Why Trump is Welcoming White South Africans as Refugees. Plus, Ep 2 of The Divided Dial.

Speaker 1 An international publicity campaign for white farmers in South Africa has had unintended consequences.

Speaker 2 The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by the Trump administration arrived in the U.S. Monday.

Speaker 1 From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Michael Loinger.
Meanwhile, back home, Afrikaner activists are dealing with the fallout.

Speaker 3 They were trying to get attention. They were even trying to get sanctions.
They were never trying to get refugee status.

Speaker 3 These groups are sort of like a dog that caught a car, but they caught the car that they weren't chasing.

Speaker 1 Also, on this week's show, two journalists listening to shortwave radio in the 90s heard the modern militia movement forming in America.

Speaker 4 It was very militant. We were Radio for Peace International.
We believed in living peaceful spiritual lives. And so it was really shocking to us.

Speaker 1 It's all coming up after this.

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Speaker 1 From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week.
I'm Michael Loewinger.

Speaker 2 The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by the Trump administration arrived in the U.S. Monday.

Speaker 2 The group included 49 Afrikaners, which is an ethnic group in South Africa made up of descendants of European colonists.

Speaker 7 The United States really rejects the egregious persecution of people on the basis of race in South Africa, and we welcome these people to the United States.

Speaker 1 Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau on Monday, answering a question from the BBC about why Afrikaners and not people from say war zones had been granted refugee status.

Speaker 7 The criteria are making sure that refugees did not pose any challenge to our national security and that they could be assimilated easily into our country.

Speaker 7 And all of these folks who have just come in today have been carefully vetted pursuant to assimilated easily.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 1 On Wednesday, multiple outlets reported reported that one of these carefully vetted Afrikaners had posted on X in 2023 that, quote, Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.

Speaker 1 This despite a recent Department of Homeland Security policy that anti-Semitic activity on social media could lead to a rejected immigration request.

Speaker 1 But, as we've been told, the safe refuge of Afrikaners is an urgent matter.

Speaker 9 It's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about.

Speaker 1 President Donald Trump addressed the media this this week in the Oval Office.

Speaker 9 Farmers are being killed.

Speaker 9 They happen to be white, but whether they're white or black makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.

Speaker 1 Concern for this 2024 expropriation law in South Africa, which is a bit like eminent domain, has also been amplified repeatedly by South African-born billionaire Elon Musk.

Speaker 1 His AI chat bot, Grok, this this week began mysteriously telling users on X about a white genocide among Afrikaner farmers in response to completely unrelated questions.

Speaker 3 There's been a problem with violent crime in South Africa. Let's put that out there first.

Speaker 3 But this idea that white farm owners are particularly victimized doesn't play out if we look at the police statistics. So where does this myth come from?

Speaker 1 Carolyn Holmes is a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Knoxville, where she specializes in South African nationalism.

Speaker 1 She's been tracking the years-long PR campaign behind the white genocide narrative.

Speaker 3 A series of activist groups have really made this their central cause.

Speaker 3 There's a really easy way to make statistics look more powerful, and that's to mess around with who actually counts as a white farm owner, who actually counts as the victims that they're concerned about.

Speaker 1 I read one piece in Al Jazeera that even looking at data provided by by some of these Afrikaner advocacy groups, the supposed proof showed that just about 60 farmers across all races are killed each year in a country where there are some 19,000 murders annually.

Speaker 1 That doesn't make a strong case.

Speaker 3 No, it doesn't.

Speaker 3 Full-time residents of commercial farms, regardless of race, are actually statistically significantly less likely to experience violent crime than their urban and peri-urban counterparts in South Africa.

Speaker 3 These activist communities have foregrounded this idea of white victimization by picking out a very small number of stories and continually focusing on them.

Speaker 3 They tend to be stories with incredibly sympathetic victims. They say, look at this particularly horrifying case that happened in 2018.
And it's like, well, okay, that was seven years ago.

Speaker 3 Those folks were brought to trial, the people who perpetrated that. They're all serving time, those that were convicted.

Speaker 3 This is not misinformation in the way that we've traditionally thought about it, where we can correct it by saying, oh, but that's factually incorrect.

Speaker 3 I can hold up every statistic in the world saying, you know, white people are not significantly more likely to be targeted, but the story has become so real that it has resulted in 49 people leaving their home and coming to Texas.

Speaker 1 We've made reference to some of these activist groups. You call them white rights groups.

Speaker 4 Who are they?

Speaker 3 There's a lot of them. So we have groups like Afri Forum.
We have groups like the Urania movement. We have more militant groups like the AWB.

Speaker 3 They historically have focused on things like language rights and self-defense training and neighborhood watch patrols and some would call it vigilante activity.

Speaker 3 They've recently pivoted to specifically talking about rural security and quote-unquote farm murders, partially, I think, because it's been so successful for them in the international arena.

Speaker 1 And to advance the narrative of this disproportionate violence levied against them, some of these Afrikaner groups have pointed to a XOSA anti-apartheid song, which they say explicitly calls for the killing of white farmers.

Speaker 1 The South African courts have weighed in on this. Elon Musk and Marco Rubio have posted about it repeatedly on X.
Tell me about it.

