I started going door to door trying to find out something about the most famous writer
of this area, a man named Asa Carter, who wrote under the pen name of Forrest Carter.
She said, get out of here and don't come back.
This is part two of our con man series on the double life of Asa Forest Carter.
We're diving into the gritty details of the violence, hate, and conspiracy philosophies
that themed the first 45 years of his life and how in the last decade of his life, he
transformed into an unrecognizable Cherokee Indian author who wanted to be America's
next homingue.
And he almost did it.
Once again, author of Unmasking the Clansman, Dr. Dan T. Carter, and Steve Ronella of Mediator
lead the way as my guests.
Brace yourself because our windy trail will be treacherous as we'll talk about the beating
of jazz singer Nat King Cole, read from the Unabomber's Manifesto, and we'll begin to
understand how Asa Carter did what he did.
We're going neck deep into the mind of a con man.
For real.
I don't think you're going to want to miss this one.
If he was shooting for in still racial hatred, he missed the mark.
If you're shooting to make you love your grandparents.
Yeah.
My name is Clay Nukem and this is the Bear Greece Podcast where we'll explore things
forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell
the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF gear, American made, purpose built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed
to be as rugged as the places we explore.
While I was in the middle of doing my research on the Wallace biography, George Wallace, I
watched the educational little tree climb from being a university press book with 5,000
printing of 5,000 books.
Suddenly, it was 100,000, 200,000, and it was on the New York Times bestseller list.
And if I've considered it, I was probably more indignant than I should have been.
I thought, this is a guy.
This is a lie.
And I read the book.
I thought there's nothing wrong with the book.
There is something wrong with claiming to be some Native American having an Indian ancestry
and using it to sell your book.
So I contacted the New York Times.
And actually, when I first contacted, they didn't believe me.
They said, no, he has a long record.
It's anomalous.
So I sent him a statement from the ambulance driver who died in 1979 in the Abilene after
a biblical death that I describe in the book.
And he was shipped out of Abilene by air as far as Carter and the Hearst driver I talked
to who said, all I know is that when he arrived, he was far as Carter.
And when I buried him, he was acesa Carter.
That was Dr. Dan T. Carter.
He's no relation to Asa.
And on episode one of our Cotton Man series, we dove deep into the contents of a book published
in 1976 called The Education of Little Tree, written by a man who claimed he was a Cherokee
Indian named Forrest Carter.
And his book was semi-autobiographical.
This brilliant prose about an orphan Native American boy raised by his grandparents while
being taught moral lessons about life through their connection to the land and the people
in their community.
It gives poignant insight into empathy, love, and integrity towards all shades of people,
except politicians, the government, and anything organized and institutionalized by man, which
all these things are inherently corrupt.
This all sounds pretty reasonable.
Moonshine and Deer hunting, Fox hunting with hounds, predator-prey relationships, turkey
trapping, mules, whooper will, lore, and how to tell when a watermelon is ripe is all
in the book too.
It teems with the rich mountain culture of the Great Depression era in impoverished southern
Appalachia.
However, there's a catch that was relatively unknown until 1991 when a New York Times article
by Dr. Dan T. Carter, who we just talked to, exposed the author as Asa Carter.
And he wasn't a Cherokee Indian, but he was an ardent white supremacist, considered radical
even by others in the movement.
He was a leader in the Clu Klux Klan under constant surveillance from the FBI.
He was involved in several acts of violence, and he was a speechwriter for Alabama Governor
George Wallace.
Asa Carter was a con man.
He was a professional white supremacist dedicated to his craft.
He was a wordsmith, an orator, an actor.
He had an IQ of 138, and some considered him a media and marketing genius.
And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
Those famous words spoken by George Wallace were written by Asa Carter.
Today, there is a 1000 page FBI folder holding all the surveillance done on Asa.
He was suspicious to be a dangerous man.
Is that why he had to change his identity?
But the latter part of his life, his writing, did that evidence change man?
We're contrasting the two external data points we have on his life.
Number one, a brilliant book of empathy to Native Americans.
And number two, a professional life dedicated to racial supremacy.
Racism is typically rooted in a desire to preserve one's culture at the detriment of
another.
It's the manifestation of a fear and insecurity, but it's also misguided love of one's own
culture.
But loving your culture isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I'd say most people of the world appreciate their culture.
But if we're trying to really understand who Asa Carter was, I think we've got to see
and acknowledge the mechanics at play.
In Asa's case, he was very interested in preserving the Anglo-Saxon south, which he
believed had been taken advantage of in the post-Civil War Reconstruction, which isn't
an outlandish statement.
However, the philosophy of his hate preyed on people's bitterness, weakness and fear.
The rudimentary, carnal, corrupt ideology produced nothing but more brokenness.
What makes crazy men so dangerous is how close they are to being incredibly normal.
I'd also like to say that I'm not telling this story to demonize the south, nor suggest
that we're a bunch of racists down here.
