Behind the Bastards - Part Six: The Perfect Soldier

Episode Date: August 22, 2019

Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston for a reading of Chapter Six of Robert's. 'The War on Everyone. 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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. 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 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. What's being insulted by Sophie? My, me. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. Sophie is angry at me because I fucked up and tried to start the episode before we were ready. We don't know what's up or down. We don't know what's up or down. I can't stop thinking about this Perrier case that I'm left with. None of us can. I have to get about it. Cody's not sweating it. It's like the sword of Damocles, but instead of being a sword held up by a single string or whatever the hell the sword of Damocles was, it's a case of Perrier that I'm just going to throw for no good reason. That's very true. That's the best way to phrase it. His reason is that he's been saying it. It is. But that's not a good reason. No, it's not. And

it's a problem that I have. And like with a drug problem, the only way to really get over it is to do the most dangerous version of it you can possibly do. Bad advice. There are other ways. Nope. I would look that up or talk to a professional before you decide to throw that Perrier. I think I have to do it. There's going to be a hotline in the notes of this episode. When it comes to throwing things in this room, there's no professional more experience than me. That is true. That is true. Wow. Yeah, I accept that. I love professionalism. I've been convinced. You should throw it. First, let's start chapter 6, The Perfect Soldier. The 1988 Seditious Conspiracy Trial held important lessons for the chief minds behind the white supremacist movement.

When they leaned into their patriotism, their love of an America that was white and Christian, but America, nonetheless, they could draw significant sympathy from their fellow white men and women. Swastikas and clan robes were much less useful than tearful stories of hippie protesters spitting on flags. The 1990s saw continuous growth of both the survivalist and the American militia movement. Neither of these things was inherently white supremacist, but Beeman and his colleagues had been remarkably successful at seeding their propaganda into gun shows and conventions. As a result, the early 90s brought them a whole crop of fellow travelers, men and women who did not identify as Nazis and had never held clan membership,

but who were also quite capable of reading the Turner Diaries and identifying with its message. Randy Weaver is a perfect example of this new sort of recruit. He was a former Green Beret, a patriot who loved his country and working with his hands. He and his wife Vicki were Christian conservatives. They fell in love with the first generation of evangelical TV preachers, men like Jerry Falwell. They also read a book called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, which focused around using the Bible to predict the near future. Lindsey's book convinced Randy and Vicki that Gog, an anti-Christian empire from the book of Ezekiel, was the Soviet Union. You say Gog? Gog, I did say Gog. They became more and more drawn into conspiracy theories and

convinced themselves that a great and fiery apocalypse was imminent. I'm going to quote next from American Experience by PBS. Concerned citizens, they set out to spread the word. They were unable to find a church that approached these matters with what they felt was the appropriate level of seriousness, so they held their own Bible studies with like-minded friends and neighbors. This sparked the attention of a local reporter who came to do a story on them. The Weavers, Walter learned, did not appreciate the results. They felt betrayed, but they had never been more sure in their beliefs. A great conflagration was coming, and they felt increasingly unsafe in Iowa. Vicki started having visions in the bathtub. God was speaking to her, and God was telling her

to go west, to find for her family a mountaintop. They would be safe there. The Weavers moved to a place that would later come to be called Ruby Ridge in Idaho, not far from Richard Butler's Aryan Nations compound. Randy Weaver began to visit the compound, attending several events, and making a few friends among the neo-Nazis. The exact nature of what he believed precisely is unclear and heavily debated. It seems that he identified with some aspects of Christian Identity theology, and it's safe to say he was racist by normal people standards, but it's also fair to say that Randy Weaver was not really a Nazi or even an ideological white supremacist. He hung around Aryan nations because he lived in the middle of nowhere,

they were the only people to hang with, and he just didn't care about their racism. He was not the kind of man who'd have joined a group like the Order, but he would come to play an important role in the next step of the white supremacist movement. That's the thing. You're like, okay, well, I know he's evil, but he's kind of cool in this aspect. I'll be buds with this person. They make good hot dogs and old tippings. That's how Nazis happen. That's how you help your Nazi friends. Yup. Now, the FBI wound up wiretapping several of the fascists that Randy Weaver befriended. It was quite immediately obvious to them that Mr. Weaver had no plans to overthrow the government,

