Part Three: The Apostle of Fascism

Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston for a reading of Chapter Three of Robert's. 'The War on Everyone.'

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
What's strung out my co host? Oh yeah, we are
all ruined right now. I'm trying my best. I'm fascinated
by it. I just gotta get caffeine. I'm doing. I'm
great cold Drew coffees and Starbucks spritters. I have repeatedly

(00:28):
failed to I'm trying to get these throwing bagels to
land and stay on top of the soundboard on the ceiling.
But I can't quite arcume over this. It's been a
long time, and I don't want to. I don't want
to say how many times Katie's going to take a shot.
She's at a good angle. You didn't want don't tell anybody,

(00:49):
that's right, Just let me take care of it. Sound
boards for us. Yeah, so this way, if women don't
win the presidential election, they at least put throwing bagels
on top of the sound avoid. It was impeccable, aim,
perfect kind of arc Let's talk about what a feminist
icon I am for enabling you to do that. You

(01:12):
know what, Robert Let's you and me talk about. Yeah,
I couldn't have done it without you, guys. I mean
you handed me the bagel. I believe in you. I
want to I want like a Rosie the Riveter poster
that says, I couldn't have done it without you guys.
That's another merchant. Oh boy. Chapter three, The Apostle of Fascism. Yeah,

(01:40):
what a great chapter. Names not a mediocre ones kind
of a mix. Well, we got to celebrate the good ones.
We're going to celebrate the good ones. If the international
fascist movement as a single founding father, that man would
be George Lincoln Rockwell. George took the ideologies and the hateful,
vicious drive to exterminate and dominate that Adolf Hitler established,
and he found a way to let them function in

(02:01):
a post World War two world. After the war, fascism
had lost its ability to attract a mass audience. In
the United States, it was seen as the ideology that
had torn the world apart because it was people wouldn't
show up to Nazi party meetings or pay dues or
vote as fascists, and so Rockwell instead focused on generating
media attention with a few men he actually had at
his disposal. He picketed civil rights marches, wielding signs covered

(02:24):
in racial slurs and trusting the police to defend him
and his outnumbered crew, even if he could only get
nine or ten men to march with him, the rage
and violences signs inspired and counter protesters would guarantee massive
media coverage. He spoke at colleges for the same reason,
Knowing that protests and attacks caused by his presence would
get him in the papers and ensure a steady stream
of donations. Rockwell positioned himself as a free speech crusader,

(02:45):
since arguing to the public about his desire for genocide
would have been way less appealing. These are, all, of course,
tactics that modern fascists used today. Yeah, well, you know,
I knew it sounded familiar. Besides, the last time we
were him and talked out this. Yeah, but the fascist
movement has evolved considerably since g l r's days. While
many of the TOOLSI pioneers as still very effective, his

(03:07):
obsession with Nazi imagery and the swastika in particular, was
doomed for his hopes of ever building a mass movement.
He had started to realize this near the end of
his career. In n He came up with a brilliant slogan,
white Power, which he had printed up on T shirts
and protest placards. He worked the phrase and do his
speeches in Chicago, where he arrived to counter protest Martin
Luther King Jr. Now, we already talked about this one

(03:28):
as well, but doctor King was in the city to
organize a protest advocating from more public housing and traditionally
white and thus more affluent parts of the city. For
the first time in his career, Rockwell was able to
strike a nerve with a large number of white Americans
by focusing on their fear and resentment of black people.
On August six, nineteen sixty six, Martin Luther King Jr.
Led a group of marchers through Gauge Park. He was
met by a huge crowd of counter protesters, organized and

(03:50):
radicalized by George Lincoln Rockwell. They numbered more than hundred.
The crowd carried placards and banners and blazed with Rockwell
quotes like joined the white rebellion, and we worked hard
for what we got. Thousands of furious voices chaunted white
power at King and his comrades, and it marked the
most violent and vicious reception Doctor King ever received. It
also marked the high point of Rockwell's career. It was
shot dead a year later. His dream of fomenting a

(04:12):
white revolution did not die with him. It lived on
in his apostles, and chief among them was a man
named William Luther Pierce always got three names, these guys.
Pierce was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September eleventh, nineteen
thirty three. Another nine eleven. His father, also William Luther Pierce,

(04:33):
died in a car accident when he was eight years old.
His mother had to scramble to support him and his
younger brother. Leonard Zescint, author of the crucial book Blood
and Politics, suspects her background heavily influenced the fascist that
Pierce would become. Quote. Marguerite's biological father had run off
when she was a child, leaving her fatherless until Marguerite's
mother remarried. The new stepfather was a Jewish man from
New York who had moved south, and Marguerite had a

(04:55):
bitter relationship with him. William Pierce's story thus begins with
his own absent father and his mother unhappy tie to
a Jewish stepfather. Marguerite moved about the South with her
two young sons. In tow from those travails, William Pierce
claimed that he learned the virtues of self discipline and
the importance of delaying immediate gratification for a greater goal.
Values he said that became constant themes in his life.

(05:15):
So Pierce worked as a child to help his mom
feed their family. He would later write that his difficult
upbringing made him into the man he became. I think
this external discipline, this external control, being forced over a
long period of time to do things they didn't want
to do but were necessary to do, helped me to
develop self discipline. A lot of children these days never
learned that. It's amazing how many adults can't do that,
they can't stick at a job they don't want to do. Yeah,

(05:37):
that's true. It's weird because you get the feeling from
him that he kind of wanted to do the Nazism thing,
which is actually it's interesting for a couple of reasons,
which we'll get to, because yeah, young Bill was clearly
a brilliant bloyed. He did well in high school and
went to a military academy in Brian, Texas. From fifty one.