Speaker 3 Dubule Buno, right? Shoot Shoot the Bur is what that song is. And it was a struggle song.
It was part of the anti-apartheid movement.

Speaker 3 That this is a song that was sung in the context of an armed struggle against a white minority regime. So it's very controversial.

Speaker 3 It's sung sometimes in Plosa, sometimes in Zulu, and it was particularly brought to the forefront by a politician by the name of Julius Malema. He was then the leader of the ANC Youth League.

Speaker 3 He sung it at a rally, got a lot of people fired up about this.

Speaker 3 In 2010, the first time that made a lot of international headlines, there was also a farm killing of a far-right Afrikaner leader, Eugene Terreblanche.

Speaker 3 And so a lot of people sort of paired those two events and said, look, this is evidence. This is a causal connection between singing the song and violence against white people.

Speaker 3 And it was ruled to be a form of hate speech in 2010, although that ruling was then overturned in 2022.

Speaker 3 Other folks like Julius Malemo, who has now been kicked out of the ANC and has his own political party, has said this is a legitimate part of our struggle history and we need to be able to honor the people that fought for our freedom.

Speaker 1 Of course, the reason that we're speaking is that the Trump administration has elevated the grievances and claims of some of these Afrikaner groups, including Afri Forum.

Speaker 1 How and when did they first get the president's ear?

Speaker 3 So in the first Trump administration, a lot of these white rights groups saw an opportunity.

Speaker 3 And so Afri Forum, one of the major groups that have forwarded this idea of white victimhood, came to the United States. In 2018, they were wildly successful.

Speaker 3 They got meetings with people like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz. They posted a photo on their social media of a meeting with John Bolton in the White House.

Speaker 3 And in probably the biggest PR coup, they landed a sort of primetime spot on Tucker Carlson's show.

Speaker 11 Well, now to a fascinating fascinating and significant story the media have all but ignored.

Speaker 11 An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans-speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders.

Speaker 8 Best thing that you can do to help us is to talk about this, to talk about it on public platforms, and in that way, to continue to put pressure on the South African government. Just to tell the truth.

Speaker 8 I agree.

Speaker 3 In the wake of that Tucker Carlson interview, we have the first Trump tweet in 2018.

Speaker 12 Trump writes that he's asked his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and the large-scale killing of farmers.

Speaker 1 What were they advocating for on this tour exactly?

Speaker 3 So that's an interesting question, because aside from international attention, they didn't necessarily have a policy prescription that was embedded in these tours.

Speaker 3 What they said is, we need attention, we need help.

Speaker 3 Maybe we need some sort of international diplomatic pressure. We need possibly something like capacity building for the South African police forces.

Speaker 1 Fast forward to the present, policy did come out of this tour, ultimately.

Speaker 3 Yes, with the executive order that outlines this refugee status for Afrikaners.

Speaker 3 The fascinating thing is that it was met with deep ambivalence by these activist communities that had worked so hard to put this issue item on the agenda of President Trump and his administration.

Speaker 1 Refugee status wasn't really on their wish list.

Speaker 3 Not at all. And they have repeatedly said so since February.

Speaker 14 We want not to be refugees in another man's country. As the Orania movements say, if someone wants to help, help us here.

Speaker 3 And Strutz, the guy who was on Fox News with Tucker Carlson, was interviewed by the New York Times and he said, I'm not sure I know anybody that wants to be a refugee.

Speaker 15 We like America. We regard ourselves as friends of America.
But we want a future for our community here in the southern tip of the African continent.

Speaker 1 One of the current leaders of Afri Forum, Callie Creel, said,

Speaker 1 Afrikaners, let me be clear, cannot survive as a cultural community in the U.S. or any other country.
What they want is more power in South Africa.

Speaker 3 Exactly. And so, interestingly, there was a song that Afri Forum produced in late 2024 called Die Afrikaner Maksua.
The Afrikaner does this.

Speaker 3 And it's talking all about how we live here, we're from here, this is our home, this is where we speak our language. They're desperately trying to establish legitimacy in South Africa, right?

Speaker 3 So the question is, what do you do when you've achieved this objective that you never set out to achieve? that is wildly unpopular and you're still trying to operate in that country.

Speaker 3 These groups are sort of like a dog that caught a car, but they caught the car that they weren't chasing. They were trying to get attention.
They were even trying to get sanctions.

Speaker 3 They were never trying to get refugee status. And now that they have it, how that affects them domestically is a really big problem for them.

Speaker 1 Another kind of lost in translation quality to all this is that people like Elon Musk, even Donald Trump, have been using the term white genocide to describe these exaggerated claims of violence against white farmers.

Speaker 1 That term white genocide, it's pretty taboo in South Africa, right? And it's pretty taboo among the groups making some of these claims, no?

Speaker 3 It is. The term white genocide is a kind of third rail in South African politics.
Afri Forum has very carefully walked a line. around never saying those words in that order.

Speaker 3 And in fact, the only groups that are making genocide type claims are paramilitary groups in South Africa. They don't command a lot of public support, but they exist.

Speaker 3 These most extreme claims come from a non-resident population. And in fact, they primarily come from a non-Afrikaans population, too.
Elon Musk is not an Afrikaner. He is an English South African.

Speaker 1 Is it fair to say that white genocide is akin to the kind of white supremacist idea of the great replacement theory in the United States?

