Behind the Bastards - Part Two: An American Fascist Faith

Episode Date: August 14, 2019

Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston for a reading of Chapter Two 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's talkin' too much about come-a-codes? That's behind the bastards. Part two of my reading to my friends of the war on everyone. I have armed myself additionally with a fistful of a plastic silverware packet. Sophie, no! I have to throw the cans! She's trying to take my cans! I need all of these to throw.

Now Katie commented during the show break that the oranges I have are very soft and they are almost certainly bad. They're ready to burst. You could touch it lightly and it'd explode. I'm so excited to throw those at the wall. Sophie, just give me a withering look. That's her excited look. That's her excited look.

Well speaking of excitement, it's time for part two. Chapter two, because this is an audiobook, which is different from a seven-part podcast for reasons. I'm glad that I'm finally recording an audiobook, maybe this will start my audiobook career. I think so. Thank you for narrating the Katie parts that I wrote ahead of time. He thought out loud. See, good at it.

Chapter two, an American fascist faith. At 9.50 a.m. on October 27th, 2018, Robert Bowers entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He carried a Colt AR-15, three Glock handguns chambered in 357 SIG, body armor, and a substantial amount of ammunition. Bowers proceeded to open fire during a Shabbat morning service. He killed 11 of the 75 people worshiping at the synagogue that morning. In the hours and days that followed, journalists and researchers in the countering violent

extremism community began to dig into Mr. Bowers' social media presence and internet footprint. If you read or listened to any coverage about this, it probably focused on his use of the social media website GAB, which is essentially Twitter for Nazis. GAB earned a lot of attention because it's where Bowers chose to announce his attack, and his belief that a Jewish conspiracy was responsible for it. In addition to announcing the start of his attack on GAB, Robert Bowers said other things on the site.

Stranger things. In various posts, he claimed that people of Anglo-European descent were the chosen people with Jews as their ancient enemy. He warned his fellow racists of a coming false flag attack that would be, quote, one of the final desperate attempts by the Jewish international oligarchy to maintain power in the face of collapsing public trust in the media, which he believed they controlled. On the profile page for his account, Bowers included a quote, Jews are the children of Satan.

A little more than two weeks before his rampage, he reposted a link to the Wikipedia page for Christian identity. Have you ever heard of Christian identity? I'm you? Yeah. Exactly. This is what we're getting into today. So he reposted a link to the Wikipedia page for Christian identity and wrote, if the Jews

hate it, then it must be truth. Now if you haven't heard much about Christian identity, don't worry, neither had I before Bowers went on his rampage. A friend of mine, actually, a woman named Sarah, who's a CVE researcher, is the person who like first said that you should start looking into this shit. And as soon as I did, I found that it connected to basically everything that's ever happened in American fascism after World War II, and kind of before it. Now Christian identity theology is not widely known in modern America, and in fact the vast

majority of people who have been influenced by it have probably never actually heard the term. Bowers is sort of a rare figure in that he was aware of it. It's been around for so long and embedded itself so deeply in the consciousness of the far right that it's woven itself into the DNA of American fascism. Christian identity, however, did not begin in America. The origin of this philosophy traces back to Britain in 1791, when a crazy person and retired Navy man named Richard Brothers started having visions.

Rather than writing these visions off as the result of bad canned sardines or ergot poisoned bread, he decided that these visions were God telling him that he had to lead the Jews back to Palestine. Now he also decided that he was a descendant of the biblical King David for reasons which are slightly less clear. And by the time Richard Brothers was done, he'd concluded that the majority of Jewish people were actually hidden in Britain. This hidden Israel, as he called it, became one of the central tenets of British Israelism.