(05:58):
He earned a job there cleaning the chemistry lab Stockram
and that job wind up stoking would become a deep
love of science William went to college and then graduate school,
where he studied to become a physicist, who worked at
the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena for a year and
married Patricia Jones, who was also a brilliant mathematician. The
couple moved to Boulder, and Pierce finished his doctor in
physics in nineteen sixty two. His dissertation had something to

(06:20):
do with nuclear dipole and electric quadruple residents, which I
do not know what that means. Stuff No, apparently not apparently,
nothing Nazis in his physics. Flat stuff. No, it just
classic physics, Stolasic physics, classical, neoclassical, the classical physics. Pierce

(06:42):
had a job as an assistant professor of physics at
Oregon State University in Corvallis. They always go through Oregon. Yeah.
He and his wife had twins, and they settled into
what seemed like it would be a perfectly dull, normal, happy,
healthy life. Pierce later wrote, until I was thirty years old,
I had hardly given a thought to politics, to race,
or of social questions. That changed after he started working

(07:03):
at Oregon State University. He began showing up at meetings
of the John Birch Society. Yeah, yeah, is hissing like
nose ferrato right there. Classic John Birch response. Yeah, what
is it about the John Society? No, No, like just
that area for I don't know, but keeps coming up
in this like it wasn't intentional, but like it's the

(07:26):
fascist movement in the US always runs through fucking Oregon. Yea. Yeah,
I don't intuitive for me, but there's something there, but
I don't know what it is. Yeah, I don't know
why it is either, but it's it's it happens enough
that it's like something out there. Well in the last
like twenty years, you know, there's this like idea of

(07:47):
like trying to make a white homeland out there, but like,
but but this is so much further too. Yeah, that's weird,
just a fashy place, I guess. Yes, Nazis love pine trees,
but I love pines. I know I love pine trees too.
Does that make me a Nazi? Yes? This is the

(08:08):
podcast where we all go. Was I just radicalized by
pine trees? Maybe we're just here to be claim pine trees. Yeah,
let's take pine trees from the Nazis, string them up
on pine trees anyway. Um, probably shouldn't advocate for violence
in this episode of the podcast, but all the other YEA. Now,

(08:33):
the John Birch Society listeners may not have heard of
these guys, but they're one of the most important organizations
in the history of the American right. They're named after
an American adviser in China who the group's founder, Robert Welch,
considered to be the first American who died fighting communists. Yeah, Yeah,
that's that's who John Birch was. Robert Welch, the guy
who found the organization. UH and John Birch Society publications

(08:56):
encouraged the US to withdraw from the U WIN, urged
the impeachment of che Justice Earl Warren, and accused former
President Eisenhower of being a secret communist. Yeah. Here's a
line from one of their nineteen sixties publications, The Blue Book,
which William Pierce would certainly have read. Now, if the
danger from the communist conspiracy we're all we had to
worry about, it would be enough. But everythinking and informed

(09:18):
man senses that even as cunning, as ruthless, and as
determined as are the activists whom we call communists with
a capital C, the conspiracy could never have reached its
present extensiveness, and the gangsters at the head of it
could never have reached their present power unless there were
tremendous weaknesses in the whole body of our civilization. Weaknesses
to make an advance of such a disease so rapid
and its ravages so disastrous. Weird, how communism has been

(09:41):
like right on the edge of taking over America for
like seventy years. Yeah, Yeah, it's gonna It's going to
one of these days. Yeah. Robert Walsh always denied that
the John Birch Society had any anti Semitic leaning, but
many people suspected that some of the weaknesses Wilch saw
in American society were in fact Jewish people. This is

(10:03):
because John Birch society propaganda was often very similar to
the Third Reich's own propaganda. The Nazis also felt that
Communism was brought down on societies by hidden actors who
weakened the state enough for a disease to advance upon it.
The main difference between the two is that the Nazis
named the Jews explicitly and that John Birch Society did not,
and in fact, Pierce's main issue with the Birch Society

(10:24):
became that it wasn't willing to discuss the Jews or
explicitly racist issues. The Birchers were far right, but they
didn't want anyone to mistake them for literal Nazis. Pierce
later wrote quote, I quickly found out that the two
topics on which I wanted an intelligent discussion, race and Jews,
were precisely the two topics Birch Society members were forbidden
to discuss. Dance took a quick dip. I just want

(10:49):
to talk about Jews. Intelligent conversation about race, the Jews,
Oh Jesus. William Pierce maintained a successful career as a
physicist while he devoured more and more John Birch propaganda.
Nineteen sixty five, he left the university and got a
job in Connecticut working for the Pratt and Whitney Aircraft
Plant as a senior research associate physicist. He made good

(11:12):
money and did well, but his coworkers described him as
a real loner who worked poorly with others and seemed
almost unable to manage subordinates. Okay, Pierce's political leanings were
kept more or less under wraps until the plants workers
went on strike. This face to face contact with what
Pierce considered communism infuriated him so much that he tried
to drive his croud through a picket of a thousand

(11:33):
union Wow. Um, excuse me? Is everything communism? Everything? And
the proper response to communism? I'm just I just wanted

(11:53):
to clarify. Presumably they were protesting in a way that
would have benefited him, right, these were like his coworkers. No,
I think as a as a physicist working there, he
was at a different level than these guys. Stuff. Yeah,
we hit him with your fucking car. Yeah, that seems
that's a pretty big through line too. Yeah. Yeah, hitting

(12:13):
a lot of memes out there. Yeah, yeah that that
has not changed at all in the last several decades.
And all cars, no wrong answer, Okay, it's not wrong.
It's not wrong. Ban all cars except for mine. Yeah,
we went. I keep too much stuff in my car.
Can I borrow your car? Yes? Okay, then I'm fine,

(12:34):
it's fine. I I think I should be with a car.
I think you should be with a gun. And then
I could just make myself king just tooling around in
a Prius with a rifle. The one thing I know
about Robert Evans. He loves kings king advocate. I mean,
if I'm the king. Yeah, see this is the problem. Yeah,

(12:58):
that's that's how what happens. But but if I but
if I solve the problems? All right? Back to the
episode chapter it's a chapter when it's yeah uh so, um, yeah,
Pierce tried to run down a thousand people with his
car that did not work, and he uh he soon

(13:22):
had to move on from his job, which what a
kind way to say that. Yeah. So, since Pierce had
moved out to the East Coast, he'd used it as
an opportunity to start visiting the American Nazi Party headquarters
in Arlington, Virginia. He met a fellow named George Lincoln Rockwell,
and William and g. L. R. Got along quite well.

