What's clear in my throats. I'm Robert Evanson. This is once again Behind the Bastards, the podcast where YadA YadA, bad people talk about him whatnot. This is the fourth chapter of my audiobook, The War on Everyone. It's our second day recording it. I'm here with Cody Johnston, Katie Stole. Hey, guys, we are all higher than we were last time. Goodness very much. The first time we were not high. We were not We were all strung out too, yeah, tired. And now we're a little bit high. We're more than a little bit high. We're more than a little bit high, but we're not as strung out. So I have a considerable assortment of throwing things around me that doesn't worry me at all. Cody called this hyper normalization, um, because I can no longer be satisfied with just just look at this, tossing some fucking bagels. You to do nothing for me, nothing for me. So I have a bag of roughly twenty paper towel rolls. I have to say that. Right before we started recording, Robert suggested that we all get on helmets and armor and he would practice his throwing knives. And that's a that's a null practice is a strong word. I just want to throw knives one episode and see if I could stick him in the soundproofing on the wall. Yeah yeah, I mean I would argue that we don't have to be here in front of you for that. Well you could be on my side. Oh yeah, Okay, now that you've said that you want to throw around knives and we're like, no, you can say something a little bed you can have. I have these throwing prinkles. You can throw some pringles. I have a box of around twelve little hundred calorie packs of pringles that are all in an open topped box together. I am excited to throw that if I can kind of wing it. My my theory, because it's kind of rectangular shaped, is if I can wing it like a frisbee, I can get it to go straight until it hits the wall and then bursts like a scatter bomb over an Afghan wedding right right. If angle it properly enough, you could get it on the stone boards. Yeah. I mean that that's the dream. That's the dream, But I think it might be a little bit unreasonably bounce out and you have to start like sharing pictures of this room so that people can get an idea of what you're talking about. We did this morning there's Danil shared a picture of the of the bagels that are stuck on the top of the sound perfect I do have a plan for those bagels and for if you guys remember two months ago we threw the coffee mate on top of the poison room. Um, so when we start our new podcast, which will be named some variant of the worst Year Ever, for the worst year of our lives, we haven't we haven't quite set yere bad year for everybody. Bad year, bad podcast, fine podcast about a bad, bad year. In January. We should inaugurate the show by taking the by that point, very very very stale bagels off of the soundproofing and taking the very very very bad uh coffee mate off of the top of the poison room and having ourselves some coffee made bagels. Gross. That sounds awful. Let's do it. Let's do it, terrible bagels to start a terrible year. We can at least see what comes out. You know, choose some coffee cream. I mean it was expired the last time we had. How much worse could it get? One pump a portion of a cream curdled cream, just like several several dusts. What that's the Joe Biden. Yeah, so he covered her mouth with that. Her reaction is hard to place. No, what do other podcast talk about before they start? Well, coach doesn't like for us to talk about too much because we always feel like, well, I feel like we've talked for like ten minutes at this point. We have, we have, we have, but like so we normally just talk. We um, we say whatever holiday it is, happy, whatever, and we make a couple of jokes or whatever about that, and then we get started. What is your book? You know? It is my audio book and there's a version of it with none of this where it's just me reading it. So I feel like they've got options, So fuck it. Fuck them assholes who donated money generously so that I do work theoretical bastards that haven't actually complained, but that I'm imagining. Well, what are you doing, Sylphie read the book to it? Okay, yeah, we might be high. It's it's possible. Chapter four, How to Build an Army Fun times. Everything you're going to read about in this chapter or listen about here about in this chapter I wrote here, but I said read I don't know why. Maybe because I'm reading is documented history. I feel the need to emphasize that here at the beginning, because the history I'm about to discuss is very much underreported. Most of this is probably not stuff you heard about, certainly not in a textbook, And the question of why that is the case is a really good one, because the story that I'm going to tell in this chapter is the story of a bloody, vicious, and exceptionally deadly insurgency that, had a few things broken differently, might have plunged the nation into mass violence. As it was, hundreds and hundreds of people were killed, and the killing continues to this day. A weird way to read that last line there. Yeah, this story of the story of this insurgency starts, as most stories of insurgencies do, with a single guy. Now, this guy's name was Louis Beam. Guys remember talking about Louis Beam a little bit in our Border episode? Um is he uh? One of the He's one of them? Listiamen that yep, yep had a border KKK guy. He had a lot to say, a lot to say, so like me, Louis Beam was a Texan. He was born in ninety six in Lufkin, Texas. And I had a roommate who was from Lufkin. Once he used to drunkenly punch out light bulbs. But that's neither here nor there. Um fun guy Sam was his name. I'd like to hear sometimes it's that's the whole story. He would get drunk and he would punch light bulbs. He was seven ft tall. Okay, so Lefkin alright. Wi. Beam was from Lefkin. He grew up in the America that modern conservatives still longingly hearkened back to. His parents were working class people, and his father served in combat during World War Two. That tradition inspired Beam to enlist in the army at age nineteen. He had a pregnant wife at this point and every reason to avoid conflict, but Beams sought out a baptism by fire and he got it. So when Beam entered the U. S. Military, he was entering an organization that, for the very first time, was racially integrated. Vietnam was the first war where like black guys and white guys would fight and mixed units and black people were allowed to do all the jobs. And yeah, um, now This did not sit well with Beam because he was a big supporter of George Wallace. You might remember from the last Segregation Forever fella. Yeah, a lot of common you know, idols and heroes and people that these people towards. Yeah, they're all connected in at least two or three ways. Part of the trouble putting this together was figuring out, like where to stop talking about their connections, like with Matt Brack and the guy who wrote the third series of books inspired by the Turner Diaries, also a guest on Alex Jones's show. Right, Yeah, there are a lot of these sea And at what point is it? Are you saying it too much? And it's like taking the time to from it? Yeah. Yeah, So Louis Beam joins the military, love