September 5, 2024 • 43 mins
What does Eric Rudolph and all his senseless violence have to do with our culture today? In this final episode, we unpack what led up to this point and how to navigate a meaningful path forward.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:17):
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Speaker 1 (00:41):
In nineteen ninety four, two years before the Centennial Olympics,
John Britton, a physician who provided services for legal abortions,
and his bodyguard, were murdered by a man named Paul Hill.
That same year, Hill was interviewed from jail on camera,
an interview that Eric Rudolph saw. After seeing it, Rudolph wrote, quote,
(01:06):
Christianity had become a religion without testicles, and Paul Hill
seemed like a perfect anomaly, a genuine American hero in
an age of cowardice. I'd read about such people in
history books, but I didn't think they existed anymore. I
knew then that the era of hot air was over.
(01:27):
People were finally bridging the gap between their rhetoric and
their actions. I knew then it was time for me
to act as well, and that he did. The faulty
premise of the lone wolf is often invoked to describe
extremists like Paul Hill and Eric Rudolph, but Rudolph and
(01:48):
Hill both self identified as soldiers in the Army of God.
Militant Christian identity groups like the Army of God and
the Church of Israel are understood today to be tendrils
in a network, part of a thing we now call
leaderless resistance. This idea has been around for a while,
but it first came to prominence for most Americans back
(02:11):
around nine to eleven under a different name, sleeper Cells.
Today they operate under names like the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers,
the Three Percenters, even QAnon. There is no singular, unifying organization,
no individual leader, no headquarters, just an amorphous murmurration, a
(02:35):
spiraling tangle of battalions shitting everywhere, sometimes even blocking out
the sun. There is, however, a unifying ideology in ideology,
with a long list of common causes. In ideology that's
against a whole lot of things. It's against abortion.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
The alleged planned parenthood shooter just shouted in a courtroom
that he killed three people out of Colorado Springs clinic
to quote protect the babies. Doctor George Tiller was shot
and killed, and his murder is sparking new fears for
the safety of other abortion providers.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
The first explosion blew out windows at the North Atlanta
Family Planning Clinic.
Speaker 5 (03:17):
Against gay rights, the beating of a gay college student
in Wyoming, Twenty one year old Matthew Shepherd remains in
critical condition after being left for dead in a field.
Speaker 6 (03:27):
Colorado Springs, where overnight at least.
Speaker 7 (03:29):
Five people were shot and killed at an LGBTQ nightclub.
Speaker 8 (03:33):
It happened outside a lesbian club called The Other Side.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
The first bomb injured five people. Against civil rights.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
In the name of the greatest people that have ever
cad with her, I say segregation now, segregation to Mara
and segregation forever.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
The deadly shooting inside at Charleston, South Carolina church is
being investigated as a hate crime.
Speaker 9 (03:59):
Friends, the twenty one year old high school dropout was
a loner and unabashed racist with a deep hatred for
black people.
Speaker 8 (04:06):
Carr in Charlottesville chaos in the streets.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
The bar flowers into a crowd of people. Who's a
blood all of the ground, people screaming.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
I have never seen such a horrific light you, racist
attack in my entire life.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
But this particular ideological strain is all the more insidious
because it's cloaked in a robe of righteous religious conviction.
Speaker 10 (04:28):
There are have now broken into the US capital, fucking
cub We love on the state of America to be reborn.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
As the traders within our government.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
We love you, only you, in course only mark Eric
Rudolph bombed the Olympics. Then he bombed an abortion clinic,
a gay bar, and another abortion clinic. Then when he
could sense that he was being hunted, he ran. But
he didn't do all this by himself. He was part
(05:04):
of something bigger. This escalation on the far right has
been happening for a long time. In these days it's
gained a very real foothold in the mainstream comporical cap
We have a right.
Speaker 11 (05:19):
To the campo.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
So how did this happen? Episode eight? The paradox.
Speaker 8 (05:52):
It's always hard to know where to begin these stories.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
That's Neil J. Young, historian and all author of We
Gather Together a book that debunks many common misconceptions about
the religious right in interfaith politics.
Speaker 8 (06:08):
I think a lot of historians have pointed to the
late seventies and the sort of cultural backlash to the
things that had been happening in the decade, the legalization
of abortion in the early nineteen seventies from the previous decade,
allowing Bible reading and public prayer in public schools. I
think the nineteen sixty four election is an important moment
(06:30):
in which conservatives really begin to galvanize as a force
within the Republican Party.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
The nineteen sixty four presidential election was a contest between
Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in Republican Barry Goldwater. Back when
we started making this podcast, Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign seemed
like a reasonable point in history to start the story.
Speaker 12 (06:54):
And to all inline fellow Republicans, Zurosembel and Americans across
this great nation who do not care for our cause,
we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case,
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of
liberty is no vite.
Speaker 13 (07:16):
And let me remind you also that moderation and the
pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
It was two years before Rudolph was born, in an
indisputably turbulent moment in American culture, and I wanted to
understand what led up to this point.
Speaker 8 (07:37):
It's an important moment because conservatives really coalesced around Verry Goldwater,
and even though he himself was not what we would
describe as a religious conservative or even a religious person,
particularly fundamentalist in the American South and the American West
saw him as their great hero.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
It was a moment for the right that kicked off
a grassroots movement and hugely influenced the far right of
the moment, the alt right of the future, and eventually
even today's mainstream right as history remembers. Lyndon B. Johnson
won the election in a landslide. It looks like a
devastating loss for Barry Goldwater, who only won six states,
(08:19):
but looks can be deceiving.
Speaker 8 (08:21):
And so when he lost, they didn't take it as
a permanent defeat, but rather as a moment to continue
organizing and building the networks that I think brought about
the conservative revolution that most of us see in the
nineteen eighty election of Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 12 (08:39):
And I'm asking you as I ask all Americans, and
together we'll make America great again.
Speaker 9 (08:46):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 6 (08:48):
There's no unique or simple narrative about America right.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Matthew D. Taylor is the senior scholar at the Institute
for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies and the author of
the violent Take It by Force. The Christian movement that
is threatening our democracy.
Speaker 6 (09:06):
These are ongoing battles and ongoing debates. What we see
in the late nineteen seventies is a very concerted effort
to form a coalition of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Fundamentalist Christians are absolutists like Dan Gamon who insist on
a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible.
Speaker 6 (09:29):
It was still positive identity for many American Christians. But
this coalition of evangelicals and fundamentalists and then they start
looping in conservative Catholics and Latter day Saints ideas. We're
all fighting against the same things. We all are trying
to arrest this progress, these shifts that are going on
in our culture. We all feel threatened by these things.
(09:50):
Let's band together.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Then came nineteen seventy three, Roe v. Wade ruled that
the decision whether to continue or into pregnancy belongs to
the individual, not the government. At the time, evangelical Christians
were largely not opposed to that decision. They were instead
focus on other issues. But that would change.
Speaker 14 (10:13):
Turns out, the catalyst for evangelical political activism in the
nineteen seventies was a court decision, but it wasn't Roe v.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Wade Randall Balmer is a prominent historian on this topic.
He's the author of dozens of books, including Evangelicalism in America.
Speaker 14 (10:29):
It was a court decision that was handed down on
June thirtieth, nineteen seventy one, in a case called Green vy. Connolly,
and the issue presented before the court is whether or
not racially segregated educational institutions known as segregation academies, should
be allowed tax exempt status. And the court ruled decisively
(10:56):
on June thirtieth, nineteen seventy one, that any or organization
that engaged in racial segregation or racial discrimination was not,
by definition a charitable institution and therefore had no claims
on tax exempt status. And as the Internal Revenue Service
began enforcing that ruling over the course of the nineteen seventies,
(11:17):
that got to the attention of Bob Jones University, which
of course was founded back in nineteen twenty seven explicitly
to be a racially segregated institution, as well as people
like Jerry Folwell, who had his own segregation academy in Lynchburg, Virginia,
which he began in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
This segregation academy would lead to today's Liberty University, which
has a one point six billion dollar endowment.