On the contrary.
This story is so extreme, it stands out like a strutting gobbler in a wheat field.
To say that the south hasn't massively moved forward in racial reconciliation since the
Jim Crow days would be inaccurate.
And it would be as inaccurate to say that racism doesn't exist here in 2023.
And I think stories like this are important to talk about.
I think it helps us understand where some of this stuff comes from and how to fix it.
It's important to remember that Asa Carter died at the age of 54 in 1979, the year I was
born.
So we're just guessing about his motivations.
Here's Dr. Dan T. Carter, who I'm going to call Dan to keep things simple on this podcast,
who is now 81 years old and sharp as a tack.
He's going to tell us about his on the ground research on Asa in the 1990s.
Well, the summer 1991, when the posthumous book, Education and Little Tree, became so
popular, I thought, I've got to find out something about this guy.
So I had been in Alabama doing a lot of research and I drove up to Aniston, went to the local
library.
They were very helpful.
But I couldn't exactly find out where he lived.
I knew the area.
Darmenville, it was called, in rural area.
So I drove out there, my life was with me.
And I think I could be a con man, I guess.
I was never dishonest with anybody, but I would always say I'd go up to doors or I went
to several small businesses there and said I'm trying to find out something about the
most famous writer of this area, a man named Asa Carter, rolled under the pen name of Forrest
Carter, and everybody either claimed they didn't know anything.
But then I started going door to door.
And this is real journalism.
And some fair number of people didn't, you know, they were younger, they didn't know.
But if it was older people, without exception, I started to say almost, but without exception,
they either became hostile or they wouldn't talk to me.
And years later, when I got the FBI files, I found out why the local community resented
the fact that when he was active as a right-wing radio announcer and everything lived there,
he was on the constant suspicion by the FBI.
They were constant monitoring.
They'd follow him.
They'd park at the end of his driveway.
And this is the middle of civil rights movement.
These people didn't like government people anyway.
And they saw this kind of persecution of their hometown boy.
So I finally found a small engine shop and I talked to the guy.
He said, I don't know anything about him, but he did.
He just didn't want to talk to me.
And as I left, one of the mechanics, older guy walked out behind and he motioned me
over and I went over and he said, well, listen, I said, I wasn't one of Asa's boys.
He said, boy, he's part of his clan group.
But he said, I know a boy.
He said, who's real good friends with Asa's son, Asa Jr.
And I said, I'll tell you how to find his house.
So I drove up there, went inside, talked to his wife first and she got her husband.
She was cheerful and everything.
And he came down and I explained what I wanted.
He didn't say a word.
He went back upstairs.
I could hear him on the phone.
I couldn't hear what he was saying.
And his wife was kind of embarrassed.
She said, I don't know what's going on.
So she walked up the stairs to the top of the stairs for a minute.
She came running down the stairs.
She said, get out of here right now.
And I said, what do you mean?
She said, get out of here and don't come back.
And I don't know what he was promising to do, but it clearly was not a good idea to
stay there.
So I left and he came running out on the porch just as I drove off.
He was hot.
Ben would later receive some veiled threats of violence from others after his New York
Times story broke.
Neighbors standing up for the reputation of neighbors is conceivable, but so was violence
in the stratosphere of Ace of Carter.
On April 10, 1956, jazz singer Nat King Cole was attacked on stage in Birmingham, Alabama
and members of Ace's Clu Klux Klan group did it.
Well, they say that the reason those men attacked you was because of a feeling against rock
and roll music and Negro music so called.
Now, what do you feel about that?
Well, I mean, if that was the case, then I'm the wrong guy.
You're not rock and roll.
I don't think so.
I think if you heard me before, I'm sure you would ask me that if you heard me before.
What do you know what rock and roll is?
That was Nat King Cole being interviewed about the attack.
The Klan was very concerned about the racial crossover popularity of black musicians and
the dangerous craze of rock and roll music.
Six men were arrested for the attack and Ace of Carter would set up a legal defense fund
for them declaring them political prisoners.
Ace was incredibly media savvy and knew how to turn a story.
In a non-related incident, Ace would be accused but acquitted of shooting two men with a 44
Magnum at a Klan meeting in downtown Birmingham.
These men had accused him of stealing money and he shot them.
Lots of people saw it happen, but nobody would talk against Ace so they had no evidence.
But it's widely believed that he did shoot these men.
But let's get back to Dan being in Alabama in the early 1990s trying to learn about Ace.
I asked him how Ace could have pulled off this double life so well.
It's partly the power of his skills.
When he was in high school, I interviewed one of his high school friends and he was in
a high school play and this classmate of his said it was embarrassing.
And I said because he was bad.
He said no.
It's because the rest of these were high school kids and he was like a Hollywood actor.
He was totally at ease on the stage.
His lines were delivered like a professional actor and it made the whole world awkward
to watch.
So from the very beginning, he had these skills.
