LISA HAGEN, HOST:
Previously on NO COMPROMISE.
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HAGEN: Did you ever have board meetings of any kind?
CHARLES LOWERY: No, I never. Never had a board meeting - nothing. And I say that emphatically.
BILL EVANS: Paul is a former banker. He's a reconstructionist. He is a home-schooling patriarch with a impressive family.
JOHN LANDGAARD: It's twisting that information to fit the story, and they tell a pretty good story.
PAUL DORR: Let me back up a second, explain why I spend so much of my time on defunding government education. I'll give you my reason. It's almost always not my client's reason, but it's my personal...
BILL MOYERS: But you would reinstate the death penalty for some of these or all of these biblical crimes?
R J RUSHDOONY: I wouldn't.
MOYERS: But, I mean, the reconstructed society.
RUSHDOONY: I'm saying that this is what God requires.
JULIE INGERSOLL: There's God's authority. And then there is humanism, which is the claim to the authority of human rationality.
CHRIS HAXEL, HOST:
So there's - in other words, there's no room for compromise?
INGERSOLL: No room for compromise. No room for pluralism. For them, pluralism is idolatry.
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HAXEL: When the country exploded into protest after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, the conversation split along frustrating, familiar fault lines.
HAGEN: One side says Black Lives Matter. Its supporters call for justice when unarmed Black people are killed by police officers and seldom held accountable.
HAXEL: Another side says, well, just listen to Aaron Dorr.
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AARON DORR: So we have these violent thugs right here in Des Moines. And what happens? This is the socialist takeover of our way of life because if these people had tried to do that six months ago, they would have been boot-stomped into the dirt and arrested for violence, for rioting, for all kinds of violent crimes. But now these days, it's in vogue in Des Moines - the cops take a knee.
HAXEL: Over on the Minnesota Gun Rights page, it's pretty much the same thing.
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BEN DORR: Ryan (ph) says, I only take a knee for Jesus and to return fire. Have you seen that crap? People getting on their knees, kissing the feet of other individuals. Try to make me get on my knees and kiss anyone's feet.
HAGEN: Ben keeps scanning the comments.
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B DORR: Michelle (ph) says, this is my country, and they can't have it.
HAXEL: Over the summer, Ben Dorr shared dozens of videos depicting rioting and mayhem.
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HAXEL: He seems gleeful when protesters are arrested and when people break into CNN headquarters in Atlanta, incredulous when a Minneapolis grocery store is looted, enraged when someone burns an American flag.
HAGEN: The message from the Dorrs is simple - law-abiding citizens, like the Dorrs and their followers, need guns to protect themselves from senseless, rabid mobs.
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A DORR: People are going to be in the streets burning and looting and shooting businesses tonight in Louisville, Ky., and it could easily happen here now. And the rioting mob...
HAXEL: Keep in mind - all through this podcast, when you hear the Dorrs and their associates, it's mostly through their Facebook Live videos.
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A DORR: These Black Lives Matter thugs are now...
HAXEL: But if you follow them on Facebook, there's a lot more to see - memes, news articles.
HAGEN: Crime stories get a lot of engagement, shares, comments, likes. The vast majority feature a grainy security image or a mug shot of a young Black man.
HAXEL: One recent post is a report from Tennessee. A Black carjacker shot and killed a white man, Jordan Stevens, in front of his pregnant wife before taking her hostage. It's a horrifying story. On this Facebook page, it's framed as a cautionary tale about why followers should carry guns every day.
HAGEN: The post has thousands of shares and likes, almost 300 comments. Demon-filled animal, one woman writes.
HAXEL: Another guy says, anybody see a pattern about who's committing these crimes?
HAGEN: Seems to be a common denominator in these shootings, and it's not the guns.
HAXEL: This one says, time for a hanging.
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HAXEL: There's a lot of comments calling for the death penalty, which means people didn't read the article. The carjacker ultimately shot himself.
HAGEN: Now, this may be obvious, but all of the Dorr brothers are white. Chris and I are white. Actually, I'm half Okinawan, but I look white. We wanted to go through these Facebook pages with someone more likely to be on the sharp end of these comments.
MARLON PETERSON: My name is Marlon Peterson. I'm the host of the "Decarcerated" podcast. And most of my work is around criminal and racial justice.
HAGEN: He's a writer and respected organizing voice. He gave a TED talk about what he does.
