Hateland

by Daryl Johnson

  Lane claims his first inkling of these conspiracies was a result of the reputed cover-ups in the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.18 Soon thereafter, he joined the John Birch Society, a vehemently anti-Communist group that provided an excellent introduction into conspiratorial thinking for many future right-wing extremists.

  As Michael Barkun writes in Culture of Conspiracy, all conspiracists tend to converge around three points: 1) Nothing happens by accident; 2) Nothing is as it seems; 3) Everything is connected.19 The John Birch Society, a group which may have had up to a hundred thousand members in the 1960s, followed these tenets, but saw everything through paranoid Cold War visions of hidden Communist agents everywhere. For example, clergy-led civil rights groups marching for the right to vote were reputedly Moscow-controlled agents who wanted to create a “Soviet Negro Republic.” Dire threats emanated from the liberal media and the New York “Eastern establishment.”20 The group was so unhinged that its leader even accused President Dwight Eisenhower of Communism.21

  As much as Lane appreciated the group's insistence that “powerful, evil, deep, forces control human destinies,” he eventually came to believe that the Birchers were focusing on the wrong enemy. After doing his own research, Lane decided: “The Western nations were ruled by a Zionist conspiracy.”22

  Now well down the path of right-wing extremism, Lane tried to recruit others to his cause. He began arriving to work early to print out hundreds of copies of his free pamphlets. His goal was to distribute the racist, conspiracy-laced literature around the entire Denver area. Although Lane never specifically referenced the Protocols, their direct influence is clear. In “The Death of the White Race,” for example, Lane wrote “The JEWS, who have sworn to destroy our Race and who now own all three TV networks, the major movie companies, and nearly all newspapers and publishing companies, make it front page headlines, if they can find a nonintegrated school or neighborhood anywhere.”23 Lane also repeatedly refers to the “JEWSMEDIA.”

  His “White Genocide Manifesto” expanded this Protocols-inspired conspiracy: “Zionist control of the media, as well as of all essential power points of industry, finance, law and politics in the once White nations is simply fact.”24

  By the mid-1970s, Lane was fully on the path of radicalization. He had dived even deeper into the Denver-area far right, first becoming an organizer for the local KKK before joining the Aryan Nations, a group steeped in “Christian Identity,” the pseudo religion that teaches that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan. He also became involved with neo-Nazi groups in northern Idaho. Eventually, though, he tired of the lack of action among other white supremacists.

  Then, in September 1983, he joined a new, secretive subgroup of the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho. The creation of this new band of white supremacist brothers was based on a violent, conspiratorial piece of fiction published a few years earlier.

  The Turner Diaries, written by the neo-Nazi National Alliance's William Pierce, but published under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald, was a violent call to action against a global conspiracy. A kind of dystopic science fiction, the book tells the story of Earl Turner through two years of his diary entries.

  In brief, Turner has joined a violent white supremacy group called The Organization in its violent struggle against The System, an anti-white, anti-gun US government that keeps restricting people's liberties. The System is, of course, run by the Jews and their willing dupes on the left, but Turner also has extreme contempt for conservatives and “ordinary” white people who would rather remain comfortable than face up to the horrifying reality of their enslavement.

  After launching a series of mortar attacks on Washington, DC, Turner is recruited into The Order, the elite, secretive survivalist group at the center of The Organization. Throughout the novel, Turner prepares for, and participates in, violence, such as blowing up federal buildings, stockpiling biological weapons, going on racist shooting sprees, graphically cutting the throat of a Jew, and assembling pipe bombs for Jewish and black targets. In the final entry, toward the end of 1999, Turner is about to fly a crop duster with a strapped-on warhead into the Pentagon, The System's last stronghold. Although his diary ends there, we find out that The System crumbled after Turner's suicidal attack, creating a white supremacist paradise.