Speaker 14 (11:44):
So a defense of racial segregation was the actual catalyst
for the emergence of the religious right in the nineteen seventies.
The big question is how it was that a movement
that emerged in defense of racial segregation transformed itself into
(12:04):
a movement that was opposed to abortion. The key figure
here is a conservative strategist named Paul Weyrick. And I
actually met and had a conversation with Paul Weyrick in
November of nineteen ninety at a conference, a small closed
door gathering, where he made the emphatic point that the
religious right did not organize in opposition to abortion. And
(12:29):
I pulled him aside after he made that statement, and
I said, I want to make sure I hurried you
correctly on this, and he said absolutely. He said, I'd
been trying since the Goldwater campaign to get these people,
meaning evangelicals, involved in politics. He said, I tried everything.
I tried the abortion issue. I tried the women's rights issue.
I tried the school prayer issue. I tried the pornography issue.
(12:51):
Nothing got their attention until the Internal Revenue Service started
coming after these segregation academies in the nineteen seventies. And
so then I pushed a little further on this, how
did abortion become part of the conversation? And according to Wirek,
there was a conference call among these leaders of this
(13:13):
nascent movement, the religious right, and these various pastors, together
with WIREX, said you know, we have the makings here
of a larger political movement. What other issues can we
talk about? And according to Wirek, there were several suggestions,
and finding the voice on the end of one of
the lines said how about abortion. I think Wyreck's great brilliance,
(13:42):
and he was a brilliant political activist, was to recognize
that even though he had mobilized these evangelical leaders in
defense of racial segregation at their institutions, Wyreck still realized
he needed an issue other than a defense of segregation
in order to mobilize grassroots evangelical voters.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
That conference call between Wyrek and the various leaders and
pastors was the birth of the moral majority, a movement
from the Christian right to galvanize everyday evangelical voters by
using moral issues functioning on an emotional level to motivate
action at the polls. You can make the argument that
this was the beginning of the culture wars on a
(14:29):
mass scale.
Speaker 6 (14:30):
It's a very famous scene. Just a couple months before
the nineteen eighty election. In that summer, there was a
gathering in Texas is called the National Affairs Briefing, and
it's all these kind of Christian evangelical leaders gathered in
Texas and they invite the presidential candidates to come, and
Ronald Reagan agrees to come. Ronald Reagan who gets picked
up at the airport by a Baptist preacher named James Robison.
(14:54):
And as they're driving to this convention, James Robinson says
to Reagan, you know, if you really want to get
this crowd on your side, here's the thing to say.
Tell them. I know you can't endorse me because they're
all leaders of nonprofits. Right, I know you can't endorse me,
but I endorse you. And this becomes the line that
(15:17):
Ronald Reagan delivers in this speech at the National Affairs Briefing,
and it becomes this iconic moment of this congealing of
the religious right around Reagan. And I mean, the great
irony is that Jimmy Carter was a very good evangelical,
He was a very good Baptist. He was steeped in
this stuff. And Reagan is this divorced, mainline Protestant actor, right,
(15:43):
who in any ways is the antithesis of the values
or the ideals that these Christian nationalist evangelicals of the
late nineteen seventies. But he fits the bill in terms
of his agenda and his willingness to work with them.
And so what they're doing in this rise of the
moral majority, the rise of the religious right, the Christian Coalition,
(16:07):
is they are trying to channel the energy and demographic
power of American Christianity into political causes. There really is
this sense of we can just get the Christians all voting,
we can change this country.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
As Neil Young aptly observes, this began to take root
fundamentally changing the way evangelicals understood their role in American politics.
Speaker 8 (16:33):
One of the really fascinating things that I've watched over
the last couple of election cycles is to see prominent
evangelical figures who have argued that one of the things
Christians will have to account for when they stand before
the judgment, throne of God, and the afterlife is how
they voted in an American election. Now, that is an
(16:54):
amazing historical and theological development. Politics was dirty, it was secular,
it was worldly, and so yes, you know, you should
be a voter, you should be up on the issues
and cast your vote. But to be caught up in politics,
to be devoted to it, to make too much of it,
was to too much engage in secular or worldly pursuits.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Historian Randall Ballmer also takes a note of this change.
Speaker 14 (17:20):
I think what happens after the Reagan era is that
number one, the religious right becomes even more effective tactically
in trying to advance its agenda. I mean to all
the wrong ends in my judgment, but nonetheless very effective
talk in terms of war and consistently use military metaphors
(17:43):
to talk about what is going on, and that sort
of rhetoric is picked up by leaders of the religious right.
Let's remember, these folks had huge, huge media empires who
are out broadcasting their message quite literally to the masses.
And as this militant rhetoric starts to take hold, people
(18:05):
begin to believe that they're in some sort of apocalyptic
struggle against the forces of evil. The other thing, they're
very good at them. Speaking of the leaders of the
religious right, they're very, very fluent in the language of victimization.
We are the victims here. And I believe, by the way,
(18:29):
that one of the reasons that the anti abortion movement
is so successful among evangelicals is that they identify with
the victimhood or the victimization of the fetus. I remember
very clearly, on the eve of the Iowa precinct caucuses
in nineteen eighty eight, I was in Iowa talking to
(18:51):
these religious right activists and the woman her name was
Maxine Sealman. She was head of the Iowa chapter of
Concerned Women for America. Maxine looked at me and pointed
her finger and said, let's remember, the most dangerous place
to be these days is inside a mother's womb. And
I think there's a sense in which evangelical has identified
(19:15):
with the sort of helplessness of the fetus. There was
some sort of visceral connection that I think helped to
fuel the passion that they brought to the anti motion movement,
and that they subsequently transferred to other social issues, the
anti gay movement and so forth, and now the anti
(19:36):
trans movement. The rhetoric of victimization I think is very
very powerful, and the leaders of the movement used it
quite successfully to mobilize these evangelical activists.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
In this rhetoric, this mindset was also very much in
sync with the militant organizing that was taking place further
time to the right.
Speaker 15 (20:03):
When I think about the organizing of modern far right extremism,
I look to the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Nicole Himmer is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University,
where she specializes in the history of conservative media in
the US in the role of right wing media in
American electoral politics.
Speaker 15 (20:22):
So you start to see in the nineteen seventies that
there is this energy around anti government, anti Semitic, anti
black organizing that will then lead in the nineteen eighties
to an organization known as the Order, and then There's
another phase that emerges in the nineteen nineties. The first
of these is the siege on Ruby Ridge.
Speaker 8 (20:43):
In Maples, Idaho.
Speaker 13 (20:45):
Federal marshals are surrounding a cabin where a fugitive white
supremacist named Randy Weaver is hold up with his family.
Speaker 15 (20:52):
Federal marshals stand off against white identitarians who are out
in this cabin in the middle of the woods, living
off of the grid.
Speaker 12 (21:00):
Most of us don't pay taxes, most of us don't
have jobs.
Speaker 7 (21:03):
We live off the land.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
We don't need the system.
Speaker 7 (21:06):
We can live without it.
Speaker 15 (21:08):
And the wife is killed and the son is killed,
and there is this sense that they are martyrs for
the cause of the far right and the militia movement.
Speaker 16 (21:18):
They consider it a threat when anyone lives outside the norm.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
And I think the systems.
Speaker 16 (21:23):
Got to where it serves the power of structure instead
of the people.
Speaker 15 (21:27):
Just a year later, in Waco, Texas, there is another
federal siege, this time on a religious compound.
