Episode 366 - The Order: Part 1

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The year is 1967.

I am a lowly photocopy shop owner, and every day I'm having an increasing number of Mormons come into my shop.

They're printing strange strange pamphlets, but I don't question because they pay in cash.

Across the city, a young Vietnam veteran is returning home from war and is excited to see his new favorite band, the Almond Cousins.

Well, when I got back from Vietnam, I went to what's something called a Steve Miller band venue show.

And some man with the strangest haircut of shaved on the side.

and long in the back handed me a pamphlet about gold plates.

And I knew I liked the cut of his jib because much like myself he loved soulful blues music but you know different on the other side of the city a young man is arguing with his customer about buying a reasonably priced used for f250 brand new model that was released two years prior but had just been written off due to a crash while arguing over the price he notices a strange flyer stuck outside the window of his showroom listen man i don't know what else i can tell you all right yeah it's been damaged, but it's going to get you from point A to point B, and the bed's still attached to the cab, okay?

So, like, you can put a fridge in there.

You can put a couch in there.

I'm not saying that it's going to work tomorrow, but it'll work today.

Hey, yeah.

I don't know.

Hang on.

I don't think I've ever seen that before.

These folks putting fucking mizus up on my goddamn business.

Oh, oh, it's the other religious people.

Sorry, it's the Mormons.

Sorry, y'all.

Give me one sec, man.

I got, I just, you know what?

Like, we can, we can argue about this truck in a second, but I got to go straighten these guys out.

They're all wearing suits and ties and shit outside.

Very soon, all three of these men will be brought together through a 5'8 Mormon man with a squeaky voice who intends to rid the world of the Zog government.

That man is Robert Matthews.

How's it going, fellas?

Welcome to the Lions Head by Docies podcast.

I don't think I like Zog government, Big said.

Oh, God.

Oh.

I will say that when you go back and you look at some of the things that these guys wrote, like in the lead up to everyone dying at Waco or Ruby Ridge or fucking the Oklahoma City bombing and shit.

Like, it's insanely hateful.

It's bizarre.

It's psychotic.

But there are these brief instances where, like, these guys kind of sound like posters.

Like, they get into their little neologisms to the point where, like, it just, yeah, you know, getting zogged and whatnot.

For people, Tom will most assuredly explain that they love the concept of the Zionist occupied government as if to say that the U.S.

is run by Israel and the Jews.

And so this is a thing that they were saying back, way back when.

So this is Nate announcing he is the new president of the United States.

Well, I mean, I was going to say, like, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

And, you know, at the end of the day,

in the kingdom of dudes with senility and ass cancer, the guy who's not quite senile and has a relatively healthy ass is also king.

I do like harkening back to the day of, I mean, of course, I'm too young to remember this, but I have read and watched a lot of things about it of like posting is kind of true, but the weird gun show circuit of like the late 80s and early 90s where like the militia movement came from, like they kind of were posters because if you go back and listen to some of the shit that they're talking about, which sure we'll get into, like it's kind of impenetrable to a normal brain.

To a normal brain, you can't look at this and see what they're going into.

Reading the Turner Diaries is basically like, okay, you got to know all of the Wattpad lore before you can really make sense of it.

Don't worry.

We will get to that in part two, where we are talking about a lot of posters and pamphlets but yes you're very welcome to the yearly tom terrorism series um we're hard terror correspondent we saw you we heard you we care about your feelings and uh we've decided to set our sights instead on the right wing of terrorism and we are going to be talking about uh robert matthews and the order uh recently featured in a movie featuring jude law and nicholas holt which the greatest crime of that movie is that Nicholas Holt is too hot to be Robert Matthews.

That's always the case with these movies.

They always pick someone who's way too hot.

Never do you watch a movie about anything, whether it be terrorists or a war film or fucking any true story.

It's like, ah, this actor, much uglier than the real thing.

Yeah.

The CIA had to make Jude Law lose his hair because he was turning too many of the 1% bisexual.

So, where do we start?

I think it's fair to say that for the majority of its history, the United States of America hasn't been a white supremacist project.

Historically, states like

shock horror.

I feel like you're setting yourself up for failure by saying, for the majority of its history, in the sense of like, that kind of implies there's been some rupture.

There was that time when, you know, obviously the United States elected a black president and solved racism, and then nothing bad happened after that dissolved.

Yeah, nothing about Dow Stream of American politics in terms of how white people reacted would indicate that this was any kind of moment of rupture in any way.

Anyway, no reason to look into why we cannot safely tour the United States at this moment.

Yes.

But for the majority of its history, it was a place where white Christian values reigned over those deemed as outside the polite racial hierarchy.

But over the course of the mid-20th century, a new breed of racists would be proliferated in the United States that combined several strands of conservative thought, Christian fundamentalism, small government conservatism, gun ownership lobbyists, survivalists, farmsteaders, farmers, and fascists.

A fatal mix of anti-government rhetoric, anti-Semitism, and apocalyptic thinking that would brew together in the underground and in backrooms of secluded homes outside of the purview of an overreaching government intent on destroying what would some perceive as the fundamental freedoms of all American citizens.

Well, certain American citizens, that is.

Oh, fuck, we're talking about the formation of Oregon.

Yep.

This would culminate in, not exclusively to, but most potently in one Robert Matthews and his group, the Order, alternatively called the Organization, the Company, the Schweider Bruiters, or in English, the Silent Brotherhood, a gang of racist, white nationalist, Christian fundamentalist bank robbers who would go on to attempt to incite a race-based revolution.

aimed at stopping the moral degeneracy of their once great nation and restore the place of the white man in society through bombings, bank heists, and assassinations.

For anyone who's familiar with the Turner diaries.

Basically, this is what the, if there was a real-life version of Gary Busey's gang from Point Break, this is what their politics would be.

Pretty much.

Pretty much.

Man, we would have been saved from all of this shit if someone would have just given these guys, like if we had a smartphone and then they were hooked into like 8-kun or something, they would just gotten really into QAnon instead.

Also, I realized, okay, fact-check me once again, Gary Busey is actually Judge.

Was he the cop in that movie?

Yes, he's Johnny Utah's boss.

I was thinking of Patrick Swayze's gang in point.

Yeah, he's Johnny Utah's boss.

He's Steve, New Mexico.

But first, let's take a step back and look at the history of white nationalism in America, most notably, and I suppose most famously, the Ku Klux Klan forming during the Reconstruction era.

It faded into prominence towards the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century had a resurgence due to D.W.

Griffith's The Birth of a Nation.

Famously showed at the White House by our favorite racist president Woodrow Wilson.

And basically, like the Klan obviously formed after the Civil War.

And what you're looking at by the 19 teens when the Klan began to really, really surge back was a period that they call redemption, which is basically post-Reconstruction, reestablishing the antebellum racial hierarchy, you know, eliminating any of the civil rights protections and improvements, you know, like sort of forward progress made in the South.

And then also a lot of the shit then extending to northern states.

A quick aside, my home state of Indiana was openly run by the Klan in the 20s.

Now, that doesn't mean it was worse than the South.

In the South, they didn't need to run for office.

They just ran shit from fucking everyone was basically involved.

But imagine a northern state that literally fought in the Union, fought for the Union against the Confederates, lost thousands of men in the Civil War, and it was fully run by, openly by the Klan.

And the guy who ran it literally made his fortune selling white sheets to farmers to join the Klan.

Like, that's what was happening.

So he would have had a podcast and sold merch.

Buy the Klan.

Brain supplements.

You could get 10% more racist with KKK Plus.

You don't have to lie.

That is just alpha brain.

1920s white nationalist no tropics just fucking yeah

it's just corn it's all just

eat corn boys i mean this is back when cocaine was legal you just buy it in the drugstore so i mean like they had to find they had to diversify corn and cocaine the two c's you've joined the three k's eat the two c's

so um the clan faded somewhat into irrelevance during the interwar period after World War I.

And during World War II, it was really had a resurgence during the civil rights era, but then, you know, once again, kind of faded away into irrelevance in place of other groups, which we will be talking about in a second.

Namely, someone like George Lincoln Rockwell,

who formed the American Nazi Party in 1959.

He sure did.

Who never won an election and then was murdered by one of his friends in 1967.

And then another notable piece of shit who's still alive, William Pierce,

who formed the White Nationalist National Alliance in 1974.

You also had the John Birch Society and people.

Oh, we'll get there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Real psycho shit.

Yeah.

Then there was another feather on the right wing, the anti-taxers.

Now, the anti-tax groups are a bit harder to untangle because there's simply so many of them and the belief is actually quite a broad church with a lot of ideologies feeding into it.

For instance, the Quakers objected to to government taxation during the French Indian War of 1754 to 63 due to a pacifist and anti-war position.

This is actually something that has like a long history since then of like pacifist opposition to government taxation through the funding of the military, et cetera, et cetera.

But there's also fundamental antecedents of, you know, mid-2000s anti-bush shit of like, I'm not paying my taxes because of the war on terror, which is a lie because they just didn't want to pay their taxes.

I can respect the hustle.

