Michael Phillips
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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I'm Michael Phillips. I wrote a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis and have co-authored an upcoming book on the history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
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School board meetings used to be boring. Board members typically spend hours discussing financial reports, land purchases, plumbing contracts, and other tedious topics.
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But beginning in 2020, Christopher Ruffo, a former documentary filmmaker and fellow at the Right-Wing Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025, launched a campaign to convince Americans that public schools have become communist indoctrination centers.
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Ruffo falsely claimed that public school teachers were brainwashing schoolchildren with something called critical race theory, or CRT for short. Adherents of critical race theory argue that racism has become so intrinsically entwined in American politics, law, and culture that anti-discrimination laws typically fail.
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While CRT is studied in some graduate schools and law programs, it hasn't been taught at the grade school level where the outrage has been directed.
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Rufo's timing could not have been more perfect. The artificial CRT panic broke out during the COVID pandemic. Parents already felt frustration and fury about the hardships of campus closings, remote learning and mask mandates.
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Now convinced that their children were being taught to scapegoat white people for all the country's problems, parents across the country exploded in rage at local school boards. Reuters reported on one meeting that turned violent in Loudoun County, Virginia.
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Textbooks before the 1950s and 1960s civil rights era were explicitly and astonishingly white supremacists. School books in the South, for instance, portrayed Confederates as gallant gentlemen fighting for a noble lost cause. This influenced popular culture, as we see in films like Gone with the Wind.
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Meanwhile, school kids were taught that abolitionists who wanted to end slavery before the Civil War were terrorists who needlessly plunged the country into civil war. And this, too, steeped into the public imagination of movies like Santa Fe Trail, starring Van Heflin.
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According to the myths promoted first in schools, then echoed in mass entertainment, slavery would have gone away eventually if only white slave-owning southerners had been left alone to figure it out themselves. Screenplay writers have often echoed what they heard in the classroom, as we see in this scene from the 1940 film Santa Fe Trail.
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Here, Raymond Massey plays John Brown, a white abolitionist who tried to start a slave rebellion in Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859. Massey portrays him as a thoroughly crazed maniac, while Errol Flynn depicts future Confederate General J.E.B. Seward as sweetly rational.
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American schoolchildren, furthermore, learned from their teachers that so-called radical democracy was not a good idea, and sometimes dictatorship was the better option. The 1924 textbook, Our World Today and Yesterday, A History of Modern Civilization, published two years after Mussolini's fascist government took over Italy, had nothing but praise for that nation's new dictator.
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The authors told the impressionable high school students the following about the world's first fascist leader.
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I tell it, the Italians of America who are working to make America great. Another textbook published in 1935, The Record of America, told students that the so-called founding fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, were not big believers in democracy, an attitude the authors seemed to endorse.
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In 2015, Ronnie Dean Barron got a text from her son, Kobe. who was glancing at a ninth-grade geography textbook published by McGraw-Hill, assigned him by his high school in Paralin, Texas, near Houston. He sent her a video highlighting a map in a shocking caption. Soon Burren posted her son's video online. That video, as KPRC reported, spread outrage across the nation.
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The caption wasn't an accident. McGraw-Hill had given the state of Texas what it wanted. Rather than anything like critical race theory, the State Board of Education in 2010 adopted changes in Texas curriculum standards for public schools, known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills.
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that imposed a whitewash of American slavery, raised doubts about human-caused climate change, and imposed other right-wing content. To be sold in Texas, school textbooks had to meet the board's standards.
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The demands Texas makes of textbook publishers matter, as PBS reported a decade ago.
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This is how Kobe Burin ended up with the World Geography textbook that used the word workers to describe chattel slaves. Kathy Miller of the anti-censorship group Texas Freedom Network said, quote, Those serious about education aren't laughing, however.
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In 2018, the state board removed Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be presidential nominee of a major political party, from the list of major historical figures Texas students must learn about. A decision later reversed after embarrassing news coverage.
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In 2010, the board mandated that textbooks depict the Civil War as primarily a struggle over states' rights and not slavery, a choice that was later modified in 2018 to return slavery as the primary cause, but still maintained that, quote, states' rights and sexualism were key contributing factors.
