It Could Happen Here - Nut Country Revisited feat. Steven Monacelli & Dr. Michael Phillips

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Since before the fall of the Alamo, Texas has served as an incubator for unhinged conspiracy theories about the motives behind the Texas Revolution, feared rebellions by the enslaved, Mexican plans to retake Texas, the supposed plot by Franklin Roosevelt to impose communism in the United States, why water is being fluoridated, who killed Kennedy, and the various fever dreams of the QAnon movement. In this episode, we explore what makes Texans, and Americans in general, particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories and what emotional comfort these ideas give believers. Sources: Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America https://www.ucpress.edu/books/a-culture-of-conspiracy/paper  Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture   https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816654949/conspiracy-theories/  Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo19197692.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lately on the NPR Politics Podcast, we're talking about a big question. How much can one guy change? They want change. What will change look like for energy? Drill, baby drill. Schools? Take the department of education, close it. Health care?

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Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandi B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right.

Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests

to relatable stories that'll resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We want to speak out and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful.

I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a Playboy model. He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star. To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in. It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated. We're an army in comparison to him. From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeart Radio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Call zone media. I'm Michael Phillips, an historian, the author of a book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co-author of an upcoming book about the eugenics movement in Texas called The Purifying Knife. And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in Texas who covers political extremism and beyond. Since the late 1990s, Alex Jones built an extensive media empire, spreading out landish conspiracy theories from his home base in Austin, Texas.

A native of the Dallas suburb of Rockwall, over the years Jones has claimed that the Apollo 11 moon landing was fake. So too, he said, was the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting he claimed was staged to justify new gun control laws. According to Jones, the U.S. government can control the weather and has intentionally caused floods and other weather disasters to punish Texas and other conservative states. He has insisted that chemicals intentionally placed in American drinking water are turning frogs gay, part of an experiment by the American government seeking a way to undermine the

nuclear family, while peddling dubious supplements with unproven health benefits. Jones began his broadcasting career with a call-in public access cable TV show before moving onto radio and then online. In spite of his outlandish claims, in 2015 Jones was able to set off a panic in Texas that inspired action from Governor Greg Abbott. Now to a Texas-sized conspiracy theory sparking headlines across the country, including this week in the New York Times. The theory that an upcoming Pentagon training exercise is actually part of a plan The conspiracy theory John described on his Infowars show spun in even wilder directions.

The Army troops participating in the Jade Helm military exercise, panicked right-wingers said, would turn on the local population. Guns would be seized from private citizens and local Walmarts would be converted into vast holding cells where those opposing Obama's plan to seize dictatorial power would be imprisoned, according to these sorts of theories. These accusations went viral and a military spokesman got waylaid by angry questions at a Bastrop County Commissioner's Court meeting held near the central Texas staging area for Jade Helm.

Armed men in trucks patrolled in Bastrop County and surrounding communities and a private group called Counter Jade Helm spied on the movement of troops and military vehicles while they quizzed residents for any intelligence they may have gathered on the impending alleged coup d'etat. The crazier the conspiracy theory got, the more Texas's far-right political leaders were willing to pander to Jones and his ilk. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to monitor U.S. Army troops near Austin. We're playing a pivotal role of government, and that is to provide information to people

who have questions. Texas Senator Ted Cruz pledged that he would demand answers from the Pentagon about the military's intentions and said he completely understood the widespread paranoia. You know, I understand the concern that's been raised by a lot of citizens about Jade Hill. We have seen for six years a federal government disrespecting the liberty of the citizens, and that produces fear. Suffice it to say, the Obama administration did not overthrow the state government.

The intense outrage and fear generated over army combat preparations might have seen perplexing to those outside of Texas, a state that prides itself on being patriotic and pro-military. However, seething distrust of liberal elites is a lucrative business in Texas. Alex Jones built a fortune of $270 million with his internet show and sales of dubious health and survivalist products advertised on those broadcasts. This is nothing new south of the Red River. From the beginning of its history, the state has been an incubator for outlandish and occasionally not completely unreasonable conspiracy theories.