All of the Jews are secretly British. That's British Israelism in a nutshell. Brothers was eventually declared insane by the state, which is probably fair. He was stuck in an institution, which is probably unfair, from 1795 to 1806. But in the four years before he got locked up, he earned himself some followers. Although his flock didn't stick together until he got out of the asylum, some of his ideas persisted for years amongst the fringes of British society. In 1840, a writer named John Wilson wrote, Lectures on our Israelite origin, and began

lecturing across England and Ireland about the theory that the real Jews were basically everyone but actual Jewish people. According to the book Religion and the Right by Michael Barcun, quote, the lectures depended less on the interpretation of biblical prophecy than on Wilson's attempt to demonstrate empirically that the lost tribes had in fact migrated from the Near East to Europe. Like many writers after him, one of his favorite techniques was to look for words in different languages that sounded the same, assuming, usually erroneously, that if the words sounds were similar, then the languages and their speakers had to be connected.

When similar sounds often crop up in otherwise unrelated languages, they allowed Wilson to claim and to believe that he had proved that, quote, many of our most common English words and names of familiar objects are almost pure Hebrew. Yeah, it's one of those things, when you read early arguments as to why the Bible shouldn't be printed, like back when they wouldn't give out copies of the Bible to people, like only the priest would have a copy of the Bible, the internet makes me have a little bit more respect for those arguments. I was like, oh yeah, maybe just letting everyone read everything is a bad idea.

Maybe human beings naturally look for patterns, and not all those patterns actually exist or are irrelevant. I took a sip of tea and started laughing though, I'm dying. Sophie, can I have one of my Canada dries? I promise I won't throw it. I love professionalism. That's the best thing about podcasts, is the professionalism. And this one specifically is the most professional.

This one specifically is the most professional. And as a mark of my professionalism, I'm going to throw this sack of clementines. Clementines, what? Everywhere. Ads. We're back. Oh gosh. We're back.

There's oranges all over the floor. Cody, are any of them oozing? No, that's very good. That's a shame. That's unfortunate. I'm going to dump on them. One's under the couch. Well, let's not remove them in the hopes that they get forgotten and begin to rot, and

Dan will find them. That's the dream. And it's a dream that could be a reality. Just leave it for a month, and then you come back, and there'll be a bunch of flying at like what happened at our office last night. I don't know if y'all remember, but months ago when we did the Rockwell episodes, I tossed the coffee mate up on the ceiling of the poison room. Of course I remember.

It's still there. Where is it? I'm looking forward to making some coffee with that next year. So yeah, it's going to be a laxative. One pump, one cottage cheese. Gross. All right. We're talking about British Israelism.

The normal, sane concept of British Israelism. Yes, the idea that the British people are the Jews, and the Jews are not the Jews. Yes, I follow. Yes, this all makes sense. Well, at this point, the Jews are still the Jews, but also British people are secret Jews. That's British Israelism in a nutshell. So British Israelism continued to evolve over the course of the 1800s. Fellow named Hein added the assertion that Germans were really Assyrians, because apparently

those people had gotten lost too and wound up in Germany somehow. Hein claimed that the United States was also full of Israelites. Now at this point, actual Jewish people, like real Jewish folks, were not seen as bad guys. They were considered part of a greater community called All Israel, which was made up of the House of Israel, which was Europe, and the House of Judah, which is actual Jewish people. Now there was no evidence for any of this at any point in time. This was all just the result of a guy's mental illness. That's what was going on here.

This was a sick man who had a dream about leading the Jews back to Palestine and read too much into that. So that's where this starts. Now a fellow named Joseph Wilde was the very first American British Israelite. Or if he wasn't the first, he's the first guy who tried to popularize it here in the first one we have any records of. Wilde was a pastor at the Union Congregational Church in Brooklyn. At this point, the theory, or whatever you would call it, was fundamentally pretty harmless.

But as it drifted through the United States, from the frigid east to the also frigid northwest, something funny happened. British-Israelism turned racist as fuck. That's crazy. That's weird. How weird? Weird. Weird.

Weird that would happen. Surprising. Yes. Surprising indeed. Now the man most responsible for this turn was an Oregonian named Reuben H. Sawyer. In the late 1910s, he started writing for a monthly magazine called The Watchman of Israel, which was dedicated to the idea that, quote, the English-speaking peoples of today are the lineal descendants of the lost ten tribes of Israel and must fulfill in these latter

days the responsibilities decreed for them through the patriarchs and the prophets. So Reuben was the pastor of the East Side Christian Church in Portland, Oregon. And over the years, he built up a sizable British-Israel group in the city of Roses. In fact, he was so successful at this that he left his job as a pastor in 1921 to lecture and write about British-Israelism full time. Well, not quite full time. He did have one other side gig as a member of the Oregon Ku Klux Klan. There it is.

