Steven Monticelli
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
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And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in Texas who covers political extremism and beyond.
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The conspiracy theory Jones described on his InfoWars show spun in even wilder directions. The Army troops participating in the Jade Helm military exercise, panicked right-wingers said, would turn on the local population. Guns would be seized from private citizens and local Walmarts would be converted into vast holding cells.
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or those opposing Obama's plan to seize dictatorial power would be imprisoned, according to these sorts of theories. These accusations went viral, and a military spokesman got waylaid by angry questions at a Bastrop County Commissioner's Court meeting held near the Central Texas staging area for Jade Helm.
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Armed men in trucks patrolled in Bastrop County and surrounding communities and a private group called Counter Jade Helm spied on the movement of troops and military vehicles while they quizzed residents for any intelligence they may have gathered on the impending alleged coup d'etat.
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After Texas violently separated from Mexico in 1836, white Texans spent the next decade fearing their southern neighbor, a nation that saw the Texas Revolution as illegitimate and wanted to regain control of the breakaway province.
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Meanwhile, those same white Texans viewed the African Americans they enslaved with suspicion bordering on dread, knowing that their black captives desperately wanted freedom and might use violence to liberate themselves. This created an atmosphere of uncertainty and distrust that fed conspiracy theories of all sorts.
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After their rebellion against Mexico, Texans wanted to become part of the United States, but they were forced to spend almost a full decade as an independent republic because of well-founded suspicions held by American abolitionists that the Texas Revolution was a part of a plot to add a slave state to the Union.
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In 1860, construction workers carelessly tossed matches into a pile of wood in Dallas during a hot, drought-ridden summer. The blaze that resulted destroyed much of what was then only a village. Immediately suspecting that enslaved arsonists had set the fire as part of a planned revolution, whites in Dallas tortured and whipped almost every enslaved person in the county in search of scapegoats.
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Eventually, they hanged three African Americans and set off what would become known as the Texas Troubles. Fires broke out across the state, and each got blamed on black suspects and their supposed white abolitionist instigators, often men from northern states. As one historian put it, white Texan enslavers decided it was better to, quote, hang 99 innocent men than to let one guilty pass.
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Acting on little evidence, mobs lynched as many as 80 enslaved African American men and 37 accused white abolitionists by the time the panic burned out in September.
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As oil millionaires and billionaires built their wealth over the 20th century, they became a force in conspiratorial far-right politics in Texas. Starting in the 1930s, they mobilized against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which they insisted was a part of an international communist plan to overthrow capitalism around the planet.
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Anti-communism, anti-Semitism, and hostility to the post-World War II African American civil rights movement blended seamlessly in the conspiratorial imaginations of the far right in the Lone Star State, ideas that reached a national audience in large part because of oil money.
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Rather than earning him scorn, Beatty's virulently hateful anti-Jewish rants won him a large following. His book, Iron Curtain Over America, went through nine printings by 1953. The Public Affairs Luncheon Club, a women's organization, adopted a unanimous resolution backing Beattie in requesting that SMU investigate alleged communist influence on the university's faculty, politics, and values.
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Beattie taught at SMU until his retirement in 1957, two years after a panic over allegedly red art, during which the conservative Dallas Patriotic Council accused the Dallas Museum of Art of intentionally promoting, quote, subversive artists who were ostensibly part of communist front groups connected to the Soviet Union.
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But before we get into that, a quick ad break. One Dallas oil magnate who built a mansion intentionally designed to be a bigger duplicate of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate used his wealth to broadcast extremist fever dreams in the 1950s and 1960s. His name was H.L. Hunt, and he was profiled by the BBC in the 1960s.
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A health fattest who avoided white bread and sugar, Hunt believed his diet of largely raw vegetables might actually allow him to achieve immortality. He also thought he had psychic abilities, lived as a secret bigamist, and published pamphlets such as Hitler Was a Liberal.