Then Mary Kane,

who was a columnist and owned her own paper, was a popular conservative opposition to government taxation as she railed against desegregation and social security.

In 1952, she protested the Social Security program by refusing to pay $42.87 in taxes, denouncing it as unconstitutional, immoral, and un-American.

In an attempt to evade the IRS, she sold her newspaper to her niece for $1 and closed all of her bank accounts.

Oh, she sold out to big niece.

Nobody were used to big nephew on this show.

The nieces are getting in on the action.

I like that all this came down to not wanting to pay less than $50 in taxes.

Yeah,

her legal challenge against the IRS reached the Supreme Court and she lost, but the government was just like, this is way too much hassle.

And then they just dropped the case.

This has cost thousands of dollars for not wanting to pay $50 in tax.

Like, if you are annoying enough, you can always win.

And then there is the out-and-out racists like George Lincoln Rockwell, uh, Richard Butler, who founded the Aryan Nations, William Pierce, and uh, David Duke famously of the KKK.

Um, and while each of the four represents slightly different takes on the whole Christian white nationalism thing, it's important maybe to kind of talk about them for a second.

So, Joe, before I talk about George Lincoln Rockwell, uh, can you please tell me some some business ideas and japes that ex-military men get into after leaving the army in order to make money?

Jesus.

It's important to remember that most people, when they leave the army, they're still quite young.

Like, for example, when I joined, I was 17.

If I would have just done one contract to gut it, I wouldn't have even been 21.

So, like, my idea of how the real world works would have been very, very divorced from reality.

And I think that's where a lot of these are coming from.

A lot of it is just some, never underestimate.

Soldiers are just dumb.

Soldiers are very stupid.

And the army actually makes you worse at that.

So you get people who come in.

They have no like education outside of high school or a GED, which is fine.

But like we all have to be very realistic of like where that leaves you in the employment field when you get out.

And they do their three years, I don't know, cleaning fucking weapons or being miserable in the woods with their homies.

And they get out like, oh, bro, I've, I have.

My stepdad, my cousin, my uncle, he runs a construction company.

I'm going to be a foreman when I get out.

which isn't the dumbest, right?

Like, you're not going to be a foreman, but at least you'll get a job as a laborer, like, which is better than some of the other ideas I've heard.

I heard one guy just tell me, bro, I'm going to be a drug dealer with an outlaw motorcycle gang in my city, which, like, again, entrepreneurship, sure.

But, like, I know you.

You're not going to be able to pull that off.

Like, you can't count to 10 when we ask you to.

Exactly.

That's the kind of shit I expect from soldiers, or I'm going to like paint trucks trucks out of my house.

Yeah.

But then he got kicked out of the army for heroin.

So I don't know if

maybe he just really liked needles and figured tattoos with like the inevitable endpoint.

But yeah, like soldiers always have the dumbest fucking hustles because they just don't understand.

And this is specifically younger soldiers.

They just don't understand how work works, if that makes sense.

Like, oh, because I have this couple years of military service, which is the most entry-level job you could possibly have as a legal adult.

Like, McDonald's, in many ways, has higher standards.

Like, you think that you could just walk in anything, which is true if you want to be a cop, to be fair.

You could just walk in with your military experience, become a cop, which does explain a lot.

But

not really, though, because I mean, like, in big cities, the cop jobs that actually pay well, like, the waitlist is infinity, and like, the only way you can skip the waitlist is if, like, you come from, you know, genetically proven cop stock.

Yeah, Irish Americans.

Being a state trooper or a sheriff or whatever is one thing.

But yeah, I would say too, the thing with soldiers is that and I'm trying to be sympathetic is that like the army is both like way stricter and also way, way more lax than regular civilian jobs.

Like the way that people treat each other in the army, the way you're expected to treat superiors, the requirements, the idea that they can make you do anything that you can't quit, but then also like the time scale being kind of ridiculous, a lot of wasted time.

People expect that's what it's going to be like.

And it's like, well, no, McDonald's doesn't make you show up at 6 a.m.

and sing songs about conquering the mountains and the valleys, but also you can walk away from a job at McDonald's.

And so it's like you really have to readjust to the civilian world.

And the only way to do that is to have experience, which is very hard, like you were saying, if you're, you know, you've done a three-year enlistment and you're 21 or 22.

I mean, all men between the ages of 18 and 22 are fucking stupid.

Yes.

We can all say that definitively.

And I feel like the Army can be a kind of like arrested development in a lot of ways because

it's such an alternate universe.

And then people get out and they want to be, to answer the question you asked, Joe, Tom, a lot of my soldiers, their plans to get out were like run a landscaping business, do private security, be a contractor overseas.

Those are two big ones, private security and contractor back when I was.

Because this is a very long time ago, you know?

The thing about it is that like those jobs are actually, I mean, they're relatively hard to get in terms of like the things you have to pass.

Like there's requirements that

they won't accept you if like, for example, you're not good at marksmanship.

Kind of have to be if they're paying you.

a 150 grand tax free to fucking, you know, be a hired gun.

And it's like, oh, damn, maybe, maybe you should have done dime washer drills, fucker.

You know what I mean?

Maybe you should have actually cared about qualifying.

Well, what if I told you George Lincoln Rockwell pretty much did everything you described?

And he just ended up falling back.

I was like, oh, I guess I'll just be a fascist.

Well, like Timothy McVay deployed to the Gulf War, and then he fucking became, he tried out for the Green Berets, but he just like didn't break in a new pair of boots and got really bad blisters and failed out.

And it's like, I mean, I'd like to think that you'd been in the Army long enough, you'd have been deployed, you'd know, like, you probably shouldn't wear fresh ass, back in the black leather boots days, fresh ass unbroken in boots to SFAS.

This is where, unfortunately, I have to tell you, I know why Timothy McVay did know that because he was in a heavy cavalry unit and he was in a Bradley the whole time.

I was not in a Bradley, I was in a tank, I was not a scout, I was a tank crewman, but I know we in heavy vehicles are all very stupid.

It's something of a stereotype.

I am God's sleepiest and crybabiest servant, soldier, etc.

I managed to pass SFAS.

So, what I'm saying is that you can do it if you prepare.

We're both better than Timothy McVay.

What can I say?

Rockwell really speedrun all of the post

army job hits.

Rockwell, a deadbeat father who abandoned his first wife and kids after meeting a 22-year-old at a party in Iceland.

All right.

Was discharged from active service in 1954.

where he would spend the next few years running like various print publications to varying success.

And in 1957 would experience a series of dreams yes you heard that dreams uh in which he met hitler which further fueled his bigotry um it was through his organization uh the american nazi party that people like william pierce would get their start but we'll come back to pierce much later more pertinent to our story though the other side of a former soldier turned uh nazi fascist is uh richard butler butler was an adherent of the christian identity school of thought which was central to influencing the order later on.

Christian Identity is an offshoot of a school of thought called British Israelism from the 19th century, which is,

oh,

it's interesting.

Nate, do you want to explain the lost tribes of Israel?

I'm like Rey Mysterio, like tagging you in.

As someone who doesn't know anything about British Israelism, to me, it just sounds like an asshole from the Midlands who's way too into the worst electronic music you've ever heard.

So, you have to understand that a lot of this is relevant in modern politics as well, because the kingdom of Israel, and we're talking like 1000 BC to about 700-ish BC, is the area now that when you see those insane maps that like the really hard line, like settler parties in Israel show, where it's like, wow, the map of Israel, that's like all of the Sinai Peninsula, basically all of Egypt up to Cairo, all of Iraq, all of Syria.

Seems fun.

Yeah.

That seems very historically accurate to me.

Also, please help have been kicked in the head by a horse.

Yeah, and basically the Assyrians captured, they conquered the kingdom of Israel, and basically many people fled.

And the notion is that of the 12 tribes of Israel, I believe it was 10 of them were left, and thus the Jewish diaspora.

And there are things where you can find communities relatively nearby that have been Jewish for forever.

There's a community called Beta Israel in Ethiopia is an example.

But this also led to this idea that there's lost tribes that people are descended from.

And

some have far more plausibility than others.

And this has led to the idea that numerous groups around the world are descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel.

The Pashtuns of Afghanistan and northern Pakistan have this is a bit of mythology.

Sometimes they say it's the Finnish.

Sometimes they say

New Guinea.

Look, this makes as much sense as the people, as like the neo-Nazis who say Armenians were Vikings.

Oh, Joe, just doesn't check out.

Wait, the Armenians are going to feature in a second.

Of course, of course.

There was a 19th century kind of syncreticist, almost conspiracist notion in Britain that the English are one of the lost tribes of Israel as well.

Okay.

And this does feature a little bit into things.

For example, I don't know if there's a direct link here, but like you'll see some of this come out with like, for example, the national anthem of the nation of England, not the United Kingdom, but the

constituent nation of England being a song called Jerusalem.

Now, it's based on a poem.

I love my traditional Bangladeshi national anthem, Ohio.

The fact that in the poem, it basically talks about dark satanic mills and will make the new Jerusalem and England's green and pleasant land.