There we go. You see that smile coming across Robert's face, and you know where it's going. You know I love talking about the 1920s Klan, though that one beautiful wacky Klan before it got back to being terrorists. Back when they were still hanging out at the cool coast camp. The hilarious losers, not the really dangerous losers. Not the mass murderers, although they still killed a lot of people, and we probably shouldn't laugh at them as often as we do, but I mean the cool coast camp adds to it.

The cool coast camp? Right there. Fucking Christ. Can you imagine the pitch meeting for the cool coast camp? I can. Well now that you mentioned it, I am, yeah. I think someone mentioned, someone suggested it and everyone else was like, that's a great idea.

That's a great idea. We should do that. So Rubin was big into the Klan for several years, and in fact he helped sell his fellow Portlanders on it, addressing 6,000 of them on December 22nd, 1921 at the municipal auditorium. He told them the KKK sought, quote, a cleansed and purified Americanism where law-abiding citizens will be respected and their rights defended irrespective of race, religion or color so long as they make an honest effort to be Americans, and Americans only. So that's nice.

Mm-hmm. Regardless of race or color. Oh. Yeah. And at this point, this wasn't totally bullshit. The 20s Klan was more of a pyramid scheme than a terrorist organization. It was racist, but not more racist than mainstream American society when it came to skin color. They were, however, more racist than mainstream Americans about certain things.

They hated the Catholic, the foreign born, Asians, and of course, Jews. That's pretty racist. This presented an issue. It's pretty racist. Yeah, this is the 20s. Like, so we grade on a curve in the 20s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So are you suggesting that when you create a big in-crup, inevitably you'll have a bunch

of out-crups? Yes. Mm-hmm. An increasing number of out-crups. Interesting. Now, the fact that KKK hated the Jews presented an issue for Reuben Sawyer because British Israelism loved the Jews, or at least it traditionally did, right? That was part of the whole idea was this kind of veneration of Judaism that all these British

people wanted to be Jews as well. Yeah. So, Reuben started out as like kind of being, you know, on the side of Jewish people, like liking them. But over time, in exposure to other anti-Semites in the KKK, Reuben radicalized. In his first speech about the Klan, he'd brought up the Jewish question, but made a point of noting that some Jews were of ancient and honorable faith, while only a few were objectionable.

According to the book Religion and the Right, quote, by 1922, however, this innu window had been replaced by full-blown anti-Semitism that was as crude as it was open. Quote, Jews are either Bolshevists undermining our government, or are Shylocks in finance or commerce who gain command and control of Christians as borrowers or employees. It is repugnant to a true American to be bossed by a sheenie. And in some parts of America, the kikes are so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk on the sidewalk. And where they are so thick, it is Bolshevism they are talking, Bolshevism and revolution.

The transformation is so startling that one wonders at first if it is the same person speaking. This is back to a quote from the book. Yeah. My eyes popped out of my head listening to that. Yeah, that is a lot of racial slurs for Jewish people in like a paragraph. That's like all of them. Yeah.

I've run out of yikes. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, he started out making a distinction between like good Jews and bad Jews. Interesting. And then eventually just decided that all Jews were terrible. Like religious Jews and ethnic Jews? Yeah.

Yeah. So, Ruben became a major force for pushing his fellow American-British Israelites towards anti-Semitism. In the early and mid-1920s, the Dearborn Independent, the newspaper funded by Henry Ford, began pushing even more extreme anti-Semitic ideas on the wider American public. Its editor, William Cameron, was a British-Israelite. Thanks to people like Ruben and Cameron, the category of good Jews shrank every year and the dangers of the bad ones expanded to something resembling the all-encompassing anti-Semitic

conspiracy theory that set Robert Bowers off on his rampage. From the late 1920s to the 1930s, Howard Rand, a British-Israelite from New England, became a thought leader in the movement. His goal was to build it into a political organization. In 1933, he formed the Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, which claimed that actual Jewish people were not, in fact, descended from Judah. By the late 1930s, Rand's ideas had evolved to the point where he began to claim that Jewish people were literally the children of the devil.