(13:42):
Pierce found national socialism to be a good fit with
the beliefs he'd been developing since his moved to Oregon.
His only issue with Rockwell in the Nazis was, you know,
all the Nazi stuff. Pierce thought that old fashioned fashion
uniforms and swastikas made them look like they were LARPers
rather than serious revolutionaries. He didn't use the term LARPer,
but he accused them of Hollywood antics, which is essentially

(14:02):
the same thing. Uh. In May nineteen sixty six, Pierce
resigned from his factory job and moved his family to Virginia.
His wife, Patricia, started teaching university math so she could
support her husband and his Nazi efforts. Weirdly enough, Patricia
wasn't a Nazi and later divorced her husband for his beliefs,
but for a time, she seemed willing to like humor him.
Maybe right, it's hard to it's hard to pin down

(14:25):
at first. Yeah, she probably didn't know exactly what it was,
you know, because like obviously you're hiding your power level,
and also you you married the person, so you love them,
you love they used to be like it are you
slowly turning into a Nazi? So a divorce is just
so hard to deal with. Um power level always gets me.
It does sound like a video game or a DNA.

(14:47):
I mean, it's that's there, all the bullshit, that's the
fantasy bullshit. It's exactly where this story leads. Oh yeah, yeah,
but you know where this story is going to lead
right now. You did win, You did win, and you
know what, as a celebration for your victory. I'm going

(15:07):
to try to throw this bottle of apple juice up
onto the ceiling with the throwing bagels. It's a good idea,
great idea, overshot. It the one thing I like with
six bagels, a tiny bottle of apple juice products. We're

(15:32):
back from maybe the best ad pivot in the podcasting game.
It was so good frame of shaking her head. Yes,
classic yes suggesture in gold side to side, I wish
I had a gold covered bagel? Do you yes? What
do you do? Throw it in the walls? Just chucking across.

(15:59):
You are out of touched with the working man. I
am definitely out of touch with working you want to
and gold? Okay, seeing a different sign of Robert. This
podcast has gone to my head. Now I'm I'm I've
I've lost I've lost my classic Robert Evans working man's touch.
Now you're the bastard I've always been, and I'm almost

(16:22):
out of things to throw. We'll figure that we'll find something.
Maybe I can we throw a recording equipment. So if
he didn't shake your head, we're good to do it.
That's approval. How about you throw that nice pillow? No,
so now, William Luther Pierce was kind of a hard
guy to get along with, which is probably not super surprising.

(16:45):
He's not reported to by either of his kids showing
much emotional connection to them. His wives say that he
was like also distant. The only thing he ever really
seemed to love effusively were his Siamese cats. Uh and
nazism Um so big and a cat's big fan of
hitler Um. Yeah, go figure, Siamese cats are like the

(17:05):
worst cats. That's not true. That, that's not true. They're fine,
are good? Yeah, cats are fine. A keg all cats
are good. Cats are good. Fans of Behind the Bastard. Yes, yeah,
they would like this podcast. Didn't mean it. No, we know,
we know. Siamese cats are fine. They're just I was

(17:25):
originally picturing instead of Siamese cats, the Persian cats with
the pushed in faces. Oh, those terrible cats. That's what
I was picturing. The bean bag chairs somebody, so it
would be like, yeah, I figures you'd like those cats. Yeah,
that's not cats fake, it's not what you said. We're
going to really offend some Persian cat owners today. Well

(17:47):
I'm sorry. Yeah, they shouldn't have made that mistake. You
don't sound sorry. It sounded like you're being sarcastic when
you said that. Well, I'm sorry that's what you perceived. Okay,
But what now? Now what I think? I think we're
derailing the story. In so, Rockwell and Pierce embarked in
a publishing venture together, putting out six issues of a
Nazi magazine, but William refused to actually join the American

(18:10):
Nazi Party until Rockwell changed its name from the American
Nazi Party to the National Socialist White People's Party. He
just needed it covered up a little bit. Just don't
white people are almost making it worse? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When Rockwell was gunned down in the parking line that
launderette want a transition. I love that he died that way,

(18:34):
shut down next to a fucking lawn from Rockwell. The
most Nazi should go. It is the movement he had
spent his entire life crafting began to fracture. Nazis worth
then now when always Caddy Bitches g l R. Had
kept his party together by sheer force of will, and
even he hadn't done a very good job of that,
since he was murdered by one of his own men,

(18:55):
Pierre stuck with an n s w p P, which
retained the most members after Rockwell's death. For a while,
he tried to take Rockwell's place, acting as the functional
head of the party, writing all of its propaganda and
even speaking at university campuses. He did not have Rockwell's
talent for drawing media attention. His only real success was
saying that Nixon should be quote dragged out of his
office and shot, which drew some coverage and got the

(19:16):
FBI to start looking into him. It was also the
truest thing he would ever say. Wow, that abbreviated it
as as w's not it's not safe for work. That's
not a joke, I just not. You have the pps
that are safe for work? Are the ones that aren't? Yeah,

(19:37):
I guess I just like PEP. That's funny. Also funny that.
I mean, you know, even the Nazi clock is going
to be right once a day. Wait, so wait, why
did you want Nixon? Because Nixon was soft on the juice,
which if you told Nixon he would have said, no
can do to fix that? That comes off on the ruin.

