolshevism. They're talking Bolshevism

13:56

and revolution. The transformation is so

13:58

startling that one wonders at first if it is the same

14:00

person speaking. This is back to

14:02

a quote from the book. Yeah, out

14:05

of my head listening to that. Yeah, that is a

14:07

lot of racial slurs for Jewish people in like

14:10

like a paragraph that's like all of

14:12

them. Yeah, I've run out of yikes.

14:14

Yeah yeah. Uh

14:16

so yeah. He started out making

14:19

a distinction between like good Jews and bad

14:21

Jews. Uh and then

14:23

eventually just decided

14:26

that all Jews were terrible and ethic

14:28

Jews. Yeah

14:31

yeah, So Rubin

14:33

became a major force for pushing his fellow American

14:35

British Israelites towards anti Semitism.

14:38

In the early and midnighteteen twenties, the Dearborn

14:40

Independent, the newspaper funded by Henry Ford,

14:42

began pushing even more extreme anti Semitic

14:45

ideas on the wider American public. It's

14:47

editor, William Cameron, was a British

14:49

Israelite. Thanks to people like Reuben

14:51

and Cameron, the category of good Jews shrank

14:53

every year, and the dangers of the bad ones expanded

14:56

to something resembling the all encompassing anti

14:58

Semitic conspiracy theory that set Robert

15:00

Bowers off on his rampage. From

15:03

the late nineteen twenties to the nineteen thirties, Howard

15:05

Ran, a British Israelite from New England, became

15:07

a thought leader in the movement. His goal was

15:09

to build it into a political organization. In

15:12

nineteen thirty three, he formed the Anglo

15:14

Saxon Federation of America, which

15:16

claimed that actual Jewish people were not in

15:18

fact descended from Judah. By the

15:20

late nineteen thirties, RAN's ideas had evolved

15:22

to the point where he began to claim that Jewish people

15:24

were literally the children of the devil.

15:27

If you're curious about how this went down, here's

15:29

an explanation from the website of a modern Christian

15:31

identity group. Quote. Most

15:33

that call themselves Jews today are, in fact

15:36

the race of Lucifer through his son Kane.

15:38

Kane was inherently evil from the beginning because

15:40

he was of Lucifer's seed. Eve was

15:43

beguiled by Lucifer and did, in the carnal

15:45

sense, lay with him and begot Kane. It

15:47

was a pair on the ground, not an apple on the

15:49

tree. Eve was deceived by Lucifer

15:51

and was led to believe that she was laying down with Yahweh

15:54

God. That's the conspiracy

15:56

theory that the

15:58

devil tricked Eve and to fucking him

16:01

and thinking that he was God. But it

16:03

was really the devil. And that's where Caine comes

16:05

from. And Caine is the father of the Jews. Well,

16:08

that all makes sense. I

16:11

love him history.

16:14

Yeah, you can't

16:16

not put quotation marks around it in that context.

16:19

God. So Howard Rand

16:21

was the very first person to use the

16:24

term Christian identity, and

16:26

his thinking had a big impact on a fella named

16:28

William Dudley Pelley, who was, of course

16:30

the founder of the American fascist Silver

16:32

Shirts movement, who we also talked about

16:35

on an episode of Behind the Bastards, really

16:38

bringing all the hits yea like

16:41

tour. I mean, it's all culmination. It's all

16:43

called intersectional fascism.

16:45

Intersectional fascism, we're coining it

16:47

here. But the nineteen forties,

16:50

the core of the Christian identity belief system

16:52

was more or less formed. It includes three

16:54

specific ideas. Number one, Arians

16:57

are descendants of the biblical tribes of Israel.