spark a race war, or do anything more subversive than live off the land with his family and picnic with Nazis from time to time. In fact, when other people in these wiretap conversations would suggest committing crimes, Randy would usually say something like, we don't really go in for that stuff. It's a better response for lynchings than sure, but it's not a great response. Well, the feds knew Randy wasn't really dangerous. They saw him as the perfect guy to approach as an informant. He wasn't a true believer, and he was very poor. If they could entrap him into committing a crime, they could scare him with prison time until he agreed to wear a wire and help them catch some of the big fish in the

Aryan Nations community. What? Offer money. Yeah, just offer him. Start like that. Yeah, that's not what they do. They're two things you said, like he's not a true believer, and he's poor. Okay, so offer him money to help you out. I know that's not what they do, and it just sucks. An undercover agent approached Randy and offered him good money to illegally saw off a couple of shotguns. Now, Randy was not a believer in the legitimacy of American gun control regulations, and he needed the cash, so he happily acquiesced and was subsequently busted for it. The feds made their offer, and Randy refused them. He was arrested on federal firearms charges and taken to jail. Randy made bail, though, and he fled back to Ruby Ridge and holed up with his family and a

whole bunch of guns in the hope that the federalies would not follow. They did. But the attempted arrest did not go well. A U.S. Marshal was shot dead by the Weaver Clan, and the authorities responded with a blizzard of indiscriminate gunfire, which killed Randy's 14-year-old son, the family dog, and his unarmed wife, Vicky. They were trapped in the cabin with her corpse for, like, days. It was horrible. This is awful. Yeah, it's a terrible story. A standoff ensued, the law came in with helicopters, armored vehicles, and the kind of militarized police that looked familiar to us now, but were new and terrifying back in 1992. The media descended on Ruby Ridge, too, and the assault on the Weaver families was spread virally throughout the far right. The Weavers

were the perfect poster family to illustrate government overreach. Footage of black helicopters hovering over Ruby Ridge and saint-like pictures of Vicky Weaver were almost tailor-made to sell the idea that the New World Order was coming for decent, white, Christian, gun-owning Americans. Well, yeah, handed that one out on the platter. Louis Beam and his fellow fascists knew a great opportunity when one came unknockin'. Later in 1992, while Ruby Ridge was still in the news, the leading minds of the white supremacist movement gathered in Estes Park, Colorado, for a summit on how, precisely, they could use this tragedy to their advantage. The summit was convened by Pete Peters, a Christian identity preacher

from Colorado and the head of a sizable Christian identity church, the La Porte Church of Christ. Here's how Leonard Zeskin summarizes the proceedings and blood and politics. For two and a half days, they met in committee, deliberated in plenary sessions, and engaged in the kind of one-on-one conversations known in the parlance of business professionals as networking. They made decisions in the name of Jesus Christ in Yahweh, sang onward Christian soldiers, and otherwise conducted themselves in a manner of quiet resolve appropriate for their surroundings, an YMCA facility abutting the park. No guns were waived, and even the most heated rhetoric seemed to have the blood drained out of it. Estes Park signified a radical shift in the tactics of the white power movement.

Like the 1983 Aryan Nations Congress, we mostly know it was discussed at Estes Park because of the things that happened after it. The Nazis started reaching out to more moderate Americans. Louis Beam published an article in his new magazine, ironically named The Seditionist, because he'd gotten fined declared innocent of sedition. He called for leaderless resistance in the wake of Ruby Ridge. Big Star One, a militia with members in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, carried out grenade launcher and mortar training exercises in rural Texas. The Montana militia published a guidebook on how to engage in domestic terrorism. In 1993, law enforcement across the nation found 13 explosives caches meant to be used in attacks as varied as a national Afro-American

