Michael Phillips
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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I'm Michael Phillips, an historian, the author of a book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co-author of an upcoming book about the eugenics movement in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
Behind the Bastards
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Since the late 1990s, Alex Jones built an extensive media empire, spreading outlandish conspiracy theories from his home base in Austin, Texas. a native of the Dallas suburb of Rockwall. Over the years, Jones has claimed that the Apollo 11 moon landing was fake. So too, he said, was the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting he claimed was staged to justify new gun control laws.
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According to Jones, the U.S. government can control the weather and has intentionally caused floods and other weather disasters to punish Texas and other conservative states.
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He has insisted that chemicals intentionally placed in American drinking water are turning frogs gay, part of an experiment by the American government seeking a way to undermine the nuclear family, while peddling dubious supplements with unproven health benefits. Jones began his broadcasting career with a call-in public access cable TV show before moving on to radio and then online.
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In spite of his outlandish claims, in 2015, Jones was able to set off a panic in Texas that inspired action from Governor Greg Abbott.
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The crazier the conspiracy theory got, the more Texas's far-right political leaders were willing to pander to Jones and his ilk. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to monitor U.S. Army troops near Austin.
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Texas Senator Ted Cruz pledged that he would demand answers from the Pentagon about the military's intentions and said he completely understood the widespread paranoia.
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Suffice it to say, the Obama administration did not overthrow the state government. The intense outrage and fear generated over Army combat preparations might have seemed perplexing to those outside of Texas, a state that prides itself on being patriotic and pro-military. However, seething distress of liberal elites is a lucrative business in Texas.
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Alex Jones built a fortune of $270 million with his internet show and sales of dubious health and survivalist products advertised on those broadcasts. This is nothing new south of the Red River. From the beginning of its history, the state has been an incubator for outlandish and occasionally not completely unreasonable conspiracy theories.
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A decade later, the tide shifted, and Texas was hurriedly annexed in 1845 after widespread rumors gripped Washington, D.C., of a British plot to annex Texas and convert it to a haven for African Americans escaping slavery.
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In the 1850s, even prominent Texans like Sam Houston flocked to the American Party, also known as the Know-Nothings, that claimed the Pope had ordered Catholics from Ireland, Germany to immigrate to the United States in order to take the country over and hand power over to the Vatican.
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Panics over suspected rebellions by the enslaved gripped Anglo-Texans in 1835, 1838, 1841, and in 1856, when perhaps as many as 400 African-Americans held in bondage in Colorado County and South Central Texas apparently plotted to rise up against their white oppressors and battle their way to freedom in Mexico, where slavery had been abolished.
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A wave of labor unrest, including the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 and the rise of the populist movement, which called for the government seizure of railroads and telegraph lines.
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In addition to a global panic amongst the well-to-do about anarchism after a series of bombings in Europe and even the United States from the 1880s to just after World War I, convinced economic elites in Texas that revolution was in the air.
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The Ku Klux Klan, which in its original incarnation during Reconstruction served as a goon squad to keep newly freed African American labor under tight control, came to dominate cities like Dallas in the 1920s, where one in every three eligible men were members of the KKK at its peak. The KKK charged that both Jews and Catholics were conspiring to control the world.
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Texas politicians like Representative John Box of Texas, in a column in Henry Ford's anti-Semitic newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, charged that Jews had manipulated the Congress to add loopholes to American immigration laws passed in 1921 and 1924 in order to let Jewish people escaping the Russian Empire into the United States as part of a scheme to undermine American society.
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John Owen Beatty, the longtime chairman of the English department of Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1951, authored one of the first and perhaps the best-selling of all time book promoting Holocaust denial, Iron Curtain Over America. Beatty claimed that the Jews of today were not the Hebrew heroes of what Christians call the Old Testament.
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Instead, they were descended from a sinister Asian trot called the Khazars that converted to Judaism around the year 800. Too arrogant to assimilate with Christian Europe, Beatty wrote, Khazars undermined society under their stolen identities and caused the communist revolution in Russia in 1918.