After Texas violently separated from Mexico in 1836, white Texans spent the next decade fearing their southern neighbor, a nation that saw the Texas Revolution as illegitimate and wanted to regain control of the breakaway province. Meanwhile, those same white Texans viewed the African Americans they enslaved with suspicion bordering on dread, knowing that their black captives desperately wanted freedom and might use violence to liberate themselves. This created an atmosphere of uncertainty and distrust that fed conspiracy theories of all sorts. After their rebellion against Mexico, Texans wanted to become part of the United States, but they were forced to spend almost a full decade as an independent republic because of well-founded suspicions held by American abolitionists that the Texas Revolution was a part of a plot to add a slave state to the

Union. A decade later, the tide shifted, and Texas was hurriedly annexed in 1845 after widespread rumors gripped Washington, D.C., of a British plot to annex Texas and convert it to a haven for African Americans escaping slavery. In the 1850s, even prominent Texans like Sam Houston flocked to the American Party, also known as the Know-Nothings, that claimed the pope had ordered Catholics from Ireland, Germany to immigrate to the United States in order to take the country over and hand power over to the Vatican. Panics over suspected rebellions by the enslaved gripped Anglo-Texans in 1835, 1838, 1841,

and in 1856, when perhaps as many as 400 African Americans held in bondage in Colorado County and South Central Texas apparently plotted to rise up against their white oppressors and battle their way to freedom in Mexico, where slavery had been abolished. South Central Texas apparently plotted to rise up against their white oppressors and battle their way to freedom in Mexico where slavery had been abolished. In 1860, construction workers carelessly tossed matches into a pile of wood in Dallas during a hot drought-ridden summer. The blaze that resulted destroyed much of what was then only a village. Immediately suspecting that enslaved arsonists had set the

fire as part of a planned revolution, whites in Dallas tortured and whipped almost every enslaved person in the county in search of scapegoats. Eventually, they hanged three African Americans and set off what would become known as the Texas Troubles. Fires broke out across the state, and each got blamed on black suspects and their supposed white abolitionist instigators, the state and each got blamed on black suspects and their supposed white abolitionist instigators, often men from northern states. As one historian put it, white Texan enslavers decided it was better to, quote, hang 99 innocent men than to let one guilty pass. Acting on little evidence, mobs lynched as many as 80 enslaved African American men and

37 accused white abolitionists by the time the panic burned out in September. A wave of labor unrest, including the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 and the rise of the populist movement, which called for the government seizure of railroads and telegraph lines, in addition to a global panic amongst the well-to-do

about anarchism after a series of bombings in Europe and even the United States from the 1880s to just after World War I, convinced economic elites in Texas that revolution was in the air. The Ku Klux Klan, which in its original incarnation during Reconstruction served as a goon squad to keep newly freed African American labor under tight control, came to dominate cities like Dallas in the 1920s, where one in every three eligible men were members of the KKK at its peak. The KKK charged that both Jews and Catholics were conspiring to control the world.

Texas politicians like Representative John Box of Texas, in a column in Henry Ford's anti-Semitic newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, charged that Jews had manipulated the Congress to add loopholes to American immigration laws passed in 1921 and 1924 in order to let Jewish people escaping the Russian Empire into the United States as part of a scheme to undermine American society. As oil millionaires and billionaires built their wealth over the 20th century, they became a force in conspiratorial far-right politics in Texas.

Starting in the 1930s, they mobilized against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which they insisted was a part of an international communist plan to overthrow capitalism around the planet. Anti-communism, anti-Semitism, and hostility to the post-World War II African-American civil rights movement blended seamlessly in the conspiratorial imaginations of the far-right in the Lone Star State. Ideas that reached a national audience in large part because of oil money. John Owen Beatty, the longtime chairman of the English Department Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1951, authored one of the English department of Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1951, authored one of the first, and perhaps the best-selling of all time, book promoting Holocaust denial,

Iron Curtain Over America. Beatty claimed that the Jews of today were not the Hebrew heroes of what Christians call the Old Testament. Instead, they were descended from a sinister Asian trot called the Khazars that converted to Judaism around the year 800. Too arrogant to assimilate with Christian Europe, Beatty wrote, Khazars undermined society under their stolen identities and caused the Communist revolution in Russia in 1918. After immigrating to the United States in large numbers, they took over the Democratic

Party, Beatty said, and moved it to the United States in large numbers, they took over the Democratic Party, Beatty said, and moved it to the radical left. Beatty also claimed that Jews controlled Franklin Roosevelt's administration and pushed it into war against Hitler's Germany, which Beatty described in his book as, quote, the historic bulwark of Christian Europe. A mere six years after Soviet and American troops had liberated Nazi concentration camps, Beatty claimed that most of the victims there died from disease and the Holocaust was a fraud used after 1948 to blackmail the West into political and financial support of Israel. The SMU professor urged the United States to expel Jews from the United States.