Speaker 3 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 This sort of cross-pollination of racist ideology between the United States and South Africa goes much further, though, than white supremacist forums.

Speaker 3 It seems like every so often there will be a cataclysm of violence, like Dylan Roof committing mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina, wearing an apartheid era flag on his jacket.

Speaker 3 And people will say, what does that have to do with anything? And what I want to say is that this conversation has been happening. It's been happening for a century.

Speaker 3 The United States and South Africa have been intertwined sort of since South Africa became a single country.

Speaker 3 And there is this attention by particularly a philanthropic class of Americans, people like Andrew Carnegie, who said what South Africa needs is the same thing that the U.S. South needs.

Speaker 3 It needs a welfare state to lift up white people, and it needs institutional segregation. And so this took the form of a variety of laws in South Africa.

Speaker 3 So the Land Act, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, et cetera.

Speaker 3 And all of these were state efforts to define a population of whites that would then be the beneficiaries of welfare state programs in the service of making sure that white people didn't, quote, fall below their racial station.

Speaker 1 In what ways did South Africans look to Jim Crow-era United States for inspiration on their end?

Speaker 3 So, one of those pieces of legislation that I had spoken about, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which was a bedrock of what was then the nascent apartheid government, has as its first appendix a list of U.S.

Speaker 3 states, not just in the South, in fact, but across the Union, that had more restrictive covenants on interracial marriage than the one that was being proposed in South Africa.

Speaker 3 So, it was very much a, look, we can't be the bad guys. Look at what they're doing over there.

Speaker 3 So there's this trading off of respectability, trading off of ideas about how to define whiteness, how to institute segregation across the Atlantic Ocean throughout the 20th century.

Speaker 1 These Afrikaner groups, they didn't ask for refugee status. There's no proof for the white genocide conspiracy theory.
What does the Trump administration get from

Speaker 1 this stunt?

Speaker 3 This is a cause that many of his most fringe supporters believe in deeply.

Speaker 3 In many ways, the Afrikaans community has been made a sort of ping-pong ball in the conversation about immigration here in a way that is profoundly dehumanizing.

Speaker 3 You know, they're not actually interested in engaging with the politics on the ground in South Africa. There is an effort to say, look at these folks who have been victimized when they let

Speaker 3 majority rule happen. We can't let ourselves be replaced.

Speaker 1 Carolyn Holmes is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Carolyn, thank you very much.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much for having me. It's been great.

Speaker 1 Coming up in the early days of the modern American white supremacy movement, they honed their message on shortwave radio. This is on the media.

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Speaker 1 This is on the media. I'm Michael Lewinger.

Speaker 1 A few years back, I reported a series of stories about a walkie-talkie app called Zello, which I discovered had become an organizing hub for far-right militia groups.

Speaker 1 I listened to hours and hours of recruitment interviews, planning meetings, and I even recorded an Oath Keepers leader discussing their group's secret plans to storm the Capitol as they were breaking in on January 6th.

Speaker 1 We have a good group.

Speaker 17 We got about 30, 40 of us. We're sticking together and sticking to the plan.

Speaker 1 What I didn't know until recently is that long before Zello, journalists monitored the early days of the militia movement on shortwave radio back in the early 90s.

Speaker 1 That's the subject of the second episode of The Divided Dial Season 2, hosted by Katie Thornton. Here's Katie.

Speaker 10 It took a lot of digging to put this series together.

Speaker 10 Digging through informal archives people had made of old shortwave radio shows, digitizing tapes, flipping through old broadcast schedules and super niche industry magazines.

Speaker 10 And as I dug, and flipped, and digitized, and listened, there was one station that jumped out at me. Broadcast from the studios of Radio for Peace International.

Speaker 10 Radio for Peace International.

Speaker 10 It isn't around anymore, but it started in the 80s. And it stood out because, unlike most shortwave stations at the time, it wasn't run by a government.

Speaker 10 It was a small, not-for-profit outlet, broadcasting from Costa Rica, mostly to the Americas and the Caribbean.

Speaker 10 On a little patch of land in the jungle, station founder James Latham and his wife Deborah built their own transmitters piece by piece, with parts brought into the country in suitcases.

Speaker 10 Their station hosted a Spanish-language feminist program and some progressive talk shows that got mailed to them from the U.S. on cassette.

Speaker 10 Just like the shortwave dreamers of the early 20th century, they believed deeply in the power of the media.

Speaker 20 Shortwave radio can be beamed across political and geographic boundaries.

Speaker 10 I mean, they ran programs about shortwave on shortwave.

Speaker 20 Equipped with a simple radio, listeners can tune into perspectives and insights not available to them locally.

Speaker 10 In his free time, James, the guy who started it all, tuned into other international radio stations

Speaker 10 and he noticed something.

Speaker 4 He explained to me in just my first few weeks there the fact that recently a new type of program had started to pop up.

Speaker 10 This is Brad Hefner. He worked with James at the station in the 90s.

Speaker 4 And they were racist and hateful and violent.

Speaker 21 I understand that, Robbie. I ain't a racist.

Speaker 18 I make no bad.

Speaker 18 I'm not ashamed of it.

Speaker 22 Are you a white woman such as myself who is sick of being harassed and tormented? Call Aryan Nations for a whiter, brighter America.

