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

Micah Loewinger: An international publicity campaign for white farmers in South Africa has had unintended consequences.

Carolyn Holmes: The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by the Trump administration arrived in the US Monday.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Meanwhile, back home, Afrikaner activists are dealing with the fallout.

Carolyn Holmes: They were trying to get attention. They were even trying to get sanctions. They were never trying to get refugee status. These groups are sort of like a dog that caught a car, but they caught the car that they weren't chasing.

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

Brad Hefner: It was very militant. We were Radio for Peace International. We believed in living peaceful, spiritual lives. It was really shocking to us.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Carolyn Holmes: The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by the Trump administration arrived in the US Monday. The group included 49 Afrikaners, which is an ethnic group in South Africa made up of descendants of European colonists.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau: 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 and to [crosstalk]

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau: 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, and all of these folks who have just come in today have been carefully, pursuant to our [crosstalk]

Micah Loewinger: Assimilated easily. Right. On Wednesday, multiple outlets reported that one of these carefully vetted Afrikaners had posted on X in 2023 that "Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group." This, despite a recent Department of Homeland Security policy that anti-Semitic activity on social media could lead to a rejected immigration request, but as we've been told, the safe refuge of Afrikaners is an urgent matter.

President Donald Trump: It's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about.

Micah Loewinger: President Donald Trump addressed the media this week in the Oval Office.

President Donald Trump: Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white, but whether they're white or Black makes no difference to me. White farmers are being killed, brutally killed, and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.

Micah Loewinger: 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. His AI chatbot, Grok, this week began mysteriously telling users on X about a "white genocide" among Afrikaner farmers in response to completely unrelated questions.

Carolyn Holmes: There's been a problem with violent crime in South Africa. Let's put that out there first, but this idea that white farm owners are particularly victimized doesn't play out if we look at the police statistics. Where does this myth come from?

Micah Loewinger: Carolyn Holmes is a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she specializes in South African nationalism. She's been tracking the years-long PR campaign behind the "white genocide" narrative.

Carolyn Holmes: A series of activist groups have really made this their central cause. 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.

Micah Loewinger: I read one piece in Al Jazeera that, even looking at data provided by some of these Afrikaner advocacy groups, the supposed proof shows showed that just about 60 farmers across all races are killed each year in a country where there are some 19,000 murders annually. That doesn't make a strong case.

Carolyn Holmes: No, it doesn't. Full-time residents of commercial farms, regardless of race, are actually statistically significantly less likely to experience violent crime than their urban and periurban counterparts in South Africa. These activist communities have foregrounded this idea of white victimization by picking out a very small number of stories and continually focusing on them. They tend to be stories with incredibly sympathetic victims.

They say, "Look at this particularly horrifying case that happened in 2018." It's like, "Well, okay, that was seven years ago. Those folks were brought to trial. The people who perpetrated that, they're all serving time, those that were convicted." 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." I can hold up every statistic in the world saying 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.

Micah Loewinger: We've made reference to some of these activist groups. You call them white rights groups. Who are they?

Carolyn Holmes: There's a lot of them. We have groups like AfriForum. We have groups like the Orania Movement. We have more militant groups like the AWB. They, historically, have focused on things like language rights and self-defense training, and neighborhood watch patrols, and some would call it vigilante activity. They've recently pivoted to specifically talking about rural security and "farm murders," partially, I think, because it's been so successful for them in the international arena.

Micah Loewinger: To advance the narrative of this disproportionate violence levied against them, some of these Afrikaner groups have pointed to a Xhosa antiapartheid song, which they say explicitly calls for the killing of white farmers. 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.

Carolyn Holmes: Dubul' Ibhunu, right? Shoot the Boer is what that song is, and it was a struggle song. It was part of the antiapartheid movement that this is a song that was sung in the context of an armed struggle against a white minority regime. It's very controversial. It's sung sometimes in Xhosa, 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. He sang it at a rally, got a lot of people fired up about this.

In 2010, the first time that made a lot of international headlines, there was also a farm killing of a far-right Afrikaner leader, Eugène Terre'Blanche. 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," and it was ruled to be a form of hate speech in 2010, although that ruling was then overturned in 2022. Other folks like Julius Malema, 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."

Micah Loewinger: 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 AfriForum. How and when did they first get the president's ear?

