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

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

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

Songs:

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

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

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

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Trailer music by Ramona

For true fans of the over-a-decade-long Christian fiction series, Left Behind, and it's apocalypse addicted author, Tim LaHaye. Follow Timmy's political and cultural rise, evangelical influences, and the birth of the New Right's gray eminence, the Council for National Policy. Then, Fritz reviews Timothius' unfortunately impactful series of books and films. Also, some original Left Behind fan-fic from your host!

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Trailer music by Ramona

Fritz digs even deeper into the cultural crater left by the Regnery family with the unending Fash Fic novel, Mister, written in 2009 by soon-to-be Alt-Right darling, the insufferable Alex Kurtagic. This 500-page self-published fashy rant is both pointless and terrible, and so is the perfect x-ray image of the 'New New Right' brain and its cringe-core obsessions.

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Trailer music by Ramona

Fritz, following some leads in episode 15, picks up a novel written by turn-of-the-century Secretary of State, John Hay: The Bread-winners (1884). The book follows Arthur Farnham, military-industrial exemplar of the 'American Race', as he woos the ladies and puts down labor rebellions led by conspiring socialist agitators. It's not as gross as fash fic, but it ain't great...

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Outro music by Ramona

Bursts of The Final Straw joins Fritz to reflect on the HBO miniseries created by David Simon (Homicide, The Wire, etc.), The Plot Against America (2020), based closely on the novel of the same name by Phillip Roth in a counterfactual 1940s USA where the Nazi-loving aviator Charles Lindbergh becomes president. The series follows a middle-class Jewish family in Newark as they respond to the rising realities of American fascism, posing relevant questions on when to flee, when to stand your ground, and when to take the fight to the enemy, but offering no easy answers.

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Trailer music by Ramona

TSBU begins their study on the early-1980s information clearinghouse and private surveillance organization, Western Goals, focusing on two of its founders: the English scam-artist John Rees and martyred John Birch Society luminary, congressman Larry McDonald. The edgiest kids in the capitol, the threads of Western Goals weave their way from McCarthyists like Roy Cohn through Nazi intelligence agents around Gehlen to Cold War hawks and all the way up to present day American fascism under Trump.

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

Reading:
Dorfman, Zach. "The Congressman Who Created His Own Deep State. Really." Politico. 2018.
Gelbspan, Ross. Break-Ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Movement. South End Press, 1991.
Manzione, Elton. "The Private Spy Agency". The National Reporter. 1985.
Recluse. A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: The Secret Origins of the Patriot Movement Part IV. VISUP blog. Link here. (Also check out "WACL VII: Eighties Part I w/John Brisson, Keith Allen Dennis, Moss Robeson, Don Diligent, & Recluse". Podcast. The Farm Mach II. 2022. Link here.)
Simpson, Christopher. Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.

This episode also used documents from the Larry McDonald archives from Emory University and the online Ernie Lazar FOIA collection of FBI files.

Music:
Slime - "Polizei SA SS", 1980.
CCCP Fedeli Alla Linea. "Spara Jurij", 1983.
Also featuring compositions by Koleso Nešťastia and Ramona
Other music from youtube.com, pixabay.com, and fesliyanmusic.com

TSBU breaks ground on its study of Americanism and American Fascism, and grips their stubborn roots in the 19th Century. From the Mexican-American war, through the 'Real' First Red Scare, to the creation of a Military/Industrial aristocracy, Fritz gets his timeline right by meandering around some books in front of a psychedelic camp fire. Features willful overproduction and special guests from the distant future of 2025!Photo by Andrew Harnik/Pool via Reuters

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

Reading:
Richard Slotkin. The fatal environment: the myth of the frontier in the age of industrialization, 1800-1890. Antheneum, 1985.
"". Gunfighter Nation: the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America. Atheneum, 1992.
Tariq Kahn. The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression. Illinois, 2023.

Check out Burst's interview with Prof. Kahn on the Final Straw Radio!

Music:
"131", "But at the same time, I don't want to feel detached from the shithole. I don't want to be a tourist in my own ends. I don't want to feel completely separate from the struggles my friends ", and "I fucking hate when westerners go and watch us like in damn safari. Our depression is not for their privileged amusement" by Koleso Nešťastia. Check it out on bandcamp!
"Train Robbery" by Hayden Folker
"In Honor" by Fesliyan Studios
"Cannibal" by Ennio Morricone

Other music from pixabay.com
SFX from freesound.org