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PETERSON: Family, I'm asking you to do the hard work, the difficult work, the churning work of bestowing undeserved kindness upon those whom we can relegate as garbage, who we can disregard and discard easily.
HAXEL: Marlon is Black. His family moved from Trinidad to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he was born. In a lot of ways, guns are central to the work Marlon does. He's had a lot of experience with them, which we'll get into in a bit.
HAGEN: He wouldn't normally scroll through a no-compromise gun group page on Facebook...
PETERSON: So I got the Facebook page, yeah.
HAGEN: ...But I asked him to.
PETERSON: I mean, it's propaganda. I mean, it's also, you know, racial - sometimes racial undertones, sometimes racial right in your face.
HAGEN: Marlon reads me some of the memes he's seeing.
PETERSON: The first rule of gun safety, never let the government take your guns. Criminals obey laws like politicians follow oath of office. It's a mindset that's harmful. Check on your friends who are looking for ammo. We are not OK.
HAGEN: This post is mocking a phrase Black Americans used a lot after the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others.
PETERSON: I mean, that one is just egregious. I mean, I see this next one with Chicago right under the we are not OK.
HAGEN: He spots a Facebook post I hadn't even noticed. It's a picture of the bottom of someone's sneaker. Stuck in the shoe's rubber tread are some spent shell casings. The meme text reads, jogging in Chicago be like.
PETERSON: And they're saying, jogging in Chicago be like, like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. You know, there's obviously a huge problem in Chicago in terms of violence, but it's all over the country. It's completely insensitive. And it's fucked up. I mean, I know it's NPR, so we don't use those words here. But, you know, it's real - it's fucked up. I mean, it's just horrible. Black people and brown people are able to be the butt of these type of jokes in terms of, like, our death and our pain. It is always susceptible to being a punch line, you know?
HAGEN: I'm not feeling great about getting him to read this stuff.
PETERSON: Damn, why you put me on to this page (laughter)?
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HAGEN: I'm Lisa Hagen.
HAXEL: And I'm Chris Haxel. This is NO COMPROMISE, an NPR investigative series about a mission to reconstruct America using two powerful tools, guns and Facebook. In the last episode, we met the father who raised the Dorrs to fight for a new America, one organized under biblical law. We learned about a movement to destroy public education and eliminate gun laws.
HAGEN: In this episode - no compromise didn't begin with the Dorr brothers. We'll track the tangled history of the message.
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HAXEL: The Dorr brothers use the word thug to mean a lot of things.
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B DORR: I love it. Daniel (ph) also says, my father was a Marine. I know damn well he'd give it to these thugs. That's what they are. They're thugs. They're criminals. They're criminals.
HAXEL: In some cases, it's a blanket insult hurled at anyone involved in Black Lives Matter protests. Thug can also just be a catch-all for a faceless enemy, a home invader, maybe, someone their supporters should always be armed against.
HAGEN: And the Dorr's definition of thug definitely includes someone with a criminal record, someone they would say deserves punishment, scorn, sometimes even death. It's also just a common dog whistle for a Black guy, maybe from someplace like New York.
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PETERSON: We are in Tompkins Park in Bed-Stuy. Brooklyn, otherwise known as Von King Park.
HAGEN: Marlon Peterson is in his early 40s now. He runs youth development programs and, like he said, hosts a podcast. He interviews people who've been incarcerated. Growing up, he says guns were all over the place.
PETERSON: The first time I ever seen a gun, a gun was - a friend of mine, we were in his apartment. And his nephew pulled a gun out and pointed it at me. He said - and, you know, he was playing. Obviously, I found out he was playing. But he pointed it at me. He said, get out. Get out this room. Get out the room before I shoot you - or something like that. And I remember, like, looking at my friend like, is he serious? And he - my friend just stayed quiet.
And that was the first time I ever - that was my first introduction to a gun, at least physically, like, real-life gun. And then, after that, I mean, you know, guns were around. So I mean, I never owned my own gun. But I held guns, carried guns for different reasons - for fun, for protection. I would - when I say for fun, like, we would go on a roof and shoot them off of buildings around, like, July Fourth and New Year's.
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HAGEN: There's something important we should say about Marlon's past. Remember that TED talk he gave?
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PETERSON: She wrote, when I become famous, I will tell everyone that I knew a hero named Marlon Peterson. Heroes rarely look like me. In fact, I am what garbage looks like.
HAGEN: As a teenager, Marlon was convicted of a serious crime involving guns.
