Part Five: The Hidden Civil War

take one out and you're going to that one? Well, now I'm not There's something visual things going on right now. What I love about visual things is that they're the ideal thing to do on a podcast famed visual medium. We're doing great. Chapter five, A Hidden Civil War cool. One of the issues with discussing the history of secret organizations one to overthrow the government is that, for obvious reasons, an awful lot is left in shadow. We do not know the precise day or the hour that the Order

was founded. We do not know its exact composition, or to what precise extent. Men like Louis Beam and William Pierce were involved in it. Officially, the Order was probably not certainly not a lot. Officially, the Order was founded in September of nine by Robert Matthews during a convention he attended for Pierce's National Alliance in Arlington. While Beam and Pierce tended to approach the issue of sparking a fascist revolution rather differently, Matthews had deep ties to both men.

He was profoundly influenced by Beam's ideas and writings, and was also an obsessive fan of the Turner Diaries. He essentially acted as a bridge between the two sides of the vanguardist movement, tying Beams Klansmen and Christian identity nuts together with Pierce's neo Nazis. William Pierce called the Order

the Aryan Resistance Movement. Robert Miles called it the Bruto Schwigen or Silent Brotherhood, but to Bob Matthews and most of the members it was known simply as the Order in direct imitation of the group responsible for organizing the fictional white nationalist insurgency and the Turner Diaries. There were originally nine men, three from the National Alliance, four from the Aryan Nations and one former clansmen. Now Matthews devised

a six step strategy for his new terror organization. He would start by recruiting a base of soldiers around the nation and train them at sundry fascist compounds around the country. Once Matthews had to train a corps of soldiers, they would be gained committing robberies and counterfeiting money. This would fund the purchase of an arsenal, which would allow them to commit more ambitious robberies and raise millions of dollars which they would then dispense to different fascist groups around

the nation. In essence, Bob Matthews had looked out at all the white supremacist compounds around the country, places like Elohim City, the Aryan Nations near Mayah Township, and various Possecomatatius communities. He decided these groups had potential they were connected and funded more effectively. The Order was a way to do that. And carrying out this plan, Matthews was both working to fulfill Pierce's dream of a big tent fascist organization and actively funding beams plan to connect these

different groups via the early Internet. Okay, cool, it's just a bunch of cool buds hanging out, but cool dudes having cool friends. The Order's end goal was a white ethno state in the Pacific Northwest. Here, to Matthews was following in the fust steps of other fascist thinkers. The Northwest Imperative, as it is now known, first propped up in the nineteen seventies and was initially cheered on by

Christian Identity pastor and Arian Nations leader Richard Butler. In creating the Order, Matthews had since synthesized decades of far right thinking with his love of the Turner Diaries into a serious plan for revolution. On paper, it looked kind of silly. She was even based off of yes, speculative science fiction, but Matthews quickly turned his plans into action. On October three, Bob and several of his men held up an adult bookstore in Spokane, Washington, netting three hundred dollars.

It was seems silly, right, It seems silly. It seems not worth It seems not worth it. But this small scale crime was just the start of many. Matthews and his crew kept on robbing. Two months later, they stole twenty five thousand dollars from a Seattle bank dollars from a spoke Can bank. They robbed a courier after picking up the daily cash receipts from a Shawnees restaurant and

made out with eight thousand dollars. The Order professionalized quickly, and within a matter of months that also started counterfeiting fifty bills. Okay, yeah, we need to do that. They're still on the money. They really didn't need to do that. Turn out to have been a bad idea, yeah, yeah, but the idea was that like, by counterfeiting money, they could both damage the state by like bringing financial collapse,

and we could make money. Yeah. By spring, Robert Matthews had proved himself to be a competent and dangerous guerilla leader, and his Order was quickly becoming the biggest new thing in American fascism. Dozens of young militants flocked to join and do their part to further the cause. They fled it in from other far right groups with names like The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, Sundry pasticcomtaties in a sort of KKK chapters. Yeah, they're

all there. The fucking nerves, doesn't it always grosses me out? Yeah? The Proud Boys are just in variation on a theme of terrible names for right wing terrorist groups. Yeah. In order to briad camaraderie and loyalty, Matthews developed rituals for his warrior elite and went to quote now from bringing the war home. They took their induction oath on Matthew's farm. They stood in a circle around a white female infant, who symbolized the race they sought to protect. They raised

