Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman. The shooting at a synagogue outside San
Speaker 1: Diego on the last day of Passover was just the
Speaker 1: latest deadly attack where the suspect has reported links to
Speaker 1: white supremacy. This incident pushed me to think harder and
Speaker 1: deeper about the roots of white supremacy in the United States.
Speaker 1: Are we really seeing something new here or is this
Speaker 1: the same brand of white supremacy that's been around for
Speaker 1: a very long time, as long ago as the Civil
Speaker 1: War maybe before. To answer these questions and more, we're
Speaker 1: joined by Kathleen Bellou. She's an assistant professor of history
Speaker 1: at the University of Chicago, and her book Bring the
Speaker 1: War Home, The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is
Speaker 1: the definitive look at the modern history of white power movement. Kathleen,
Speaker 1: Welcome to Deep Background. Thank you for having me, and
Speaker 1: thank you for the kind words about the book. Before
Speaker 1: we dive into the history and prehistory of white power
Speaker 1: and white supremacy, can I ask you just a personal question,
Speaker 1: how did you get interested in this topic? It is
Speaker 1: not the most obvious topic for a starting to work on.
Speaker 1: It isn't, and in fact, when I began the dissertation,
Speaker 1: I was told by more than one person that it
Speaker 1: technically could not count as history, because the usual rule
Speaker 1: of thumb when you're starting a dissertation is that you
Speaker 1: should be studying things twenty five years ago or further
Speaker 1: is the rule. It turns out that it took me
Speaker 1: so long to finish the book that I had cleared
Speaker 1: that mark by the time it was all said and done.
Speaker 1: But I actually think that the study of the recent
Speaker 1: past has become, as you can see with this project,
Speaker 1: urgently important to understanding our political moment and the debates
Speaker 1: and challenges that we now find ourselves embroiled in. I
Speaker 1: wanted to start by asking about the category of white
Speaker 1: power or white supreme see. Certainly in a country like
Speaker 1: the United States, which had slavery from the very beginning
Speaker 1: of the country, and of course there were slavery long
Speaker 1: before there was a United States in North America, the
Speaker 1: idea that white people are superior to the black people,
Speaker 1: that people of African descent is you know, almost baked
Speaker 1: in to the earliest history of the country and the
Speaker 1: prehistory of the country. And I wonder, how do you
Speaker 1: know where to start? You know, when you talk about
Speaker 1: white power or white supremacy. You know, how do you
Speaker 1: know that you don't have to start all the way
Speaker 1: back in the sixteen hundreds when the first African slaves
Speaker 1: were brought to the Americas, or in seventeen eighty seven
Speaker 1: with the US Constitution which enshrines slavery in certain respects.
Speaker 1: The what's your working starting place when you start thinking
Speaker 1: about white power? So when I teach this to my undergraduates,
Speaker 1: we do start with those long histories of racial inequality,
Speaker 1: the ways that white supremacy is not only a matter
Speaker 1: of ideological belief for some people in the United States,
Speaker 1: but has become imbricated in our systems of government, our
Speaker 1: distribution of resources, are policing, and all kinds of other ways.
Speaker 1: It's everywhere everywhere in this country. Race is everywhere. I
Speaker 1: think reasonable people can agree on that. I think that
Speaker 1: the definitions part is critically important, especially now. So what
Speaker 1: white power refers to is a movement that comes out
Speaker 1: of the Vietnam War, brings together a bunch of ideologically
Speaker 1: diverse activists who had not been working together before. Such
Speaker 1: as clansmen, Neo Nazis, skinheads, radical tax resistors, white separatists,
Speaker 1: and others, and kind of amalgamates them into one social movement,
Speaker 1: using the narrative of the war to bind them together,
Speaker 1: and then declares war on the federal government. So that
Speaker 1: begins in nineteen eighty three. Before that, I would characterize
Speaker 1: things like the many iterations of the KKK, the Neo
Speaker 1: Nazi Party in the United States. Those things are more
Speaker 1: like vigilante violence in that the violence is either supporting
Speaker 1: the state or supporting local status quo power. Post nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, we're dealing with a completely different thing. After that,
Speaker 1: it is a revolutionary movement that is attempting to overthrow
Speaker 1: the United States, either through a kind of long asymmetrical
Speaker 1: war of sabotage or through a direct revolution. So that's
Speaker 1: the white power movement. The tricky one for a lot
Speaker 1: of people is white nationalism. And actually I think it's
Speaker 1: easier to understand right now because all of these stories
Speaker 1: in the news about Hindu nationalism make this distinction really
Speaker 1: really clear. So Hindu nationalism, for listeners who might not
Speaker 1: be familiar, is a movement in India in which people
Speaker 1: who are a Hindu nationalist, and they call themselves that
Speaker 1: are organizing to make India more oriented around Hinduism in
Speaker 1: culture and in policy. Right, so they're trying to inject
Speaker 1: the nation of India with Hinduism more than a Nardias.
Speaker 1: It's complicated in India by the fact that the name
Speaker 1: for India in the language Hindi is Hindustan. So you know,
Speaker 1: the word itself, Hindu doesn't only mean the religion, it
Speaker 1: also means a culture. It also means a civilization. It's
Speaker 1: a tricky one indeed, But the category is India. In
Speaker 1: white nationalism, the category is not the United States. The
Speaker 1: nation imagined by white nationalism after nineteen eighty three is
Speaker 1: fundamentally opposed to the United States and also to New
Speaker 1: Zealand and Australia and other nations where this takes hold.
Speaker 1: White nationalism is attempting to create a transnational group of
Speaker 1: white people that will take over white homelands, and eventually
Speaker 1: many of them hope to wage war such that they
Speaker 1: can achieve an all white world. That's not the same
Speaker 1: thing as say the clan in the nineteen twenties, where
Speaker 1: people were marching on the National Mall with their robes
Speaker 1: and hoods, but their faces uncovered, which was which is,
Speaker 1: among other things, anti immigrant. It was both about suppressing
Speaker 1: African Americans, but also the clan in the nineteen its
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties iteration was very focused on immigrants, especially from
Speaker 1: Catholic countries. The White Power movement also is anti immigrant.