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Approved books still tell students that segregated black schools in the Jim Crow era, quote, had similar buildings, buses, and teachers as white schools, maintaining a hint of the separate but equal logics that upheld segregation. One textbook included a cartoon in which a space alien lands on Earth and asks if he's eligible for affirmative action programs.
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Students can get dramatically different versions of American history based on which state they attend schools. A New York Times comparison of textbooks used in California and Texas showed that both versions of the same history textbook include an annotated Bill of Rights.
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In reference to the Second Amendment, however, the California textbook notes that several federal court rulings have allowed regulation of gun sales and ownership. The Texas version of the same book replaces this commentary with a, quote, blank white space, as the New York Times reported.
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As the New York Times reported, the California version of a history textbook addressed the issue of white flight, the phenomena whereby parents move from cities when schools became integrated and moved to overwhelmingly Anglo suburbs. The California textbook said this.
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The Texas version of the same textbook deleted the sentence referring to racism as a motive for white flight, but left the reference to a fear of crime, reframing what students learned about why suburbs grew so rapidly after World War II.
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The Texas State Board also specifically asked one textbook publisher to emphasize how many clergy signed the Declaration of Independence and to underscore the supposed importance of religion to the founders. These particular demands were the result of intense lobbying by a Texas Christian nationalist, David Barton.
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In 1988, Barton founded Wall Builders, a nonprofit the organization says is dedicated to, quote, educating the nation concerning the godly founding of the nation. Barton believes that Americans have been deceived about the true meaning of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which declares, quote, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion.
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The founders, Barton claims, only meant that Congress should pick a particular Protestant denomination as the national faith.
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Barton also argues that Thomas Jefferson meant that the wall of separation between church and state should operate only in one direction, that the government should not interfere with religion, but that Christians should dominate the government, as Barton said in an interview.
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There were some states that objected to this notion. The state governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts, for instance, initially interpreted the First Amendment as meaning only Congress could not establish religion, but states could. Citizens of those two states paid taxes that supported the Congregationalist Church, respectively, until 1818 and 1833.
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For decades, some states had so-called, quote, Jew laws that prohibited non-Christians from holding office or had similar bans on Catholics. Such laws were the exception, however, and fell by the wayside by the end of the 19th century.
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The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, placed the same limits on state power that are placed on the federal government regarding the establishment of religion, a limitation upheld in the 1947 Supreme Court case Everson v. Board of Education.
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Martin believes that not just the Bible, but also the original United States Constitution, which includes provisions protecting slavery, such as the Three-Fifths Compromise, were directly inspired by God. He asserts again, with no evidence and without defining terms, that 52 of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were, in his words, quote, "...Orthodox or Evangelical Christians."
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In reality, the early leaders of America didn't speak with one mind regarding religion. Many were deists who saw God not as a deity invested in the daily lives of humans, but as a dispassionate clockmaker who put the gears of the universe together, wound it up, and let it run on its own. Their God didn't intervene in history or perform miracle healings at spiritual revivals.
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When Ben Franklin proposed opening the first session of the 1787 Constitutional Convention with a prayer, the proposal was voted down, with only four approving Franklin's motion and a gathering that as many as 55 attended on any given day.
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Barton's books and speeches are filled with misquotes and statements attributed to historical figures that no credible scholars have been able to find. He cherry-picks evidence to bolster his claims about the founder's religious beliefs. Barton, for instance, made up a story that Jefferson started the practice of holding church services in the U.S. Capitol.
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More reputable scholars argue that while there's evidence that Jefferson attended one service held at the Capitol building, there's no evidence that he approved them officially. What's more, Jefferson was far from an Orthodox Christian or the sort of Christian that dominates conservatism today.
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He edited and published The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jeffersonian Bible, which is a condensed version of Jesus' teachings from the Bible that excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, the resurrection, the raising of the dead, and so on.
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These sort of facts are the subject of Barton's 2022 New York Times bestseller, ironically titled The Jefferson Lies, exposing the myths you always believed about Thomas Jefferson.