their arms in a Hitler salute. I as a free Aryan man, they recited hereby swear an unrelenting oath upon the green graves of our sires, upon the children, and the wombs of our wives. They swore that they had no fear of death or foe, but had a sacred duty to do whatever is necessary to deliver our people from the jew and bring total victory to the Aryan race. They pledged secrecy about all activities to follow. They swore

to rescue any of their number taken prisoner. Should an enemy agent hurt you, they promised their silent brothers, I will chase him to the ends of the earth and remove his head from his body. Their oath recognized them as racial warriors, but also transformed them into weapons. My brothers, let us be God's battle axe and weapons of war. Let us go forth by ones and twos, by scores

and legions as true Aryan men. They vowed, we are in a state of war and will not lay down our weapons until we have driven the enemy into the sea and reclaimed the land which was promised to our fathers of old, and through our blood in his will becomes the land of our children to be. I cannot believe these nerds who look so disgusted to the entire thing. I was just like, oh, I hate it so much, some sexist, racist, awful, white supremacist bullshit. But it's also

so they're so embarrassing. It is also what it is. It's like they're so evil and they're so lame. This is part of why I think that like making stuff like dungeons and dragons and larking more socially acceptable might reduce the number of young men who do you see your outlet, Yeah, just give him an excuse to talk about axes and hating people. Except you know, yeah, that really kind of proves me incorrect on that, because they

just did both. They both Yeah, in March Night, the Order carried out their first robbery of an armored car. They netted forty three thousand dollars. They robbed the same armored car again in April and got their biggest score yet, two hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Later that month, Order members also bombed a synagogue in Boise, Idaho, Okay. As the summer of rolled along, Matthews and other members of his inner circle began to worry that one of their men,

Walter West, might talk. Two of Bob's men shot and buried him in the woods on June one. A little more than two weeks later, on Jeans sevent, Matthews and three of his men shot and killed Alan Berg, a Jewish radio host and anti fascist who regularly attacked Neo Nazis on the air. The Burg murder officially raced the

Order's profile and guaranteed major law enforcement attention. The group's danger was reinforced a month later when they hoisted a Brinks truck in Ucaya, California, and made off with the staggering three point six million dollars. Je yep, I wonder where all that money went? Let's read the next paragraph. Now flush with enough cash to rage wage of revolution.

Using his order, began buying up guns like they were going out of style when they also purchased a three acre plot of land in Missouri in a hundred and ten acres in Idaho. Each participant in the robbery got forty dollars, but the bulk of the money went to other fascists around the country. Different organizations received grants in a hundred thousand dollar increments. Matthews also tied not So Gred do Nazi research. Yeah. Matthews also tithed ten percent

of has stolen money to the Arian nations. So that's good. Yeah, you know, just give them giving out, giving back. They're really hurting for cash. You know who else is certain for cash? That's a bad ad transition, Sophie. You know who else wants your cash? Who and is better than Nazis the advertisers for this show, for this show. Yeah that's good, that's your hope. Yeah. Yeah, I am not doing great today. I do have Chekhov's case of Perry.

No not yet. I just I feel like I have to really build it up because definitely going to be the last thing I get to throw in this room. Now. Sophy's just giving me a look anyway, products we're back. How you doing, Sophie, Yeah, you should make sure the dogs on the other side of the room, because who knows when I'll throw this, PERRYA just look for the dog I will now. Members of the Order developed code names and acquired fake I d. S. Matthews even had

silver medallion's crafted to act as proof of membership. Oh, it's about to get cooler, Katie. Because they had nicknames, ye, nicknames like moon Wolf, Marshal somebody Sam. Do you say Veal mar? These are bad? Yeah, Yosemite Sam, that's like yeah. One member was nicknamed Mr. Closet for his love of assaulting gay men. Oh my god, no, it makes it sound like he's in the closet. She probably was, probably was.

Louis Bean was codenamed Jolly, and Lone Star. Pierce was code named Brigham after Mormon leader Brigham Young had medallion's. The only good nickname there is Jolly. They're chilling. First of all, it's super lame to pick your own nickname. And you know, they all picked their own nicknames, except for maybe Mr. Closet. I feel like somebody gave me was like, but they're so bad they're so lame. They're so lame, okay, and they're silly, and you get it

at all. It's like a lone wolf, all right, now you're not You're like a yeah, you got your law enforcement field officer, no, field marshal, marshal. There's some cops that or nazis. Well that's not a field mark, that's an cop. They're like law enforcement. No, no field marshals, like a general level rank. But it was like the Germans had a lot of feel not only Germans, but yeah it's a military. Yeah, but the same idea. Yeah. Yeah. And then you got Sam which is silly that they are. Yeah,