If you're curious about how this went down, here's an explanation from the website of a modern Christian identity group. Quote, Most that call themselves Jews today are in fact the race of Lucifer through his son Cain. Cain was inherently evil from the beginning because he was of Lucifer's seed. Eve was beguiled by Lucifer and did, in the carnal sense, lay with him and begot Cain. It was a pair on the ground, not an apple on the tree.

Eve was deceived by Lucifer and was led to believe that she was laying down with Yahweh God. So that's the conspiracy theory that the devil tricked Eve into fucking him and thinking that he was God, but it was really the devil and that's where Cain comes from and Cain is the father of the Jews. Well that all makes sense. I love history. You can't not put quotation marks around it in that context.

So Howard Rand was the very first person to use the term Christian identity and his thinking had a big impact on a fella named William Dudley Pelley, who was of course the founder of the American Fascist Silver Shirts movement, who we also talked about on an episode of Behind the Bastards. Really bringing all the hits in this one. Yeah, this is like a grand tour, I mean it's all culmination. It's all culmination. Intersectional fascism.

Intersectional fascism. We're coining it here. For the 1940s, the core of the Christian identity belief system was more or less formed. It includes three specific ideas. Number one, Aryans are descendants of the biblical tribes of Israel. Number two, actual Jews are the result of the devil having sex with Eve in the Garden of Eden. And number three, the apocalypse is nigh and when it comes, Aryans will have to go toe

to toe with the worldwide Jewish conspiracy in order to save the planet. When he walked into the Tree of Life synagogue that cold October morning, Robert Bauer saw himself as a soldier taking place in this great apocalyptic battle against the Jews. Now, Hart and his fellow Christian identity believers had to be careful during World War II, since their belief system was essentially just Nazism without the swastika. But that didn't stop him from railing against FDR's appointment of the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter. It also didn't stop him from opposing the admission of Jewish refugees into the United

States after 1938. Hart's specific beliefs were always fringe, but they bled over into the mainstream American right wing due to the right's obsessive fear of socialism. I'd like to quote next from a great Tablet magazine article, The Bloody History of America's Christian Identity Movement. Quote, The broader concern of Hart and his allies in the respectable wing of anti-Semitism, liberal journalist Casey McWilliams called them the armchair anti-Semites of the right,

was that liberal and socialist Jews were ultimately behind the hated New Deal and the corresponding transformations of an American society. These armchair anti-Semites believed that admitting Holocaust survivors into the United States after World War II would be the first step in dismantling the Immigration Act of 1924 to preserve the racial character of America. American Jews, many of whom supported easing immigration restrictions broadly, were the boogeymen of the nativist right, and since right wing nativists also often subscribed to Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theories, opposing immigration was a way to strike a blow against

communism as well as Judaism and preserve the white Christian character of the United States. I just hate this song. You hate this song? I hate the song. I hate that we have to play it. Yeah. All the time.

It's the same song. Well, it's not even catchy. It doesn't have a good hook. It's not. It's a bad song. And we just play it all the time. A big mushpot. Everyone's like, what even are you trying to say?

Everyone's just like, yeah, play encore. Play it again. No. Let's keep complaining about how immigration is going to destroy the country like we have for 200 straight years. Conflation of all this anti-Semitism and then the communism and the socialism and the immigration, all these topics. Pick a lane.

It's all the same. Or actually, don't pick any of those lanes. Don't pick any of those lanes. Just get off the highway. Pull over, go to a rest stop. You need to sleep. Burn your car. Burn your fucking car.

Burn your car. Take a nap in the bathroom. So from the beginning, Christian Identity connected more with the dark and violent chunks of the far right than mainstream conservatism. This started with the silver shirts in the KKK and continued into 1964 when this peculiarly American fascist cult met a little guy named George Lincoln Rockwell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what we're going to talk about after this ad pivot.