Carolyn Holmes: In the first Trump administration, a lot of these white rights groups saw an opportunity. AfriForum, one of the major groups that have forwarded this idea of white victimhood, came to the United States in 2018. They were wildly successful. 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, and in probably the biggest PR coup, they landed a sort of primetime spot on Tucker Carlson's show.

Tucker Carlson: Well, now to a fascinating and significant story the media have all but ignored. An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans-speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders.

Ernst Roets: The 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.

Tucker Carlson: I agree.

Carolyn Holmes: In the wake of that Tucker Carlson interview, we have the first Trump tweet in 2018.

Newscaster: 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.

Micah Loewinger: What were they advocating for on this tour, exactly?

Carolyn Holmes: That's an interesting question because, aside from international attention, they didn't necessarily have a policy prescription that was embedded in these tours. What they said is, "We need attention. We need help. Maybe we need some sort of international diplomatic pressure. We need, possibly, something like capacity-building for the South African police forces."

Micah Loewinger: Fast forward to the present, policy did come out of this tour, ultimately.

Carolyn Holmes: Yes, with the executive order that outlines this refugee status for Afrikaners. 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.

Micah Loewinger: Refugee status wasn't really on their wish list.

Carolyn Holmes: Not at all, and they have repeatedly said so since February.

Jooste Strydom: We want not to be refugees in another man's country, as the Orania Movement say, if someone wants to help, help us here.

Carolyn Holmes: Ernst Roets, 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."

Ernst Roets: 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.

Micah Loewinger: One of the current leaders of AfriForum, Kallie Kriel, said, "Afrikaners, let me be clear, cannot survive as a cultural community in the US or any other country." What they want is more power in South Africa.

Carolyn Holmes: Exactly. Interestingly, there was a song that AfriForum produced in late 2024 called Die Afrikaner Maak So. The Afrikaner does this.

[MUSIC - Bernice West and Bok van Blerk: Die Afrikaner Maak So]

Carolyn Holmes: 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? 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? 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. 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.

Micah Loewinger: 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. That term, "white genocide," it's pretty taboo in South Africa, right? It's pretty taboo among the groups making some of these claims, no?

Carolyn Holmes: It is. The term "white genocide" is a kind of third rail in South African politics. AfriForum has very carefully walked a line around never saying those words in that order, 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. These most extreme claims come from a nonresident 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.

Micah Loewinger: 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?

Carolyn Holmes: Absolutely.

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

Carolyn Holmes: It seems like every so often, there will be a cataclysm of violence, like Dylann Roof committing mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina, wearing an apartheid-era flag on his jacket, and people will say, "What does that have to do with anything?" What I want to say is that this conversation has been happening. It's been happening for a century. The United States and South Africa have been intertwined since South Africa became a single country.

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 US South needs. It needs a welfare state to lift up white people, and it needs institutional segregation." This took the form of a variety of laws in South Africa, so the Land Act, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, et cetera, 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 "fall below their racial station."

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

Carolyn Holmes: 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 US 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. It was very much a "Look, we can't be the bad guys. Look at what they're doing over there." 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.

Micah Loewinger: 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 this stunt?

Carolyn Holmes: This is a cause that many of his most fringe supporters believe in deeply. 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. 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 majority rule happen. We can't let ourselves be replaced."

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

Carolyn Holmes: Thank you so much for having me. It's been great.

Micah Loewinger: 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. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. 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. 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.

Oath Keepers Leader: We have a good group. We got about 30, 40 of us. We're sticking together and sticking to the plan.

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

Katie Thornton: It took a Lot of digging to put this series together. Digging through informal archives people had made of old shortwave radio shows, digitizing tapes, flipping through old broadcast schedules and super niche industry magazines, and as I dug and flipped and digitized and listened, there was one station that jumped out at me.

Announcer 1: Broadcast from the studios of Radio for Peace International.

Katie Thornton: Radio for Peace International. 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. It was a small, not-for-profit outlet, broadcasting from Costa Rica mostly to the Americas and the Caribbean. On a little patch of land in the jungle, station founder James Latham and his wife Debra built their own transmitters piece by piece, with parts brought into the country in suitcases.

Their station hosted a Spanish language feminist program and some progressive talk shows that got mailed to them from the US on cassette. Just like the shortwave dreamers of the early 20th century, they believed deeply in the power of the media.

Announcer 2: Shortwave radio can be beamed across political and geographic boundaries.

Katie Thornton: They ran programs about shortwave on shortwave.

