I Don't Speak German, Episode 18: Christian Identity, White Separatism, and the Militia Movement
I Don't Speak German
Unpacking Hierarchies & Ideologies
Exploring the concept of hierarchies and how ideologies utilize IQ differences to justify societal structures, while warning against scapegoating minorities and the poor. Addressing the incoherent beliefs within white separatism, exposing the inconsistent logic used to justify prejudices against minority groups, and discussing responsibility in combatting white supremacy.
This week, Daniel tells Jack about... well, the clue's in the title.
Content Warnings apply for episode and show notes.
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Show Notes:
"Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump"
American Experience: Oklahoma City
Bundyville, from Oregon Public Radio and Longreads, by Leah Sottile.
From John Earnest's (Poway synagogue shooters) manifesto:
"Plenty of people wrongfully identify with being Christian. Beyond the scope of time the Father and the Son made a covenant in eternity—that the Son would bring a people to Him that He may be glorified through them. I did not choose to be a Christian. The Father chose me. The Son saved me. And the Spirit keeps me. Why me? I do not know. And my answer to loving my enemies? Trust yids and their puppet braindead lemming normalfags to take one quote from the Bible and grossly twist its meaning to serve their own evil purposes—meanwhile ignoring the encompassing history and context of the entire Bible and the wisdom it takes to apply God's law in a broken world."
Christian Identity at Wikipedia
RJ Rushdoony and Christian Reconstruction:
"McVicar notes that it's during this time period that Rushdoony discovered the work of Cornelius Van Til, author of The New Modernism and father of a doctrine called "presuppositional apologetics."
It isn't necessary or even possible to delve too deeply into Van Til's theology here, but a Cliff Notes version is helpful: Christians and nonbelievers alike comprehend the world based on certain presuppositions. Christians operate from a correct presupposition; nonbelievers do not, and ne'er the twain shall meet. According to Van Til, nonbelievers are incapable of accurately comprehending reality, and by extension, cannot develop a correct moral framework.
Van Til's work pulled heavily from Kant, which appealed to the intellectual Rushdoony; so did his Reformed leanings, which Rushdoony shared. Van Til's epistemology also validated the would-be philosopher's Duck Valley observations.
But Rushdoony took Van Til's thought a step further. If nonbelievers couldn't be truly moral or reasonable, secular laws, based on secular reasoning, were therefore illegitimate. The answer to solving society's problems – and to solving Duck Valley – lay in the application of biblical law."
"Butler openly admired Adolf Hitler and longed for a whites-only homeland in the Pacific Northwest. He retired as an aeronautical engineer at age 55 and moved to Hayden Lake, Idaho, in 1974. There, he bought an old farmhouse and formed his own "Christian Posse Comitatus" group. By 1977, Butler had decided to form the Church of Jesus Christ Christian at the farmhouse, and named its political arm Aryan Nations.
In 1980, Butler's church was bombed, causing $80,000 in damage. Nobody was injured or arrested. Butler responded by building a two-story guard tower and posting armed guards around his 20-acre property.
In 1981, Butler hosted the first of what would be many annual Aryan World Congress gatherings on his property. It, and the confabs that would follow, attracted almost every nationally significant racist leader around. Among them: Tom Metzger, former Klansman and leader of White Aryan Resistance; Louis Beam, another onetime Klansman who promoted the concept of leaderless resistance; Don Black, the former Klansman who created Stormfront, the oldest and largest white nationalist forum on the Web; and Kirk Lyons, a lawyer who has represented several extremists and who was married on the compound by Butler."
Lyons appeared on The Political Cesspool on 4/24/2019
The Butler Plan at the Northwest Front
"Harold Covington Died a Coward"
"For a time the program was co-hosted by Corinna Burt, a body builder who had a brief stint in the adult industry, under the alias "Axis Sally." By 2013 she had left white nationalism behind, and, in an interview with the SPLC, explained that Covington's goal was "to get a thousand alpha Aryan males to move to his neighborhood and then basically just start shooting everyone who isn't white."
Indeed, Burt painted a portrait of a man who was unstable and paranoid. He "called nearly everyone in the [white supremacist] movement a homosexual," was petrified of the thought that black men wanted to rape him, and his apartment was "filthy" with "layers of grime" on the walls. In her words, Covington was "pretty much the most horrible person ever."
His final years were spent making YouTube videos and podcasts for NF, much of which failed to gain traction even among other white nationalists. In the age of the alt-right, troll storms, racist memes, and torch marches, Harold's influence had waned to practically nothing. When he was in the news, it was for calling Dylann Roof's Charleston bloodbath "a preview of coming attractions" and speculating that The Right Stuff's Mike Enoch was secretly Jewish.
[...]
"I had only ever written about this curmudgeonly racist once, but decided that he didn't seem important enough to merit further attention. Looking back I stand by that calculation. His brother Ben probably summed it up the best, however, stating that "the bottom line here is that my brother is a coward. He has always been a coward and he will die a coward." On July 14, 2018, Harold Armstead Covington died a coward at the age of 64. He will not be missed."
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Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association
Sovereign Citizen Movement at Wikipedia
Militia Movement at Rationalwiki
Shane Bauer at Mother Jones, "I Went Undercover with a Border Militia"
Hijacking America by Susan George
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