Speaker 9 (21:36):
The fierce gun battle has led to a standoff between
law officers and occult members of a religious compound outside
of Waco. This evening, the cult is something called the
Branch Davidians.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
They're an offshoot of the.
Speaker 15 (21:46):
This compound, led by David Koresh, was a religious sect
that had gathered more than one hundred people who were
shockingly well armed and who were sort of holed up
in this compound. There were allegations of child abuse, but
what the federal government was really paying attention was this
armstock piling. And the federal government forces a confrontation in Waco,
(22:09):
and it ultimately leads not only to a lengthy siege,
but the death of nearly one hundred people, most of
whom were children.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
The cult compound there about one hour ago went up
in flames and burned to the ground, one hundred twelve
people inside.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Remember when Eric Rudolph sent letters to various media outlets
following the bombing at the Other Side Lounge, he signed
it off with four nineteen ninety three, the final day
of the siege at Waco. Two years later, four nineteen
was also the date that Timothy McVeigh would bomb a
federal government building in Oklahoma City, killing one hundred and
(22:50):
sixty eight people and injuring six hundred eighty.
Speaker 15 (22:53):
And So Ruby Ridge and Waco are core parts of
Patriot lore that develop in nineteen ninety two, in nineteen
eighty three. They would remain touchstones for all of these
movements through today. And all of this came together to
help fuel a movement that was based around guns and
anti government violence. It stood for, the government is coming
(23:14):
to where you are, and it has the power to
take you out. They're going to come for you. They're
going to kill you on any possible pretense.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Eric Rudolph even wrote about some of this from prison.
Here's an excerpt. The mainstream media tried to bury the story,
but words spread in spite of the blackout on shortwave radio,
in small newsletters, in sermons at church, people learned of
the Ruby Ridge massacre. Like the Weavers, my family had
(23:44):
left the big city to live in the mountains. For
those of us who had grown up in that lifestyle,
the Ruby Ridge massacre came as a clarion call.
Speaker 8 (23:54):
Even someone like Barry Goldwater, you know, this staunch conservative,
he could see where all of that was headed. In
nineteen ninety four, he said, and I'm quoting here, mark
my word. If and when these preachers get control of
the Republican Party, and they're sure trying to do so,
it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these
(24:15):
people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise, but these
Christians believe they are acting in the name of God,
so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried
to deal with them.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
If you're not for us, you're against us is a
crafty rhetorical device. If you're an anti communist, then anyone
who disagrees with you or does something you don't approve
of is a communist. And if Satan is your enemy,
then anyone who disagrees with you is therefore satanic. This
(24:51):
logic allows any evangelical Christian to say that anything non
Christian is satanic or of the devil.
Speaker 8 (25:00):
Another thing that Goldwater said this was back in nineteen
eighty one, was, and I'm quoting again, there is no
position on which people are so immovable as the religious beliefs.
There is no more powerful ally one can claim in
a debate than Jesus Christ, or God or Allah or
whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon,
(25:24):
the use of God's name on one's behalf should be
used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our
land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They
are trying to force government leaders into following their position
one hundred percent. If you disagree with these religious groups
on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you
(25:47):
with a loss of money or votes or both.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
This makes the world a very black and white place.
It's this world versus the spiritual world. It's this life
versus the afterlife. It's a zero of some game. If
you're not for us, you're against us. Every conflict becomes
an existential threat that to some justifies a violent end.
Speaker 17 (26:15):
No one, whether they're a terrorist or you know, a preacher,
both wakes up and says like I'm a bad person
and I want to make the world worse.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Talia Levin is a journalist and, in the wake of Charlottesville,
the author of Culture Warlords, My Journey into the Dark
Web of White Supremacy.
Speaker 17 (26:33):
Most people believe that they're essentially good, and most people,
especially in the grips of fervent ideology, believes that they're
making the world a better place. And someone like Eric
Rudel very much believed he was making the world a
better place. Well, if it stops baby killing, that makes
the world a better place, good things for God. And
I really think when you look at these thousands of sermons,
(26:58):
you have the same This is murder, murder and a mascow.
It's a holocaust that the liberals love because they love
killing babies. Some people draw that logic to its conclusion,
how do we react to people who kill children?
Speaker 13 (27:15):
You know?
Speaker 17 (27:16):
How should we react to child murderers? Some people are
content with the picket, other people go get the tntape.
You know, the rhetoric is the same.
Speaker 7 (27:32):
As anti abortion becomes an animating principle on the right.
What happens is it becomes further and further politicized.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Kevin Cruz is a professor of history at Princeton University
and the author of One Nation Under God. He was
also known as the Twitter Historian until leaving the platform
in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 7 (27:55):
One the New Right techniques of kind of mobilizing voters
in the seventies and eighties direct mail campaigns and which
you can only get money out of them if.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
You scare them to death.
Speaker 7 (28:06):
Right, So the language becomes much much more apocalyptic. If
we don't get your donation, your help, this is going
to happen.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Language like abortion is murder, abortion is killing.
Speaker 7 (28:18):
Stop the slaughter, and literally millions of babies are going
to die is the result they're talked about. So it's
framed increasingly as as a holocaust. It's framed as a
fight not just for the soul of the nation, but
for millions of souls of the unborn. And if that's
something that your faith teaches you to take seriously, that
(28:39):
becomes a real rallying cry to go kind of old
Testament on this and seek an eye for an eye.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
And there are groups like the Army of God.
Speaker 7 (28:49):
Which, as the name implies, saw itself as a kind
of paramilitary force doing God's will, and that involved blowing
up clinics. There were the assassinations of doctors who provided
abortion services, most famously George Tiller. And again it's no
accident that Tiller had been repeatedly singled out, I believe,
on radio shows by people like Bill O'Reilly who called
(29:11):
him Tiller the Killer, and then he was assassinated. So
as these individuals are put in the literal crosshairs of
national media campaigns, of political operatives fundraising, it heightens the stakes.
It makes this literally a life and death situation. In
which some people are more than willing to meet with
they see as a deadly movement with deadly force, and
(29:33):
that's what takes us up to people like Rudolph.
Speaker 17 (29:39):
And so many had Dan Gayman as a spiritual mentor
very much can bring himself to a place where he's
burying shrapnel in a bomb that's going to mutilate a nurse. Well,
if it stops baby killing, that makes the world a
better place. The rhetoric is the same, and so I
don't necessarily view that is benign in any sense. I
(30:03):
think that for going on fifty years, the Christian right
has preached that women exercising autonomy over their own bodies
and their reproductive choices is equivalent to mass murder and
should be punished as such. And so having the Eric
Rudolph figures the arsonists to sort of demonize that's a
(30:26):
useful rhetorical jiu jitsu move I mean, of course, it's
useful to have someone to say, well, they're the crazy one.
I'm the sane and normal one. What I'm saying is that,
as always in a movement, you have a radical fringe
in a successful movement, and the anti abortion movement in
the US is a successful political movement, absolutely successful. You
(30:48):
have a radical fringe, you have the Eric Rudolph's of
the world, and then you have you know, the Mike
Johnson's of the world. You know, the Mike Pences, right,
and they have the same goal and much of their
rhetoric overlaps. But to my mind, and this is why
I talk about the arsonists and the legislators being not
(31:11):
that different and having the same goals, just going about
them in different ways. You know, Ask the seventeen year
old bleeding to death because she couldn't, you know, get
a still berth out of her body and it has sepsis.
Ask the eleven year old forced to give birth to
a rapist child. Ask them whether there's a difference. I
(31:31):
don't think there's a difference.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Lately, it seems as though we're becoming more and more polarized.
Feels like we're living through a new historical event every week.
Certain human rights that I took for granted as a
kid are at risk now. Technically, a flashpoint refers to
the temperature at which a chemical reaction triggers ignition, but
(32:07):
in human terms, it means the point of no return.
It's when shit officially goes sideways, spinning out of control.
