Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Complete, Insane History of American Border Militias

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

In Episode 59, Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to discuss the wild history of American Border Militias.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What pumping my creams? I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. My guests today, the inimitable, the unstoppable, the dynamic duo sexier than Obama, deadlier than Osama, Cody Johnston, and Katie Stoll.

This is the best intro I've ever had. Oh wow, yeah. I really worked on that one. Thank you so much. I loved every second of it. Also, you could have just said Obama for the second one, and it would have worked. Well, yeah, but I appreciate you went to the extremes. I did, I did, I did. I always like comparing my guests to famous terrorists. Yeah, it felt right.

It goes well every time. How are y'all doing today? Great. Great. Absolutely excellent. Yeah. We do have, of course, our coffee mate in the room with us, One Pump One Cream. One Pump One Cream. Yeah, it expired in January 2019.

So that's cool. Delicious. That's very cool. I do have, because I throw things now on the air, because I've become a prima donna, this time it is a loaf of Izzio Artisan Bakery San Francisco style sourdough. Delicious. So I will be throwing this in anger at several points today. I do think that coffee mate might have curled by now, but it might make a good spread for the sourdough. Oh, that's a good idea, Katie.

Just putting that out there. And if I wanted One Cream spread on the sourdough, how many pumps would that be, do you think? One. It could be one pump. One pump is one pump. Honestly, though, it's so, like, old now, and curled, it might need two or three pumps, you know? At least to get it started. Yeah. Speaking of getting it started, you guys hear about that border militia that apprehended

hundreds of migrants at gunpoint? Yeah. You want to hear the whole history of civilian border militias? I really do. Oh, I thought we were just going to hang out. Okay, okay, okay. That's what I told Cody to get him here, but. But when the coffee mate's on the table, it's working time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what everybody says. Gotta get those pumps. And the equal number of creams, ideally. We should get new coffee mate. X pump is X cream. X pump is. Except that clearly nobody wants to use it.

So I don't know if you do need any more cream. Yeah, it's only a prop now. It's just a prop. It's, it's ambient cream. Okay, let's get into it. So, when I was a little kid growing up in Texas, I learned about the glorious war my white ancestors had fought against the brutal Mexican government and the evil cross-dressing Santa Ana.

There was a lot I did not learn, though, like that the Texas revolutionaries had been fighting for their right to own human beings, and that Santa Ana was one of the founding fathers of cock fighting. I did, however, learn a lot about the Alamo. From there, my Texas history course went from the short-lived and incompetently led Republic of Texas to the Civil War, and that's basically it. I don't remember learning much about Texas in the 1920s or anything about the border, aside from some hagiographic tales of the very first Texas Rangers.

Now, in case you don't know, the Texas Rangers are basically the Lone Star State's FBI, only with more spin kicking. See the documentary, Walker, Texas Ranger, for more information on the Rangers and their current incarnation. I did not, however, learn much about what the Rangers had gotten up to pre- and post-Civil War days. According to Kelly Hernandez, author of Migra, A History of the U.S. Border Patrol, quote,

They battled indigenous groups for dominance in the region, chased down runaway slaves who struck for freedom deep within Mexico, and settled scores with anyone who challenged the Anglo-American Project in Texas. The Rangers proved particularly useful in helping Anglo-American landholders win favorable settlements of land when labor disputes with Texas Mexicans. Whatever the task, however, raw physical violence was the Rangers' principal strategy. Yeah, yeah. So, cool.

Very cool. So that's how you do it. That's how you do it, raw physical violence. Yeah. Yeah. The art of the raw physical violence. Yes. Just shooting people.

Now, I found that quote in several others in a wonderful Intercept article that makes it very clear just how much unchecked violence was key to early Border Patrol strategies. Because the Texas Rangers evolved from a force bent on maintaining white dominance in Texas too in the early 1900s, this nation's first real Border Patrol. Here's the Intercept. Quote, The early years of the 20th century, from 1910 to 1920, were particularly bloody, with hundreds of Mexicans murdered and lynched in the Texas borderlands.

The dead included women and children, the aged and the young, longtime residents and recent arrivals, says the refusing to forget project and initiative started by a collective of border-based historians and researchers. They were killed by strangers, by neighbors, by vigilantes, and at the hands of local law enforcement officers and the Texas Rangers. Some were summarily executed after being taken captive or shot under the flimsy pretext of trying to escape. Some were left in the open to rot.

Others desecrated by being burnt, decapitated, or tortured by means such as having beer bottles rammed in their mouths. So that's the start of Border Patrol. Ah. What if we didn't do any of that? What if somebody looked at that and was like, that, we shouldn't allow that. Well, but then you wouldn't be a country. Mmm.

Mmm. Mike, okay. You got a funny definition of country here. What if we, you could though. That's just, all I'm saying is what if you could be a country and not do that. Sounds like some pie in the sky. Leftist, woo-woo, county-bacon. Okay, okay, okay, okay.

Keep dreaming, Cody. Okay, but imagine, okay. No, you're right. Yes, too lofty. Imagine all the people torturing immigrants with beer bottles rammed in their mouths. I want to imagine not that though. What if not that? What if not that?

