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

Summary

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

Release Date: May 16, 2025

Hosts: Michael Olinger and Carolyn Holmes
Producer: WNYC Studios

---

1. Trump Administration Grants Refugee Status to White South Africans

A. Arrival and Background

The episode opens with Michael Olinger announcing the arrival of the first group of Afrikaners—white South Africans—granted refugee status by the Trump administration. On May 16, 2025, 49 Afrikaners landed in the United States, sparking international controversy and domestic repercussions in South Africa.

Carolyn Holmes provides context, explaining that these groups initially sought international attention and sanctions against South African policies, not refugee status. She analogizes their unintended success:

“These groups are sort of like a dog that caught a car, but they caught the car that they weren't chasing.”
[00:23]

B. Government Perspective and Policies

Christopher Landau, Deputy Secretary of State, addressed BBC queries regarding the selective refugee admissions:

“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.”
[01:32]

Despite thorough vetting, one Afrikaner refugee posted anti-Semitic content on social media, challenging recent Department of Homeland Security policies aimed at preventing such individuals from gaining entry. Landau emphasized the urgency of the situation:

“It's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about.”
[02:31]

President Donald Trump underscored the severity of threats against white farmers in South Africa, linking their plight to a broader narrative of racial persecution:

“Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white, but whether they're white or black makes no difference to me. But white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.”
[02:34]

C. The White Genocide Narrative

The Trump administration's support amplified the white genocide narrative, a claim that white South African farmers were being systematically exterminated. Carolyn Holmes, a political science professor, debunks this myth by highlighting the low numbers of white farmer deaths compared to overall violent crime in South Africa:

“Full-time residents of commercial farms, regardless of race, are actually statistically significantly less likely to experience violent crime than their urban and peri-urban counterparts in South Africa.”
[04:24]

Holmes identifies several Afrikaner advocacy groups—including Afriforum and the Orania Movement—responsible for perpetuating these exaggerated claims through selective statistics and sympathetic storytelling.

One provocative example involves the Xhosa anti-apartheid song “Dubula Bunu” (“Shoot the Boer”), which Afrikaner groups have used to suggest incitement to violence against white farmers. Although initially ruled as hate speech, this determination was overturned in 2022, allowing continued dissemination:

“This is not misinformation in the way that we've traditionally thought about it... the story has become so real that it has resulted in 49 people leaving their home and coming to Texas.”
[04:31]

D. Afrikaner Groups and U.S. Politics

Afrikaner groups capitalized on the Trump administration's openness to gain international attention. In 2018, Afriforum successfully met with key political figures and secured media spots, including a significant appearance on Tucker Carlson's show. Christopher Landau remarked:

“Well, now to a fascinating and significant story the media have all but ignored... being brutally killed and their land being confiscated in South Africa.”
[08:48]

However, these groups never intended to become refugees, leading to internal conflict once their unexpected objective was achieved. Callie Creel, a leader of Afriforum, clarified their true intentions:

“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.”
[10:24]

E. Cross-Pollination of Racist Ideologies

The term white genocide resonates more with American white supremacist ideologies, akin to the great replacement theory prevalent in the U.S. This cross-pollination has deep historical roots, with both South Africa and the United States sharing epochs of racial segregation and white supremacist policies. Holmes draws parallels between Jim Crow-era laws and South Africa's apartheid legislation:

“We need to establish legitimacy in South Africa... They were trying to get attention... They were never trying to get refugee status.”
[14:43]

2. The Divided Dial: The Rise of the Militia Movement via Shortwave Radio

A. Early Days of Militias on Shortwave

The second segment of the episode delves into the origins of the modern American militia movement, tracing its roots back to the early 1990s with the use of shortwave radio as a primary communication tool. Brad Hefner recounts how Radio for Peace International inadvertently became a hub for emerging far-right militias:

“We were really shocked to us.”
[04:01]

Katie Thornton, the host of "The Divided Dial," narrates the transformation of shortwave radio from a utopian global communication medium to a breeding ground for extremist ideologies. She highlights the efforts of broadcasters like Tom Valentine and Mark Kornke in spreading anti-government rhetoric:

“Shortwave would be the movement's medium of choice and that would have big consequences.”
[33:47]

B. The Rocky Mountain Rendezvous

A pivotal moment occurred in 1992 at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where the deadly standoff between Randy Weaver and federal marshals galvanized various right-wing factions. Pastor Pete Peters organized the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous, uniting disparate groups under a common anti-government and white supremacist agenda:

“We might not be able to agree on [individual beliefs], but by the God of Abraham, we agree.”
[32:23]

This gathering marked a significant consolidation of the militia movement, setting the stage for the heightened use of shortwave radio to disseminate extremist messages.