James Latham: Equipped with a simple radio, listeners can tune into perspectives and insights not available to them locally.

Katie Thornton: In his free time, James, the guy who started it all, tuned into other international radio stations, and he noticed something.

Brad Hefner: 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.

Katie Thornton: This is Brad Hefner. He worked with James at the station in the '90s.

Brad Hefner: They were racist and hateful, and violent.

Speaker 1: Understand that, Robbie. I am a racist. [unintelligible 00:19:34] about it. I'm not ashamed of it.

Speaker 2: 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 1: They hate Americans. They hate white Americans.

Brad Hefner: It was very militant. We were Radio for Peace International. We believed in living peaceful, spiritual lives. It was really shocking to us.

Katie Thornton: There was no way for Brad and James to know it at the time, but the broadcasts they were hearing would fundamentally change shortwave radio and help fuel a movement that would change the US forever.

Reporter: Good evening. Dozens are dead. Hundreds are missing after the worst terrorist attack in US History.

Reporter: A car bomb exploded in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, blowing off the entire building.

Katie Thornton: This is Season 2 of The Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton. 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, and how a little-known battle playing out on the shortwaves today might say a lot about how we regard our public airwaves. Last week, we learned how shortwave radio became a propaganda tool for governments at war.

This week, the untold story of how it became a propaganda tool for American anti-government militias. Let's back up. It turns out a lot of the broadcasts Brad and James were hearing they started in earnest around the beginning of the '90s at a small family-run radio station on the outskirts of Nashville.

WWCR Announcer: On Worldwide Christian Radio, WWCR.

[MUSIC]

Katie Thornton: WWCR was one of the several new privately run shortwave stations broadcasting from the US that got on the air in the 1980s. Shortwave stations are expensive to run. 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. 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.

In the 1980s, two things happened to give shortwave a boost. 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. Some enterprising station owners in the US decided it was worth a shot to get on shortwave, and they survived, mostly thanks to evangelists.

The station owners sold airtime an hour a week, an hour a day, to American preachers who wanted to build a global congregation. WWCR was no exception. Lots of preachers paid to play their sermons there, but nothing was stopping other people from buying airtime, and not long after WWCR launched, a guy who wasn't preaching at all got on the air.

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

Tom Valentine: I'm Tom Valentine. This is Radio Free America.

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

Tom Valentine: Who rely on government they want to be an [crosstalk]

Katie Thornton: At first blush, he just sounded like the other shock jocks of the era.

Tom Valentine: It's almost a socialist state.

Katie Thornton: Your run-of-the-mill Rush Limbaugh wannabe.

Tom Valentine: Hi. This is Tom Valentine live again, and we have Jeff in [crosstalk]

Katie Thornton: He was financed by a newspaper called The Spotlight.

Tom Valentine: First-time caller just started listening a little bit, and I'm going to order that Spotlight.

Katie Thornton: The Spotlight was the flagship publication of the far-right white nationalist and holocaust-denying think tank, the Liberty Lobby.

Tom Valentine: It's the best newspaper in America, and you're going to find it fascinating. After you find out that The Spotlight's everything I say it is, you become a distributor, and that'll help because other people will get the word. It's the best [crosstalk]

Katie Thornton: He called his show Radio Free America, a riff on the government service, Radio Free Europe, but Valentine's brand of patriotism was increasingly mistrustful, even disdainful of America's institutions. Tom Valentine's show spawned others like it on shortwave. There was one guy, a regular caller named Mark Koernke, who was a dorm room janitor at the University of Michigan. He called in so often, he came to be known by the nickname Mark from Michigan. 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.

Mark Koernke: Now, I did some basic math the other day, not new world order math. I found that using the old style math, you can get about 4 politicians for 120 foot of rope. Always try and find a willow tree. The entertainment will last longer.

J.R. Lind: He had wild theories that the UN had stationed thousands of Gurkhas, who were these specialized British soldiers from Nepal and Burma, in Michigan to take over the US.

Katie Thornton: 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.

J.R. Lind: That attracted some more conspiracists, if for no other reason than this was a place where they could broadcast, right? They weren't going on CBS News.

Katie Thornton: 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, and shortwave became the perfect platform for guys with something to say. Within a couple of years, there was enough demand from far-right hosts that WWCR started adding new frequencies to air them all. That's another thing that makes shortwave different from, say, AM radio.