Speaker 18 They hate Americans. They hate white Americans.

Speaker 4 It was very militant. We were Radio for Peace International.
We believed in living peaceful spiritual lives. And so it was really shocking to us.

Speaker 10 There was no way for Brad and James to know it at the time, but the broadcast they were hearing would fundamentally change shortwave radio and help fuel a movement that would change the U.S.

Speaker 3 forever.

Speaker 23 Good evening. Dozens are dead.
Hundreds are missing after the worst terrorist attack in U.S.

Speaker 24 history.

Speaker 25 A car bomb exploded in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, blowing off the entire planet.

Speaker 10 This is season two of The Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton.

Speaker 10 This season is all about shortwave radio, how it went from a utopian experiment in global communication to a hollowed-out backwater haunted by extremist preachers and cult leaders.

Speaker 10 And how a little-known battle playing out on the shortwaves today might say a lot about how we regard our public airwaves.

Speaker 10 Last week, we learned how shortwave radio became a propaganda tool for governments at war.

Speaker 10 This week, the untold story of how it became a propaganda tool for American anti-government militias.

Speaker 10 So, let's back up.

Speaker 10 It turns out a lot of the broadcasts Brad and James were hearing started in earnest around the beginning of the 90s at a small family-run radio station on the outskirts of Nashville.

Speaker 4 On Worldwide Christian Radio, WWCR.

Speaker 10 WWCR was one of several new privately run shortwave stations broadcasting from the U.S. that got on the air in the 1980s.
Shortwave stations are expensive to run.

Speaker 10 Launching a radio signal into the sky so it can come back to Earth thousands of miles away takes a lot of electricity. Plus, advertising is kind of a bust on shortwave.

Speaker 10 While some dry cleaner or regional bank might want to advertise on their local AM station, no one wants to promote their discounted duvets or high-yield savings accounts to random listeners from Michigan to Morocco.

Speaker 10 But in the 1980s, two things happened to give Shortwave a boost.

Speaker 10 A shift in regulatory oversight allowed more people access to broadcast licenses, and new technology made the actual receivers smaller and easier to tune, which sent radio sets flying off the shelves in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Speaker 10 So some enterprising station owners in the U.S. decided it was worth a shot to get on shortwave.
And they survived mostly thanks to evangelists.

Speaker 10 The station owners sold airtime, an hour a week, an hour a day, to American preachers who wanted to build a global congregation.

Speaker 10 WWCR was no exception. Lots of preachers paid to play their sermons there.
But nothing was stopping other people from buying airtime.

Speaker 10 And not long after WWCR launched, a guy who wasn't preaching at all got on on the air.

Speaker 27 It's Radio Free America, the talk show for intelligent Americans with your host, Tom Valentine.

Speaker 18 I'm Tom Valentine. This is Radio Free America.

Speaker 10 The general consensus is that this guy, Tom Valentine, was the first really far-right guy to consistently run his show on shortwave.

Speaker 18 Who rely on government. They want to be in that state.

Speaker 10 And at first blush, he just sounded like the other shock jocks of the era.

Speaker 18 It's almost a socialist state.

Speaker 10 You're run-of-the-mill, Rush Limbaugh.

Speaker 18 Hi, this is Tom Valentine live again, and we have Jeff and B.

Speaker 10 But he was financed by a newspaper called The Spotlight.

Speaker 18 First time caller just started listening a little bit, and I'm going to order that spotlight.

Speaker 10 And The Spotlight was the flagship publication of the far-right, white nationalist, and Holocaust-denying think tank, The Liberty Lobby.

Speaker 18 It's the best newspaper in America, and you're going to find it fascinating after you... find out that the spotlight's everything like we say it is.

Speaker 18 You'll become a distributor and that'll help because other people will get the word. It's the best.

Speaker 10 He called his show Radio Free America, a riff on the government service, Radio Free Europe.

Speaker 10 But Valentine's brand of patriotism was increasingly mistrustful, even disdainful, of America's institutions.

Speaker 10 Tom Valentine's show spawned others like it on shortwave. There was one guy, a regular caller, named Mark Kornkey, who was a dorm room janitor at the University of Michigan.

Speaker 10 He called in so often, he came to be known by the nickname Mark from from Michigan.

Speaker 10 His takedowns of the government were even more vitriolic than Valentine's, and with airtime so cheap on WWCR, Mark from Michigan decided to get his own show.

Speaker 27 Now I did some basic math the other day, not New World Order math, and I found that using the old-style math, you can get about four politicians for 120-foot of rope.

Speaker 27 Always try and find a willow tree. The entertainment will last longer.

Speaker 13 He had wild theories that the UN had stationed thousands of Gurkhas, who were these specialized British soldiers from Nepal and Burma, you know, in Michigan to take over the U.S.

Speaker 10 This is J.R. Lind.
Years ago, he wrote a story for Nashville's Alt Weekly about WWCR and its reputation for having a wide open door when it came to who could get on the air.

Speaker 13 That attracted some more conspiracists, if for no other reason, then this was a place where they could broadcast, right? They weren't going on CBS news.

Speaker 10 The fact that anyone could get their opinions broadcast far and wide without a fat radio or TV contract was a big deal in the pre-internet era.