C. Influence of Shortwave Hosts

Shortwave radio hosts like Kurt Saxon provided explicit instructions for violent actions, inadvertently laying the groundwork for events like the Oklahoma City bombing. Clips from Saxon’s broadcasts revealed detailed bomb-making techniques:

“All you got to do is point it in the general area and whoever comes through that door is dead.”
[35:54]

After the bombing, Brad Hefner and James Latham leveraged their shortwave monitoring to inform the mainstream media about the militia threat, leading to significant coverage and government attention.

D. Transition to the Internet

As the internet emerged, many shortwave hosts migrated online, drawing from their established bases to build more extensive and accessible platforms. Despite the decline of shortwave radio, the foundational work laid by these early broadcasters facilitated the rise of online extremist communities. Brad Hefner notes:

“People promoting peace can have a forum at the library... But this is a medium where they could spread their message and get the word out to their followers.”
[46:45]

E. Legacy and Continuing Impact

Even as shortwave radio faded, its influence persisted through the advanced organizational capabilities of online platforms. The practice of anonymous and unfettered communication enabled by shortwave laid the groundwork for today's digital extremist networks.

Conclusion

This episode of "On the Media" meticulously unpacks the interplay between government policies, media narratives, and extremist movements. From the Trump administration's controversial refugee policy towards white South Africans to the historical evolution of the American militia movement via shortwave radio, the discussions shed light on how media can shape and be shaped by political agendas and extremist ideologies.

Notable Quotes:

• 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.”
  [01:32]

• Carolyn Holmes:
  “These activist communities have foregrounded this idea of white victimization by picking out a very small number of stories and continually focusing on them.”
  [04:01]

• Callie Creel (Afriforum):
  “Afrikaners, let me be clear, cannot survive as a cultural community in the US or any other country.”
  [10:24]

• Katie Thornton:
  “Shortwave would be the movement's medium of choice and that would have big consequences.”
  [33:47]

• Brad Hefner:
  “People promoting peace can have a forum at the library... But this is a medium where they could spread their message and get the word out to their followers.”
  [46:45]

---

Produced by: Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong
Senior Producer: Eloise Blondio
Executive Producer: Katya Rogers
Music and Sound Design: Jared Paul
Technical Director: Jennifer Munson
Fact-Checking: Graham Hacha

On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios.

Transcript

[Michael Olinger]

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.

[Michael Olinger]

From WNYC in New York, this is ON THE media. I'm Michael Oinger. 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.

[Michael Olinger]

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. And so it was really shocking to us.

[Michael Olinger]

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 Michael Ohinger.

[Carolyn Holmes]

The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by the Trump administration.

[Michael Olinger]

Arrived in the US Monday. The group included 49 Afrikaners, which is.

[Carolyn Holmes]

An ethnic group in South Africa made up of descendants of European colonists.

[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.

[Michael Olinger]

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.

[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.

[Michael Olinger]

Vetted pursuant to 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.

[Christopher Landau]

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

[Michael Olinger]

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

[Christopher Landau]

Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white, but whether they're white or black makes no difference to me. But white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.

[Michael Olinger]

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. So where does this myth come from?

[Michael Olinger]

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.

[Michael Olinger]

I read one piece in Al Jazeera that even looking at data provided by some of these Afrikaner advocacy groups, the supposed proof show 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 peri. Urban 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. And 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, you know, 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.

[Michael Olinger]

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. So we have groups like Afriforum, we have groups like the Orania Movement, we have more militant groups like the awb. 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 quote, unquote, farm murders, partially, I think, because it's been so successful for them in the international arena.

[Michael Olinger]

And to advance the narrative of this disproportionate violence levied against them. Some of these Afrikaner groups have pointed to a Xhosa anti apartheid song.

[Carolyn Holmes]

Yeah.

[Michael Olinger]

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]

Dubula Bunu. Right. Shoot the Boor is what that song is. And it was a struggle song. It was part of the anti apartheid movement. That this is a song that was sung in the context of an armed struggle against. Against a white minority regime. So 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 sung 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, Eugene Terblanche. And so 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.

[Michael Olinger]

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]

So, in the first Trump administration, a lot of these white rights groups saw an opportunity. And so Afriforum, one of the major groups that have forwarded this idea of white victimhood, came to the United states. And 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.

[Christopher Landau]

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.

[Michael Olinger]

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. I agree.

[Christopher Landau]

Mr.

[Carolyn Holmes]

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

[Christopher Landau]

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 tours.

[Michael Olinger]

What were they advocating for on this tour? Exactly.