Rather than earning him scorn, Beatty's virulently hateful anti-Jewish rants won him a large following. His book, Iron Curtain Over America, went through nine printings by 1953. The Public Affairs Luncheon Club, a women's organization, adopted a unanimous resolution backing Beatty in requesting that SMU investigate alleged communist influence on the university's faculty, politics, and values. Beattie taught at SMU until his retirement in 1957, two years after a panic over allegedly red art, during which the conservative Dallas Patriotic Council accused the Dallas Museum of Art of

intentionally promoting, quote, subversive artists who were ostensibly part of communist front groups connected to the Soviet Union. After World War II and the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in China, the uber-wealthy giants of the Texas oil industry, to a large degree, funded what came to be known as McCarthyism. Clinton Murchison, whose son in 1960 became owner of the Dallas Cowboys National Football League team, became one of the largest financial contributors to red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy

of Wisconsin. In Houston, hard-right organizations like the Minut Women, fought against school integration, took over the school board, firing the assistant superintendent George eBay because he previously lived in California and Oregon where he had nice things to say about Roosevelt's New Deal and the African American freedom struggle. A math instructor got fired after he carelessly commented in a teacher's lounge that he supported Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democratic Party nominee for president in 1952 and 1956.

The Eastern School Board yanked books from campus libraries that said positive things about the United Nations, while right-wingers in Dallas forced the city library and the Museum of Fine Arts to ban artists like Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso because of their supposed communist sympathies. But before we get into that, a quick ad break. Lately on the NPR politics podcast, we're talking about a big question. How much can one guy change? What will change look like for energy, schools, healthcare? Follow coverage of a changing country. Schools. Take the Department of Education closely. Health care. Better and less expensive. Follow coverage of a changing country.

Promises made, promises kept. We're going to keep our promises. On the NPR Politics Podcast, listen on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Catch Jon Stewart back in action on The Daily Show and In Your Ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now.

Plus, you'll get special content just for podcast listeners, like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When I smoke weed, I get lost in the music. I like to isolate each instrument. The rhythmic bass, the harmonies on the piano, sticky melody.

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The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and batter than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened.

And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Stephens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happen. And then everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was OK. Problem.

My oldest daughter, her first day of ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like I feel the moisture between my legs

when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast. Every Wednesday. On the Black Effect Podcast Network. The iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast.

One Dallas oil magnate who built a mansion intentionally designed to be a bigger duplicate of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate, he used his wealth to broadcast extremist fever dreams in the 1950s and 1960s. His name was H.L. Hunt, and he was profiled by the BBC in the 1960s. But as well as being perhaps the most frugal, the most stingy plutocrat of Texas, H.L. Hunt is probably the most controversial.

For he is a fervent advocate of right-wing, some would say reactionary causes. He is against the UN, against the war on poverty, against Medicare, against central government aid of any sort. He would rather Washington didn't rule the United States at all. The constructives, his private word for anti-communists. You are either for him or against him. He brooks no halfway position. A health fattest who avoided white bread and sugar, Hunt believed his diet of largely raw vegetables might actually allow him to achieve immortality. He also thought he had psychic abilities, lived as a secret bigamist, and published pamphlets such as Hitler was a Liberal.

An early prototype of Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk, Hunt tried to create an alternative right-wing media infrastructure, funding a nationwide radio program and pamphlet subscription called Lifeline that promoted conspiracy theories from coast to coast. It is time for Lifeline. Let us send the Texas class planet planet Earth and the planet Earth. Let us send to the planet Earth and the planet Earth. Let us send to the planet Earth and the planet Earth. Let us send to the planet Earth and the planet Earth. Let us send to the planet Earth and the planet Earth. Let us send to the planet Earth and the planet Earth.

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Let us send to the planet Earth and the planet Earth. Let us send to the planet Earth and the planet Earth. Let us send to the planet Earth and the planet Earth. Let us send to the planet Earth and the planet Earth. Let us send to the planet Earth and the planet Earth. Dallas, Texas 75206. I'll be back after this message from our sponsor. The Lifeline Show was hosted by a former FBI agent named Dan Smoot and broadcast on more than 80 television and 150 radio stations. Hunt believed that democracy was the instrument through which wealth would be seized from billionaires such as himself and redistributed to the lazy and the worthless. Hunt once raged at Smoot when the Lifeline host claimed on air that democracy was a political outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Hunt corrected Smoot, condemning democracy as the handwork of the devil and a phony liberal form of watered-down communism. Hunt innovated in a number of ways to alarm audiences about far-left plots.