Speaker 1: But the thing that's different is that after nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: this is an anti government, anti nation movement. It's not
Speaker 1: an over exertion of patriotism. It's not just too much nationalism.
Speaker 1: You talked about opposition to the United States as opposed
Speaker 1: to vigilante violence. But in its first iteration, when the
Speaker 1: Ku Klux Klan came into existence after the Civil War
Speaker 1: in part to resist the attempts at the creation of
Speaker 1: racial equality that we're being imposed in the South by
Speaker 1: military reconstruction, that is, by an occupation of Union troops,
Speaker 1: wasn't it also in its origins the clan at that
Speaker 1: point in a sense revolutionary. It was opposed to the
Speaker 1: government of the United States and was supporting the already
Speaker 1: defeated ideals of the Confederacy. So in some sense wasn't
Speaker 1: there a revolutionary impulse implicit in the clan from the beginning.
Speaker 1: I think yes, But I think this one is highly debatable,
Speaker 1: and I think it depends on what historians would call periodization,
Speaker 1: meaning when you choose to stop that story. So, the
Speaker 1: first clan was founded in eighteen sixty six in Pulaski,
Speaker 1: Tennessee by frustrated veterans of the Confederacy. It very quickly grew,
Speaker 1: but at the beginning was mostly understood a sort of
Speaker 1: like a burlesque prankster group. And then there is this
Speaker 1: moment when it formalizes and turns violent, and that violence
Speaker 1: is directed at African Americans, school tax collectors, school teachers,
Speaker 1: and people from the North who come in to implement
Speaker 1: reconstruction and people in the South who support reconstruction. In
Speaker 1: other words, it is an attempt either to resist the
Speaker 1: federal government's effort to reconstruct the South or to form
Speaker 1: a new system of power. So right in there is
Speaker 1: the distinction between revolutionary and something else. Historians have sort
Speaker 1: of argued a lot over this, but I think it's
Speaker 1: important to remember that the Jim Crow regime in the
Speaker 1: South is not sort of just a continuation of slavery,
Speaker 1: but something that has to be built and constructed and
Speaker 1: invented after reconstruction, the clan doesn't disappear when reconstruction ends. Instead,
Speaker 1: it largely just relocates into citizen militias, into groups like
Speaker 1: the Red Shirts and the White Shirts, into rifle clubs,
Speaker 1: and into spectacle lynchings, which are these mass public participation
Speaker 1: events that carry out a lot of the same kind
Speaker 1: of violence that the clan was already doing a lot
Speaker 1: of it in public. I mean. One of the things
Speaker 1: that always amazes me about lynching is that there are
Speaker 1: postcards that were spread through the South of people white
Speaker 1: people gathered around a lynched African American with a photograph
Speaker 1: being taken as a kind of commemoration of the event,
Speaker 1: and no one's wearing a mask, no one's hiding his face.
Speaker 1: Not only that, but there are women and children in
Speaker 1: their Sunday best clothes. These events are all very often
Speaker 1: happening on the courthouse or at local sites of power.
Speaker 1: And it's also not just in the South. These are
Speaker 1: happening in Indiana, in the Pacific Northwest, in Texas, and
Speaker 1: in fact, for one stretch in South Texas, the chance
Speaker 1: of being lynched as much higher for Mexican Americans and
Speaker 1: Mexicans than it is for African American men in the South.
Speaker 1: It's it's that move into lynching that makes me reluctant
Speaker 1: to think of it as revolutionary violence, because lynching has
Speaker 1: mostly been understood as scholars as conveying a kind of
Speaker 1: popular sovereignty of the community, in other words, that in
Speaker 1: other words, that when when you lynch somebody, the whole
Speaker 1: community is getting together to do it, it's a kind
Speaker 1: of perverted version of small d democracy, where we're doing
Speaker 1: this as a collective. Yes, it's a claim to that power.
Speaker 1: It's a taking back of sovereign power from the state.
Speaker 1: Let's turn now to that revolutionary movement which, as you
Speaker 1: described in nineteen eighty three, unites itself to some degree
Speaker 1: and declares war on the United States of America. Tell
Speaker 1: us that story, because I don't think that's very well known.
Speaker 1: The nineteen eighty three turn comes after this big infrastructure
Speaker 1: build up, an organization of social movement that happens in
Speaker 1: the years proceeding. The clan builds paramilitary training camps all
Speaker 1: around the country. It trains people in paramilitary warfare. It
Speaker 1: works on amassing weapons and material, getting money, getting people organized,
Speaker 1: getting people in contact with one another, and by nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three. I think there are two major things that happen.
Speaker 1: One is that that infrastructure is in place. Activists know
Speaker 1: each other, They're all in the same room. They're kind
Speaker 1: of coherent around this common story of the Vietnam War,
Speaker 1: which has allowed some connections possible between different groups that
Speaker 1: weren't possible before. And the other thing that happens is
Speaker 1: they get really frustrated with Reagan. Activists in the movement
Speaker 1: don't make this revolutionary turn in a moment of leftist
Speaker 1: state power, but instead under the second term of the
Speaker 1: Reagan administration. And their argument about this is that the
Speaker 1: distance between Reagan's campaign promises and what they see as
Speaker 1: his moderation proves to them once and for all that
Speaker 1: electoral change will never deliver the kind of world they want,
Speaker 1: and therefore they need to declare war. Now. This is
Speaker 1: this is really relevant to us in the present moment
Speaker 1: because it means that even at moments when the center
Speaker 1: through the left might see kind of a moment of
Speaker 1: conservative orientation and executive power, that doesn't mean that activists
Speaker 1: on the friend right will be assuaged by that, and
Speaker 1: in fact, that's had just the opposite effect. In this case.