I don't know if there is a direct link with British Israelism to that, but what I will say is that, like, this was a thing.

When you think about some of the bizarre theories that have been kicked around, you know, in the sort of like in the century that gave us the Book of Mormon and

eugenics, and we had just moved past the concept of phlojistan, which is that all objects have fire within them that you have to coax out somehow, and that's how things combust.

I do like the story of like the really weird lost tribes of Israel, guys who wear purple and scream at each, scream at people on street corners.

Yeah, Israel, the state, refusing to acknowledge that they were Jewish, but that they illegally immigrated to Israel and settled there.

And the only thing I could think of was like, doesn't feel good, does it, motherfuckers?

Okay, okay, okay.

When you're talking about the Black Hebrews, like the way that that kind of like

their worldview kind of stems from is the idea that one of the lost tribes of Israel migrated to West Africa and then were enslaved and trafficked to the United States.

It's a kind of a syncretic thing as well.

That is, yeah, part of it, but like the Black Hebrews aren't the only ones where there's this notional link.

There are groups in China, there are groups in India, in China, in some cases, like that.

They are actually, I mean, we don't know, like, you can't say for certain if these people converted a long time ago in some places in Africa, like these communities have been Jewish for a very long time.

Going to Jerusalem and being like, Yeah, nothing's wrong.

I just didn't expect it to be Chinese.

I mean,

okay, so, but what if I told you that everything you knew about the history of Israel was bullshit, and that the core tenet of British Israelism is that the traditional thought of the lost tribes of Israel are, in fact, not the lost tribes of Israel, Israel, that would make us the Jewish people, but in the lost tribes of Israel, that would make the Jewish people not actually descendant of the lost tribes of Israel, but in fact the lost tribes traveled down into the Caucasus, crossed into Europe, and eventually settled as the Gothic people of Central Europe, who would eventually become like the Anglo-Saxons, the Nordics.

But what if I told you it didn't stop there?

Wait, so in this situation, who isn't Jewish?

Are we all just Jewish?

Okay, we're getting there.

But what if I told you that the adherents of British Israelism believe that most of the descendants of the lost tribes are not Jews, but are in fact the British, specifically the people of the British Isles,

which I feel weird about is that may include like the people in Ireland are, you know, the lost tribe.

This is where I get to be an Irish hotep.

But

well, as we're always saying when we're down the pub, Tom, look,

I'm posting the meme of the white Pharaoh.

So all of these are secret tribes or lost tribes of Israel, but they're not Jewish.

They're British.

Yeah.

Basically, that all of the actual established, like Central European, Eastern European, and then Levantine Jewish communities are actually all imposters, and the only true Jews are the Brits.

Okay, so congratulations.

You've turned Armenia from the only worst possible thing Armenians could be, which was conquered and assimilated by the various Turkish empires, and now we're just British.

This has gone too far.

Remember, there was this whole thing where during Hitler's reign, he was talking about establishing the thousand-year Reich, and it was drawing so much from kind of Roman iconography, the Roman Empire.

But it's like the Italians are the descendants of the Romans, obviously, but Hitler, that doesn't factor in, it doesn't fit into his worldview.

And so he wound up basically making the statement that Italians aren't actually Romans because Italians were actually Aryan, and that Italians today are all just Romani people who sneaked in and are squatting on the legacy of Rome.

It's not too far removed from that kind of thought.

It's like, disregard everything that's there.

Those people are lying and they're fake.

We are the original.

We're the only true Israelites.

So,

in addition to

what has been previously said, British Israelites believe that the British throne and the British crown is the continuation of the Davidic throne, and the blessings of Judah have not only passed on to Britain, but by extension, the settler colonies in America.

That's why we have to give the DWP the sword of Solomon.

I mean, it's basically what they're doing.

Except they don't like to shoot.

They just cut the baby in half, non-stop.

Just a constant hacking of the child.

So how widespread is this insanity believed?

I've never heard of this before.

I'm loving this.

The head of the current iteration of British Israelism is based in New Zealand.

So it's spread pretty wide.

I gotta say, I'm more surprised

he's not based out of Malaga or something.

I assume it's like, no, we must go to the true western wall of British Israelism, which is Spain.

So then out of British Israelism, we have Christian identity, which broke off from the dominant form of British Israelism via Wesley A.

Swift, a white supremacist preacher out of California in the 1940s, who pioneered the thought that non-whites and Jews are literally the offspring of Satan through the combination of the two seed theory where that Eve in the Garden of Eden actually had two children, one with Adam and the other one with Satan.

And so everyone, I don't like literal offspring of Satan.

Do you think Adam watched?

He was sitting in the cookstool.

I was like, cooked in the Garden of Eden, man.

There's only one stool in the Garden of Eden that's aimed weirdly towards like a pile of hay.

Christian identity combined two seed theory with more contemporary fears over race mixing at the time, creating a potent mixture of faith and racism.

Swift also broke off from British Israelism by saying that America was the true kingdom of Israel and that the land was defined by God to be the homeland of his chosen people.

And it's in this kind of school of thought that Richard Butler founded his separatist Aryan Nations Church.

The kind of Christian separatists are something that will come up later in this series and towards like the end of the final part where we talk about stuff like Elohim City, the CSA.

The CSA will be very prominent in part two.

Okay.

But Butler was born in 1918 in Colorado, but moved as a child to LA.

Full name Richard Gernd Butler.

That's a real early Gernd,

early 20th century middle name.

This is my son Gernd.

You know what I'm going to say?

Because it's what I always say.

She gernt on my Butler till I Richard.

Dick Gernd Butler?

His name was Dick Gernd.

Dick Gernd cut his teeth in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a street fascist with the silver shirts.

Better to cut your teeth than cut your gernd, you know?

The silver shirts, it's like I didn't realize that there was a DC Comics version of the British Union of fascists.

They're very annoying and stupid looking.

That was until the group was suppressed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

And

Butler eventually enlisted in the Air Corps wanting to help out with the war effort.

But he was disappointed to be stationed stateside rather than seeing any combat.

It was during his time in the army that he became an admirer of Adolf Hitler.

Well, that's the opposite of what you're supposed to do.

That must have been really difficult, you know?

It was like, I mean, you get it that all these people are, you know, joined at the hip with the U.S.

sort of military,

industrial, social, weird middle-class welfare that the military and government jobs provide, but also, you know, being anti-government in the extreme.

But like when you're in the U.S.

Army in World War II and you love Hitler, that must be really difficult.

Star-crossed lovers?

Nate, it's like the people in the 90s when they got asked Oasis or Bur and they would say shit like Swede.

It was like, oh yeah, you're just doing this to be controversial.

I mean, I knew people when I was in the army who weren't, you know, Hitler lovers.

I think they kept that a little more hidden back then than they do today.

I mean, I had an NCO who like full-on had to be like, oh yeah, this tattoo I had to cover up because it was some Hitler shit.

I was like, you probably shouldn't have done that.

I'm your literal platoon leader.

But like, I knew people who were like very much so on the side of weird anti-government libertarianism.

It's like, bro, you take a government paycheck, you get a government salary and government benefits.

Like, be the change you want to see in the world and go AWOL, you fucking coward.

Yeah.

Nothing could be more.

I am a part of the U.S.

government than when you are in the U.S.

military.

But yes, I've encountered this as well.

Yeah, the weird libertarian kind of evangelical shit.

Yeah.

My rights will not be trampled by the state.

Like, homie, I hate to tell you, but if any rights are going to be trampled, you're the one that's going to be doing it.

I mean, I had a soldier who got out and he was like, you know, I was wearing our battalion insignia and stuff representing, you know, at the Bundy Ranch or whatever.

And he posted a photo and he had the wildest pube beard I've ever seen in my fucking life.

Like it was.

It was like, it would make Rasputin look like the chad meme.

And fucking,

that's the mentality man but it was in post-war America that Butler would run a factory manufacturing engine parts for commercial military aircrafts and he would have go on to have a lovely decade-long career until 1973 at Lockheed Martin but it was while living in Whittier California that Butler met Swift as well as fellow piece of shit William Potter Gale.

The three men would work on the California Committee to Combat Communism.

That's really fucking hard to say all at once.

Communism is seen by the Christian identity movement as an international Jewish plot to enslave the world and take away people's individual freedoms.

I'm sorry to interrupt you, Tom, but I feel like you know exactly what I'm talking about.

But for the listener, I would strongly recommend reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 because it's all set in this milieu of like the aerospace industry in Southern California and like how much of this psychotic shit was going around.

Yep.

It was very out in the open.

Yeah.

If you worked in aerospace, you could either be Bill Withers or these guys.

Like

one or the other.

And now they all work in tech.

Yep.

And they just work in tech in a different version of the aerospace industry with like fucking Raytheon or, you know, BioDynamics or et cetera, et cetera.

But it was while under the influence of William Potter, Gale, and Swift that Richard Butler's staunch anti-communist, white supremacist, and separatist views would only harden.

And he would soon begin to see the world as devolving into chaos as the white race was slowly losing its grip on society.