What if, um, laws? What if not that? What if laws? But they broke the law by crossing an imaginary line. If they didn't want a beer bottle rammed in them, they shouldn't have come here. Yeah. That's true. And then by virtue of being here, they're criminals.

They're illegal. Human beings, they're illegal. Do we even want to say human beings? Would these people doing this probably use that word? When you refer to them as human beings, that makes me breadthrow and angry. Take it back, Cody. If they didn't want these things to happen to them and they shouldn't come here, we don't want to do it.

This is deterrent. Oh, it's a deterrent beer bottle. This is an example. So you know what you're getting. I hate it. Did it work? No. Oh, okay.

I did a paper tapping just here. Which does not in any way translate to the audio format that we work exclusively in. But it was very comedic in the room. Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad it worked in the room. In the roaring 20s, inequality soared while an oppressive drug prohibition state led to outbursts of violent crime across the United States. By 1924, some Americans had decided that the cause of their problems were all the goddamn immigrants. We've talked a bit about this a little in other episodes. The second KKK made halting immigration a keystone of its politics, although they were mostly focused on stopping immigrants from the bad parts of Europe.

But down south, in Texas, many Americans decided the problem was Mexican immigrants. The need for Mexican farm labor meant that no real restrictions were put in place on immigration, but the government created the border patrol as a saff to people who wanted something done. I capitalized the essence of something. I heard that with the way you inflected. That's why? Yeah. Because they wanted something done.

Yeah, but people racist in Texas were like, I don't want these Mexicans coming in and the agribusiness companies were like, we can't harvest food without them. So we're not going to lobby the government to not restrict them from coming in. And racists were like, but that makes me angry. So the government was like, have border patrol. That's where they come from. And now, I toss the bread. There goes the bread that also says eat more toast on it. You know what I'm noticing right now is an issue with my toss and bread today?

It doesn't bounce back. The bagels would pop right back to me. I could boomerang. Well, I'm going to have to have Dan will go get it. That's some extra work for somebody. Because I am a prima donna. Like Beyonce. A queen.

I have taken that on myself. Oh, no, no, no. I'll keep throwing the bread. You're going to get the bagel. Let's continue while he grabs my toss and bagels. Now, the early border patrol was very much cut from the cloth of the Texas Rangers. The intercept interviewed Francisco Cantu, a former border patrol agent who told them, quote, I often heard romanticized stories of the old patrol. A lament for the days when agents had free rains across the borderlands,

lighting abandoned cars on fire and tuning up smugglers and migrants at will. As young trainees, my colleagues and I were taken to storied places in the desert. A remote pass where earlier generations of agents were rumored to have pushed migrants from clifftops and hidden their corpses. A stretch of road where an agent had run over a Native American lying drunk in a sleep in the road. An isolated patch of scrubland where agents had force-fed smugglers fistfuls of marijuana and turned them loose to rock through their wilderness barefoot and stripped to their underwear. There was a lot to digest there.

Yeah. Thank you, Dan. What does turning up mean? Tuning up. It's a shit out of. Of course, as time went on, the border patrol became gradually more professional and somewhat less like a bunch of drunken sociopaths. Less being the operative word, not unlike. And we're not going to talk enough about the number of people who are killed by border patrol every year.

Some violence still persists, but it's obviously less than it was in the 20s. Just like we don't, you know, there's still problems with prescription drugs and companies, but we don't sell children morphine. A lot of things are less than the 20s. As a general rule. Doesn't make it okay. Doesn't make it okay. Literally almost a hundred years ago.

So the border patrol became less sociopathic, but the desire to fight immigration with hooliganry remained. Enter Louis Beam. You guys ever heard of Louis Beam? No. Oh, he is someone we will be talking about a lot in my upcoming audiobook, The War on Everyone, because he's like, if George Lincoln Rockwell is like the George Washington of American fascism, Louis Beam is like the Abraham Lincoln of Nazis. Okay.

Yeah. That actually does not scan at all. So I don't know why I said it. I mean, I scanned it. I gotcha. Yeah. You carry, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. Louis Beam did an 18 month extended tour in Vietnam as a helicopter machine gunner. He saw extensive combat and spent roughly a thousand hours shooting bullets at people, accounting for between 12 and 51 kills. When he came home, it was as a radicalized, far-right white nationalist with fervent anti-communist views. In the early 1970s, Beam created the Klan Border Watch, part of a new trend towards paramilitary training among the KKK. Beam stated at the time, when our government officials refuse to enforce the laws of the country, we will enforce them ourselves. Okay.

Great. That's why they're there. That's the Constitution. Yeah. That's what we do. Our God-given right to take the law into our own hands. Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. If the government won't stop people who are critical to the infrastructure and economy of this nation from entering illegally because the legal pathways are a gigantic pain in the ass, then it's got to be up to the KKK to do it. That just makes sense. That doesn't make me question any of my feelings about immigration or immigrants or what people think about getting rid of them. I'll just take those two things at face value and never think about it again. You know what I love is never thinking about things again. Just never think about it again. Just never think about it again.