and segregation and George Wallace. Uh, and yeah, he's frustrated by the military that he finds himself in frustrated it serving alongside black people. At one point, Beam and several of his most racist comrades hang Confederate flags in their barracks and active protest against the civil rights movement. That was the right thing to protest during the Vietnam War. So that's the guy Beam is super psyched about Vietnam, hates black people being able to drink from the same water. Fans Yeah, so Bring the war Home by Kathleen Blue provides good context for the nature of racial strife among the U S soldiers in Vietnam during the time Beam enlisted. Quote will white and black soldiers faced combat together, the rear echelon was intensely segregated. One black soldier described Saigon as just like Mississippi. In Beams camp at Chiu Chi and Vietnam, black and white soldiers frequently exchanged insults, slights, and blows. Beam served in the twenty Aviation Battalion at a moment of escalating racial tensions. As the language of black power circulated between home and battlefront, black soldiers created a culture of a frozen black berets greeting each other with fist bumps. Some white soldiers in the twenty five reported feeling alienated are threatened because of such actions. Klansman, serving as active duty personnel in Vietnam announced plans for cross burnings and spray painted racial epithets on rear echelon buildings. By nineteen seventy, the Marine Corps recorded more than a thousand incidents of racial violence and installations, both in Vietnam and back home. Wow, that's actually I've never heard that before. That you never hear that story. Yeah, I'm not surprised. But also back in the States there were murders and lynchings on military bases. Yeah, yeah, of course there were. I can't stop using those voice of like mild interest, not not appropriate for this. Uh. Yeah. In nineteen sixty four, four members of the United Clans of America murdered a Black Army Reserve lieutenant colonel. Later in the nineteen sixties, the Camp Pendleton Clan chapter reached two hundred members in size and carried out a campaign of shootings, fire bombings, torture, and harassment of black marines. Beam did not join the United Clans until after he was discharged from service, but he served in a military where racial violence was common and where membership in extremist groups by uniformed service members was also common. It was not illegal yet you could openly be a clansman and serving the U. S. Military. At this point. That changes as a result of some of the things that happened in the story. It's a good change, yea positive change. Good move. Maybe soldiers shouldn't have the right to join organizations that urge the enslavement of huge chunks of the populace. What's the It's no, it's a quarter of soldiers. It's a quarter of active duty in the u S. Soldiers. No, not our members have have met white supremacists at some point during their time. So yeah, yeah, but it's not a quarter of them are experienced. Yeah it's common though, Yeah, yeah common. Yeah. Beam was a helicopter doorgunner. He manned a fifty caliber machine gun on a Huey and by his own recollection, killed over fifty people. Um, yeah, so he had he had a hardcore job. He saw some hardcore combat. He expressed appreciation for quote the joys of killing your enemy, but he also struggled with what would later become known as PTSD. Beam and many others at the time called it post Vietnam stress syndrome because again, like this is not something people really had vocabulary for it. Yeah, after coming home from the war, he said this to an undercover reporter at a KKK event. Quote, after I got home from the war, things didn't seem like they were before I went to Vietnam. Everything seemed different. The whole climate of the nation had changed. Before I went over to fight, most of the people seemed behind US soldiers, but when I returned, it seemed the majority of Americans were against us, against the war as a whole. So he doesn't see that as a good thing. It kind of sees it as like a stab in the back sort of tuation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's never happened to a soldier before later turned into a fascist revolutionary. Louis Bim came home in nineteen sixty eight and almost immediately joined the KKK. He was racist, certainly, but the primary hatred he developed in Vietnam was an intense discussed with the left and with communism. In the early nineteen seventies, he was involved in a spate of terroristic crimes, machine gun attack on a Communist party headquarters in Houston, the bombing of a left wing radio station. No one died in these attacks, and he managed to avoid charges for either of them. In nineteen seventy six, he switched to a different section of the KKK, the Knights of the ku klux Klan lived by a little tyke named David Duke. Yeah, d Duke, Yeah, so Duke had grown up as we stayed in the last episode, reading Willis Carto's Western Destiny paper and flirting with Nazism in college, dressing in his SSU learn Well, he's a little bit, a little bit Nazism. Yeah, I mean he was wearing his S. S uniform as a protest for a guy whose name I have forgotten when he marched in it a been down to school's free speech alley, but he also had an S. S uniform. Duke's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan became the most prominent clan group of the nineteen seventies, due in large part to Duke's decision to wed the organization more closely with outright Nazism and help organize clan border patrols to stop migrants. Racial paranoia and fear of communism led to a vast surgeon clan ranks throughout the nineteen seventies. What's up coding to this racial paranoia? Yeah, this is never this has never happened again, thankfully. In nineteen seventy five, there were an estimated sixty clansmen nationwide. By nineteen seventy nine, that number had increased to ten thousand. Plus another seventy five thousand Clans sympathizers. So for a while, Duke seemed like a pretty good pick for someone who might manage to take on the role of being the next George Lincoln Rockwell. He was charismatic and go to drawing media attention. In nineteen seventy eight and seventy nine, he became a constant figure on American talk shows, who would have him on because they thought he was funny. In nineteen seventy five, Willis Harte covered Duke's campaign for the Louisiana Senate in an issue one of his weekly magazine, The National Spotlight. Carto wrote, he sees the Clan not as a terrorist organization, but as a political movement with ideological leadership now zing and whatnot. Duke only one about one third of the vote, but that was still seen rightly as a huge improvement in the political fortunes of the fascist right. Gallup reported that the number of Americans with favorable opinions of the Clan nearly doubled from nineteen nineteen seventy five. Duke then represented the best hopes of main streamers in the late nineteen seventies, Beam and a number of other clansmen would wind up on the side of the Vanguardists. One of these other men was Bill Wilkinson, a former mid level leader in Duke's clan who created his own group, the Invisible Empire, in the