[Carolyn Holmes]

So 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.

[Michael Olinger]

Fast forward to the present. Policy did come out of this tour.

[Carolyn Holmes]

Ultimately, 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.

[Michael Olinger]

Refugee status wasn't really on their wish.

[Carolyn Holmes]

List, not at all. And they have repeatedly said so since February.

[Michael Olinger]

We want not to be refugees in another man's country, as the Iranian movement say. If someone wants to help, help us here.

[Carolyn Holmes]

And Strutz, 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.

[Michael Olinger]

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. One of the current leaders of Afriforum, Callie Creel, said, quote, 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. And so interestingly, there was a song that Afriforum Produced in late 2024 called Die Afrikaner Mak Sue. The Afrikaner does this the Africa. And it's all, 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. So 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.

[Michael Olinger]

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? And it's pretty taboo among the groups making some of these claims. No, it is.

[Carolyn Holmes]

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 non resident 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.

[Michael Olinger]

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.

[Michael Olinger]

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? And 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 sort of since South Africa became a single country. And 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. And so 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, quote, fall below their racial station.

[Michael Olinger]

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

[Carolyn Holmes]

So 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 the Union, that had more restrictive covenants on interracial marriage than the one that was being proposed in South Africa. So it was very much a look, we can't be the bad guys. Look at what they're doing over there. So 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.

[Michael Olinger]

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, in a way that is profoundly dehumanizing. You know, 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.

[Michael Olinger]

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.

[Michael Olinger]

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 Michael Olinger. A few years back, I reported a series of stories about a walkie talkie app called Zello, which I discovered had become an organ 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.

[Christopher Landau]

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

[Michael Olinger]

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.

[Christopher Landau]

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 Deborah 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 medium. Shortwave radio can be beamed across political and geographic boundaries. I mean, they ran programs about shortwave on shortwave.

[Brad Hefner]

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]

And they were racist and hateful and violent.

[Christopher Landau]

Understand that, Robbie. I am a racist. I make no battle about it. I'm not ashamed of it.

[Katie Thornton]

Are you a white woman such as.

[Brad Hefner]

Myself who is sick of being harassed and tormented?

[Christopher Landau]

Call Aryan nations for a whiter, brighter America. They hate Americans. They hate white America.

[Brad Hefner]

It was very militant. We were Radio for Peace International. We believed in living peaceful, spiritual lives. And so 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.

[Christopher Landau]

Good evening.

[Carolyn Holmes]

Dozens are dead. Hundreds are missing. After the worst terrorist attack in US history.

[Christopher Landau]

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

[Katie Thornton]

This is season two of the Divided Dialogue.

[Carolyn Holmes]

Katie.

[Katie Thornton]

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. So 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.

[Christopher Landau]

On Worldwide Christian Radio, wwcr.

[Katie Thornton]

WWCR was one of 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. But 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. So 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.

[Christopher Landau]

It's Radio Free America, the talk show for intelligent Americans with your host, 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 consider consistently run his show on short wave.

[Christopher Landau]

Who rely on government, they want to be in that.

[Katie Thornton]

And at first blush, he just sounded like the other shock jocks of the era.

[Christopher Landau]

It's almost a socialist state.

[Katie Thornton]

Your run of the mill Rush Limbaugh wannabe.

[Christopher Landau]

Hi, this is Tom Valentine live again. And we have Jeff, but he was.

[Katie Thornton]

Financed by a newspaper called the Spotlight.

[Christopher Landau]

First time caller just started listening a little bit and I'm gonna order that Spotlight and.

[Katie Thornton]

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

[Christopher Landau]

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.

[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 short wave. There was one guy, a regular caller named Mark Kornke, 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.

[Christopher Landau]

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 four politicians for 120 foot of rope. Always try and find a willow tree. The entertainment will last longer.

[J.R. Lynd]

He had wild theories that the UN had stationed thousands of Gurkhas. Who were these specialized British soldiers from Nepal and Burma, you know, in Michigan.

[Katie Thornton]

To take over the US this is JR Linda. 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. Lynd]

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 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. So 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. So 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.

[Christopher Landau]

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.

[Christopher Landau]

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 shore wa called for an armed militia to attack Washington and put public officials on trial.

[Christopher Landau]

There's a lot of people that are holding back, saying, well, you know, 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 mean, 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 antigovernment right all together on short wave. His name was pastor Pete peters.

[Christopher Landau]

They hate Christ, they hate America, and they hate our people.

[Katie Thornton]

Peters flock was Colorado's la porte church of christ, A leading church in the so called christian identity movement.

[Brad Hefner]

And 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.

[Christopher Landau]

When you see a black man and a white woman, or vice versa, white, 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.