It's at this time then that we jump to a completely different part of the country.

Joe, are you familiar with Marfa, Texas?

The name sounds weirdly familiar to me, and I don't think I've ever been there.

I know of Marfa because of art stuff that happens there, but I can recall when they tried to do a Marfa like grant thing and they tried to get artists to come from Berlin to Marfa and they all left after like 48 hours.

Like, so yeah, it's that's what I know it for.

Yeah.

So on the other side of the country, Una and Johnny Matthews were like kind of any young couple in post-World War II America.

They were bust and raw and they had a young son called Grant and in previous years had spent their time splitting it between Detroit and Texas during World War II, Detroit where Una lived with her parents and Texas where Johnny was stationed.

Eventually, the family relocated to Marfa, Texas, where Johnny was stationed and was working in the aerospace industry, of course.

Post-war, Johnny was running a string of local businesses and quickly became the president of the local chamber of commerce and head of the local Lions Club.

And in 1949, he was eventually elected mayor.

But Johnny Matthews would always be an outsider in Marfa after welcoming their second son, John Lee, into the world, just called Lee after this.

Johnny would make a series of politically ill-advised moves that would anger the local town because Marfa at the time was a predominantly, you know, aerospace industry, ranches some processing factories but after the war all that just went away in demobilization after 1945 marfa lost the bomber school where johnny was teaching the pullout crippled the town and there was no real industry to support the sizable mexican population uh when ranching was slow marfa is like you could spit across the border it's like that close to mexico okay so mayor matthews set out to try and solve the problem uh a lebanese friend of his was an uncle to the Farahs, an El Paso clothing manufacturer.

And Matthews managed to convince his friend to move the factory to Marfa.

When it opened, it provided work for most of the Mexican population.

But yeah, this pissed off local farmers who relied on cheap Mexican labor to run their ranches.

And the factory didn't last long there.

It moved back to El Paso and the locals would just be pissed off at him forevermore.

But it wouldn't be the last politically impolite thing he would do.

He tried to introduce measures such as equalizing tax assessments and instituting the town's first garbage fee to balance the municipal budget.

Oh, no, my freedoms.

All of the redneck farmers lost their shit.

Because the municipal trash collection?

Yep.

It always comes back to the bins.

It's always the bins.

Oh, no.

Maybe we are.

Ancestrally, Americans are still too too British.

We're still obsessed with garbage fees.

Johnny's political career would only last about four years.

But as it ended, the Matthews welcomed their third son into the world, Robert J.

Matthews.

The J, much like Homer Simpson, just stands for J.

But the family lived a pretty happy life despite growing financial troubles.

And on all accounts, their three kids were pretty perfect.

They rarely got in trouble.

One time, Robbie hit his brother Lee with a baseball bat and thought he knocked him out and got so scared he ran into the house and like hid under his grandmother's bed.

My brother did that exact thing to me when I was a kid, but it was a hockey stick.

Just like nailed me in the back of the head, panicked because I went down like a crumpled pile of shit and

hid in like the shed in the backyard until my mom found me in the front yard.

My brother beat my ass one time and I was mad.

So I pretended one time riding my bike when I saw him coming that I'd had an accident, was knocked out and he freaked out and thought I was like dying.

And then I jumped up and punched him in the face to get him back.

Needless to say, he didn't appreciate that.

Called ambulance, but not for me.

One of Una Matthew's greatest pleasures was reading to her kids.

A favorite source were booklets she received from the Unitarian church in Boston, which in turn was part of her own personal religious growth.

At bedtime, she would read all three of her sons about Indian traditions, African cultures, and other topics foreign to their lives in Marfa.

She hoped to instill in them a larger view of the world, but in a small town in the middle of fucking nowhere in Texas, it can be very easy to develop a small worldview.

Perhaps.

Yes.

But in 1958, after a series of job changes, Johnny's old employer, the Graham Paper Company, offered to rehire him in Phoenix, Arizona, and the family soon, you know, upsticks and moved shortly before 1958.

Around the time the Matthews were moving to Phoenix, there were men who were also making some changes in their lives that would cause an inadvertent butterfly effect that would change the course of Robert Matthews' life forever, as well as America in general.

The first was Robert Welch.

Are you familiar with Robert Welch?

No, I'm not either.

No, Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer from Massachusetts.

In 1958, he founded the John Birch Society.

Ah, ah.

I know who the John Birch Society is named after.

I didn't know it was founded by a candy guy.

Yeah, it's the Sweet Man.

We have sent it to Sweet Man to found the John Birch Society.

He will defeat the communists.

I assume he is the evil part of the Horribo family tree or something.

Maybe.

Maybe.

I don't know.

I should actually look into that.

I'll report back in part two.

Yeah.

So for those who are unfamiliar, John Birch was a Baptist missionary in China during World War II.

He fought the Japanese troops for two years and was executed by Chinese communists in the closing days of the war.

Welsh blamed communism's powerful friends in Washington for covering it up.

In Indianapolis, Welsh organized the John Birch Society as a grassroots American campaign against communist infiltration and takeover.

Yeah, that thing that was totally happening.

all the time, just everywhere.

This is like where Alex Jones' parents hung out as well.

Yeah, this is why he is the way that he is.

Yeah, the John Birch Society started kind of as a grassroots kind of community thing, and we'll talk about it a lot throughout the rest of the episode.

But it's like infiltrated a lot of politics as well because people came out of the John Birch Society who would then get elected and be influential in politics as well.

Yeah, like they accused Eisenhower of being an undercover communist, if memory serves me correctly.

You know, that famously pro-communist president, Dwight Eisenhower.

But a chapter in Phoenix was organized in 1960.

And within two years, around half a dozen John Birch units were formed.

The rallying points attracting those who joined were support for local police, whose authority was being weakened by liberals, spreading the truth about communist influence in the civil rights movement, and pulling the United States out of the United Nations.

Okay.

Just laughing because I looked in the map for Marfa and the nearest border crossing, and I'm pretty sure it's exactly the place that they made the 3D rendering of for the end end of the game Life is Strange 2.

And so, looking at the Google Street View, I'm like, expecting a nine-year-old with psychic powers to kill me and everyone else.

It's just like, I fucking love America.

Yeah, those are the only people that live in Marfa now are psychic nine-year-olds.

Well, also, I'm just laughing because if you look on the side of the Mexican side, it just seems like a normal country and a normal border crossing.

And you look on the U.S.

side and it's just like fucking ultra cops.

It's amazing.

So, the second man who would influence Robbie Matthews' politics is a guy called Robert Bolivar Depew, who founded a group, Independence Missouri in 1961 that would become one of the most feared right-wing movements at the time kind of like a minuteman terrorist cell it had weaponry a secret cell structure and a paranoid view of the world that misinformed people have attributed to the john birch society but by comparison the birchers were like pretty benign like they were like oh we rail against big government these guys were wanting to you know shoot and blow up big government oh so this is like the first militia movement in a way.

Because that's kind of what the militia movement in the 80s and 90s was.

Yep, yeah.

Well, we'll get there, Joe.

We'll get there.

Oh, I know.

Depew, who was 38 at the time and owned a veterinary pharmaceutical firm, so he was off that sweet, sweet ketamine.

Oh, that dude was that he is the most juiced any militia member has ever been.

He's like, Yeah, this is trend for my horse.

He's taking horse electrolytes, horse trend, horse ketamine, horse de-ball,

horse fucking epinephrine.

He is turning into that cover of animorphs where he's caught in the midway between human and horse.

We have America's first centaur militant.

It's like a guy who had that much ivermectin, and it's like it's like we're thinking about somebody who didn't know the value of like pure silver and just had like an infinity quantity of it.

Like, can you imagine all of the people who follow this guy's political thought 60 years later thinking back to him sitting on his trove of ivermectin and not knowing what to do with it.

He just thought it was horse dewormer.

Sitting on a pile of ivermectin, like Smog sits on the gold dragon.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

He's got one scale missing from his armor because it's where he's got ringworm because he wouldn't take ivermectin.

DePue believed that up to 500,000 communist infiltrators were working in the United States.

And the Minutemen prepared for a last-ditch military defense against the communist takeover.

Its members belonged to shitloads of these groups.

These groups were like all over America in like cells of like 10 to 12 people and like a lot of them were communicating through like mail order magazines and like all this stuff was kind of happening out of the view of the police.

Well, it's because half of them probably were still cops.

Yeah.

I mean, it's it's a tried and true like fucking fact in American terror groups is like if you have six right-wing militants in a room, three of them are cops and they're not under cover in any functional way, and then one of them is an FBI agent who's kind of sympathizes with them, but is still gonna be a narc.

Well, uh, Joe, uh, more credence to that.

Uh they held survivalist camps for weapons and explosives training.

They kept intelligence folders on activities in their area, clipping newspapers for items containing names of potential enemies and targets, such as members of the United Nations or the American Friends Service Committee, and they filed intelligence cards on every single deemed foe.