Speaker 10 And Shortwave became the perfect platform for guys with something to say.

Speaker 10 Within a couple years, there was enough demand from far-right hosts that WWCR started adding new frequencies to air them all.

Speaker 10 That's another thing that makes Shortwave different from, say, AM radio.

Speaker 10 One shortwave station can have multiple signals, usually aimed at different parts of the world, and they can put different programming on each of them, like stations within a station.

Speaker 10 Other shortwave stations in the U.S. wanted to cash in too, so they started selling airtime to many of the same right-wing hosts who'd been getting on WWCR.

Speaker 10 Shortwave was converting from evangelism to right-wing rhetoric.

Speaker 10 According to the FCC, shortwave stations broadcasting from the U.S. are supposed to serve a mostly international audience.
That's the law. But the feds didn't seem to be paying much attention.

Speaker 10 So, without meaningful oversight, a lot of these newer stations were beaming their broadcasts first and foremost at U.S. citizens.

Speaker 10 While the FCC might not have been monitoring the rise of the right on shortwave, Brad Hefner and James Latham, all the way down in the Costa Rican jungle, were.

Speaker 10 They heard Tom Valentine, they heard Mark from Michigan, and they kept listening as more and more hateful new shortwave shows filled the airwaves in the first half of the 90s.

Speaker 10 Some shows were hosted by leaders of big neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance and the National Vanguard.

Speaker 10 As Brad and James listened, they caught wind of a new movement that was brewing, an army gathering and making violent plans.

Speaker 30 You must form your militia units.

Speaker 10 Shortwave host Bill Cooper was a Navy veteran who claimed to have high-level government intel and urged people to rebel.

Speaker 30 You must prepare on a local level to defend

Speaker 30 your communities, cities, and states. Identify targets on a local level.
Pay no heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy foreign government.

Speaker 10 Host Linda Thompson, a former lawyer-turned conspiracy theory peddler, and one of the rare women on the shortwaves, called for an armed militia to attack Washington and and put public officials on trial.

Speaker 31 There's a lot of people that are holding back saying, well, you know, if there's not enough people, I don't want to be there because I don't want to be the one to get shot.

Speaker 18 I mean, they're for this couch potato patriot.

Speaker 31 I've heard from enough of them.

Speaker 4 Most people didn't know what the militia movement was, but they had started organizing and they were readying themselves for an armed confrontation with the government.

Speaker 10 There was another host Brad heard a lot, a guy who helped unite the Christian right, the white supremacist right, and the growing anti-government right, all together on shortwave.

Speaker 10 His name was Pastor Pete Peters.

Speaker 19 They hate Christ, they hate America, and they hate our people.

Speaker 10 In that media, Peters' Flock was Colorado's Laporte Church of Christ,

Speaker 10 a leading church in the so-called Christian identity movement.

Speaker 4 And we had never heard of that before and looked into it.

Speaker 4 And what they were espousing was that Jewish people are directly descended from Satan, and it is the God-given obligation of Aryan people to eliminate Satan from the earth. And this is a race war.

Speaker 4 They're trying to provoke a race war.

Speaker 32 When you see a black man and a white woman, or vice versa, waltz down the aisle in a wedding ceremony, something inside your gut says that's not right.

Speaker 10 Peters preached openly against interracial marriage.

Speaker 32 It's wrong, it's wrong, it's

Speaker 10 He told his followers that the Bible sanctioned the murder of gays and lesbians.

Speaker 10 And all this hate, it wasn't just hot air. Remember the story of Alan Berg from season one of The Divided Dial?

Speaker 29 Alan Berg, I can't wait. 3:17 in the afternoon is about 10 minutes in the show.
Let's go to lunch.

Speaker 10 He was the lefty Jewish talk radio host whose AM show was popular in the early 80s.

Speaker 10 In 1984, Berg sparred with two white supremacist preachers who had called into into his show. One of those preachers was Pete Peters.

Speaker 10 After that skirmish, a member of Peters' flock called into Berg's show to berate him.

Speaker 29 You are a Nazi by your very own admission.

Speaker 10 Then later, that very caller drove the getaway car. 10.39 KOA time and we're that sped away from Alan Berg's home.

Speaker 33 Someone passing in a vehicle using a semi-automatic weapon or an automatic weapon, I'm not sure, fired upon Alan Berg when he was exiting his vehicle in front of his home. And Allen Berg has, in fact,

Speaker 33 passed on. He is no longer with us.

Speaker 10 Allen Berg was murdered by members of the white supremacist group The Order. At least two members of the Order, including that getaway driver, regularly attended Peters' church.

Speaker 10 This violent act sent shockwaves through the radio world.

Speaker 10 But there weren't obvious signs of a bigger, growing threat because back then the far right was fractured.

Speaker 25 That was the problem that these extremists, these neo-Nazis, the Aryan nations had. Nobody was buying the message because this message of hate wasn't selling.

Speaker 10 That's Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, speaking at the National Press Club in 1996.

Speaker 10 He explained that there wasn't a ton of overlap between the racists, the ultra-conservative Christians, and the anti-government guys until.

Speaker 35 On August August 21st, 1992, shots rang out in the remote hills of northern Idaho.