[Christopher Landau]

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. And all this hate. It wasn't just hot air. Remember the story of Alan berg from season one of the Divided Dialogue?

[Christopher Landau]

Alan Berg on KOA 317. The afternoon is about 10 minutes in the show. Let's go to line.

[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.

[Christopher Landau]

You put a Nazi on your program and then you have somebody, you are a Nazi Nazi by your very own admission.

[Katie Thornton]

Then later that very caller drove the getaway car.

[Christopher Landau]

10:39 KOA time and we're that sped.

[Katie Thornton]

Away from Alan Berg's home.

[Christopher Landau]

Someone passing in a vehicle using a semi automatic 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.

[Christopher Landau]

That was the problem that these extremists, these neo Nazis, the Aryan nations had. Nobody was buying the 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 on August 21, 1992 shots.

[Carolyn Holmes]

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.

[Christopher Landau]

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. Lewis 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.

[Christopher Landau]

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

[Katie Thornton]

Southern poverty law center co founder Morris Dees again.

[Christopher Landau]

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. And 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.

[Christopher Landau]

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, 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.

[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 two from on the media. I'm Katie Thornton and this is on the media. We're in the middle of our second episode of season two 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]

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

[Christopher Landau]

Well, it did. 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]

And 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 and hello everyone.

[James Latham]

Welcome to the Far Right Radio Review. I'm James Lathan.

[Brad Hefner]

I'm Brad Hevner.

[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 subscribed to, all their newsletters.

[James Latham]

We've been monitoring them for the last couple weeks and well, we'll let you, the listener decide. Are they a racist, anti semitic organization or not? Here's some clips.

[Christopher Landau]

We're hostage to a bunch of criminals. You'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. 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, you know, militia patriots and lots of new programs.

[Katie Thornton]

They exposed the hate and the aspirations.

[James Latham]

A real known racist, anti Semitic individual.

[Brad Hefner]

Said there he's hoping to get to Congress.

[James Latham]

Eh, Right.

[Katie Thornton]

And 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, they.

[Katie Thornton]

Added a call in component where listeners could try to make sense of it all.

[Christopher Landau]

This is the first time I've heard you broadcast. You're on 7,000, 385.

[James Latham]

That's correct.

[Christopher Landau]

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

[Brad Hefner]

Sure. 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. You know, 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.

[Christopher Landau]

These two Bolsheviks down there in Costa Rica have got just those yahoos in Costa Rica on the air. But they, they wouldn't have my guts to call up. You're sniffing a little coyote hiding down there. Yeah, I know.

[Katie Thornton]

Anyway, 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 19, 1995.

[Christopher Landau]

You're looking right now at some of the first pictures that we got of the Murrah building down.

[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.

[Christopher Landau]

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.

[Carolyn Holmes]

I don't know, Chris, if you can.

[Christopher Landau]

Just see that line of ambulances just waiting to head back down to the federal building. You know, you hope and you pray that, 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 U.S. 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 Kornke.

[Brad Hefner]

And so we did interviews with major media outlets all over the US all over the world, explaining what the militia movement was and who Timothy vay 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.

[Carolyn Holmes]

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 and assassination techniques, conspiracy theories.

[J.R. Lynd]

The media just chased down everything they could find.

[Katie Thornton]

J.R. lynd again.

[J.R. Lynd]

And that led them to Mark Kornke. 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.

[Christopher Landau]

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.

[Katie Thornton]

The bombing and 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 Kornke's show. Which of course fed right into some people's suspicions.

[J.R. Lynd]

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]

But that wasn't why he was taken off the air.

[J.R. Lynd]

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 you know, so many children were killed and the mothers would call the station and say, why are you letting these people who helped kill children broadcast on your air?

[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.

[Christopher Landau]

I guess it's read that God's gonna.

[Carolyn Holmes]

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. Lynd]

So even if you were a moderate voice, now, you're sucked out, right? 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]

But 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 businesses partners. One big time host was killed in a shootout with Arizona sheriffs after he shot a trooper twice in the head. Mark Kornke 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, quote, 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. But 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 and 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 hevner 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 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 two. I'm Katie Thornton. The Divided Dial is written and reported by me, Katie Thornton, and edited by OTM's executive producer, Katya Rogers. Music and sound design is by Jared Paul. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact Checking by Graham Hacha. This series was made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Special thanks this week to Brad Hevner 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 Hagan, who reported the great NPR podcast no Compromise and who generously shared their audio from the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous With Us.

[Michael Olinger]

On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender and Candice Wong. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone is gonna be out for a couple more weeks. I'm Michael Oling.