In 1966, 20 minutemen were arrested in New York after an investigation showed that they have obtained tons of guns, ammo, rockets, and bombs for attacks on three socialist camps in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

The next year, Depew was prosecuted twice.

for weapons violations in Kansas City and Joplin.

I bet he didn't get any time in prison because this is the era where like terrorism is a slap on the wrist, right?

Oh,

he disappeared while he was on bond.

Oh, all right.

After he was indicted for a conspiracy for a bank robbery scheme in Seattle, seven people were charged in February 1968 and police said they planned to blow up the suburban Seattle police station and a power plant to provide diversions for four different bank robberies.

And DePue was out of there.

Well, it's certainly a distraction.

Did they ever find this guy, or did he just vanish like a fart in the wind?

He vanished for a while, and he had been caught, then he vanished again.

It's like, look up Depew.

It's very interesting, but he's much more of a kind of like bit character in this story.

Okay.

When the Matthews moved to Phoenix, they were slowly adjusting to a new pace of life in a busier environment, but both parents had to take up jobs in order to support the family.

Johnny at the Graham Paper Company and Una at the First National Bank.

Soon, the family started to slowly drift apart.

That's when their son Grant was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 15, and he required a lot of care, which took up a lot of the parents' time outside of work.

The two youngest brothers grew together, and the family eventually started to drift apart.

When the family moved from downtown Phoenix to the suburbs in 1961, the boys were enrolled in a school they didn't really like.

And with Grant's problems, both parents working, and the overall hectic pace of life, the family kind of just really drifted apart.

But Robbie was an average student at best.

He wasn't overly smart.

He wasn't overly stupid, but he had a talent for subjects that he was interested in, mainly history.

And I'll give you one guess at what particular part of American history he was really interested in.

Oh, no.

Civil War.

Civil War.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because it's too recent for him to be a World War II guy.

You know, like he had to pick something where everybody involved was dead.

When Johnny was 11, that he shocked his parents by arriving home on a Sunday in October 1964 with a pamphlet for the John Birch Society and said that he wanted to join.

When he was 11?

Yep.

Oh, don't worry, Joe.

It gets worse here.

Oh, man, this kid sucks.

Yeah, when I was 11, I was doing chrono tricker cosplay.

All right.

So, like,

we're not the same.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I was still playing Pokemon.

Maybe, maybe I'd moved on to like one of the Final Fantasies, but I don't think I was sitting down, opening up a pamphlet and saying, maybe Bill Clinton's secretly a Jew.

Like Robert Matthews got interested in this stuff because his mother would, when they moved, would read him the newspaper.

And it was around the time in the early 1960s where like, you know, the Cold War was at its height and the Cuban Missile Crisis, like Robert Matthews became terrified as like a pre-10 year old of communism and nuclear war.

And it was in the newspaper that he found like a full-page advertisement for the John Birch Society saying like, we're going to defeat communism, blah, blah, blah.

And he was like, that's for me.

I feel comfortable saying, parents, if your 11-year-old brings home a pamphlet for the John Birch Society, you're legally allowed to beat the shit out of them.

I mean, I would just say, like, it's just also, it's 1964.

So it's like normal kids his age would be like, I love the Beach Boys.

And instead, he's like, I love the thought of the eventual triumph of capitalism over communism.

He wasn't bullied enough.

Bullies do have a critical function on the playground, and that is to beat up kids like this.

When he said this to his parents, his father like exploded.

He said it was moronic for Robbie to get involved in such politics before he was old enough to shave.

Fair.

Someone in this fucking story is at least normal, and it's the guy whose middle name is like Gunt or whatever.

No, don't worry.

Like, Robert Matthews' father is like the only sane person in this entire series.

Like, he's the only one who's like, you are a fucking moron and an asshole, and you are 15 years old.

But his mother defended him.

After all, it was the 1960s and pretty precarious time in terms of the Soviet threat.

It was popular for true blue Americans to look for reds behind the bushes.

If this is what Robbie heard on the news and talked about in school, she wouldn't stifle his interest.

His interest in paranoia?

oh joe just wait um but she thought that this was healthy for him to be interested in what's going on in the world his father was eventually just like all right

join the young birchers you're an annoying little cunt just do it um

this will certainly make you less annoying i i could see where he's coming from like maybe perhaps If we send you over there to hang out with these other fucking idiots like you, you'll realize that they all suck and you won't want to be part of it anymore.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

His mother thought, you know, this might be a good influence on him.

You know, the hippies are starting to be a thing.

I don't want, you know, my kid to be a hippie, which, you know, Robbie, by all accounts, was already the model all-American boy.

He didn't smoke, abhorred drugs.

He didn't get into trouble.

He didn't date girls until he graduated high school.

Well, finished high school.

We'll get to that.

And he kept his hair short.

Now, Joe, the next bit is like, this could be 1960s or this could be like 30 seconds ago.

Okay.

Soon, Robbie took up wrestling and weightlifting to overcome his childhood chubbiness.

He stopped eating hot dogs once he read the ingredients list.

And for the exception of at times being politically sanctimonious and overbearing with his parents, they believe that Robbie was kind of on the right path in life as he saw it, you know, juvenile rebellion towards conservatism.

That is a phase that he would soon grow out of.

I love to rebel against my parents by becoming a Republican.

I mean, this is like entire generations of people.

Like, this is a huge thing, genuinely.

It's his problem as they are.

They're basically our age and they work for Trump now.

Yeah, but

Robbie loved to argue with his liberal-leaning father about everything and anything from politics to lifestyle.

Even when he was right, he would be so insufferable that his dad would just argue with him anyway.

Just hit your child.

I never thought I was going to say this.

Please, please abuse your child.

Please beat the shit out of this kid.

In the 60s, they would have been hitting the kids anyway.

It would have been fine.

It would have been fine to beat the shit out of this kid.

I'm always going to be on the side of not hitting kids, but I feel like, yeah, maybe you need to take this kid to Timothy Leary.

Maybe the All-American shit's not working.

Maybe he needs to get on some Ken Kesey shit.

He needs to take Asterisk.

Feed my child just

like angelic levels of hallucinogens.

Make him see the eyes of God.

Maybe he'll stop being racist if he thinks the trees are breathing at him.

Yo, my kid used to be really into Ayn Rand, but now he thinks he's a glass of orange juice who doesn't want to be spilled.

And this is what we call progress.

This is an improvement over being a John Bircher.

We could have saved this entire story from happening if we had just given this kid an entire bottle of Robotessin and made him Robotrip so that he really couldn't eat it anymore.

R.I.P.

Robert Matthews, born too early to inhale computer duster.

I really hate that I'm falling onto the side of beat your children here.

If you want to know how insufferable he was, when Robbie tried to get his dad to quit smoking, he started leaving notes all over the house in his sock drawer and on his pillow saying, for your health's sake, don't smoke.

But just a note that is very important on Robert Matthews, his voice was described as high-pitched and nasal and almost childlike for the entirety of his life.

Oh my god, he's Ben Shapiro.

So basically what you're saying is it's the Greater Southwest in the 1960s.

He's one of three brothers.

His dad didn't need to abuse him.

He needed to force him to create a barbershop quartet band singing songs about surfing, even though he'd never surfed before.

Slightly chubby, goofy, really driven, annoying, persistent.

He could have been Brian Wilson too.

We need to lock that child behind a piano in a sandbox and see what happens.

I mean, probably would have harmed society less if he had tried to write Smiley Smile, less racist, more racist.

I don't know.

You know what I mean?

I don't think Brian Wilson was racist.

He was just a piece of shit in a different way.

Yeah.

So we got John Bircher Ben Shapiro, or as we would just know him today as Ben Shapiro.

Yeah, pretty much.

But okay, okay.

I hate that, by the way.

Thank you.

But also, like, for anyone who's listening who has kids, I feel like you will definitely feel this, like, if you have teenagers.

During his young Bircher society,

Robbie wanted to be independent from the family, you know, but his parents would sometimes have to go to meetings with him.

So imagine like your kid has decided to be a young Bercher and you're like, well, I got to bring him to the meeting because he's sick.

He's like 13.

Like, fuck it.

What could happen if I'm not there?

No, fuck that.

Make him walk.

They'll talk him out of it.

Yeah, this is basically like the right-wing conspiracy equivalent of giving your kid an entire pack of cigarettes to smoke.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

Like, oh, you, you want conspiracy theories, huh?

I'll give you all the conspiracy theories you want.

I told you this story about my parents being like when I was five, six, and I was really into heavy metal.

They're like, fine, we'll just get you a heavy metal magazine, you know, for your sixth birthday.

And then, like, you'll just get over it.

And instead, I got even more into it and put up the book, but the poster that came with that magazine was a poster of fucking Queen's Reich.

And I still put it up on my wall because I thought it was heavy metal.

But then there was a weird German satirical bestiality cartoon in the magazine, and my mom got really mad and threw it away.

I was thinking it would be even funnier if your mom thought you were into heavy metal and just went to the store and bought the first thing she saw that said heavy metal metal.