late nineteen seventies. Bill was noteworthy for his sheer willingness to make violent threats, saying in an interview, I'm the only clan member who believes in having guns around. These guns aren't for shooting rabbits, therefore wasting people, cool, cool company, wonderful thing to just publicly say today, loud, very loud. If he were saying that today, he would be posting it on Facebook, and there would be a minion in the background on all those little image messages. Maybe. In nineteen seventy nine, Wilkinson's clan protested a march by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Indicatur, Alabama. They showed up with clubs and wound up fighting with both the marchers and the local police. Gunfire ensued and three people were wounded. No one was killed, but that would change November nineteen eighty, when Wilkinson's clan marched against communist demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina. Now, have you heard of Greensboro, North Carolina. Yeah, it's a long story that we won't be getting into enough detail in this because we just have to so much to cover. But there's a clash between the communists in between the klansmen, and the clansmen opened fire, killing five of the protesters, and their stories of them like specifically targeting black protesters and like not shooting white ones. It's it's it's a it's a murder. They murder five people. Now, later investigation reveals that police were complicit in the massacre, actively directing officers away from the side of the protest in order to ensure that no law enforcement was present when the clan attacked, aside from an FBI agent who was embedded with the clan attackers but did nothing to stop them from firing into the crowd. Cool, yeah, go FBI. Why would you? Why would you do anything in that situation. It's one of those surprising yeah. Now, none of the killers in Greensboro were found guilty. In a subsequent criminal trial, they argued that opening fire into the crowd, often when the back of moving vehicles, had been justified because of the threat to their lives. Posed by the communists. Yeah, because communists are inherently dangerous. There's one thing we know about communists. Yeah, I love these feelings that all these people are gravitating towards. Yeah, I us legal facts, do care about their feelings. I wish, like it would be cool if like someone who embodies a lot of these things became the leader of the country. That would probably end well, would be interesting to watch, interesting to watch, like a guy. And yeah, I like, now, let's talk about real history rather than your nonsense fantasizing. Just what happened, not crazy theories about the future. It was just like what if? Like all right. So, Greensboro was a huge moment for the clan, and it was seen, as many within the American fascist movement as nothing less than the first shots fired in a war to take back their country from communist infiltraders. The Greensboro Clansmen went on to become heroes in the movement, giving speaking tours and acting as living billboards for the cause. So that's cool, very cool. It's so pretty cool. And this brings us back to Louie Beam. While he was not president Greensboro, Beam kept extremely busy in the late nineteen seventies. In nineteen seventy nine, Dang Joping, the leader of China at the time, visited the United States. When he arrived in Texas, Beam attempted to spray him with red paint in the lobby of his hotel. He was punched out by a security guard. Later variations of the story would mark it down as an assassination attempt against the Chinese statesman, but the reality seems to have been much dumber than that. He was just trying to cover him with paint, paint him red because he's communist. That's such a like cheap attempts. It was the seventies, okay, everything was a little more primitive, except for Indiana Jones movies. Great time. Yeah, speaking of Indiana Jones movies, you know what else is perfect art? What the products and services and stuff that represents the show. And unlike Indiana Jones, it was not made with the female protagonists being initially envisioned as a fourteen year old. I shouldn't talk about that. Well, we're back. Sophie just opened an enormous bag of chips, made a tremendous amount of noise. Yeah, it was so loud, really really unprofessional. So I can't believe you, Sophie, excited to see what I throw next. Speaking of professional we're back. Oh yeah, Robert lecturing about professionalism. I'm a I'm a consummate professional. Thank you anything yet? Yeah, except for those bagels. I started throwing bagels and they brought me no joy now because I've just moved past that, but not past throwing. Never moved past throwing. So when we last left Louis Beam, he had tried to literally paint Dang Jiao Ping red and gotten the ship punched out of him by a security GUARDA that will be the most emotionally satisfying beat of this story. The rest is just frustrating. Okay. So right around the same time he was attacking Danja Pain with paint uh, Louis Beam began to operate a paramilitary training camp in Oklahoma called Camp Polar. White supremacists would gather there to train and combined arms techniques and prepare for it to fight in a civil war against communists, Blacks, and Jews. Attendees with military experience were encouraged to wear their medals in insignia over their clan fatigues. So I found an interesting article from U p i UH in November of nineteen eighty that covered this camp and a little kerfuffle it ran into legally when they kind of brought a bunch of Boy Scouts over. Quote a Ku Klux klansman who says he is prepared to do battle against communists and homosexuals and structs explorer Scouts and Civil Air Patrol cadets and guerilla warfare techniques at a paramilitary camp. A newspaper reports. The post, which has not been fully chartered by the Boy Scouts of America, is run by Robert Johnson Sente of Deer Park, who denies he as a clan member, and Lewis Beam of Pasadena, the Grand Dragon of the Texas. I am proud to be a member of the clan, said Bogert, a former marine from the Port, Texas, who said he had been a member for two years. There are only two groups. I'll do battle with communists and homosexuals. That's the basic reason I joined the clan. Yeah, what a statement, what a man. The Grand Dragon just a simple paramilitary training camp teaching Boy Scouts. It's not a clan camp. It's just run by the Grand Dragon of the clan and another random guy. Unbelievable, just a guy. The article notes that the concerns about the camp were initially sparked when parents of Explorer scouts and Civil Air Patrol cadets complained that their fifteen and nineteen year old sons were learning guerilla warfare techniques and racial slurs from leaders of the camp, which would be a thing to complain as a parent. I usually think parents are being too sensitive about stuff like this, but not stuff actually yeah soft these days. But yeah, yeah, kids are still too soft. But maybe it's bad for the KKK to teach them how to fight a war. The other guy, Well, yeah, you're right. The other guys not with the KK So I guess that's fine. Yeah, we got both sides. That's why all of us kids are pussies