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An early prototype of Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk, Hunt tried to create an alternative right-wing media infrastructure, funding a nationwide radio program and pamphlet subscription called Lifeline that promoted conspiracy theories from coast to coast.
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For much of the 20th century, Dallas had built up a reputation as a clean, dull, modern, and efficiently run city. By the 1950s, however, it had also acquired a reputation as the capital of crackpots and conspiracy theorists, a development that historian Edward H. Miller would describe in his book, Nut Country. In 1954, Dallas elected a far-right House representative, Republican Bruce Alger.
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Less than a week prior to the 1960 presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, a pro-Alger mob assaulted and spat on the Democratic vice presidential nominee and then-Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, as they left the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas. Alger joined the protesters, who held signs with slogans that said, LBJ sold out to Yankee socialists.
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Soon thereafter, Major General Edwin Walker, who inspired the deranged fictional character General Jack D. Ripper, the person responsible for global nuclear holocaust in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, called Dallas home.
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Before filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned Walker into an unforgettable caricature, the real-life Walker achieved infamy, commanding an infantry division in what was then Western Germany. President Kennedy pressured Walker to resign because he repeatedly lectured soldiers under his command to vote for far-right-wing political candidates.
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He also distributed among the troops literature from the conspiracy theory-promoting far-right John Birch Society, and he encouraged them to join. The John Birch Society, formed in 1958, opposed American membership in the United Nations, which it claimed was part of a global communist conspiracy to enslave free peoples around the world.
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The fringe organization, established by former candy manufacturer Robert Welsh, accused all American presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Kennedy, of being secret communists under the command of the Soviet government.
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Edwin Walker's devotion to the John Birch movement cost him his military career. Under pressure from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Walker retired and moved to Dallas, where he found a friendly political environment. The National Far Right saw him as a martyr to Kennedy's supposedly out-of-control leftism, and he received financial support from fellow devotee of the John Birch Society, H.L.
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Hunt. In 1961, Walker made the cover of Newsweek as a leader of the new right. And in 1962, he entered the race for Texas governor.
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Outside Memorial Auditorium Theater, where Stevenson delivered his speech, Walker had gathered a furious gang of middle and upper class men and women who rocked his limousine back and forth while it waited to whisk him away to safety and surrounded the ambassador when he stepped outside.
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When he finally returned to Washington, D.C., Stevenson warned the administration about the intense and extremist atmosphere in Dallas, where President Kennedy was planning a visit meant to heal a rift between the conservative and liberal wings of the Democratic Party in Texas.
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The president's murder spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists. Some said the president had been murdered by the mafia, angered because they had been investigated by the president's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Others blamed Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, who also had been the subject of criminal probes by the Justice Department.
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Other suspected assassination plotters included Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had himself been targeted for assassination attempts by the Kennedy administration, exiled Cubans in Florida, angered because the president had not fully supported the attempted overthrow of Castro during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and even the Soviets.
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One of the more elaborate theories involved an alleged plot hatched by American military leaders and CIA agents angered that Kennedy supposedly wanted to end American involvement in Vietnam. Finally, others said Lyndon Johnson ordered a hit on the chief executive because he wanted to grab power.
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Or maybe others said Kennedy died because of a combination of some or all of the above, having made enemies with the intelligence agencies under his command, who he had said he would dash to the winds if they continued to do things that were against what he saw as in the best interests of the United States. Quote,
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President shot 129 times from 43 different angles, a satirical headline from The Onion later asserted.
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In the novel, racist revolutionaries then take over Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California and seize its nuclear missiles, which they later use on cities across the nation. While ethnically cleansing California of non-whites, they hang 60,000 so-called race traitors during the Day of the Rope, a phrase you may find familiar if you've ever looked at white supremacist posts online.
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In the end, the book's hero, Earl Turner, finally defeats the system by flying a crop duster armed with a small nuclear weapon into the Pentagon.