When he decided after he got out of the Navy to go to the University of Colorado, he had
done his naval training during the war.
He graduated from high school but it was a rural high school in Alabama and the entrance
person at the University of Colorado, I don't know about this.
So do you mind taking an IQ test?
It's 138.
So there was never any doubt about how really smart he was.
He made a lot of political misjudgments but in terms of intelligence, he was very capable
and a great performer.
He was like a Hollywood actor.
Asa was gifted with words, with reading people and had instinctual insight into the way humans
operated, what compelled them, what scared them, what moved them.
Most dynamic leaders have this capability.
He knew what people wanted to hear.
Here's Dan with some of Asa's deep background.
Asa Carter had a background very much like mine, he grew up on a small farm in northeast
Alabama near Aniston.
And there's no evidence at all during his high school years from his classmates that
he was anything other than a typical white-sullen boy.
I mean, sure, all of us of that generation, his generation, and even up to mine were unconsciously
racist.
But there's nothing to indicate he was virulent about it at all or even obsessed about it.
So there was nothing in his early childhood that indicated this.
And then he had some traumatic event.
He enlisted in the Navy in the officer training program in 1943 and he flunked out.
Not because he wasn't smart, but because he went to a rural high school that just did
not prepare him for the rigorous kind of program involving mathematics and other things.
He just didn't have the background.
And it really embittered him.
And he was now 18, almost 19 years old.
He goes in the Navy.
He becomes a radio operator, a very courageous one.
He serves in combat.
But while he's on a ship in the Pacific, he meets a small group of people.
Who are studying a series of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-black writers, Gerald L. K. Smith.
Names that you might not be familiar with the day, but were really big in the 1930s and
40s.
Many of them growing out of the fascist movement of the 1930s.
And they couldn't talk about during the war.
Obviously, we were all in the war against it, but secretly, many of them really, really
supported Hitler.
And they were fine with the war against Japan.
That was why Carter always said, I was glad to fight the Japs.
But I didn't want to fight my Aryan brothers.
And he became obsessed with this during the time he was the Navy.
And that was a turning point in his life.
Think about it.
Most of us young people, and I know this from studies as well, that your real political
outlook, if you have a political outlook, is often shaped 18, 19, 20 when you're becoming
an adult.
That's exactly the time for him.
And then from then on, he was one of these, what's the word for it?
Otto Dabakt, in which you teach yourself.
He read, he had a brilliant IQ.
He read, but he read exclusively in two kinds of literature.
One was fascist literature, anti-Semitic literature.
The other was this veneration for the Confederacy.
He worshipped the Confederacy and saw in the, and not the fancy Confederates like Robert
E. Lee and these, but in the, in the Dabakt you, in kind of people like Nathan Bed for
Forrest who could barely read and write, but thought like to maintain, you know, the white
south in the Confederacy.
And these became his heroes.
And he gradually developed a whole way of appealing to people.
He started that as a radio announcer in Denver after the war.
Then he worked in Yazoo City, Mississippi a little while.
And then he was hired and given a radio program that gradually spread to a network.
In 1865, this state right here after the war between the states was occupied by federal
Ireland.
In one year, they confiscated 190,000 farms and homes from these poor old redneck great
grandad as ours.
But they refused to cooperate.
In 1874, they whipped them.
They whipped them.
That was the voice of Asa.
I've listened to many of his broadcasts and he was really good.
He's quite different from the broadcast, many of the broadcasters of the period who were
centaurium and, and what today makes you kind of cringe to listen to them.
They had this kind of booming voice in which everything was overly dramatized.
That's not the way he was.
He acted like he was your uncle sat down and just talked casually to you.
So it was, it was different.
It was a different frequency that people could connect to maybe more than they ever had.
Yeah.
And he, he was so good at a kind of folksy style in which he would tell stories about
most of them made up, but about his past or about other people.
And then he would always link it back to the threat.
He was smart enough to realize that anti-Semitism, particularly after the Holocaust and the news
about the Holocaust didn't play very well.
That didn't mean it wasn't there.
There were a large number of Americans who were still anti-Jewish, but he realized it
was kind of a third rail.
So he didn't talk about that much on his radio show.
What he did discover was the great weapon that white supremacists had in the South.
Anti-communism.
Because the anti-communist fervor of the 1940s and 1950s explodes with McCarthyism.
And what white cell-theners immediately realized, because there were some savvy politicians
for us, we have to convince white Americans outside the South that all the civil rights
stuff is being formatted by the communists.
In the South, we have 98% Anglo-Saxon races, not counting an ****.
These are responsible people who erect free government and who have stood up and told
the **** you must operate, you must conduct yourself from a separate state.
But the Communist says, one world government, one world economy, one world here roughly
and one world right.
Those are heavy words.
It's hard to reconcile that he's the guy that wrote the education of little tree.
The political play was to say that the communists were behind the civil rights movement.
Whether he believed that or not, we don't really know.