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. Other shortwave stations in the US wanted to cash in, too. They started selling airtime to many of the same right-wing hosts who'd been getting on WWCR. Shortwave was converting from evangelism to right-wing rhetoric. According to the FCC, shortwave stations broadcasting from the US are supposed to serve a mostly international audience.

That's the law, but the feds didn't seem to be paying much attention. Without meaningful oversight, a lot of these newer stations were beaming their broadcasts first and foremost at US citizens. 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. 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.

Some shows were hosted by leaders of big neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance and the National Vanguard. As Brad and James listened, they caught wind of a new movement that was brewing, an army gathering and making violent plans.

Bill Cooper: You must form your militia units.

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

Bill Cooper: You must prepare on a local level to defend 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.

Katie Thornton: 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 put public officials on trial.

Host Linda Thompson: There's a lot of people that are holding back, saying, "Well, 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." I've heard this couch potato patriot. I've heard from enough of them.

Brad Hefner: 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.

Katie Thornton: 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. His name was Pastor Pete Peters.

Pastor Pete Peters: They hate Christ, they hate America, and they hate our people. In that [crosstalk]

Katie Thornton: Peter's flock was Colorado's Laporte Church of Christ, a leading church in the so-called Christian Identity Movement.

Brad Hefner: We had never heard of that before, and looked into it, 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 it's a race war. They're trying to provoke a race war.

Pastor Pete Peters: 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."

Katie Thornton: Peters preached openly against interracial marriage.

Pastor Pete Peters: It's wrong. It's wrong, it's wrong.

Katie Thornton: He told his followers that the Bible sanctioned the murder of gays and lesbians. All this hate, it wasn't just hot air. Remember the story of Alan Berg from Season 1 of The Divided Dial?

Alan Berg: Alan Berg on KOA 370 in the afternoon, leaving us about 10 minutes in the show. Let's go to line [crosstalk]

Katie Thornton: He was the lefty Jewish talk radio host whose AM show was popular in the early '80s. In 1984, Berg sparred with two white supremacist preachers who had called into his show. One of those preachers was Pete Peters. After that skirmish, a member of Peters' flock called into Berg's show to berate him.

Pastor Pete Peters' Flock Member: Put a Nazi on your program and then you have somebody [crosstalk]

Alan Berg: Sir, you are a Nazi by your very own ambition.

Katie Thornton: Then, later, that very caller drove the getaway car.

Reporter: 10:39 KOA time [crosstalk]

Katie Thornton: -that sped away from Alan Berg's home.

Reporter: Someone passing in a vehicle using a semiautomatic 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 Alan Berg has, in fact, passed on. He is no longer with us.

Katie Thornton: Alan 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. This violent act sent shockwaves through the radio world, but there weren't obvious signs of a bigger, growing threat because back then, the far-right was fractured.

Morris Dees: That was the problem that these extremists, these neo-Nazis, the Aryan Nations had. Nobody was buying their message because this message of hate wasn't selling.

Katie Thornton: That's Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, speaking at the National Press Club in 1996. He explained that there wasn't a ton of overlap between the racists, the ultra-conservative Christians, and the anti-government guys until-

Reporter: On August 21, 1992, shots rang out in the remote hills of Northern Idaho.

Katie Thornton: -the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Federal marshals killed the wife and son of a Christian Identity worshiper, Randy Weaver. 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. Pastor Pete Peters understood that the government's actions at Ruby Ridge had the potential to unite these previously disconnected right-wing factions. He called a three-day gathering at a YMCA in Estes Park, Colorado, not far from his hometown.

Pastor Pete Peters: You know 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. I want to tell you how I got involved and why we're having this meeting.

Katie Thornton: 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. Louis 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.

Louis Beam: We might not be able to agree on his name. We might not be able to agree on a Bible translation. We might not be able to agree on a day we set aside to rest, but by the God of Abraham, we agree you don't murder our wives and our children, and that's why we're here. If there's one thing I prayed for, is that we could come together as one.

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

Katie Thornton: Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees. Again, in fact.

Morris Dees: In fact, at the Estes 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." Someone stood up and said, "Look, we can argue about that later once we win this war."

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

Pastor Pete Peters: 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, and other denominations. In the name of our master, the king of kings and the Lord of lords, who died for our sins, we offer this prayer. Amen. We are adjourned.