museum in Ohio and a black church in Los Angeles. None of this made the news in a big way because of something that happened in mid-1993, the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians were not a Christian identity sect, and their leader David Koresh was not affiliated with the white supremacist movement, but the ATF siege of their compound so soon after Ruby Ridge was easy for Louis Beam and his comrades to propagandize around. Now this is not an audio book about the Waco disaster, and I won't even try to cover what happened there in detail. What's important for our purposes is the end result. On February 28, 1993, ATF agents attempted to serve a search warrant about sexual abuse and illegal weapons charges. People inside the compound opened

fire, four agents and five Branch Davidians were killed, and the situation devolved into a bloody siege. On April 19th, the FBI, who had taken control of the situation, launched an assault on the compound. In the ensuing melee, several fires broke out and quickly swept through the structures. By the time the smoke had cleared and it was all over, 53 adults and 23 children were dead. The whole tragedy was inarguably a clusterfuck on behalf of the federal government, which of course helped groups like the fascist people. They'd started after Essie's Park reaching out to militias and stuff, and again trying to like propagandizing directly to militias. Instead of just sending out Nazi propaganda to guys who aren't going to bite on Nazis, what if we focus

on pictures of this dead white woman killed by the government and try to scare them that way, and then if they're interested in that, maybe they'll gradually start reading some of our other propaganda. So Kirk Lyons, a close friend of Louis Beaman, a white supremacist militia leader himself, sent out an issue of his group's fundraising newsletter that featured a photo of a spiraling 14-year-old girl who died in the Waco siege. The girl was of course white, and her photo was captioned, Why We Fight. There were dozens, hundreds, and eventually thousands of other similar pieces of propaganda. Gradually, day by day and month by month, explicitly fascist white supremacist groups began to wrap their ideological claws around the militia movement

and suck in ever more patriots. British journalist John Ronson was one of the few reporters who spent a great deal of time embedded with the fringe right during this period. He actually visited the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound several years after the siege, with Randy Weaver in tow. They wound up having a conversation with several members of the Michigan militia who were there taking part in a vigil for the people who died at Waco. One of these people told him, we are here to ask for these people's forgiveness for sitting around on our butts and watching it on TV. What happened at Ruby Ridge and Waco will never happen again under any circumstances. If it does, there will be immediate retaliation, armed resistance from the Michigan militia.

Now, the Michigan militia in this time had about 12,000 members, which was a significant surge for in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco. One of those members was a young desert storm veteran named Tim McVeigh. Timothy McVeigh was born. Oh, wait, it's time for an ad plug, isn't it, Sophie? Timothy McVeigh. You know what I think about when I think about Tim McVeigh. You really are great at this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You know, there's nothing that goes with Tim McVeigh, like, well, fertilizer bomb. But other than a fertilizer bomb, no, Sophie, you're saying that's not a good ad plug. There are a lot of things better than Tim McVeigh, and those things are these. You know what does less damage than Tim McVeigh? The products and services advertised on this show.

You got to pick one of these, Sophie. That one's great. All right, perfect. Let's roll to dick pills. 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 got to 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 not in 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 heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. 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. We're back. We're talking about how good I am at making ad plugs. Still talking about that. Yep. Still talking about this good. I can't stop talking about it. No, I can't stop talking about this case of Perrier. Yeah. Yep. Just listen to that. It has to be thrown. I don't know. There's only 10. There aren't 12. Yeah, there are 12. So it's safe. It's the industry requirement.

For the record, I don't think you should throw it. No, I have to. I have to. Well, Timothy McVeigh. So he was born on April 23, 1968. McVeigh grew up in Pendleton, New York, and had an early childhood that was pretty standard for the 70s and 80s. He watched Gumby and Truth or Consequences. He played cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers with other kids in the neighborhood. Tim preferred playing the good guys as he saw them, cops or cowboys, wherever possible. He was sickly and somewhat prone to accidents, hurting himself in all sorts of ways young boys who spend a lot of time in the woods tend to do. Tim was an energetic boy, and he might have been someone who'd have wound up on Ritalin had he