Some evidence would later suggest that he didn't believe that at all, but it was just
a political strategy.
What many have since said is that Ace's public career in media was him playing an exaggerated
character that he believed the South wanted.
And therein lies the problem with political leaders and most media personalities.
They've got to get ratings and votes so they do what sells.
And like a nasty social media algorithm, they give the people their base level desires
of what they think they want.
Do you realize how nasty and dirty social media algorithms are?
They'll feed you and your kids filth and tell you it's a favor and media and politics
do the same thing.
Do you see these reoccurring themes in American politics?
Here's Dan on anti-communism.
And that became his theme and that of other right wing radio broadcasters, not only Southern
but Northern as well, that the Communist Party is maneuvering these people that they're
not smart enough to do it on their own.
And in their publications, as opposed to their sort of inner publication, is really the
Jews that were behind it.
And it would sort of be on the periphery all the time.
So that for example, in his broadcast and the broadcast of many of these people, they
would often emphasize the Jewish names of individuals who supported civil rights.
Because it was true that as a whole, Jewish Americans were a group that were much more
supportive of African Americans than generally white Americans were.
So he was able to get away with it mostly.
He did run into a problem in 1955.
He overstepped himself and on a radio broadcast he talked about the Jews and their role in
formatting this.
And actually it was a group of white businessmen who were closely tied to the Jewish community
in Birmingham who said to his sponsors, you got to get rid of this guy.
And they succeeded and that just reinforced his belief that Jews were behind.
They fired me from my job.
He later ended up doing other radio broadcasts but never as successfully as he originally
was.
Asa became so radical that he outpaced his peers.
But deep down he believed the Jews were behind the civil rights movement and they intended
to deconstruct the current South.
What's odd to me is it seems like a lot of people were interested in deconstructing the
South.
Here's an interesting observation from Steve Rinella about Asa's book, The Education of
Little Tree.
Some of this just doesn't make any sense.
Here's what I stumbled over knowing about the presumptive feelings of this Klansman.
And their antipathy and hatred of Jews and religious persecution of Jews.
So here I'm reading the education, Little Tree.
And there's a guy that there's a storekeeper.
The tree sees guys very well.
And one might look and be like, Oh, of course, they've made the Jew the storekeeper.
Okay.
There's a storekeeper who's Jewish.
Little Tree overheard someone refer to him as a Jew and mentions his stinginess.
Little Tree goes on to say, Mr. Wine was not stingy.
He was thrifty and paid his obligations and seen that his money was used in the right
manner.
Later, he says, he's worried about this and he says to his grandpa, what is a Jew?
Okay.
So you're like, so as the reader, I'm like, what's the grandpa going to say now?
Knowing that here's this.
We have a Klansman espousing his beliefs.
What a grandpa's answer be.
Grandpa just says, I don't know.
Something is set about him in the Bible, somewhere is or other must go back a long ways.
Like the Indian, I hear tell they ain't got no nation either.
And the story, as political rhetoric, what is that gaining?
The primary character, Little Tree is introduced to a person who stereotypes this individual.
He's a Jew, he's stingy.
And they spend a lot of time talking about the difference between stingy and thrifty.
Stingy you just hoard things thrifty.
You have things that matter.
So you don't spend on things that are frivolous because you want to focus on things that matter.
This is a conversation they've had since the guy's not stingy, he's thrifty.
He just wants to know where his money's going.
It seems like it would have been an easy spot to throw him under the bus if he wanted
to.
It's yeah.
Once again, we're conflicted with the first version of Ace's life compared to the presumed
life of a man that could write the education of Little Tree.
Does that make any sense to you?
Dend to me.
Just to clarify the timeline, Ace Carter's life as a professional racial supremacist media
personality was in the 1950s into the early 1970s.
Ace ran for governor of Alabama in 1970 against George Wallace.
On a platform so radical George Wallace was the moderate candidate.
He claimed that Wallace had left the cause.
As Ace's message that had been so well received for 20 years was now obsolete.
It didn't jive with the voters of Alabama and he received 1.6% of the statewide vote.
Here's Steve with an interesting tidbit on Ace's political career.
This is the only thing people got to go back to their history books to study up on.
These guys are all Democrats.
Right.
He was trying to get the Democratic nomination for governor and he was running as being
an absolutist on segregation.
Wow.
Listen, as we're talking, I keep warming up to the idea that there's just like a unstable
hand here.
Yeah.
But then you get into this.
How could you write so tightly and so beautifully?
It was after the devastating loss of this political race for governor that Ace began
writing the novels he'd always wanted to write.
He knew he'd never get published as Ace Carter so he changed his name to Bedford Forest
Carter, which eventually just became Forest Carter.
And FYI, Nathan Bedford Forest was the first grand wizard of the Clu Klux Klan who would
later renounce his involvement in the Klan.
He mentioned him before on our episode about Holt Collier.
Here's Dan with more details of Ace's identity switch.