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After immigrating to the United States in large numbers, they took over the Democratic Party, Beatty said, and moved it to the radical left. Beatty also claimed that Jews controlled Franklin Roosevelt's administration and pushed into war against Hitler's Germany, which Beatty described in his book as, quote, the historic bulwark of Christian Europe.
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A mere six years after Soviet and American troops had liberated Nazi concentration camps, Beatty claimed that most of the victims there died from disease and the Holocaust was a fraud used after 1948 to blackmail the West into political and financial support of Israel. The SMU professor urged the United States to expel Jews from the United States.
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After World War II and the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in China, the uber-wealthy giants of the Texas oil industry to a large degree funded what came to be known as McCarthyism.
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Clinton Murchison, whose son in 1960 became owner of the Dallas Cowboys National Football League team, became one of the largest financial contributors to red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. In Houston, hard-right organizations like the Minute Women fought against school integration and took over the school board.
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firing the assistant superintendent, George Ebay, because he previously lived in California and Oregon, where he had nice things to say about Roosevelt's New Deal and the African-American freedom struggle. A math instructor got fired after he carelessly commented in a teacher's lounge that he supported Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democratic Party nominee for president in 1952 and 1956.
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The Eastern School Board yanked books from campus libraries that said positive things about the United Nations, while right-wingers in Dallas forced the city library and the Museum of Fine Arts to ban artists like Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso because of their supposed communist sympathies.
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The Lifeline show was hosted by a former FBI agent named Dan Smoot and broadcast on more than 80 television and 150 radio stations. Hunt believed that democracy was the instrument through which wealth would be seized from billionaires such as himself and redistributed to the lazy and the worthless.
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Hunt once raged at Smoot when the Lifeline host claimed on air that democracy was a political outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Hunt corrected Smoot, condemning democracy as the handwork of the devil and a phony liberal form of watered-down communism. Hunt innovated a number of ways to alarm audiences about far-left plots.
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The John Birch Society also saw the African-American civil rights movement as part of a Bolshevik conspiracy to divide the country and argued that efforts of towns and cities after World War II to add fluoride to public water supplies was part of a sinister scheme to weaken men physically and make them less able to resist the radical takeover of the United States.
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That particular Berkshire conspiracy theory made a long-lasting impact on the American psyche. Cities across the United States banned fluoridated water.
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Today, the John Birch Society is still active in North Texas, where recent gubernatorial candidate and car dealer Don Huffines has published anti-fluoridation essays on the Dallas Express, a right-wing website that repurposed the name of a historic black newspaper that went defunct in the 1970s.
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Walker was a painfully dull public speaker. In the end, he couldn't bring his version of deliverance to his own state, finishing a distant sixth in the 1962 gubernatorial race. That would not prevent him and his allies from creating mayhem over the following months.
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He got arrested and was ordered to be psychiatrically evaluated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy after he incited racial violence during the integration of the University of Mississippi in September 1962. Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations, would confront Walker and a mob of his followers when the diplomat visited Big D on October 26, 1963.
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Stevenson was shouted down as he attempted to deliver a UN Day speech to the Dallas Council on World Affairs. Mr.
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On the morning of November 22, 1963, Kennedy and his entourage felt foreboding as they prepared for a short airplane jaunt from Fort Worth to Dallas. The president just examined a full-page ad in the far-right Dallas Morning News that featured a bold-faced headline, Welcome, Mr. Kennedy to Dallas. The advertisement, paid for in part by H.L.
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Hunt's son, Nelson Bunker Hunt, and the future owner of the Dallas Cowboys, H.R. Bumbright, featured accusations that Kennedy was soft on communism around the world and radicals at home, while persecuting conservatives who criticized him. The same morning, a group distributed leaflets designed like a wanted poster with front and side photos of the president with the caption, Wanted for Treason.
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How can people say such things, the president said to First Lady Jackie Kennedy. We're heading into nut country. Soon the Kennedys would make their fateful flight to Dallas, and the president would die from an assassin's bullet shortly after noon.
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Sometimes conspiracy theories have deadly consequences. William L. Pierce spent his teen years attending a military academy in Dallas as the city stewed in anti-communist dread and anti-Semitic hatred. As a young adult, he had joined the John Birch Society, but grew frustrated because it wasn't racist enough.