Speaker 1: So that's extremely important, as you say, for the question
Speaker 1: of the relationship between recent rounds of white power of
Speaker 1: violence and the Trump administration. There's a tendency on the
Speaker 1: left to say, well, look at Charlottesville, which followed Donald
Speaker 1: Trump's ascending to the presidency, and then look at subsequent
Speaker 1: events the Tree of Life shooting, for example in the
Speaker 1: United States, the Christchurch, New Zealand attacks, and to see
Speaker 1: this all as very much a result of the election
Speaker 1: of Donald Trump. And if I understand you correctly, you're
Speaker 1: telling a slightly different story about the way that white
Speaker 1: power activists reacted, for example, to the election of Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 1: It's not that they were empowered or emboldened by the
Speaker 1: election of a conservative president. It's rather that they felt
Speaker 1: that it wasn't enough and that therefore they needed to
Speaker 1: take some revolutionary action. Is that in your mind? I mean,
Speaker 1: we're jumping ahead to the president, which will come to
Speaker 1: you in good time as well. But is your view
Speaker 1: that something like that is happening now among white power activists.
Speaker 1: It's not that they're emboldened so much by Trump's election,
Speaker 1: It's that it's not enough, and it gives them reason
Speaker 1: to do more. I suspect that's what we're seeing. This
Speaker 1: is when I have to give the historian caveat that
Speaker 1: the thing that lets me see the story that I
Speaker 1: write about in the book is this archive that spans newspapers,
Speaker 1: primary source materials, FBI and other surveillance documents, court testimony.
Speaker 1: We don't get that kind of source base in real time.
Speaker 1: When you talk about as a starian, talk about the archive,
Speaker 1: you mean some literal archives, in some cases cashes of documents.
Speaker 1: But it's also the word archive is also a metaphor
Speaker 1: that a Starin's used to describe all the materials that
Speaker 1: you guys use to try to make sense of his
Speaker 1: darical events exactly. You can think about it as like
Speaker 1: the receipts for the story I'm going to tell I
Speaker 1: don't have that kind of information about events from about
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six forward, and there are some reasons for
Speaker 1: why that is in this particular cash of sources. But
Speaker 1: the earlier period does tell us a couple of things
Speaker 1: that make me concerned about the present moment in the
Speaker 1: ways that you've just described. One of them is that
Speaker 1: when there is this moment of perceived sympathetic administration, that
Speaker 1: has not assuaged these activists, and in fact that has
Speaker 1: been seen as a call to arms. The other one
Speaker 1: is that there have always been sort of two spheres
Speaker 1: of activity in this movement. One of them is the
Speaker 1: sort of mass mobilizations like Charlottesville marches, political campaigns, organizing events, recruitment, drives,
Speaker 1: campus campaigns to recruit students, speak of public speaking to ours,
Speaker 1: things like that. The other one is this massive network
Speaker 1: of paramilitary camps, cell style terror, illegal communication in many cases,
Speaker 1: and different kinds of crime ranging from assassination to the
Speaker 1: obtaining of stolen military weapons and material to mass violence attacks.
Speaker 1: In the period that I study, those two spheres of
Speaker 1: activity happened at the same time, um and often there
Speaker 1: were people who crossed the line between those two kinds
Speaker 1: of activism, and we're undertaking both of those things as
Speaker 1: a coordinated kind of kind of campaign. The fact that
Speaker 1: we can't see that underground in real time doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that that's not happening, as as we are noticing more
Speaker 1: of these above board events and in fact, this wave
Speaker 1: of violent attacks that you describe, which I might also
Speaker 1: add Dylan Roofs shooting in Charleston. Absolutely, oh no, yeah,
Speaker 1: wells Bravik in Norway. Yes, putting those all together in
Speaker 1: one story is very very important because then we can
Speaker 1: start to say, oh, wow, this is a wave we're
Speaker 1: talking about. You know, three attempted attacks in the last
Speaker 1: six months. Um. A lot of these are mass attacks,
Speaker 1: A lot of these are people who are using the
Speaker 1: same coordinated messaging. UM. That indicates to me that we
Speaker 1: do have this two spheres model of activism going again,
Speaker 1: even if I can't see the sources in real time
Speaker 1: to be able to describe it in detail. One element
Speaker 1: that I think we need to also add to your
Speaker 1: depiction of people's common narrative of the Vietnam War having
Speaker 1: been lost because of betrayal by the American government and
Speaker 1: anti communism and they're bringing together of clan members and
Speaker 1: neo Nazis and others, is the religious component. Would you
Speaker 1: say something about the apocalyptic religious elements of the combined
Speaker 1: viewpoints that are coming together around nineteen eighty three in
Speaker 1: this revolutionary movement. Sure, there are kind of two major
Speaker 1: theological innovations of this movement. One of them is Norse paganism,
Speaker 1: so Odinism and other kind of neopagan ideologies that put
Speaker 1: forward the greatness of white cultures in different ways. So
Speaker 1: the idea is to take Nordic mythology, of which Odin
Speaker 1: is a central figure, and to say, ah, Nordic mythology
Speaker 1: equals white people's mythology something like that exactly. So there's
Speaker 1: and it comes with a whole cultural apparatus of things
Speaker 1: like writing in ruins and using the Viking imagery and
Speaker 1: things like that. The other one is Christian identity, and
Speaker 1: I think this one is more impactful for a couple
Speaker 1: of different reasons. One is that it has a very
Speaker 1: clear role for women, who turn out to be enormously
Speaker 1: important to motivating this movement and holding it together. The
Speaker 1: other is for its depiction of the end of the world.
Speaker 1: So the nineteen eighties in general are a time of
Speaker 1: deep fixation on the end of the world. There's deep,
Speaker 1: deep apocalyptic belief kind of across American culture, including in
Speaker 1: evangelical churches, which are recruiting much larger congregations and much
Speaker 1: more politicized congregations in the nineteen eighties. Now in evangelical Christianity,
Speaker 1: that comes with a belief in a day all the rapture,
Speaker 1: which is a moment when all of the faithful are
Speaker 1: supposed to be peacefully transported to Heaven before this big,
Speaker 1: bloody last battle that will come right before the return
Speaker 1: of Christ. So Christian identity has no rapture, but it
Speaker 1: does have the battle. So what Christian identity does is
Speaker 1: turn its believers into either survivalists. You either have to
Speaker 1: survive this end times before Jesus returns, or you have
Speaker 1: to become a soldier of God to clear the world
Speaker 1: of non white populations before you know, before Christ can
Speaker 1: return to the world. So what it does is transfigure
Speaker 1: this whole host of social issues that are important to
Speaker 1: the white power movement into a holy war. And one
Speaker 1: way to think about this is that it comes with
Speaker 1: this intense sense of emergency about something that people talk
Speaker 1: about very casually in American culture, which is this kind
Speaker 1: of imagined moment of demographic change when the country will
Speaker 1: switch over from a majority white population to something else.