  The group that Lane joined in 1983 was originally called the Brüder Schweigen (German for “Silent Brotherhood”) but soon became known, in homage to Pierce's novel, as The Order. Their goal was also taken directly from the book: kick-start a race-based revolution that would ultimately lead to an all-white nation. The goal of this fictional conspiratorial organization also marked a sharp departure from the traditional mindset of groups like the KKK, which has long wanted to restore the racial order that existed decades or centuries previous. The Order didn't want to return to the Jim Crow South or even slavery; they wanted to erase blacks, Jews, and any other people they considered nonwhite from the country. What's more, the death of white Americans was an acceptable cost. As the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)'s former editor-in-chief, Mark Potok, puts it, The Order marked “one of the opening shots of a truly revolutionary radical right, perfectly willing to countenance the mass murder of American civilians for their cause.”25

  The Order relocated just across the Idaho border to Metaline Falls, Washington. Timber was a big industry there and was going to fund the group, but according to former member Gary Yarbrough, logging didn't work out because “the men were a bit lazy.”26 They also failed at counterfeiting—a member was arrested for trying to pass off fake money—and robbing pimps, because they didn't know how to find them. Eventually they settled on robbing armed cars, including a $3.8-million haul in northern California, which was organized by an ideologically sympathetic employee of Brinks security.27

  With their finances secure, The Order entered the next stage of their plan, drawing up a hit list. Number two on the list was Alan Berg. A left-wing Jewish attorney, Berg hosted a popular Denver-area radio talk show notable for its confrontational interviews and strident criticism of the far right. On the evening of June 18, 1984, Berg returned home from dinner with his ex-wife, with whom he was attempting to reconcile. He parked in his driveway and stepped out of his black Volkswagen. Automatic gunfire rang out, striking Berg twelve times. He collapsed next to his car and died almost immediately.

  The following March, Lane was arrested in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, charged with driving the getaway car after Berg's shooting and was eventually convicted as an accomplice to the murder. He served twenty-two years before dying in a federal prison in Indiana in 2007.

  Lane, though, did not go quietly into the night. From his prison cell, he became a prodigious writer. He was “the Renaissance man of late 20th-century white nationalism,” as the SPLC once described him.28 It was Lane, for example, who composed the famous “14 Words” for white supremacists—“We Must Secure the Existence of our People and a Future for White Children”—that turned the number “14” into a credo and coded reference for white nationalists and supremacists, including Dylann Roof. True to his conspiracy roots, he wrote that the military is controlled by Jewish bankers and that all the silver and gold is in the hands of Jews.29 There is, however, one substantive difference between Lane's influential prison writing and the Protocols. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Zionists weren't planning to dominate the world, they had already succeeded.

  William Pierce, who was reportedly surprised by the popularity of The Turner Diaries, once commented that he thought novels could be effective because “if the protagonist comes to believe in something…the reader tends to do the same thing.”30 Despite holding a doctorate degree in physics and being a former assistant professor at Oregon State University, Pierce deliberately wrote The Turner Diaries using very simplistic words and phrases, so anyone with a middle school level of education could read and understand it.

  Certainly, that's part of his book's lasting success, but the Diaries tap deeply into s
ome of the deepest and oldest narratives in Western history. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, a messiah leads a chosen people from a polluted earth to a golden age. End-times conspiracy theories are also a natural fit with right-wing evangelicals, survivalists, and doomsday preppers. It's no coincidence that Turner's attack takes place in 1999—the narratives of those groups often rely heavily on cycles of a thousand years.

  The Turner Diaries also shares quite a bit in common with the 1999 film The Matrix. Early on, the protagonist, Neo, is given the option to choose between two pills: a blue one will return him to his false but comfortable life, while the red one will show him the world for what it is, a terrifying conspiracy. Neo chooses the red pill and wakes up to find out that people's conception of reality is manufactured by machines, which are actually harvesting humans for biochemical energy. He then fights back against the evil system, eventually sacrificing himself to defeat the machines. Because the movie's plot tracks perfectly with a conspiratorial mindset, the term “red-pilled” has become slang for suddenly becoming aware of a reality hidden from the mainstream.