Oh. Pivot. Should I throw something? No. Not yet. Oh, no, no, no. Of course not. Not yet.

We're back. I rejected the urge to throw another thing, but I'm looking at it. I think I'm going to throw this big fistful of silverware packets. You showed your strength in that moment. Thank you. Thank you. Character counts. Be best.

Be best. Yeah, these seem safe. They're projectiles, but they're covered in plastic, so they're not going to hurt anybody. They're going to get it at the amount of mess they're going to make, because that's really going to be a lot for Dan'll to deal with. Sophie says they have a cleaning staff now. I don't want a cleaning staff to have to deal with it. Well, Sophie and Dan'll have to do it.

No, just Dan'll. All right. All right. Well, the plastic, the plastic forks and knives will be all right. That's not like a mess. I wouldn't describe that as a mess. Can I put a dope clean sign on the door? I'm going to do that.

There's just a little agent of chaos over here, aren't you? Yeah. Yeah, he did the most adorable little shrug. Yeah, a little bit. Oh, heck. Oh, shucks. I want to hear some more about some fucking... About some fucking George Lincoln Rockwell and the Christian Identity Movement.

I don't, but I will. So in case some of the people listening haven't listened to the three-parter on George Lincoln Rockwell's life and impact that we talked about earlier, I'm going to summarize his life here. Rockwell was the founder of the American Nazi party, not much more than a decade after World War II ended. He was the first post-war Holocaust denier. He was the first fascist to make money by lecturing at American colleges and provoking

fights with anti-fascists. He invented the term white power and was, in general, basically the Johnny Apple seed of Nazism in America. Now Rockwell was an original thinker, a pioneer of the tactics that fascy folks still used today to get media coverage and play the victim, but he came into the game early enough that he never quite figured out how to hide his power level, which is a term modern fascists use for hiding their beliefs as garden variety conservatism. Rockwell was initially somewhat anti-Christian because, you know, Jesus was Jewish, which

is something that didn't exactly play well with 1960s American conservatives. But in 1964 Rockwell met with Wesley Swift, leader of the Christian Identity Church. Rockwell instantly recognized what an opportunity Christian identity represented for Nazis in America. As it stood at that point in the party's history, American Nazism was basically just a cheap rip off of German fascism. It was good for triggering Jewish war veterans and civil rights activists, but it didn't click with regular Americans in a way that would allow it to spread.

American fascism, Rockwell thought, needed a spiritual core, something esoteric, a little occult, and thoroughly American. Wherever it arises in the world, fascism takes pieces of different spiritual traditions and hammers them together around its central authoritarian framework. This is part of what allows it to spread in different cultures. From Berto Echo identified this trait as syncretism, quote, the Nazi Gnosis was nourished by traditionalist syncretistic occult elements, the most influential theoretical source of the theories of the New Italian right, Julius Avola, merged the Holy Grail with the protocols of the Elders of

Zion alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. If you browse in the shelves that in American bookstores are labeled as New Age, you can find there even St. Augustine, who as far as I know was not a fascist, but combining St. Augustine and Stonehenge, that is a symptom of Urr fascism. So obviously Echo didn't write his essay until decades after Rockwell's death, but GLR was such a natural fascist and such an instinctive furor type that he instantly seemed to know that grafting Christian identity onto American Nazism was going to be critical if it was going to spread.

So he appointed Ralph Forbes, head of the California branch of his Nazi party, to be the party Christian identity minister. For Race and Nation, my favorite Rockwell biography says this about Forbes. His strident racial views is flair for the dramatic, and his loyalty to Rockwell made Forbes the perfect man for the job. California was an ideal location. There were numerous identity ministries successfully operating there. Forbes would be the first Nazi officer to preside over a flock.

By fusing Christian identity and national socialism, Rockwell hoped to maximize the synergies of the groups and broaden the potential membership for each group. Nazis could find religious justification and legitimization in the church. Identity members could find political expression for their a theology in the ANP. A riot could now be expressed as religion under the guise of the identity church. The push was on within the party to legitimize the cause, to de-emphasize Nazism and push racial issues to the forefront. Racial issues could be easily exploited because they preyed upon nativist fears of the white

population. Cool. Yeah, good idea. It's all adds up. So this is just more palatable. Yeah. Yeah, it makes it more palatable, more American, and kind of expands the breadth that it can reach because now there's a theology behind it.