Over the last half century, we've seem domestic terrorists like
Eric Rudolf planning a series of detonations of flashpoints, slowly
ramping up each explosion, coming faster and faster, until finally
(32:32):
reaching today's breakneck pace. But do these terrorists ever feel remorse?
Does time or the reality of being caught ever make
them question their actions or their beliefs. For the longest time,
I've wondered this about Eric Rudolf. It's why I wrote
to him to see what he thought of my story
(32:53):
in What's Become of the World Today? And Eric Rudolf
wrote back.
Speaker 9 (33:01):
On he doesn't.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
After receiving the letter, I reconnected with Rudolph's sister in law,
Deborah to share his unsettling words with her, And.
Speaker 11 (33:13):
Then I'll read you what he said too. Oh my god,
he said, dear call, thank you for the kind letter.
I'm glad to hear that you are alive and that
my actions at Sandy Springs played some role in your
mother's decision not to kill you. And I cannot say
that I regret my actions. Your story only reinforces that conviction.
(33:37):
If you're curious about my case, go to the Army
off Good dot com and read my memoir between the
lines of Drift. Feel free to download the memoir or
any of my writings. I await your response, Sincerely, Eric Rudolf.
Speaker 17 (33:54):
Do you want to know what I think of that?
Speaker 11 (33:56):
Please?
Speaker 18 (33:57):
I think it's very narcissistic. But he wrote because he
makes it again about him. Please read my You know
he's never far away from his original role. That's scary. Yeah,
he's a psychopath, no doubt. If he had not gotten caught,
I think he would have continued.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I wrote him back four times, each letter a bit
more direct, but he never responded again. I'm not sure why.
I have my theories, but I just don't know. He
seemed willing to talk at first, but then crickets. I
(34:43):
may never figure out that part of the story. But
I've always known about my birth story, well most of it.
I knew about my mom's relationship with BeO, how Bou
was never part of our lives, and how my dad
officially adopted me when I was six. But the Eric
Rudolph part of it, I didn't know about that until
(35:04):
I was in high school. I think my mom just
put it away. It wasn't that significant to her once
she had me, because life just kept happening. She had
a kid to take care of, a family to mother.
It just wasn't something she had space for anymore.
Speaker 9 (35:23):
I remember driving in the car one time with my
mom and she and my stepdad used to go to
this liquor store named Jack's in Sandy Springs and it's
right next to the street that goes up the hill
to the abortion clinic. And I remember making a comment
(35:44):
one time to my mom and saying, Cole probably wouldn't
be here had that place not been bombed.
Speaker 11 (35:54):
What would you say Eric's mom if she were sitting here.
Speaker 9 (35:57):
I mean, I feel nothing but empathy for her.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
As mothers, we love our.
Speaker 9 (36:03):
Kids no matter what, and I think doesn't mean you
love everything they do or have done. But it would
be very difficult to have your child hurt somebody or
kill somebody or do things like that, and to know
that your child's going to spend the rest of their
life behind bars. And I feel like she's probably been
(36:28):
blamed a lot for his actions. I would assume in
how usually it's the mother that is blamed. I mean,
I think that that's just pain that I can't imagine
that as a mother. I mean, I have compassion for her.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
There's so many paradoxes in play with the story, and
I've been living with them, trying to make sense of
it all. Sometimes people think I must be anti abortion,
They think my mom must be anti abortion. How could
we support something that nearly snuffed out my existence.
Speaker 9 (37:09):
You know, hearing the story, I think sometimes can come
across like I am purely pro life now just because
of my situation and how things turned out. But that
does not for a second mean that that's where I stand.
I mean, I am totally in completely pro choice. The
(37:30):
parallel of Eric Rudolph being a man trying to impact
and affect women's lives is the parallel to what's happening
with things now. And yes, I chose to have you
as a teenager, but it's never just as easy as
just having a baby. I had a lot of help,
(37:52):
a lot of support, whether it's physical help, financial help, whatever,
And I would say we were the exception, not the rule.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
At the end of the day, the world my mom
grew up in afforded her a choice, and having that choice,
being able to hold the two conflicting options made it
possible for her to get her arms around her situation
and know what she needed, what mattered to her. And
for me, the thing I've been reminded of sifting through
(38:26):
the wreckage and talking with all these people who I
never knew before this podcast is just how valuable it
is to find connection, to realize you care what someone
else thinks. It's simple, but it's powerful. Human connection makes
us feel stuff, makes us feel stuff more than anything
else does, good and bad and everything in between. What
(38:50):
matters most is finding a way to have real conversations
about the hard stuff, the difficult things, the contradictory truths.
I know that seems im possible right now, but if
we don't, this is just going to keep happening and
happening and happening. Here's Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility,
(39:16):
the struggle between theocracy and democracy.
Speaker 16 (39:21):
The dilemma is that if you really believe that everybody
has a right to their ideas and to express them
in a democratic society, you have to accept and respect
the people who are opposed at the same time. And
so how do you do that? How do you deal
with your formidable political opponents who are opposed to your
(39:42):
very ideas, and there's never totally good answers to that.
We need to understand that every single day we're living
the paradox, and if we don't get that, we're putting
everything that we hold dear at risk. So the odd
thing for us to embrace the delpe embrace the paradox.
(40:05):
We have to decide that that's a good day.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
How do you feel about him today?
Speaker 19 (40:13):
Sometimes there's some revenge in there. Some days I really
don't think about him.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
What Emily Lyons survived at that clinic in Birmingham, it
would destroy most people. She's one of the strongest souls
I've ever met.
Speaker 19 (40:30):
Some weeks are probably a little bit more anger. This
is one of those weeks. There's another surgery in my future,
and that's only because of him. Very few things surgery
was that I've had done was for my own fault.
(40:51):
He has caused forty nine of my fifty surgeries. I
don't think there's really anything I'm polite I could say.
I get up in the morning. As soon as I
put my legs down, it's like, oh everything hurts, thank
you Rudolf, And I get up and look in the
mirror and see my face. It's my Rudolph face. It's
my Rudolph problem, my knees Rudolph. This week, it's my face.
(41:17):
There's another surgery in my future. I lost my independence,
I lost my career, I lost my friends. To me,
it's a matter of control over women. It's not their
duty to patrol the bedroom. How does that leave a
(41:38):
lot of women with nothing, no support, no loss to
protect them. In the talks I would give, would talk
about frog is overturned than what Sandy and I went
through has been for nothing, And I still think that
it's been for nothing. The rights have been taken away
(41:58):
in most places. There are still some left in the country,
but they're working to get rid of that too.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Flashpoint is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeartMedia.
I'm Your Host. Cole La Cassio, Donald Albright and Payne
Lindsay are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV. Flashpoint
was created, written, and executive produced by Doug Mattica and
myself on behalf of seven nine ninety seven. Lead producer
(42:41):
is Alex Espastad, along with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Steadman.
Our Associate producer is witt Lakassio, Editing by alex Espostad
with additional editing by Liam Luxon and Sidney Evans. Supervising
producer is Tracy Kaplan. Work by Station sixteen. Original music
(43:03):
by Jay Ragsdale mixed by Dayton Cole. Thank you to
Orrin Rosenbaum and the team at Uta Beck Media and
Marketing and the Nord Group. Special thanks to Angela q,
Tylie Revive, Mattica and Tim Livingston. For more podcasts like Flashpoint,
search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app, or visit
(43:26):
us at tenderfoot dot tv. Thanks for listening. Thanks for
listening to this episode of Flashpoint. This series is released
weekly absolutely free, but for ad free listening, early access
(43:49):
and exclusive bonuses, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus on
Apple Podcasts or at tenderfootplus dot com
Flashpoint is released weekly and brought to you absolutely free,
but for ad free listening, early access and exclusive bonuses.