because we didn't grow up been talking like you get it, we're all I just gave up. Yeah, how can you? So, if there's anything to edit out, it's that no, no, no, no, no, send him a verity, katie. That's what this is. So uh yeah, the parents complained. Uh. Civil Air Patrol Major Paul Renfro, who invested gated the camp, stated to the newspaper quote. There was nothing boy scout about it. They were on maneuvers, they were firing unloading using live ammunition, and the parents were very upset because they were told nothing about this. These guys misled the Scouts. So Camp Puller was you know, shut down after this as resulted the controversy, but not forever. Oh no, Now, Camp Pollar came together again during a very different time in the US, So the fact that a lot of these guys were active due to U S service members was not a problem. Uh. It was also consequently a time in what's weapon theft and the smuggling of military grade armaments like rocket launchers to civilian militias and terrorist groups was incredibly common. So might be tied together those two things. I don't know what you're talking about. So in two thousand nineteen, as I write this episode, the state of Oregon is currently ground zero for a resurgent militia movement. You can trace the start of our most recent band of troubles back to the standoff at the Bundy Compound in Bunkerville, Nevada, which led to the occupation of Malhair Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. A number of the men who were involved in that are currently helping state level Republican legislators hide in Idaho or where. When I wrote this, they've since come back after getting their way because they threatened people with violence. Um. Yeah, so even from that brief summary, it should be obvious groups like this work. They don't have the numbers to enforce their will democratically, but they do have guns, which they used to threaten people with horrible violence to get what they want. They're gambling on the fact that nobody else will deploy violence against them because for some weird reason, those people would be seen as having started it. Yeah, so we're all what it all is that angry? Angry angry. Yeah, it's anti democratic. Yeah, but it's fine for them now. If they were Puerto Rican would not be okay, which is why the Puerto Rican group that attacked the capital with guns got wiped out and uh I think executed. Uh. It was bad for them, but cool to do it. Yeah, if you're that it was like in the seventies or eighties, there was like an attack by a puerter terrorist group. I should have looked this up before bringing it up, but yeah, wend circle around. It's they got heavily punished, yeah, but but not not so much this pardoned. Yes they do, oh boy. Uh. So you know, when these people are not confronted and forced to face consequences for breaking the law, they continue to push. Which is what we've seen with all the guys involved in the Bundy standoffs who have now continued to push local laws and stuff in Oregon. And it's what we saw with Louis Beam in the early nineteen eighties. He and his fellow klansmen had not been punished for greensborow they hadn't really been punished for Camp Fuller, and so Beam started looking for more opportunities for he and his men to enforce their own rule of law in places where they felt the government wouldn't have the guts to stand up to them. Greensboro obviously, had been proof positive of how well this would work. So Beam looked south from Camp Puller and he saw the town of Sea Drift, Texas. He thought it was another place where he and his comrades might be able to exercise their will and force the cowardly state to flee before them. Now, Sea Drift was a crabbing town with a population of about a thousand people. Life there had been recently disrupted by the arrival of roughly one Vietnamese refugees overnight. Seedrift went from a very homogeneous culture where everybody spoke English to a town where only ninety percent of the people spoke English. It's toms, that's why genocides. Yeah, so that on its own might not have been an issue. But the Vietnamese families proved to be extremely good at fishing for crabs. They worked together in large collaborative family fishing groups and worked more efficiently and effectively than the native crabbers of sea drifts. That's going to be a problem. Now, you'd think capitalism, being capitalism, they'd just be rewarded for this. Yeah, Nope. In August ninety nine, there was a dispute over the distance between two sets of crab traps a fighting suit, and a white crabber was shot dead to Vietnamese crabbers were acquitted for the shooting on self defense grounds. So so far, what happened next will sound very familiar. Rumors began to percolate that the Vietnamese refugees were being funded on sketchy government welfare checks, but they smuggled gold out of Vietnam before they'd fled. Several of the men in Sea Drift were Vietnam veterans, and the scars of war hardened their hatred to their new neighbors. Which was ironic because the Vietnamese refugees who settled in Seadrift did so because they'd sided with the Americans and worked with the South Vietnamese government and it had to flee the country when the Communists took over. They had way more costing Communism than who were angry. Really ironic, fortunate, Yeah, communicate. Well, this is another thing that I didn't know about. Yeah, little talks about Drift anymore. Drift good name for a crabbing town, is a good name for it? Is? Absolutely Yeah, you could see like the movie starting I'm imagining what's his name, the guy who played Sheriff Brody and Jaws. He was in Sequest too, incredible acting. Roy Scheider. I'm imagining Roy Scheider was the sheriff of this little town. Yeah, okay, I can accept that. I wish Roy Scheider was still alive so they can make a he wants the Draft movie? What for this movie? I want to see drifting of a Yeah, not SeaQuest. We got enough seaquests. Yeah, the SeaQuest cameo a movie called Sea Drift. You know, you know what we could have, We could have, We could have the big boat and SeaQuest comes saved the day with that dolphin. That's spoilers, but saves the day. That is not what happens. So uh. In nineteen eighty, the first of these new immigrants to See Drift earned their American citizenship. This provoked a paroxysm of rage. Three Vietnamese boats and one mobile home where fire bombed. There were beatings. One man pulled a gun on a Vietnamese fisherman walking across the deck and shot him in the leg. Louis Beam and his clan waded into this mess with glee and consummate expertise. They started putting out reams of propaganda newsletters and magazines, calling the Vietnamese refugees boat people and accusing them of being riddled with tuberculosis and malaria. Clan propaganda also sought to stoke fears that the new immigrants would sexually assault local white women. Yeahs. The clan even named their activities and Sea Drift operation hymn Line, a reference to the modest, decent white women that were supposedly protecting. In one interview with the reporter, a Klansman and Seddrift. Instead, Galveston Bay is just like a fine woman. If you're rape her, she's never good anymore. The clan awful. Yeah, no