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PETERSON: Twelve days before my 20th birthday, I was arrested for my role in a violent robbery attempt in lower Manhattan while people were sitting in a coffee shop. Four people were shot. Two were killed. Five of us were arrested.
HAXEL: He spent his 20s in prison for felony murder. Marlon did not kill anyone, but he participated in the robbery.
HAGEN: A lot of his work today is about getting people to see the full humanity of even people with violent criminal records. And to do that, he puts a lot of really personal, painful parts of his life on display.
PETERSON: You know, how'd I get in a position to where I was holding up a store with these folks? I mean, I went through stuff growing up in the neighborhood. I mean, growing up in the neighborhood, I was harmed in physical ways. I was sexually harmed and by - oh. Yeah, at 14, I was sexually assaulted by someone at gunpoint. So I mean, I'm not giving those things as excuses. I'm just saying that, like, there were things I grew up around or experienced that made me feel as if I needed to sort of, like, be a part of the problem (laughter) in so many ways, right? And in those days, I didn't see it as being a part of the problem. I saw it as, like, me saving myself, like, being around certain elements to protect myself in the neighborhood, being around...
HAGEN: He says guns are still easy to get for some of the kids he works with.
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HAGEN: I tell Marlon about the no-compromise philosophy the Dorrs and their friends push.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: It's always been that way. That's why the background checks are a joke. You know, magazines limits are a joke. It only affects law-abiding citizens. That's not going to stop - it's going to stop any criminals.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: So you don't like these ideas because...
HAGEN: Marlon sits with that idea for a minute and starts telling me this country's relationship with guns has always been about race.
PETERSON: The idea that not having gun laws should be a thing because we're going to get them anyway is not looking at the problem with American culture, right? The problem is that why is it that America is such a violent country that everybody feels like guns are a necessity for the most part, right? And we create gun laws in this country because Black people were asserting their rights. Go back to the Panthers. Like, you know, it wasn't until Black people said, oh, yeah, this is ours - like, we got the right to do this, too - that gun laws, in terms of the restriction of guns, became a thing.
HAGEN: He's talking about a moment in history back in 1967 that really shook up how Americans thought about guns.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: I have these Black Panthers up here with guns on the second floor.
HAXEL: When the Black Panthers showed up to the California state Capitol armed.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Am I under arrest, am I? Take your hands off me if I'm not under arrest.
HAGEN: For months, the Panthers had been patrolling their own neighborhoods with guns. They were responding to police violence in Oakland. And on this day, led by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, they were at the Capitol protesting a proposed gun control law, one specifically aimed at disarming them.
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BOBBY SEALE: On the Mulford Act now pending before the California legislature, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general and the Black people in particular to take full note of the racist California legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the Black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of Black people. At the same time...
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HAXEL: News headlines called the Panthers visit to the state house an invasion. And white politicians, like then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, were quick to embrace new gun control measures.
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RONALD REAGAN: But I would think that some of the bills that have been suggested, such as not carrying a loaded weapon on a city street or in town, this might certainly be a good one. There is absolutely no reason why out on the street today civilians should be carrying a loaded weapon.
HAGEN: That bill, the Mulford Act, it passed. Reagan signed it. This was four years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Gun control was on the march. Even the National Rifle Association of the time ultimately supported the federal Gun Control Act that would pass in 1968. This was just after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
HAXEL: Among other things, the new gun law restricted mail orders of rifles and shotguns and barred sales to felons, mentally ill people and anyone who is, quote, "an unlawful user of or addicted to marijuana."
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LYNDON B JOHNSON: But this bill, as big as this bill is, still falls short.
HAXEL: President Lyndon Johnson signed it and hoped more would come.
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JOHNSON: I ask for the national registration of all guns and the licenses of those who carry those guns, for the fact of life is that there are over 160 million guns in this country - more firearms than families.
HAXEL: At the time, some in NRA leadership were considering pulling the group out of politics altogether. But that was about to change.
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HAGEN: A major shift was brewing inside the NRA and across the gun rights world.
HAXEL: We said earlier in the podcast that the Dorrs are just one faction in a whole movement. And just as the NRA was having its inner turmoil - the Cincinnati revolt - a new competitor popped up.
HAGEN: Gun Owners of America, the original no-compromise gun group.
HAXEL: Remember R.J. Rushdoony, father of Reconstructionism, the slavery wasn't so bad guy? Well, he had this friend.