So with that change of identity, obviously in public, like if he's talking to Barbara
Walters, he's going to be, he's going to be, he's going to be like Forest Carter, look
like Forest Carter, talk like, did he maintain that identity like throughout his whole life
during that period?
Yes, absolutely.
Was he married?
What about his, he was married to his wife's name was India.
That's right, is that correct?
When did he marry her?
He married her right out of the Navy in 1947.
Okay, so she was here for this whole thing?
Oh yeah, and she was very much his supporter and played along with the whole thing.
She didn't even, she lived, they bought a house, as I described in the book, through
a fluke-ish set of circumstances.
He came into some money.
And he bought a house down in St. George Island and she lived down there.
But he spent most of his time in that way.
He came into some money.
In 1972, Asa wrote his first novel under the alias Forest Carter, which he titled Gone to
Texas.
And the movie rights to the book were purchased by Clint Eastwood and he made it into his breakout
movie, The Outlaw, Josie Wales.
And this part is absolutely wild, almost unbelievable.
But knowing that he was being tracked by the FBI, Asa went to the FBI office and told them
how to get in touch with him if they needed him because he was about to, quote, make some
money for the first time in my life.
And I don't want anything to screw it up.
This is a direct quote from the over 1000 page FBI file on Asa.
He then moved to Abilene, Texas.
At this point, he called his son's nephews.
He grew a mustache, dried as sideburns, wore a cowboy hat and became a new age Cherokee
Indian writer.
But he had some help with this new story.
All of that was made possible because of one man, a man named Don Josie, who was a wealthy,
wealthy tall Texas oil millionaire who had given a lot of money to join.
George Wallace.
And Carter had met him and they just became like brothers.
And when Carter contacted him in 1971 and said, look, I want to change my identity and
move to Texas.
And the two of them came up with this background story.
Don Josie would meet when newsman, when he first started trying to promote his book and
say, yeah, he worked for me for 25 years as a Bronco Buster and Don Josie owned several
ranches.
He said he was here and there and wherever.
Okay.
So he had an accomplice.
He had an accomplice who set up the background story for him.
And so when anybody asked about, well, why didn't you hear this guy?
Guys, you know, all these years and he came up with these stories about how he was a storyteller
to the Cherokee nation.
Well, it's just strange.
Nobody went back to here to North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee and said, can you tell us
about this?
Nobody ever checked in.
Right.
You know, it's partly the power of his skills.
Aesah had skills.
The release of the book, The Outlaw Josie Wells and Eastwood making the movie was the
beginning point of his new life.
What's interesting is that Aesah's life mirrors the plot of this movie almost to the tee.
Josie Wells is a Confederate soldier who won't give in to the ideology of a reconstructed
south.
Aesah made a living talking about rejecting reconstruction and how the south got the shaft.
Josie Wells leaves the south under persecution from the Yankee army and heads to Texas.
Aesah, under the persecution of the establishment, left to south and headed to Texas.
Josie Wells in the movie makes a new life with the Comanches in Texas.
Aesah becomes Forest Carter, the Cherokee Indian and has a completely new life in Texas.
Is that not wild?
It's hard to know if this guy is crazy or a genius.
Now we're going to have to hold it together and stay on track.
We're talking about a lot of different books and a lot of moving parts.
It's a complicated story, bros.
This is Bear Greece.
Now we're going to talk to Steve about Aesah's later book, the 1976 book, The Education
of Little Tree.
This book was even later in the progression of the Forest Carter character.
I have a question for Steve about how intentional the message of that book was or was he just
writing the book he thought people would like.
What I would ask too is if he was writing this book, would his value system just be found
inside the way that he would tell the story that he was interested in?
Or did he really write this book with the intention of creating people that were deeply
anti-government?
And, you know, it's like how intentional was it?
If when I hear in my understanding of not being a subject matter expert, when I hear
a segregationist Klansman, I think of someone who is deeply invested in racial hate, okay?
That's what I get.
I don't think I'm going out on a limb here.
If that's what he was shooting for in this book, I like, he missed the mark.
If for some reason he had gotten where he was just anti-establishment, he just wanted
to see the whole thing burned down.
Sure.
If you told me that the Unabomber wrote that book, okay, what the Unabomber was a radical
environmentalist and he was anti-establishment, okay?
If you told me that the Unabomber wrote that novel, now a bunch of you are going to fly
off the handle.
They haven't read the Unabomber's manifesto.
I've read the Unabomber's manifesto.
So if you're feeling like insulted right now or that I'm saying something naughty, I know
what I'm talking about.
And if you read the Unabomber's manifesto, you'll see what I'm talking about.
If you told me the Unabomber wrote that book, I would buy it.
Really?
If you told me a Klansman wrote that book, even though we know it's true, I would initially
be like, I don't get it.
If he was shooting for in still a racial hatred, he missed the mark.
If he was shooting to make you love your grandparents, yeah, that's why the more I think
about it, my wife's idea that maybe the guy was just nuts.