comment. Also, how do you rape a bay? Yeah? I mean actually Charles Coke could answer that question about this bay because he's largely responsible for ruining Galveston Bay. He's had his way with guy, do you He's had his way with Galveston Bay, and it's no good anymore. That old sea song, do you know the way to Galveston? No, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work because we're you know what, I'm angry that we got high with do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna throw the box at wrangles. Wait wait, you know what I got to do this? Yeah, I knew that would happen. That was a real problem. It rained the pringles, It rained pringles everywhere the box. That's exactly what you wanted everywhere. So happy about it about how that works to clear their little their little containers of pringles. There aren't like individual pringled chips everywhere. That would cause that would cause mice. You know what I love is how satisfying that is on a podcast. M hm, m hm. You have to take pictures of it. You have to take pictures of it. She's shaking your head. Now, she's ashamed, as she should be anyway, scouraging it. On January, the Vietnamese owns shrimping vessel Tru dB, was lit on fire in its dock. The next night, another Vietnamese shrimping boat was burned. Local police reported seeing four white males and clan robes starting the fires. Wait, was there was there a fifth person? Nope? Nope, alright, and yeah, it's probably the clan. Would it be a basketball team if it were fine, the Texas Longhorns. Yeah, so this would prove to be but a prelude. In February, the Texas KKK held a massive clan really in Santa Fe, Texas, drawing three or four hundred armed paramilitaries. As master of ceremonies, Louis Beim burned a small rowboat named the U S. S. Viet Cong. He told the gathered klansmant to pay attention to his technique because he was illustrating the proper way to destroy a boat by arson. This was illegal because reasons. He decried the theft of the job security of real Americans by immigrants and promised that if the Vietnamese fishermen and sea drifted and flee by May fifteenth, the KKK would quote take matters into its own hands. In March, robed klansmen started carrying out armed boat patrols of the Galveston Bay, wielding assault rifles and displaying an effigy of a lynched Vietnamese person on the rigging of their boat. Several Vietnamese families living on the water fled their homes after close passes by the clan's armed patrol. There are pictures you can find of these patrols, and they are quite shocked to behold. This is crazy. This is a revolution. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's the clan taking over law enforcement of a town to enforce their laws. It's so terrifying. Yeah. In one of these yeah that this just happened. Yeah, it's just happened. In one of these patrol pictures, we see seven men and one young woman in a mix of clan robes and military fatigues. They wear rifles and stare out with certainly expressions into the sea. Most of them are overweight, and on an individual basis, they look distinctly observed in their costumes and military gear, But there is nothing funny about the broader image of the squadron of armed and uniform racists enforcing their own laws on American soil. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like if you just make fun of these people for appearing absurd, Uh, it allows them to do a lot of dangerous ship without getting taken seriously. Ye yeah, what if one of them was like the leader of the country, him in a military uniform, Like he'll do it eventually. No, yeah, and it's going to spawn like a bunch of jokey hashtags. I hope that never happened. Yeah, it's okay. I'll call him drump and that'll deal with the problems. That'll that'll show him. So. Camp Poler had closed briefly after their controversy with the recruiting Boy Scouts, but it reopened in April of n which was just fine. For some reason, dozens of uniform militiamens again showing up again, firing their guns past the homes of several black families who lived nearby on their own land. The local sheriff complained that he could do nothing because quote, no one has filed a complaint. They won't file complaints because they fear reprisal or potential reprisal. Sure, yeah, that guy qualifies as the good guy in this story. Because the mayor of Kima, a small neighboring town to See Drift, where many of the threatened Vietnamese fishermen lived, was less sympathetic. He admitted that the site of klansmen and robes was disturbing, but declared I don't have any reason to believe the Vietnamese or not safe. Oh my god, the boat's being litten on fire. Might be might be one the guy that got shot in the leg, frustrating the lynched effigy of a Vietnamese fisherman long ago. No, this is like cheers is on the air. Dr Frasier Crane had taken to the screen. If I'm not mistaken, maybe maybe not by one? Was it eight two? Oh? So he's holding up two fingers because it's times you look up when she started, so that I can when she did that. Yeah, because if if Frasier Crane was around, so Frasier Crane should have said something about this. At least it's a cold open. Yeah, yeah, at least they're cold open. Doesn't have to it doesn't have to be about it. Okay, Well, we're gonna pull the ads now because I can't keep up with with all these Cheers gags. So we're back are We're not talking about Cheers anymore because I don't know enough about Cheers to joke about it, all right, Yes, moving on, moving one. Ers. You know, I only know them for their cameos on Frasier, the show I did watch. Yeah, she wasn't both. Yeah, it turns out I know a lot about Cheers characters. Okay, I just know what I learned about them in Frasier. Anyway, the book A little Bit, A little Bit, So help did not come from the local government or rare or law enforcement. Instead, it came from the Southern Poverty Law Center, who helped a group of Vietnamese fishermen file suit against the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Beam showed up to court wearing his clan robes, carrying a gun and claimed, I'm only charged with loving this country. Again. He wore a gun to his own trial and at one point challenged Morris D's, the lawyer for the SPLC, to a duel to the death. This guy did he accept? No, No, we did not. Eventually, however, the sunlight of the court case acted as a moderate disinfectant, or at least the first sign of real resistance, finally checked the clan's escalating use of force. During the trial, video was played a Beam training militiamen at Camp Puller. In that segment, he was seen advising his soldiers on how to conduct themselves in battle. He said, quote utterly destroy everybody, maximum damage, maximum violence in the shortest period of time. They can do only one thing. Die. This did not go over well in court. Finally, on a third, nineteen eight nine, under an avalanche of death threats, the judge issued a court order demanding an into the clan harassment Beams paramilitary group. Camp Puller and four other far right militia training camps in the area were ordered shut down. The Vietnamese fishermen had one, but Louis Beam was far from defeated. Not eight