(20:01):
Oh my god, as we state this, that audio has
just leaked out of Donald Reagan saying horrible things about
black people Richard Nixon, And the most amazing thing about
that is Richard Nixon's clearly uncomfortable with it on the
light and hear him being like, don't like wanting to
like he doesn't bring it up. It's like, yeah that Yeah,

(20:23):
you can't call the monkeys Jesus Christ. And the reaction
to that is so oh god, it's pathetic. Oh, I
can't imagine anyone would even address it. I mean, they're
like Reagan sites and peoples like why why do we
have to judge him on this? Like, well, if you
have a person who's like been called racist for decades
and then he's racist, maybe you should like think about

(20:46):
what about about like whirired offending that guy and whatever?
Doesn't matter what we're talking a talking about his office
and shot yeah and it. Pierce would also have issues
with Reagan for not uh so um now. During this

(21:07):
period of the of the nineteen seventies um uh, Pierce
became something of a tutor uh and a mentor to
a fellow named James Mason. Young. James had joined Rockwell's
American Nazi Party back in nineteen sixty six, when he
was fourteen. Two years later, at age sixteen, James got
in trouble at school. He was disciplined by his principle
and in retaliation started planning to go on a shooting

(21:29):
spree and murder multiple members of his school's administration. Before
carrying out his plan, the n s w PPS headquarters
wound up on the horn with William Pierce or sorry
he called the n s w PPS headquarters. This kid
plans to go in to school shooting and he calls
the party before he starts shooting the school called the party,
was like, Hey, I want to do that. Yeah, I'm
gonna do this. I want to shoot up this school,

(21:50):
and William Pierce talks him down. Uh and Pierce instead
convinces James Mason to move to Virginia and start working
for the party and learn how to run a printing
machine instead of committing a school shooting. Oh yeah, given,
but actually debatably given what comes later from James Mason

(22:11):
might have been better for the world if he'd shut
up his school, because you're like, you're you're taking this
kid and you're not de radicalizing him, You're you're funneling,
you're channeling his anger and his Nazism propagandist and yeah,
and James Mason would go on to write a book
titled Siege, which would provide the nuts and bolts inspiration

(22:31):
for the terrorist group Adam Woffen and a whole shipload
of other school shoots and clean those two Canadian kids
who are currently on the run in the middle of
the wilderness, siege heads as we call them. Yeah, so
that's James Mason starts out wanting to be a school shooter,
gets convinced by William Luther Pierce. No, no, no, no, no,
I know what you're good at. You're firing school shootings.

(22:54):
What if instead you made a hundred school shooting right? Yeah? Yeah.
As the nineteen sixties wound to a close, William Pierce
started to get frustrated with the n s w p P,
mainly about the fact that it again was just too
darn Nazish. He believed fascism needed an authentically American character
and movement if it was going to have any chance

(23:16):
of taking over the country. Just dressing up his Nazis
was not going to cover it. He quit the party
in July of nineteen seventy and published a paper titled
prospectus for a national front, which he circulated around neo
Nazis circles. Here's how it opened America today, and more specifically,
the American people faced the most serious and deadly menaced
which has arisen in their entire history. This menace far

(23:38):
overshadows that posed by any war we have fought, any
economic catastrophe through which we have passed, or any previous
domestic strife which has torn us. For today, we are
faced not just with a threat to our territorial integrity,
or to our material possessions, or to our way of life,
or even to our own lives, but to something far dearer. Today,
all that we have ever been and all that we
ever might be, Our race itself is threatened with extinction. Okay,

(24:01):
right on man. Yes, this famously doomed people white Americans
in nine Yeah you had. That was a really tough
decade for white people. Yeah, the dark the dark ages. Yeah,
under under attack and threat. I just know the whole
thing is like, just under attack means who cares other people? Too?

(24:24):
Many other people get more rights. I mean fucking black
people were moving on up exactly. That's the threat. Yeah,
that means that white people are moving on down exactly.
It's the only way that it works. He went on
to complain that none of the existing radical right wing
organizations in the US had the ability to turn into
a quote large scale revolutionary movement. Quote. They're long established,

(24:47):
an unbroken record of failure is the best evidence of
this fact. It was not an inaccurate statement. Yeah, He
attacked the movement for being filled with overgrown children and said,
in essence, we need to stop waiting around for a
new Hitler to rise up, and you of fy all
of our different little fringe groups instead, Yeah, unite the right. Yeah,
there it is. Instead, Pierre suggested America's fascists take a

(25:10):
leaf out of Communisms book and create a national Front,
a large umbrella organization that could combine and coordinate all
of the different far right groups and allow them to
recruit people more easily without the baggage of swastikas and
clan robes. Towards this end, William Pierce established the National
Alliance in nineteen seventy four. We'll talk more about it
throughout the book, but obviously the National Alliance did not

(25:31):
wind up being the trick to create a mass fascist
movement in the United states. It was objectively more successful
than Rockwells American Nazi Party, though, drawing in thousands of
members over the years and generating millions in income, but
it proved no more capable of creating a popular revolution
than the A and P had been. However, buried in
Pierce's perspectives was a very important paragraph that contained realization

(25:53):
far more critical than his National Alliance could ever become.
Quote about the only good thing which can be said
of all these little groups is that they do generate
quite a flood of pamphlets, leaflets, bulletins, newsletters, and other
printed materials which express some excellent sentiment. But even here
it is largely an incestuous sort of affair, in which
the propaganda and the sentiment are circulated largely within the
same vaguely defined a movement in which they were born.

(26:15):
Any real contact or rapport with the general population is absent,
And this lack of contact with the public is not
do simply to the problems of distribution or a lack
of access to the mass media. Most movement literature would
fail to evoke a sympathetic response from the masses, even
if it could be placed regularly in their hands. It
is for the most part, too esoteric, too introverted, and
too kookie to strike a responsive chord among the general public.

(26:40):
To racist, too terrible, too awful. I hate that. You're
not right. It was it was the racism wasn't the problem.
The racism wasn't the problem. No, yeah it was. It was.
It was. We'll get to work. So you see, he's
he's he's started to realize that, like, our propaganda is
not cutting it. We need to find a way to

(27:01):
make Nazi propaganda that doesn't feel like Nazi propaganda so
it can hit a broader chunk of the populace to
be need to fight harder in the meme wars. Yeah,
that's just smart, and Pierce is going to go on
to be the guy who strikes the greatest blow in
the meme warps. So Pierce correctly understood that to really

(27:22):
make progress, American fascism was going to have to craft
propaganda that could infect the hearts and minds of normal
white Americans. It would take years for Pierce to translate
this insight into action, but when he did, the result
would quite literally shake the world. First, however, came his
dalliance with a sprightly gentleman named Willis Carte. Now Carter
was one of the very few individuals in this story