been born a decade or two later. He was constantly in trouble for minor things, but he also had a good heart as this story from American terrorist, the fantastic biography of McVeigh, makes clear. Tim was playing near the pond when he noticed one of the older neighborhood boys carrying a burlap sack. The sack was weighted down with rocks, but the curious Tim could see there was something else wriggling in the sack. He watched as the older boy pitched the sack out into the pond, where it quickly sank to the bottom. What was that, Tim asked, running to the far shore of the pond where the neighborhood boy stood? Those are kittens my dad had, the boy answered in a matter of fact tone. We had to get rid of them. For Tim, who loved animals and especially kittens,

the realization of what he had witnessed hit him hard. He cried about the incident for days. So part of what we're trying to ask here is, you know, we talked about Robert Matthews a little bit earlier. We talked about Louis B, and these are guys who were pretty brutal early on. Matthews was a very draught-up society from age 11. Louis B like immediately wanted to fight and go to war and kill. Tim McVeigh is a sensitive kid who's like heartbroken when he sees someone being cruel to animals. Yeah, it's confusing. He's not the kind of guy who would have wound up joining George Lincoln Rockwell's Nazi party, which both Matthews and Beam are the kind of guys who might have been speared by that. The story of Tim McVeigh is the story of how a young mind got

enraptured with this kind of terroristic, apocalyptic ideology who wouldn't have gotten caught in the first iteration of it. This is a guy who would only have been caught by the changes made to the movement's propaganda outreach at the rest of his park, I think. That's the story we're talking about today. Tim fell in love with guns at an early age. His grandfather first took him shooting when he was seven. This probably sounds crazy to some people, particularly in Los Angeles where we read this, but I started shooting at the same age that Tim did when I was a little kid living in rural Oklahoma. Tim's grandpa Ed McVeigh was a stickler about firearm safety and considered safe gun ownership to be an integral part of American citizenship. He likes guns, but he

doesn't like killing things. He's like a target shooter and stuff. Being small and sort of weird, Tim McVeigh was a bit of a magnet for bullies. He developed a deep hatred of bullying and a reflexive rage at the sight of anything he saw as bully behavior, whether it came from an individual or an institution. Tim's parents divorced when they were young. His sisters chose to go with their mother, but Tim stayed with his father so that he would not have to be alone. Again, sensitive kid. After the Oklahoma City bombing, a number of pundits would try to tie Tim's parents divorce to his evolution as a terrorist. This would seem to be an overstatement, but he did tie his mother leaving his father to broader social trends. Later stating in an interview that,

in the past 30 years, because of the women's movement, they've taken an influence out of the household. Yeah, I mean, I can see that as being a formative spot for why you don't like women. Yeah, which maybe makes them a little bit more sympathetic to the kind of propaganda put out by these groups. And hating bullying if you start to think of the government as a bully. Yeah. When one reads about McVeigh, they get the feeling that had he been born later, he might have found a home within the alt-right. For one thing, he was obsessed with the Star Wars movies and identified heavily with Luke Skywalker. As the 80s rolled along and home computers started to become more common, McVeigh became one of the first generation of computer nerds.

He was the only internet before basically anyone else. His handle on those early message boards was The Wanderer. We can't know everywhere McVeigh went on the early internet, but it's unlikely to be pure coincidence that Timothy grew obsessed with survivalism in the Second Amendment during the years he was most involved in nascent internet culture. It's entirely possible he came across some of Louis Beam's writings during this time. We know for a fact that he fell in love with a book we've already talked about a lot in this series. You want to guess what it is? The Turner Diaries? Oh, it's Les Miserables. Oh, I love Les Miserables. Oh, it's beautiful, beautiful book. But that was a lie. He fell in love with The Turner Diaries. You were right,

Katie. Oh, thank God. Yeah. He first heard about The Turner Diaries from an ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine. He ordered the book by mail and fell madly in love with it. Now, for the rest of his life, he'd insist that the book's gun rights advocacy was what drew him to it, not its depiction of a genocidal worldwide race war. And it's kind of possible he was telling the truth. Again, like Randy Weaver, Tim McVeigh is definitely a racist, but that's not his motivation. Right, you get pieces of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really think he's probably telling the truth when he was mostly just into it because it had a lot of violent scenes, and it was about a gun control revolution. The racism he could take or leave. That's not a great sign. It's not a great sign.