Yeah. It's easier that way. It's way easier that way. We're going to, as I said, talk about Louis Beam so much more during the war on everyone, my upcoming very fun audio book that everyone's going to love, find up lifting, and dare I say, shamefully erotic. But for the purposes of our story today, the tale of the Klan border watch has a lot more to do with two different and somewhat more comical racists. Tom Metzger and David Duke. Yeah, there it is. Yeah.

Oh, you knew David Duke was coming out of this motherfucker. Yeah. Here was Beam's counterpart in the California Ku Klux Klan, and Duke was, well, we'll get to David Duke in a little bit. Anyway, here's how Bring the War Home by Kathleen Ballew describes the Klan border patrol. Quote, The patrols function both as a publicity stunt and as a way to inculcate real anti-immigrant hostility and encourage acts of violence. When no undocumented immigrants appeared, Duke boasted to reporters, I think some Mexicans are afraid to enter the country because of the Klan.

See, there's that deterrent working. There's that deterrent working. Yeah, that's because if the KKK being there didn't work, so like, let's just take your kids away. That's the next step. That's a logical progression. That's a logical step. It doesn't work. Okay, well, I guess like tear gas, you know.

That doesn't work. Next stop bullets? I didn't want to think about it more. I was going to put that away. I wasn't going to, you know. Just not analyze that until the shooting starts. I honestly can't even remember what you're talking about. Exactly.

There you go. You know what I'm about to put away? These throwing bagels. There you go. Yeah. See, that bounces right under my feet. We got to stick with the throwing bagels. This toss-and-dough bread is...

Toss-and-dough. Toss-and-dough doesn't work. What are you laughing at, Sophie? This is very important. I'm doing a very important podcast right now. All right, nerd. What if the toss-and-bread company offered to sponsor this show? You know, I have too much integrity.

That's what I like to hear. I mean, I'll let them sponsor the show, but I'm not going to lie and say that the toss-and-bread is better than the throwing bagels. Exactly. You can't. You can't. You've got to be honest. Anyone can advertise as long as the truth can be told about it.

The bread is for curdled cream. And that's what we stand behind. I'll say this. It's more fun to throw the bread, but the bounce back is so much more satisfying on the toss-and-bagels. What are you going to do? I mean, I'm going to throw the bagels along. Four pumps, one cream?

I mean, we could test that out. Let's not. Let's not. But let's do some day. When we inevitably do the drunk episode of this podcast, we'll figure out exactly how these relate to one of those little creamer packets you get in the 7-Eleven. In one year, when it's a year old.

When it's a year old cream, we'll figure that out. Yeah, you're very 20-20. So, Tom Metzger and David Duke are both important figures in the development of the American Fascist Movement, but today I want to go into a little bit more detail about David Duke. He's been racist longer than most Americans have been alive. During the 1960s, when he was in high school, he was already an ardent white nationalist.

When he went to college in 1969, he became a student organizer for the National Socialist White People's Party, a direct descendant of George Lincoln Rockwell's Nazi Party. Duke also started the White Student Alliance and the White Youth Alliance. He was particularly active in Louisiana State University's Free Speech Alley. According to Leonard Zeskin's Blood and Politics, in one incident from those early years, Duke donned a Nazi stormtrooper uniform

complete with swastika armband and strode around for the cameras with a picket sign protesting a campus speech by noted left-wing attorney William Kunzler. Free speech! All this checks out. Sounds like a real good conservative. Sounds like a real good guy. Let's say he and these people were to get a lot of power.

Do you think that they would care about free speech? Yeah, of course. You think that they would defend free speech for people who maybe disagree with them? No, that's not free speech, Cody. Free speech is my ability to talk about what I want. I don't give a hoot taller about someone else. I was reading about a free speech activist,

a guy named Hitler, something like that, in Germany. I think it's pronounced Heitler. Yeah, and he came to power actually in the early 1930s. I haven't read further in the book that I'm reading about him, but I think he was a real free speech crusader. Well, whatever happened in him. I haven't finished the book. I'll get through it one of these days.

We can talk about Heitler. The California border patrol was Duke's brain baby first and foremost, although Metzger handled most of the logistics. Blood and Politics describes the media campaign he crafted around these patrols, relating a press conference in October of 1977. David Duke stepped out of a rented helicopter and onto the grounds of the San Ysidro Port of Entry south of San Diego, a federal office used by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS,

to regulate traffic on the border with Mexico. Dressed in a light blue business suit, Duke was surrounded by an entourage of tough-looking men in street clothes, all members of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They faced a protest group, angry at the Klan's public appearance, an egg splattered on Duke's clothes, and a rock broke the windshield of a Klansman's car. Police arrested the rock thrower while an INS agent in charge

welcomed the Klansman and gave them a guided tour of the port facility. For Duke and Company, this visit was the first stop in an effort to stir up opposition to brown-skinned immigrants. We believe very strongly white people are becoming second-class citizens in this country, Duke told the press. When I think of America, I think of a white country. Honestly, that just makes it. We try to keep this light and fun, but my blood boils a little bit.

Like, I feel my shoulders inching up to my ears. Because you're angry at the anti-free speech people who tossed a rock at that Klansman? Yes, you got me. No one let them speak. I mean, you're doing a great job because you're relaying the message. He's speaking right now. Yeah, these rock throwers, the egg throwers. They might as well be shooting guns.