Especially after all that messiness in Germany. Yeah. Thankfully for all of us, Rockwell was assassinated by one of his own men on August 25, 1967. We'll talk about what happened to the American Nazi party after his death in more detail in the next chapter. Right now, what's important is that Rockwell's marriage of American Nazism with Christian identity took. It spread throughout the fascist right.

Richard Butler, the reverend who founded the Aryan Nations Compound in Idaho, was a Christian identity preacher. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Aryan Nations acted as one of the linchpins of American fascism, a place where every kind of violent right-wing extremist would gather and meet and make connections with each other. From the Aryan Nations, Christian identity beliefs were able to make inroads not just among Klansmen and neo-Nazis, but into the American militia movement. Tanya Telfer Sharp, a researcher with the Journal of Black Studies, was one of the first

academics to document the spread of Christian identity outside of explicit fascists and into the murkier world of American, quote, patriots. She documented evidence of Christian identity pamphlets and underground literature spreading in small local gun and knife shows throughout the country from 1995 to 1999. It had, of course, been prominent in that world before 1995. Christian identities focused on the inevitable apocalyptic battle between Aryans and satanic Jews, meshed well with the apocalyptic fetishism of the survivalist and militia communities. That's part of why it's so naturally American, whole, yeah.

It gives them a reason. Quote, logic for their feelings or desires. Especially once the Cold War's over and you don't have that secular reason to expect the apocalypse, like now there's... As Tanya Sharp wrote, both groups were tied together by their belief that, quote, re-establishment of white sovereignty depends on the use of organized aggression against the enemies of true Christians, all non-whites and all non-protestants. The first two letters of racial holy war make up the battle cry, rahoa, often used in identity

speeches and publications. Christian identity literature regularly focused on preparing for this apocalyptic battle, which allowed them to suddenly recruit preppers by focusing on not explicitly ideological tasks, like acquiring dried food and weaponry or building anti-personnel traps in order to protect woodland compounds. Y2K was the goldmine for Christian identity. Fear of the year 2000 brought thousands of new Americans into the world of survivalist magazines, conventions, and online message boards.

The worlds of the militia movement in the survivalist communities are, of course, closely tied into the world of conspiracy theorists. In the late 1990s, guys like Alex Jones weren't preaching overt anti-semitic conspiracy theories. You'd never catch him claiming Jews were the spawn of Satan, for example. But Joan and his ilk were major proponents of the New World Order, the king of conspiracy theories throughout the 90s and early 2000s. The NWO took different forms in the mouths of different conspiracy theorists. The most mainstream and least racist version of the theory was that a secret world government

of shadowy globalists was slowly taking over the federal government, and the governments of the world, with the aim of enforcing total Orwellian control over the populace and killing the majority of the world's population, particularly the Christians. The New World Order conspiracy was, again, not inherently anti-semitic or racist, but in practice, most expressions of the theory wound up focusing on beliefs that a Jewish-led cabal of blacks, homosexuals, Hispanic immigrants, and liberals was trying to wipe out all straight white Christian Americans. Christian identity believers introduced the term Zionist-occupied government, or Zog,

into the lexicon of American fringe politics. It took off like wildfire, leading countless Americans on the far right, or entering the vocabularies of countless Americans on the far right, who would never have considered calling themselves a Nazi. Yeah, they would never. They never do it first. Taylor's all this time, guys. Same thing.

Over and over again. They never make that connection quite that that's where it's heading towards. That is where it all heads towards. That's where Alex Jones all heads towards, and he has had so many Christian identity preachers on his show. They never talk about Christian identity, but you look into a ton of these guys, and it's like, oh, he's a pastor of a Christian identity church. It's the underlying current.