Speaker 10 The 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Federal marshals killed the wife and son of a Christian identity worshipper, Randy Weaver.

Speaker 10 The marshals came to Weaver's cabin after he failed to show up to court for illegally selling weapons to an informant embedded with the Aryan nations.

Speaker 10 Pastor Pete Peters understood that the government's actions at Ruby Ridge had the potential to unite these previously disconnected right-wing factions.

Speaker 10 He called a three-day gathering at a YMCA in Estes Park, Colorado, not far from his hometown.

Speaker 36 Who I'm talking about, Randy Weaver, and I'm talking about the incident that took place up near Naples, Idaho, and the shooting that went on there.

Speaker 36 Or tell you how I got involved and why we're having this meeting.

Speaker 10 More than 150 men came from all over the country. They represented everything from more mainstream churches and gun rights groups to the Aryan Brotherhood.

Speaker 10 Lewis Beam, perhaps the most notorious figure of the more recent KKK, was a keynote speaker. And leveraging the government's bungled response at Ruby Ridge, Peters implored them to unite.

Speaker 37 We might not be able to agree on his name. We might not be able to agree on a Bible translation.

Speaker 37 We might not be able to agree on a day we set aside the rest, but by the God of Abraham, we agree you don't murder our wives and our children.

Speaker 37 And that's why we're here.

Speaker 36 And if there's one thing I prayed for, is that we could come together as one.

Speaker 25 They were able to pull under that tent a lot of people, disparate groups, who had never joined together before.

Speaker 10 Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees again.

Speaker 25 In fact, at the ST's Park meeting, one of the arguments was, well, look, I don't want to be here with these people over here because I don't believe in their philosophy.

Speaker 25 And someone stood up and said, Look, we can argue about that later once we win this war.

Speaker 10 Peter's meeting came to be known as the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous. It was a watershed moment in the anti-government militia movement.

Speaker 26 We have come a long way at this meeting, this weekend, towards unity among the various thoughts, the various factions within not only our own identity movement, but within the Constitutionalist movement, the Patriot movement,

Speaker 26 other denominations.

Speaker 32 In the name of our Master, the King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords, who died for our sins, we offer this prayer.

Speaker 4 Amen.

Speaker 27 We are adjourned.

Speaker 10 Pastor Pete Peters hosted this gathering right around the time he started his show on Shortwave Radio. The message was clear: Shortwave would be the movement's medium of choice.

Speaker 10 And that would have big consequences.

Speaker 10 That's coming up after the break. I'm Katie Thornton, and this is the Divided Dial Season 2 from On the Media.

Speaker 2 This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. You'll see your favorite actors, directors, and comedians on late-night TV shows or YouTube.
But what you get with Fresh Air is a deep dive.

Speaker 2 Spend some quality time with people like Billie Eilish, Quest Love, Ariana Grande, Stephen Colbert, and so many more. We ask questions you won't hear asked anywhere else.

Speaker 2 Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY.

Speaker 10 I'm Katie Thornton, and this is On the Media. We're in the middle of our second episode of season two of The Divided Dial.

Speaker 10 Before the break, I explained how shortwave was quickly becoming the medium of choice for an increasingly unified group of anti-government activists, white nationalists, and ultra-conservative evangelicals.

Speaker 10 And back in Costa Rica, Brad Hevner and James Latham were following the breadcrumbs. Neo-Nazi William Pierce had a regular shortwave show.

Speaker 10 He wrote The Turner Diaries, a sacred text of the militia movement. In it, a fictitious character named Earl Turner joins a white supremacist militia and overthrows the U.S.

Speaker 10 government, in part by bombing a federal building.

Speaker 4 And there were others. At one point, there was one program from a man named Kurt Saxon.

Speaker 4 And one day we were listening, and he, on the radio program, he gave explicit directions on how to get away with murder.

Speaker 27 Well, you could just have your regular shotgun.

Speaker 21 Don't worry about the barrel length. All you got to do is point it in the general area, and whoever comes through that door is dead.

Speaker 10 On another broadcast, Kurt Saxon just read instructions on how to make a fertilizer bomb.

Speaker 4 And that was the last straw, and we decided that we had to respond very directly.

Speaker 10 Brad and James took to the airwaves themselves.

Speaker 28 And hello, everyone. Welcome to the Far Right Radio Review.

Speaker 19 I'm James Latham. I'm Brad Hevner.
The Far Right Radio Review is a program that takes a critical look at the far right, its use of shortwave AM FMs.

Speaker 4 We would record it, edit it down, pull out the snippets, play the snippets on the air, and talk about them.

Speaker 4 We got all the information we could about who these people were, their background, the organizations. We subscribed to all their newsletters.

Speaker 28 We've been monitoring them for the last couple weeks. Well, we'll let you, the listener, decide, are they a racist, anti-Semitic organization or not?

Speaker 19 Here's some clips.

Speaker 18 We're hopping to a bunch of criminals that robbed this country. I want to make a deal with you.
You pray for them, and I'll pick them in the testicles and cut at them.

Speaker 18 They're going to be coming for you. You better get yourself a good shotgun and a good rifle in the process.

Speaker 34 If you listen from abroad, you would think that most of America consists of these

Speaker 34 militia patriots.

Speaker 10 And lots of newcomers. They expose the hate and the aspirations.