They might as well be shooting guns and should be treated as such. Also, what about those poor baby eggs, those poor baby chickens? Exactly, that could have been a third of an omelet. As the current president of the United States says, maybe we should treat them throwing rocks as if they were guns. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Because, you know, when you toss a rock, that can go in a solid 15, 20 feet per second. And, you know, a rifle is only like 3,000 feet per second. And what's a bullet but a tiny rock?

Exactly. What's math but numbers, you know? Come on. Duke officially announced his Klan border watch several days later in Sacramento. He said 500 to 1,000 Klansmen would patrol the border crossings in areas in between the fences in search of illegal immigrants. The reality was less impressive. Less than 200 Klansmen actually showed up to drive around, and their activity at the border was limited to a few weeks. The Knights of Texas started patrolling their border at the same time,

but in both cases, the border watches were more PR than practical. The Klan's newspaper, The Crusader, published a special article to commemorate this heroic action. No single action in the last decade has done more to bring public attention and awareness on the border problem. Now, it would be more accurate to state that no single action did more to bring public awareness to the cause of white nationalism. Focusing on the border and illegal immigration was a hugely successful PR move for America's most organized racists. As David Duke himself noted, when a hundred reporters are gathered around hanging on every word, when they hope you accomplish your objectives by their own misguided sensationalism, if indeed it was a media stunt, it was by their own presence an admission that it was a very brilliant one.

That's irrelevant to anything today? Yeah, no, it does not tie into anything that's happened recently. That's my favorite thing about coming on this podcast, because it's like... How irrelevant it is today? Yeah, hearing stories and stuff that has nothing to do with what's going on. Like, because I like to, you know, we read the news all the time, we talk about it all the time, and so you want to shut that part of your brain off. And talk about things that never happened again.

You just want to hear stories that are like, here's this random thing that happened. Yeah, that doesn't tie into anything else. Nothing. You know, it does tie into anything else. What? Ads for products and services. Oh, yes. It might even be an ad for Sarah Lee, deluxe throwing bagels.

What? Yeah! They bounced right back. Products! During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Just like these bagels were back after I threw them because they bounce right back, which should be the tagline if the fucking Sarah Lee people knew how to advertise a product. Are you listening Sarah? Hire a Sarah Lee. I can sell some motherfucking bagels. They bounce right back. They bounce right back.

Bagel rings. Bagel rings. Oh good. I love it. We've got another career trajectory blooming in this room. Yeah, this feels more organic than pitching Doritos, because I love tossing bagels. Yeah, even more than you love Doritos? That can be a euphemism for a lot of things too, tossing bagels.

It could be. My mind went places. Yeah, it does, especially if you're a fan of bagel salad as I am. Yeah, chopped up bagels in a chicken stir fry salad. And a coffee meat drizzle. Yeah, that's the cream. It's a reduction in the salad cream. I've been on this podcast a lot. This is the worst thing I've ever heard.

Let's talk about stuff that's even worse. So, while David Duke and Louis Beam were content to mostly use the question of illegal immigration to drum up interest in their super cool clubs, other Americans remained frustrated by the fact that no actual action had been taken to stop migrants from coming over. Enter civilian materiel assistance, or the CMA. The CMA was founded in 1983 by a wholesale grocer from Arizona who wanted to provide aid to anti-communist guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua. This aid eventually turned into actual volunteer fighters, several of whom died in that country. Kathleen Bellou notes that, quote, in Nicaragua, CMA acted covertly on behalf of the U.S. government. It was funded by the CIA and supplied by the U.S. military.

Cool. That's a good shit, yeah. Now, the 1980s were a time in which a lot of civil wars were raging all across Latin America. Most of those wars were funded and in some way supported by the CIA and the U.S. military. For example, also during this period, the Guatemalan government was fighting an insurgency. They dumped suspected guerrilla fighters into the ocean out of helicopters so no one would find their bodies and disrupt the military aid they received from the United States. All this violence and unrest across the region led a lot of people to flee their homes and search for a better, less violent life in the United States. The CMA was not a fan of this.

According to the Intercept, quote, In the summer of 1986, approximately 20 heavily armed men in military fatigue stepped into the darkness of the Arizona desert. It was July 4th weekend outside the remote border town of Luchiel. And the gunmen were on the hunt, carrying M16s and AK-47s with Israeli night vision goggles strapped to their heads. The vigilantes soon found what they were looking for, two carloads of Mexican nationals. J.R. Hagan, the crucifix wearing Vietnam veteran who led the operation, would later say that the vehicles came to a stop on their own. Other members of his team disagreed, telling reporters that they booby-trapped the road, tearing the tires of one of the vehicles to shreds, before opening fire. It was the latest in a series of escalating CMA actions, which had also included clandestine forays into Mexico.

The militia members held 16 men, women, and children at gunpoint for an hour and a half before Border Patrol agents arrived to take them away. Very big discrepancies in their story. I love that they're protecting the U.S. border by invading Mexico. Unbelievable. And it's fine. It's almost like these hyper-masculine people. They need this award to be fighting. They need to have some battle at their planning.

