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. We're going to have a new episode
Speaker 1: in your feed on Wednesday, but before then, I wanted
Speaker 1: to share this episode with you from our archives. I
Speaker 1: couldn't stop thinking about it in the light of the
Speaker 1: insurrection at the Capitol. It's a conversation I had with
Speaker 1: Kathleen Bellou, a historian at the University of Chicago. Her
Speaker 1: book Bring the War Home, The White Power Movement and
Speaker 1: Paramilitary America is the definitive look at the modern history
Speaker 1: of the white power movement. I spoke to Kathleen in
Speaker 1: May of twenty nineteen, just after a shooting at a
Speaker 1: synagogue outside San Diego in which one person was killed
Speaker 1: and three were injured. She held me then see how
Speaker 1: that shooting was not just an isolated action by a
Speaker 1: white supremacist, but part of a broader social movement, and
Speaker 1: she predicted that there would be more attacks. Unfortunately, Kathleen
Speaker 1: was right. I've been thinking about our conversation because it
Speaker 1: helped me put what happened at the Capitol into historical context.
Speaker 1: It's no surprise that Kathleen has been widely interviewed and
Speaker 1: quoted in the last week. I hope listening to her
Speaker 1: now helps you contextualize the same way it has done
Speaker 1: for me. Kathleen, welcome to Deep Background. Before we dive
Speaker 1: into the history and prehistory of white power and white supremacy,
Speaker 1: can I ask you just a personal question, how did
Speaker 1: she get interested in this topic? It is not the
Speaker 1: most obvious topic for historian to work on. It isn't
Speaker 1: and in fact, when I began the dissertation, I was
Speaker 1: told by more than one person that it technically could
Speaker 1: not count as history, because the usual rule of thumb
Speaker 1: when you're starting a dissertation is that you should be
Speaker 1: studying things twenty five years ago or further is the rule.
Speaker 1: It turns out that it took me so long to
Speaker 1: finish the book that I had cleared that mark by
Speaker 1: the time it was all said and done. But I
Speaker 1: actually think that the study of the recent past has become,
Speaker 1: as you can see with this project, urgently important to
Speaker 1: understanding our political moment and the debates and challenges that
Speaker 1: we now find ourselves embroiled in. I wanted to start
Speaker 1: by asking about the category of white power or white supremacy,
Speaker 1: certainly in a country like the United States, which had
Speaker 1: slavery from the very beginning of the country, and of
Speaker 1: course there was slavery long before there was a United States.
Speaker 1: In North America. The idea that white people are superior
Speaker 1: to the black people, that people of African descent, is
Speaker 1: almost baked in to the earliest history of the country
Speaker 1: and the prehistory of the country. And I wonder, how
Speaker 1: do you know where to start? You know, when you
Speaker 1: talk about white power or white supremacy. You know, how
Speaker 1: do you know that you don't have to start all
Speaker 1: the way back in the sixteen hundreds when the first
Speaker 1: African slaves were brought to the Americas, or in seventeen
Speaker 1: eighty seven with the US Constitution, which enshrines slavery in
Speaker 1: certain respects. The what's you are working starting place when
Speaker 1: you start thinking about white power. So when I teach
Speaker 1: this to my undergraduates, we do start with those long
Speaker 1: histories of racial inequality, the ways that white supremacy is
Speaker 1: not only a matter of ideological belief for some people
Speaker 1: in the United States, but has become imbricated in our
Speaker 1: systems of government, our distribution of resources, are policing and
Speaker 1: all kinds of other ways. It's everywhere. Race is everywhere
Speaker 1: in this country. Race is everywhere. I think reasonable people
Speaker 1: can agree on that. I think that the definitions part
Speaker 1: is critically important, especially now. So what white power refers
Speaker 1: to is a movement that comes out of the Nam War,
Speaker 1: brings together a bunch of ideologically diverse activists who had
Speaker 1: not been working together before, such as clansmen, Neo Nazis, skinheads,
Speaker 1: radical tax resistors, white separatists, and others, and kind of
Speaker 1: amalgamates them into one social movement, using the narrative of
Speaker 1: the war to bind them together, and then declares war
Speaker 1: on the federal government. So that begins in nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: Before that, I would characterize things like the mini iterations
Speaker 1: of the KKK, the Neo Nazi Party in the United States.
Speaker 1: Those things are more like vigilante violence, in that the
Speaker 1: violence is either supporting the state or supporting local status
Speaker 1: quo power. Post nineteen eighty three, we're dealing with a
Speaker 1: completely different thing. After that, it is a revolutionary movement
Speaker 1: that is attempting to overthrow the United States, either through
Speaker 1: a kind of long asymmetrical war of sabotage or through
Speaker 1: a direct revolution. So that's the white power movement. The
Speaker 1: tricky one for a lot of people is white nationalism.