Steve said he would have believed it if the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, wrote this book,
The Education of Little Tree.
Expounding on this is a bit like chasing a distant gobble from a bird.
You know you can't kill, but we're going to do it anyway.
Kaczynski terrorized America by sending bombs in the mail to random people for 20 years.
The FBI had over 150 people working full time trying to find out who he was.
In 1995, he wrote an anonymous 35,000 word manifesto demanding it be published or he'd
send more bombs.
He wanted to quote overthrow the economic and technical foundation of modern society
and to protect wilderness, which is the antithesis of technology.
Here is an excerpt from his manifesto, which was published in the New York Times in Washington
Post in 1995.
Let me know if this sounds reasonable to you.
Modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulation and his fate depends
on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence.
This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats.
It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society.
The system has to regulate human behavior closely in order to function.
The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person.
It may be however that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological
tools that make us want to do what the system requires.
The system has to force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the
natural patterns of human behavior.
For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.
It can't function without them, so heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these
fields.
It isn't natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting
at a desk absorbed in study.
A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world.
Among primitive peoples, the things that the children are trained to do tend to be in reasonable
harmony with natural human impulses.
During the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits,
just the sort of thing that boys like.
But in our society, children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do
grudgingly.
Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there
is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society's
requirements.
There are leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalists,
saboteurs, dropouts, and resistors of various kinds.
Wow.
Now, I can see what Steve meant when he said the Unabomber could have written the education
of little treat.
And now you can say that you've heard part of the Unabomber's manifesto, and it caught
you and me both by surprise.
Remember what I said about the trouble with some crazy folks is that they're often really
close to making rational arguments that make a lot of sense?
Yep, we said that.
Here is a throat punch question for Steve Rinella on ACE's writing.
What in the heck was he trying to say?
Man, knowing what we now know, I got two ideas about it.
You asked me how I became introduced to the book.
I was in a class about political rhetoric.
We read works from people who had like an axe to grind, okay?
And one day he gives us education little treats.
As far as I can remember, he probably gave us two nights to read it.
We all come in and we talk about the book for a while.
Everybody's kind of blown away about the book.
This is pre-internet, so you can't look stuff up good.
And he says, what would you think if I told you that was written by a Klansman?
What does that change?
Now, to answer that, I want to point out a thing that I also became aware of in colleges.
We were introduced to a lot of theories of literary criticism.
You can read a text, a book.
You can read this book and apply a Marxist criticism to it, meaning you're going to read
this book and we're going to look at how money, how does money influence behavior, okay?
How does the big man eat up the little man, okay?
Let's say we're going to look at it from a feminist perspective.
What is the role of the grandmother, okay?
Why do when certain things are happening, the boy and the grandfather go and do them,
but the grandmother doesn't participate?
What does she do while they're gone?
And we'll look at this whole book just in gender, okay?
That'd be like feminist criticism.
But there's this other idea in criticism.
It was popularized by this guy, Roland Bartz, who was a philosopher and critic.
And he brought up this additional way to look at a book which is called Death of the Author
to look at art or books or whatever, meaning a text is only itself.
It doesn't matter what the author meant.
The author's biography doesn't matter.
The author's background doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
The text is itself.
The text is its own living, breathing thing.
Don't burden it with what someone meant, right?
Right.
When a song means something to you, okay?
So you listen to a song.
A song means something to you and it feels a certain way.
And then someone says, oh, no, that's not what it's about.
If you listen to the lyrics carefully and then you watch this interview with the songwriter,
you'll see that it's not about heartbreak.
It's about his mom.
The death of the author stuff will be like, that doesn't change it.
When I hear it, that's how I feel.
That's what it made me think of.
I don't care what he thought.
He has nothing to do with this.
It's a thing.
It's a piece of art.
It's a piece of art, a piece of art, a piece of art, a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
I'm not going to be a piece of art.
One take is that he didn't change it all.
He despises the US government.
He despises Catholicism.
He has a real axe to grind with organized religion.
Doesn't like the education system.
He's an anarchist.
When I recently emailed with the teacher that taught it,
he pointed out there's a lot to be found in here
around things that you might consider that don't tread on me.
Movement.
Anything organized, anything establishment should be torn down.
Maybe that's what he meant.
But if that's what he meant, and this is a clan text,
there's some parts that are really hard to get your head around.
One of the first things that happens in the book is they get on a bus.
The grandfather gets the boy.
They get on a bus.
Opening scene.
The opening scene.
They step onto a bus and the bus driver.
Keep in mind, this is in the 70s and we're talking about a bus.
Okay.
People getting on buses and rolls of parks and the civil rights movement
and how you're seated on a bus, what your interactions with the person driving the bus are.
A hot topic back then.
It's in here.
Little tree and his grandfather get on the bus.
The bus driver makes a joke to everybody on the bus and says,
how?
And everybody on the bus says he's greeting.