Speaker 1: And as different communities begin to make that transition in
Speaker 1: the eighties and the nineties, these activists get more and
Speaker 1: more preoccupied with this. For people in the white power movement,
Speaker 1: the issues that might be conservative or understandable to us
Speaker 1: as conservative, like opposing immigration, opposing abortion, LGBT rights, opposing feminism,
Speaker 1: being in favor of racial segregation or freedom of association.
Speaker 1: All of that stuff, for white power activists is attached
Speaker 1: to this deep preoccupation with the future of the race
Speaker 1: through the production of white babies. So it's not for
Speaker 1: white power activists just they oppose abortion because it's a
Speaker 1: conservative issue or because they have concerns about unborn life.
Speaker 1: It's that they oppose abortion because abortion is one thing
Speaker 1: that is threatening the white birthrate, along with immigration integration,
Speaker 1: which they think will result in the birth of non
Speaker 1: white children or mixed race children who they see as
Speaker 1: non human. LGBT rights they think will take white women
Speaker 1: out of the work of birthing children. They're worried about
Speaker 1: feminism because they think women should be at home raising children.
Speaker 1: This whole production of white children thing is like the
Speaker 1: glue that holds together this whole belief system. And in
Speaker 1: order for it to make sense, you really have to
Speaker 1: think about how vivid and immediate this sense of emergency
Speaker 1: is to these activists. They feel this as an apocalyptic threat,
Speaker 1: so not as kind of like a soft demographic change
Speaker 1: that's going to come at some point. Okay, so you
Speaker 1: get this attempt to unify these disparate, potentially disparate social
Speaker 1: groups around a common vision and a kind of a
Speaker 1: common ideology. It's happening in the middle of the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: and it then leads to some rather extraordinary consequences, most
Speaker 1: saliently in your book. And this is the kind of
Speaker 1: climactic point in your book, the nineteen ninety five bombing
Speaker 1: of the Oklahoma City Federal Building by Timothy McVay and
Speaker 1: a group of others, And will say more about that group.
Speaker 1: How did that spectacular bombing spectacular in the sense that
Speaker 1: it was a spectacle. It created a spectacle in which
Speaker 1: nearly one hundred and seventy people were killed grow out
Speaker 1: of this movement? How did the movement go from, as
Speaker 1: it were, a group of possibly crazy looking peripheral people
Speaker 1: to a cohesive movement that could produce an attack like this.
Speaker 1: That's a great question, and the short answer is through
Speaker 1: women during the nineteen eighties. What unfolds is not sort
Speaker 1: of a popularly understood collection of shrieking and ignorant activists
Speaker 1: in backwoods something, you know, doing their own and fighting
Speaker 1: with each other, etcetera. What we see is actually a
Speaker 1: broad ranging social movement. It includes men, women, and children.
Speaker 1: It includes people in all regions of the country, including rural, suburban,
Speaker 1: and urban spaces, and includes people of a lot of
Speaker 1: different age groups, people with education ranging from high school
Speaker 1: dropout and to homeschool to I mean rocket launch engineer
Speaker 1: kind of people. Um. Religious leaders and felons and civilians,
Speaker 1: veterans and active duty troops. So it's really a disprint
Speaker 1: group of people group the word poor everybody. Yeah, well done. No, no,
Speaker 1: not at all. It's a very diverse group of people
Speaker 1: except racially, yes, um. And it even has multiple faiths
Speaker 1: in it, as we talked about. So that UM, that
Speaker 1: structure UM, together with this turn against the state, leads
Speaker 1: them to adopt a strategy called leaderless resistance in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three. So talk to us about leaderless resistance because
Speaker 1: that hugely important for the present moment as well. It
Speaker 1: is leaderless resistance is easy to understand now as just
Speaker 1: cell style terrorism. The idea is that you're going to
Speaker 1: indoctrinate and shape activists and maybe small cohorts of cells,
Speaker 1: like one to six people, maybe the occasional larger cell
Speaker 1: of twelve people, maybe just one to two activists you're
Speaker 1: going to get them all aligned towards the same targets,
Speaker 1: and then they're going to act independently, without communication with
Speaker 1: leadership and without communication with each other. Now, there's actually
Speaker 1: a historical reason for why they adopt this strategy, which
Speaker 1: is that in the earlier clan, in the fifties and
Speaker 1: the sixties, the Third Era clan, which is the one
Speaker 1: that opposes the Civil rights movement, the federal government had
Speaker 1: sent in a ton of informants under the FBI's Counterintelligence
Speaker 1: Project and other initiatives, and clansmen got really really frustrated
Speaker 1: with how many of these people were getting into their
Speaker 1: meetings and messing their stuff and getting people arrested and
Speaker 1: turning over mailing lists and all kinds of things like that.