And it was just the porn comic heavy metal

american adult anime yeah this was the origin of the the balthazar speedboat was actually the joke about the cartoon i saw when i was six about the dog named balthazar who while his master is away is um is performing oral sex on the master's wife and then the master comes home and shoots the dog and takes his place performing the same sex act and me as a you know bright-eyed chipper six-year-old describing this to my mom and watching her face just get more and more crestfallen.

So that's the problem when you decide you want to, you know, you're like, you know what, I need to just take them to the thing and make them do it so that maybe they'll get over it.

Sometimes you wind up at the John Burch Society meeting.

Sometimes you learn about how communists are putting fluoride in the water.

Sometimes your kid at age six is describing panel for panel a German satirical bestiality cartoon.

My mom's way to fix this was whenever I wanted to go and do something that she thought was stupid, she's like, all right, walk.

I'm like, well, that's going to take like two hours.

She's like, well, you should start walking.

So then you know what I did?

I didn't go.

In his attendance of these meetings, the older members of the John Burch Society took an interest in Robbie Matthews and his keen enthusiasm for conservatism and anti-communism.

The older men

burst with pride when Robbie, still a fucking child, spoke of patriotism, fighting communism, and defending the Constitution.

Over time, Robbie would like convince his parents to come to like dinners and talks.

One given by Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, when he came to Phoenix, persuaded Robbie to fully commit to his anti-communism.

And his parents went and they were so appalled by what they heard.

They were like, yeah, no, we're never going to one of these again.

If you want to go, whatever, but we're just not doing this.

This is horrible.

We're never going again, but you kid.

You can definitely go if you need to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

These guys are all freaks and perverts, but I mean, yeah, whatever.

Walk off.

And then in 1969, the family moved again.

So Lee, the middle son, could attend the local University of Arizona State.

And under mounting pressure for the eldest brother's grants care, he was placed in an institution because this is 1969.

What do you do with

a dependent that needs care?

I'll just stick him in a mental hospital.

Yeah, it's perfect.

It's fine.

It's the level of care you expect in the 60s, which is a hole you put a person in.

If it was 1969, I would go back on my previous statements.

I would much rather my child be a fan of the doors than this shit.

Ooh, that's a steep thing to say.

Coming from me, yeah.

It's about to get much, much worse.

Worse than the doors.

By this time, Lee didn't want anything to do with his younger brother as like Robbie became like a kind of ultra conservative, would always be on his soapbox complaining about this or that.

And the family unit was just kind of pretty shattered.

But do you want to guess what Robbie did next?

Something only known as the incident, and then they had to move again.

Do you like go to Altamont or something?

He volunteered to stab hippies with Hell's Angels at Altamont?

No, he decided to become a Mormon.

He's 16.

Who does this?

This child is so weird.

Once again, why are your parents not involved in your life?

Well, I mean, like, saying this with as much respect as I possibly can.

If it's the 1960s and you're a weird, right-wing, conservative child, adolescent, who wants to fit fit in.

And you're like, where can I find a gathering of strangely focused, weird boys with short hair?

It's like, joining the Mormon church is like finding the land of the bees at the end of that blind melon video.

Like, you found your people.

And much like the blind melon sung in Utah, there's no rain.

At the age of 16, he decided to find the one church that's full of hyper anti-communist, racist white people and landed on Mormon, which is accurate.

So essentially what happened was when they moved so Lee could go to college, he had to go to a new school.

And there was like a lot of Mormons in that school.

And Robbie kind of admired their kind of pious outlook, but also that they were like doing the kind of clean living bullshit.

You know, like they weren't smoking dope.

They weren't smoking cigarettes or drinking.

So he was like, I'm going to become a Mormon.

None of you guys have even turned yourself into a centaur.

Yeah.

I mean, I will say that when you describe him, I'm sure we can look at pictures of him at various ages, but all I can think of is one of the weird children from Akira, Masaru, the one who's got like the kind of like comb over hair.

Like, he's just that, but American.

Yeah.

He doesn't listen to the Beach Boys, though, because he thinks it's too communist.

I have something being born in my mind.

We have discovered Mormon Yukio Mishima.

Can you imagine what he's listening to?

Yeah, he got into weightlifting, you know, to get over his head.

Exactly.

Obsessed with his health, obsessed with like all of this other stuff.

Nate, hold the idea of what music he's listening to for part two.

Okay, because I'm just going to put it throughout there.

I'm just going to blind roulette guess here that it's Pat Boone, but I'm not going to.

So just hold on, hold on.

So his parents attended his baptism at the local church, but they didn't want anything to do with the Mormons and hope that this would at least be an outlet for his like growing kind of right-wing fanaticism.

No.

You'll meet a nice girl, get married, have 13 kids.

You'll learn a lot about making jello molds.

It'll be fine.

You're going to have the worst sex of your life, kid.

Literally, later that night after his baptism, Robbie burst into his parents' room just as his father was getting into bed with a book of Mormon in his hand about to give a sermon, and his dad just shouted at him to fuck off.

And he like shrieked out of the room.

I have never felt so sympathetic to a dad that we've ever talked about this show.

Like, mostly because the only dads we ever talked about here are like making fun of my own.

But like, your little annoying kid joins the John Bircher Society, and you go to those meetings, and you see how fucking awful they are, and he's just becoming worse and worse.

And then he goes to college and he joins the Mormons.

You don't know, no, know a lot about the Mormons, but you're like, this has to be better than the John Bircher's, right?

And then at midnight, the door to your bedroom bursts open, and your little shithead of a son starts screaming

and waving nasal voices like, You want to hear about Joseph Smith?

Hey, dad, I got some things about Joseph Smith I want to talk about the gold plates you want to hear about the Nephi

honey get the gun hold on to that

by the end of this page I feel like you will lose all faith in parenthood but uh his parents soon saw a change in him and felt like they had to put their foot down uh robbie was 17 when he told his parents that He was going to a seminar in Mesa where fellow Mormon Marvin Cooley was teaching tax resistance.

His mother had heard of Cooley, a Mesa melon farmer who had been messed around once by the IRS in an audit.

His speciality was invoking the Fifth Amendment on blank tax returns, and his mother was now worried that Robbie was going to break the law.

His dad was slightly more blunt.

He said the United States is the best country in the world despite its problems.

And he believed in supporting the government, not in supporting fringe groups that his father thought had more on their agendas than protesting taxes.

His mother argued with him, but Robbie literally just like wore her down and just went anyway.

The anti-tax activism he heard was a call to action.

The very act of paying income tax, which he thought were illegal, was aiding a communist cause.

Enthralled by Marvin Cooley, the dynamic Robbie was singled out after a while to act as sergeant-at-arms for some of Cooley's meetings.

He's 17.

Oh, just

wait.

Robbie's hatred of communism was quickly turning towards his own country, which he felt deeply patriotic for and felt that the United States was already infiltrated by creeping communism.

He protested learning about Keynesian economics in school and refused to engage with his schoolwork.

And when his parents fucking gave out to him for this,

they said, this will hurt your chances of going to college.

And he simply said, colleges are hotbeds for communism.

I feel so bad for his dad.

I mean, what do you do when your kid is such a little shithead like this?

Like, normally, like, nowadays, of course, most kids that you see who are like dead-eyed psychos, their parents have extreme politics as well.

But what do you do if, I mean, I'm not a parrot, Tom's not a parrot, Nate, your daughter has not yet developed political thought yet that I'm aware of.

She's definitely devoted her life to fighting the scourge of big bedtime.

So, you know, I think the thing about it is, is that I don't know, but I mean, I feel as though like this is indicative of both obvious like behavioral issues, but also the fact that this stuff is proliferating.

These are extremist groups, but like these weren't censured.

These weren't illegal.

These weren't, I mean, in a lot of ways, like there were tons of political figures in power in America who were on the same side, who were supporting it, you know, like.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, there's a reason why they came to power and they're still in power today.

And for people who are listening, all of these things are legal in America.

Like, these groups are perfectly legal to have in the United States.

And I'd also say, too, that I mean, like, there were people who committed suicide because they thought that hearing radio reports of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that it was the, it was, it was, you know, a safe way out compared to what was coming.

Like, the level of fear and anxiety in American politics at the time, you can't overstate it.

But, I mean, I don't know, as a parent, like, I wouldn't give up and say, fine, dude, if you want to.

That seems less than ideal.

I might have to become the bad parent that they're trying to sneak around, but I would make it hard as fuck for them to sneak around.

Like, you can't stop everything.

Like, you can't, like, at at a certain point, like, then you can feed the rebellion.

But, like, I wouldn't give in and just let my kid do this stuff.

That's just like, there's no fucking thing.

My child is simply going through a Mormon Nazi phase.

Yeah.

But there is some good news.

There was a college that Robbie did want to go to.

Do you want to guess what it was?

It was Brigham Young, wasn't it?

It was fucking Brigham Young.

No, it wasn't.

Was it Bob Jones University?

Was it Duke?

Was it Hillsdale College?

No, he wanted to go to West Point.

Oh,

right.

Right.

You know who also went this route, but then didn't go to West Point?