During the last two years, H.L. Hunt has added another emotive missile to his armory. His league of so-called youth freedom speakers, engaging young teenagers, drove to deliver three-minute bursts of his propaganda to rotary clubs and Bible classes. Many people in the United States really don't believe that communism is a serious threat. Well, these people are in for a big shock because the communists have every intention of doing exactly what they've said they'll do.

And they do not hesitate to use force and violence any time they think that it will further their cause Now I don't pretend to know all the answers But I do know That it is our duty to get out and warn others of the serious threat that we are facing We have got to get out and tell others of the subversive movements that are going on right here under our very own noses It's time to do away with this attitude. Oh, it can't happen here. Will communists bury us? Will we face firing squads as in Cuba and will our little bitty children become slaves?

Ladies and gentlemen, the answer rests in the hands of you and others like you. Thank you. For much of the 20th century, Dallas had built up a reputation as a clean, dull, modern, and efficiently run city. By the 1950s, however, it had also acquired a reputation as the capital of crackpots and conspiracy theorists, a development that historian Edward H. Miller would describe in his book, Nut Country. In 1954, Dallas elected a far-right House representative, Republican Bruce Alger. Less than a week prior to the 1960 presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon,

a pro-Alger mob assaulted and spat on the Democratic vice presidential nominee and then Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, as they left the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas. Alger joined the protesters, who held signs with slogans that said, LBJ sold out to Yankee socialists. Soon thereafter, Major General Edwin Walker, who inspired the deranged fictional character General Jack D. Ripper, the person responsible for global nuclear holocaust in the 1964 film communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Before filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned Walker into an unforgettable caricature, the real-life Walker achieved infamy commanding an infantry division in what was then western Germany. President Kennedy pressured Walker to resign because he repeatedly lectured soldiers under his command to vote for far-right wing political candidates. He also distributed among the troops literature from the conspiracy theory promoting far-right John Birch Society, and he encouraged them to join. The John Birch Society, formed in 1958, opposed American membership in the United Nations, which it claimed was part of a global communist conspiracy to enslave free peoples around

the world. The fringe organization, established by former candy manufacturer Robert Welsh Welsh accused all American presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Kennedy of being secret communists under the command of the Soviet government. The John Birch Society also saw the African American civil rights movement as part of a Bolshevik conspiracy to divide the country and argued that efforts of towns and cities after World War II to add fluoride to public water supplies was part of a sinister scheme to weaken men physically and make them less

able to resist the radical takeover of the United States. That particular Berkshire conspiracy theory made a long-lasting impact on the American psyche. Cities across the United States banned fluoridated water. Today the John Birch Society is still active in North Texas, where recent gubernatorial candidate and car dealer Don Huffines has published anti-fluoridation essays on the Dallas Express, a right-wing website that repurposed the name of the historic black newspaper that went defunct in the 1970s.

Edwin Walker's devotion to the John Birch movement cost him his military career. Under pressure from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Walker retired and moved to Dallas, where he found a friendly political environment. The National Far-Right saw him as a martyr to Kennedy's supposedly out-of-control leftism, and he received financial support from fellow devotee of the John Birch Society H.L. Hunt. In 1961 Walker made the cover of Newsweek as a leader of the New Right and in 1962 he entered the race for Texas governor. To all victims of communist tyranny throughout the world I I send this word. The hour of your deliverance is approaching to patriots in every land, Korea, China, the Ukraine, the Baltic nations, Poland,