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RUSHDOONY: Friend of mine who is a state senator in California, a very fine Christian, thoroughly reformed. He's running for U.S. Senate.
HAXEL: Rushdoony calls him Bill. He also went by Sen. H.L. Richardson. They talked a lot more.
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RUSHDOONY: I was chatting with Bill Richardson, our state senator.
Bill Richardson was in Sacramento. He called me up one day. He'd had a long session with feminists who were there in his office.
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HAGEN: Rushdoony's pal H.L. Richardson was not happy with the gun control sweeping through California and the rest of the country. In 1975 when his fellow state lawmakers tried to ban handguns, Richardson decided to start some gun groups of his own.
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RUSHDOONY: Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners of California, Law and Order Committee - all run by Bill Richardson.
HAGEN: Gun Owners of America - today, it's the second largest pro-gun group in the country, says it has 2 million members compared to the NRA's 5 million. Just like R.J. Rushdoony was the father of Christian Reconstructionism, Gun Owners of America - or GOA - is like the Johnny Appleseed of the whole no-compromise movement. Some 40 years after its founding, the seeds it planted are bearing fruit.
HAXEL: That talking point the Dorrs use about how the Second Amendment isn't about hunting...
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A DORR: Gun rights is not about hunting. It's not about sports, you know? It's about a response to tyrannical government.
HAXEL: Here's the longtime head of Gun Owners of America. You're going to want to remember this name, Larry Pratt.
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LARRY PRATT: Yes, our guns are in our hands for people like those in our government right now that think they want to go tyrannical on us. We got something for them. That's what it's all about. The Second Amendment is not about hunting. It's not about target shooting. It's about Democrats who want to take our rights.
HAXEL: Pratt's been saying that for decades. In the gun world, GOA is known as the more militant cousin of the National Rifle Association, which has a lot of appeal for anyone who's fed up with NRA Wayne LaPierre and his suits.
HAGEN: As we know by now...
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HAGEN: ...There is no shortage of scandalous reports coming out of the NRA. But Gun Owners of America has its own skeletons.
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HAXEL: A story from the 1990s that a lot of its supporters don't like to bring up, that whole Aryan Nations thing.
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HAXEL: How are you doing this morning?
LEONARD ZESKIND: You don't want to know, and I don't want to tell you.
HAXEL: (Laughter).
Don't worry, Leonard Zeskind is always this cantankerous. He's a writer. And in the '90s, he won a MacArthur genius grant for his work on American white nationalism. He brought us some treasure, a shoebox filled with old cassette tapes.
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ZESKIND: The tape in question - I have a lot of Louis Beam tapes...
HAXEL: Ah, right.
ZESKIND: ...From Aryan Nations and all sorts of other shit.
HAXEL: OK.
ZESKIND: So I don't know whether that'll do.
HAGEN: I've asked him for recordings from an infamous meeting in 1992. Its organizers called it The Gathering of Christian Men. It was 160 guys who showed up to talk white power for three days.
HAXEL: The plan with the cassettes is for me to copy them while Lisa talks to Leonard Zeskind. But here at KCUR, working cassette players are getting kind of scarce. And another reporter is using that room right now. So...
ZESKIND: You're in trouble, though, because Chris has not copied at any speed worth talking about.
HAXEL: I'm scrambling. Leonard does not want to leave his precious tapes with me, a reporter he barely knows. But the man brought hours of cassettes and a big folder of documents.
ZESKIND: At the current rate, he'll be done at the end of next year.
HAGEN: (Laughter) OK. I am not there. I don't know what the facts are...
ZESKIND: Ah, bingle-dingle (ph). It's bingle-dingle time with him.
HAGEN: Would you be open to coming and picking up things maybe tomorrow? Is that possible?
ZESKIND: Tomorrow, but no later than tomorrow, young lady.
HAGEN: OK, let's get into these cassettes.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: This ministry is made possible by...
HAGEN: Leonard mail-ordered this set of tapes straight from the source...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: ...Of other tapes, materials and services...
HAGEN: ...The organizers of this gathering of extremists at a YMCA in Estes Park, Colo. These recordings are incredibly rare.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: ...80535. And now the message.
PETE PETERS: Good evening, gentlemen. I'm Pete Peters. I'll get right to the chase. We've got a lot to cover tonight. I'll not ask you how you are.
ZESKIND: Pete Peters was a Christian identity preacher - that is, he believed that the white people of northern Europe were the tribes of Israel. He believed that Jews were devils or devilish, and he believed that people of color were not human the way white people were.