  By tapping into conspiracy theories and sweeping narratives, Pierce's “powerful teaching tool” was an incredibly effective piece of radicalizing propaganda. The FBI has called The Turner Diaries the “Bible of the racist right.” The fantasy of being a suicidal freedom fighter against an evil conspiracy has radicalized innumerable violent extremists for years following the book's publication.

  Timothy McVeigh sold the book for several years before trying to make it a reality. His choice to blow up a federal building in 1995 was directly inspired by The Turner Diaries, pages of which were found in his car as he fled the scene.

  Three years later, in 1998, a white supremacist in Texas named John King reportedly announced, “We're starting The Turner Diaries early,” before he and two other men dragged a black man, James Byrd, Jr., behind their pick-up truck for three miles.

  In 2002, Michael Edward Smith was spotted pointing an AR-15 assault rifle at a synagogue in Nashville, Tennessee. After police apprehended him, he led them to a large cache of weapons including a shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon, armor piercing ammo, dynamite fuses, and a copy of The Turner Diaries.

  The success of books like the Protocols and The Turner Diaries is similar to that of the Harry Potter series: both have nearly timeless fantasies. But, as frightening and, in a sense, impressive as these narratives have been for over a hundred years, social media's capacity to multiply and spread conspiracy theories has increased exponentially since 2008.

  In 2002, a figure wearing a bulletproof vest, a rubber skeleton mask, and blue fatigues with “Phantom Patriot” spelled out in red across his chest entered a two-thousand-acre redwood grove near the Russian River in California. Richard McCaslin was equipped with a specially modified double-barreled shotgun assault rifle hybrid, a .45 caliber pistol, a crossbow, knife, homemade bomb launcher, and two-foot long sword.

  After making his way into the grove of old-growth redwoods, his flashlight ran out of batteries. The Phantom Patriot stumbled around in near complete darkness—the high, dense canopy didn't let in any natural light from the moon or stars. Eventually he happened upon a large bunkhouse, broke inside, and slept the night in a bed.1

  At daylight, he continued his mission. He soon located his primary target, a giant owl statue on the edge of a small lake. McCaslin believed this was the site where an elite group of politicians and businessmen assembled annually for a ceremony in which a casket was rowed across the lake on a boat by hooded figures. Once they reached the other side, the casket was cremated at the foot of the idol while music played and fireworks went off. The Phantom Patriot also suspected child abuse and human sacrifice might be taking place.

  McCaslin attempted to burn down the hollow owl statue, but it turned out to be concrete over steel supports. Instead, he placed a verse from Leviticus at the foot of the owl and set fire to a nearby mess hall. This part of his plan was also foiled by the sprinkler system. Soon thereafter he was discovered by the maintenance man and caretaker. He later surrendered peacefully to local law enforcement.

  McCaslin wasn't completely delusional; all the greatest lies have a kernel of truth. He had broken into the Bohemian Grove, which does indeed host a sort of all-male elite summer camp for two weeks in July. (Participants over the years, both as members and guests, have included—just to scratch the surface—both Presidents Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Colin Powell, David and Nelson Rockefeller, Teddy Roosevelt, Karl Rove, and Henry Kissinger.) There is also a bizarre “Cremation of Care” ceremony involving the owl, fires, costumes, and sound effects. But there is no reliable evidence of sexual abuse or human sacrifice.

  Paroled in 2008, McCaslin came out unrepentant. Three years later, he was protesting outside an Alcoa plant in Davenport, Iowa, during President Obama's 2011 visit. The Phantom Patriot was now wearing a superhero prison outfit: a black shirt with an angry emoji face on it, black-and-white-striped pants, and a matching hat that read “THOUGHT CRIME.” His sign featured a picture of the president with yellow reptilian eyes, a long red tongue, and a satanic star on his forehead. The sign read “Reptoid Royalty No Blue Bloods in the White House.”2 His protest wasn't just aimed at the current president.