Right, you present them on the platform, and then people are watching, and eventually get into them, and then they don't realize what they actually preach, and then they absorb what they preach, and then they're there. Yeah, it's brilliant. Christian identity beliefs happen to mesh perfectly with every other extremist belief in the United States. In the late 1980s and early 90s, tax protesting became more common. Christian identity fit in with that, too, arguing that paying taxes was really just paying for

the demonic Jews to carry out their white genocide aims even faster. In 1997, William Luther Pierce, a former devotee of Rockwell and head of a Nazi group called the National Alliance, wrote this in a newsletter. The truth of the matter is that the New World Order people ultimately aim to create a New World population of serfs for their global plantation, a homogenous population of coffee colored serfs, a population of docile, predictable, and interchangeable serfs, and they definitely don't want any large reservoir of white people anywhere who might rebel. 1997.

God. Now, if you take the word white out of that sentiment, it almost word for word matches with any one of a thousand rants Alex Jones has gone on throughout the years. Under Rockwell, the American Nazi Party never numbered more than a few dozen real committed members, and its ideas never gained any kind of mainstream penetration. By the late 1990s, American fascists were no less hateful or violent than they'd ever been, but their rhetoric had evolved to fit with the deep conspiratorial undercurrents sweeping through American society.

People had shotgunned out hardcore racism, and as a result, he'd only been able to recruit a small number of the craziest people in America. Or I shouldn't say craziest, of the worst people in America. New American fascism blended with Christian identity was capable of hiding out in more moderate spaces and luring in new believers without waving a swastika in their faces. Perhaps the most potent weapon Christian identity added to the arsenal of American fascism was the idea of white genocide. If you spent much time studying neo-nazis, you're aware of the significance of the number

14, that stands for the 14 words, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. This is the invention of David Lane, a neo-nazis bank robber, and for decades, a Christian identity believer. While Lane has moved on from Christian identity to a weird sort of bastardized Norse mythology ripoff, he and other Christian identity believers in the 80s and 90s were largely responsible for seeding the fear of white genocide into American fascism. From Tanya Sharpe's article, quote, the identity literature is filled with negative images

of white women caring for mixed race babies. Race mixing in and of itself is a cause for an organized and radical plan to separate the races. The National Vanguard magazine, a leading neo-nazi publication, suggests that the cult of miscegenation, which according to them has proliferated over the past 30 years, has placed the white race on the precipice of biological extinction. Furthermore, they argued that only radical action will end the morality of death. Now, the urge to protect white babies and ensure the future of the white race inspired

a little guy named Eric Rudolph to bomb an Alabama abortion clinic in 1996. Rudolph was a Christian identity believer, and his beliefs led him to bomb Atlanta's Olympic Park the same year, along with a gay nightclub. Rudolph spent more than a year hiding in the woods, alluding federal agents. He killed two and injured more than 120 people over his almost two-year-long bombing spree. And as we talked about in the introduction to this, he also inspired that British bomber, who's built a series of nail bombs that killed three people and injured dozens more, which also inspired the guy who killed Joe Cox.

It's almost like it's a chain reaction. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now Eric Rudolph, as I just stated, was not the last person moved to violence by this picture of declining white race. Everyone listening to this will remember, of course, the 2019 Christchurch massacre, which a fascist extremist murdered 51 Muslim worshipers at a New Zealand mosque. That shooter did not identify as a Nazi, and his manifesto lacked the expected anti-Semitic rambling.

But he ranted at length about the threat of white genocide and what he called the Great Replacement. In between those two terrorists are dozens and dozens of other attacks, with bits of Christian identity DNA coated into them. John Ernest, the Pauway synagogue shooter, did not identify himself as a follower of Christian identity theology. But, according to Tablet Magazine, quote, the manifesto left behind by the Pauway shooter reads like a hybrid of classical Christian anti-Semitism and contemporary white nationalism.