nineteen nine, sorry n one. It's probably matter now, yeah, much matter. It probably has like other plans. Now he did start making other plans he continued to Yeah, spoilers, it ends with federal Actually. So. Beam continued to write speeches, newsletters, and articles in various far right journals of record, culminating in his nineteen eighty three book Essays of a Klansman. In this book, he encouraged his fellow fascist Vietnam veterans to bring the war on home to the United States. While the legal prescriptions against Beam and his fellow klansmen after Sea Drift were more effective than the complete exoneration they'd received after Greensboro, it effectively did nothing to actually stop clan organizing. While the fascist right receided ever so slightly in the first years after Reagan's election. By nine four, America's Nazis had realized that the president was not going to be the quasi nationalist leader they'd hoped he might be. How what what are they gonna do? Well? Nothing good? Yeah, yeah, So the white power movement began to grow again after Reagan failed to ban abortion and reinstate segregation. I'm gonna quote again from the book Bring the War Home. Quote. Scholars and watchdog groups who have attempted to calculate the numbers of people in the movements varied branches, including for instance, Klansmen and Neo Nazis, who are often counted separately. Estimate that there were about twenty five thousand hardcore members in the nineteen eighties. An additional hundred and fifty two hundred and seventy five thousand people bought white power literature, sent contributions to groups, or attended rallies or other events, signifying a larger, although less formal Levell membership. Another four hundred and fifty thousand did not themselves participate or purchase materials, but did read the literature. The John Birch Society and contrast, reach only a hundred thousand members at its nineteen sixty five peak. That's cool, that's lot of people. So um. We focus mostly on Louis Bim and the KKK and Neo Nazis during this chapter, but it's important to know that an awful lot of other fascist groups were active, organizing and growing during this period. Militant right wing organizations popped up constantly throughout the nineteen eighties. One important group was the Posse Coomatatis. In brief, the Posse's were a series of militant anti government cells. They were believers of Christian identity theology, and these true Israelites also subscribed to a conspiratorial interpretation of American history in which all government above the county level was fundamentally illegitimate. Posse believers felt the Federal Reserve and the i r s were part of a Jewish plot to wipe out the white Man, and their view, the county sheriff was the only legitimate power in the land, and if he did not act in accordance with the wishes of the county, he should be hung by the neck until dead. Okay, slightly different flavor, but I follow you see where this is going. So as a big general rule, Posse members were big fans of hanging. Modern day sovereign citizens descend from the Posse coomatatis. You can draw a direct line between them and many modern militia movements, including the constitutional sheriffs who supported the Bundey Clan's malher occupation. In fact, when they got stopped in that guy Lavoy Finning and got killed, it was because the Bundy brothers were driving with some of their friends to go meet a constitutional sheriff. Of course, yeah cool. Appropriately enough, the first Posse Commatata cell was formed in Portland, Oregon, back in nineteen Portland It's so weird, But POSSE beliefs did not generate national awareness until nineteen eighty three, when a guy named Gordon Call got into a series of gun fights with authorities. Call had declared himself a tax protester in nineteen sixty seven, writing the I R S to let them know he would no longer pay taxes to the quote Synagogue of Satan. He was a big old Christian identity fan guest. He was arrested in nineteen seventy six, but got out on parole and went to ground near Medina, North Dakota. A warrant was officially issued for his arrest over parole violations, which prompted U S. Marshals to try and arrest him. While he and his family were driving home from a POSSE related meeting in February, A shootout ensued and Call and his family killed to federal marshals. Gordon went on the run after that, was finally brought down in June after a vicious gunfight that left in Arkansas sheriff and Call himself dead. By the time Called died, the POSSE movement had metastasized into which series of townships filled with white supremacist Christian identity believers who considered the federal government illegitimate, were heavily armed, fiercely independent, and more than willing to kill for their beliefs. This was part of a broader trend on the far right in the nineteen eighties to create autonomous enclaves for their ideology and isolated rural communities. Another such group was the Arian Nations and Neo Nazi organization centered around a compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho. On paper, the Nations were officially a Christian identity church led by the self proclaimed Reverend Richard Butler. In the early nineteen eighties, Butler's group began to reach out to incarcerated white Americans, eventually leading to the formation of the Aryan Brotherhood, a Christian identity prison gang that remains influential today. That's where that comes from. Well, that was a concise little run down to that. Did you know that Arian Brotherhood were Christian identity believers? I didn't either, Yeah, cool, I didn't know that, It's all I started researching and stuff. Another Christian identity compound was and still was today Elohim City in Oklahoma. By the early Elohem was a fully self sufficient community with its own sawmill, crops and weapons ranges on four hundred sprawling acres. Elohim's operations were funded by a Transcontinental trucking company and construction business operated from the compound. The denizens of Elohim considered American society to be decadent and sinful beyond salvation, and they homeschooled their children and stockpiled weapons in anticipation of societal collapse. I mean, I want to do all of that without the religion. Can we can? Can? I can? Can I just stockpile guns on a compound? I mean probably, I think that you can. Dreams. Seems like you can anyway. Donate to my go fund me by Robert A compound. So you're stocking yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, guns, Maybe a couple of legally bought rocket launchers. Chickens just to have a police bear cat. Yeah, pig farm bodies. Sure. I bet it would be illegal for me to do, he said, illegally, describing a few things. You know what I did, I did well. I don't really want to come to that place. Oh, come on, it'll be fine. It was fine with these people. It was fine with these people. They got to do it. But for how long they're still doing it? All right, man? Okay, keep telling a story. There were numerous other far right groups doing similar things around the country in the nineteen eighties, and most of them fell either into the mold of the Lohan City urgent total