(27:42):
whose commitment to fash them precedes the activism of George
Lincoln Rockwell. Willis started a monthly paper in nineteen fifty
five called Revealing Lee, the entitled Right, the Journal of
Forward Thinking American Nationalism. Yeah Yeah, little on the knows,
Little Yeah. It was basically just like a bunch of

(28:05):
anti communist, anti Semitic, segregation like articles. Uh. In nineteen
fifty seven, Cargo first wrote openly about his idea to
create something called the Liberty Lobby, which he promised would
quote lock horns with the minority special interest pressure groups
in order to support the needs of white people who were,
you know, suffering in the nineteen fifties. Carter wrote that quote,
to the goal of political power, all else must be

(28:27):
temporarily sacrificed. He spent his life embodying that creed. Now,
Carter was not an out on the street bullhorn and
Placard's activist, nor was he an armed revolutionary clutching a
rifle and calling for racial holy war. Instead, he sought
to bring anti communists and segregationalists together and craft a
thoroughly American fascist movement. In nineteen sixty two, he started
to publish a magazine, Western Destiny, dedicated to inculcating these

(28:50):
ideas among the American right. He wrote about culture creators
a k a. White people in their eternal battle against
culture destroyers a black people. Tolerance, Carto wrote, can often
be a culture retarding and culture distorting weakness. Yeah, that's
the good stuff right here. Yeah, it's it's like the way, yeah,

(29:12):
real close to being fucking uh. What's that fake university
they have now? Western civilization fetishism, Yeah, cover up the
races a little bit more. An ancestor of Prager Year. Yeah. Now,
Western Destiny began to attract a dedicated audience of budding extremists,
including a teenager named David Duke. That's possible that Willis

(29:34):
Carto is the man who read pilled Duke. Yeah, so
that's who we're with now. Throughout the late nineteen sixties,
is William Pearce was coming up with his idea for
a national front. Willis Carto built the Liberty Lobby into
a moderately large mailing list for the distribution of far
right but not openly fascist propaganda. He latched onto the
nineteen sixty eight presidential bid of a fellow named George Wallace. Now,

(29:56):
Wallace was the fort governor of Alabama and one of
the leading voices against the civil rights movement. His most
famous line is probably this, in the name of the
greatest people that have ever trod the earth, I draw
the line in the dust and tossed the gauntlet before
the feet of tyranny. And I say, segregation today, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever, throwing the gauntlet at the feet of tyranny. Yeah,

(30:20):
keep black people in, white people in different schools, you tyrants. Yeah.
He's the first guy to use the liberal media. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
George Wallace groundbreaking. Yeah, it sounds like a real keeper
is to discredit the civil rights movement. So different from today. Different.

(30:44):
Yeah yeah. So Cart turned the Liberty Lobby to the
cause of getting Wallace elected president. He was, of course,
unsuccessful in this goal, but the campaign was an incredible
success for the Liberty Lobby. By its end, they'd become
home for almost but not quite Nazi politics in the
United States. Their newsletter, The Liberty Letter, had a hundred
and seventy thousand subscribers, now in Wallace's campaign fell apart,

(31:07):
Carter was able to swoop in and acquire a mailing
list with the names of an additional two hundred thirty
thousand people members of the group Youth for Wallace. Willis
felt that the failure of George Wallace to win the
presidency was no good reason to let the movement of
young fascist seas inspired go to waste. Under Karto, Youth
for Wallace molded into the National Youth Alliance, according to
Zeskin's Blood and Politics quote. In the subsequent months of

(31:30):
the National Youth Alliance sponsored several regional meetings, including a
January nineteen sixty nine event at Conley's Motor Hotel in
Monroeville outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was here that the youth
organization first began to unravel. Several officers in the new
group objected to the content and tenor of the meeting,
and an attendant social ed and supporters home. It claimed
that the affair was a washing Nazi heraldry, including women

(31:50):
who wore swastika jewelry and men who sang the Horst
Wessel led, a Nazi Party anthem from the nineteen thirties
the host and MC promoted a new booklet by Karto's
West Coast enterprise, Noontide Press, Myth of the six Million.
It argued that the Nazi genocide was a figment of
the Jewish imagination. One of the formal presentations was entitled
Plato the Fascist. So this breaks apart the movement into

(32:13):
two chunks. There's the people who really were just very
far right conservatives. But once he starts talking about Holocaust
and now like, oh shit, I accidentally round up in
a Nazi. Yeah I didn't, And I don't want to
be a Nazi. I just want liberty. I just want liberty,
and good for them, good, good for them for at
least being like, oh, ship, this is Nazi. Yeah, I
gotta get out of here. Yeah. It's like you go

(32:36):
to the unit the right rail and you're like, oh wait, Nazis.
You would hope that would provoke some real thinking from
like some soul searching. That never happened. So it's like, you,
you know, if I was part of a political organization
and I showed up at a house party thrown to
celebrate it and everybody was wearing swastika's, I would really
sit down and reconsider how should I get here to

(32:57):
take a moment? You take a moment, at least a
moment it Yeah, speaking of taking a moment, pivot ad pivots.
If we did Snickers ads, this would really have been
a good time for one. Yeah, there's like need a moment.
That's a Snickers ad. Like you, you show up at
like a National Youth Alliance meeting and everybody's dressed as
a Nazism Snickers. Are you listening? This is gold. This

(33:22):
is a gold covered bagel. Distance yourself from Nazi Snickers.
Geez a Snickers, the distance yourself from Nazis snack products.
We're back. I want a Snickers? Yeah, I want a Snickers?

(33:45):
Want Snickers? We don't want to Snickers. So the National
Youth Alliance quickly alienated the majority of its potential membership,
mainly because cart had revealed his power level a little
too early every time. Every time. Yeah, it's it's never
not stupid, it's a fucking dragonball z reference. How did
that turn into Nazism syncretis? So Carto's work attracted some

(34:12):
new blood. However, William Pierce an a sizeable herd of
National Socialists. They started hovering around the Liberty Lobby like
flies on the rotting corps of George Wallace's presidential ambitions.
They worked together for a while, but it was an
acrimonious pairing, and the straight up national Socialists conflicted with
Karto's old guard We're basically fine towing the Nazi line,
but didn't want other people to call them Nazis. Carto

(34:33):
and Pierce wound up breaking apart, and after a complex
series of bureaucratic battles I don't care to recount, William
Pierce wound up in charge of the National Youth Alliance.
He reincorporated in Virginia in October of nineteen seventy. This
is the group that would go on to become the
National Alliance. So that's where it came from, as George
Wallace's Youth Movement becomes the National Alliance, largest Nazi organization
in the US. Okay, cool, that's really cool and not upsetting.