I get it. I like guns. That's why we have football. I get the desire to lark with a fucking AR-15. Go do it on your friend's land and shoot at old cars. Don't fuck with people's lives and shoot their vehicles. Play a video game. Play a fucking video game.

Play a video game. Yeah. Laser tag. I don't know. Yeah. Go fuck up another country and then when they come here and stop them with guns. I love what you're doing because it's really... I was like, okay, one guy said that they stopped on their own, but they disagreed.

And I was waiting for you like, no, they held up guns, they stopped the car. No, no, they booby-trapped the road. They booby-trapped the road. No, no, no, no. We put shit down. We weren't just standing in the middle of the road. What do they think this is? They didn't want a war zone.

Yeah. No, they want a war. They want a civil war. They want a revolution. There's a... What? Hannity's old website in 2009 and all these polls of what revolution do you prefer? And it's like, I want a civil war.

No, I want revolts against the government. Just all these different options. There's one thing they want. They have all those cool toys and they want an excuse to use them. So nobody voted for the industrial revolution? No. Oh, man. That was my favorite.

I don't think it was an option. What's your favorite resolution? You know what I love is cute little tykes working in factories. That just, I love it. Yeah, that really gets me. The keyword is cute. It's cute. It's cute.

Why do you think they are adults? When they're little hands, they go into those grain thrushers and they just try to pull the stuff out faster than it can cut their fingers off. It's a fun game. So cute. Wholesome. Adult hands wouldn't be able to do that. No, they wouldn't.

And they'd be less cute. And it would be less cute. Oh, my God. And they're the little cute little fake limbs for them, the little peg legs and stuff. Oh, yeah. They lose their legs in the thrushers. Adorable. I like the little cough at the end.

Little black lungs. Yeah. Yeah. Think of how little those black lungs are, too. It's adorable. Itty bitty. I love a good resolution. It's like little licorice jelly beans in their chest.

Yeah. Aww. So cute. Yeah. You took it too far. You did. You really did. Jelly beans are cute.

What's up? No. You know what? Oh, shit. Yep, it hit Katie's mic. It's like, if I throw it out the other wall, it mounts back to you. What is that expression, Sovi? I just had a t-shirt idea that to public that was like a protest or throwing something.

But instead of it being like a fire, it's a throwing bag. Oh, that's a great idea. That's a great one. Do you want your bagels back? Yes please. Thank you. Yeah, instead of a Molotov. Molotov cocked bagel.

Basically like your business card, the back of your business card, but instead of it being like a weapon, it's throwing. I love that. Bagel. I love that. That's a good one. I love that bagel there's something here multiple locks to Something we're close. We're getting there. We're getting there

I'm proud of all of us We'll probably cut some of that out Dan says no, sir. Yeah 1991 was an important year for America's political racists. It's the year David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana He lost but he won almost 39% of the popular vote, which is a lot of votes. That's the magic number Yeah, it's like that like that rain. It's yeah, there's always that range of people who are vote for this kind of the president's current approval rating It was also the year of the Gulf War and many of America's white supremacists were very much against that war happening

The populist party was founded by Willis Carto in 1984 Willis will get an episode himself, but the short of it is he wasn't modern America's first successful intellectual Nazi Think of him as rich as the Richard Spencer of the 1980s and 90s He kept his power level just wrapped up enough to avoid being tarred with the same brush as George Lincoln Rockwell But he shared Rockwell's ultimate goal uniting the American right behind white supremacist politics The populist party was a major early vehicle for David Duke's political career in 1991 They picketed and protested the Gulf War blood and politics cites one of the leaflets. They handed out by the hundreds quote If the populist party were in power

We would have hundreds of thousands of troops on the Mexican border not in desert Desert sand dunes 10,000 miles away. There would be no affirmative action quotas or other anti white racist schemes Anti white racist games. That's my oh god Waiting for like no more wars. No, just not where we want it closer We want to do it closer. We want to war on those unarmed People tried to cross the border Gotta kill those women and children. Gotta shoot those women. We want to be able to see the war from our backyard Yeah, I want to be able to go partake in the war, but I want to I want to war

But I also don't want to have to go too far from a kitchen Well, you don't want to have to fight war in like a gross foreign country. No, you know, you want to do it here I want to I want to kill some people. I want to go home to my own bed exactly America first Mm-hmm We're here Forever yeah import don't export exactly exactly exactly exactly we've got a war deficit Trade wise at the war gap. Yeah By 1992 or in 1992 Pat Buchanan ran in the Republican Party primary against George HW Bush

So did Tom Metzger for that matter Buchanan made border security the keystone issue of his campaign during a press event at the border in May He told the LA Times quote I am calling attention to a national disgrace The failure of the national government of the United States to protect the borders of the United States from an illegal invasion That involves at least a million aliens a year as a consequence of that We have social problems and economic problems and drug problems. Oh Unfortunately for Pat Tom Metzger showed up at the border that same day intent on attacking Pat Buchanan from the right Here's how blood and politics relates what happened next The only problem was Metzger who waited with great fanfare for Buchanan to appear. Where was the great white hope?