Speaker 1: And actually, I think it's easier to understand right now
Speaker 1: because all of these stories in the news about Hindu
Speaker 1: nationalism make this distinction really, really clear. So Hindu nationalism,
Speaker 1: for listeners who meant to be familiar, is a movement
Speaker 1: in India in which people who are a Hindu nationalists
Speaker 1: and they call themselves that are organizing to make India
Speaker 1: more oriented around Hinduism in culture and in policy. Right,
Speaker 1: so they're trying to inject the nation of India with
Speaker 1: Hinduism more than an Ardias. It's complicated in India by
Speaker 1: the fact that the name for India in the language
Speaker 1: and Hindi is Hindustan. So you know, the word itself,
Speaker 1: Hindu doesn't only mean the religion. It also means a culture,
Speaker 1: also means a civilization. It's a tricky one, indeed. But
Speaker 1: the category is India white nationalism. The category is not
Speaker 1: the United States. The nation imagined by white nationalism after
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three is fundamentally opposed to the United States
Speaker 1: and also to New Zealand and Australia and other nations
Speaker 1: where this takes hold. White nationalism is attempting to create
Speaker 1: a transnational group of white people that will take over
Speaker 1: white homelands, and eventually many of them hope to wage
Speaker 1: war such that they can achieve an all white world.
Speaker 1: That's not the same thing as say the Clan in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties, where people were marching on the National
Speaker 1: Mall with their robes and hoods but their faces uncovered, which,
Speaker 1: among other things, anti immigrant. It was both suppressing African Americans,
Speaker 1: but also the Clan in the nineteen it's nineteen twenties
Speaker 1: iteration was very focused on immigrants, especially from Catholic countries.
Speaker 1: The white power movement also is anti immigrant. But the
Speaker 1: thing that's different is that after nineteen eighty three, this
Speaker 1: is an anti government, anti nation movement. It's not an
Speaker 1: over exert 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 it was supporting the
Speaker 1: already defeated ideals of the Confederacy. So in some sense,
Speaker 1: wasn't there a revolutionary impulse implicit in the clan from
Speaker 1: the beginning? I think yes, But I think this one
Speaker 1: is highly debatable, and I think it depends on what
Speaker 1: historians would call periodization, meaning when you choose to stop
Speaker 1: that story. So, the first clan was founded in eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty six in Pulaski, Tennessee, by frustrated veterans of the Federacy.
Speaker 1: It very quickly grew, but at the beginning was mostly
Speaker 1: understood as sort of like a burlesque prankster group. And
Speaker 1: then there is this moment when it formalizes and turns violent,
Speaker 1: and that violence is directed at African Americans, school tax collectors,
Speaker 1: school teachers, and people from the North who come in
Speaker 1: to implement reconstruction and people in the South who support reconstruction.
Speaker 1: In other words, it is an attempt either to resist
Speaker 1: the federal government's efforts to reconstruct the South or to
Speaker 1: form a new system of power. So right in there
Speaker 1: is the distinction between revolutionary and something else. Historians have
Speaker 1: sort of argued a lot over this, but I think
Speaker 1: it's important to remember that the Jim Crow regime in
Speaker 1: the 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, but a
Speaker 1: lot of it in public. I mean, one of the
Speaker 1: things that always amazes me about lynching is that there
Speaker 1: are postcards that were spread through the South of people
Speaker 1: white people gathered around a lynched African American with a
Speaker 1: photograph being taken as a kind of commemoration of the event,
Speaker 1: and no one, no one's wearing a mask, no one's
Speaker 1: hiding his face. Not only that, but there are women
Speaker 1: and children in their Sunday best clothes. These events are
Speaker 1: all very often happening on the courthouse or at local
Speaker 1: sites of power. And it's also not just in the South.
Speaker 1: These are happening in Indiana and the Pacific Northwest, in Texas,
Speaker 1: and in fact, for one stretch in South Texas, the
Speaker 1: chance of being lynched as much higher for Mexican Americans
Speaker 1: and Mexicans than it is for African American men in
Speaker 1: the South. It's that move into lynching that makes me
Speaker 1: reluctant to think of it as revolutionary violence, because lynching
Speaker 1: has mostly been understood as scholars as conveying a kind
Speaker 1: of popular sovereignty of the community, in other words, in
Speaker 1: other words, that when you lynch somebody, the whole community
Speaker 1: is getting together to do it. It's a kind of
Speaker 1: perverted version of small d democracy, where we're doing this
Speaker 1: 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 a social movement that happens
Speaker 1: in the years proceeding. The clan builds paramilitary training camps
Speaker 1: all around the country, It trains people in paramilitary warfare.