  “Every American president has British peerage, and royalty has always said they have the right to rule by their bloodline,” McCaslin explained to a fourteen-year-old girl waiting for the motorcade. “Their ancestors weren't human; they were aliens, probably of the reptilian type.”3

  McCaslin was the sole protestor, but he was hardly alone in his beliefs. The source for his impromptu tutorial on presidents, royal bloodlines, and Satanic alien influences source was conspiracy propagandist extraordinaire Alex Jones, whose radio show has two million listeners. His website, InfoWars, has around ten million monthly visits, more than the sites for Newsweek or the Economist.4

  By his own account, the man who would become the world's leading purveyor of conspiracy theories had a normal childhood in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. Jones's dad was a dentist, his mom a homemaker. As a teenager, he read a 1972 book titled None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen, a John Birch representative. The book, which owed an obvious debt to the Protocols, described the actions of an international banking cartel that financed the Russian Communist revolution and is now working to enslave global populations through centralized monetary policies, income taxes, and social welfare programs, among other nefarious schemes.

  Jones graduated from high school the same year as the standoff at Ruby Ridge, which left two Weavers and a federal agent dead. The following year, 1993, the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound ended in a conflagration that killed seventy-six church members. That event, which played out in nearby Waco, Texas, prompted Jones to quit community college and begin a public-access TV program.

  For the next few years, Jones honed his bombastic style while claiming that, among other things, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was engineered by federal agents for whom Timothy McVeigh was a patsy. In what would become a common theme following violent attacks, Jones claimed the attack was a “false flag” designed to create support for increased federal crackdown on Americans. It was, Jones said, “just like the Reichstag!”5

  In 1996, Jones moved to Austin's KJFK-FM to host a show called The Final Edition. Two years later, he led an effort to rebuild the Branch Davidian church as a memorial. He also publicly assailed then Texas governor George W. Bush in person, suggesting that the Federal Reserve be dismantled.6 Although Jones's show proved popular and he tied for the Austin Chronicle's “Best Austin Talk Show Host,” in 1999, he was dropped from the station for refusing to make his show more commercially accessible by engaging a wider range of topics.

  For Jones, this temporary setback ultimately paved the way to great riches. He began broadcasting his radio show online. As the medium rapidly expanded, Jones built up a massive base that stuck with him even after station managers dropped him for clai
ming that 9/11 was an inside-government job.

  “Those were controlled demolitions,” Jones told his audience. “You just watched the government blow up the World Trade Center.”7

  A few years later, Jones began posting on YouTube, the massive video-sharing platform that would essentially become his promoter. Like other online formats, video sharing provided an end run around mainstream media that considered his claims ludicrous. What's more, as the site developed algorithms to encourage people to spend as much time as possible on YouTube, it also, inadvertently, began pushing Jones's videos.

  Guillaume Chaslot, a software engineer in artificial intelligence who worked on the site's recommendation engine, remembers noticing between 2010 and 2011 that YouTube's algorithms began steering people toward conspiracy videos. As NBC News reported, Chaslot found that “the best way to get people to spend more time on YouTube was to show them videos light on facts but rife with wild speculation.”8 At about the same time as extremists of various stripes began making use of Facebook, Twitter, encrypted communications, and other technologies to promote their marginalized ideas and plan attacks, Jones was getting a huge boost from YouTube.

  Aside from having the world's largest video platform on his side, Jones also enjoyed huge exposure to mainstream conservatives post-2008, thanks to Matt Drudge. The Drudge Report, one of the most popular websites on the right, had gained adherents in the late 1990s by breaking news like the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In the two years beginning April 2011, Drudge linked to 244 different articles on Jones's websites InfoWars and PrisonPlanet.9

  The mainstream right was thus exposed to man whose career was built on an almost limitless number of unsupported and far-fetched claims including, but not nearly limited to: NASA's footage of the moon landing was faked, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is setting up concentration camps for American citizens, and the US government is deploying chemically laced juice boxes to encourage homosexuality so people won't have children.