it's silly, exactly who they are. Yeah. In nine months, Bob Matthews had turned his dreams in the theories of men like Beaman Pierce into a real revolutionary movement. He had made the Turner Diaries. Real new recruits to the Order were reportedly handed copies of the book, and for a while, law enforcement seemed powerless to do anything to

stop them. According to Bring the War Home quote, even if federal agents and a few journalists were aware of the white power movement, the mainstream public continued to see most white power of violence as the work of Arrant Madman. The phrase lone wolf, previously used to describe criminals acting alone, was employed increasingly in the nineteen eighties and nineties to

describe white power activists. Has played into the movement's aim to prevent anyone from putting together a cohesive account of the group's actions up Not all checks out, doesn't it? So I take them seriously. History of how we don't call white terrorists, but you know who we should call terrorists? Antifa group that didn't kill anybody, zero people? Yes, are you suggesting that they're not? I'm just saying, like of

the groups I'm willing to consider terrorists. Al Qaeda, the death toll thousands, right, yeah, uh, Antifa death told zero, KKK death toll thousands. But they're not actually a terrorist group in the US. That's that's what's white nationalist terrorism. It doesn't seem to be treated as seriously. Not because there are a bunch of lone wolves in a pack together. Yeah, you can't fight lone wolves, but they're they're a pack, but they're alone. Yeah, they're a pack of lone wolves,

which you can't defend. Again, it is good times. So the orders undoing came from a member of the group and a former National Alliance schoon named Tom Martinez. Matthews had brought Martinez in to help pass counterfeit bills around his home in Philadelphia. He was caught by the FBI, and he turned informant to avoid prison. The FBI used this information to track Matthews to Portland, Oregon, where they

engaged him in a short gun battle. Bob was wounded but managed to flee to Whidbey Island in Washington with several of his most loyal soldiers. The FBI surrounded the house and eventually all of Matthews's men surrendered, but Robert Matthews refused to give up alone. He fought the FBI off for an astonishing forty hours. The Bureau eventually burned the cabin down around Matthews, killing him on December eighth. Yeah. He's a bit of a hero to these guys to

this day. Yeah. With their leader debt, the Order eventually crumbled, proving by the way that Louis Baum had been right to emphasize leaderless resistance. After five months of arrests around the country, more than fifty members of the Order had been arrested. The FBI recovered a great deal of cash,

but millions remained unaccounted for. They found what some of that money had bought, though, When they rated the heavily armed Ozark's compound of the Covenant, the Sword in the Arm of the Lord Law, anti tank rockets and machine guns were found hidden on the property. The c s A. We're not the only group who had bought rocket launchers with the orders of gotten Gains, however, and not all

of those weapons were recovered. This is part of why it became illegal for U. S. Servicemen to be members of extremist groups, because all these fucking weapons kept getting it. And that's the only reason. Yeah, that's the only reason. You used to be really easy to get military grade weapons. They did some reforms that have made that harder apparently,

so good bully for them. Kudos the military. I mean, they're actually, of all the government organizations, they're the only one with any kind of effective long term response to any of this. Yeah. Yeah. Now. The first trial associated with the order took place in Seattle and included several members of the c s A. They played guilty on weapons chargers and were convicted of rack teering. Next, the U S Attorney brought a ninety three page indictment against

twenty three members of the Order. Robert Miles, Louis Bam, and William Pierce were not indicted. In the months leading up to the trial, members of the Order rolled over on their comrades with unusual regularity. By the time the trial rolled around in September n only ten of them actually faced trial. This hardened core of loyal racists included David Lane, the man who would years later coined the fourteen words that neo Nazis still used today as a

calling card YEP. During the case, prosecutors specifically noted that the Turner diaries had acted as a blueprint for Bob Matthews. According to Blood and Politics quote, in an opening statement, a defense attorney acknowledged that his client was a clan member and an avowed white supremacist or white separatist. Now I say white separatist, he continued, because there is a significant difference in an individual who professes to be a white supremacist as opposed to a white separatist. What was

that difference? The white separatist is nothing different than a black nationalist who advocates a separation of races, wants to live only with those members of his race. He advocates the fact that when racism mixed together, they cannot survive because of their division in their cultural backgrounds, their upbringing,

in their history. The Seattle jury did not buy this distinction between white supremacy the nineteen any more than the Supreme Court was willing to endore separate but equal doctrine in nineteen fifty four. Neither did the jury believe defense efforts to impute the credibility of arians who became prosecution witnesses, nor did jurors accept contentions that the defendants beliefs were unrelated to the enumerated crimes. After four months at trial,