Subscribe to tenderfoot Plus at tenderfootplus dot com or on
Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
You're listening to Flashpoint, a production of tenderfoot TV and
association with iHeartMedia. The views and opinions expressed in this
podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast.
This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be
suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
In nineteen ninety four, two years before the Centennial Olympics,
John Britton, a physician who provided services for legal abortions,
and his bodyguard, were murdered by a man named Paul Hill.
That same year, Hill was interviewed from jail on camera,
an interview that Eric Rudolph saw. After seeing it, Rudolph wrote, quote,
(01:06):
Christianity had become a religion without testicles, and Paul Hill
seemed like a perfect anomaly, a genuine American hero in
an age of cowardice. I'd read about such people in
history books, but I didn't think they existed anymore. I
knew then that the era of hot air was over.
(01:27):
People were finally bridging the gap between their rhetoric and
their actions. I knew then it was time for me
to act as well, and that he did. The faulty
premise of the lone wolf is often invoked to describe
extremists like Paul Hill and Eric Rudolph, but Rudolph and
(01:48):
Hill both self identified as soldiers in the Army of God.
Militant Christian identity groups like the Army of God and
the Church of Israel are understood today to be tendrils
in a network, part of a thing we now call
leaderless resistance. This idea has been around for a while,
but it first came to prominence for most Americans back
(02:11):
around nine to eleven under a different name, sleeper Cells.
Today they operate under names like the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers,
the Three Percenters, even QAnon. There is no singular, unifying organization,
no individual leader, no headquarters, just an amorphous murmurration, a
(02:35):
spiraling tangle of battalions shitting everywhere, sometimes even blocking out
the sun. There is, however, a unifying ideology in ideology,
with a long list of common causes. In ideology that's
against a whole lot of things. It's against abortion.
Speaker 3 (02:56):
The alleged planned parenthood shooter just shouted in a courtroom
that he killed three people out of Colorado Springs clinic
to quote protect the babies. Doctor George Tiller was shot
and killed, and his murder is sparking new fears for
the safety of other abortion providers.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
The first explosion blew out windows at the North Atlanta
Family Planning Clinic.
Speaker 5 (03:17):
Against gay rights, the beating of a gay college student
in Wyoming, Twenty one year old Matthew Shepherd remains in
critical condition after being left for dead in a field.
Speaker 6 (03:27):
Colorado Springs, where overnight at least.
Speaker 7 (03:29):
Five people were shot and killed at an LGBTQ nightclub.
Speaker 8 (03:33):
It happened outside a lesbian club called The Other Side.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
The first bomb injured five people. Against civil rights.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
In the name of the greatest people that have ever
cad with her, I say segregation now, segregation to Mara
and segregation forever.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
The deadly shooting inside at Charleston, South Carolina church is
being investigated as a hate crime.
Speaker 9 (03:59):
Friends, the twenty one year old high school dropout was
a loner and unabashed racist with a deep hatred for
black people.
Speaker 8 (04:06):
Carr in Charlottesville chaos in the streets.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
The bar flowers into a crowd of people. Who's a
blood all of the ground, people screaming.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
I have never seen such a horrific light you, racist
attack in my entire life.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
But this particular ideological strain is all the more insidious
because it's cloaked in a robe of righteous religious conviction.
Speaker 10 (04:28):
There are have now broken into the US capital, fucking
cub We love on the state of America to be reborn.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
As the traders within our government.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
We love you, only you, in course only mark Eric
Rudolph bombed the Olympics. Then he bombed an abortion clinic,
a gay bar, and another abortion clinic. Then when he
could sense that he was being hunted, he ran. But
he didn't do all this by himself. He was part
(05:04):
of something bigger. This escalation on the far right has
been happening for a long time. In these days it's
gained a very real foothold in the mainstream comporical cap
We have a right.
Speaker 11 (05:19):
To the campo.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
So how did this happen? Episode eight? The paradox.
Speaker 8 (05:52):
It's always hard to know where to begin these stories.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
That's Neil J. Young, historian and all author of We
Gather Together a book that debunks many common misconceptions about
the religious right in interfaith politics.
Speaker 8 (06:08):
I think a lot of historians have pointed to the
late seventies and the sort of cultural backlash to the
things that had been happening in the decade, the legalization
of abortion in the early nineteen seventies from the previous decade,
allowing Bible reading and public prayer in public schools. I
think the nineteen sixty four election is an important moment
(06:30):
in which conservatives really begin to galvanize as a force
within the Republican Party.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
The nineteen sixty four presidential election was a contest between
Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in Republican Barry Goldwater. Back when
we started making this podcast, Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign seemed
like a reasonable point in history to start the story.
Speaker 12 (06:54):
And to all inline fellow Republicans, Zurosembel and Americans across
this great nation who do not care for our cause,
we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case,
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of
liberty is no vite.
Speaker 13 (07:16):
And let me remind you also that moderation and the
pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
It was two years before Rudolph was born, in an
indisputably turbulent moment in American culture, and I wanted to
understand what led up to this point.
Speaker 8 (07:37):
It's an important moment because conservatives really coalesced around Verry Goldwater,
and even though he himself was not what we would
describe as a religious conservative or even a religious person,
particularly fundamentalist in the American South and the American West
saw him as their great hero.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
It was a moment for the right that kicked off
a grassroots movement and hugely influenced the far right of
the moment, the alt right of the future, and eventually
even today's mainstream right as history remembers. Lyndon B. Johnson
won the election in a landslide. It looks like a
devastating loss for Barry Goldwater, who only won six states,
(08:19):
but looks can be deceiving.
Speaker 8 (08:21):
And so when he lost, they didn't take it as
a permanent defeat, but rather as a moment to continue
organizing and building the networks that I think brought about
the conservative revolution that most of us see in the
nineteen eighty election of Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 12 (08:39):
And I'm asking you as I ask all Americans, and
together we'll make America great again.
Speaker 9 (08:46):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 6 (08:48):
There's no unique or simple narrative about America right.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Matthew D. Taylor is the senior scholar at the Institute
for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies and the author of
the violent Take It by Force. The Christian movement that
is threatening our democracy.
Speaker 6 (09:06):
These are ongoing battles and ongoing debates. What we see
in the late nineteen seventies is a very concerted effort
to form a coalition of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Fundamentalist Christians are absolutists like Dan Gamon who insist on
a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible.
Speaker 6 (09:29):
It was still positive identity for many American Christians. But
this coalition of evangelicals and fundamentalists and then they start
looping in conservative Catholics and Latter day Saints ideas. We're
all fighting against the same things. We all are trying
to arrest this progress, these shifts that are going on
in our culture. We all feel threatened by these things.
(09:50):
Let's band together.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Then came nineteen seventy three, Roe v. Wade ruled that
the decision whether to continue or into pregnancy belongs to
the individual, not the government. At the time, evangelical Christians
were largely not opposed to that decision. They were instead
focus on other issues. But that would change.
Speaker 14 (10:13):
Turns out, the catalyst for evangelical political activism in the
nineteen seventies was a court decision, but it wasn't Roe v.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Wade Randall Balmer is a prominent historian on this topic.
He's the author of dozens of books, including Evangelicalism in America.
Speaker 14 (10:29):
It was a court decision that was handed down on
June thirtieth, nineteen seventy one, in a case called Green vy. Connolly,
and the issue presented before the court is whether or
not racially segregated educational institutions known as segregation academies, should
be allowed tax exempt status. And the court ruled decisively
(10:56):
on June thirtieth, nineteen seventy one, that any or organization
that engaged in racial segregation or racial discrimination was not,
by definition a charitable institution and therefore had no claims
on tax exempt status. And as the Internal Revenue Service
began enforcing that ruling over the course of the nineteen seventies,
(11:17):
that got to the attention of Bob Jones University, which
of course was founded back in nineteen twenty seven explicitly
to be a racially segregated institution, as well as people
like Jerry Folwell, who had his own segregation academy in Lynchburg, Virginia,
which he began in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
This segregation academy would lead to today's Liberty University, which
has a one point six billion dollar endowment.