Speaker 1: So leaderless resistance is actually implemented in large part to
Speaker 1: foil surveillance, and it has the other kind of immediate
Speaker 1: benefit of foiling court prosecution. But the lasting impact of
Speaker 1: it has actually been to foil public understanding. Because what
Speaker 1: happens is leaders resistance plays right into this sort of
Speaker 1: media narrative about lone wolf violence or crazy people or
Speaker 1: a few bad apples or mad gunmen, right where we
Speaker 1: get a lot of different stories about one person committing
Speaker 1: an act of violence and don't get the apparatus to
Speaker 1: put those things together into the same history. So leaderless
Speaker 1: resistance is one of the ways that we get from
Speaker 1: the formation of the movement to Oklahoma City. The other
Speaker 1: one is the implementation of computer social networking. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three eighty four, they implement a series of code
Speaker 1: word accessed message board is called liberty net UM. This
Speaker 1: is before the Internet, so technically this is not the Internet,
Speaker 1: but we can we can understand this is like the
Speaker 1: proto Internet. It's it's networked computers that can speak to
Speaker 1: one another. Um. And also, by the way, it takes
Speaker 1: the FBI like two years to crack the code and
Speaker 1: see what they're posting, kind of amazing that White Power
Speaker 1: might be might be the very first social movement to
Speaker 1: have actively exploited computer technology in that way. Yeah, not
Speaker 1: only that, but the way that they do this is
Speaker 1: very much like Facebook, long before Facebook was invented. Um.
Speaker 1: What they post to these message boards includes a lot
Speaker 1: of you know, practical content like assassination lists and um,
Speaker 1: you know, propaganda messaging and things like that, but it
Speaker 1: also includes things like personal ads, So what these these
Speaker 1: boards are meant to do is to connect activists together
Speaker 1: in a movement in order to motivate this cell style activism.
Speaker 1: M So it's in a way, if you're going to
Speaker 1: have leader list resistance, you need cells and they need
Speaker 1: to communicate with each other somehow, even if not in coordination,
Speaker 1: and then the message sports become the mechanism in your
Speaker 1: story for how that happens. Yeah, well you also need
Speaker 1: a big you need the social movement to share resources
Speaker 1: and also to connect everybody in common culture as such
Speaker 1: that they can understand what the targets are supposed to be.
Speaker 1: It's interesting that Timothy McVeigh, I think you show in
Speaker 1: your book also engage in one of these models of
Speaker 1: get some resources by robbing somebody. Right, He and a
Speaker 1: couple of the associates robbed a gun dealer to get
Speaker 1: the money to have the resources to buy to buy
Speaker 1: the material to blow up the Federal building. Yes, and
Speaker 1: that's a strategy from the order and also from a
Speaker 1: novel called The Turner Diaries, which kind of becomes a
Speaker 1: I mean, it's important as a cultural text, but it's
Speaker 1: and as a manual of operations. But it's also kind
Speaker 1: of a cultural loadstar from the movement in the sense
Speaker 1: that it does that work of explaining to everybody what
Speaker 1: they're trying to do and how they're going to do it.
Speaker 1: I was fascinated reading your book about the centrality of
Speaker 1: this novel, the Turner Diaries, which seem to include in
Speaker 1: your account actually a blueprint even for blowing up a
Speaker 1: federal building with a truck bomb. I mean, very very detailed,
Speaker 1: sort of sort of envisioning process. Yeah, tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about that about that novel, because again, it
Speaker 1: was a novel that I had not heard of before
Speaker 1: reading your book. Oh okay, So it's a novel that's
Speaker 1: published in Cereal in the late nineteen seventies and then
Speaker 1: comes out in paperback, And it is very difficult to
Speaker 1: overstate how important this novel is to the movement. The
Speaker 1: Turner Diaries shows up everywhere, so McVay sells it for
Speaker 1: a while on the gun show circuit. The Order that
Speaker 1: I talked about a moment ago keeps a stack of
Speaker 1: them in the bunk house. Other white power groups distribute
Speaker 1: them at paramilitary training. It shows up in bookstores and
Speaker 1: other places where the movement is trying to recruit far
Speaker 1: aways South Africa, and it's it's mentioned in advertisements and
Speaker 1: all kinds of different white power publications. And I think
Speaker 1: one of the reasons it's so important is it sets
Speaker 1: out to answer a question that is sort of baffling
Speaker 1: on its face and that actually has stood in the
Speaker 1: way of prosecution more than once, which is, how could
Speaker 1: this fringe movement, right, it's a very small movement possibly
Speaker 1: hope to do what it's setting out to do, which
Speaker 1: is to overthrow the United States, the most militarized superstate
Speaker 1: in world history. This is a kind of baffling problem
Speaker 1: for these activists, and in the novel, I think he
Speaker 1: describes it as a nat trying to assassinate an elephant.
Speaker 1: So the imaginative work that the Turner Diaries does in
Speaker 1: laying out how such a thing could be possible is
Speaker 1: really important for this movement in terms of being able
Speaker 1: to have an imaginary in which this could happen. And
Speaker 1: it tells us something very very important and alarming about
Speaker 1: the kind of violence we're seeing today, which is that
Speaker 1: acts like Christchurch or the Pittsburgh shooting or the Oklahoma
Speaker 1: bombing are not imagined to be the endpoint of this activism.
Speaker 1: The endpoint is not the act of violence. These are
Speaker 1: supposed to be political acts of violence that white power
Speaker 1: activists hope will awaken other white people to what they
Speaker 1: see as the self evident state of emergency facing the
Speaker 1: white race, and they think that that will eventually lead
Speaker 1: to an armed uprising that will create an all white world.