all were found guilty. So that's good. That's good. Yeah, yeah yeah. Now, in death, Bob Matthews and his Order became a symbol for fascists around the country. In Raleigh, North Carolina, hundreds of Nazis rallying under banners that said we love the Order. In Idaho, a group called Order to set off several bombs in cort Aline. The date of Matthew's death, December eighth, became Martyr's Day to many

neo Nazis. Some of them started carrying out memorial camping trips near where he had been killed on Whidbey Island. But still the order had failed in its goals, and that failure had come at a substantial cost. William Beam and Lewis Pierce had not been indicted or charged his result of Matthew's activities, but they now found themselves at the center of much more FBI attention. In an operation named Clean Sweep, the bureau began seating white supremacist organizations

around the country with undercover operatives. Later, in nineteen eighty five, they stopped an area nation's plot to kill a government in form it. Another terrorist associated with the group was stopped after a bombing a federal building, several businesses, and a rectory and cord Aline. In nine six, the FEDS busted William Potter Gale, founder of the Posse Coomatatus in Nevada. Gale and several allies were convicted of planning to bomb the i R. S kind of sounds like an insurgency,

It kind of does sound like yep. Near the end of nineteen eighty six, the FBI busted eight members of a new group the Arizona Patriots before they could carry out their goal of following in Bob Matthews's footsteps. The group had planned to rob banks to finance a domestic consurgency. All around the u S, white supremacists continued to plot and launch attacks. One of these men was Glenn Miller, formerly the leader of a group called the White Patriot Party.

He'd received at least seventy five thousand dollars in Order Monny from Bob Matthews. As the FBI busted more and more of these guys, they found more and more evidence of the Order's influence and money, and gradually they pieced together the story of what had really happened and came to realize that Matthews's group had sought nothing less than

the complete overthrow of the federal government. In midnight, Louis Beam, Richard Butler, Robert Miles, and several other ideological leaders of the fascist movement were finally indicted for their role in the Order. So that's cool, yeah, and we're gonna hear about what happened next after ads, I'm just incapable of doing a good ad transition. That was great, thank you, but it's a lie. You know it's I'm not going to throw it yet. I'm just I'm building tension. Bring

it up. This is how you screenwriting one on one Katie Chekhov's case of Perry A. Just my heart stops. But I'm cool and laid back, So whatever you're gonna do. You know, the reality of the situation is, as soon as I started getting a sense for the heft of this case, I started regretting the fact that I've taught this up so much, but now it has to happen. What about taking one out throwing it? That actually might make it more dangerous. Then it will fall out the

back like a scatter bomb if you open it. It's what if we taped pillows all around it. I don't think we can do that. I think I have to throw it. You can subvert the narrative and not throw it, but the best thing we do with narratives is not to subvert them. Sure, you can just give it a gentle stories the way we do, but you could get a bit of you could redefine what throwing is, make it like a gentle toss. I'm not going to go because I don't feel like that's necessary given the extremity

of what this case of perry A represents. But I am going to throw it. I mean those are the cans, correct, Yeah, okay, that's something. Yeah, it's several pounds tin slim cans. As the package states, how we doing, Sylphie adds, it's not even twelve products. We're back. Okay, we hadn't come back yet, I started talking about perry A. So, uh yeah. Robert Miles, Richard Butler, Louis Beam, and several other fascist ideologues had

gotten indicted for their role in the order. Um Getting all of these guys together was quite a task, and at one point Louis Beam's wife shot of federal agent who came for them. But eventually they all got found up. Yeah, they all wound up under trial. Um So, the Justice Department charged these men with a number of crimes, including seditious conspiracy to quote overthrow, put down, and destroyed by force the government of the United States and form a

new arian nation. Oddly enough, William Pierced was not indicted. Seditious conspiracy was a crime numerous communists and Puerto Rican nationalists had already been successfully convicted of committing, but no Nazis or white supremacists had ever been convicted of the crime. Despite the order's shocking violence and well docum minute goals, this fact did not change The trial convened in February of nine, and the fascist defense attorneys managed to exclude

any black people from the jury. The trial was almost instantly a ship show and served more to allow Louis Beam to preach his views to the nation than to guarantee justice. In his opening statement, he told the jury, the only reason I'm here is because I said what I think. If the Constitution is still alive, I'm innocent. Beam admitted that he had set up computer billetin boards for different fascist groups around the country, but denied that

these boards were used for any illicit communication. He told the jury he had been changing his daughter's diaper when the purported meeting that created the order had occurred, so he dubbed the government's case the baby diaper conspiracy for the whole meeting. Yeah, that's an outrageous diaper, Like take her to the doctor. Man, you're doing more to pick this story apart than anyone in the court of law did.