Speaker 34 A real known racist anti-Semitic individual.

Speaker 39 Said there he's hoping to get to Congress, eh?

Speaker 34 Right.

Speaker 10 And they followed the money.

Speaker 28 We've long wondered how do the far right support themselves so well with so many programs on shortwave, for example. This is one individual here that has a lot of money and capital.

Speaker 10 Speaking of swindlers sponsoring shortwave programs, we have they added a call-in component where listeners could try to make sense of it all.

Speaker 18 This is the first time I've heard you broadcast on 7385.

Speaker 34 That's correct, yeah.

Speaker 18 I think a lot of people out there are confused over the militias that they don't have enough information.

Speaker 18 Like, I'm kind of confused about it. I don't really know what kind of people are in it.

Speaker 39 Certainly, a lot of militia supporters and members are good folks that just like to be well-trained in self-defense.

Speaker 39 I think, by and large, the militia leadership are pulling people towards these wild conspiracy theories, sort of to advance their own agenda. You know, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Speaker 10 The right-wing broadcasters did not appreciate the scrutiny.

Speaker 4 There were very clear statements made on the other programs about us, and some of them saying, let's get some guns and go get them.

Speaker 18 These two bolts of the other in Costa Rica have got just those Yahoos in Costa Rica on the air, but they they wouldn't have the guts to corrupt.

Speaker 18 Anyway.

Speaker 10 Brad and James cataloged over two dozen far-right hosts with regularly scheduled shows on shortwave. Some were broadcasting every day.

Speaker 10 To most Americans though, shortwave radio and the movement it was platforming were still under the radar. Until April 19th, 1995.

Speaker 40 You're looking right now at some of the first pictures that we got of the Murray Building downtown. It's a federal office.

Speaker 10 The attack on the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols remains the country's most deadly domestic attack.

Speaker 40 Fire chief or one of the fire chiefs for Oklahoma City has said that there are people trapped inside. They're having to get to them one by one.

Speaker 10 I don't know Chris if you can just see that line of ambulances just waiting to head back down to the federal building.

Speaker 34 You know you hope and you pray that every time you turn a stone there'll be a survivor somewhere. It hurts deep down as to why someone would do something of this magnitude.

Speaker 4 Of course, everyone assumed it was some foreign terrorist, but within a couple of days it was reported that Timothy McVeigh was the prime suspect, and he came from this world of the militia movement.

Speaker 4 And mainstream media in the U.S. all said, what's the militia movement?

Speaker 10 Thankfully for the media, there were a couple of guys down in Costa Rica who had a lot of intel.

Speaker 10 It turns out Timothy McVeigh was an avid shortwave listener, allegedly even serving as a bodyguard for Mark Kornke.

Speaker 4 And so we did interviews with major media outlets all over the U.S., all over the world, explaining what the militia movement was and who Timothy McVeigh was.

Speaker 10 The hosts of the far-right radio review were featured in the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Japan State Broadcaster, and NPR.

Speaker 24 James Latham does his monitoring for a group called Radio Peace International based in Costa Rica.

Speaker 24 He says these nightly broadcasts offer an alternative worldview with a steady diet of hate speech, recipes for making homemade bombs, assassination techniques, conspiracy theories.

Speaker 13 The media just chased down everything they could find.

Speaker 10 J.R. Lind again.

Speaker 13 And that led them to Mark Kornke.

Speaker 13 From there, reporters found out about Kurt Saxon giving pretty straightforward directions about bomb building that bared a pretty striking resemblance to the type of bomb that was used in Oklahoma City.

Speaker 10 Suddenly, all eyes were on shortwave. Even President Clinton referenced it in a speech.

Speaker 38 I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves today.

Speaker 38 And to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia,

Speaker 38 it is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.

Speaker 10 The bombing and the scrutiny that followed sent WWCR into a tailspin.

Speaker 10 In the words of the station's then manager, they decided to get the gasoline off the fires by canceling Mark Kornke's show, which, of course, fed right into some people's suspicions.

Speaker 13 Kornke and the others said we're being silenced and this was all pressure from the government to keep the truth away from you.

Speaker 10 But that wasn't why he was taken off the air.

Speaker 13 If you read the contemporaneous accounts of it, the FBI never pressured the station at all, from what we understand.

Speaker 13 As the attention grew, the station was being overwhelmed by calls from particularly young mothers.

Speaker 13 Because one of the great tragedies of the Murrow bombing was that there was a daycare center for federal workers, and so many children were killed.

Speaker 13 And the mothers would call the station and say, why are you letting these people who help kill children broadcast on your air

Speaker 10 in time? the media moved on from the shortwave story. But some people who learned about shortwave through the Oklahoma City bombing coverage stuck around.

Speaker 10 They weren't the critics, but the curious, the militia curious.

Speaker 10 Not long after the attack, in an interview with 60 Minutes, a militia leader had a shortwave radio on display behind him, like a calling card.

Speaker 10 WWCR put Mark from Michigan's show back on the air within a month, and another slew of right-wing hosts got on the shortwaves.

Speaker 10 WWCR was so busy after the bombing that they had to add a fourth super high-powered transmitter to keep up with demand. One of their new hosts was someone you're probably familiar with.