Like hi.
Yep.
A big, loud, sarcastic, Cherokee greeting of how directed toward the people
on the bus who all laugh at the Indians.
It makes them feel very awkward to pay and makes it painful for them to count out and pay the
bus fare.
And that's loaded.
Yeah.
And it's not about whites.
It's about the treatment of Indians.
What's more, there's a part in the book where grandpa is relating a story that
happens to his father and his father had, it's like a parable about the reconstruction
south and in it, Union soldiers, Union soldiers kill a black man.
It is like when you look at it, like, step in, like never minding the death of the author
thing and just taking the educational little tree as this thing, which is very hard,
admittedly, very hard to do, knowing what we know about the individual road.
Right.
And it's a clan thing.
It's a segregationist thing.
It's very complicated, if that's the case.
My professor that I emailed with, he pointed out, if you do look at it as political rhetoric,
he's not preaching to the choir, right?
He's taking people from the environmental movement.
He's taking people who feel Native Americans were brutalized by the U.S. federal government.
He's drawing an audience here.
This was on Oprah, prior to the revelation about the author, this was on like this sort
of like formalized book list, library shelf of Oprah Winfrey in the early 90s.
Okay.
Is it so like seditious that it's taking an audience of the environmental movement back
to the landers, hippies, people who sympathize with the Native American movement in the 70s?
He's introducing them to anti-establishment.
He's introducing them to the idea that their government is evil.
Like, is he that shrewd?
Can I do the third one?
Yeah.
My wife's like, maybe he's schizophrenic.
Did you know in real life he at one point in time had his kids stop acting like he was
their father.
He wanted them to treat him as though he was their uncle.
He died in complications of getting into a big fight, physical fight with his kid.
You look at the bio and you see that there's a person who struggled with mental illness.
Yeah.
Maybe we're trying to go like, well, maybe he meant this.
Maybe, you know, we're playing checkers and he's playing chess.
Yeah.
Right?
Yep.
Crazy.
Maybe he's nuts.
He's schizophrenic.
He's nuts.
He doesn't know what he thinks.
He can't hold his family life together.
He's like, and he's not the first insane person to be a great writer at all.
Yeah.
Man, I guess this brings up the question of what is the definition of being crazy.
At an external level, this guy was incredibly intact.
However, we know that he craved attention, the limelight.
He was an incredibly good liar, but maybe his motivations were much more simple.
I asked Dan the same thing.
I asked Steve and got an interesting answer.
So here's the big question.
Yeah.
This is the reason I came to North Carolina.
Why did Asa Carter write this book?
That's a simple.
That's a simple answer.
Asa Carter became disillusioned with politics.
Not only did he realize that he was losing the battle against integration, but he realized
his brand, the politics, was never going to fly.
He made a very conscious decision.
He told, I interviewed his lawyer, and he said, you know, I'm going to make some money.
I've struggled a lot.
He had good periods, bad periods, but he said, I'm going to make some money.
I'm going to be the next Timmy away.
Well, he wasn't the next Timmy away, but he used to be a good guy.
He actually had ambitions.
He had ambitions.
He had ambitions.
And so he had really clearly in his mind the outlaw Jesse Wales.
That grew out of his research and writing about Jesse and Frank James, because he saw
them as Confederate heroes, because they were marauders, and then became outlaws, and so
on.
And he tried to claim they weren't outlaws.
So I understood that about the outlaw, Josie Wales, and the second book.
But the Indian thing, it was only as I began to dig into it that I really began to understand.
He was drawn to Indians and cowboys for a lot of reasons.
But Indians in particular, because he saw Native Americans and their struggle to maintain
their way of life against a vicious and murderous national government army as analogous to his
struggle to maintain white southern culture.
And in some ways, it was much safer to write about Indians being oppressed than white
southerners being oppressed.
Now, did he think he actually thought that that would translate to people?
Because that wouldn't be...
No, no, but to him it's like...
Just deep some need.
Some of him.
I don't think he thought most people would see it that way.
The other thing is he was always attracted to the whole story of Native Americans.
And I think it was part of that generational thing, you know.
And that is true that Americans became much more attracted to Native Americans once they
were gone.
They were gone.
It was just like this mythical thing that they were.
He somehow grasped that at a very early age.
I was reading this interview.
I mean, I thought of it as something growing out of the 60s or 70s.
And Fred Berger, the sky that I'm really indebted to, he died suddenly of a heart attack.
But he had interviewed a lot of people.
But he interviewed one of his shipmates, a guy named Gordon Lackey, who was closest friend
when he was in the Navy in World War II.
And it turned out, he told the whole story of Little Free when he was 18 years old.
Just as a...
It's a story.
He just said, I grew up with...
My grandpa was a Cherokee American.
And he told the story of Little Free.
As if it was him.
Like he didn't get to the States.
Yeah, he lied to this guy.
And Lackey said when Fred interviewed him, he said, I thought maybe he was a bullsh**
here.