separation from society, or the Area Nations attempting to build a white insurgency against the Zionist occupied government. These disparate groups were tied together loosely by Christian identity beliefs and recruited heavily from the nascent prepping movement that started to crop up in the nineteen eighties. And Blood and Politics, Leonard Zeskin notes quote for William Pierce, survivalist events became an opportunity for nationalists interested in self preservation rather than the advancement of the white race, so they start reaching out to these guys survivalist community around the time. Now Pierce's gold became to infuse white racial consciousness into the survival movement and thus turn it from a disconnected community of armed loaners into something he could use to bring about the revolution. He desired independently. Klansman Louis Beams Smith the Early nine is on a similar goal, spreading white racial consciousness and a desire for revolution to disaffected white Vietnam veterans. In two he wrote, America's political leaders, bankers, church ministers, newsmen, sports stars, and hippies called us baby killers and through chicken blood on some of us when we return home. You're damn right. I'm mad. I've had enough. I want these same traders to face their enemy now, the American fighting man. They betrayed, all three million of us. This is the tact that Louis Beam takes. Beam wrote articles in which he warned up a coming mass gun confiscation. He told his readers to arm up and hide their weapons and hope that the future might bring headlines like and this is Louis bs like what what he wrote as his hoped foreheadlines. Millions of formerly peaceful, law abiding citizens up in arms, vigilantes of one and two persons take law and to own hands. Politician cut in two by shotgun blast as he steps from car. Federal judge killed by bomb blast as he starts car. Judge found dead, hands tied behind back, throat cut U S Senator found hanging from limb of Treon River Cool, cool and good, and cool and good. In June of two thousand nineteen, Walter Libkey, a Christian Democratic Union politician in Germany, was shot dead by a neo Nazi terrorist. Lubkey was hated for his support of Angela Merkel's open door refugee policy. His killer head ties to larger organizations of German Nazi radicals, which included members of law enforcement. On an unrelated note, several weeks after this, members of a neo Nazi ring within German law enforcement were found with a massive stockpile of arms and a list of politicians they planned to murder. Now what's happened? Like weeks ago this one was Oh, yes, this is the one I know about. This is the one that we all heard about. So that's cool. So it kind of sounds like the headlines Beam wrote. Yeah, it's just okay when you hear about it like this everything, it's like there's all these stories and at first you think, well that was so long. It's a crazy thing that happens, and you're like, this is fucking still happening. It's all the same you're talking. I start to think, like, maybe, well, I don't know what's the first do you know what the percentage of racist cops is now versus like that? I mean, it's got to be more versus in comparison toil later. I like, I like to think that, like this all happened so long ago, and that things are getting better, like there's a smaller percentage of people that are this terrible. But it's not true. It's is what I'm getting at, is like what my thought process has been, honestly this whole episode, and like the like the roles that those people gravitate towards. Anyway, we're still we're interrupting event. That's your job. So, like many white nationalists in the nineteen eight what go on being expressed to growing the satisfaction with the Republican Party in American conservatives in general, he damped compromise and wrote that his readers should take up the sword, adding the sword need not be literal, although many of us would enjoy righteous fast, the righteous satisfaction from actually lopping off heads of the enemy a sword in the year of our Lord nineteen eight one can be an m sixteen three sticks of dynamite taped together at twelve gage you can of gas or whatever is suitable to carry out any commission of the Lord that has been entrusted to you. Cool that this is legal to write falks Lord. In three Lewis Beam published an essay in the Interclan newsletter titled leaderless Resistance. This is where that term comes from. In the essay, he argued that the top down organization of traditional fascist groups like his own clan, Rockwell's Nazi Party, and that successor William Pierce his National Alliance, were fundamentally vulnerable to infiltration from law enforcement. This was backed up by the well own fact that Rockwell's marches had often been half composed of federal informants. It was also backed up by the disastrous nine eight one attempted by several American clansmen to conquer the island of Domenica. You guys, hear about that one? Yeah, it's quite a tale. Domenica is a small island nation near Venezuela. An assortment of neo Nazi commandos, including a clan leader named Don Black, who had previously been the driver of George Lincoln Rockwell's hate bus, had gathered enough weaponry that they believed they could deploy enough force to overthrow the prime minister of that country and install their own government. Then they could use Domerica as a base of operations and as a funding engine to support and insurgency in the US. Now, I should note that a lot of those guys also just wanted to make money by setting up casinos and stuff, so that there was a mix of people who just wanted money and Nazi mercenaries. That's the idea, right, Yeah, yeah, intersectionality exactly. The whole thing fell apart before any of these guys could set sail. FBI agents arrested Tin Nazi commandos and New Orleans on a rented boat filled with guns, dynamite bullets, and Confederate and Nazi flags. Don Black things to be with, great things there, just cover all your bases. Don Black and several of these other guys spent time in prison, and when Black got out, he went on to found the neo Nazi website Stormfront. Okay, that's where that comes from. He's actually pretty minor part of the well, not minor, he just wasn't a huge part of the Dominican thing. He's just kind of a kind of a guy there. He was just there. The is a big deal. So after Dominica, fascist thinkers like Beam were eager to find a new way to organize that wouldn't just get them caught by the FBI. Yeah. As he noted in the Leader List Resistance, an infiltrator can destroy anything which is beneath him in the pyramid of organization. In order to counter this, Beams suggested White supremacists adopt a cell type organization similar to those used by communist insurgencies. To quote Leonard Zeskin's bledded politics, small groups of people work together but were known to only one another. Other small groups worked independently, and the participants of one cell remained unknown to the personnel of another. Thus, an enemy infiltrator could possibly betray one cell, but couldn't break up the entire underground. While this cell structure was an improvement over the traditional pyramid, Beam decided it