Hungary, East Germany, the Congo, Cuba, and every other land stricken by the monster of communism. I say, for the time, lie low, preparing your hearts for liberation. Do not expose yourselves to the brutal requital of a monster temporarily in power." Walker was a painfully dull public speaker. In the end, he couldn't bring his version of deliverance to his own state, finishing a distant sixth in the 1962 gubernatorial race. That would not prevent him and his allies from creating mayhem over the following months. He got arrested and was ordered to be psychiatrically evaluated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy

after he incited racial violence during the integration of the University of Mississippi in September 1962. Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations, would confront Walker and Amatova's followers when the diplomat visited Big D on October 26, 1963. Stevenson was Affairs. Mr.... Shall we get on with the business of the meeting? Surely, my dear friend, I don't have to come here from Illinois to teach Texas manners, do I? Outside Memorial Auditorium Theater, where Stevenson delivered his speech, Walker had gathered a furious gang of middle and upper class men and women who rocked his limousine back and

forth while it waited to whisk him away to safety and surrounded the ambassador when he stepped outside. When he finally returned to Washington D.C., Stevenson warned the administration about the intense and extremist atmosphere in Dallas where President Kennedy was planning a visit meant to heal a rift between the conservative and liberal wings of the Democratic Party in Texas. On the morning of November 22, 1963, Kennedy and his entourage felt foreboding as they prepared for a short airplane jaunt from Fort Worth to Dallas. The president just examined a full-page ad in the far-right Dallas Morning News that

featured a bold-faced headline, Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. The advertisement, paid for in part by H.L. Hunt's son Nelson Bunker Hunt and the future owner of the Dallas Cowboys, H.R. Bumbright, featured accusations that Kennedy was soft on communism around the world and radicals at home, while persecuting conservatives who criticized him. The same morning, a group distributed leaflets designed like a wanted poster with front and side photos of the president with the caption, wanted for treason. How can people say such things, the president said to First Lady Jackie Kennedy. We're heading into nut country.

Soon the Kennedys would make their fateful flight to Dallas and the president would die from an assassin's bullet shortly afternoon. The president's murder spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists. Some said the president had been murdered by the mafia, angered because they had been investigated by the president's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Others blamed Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, who also had been the subject of criminal probes by the Justice Department. Other suspected assassination plotters

included Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had himself been targeted for assassination attempts by the Kennedy administration, exiled Cubans in Florida, angered because the president had not fully supported the attempted overthrow of Castro during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and even the Soviets. One of the more elaborate theories involved an alleged plot hatched by American military leaders and CIA agents,

angered that Kennedy supposedly wanted to end American involvement in Vietnam. Finally, others said Lyndon Johnson ordered a hit on the chief executive because he wanted to grab power. Or maybe others said Kennedy died because of a combination of some or all of the above, having made enemies with the intelligence agencies under his command, who he had said he would dash to the winds if they continued to do things that were against what he saw as in the best interests of the United States. Quote, president shot 129 times from 43 different angles, a satirical headline from The Onion later asserted.

Sometimes conspiracy theories have deadly consequences. William L. Pierce spent his teen years attending a military academy in Dallas as a city-stood in anti-communist dread and anti-Semitic hatred. As a young adult, he had joined the John Birch Society, but grew frustrated because it wasn't racist enough. He became a leading figure in the American Nazi Party, and at the age of 41, formed the Neo-Nazi National Alliance. Beginning in 1975, he published in serial form one of the most influential examples of white supremacist literature, The Turner Diaries, a novel which told the story of a white nationalist revolution in the United States in the near future.

This revolt is sparked by a Jewish-authored law outlying private ownership of guns. The hero, Earl Turner, joins an underground terrorist army, the Organization, which battles a Jewish plot to destroy America not just through gun control, but also through uncontrolled non-white immigration and by using rock music and drugs to encourage interracial sex. At one point to save the white race, Turner blows up the FBI National Headquarters in Washington D.C. with a truck bomb. In the novel, racist revolutionaries then take over Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California and seize its nuclear missiles, which they later use on cities across the

nation. While ethnically cleansing California of non-whites, they hang 60,000 so-called race traitors during the Day of the Rope, a phrase you may find familiar if you've ever looked at white supremacist posts online. In the end, the book's hero Earl Turner finally defeats the system by flying a crop duster armed with a small nuclear weapon into the pedacon. White nationalists have since seen the Turner Diaries as both an accurate description of the modern world and as a manual on how to win a race war. From 1983 to 1984, The Order, a white supremacist terrorist group that took its name from the secret circle

the fictional Earl Turner joins, robbed a pornography shop, banks and armored cars, heisting more than $8 million they later distributed to several white supremacist groups with the intent of funding a white revolution. Along the way they assassinated Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg. The Turner Diary became the favorite novel of Timothy McVeigh, a bitter, disgruntled veteran in the 1991 Gulf War, who saw the deadly confrontation between the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the gun-toting Branch Davidian Religious Sect

in Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993, as a major step in a government plan to seize firearms from law-abiding Americans. McVeigh had spent years selling copies of the Turner Diaries at gun shows. He retaliated against what he saw as his government oppressors by blowing up the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the Waco conflagration. He used a truck bomb, facing his attack, in part on the fictitious bombings of the FBI headquarters in William Pierce's novel.