HAXEL: Peters is the host. And among the crowd he's gathered are old-line Klansmen, leaders of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations and soon-to-be founders of a wave of militia groups.
HAGEN: It's a real who's who of 1990s white supremacists - all gathered together because of something that happened just two months earlier at a place called Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: In northern Idaho, a standoff between federal law officers and a fugitive white supremacist, Randy Weaver, is entering its sixth day. The standoff began last Friday when gunfire killed...
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HAXEL: It all started when undercover federal agents got Randy Weaver to sell them two illegally sawed-off shotguns. For months, the feds tried to get the former Green Beret to turn himself in. Knowing the family was heavily armed, they finally sent a team of federal agents to get them. There was a firefight. Weaver's teenage son and a federal agent got killed.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Skinheads and members of the Aryan Nations have been arriving more frequently at the scene. Five were arrested yesterday on charges of carrying concealed weapons, which consisted of long rifles and bayonets. It's hard to separate them from local Weaver sympathizers, like...
HAXEL: Weaver's wife Vicki was killed, too, by a government sniper. Weaver surrendered after 11 days, and the government eventually paid him $3.1 million for the wrongful killing of his wife and son. But in the immediate aftermath, outraged Weaver supporters called a meeting in Colorado.
ZESKIND: Well, Ruby Ridge was a crisis for them. They believed that Weaver had been targeted over the issue of gun rights and religion. And they were somber. They were angry. And they wanted to do something. And they came up with a strategy of reaching out across the white supremacist barrier into the larger public. And then the militia movement was born.
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HAGEN: These days, we can see local militia chapters recruiting in the comments of Facebook pages in the Dorr network, sometimes right alongside known white nationalists.
HAXEL: This meeting in Colorado in the early '90s is sometimes called the Rocky Mountain rendezvous. And the men who came were from all different parts of the white power spectrum, which means - believe it or not - they didn't agree on a lot of things. But they knew they wanted to come together. Christian identity Pastor Pete Peters kicks things off with a little lesson from Scripture.
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PETERS: ...By the God of Abraham, we agree you don't murder our wives and our children. And that's why we're here, and that's why those men got together. As cantankerous and noxious as they could be, they said to those gays of Gibeah, you stinking bloodthirsty maggot faggots of Gibeah, you don't go murdering the man's concubine. And they came together as one.
HAGEN: That's from the brief fire-and-brimstone portion of the recordings. But most of what we have on tape honestly sounds more like some kind of business conference.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Our premise is that if we're going to beat these people, we have to come up with something new. So we can't play their game any longer. We're playing a parlor game. Law is a parlor game.
ZESKIND: That's what these people are all about - creating an all-white territory that's a whites-only territory. That's the definition of white nationalism - to create a white nation.
HAXEL: This meeting in Colorado lasted three days. Over that time, the men broke into working groups to discuss strategy and to report back.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: All right, so the third system is called leaderless resistance. But, of course, we know better. We call it following the mandates given to us by our God.
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HAXEL: Listening through all these tapes is pretty wild. But there's one main reason we wanted them - because a very special guest accepted an invitation to talk to these men about guns. Here's Gun Owners of America's Larry Pratt telling the crowd at Estes Park a story from a time just after MLK was assassinated.
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PRATT: I'll tell you this - when I bought my first gun, it was in 1968 during the riots in Washington, and I lived very close by.
HAXEL: Pratt says all he could find was a shotgun.
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PRATT: But I do know this - that if they'd have had that assault rifle - or so-called - for sale, that's exactly what I would have bought 'cause I was thinking about defending my family in the face of a total breakdown of police providing any kind of law and order at all. And I wasn't thinking of hunting; I've very seldom ever gone hunting. The deer are much smarter...
HAGEN: Leonard told me Larry Pratt was a really useful figure to the extremists at Estes Park. He'd been a lawmaker in Virginia. He headed up a national gun rights group. He looked presentable and had powerful friends in Congress. It was just the kind of respectability these white power guys were looking for and the perfect anti-government gun rights philosophy.
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PRATT: Infringed means nothing. It means don't touch. It means not even in the slightest. If you look up the word in the dictionary, you'll find that it's a rather complete word - means don't even touch even out on the fringe, I guess we could say is sort of the idea that's built in, let alone the heart of the matter. So just stay completely away. I think that all gun laws are unconstitutional, and I've taken that position.
HAGEN: He also takes the position that Americans should have access to whatever state-of-the-art weaponry the military has. Tanks? Shoulder-fired rockets?
ZESKIND: Sure. He was their kind of guy.
HAGEN: Right. And part of his thinking about it is that not only should everyone be armed, but that people should be a part of - in militia, right?
ZESKIND: Absolutely.
HAGEN: That's sort of his big...
ZESKIND: Yes, absolutely.
HAGEN: Remember - this was to a crowd that believes Jews and Black people are less than human, people who want to form their own nation-state. Pratt takes questions from the audience, gives them gun recommendations.
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PRATT: So-called assault weapon that we hear about, the AR-15 or the AK-47 - those guns are good in their place and they're especially good for defense, but not for 200 yards taking somebody out. You really would want to get another kind of gun.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: I appreciate Larry coming back up to speak. We might have him again...
PRATT: Thanks for the opportunity.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: You bet. I'm going to have - right on his heels. And we'll just leave it right on the same take if my technician can do it. Gentlemen...
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HAXEL: About four years after the white supremacist meeting, his participation came back to bite him because, by then, 1996, he was co-chair of Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign.
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PAT BUCHANAN: You know, I don't even know of this group, white Aryan Nations. But let me say this - if this is a group...
HAXEL: This is Buchanan facing questions about Larry Pratt from the press.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: Did you know that he spoke in Estes Park, Colo., in 1992?
BUCHANAN: I don't know where Estes Park, Colo., is. And I don't know that that's true. And - but I think you ought to call him to have him answer all of this because I have no knowledge of it whatsoever. All I know is Larry Pratt of the Gun Owners of America has been a loyal early supporter of mine when no one else did.
HAGEN: Pratt resigned from the campaign but stayed on at Gun Owners of America. Through the rest of the '90s, the aughts and even in recent years, he's kept doing TV appearances for GOA on everything from C-SPAN...
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: Larry Pratt with the Gun Owners of America. The Senate is going to be to voting...
HAGEN: ...To "InfoWars," hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
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ALEX JONES: Now joining us is Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America - gunowners.org. Hadn't been on in a few weeks.
HAGEN: Larry Pratt is still listed on the Gun Owners of America's most recent tax records as executive director emeritus. But they keep him off the about-the-team page on the GOA website. His son Erich's become more of the front man. We asked Gun Owners of America for a comment several times - they refused.
HAXEL: For decades, Larry Pratt and GOA have used the media of the day to spread the no-compromise message - newsletters, talk radio, TV interviews. He continued flying around the country, popping up in state houses to advocate for gun laws, sometimes right alongside the brothers Dorr.
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CHRIS DORR: My name is Chris Dorr. I am the executive director for Ohio Gun Owners. And today, I'm joined with Larry Pratt, the director of Gun Owners of America. And we just got done with the committee hearing on...
HAXEL: Larry Pratt stands next to Chris Dorr. He's a little shorter with white hair and a red tie.
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C DORR: So how many times have you done this before, Larry?
PRATT: Well, over several decades. It's been a while, quite a few. And it's not always...
HAGEN: As they shoot this video together, Larry starts talking about how much times have changed since he got his start back in the 1960s.
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PRATT: And now we're using Facebook.
C DORR: Yep.
PRATT: And this gets the word out. That was not available even when the concealed...
C DORR: Right.
PRATT: ...Carry movement got started. And, happily, the gun owner has continued to utilize these new media.
C DORR: Yes. And so, folks, what he touched on there is really important. It is really a new era for communication. So when we send out emails asking you folks to...
HAXEL: Larry is nodding like a proud grandfather as Chris picks up the pitch.
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C DORR: This stuff really works. This is a big, huge powerful...
HAGEN: They're volleying talking points like it's tennis. You can bet there would be no Dorr brothers gun rights groups if it weren't for Larry Pratt. Gun Owners of America has been training activists on confrontational politics for years.
HAXEL: Meanwhile, as Larry's continued working on the far fringes, his gun rights group is expanding in other directions. Gun Owners of America recently hired a Black woman as one of its public faces.
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PRATT: She is a fierce, no-compromise defender, advocate of the Second Amendment. And she's going to be a tremendous help in helping us to reach high school and college students.
HAGEN: GOA's been funding conservative Black speakers who take the no-compromise message into Black and brown communities.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: How are we going to get conservative principles in urban America? That's the overarching theme. That's the reason why socialism looks so attractive - because we have been unavailable to urban America.
HAGEN: Now, the Dorr brothers' operation is smaller than GOA's. They don't necessarily have the cash flow to sponsor Black speakers, even if they wanted to. What they have is memes. In Georgia, the Dorrs' partner Patrick Parsons recently shared an image of a Black family standing proudly with AR-15s slung over their shoulders. Followers in the comment section are thrilled.
HAXEL: One guy says, armed minorities are harder to oppress - good for them.
HAGEN: That big gun rally I went to in Richmond...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: It's exciting. It's about time that the gun owners finally said, this is it...
HAGEN: ...Was overwhelmingly white. But the Dorrs reposted lots of pictures of the pretty small number of Black people who did show up. I talked about this stuff with Marlon Peterson, the guy from the top of the show. He doesn't buy the pitch from any of the no-compromise groups.
PETERSON: It's not for the purpose of freeing Black people. It's not for the purpose of making sure that another Black person isn't killed by the police. It isn't to make sure that Chicago or Jackson, or Brooklyn, or Harlem, or Inglewood - it's not being done to make sure that these areas become safer. That's not what it's for.
HAXEL: So what is it all for? That's part of the puzzle we've been trying to solve all along. What drives the Dorr brothers? Is it really just guns? Is it money, religion, racism?
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HAGEN: We've seen that these groups are comfortable playing with racist stereotypes. We know the Dorr brothers were heavily influenced by religious thinkers who were slavery apologists and who condemned interracial marriage and who opposed the civil rights movement, resisted when the federal government began to enforce the idea that Black people and women are the equals of white men. And we've heard what the Dorrs think of social justice activism today, specifically the Movement for Black Lives.
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UNIDENTIFIED DORR BROTHER: We've got these vile criminals known as Black Lives Matter. And believe me - they're not peaceful protesters. They're only peaceful...
HAXEL: The Dorrs and their partners have stopped talking to us. And even if they would talk, why would they answer our questions about any of this?
HAGEN: I mean, did they even know the answer about what motivates them at their most basic emotional level?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: You know, when he's doing a Facebook Live and there's all these people checking in and they're telling him how wonderful he is - and so that's incredibly self-affirming, isn't it? I'd have to think that it is - To be the leader of these people that really believe you're doing God's work.
HAXEL: On the next episode of NO COMPROMISE, we head to a state where, whatever their motivations, it's gotten harder to ignore the Dorrs and their partners.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: If you watch them, I think you'll - the ego part, you'll see - that he is the authority. And anybody that challenges his authority is a commie gun-grabber (laughter).
HAXEL: And we learn about a book that did not get burned, a literal playbook that helped the no-compromise movement hack American politics.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: We got into confrontational politics. And he actually said, read the book "Confrontational Politics" by a former senator - state Sen. Richardson from California, who was...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: And then you use words like kill or we're killers or we're - you know, we're coming for you beside the picture of a gun, there really is no other conclusion you can come to.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: They can point to us and point to this whole ethnostate thing and organize around it and say, see - see how crazy they are. They want to ethnically cleanse everyone.
HAXEL: That's next time on NO COMPROMISE.
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HAGEN: NO COMPROMISE is us, Lisa Hagen and Chris Haxel. The show's produced by Graham Smith and edited by Robert Little of NPR's Investigations Unit; Josh Rogosin and Stephen Key are sound engineers - sound design by Josh and Graham. Our music comes from Peter Duchesne, Brad Honeyman (ph), Rob Braswell (ph) and The Humpmuscle Rolling Circus.
HAXEL: Special thanks to Sarah McCammon, Keith Woods, Monika Evstatieva, Chris Benderev and our friends at Story Lab - Michael May, Alex Goldmark, Bruce Auster and Cheryl W. Thompson. And thanks as well to our colleagues at the Guns in America reporting collaborative.
HAGEN: Also, thank you, Schuyler Swenson (ph), Ruby-Beth Buitekant, Ross Terrell (ph) and Matt Richmond (ph).
NO COMPROMISE is a production of NPR working in partnership with KCUR in Kansas City, WABE in Atlanta and WAMU in Washington, D.C.
And I know we haven't been doing this. But I mean, we have to - our moment of Zen.
ZESKIND: Ah, bingle-dingle. It's bingle-dingle time with him. You could talk to him and see how long - ask him, how long is it going to take to copy all this shit?
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