He has to be a racist for this, but he wasn't racist enough that he wouldn't have joined the order. Just because of that. Exactly. He wasn't a believer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Post Estes Park, The Turner Diaries, remained one of the linchpins of white supremacist recruitment in the US. Ads for it in magazines like Soldier of Fortune often pose the question, what will you do if the government comes for your guns? None of this is to say that McVeigh wasn't racist. He grew up in a place where everyone was white. At age 19, he got a job as a guard on an armored car. He later recalled his colleagues expressing casual racism towards black residents on the east side of Buffalo, and eventually he adopted

those beliefs and their propensity for using racial slurs. Racism was a fact of Tim's life, but again, it wasn't like the main thing for him. What was his main thing were guns. During his time as a security guard, McVeigh spent most of his recreational time shooting. He eventually got in trouble with his neighbors for doing so, and this seems to have influenced his desire to join the army. He basically just wanted to play with guns. Yeah. McVeigh was an excellent recruit, and by all accounts, a very good soldier. He fell in love with most aspects of army life, although he disliked the emphasis training placed on killing. In a later interview who recalled, 20 times a day it would be, blood makes the grass grow, kill, kill, kill. You would

be screaming that until your throat was raw. If somebody put a video camera on that, they would think it was a bunch of sickos. You're right. Weird thing to say after blowing up a federal building filled with babies, Tim. Bunch of sickos. But a valid point. On base, McVeigh continued to read far-right literature, devouring conspiracy theories about the United States and the United Nations conspiring to steal the freedoms and guns of Americans. He handed out copies of the Turner Diaries to his closest comrades. He was warned several times by friends who read the book that people would think he was fucking racist if he kept messing that stuff around. Good for them. Maybe report him. Decent friends. Not great. Yeah. The Gulf War would give Tim McVeigh his

first chance to actually use guns against other human beings. And interestingly enough, he seems to have hated it. He was not on board with the war from the beginning. McVeigh felt the U.S. military should only get involved in conflicts that directly affected the lives of American citizens. He saw the U.S. intervention against Iraq as bullying. And Tim McVeigh hated bullies. When he shipped over to Iraq, McVeigh was the gunner on a Bradley fighting vehicle. During a battle in country, he killed two Iraqi soldiers with the Bradley's very large gun and watched in a horror as their bodies disappeared into a red mist. The incident scarred him. Unlike Louis Beam, McVeigh did not enjoy killing. The whole war left a bad taste in Tim's mouth. He was particularly

furious when he read about the U.S. Air Force bombing of the Al Amira bomb shelter in Baghdad, which killed 300 women and children. McVeigh returned to America, much less enchanted with military life. He focused some of that frustration on the Black soldiers he served alongside. Several of them walked around the base in Black Power shirts, which infuriated Tim. He was heard several times using the N-word and had a reputation for ordering some of his Black supportments to sweep up the motor pool. When pressed about this later, McVeigh would point out that some of his closest comrades in the military were Black. I'm going to quote again from American terrorist. While he swore he never embraced racism, McVeigh actively explored the racist point of view.

He had already begun selling copies of the Turner Diaries at gun shows, and because of the racist content of the book, McVeigh wound up on a mailing list for the Ku Klux Klan. McVeigh claimed he had virtually no idea what the KKK was all about the first time he received literature from the racist group. He was impressed by one of its pamphlets, which expressed concerns about the loss of individual rights in American society and the desire to go back to the way things were in the days of the founding fathers. McVeigh spent $20 for the trial membership to KKK headquarters in North Carolina. One of the enticements for joining was a white power t-shirt that McVeigh planned to wear around Fort Riley. Why would a non-racist want a white power t-shirt?