Speaker 1: And the turnidiaries imagines this very violently and very vividly,
Speaker 1: and it includes things like like many nuclear weapon blasts,
Speaker 1: the forced march of people of color out of the
Speaker 1: United States, and the eventual genocide of all populations except
Speaker 1: for white people in the world. And so then Oklahoma
Speaker 1: City does happen and the bombing does occur. And then
Speaker 1: from the standpoint of public perception, instead of the world
Speaker 1: sitting up and taking notice and ordinary concerned Americans saying
Speaker 1: there's this powerful, dangerous social movement that's seeking revolution and
Speaker 1: is using terrorist techniques and it's just blown up a
Speaker 1: building and killed a lot of people, we get basically
Speaker 1: the opposite. We get a narrative of this was a
Speaker 1: few people. I remember a narrative that you know, Timothy
Speaker 1: fi McVeigh was so radical that even the militias wouldn't
Speaker 1: have him as a member, thereby implying that maybe these
Speaker 1: militias actually aren't so bad after all. McVeigh doesn't put
Speaker 1: up much of a defensive trial. And then he allows
Speaker 1: himself to be executed by not challenging the death sentence,
Speaker 1: and he's executed in record time, and it's as though
Speaker 1: the story disappears. Why did this happen? I mean to
Speaker 1: take a comparison. After September eleventh, whatever skepticism there might
Speaker 1: have been about the capacities of terrorists operating the name
Speaker 1: of Islam to change global affairs was eliminated, and a
Speaker 1: generation of experts or pseudo experts in some cases, but nevertheless,
Speaker 1: a generation of concerned people who cared about this was
Speaker 1: born in a moment and created an industry that hasn't
Speaker 1: gone away since. In contrast, in radical contrast and the
Speaker 1: aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, things sort of don't
Speaker 1: happen in that way. Talk about why, because I think
Speaker 1: it's so important. The Oklahoma City bombing represents the largest
Speaker 1: deliberate mass casualty in the United States between Pearl Harbor
Speaker 1: and nine to eleven, and the fact that we don't
Speaker 1: have a narrative about it in the ways that you've
Speaker 1: outlined is both alarming and surprising given how thoroughly these
Speaker 1: these events that I cover in the book were talked
Speaker 1: about at the time. So if you think about something
Speaker 1: like the shooting at Greensboro, people knew about that. That
Speaker 1: was front page news. Yeah, that made the front pages
Speaker 1: of many, many, many newspapers, and eventually also became a
Speaker 1: Saturday Net Life sketch like that was in the zeitgeist.
Speaker 1: But somehow we haven't connected that event with Oklahoma City.
Speaker 1: We haven't connected either of them with a narrative about
Speaker 1: a social movement. We don't have really a durable way
Speaker 1: at all of thinking about how to narrate these events.
Speaker 1: So with Oklahoma City, one of the things that happens
Speaker 1: is that the federal government tries to do a big
Speaker 1: prosecution of these activists in nineteen eighty seven eighty eight
Speaker 1: in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and so it's a federal trial
Speaker 1: on charges including seditious conspiracy. Seditious conspiracy in this case
Speaker 1: was wholly evident. The jury heard testimony about white power
Speaker 1: activists plotting to poison the water supply of a major
Speaker 1: city with cyanide. They seized thirty gallons of cyanide. The
Speaker 1: jurors saw laundry hampers full of illegal weapons and material
Speaker 1: pushed through the courtroom, and we're talking about things like
Speaker 1: anti tank weapons and claim war minds. They saw the
Speaker 1: writings of these activists where they had said that they
Speaker 1: were involved in seditious conspiracy. It goes on and on
Speaker 1: like this. That trial got no convictions. So you get
Speaker 1: these acquittals in these cases of trying people for trying
Speaker 1: to overthrow the government. I get that that's a part
Speaker 1: of the disappearance of a story that there's a coherent
Speaker 1: movement say more about how yeah, go ahead. More than that,
Speaker 1: what emerges from it is that it is a disaster
Speaker 1: for the prosecuting agencies, the atf dog, FBI. Everyone is
Speaker 1: embarrassed by this entire thing. And afterward, there's a policy
Speaker 1: institutionalized at the FBI that says they will make no
Speaker 1: attempt to tie white power violence to a movement. They
Speaker 1: will prosecute only individual crimes. They will not attempt to
Speaker 1: prosecute as part of a movement. So you have a
Speaker 1: piece of paper written at the end of this sedition
Speaker 1: trial that when the Timothy mcveay case comes up, says
Speaker 1: they will not try to prosecute as part of a movement.
Speaker 1: And why do they say in this document that they
Speaker 1: won't do that, because because it's a no win proposition
Speaker 1: that they thought that was why they lost those prosecutions.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of tactical judgment. It's a tactical judgment
Speaker 1: and a recognition that there's not a sufficient public will
Speaker 1: to prosecute white power violence as the work of a movement.
Speaker 1: And I mean, if anything, that's only deepened by the
Speaker 1: events of the early nineteen nineties Ridge and Ridge and
Speaker 1: Waco and the sieges, where where the state very clearly
Speaker 1: oversteps in and uses militarized violence against against white power
Speaker 1: activists in one case and followers of the branch Davidian
Speaker 1: compounded the other case. So the FBI is a part
Speaker 1: of the story and the deal Department of Justice. They
Speaker 1: decline to treat white white power or white supremacy movements
Speaker 1: as a coordinated and coherent said of terrorist groups, even
Speaker 1: after Oklahoma City. Why does the rest of the world
Speaker 1: go along with that? Why does the media accept that
Speaker 1: instead of pushing against the government's failure to construct a narrative.
Speaker 1: I think that there is a very durable narrative form
Speaker 1: about the lone wolf gunmen. And when there is a
Speaker 1: mass violent event that is carried out by a white perpetrator,
Speaker 1: we almost always see the same story about it. It
Speaker 1: almost always goes to lone wolf mental health and sort
Speaker 1: of like a psychological profile, rather than going to connections
Speaker 1: and ideology and politics, even when there is clear clear
Speaker 1: evidence that these are white power gunmen. So it's a
Speaker 1: kind of denial, and it may be an individual psychological denial,
Speaker 1: or it may be a white people wide social denial.
Speaker 1: I mean, my assumption is that you know that many
Speaker 1: African Americans would not instinctively think, oh, it must be
Speaker 1: a lone wolf, but might think they are organized people
Speaker 1: who are who are out to get us. Well, not
Speaker 1: only that, but the term lone wolf comes from this movement,
Speaker 1: So we are allowing this movement to disappear every time
Speaker 1: we say that phrase. One question that I hear a
Speaker 1: lot about this story is who failed to stop this movement?
