As Tucker Carlson splits the Right into weirder and more racist directions, TSBU examines a precedent to this contemporary moment occurring in the 1950s and '60s. William F. Buckley and his National Review cultivated a complex... 'frenemyship'?... with the hyper-conspiratorial N.A.M.-leader Robert Welch and his John Birch Society and the cringe-inducing fascist nerd, the classicist Revilo P. Oliver. This web of allyship and conflict opened a space for a return of classic racist and antisemitic activism with the rise of Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby which directly created William Luther Pierce's infamous National Alliance, and the decades of neonazi horror that followed it.

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Music:
Intro and Outro by the Chad Mitchell Trio
Also featuring music from koleso neštastia, pixabay.com, archive.org, and fesliyanstudios.com

25. Revenge of the WASP pt. 1: The Tucker Diaries
Fritz fears the rise of the post-Trump right, arguing that a fashy new take on the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant with some worrying and familiar characteristics is on the rise, and begins an investigation into the Revenge of the WASP with a look at Tucker Carlson, his notable rise on the MAGA right, his weirdo mystical racist beliefs, and how those beliefs tie him to a movement of WASP revanchists, including the Vice President, who suggest a very dark future on the horizon.

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Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images retrieved from theguardian.com

Reading:
*Barkun, Michael. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. UNCP, Chapel Hill, 1996.
*Gross, Michael. Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America's Original Ruling Class. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023.
*Schrag, Peter. The Decline of the WASP. Simon & Schuster, 1971.
*Zengerle, Jason. Hated By All The Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. Crooked Media Reads, 2026.

Music by koleso neštastia and Ramona as well as from pixabay.com and fesliyanstudios.com

[Trailer] Fritz analyzes a Trad-Cath classic, and is inspired to try his own hand at the genre. Written by a Carmelite nun in 1972, the novel AA-1025: The Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration into the Church, also known as The Memoirs of an Anti-Apostle, pretends to be the diaries of a Soviet sleeper agent deep within the Catholic Hierarchy. The Agent, a mysterious orphan raised in Poland, hatches a plan to create a godless one world church: the ultimate goal of the Evil Empire! It's pretty whacky, folks.

Stick around for Fritz's own TradCathFashFicFanFic, AA-1312, at the end of the episode!

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Trailer music by Ramona

In TSBU's second edition of the News Rug, Fritz rips up the carpet on two recent U.S. press stories to track the long history of bad trouble underneath them: [2] trad-cath marine John W. Ripley's posthumous medal of honor taking us back to a militant traddy cult from Brazil: the infamous Tradition, Family, and Property, and [2] the news that American soldiers are being told that the war in Iran is about to trigger the rapture, and the terrible fashy network behind it, the good ole Council for National Policy.

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Reading:
◇ Celestini, Carmen. God, Country, and Christian Conservatives - The National Association of Manufacturers, the John Birch Society, and the Rise of the Christian Right. (Dissertation 2018, University of Waterloo)
◇ Hummel, Danielg G.. The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013.
◇ Kruse, Kevin M.. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Princeton, 2016.
◇ Lernoux, Penny. People of God : the struggle for world Catholicism. Viking, 1989.
◇ Weinberg, Carl R.. Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America. Cornell, 2021.
◇ Wink, George. Brazil, Land of the Past: The Ideological Roots of the New Right. Bibliotopia, 2021.

Music by koleso neštastia, Ramona, pixabay.org, Louis Armstrong, and Jeff Mangum.

Author and Journalist Jonathan M. Katz joins TSBU to turn the Smedley Dial up to 'Maximum Smedliness' by discussing Butler's formative role in the creation of the American Empire at the turn of the century, his transformation into an anti-imperialist and anti-fascist whistle-blower in the '20s and '30s, and the long shadow that Smedley casts over the USA and its subjects to this day.

Like it? Share it! Connect to The State Between Us at patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs for more episodes, exclusive content, and live events. Bluesky: @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social‬.
Instagram: thestatebetweenuspod
Hit us up at thespacebetweenuspod@gmail.com!

Get Jonathan M. Katz's Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire here!

Check out The Racket newsletter here!

Music by koleso neštastia and Ramona.

Smedley addresses the Bonus March. Credit: AP Images

Lon Chaney and his legendary impression of Smedley.

Smedley at the game.

Finally laying out the origins of the National Association of Manufacturers, TSBU looks at the tactics by Capital to shape the American political economy into a corporatist hell from George Pullman's dystopian town at the end of the 19th century, through the General Association of Manufacturer's open class warfare, to the bizarre religiously-tinged mass propaganda program of the NAM. Festoons abound!

Credit: Hagley Digital Archives digital.hagley.org/MSS_1411_0079_013_002

Satirical post in a 1935 newspaper

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Reading:
Schneirov, Richard. The Pullman Strike. Northern Illinois University. digital.lib.niu.edu/illinois/gildedage/pullman
Watts, Sarah Lyons. Order Against Chaos: Business Culture and Labor Ideology in America 1880-1915. Greenwood Press, 1991.
Artistic Decorations: Adornments of the Hall for the Manufacturers' Convention. In National Association of Manufacturers founding news article. Retrieved from Hagley Digital Archives. digital.hagley.org/MSS_1411_0079_013_002

Music:
Opening: "1" by koleso neštastia
Closing track: 240 by koleso neštastia
Features music by Ramona.
Other tracks from fesliyanstudios.com and pixabay.com
SFX from freesound.org

Hooooo boy... Keith Allen Dennis drops by once more to help Fritz tell a darkly fantastical tale about a little weird looking dude who specialized in leaping out of planes to spread democracy via death squad, Major General John K. Singlaub, co-founder of the private intelligence clearinghouse and Contra fundraiser, Western Goals. From Operation Phoenix to Iran-Contra to the "renaissance" of the World Anti-Communist League, Singlaub wove weird webs of drugs, guns, and guerillas in his never-ending war against the Red Menace!

Singlaub (center) with Contras in Honduras, 1985. From Inside the League.

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Reading:
Anderson, Scott and Jon Lee Anderson. Inside the League: The Shocking Exposé of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League. Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., 1986.
Cockburn, Leslie. Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua. Bloomsbury, 1987.
Parry, Robert. Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'. TMC, 1999.
Gelbspan, Ross. Break-Ins, Death Threats, and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Peace Movement. South End Press, 1991.
Seagraves, Sterling and Peggy. Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold. Verso, 2002.
Singlaub, John K.. Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century. Summit Books, 1991.

Songs:

Rodríguez, Silvio. "Canción Urgente por Nicaragua," date not broadly documented, likely 1980s.
Minutemen. "Big Stick," from album Double Nickels on the Dime, 1984.
Other music from pixabay.com and fesliyanstudios.com.

Link to the Frontline documentary on the Moonies that Keith mentions.
Also check out "WACL VII: Eighties Part I w/John Brisson, Keith Allen Dennis, Moss Robeson, Don Diligent, & Recluse". Podcast. The Farm Mach II. 2022. Link here.

Fritz takes a peek under the disgusting rug of the news and finds a long historical chain of apocalyptic lunatics and klansmen crawling underneath the recent shooting in Minnesota of Democratic state representatives. We get to know William Brahnam, his KKKompanions, Gordon and Freda Lindsay, and many more strangebad folks!

Like it? Share it! Connect to The State Between Us at patreon.com/TheStateBetweenUs and on Bluesky @thestatebetweenus.bsky.social‬. Hit us up at thespacebetweenuspod@gmail.com!

Trailer music by Ramona