He sneered like a perfect villain in a street theater I want to talk with him when Buchanan finally did appear He was forced to huddle in a small circle of supporters to avoid contact with Metzger But the ornery Aryan worked his way into camera range nevertheless Pat He yelled as all the cameras swung away from the candidate and toward him What are we going to do about all those rich Republicans making millions off the wetbacks in the Imperial Valley as the cameras swung back and forth? Buchanan beat a hasty retreat after less than 15 minutes of photoless opportunity With the cameras all to himself Metzger then staged his own press conference if he were president he argued volubly

He would station National Guard troops like a picket fence along the border with orders to shoot to kill the immigration problem would be over in one night He declared. Yes Wrong that's a but also Cool, but also gross. Mm-hmm. Um, but also gross. That's uh, yeah, that's It's always fascinating. Yeah, hearing hearing current stories Like a picket fence. Mm-hmm. Which is like, yeah, that beautiful fence. Yeah guns and guns you can't have from the right Yeah, that's yeah, that's a thing. That's a feat. Yeah Okay, okay. It's like

Like I've seen that conversation happen online many many times, but just like oh, yeah, two like candidates are Doing their mm-hmm. They're Twitter their Twitter argument, but in real life. Yeah, I'm pulling them to the right This is what we had to do before Twitter was show up at the the the border and shout at each other No, obviously the 1992 election did not go to any Republican slick Willy noted lawyer and probable rapist one in the mid 1990s Clinton's border patrol launched the prevention through deterrence campaign This basically focused the border patrol in several specific border cities in an attempt to funnel migrants into the Sonoran Desert By basically blocking off all of the easy ways into the country The idea was that migrants would realize there were no safe routes into the United States and thus stopped trying to enter

I'm gonna I'm sure that worked seems seems like people fleeing war and in some cases literal genocide in their homes Would be stopped by crossing an additional desert Right desperation and the human drive for survival. Mm-hmm is easily deterred. Yes It very very easy to buy like a single extra obstacle exactly. Yeah, that isn't necessarily a worse obstacle than ones They've already got that's a key way to get people to stop trying to do something It's like go through hell and be like what about the hell light. Yeah, what about a slightly less worse anyway? Let's read the next paragraph. Oh, no It turns out thousands of migrants tried to cross and hundreds of them died in the Sonoran Desert

In many cases they died due to lack of water heat stroke and all the other terrible things that can happen to a body whilst traveling through The desert on foot but a number of those migrants We will never know how many died violently in 2000 You CBO de Haro a Mexican man was shot to death by Texas landowner Sam Blackwood You CBO had asked Sam for water Blackwood was convicted of a misdemeanor deadly conduct charge and fined $4,000 Several members of the jury hugged members of his family after the verdict was given All of this finally brings me to

The Minutemen Yep Now if you're like me the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps were the first vigilante border militia you ever heard about Yes, they started in April of 2005 as the brainchild of a man named Chris Simcox Now Chris was born in 1961 his childhood occurred while David Duke was wearing a swastika in Free Speech Alley And Lewis Beam was machine-gunning people in Vietnam In his early years Chris's life gave little hint that he would follow down an even vaguely similar path to those men He moved out to LA with dreams of becoming an actor after several years of failure

He became a kindergarten teacher instead and taught at the Wildwood School for 13 years What just like By September 11th 2001 he transitioned to running a private tutoring business According to the nation quote he appeared to suffer a mental breakdown in the days after the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks refusing to communicate with anyone unless they first recited the preamble to the U.S. Constitution Leaving a series of bizarre messages on his ex-wife's answering machine about stockpiling weapons I'm going on a great adventure Simcox told his son three weeks after the attacks This doesn't end well

Adventures are fun. Yeah adventures are fun. I love adventures. I've never heard of a bad adventure. Adventures are Avengers adventures adventures Mm-hmm. Both are fun. Both are fun And nobody dies and either either room. That's my favorite thing about adventure is the never-dying part This adventure was Chris moving out to Tombstone, Arizona and getting a gig as a fake gunfighter and a local show for tourists He also sunk some of his savings into buying the tombstone tumbleweed a small local paper Chris changed its editorial direction from local news to ranting violently about immigrants The next year 2002 he founded the tombstone militia, which his own newspaper described as a committee of vigilantes

The tombstone militia started patrolling the border irregularly in January 2003. Chris was arrested for infrequently Actually, that's that's how you we wear that costume In 2003 Chris was arrested for illegally carrying a firearm in a national park during one of these missions the nation notes also in his possession We're a police scanner and a toy figure of Wyatt Earp riding a horse. Yeah, so it is weirdly Everything's adding up. Yeah In April of 2005 Chris teamed up with Jim Gilchrist a retired accountant in Orange County to start the Minuteman project According to Chris citizen border patrols were needed to do the job the government refuses to do and protect the country from people

He called invaders. Mmm. Mmm. That's a new word All of this is new not the same Language that Lewis beam the Nazi used to justify the Klan border patrol a couple of decades early very totally different Not the same word identical language. Yeah, not the same word that any of these people use or the president specifically or the Christchurch shooter, or I could You know what I'll just I'll just you know, I actually It's one of you want to throw these bagels in anger at that one wherever you want You toss you toss those bagels. Nothing in here can be damaged Oh, this is solid toss. They still go back. It all bounces back to Robert and the invasion is over