Speaker 1: Because in the entirety of my book, there's never a
Speaker 1: moment where when there's like a decisive court case that
Speaker 1: renders the movement unable to organize even for a short time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't have an Elliot's in your book. You don't
Speaker 1: have a you know, it will be hard to make
Speaker 1: a movie out of it because you don't have the
Speaker 1: heroic cop or you know, an FBI agent who stands
Speaker 1: up and says enough, I'm going I'm going to change
Speaker 1: this around. There's one actually who quits and frustration after
Speaker 1: this edition. Trial policy is instituted about not tying the
Speaker 1: individual crimes of the broad movement. And there are some
Speaker 1: heroic local reporters who have like one piece of this
Speaker 1: story in real time, which is amazing. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are people who are trying right, but the failure is
Speaker 1: exists at a I have to use one historical jargon term,
Speaker 1: which is transscalar, meaning that the failure of response to
Speaker 1: this movement lives both at the level of like personal
Speaker 1: prejudice of people in various positions of power allow it
Speaker 1: to go unchecked right all the way up through failures
Speaker 1: of media reporting, failures of juror education, failures of prosecutorial
Speaker 1: policy and the law, failures of military policy to stop
Speaker 1: this kind of organizing, and active duty troops failures in
Speaker 1: all kinds of different allocation of surveillance resources all the
Speaker 1: way up right, so transcalar, meaning it goes every level
Speaker 1: of all the way up to every level of systemic
Speaker 1: power you can think of, and it's all so imbricated
Speaker 1: that I think to really change it would require a
Speaker 1: massive shift in public discourse such that people start to
Speaker 1: think about it as a movement all the way up
Speaker 1: to reforming those policies and laws that allow these things
Speaker 1: to continue. Well, one change that might potentially becoming is
Speaker 1: ironically driven by a rapidly growing number of wildly successful
Speaker 1: and heavily publicized terrorist attacks, which is what we've seen
Speaker 1: in the last few years. You know, I'm oversimplifying a bit,
Speaker 1: but I would say since Charlottesville, American public consciousness, US
Speaker 1: public consciousness has really been profoundly raised around these issues,
Speaker 1: such that even events that take place abroad like the
Speaker 1: christ Church, New Zealand attacks, are incorporated into our understanding
Speaker 1: or our wake up call, which I think was not
Speaker 1: so much true for the unders Bravick attacks, which although
Speaker 1: there was interested in the United States, and there was
Speaker 1: a movie and there was a long New York or article,
Speaker 1: there was still some tendency to see this as though
Speaker 1: it were a Northern European problem. You know, something not
Speaker 1: a problem of the US. On top of that, there
Speaker 1: was the fact that Bravick, you know, was a white
Speaker 1: guy who killed a lot of white people, I mean,
Speaker 1: and so it was it seemed possible not to construct
Speaker 1: this narrative. But the recent events don't look that way.
Speaker 1: They look like a coordinated set of events around the world.
Speaker 1: And what's more, we also now have a powerful comparison
Speaker 1: to make, which is the comparison to self radicalized terrorists
Speaker 1: who are acting in the name of Islam, who also
Speaker 1: have practiced a kind of leaderless resistance. But that's not
Speaker 1: how a lot of the most effective attacks of the
Speaker 1: Islamic state operate. They operate on a leaderless resistance principle.
Speaker 1: So we now have a salient example in our minds
Speaker 1: and lots and lots of attacks. Do you have a
Speaker 1: sense that these attacks are actually speeding up or is
Speaker 1: that an artifact of our starting to notice them more?
Speaker 1: It feels to me like a wave of attacks that
Speaker 1: we're in. And something that I have been trying to
Speaker 1: talk about since Charlottesville is that the body count is
Speaker 1: very very low still given the kind of public facing
Speaker 1: activism that we can observe. So the body count is
Speaker 1: low relative to what it could be. Well, so if
Speaker 1: we compare the earlier moment with this moment and compare
Speaker 1: something similar amounts of public sphere activity with where we
Speaker 1: are right now, the comparative body count is very low, UM,
Speaker 1: meaning that I would expect there to be more death.
Speaker 1: But does that mean, just to clarify, does that mean
Speaker 1: you expect more death is coming or that you're surprised
Speaker 1: that it hasn't come yet. No, no, no no, no, I
Speaker 1: would expect more mass attacks to becoming. Yes, and we
Speaker 1: should pause on that for a moment. You're saying, in
Speaker 1: light of the historical examples and evidence, you would predict
Speaker 1: that there are more very violent public attacks coming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be my hunch. I mean, historians always are
Speaker 1: reluctant to make prognosis about the future, and understandably I am,
Speaker 1: like I said, I don't have an archive. But my
Speaker 1: hunch is that, given how much public facing activity we've
Speaker 1: seen in the last say, five years, I am staggered
Speaker 1: that the body count is not already higher. So I
Speaker 1: would be very surprised if it did not amplify. UM.
Speaker 1: And that's also true because we have this other X
Speaker 1: factor about UM. So if you look at rises in
Speaker 1: the clan throughout its life, so from eighteen sixty six
Speaker 1: to the present, we have these clearly defined ebbs and
Speaker 1: flows of the clan. Um. The the high points always
Speaker 1: align with the aftermath of warfare in American society, and
Speaker 1: they do that more consistently than they align with things
Speaker 1: like economic hardship or poverty, or even anti immigration sentiment
Speaker 1: or um segregation law changes, UM. And the fact that
Speaker 1: we are now in a prolonged aftermath of war period
Speaker 1: that is stretched out coming out of Iraq and eventually
Speaker 1: out of I mean we're in. We're in kind of
Speaker 1: like a forever aftermath right now, forever wars aftermath exactly.
