#1750: Richard Hoskins

The Phineas Priesthood, or Phineas Priests, is a title for self-selected vigilantes who commit violent acts in accordance with the ideas described in Richard Kelly Hoskins’s 1990 book, Vigilantes of Christendom: The Story of the Phineas Priesthood. The Phineas Priesthood isn’t an organization, but the title chosen by certain terrorists acting on their own (like Larry Steven McQuilliams) The original Phineas Priesthood described in Hoskins’s book was a group of four guys who, in the 1990s, carried out bank robberies and a series of bombings in the Pacific Northwest before being sent to prison, and Hoskins’s fans have engaged in typical terrorist activities like abortion clinic bombings, the bombing in Spokane of The Spokesman-Review newspaper, bank robberies, and plans to blow up FBI building.

Hoskins, then, is a deranged promoter of white supremacism and Christian Identity, and is opposed to evils such as interracial relationships, race mixing, homosexuality, and abortion, and is involved in – you know the type – anti-Semitism, anti-multiculturalism, and sovereign citizen claptrap. His book gives approving descriptions of murderers of homosexuals and interracial couples, and praises Phineas credo followers like John Wilkes Booth, the Waffen SS, the Ku Klux Klan and the 1980s terrorist group The Order. He also devotes a section to “proving” that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by the Jews to destroy the German nation. “Phineas” refers to the Israelite Phinehas, who executed an Israelite man and a Midianite woman while they were together in the man’s tent and thereby ending a plague sent by God to punish the Israelites for intermingling sexually and religiously with the Midianite Baal-worshipers.

Hoskins is also the author of Our Nordic Race (1958), a self-published attempt to prove the superiority of “pure Nordic” peoples and warn about the dangers of “race traitors”. Jewish people, on the other hand, are a “mixed breed” of Mongolian descent, unable to “blush red” and unrelated to the “Nordic” Israelites of antiquity (oh, goodies). Like in Germany in the 20s, “agitation Jews” have been working in concert with the Nordic “race traitors” to undermine Western civilization. These are, of course, central tenets of the Christian Identity movement: whites are God’s chosen race and descendants of the Bible’s Israelites, whereas Jews literally and figuratively descend from Satan. In 1985 he published War Cycles, Peace Cycles, which purported to be a Christian analysis of banking and economics denouncing predatory lending and banking practices, but was most notable for blaming everything on a conspiracy of Jewish banking concerns and corrupt political leaders, as well as its intermittent advocacy of racial purity.

He is still publishing his financial/racist newsletter The Hoskins Report, which has for instance laid out his research on the Holocaust (“Constant lies. Lies, lies, lies [repeating “lies” many times substitutes as evidence]. Forty years of lies ... the anti-Christ Holohoax scam”), integration (“Better a blood-soaked Joseph Stalin than a smiling Ian Smith or congenial DeKlerk who opens the door to the barbarians. Compromise means death”) and politics (“A political candidate need take just 3 simple stands. 1) Abolish usury. 2) Root sodomists from the land. 3) Outlaw racial interbreeding.” Simple, really).

Hoskins has also written for Willis Carto’s neo-fascist Western Destiny.