Part One: The Complete, Insane History of American Border Militias

In Episode 59, Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to discuss the wild history of American Border Militias. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
What's pumping my creams? I'm Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards,
the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know
about the very worst people in all of history. My
guests today, the Inimitable, the unstoppable, the dynamic duo, Sexier
than Obama, Deadlier than Osama, Cody Johnston and Katie Stole.

(00:28):
I really worked on that one than second of it.
And also you could have just said Obama for the
second one and it would have worked. Well. Yeah, but
I appreciate you went to the extremes. I did, I did,
I did. I always like comparing my guests to famous terrorists. Yeah,
it felt right, it goes, It goes well every time.
How are y'all doing today? Great? Yeah. We we do have,

(00:51):
of course, our coffee mate in the in the room
with us one pump, one cream. It expired in January.
That's very cool. I do have because I throw things
now on the air because I've become a prima donna. Uh.
This time it is a loaf of Izio Artisan Bakery,
San Francisco style sour dough. Delicious. I will be throwing

(01:12):
this in anger at several points. I do think that
coffee mate might have curdled by now, but it might
make a good spread for this sour dough. Oh that's
a good idea, just putting that out there. And if
I wanted one cream spread on the sour dough, how
many pumps would that though? It's so like old now
and curls, that might need two or three pumps, you know,

(01:34):
at least to get it started. Yeah, speaking of getting
it started, you guys hear about that border militia that
that apprehended hundreds of migrants gunpoint. Yeah, you want to
hear the whole history of civilian border Militia's I really do? Oh?
I thought we were just going to hang out. Okay, okay, okay,
that's what I told Cody to get him here. But

(01:56):
every time table, it's working time. That's what I pump says.
Got to get those pumps and the equal number of creams.
Ideally we should get new coffee X pump is X
cream X pump, except that clearly nobody wants to use it,
So I don't know if you do need any more cream.
It's only a prop. Now, it's just a prop. It's
it's ambient cream. Okay, let's get into it. So when

(02:23):
I was a little kid growing up in Texas, I
learned about the glorious war my white ancestors had fought
against the brutal Mexican government and the evil cross dressing
Santa Anna. There was a lot I did not learn, though,
like that the Texas Revolutionaries had been fighting for their
right to own human beings and that Santa Ana was
one of the founding fathers of cock fighting. I did, however,
learn a lot about the Alamo. From there. My Texas

(02:43):
history course went from the short lived and incompetently led
Republic of Texas to the Civil War. That's basically it.
I don't remember learning much about Texas in the nineteen
twenties or anything about the border, aside from some haggeographic
tales of the very first Texas Rangers. Now, in case
you don't know, the Texas Rangers are basically the Loans
our state's FBI, only with more spin kicking. See the
documentary Walker Texas Rangers for more information on the Rangers

(03:06):
in their current incarnation. I did, not, however, learn much
about what the Rangers have gotten up to pre impost
Civil War days. According to Kelly Hernandez, author of Migra
history of the U S Border Patrol quote. They battled
indigenous groups for dominance in the region, chased down runaway
slaves who struck for freedom deep within Mexico, and settled
scores with anyone who challenged the Anglo American project in Texas.

(03:26):
The Rangers proved particularly useful in helping Anglo American landholders
win favorable settlements of land when labor disputes with Texas Mexicans.
Whatever the task, however, raw physical violence was the rangers
principal strategy. Yeah, yeah, so cool, very cool. That's how
you do it, raw physical violence. The art of the
raw physical violence, just just shooting people. Now. I found

(03:49):
that quote in several others in a wonderful Intercept article
that makes it very clear just how much unchecked violence
was key to early border patrol strategies, because the Texas
Rangers evolved from a force bent on maintain aiming white
dominance in Texas to in the early nineteen hundreds, this
nation's first real border patrol. Here's the Intercept quote. The
early years of the twentieth century from nineteen ten to

(04:10):
nineteen twenty were particularly bloody, with hundreds of Mexicans murdered
and lynched in the Texas borderlands. The dead included women
and children, the aged and the young, longtime residents, and
recent arrivals, says the Refusing to Forget Project, an initiative
started by a collective of border based historians and researchers.
They were killed by strangers, by neighbors, by vigilantes, and
at the hands of local law enforcement officers and the
Texas Rangers. Some were summarily executed after being taken captive

(04:33):
or shot under the flimsy pretext of trying to escape.
Some are left in the open a rod. Others desecrated
by being burnt, decapitated, or tortured by means such as
having beer bottles rammed in their mouths. So that's the
start of border patrol. What if we didn't do anyway? Like,
what if what if somebody looked at that and was
like that we should allow that? Well, but then you

(04:54):
wouldn't be a country. M m night. Okay, okay, But
what funny definition of country here? What if you could though?
That's just I was I'm saying, is what if you
could that be a country and not do that? Sounds
like some pie in the sky leftist woo woo, common bag. Okay, okay, okay,
keep dreaming, Cody, here, but imagine okay, all right, no,

(05:18):
you're right, yes, too lofty. Imagine all the people not
torturing migrants with beer bottles rammed in their mouths. I
want to imagine, not that, though, what if? What if?
What if not that? What what if not that? What if?
Um laws? What if not that? What if? Laws? This
is poetic, But they broke the law by crossing an

(05:40):
imaginary line. They had to come. If they didn't want
a beer bottle ram in them, they shouldn't have come here. Yeah,
that's true. And then by like just by virtue of
being here, they're they're criminals. So they're legal human beings.
I mean, do we even want to say human beings
like with these people doing probably use that word when
you when you when you refer to them as human beings.