16:59

Number two, actual Jews are

17:01

the result of the devil having sex with Eve in the

17:03

garden of even Eden. And number

17:06

three, the apocalypse is nigh

17:08

and when it comes, Arians will have to go toe

17:10

to toe with the worldwide Jewish conspiracy

17:12

in order to save the planet. When

17:14

he walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue that cold

17:16

October morning, Robert Bowers saw himself

17:19

as a soldier taking place in this great apocalyptic

17:21

battle against the Jews. Now,

17:25

Heart and his fellow Christian identity believers had

17:27

to be careful during World War Two, since their belief

17:29

system was essentially just Nazism without

17:31

the swastika, but that didn't stop him

17:33

from railing against FDR's appointment

17:35

of the first Jewish Supreme Court, Justice Felix

17:38

Frankfurter. It also didn't stop him from

17:40

opposing the admission of Jewish refugees into the

17:42

United States after ninety eight. Heart

17:44

specific beliefs were always fringe, but

17:46

they bled over into the mainstream American right

17:48

wing due to the right subsessive fear of socialism.

17:51

I like to quote next from a Great Tablet magazine

17:54

article the Bloody History of America's

17:56

Christian Identity Movement. Quote. The

17:58

broader concern of Heart and his allies in the respectable

18:01

wing of anti Semitism, liberal journalist

18:03

Kasey McWilliams called them the armchair andy

18:05

Semites of the right, was that liberal and socialist

18:08

Jews were ultimately behind the hated New Deal

18:10

and the corresponding transformations of in American

18:12

society. These armchair anti Semites

18:14

believe that admitting Holocaust survivors into the United

18:17

States after World War Two would be the first step

18:19

in dismantling the Immigration Act of nineteen

18:22

to preserve the racial character of America. American

18:24

Jews, many of whom supported easing immigration

18:27

restrictions broadly, were the boogeyman of

18:29

the nativist right, and since right wing nativists

18:31

also often subscribe to Judeo Bolshevik conspiracy

18:34

theories, opposing immigration was a way to

18:36

strike a blow against communism as well as

18:38

Judaism and preserve the white Christian character

18:40

of the United States. I just

18:42

hate this song. I

18:44

hate the song. I hate that we have to play it, yeah

18:47

all the time. It's the same song. It's not even catchy.

18:49

It doesn't have a good hunt. It's not it's a bad

18:51

song. It's just play it all the time,

18:54

a big mushpot are you

18:56

trying to say? It's

18:59

like, yeah, play encore, play it again. Let's

19:01

let's keep complaining about how immigration is

19:03

going to destroy the country like we have for

19:05

two straight years, the inflation of like

19:08

all this like anti semitism, and

19:10

then like the communism and the socialism

19:12

and the immigration, all these topics, it's

19:15

all the same. Or actually, don't pick any

19:17

of those lanes, don't pick any just get off, get off

19:19

the highway. It's yeah, pull

19:22

over, go to a rest stop. You need to sleep.

19:24

Buring your car, burning

19:26

your car, and burn your car taking nap

19:28

in the pathroom.

19:34

So from the beginning, Christian identity

19:36

connected more with the dark and violet chunks of

19:38

the far right than mainstream conservatism.

19:40

This started with the silver Shirts in the KKK

19:42

and continued into nineteen sixty four when

19:45

this peculiarly American fascist

19:47

cult met a little guy named

19:49

George Lincoln Rockwell. And

19:51

that's what we're going to talk about after

19:53

this ad pivot pivot.

19:56

Should I throw something? No, not

19:58

yet, No no, no, not not

20:00

yet. Products we're

20:08

back. I rejected

20:10

the urge to throw another thing, but I'm looking at I think

20:12

I'm gonna throw this big fistful of

20:15

silver ware packets. You showed your strength.

20:17

Thank you in that moment. Thank you, thank

20:19

you. Character counts the

20:22

best.

20:26

Yeah, these these seem safe. They're projectiles,

20:28

but they're covered in plastics. At

20:32

the amount of mess they're going to make, because

20:34

that's really going to be a lot for Daniel lidial with.

20:36

So if he says they have a cleaning staff, now, I

20:39

don't want a cleaning staff to have to deal with

20:41

it. No,

20:43

just stantal well,

20:46

the plastic, the plastic forks

20:48

and knives will be all right. That's that's not like

20:50

a mess. I wouldn't describe that as can I put

20:52

a clean sign on the door. I'm

20:55

gonna do that. Just

20:57

a little agent of chaos over here, aren't

20:59

you? Yeah? Yeah, he

21:01

didn't. Yeah

21:03

a little bit. Shucks.