Speaker 14 (11:44):
So a defense of racial segregation was the actual catalyst
for the emergence of the religious right in the nineteen seventies.
The big question is how it was that a movement
that emerged in defense of racial segregation transformed itself into
(12:04):
a movement that was opposed to abortion. The key figure
here is a conservative strategist named Paul Weyrick. And I
actually met and had a conversation with Paul Weyrick in
November of nineteen ninety at a conference, a small closed
door gathering, where he made the emphatic point that the
religious right did not organize in opposition to abortion. And
(12:29):
I pulled him aside after he made that statement, and
I said, I want to make sure I hurried you
correctly on this, and he said absolutely. He said, I'd
been trying since the Goldwater campaign to get these people,
meaning evangelicals, involved in politics. He said, I tried everything.
I tried the abortion issue. I tried the women's rights issue.
I tried the school prayer issue. I tried the pornography issue.
(12:51):
Nothing got their attention until the Internal Revenue Service started
coming after these segregation academies in the nineteen seventies. And
so then I pushed a little further on this, how
did abortion become part of the conversation? And according to Wirek,
there was a conference call among these leaders of this
(13:13):
nascent movement, the religious right, and these various pastors, together
with WIREX, said you know, we have the makings here
of a larger political movement. What other issues can we
talk about? And according to Wirek, there were several suggestions,
and finding the voice on the end of one of
the lines said how about abortion. I think Wyreck's great brilliance,
(13:42):
and he was a brilliant political activist, was to recognize
that even though he had mobilized these evangelical leaders in
defense of racial segregation at their institutions, Wyreck still realized
he needed an issue other than a defense of segregation
in order to mobilize grassroots evangelical voters.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
That conference call between Wyrek and the various leaders and
pastors was the birth of the moral majority, a movement
from the Christian right to galvanize everyday evangelical voters by
using moral issues functioning on an emotional level to motivate
action at the polls. You can make the argument that
this was the beginning of the culture wars on a
(14:29):
mass scale.
Speaker 6 (14:30):
It's a very famous scene. Just a couple months before
the nineteen eighty election. In that summer, there was a
gathering in Texas is called the National Affairs Briefing, and
it's all these kind of Christian evangelical leaders gathered in
Texas and they invite the presidential candidates to come, and
Ronald Reagan agrees to come. Ronald Reagan who gets picked
up at the airport by a Baptist preacher named James Robison.
(14:54):
And as they're driving to this convention, James Robinson says
to Reagan, you know, if you really want to get
this crowd on your side, here's the thing to say.
Tell them. I know you can't endorse me because they're
all leaders of nonprofits. Right, I know you can't endorse me,
but I endorse you. And this becomes the line that
(15:17):
Ronald Reagan delivers in this speech at the National Affairs Briefing,
and it becomes this iconic moment of this congealing of
the religious right around Reagan. And I mean, the great
irony is that Jimmy Carter was a very good evangelical,
He was a very good Baptist. He was steeped in
this stuff. And Reagan is this divorced, mainline Protestant actor, right,
(15:43):
who in any ways is the antithesis of the values
or the ideals that these Christian nationalist evangelicals of the
late nineteen seventies. But he fits the bill in terms
of his agenda and his willingness to work with them.
And so what they're doing in this rise of the
moral majority, the rise of the religious right, the Christian Coalition,
(16:07):
is they are trying to channel the energy and demographic
power of American Christianity into political causes. There really is
this sense of we can just get the Christians all voting,
we can change this country.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
As Neil Young aptly observes, this began to take root
fundamentally changing the way evangelicals understood their role in American politics.
Speaker 8 (16:33):
One of the really fascinating things that I've watched over
the last couple of election cycles is to see prominent
evangelical figures who have argued that one of the things
Christians will have to account for when they stand before
the judgment, throne of God, and the afterlife is how
they voted in an American election. Now, that is an
(16:54):
amazing historical and theological development. Politics was dirty, it was secular,
it was worldly, and so yes, you know, you should
be a voter, you should be up on the issues
and cast your vote. But to be caught up in politics,
to be devoted to it, to make too much of it,
was to too much engage in secular or worldly pursuits.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Historian Randall Ballmer also takes a note of this change.
Speaker 14 (17:20):
I think what happens after the Reagan era is that
number one, the religious right becomes even more effective tactically
in trying to advance its agenda. I mean to all
the wrong ends in my judgment, but nonetheless very effective
talk in terms of war and consistently use military metaphors
(17:43):
to talk about what is going on, and that sort
of rhetoric is picked up by leaders of the religious right.
Let's remember, these folks had huge, huge media empires who
are out broadcasting their message quite literally to the masses.
And as this militant rhetoric starts to take hold, people
(18:05):
begin to believe that they're in some sort of apocalyptic
struggle against the forces of evil. The other thing, they're
very good at them. Speaking of the leaders of the
religious right, they're very, very fluent in the language of victimization.
We are the victims here. And I believe, by the way,
(18:29):
that one of the reasons that the anti abortion movement
is so successful among evangelicals is that they identify with
the victimhood or the victimization of the fetus. I remember
very clearly, on the eve of the Iowa precinct caucuses
in nineteen eighty eight, I was in Iowa talking to
(18:51):
these religious right activists and the woman her name was
Maxine Sealman. She was head of the Iowa chapter of
Concerned Women for America. Maxine looked at me and pointed
her finger and said, let's remember, the most dangerous place
to be these days is inside a mother's womb. And
I think there's a sense in which evangelical has identified
(19:15):
with the sort of helplessness of the fetus. There was
some sort of visceral connection that I think helped to
fuel the passion that they brought to the anti motion movement,
and that they subsequently transferred to other social issues, the
anti gay movement and so forth, and now the anti
(19:36):
trans movement. The rhetoric of victimization I think is very
very powerful, and the leaders of the movement used it
quite successfully to mobilize these evangelical activists.
Speaker 1 (19:52):
In this rhetoric, this mindset was also very much in
sync with the militant organizing that was taking place further
time to the right.
Speaker 15 (20:03):
When I think about the organizing of modern far right extremism,
I look to the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Nicole Himmer is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University,
where she specializes in the history of conservative media in
the US in the role of right wing media in
American electoral politics.
Speaker 15 (20:22):
So you start to see in the nineteen seventies that
there is this energy around anti government, anti Semitic, anti
black organizing that will then lead in the nineteen eighties
to an organization known as the Order, and then There's
another phase that emerges in the nineteen nineties. The first
of these is the siege on Ruby Ridge.
Speaker 8 (20:43):
In Maples, Idaho.
Speaker 13 (20:45):
Federal marshals are surrounding a cabin where a fugitive white
supremacist named Randy Weaver is hold up with his family.
Speaker 15 (20:52):
Federal marshals stand off against white identitarians who are out
in this cabin in the middle of the woods, living
off of the grid.
Speaker 12 (21:00):
Most of us don't pay taxes, most of us don't
have jobs.
Speaker 7 (21:03):
We live off the land.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
We don't need the system.
Speaker 7 (21:06):
We can live without it.
Speaker 15 (21:08):
And the wife is killed and the son is killed,
and there is this sense that they are martyrs for
the cause of the far right and the militia movement.
Speaker 16 (21:18):
They consider it a threat when anyone lives outside the norm.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
And I think the systems.
Speaker 16 (21:23):
Got to where it serves the power of structure instead
of the people.
Speaker 15 (21:27):
Just a year later, in Waco, Texas, there is another
federal siege, this time on a religious compound.