(06:01):
That makes me breadthrowing angry. Don't take it back, Cody,
I'm not. Actually, if they didn't, if they didn't want
these things to happen to them, and then they shouldn't
come here. We don't want to do it. This is deterrent. Oh,
it's a it's a deterrent beer bottle shows. This is
an example, so you know what you're getting. Yeah, I

(06:21):
hate it. Did it work? No? I did a paper
which does not in any way translate to the audio
format that we work exclusively in. But it was very
comedique in the room. Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad it
worked in the room. In the roaring twenties, inequality sword
while an oppressive drug prohibition state led to outbursts of

(06:43):
violent crime across the United States, some Americans had decided
that the cause of their problems we're all the goddamn immigrants.
We've talked a bit about this a little in other episodes.
The second KKK made halting immigration a keystone of its politics,
although they were mostly focused on stopping immigrants from the
bad parts of Europe, but down south in Texas, many
Americans decided the problem was Mexican immigrants. The need for

(07:06):
Mexican farm labor meant that no real restrictions were put
in place on immigration, but the government created the border
Patrol as a sav to people who wanted something done.
Capitalized the essence something I heard that with the way inflected,
that's why they wanted something done. That's that's yeah, but
people racist and Texas were like, I don't want these

(07:27):
Mexicans coming in. And the agribusiness companies were like, we
can't harvest food without them, so we're not gonna like,
We're gonna lobby the government to not restrict them from
coming in. And racists were like, but that makes me angry.
So the government was like, have have border patrol. That's
where they come from. And now I tossed the bread

(07:49):
also says eat more toast on it. You know what
I'm noticing right now is an issue with my toss
and bread today. It doesn't bounce back like the bagel.
The bagels would pop right back to me like a boomerang.
I'm gonna have. Well, I'm gonna have to have Dani'll
go get it. Thank you, some extra work for somebody,
for somebody, because I am a prima donna. Yeah, Davis

(08:10):
um like Beyonce a queen. I have taken that on myself.
Oh no, no, no, I'll keep throwing the bread. You're
gonna get the bagels, all right, Let's continue while he
grabs my toss in bagels. Now. Uh. The early border
patrol was very much cut from the cloth of the

(08:31):
Texas rangers. The intercept interviewed Francisco Can't, a former Border
Patrol agent, who told them quote, I often heard romanticized
stories of the old patrol, a limit for the days
when agents had free reins across the borderlands, lighting abandoned
cars on fire, and tuning up smugglers and migrants at will.
As young trainees, my colleagues and I were taken to
storied places in the desert. A remote pass where earlier

(08:52):
generations of agents were rumored to have pushed migrants from
cliff tops and hidden their corpses. A stretch of road
where an agent had run over a Native American lying
I'm going to sleep in the road. An isolated patch
of scrubland where agents had force fed smugglers fistfuls of
marijuana and turn them loose to rock through the wilderness
barefoot and stripped to their underwear. There was a lot
to digest there, Thank you, Dan. What does turning up mean?

(09:14):
Tuning up beating the ship out of Yeah? Of course,
as time when on the border, patrol became gradually more
professional and somewhat less like a bunch of drunken sociopaths.
Less being the operative word not unlike and we're not
going to talk enough about the number of people who
are killed by border patrol every year. Some violence still persists,
but it's it's obviously less than it was in the twenties,

(09:37):
just like we don't you know, there's still problems with
prescription drug companies, but we don't sell children morphine. A
lot of things are less than the twenties. Yeah, as
a general rule, doesn't make it okay, doesn't make it okay. Um,
so literally almost a hundred years ago. Yeah, so the
border patrol became less sociopathic, but the desire to fight
immigration with hooliganry remained ent. Louis Beam. You guys ever

(10:02):
heard of Louis Beam. Oh, he is someone we will
be talking about a lot in my upcoming audiobook, The
War on Everyone, because he's like if George Lincoln Rockwell
is like the George Washington of American fascism, Lewis Beam
is like the Abraham Lincoln of Nazis. Yeah. That actually
does not scan at all. So I don't know why

(10:24):
I said it, but yeah, I got you. Yeah, yeah.
Lewis Beam did an eighteen month extended tour in Vietnam
as a helicopter machine gunner. He saw extensive combat and
spent roughly a thousand hours shooting bullets at people, accounting
for between twelve and fifty one kills. When he came home,
it was as a radicalized far right white nationalist with
ferment anti communist views. In the early nineteen seventies, Beam

(10:47):
created the Clan Border Watch, part of a new trend
towards paramilitary training among the KKK. Beam stated at the time,
when our government officials refused to enforce the laws of
the country, we will enforce them ourselves. Okay, m that's
what the that's the that's yeah, are gone given right

(11:09):
to take the lawn to our own hands? Exactly, Yeah, exactly.
If the government won't stop people who are critical to
the infrastructure and economy of this nation from entering illegally
because the legal pathways are a gigantic pain in the ass,
then it's got to be up to the KKK to
do it. That just makes sense. That doesn't make me
question um any of uh my feelings about immigration or

(11:33):
immigrants or what people think about getting rid of them. Yeah,
I'll just take those two things at face value and
never think about it again. You know. What you know.
What I love is never thinking about things again. Just
never think about it again, never think again. It's easier
that way. It's way easier that way. Now we're gonna,

(11:54):
as I said, talk about Louis Beam so much more
during the War on everyone my upcoming very fun audiobook
that everyone like love find up lifting and dare I
say shamefully erotic. But for the purposes of our story today,
the tail of the Clan border Watch has a lot
more to do with two different and somewhat more comical racists,
Tom Metzger and David Duke. Yeah this motherfucker. Yeah. Now,