[MUSIC]

Katie Thornton: 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, and that would have big consequences. That's coming up after the break. I'm Katie Thornton, and this is The Divided Dial, Season 2 from On the Media.

[MUSIC]

Katie Thornton: I'm Katie Thornton, and this is On the Media. We're in the middle of our second episode of Season 2 of The Divided Dial. 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, and back in Costa Rica, Brad Hefner and James Latham were following the breadcrumbs. Neo-Nazi William Pierce had a regular shortwave show.

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 US government in part by bombing a federal building.

Brad Hefner: There were others. At one point, there was one program from a man named Kurt Saxon, and one day we were listening and, on the radio program, he gave explicit directions and how to get away with murder.

Kurt Saxon: Well, you could just have your regular shotgun. 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.

Katie Thornton: On another broadcast, Kurt Saxon just read instructions on how to make a fertilizer bomb.

Brad Hefner: That was the last straw, and we decided that we had to respond very directly.

Katie Thornton: Brad and James took to the airwaves themselves.

James Latham: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Far-Right Radio Review. I'm James Lathan.

Brad Hefner: I'm Brad Hefner.

James Latham: The Far-Right Radio Review is a program that takes a critical look at the far-right, its use of shortwave, AM, FM.

Brad Hefner: We would record it, edit it down, pull out the snippets, play the snippets on the air, and talk about them. We got all the information we could about who these people were, their background, the organizations. We subscribe to all their newsletters.

James Latham: We've been monitoring them for the last couple of weeks, and well, we'll let you, the listener, decide, are they a racist, anti-Semitic organization or not? Here's some clips.

Speaker 3: We're hostage to a bunch of criminal Jews. They've robbed this country. I want to make a deal with you. You pray for them, and I'll kick them in the testicles and cuss at them.

Speaker 4: They're going to be coming for you. You better get yourself a good shotgun and a good rifle in the process.

James Latham: If you listen from abroad, you would think that most of America consists of these militia patriots.

Brad Hefner: And lots of new programs.

Katie Thornton: They expose the hate and the aspirations.

James Latham: A real, known racist, anti-Semitic individual.

Brad Hefner: He said there, he's hoping to get to Congress, eh?

James Latham: Right.

Katie Thornton: They followed the money.

James Latham: 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 in capital.

Brad Hefner: Speaking of swindlers sponsoring shortwave programs, we have [crosstalk]

Katie Thornton: They added a call-in component where listeners could try to make sense of it all.

Caller: This is the first time I've heard you broadcast. You're on 7385?

James Latham: That's correct, yes.

Caller: I think a lot of people out there are confused over the militias, that they don't have enough information. I'm kind of confused about it. I don't really know what kind of people are in it.

Brad Hefner: Sure.

James Latham: Well, certainly a lot of militia supporters and members are good folks that just like to be well-trained in self-defense. I think by and large, the militia leadership are pulling people towards these wild conspiracy theories, sort of to advance their own agenda. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Katie Thornton: The right-wing broadcasters did not appreciate the scrutiny.

Brad Hefner: 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 3: These two Bolsheviks down there in Costa Rica have got to just [crosstalk]

Speaker 4: Those yahoos in Costa Rica on the air, but they wouldn't have the guts to call up.

Speaker 3: I'm sniffing the little cowards hiding down there.

Speaker 4: Yes, I know. Anyway.

Katie Thornton: Brad and James cataloged over two dozen far-right hosts with regularly scheduled shows on shortwave. Some were broadcasting every day. To most Americans, though, shortwave radio and the movement it was platforming were still under the radar until April 19th, 1995.

Reporter: You're looking right now at some of the first pictures that we got of the Murrah Building downtown. It's a federal office.

Katie Thornton: The attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols remains the country's most deadly domestic attack.

Reporter: The 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.

News Correspondent: I don't know, Chris, if you can just see that line of ambulances just waiting to head back down to the Federal Building.

Eyewitness: 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.

Brad Hefner: Of course, everyone assumed it was some foreign terrorists, 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, and mainstream media in the US all said, "What's the militia movement?"

Katie Thornton: Thankfully for the media, there were a couple of guys down in Costa Rica who had a lot of intel. It turns out Timothy McVeigh was an avid shortwave listener, allegedly even serving as a bodyguard for Mark Koernke.

Brad Hefner: We did interviews with major media outlets all over the US, all over the world, explaining what the militia movement was and who Timothy McVeigh was.