McVeigh maintained it was intended to protest what he saw as the growing double standard in the army. He said that he never did wear the shirt, but he made no apologies for buying it, then or now. I wanted to make a point, he said, Black guys were wearing Black power t-shirts on the base. They weren't supposed to. I wanted to see what would happen if I wore the white power t-shirt. McVeigh didn't renew his KKK membership when his first year was up. He had joined the KKK, he said, because he thought the Klan was fighting for the restoration of individual rights, especially gun rights. But the more research and reading he did, the more he realized that the Klan was almost entirely devoted to the cause of racism. Really? Really, Tim? I'm glad you did some research

on that. Yeah. Well, he decided the KKK was manipulative to young people and he didn't renew his membership. Yeah. Doesn't like bullies. Yeah, he didn't. Doesn't like bullies. Backbone. Values. Yeah, values. And you know, values are important. And I personally love the values of the products and services that support this show. That was so good. 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 not in the good and bad ass 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 heaven. 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 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. We're back. And I just admitted that I would be willing to have sex with Cory Booker. If Cory wanted. If Cory wanted. If Cory wanted. How we got to this conversation we're not going to talk about. It's very inappropriate. Does not lend anything to the episode. Shouldn't have admitted it. Not related to the products. He has good bone structure though. I think he's cute. Forget what you said anything about it guys. Yeah, Sophie does not think he's cute. I don't. Everyone has different opinions about who they find cute. Yeah, it's not him. We can all agree though. Bernie's the cutest. Bernie's cute. Talking about bone structure. That guy's got bone structure. He's really cute. He's really cute. He's cutie. He's cutie and

sweetie. Young Bernie is weird, but you know, cute. He got better looking as he got older. Young Bernie, his wife must really have been into radical politics. Anyway, boy. This is about your, this is uh. We're finishing this chapter. We should finish this chapter. Right. Um, so Tim McVeigh, like Randy Weaver, was the perfect example of the sort of man Louis Beam was hoping to reach. Not motivated enough by racism to have sought out the movement, but comfortable enough with racism and frustrated enough by mainstream American culture to be radicalized by the anti-gun control, new world order conspiracies

peddled by the propagandists of the white power movement. McVeigh opted not to re-enlist after his time of service ran out. And outside of the military, McVeigh's life was just one frustration after another. Despite his glowing service record, he had trouble finding work. Civil service jobs he applied for in the state and federal government turned him down. He convinced himself that this was because he was a young white man and thus the victim of what he termed reverse discrimination. It's probably a better way to say this, like a more alliterative way to say that. Yeah, yeah. Reverse racist, maybe. Yeah. Affirmative action became the focus of McVeigh's thwarted ambitions. He started spending more and more time around gun shows and flirted

vaguely with some militias, including the Michigan militia. He started sending his sister, Jennifer, stories he'd read about the Rockefeller family and their supposed control of most of the organs of state power. The conspiracies McVeigh embraced were not quite open neo-nazi anti-Semites, but they were kissing cousins to that kind of belief. From American terrorist, quote, the brother and sister's discussion sprawled in myriad directions from the Bible to the pyramid and its crowning all-seeing eye on the back of the dollar bill. McVeigh was reading more anti-government books and pamphlets and he shared them with his inquisitive younger sister. He wanted to expand her perspective, though some of the claims in the literature seemed bizarre and inconceivable to

Jennifer, including one writer's contention that the government was building massive crematoriums and 130 concentration camps to exterminate individuals who disagreed with federal policies. The authors of the pamphlets, anticipating skepticism, warned that Americans risk becoming victims of it can't happen here syndrome when it came to government usurping power from the people. Jennifer wasn't sold on everything she read, but just as McVeigh hoped, the literature got her thinking about the government and individual rights. She looked up to her older brother, flattered that he thought enough of her to engage her in political discourse. McVeigh believed that the federal government intended to disarm the American public gradually

and take away the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. In the summer of 1992, he pointed to events in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, as proof positive that his theory was correct. Now, one of the publications that McVeigh read during this period was called The White Patriot. It was published by the former KKK leader, the attempted invader of the island of Domenica, and the founder of Stormfront, Don Black. It featured articles with titles like Why is the clan opposed to Jews? and also hosted essays from William Pierce. As McVeigh's life prospects dimmed, he grew more obsessed with guns and gun shows, traveling around the country, selling weapons and literature and survivalist gear. The gun show circuit

introduced him to more French right-wing literature. McVeigh began to express frustration that American women were on fairly withholding sex from American men. He called them Prudish and Stingy. When the Waco siege began, McVeigh was instantly obsessed with the story. He drove to Mount Carmel and sold t-shirts outside the siege lines, communing with his fellow survivalist and militiamen as they wordly waited for the outcome. And when that outcome came, it radicalized to McVeigh as nothing else could have. He read that the government had used CS gas, which McVeigh had been exposed to during his military training. To McVeigh, this was the ultimate representation of government over each. Pure, vicious, murderous, bully behavior.