(12:18):
Metzker was beams counterpart in the California ku Klux Klan,
and Duke was, Well, we'll get to David Duke in
a little bit anyway. Here's how Bring the War Home
by Kathleen Blue describes the Clan Border patrol quote the
patrols functioned both as a publicity stunt and as a
way to inculcate real anti immigrant hostility and encourage acts
of violence. Some patrols worked as photo opportunities for the press,

(12:41):
and one such incident, Duke and California KKK members hung
Clan border Watch signs on their cars and drove to
the border in near San Diego and Tijuana. When no
undocumented immigrants appeared, Duke boasted to reporters, I think some
Mexicans are afraid to enter the country because of the clan. See,
there's that deterrent working. There's that deterrent working. Yeah, that's
that's because if if the KKK being there, it didn't work.

(13:04):
So like let's just uh take your kids away. That's
the next step. And just like step, it doesn't work. Okay, well,
I guess like tear gas, you know, Um, that doesn't work.
Next up, bullets. I didn't want to think about it more.
I was gonna put that away. I wasn't gonna, you know,
just not analyze that. The shooting stuff. Remember what you're

(13:25):
talking about. Ay, there you go. You know what I'm
about to put away. The throwing right under my feet.
We gotta stick with the throwing bagels. This this Tasson
bread is Tasson dough doesn't work. What are you laughing at, Sophie?
This is very important. I'm doing a very important podcast

(13:48):
right now. What if the Tasson bread company offered to
sponsor this show? Um, you know, I have too much integrity.
That's what I like to hear. I mean, I'll let
them sponsor the show, but I'm not going to lie
and say that the tossing bread is better than the
throwing babe exactly exactly. You gotta be honest. Anyone can
advertise as long as the truth can be told exactly.

(14:08):
The bread is for cradled cream. And that's and that's
what we stand behind. I mean, it's I'll say this,
it's more fun to throw the bread, but the bounce
back is so much more satisfy on the on the
tossing bagels. You're gonna do that's I mean, I'm gonna
throw the baby. Yeah, four pumps one cream. I mean,

(14:30):
we we could test that out. Let's not, let's not,
but let's do someday when we when we inevitably do
the drunk episode of this podcast, we'll figure out exactly
how these relate to one of those little creamer packets
you get in the seven eleven in one year when
it's a year old, when it's a it's a year old.
Cream will figure Yeah. So Tom Metzger and David Duke

(14:55):
are both important figures in the development of the American
fascist movement. But the day I want to go into
a little bit more detail about David Duke. He's been
racist longer than most Americans have been alive. During the
nineteen sixties, when he was in high school, he was
already an ardent white nationalist. When he went to college
in nineteen sixty nine, he became a student organizer for
the National Socialist White People's Party, a direct descendant of
George Lincoln Rockwell's Nazi Party. Duke also started the White

(15:18):
Student Alliance and the White Youth Alliance. He was particularly
active in Louisiana State University's Free Speech Alley. According to
Leonard Zeskin's Blood and Politics quote. In one incident from
those early years, Duke dawned the Nazi stormtrooper uniform, complete
with swastika arm band, and strode around for the cameras
with a picket sign protesting a campus speech by noted
left wing attorney William Kunsler. Free speech. All this checks out.

(15:44):
It sounds like a real good conservative, sounds like a
real good guy. What if, let's say he and these
people were to get a lot of power, do you
think that they would care about free speech? Yeah? Of
course you think they would they would defend free speech
for people who we disagree with them. You know, you
know that's not free speech, Cody. Free speech is my
ability to talk about what I want. I don't give

(16:06):
a about someone else. I was reading about a free
speech activist guy named Heitler Hitler something like that in Germany.
I think it's pronounced Titlerler. Yeah, and he came to
power actually in the early nineteen thirties. I even read,
you know, further in the book that I'm reading about him,
But I think he was a real free speech crusader. Well,
because I don't, you know, I haven't finished the book.

(16:28):
I'll get I'll get through one of these days. Next
time you talk about Heitler. The California Border Patrol was
Duke's brain baby, first and foremost, although Metzger handled most
of the logistics. Blood and Politics describes the media campaign
he crafted around these patrols. Relating a press conference in
October of nineteen seventy seven, David Duke stepped out of
a rented helicopter and onto the grounds of the San

(16:49):
Ya Cedro Port of Entry south of San Diego, a
federal office used by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. I
n S to regulate traffic on the border with Mexico.
Dressed in a light blue business suit, Duke was to
rounded by an entourage of tough looking men in street clothes,
all members of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
They faced a protest group angry at the clan's public appearance,
and eggs splatted on Duke's clothes and a rock broke

(17:10):
the windshield of a klansman's car. Police arrested the rock thrower,
while an I n S Agent in charge welcome the
klansmen and gave them a guided tour of the board
facility for Duke and company, this visit was the first
stop in an effort to stir up opposition to brown
skinned immigrants. We believe very strongly white people are becoming
second class citizens in this country, Duke told the press.
When I think of America, I think of a white country. Honestly,

(17:31):
that just makes we try to keep this light and fun,
but my blood boils a little bit like I feel
my shoulders and shining up to my ears could because
you're angry at the anti free speech people who toast
the rocket that you you you got me go and
let him speak Yeah. I mean, I think you're doing
a great job because you're you're like relaying the message

(17:53):
but speaking right now. Yeah, these rock throws, the egg throwers,
they might as well be shooting guns. They might as
well should guns and should be treated as such. Also,
what about those poor baby eggs, those poor baby chicken
that could have been a third of an omelet um?
As the current president the United States says, maybe we
should treat them throwing rocks as if they were guns. Yeah, yeah,

(18:16):
that makes sense, Uh, because you know, um, when you
toss a rock that can that could go in a
solid fifteen twenty ft per second, and you know a
rifle is only like three thousand feet per second. And
it's not that it's not that different, but a tiny
rock exactly what's math but numbers? You know? Come on.

