Lis­ten:
MP3 One Seg­ment

In FTR-168 (Cau­tion: Lone Nuts at Work), Mr. Emory set forth infor­ma­tion about a num­ber of sup­posed “lone nut” assas­sins, indi­cat­ing that they were nei­ther “lone,” nor “nuts.” (One of these char­ac­ters is Buford Fur­row, a mem­ber of the Aryan Nations who killed and wound­ed a num­ber of peo­ple in Los Ange­les in August of I999.) In the same inves­tiga­tive vein, this broad­cast high­lights sev­er­al aspects of the life of Richard Baumham­mers, a “lone nut” killer, who killed five Jews and per­sons of col­or on April 28, 2000, in addi­tion to appar­ent­ly scrawl­ing a swasti­ka on a syn­a­gogue.

Far from being a lone nut, Baumham­mers expressed ide­o­log­i­cal polit­i­cal themes that are embraced by fas­cist and racist groups around the world. Echo­ing the anti-immi­grant theme cen­tral to fas­cist and reac­tionary pol­i­tics through­out Europe and the U.S., Baumham­mers was known to be recruit­ing for a polit­i­cal par­ty that he found­ed on a plat­form of oppos­ing immi­gra­tion to Amer­i­ca from Third World coun­tries.

In addi­tion, Baumham­mers embraced the fas­cist “Third Posi­tion,” or ‘Third Way”. This is a fas­cist phi­los­o­phy that specif­i­cal­ly aims to unite ele­ments of the extreme left with ele­ments of the extreme right, in order to over­throw the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment. Baumham­mers’ web site had been linked to by, among oth­er orga­ni­za­tions, the Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens’ Coun­cil, a racist group that was the suc­ces­sor to the White Cit­i­zens’ Coun­cil (a pil­lar of South­ern racism in the 1940’s and 1950’s.) The Con­ser­v­a­tive Cit­i­zens’ Coun­cil gar­nered head­lines in 1998, after a num­ber of Repub­li­can politi­cians were revealed to have spo­ken to, or to have been affil­i­at­ed with the group. Among those politi­cians was Trent Lott (R‑Mississippi), the Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader.

Baumham­mers trav­eled fre­quent­ly to Latvia, the birth­place of his par­ents. Latvia has been dis­play­ing signs of renascent fas­cism, hon­or­ing the Lat­vian Waf­fen SS units that fought for Hitler.

Baumham­mers was a reg­is­tered attor­ney, but had lit­tle or no vis­i­ble income. Nonethe­less, he trav­eled fre­quent­ly to Europe, a rather expen­sive prac­tice.

The last third of the pro­gram con­sists of an inter­view with Kevin Coogan, thc author of Dream­er of the Day: Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey and the Post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al (Autono­me­dia, copy­right 1999.) In the inter­view, Kevin reviews key aspects of the career of Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey, a Nazi spy pri­or to, dur­ing, and after World War II. Yock­ey’s career bears a num­ber of super­fi­cial sim­i­lar­i­ties to that of Baumham­mers. Both worked as lawyers, both trav­eled fre­quent­ly to Europe and both were doc­tri­naire fas­cists. In addi­tion, Yock­ey delib­er­ate­ly had him­self clas­si­fied as a “men­tal patient,” in order to give him­self a lit­tle polit­i­cal breath­ing room. This reduced the pres­sure on him as a result of his polit­i­cal activ­i­ties, which could then be dis­missed as “men­tal ill­ness.” Baumham­mers also delib­er­ate­ly check him­self into a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal. (Aryan Nations killer Buford Fur­row did the same thing.) In the broad­cast, Mr. Emory spec­u­lates that, like Yock­ey, Baumham­mers may have been oper­at­ing on behalf of the “Under­ground Reich”. (Record­ed on 5/14/2000.)