He alternated within paragraph, sometimes within sentences, from charging the Jews with responsibility for the death of Jesus and the early Christian saints to declaring that Jews fund politicians and organizations who use mass immigration to displace the European race. The document is riddled with contradictions and is inarticulate even by white nationalist manifesto standards, as it moves between citing the Gospels and the killer's love of Friedrich Schopen with explosive hatred toward Jews, but what it does events clearly is a grounding in a form of anti-Semitism that's equally in debt to older Christian

traditions and more modern secular variants centered on race and soil. Christian identity's influence in the fascist right is so deep and so well-woven that attacks are now carried out by terrorists who have been inspired by its tenets without ever learning the words Christian identity. You'll be hearing about it regularly throughout the rest of this audiobook, and I'll be sure to point out wherever groups or individuals we discuss are Christian identity believers, but it almost isn't necessary. Christian identity is now just part of the furniture of American fascism.

No matter whether or not it's referenced directly, it shows up everywhere. It's there. Yeah. Yeah. So it's the same kind of shade, it's the same. I mean, this is fascinating and horrifying, of course. Yeah, this was just like the groundwork we needed to lay to really get into the story. Well, because it's all this stuff that's there that, like you said, even they don't necessarily

know where it came from or... Robert Bowers is kind of rare in that he actually did read into Christian identity philosophy. I don't think Ernest ever did. But it's there. But it's how so insidious people believe it. Like you said, they start listening to this person talk and they don't on the surface understand that it has all of these different layers to it, but then as you get drawn in, then you're starting on subconsciously at least.

It's like you don't notice that Trump's references to Soros funding the American Caregamer and stuff, how that ties into Christian identity and this idea that goes back to the fucking 30s that the Jews are trying to replace what they want. Yeah, fund multiculturalism in order to replace all the nonsense. And if you don't need to have read all of this to know that or believe in it, you're just like a piece in the long thread that they got there. My metaphor fell apart. I'm sorry.

You just lost confidence. Yeah, you should have. I saw it. I just figured it out. Well, it's because we all turned and looked at you. And then... Yeah, the pressure from being looked at by my familiars. Quick, throw some mayonnaise.

I think I'm going to throw this packet of silverware. Sophie, where do you think I should throw it? Away from my dog. The ceiling, huh? Yeah. It's raining. Silverware. No, actually, it just went straight forward.

I was hoping it would all... It's among the oranges now. It's among the oranges now. Well, we can use those to eat the oranges. Quite a mess. Quite a mess for Danil. There's some tongs in there? Yeah, there's some tongs in there.

Oh, yeah. I think I threw a tong. Oh, yeah. We can use those to pick up the oranges. Mm-hmm. No, the oranges stay. Oh, yeah. Danil can use those.

Oranges stay, tongs stay. Mm-hmm. The dog stays. You guys want to plug some stuff? More than anything in the world. I love plugging. Check out our podcast called Even More News. That's right.

Check out our Patreon.com, slash Some More News. Damn straight. We are also... We have shirts and merch on Tee Public, I believe, probably.com, slash users, slash Some More News, sounds right. I don't know. Look it up. I'm on Twitter, Dr. Mr. Cody, we're also on Twitter, Some More News.

Are you going to say my Twitter handle, too? And our YouTube shows called Some More News. And Katie Stoll is the Twitter name for Katie Stoll. I love how you just spoke for me. All of it. I got all of it out there. Last time you were like, I don't want to do this, so here we are. I have nothing to plug. The episode's over. Soap is very proud of me.

She's clapping. You can't hear it, but she's clapping for you. On the inside. Oh, no, wait. She's not clapping. She's slapping her head. Oh, I mistake those two regularly. You can buy t-shirts. Yeah. That's it. In general, just like go to a store and buy some t-shirts.

Buy some t-shirts. Yeah. I'm a fan of the concept. Sophie, what do you want? She wants you to plug your T-public store for Behind the Bastards. There's a T-public store for Behind the Bastards? There is. That's one of my favorite podcasts.

So you guys should check that out. Robert, you should get pickups and merch. This audiobook that he's releasing is something to plug. You're listening to it now. You're listening to it now and you can go to thewarandeveryone.com and you can read, or you can't read it, but you can listen to it without the jokes and digressions. If that's what you want.

If that's what you want. Katie, I can't believe you gave me Guff for plugging your stuff, but then you plugged his stuff. Guff for plugging your stuff. This is real stuff, Guffer. Is this over yet? I don't know. Episode.