(18:37):
Duke officially announced his Clan border watch several days later
in Sacramento. He said five hundred to a thousand clansmen
would patrol the border crossings in areas in between the
fences in search of illegal immigrants. The reality was less impressive.
Less than two hundred clansmen actually showed up to drive around,
and their activity at the border was limited. To a
few weeks. The Knights of Texas started patrolling their border
at the same time, but in both cases, the border

(18:58):
watches were more pr than pray article. The clan's newspaper,
The Crusader, published a special article to commemorate this heroic action.
No single action in the last decade has done more
to bring public attention and awareness on the border problem. Now,
it would be more accurate to state that no single
action did more to bring public awareness to the cause
of white nationalism. Focusing on the border and illegal immigration

(19:20):
was a hugely successful pr move for America's most organized racists.
As David Duke himself noted, when a hundred reporters are
gathered around, hanging on every word, when they hope you
accomplish your objectives by their own misguided sensationalism. If indeed
it was a media stunt, it was by their own
presence an admission that it was a very brilliant one
that's irrelevant to anything today. Yeah, no, it does not

(19:43):
tie into That's my favorite thing coming on this podcast
because it's how irrelevant it is to hearing hearing stories
and stuff that has nothing to do with what's going on,
Like because I like to. You know, we read the
news all the time, we talk about all the time,
and so you want to shut that part of your
brain off and you just want to things that never happened.
I just want to hear stories that are like, here's
this thing happen. Yeah, that has that doesn't tie into

(20:06):
anything else, you know, it does tie into anything else.
Ads for products and services. It might even be an
ad for Sarah Lee Deluxe Throwing bagels. Yeah they failed
right back products, We're back, just like these bagels were

(20:30):
back after I threw them because they bounced right back,
which should be the tagline. If the fucking Sara Lee
people need to advertiser products, I can sell some motherfucking babys.
They bounce right back. They bounce right Bagel rings, bagel
Oh good, I love it. We've got a career in
this room. Yeah, this this feels more organic than pitching

(20:53):
Derrito's because I love tossing bagels. Yea, even more than
you love. I mean that can be a euphemism for
a lot of things, to tossing bagels. Yep, yep, my
mind one places. Yeah, if you're a fan of bagel
salad as I am chopped out bagel in a chicken

(21:15):
stir fry, salad and coffee meat. Coffee mate. Yeah, that's
that's the that's the that's the cream. It's a reduction
in the salad cream. This is I've been on this
podcast a lot. This is the worst thing I've ever heard.
Let's talk about stuff that's even worse. So. While David

(21:35):
Duke and Louis Beam were content to mostly use the
question of illegal immigration to drum up interest in their
super cool clubs, other Americans remained frustrated by the fact
that no actual action had been taken to stop migrants
from coming over. Inter Civilian Material Assistance, or the CMA.
The CMA was founded in nine three by a wholesale
grocer from Arizona who wanted to provide aid to anti

(21:57):
communist guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua. This aid even they turned
into actual volunteer tier fighters, several of whom died in
that country. Kathleen Blue notes that quote in Nicaragua, cm
A acted covertly on behalf of the U. S government.
It was funded by the CIA and supplied by the
US military. Cool that now. The nine eighties were a
time in which a lot of civil wars were raging

(22:18):
all across Latin America. Most of those wars were funded
and in some way supported by the CIA and the U. S. Military.
For example, also during this period, the Guatemalan government was
fighting an insurgency. They dumped suspected guerilla fighters into the
ocean out of helicopters so no one would find their
bodies and disrupt the military aid they received from the
United States. All this violence and unrest across the region

(22:39):
led a lot of people to flee their homes and
search for a better's violent life in the United States.
The c m A was not a fan of this.
According to the intercept quote, in the summer of nineteen
eighty six, approximately twenty heavily armed men and military fatigue
stepped into the darkness of the Arizona Desert. It was
July fourth weekend outside the remote border town of Lachielle,
and the gunmen were on the hunt, carrying M sixteens

(23:00):
and AK forty seven with Israeli night vision goggles strapped
to their heads. The vigilante soon found what they were
looking for, two car loads of Mexican nationals. JR. Hagen,
the crucifix wearing Vietnam veteran who led the operation would
later say that the vehicles came to a stop on
their own. Other members of his team disagreed, telling reporters
that they booby trapped the road, tearing the tires of
one of the vehicles to shreds before opening fire. It

(23:21):
was the latest in a series of escalating c m
A actions, which had also included clandestine foes into Mexico.
The militia members held sixteen men, women, and children at
gunpoint for an hour and a half before border patrol
agents arrived to take them away. Very big descrupancy story.
I love that they're they're protecting the US border by
invading Mexican and it's fine. It's like, it's like almost

(23:44):
like people, these hyper masculine people, they need this award
to be fighting. They need to have some like battle
at their planets. I get. I like guns, have football.
I get the desire to larp with a fucking a
R fifteen. Go do it on your friends end and
shoot it old cars. Don't funk with people's lives and
shoot their vehicles playing video game play video Yeah. Yeah,

(24:11):
like go funk up another country. And then when they
come there and stop them with guns. Um. I love
because it's really I was like, okay, one guy said
that they stopped in their own but they disagreed, and
I was waiting for you, like, no they stopped, they
like held up guns, they stopped the car. No no
they booby no no, we like we like put sit down.

(24:34):
We weren't just standing in the middle room. They didn't
want Yeah, yeah, I know. They want a war. They
want a civil war. They want a revolution. There's a
hand in the old website and like here's nine and
all these polls of like what revolution do you prefer?
And it's like I want a civil war. No, I
want like like revolt against the government. Just like all

(24:55):
these different options, there's one thing they want. They have
all those cool toys and they want an excuse to
use them. So nobody voted for the industrial revolution. And
that was my favorite. Was like, what's your favorite? It's
just I just you know what, you know what I
love is little cute little tikes working in factories. That
just yeah, that really gets me. Well, the keyword is cute.

(25:16):
It's cute. It's cute as when they're little hands they
go into those grain threshers and They just try to
pull the stuff out faster than it can cut their fingers.
So cute hands wouldn't be able to do that. They
wouldn't be less cute, and it would be less cute.
Oh my god. In there the little the little cute
little fake limbs for them, the little peg legs and stuff,
and they lose their legs and the threshers like that,

(25:39):
like little black lung Yeah, yeah, I think how little
those black lungs are too. It's adorable. I love a
good liquorice jelly beans in their in their chest. So
cute took it too far. Jelly beans are cute with
you know what? Yeah, it hit Katie's mike if I

(26:06):
throw it out the other wall. What what do you?
What is that expression? Sylvie? That was like a pro
Chester throwing something like fire back, Yes, please, thank you, yeah,
instead of a Molotov's Yeah, Molotov cocked bagel your business

(26:28):
card like a weapon. I love that bagel. There's something here.
Molototh locks to something. We're close, We're getting there, We're
getting there. I'm proud of all of us. We'll probably
cut some of that out. Dances, No, Sir. One was

(26:51):
an important year for America's political racists. That's the year
David Duke Ranford governor of Louisiana. He lost, but he
won almost of the popular vote, which is a lot
of folks. That's the magic number. Yeah, it's like that,
like that, there's always that range of people who will
vote for this kind of thing, the president's current approval rating,

(27:12):
and then I don't know you're talking about who you're
talking about. It was also the year of the Gulf War,
and many of America's white supremacists were very much against
that war happening. The Populist Party was founded by Willis
Carto in nineteen eighty four. Willis will get an episode himself,
but the short of it is he was modern America's
first successful intellectual Nazi. Think of him as rich as

(27:33):
the Richard Spencer of the nineteen eighties and nineties. He
kept his power level just wrapped up enough to avoid
being tired with the same brush as George Lincoln Rockwell,
but he shared Rockwellt ultimate goal uniting the American right
behind white supremacist politics. The Populist Party was a major
early vehicle for David Duke's political career. In nine they
picketed and protested the Gulf War. Blood and Politics cites

(27:56):
one of the leaflets they handed out by the hundreds quote,
if the Populist Party were in power, we would have
hundreds of thousands of troops on the Mexican border, not
in desert desert sand dunes ten thousand miles away. There
would be no affirmative action quotas or other anti white
racist schemes, anti white racist schemes. That's my, oh God,

(28:16):
waiting for like, no more wars, just not we want.
We want to war on those unarmed people trying to
cross the border. I got to kill those women and children.
We want to be able to see the war from
our backyard. I want to, I want to. I want
a war, but I also don't want to have to

(28:37):
go too far from the kitchen. Well, you don't want
to have to fight a war in like a gross
foreign country. No want I want to. I want to
kill some people. I want to go home to my
own bed. Exactly America first, we're here forever. Import, don't
export exactly exactly exactly. We've got a word deficit trade

(28:59):
wise at the war gap. By nineteen ninety two or
in nineteen ninety two, Pat Buchanan ran in the Republican
Party primary against George H. W. Bush. So did Tom
Metzger for that matter. Buchanan made border security the keystone
issue of his campaign. During a press event of the
Border in May, he told the l A Times quote,
I am calling attention to a national disgrace, the failure

(29:20):
of the national government of the United States to protect
the borders of the United States from an illegal invasion
that involves at least a million aliens a year. As
a consequence of that, we have social problems, in economic
problems and drug problems. Oh. Unfortunately for Pat, Tom Metzker
showed up at the border that same day intent on
attacking Pat Buchanan from the right. Here's how Blood and
Politics relates what happened next. The only problem was Metzker,

(29:42):
who waited with great fanfare for Buchanan to appear. Where
was the great White hope? He sneered like a perfect
villain in a street theater. I want to talk with him.
When Buchanan finally did appear, he was forced to huddle
in a small circle of supporters to avoid contact with Metzger,
But the ornery arian worked his way into camera range. Nevertheless,
pat he old as all the cameras swung away from
the candidate and toward him, what are we going to

(30:03):
do about all those rich Republicans making millions off the
wet backs in the Imperial Valley. As the camera swung
back and forth, Buchanan beat a hasty retreat after less
than fifteen minutes of photo less opportunity. With the cameras
all to himself. Metzger then staged his own press conference.
If he were president, he argued volubly, he would station
National Guard troops like a picket fence along the border
with orders to shoot to kill. The immigration problem would

(30:25):
be over in one night, he declared, Yes, but also cool,
but also gross. Um, but also gross. That's a yeah,
that's it's always fascinating, Yeah, hearing current stories like a
picket fence, but just like, yeah, that a beautiful fence

(30:46):
guns the right. That's that's a thing. Okay, Okay, It's like, uh,
like I've seen that conversation happen online many many times,
but just like oh yeah too, Like candidates are doing
their their Twitter their Twitter argument, but in real life, yeah,
and pulling them to the right. This is what we

(31:06):
had to do before Twitter would show up at the
border and shout at each other. Now, obviously the election
did not go to any Republican slick Willie, noted lawyer
and probable rapist one. In the mid nineteen nineties, Clinton's
Border Patrol launched the Prevention through Deterrence campaign. This basically
focused the border patrol in several specific border cities and

(31:27):
an attempt to funnel migrants into the Sonoran Desert by
basically blocking off all of the easy ways into the country.
The idea was that migrants would realize there were no
safe roots into the United States and thus stopped trying
to enter. I'm sure that worked. Seems like people fleeing
war and in some cases literal genocide in their homes
would be stopped by crossing an additional desert. Desperation and

(31:50):
the human drive for survival is easily deterred. Yes, it
very very easy to buy a single extra obstacle exactly,
that isn't necessarily a worse obstacle than once they've already.
That's a key way to get people to stop trying
to do something. It's like go through hell and be
like what about hell light? Yeah, what about a slightly

(32:13):
less worse. Anyway, let's read the next pair. Oh no, uh.
It turns out thousands of migrants tried to cross and
hundreds of them died in the Sonoran Desert. In many cases,
they died due to lack of water, heat stroke, and
all the other terrible things that can happen to a
body whilst traveling through the desert on foot. But a
number of those migrants we will never know how many
died violently. In two thousand, you Cbo de Harrow, a
Mexican man, was shot to death by Texas landowners Sam Blackwood.

(32:36):
You Cbo had asked Sam for water. Blackwood was convicted
of a misdemeanor deadly conduct charge and find four thousand dollars.
Several members of the jury hugged members of his family
after the verdict was given. All of this finally brings
me to the Minutemen. Now, if you're like me, the
Minuteman's Civil Defense Corps were the first vigilante border militia

(32:57):
you ever heard about. They started in April of two
thousand five as the brain child of a man named
Chris Simcox. Now Chris was born in nineteen sixty one.
His childhood occurred while David Duke was wearing a swastika
in Free Speech Alley and Lewis Bean was machine gunning
people in Vietnam. In his early years, Chris' life gave
little hint that he would follow down an evening vaguely
similar path to those men. He moved out to l

(33:19):
A with dreams of becoming an actor. After several years
of failure, he became a kindergarten teacher instead, and taught
at the Wildwood School for thirteen years. What just like
You're You're really not gonna like where this goes. By
September eleventh, two thousand one, he'd transitioned to running a
private tutoring business. According to The Nation Quote, he appeared

(33:41):
to suffer a middle breakdown in the days after the
September eleventh, two one terrorist attacks, refusing to communicate with
anyone unless they first recited the Preamble to the U. S. Constitution,
and laying a series of bizarre messages on his ex
wife's answering the machine about stockpiling weapons. I'm going on
a great adventure, Simcox told his son three weeks after
the attacks. Ah, this doesn't end well. Adventures are fun, yeah,

(34:05):
adventures are fun. I love adventure adventures as adventures, adventures
adventures avengers both are fun. Both are fun um and
nobody dies and either either of them. That's my favorite
thing about adventure is the never dying part. This adventure
was Chris moving out to Tombstone, Arizona and getting a
gig is a fake gunfighter and a local show for tourists.

(34:27):
His James are coming. It's fun. It's gonna be fun.
He also sunk some of his savings into buying The
Tombstone Tumbleweed, a small local paper. Chris changed its editorial
direction from local news to ranting violently about immigrants. The
next year, two thousand two, he founded the Tombstone Militia,
which his own newspaper described as a committee of vigilantes.

(34:49):
The Tombstone Militias started patrolling the border irregularly. In January
two thousand three, Chris was arrested for infrequently weirdly. That's
that's how you duck costumes. We don't do it that often,
you know. In two thousand three, Chris was arrested for

(35:10):
illegally carrying a firearm in a national park. During one
of these missions, The Nation notes also in his possession.
We're a police scanner and a toy figure of Wyatt
earth Redding a horse. So it is weirdly Yeah, alright,
everything's adding up. Yeah. In April of two thousand five,
Chris teamed up with Jim Gilchrist, a retired accountant in
Orange County, to start the Minuteman Project. According to Chris,

(35:30):
citizen border patrols were needed to do the job the
government refuses to do and protect the country from people
he called invaders. That's a new word. All of this
is new. Not the same language that Louis Beam, the Nazi,
used to justify the Clan border patrol a couple of
decades earlier. Very totally different, the same identical language. Yeah,

(35:54):
not the same way that any of these people use,
the President specifically, or the christ Church shooter, or I
could should I mean, yeah, you know, I'll just I'll
just you know, I actually, it's what do you want
to throw these bagels and anger at that one wherever
you wants you tossed those bagels. Nothing in here can

(36:14):
be damaged solids. They still bound back to Robert and
the invasion is over. Does this play well on podcasts? Oh? Yeah?
People love people love a good a good bagel throw.
It's the cornerstone of my show. The minute Man Project
lasted a month, and it mostly involved groups of volunteers
sitting in lawn chairs near the border looking for migrants