(34:58):
How clear the path Yeah, the Republicans did straight Nazis
was yeah. Now. Carto accused Pierce of stealing the Liberties
Lobbies mailing list, which was probably true. Pierce accused Carto
of embezzling fifty five dollars from his own organization, which
was also probably cart Carter accused Pierce's faction, who were

(35:21):
again literal Nazis, of being Zionists. Pierce responded by calling
Carto swarthy, which was racial. You're well, you're not white,
and up, oh my gosh, Nazis. The fighting between Pierce
and Carto just underscored how unsuccessful Pierce's efforts to build
a national Front had been. His plan had been to
start by recruiting more students, starting in the DC area,

(35:41):
but this was a miserable failure. When he was invited
to speak at George Washington University in February of nineteen
seventy two, Pierce couldn't gather more than two dozen students.
Anti fascists showed up and threw raw eggs at him
and his men, which I think is fun, just because
we talk a lot about the long standing traditions among fascism,
and it's neat that along stranding anti fascist tradition is eggs, eggs, yea,

(36:06):
no milkshakes, just some eggs. Yeah, it's nice that yeah,
that egg boy, Yeah, that egg boy who hit hit
what's his name? Frasier the Fraser anning the Australian fascist
politician Christ Church stuff, you have been a good egging classic. Yeah,
egging fascists, egging fascists. On February the nineteen seventy four,

(36:28):
William Pierce decided to revamp the National Youth Alliance into
a new organization, the National Alliance. He continued to publish
the organization's newsletter Attack, which included guides for how to
bomb movie theaters and articles on which arms which worked
best for what you don't like bombing movie theaters getting
I don't like it. No, I don't like it one bit.
I thought you were a big movie theater. No, no, no, no, no, no.

(36:53):
M oh, you like movies. I'm a movie goer, So
you're comfortable putting yourself on an anti bombing movie theater list. Yeah,
that sounds a little extreme to me, but okay, this
is how we get radicalized. Yeah, we're all taking a
journey towards radical is a I mean, if you're forcing
me to mistake a stance, then yes, sign me up.
I'm just saying it's radical to be in favor of
bombing movie theaters, but it's equally radical to be against it.

(37:17):
It isn't They're equal the antie of of a of
another thing is just as radical as that thing. Always extreme,
then you are extreme exactly. Both are equally bad. You
can just take your radical anti movie theater bombing opinions elsewhere.
Will I stay in the middle and say, maybe it's

(37:38):
fine a bomb movie theater. Sometimes that's you just got
reasoned logic. I've got nothing to say to that. That's right,
you got destroyed. Robert Evans breaks Katie Stole in the
wheel of logic. It's so much more pathetic in person.

(37:59):
You've got to Troy. Yeah, so uh yeah. The Attack
included a lot of the fair that Nazi newsletters had
always focused on. But the next year, nineteen William Luther
Pierce introduced his first truly great innovation into the annals
of right wing terror. He started publishing a book an Attack,

(38:23):
a book titled the Turner Diaries. Oh there it is.
I was wondering where they'd come in. Published in sections
across several issues of Attack, the book is presented as
a series of diary entries from a revolutionary. You might
compare it to a Nazi answer to a Handmaid's tale,
and in fact it was partly probably inspired by I
think it actually predates that by a little bit. There

(38:44):
were other books that was inspired by there's a long
tradition of books in this line that Turner Diaries inspired
by Yeah, um, I haven't read it. Um. The Turner
Diaries were meant to take place in a near future
America in which a Jewish dominated liberal government had taken

(39:04):
over and forcibly instituted such horrors as multiculturalism and gun control.
Pierce presents those things from a Nazi point of view,
So multiculturalism is presented as feral, analystic black people raping
white women at will, and gun control was portrayed as
the forcible confiscation of all privately owned firearms. There are
a quality police in the book to give you an
idea of its tenors, idiot losers, the equality Police. It's

(39:32):
just really on the nose and obviously, yeah, so embarrassing.
Earl Turner is a normal white man who gets swept
up in a secret terrorist organization led by a group
called the Order, who organized their insurgency in a series
of small cells and carry out vicious terror attacks, including
the bombing of an FBI headquarters. The goal of these
attacks is to destabilize the American government and provoke a

(39:52):
vicious race war. The Order funds its operations by robbing
banks and armored cars, which allows them to buy weapons
and explosives to carry out more attacks and gradually to
tip the country into one nightmare. The book launched a
number of concepts into the fascist mindset, not the least
of which is the idea of the day of the rope?
Who idea rope? Yeah, I'm gonna quote now from the

(40:13):
Turner Diaries quote today has been the day of the rope,
A grim and bloody day, but an unavoidable one tonight.
From tens of thousands of lamp posts, power poles, and
trees throughout this fast metropolitan area, the grizzly forms hang
and the lighted areas, one sees them everywhere, even the
street signs that intersections have been pressed into service. And
at practically every street corner I passed this evening on
my way to h Q, there was a dangling corpse

(40:34):
forward every intersection. Hanging from a single overpass. Only about
a mile from here is a group of thirty, each
with an identical placard around its neck bearing the printed
legend I betrayed my race two or three of that
group had been decked out in academic robes before they
were strung up, and the whole batcher apparently faculty members
from the nearby u C. L A campus. The first
thing I saw in my moon in the moonlight was
the placard with the legend in large block letters, I

(40:56):
defiled my race. Above the placard lead the horribly bloated
purple ish face of a young woman, her eyes wide
open and bulging her mouth a gape. Finally, I can
make out the thin vertical line of rope disappearing into
the branches above. Apparently the rope had slipped a bit,
or the branch to which it was tied had sagged,
until the woman's feet were resting on the pavement, giving
the uncanny appearance of a corpse standing up right of
its own volition. I shuddered and quickly went on my way.