Fred Phelps from the Westboro Baptist Church.

Yeah, he had a weird career that one.

So, but wait, how does he square that circle?

Like, how do you hate the government, hate all this other stuff, but you're going to go to West Point?

I know it doesn't have to make sense, but like.

So his patriotism was that, like, he wanted to fight the communists in Vietnam on behalf of the American people because he's a patriot.

He wants to save the country.

And his dad spent months lobbying like local Republican politicians, et cetera, to try and get him a place on the entrance exam at Fort Wachuca.

But a small thing happened three years ago in 1968 that would stop Robbie dead in his tracks from ever joining the military.

Crime?

Was it crime?

It's nothing to do with him.

It's something that happened outside of the U.S.

Oh, the Ted Offensive.

It was the conviction of William Calley for his involvement in the Mylai massacre.

Oh, didn't see that, Kurt Bog.

Wait, so he saw that and was just like, oh, I guess we're not fighting communists.

Not to mention William Colley.

Nothing happened to him.

Nothing happened to him.

Callie Callie got like house arrest.

He got house arrested and then let go.

We'll eventually do a series on that in the future.

But like, yeah, like nothing happened to him.

So, yeah, Robbie believed that Callie was punished for following orders.

So he wanted no part in the army.

He saw it as just as authoritarian as the communists.

But when was Robbie born?

I'm just asking the question.

I forgot.

In 1953.

So he's the same age as my dad.

And if he had entered West Point the same time my dad, my dad did go to West Point, he would have graduated with a class of spring 1975 and would have been like, sweet, no Vietnam war for you to fight in.

Do you want to go to West Germany and get beaten up by your soldiers?

Man, look, look, 50,000 plus American soldiers died in Vietnam.

I feel like we could make an exception and make sure this guy is one of them.

Shortly before they were meant to drive to Fort Wachuca, Robbie just told his dad that, like, no, the army is woke and gay and communist.

I don't want anything to do with it.

West Point's DEI.

And by the end of 1971, his parents were told that Robbie would not be allowed to graduate high school because of an incomplete grade in economics over his protest of the course material.

I hate this child.

I hate this child more than any child we've ever talked about.

I don't know how many kids we've talked about this podcast, but I hate this fucking kid.

This kid sucks.

Yeah.

So in 1972, after becoming a high school dropout, Robbie formed the Sons of Liberty, a fucking Kojima ass name for a militia group.

He's naming them after the same group during the American Revolution.

He He did the Tea Party and all that other shit.

Yeah.

But also, he would have been eligible for draft age.

It didn't end the draft till 73.

Yep.

Yeah, but it's because he's a high school dropout who would have dropped on the rankings of those available to be conscripted.

Stupid like a fox.

They still could have fucking drafted his ass.

They could still pick him up, but he wouldn't have been at the top of the list.

His eligibility would drop.

Ironically, so.

The Sons of Liberty was a, on the face of it, survivalist group full of like other Mormons from the local area.

Some he, Robbie would meet from around gun shops or motorcycle shops in South Phoenix.

Essentially, what he was doing was the Republican version of cruising.

Robbie was easily...

That's just cruising with the worst head ever.

It's all teeth.

Pulling my fucking Kia Sorrento up and rolling down the window.

Like, hey, boys, you want some fucking teeth?

Yeah, but it's just, it's basically like imagine Tom of Finland cartoons, but everyone's dressed like Ronald Reagan.

Like, it's just

you want to have the most disappointing sex ever?

Yeah, no kidding.

You want to get your cheeks moderately clapped in the back of my family sedan?

It's like a soft opera clap.

If you tried to cruise these guys, every single one of them would both want it.

And then at the critical moment, they would basically turn into the cruising scene from Boogie Nights.

They start beating you with a Bible or some shit.

God damn it.

But yeah, the group was full of like local Mormons, but like Robbie was starting to become obsessed with this kind of fantasy of like reds under the bed and feds at the door.

And most of these survivalist groups, both Robbie's and like other ones, followed the same logic.

The government controlled by some shadowy group, brackets, Jews, was slowly going to come for you, your property and your freedom.

And the only way to defend it would would be to become self-sufficient outside of society systems now throw in varying levels of anti-semitism racism evangelical thinking and you've got everyone from like the covenant sword and the arm of the lord sons of liberty elohim city all the way up to like waco pretty much

branch davidians it's not that far removed from like ruling jeffs and some of the the mormon uh kind of separatist groups flds yeah but there's just a lot of a lot more of the like they're more engaged with the world and the idea of like conspiracism and like they're less living on a commune and marrying everyone under the age of 14.

It's more, this is, it's just so grim because it's like, you want to make a joke, but it's like, I don't know what kind of, because in my experience, the only way that you can really break people out of this stuff is they have to either have a kind of moment of rupture when they realize it's bullshit, or they have to make friends with someone that makes them, they trust, that makes them challenge that belief.

And they want to stay friends with that person.

And it's like, this person seems like the most unfriendable person on earth.

And also like, I don't really see a moment of rupture coming.

Yeah, he's an unsufferable little dickhead.

And you feel a little bit of sympathy for someone who's this far gone when they're very young, but then, you know, they get older and become just a piece of shit adult.

And then it's like, what are you doing?

America's full of piece of shit adults, but it's just, I don't know, it's really sad and really grim.

Yeah.

It's not my fault that his parents managed to birth a child that's so fucking annoying, even his own parents don't want to parent it.

There's a scene, I don't know if you've ever read

The Prayer for Owen Meany.

I'm not a huge fan of John Irving's work, but that book's pretty good.

But there's a scene at the end where there's a guy who's

an Army NCO and a Korean War veteran who has to basically stop an attempted mass shooting by a 15-year-old whose older brother died in Vietnam.

And he basically takes the kid's machete and hits him with the blunt side of it and breaks his neck and kills him.

And the author in the narration makes the point that, like, you know, this is extremely disturbing to this guy.

Like, he didn't wake up that morning with the expectation that he wanted to or would need to kill a 15-year-old.

He's like, but he was far, he absolutely wasn't going to let himself be killed by him.

And it's like, that's how I feel in a way.

It's like, this guy's a fucking piece of shit, but it's like, what could you do to stop it?

What can you do to intervene if he's already that far gone?

Yeah, he's so extreme at such a young age.

This is obviously going to a place with a body count.

Oh, guys, you have no idea how bad it's going to be in the next part.

Outstanding.

Robbie started to train the group as best he could in military and survival tactics in 1972, but he had one problem.

He needed to show that they were real and that they were open to recruits.

So he had the idea of inviting the local CBS affiliate broadcaster to do a report on the group.

All right.

Yeah, good idea.

Ted Knight, a journalist and host at the local KOOL station, was a CBS affiliate, was contacted through a convoluted system of payphone calls and middlemen.

I was invited to do a news report on the mysterious new group that was allegedly training for war against the communist-infected government and the ZOG, which is Zionist-occupied government.

It's something that I'll explain a lot more in the next episode.

But it's essentially, oh, the international conspiracy of Jewish people control the world.

It's insane.

Blame Henry Ford.

If you ever see the term Zog being used, you know who you're dealing with as a fucking neo-Nazi.

Yes, exactly.

But

meeting in a secluded spot outside of town, Knight was met by a phalanx of men in combat fatigues, marching in lockstep with semi-automatic rifles and was directed to their camp by two of the militiamen who got in the back of his car.

One did the talking according to night and from his voice he was not even in his 20s.

He sounded really, really young.

And this man had a very high-pitched, annoying voice.

Anyway, this is our camp.

We are the sons of liberty, the youngster said.

I'm just going to do my ghostly Mickey Mouse voice stolen from that South Park episode of like, we're going to take the battles of the communists and we're going to make sure that they pay in blood for all of our boys that they slaughtered in Vietnam.

We have to do combat against the SOC government.

Lyndon Mays Johnson is a tool of the Jews.

The young man in the back of his car told Knight that these soldiers, many of them veterans, believed society was facing imminent collapse under communist infiltrators and the government, especially in the IRS.

And I love those videos of the fucking distorted Vegeta going on about the IRS.

The Babylonian demons at the IRS.

All the men of Ted Knight's age would have been World War II or Korean War vets with very few exceptions.

And so many of these guys who are involved are Vietnam veterans.

And here is fucking stolen valor ass.

You know, Robbie just like, oh, I'm going to be a company commander of the Liberation Army of John Birch.

Like, all right.

Those of you see here are the only part of our army.

There are other kinsmen who stand ready.

When it's time, we will act.

Before that, you have no way of knowing who we are.

We could be the policeman you see on the beat, your postman, your friendly bartender.

Even we don't know the identities of all the men here.

We are organized in cells of three, and only one has contact with the mother group.

Uh, uh, happy to meet the militant arm of the underpants gnome guild or whatever.

Literally, the next day when Knight went to work, the FBI and Secret Service were waiting for him.

You stupid motherfucker.

Mr.

Knight, one agent said to him, these people aren't a big group and you don't have to take them seriously.

We would prefer the people of Phoenix not see your story until we can identify just who they are.