McVeigh didn't stop at being furious about the murder of dozens of innocent people. He became convinced that Waco was the prelude to a mass government crackdown on gun owners and freedom. He told one friend that he suspected the feds had purposely started fires in the compound. The government wanted it to burn because the government couldn't win. The public sentiment was changing, he said. McVeigh's rage was reciprocated by the other men he met on the gun show circuit. Men like Terry Nichols, a sovereign citizen whose beliefs were essentially descended from the Posseco-Motatus movement. McVeigh spent time living on Nichols' farm and crafting explosives, small homemade bombs, initially just for amusement. But over the months that followed Waco, McVeigh's

rage, the paranoia stoked by fears of fringe right-wing conspiracy theories and his love of the Turner Diaries metastasized into a plan. A plan to bomb the Murray building in Oklahoma City. The structure of McVeigh's attack was directly inspired by a passage from the Turner Diaries. At one point, Earl Turner's cell bombs the FBI's headquarters. Pierce goes into exhaustive detail about the device they use. A truck bomb made with 4,400 pounds of ammonium nitrate, essentially the same weapon McVeigh constructed and used to destroy the Murray building. On the day he detonated his bomb, killing 168 people, McVeigh put together a manifesto of sorts on an envelope in his car. It included many photocopied pages of the Turner Diaries. McVeigh had highlighted one passage in

particular, from a chunk of the book where Earl Turner's cell carries out a mortar attack on Washington DC. The real value of our attack today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties. More importantly though, is what we taught the politicians and bureaucrats. They learned this afternoon that not one of them is beyond our reach. They can huddle behind barbed wire and tanks in the city. They can hide behind the concrete walls of their country estates, but we can still find them and kill them. Glued up a daycare. God, man. Yeah, we really showed them. Yeah. There was probably a daycare on the Death Star too. You would think? Yes. Probably. Now I'm thinking about it. Yeah, lots of.

It was the size of a movie. It's got families. Yeah. Tim Skywalker Bay. Yeah, the special boy. Oh, special boys. A lot of kittens probably up there too. Yeah, a lot of kittens. I'm certain there were a lot of kittens up there. In Tim McVeigh, Louis Beam and his fellow fascists had found the perfect soldier and the perfect exemplar of Beam's concept of leaderless resistance. He was not a lone wolf as some foolish pretenders of journalism named him. McVeigh was radicalized by a constellation of writers and thinkers, as well as hundreds of men he spoke with at gun shows and survivalist conventions and sitting outside the siege lines at Waco. He was radicalized by William Pierce, who wrote the Turner Diaries, hoping desperately

that someone would do exactly what McVeigh did. McVeigh's attack prompted a response from federal law enforcement, but not the one you might expect. While there were some crackdowns on malicious cells and organizations, the dressed department largely reacted by taking a lighter hand with white supremacists and militias. Oh, okay. But... Yes, Cody? We'll see. We'll see if it gets a good idea. Maybe it'll work. Maybe if it stops white supremacist terrorism forever. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean to question. In 1996, the Montana Freeman wound up in a standoff with the federal government. As a group, they represented a synthesis of Christian identity and Possecomitatus beliefs that declared themselves independent of federal control and wound up in an 81-day standoff with

law enforcement. For a while, it looked like the Freeman compound might become another Waco. But the standoff ended peacefully. Video footage of the 23 adults and four children's surrendering showed no giant armored vehicles or military-looking police. The FBI's hostage rescue team wore sneakers and casual civilian clothing. McVeigh would go to his grave, convinced that the lighter hand used on the Montana Freeman was the result of his attack on Oklahoma City. And he may have been right. According to American terrorist, quote, Clinton R. Van Zandt, the former FBI agent who had tried without success to negotiate a peaceful end to the Waco standoff three years earlier, agreed with McVeigh, at least on that point. Retired from the FBI and working as a security