21:06

I want to hear some more about

21:08

some about some fucking George

21:10

Lincoln Rockwell and the identity movement.

21:12

I don't, but I will. Yeah,

21:15

So in case some of the people listening haven't

21:17

listened to the Three Party. On George Lincoln Rockwell's

21:20

life and impact that we we talked about

21:22

earlier, I'm going to summarize his life here. Rockwell

21:24

was the founder of the American Nazi Party not much

21:26

more than a decade after World War Two ended. He

21:28

was the first post war Holocaust denier. He

21:30

was the first fascist to make money by lecturing in American

21:33

colleges and provoking fights with anti fascists.

21:35

He invented the term white power, and was in

21:37

general basically the Johnny apple Seed of

21:40

Nazism in America. Now.

21:42

Rockwall was an original thinker, a pioneer

21:44

of the tactics that fashy folks still used today

21:46

to get media coverage and play the victim. But he

21:48

came into the game early enough that he never quite

21:51

figured out how to hide his power level, which

21:53

is a term modern fascist used for hiding their

21:55

beliefs as garden variety conservatism.

21:57

Rockwell was initially somewhat anti Christian,

22:00

because you know, Jesus was Jewish, which

22:02

is something that didn't exactly play well with nineteen

22:04

sixties American conservatives. But

22:06

in nineteen sixty four Rockwell met with

22:08

Wesley Swift, leader of the Christian

22:10

Identity Church. Rockwell instantly

22:13

recognized what an opportunity Christian

22:15

Identity represented for Nazis in America.

22:18

As it stood at that point in the party's history, American

22:21

Nazis and was basically just a cheap rip off of

22:23

German fascism that was good

22:25

for triggering Jewish War veterans and civil rights

22:28

activists, but it didn't click with regular Americans

22:30

in a way that would allow it to spread. American

22:33

Fascism, Rockwell thought needed a spiritual

22:36

core, something esoteric, a little

22:38

occult, and thoroughly American.

22:41

Wherever it arises in the world, fascism takes

22:43

pieces of different spiritual traditions and hammers

22:45

them together around its central authoritarian

22:47

framework. This is part of what allows it to

22:49

spread in different cultures. Umberto Echo

22:52

identified this trait as syncretism.

22:54

Quote, the Nazi gnosis was nourished

22:56

by traditionalist syncretistic occult

22:59

elements. Most fluential theoretical

23:01

source of the theories of the New Italian Right, Julius

23:03

Avola, merged the Holy Grail with the protocols

23:05

of the Elders of Zion alchemy with the

23:07

Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. If

23:10

you browse in the shelves that in American bookstores

23:12

are labeled as New Age, you can find there

23:14

even St. Augustine, who as far as I know, was

23:16

not a fascist, but combining St. Augustine

23:19

and Stonehenge, that is a symptom of her fascism.

23:22

So obviously Echo didn't write his essay

23:24

until decades after Rockwell's death. But G. L.

23:26

R. Was such a natural fascist and such an

23:29

instinctive fearer type that he instantly

23:31

seemed to know that grafting Christian identity

23:33

onto American Nazism was going to be critical

23:35

if it was going to spread. So he appointed

23:38

Ralph Forbes, head of the California branch of

23:40

his Nazi Party, to be the party Christian

23:42

Identity Minister. For race and

23:44

nation. My favorite Rockwell biography says

23:46

this about Forbes. His strident

23:48

racial views, his flair for the dramatic, and his loyalty

23:50

to Rockwell made Forbes the perfect man for the job.

23:53

California was an ideal location. There were numerous

23:55

identity ministry successfully operating there.

23:57

Forbes would be the first Nazi officer to preside

24:00

over a flock. By fusing Christian identity

24:02

and national socialism, Rockwell hoped

24:04

to maximize the synergies of the groups and broaden

24:06

the potential membership for each group. Nazis

24:08

could find religious justification and legitimization

24:11

in the church. Identity members could find political

24:13

expression for their theology in the A and P.

24:16

A riot could now be expressed as religion

24:18

under the guise of the identity Church. The

24:20

push was on within the party to legitimize the

24:22

cause, to de emphasize Nazism and push

24:24

racial issues to the forefront. Racial issues

24:26

could be easily exploited because they preyed upon

24:29

nativist fears of the white population. Cool,

24:32

yeah, good idea. So

24:34

this is just more palatable, Yeah, yeah,

24:37

it it. It makes it more palatable, more American,

24:39

and kind of expands the breadth

24:42

that it can reach because now there's a theology

24:44

behind it after all that messiness

24:46

in Germany. Yeah, thankfully for all

24:48

of us. Rockwell was assassinated by one of his own men

24:51

on August nine, sixty seven.

24:53

We'll talk about what happened to the American Nazi Party

24:55

after his death, and more detail in the next chapter.

24:58

Right now, what's important is that Rockwell's iriage

25:00

of American Nazis and with Christian identity

25:02

took it spread throughout the fascist right.

25:05

Richard Butler, the reverend who founded the Aryan

25:07

Nations compound in Idaho, was a Christian

25:09

identity preacher. Throughout the nineteen

25:11

eighties and nineteen ninties, the Aryan Nations acted

25:14

as one of the lynch pins of American fascism,

25:16

a place where every kind of violent right wing extremist

25:18

would gather and meet and make connections with

25:20

each other. From the Aryan Nations, Christian

25:23

identity beliefs were able to make inroads not

25:25

just among klansmen and neo Nazis,

25:27

but into the American militia movement.

25:30

Tanya Telfair Sharp, a researcher with

25:32

the Journal of Black Studies, was one of the first academics

25:34

to document the spread of Christian identity outside

25:36

of explicit fascists and into the murkier

25:39

world of American quote patriots.

25:41

She documented evidence of Christian identity pamphlets

25:44

and underground literature spreading in small local

25:46

gun and knife shows throughout the country from nineteen

25:49

to nine. It had, of course,

25:51

been prominent in that world before nine.

25:54

Christian identities focus on the inevitable apocalyptic

25:57

battle between Arians and Satanic Jews

25:59

met to well with the apocalyptic fetishism

26:01

of the survivalist and militia communities. See

26:03

it's like that. That's part of why it's so naturally American.

26:07

Yeah. Gives them a reason. Yeah, it gives them arine

26:09

like quote logic for there

26:12

they're like feelings or desires and have these

26:14

like especially once the

26:16

Cold War is over and you don't have that

26:19

sort of like secular reason to expect

26:21

the apocalypse like now there's yeah.

26:25

Yeah. As Tanya Sharp wrote, both groups were

26:27

tied together by their belief that quote re establishment

26:30

of white sovereignty depends on the use of organized

26:32

aggression against the enemies of true Christians,

26:35

all non whites and all non Protestants. The

26:37

first two letters of racial Holy War make

26:39

up the battle cry. Rahawa often used

26:41

an identity speeches and publications.

26:44

Christian identity literature regularly focused

26:47

on preparing for this apocalyptic battle, which

26:49

allowed them to subtly recruit preppers by focusing

26:51

on not explicitly ideological tasks

26:53

like acquiring dried food and weaponry, or

26:56

building anti personnel traps in order to protect

26:58

woodland compounds. White Ka was

27:00

the gold mine for Christian identity. Fear

27:02

of the year two thousand brought thousands of New Americans

27:05

into the world of survivalist magazines, conventions,

27:07

and online message boards. The

27:09

worlds of the militia movement in the survivalist

27:12

communities are, of course, closely tied into

27:14

the world of conspiracy theorists. In the late

27:16

nineteen nineties, guys like Alex Jones weren't

27:18

preaching overt anti Semitic conspiracy theories.

27:21

You'd never catch him claiming Jews were the spawn of

27:23

Satan, for example, but Joan and

27:25

his ILK were major proponents of the New

27:27

World Order, the king of conspiracy theories.

27:29

Throughout the nineties and early two thousands, the

27:31

n w O took different forms in the mouths of different

27:34

conspiracy theorists. The most mainstream

27:36

and least racist version of the theory was that a secret

27:38

world government of shadowy globalists was slowly

27:40

taking over the federal government and the governments

27:43

of the world, with the aim of enforcing total

27:45

or welly in control over the populace and killing

27:47

the majority of the world's population, particularly

27:50

the Christians. The New World Order

27:52

conspiracy was again not inherently anti

27:54

Semitic or racist, but in practiced most

27:56

expressions of the theory wind up focusing on beliefs

27:59

that a Jewish led all of blacks, homosexuals,

28:01

Hispanic immigrants, and liberals was trying

28:03

to wipe out all straight white Christian Americans.

28:06

Christian identity believers introduced the term

28:08

Zionist occupied government or ZOG

28:11

into the lexicon of American fringe politics.

28:13

It took off like wildfire, leading countless

28:16

Americans on the far right, or entering

28:18

the vocabularies of countless Americans on the far

28:20

right who would never have considered calling themselves a Nazi

28:23

just Zog's Yeah, they would never, Yeah,

28:25

they never do. At first, they never Taylor's

28:28

old time guys, same thing over

28:31

again. That connection quite that,

28:33

that's where it's heading. Towards. That

28:36

is where it all heads towards. That's where Alex Jones

28:38

all heads towards. And he has had so many Christian

28:40

identity preachers on his show. They never talk

28:42

about Christian identity, but you look into

28:44

a ton of these guys and it's like, Oh, he's a pastor

28:46

of a Christian identity underlying. Yeah.

28:49

Right, you present them on the platform, and then

28:51

people watching eventually get into them, and

28:53

then they don't realize what they actually preach, and

28:55

then they get they absorb

28:58

what they preach, and then yeah, brilliant

29:01

Christianity beliefs happened to mesh perfectly

29:04

with every other extremist belief in the United

29:06

States. In the late nineteen eighties and early nineties,

29:08

tax protesting became more common. Christian

29:11

nitinity fit in with that too, arguing

29:13

that paying taxes was really just paying for the demonic

29:15

Jews to carry out their white genocide aims

29:18

even faster. In nine William

29:20

Luther Pierce, a former devotee of Rockwell

29:23

and head of a Nazi group called the National Alliance,

29:25

wrote this in a newsletter. The

29:27

truth of the matter is that the New World Order people

29:29

ultimately aimed to create a new world population

29:32

of surfs for their global plantation,

29:34

a homogeneous population of coffee colored

29:36

surfs, a population of docile, predictable,

29:39

and interchangeable surfs. And they definitely

29:41

don't want any large reservoir of white people

29:43

anywhere who might rebel. N

29:48

Now, if you take the word white out of that

29:50

sentiment, it almost word for word matches

29:52

with any one of a thousand rants. Alex

29:55

Jones has gone on Throughout the years under

29:57

Rockwell. The American Nazi Party never numbered

29:59

more than a few dozen real committed members,

30:01

and its ideas never gained any kind of mainstream

30:04

penetration. But the late nineteen

30:06

nineties American fascists were no less hateful

30:08

or violent than they'd ever been, but their rhetoric had evolved

30:11

to fit with the deep conspiratorial undercurrents

30:13

sweeping through American society. Rockwell

30:16

had shotguned out hardcore racism, and as

30:18

a result, he'd only been able to recruit a small number

30:20

of the craziest people in America, or

30:22

I shouldn't say craziest of the worst people in America.

30:25

Uh new American fascism, blended with Christian

30:28

identity, was capable of hiding out in more

30:30

moderate spaces and luring in new believers

30:32

without waiving a swastika in their faces.

30:35

Perhaps the most potent weapon Christian identity

30:37

added to the arsenal of American fascism was

30:39

the idea of white genocide. If

30:42

you spent much time studying neo Nazis,

30:44

you're aware of the significance of the number fourteen

30:46

that stands for the fourteen words we must secure

30:49

the existence of our people in the future, for white

30:51

children. This is the invention of David

30:53

Lane, a neo Nazi bank robber and for

30:55

decades a Christian identity believer.