Speaker 1: It works on amassing weapons and material, getting money, getting
Speaker 1: people organized, getting people in contact with one another. And
Speaker 1: by nineteen eighty three, I think there are two major
Speaker 1: things that happen. One is that that infrastructure is in place.
Speaker 1: Activists know each other, They're all in the same room.
Speaker 1: They're kind of coherent around this common story of the
Speaker 1: Vietnam War, which has allowed some connections possible between different
Speaker 1: groups that weren't possible before. And the other thing that
Speaker 1: happens is they get really frustrated with Reagan. Activists in
Speaker 1: the movement don't make this revolutionary turn in a moment
Speaker 1: of leftist state power, but instead under the second term
Speaker 1: of the Reagan administration. And their argument about this is
Speaker 1: that the distance between Reagan's campaign promises and what they
Speaker 1: see as his moderation proves to them once and for
Speaker 1: all that electoral change will never deliver the kind of
Speaker 1: world they want, and therefore they need to declare war.
Speaker 1: Now this is this is really relevant to us in
Speaker 1: the present moment, because it means that even at moments
Speaker 1: when the center through the left might see kind of
Speaker 1: a moment of conservative orientation and executive power, that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that activists on the fringe right will be assuaged
Speaker 1: by that, And in fact that's had just the opposite
Speaker 1: effect in this case. So that's extremely important, as you say,
Speaker 1: for the question of the relationship between recent rounds of
Speaker 1: white power of violence and the Trump administration, there's a
Speaker 1: tendency on the left to say, well, look at Charlottesville,
Speaker 1: which followed Donald Trump's assenting to the presidency, and then
Speaker 1: look at subsequent events the Tree of Life shooting, for
Speaker 1: example in the United States, the Christchurch, New Zealand attacks,
Speaker 1: and to see this all as much a result of
Speaker 1: the election of Donald Trump. And if I understand you correctly,
Speaker 1: you're telling a slightly different story about the way that
Speaker 1: white power activists reacted, for example, to the election of
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan. It's not that they were empowered or emboldened
Speaker 1: by the election of a conservative president. It's rather that
Speaker 1: they felt that it wasn't enough, and that therefore they
Speaker 1: needed to take some revolutionary action. Is that in your mind?
Speaker 1: I mean, we're jumping ahead to the president, which will
Speaker 1: come to you in good time as well. But is
Speaker 1: your view that something like that is happening now among
Speaker 1: white power activists. It's not that they're emboldened so much
Speaker 1: by Trump's election, it's that it's not enough and it
Speaker 1: gives them reason to do more. I suspect that's what
Speaker 1: we're seeing. This is when I have to give the
Speaker 1: historian caveat that the thing that lets me see the
Speaker 1: story that I write about in the book is this
Speaker 1: archive that spans newspapers, primary source materials, FBI and other
Speaker 1: surveillance documents, court testimony. We don't get that kind of
Speaker 1: source base in real time. When you talk about as
Speaker 1: a historian, talk about the archive, you mean some literal
Speaker 1: archives in some cases cashes of documents. But it's also
Speaker 1: the word archive is also a metaphor that a starin's
Speaker 1: used to describe all the materials that you guys use
Speaker 1: to try to make sense of his artical events. Exactly.
Speaker 1: You can think about it as like the receipts for
Speaker 1: the story I'm going to tell I don't have that
Speaker 1: kind of information about events from about nineteen ninety six forward,
Speaker 1: and there are some reasons for why that is in
Speaker 1: this particular cash of sources, but the earlier period does
Speaker 1: tell us a couple of things that make me concerned
Speaker 1: about the present moment in the ways that you've just described.
Speaker 1: One of them is that when there is this moment
Speaker 1: of perceived sympathetic administration that has not assuaged these activists,
Speaker 1: and in fact that has been seen as a call
Speaker 1: to arms. The other one is that there have always
Speaker 1: been sort of two spheres of activity in this movement.
Speaker 1: One of them is the sort of mass mobilizations like
Speaker 1: Charlottesville marches, political campaigns, organizing events, recruitment drives, campus campaigns
Speaker 1: to recruit students, speed was public speaking to ours, things
Speaker 1: like that. The other one is this massive network of
Speaker 1: 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, and often there were
Speaker 1: people who crossed the line between those two kinds of activism.