Katie Thornton: The hosts of the Far-Right Radio Review were featured in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Japan's state broadcaster, and NPR.

Reporter: James Latham does his monitoring for a group called Radio Peace International, based in Costa Rica. 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, [crosstalk]

J.R. Lind: The media just chased down everything they could find.

Katie Thornton: J.R. Lind again.

J.R. Lind: That led them to Mark Koernke. From there, reporters found out about Kurt Saxon giving pretty straightforward directions about bomb building that beared a pretty striking resemblance to the type of bomb that was used in Oklahoma City.

Katie Thornton: Suddenly, all eyes were on shortwave. Even President Clinton referenced it in a speech.

President Clinton: I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves today, and to those of us who do not agree with the purveyors of hatred and division, with the promoters of paranoia, it is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.

[applause]

Katie Thornton: The bombing and the scrutiny that followed sent WWCR into a tailspin. In the words of the station's then manager, they decided to get the gasoline off the fires by canceling Mark Koernke's show, which, of course, fed right into some people's suspicions.

J.R. Lind: Kornke and the others said, "We're being silenced, and this was all pressure from the government to keep the truth away from you."

Katie Thornton: That wasn't why he was taken off the air.

J.R. Lind: If you read the contemporaneous accounts of it, the FBI never pressured the station at all. From what we understand, as the attention grew, the station was being overwhelmed by calls from particularly young mothers. Because one of the great tragedies of the Murrah bombing was that there was a daycare center for federal workers, and so many children were killed, and the mothers would call the station and say, "Why are you letting these people who help kill children broadcast on your airwaves?"

Katie Thornton: 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. They weren't the critics, but the curious, the militia curious. 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. 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. 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.

Alex Jones: I guess it's read that God's going to destroy the Earth next time by fire.

Katie Thornton: 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. In the six years after Oklahoma City, the number of hours devoted to far-right shows on shortwave doubled.

J.R. Lind: Even if you were a moderate voice, now you're sucked out, right?

Katie Thornton: J.R. Lind.

J.R. Lind: Because 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.

Katie Thornton: 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. For one, it turns out that conspiracy addled Nazis don't make for the most sustainable business partners. One big-time host was killed in a shootout with Arizona sheriffs after he shot a trooper twice in the head. Mark Koernke spent time behind bars once for attacking police officers, and also after two of his former bodyguards turned on a third and killed him.

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

Online, militia leaders and right-wing zealots could do for free what they were paying by the hour to do on shortwave. A lot of hosts dropped their shortwave broadcasts in favor of the web, and shortwave audiences in the US dwindled, but for the extreme right, all those hours and dollars spent on the air weren't wasted. The years of practice that they had in honing their message of hate on shortwave radio gave them a head start on the early Internet.

From the beginning, they created bulletin boards and forums. They set up websites where people could engage with one another anonymously, and they made online communities where established leaders, many of whom had built their platform on shortwave, could enlist new recruits. Radio for Peace International in Costa Rica shut down in the early 2000s, 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.

Brad Hefner: 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. 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.

Katie Thornton: Shortwave hosts appealed to those followers by exploiting the qualities of the medium itself. 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, created a twisted community, a fraternity of radio guys who were united in their vision for America.

Brad Hefner: Clearly, they took over and they dominated.

Katie Thornton: The right's time on shortwave prepared them for their rise on the Internet, but not everyone was ready to give it all up and move online. For some hangers-on, the shortwaves offered a few things the Internet couldn't. 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. 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. We're talking many hours a day, sometimes 24 hours a day, and if dirt-cheap airtime and hosts who primed their audience for paranoia sounds to you like a recipe for exploitation, you're right. Next time on The Divided Dial, "Shortwave in the Age of the Internet." 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. 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. I had to go see for myself. Well, he was not lying when he said, "You can't miss it." That's next week on the third episode of The Divided Dial, Season 2. I'm Katie Thornton.

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Katie Thornton: The Divided Dial is written and reported by me, Katie Thornton, and edited by OTM's executive producer, Katya Roger. Music sound design is by Jared Paul. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact-checking by Graham Haysha. This series was made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Special thanks this week to Brad Hefner for sharing his RFPI cassettes with us, and to Will Olson, who helped us digitize them, 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.

Micah Loewinger: On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wong. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone is going to be out for a couple more weeks. I'm Micah Loewinger.

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