Does this play well on podcast? Oh, yeah, people love people love a good a good bagel throw. It's the cornerstone of my show The Minuteman project lasted a month and it mostly involved Groups of volunteers sitting in lawn chairs near the border looking for migrants with binoculars Well, it was unimpressive on the ground the Minuteman project was a huge PR success Fox paid particular attention, but coverage spanned the gamut of mainstream news sources I found an NBC news article from June 2005 about two months after the Minuteman's first outing quote Headlines from the Arizona event gave the group momentum and turned what some believed to be nothing more than a publicity stunt into a national movement The group has since hired lawyers reorganized into separate corporations filed to legally protect the name Minuteman project

Hired a Washington-based media consultant and started an aggressive fundraising campaign And representatives of the group have been to Washington to lobby Congress and relate the lessons learned from their time on the border so Unless the work continues, it's just going to be viewed as a dog and pony show said James Gilchrist one of the Minuteman leaders when the Arizona project wrapped up he and Simcox unabashedly acknowledged that among their chief considerations in Arizona was getting media attention So if you know one thing about the kind of people who create volunteer militias It's that they're all impossible assholes who hate each other Simcox and Gilchrist did not get along and less than a month after blowing up, you know, press-wise the Minuteman project

Yeah, I I'm hung over again, so I'm reading some of this like a shithead It less than a month after blowing up in the news the Minuteman fractured into two separate groups Gilchrist created Minuteman Inc. an organization aimed at fighting illegal immigration inside the US by attacking employers violating immigration laws Simcox ran the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps or MC DC on paper The two groups were part of the same larger whole in reality They had fairly little to do with each other This worked out great for Chris Simcox because it meant he could solicit donations directly to his group without sharing with Gilchrist By August of 2006 between

60,000 and 130,000 people had donated money to fund the MC DC's operations Chris Simcox claimed that he'd received over 1.6 million dollars He claimed at that point to have more than 7,451 Casa Migrantes or migrant hunters in his personal army He claims these men had personally delivered 13,000 illegal aliens to the border patrol Simcox and Gilchrist quickly gained the attention of powerful forces within the American right according to the nation Quote the cannonball media splash that followed attracted the attention of diner consultants the Chicago based political Consulting and fundraising operation is run by Philip Sheldon son of the traditional values coalition long one of the nation's most vociferous anti-gay crusaders diner is one cog in Philip Sheldon's revenue-generating machine which also includes response unlimited a direct mail firm promoted as the nation's best and most

comprehensive source of mailing lists for conservative and Christian mailers and telemarketers and perhaps best known for ghoulishly purchasing a list of donors to Terry Shiveau's legal fund from her parents several days before her death Cool cool You know what is even cooler another mailing list that response unlimited would happily sell to the highest bidder was a list of people who had Subscribed to a now dead magazine called the spotlight you guys ever heard of the spotlight heard of the spotlights Yeah, well the spotlight is a literal neo-nazi news rag that mostly focused on denying the Holocaust sure it was published By Willis Carto founder of the populist party and backer of David Duke So Chris Simcox was happy to sell access to his mailing list to these these people

Didn't care for the Nazi stuff Not a fan of referring to them as migrant hunters Yeah, that's pretty pretty bull that really made you so much it didn't Can I just say like all of you both? Yeah, you can say that I'm not a fan of migrant hunting either You know what I am a fan of Products I love products services. Oh my gosh. I know service would be included before we go out to ads I'm gonna try tossing something. I've never tossed. Yeah, and this might be an objectively bad idea. Okay Yeah, I'm throwing the coffee

What happens All the cream It was fine it's safe everything's good everything's fine nothing Pardon because I baffed it away part of the language, but nothing came out But if you want something to come out product During the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations And you know what?

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His beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world Listen to the last soviet on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI Isn't based on actual science The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match And when there's no science in CSI How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize? That this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts We're back God those ads

I bought it I bought it all I'm so full from those ads So am I so am I you know let's let's let's fill our heads now with some some stuff With some some knowledge. Let's digest some things Knowledge bites. Okay, so We were talking about response unlimited people who buy up all the mailing lists They bought the Minuteman's mailing list or essentially Chris Simcock sold access to that The nation actually managed to find out some of the people who purchased access to the Minuteman's mailing list

It included Judge Roy Moore for his failed gubernatorial campaign, Oliver North's Freedom Alliance And some organization called Stop Puerto Rico Statehood Jesus Christ They know they're fucking Oh my goodness Data Cool Now most new grifters in Chris Simcox's position would have fucked everything up within six months or less of their first grift going viral

But Chris is a smart dude On April 19th 2006 he showed up on Fox News' Hannity and Combs He stated with zero evidence that 300,000 Middle Easterners had been apprehended entering the country in the last year This is a clear and present danger. It is the greatest threat to national security and public safety The time for negotiating is over He then delivered an ultimatum to President George W. Bush Declare a state of emergency and deploy the National Guard and Military Reserves Or by Memorial Day weekend we're going to break ground and we're going to start helping landowners to build a double layer security fence along their properties