(36:36):
with binoculars. While it was unimpressive on the ground, the
Minuteman Project was a huge pr success. Fox paid particular attention,
but coverage span the gamut of mainstream news sources. I
found an NBC News article from June two thousand and five,
about two months after the Minuteman's first outing quote. Headlines
from the Arizona event gave the group momentum and turned
what some believed to be nothing more than a publicity

(36:57):
stunt into a national movement. The group has since hired Yours,
reorganized into separate corporations, filed to legally protect the name.
Minuteman Project, hired a Washington based media consultant and started
an aggressive fundraising campaign, and representatives of the group have
been to Washington to lobby Congress and relate the lessons
learned from their time on the border. So unless the

(37:17):
work continues, it's just going to be viewed as a
dog and pony show, said James Gilchrist, one of the
mintment leaders. When the air Zona project wrapped up, he
and Simcox unabashedly acknowledged that among their chief considerations in
Arizona was getting media attention. So if you know one
thing about the kind of people who create volunteer malicious,
it's that they're all impossible assholes who hate each other.
Simcox and Gilchrist did not get along, and less than

(37:38):
a month after blowing up, you know, press wise, the
Minuteman project. Yeah, I'm hungover again, so I'm reading some
of this like a ship head. Uh. Less than a
month after blowing up in the news, the Minuteman fractured
into two separate groups. Gil Chris created Minuteman Inc, an
organization aimed at fighting a legal immigration inside the US
by attacking employers violating immigration laws. Simcox ran the Minuteman

(38:02):
Civil Defense Corps or m c d C. On paper,
the two groups were part of the same larger whole.
In reality, they had fairly little to do with each other.
This worked out great for Chris Simcox because it meant
he could solicit donations directly to his group without sharing
with Gilchrist. By August of two thousand six, between sixty
thousand and a hundred and thirty thousand people had donated
money to fund the mc DC's operations. Chris Simcox claimed

(38:23):
that he had received over one point six million dollars,
but he claimed at that point to have more than
seven thousand, four hundred and fifty one Kazami grantes or
migrant hunters in his personal army. He claims these men
had personally delivered thirteen thousand illegal aliens to the border patrol.
Simcox and Gilchrist quickly gained the attention of powerful forces
within the American right. According to the Nation Quote, the

(38:46):
cannonball media splash that followed attracted the attention of Diner Consultants.
The Chicago based political consulting and fundraising operation is run
by Philip Sheldon, son of the Traditional Values Coalition, long
one of the nation's most vociferous anti gay crusaders. Diner
is one cog and Philip Shelbon's revenue generating machine, which
also includes Response Unlimited, a direct mail firm promoted as
the nation's best and most comprehensive source of mailing lists

(39:08):
for conservative and Christian mailers and telemarketers, and perhaps best
known for ghoulishly purchasing a list of donors to Terry
Shivo's legal fund from her parents several days before her death. Cool. Cool,
that's cool. You know what is even cooler. Another mailing
list that Response Unlimited would happily sell to the highest
bidder was a list of people who had subscribed to
a now dead magazine called The Spotlight. Ever heard of Spotlight?

(39:30):
I've heard of spotlights? Yeah? Well The Spotlight is a
literal neo Nazi news rag that mostly focused on denying
the Holocaust. Was published by Willis Carto, founder of the
Populist Party and backer of David Duke. So Chris Simcox
was happy to sell access to his mailing list to
these these people'll checks out? Cool? Uh, the the I

(39:55):
didn't care for the Nazi stuff, didn't care for I
didn't care for that. I like that part. Not a
fan of referring to them as migrant hunters that so much,
didn't Um, Can I just say like all of the above, Yeah,
you can't say that. I'm not a fan of migrant
hunting either. You know what, I am a fan of products.

(40:18):
I love products services. Oh my gosh, I didn't know
he included before we go out to ads. I'm gonna
try tossing something I've never tossed, and this might be
an objectively bad idea. Yeah, I'm throwing them. What happened?
There's no way to one toss all the cream. It
was fine, safe, everything's good, everything's fine. Nothing pardon because

(40:43):
I bapped it away part of the language, but nothing
came out. But if something to come out, products, we're back. God,
those ads, I bought it. I bought it all. I'm

(41:06):
so full from those ads. So am I, so am I.
You know, let's let's let's fill our heads now with
some some knowledge. Let's digest something knowledge. So we were
talking about response unlimited people who buy up all the
mailing lists. They at the minute Man's mailing list, or essentially,
Chris Simcox sold access to that. The Nation actually managed

(41:28):
to find out some of the people who purchased access
to the Minuteman's mailing list. It included Judge Roy Moore
for his failed dubernatorial campaign, Oliver North's Freedom Alliance, and
some organization called Stop Puerto Rico Statehood Budge. They know
they're fucking Oh my goodness, uh data cool. Yeah, Now,

(41:49):
most new grifters and Chris Simcox's position would have sucked
everything up within six months or less of their first
grift going viral. But Chris is a smart dude. On
April nineteenth, two six, he showed up on Fox News
is Hannity and Colmbs. He stated, with zero evidence that
three hundred thousand Middle Easterners had been apprehended entering the
country let in the last year. This is a clear
and present danger. It is the greatest threat to national security,

(42:11):
in public safety. The time for negotiating is over. He
then delivered an ultimatum to President George W. Bush, declare
a state of emergency and deploy the National Guard in
military reserves or by Memorial Day weekend. We're going to
break ground and we're going to start helping landowners to
build a double layer security fence along their properties. Thus
was born fence Gate. Okay, okay cool. President Bush was