Speaker 9 (21:36):
The fierce gun battle has led to a standoff between
law officers and occult members of a religious compound outside
of Waco. This evening, the cult is something called the
Branch Davidians.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
They're an offshoot of the.
Speaker 15 (21:46):
This compound, led by David Koresh, was a religious sect
that had gathered more than one hundred people who were
shockingly well armed and who were sort of holed up
in this compound. There were allegations of child abuse, but
what the federal government was really paying attention was this
armstock piling. And the federal government forces a confrontation in Waco,
(22:09):
and it ultimately leads not only to a lengthy siege,
but the death of nearly one hundred people, most of
whom were children.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
The cult compound there about one hour ago went up
in flames and burned to the ground, one hundred twelve
people inside.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
Remember when Eric Rudolph sent letters to various media outlets
following the bombing at the Other Side Lounge, he signed
it off with four nineteen ninety three, the final day
of the siege at Waco. Two years later, four nineteen
was also the date that Timothy McVeigh would bomb a
federal government building in Oklahoma City, killing one hundred and
(22:50):
sixty eight people and injuring six hundred eighty.
Speaker 15 (22:53):
And So Ruby Ridge and Waco are core parts of
Patriot lore that develop in nineteen ninety two, in nineteen
eighty three. They would remain touchstones for all of these
movements through today. And all of this came together to
help fuel a movement that was based around guns and
anti government violence. It stood for, the government is coming
(23:14):
to where you are, and it has the power to
take you out. They're going to come for you. They're
going to kill you on any possible pretense.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Eric Rudolph even wrote about some of this from prison.
Here's an excerpt. The mainstream media tried to bury the story,
but words spread in spite of the blackout on shortwave radio,
in small newsletters, in sermons at church, people learned of
the Ruby Ridge massacre. Like the Weavers, my family had
(23:44):
left the big city to live in the mountains. For
those of us who had grown up in that lifestyle,
the Ruby Ridge massacre came as a clarion call.
Speaker 8 (23:54):
Even someone like Barry Goldwater, you know, this staunch conservative,
he could see where all of that was headed. In
nineteen ninety four, he said, and I'm quoting here, mark
my word. If and when these preachers get control of
the Republican Party, and they're sure trying to do so,
it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these
(24:15):
people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise, but these
Christians believe they are acting in the name of God,
so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried
to deal with them.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
If you're not for us, you're against us is a
crafty rhetorical device. If you're an anti communist, then anyone
who disagrees with you or does something you don't approve
of is a communist. And if Satan is your enemy,
then anyone who disagrees with you is therefore satanic. This
(24:51):
logic allows any evangelical Christian to say that anything non
Christian is satanic or of the devil.
Speaker 8 (25:00):
Another thing that Goldwater said this was back in nineteen
eighty one, was, and I'm quoting again, there is no
position on which people are so immovable as the religious beliefs.
There is no more powerful ally one can claim in
a debate than Jesus Christ, or God or Allah or
whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon,
(25:24):
the use of God's name on one's behalf should be
used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our
land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They
are trying to force government leaders into following their position
one hundred percent. If you disagree with these religious groups
on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you
(25:47):
with a loss of money or votes or both.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
This makes the world a very black and white place.
It's this world versus the spiritual world. It's this life
versus the afterlife. It's a zero of some game. If
you're not for us, you're against us. Every conflict becomes
an existential threat that to some justifies a violent end.
Speaker 17 (26:15):
No one, whether they're a terrorist or you know, a preacher,
both wakes up and says like I'm a bad person
and I want to make the world worse.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Talia Levin is a journalist and, in the wake of Charlottesville,
the author of Culture Warlords, My Journey into the Dark
Web of White Supremacy.
Speaker 17 (26:33):
Most people believe that they're essentially good, and most people,
especially in the grips of fervent ideology, believes that they're
making the world a better place. And someone like Eric
Rudel very much believed he was making the world a
better place. Well, if it stops baby killing, that makes
the world a better place, good things for God. And
I really think when you look at these thousands of sermons,
(26:58):
you have the same This is murder, murder and a mascow.
It's a holocaust that the liberals love because they love
killing babies. Some people draw that logic to its conclusion,
how do we react to people who kill children?
Speaker 13 (27:15):
You know?
Speaker 17 (27:16):
How should we react to child murderers? Some people are
content with the picket, other people go get the tntape.
You know, the rhetoric is the same.
Speaker 7 (27:32):
As anti abortion becomes an animating principle on the right.
What happens is it becomes further and further politicized.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
Kevin Cruz is a professor of history at Princeton University
and the author of One Nation Under God. He was
also known as the Twitter Historian until leaving the platform
in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 7 (27:55):
One the New Right techniques of kind of mobilizing voters
in the seventies and eighties direct mail campaigns and which
you can only get money out of them if.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
You scare them to death.
Speaker 7 (28:06):
Right, So the language becomes much much more apocalyptic. If
we don't get your donation, your help, this is going
to happen.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
Language like abortion is murder, abortion is killing.
Speaker 7 (28:18):
Stop the slaughter, and literally millions of babies are going
to die is the result they're talked about. So it's
framed increasingly as as a holocaust. It's framed as a
fight not just for the soul of the nation, but
for millions of souls of the unborn. And if that's
something that your faith teaches you to take seriously, that
(28:39):
becomes a real rallying cry to go kind of old
Testament on this and seek an eye for an eye.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
And there are groups like the Army of God.
Speaker 7 (28:49):
Which, as the name implies, saw itself as a kind
of paramilitary force doing God's will, and that involved blowing
up clinics. There were the assassinations of doctors who provided
abortion services, most famously George Tiller. And again it's no
accident that Tiller had been repeatedly singled out, I believe,
on radio shows by people like Bill O'Reilly who called
(29:11):
him Tiller the Killer, and then he was assassinated. So
as these individuals are put in the literal crosshairs of
national media campaigns, of political operatives fundraising, it heightens the stakes.
It makes this literally a life and death situation. In
which some people are more than willing to meet with
they see as a deadly movement with deadly force, and
(29:33):
that's what takes us up to people like Rudolph.
Speaker 17 (29:39):
And so many had Dan Gayman as a spiritual mentor
very much can bring himself to a place where he's
burying shrapnel in a bomb that's going to mutilate a nurse. Well,
if it stops baby killing, that makes the world a
better place. The rhetoric is the same, and so I
don't necessarily view that is benign in any sense. I
(30:03):
think that for going on fifty years, the Christian right
has preached that women exercising autonomy over their own bodies
and their reproductive choices is equivalent to mass murder and
should be punished as such. And so having the Eric
Rudolph figures the arsonists to sort of demonize that's a
(30:26):
useful rhetorical jiu jitsu move I mean, of course, it's
useful to have someone to say, well, they're the crazy one.
I'm the sane and normal one. What I'm saying is that,
as always in a movement, you have a radical fringe
in a successful movement, and the anti abortion movement in
the US is a successful political movement, absolutely successful. You
(30:48):
have a radical fringe, you have the Eric Rudolph's of
the world, and then you have you know, the Mike
Johnson's of the world. You know, the Mike Pences, right,
and they have the same goal and much of their
rhetoric overlaps. But to my mind, and this is why
I talk about the arsonists and the legislators being not
(31:11):
that different and having the same goals, just going about
them in different ways. You know, Ask the seventeen year
old bleeding to death because she couldn't, you know, get
a still berth out of her body and it has sepsis.
Ask the eleven year old forced to give birth to
a rapist child. Ask them whether there's a difference. I
(31:31):
don't think there's a difference.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Lately, it seems as though we're becoming more and more polarized.
Feels like we're living through a new historical event every week.
Certain human rights that I took for granted as a
kid are at risk now. Technically, a flashpoint refers to
the temperature at which a chemical reaction triggers ignition, but
(32:07):
in human terms, it means the point of no return.