Thus was born Finsgate Okay Okay, okay Cool President Bush was forced to send 6,000 National Guard troops to the border to placate the Fox watching crowd Chris used the media storm around this to solicit even more donations His plan was to buy up miles of private land along the border and build what he called an Israeli-style security fence

Including a six-foot trench and concertina wire on top By May 9th, just a few weeks after his Fox appearance, the fence had raised $175,000 A month later, almost $400,000 had been donated Week by week, the Minuteman grew more and more tightly woven into the Republican establishment In mid-2006, it was absorbed into the Declaration Alliance A group formed by conservative activist Alan Keyes in 1996 to fight abortion and gay rights The Alliance's president, Mary Lewis, was a former assistant to Bill Crystal, editor of the now defunct Weekly Standard During a Minuteman gathering, Keyes told the assembled militiamen

What we're doing here is not just building a fence, we are rebuilding a character, we are redefining a people Now, in every press appearance in interviews, Simcox has been careful to note that the Minutemen were nonviolent When Alan combs, Fox's now dead pocket Democrat, questioned Chris about the fact that some Minutemen carried guns on patrol Chris told him, Alan, this is a dangerous place, there are drug dealers Our group in California yesterday came across some drug mules, one of them carrying an AR-15 You know, our volunteers, thank God for the Second Amendment, are allowed to defend their lives if they're attacked And when they put themselves in this dangerous situation, the same as the men and women of Border Patrol, they have that right The reality of the situation is that Chris Simcox, Jim Gilchrist, and many of their volunteers were champing at the bit for an excuse to murder brown people

I'm going to play an audio clip from documentary footage shot in 2004 The first person we're going to hear is Gilchrist I'm going to be able to shoot the Mexicans on sight and that would end the problem After two or three Mexicans are shot, they'll stop crossing the border and they'll take their cows home too And here's Simcox I feel that the people that are coming across invading this country, I think they should be treated as enemies of the state We need to start putting them in work camps Anyone could have walked through the borders of this country bringing bombs, chemicals, weapons, and mass destruction

I think they should be shot on sight, personally Yeah, you know all those migrants bringing weapons of mass destruction? Yeah, I looked into it because I wanted to know how many terrorists al-Qaeda guys have snuck into America through the southern border It's still zero It's still zero I was wondering if it's still zero It's only been 18 years Yeah, so fingers crossed, that changes

Yeah, you're saying it's zero now Exactly, 18 years after people started Worried about it You never know It's interesting hearing all these people talk and say these terrible things that many of our public officials say And now do And now do Like the camps

Like the camps insinuating that maybe we should shoot them But we won't, maybe we should We should It would be effective if we did We won't, but maybe we'll work I also like, yeah, the deterrent, that'll deter them And that's what Gilchrist said, that like if you start, you only have to kill a few and it'll deter them That's literally the same thing Nazi Tom Metzger said 30 years earlier

Yeah That you start killing a few and it'll stop it Yeah Yeah It's important to note that the Minutemen, although they wrap themselves in more moderate garb and were very tightly woven into the Republican Party Were just as hateful and had intentions just as violent as the neo-Nazis and Klansmen who preceded them Yeah, you know how like people are talking about like Donald Trump and how like he's like, ah, look what he's doing to everybody Look what he's doing to the Republican Party

It's interesting how it's less that and more he's pumped up the volume He's an expression of it He's just the DJ, they were already dancing But he got up and he pumped up the fucking volume He's the one pump one cream to their rhetoric Yes If I may borrow and name the spotlight Yeah

Nice Nice Maybe a little bit Nice Lots of tie-ins here Yeah, so yes, the Minutemen wrap themselves in the notion of protecting America, but what they really wanted was an excuse to murder Hispanics In part two, we're going to talk about what happened when some of them finally got that chance Right

But first But I don't want to Plugs Oh, yeah It's P zone We said the P zone What with the P zone I mean, you guys plug your stuff, drop a P in the P zone

Look, we're here We're here on the podcast a lot, you like that We got our own podcast called Even More News Cody, you do the rest There's also a YouTube show called Some More News The videos and my Twitter is Dr. Mr. Cody And the show's Twitter is Some More News And Katie's Twitter is Katie Stoll

That's right I have a Twitter, am I right okay on Twitter? You can follow me there if you want to be my friend or my enemy I'm taking both I have, there's t-shirts you can buy on t-public You can find this podcast on Twitter or the Graham at at Bastards Pod You can find all of the sources for this episode on BehindTheBastards.com I don't think I have any other podcasts to plug Sophie, is that correct?

You're just looking like you're angry at me Like you're furious Am I missing something? Oh, do you want me to throw the bagels again? Okay, I'm gonna throw the bagels again Oh, knocked over Katie's drink They are getting progressively more dangerous But I'm not, I'm not gonna stop

Why would you? Why would you stop? Kind of craving a bagel Exactly Keep going, keep going That's a America logic Speaking of America, I have a podcast about what if Civil War called it could happen here Spoilers, it's terrible

I mean, the podcast is good, but the podcast is good I hope so Anyway, the episode's over Go throw some bagels, hug a cat, give a cat bagels We're done Make a bagel stop This episode's over What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price Two death sentences and a life without parole My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts