Having looked at Hal Turner’s history of racist statements last week, Media Mouse today turns its attention to the Hal Turner’s racist radio show, reviewing the July 11 edition of the show. While the police in Kalamazoo have urged people to “ignore” the white supremacist event being organized by Hal Turner in Kalamazoo on August 4, it is important to explore the histories of the people organizing the rally and to directly confront their racism.
Hal Turner’s radio show, broadcast every Wednesday, features a steady two hours of racist talk radio. Much of the show consists of Turner’s rants and incitements to violence, broken up by a variety of commercials and music, both of which are racist. While Turner’s advocacy of “white nationalism” occasionally attempts to seize on popular discontent, fear, and uneasiness about cultural and economic changes in the United States, the majority of his appeals are overtly racist and clearly associated with the white supremacist movement. Unlike organizations such as the Council of Conservative Citizens that attempt to disguise their racism, Turner’s overt and violent racism is more in line with that of the Ku Klux Klan.
Not surprisingly, a major topic of discussion was Turner’s upcoming rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Turner announced the location for the rally and thanked the city government for their role in accommodating him. Turner expressed his alleged desire to “make it a legal, safe, happy event,” despite the fact that a rally featuring prominent racists–especially ones associated with the more violent portions of the racist movement–will never be a “safe” or “happy” event for large segments of the population.
Turner took issue with an article in the Kalamazoo Gazette in which the police urged people to ignore the rally. Turner asserted that he has never heard of a governmental entity telling people to ignore an event in their town and painted himself as a victim. He asserted that he has “never heard of govt. telling people to ignore Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton when they come to their town” and that it is a deliberate effort by the city of Kalamazoo to discourage “white people” from “organizing against black gang crime.” Turner then claimed that the city was hoping that people would ignore the rally because his rally was exposing the “truth” that Kalamazoo has “a racial problem with blank gangs.” He further painted whites as victims, asserting that “violent criminal gangs, [are] roving the streets of a city, attacking, robbing, beating, and now killing innocent people based on the color of their skin.” As a counter to this, Turner attempted to speak for the people of Kalamazoo and called on the people to “stand united with one voice” and to “stand up to the hoodlums.”
Of course, Turner has no connection to Kalamazoo and has no authority to speak on the behalf of residents of the city. While Turner repeatedly cited the corporate media in Kalamazoo to back up his assertions about the city’s alleged problems with “black on white violence,” Turner made it clear that he has little understanding of what is happening and instead is relying on a common white supremacist tactic of instilling fear as a means o gaining sympathy for white supremacist ideology. At one point Turner even states that the might be a substantial Hispanic population in the city because a city commissioner has the last name “Juarez” although he later admits that he is “just guessing.” Turner suggests that perhaps African-Americans and Latinos are killing each other as a part of a territorial battle. Of course, for a man that has advocated killing undocumented immigrants and deporting African-Americans, this would not bother him:
Now while I personally don’t care if non-whites kill each other, the problem with this is when they’re firing bullets from moving cars when there’s women and children and senior citizens walking down those streets. Innocent people.
Later in the show, Turner attempted to back pedal from his racism, suggesting that he only hates some African-Americans, not the entire race:
There is a difference between black people and niggers. Black people are hard working, decent, law-abiding people – take care of their property, go to work everyday, pay their bills, raise their children right. They’re black people. A nigger–it’s kind of hard to describe in words, but you know it when you see it… Same thing with Hispanics, there is a difference between Latinos and spics. Latinos, like I said earlier, decent, hard-working, law-abiding, clean, honorable people. Spics, you know, it’s hard to put it to words but I know one when I see one. Same thing with white people. We don’t have a neat little moniker for it, we call it white trash but there is a difference between a white person, and white trash. Being poor is not an automatic reason to be a violent criminal. It’s the criminality I hate. It’s the violence I hate. And I use strong racial language to go after those criminals. And what happens is the politically correct people hear the words nigger and spic and they are the ones who instantly think that I mean everybody.
And:
The propensity of the non-white races to act in this fashion is demonstrably greater than the propensity of whites to act in this fashion. And so, you know, like, I think that if you bring criticism on a group it’s kind of like peer pressure. You get the group itself to rein in its bad apples.
Of course, his comments are reprehensible and his logic is flawed and inconsistent with previous statements.
Turner also dedicated a portion of his show to attacking Jewish people. Turner asserted that “whenever there’s a problem of something of political correctness, there is always a Jew in the woodpile,” before claiming that:
We have a whole race, millions and millions of people on this planet to this very day, who have in their blood, the DNA of Satan himself. And those of us who are racially aware now realize that those are the Zionist Jews.
This anti-semetic rhetoric reached its high point when Christian Identity Pastor James Wickstrom–a Michigan resident who will be speaking at Turner’s rally–called in to the show:
Wickstrom: We talk about diversity and all this other garbage, tolerance by the (inaudible), but you know, when you get down to it, nickels and nickels and dimes and dimes, what have these other races accomplished to enhance our standard of living?
Turner: To my knowledge, nothing.
Wickstrom: That is exactly right.
Wickstrom: Anything the Jews are for, everyone should be automatically against because there is nothing good in them. Nothing good can come from the Jew.
Turner: Because those who call themselves Jews are of the synagogue of Satan, it says it in the Bible.
Wickstrom and Turner then shifted their attention back to attacking African-Americans:
Wickstrom: Now, Martin Luther Coon had a dream. Now if this thing can have a dream, you mean to tell me we’re not entitled to have a dream under equality?
Turner: Well of course not Jim. Cause when blacks get together its called black pride, when Latinos get together its called Latino pride. When whites get together it’s called racist hate. There’s a double standard.
Wickstrom: You know, we whites have a dream, as far as the ones I’m associated with and have been for forty years, and I believe it is the same dream that our ancestors and forefathers had in this country, a totally white republic.
This discussion was continued when the two argued that white people were robbed of their property when the slaves were emancipated during the Civil War:
Wickstrom: The 14th amendment which made the blacks and other alien races who are non-white, who made them federal property. The 14th Amendment made all of the aliens–the non-white people–federal property–and the District of Colombia stole that collateral property, which had value, and never reimbursed any plantation, or slave owner one penny.
Turner: That’s right. It’s funny they argue for reparations for slavery even though none of them was ever a slave, but nobody talks about reimbursing the slave owners for the property they lost. Nobody talks about war reparations to rebuild the city of Atlanta after Sherman burned it to the ground.
Finally, Wickstrom and Turner ended their conversation by agreeing that Jewish people should be sent through “the wood chippers:”
Wickstrom: You know, once these are things, little silver bullets, that we can talk about. But you know, I really believe and you know Hal–we’ve had the pleasure of meeting each other and we’re going to see each other soon in Kalamazoo, Michigan–once the Jewish issue is settled, with all of them going through the wood chippers, the races–I’m talking about all the races–will go their separate ways… no more race mixing, no more jew communist tolerance.
Wickstrom: All of modern Jewry, my dream is all of them going through the wood chippers.
Turner: And I stay with you.
Near the end of the show, Turner once advocated violence as a means of supporting the goals of the white supremacist movement:
I’ve got to tell you that I believe it is going to take extreme violence to fix the problems in this country. I really believe that… You know, people say “violence never solved anything,” bullshit. Violence solves everything.
Violence is repeatedly advocated by Turner as a means of addressing what he claims is an assault on “white America:”
Our country is being infested by millions of inferior people from inferior countries and there’s so many of them that instead of us lifting them up, they are dragging America down. It has to stop.
It is also worth noting that on Turner’s show, even the commercials and music are racist. Turner ran an advertisement for the Aryan Nations, as well as an “ethnic cleansing” video game:
Hip-hop beat playing
Speaker1: Hey Dave, what the hell is that noise?
Speaker 2: Oh that’s just the news, we’ve got a nigger problem around here.
Speaker 1: So what are you going to do about it?
Speaker 2: Haven’t you ever heard of ethnic cleansing?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, but..
Speaker 2: Look, I just happen to have my acme nigger-seeking missile.
Speaker 1: Heya, what is that?
Speaker 2: Just aim it at a herd of niggers and
Speaker 1: Hey, what are you doing?
Speaker 2: Fire the missile
(sound of missile exploding)
(sound of mockery of hip-hop vernacular)
(sound of missile exploding)
Speaker 2: And presto, nigger soup.
Speaker 3: Resistance.com We can’t sell you a nigger-seeking missile, but we can sell you “Ethnic Cleansing: The Video Game.”
(sound of machine gun fire)
Speaker 3: Ethnic Cleansing from Resistance.com, soundtrack for the white revolution.
The music featured on the show was similar, with Turner playing a white supremacist cover of the song “Imagine” that featured the lines:
Imagine there’s no friggin no niggers… there ain’t big scary darkies running around out there and of course no friggin’ arabs, hindus, no spics, and no friggin’ gooks… it would be great huh? Imagine there are no homos… Imagine there no cripples…
Turner asserted that:
Oh yeah, you wouldn’t hear songs like that on regular radio. But you get it here on the Hal Turner Show because we have fun breaking the rules of political correctness, we have fun dishing out racy kind of stuff because it drives the politicians, the politically correct crowd nuts and man, it’s a lot of fun doing it.
He went on to state “I make fun of everybody, cause its fun… it’s ok to make fun of stereotypes, it’s being human.” He further claimed that “when we can laugh at ourselves we can get along with everybody,” a statement that is clearly meaningless given his repeated advocacy of white supremacy and threats against people of color.