Speaker 1: And we're undertaking both of those things as a coordinated
Speaker 1: kind of kind of campaign. The fact that we can't
Speaker 1: see that underground in real time doesn't mean that that's
Speaker 1: not happenings, as we are noticing more of these above
Speaker 1: board events and in fact, this wave of violent attacks
Speaker 1: that you describe, which I might also add Dylan Roofs
Speaker 1: shooting in Charleston absolutely, I oh no, yeah, well, also
Speaker 1: include Penders Bravik in Norway. Yes. Putting those all together
Speaker 1: in one story is very, very important because then we
Speaker 1: can start to say, oh, wow, this is a wave
Speaker 1: we're talking about. You know, three attempted attacks in the
Speaker 1: last 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 other 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, and
Speaker 1: it comes with a whole cultural apparatus of things like
Speaker 1: writing in ruins and using the Viking imagery and things
Speaker 1: like that. The other one is Christian identity, and I
Speaker 1: think this one is more impactful for a couple of
Speaker 1: different reasons. One is that it has a very clear
Speaker 1: role for women, who turn out to be enormously important
Speaker 1: to motivating this movement and holding it together. The other
Speaker 1: 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 called 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 or Jesus returns, or you
Speaker 1: have to become a soldier of God to clear the
Speaker 1: world of non white populations before you know, before Christ
Speaker 1: can return to the world. So what it does is
Speaker 1: transfigure this whole host of social issues that are important
Speaker 1: to the white power movement into a holy war. And
Speaker 1: one way to think about this is that it comes
Speaker 1: with this intense sense of emergency about something that people
Speaker 1: talk about very casual, casually in American culture, which is
Speaker 1: this kind of imagined moment of demographic change when the
Speaker 1: country will switch over from a majority white population to
Speaker 1: something else, And as different communities begin to make that
Speaker 1: transition in the eighties and the nineties, these activists get
Speaker 1: more and more preoccupied with this. For people in the
Speaker 1: white power movement, the issues that might be conservative or
Speaker 1: understandable to us as conservative, like opposing immigration, opposing abortion,
Speaker 1: GBT rights, opposing feminism, being in favor of racial segregation,
Speaker 1: or freedom of association, all of that stuff for white
Speaker 1: power activists is attached to this deep preoccupation with the
Speaker 1: future of the race through the production of white babies.
Speaker 1: So it's not for white power activists just they oppose
Speaker 1: abortion because it's a conservative issue or because they have
Speaker 1: concerns about unborn life. It's that they oppose abortion because
Speaker 1: abortion is one thing that is threatening the white birth rate,
Speaker 1: along with immigration integration, which they think will result in
Speaker 1: the birth of non white children or mixed race children
Speaker 1: who they see as non human. LGBT rights they think
Speaker 1: will take white women out of the work of birthing children.
Speaker 1: They're worried about feminism because they think women should be
Speaker 1: at home raising children. This whole production of white children.
Speaker 1: Thing is like the glue that holds together this whole
Speaker 1: belief system. And in order for it to make sense,
Speaker 1: you really have to think about how vivid and immediate
Speaker 1: this sense of emergency is to these activists. They feel
Speaker 1: this as an apocalyptic threat, so not as kind of
Speaker 1: like a soft demographic change that's going to come at
Speaker 1: some point. We'll be right back, okay. So you get
Speaker 1: this attempt to unify these disparate, potentially disparate social groups
Speaker 1: around a common vision and a kind of a common ideology.
Speaker 1: It's happening in the middle of the nineteen eighties, and
Speaker 1: it then leads to some rather extraordinary consequences, most saliently
Speaker 1: in your book. And this is the kind of climactic
Speaker 1: point in your book, the nineteen ninety five bombing of
Speaker 1: the Oklahoma City Federal Building by Timothy McVay and a
Speaker 1: 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 thing and
Speaker 1: fighting with each other. 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 include 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 sprint
Speaker 1: group of people at group for 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 talked to us about leaderless resistance, because
Speaker 1: that's 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: um indoctrinate and shape activist 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 up their stuff and getting people arrested
Speaker 1: and turning over mailing lists and all kinds of things
Speaker 1: like that. So leaderless resistance is actually implemented in large
Speaker 1: part to foil surveillance, and it has the other kind
Speaker 1: of immediate benefit of foiling core prosecution, but the lasting
Speaker 1: impact of it has actually been to foil public understanding
Speaker 1: because what happens is leaderless resistance plays right into this
Speaker 1: sort of media narrative about lone wolf violence or crazy
Speaker 1: people or a few bad apples or mad gunmen, right
Speaker 1: where we get a lot of different stories about one
Speaker 1: person committing an act of violence and don't get the
Speaker 1: apparatus to put those things together into the same history.