The Turner Diaries also depicted a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol. Some of the pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on January 6th erected gallows and livestreamed their crimes as they joked about hanging politicians, comparing it to the day of rope, Pierce described in his pro-Nazi work, A Fiction. Stay with us through this ad break to learn more. Lately on the NPR Politics podcast, we're talking about a big question. How much can one guy change?

They want change. What will change look like for energy? Drill, baby drill. Schools. Take the Department of Education closer. Healthcare. Better and less expensive. Follow coverage of a changing country.

Promises made, promises kept. We're going to keep our promises. On the NPR Politics Podcast, listen on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Catch Jon Stewart back in action on The Daily Show and In Your Ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now. Plus you'll get special content just for podcast listeners,

like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Some people won't give you the real talk on drugs, but it's time we know the facts. Fentanyl is often laced into illicit drugs and used to make fake versions of prescription pills.

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are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened.

And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Stephens. I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happen. And then everybody else want to get pissed off because the white said it was OK. Problem.

My oldest daughter, her first day of ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh, dad, all they were doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower. And I called to ask how I was doing. She was like, oh, dad, all they was doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slum flower. What turns me on is when a man sends me money.

Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh my god, it's go time. You actually sent it? Mm. Listen to the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you go to find your podcast.

Kennedy was a classic Cold War liberal in support of an aggressive military intervention to stop communist expansion abroad and, with varying degrees of commitment, economic and civil rights reforms at home. But because of his assassination, by the 21st century, many on the far right saw him as a martyr to the liberal deep state. Beginning in 2017, a very online far-right conspiracy theory arose that centered on cryptic messages first posted on the 4chan message board and then on 8chan by an anonymous person who identified themselves as Q. The pseudonym was for reference to the Q clearance which gives government officials access to high-level security secrets. Kennedy would be

central in the imagination of what came to be known as the QAnon movement. Q or QAnon developed a huge following that interpreted these confusing and often contradictory posts as actually revealing a secret global cabal that included top Democrats like Hillary Clinton and liberal celebrities like Tom Hanks. These people were all accused of being a part of a child sex trafficking ring in which the young victims were molested and tortured and in some interpretations of the theories had their precious bodily fluids harvested to manufacture a drug known as adrenochrome, a drug that produces hallucinations and supposedly grants eternal youth. These stories resembled anti-Semitic legends about Jews kidnapping Christian children before Passover in order to use their blood in matzah bread. A trope or a canard really

that has become known as blood libel. In the QAnon mythology, Donald Trump plans to conduct mass arrests and executions of these satanic child molesters in an event called The Storm. Trump has winked and nodded to the QAnon movement, encouraged believers, and even incorporated some of its key slogans and imagery in speeches and posts online, such as Where We Go One, We Go All. And as I've reported for Rolling Stone, a cult-like spin-off group of QAnon believers have repeatedly gathered at Dealey Plaza, the site of JFK's murder, to wait for the prophesied return of JFK and his son, JFK Jr., who both are dead, but these believers think were either

miraculously resurrected or never actually died and have been secretly working with Trump to take down the aforementioned global satanic pedophile cabal. Some believe that when JFK and JFK jr. finally reveal themselves a sort of kingdom of righteousness will reign and good will ultimately prevail over evil. QAnon believers were a heavy presence during the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021 and QAnon banners a heavy presence during the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. And QAnon banners competed with Trump and Confederate battle flags for attention. In November of that first year, we saw the first of a series of rallies that Steve just

referred to. They went to Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy had been murdered 58 years earlier. Over the course of many months, QAnon disciples kept returning to the site of JFK's death, some staying at a local hotel so they could be nearby when the Kennedy return happened. This was covered by Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA in November 2021. Reporter Kevin Reese interviewed some of the ones gathered at the Kennedy assassination site. Word on the street is that Jr., JFK Jr., will show up and introduce his parents. You're expecting JFK Jr.?