consultant, Van Zandt feels that the government learned a painful lesson from the Oklahoma City bombing. In Van Zandt's words, the government realized that it must become a velvet brick, not a battering ram. What an absolute classic tragedy Van Zandt had said soon after the conflagration at Waco, what a total indictment of mankind's inability to communicate and relate, even though we have different religious or personal philosophies. While Van Zandt condemned the Oklahoma City bombing, he felt that Waco had started a war, and that McVeigh's bombing had been not only an escalation, but a turning point in that war. My only disagreement with Mr. Van Zandt is the idea that the war Mr. McVeigh wound up fighting in had started with Waco. This war had

been going on much longer than that, at least as far back as the days of George Lincoln Rockwell. Timothy McVeigh may have seen himself as a patriotic American, but he fought as a soldier of the American fascist movement under generals Louis Beam and William Pierce. The failure of the federal government, and almost everyone, to see this war is one reason why things have gotten so bad in 2019. McVeigh would be joined on down through the years by dozens of other angry young men, men like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the infamous Columbine shooters. Most experts agree that Harris was the primary motivating force behind the attacks, more or less pulling Klebold along with him. This is not often reported on, but Harris was obsessed

with Adolf Hitler and Nazism. He wrote constantly about Nazi ideology, his hatred of free speech, the press, and his desire to see mentally defective people executed. Harris was also obsessed with Timothy McVeigh. Dave Cullen is a journalist who spent more than a decade studying the massacre. He found regular references to Oklahoma City and McVeigh and Harris' writings before the shooting. Cullen writes, quote, in his journal, Eric would brag about topping McVeigh. Oklahoma City was a one-note performance. McVeigh set his timer and walked away. He didn't even see his spectacle unfold. Harris admired McVeigh, but desperately wanted to beat him, carrying out a larger attack and killing more people. Do you think that will escalate things more? You think that attitude

might be accelerationism? Now, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did not succeed in their goal or in Harris' goal of topping Timothy McVeigh, but Harris may yet manage to beat McVeigh's high score. In the decades since the 1996 shooting at Columbine, it has inspired at least 74 copycat attacks, which have killed 89 people and injured 126 more. You can draw a direct line from George Lincoln Rockwell to William Pearson Louisbeam to Tim McVeigh and then to Eric Harris. By the late 1990s, it was incredibly clear that leaderless resistance as a tactic was the best weapon in the white supremacist arsenal, but it would take the mass adoption of the internet and the error of the smartphone for Louisbeam's deadliest innovation to see its full potential. And we're

going to talk about that in the next episode of this podcast. Should I throw the period yet, or should I wait until we're done with the whole thing? I don't know, I'm pretty bummed out right now. Yeah, you're right. Maybe it's time. Maybe it is time. Or maybe don't do it at all. No, I have to do it. I have to do it. Sophie, what do you think after the last episode or now? How about you throw it towards that couch and Sophie moves away? I can't read your your blinks, Sophie. I think we're waiting until the next episode. I really want to, I want to draw this shit out. Yeah, I'm going to draw this shit out. I'm going to wait. Wait for the climax. Plug your stuff. Yeah. That's right. Google our names, which are... Spell it right. It's Katie Stoll and Cody

Johnston. There we go. We have YouTube shows, some more news, podcasts, even more news, Cody. Twitter and patreon.com slash some more news and Tee Public and all that. Store all the things. Just Google, if you are interested, just like Google it. This is what, the six, six, six. If you're still listening, you're not just popping in. Yeah, that's why I'm not plugging everything at the end of these episodes. Stop asking. Yeah. You go to thewarandeveryone.com. But like now we're going to do it at the last one because it's the last one, but we've already done it every time. I'm not in the next one. All right. Podcasts. Bye. 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 US 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. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. 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 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.