Beam ended one speech in his defense with an almost word for word recitation of something he'd written in Essays of a Klansman about his anger at protesters he'd supposedly encountered after a turning home from Vietnam. Quote from Beam. As I sat there watching the flag disintegrate, rage and bitterness began to engulf me. The flames consuming the flag changed to flames enveloping an armored personnel carrier and the

hobo woods north of Saigon. The cheers of the demonstrators became the screams of a nineteen year old soldier over his radio as he burned to death, trapped inside what was fast becoming his coffin. The clapping of his hands as the flag fell to the ground became the deafening roar of my M sixty machine gun as I literally melted the barrel in an attempt to pin down the

enemy long enough for the dying soldiers friends to reach him. Finally, at last came the laughter of those demonstrators as they spit on the ashes at their feet, blending in my mind with the sobs of grown men as I remembered the armored personnel carrier disappearing in a ball of orange flame. Okay, the prosecution just lets them say this ship, yeah. Yeah. The judge just lets them say this ship yeah. After seven weeks of trial, Louis Bam and his fellow defendants

were all found not guilty of seditious conspiracy. They were released, presumably free to return to their lives in the movement of doing nothing. Though doing nothing their lives harmless, lives of being harmless. The Justice Department had taken it shot

at the intellectual center of the white supremacist movement. They had failed, and ultimately their failure came not from law enforcements on willingness to prosecute Nazis, but from ordinary white Americans and the sympathy they held from men like Beam, who built themselves as warriors against communism and patriots. Beams racism and his desire to overthrow the government simply weren't

seen as that bad by a jury of his peers. Sure, the leaders of the white supremacist movement had gotten off more or less scott free, but the court battle and the months many of them had spent on the Lamb before being arrested had aged them all. Richard Butler's influence would gradually fade after he returned home to Idaho, Louis Beam continued to be an influential mind within the movement, but he would be more careful and much quieter from

now on. The heat brought on by the crackdown forced Beam to retire his beloved Interclan newsletter and Survival Alert. The last issue contained an essay by an unknown author, probably Beam. In it, he wrote, the second American Revolution will be a revolution of individuals, a revolution without exact precedent in recorded history, because individuals can accomplish complex acts of resistance without peril of betrayal or even detection by

the most advanced snooping devices. Missions formally assigned to groups maybe undertaken by individuals equipped to fight alone. It would not be long before a young man named Himothy McVeigh would prove these words prophetic, individualistic. Yeah, community, it's collective, but their loan. Their long wolves, but they are loan. Just individual crazy people like the guy who shut up

the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Not connected to a larger moom was the manifesto or the book that it was by a guy named Ragnar Redbeard, and it's one of a number of books that appears regularly in full. He was like writing in the eighteen nineties, Um about like white nationalism and uh kind of eco fascism, like kind of a really early eco fascist text. That's what the other guy a piece of said. Yeah, and it's one of

a number of books that circulates a lot on a chan. Actually, Um, you sent around PDFs for this stuff, like the stuff that people wouldn't have been able to get before the Internet, which is why Louis Bean was right to start doing this. We would talk more about that later. I think I'm gonna wait until next episode launch this perry A. But that's what we call, uh foreshadowing or stating your intentions. I guess right, kind of like the Nazis did, and like the Nazis, I expect to not get in trouble

no matter what happens. I would say that that's actually foreshadowing that you won't throw the perry a. Like you're talking yourself up about it, you're bringing it up, you're reinforcing it in the really obvious way, and so that might be foreshadowing to us that you're not You're going to change your mind. I've got to I've got to throw them. Until I said this anyhow, then he said that we've talked about it too much. Well, you guys want to plug your plug hobles. Yeah, you know what

we do. We have a show called some More News after YouTube show, and a podcast called even more News. I pat Twitter dot com and a T public and a T public and we're on Twitter. Yeah. You can buy T shirts from T Public. You can find us on the internet somewhere. Yeah you can. I'm gonna throw these cans in the next episode. Oh no, high scooting all the way away. I know, I love I love

making you flinch. Just listen to the sound. That's that's foreshadowing ominous no under No Circumstances Episode over