Speaker 34 I guess he's read that God's going to destroy the earth next time by fire.

Speaker 10 Before Alex Jones was the InfoWars guy, he was a shortwave guy. In fact, he only got off shortwave after going bankrupt as a result of the Sandy Hook lawsuit.

Speaker 10 in the six years after Oklahoma City, the number of hours devoted to far-right shows on shortwave doubled.

Speaker 13 So, even if you were a moderate voice, now you're sucked out, right?

Speaker 10 J.R. Lind.
Because

Speaker 13 now, what is associated in the public's mind with shortwave, it's no longer the BBC World Service. Now it's the guys who helped Timothy McVeigh bomb a federal building.

Speaker 10 But even as the right-wing extremists and militia leaders made the shortwaves their home, the medium was in trouble by the time the new millennium rolled around.

Speaker 10 For one, it turns out that conspiracy-addled Nazis don't make for the most sustainable business partners.

Speaker 10 One big-time host was killed in a shootout with Arizona sheriffs after he shot a trooper twice in the head.

Speaker 10 Mark Kornke spent time behind bars, once for attacking police officers, and also after two of his former bodyguards turned on a third and killed him.

Speaker 10 Kornke was subpoenaed in that case, but he fled, broadcasting from a, quote, secret location and asking his listeners to wage a war of retribution against the police.

Speaker 10 Eventually, he was caught, hiding in a pond, with his hair dyed red and a fake Irish accent. His truck, full of illegal military-grade weapons, sat nearby.

Speaker 10 But the main reason Shortwave was in trouble was the elephant in the room, a new technology that could instantly connect people across vast distances, the internet.

Speaker 10 And online, militia leaders and right-wing zealots could do for free what they were paying by the hour to do on shortwave.

Speaker 10 A lot of hosts dropped their shortwave broadcasts in favor of the web, and shortwave audiences in the US dwindled.

Speaker 10 But for the extreme right, all those hours and dollars spent on the air weren't wasted.

Speaker 10 The years of practice that they had had in honing their message of hate on shortwave radio gave them a head start on the early internet.

Speaker 10 From the beginning, they created bulletin boards and forums. They set up websites where people could engage with one another anonymously.

Speaker 10 And they made online communities where established leaders, many of whom had built their platform on shortwave, could enlist new recruits.

Speaker 10 Radio for Peace International in Costa Rica shut down in the early 2000s.

Speaker 10 And over the last couple of decades, as the extreme right has moved into the mainstream, Brad Hefner has thought a lot about why the right found such fertile ground on shortwave.

Speaker 4 People promoting peace can have a forum at the library and can spread their message and grow their organizations in many ways out in the open.

Speaker 4 If you're trying to provoke a race war, you can't have a forum at the public library. So this is a medium where they could spread their message and get the word out to their followers.

Speaker 10 Shortwave hosts appealed to those followers by exploiting the qualities of the medium itself.

Speaker 10 They took the promise of radio, that feeling I described at the beginning of the first episode, like I had joined a club. They took that excitement, that potential, and perverted it.

Speaker 10 Created a twisted community, a fraternity of radio guys who were united in their vision for America.

Speaker 4 Clearly, they took over and they dominated.

Speaker 10 The rights time on shortwave prepared them for their rise on the internet. But not everyone was ready to give it all up and move online.

Speaker 10 For some hangers-on, the shortwaves offered a few things the internet couldn't.

Speaker 10 For one, listening was totally anonymous. It couldn't be tracked, like your search history.
And there aren't easy firewalls for the shortwaves. For the hosts, there was another perk.

Speaker 10 Thanks to the exodus to the internet, shortwave airtime was now really cheap. Some stations offered big discounts to people who wanted to buy time in bulk.

Speaker 10 We're talking many hours a day, sometimes 24 hours a day.

Speaker 10 And if dirt cheap airtime and hosts who primed their audience for paranoia sounds to you like a recipe for exploitation, you're right.

Speaker 10 Next time on the divided dial, shortwave in the age of the internet.

Speaker 10 Today, the shortwaves are home to extremist preachers and cult leaders, some of whom preach and recruit from beyond the grave. Many of these voices can be heard on one station in particular.

Speaker 10 It's a ramshackle outfit that recently got a facelift thanks to an international end times ministry that helped it rewire a town in northern Maine and build one of the most high-powered antennas in the world.

Speaker 10 I had to go see for myself.

Speaker 3 Well, he was not lying when he said you can't miss it.

Speaker 10 That's next week on the third episode of The Divided Dial, Season 2. I'm Katie Thornton.

Speaker 10 The Divided Dial is written and reported by me, Katie Thornton, and edited by OTM's executive producer, Katia Rogers. Music and sound design is by Jared Paul.

Speaker 10 Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact-checking by Graham Haysha.
The series was made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Speaker 10 Special thanks this week to Brad Hevner for sharing his RFPI cassettes with us, and to Will Olson, who helped us digitize them.

Speaker 10 And an enormous thank you to Chris Haxel and Lisa Hagen, who reported the great NPR podcast No Compromise, and who generously shared their audio from the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous with us.

Speaker 1 On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer.
On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios.

Speaker 1 Brooke Gladstone is gonna be out for a couple more weeks. I'm Michael Lewinger.