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He became a leading figure in the American Nazi Party and at the age of 41 formed the Neo-Nazi National Alliance. Beginning in 1975, he published in serial form one of the most influential examples of white supremacist literature, The Turner Diaries, a novel which told the story of a white nationalist revolution in the United States in the near future.
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This revolt is sparked by a Jewish-authored law outlying private ownership of guns. The hero, Earl Turner, joins an underground terrorist army, the Organization, which battles a Jewish plot to destroy America not just through gun control, but also through uncontrolled non-white immigration and by using rock music and drugs to encourage interracial sex.
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At one point to save the white race, Turner blows up the FBI national headquarters in Washington, D.C. with a truck bomb.
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White nationalists have since seen the Turner Diaries as both an accurate description of the modern world and as a manual on how to win a race war.
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From 1983 to 1984, The Order, a white supremacist terrorist group that took its name from the secret circle the fictional Earl Turner joins, robbed a pornography shop, banks and armored cars, heisting more than $8 million they later distributed to several white supremacist groups with the intent of funding a white revolution. Along the way, they assassinated Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg.
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The Turner Diary became the favorite novel of Timothy McVeigh, a bitter, disgruntled veteran in the 1991 Gulf War, who saw the deadly confrontation between the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the gun-toting Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993, as a major step in a government plan to seize firearms from law-abiding Americans.
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Kennedy was a classic Cold War liberal in support of an aggressive military intervention to stop communist expansion abroad and, with varying degrees of commitment, economic and civil rights reforms at home. But because of his assassination, by the 21st century, many on the far right saw him as a martyr to the liberal deep state.
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Beginning in 2017, a very online far-right conspiracy theory arose that centered on cryptic messages first posted on the 4chan message board and then on 8chan by an anonymous person who identified themselves as Q. The pseudonym was for reference to the Q clearance, which gives government officials access to high-level security secrets.
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Kennedy would be central in the imagination of what came to be known as the QAnon movement.
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QAnon believers were a heavy presence during the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021. And QAnon banners competed with Trump and Confederate battle flags for attention. In November of that first year, we saw the first of a series of rallies that Steve just referred to. They went to Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy had been murdered 58 years earlier.
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Over the course of many months, QAnon disciples kept returning to the site of JFK's death, some staying at a local hotel so they could be nearby when the Kennedy return happened. This was covered by Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA in November 2021. Reporter Kevin Reese interviewed some of the ones gathered at the Kennedy assassination site.
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Conspiracy theorists often pay a high personal price for beliefs that marginalize them from family, friends and mainstream society.
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With the return of Donald Trump to the White House on January 20th, conspiracy theories will move from the fringe to the seat of power. JFK Jr. won't emerge and grab the reins, but a different Kennedy will, Bobby Kennedy Jr. Bobby Kennedy Jr. has insisted that Wi-Fi causes cancer and that AIDS might not be caused by HIV. Vaccines, he claims, against overwhelming evidence cause autism.
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Antidepressants cause school shootings, and chemicals in water lead to gender dysphoria. One of these chemicals, RFK Jr. insists, might be an old obsession of the conspiratorial right.
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These enemies of freedom somehow pull all the strings, incite unseen, manipulate every aspect of the world's politics, culture, and finance, manipulate elections, engineer depressions, urban riots, and even hurricanes. Yet for all their cleverness, they leave just enough clues so that amateur sleuths, if they are just smart enough, can crack the code.
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Conspiracy theories make history an understandable contest between ruthless bad guys and intrepid heroes who then feel superior because they've unveiled the master plan. As they discover kindred spirits, they find community otherwise lacking in their lives. Perhaps if just enough people know about the conspiracy, they hope, the bad guys will fall and the millennium will follow.
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That fantasy offers a simpler, more emotionally satisfying vision of the future than planning on how to dismantle capitalism or figuring out how to persuade white people, for instance, to surrender their privileges that come with skin color. Conspiracy theories are mostly a distraction, but unfortunately they are often, from Oklahoma City to the U.S. Capitol, a call for deadly action.