also had weaknesses. The problem was it required a central command to give directions to all the cells, and their new vision of vanguardism did not support one single leadership being proposed. Instead, a structure of cells, like the communists, it's operating independently of the others, but without a headquarters. Sounds like terrorism, Yes it does now. This put Beam in direct opposition to William Pierces National Alliance and the idealized Neo Nazi insurgency he'd imagined in the Turner Diaries. The order had included a strong central structure directing a series of semi independent cells and wielding them as weapons towards the greater goal disrupting society and rendering it ungovernable. Piercing Beam in their separate camps were at Loggerheads, but in nineteen eighty three a man came along with the vision to synthesize their dueling theories into one violent hole. Robert J. Matthews was born in Marfa, Texas, on January six, nineteen fifty three, each in the John Birch Society at age eleven, yeah in nineteen seventy one, he was on his way to enlist at Fort Wachuca, Arizona, when he heard a radio report on the prosecution of Lieutenant Bill Kelly, the American officer who presided over the murder of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in my ally. Matthews obviously thought the killing of women and children was imminently justified in the fight against communism. He decided not to join an army that wouldn't let him kill children with impunity. We all have to have values. Yeah, values are critical. I will not stand for this and think that I was all fired up to go to Vietnam until I learned that my army prosecutes Oh no, thank you, thank you. I've changed my mind about this guy. Good news is he did still find a war to fight. Good. I could see your worry written on your face. Was his destiny. It was his destiny. Matthews first found himself drawn to violand extremism as part of the tax protest movement. He formed an anti communist militia called the Sons of Liberty and the Time for Tax Fraud in the early nineteen seventies. Through his involvement with the survivalist movement, Matthews was gradually trawn into the cause of white nationalism. He moved to Yeah, what shocking. He moved to Medeleine Falls, Washington in the mid nineteen seventies, and in nineteen eighty he joined William Pierce's National Alliance. Matthews fell in love with the Turner Diaries and the vision of a possible white revolution. It provided. His earliest on the ground activism involved a series of childish fist fights with anti fascist protesters during a Nazi rally and Spokane. In a Spokane public park, he single handedly fended off several anti fascists and earned a place in Richard Butler's inner circle. And so Matthews was on the Area Nation Compound in Idaho in July for the yearly Congress of white power leaders. On that fine summer day, three hundred one of being an aryan revolutionary sat down to plan the future of their movement. Louis Beam and another fascist thinker, Robert Miles, seemed to have dominated the discussion. There are no minutes taken for such meetings, since what was being planned at the congress was the violent insurgeon overthrow of the U S government, but it is generally accepted that the white supremacist leaders who assembled that day walked away with two broad conclusions about their future. Number one was the need to use computer networks to organize and coordinate the leaderless resistance, Beam advocated. Number two was the value of cell style organizations and taking the movement forward into the future. The dreams were grand indeed, and Robert Miles sought to establish a series of no less than six hundred cells, each a hundred miles apart, so the nuclear war they all thought was coming wouldn't wipe them all out. Miles' theories were very much focused around the importance of building a white supremacist movement that could dominate America in the wake of a nuclear exchange with the USSR. Bam anticipated Nuclear War two, but he was more interested in building a network of terror cells that could start carrying out attacks on enemies of the white race and once. But in order to do all this, Beam and as fellow fascists were going to need a lot of money. Computer equipment was not cheap in the nineteen eighties, and the insurgency they needed to build required weapons to not just civilian weapons, military grade equipment rocket launchers and machine guns bought from Bride military supply officers. In order to fund all this, Miles suggested robbing armored cars, and bit by bit a plan began to take hold. Louis Beam and William Pierce has spent years sketching out theories and passing up propaganda. They've been rewarded by an American fascist movement that was hundreds of times larger and more capable than anything George Lincoln Rockwell had commanded. Now it was time to take the next step forward and make the fantasies William Pierce had written down in the Turner Diaries a reality. The man to do that would be young Bob Matthews. So that's the end of this chapter. You guys having a good time. Um, yeah, happy, everybody feeling good. I wish we hadn't smoked pot. I wish we hadn't smoked pot earlier. But I'm a little less high. That's great. I'm a little less high, and I'm really excited for this next chapter. I'm excited to throw these seats. Is that giant bag of sun flower seats ever been opened? It hasn't been great excellent than Sophia wonderful. I had a whole case of barrier and water that I do think it might but Sophie took the the case away, and I'm very unhappy. But I am at some point during this recording session going to steal the cans back and throw them. Oh she wasn't on mike, but that was a serious, serious, throw them at something. I'm gonna do some damage. It doesn't seem like you're going through. I want to believe it. What was that chapter called how to build an Army? Yeah? Well there you go. There you go spelled it out for you. Yeah, let's see what should I throw next? Yeah, you can do that something paper towels, yeah, soft and harm it before. Yeah, you should probably run. Yeah. Oh god, that was a throw, did you You could have hurt yourself. That was a big it's a huge the size of you, Katie. Yeah. Yeah. Last time I met wave myself, I was twelve rolls of paper towels. So you're right, I wouldnt like a square footage. Well that too. Yeah. So your website, Oh yeah, do you go. I'm not finishing sentences. Well today, google our names and the words like some more news, even more news and the website or like platform that you're looking for Patreon and twitterings. Yeah, thanks Google dot com. And you can use Google dot com to find out if I sell t shirts. He does, it's on public, thank you, Katie. What else we don't have a website? Use Twitter. It's a great way with white nationalists. It still is that. I mean, if you go to our Twitter. You'll see great tweet like from this guy at Salt Throne who wrote more like I pronounce okay, insulting Robert's Twitter a candle. That tweet was made days ago. Sophie has saved it for this moment. That's a good burn. That's a good burn. She's really really really good. Excellent. Yeah, yeah yeah. That's at the end of the podcast.