Absolutely. Okay, how's that going to happen? He never does. Are we going to see him today? JFK Jr.? Yeah, that's what everyone's telling me. We're hoping to see him today? JFK Jr.? Yeah, that's what everyone's telling me. We're hoping to hope and pray. And then after that?

He'll probably be the vice president with Trump. Conspiracy theorists often pay a high personal price for beliefs that marginalize them from family, friends, and mainstream society. There was one real truth several of these people agreed to talk about. You gotta understand that most of the world is going to think that's just crazy. That's why half my family won't talk to me anymore. They won't. And my girlfriend thinks I've lost my mind.

With the return of Donald Trump to the White House on January 20th, conspiracy theories will move from the fringe to the seat of power. JFK Jr. will emerge and grab the reins, but a different Kennedy will, Bobby Kennedy Jr. Bobby Kennedy Jr. has insisted that Wi-Fi causes cancer and that AIDS might not be caused by HIV. Vaccines, he claims, against overwhelming evidence cause autism, antidepressants cause school shootings, and chemicals in water lead to gender dysphoria. One of these chemicals, R.F.K. Jr. insists, might be an old obsession of the conspiratorial right. I think fluoride is a poison. It causes loss IQ, neurodevelopmental injuries, and in Florida is on the way up. R.F.K.

Jr., mind you, is the nominee for the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. And in a recent interview, claimed that he was aided in his schoolwork through the recreational self-medication of heroin. Trump has himself obsessively promoted his own sinister tales of the deep state that supposedly stole the 2020 election from him, and as we have said, has co-opted some of the slogans of the QAnon movement. None of this, obviously, was disqualifying to a plurality of voters this past November. So why are people drawn to conspiracy theories? November. So why are people drawn to conspiracy theories? First off, they provide convenient explanations that can be broken down into sort of simple

logics for people who may not have frameworks for understanding a complex world. And they also provide believers sort of new family and friends as they become increasingly alienated from their original family and friends. Regardless of whatever plots they believe they have revealed, it's clear that conspiracy theorists of this sort, they don't believe that history is a product of class conflict or imperialism or the global scramble for natural resources. Nothing like that. It's not shaped by political and economic alliances

between elites or irreversible transformations in technology that render old job skills irrelevant. There's no material analysis. All of this loss, all this fear, all this terrifying disruption of what is comfortably routine, they view, stems from a sinister plot, a plan that is hidden tightly by a small circle of elites, sort of cartoon villains with near superpowers that control the world. And if only the right people, the sort of heroes of the story of the movie that they think that they're watching, if only those people would step forward and pull off the mask of the villains, then everything would be set right. These enemies of freedom somehow pull all the strings and sight unseen,

manipulate every aspect of the world's politics, culture and finance, manipulate elections, engineer depressions, urban riots, and even hurricanes. Yet for all their cleverness, they leave just enough clues so that amateur sleuths, if they are just smart enough, can crack the code. Conspiracy theories make history an understandable contest between ruthless bad guys and intrepid heroes who then feel superior because they've unveiled the master plan. As they discover kindred spirits, they find community otherwise lacking in their lives.

Perhaps if just enough people know about the conspiracy, they hope, the bad guys will fall and the millennium will follow. That fantasy offers a simpler, more emotionally satisfying vision of the future than planning on how to dismantle capitalism or figuring out how to persuade white people, for instance, to surrender their privileges that come with skin color. Conspiracy theories are mostly a distraction, but unfortunately they are often, from Oklahoma City to the U.S. Capitol, a call for deadly action. And while figures like H.L. Hunt and their operations like Lifeline may be in the past,

we have our own contemporary versions of this with roots in Texas. We now have Elon Musk who controls X, formerly known as Twitter, in which he has used his platform with millions of followers to promote dangerous conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement Theory which we recorded a previous episode of this podcast about. Ultimately we are living in a culture that swims with conspiracy theories and for us to make our way out of the rabbit hole we're going to need some sort of framework for understanding the world. Something that can help us better understand how we got here and where we're going. And no matter what that is, it certainly won't be something

as simple as believing that we just have to pull off the mask of some villain and then everything will be set straight from there. This is Michael Phillips. And this is Stephen Monticelli. Thanks for listening. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website. Or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

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We want to speak out and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a player boy, my doll. He was like, I'll take you to the top. I'll make you a star. To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in.

It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated. We're an army in comparison to him. From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.