Speaker 1: So leaderless resistance is one of the ways that we
Speaker 1: get from the formation of the movement to Oklahoma City.
Speaker 1: The other one is the implementation of computer social networking.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty three eighty four, they implement a series
Speaker 1: of code word accessed message board is called liberty net.
Speaker 1: This is before the Internet, so technically this is not
Speaker 1: the Internet, but 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. And also, by the way, it takes the
Speaker 1: FBI like two years to crack the code and see
Speaker 1: what they're posting, kind of amazing that white power might
Speaker 1: be might be the very first social movement to have
Speaker 1: actively exploited computer technology in that way. Yeah, not only that,
Speaker 1: but the way that they do this is very much
Speaker 1: like Facebook, long before Facebook was invented. What they post
Speaker 1: to these message boards includes a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: practical content like assassination lists and you know, propaganda messaging
Speaker 1: and things like that, but it also includes things like
Speaker 1: personal ads. So what these boards are meant to do
Speaker 1: is to connect activists together in a movement in order
Speaker 1: to motivate this cell style activism. So it's in a way,
Speaker 1: if you're going to have leader list resistance, you need
Speaker 1: cells and they need to communicate with each other somehow,
Speaker 1: even if not in coordination, and then the message sports
Speaker 1: become the mechanism in your story for how that happens. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you also need a big You need the social movement
Speaker 1: to share resources and also to connect everybody in common
Speaker 1: culture such that they can understand what the tarts are
Speaker 1: supposed to be. It's interesting that Timothy McVeigh I think
Speaker 1: you show in your book, also engage in one of
Speaker 1: these models of get some resources by robbing somebody, right,
Speaker 1: He and a couple of the associates robbed a gun
Speaker 1: dealer to get the money to have the resources to
Speaker 1: buy to buy the material to blow up the federal building. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that's a strategy from the order, and also from
Speaker 1: a novel called The Turner Diaries, which kind of becomes
Speaker 1: a I mean, it's it's important as a cultural text,
Speaker 1: but and as a manual of operations. But it's also
Speaker 1: kind of a cultural loadstar from the movement in the
Speaker 1: sense that it does that work of explaining to everybody
Speaker 1: what they're trying to do and how they're going to
Speaker 1: do it. I was fascinated reading your book about the
Speaker 1: centrality of this novel, The Turner Diaries, which seem to
Speaker 1: include in your account actually a blueprint even for blowing
Speaker 1: up a federal building with a truck bomb. I mean,
Speaker 1: very very detailed, sort of sort of envisioning process. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a little bit about that about that novel, because again
Speaker 1: it was a novel that I had not heard of
Speaker 1: before reading your book. Oh okay, So it's a novel
Speaker 1: that's published in Cereal in the late nineteen seventies and
Speaker 1: then comes out in paperback. And it is very difficult
Speaker 1: to overstate how important this novel is to the movement.
Speaker 1: The Turner Diaries shows up everywhere, so McVeigh sells it
Speaker 1: for a while on the gun show circuit. The Order
Speaker 1: that I talked about a moment ago keeps a stack
Speaker 1: of them in the bunk house. Other white power groups
Speaker 1: distribute them at paramilitary training. It shows up in bookstores
Speaker 1: and other places where the movement is trying to recruit
Speaker 1: far aways South Africa, and it's it's mentioned in advertisements
Speaker 1: and all kinds of different white power publications. And I
Speaker 1: think one of the reasons it's so important is it
Speaker 1: sets out to answer a question that is sort of
Speaker 1: baffling on its face, and that actually has stood in
Speaker 1: the way of prosecution more than once, which is, how
Speaker 1: could this fringe movement right. It's a very small movement
Speaker 1: possibly hope to do what it's setting out to do,
Speaker 1: which is to overthrow the United States, the most militarized
Speaker 1: superstate in world history. This is a kind of baffling
Speaker 1: problem for these activists. And in the novel, I think
Speaker 1: he 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: City bombing are not imagined to be the endpoint of
Speaker 1: this activism. The endpoint is not the act of violence.