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McVeigh had spent years selling copies of the Turner Diaries at gun shows. He retaliated against what he saw as his government oppressors by blowing up the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the Waco Configuration. He used a truck bomb, facing his attack, in part on the fictitious bombings of the FBI headquarters in William Pierce's novel.
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The Turner Diaries also depicted a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol. Some of the pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on January 6th erected gallows and livestreamed their crimes as they joked about hanging politicians, comparing it to the day of rope Pierce described in his pro-Nazi work, A Fiction. Stay with us through this ad break to learn more.
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Q, or QAnon, developed a huge following that interpreted These confusing and often contradictory posts as actually revealing a secret global cabal that included top Democrats like Hillary Clinton and liberal celebrities like Tom Hanks. These people were all accused of being a part of a child sex trafficking ring in which the young victims were molested and tortured.
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and in some interpretations of the theories, had their precious bodily fluids harvested to manufacture a drug known as adrenochrome, a drug that produces hallucinations and supposedly grants eternal youth.
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These stories resembled anti-Semitic legends about Jews kidnapping Christian children before Passover in order to use their blood in matzo bread, a trope or canard, really, that has become known as blood libel. In the QAnon mythology, Donald Trump plans to conduct mass arrests and executions of these satanic child molesters in an event called The Storm.
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Trump has winked and nodded to the QAnon movement, encouraged believers, and even incorporated some of its key slogans and imagery in speeches and posts online, such as Where We Go One, We Go All.
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And as I've reported for Rolling Stone, a cult-like spinoff group of QAnon believers have repeatedly gathered at Dealey Plaza, the site of JFK's murder, to wait for the prophesied return of JFK and his son, JFK Jr.,
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who both are dead, but these believers think were either miraculously resurrected or never actually died and have been secretly working with Trump to take down the aforementioned global satanic pedophile cabal. Some believe that when JFK and JFK Jr. finally reveal themselves, a sort of kingdom of righteousness will reign and good will ultimately prevail over evil.
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RFK Jr., mind you, is the nominee for the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, and in a recent interview claimed that he was aided in his schoolwork through the recreational self-medication of heroin.
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Trump has himself obsessively promoted his own sinister tales of the deep state that supposedly stole the 2020 election from him, and as we have said, has co-opted some of the slogans of the QAnon movement. None of this, obviously, was disqualifying to a plurality of voters this past November. So why are people drawn to conspiracy theories?
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First off, they provide convenient explanations that can be broken down into sort of simple logics for people who may not have frameworks for understanding a complex world. And they also provide believers sort of new family and friends as they become increasingly alienated from their original family and friends.
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Regardless of whatever plots they believe they have revealed, it's clear that conspiracy theorists of this sort, they don't believe that history is a product of class conflict or imperialism or the global scramble for natural resources. Nothing like that.
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It's not shaped by political and economic alliances between elites or irreversible transformations in technology that render old job skills irrelevant. There's no material analysis. All of this...
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all this fear, all this terrifying disruption of what is comfortably routine, they view stems from a sinister plot, a plan that is hidden tightly by a small circle of elites, sort of cartoon villains with near superpowers that control the world.
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And if only the right people, the sort of heroes of the story, of the movie that they think that they're watching, if only those people would step forward and and pull off the mask of the villains, then everything would be set right.
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And while figures like H.L. Hunt and their operations like Lifeline may be in the past, we have our own contemporary versions of this. with roots in Texas.
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We now have Elon Musk, who controls X, formerly known as Twitter, in which he has used his platform with millions of followers to promote dangerous conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement Theory, which we recorded a previous episode of this podcast about. Ultimately, we are living in a culture that swims with conspiracy theories.
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And for us to make our way out of the rabbit hole, we're going to need some sort of framework for understanding the world, something that can help us better understand how we got here and where we're going. And no matter what that is, it certainly won't be something as simple as believing that we just have to pull off the mask of some villain and then everything will be set straight from there.
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This is Michael Phillips. And this is Steven Monticelli. Thanks for listening.