(41:18):
There are many thousands of hanging female corpses like that
in the city tonight, all wearing identical placards around their necks.
They are the white women who were married to are
living with blacks, with Jews, or with other non white males.
What a quote the Turner Diaries, I mean, yeah, that's awful.
Not a fan, huh. No, I tell you, guys were

(41:38):
going to really enjoy that passage zero stars. So you're
glad that all those people are hanging, Yes, because the
day of the Rope is a good thing. You would
be like, I'm like, okay, so I find novel that's
the who or did that? Are the bad guys? No?
Not in this, No, no, in this, they are the
ones to be emulated. Now. Earl Turner dies in the book,

(41:59):
carrying a suicidal but successful assault on the Pentagon, but
the Order is victorious. The book is essentially framed as
a historical document, with researchers from Earl's Future commenting on it.
They note that after the US was purged of all
non white people, the same thing was done to the
rest of the planet, using a series of nuclear and
chemical weapons attacks to cleanse Asia. What yeah, wait a minute,

(42:20):
it's a total global genocide of all non whites. Yeah,
but she did like a history. Yeah yeah, yeah. It's
like written as like, oh, in the perfect White Future,
we found this the diaries of this revolutionary who helped
us establish our YouTube. Here's how we got here, and
here's how we got here. Fictional yeah. Do they believe
that they're just preamptively writing a historical I think that

(42:41):
it was, here's what we want. I was just clarifying
some words here. Okay. So The Turner Diaries took off
like gangbusters among the American far right. It was eventually
published as a book, selling as many as five thousand copies.
The Turner Diaries way too many, and it did not
sell the traditional way in a Barnes and Noble. Instead,

(43:01):
it proliferated virally on the gun show circuit, at survivalist conventions,
and in tiny, small town shops owned by racists. Five
thousand copies is of course a sizeable success even by
mainstream standards. I found a good article in The Atlantic
by jam Berger, who offered a scholarly paper titled The
Turner Legacy. It notes The Turner Diaries is notable for
its lack of ideological persuasion. At one point in the novel,

(43:24):
it's protagonist, Earl Turner, is given a book to read.
Turner claims the book perfectly explains the reasons for white
supremacy and the justification of all the Order's actions. Importantly,
this magical tone's contents are never specified, although the novel's
epilogue broadly hints at a Nazi orientation, the book never
explicitly identifies the order with a specific movement, due in
part to Pierce's desire to appeal to normal people, as

(43:45):
well as the novels limited initial circulation among the o Nazis,
Turner assumes its readers are already racist and do not
need to be recruited to that mindset. The abandonment of
Why empowers a singular narrative focused on what and how,
the necessity of immediate violent action, and concrete gugestions about
how to go about it. This is part of why
the book has been so often associated with violence and terrorism. Now.

(44:06):
The Turner Diaries would go on to become the most
influential single piece of fascist propaganda since Mind Camp. It
has inspired more than two murders since its inception, but
it's also inspired a hell of a lot more than
simple murder. The Turner Diaries became the ideological underpinning of
a vicious American insurgency, which eventually lead to hundreds and
hundreds of armed men around the country working actively towards

(44:27):
the establishment of a white supremacist state, a problem that
continues to this day. Now, the Turner Diaries inspired more
than that, though, because it also inspired a whole new
genre of terrible right wing fiction. So have you guys
heard about a little book called Unintended Consequences. I don't
think so. It was published by guy named John Ross uh,

(44:50):
and it's best described as the Turner Diaries, but all
of the racism is whispered um so like a little
bit more subtle. The cover of the copy I have
features burning copy of the Constitution with a black clad
cop attempting to sexually assault lady Justice in front. Very subtle.
Have you read these books some? Yeah, I've read Unintended Consequences,

(45:11):
have read parts of the Turner Diaries. It's just not
very inertaining, right, not good. But I came across Unintended Consequences,
not like I came across it at like a gun store.
It was wasn't an unintended consequence. Yeah, part of this
where it's like all these things just sort of pop
up in gun stores, yeah and under yeah, all this stuff. Yeah.

(45:34):
And the main innovation from the Turner Diaries and Unintended
Consequences was that it switched the focus of the revolutionaries
away from race war and gun rights towards just gun rights.
So that was a factor in the Turner Diaries. Unintended
Consequences makes it the center of the whole thing. The
plot focuses around a guy named Henry Bowman who winds
up being framed by the A t F for some
dumb reason related to the desire to steal American guns.

(45:57):
He kills all the A t F agents and then
brutally torture is one who he captures. Bowman in a
small group of gun rights advocates then carry out a
terror campaign, brutally murdering gun control advocates around the nation
until the president repeals all gun control laws. Alex Jones
has mentioned multiple times on Info Wars that Unintended Consequences
is one of his favorite books. Yeah, in more recent years,

(46:20):
has he ever mentioned the Turner Diaries. No, he's never. Okay,
that seems like a little too he's read him, though,
Oh absolutely, big fans like I wonder if it's ever
been like audio or moments where he's like slipped it in. Yeah, um,
but I believe he's too smart to mention that. Yeah,
that's one that you can't mention because then you're definitely
an then you know, yeah, yeah, but unintended consequences it's

(46:44):
a little separate enough. Another thing that's separate enough. Have
you hear to Matt Bragen No, Well, he wrote a
book series called Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Like Unintended Consequences,
this book is basically Turner Diaries with less racism in it.
The liberal government creates a false flag mass shooting to
take away everyone's guns. The HF is the bad guy,

(47:05):
and brave patriots beat them via terrorism. Now, Bracken's innovation
was to have the cast of his books include numerous
non white people. The idea seems to be that if
most of the characters are non white and the book
can't be accused of being racist. On an unrelated note,
the second book in the series is Domestic Enemies the
reconquistad Yeah, one guess is to where that goes. The