Speaker 1: These are supposed to be political acts of violence that
Speaker 1: white power activists hope will awaken other white people to
Speaker 1: what as the self evident state of emergency facing the
Speaker 1: white race, and they think that that will eventually lead
Speaker 1: to a 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, timoth
Speaker 1: Kay 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 says, 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, in 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: events that I cover in the book were talked about
Speaker 1: at the time. So if you think about something like
Speaker 1: a shooting at Greensboro, people knew about that. That was
Speaker 1: front page news. Yeah, that made the front pages of many, many,
Speaker 1: many newspapers and eventually also became a Saturday night life
Speaker 1: sketch like that was in the zeitgeist. But somehow we
Speaker 1: haven't connected that event with Oklahoma City. We haven't connected
Speaker 1: either of them with a narrative about a social movement.
Speaker 1: We don't have really a durable way at all of
Speaker 1: thinking about how to narrate these events. So with Oklahoma City,
Speaker 1: one of the things that happens is that the federal
Speaker 1: government tries to do a big prosecution of these activists
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty seven eighty eight in Fort Smith, Arkansas.
Speaker 1: And so it's a federal trial on charges including seditious conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Seditious conspiracy in this case was wholly evident. The jury
Speaker 1: heard testimony about white power activists plotting to poison the
Speaker 1: water supply of a major city with cyanide. They seized
Speaker 1: thirty gallons of cyanide. The jurors saw laundry hampers full
Speaker 1: of illegal weapons and material pushed through the courtroom, and
Speaker 1: we're talking about things like anti tank weapons and claim
Speaker 1: war minds. They saw the writings of these activists where
Speaker 1: they had said that they were involved in seditious conspiracy.
Speaker 1: It goes on and on like this. That trial got
Speaker 1: no convictions. So you get these acquittals in these cases
Speaker 1: of trying people for trying to overthrow the government. I
Speaker 1: get that that's a part of the disappearance of a
Speaker 1: story that there's a coherent movement say more about how yeah,
Speaker 1: go ahead. More than that, what emerges from it is
Speaker 1: that it is a disaster for the prosecuting agencies, the
Speaker 1: atf DOGA, FBI. Everyone is embarrassed by this entire thing.
Speaker 1: And afterward there's a policy institutionalized at the FBI that
Speaker 1: says they will make no attempt to tie white power
Speaker 1: violence to a movement. They will prosecute only individual crimes.
Speaker 1: They will not attempt to prosecute as part of a movement.
Speaker 1: So you have a piece of paper written at the
Speaker 1: end of this Sedition trial that when the Timothy mcveay
Speaker 1: case comes up, says they will not try to prosecute
Speaker 1: as part of a movement. And why do they say
Speaker 1: in this document that they won't do that, because because
Speaker 1: it's a no win proposition that they thought that was
Speaker 1: why they lost those prosecutions. It's a kind of tactical judgment.
Speaker 1: It's a tactical judgment and a recognition that there's not
Speaker 1: a sufficient public will to prosecute white power violence as
Speaker 1: the work of a movement. And I mean, if anything,
Speaker 1: that's only deepened by the events of the early nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety Ridge and Ridge and Waco and the sieges, where
Speaker 1: where the state very clearly oversteps in and uses militarized
Speaker 1: violence against against white power activists in one case and
Speaker 1: followers of the branch Davidian compounded the other case. So
Speaker 1: the FBI is a part of the story and the
Speaker 1: deal Department of Justice. They decline to treat white white
Speaker 1: power or white supremacy movements as a coordinated and coherent
Speaker 1: set of terrorist groups even after Oklahoma City. Why does
Speaker 1: the rest of the world go along with that? Why
Speaker 1: does the media accept that instead of pushing against the
Speaker 1: government's failure to construct a narrative. I think that there
Speaker 1: is a very durable narrative form about the lone wolf gunman.
Speaker 1: And when there is a mass violent event that is
Speaker 1: carried out by a white perpetrator, we almost always see
Speaker 1: the same story about it. It almost always goes to
Speaker 1: lone wolf mental health and sort of like a psychological profile,
Speaker 1: rather than going to connections and ideology and politics, even
Speaker 1: when there is clear clear evidence that these are white
Speaker 1: power gunmen. So it's a kind of denial, and it
Speaker 1: may be an individual psychological denial, or it may be
Speaker 1: a white people wide social denial. I mean, my assumption
Speaker 1: is that you know that many African Americans would not
Speaker 1: instinctively think, oh, it must be a lone wolf, but
Speaker 1: might think they are organized people who are who are
Speaker 1: out to get us. Well, not only that, but the
Speaker 1: term lone wolf comes from this movement, So we are
Speaker 1: allowing this movement to disappear. Every time we say that phrase.