(42:36):
forced to send six thousand National Guard troops to the
border to placate the Fox watching crowd. Chris used the
media storm around this to solicit even more donations. His
plan was to buy up miles of private land along
the border and build what he called an Israeli style
security fence, including a six ft trench in concertina wire
on top. By May nine, just a few weeks after
his Fox appearance, the fence had raised a hundred and

(42:57):
seventy five thousand dollars. A month later, almost four hundred
thousand dollars have been donated. Week by week, the Minutemen
grew more and more tightly woven into the Republican establishment.
In mid two thousand six, it was absorbed into the
Declaration Alliance, a group formed by conservative activist Alan Keys
in nineteen ninety six to fight abortion and gay rights.
The Alliances president Mary Lewis, was a former assistant to

(43:20):
Bill Cristel, editor of the now defunct Weekly Standard. During
a Minuteman gathering, Keys told the assembled militiaman what we're
doing here is not just building a fence. We are
rebuilding a character. We are redefining a people now. In
every press appearance in interview, Simcox has been careful to
note that the Minutemen were non violent. When Alan Colmes,

(43:40):
The Fox is Now Dead Pocket Democrat, questioned Chris about
the fact that some Minutemen carried guns on patrol, Chris
told him, Alan, this is a dangerous place. There are
drug dealers. Our group in California yesterday came across some
drug mules, one of them carrying an a R fifteen.
You know, our volunteers, thank God for the Second Amendment,
are allowed to defend their lives that they're attacked and

(44:00):
when they put themselves in this dangerous situation, the same
as the men and women of Border Patrol. They have
that right. Okay, the reality of the situation is that
Chris Simcox, Jim Gilchrist, and many of their volunteers were
champing at the bit for an excuse to murder brown people.
I'm going to play an audio clip from documentary footage
shot in two thousand four. The first person we're going
to hear is Gilchrist. I'n available to shoot the Mexicans

(44:23):
on site, and that would end the problem. After two
or three Mexicans are shot, they they will stop crossing
the border and they take their cows home to them.
And here's simcos I feel that the people that are
coming across invading this country, I think they should be
treated as as enemies of the state. We need to
start putting them in work camps. Anyone could have walked

(44:46):
through the borders of this country bringing bombs, chemicals and
weapons mass destruction. I think they should be shot on
site personally. Yeah, you know, all those migrants bringing weapons
of mass destruction. Yeah, you know. I I looked into
it because I wanted to know how many terrorists Al
Qaeda guys have snuck into America through the southern border.

(45:09):
It's a it's still zero. It's still zero. Yeah. I
was wondering if it's still It's only been eighteen years. Yeah,
so fingers crossed that changes. Yeah you're saying zero now
exactly eighteen years after people started, but you never know. Um,
it's interesting hearing all these people talk um and say
these terrible things that uh, many of our public officials

(45:33):
say and and now do and like the camps um
like the camps uh like insinuating that maybe we should
shoot them, but we won't. We maybe maybe we should
should we won't, but we should, we won't, but we work.
I also like, yeah, the deterrent, that'll deter them. It's
and and that's what Gil Chris said, that like, if
you start, you only have to kill a few and

(45:53):
it will deter them. That's literally the same thing Nazi
Tom Metzger said thirty years earlier. You start killing a
few and it'll stop it. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, it's important
to note that the Minutemen, although they wrapped themselves in
more moderate garb and we're very tightly woven into the
Republican Party, we're just as hateful and had intentions just

(46:13):
as violent as the neo Nazis and klansmen who preceded them. Yeah.
You know, like people are talking about like Donald Trump
and how like he's like, look look what he's doing
to everybody. Look what he's doing to the probiicant party.
It's interesting how it's less that more he's all expression
of it's he's just the DJ. They were already dancing.

(46:34):
He's like, he got up and he pumped up the
fu to their rhetoric. Ye, he's the if I may
borrow and name the spotlight. Yeah nice, nice, Maybe a
little bit of it in here. Yeah. So, yes, the
monument wrapped themselves in the notion of protecting America, but
what they really wanted was an excuse to murder Hispanics.

(46:54):
In part two, we're going to talk about what happened
when some of them finally got that chance. But first,
plug p zone. We can what I mean, it's you guys,
you guys, plug your stuff, drop drop a p in
the p zone. Look, we're here. We're here on the

(47:15):
podcast a lot. You like that. We got our own
podcast called even More News Cody. You to the rest.
There's also a YouTube show called Some More News. The
videos and my Twitter is dr Mr Cody and the
show's Twitter Some More News, and case Twitter is Katie Stole.
That's right. I have a Twitter. I'm I'm I right,

(47:36):
okay on Twitter. You can follow me there if you
want to be my friend or my enemy, I'm taken both.
I have. There's t shirts you can buy on t public.
You can find this podcast on Twitter or The Graham
at at Bastard's pod. You can find all of the
sources for this episode on Behind the Bastards dot com.
I don't think I have any other podcast to plug Sophie.

(47:57):
Is that correct? You just look like you're angry at me,
like you furious? Am I missing something? Oh? Do you
want me to throw the bagels again? Okay, I'm gonna
throw the babies again. Knocked over Katie's drink. They are
kidding progressively more dangerous, but I'm not. I'm not gonna stop.
Why would you Why would you exactly keep going, keep going,

(48:21):
that's some America logic. Speaking of America, I have podcast
about what if civil war called it could happen here spoilers.
It's terrible. The podcast is good, but yeah, I hope so. Anyway,
the episodes over go, throw some bagels, hug a cat,
give a cat bagels. We're done, make a bagel. Episodes

(48:43):
over