(47:27):
evil liberals orchestrate and invasion of America via using Mexicans
with the goal of having them banned English in the
Southwest and then seceed from the United States. These are
coming out, now, yeah, these are these are recent. Bracken
is like a Special Forces veteran and like a right
wing activist and stuff. This is all coming out now.
Uh jan Berger, the guy who wrote The Turner Legacy,

(47:49):
also wrote an article about these books with The Daily Beast.
He identified some similarities between Bracken's third book and the
Turner Diaries. Quote after an earthquake demolishes Memphis, black refugees
turned into a seething mob of gang rapists and cannibals,
characterizations that feature memorably in the Turner Diaries, while urban
blacks loot a path from Baltimore to Washington, d C.
Where they demand and receive a new socialist constitution engineered

(48:12):
by a thinly veiled caricature of President Obama. The narrative
disclaimers continue. One character condemns white racist killings in the
chaos after the quake, and a battle weary white racist
girl near the end of the book accepts a hand
of comfort offered by a black army medic. But these
and other moments of individual race grace are hard pressed
to counterweight the vivid, lengthy depiction of African Americans and
mass as cannibal rapists directly responsible for destroying America's constitutions

(48:35):
is so upsetting. Yeah, it really makes me angry. It's
a great rubric thought to give Pierce credit. I mean,
it works, this bastard. Yeah, credit is a piece of ship.
But apprecys ship who was very effective. Yeah, but a
lot of very effective pieces of ship. Yep, it's kind

(48:56):
of depressing. In writing The Turner Diaries, William Pierce ignited
movement within the far right that is still very much
present and relevant today. The next chapter will discuss in
depth the generation of terrorists who were inspired by his
words to take horrifying, bloody action. Like Christian identity theology,
the Turner Diaries have influenced many people who may never
have even read the book. In his manifesto, the christ

(49:16):
Church Mosque shooter wrote about his hope that his attack
would spark renewed calls for gun control in the United
States because he believed that this would inevitably spark a
new civil war. The Paway Synagogue shooter repeated the same desire.
Both of these desires are based, whether and consciously or not,
on things written out in The Turners. They want they
just want conflicts to spark, and they think that guns

(49:37):
will be central to it. William Luther Pierce died in
two thousand two, but his ideas live and kill. To
this day, the struggle between William Pierce and Willis Carto
would prove to be a microcosm of a greater struggle
within the fascist right itself. On Cardo's side are the
main streamers. Their goal is to gain political power by
pushing the Overton window further and further right and convincing

(49:58):
more and more of their fellow Americans to adopt hardcore
fascist politics. Carto supported political parties and candidates, most notably
David Duke's successful run for the Louisiana States Senate an
unsuccessful run for governor. Was also a backer of Pat Buchanan.
Carto and other mainstreamers believe that the majority of white
Americans can be converted to their political ideals, so gaining
power is just a matter of properly propagandizing to their

(50:20):
fellow whites. William Pierce, on the other hand, was a vanguardist.
Vanguardists believed that politics is hopeless and the only way
for their side to win as two, as in the
Turner Diaries, form small, dedicated groups and bring on the
collapse of society in order to take control. George Lincoln
Rockwell himself is hard to pend down. He had elements
of both mainstreamer and vanguardist in his writings and in

(50:40):
his activism, but his most direct descendants, men like William
Pierce and James Mason, became two of the most influential
minds in the vanguardist movement. But in the late nineteen seventies,
a new wave of fascists and neo Nazis began to rise,
popping up around the countryside like mushrooms on a rotting log.
For more than a decade, they would build a potent
insurgency armed with missiles, machine guns, and bombs, utterly dedicated

(51:01):
to a single dire mission, turning the Turner Diaries into
a reality. As we're gonna talk about in the next chapter.
That was a good chapter. I mean they've all been
good chapters, but that was fascinating that that was better
than the other poop ones. Yeah, the ones that then
But you did you said it with how you set it.
I only said this was a good chapter. O. His

(51:25):
garbage fell from the ceiling through my garbage on the ceiling,
but then it fell off. It stayed on for a second.
It's not the best place to keep your recycling. How
are you doing, Sophie. Okay, you guys gotta plug things.
Sophie says, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know. We
have a show too. It's called even more News. That's
the podcast. We've got a YouTube show called some More News.
That's the YouTube show. We got a Patreon go to patreon,

(51:47):
dot com slash some more news. Cody talk about merch.
We have merch now, I believe it's not t public
probably public dot com slash user slash some more news
or just searched a bunch of those words together and
stuff to buy. I'm Katie Stole on Twitter. Yeah, I'm
dr Mr Cody on Twitter Nerve. I got some more
News Twitter as well. Robert, what about you when there

(52:10):
is no place that you can currently purchase T search
themed after this podcast? But maybe one day, Sophie, could
we get that set up? Oh ouch, Sophie. She whispered
something about the money going to him and then not her,
so that she doesn't care. Well, And you can buy
a shirt. I recommend Target Ross is good too if

(52:33):
you want the shirt to be stained. Who always and
then Marshals Marsha Marshalls and you can always say I
got it at Ross got J Max Love Max, I
got it. At J Max does not have the same
ring to it. No, it's a different kind of ring. Cool.
You ruined this show, Cody. If I bring up t
J Max, unbelievable. Anytime you bring up t J Max,

(52:55):
it ruins. I ruined the Nazi show by bringing up
t J back, as I said, don't talk about t
J Max. And I think we can all agree that
t J Max is the Nazism of discount clothing outlets. Wow,
I'm I've been radicalized. We all are going to be
radicalized at one point or another. Shot this shots fired.

(53:18):
T J stands for Turner juice. This is a bad life, juice,
I said, juice, juice, turn juice turn Why are we
trying to do this? I think all is gold. I
want to make it worth bringing up t J Max.

(53:39):
It's never worth bringing up t J might be it
might be this time gracefully at the end of this burner.
That's Katie. The foundational ethos of this show is that
nothing can be graceful. Well, that's good. We're in a
bunch of time behind the bastards. In the Bastards, America's

(54:02):
most graceless of podcasts h M hm hm