There was already several moles in Matthew's operation.

We might be the cops.

Yeah, they might be.

They normally are.

Knight's tapes were confiscated for examination and soon the FBI identified Robbie as the voice on the tapes.

Yeah, that was fucking easy.

They visited his parents' house and tested the family typewriter, but Robbie had like gotten wind of the stuff being confiscated and was like already like headed for California.

Did he think California was some kind of international border?

You can't catch me here in the state next door.

I've heard this wonderful song by the mamas and papas about dreaming of California.

You'll never catch me there.

I want to listen to more of them, but they're all communists too.

I can't stand it.

I only listen to real American music like the doors.

Come on, baby, like by fire.

Riders on the storm.

I know we have to stay on topic because we've got limited time, but she's with your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel.

People are strange when you're a stranger.

Communists have taken the government.

Oh, God.

The FBI needs to put him in handcuffs to not throw him a jail, just give him the world's largest federally enforced wedgie the world has ever seen.

Women seem wicked.

Oh, my butt!

Women seem wicked because they're all Zog.

But yeah, so Robbie split for California, but he returned before the end of 1972.

Things had cooled down a little bit, so he didn't think he was at any risk.

And at the end of the day, these groups technically weren't illegal, so he hadn't really broken the law.

But it was at Christmas when one of Robbie's friends, Gregory Thorpe, who is a member of the Sons of Liberty, murdered his wife and two friends during a drunken frenzy after he punched his girlfriend in their apartment and uh his friend tried to intervene and was like hey hey maybe calm down don't do that he went to the back room got a shotgun and shot all of them and then shot himself normal right-wing gathering yeah yeah but it wasn't the murders that really tipped off the police it was that thorpe's apartment was covered in swastikas And like, he had an altar to Hitler in a back room.

And the police then were just like, yeah, we're not really dealing with, you know, your regular, you know, conservative Nazis.

Like, these are, like, you know, actual ardent, you know, menaces to society.

Mother of God, these men are nervous about the economy.

I also would point this out that in the 70s and 80s into the 90s, the FBI did actually go after American Nazis, Aryan Brotherhood.

the Klan, etc.

Yeah, because a lot of them were killing FBI agents.

Yeah, this was actually a thing.

Like this did.

And yeah, I'm sure we'll get to that.

But yeah,

if you got on their radar, it wasn't like, hey, because we're all members too.

Like it's, yeah, it was different.

Yeah, it was a different time.

But this kind of sent Robbie into a spiral of depression.

He was like, how can these like good people who I trust act this way?

But he revived the Sons of Liberty in 1973.

But it wasn't the violence or the guns or Thorpe's murders that would bring him into the crosshairs of the law.

It was tax.

Now, we all knew that was coming with this weird anti-tax bent that he was having.

So, since the Thorpe murders, like pretty much half of the Sons of Liberty was just all cops

who've been strategically placed to keep an eye on this guy.

Bear in mind, he's like not even 20 years of age at this stage.

No, he would have been 20 years of age.

He was born on the 16th of January.

When he filled out his W-4 form for his employer's federal tax withholding files in 1973.

He listed 10 dependents.

The effect was to reduce his withholding since he had no intent on filling a 1040 form.

Americans, this will probably make sense to you.

But unfortunately, Matthews is stupid.

Essentially, Matthews at age 20 had listed 10 dependents and was unmarried.

Which the IRS immediately was like, huh, this kind of seems suspicious.

They look at the guy one time.

They're like, there's no way that he's bussed that many times.

Sorry.

There's simply no way that man has gotten laid this much that he's got 10 kids with.

The RRS does not need to know how much I am doing big comms and lots of pussies.

Jesus Christ.

And getting caught for tax fraud in America is a lot like getting caught for war crimes in the United States military.

You're the most guilty person on earth if they actually catch you.

Also, they typically give you an option to just pay it and be done with it.

Yeah, and like normally it's a very minuscule file.

It's nowhere near as much as you actually owed in taxes.

Yeah.

Do you want to know

why the IRS,

they got his form and they were like, huh, this seems a bit weird.

Like, what's up with this?

They had already known of Matthews because Matthews wrote several letters to them complaining that federal tax law was unconstitutional.

Oh, that's a really good way to make them pay attention to you.

Like, if anybody is going to not pay their taxes correctly, it's going to be the cunt that's been penning letters to us for years saying that we're like zog tyrants.

Yeah.

And the U.S.

Attorney's Office drew up a misdemeanor complaint and a federal judge issued a bench warrant for Matthew's arrest on Friday, July 20th, 1973.

Agents brought guns because they knew about the Sons of Liberty and they spotted Robbie at a friend's home that evening.

and then followed him to a local 7-Eleven.

When Robbie saw them, he ran to his truck.

Oh no, my big gulp.

Oh, no, they're taking my big gulp.

I will vehemently oppose the sugar tax.

I should be allowed to have as much sugar as I can.

Taking away my slurpeeism is a violation of my constitutional rights.

The government violating the NAP because of the sugar tax.

The cops have never had somebody who basically tried to commit suicide in the back of a police car by eating a whole box of Mike and Ikes.

When Robbie saw the police, he heard a loud crack and a bang and assumed that the police were shooting at him.

God, I wish.

More than likely, it was a car backfiring.

Matthews ran out of his car and hid in a bush.

The agents then looking for him found him in another bush a short distance away.

And it was on the 16th of January 1974, six months later, when Robbie on his 21st birthday was sentenced to six months probation.

And from that point, he would never look back.

And that's where we'll pick it up next week.

Man, most people have to go to like prison to get hardened and more extreme.

This dude got like six months probation.

Getting in a high-speed car chase in the six of the 70s must have been awesome because you knew as long as you didn't like kill any cops on the way, you weren't going to go to prison.

Like, he's already the most annoying person I've ever had to research.

And in the next episode, he starts gaslighting people, and it gets so much worse.

Oh, he is ascending to to a new power level of Ben Shapiro we never previously knew existed.

I mean, it's funny to make the comparison, but yeah, like the only person I can think of who had mastered the art of like, you know, becoming annoying, like the skill of a samurai is Jim Morrison.

This guy's militant annoyance, Mormon Jim Morrison, who then became a white nationalist.

Bring them through to the other side.

If you keep

my taxes on file, if you give this man a ride, the Jews will take your bride for riders on the storm.

What a fucking episode.

Yeah, there's a...

What I will say is this series is a, it features a lot of guys and a lot of

very interesting mix of like dudes who you would expect would join a neo-Nazi bank robbery gang and then guys that you would never think at all.

So, yeah.

The fact that he was like turbo weird about

his body is interesting because when you think of like neo-Nazi militants, you think like most of them are meth heads.

Yep.

He's

Mormon Mishima.

Yeah, we've got Mormon white nationalist Mishima going on with Ben Shabiro.

He's someone who converted to Mormonism, which is obviously very different than being raised LDS.

Adult converts always.

Yeah, but also, I mean, like, a lot of the cultural stuff about LDS people is because they were raised in those communities and like where a lot of stuff that would seem quite unusual outside of it is is the norm.

It's what they know.

He just did that to himself.

He yeah, exactly.

He he he he effectively, it seems like he became a Mormon to become more extreme.

He LDSed himself.

Lids.

He got Lids.

Oh, man.

They should sent him on a mission.

They should have sent him on a mission.

He could have been the character from the Book of Mormon.

They sent him on his mission to Orlando, Florida.

And instead, he winds up just like, you know, making all the Disney people hate him because he's calling them all communists.

I'm here in the Philippines eating deliciously glazed chicken telling people about Joseph Smith.

Can you imagine if this guy learned Tagalog?

He could be an annoying Tagalog too.

He's going to be the first fucking Mormon missionary allowed behind the Iron Curtain and get stuck in Yerevan.

I'm just, yeah, exactly.

He could have converted Rodrigo Duterte.

Oh, speaking of whoch, protests still going on.

They have cardboard cutouts now down the street.

More Goku's than anyone's ever seen in one.

It's true.

I see at least one Goku shirt per week.

It is incredible.

and joe is now an owner of the japanese football team goku t-shirt which i bought for him in a street market in spain last weekend i cannot wear it wait to wear that monday for our live show that is my stage drip and that is a podcast guys uh we host other podcasts i am hosting joe's podcast right now but also listen i don't even host my own podcast listen to beneath skin the show about the history of everything told your history of tattooing and nate you have other podcasts i do do.

I am a co-host and producer of Trash Future, What a Hell of a Way to Dad, Kill James Bond, and No Gods, No Mayors.

So check all those out.

They all have free feeds and Patreon feeds.

So I hope you enjoy.

And thank you for being a listener to Lines Left by Donkeys.

It only gets weirder from here.

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And we are going to be live.

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You can come and see us.

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So come get your tickets.

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You You can come see us.

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Get your tickets.

Come and see us.

And until next time,

don't do anything in the show.

Don't let your children be horrible.

Parent your kids.

Sometimes kids have really bad vibes, but if you just let them go about their merry way, it'll only get worse.