Speaker 1: One question that I hear a lot about this story
Speaker 1: is who failed to stop this movement? Because in the
Speaker 1: entirety of my book, there's never a moment when there's
Speaker 1: like a decisive court case that renders the movement unable
Speaker 1: to organize even for a short time. Yeah, you don't
Speaker 1: have an Eliots in your book. You don't have no
Speaker 1: you know, it will be hard to make a movie
Speaker 1: out of it because you don't have the heroic cop
Speaker 1: or you know, FBI agent who stands up and says enough,
Speaker 1: I'm going to change this around. There's one actually who
Speaker 1: quits and frustration after this edition. Trial policy is instituted
Speaker 1: about not tying the individual crimes of the broad movement.
Speaker 1: And there are some heroic local reporters who have like
Speaker 1: one piece of this story in real time, which is amazing.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are people who are trying right, but
Speaker 1: the failure is exists at I have to use one
Speaker 1: historical jargon term, which is transscalar, meaning that the failure
Speaker 1: of response to this movement lives both at the level
Speaker 1: of like personal prejudice of people in various positions of
Speaker 1: power that allow it to go unchecked, right all the
Speaker 1: way up through failures of media reporting, failures of juror education,
Speaker 1: failures of prosecutorial policy and the law, failures of military
Speaker 1: policy to stop this kind of organizing, and active duty troops,
Speaker 1: failures in all kinds of different allocation of surveillance resources,
Speaker 1: all the way up right, so transcalar, meaning it goes
Speaker 1: every level of every level, all the way up to
Speaker 1: every level of systemic power you can think of, and
Speaker 1: it's all so imbricated that I think to really change
Speaker 1: it would require a massive shift in public discourse such
Speaker 1: that people start to think about it as a movement,
Speaker 1: all the way up to reforming those policies and laws
Speaker 1: that allow these things to continue. Well, one change that
Speaker 1: might potentially becoming is ironically driven by a rapidly growing
Speaker 1: number of wildly successful and heavily publicized terrorist attacks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is what we've seen in the last few years.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm oversimplifying a bit, but I would say
Speaker 1: since Charlottesville, American public consciousness, US public consciousness has really
Speaker 1: been profoundly raised around these issues, such that even events
Speaker 1: that take place abroad like the christ Church, New Zealand
Speaker 1: attacks are incorporated into our understanding or our wake up call,
Speaker 1: which I think was not so much true for the
Speaker 1: unders Bravick attacks, which although there was interested in the
Speaker 1: United States, and there was a movie and there was
Speaker 1: a long New Yorker article, there was still some tendency
Speaker 1: to see this as though it were a Northern European problem,
Speaker 1: you know, something, not a problem of the US. On
Speaker 1: top of that, there was the fact that Bravik, you know,
Speaker 1: was a white guy who killed a lot of white people,
Speaker 1: I mean, and so it was it seemed possible not
Speaker 1: to construct this narrative. But the recent events don't look
Speaker 1: that way. They look like a coordinated set of events
Speaker 1: around the world. And what's more, we also now have
Speaker 1: a powerful comparison to make, which is the comparison to
Speaker 1: self radicalized terrorists who were acting in the name of Islam,
Speaker 1: who also have practiced a kind of leaderless resistance. But
Speaker 1: that's not how a lot of the most effective the
Speaker 1: tacks of the Islamic state operate. They operate on a
Speaker 1: leaderless resistance principle. So we now have a salient example
Speaker 1: in our minds and lots and lots of attacks. Do
Speaker 1: you have a sense that these attacks are actually speeding
Speaker 1: up or is that an artifact of our starting to
Speaker 1: notice them more. It feels to me like a wave
Speaker 1: of attacks that we're in. And something that I have
Speaker 1: been trying to talk about since Charlottesville is that the
Speaker 1: body count is very very low. Still, given the kind
Speaker 1: of public facing activism that we can observe, the body
Speaker 1: count is low relative to what it could be. Well,
Speaker 1: so if we compare the earlier moment with this moment
Speaker 1: and compare something like similar amounts of public sphere activity
Speaker 1: with where we are right now, the comparative body count
Speaker 1: is very low, meaning that I would expect there to
Speaker 1: be more death. But does that mean, just to clarify,
Speaker 1: does that mean you expect more death is coming or
Speaker 1: that you're surprised that it hasn't come yet. No, no, no no, no,
Speaker 1: I would expect more mass attacks to becoming. Yes, And
Speaker 1: we should pause on that for a moment. You're saying,
Speaker 1: in light of the historical examples and evidence, you would
Speaker 1: predict that there are more very violent public attacks coming. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: that would be my hunch. I mean, historians always are