30:58

Uh wall Lane was has moved on from Christian

31:00

identity to a weird sort of bastardized

31:02

Norse mythology rip off. Turning

31:07

this fucking Viking there now? Uh

31:09

He and other Christian identity believers in the eighties

31:11

and nineties were largely responsible for seating

31:13

the fear of white genocide into American

31:15

fascism. From Tanya Sharp's article

31:18

quote, the identity literature is

31:20

filled with negative images of white women caring for

31:22

mixed race babies. Race mixing in and

31:24

of itself is a cause for an organized and radical

31:26

plan to separate the races. The National Vanguard

31:29

magazine, a leading pron neo Nazi publication,

31:31

suggests that the cult of misgenation, which

31:33

according to them, has proliferated over the past thirty

31:36

years, has placed the white race on the precipice

31:38

of biological extinction. Furthermore,

31:40

they argued that only radical action will end

31:42

the morality of death. Now,

31:46

the urge to protect white babies and

31:48

ensure the future of the white race inspired a little

31:50

guy named Eric Rudolph to bomb an

31:53

Alabama abortion clinic in nine.

31:56

Rudolph was a Christian identity believer, and

31:58

his beliefs led him to bomb atlanta As Olympic

32:00

Park the same year, along with a gay nightclub.

32:03

Rudolph spent more than a year hiding in the woods

32:05

eluding federal agents. He killed two and injured

32:07

more than a hundred and twenty people over his almost

32:09

two year long bombing spury, and as we talked

32:12

about in the introduction to this, he also inspired

32:14

that British bomber who's built a series

32:16

of nail bombs that killed three people and injured

32:18

dozens more, which also inspired the guy who killed

32:21

Joe Cox. Almost like it's a chain reaction,

32:23

yeah, exactly, Now,

32:26

Eric Rudolph, as I just stated, was not the

32:28

last person moved to violence by this picture of declining

32:30

white race. Everyone listening to this will remember,

32:32

of course, the two thousand nineteen christ Church massacre

32:35

in which a fascist extremist murdered fifty one

32:37

Muslim worshippers at a New Zealand mosque.

32:39

That shooter did not identify as a Nazi, and

32:41

a manifesto lacked the expected anti Semitic

32:44

rambling, but he ranted at length about the threat

32:46

of white genocide and what he called the great

32:48

replacement. In between those two

32:50

terrorists are dozens and dozens of other attacks

32:52

with bits of Christian identity DNA

32:55

coded into them. John Ernest,

32:57

the Paway Synagogue shooter, did not identify

32:59

himself as a follower of Christian identity

33:01

theology, but accordinated Tablet

33:04

magazine quote. The manifesto left

33:06

behind by the Patway shooter reads like a hybrid

33:08

of classical Christian anti semitism and contemporary

33:10

white nationalism. He alternated,

33:12

within paragraph, sometimes within sentences,

33:14

from charging the Jews with responsibility for the death

33:17

of Jesus and the early Christian Saints to declaring

33:19

that Jews fund politicians and organizations

33:22

who use mass immigration to displace the European

33:24

race. The document is riddled with contradictions

33:26

and as inarticulate even by white nationalist

33:29

manifesto standards, as it moves between citing

33:31

the Gospels and the Killer's love of Frederic Chopin

33:33

with explosive hatred towards Jews. But

33:36

what it does evince clearly is a grounding and a

33:38

form of anti Semitism that's equally in debt

33:40

to older Christian traditions and more modern

33:42

secular variants centered on race and soil.

33:45

Christian identities influence in the fascist rite

33:47

is so deep and so well woven that attacks

33:50

are now carried out by terrorists who have been inspired

33:52

by its tenants without ever learning the words Christian

33:54

identity. You'll be hearing about it regularly

33:57

throughout the rest of this audio book, and I'll be sure to

33:59

point out wherever groups or individuals we discussed

34:01

or Christian identity believers. But it almost

34:03

isn't necessary. Christian identity

34:05

is now just part of the furniture of American

34:07

fascism. No matter whether or

34:10

not it's reference directly, it shows up

34:12

everywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

34:14

it's always the same, same, kind of shades the same

34:17

means this is fascinating and horrifying. Of course,

34:19

yeah, this is just like the groundwork.

34:21

We need a delay to really get into the

34:23

story because it's all this stuff that

34:25

it's there, like you said, even

34:28

they don't necessarily know where it came from.