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In spite of his flexible relationship with the truth, Barton is a major player in Republican Party politics. On a podcast, Barton claimed that Republican U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson consulted with him about staffing at the Capitol.
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Johnson made a speech at a wall builders event, telling the audience that the theocratic evangelist had, quote, a profound influence on me, my work, my life and everything I do.
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Huckabee has long produced so-called history videos for school children that promote Christian nationalism and the idea that the United States has a unique relationship with God, such as a series aimed at older children called One Nation Under God, which portrays a Revolutionary War soldier and George Washington suggesting God was on their side.
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Meanwhile, Martin's political and cultural influence has grown exponentially over the last decade. One of his political action committees played a major role in getting Ted Cruz elected to the United States Senate. He is close allies with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who wields power typically held by governors in other states.
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Patrick said this at a 2022 Conservative Political Action Convention in Dallas about who he thinks wrote the U.S. Constitution.
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In Texas, regardless of a lack of evidence, textbook publishers are required to tell students that Moses, the prophet depicted in Judeo-Christian scripture as well as the Koran as leading the Hebrews out of slavery, was a major influence on the authors of the Constitution.
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Furthermore, under Barton's influence, the state of Louisiana enacted a law in June 2024, which requires every public school classroom in the state to prominently display a version of the Ten Commandments from the Book of Exodus derived from Protestant translations of the Bible. This past November, a federal court issued an injunction barring enforcement of the law.
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The history of posting 10 Commandment signs or plaques or building such monuments in public spaces over the last 70 years has an origin that might shock many right-wing cultural warriors who associate Hollywood with godless liberalism.
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As Cruz points out in his book One Nation Under God, How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the three-hour, 40-minute epic movie The Ten Commandments was a monster hit and wowed audiences with its 25,000-member cast and advanced special effects when it was released in 1956. The movie grossed more than $85 million. The film's politically conservative subtext was unmistakable.
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The director, Cecil B. DeMille, hated the New Deal and testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that communists exercised malign influence over unions, including those in Hollywood that drove up the cost of filmmaking.
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Meanwhile, an adult actor, Woody Strode, appeared in the film in two markedly different roles. A former NFL star who broke the 13-year informal NFL ban on African-American players when he signed with the Los Angeles Rams in 1946, Strode played both an Ethiopian king and the enslaved attendant of Moses' adopted Egyptian mother.
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DeMille thought that the audiences could tell whether a swaddled white baby was a boy or a girl, but apparently assumed they wouldn't notice a black actor playing both a king and a slave because of the racist belief that all black people look alike. Meanwhile, a movie set in ancient Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula featured an almost entirely light-skinned cast.
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Even though DeMille's mother was Jewish, the only Jewish actor to play a major role was Edward G. Robinson, who earlier became famous playing gangsters. And he won DeMille's favor perhaps because he was a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the communist witch hunts.
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Thus, the one prominent Jewish face in the Ten Commandments was cast as a bad guy, a Hebrew named Nathan, who continually tries to undermine Moses and convince the escaped slaves to return to their Egyptian masters.
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The contemporary obsession with festooning public spaces with religious artifacts has as much to do with malevolent nostalgia as with religious zeal.
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Men like anti-CRT crusader Christopher Ruffo, along with Barton and Patrick, want to return to the world that made the Ten Commandments film, a world in which white people are centered, the accomplishments of dark-skinned people are erased or expropriated, and where America stands as an untainted beacon of freedom in spite of its history of enslavement, imperialism, and genocide.
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And now, once again, advocates of historical amnesia have a friend in the White House.
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In the civil rights era, black and brown parents boycotted public schools that discriminated to undermine their funding, created their own freedom schools that provided lessons in black and brown history, and marched against the old Jim Crow laws. Parents who want their children to receive an honest accounting of the nation's past will do well to learn from these predecessors.
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and to disrupt the meetings of right-wing school boards as loudly and enthusiastically as the parents who were conned into a frenzy about the phantom dangers of CRT. This is Michael Phillips. And this is Stephen Monticelli.
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.
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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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
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.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
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.