It's when shit officially goes sideways, spinning out of control.
Over the last half century, we've seem domestic terrorists like
Eric Rudolf planning a series of detonations of flashpoints, slowly
ramping up each explosion, coming faster and faster, until finally
(32:32):
reaching today's breakneck pace. But do these terrorists ever feel remorse?
Does time or the reality of being caught ever make
them question their actions or their beliefs. For the longest time,
I've wondered this about Eric Rudolf. It's why I wrote
to him to see what he thought of my story
(32:53):
in What's Become of the World Today? And Eric Rudolf
wrote back.
Speaker 9 (33:01):
On he doesn't.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
After receiving the letter, I reconnected with Rudolph's sister in law,
Deborah to share his unsettling words with her, And.
Speaker 11 (33:13):
Then I'll read you what he said too. Oh my god,
he said, dear call, thank you for the kind letter.
I'm glad to hear that you are alive and that
my actions at Sandy Springs played some role in your
mother's decision not to kill you. And I cannot say
that I regret my actions. Your story only reinforces that conviction.
(33:37):
If you're curious about my case, go to the Army
off Good dot com and read my memoir between the
lines of Drift. Feel free to download the memoir or
any of my writings. I await your response, Sincerely, Eric Rudolf.
Speaker 17 (33:54):
Do you want to know what I think of that?
Speaker 11 (33:56):
Please?
Speaker 18 (33:57):
I think it's very narcissistic. But he wrote because he
makes it again about him. Please read my You know
he's never far away from his original role. That's scary. Yeah,
he's a psychopath, no doubt. If he had not gotten caught,
I think he would have continued.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
I wrote him back four times, each letter a bit
more direct, but he never responded again. I'm not sure why.
I have my theories, but I just don't know. He
seemed willing to talk at first, but then crickets. I
(34:43):
may never figure out that part of the story. But
I've always known about my birth story, well most of it.
I knew about my mom's relationship with BeO, how Bou
was never part of our lives, and how my dad
officially adopted me when I was six. But the Eric
Rudolph part of it, I didn't know about that until
(35:04):
I was in high school. I think my mom just
put it away. It wasn't that significant to her once
she had me, because life just kept happening. She had
a kid to take care of, a family to mother.
It just wasn't something she had space for anymore.
Speaker 9 (35:23):
I remember driving in the car one time with my
mom and she and my stepdad used to go to
this liquor store named Jack's in Sandy Springs and it's
right next to the street that goes up the hill
to the abortion clinic. And I remember making a comment
(35:44):
one time to my mom and saying, Cole probably wouldn't
be here had that place not been bombed.
Speaker 11 (35:54):
What would you say Eric's mom if she were sitting here.
Speaker 9 (35:57):
I mean, I feel nothing but empathy for her.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
As mothers, we love our.
Speaker 9 (36:03):
Kids no matter what, and I think doesn't mean you
love everything they do or have done. But it would
be very difficult to have your child hurt somebody or
kill somebody or do things like that, and to know
that your child's going to spend the rest of their
life behind bars. And I feel like she's probably been
(36:28):
blamed a lot for his actions. I would assume in
how usually it's the mother that is blamed. I mean,
I think that that's just pain that I can't imagine
that as a mother. I mean, I have compassion for her.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
There's so many paradoxes in play with the story, and
I've been living with them, trying to make sense of
it all. Sometimes people think I must be anti abortion,
They think my mom must be anti abortion. How could
we support something that nearly snuffed out my existence.
Speaker 9 (37:09):
You know, hearing the story, I think sometimes can come
across like I am purely pro life now just because
of my situation and how things turned out. But that
does not for a second mean that that's where I stand.
I mean, I am totally in completely pro choice. The
(37:30):
parallel of Eric Rudolph being a man trying to impact
and affect women's lives is the parallel to what's happening
with things now. And yes, I chose to have you
as a teenager, but it's never just as easy as
just having a baby. I had a lot of help,
(37:52):
a lot of support, whether it's physical help, financial help, whatever,
And I would say we were the exception, not the rule.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
At the end of the day, the world my mom
grew up in afforded her a choice, and having that choice,
being able to hold the two conflicting options made it
possible for her to get her arms around her situation
and know what she needed, what mattered to her. And
for me, the thing I've been reminded of sifting through
(38:26):
the wreckage and talking with all these people who I
never knew before this podcast is just how valuable it
is to find connection, to realize you care what someone
else thinks. It's simple, but it's powerful. Human connection makes
us feel stuff, makes us feel stuff more than anything
else does, good and bad and everything in between. What
(38:50):
matters most is finding a way to have real conversations
about the hard stuff, the difficult things, the contradictory truths.
I know that seems im possible right now, but if
we don't, this is just going to keep happening and
happening and happening. Here's Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility,
(39:16):
the struggle between theocracy and democracy.
Speaker 16 (39:21):
The dilemma is that if you really believe that everybody
has a right to their ideas and to express them
in a democratic society, you have to accept and respect
the people who are opposed at the same time. And
so how do you do that? How do you deal
with your formidable political opponents who are opposed to your
(39:42):
very ideas, and there's never totally good answers to that.
We need to understand that every single day we're living
the paradox, and if we don't get that, we're putting
everything that we hold dear at risk. So the odd
thing for us to embrace the delpe embrace the paradox.
(40:05):
We have to decide that that's a good day.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
How do you feel about him today?
Speaker 19 (40:13):
Sometimes there's some revenge in there. Some days I really
don't think about him.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
What Emily Lyons survived at that clinic in Birmingham, it
would destroy most people. She's one of the strongest souls
I've ever met.
Speaker 19 (40:30):
Some weeks are probably a little bit more anger. This
is one of those weeks. There's another surgery in my future,
and that's only because of him. Very few things surgery
was that I've had done was for my own fault.
(40:51):
He has caused forty nine of my fifty surgeries. I
don't think there's really anything I'm polite I could say.
I get up in the morning. As soon as I
put my legs down, it's like, oh everything hurts, thank
you Rudolf, And I get up and look in the
mirror and see my face. It's my Rudolph face. It's
my Rudolph problem, my knees Rudolph. This week, it's my face.
(41:17):
There's another surgery in my future. I lost my independence,
I lost my career, I lost my friends. To me,
it's a matter of control over women. It's not their
duty to patrol the bedroom. How does that leave a
(41:38):
lot of women with nothing, no support, no loss to
protect them. In the talks I would give, would talk
about frog is overturned than what Sandy and I went
through has been for nothing, And I still think that
it's been for nothing. The rights have been taken away
(41:58):
in most places. There are still some left in the country,
but they're working to get rid of that too.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
Flashpoint is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with iHeartMedia.
I'm Your Host. Cole La Cassio, Donald Albright and Payne
Lindsay are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV. Flashpoint
was created, written, and executive produced by Doug Mattica and
myself on behalf of seven nine ninety seven. Lead producer
(42:41):
is Alex Espastad, along with producers Jamie Albright and Meredith Steadman.
Our Associate producer is witt Lakassio, Editing by alex Espostad
with additional editing by Liam Luxon and Sidney Evans. Supervising
producer is Tracy Kaplan. Work by Station sixteen. Original music
(43:03):
by Jay Ragsdale mixed by Dayton Cole. Thank you to
Orrin Rosenbaum and the team at Uta Beck Media and
Marketing and the Nord Group. Special thanks to Angela q,
Tylie Revive, Mattica and Tim Livingston. For more podcasts like Flashpoint,
search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app, or visit
(43:26):
us at tenderfoot dot tv. Thanks for listening. Thanks for
listening to this episode of Flashpoint. This series is released
weekly absolutely free, but for ad free listening, early access
(43:49):
and exclusive bonuses, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus on
Apple Podcasts or at tenderfootplus dot com
Host
Cole Locascio
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