Speaker 1: reluctant to make prognosis about the future, and understandably, I
Speaker 1: am Like I said, I don't have an archive, but
Speaker 1: my hunch is that given how much public facing activity
Speaker 1: we've seen in the last say five years, I am
Speaker 1: staggered that the body count is not already higher. So
Speaker 1: I 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 so if you look at rises in the
Speaker 1: clan throughout its life, so from eighteen sixty six to
Speaker 1: the present, we have these clearly defined ebbs and flow
Speaker 1: of the clan. UM. The the high points always align
Speaker 1: with the aftermath of warfare in American society, and they
Speaker 1: do that more consistently than they align with things like
Speaker 1: economic hardship or poverty, or even anti immigration sentiment or
Speaker 1: um segregation law changes. UM. And the fact that we
Speaker 1: are now in a prolonged aftermath of war period that
Speaker 1: is stretched out coming out of Iraq and eventually out
Speaker 1: of I mean we're in We're in kind of like
Speaker 1: a forever aftermath right now, forever wars aftermath exactly. And
Speaker 1: I mean this is a this is a kind of
Speaker 1: aftermath that we have never seen before. If you think
Speaker 1: about kind of the cycles of combat and aftermath um
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. UM. We see increasing use of things
Speaker 1: like op loss and multiple tours to put people back
Speaker 1: in combat over and over rather than drafting new people.
Speaker 1: I teach at a university which is as wonderful students,
Speaker 1: but I hardly ever have students who have themselves served,
Speaker 1: or have even have family members who've served. So there's
Speaker 1: a profound social segregation around who is doing this work
Speaker 1: of violence, and a stretching out of the combat aftermath period.
Speaker 1: I 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 infanon in some way. I want to close
Speaker 1: by asking you about a phenomenon that is obviously very
Speaker 1: 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 and
Speaker 1: that the Internet is a social media are our vehicles
Speaker 1: to spread ideology and to spread violence. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, we did have Charlottesville, which was less we
Speaker 1: Forget began with a march that was called Unite the Right,
Speaker 1: which was trying precisely to translate Internet connections to the
Speaker 1: real life sphere. Talk about, if you would, the Internet
Speaker 1: and how it's going to affect or is affecting white
Speaker 1: power in our present moment. The actual violence of even
Speaker 1: public facing events like Charlottesville that led to the death
Speaker 1: of Heather Higher and the beating of other demonstrators is
Speaker 1: important to queue up as we have that conversation. The
Speaker 1: Internet is both concerning and immensely hopeful. The use of
Speaker 1: viral videos and live streaming of the attacks is new
Speaker 1: and strikes me as very much of a piece with
Speaker 1: our present moment. And I'm thinking of the christ Church
Speaker 1: shooter live streaming the attack, and also the militia is
Speaker 1: on the border detaining undocumented immigrants and live streaming, you know,
Speaker 1: their agony as they were held by a non government
Speaker 1: group 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 Christchurch
Speaker 1: and the Tree of Life shooting and Charlottesville and Dylan
Speaker 1: Roofs shooting and Charleston all as the act of the
Speaker 1: white power movement. One potential there is to connect the
Speaker 1: impacted communities with one another and to create a kind
Speaker 1: 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 listening to my conversation with Kathleen.
Speaker 1: Now in the aftermath of the Capital attack is an
Speaker 1: excellent reminder that white supremacists are not merely peripheral loaners,
Speaker 1: but part of a large, significant, organized movement that shares
Speaker 1: coordinated plans, literature, and objectives. The novel The Turner Diaries
Speaker 1: that Kathleen and I discussed was invoked again by Kathleen
Speaker 1: in an article she wrote for The Washington Post in
Speaker 1: January of twenty twenty one. She points out there that
Speaker 1: The Turner Diaries also involves an attack on the US Capital,
Speaker 1: one that was not designed in the novel to destroy
Speaker 1: the capital altogether, but to show on the fence white
Speaker 1: Americans that nothing is out of bounds, that the Capital
Speaker 1: is a soft target, and that ultimately even the Capital
Speaker 1: can be attacked. Food for thought going forward, until the
Speaker 1: next time I speak to you with a fresh new episode,
Speaker 1: Be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep background is
Speaker 1: brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Gencott,
Speaker 1: our engineer is Martin Gonzalez, and our showrunner is Sophie
Speaker 1: Crane mckibbon. Theme music by Luis Guerra at Pushkin. Thanks
Speaker 1: to Mia Loobell, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carlie mcliori, Mackie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter and Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column
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