Speaker 1: And I mean this is a this is a kind
Speaker 1: of aftermath that we have never seen before. If you
Speaker 1: think about kind of the cycles of combat and aftermath
Speaker 1: in that it is mostly focused on one sector of
Speaker 1: society that interacts less and less with other sectors of society. Right,
Speaker 1: we see increasing segregation of military families into communities apart
Speaker 1: from other families. We see increasing use of things like
Speaker 1: stop loss in multiple tours to put people back in
Speaker 1: combat over and over rather than drafting new people. I
Speaker 1: teach at a university which is as wonderful students, but
Speaker 1: I hardly ever have students who have themselves served, or
Speaker 1: have even have family members who've served. So there's a
Speaker 1: profound social segregation around who is doing this work of violence,
Speaker 1: and a stretching out of the combat aftermath period. I
Speaker 1: don't know what that will do in those earlier periods.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting because at one point I wondered if
Speaker 1: we might be seeing like a Rambo effect right where
Speaker 1: veterans come back and just can't stop doing the violence
Speaker 1: of warfare. But it turns out that violence increases for
Speaker 1: everybody in American society after warfare, people who definitely didn't serve,
Speaker 1: like older people and women and children, across all of
Speaker 1: those groups. There's just more violence in the aftermath of
Speaker 1: warfare in American society. So in this long aftermath period,
Speaker 1: I think we should be concerned about this effect where
Speaker 1: vigilante or excuse me, revolutionary groups in this case are
Speaker 1: able to either mobilize that violent sentiment or I don't know,
Speaker 1: contribute to infan and in some way. I want to
Speaker 1: close by asking you about a phenomenon that is obviously
Speaker 1: very significant for the post nineteen ninety five of white supremacy.
Speaker 1: The era that we're in now, and that is the Internet,
Speaker 1: not in its proto message board form, but in the
Speaker 1: contemporary form that we know, which includes not only Internet
Speaker 1: one point oh, but also social media, and in which,
Speaker 1: among other things, it's much easier to spread information to
Speaker 1: people who never have to have individual human contact with
Speaker 1: each other. They might, but they don't need to have done.
Speaker 1: It strikes me that, on the one hand, the phenomenon
Speaker 1: of self radicalization, the Dylan roof whom, as you say
Speaker 1: and the close of your book, never actually had to
Speaker 1: meet any people who shared his views to develop them.
Speaker 1: So in that sense, you could sort of imagine that
Speaker 1: the Internet is a social media are are vehicles to
Speaker 1: spread ideology and to spread violence. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: we did have Charlottesville, which was less we forget, began
Speaker 1: with a march that was called Unite the Right, which
Speaker 1: was trying precisely to translate Internet connections to the real
Speaker 1: life sphere. Talk about, if you would, the Internet and
Speaker 1: how it's going to affect or is affecting white power
Speaker 1: in our present moment. The actual violence of even public
Speaker 1: facing events like Charlottesville that led to the death of
Speaker 1: Heather Higher and the beating of other demonstrators is important
Speaker 1: to queue up as we have that conversation. The internet
Speaker 1: is both concerning and immensely hopeful. The use of viral
Speaker 1: videos and live streaming of the attacks is new and
Speaker 1: strikes me as very much of a piece with our
Speaker 1: present moment. And I'm thinking of the christ Church shooter
Speaker 1: live streaming the attack, and also the militias on the
Speaker 1: border detaining undocumented immigrants and live streaming, you know, their
Speaker 1: agony as they were held by a non government group
Speaker 1: in order to turn them over to the border patrol.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, I do want to say that
Speaker 1: like there is, there is a way that the internet
Speaker 1: could also be an agent of change and could offer
Speaker 1: us a seed of hope. The idea that we talked
Speaker 1: about with connecting these stories together as a form of
Speaker 1: understanding the history, such that we can talk about christ
Speaker 1: Church and the Tree of Life shooting and Charlottesville and
Speaker 1: Dylan Roofs shooting and Charleston all as the act of
Speaker 1: the white power movement. One potential there is to connect
Speaker 1: the impacted communities with one another and to create a
Speaker 1: kind of coalition politics that could resist this kind of violence,
Speaker 1: and so you know, the Internet gives and takes away,
Speaker 1: I suppose, but there is a way that it might
Speaker 1: also provide an instrument for public understanding that wasn't available
Speaker 1: to us in that earlier period. Kathleen, thank you very
Speaker 1: very much, not just for talking with us, but for
Speaker 1: your extraordinarily important work to help us come to terms
Speaker 1: with by recognizing a genuine, organized, unified set of ideologies
Speaker 1: that are in fact a social movement with real violent tendencies.
Speaker 1: Unless we recognize that, we're not going to be anywhere.
Speaker 1: And when we do recognize that, and I have some
Speaker 1: confidence that we will, it will be thanks to your
Speaker 1: work and to the work of other other people like you.
Speaker 1: Thank you very very much for being with us. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me. Before talking to Kathleen and
Speaker 1: reading her book. I'm afraid I was one of those
Speaker 1: people who believe the message that attacks by white supremacists
Speaker 1: are isolated, disconnected, lone wolf actions. I didn't take on
Speaker 1: board the extent to which the Oklahoma City bombing and
Speaker 1: the white supremacist attacks, including the Charlottesville events and attacks
Speaker 1: on mosques and synagogues, were actually part of an organized
Speaker 1: social movement, A lot like the international jihadi movement. What's
Speaker 1: scary about that diagnosis? You heard directly from Kathleen, She
Speaker 1: said she expects the body count to rise. Now, historical
Speaker 1: precedent isn't always a perfect predictor of what's going to
Speaker 1: happen in the future, but when it comes to terrorism
Speaker 1: or other complex phenomena, it's often the best predictor that
Speaker 1: we're going to get. So I was a little bit scared,
Speaker 1: I will admit. My takeaway, though, is more about what
Speaker 1: we can do going forward than just the feeling that, boy,
Speaker 1: is this scary. The only way to solve and address
Speaker 1: a phenomena like white power terrorism is actually to recognize
Speaker 1: it for what it is. Once we understand that people
Speaker 1: can be radicalized, we can try to track the people
Speaker 1: who are in the process of becoming radicalized. Once we
Speaker 1: know there are targets, we can harden those targets and
Speaker 1: try to prevent attacks, much in the way that we've
Speaker 1: tried with some success in some instances, although not on others,
Speaker 1: to protect ourselves against the threat of international jihadi terrorism. So,
Speaker 1: in a sense, I think there are things we can
Speaker 1: do provided we diagnose the threat for what it actually is.
Speaker 1: Deep background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Lydia gene Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrel
Speaker 1: and Jason Roskowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme
Speaker 1: music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the
Speaker 1: Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg and Mia Lobel. I'm
Speaker 1: Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman.
Speaker 1: This is Deep Background