But he said, then most of us were in the Navy when we talked to each other.
But it was fascinating to me that at age 18, he already had the basic outlines of that
story.
And it was just waiting.
And he didn't begin that writing that until later.
But his earlier stuff, he began writing, he had pals or manuscripts, his friend said,
back in the 1950s and 60s, he was writing.
So he was always, he wanted to be a novelist.
It was just that this break when he decided to break from his political past that it gave
him an opportunity to become that writer.
That's interesting.
But I have a bigger question for Dan.
So when you have a story like this, someone writes something later in their life.
Like we know that George Wallace would later ask for forgiveness for a lot of the stuff
that he did and go on this reconciliation tour and do all this stuff.
Some people would read into him writing this empathetic book towards Native Americans and
say that he was just a changed man.
In the book, you say that he maintained being a racist his whole life.
How do we know that?
Well, he had several friends in Texas who did not know who he was.
They knew him as far as Carter.
One of them was a woman named Louise Green, who had done a radio television personality
there and it was a really interesting woman.
I interviewed her at some length.
She was very close to Carter.
She came to terms with the fact that he was not who he said he was.
After his death.
I was the one that told her he was.
She said what broke my heart about him was that in many ways he was a fascinating individual.
She loved to be with him.
I mean he was just a great person to be around when he was in the forest Carter persona.
But she said what would happen with it by this time she knew he was struggling with alcohol.
But what happened was when he got drunk out it would come.
The last time she saw him was very shortly before his death.
They went out to dinner in Abilene and she was worried because he was drinking too much.
This black couple came in and he started raging about he wasn't going to eat where a bunch
of using the N word.
She went on and on and on and she kept trying to get him to stop.
She said not only is it not the way I feel I live here and I'm here you're saying all
this loudly so everybody can see it and people think I believe this and he wouldn't she said
he wouldn't stop and she got up and left and that was the last time she saw him alive.
It was just to her it was heartbreaking because it was to her it was an individual who had
such incredible skills as a writer but also this personality which would allow him as
she said to do such great things and yet something went awry at a very young age that
sent him this way.
Do you think that he would be classified as some type of mental illness today schizophrenia
or bipolar or something?
I don't think it would it be hard to classify it it's the kind of fanaticism we see in a
lot of people.
It is interesting to me that his sister who loved him very much but who totally disagreed
with him.
His chief of psychiatric nurses at the University of Alabama Birmingham Hospital and she loved
her brother but she sat down with him on one occasion and tried to persuade him to see
somebody for psychiatric help and he never spoke to a game.
He just cut himself off completely.
So whether it was mental illness or a diagnosable mental illness it clearly was a kind of compulsion
and the kind of fanaticism that went to the very core of who he was.
The interviews with his nephew and her niece were most useful because they spent a lot
of time with him and they talked about how he could be wonderful.
He funny he would play the guitar with his brother and sister-in-law and they would sing
songs and he'd tell stories and then something like a switch would go off and he would particularly
if you crossed him and you contradicted him and he would become furious then and as both
of both his niece and his nephew said he could be scary.
As a forest carter lived a life of drama and violence his death was even more so.
For years we knew that there were suspicious circumstances.
I mean this was common knowledge at the time that he died and the official autopsy showed
that he died of being unable to regurgitate food.
He choked to death on him.
There were also rumors that something terrible had happened at his son's home but no one
could tell exactly what happened and in 1991 I'm not too do my own horn here but I went
out to Aveline and I met Judge Samuel Metta and I told him what I was interested in and
written him ahead of time and he got the sealed police report out and which had been sealed
since no charges were ever bought and he found a way for me to get access to it even though
it was sealed.
So you had to read the book to find out.
And if you want to find out his death which as I said certainly has kind of biblical overtones
just read the story of Cain and Abel.
You read the book.
Well I am just an old rebel.
I reckon that is all I am.
For this carpet bag of government I do not give a dead bling.
I'm glad I fit again it and I'll keep fighting till we won.
And I don't want no pardon for nothing that I've done.
No I don't want no pardon for what I was and what I am.
And I won't be reconstructed and I don't give a dead bling.
This is a saccartia.
May God bless you and I thank you for listening.
Dr. Dan T. Carter's book Unmasking the Clansman was published in April 2023.
You can find it on Amazon and just about anywhere books are sold.
I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease.
Be sure to listen to the undercover agent who's been assigned to play the long game
on me, Brent Reeves and his new podcast This Country Life.
It's on the Bear Grease Feed.
And one day when I'm busted for crimes I've never committed it'll make a great story.
In the meantime check out this country life released every Friday on the Bear Grease Podcast
Feed.
And be sure to check out First Light's new Trace Pant and Jacket System for lightweight
breathable hunting gear for the south.
I look forward to talking to all the folks on the Bear Grease render next week.
Talk to you soon.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye., bye..
the bear.
Thank you.