34:30

Or Robert Bowers is kind of rare,

34:32

and that he actually did read in the Christian

34:35

any philosophy. I don't think Ernest ever did.

34:37

But it's there. That's how it's so insidious,

34:39

Like people believe it, Like you said, they start listening

34:42

to this person talk and like they don't on the

34:44

surface understand that it has all

34:46

of these different layers to it. But then as you

34:48

get drawn in, then you're starting

34:50

on subconsciously. It's like you you

34:52

don't notice that, like Trump's references

34:55

to sorrows funding

34:57

the American Caramans and stuff, how that ties

34:59

into like Christian identity, this idea

35:01

that goes back to like the fucking thirties that the Jews

35:04

are trying to like like

35:06

replace with fund multiculturalism

35:08

in order to replace all the all

35:10

the nonsense. And if you don't you

35:12

don't need to have

35:15

read all of this too to like

35:18

know that or believe in it. You just you're

35:20

just like a piece in the the long

35:23

thread that they got. There, my

35:25

metaphor fell apart. Sorry, you just

35:28

lost confidence. You should because

35:32

we all turned and looked to you, and then I

35:34

got Yeah, the pressure from being looked

35:36

at by my familiars. Quick,

35:38

throw some mayonnaise. I

35:40

think I'm gonna throw this packet

35:43

of silverware. So

35:46

people, do you think I should throw it away

35:48

from my dog? Uh? Yeah,

35:51

it's ready. Actually,

35:53

you just went straightforward. I was hoping

35:55

it would all. It's among the oranges. Now it's

35:58

the oranges. Well, we can use those eat

36:00

the oranges. Quite a mess, quite

36:02

a mess for Daniel. There's some tongs in there. Yeah,

36:05

there's some tongs on there. I think I threw a tong.

36:07

Yeah, we can use those to pick up the oranges. The

36:11

oranges stay, okay, Daniel can

36:13

use the dog

36:16

stays. You guys want to plug some

36:18

stuff More than anything in the world.

36:20

I love plugging. Check out

36:22

our podcast called even More News. Check

36:25

out our Patreon dot com slash some more news.

36:27

We are also we have shirts and

36:29

and merch on t public. I

36:32

believe probably dot com slash users slash

36:34

some More News sounds right, I don't know. Look it up. Um,

36:37

I'm on Twitter, Dr Mr Cody. Uh,

36:40

we're also on Twitter Some more News? Are

36:42

you going to say? Handed to Huh? And our

36:45

YouTube shows called some more News And

36:47

Katie Stole is the Twitter name

36:51

for how you just spoke for

36:53

me, all of it. I got all of it out there last

36:55

time you were like, I don't want to do this, So here

36:57

we are. I have nothing to plug.

37:00

The episodes over is

37:02

very proud of me. She's

37:04

clapping. You can't hear it, but she's clapping for

37:06

you on the inside. Oh

37:09

no, wait, she's not clapping, she's slapping

37:11

her head. I mistake

37:13

these two. Regularly you

37:16

can buy T shirts. Yeah,

37:20

in general, just like go to a store and buy some

37:22

T shirts, some T shirts. I'm

37:25

a fan of the concept. Sophie,

37:28

what do you want? She wants

37:30

you to plug your te public store for

37:32

Behind the Bastards. There's a t public store

37:34

for Behind the Bastard there is. That's one of my favorite

37:36

podcasts. So you guys

37:38

should check that out. Robert,

37:40

you should can't pick up some merch um.

37:43

This audio book that he's

37:45

releasing is something to plug. You're

37:47

listening to it now. You're listening to it now, and you can

37:49

go to the war and everyone dot com

37:52

uh, and you can read or

37:54

you can't read it, but you can listen to it

37:56

without the jokes and digressions, if

38:00

that's what you want. If that's what you want, Katie,

38:02

I can't believe you gave me Gough for plugging your stuff,

38:04

but then you plugged his stuff for plugging

38:06

your stuff. She's a real stuff

38:09

cover what stuff goffing

38:12

over? Yet? I don't know. Episode