Pastor Pete Peters has a message for the world.

"Nearly all of Christendom is being taught that today's 'Jews' represent Israel. Yet, how many of those same people have ever been taught that the Bible warns us of Israelite imposters?" Peters writes in an essay titled "Could You Be an Israelite -- And Not Know It?" at his web site.

The Colorado cleric preaches the gospel of Identity Christianity -- that the true descendants of the biblical patriarch Abraham are the Anglo-Saxons, Germans and the Celts. It's not a popular message, not one that's broadcast by many AM or FM radio stations. It's tenants don't grace many Sunday morning TV programming grids.

But Peters gets his message out, thanks to both the Internet and the huge short-wave transmitters of WWCR -- World Wide Christian Radio -- in Nashville, Tenn. For about 10 hours a week, Peters can be heard, hailing the blue-eyed savior and calling the white race to Christ.

Not a mainstream message, to be sure, said WWCR General Manager George McClintock. But in a free society, all messages have an equal right to be heard if they can pay for the transmitter.

"We operate with a constitutional look at everything. The day that one side of these sides can shove another one off, that isn't a good day," McClintock said.

For most of its existence, short-wave radio has been solely the domain of government and a few determined religious groups. Short-wave radio -- that part of the spectrum between 2 mHz (megahertz, or millions of cycles-per-second) and 30 mHz - takes advantage of charged particles in the atmosphere that reflect radio waves back to earth rather than going straight out into space.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union beamed Radio Moscow to the United States on nearly every available frequency, and countries such as Albania and North Korea were international radio powers, with programming aimed to nearly every part of the world in nearly every conceivable language.

Western nations were no slouches. Both the BBC and the Voice of America created thousands of hours of programming every year, trying to pierce the Iron Curtain.

The conclusion of the Cold War in 1989, though, ended a number of radio services and forced reductions in others. Into that gap charged American political groups as varied as populist Chuck Harder's For The People and former green beret and presidential candidate Bo Gritz, aiming their messages not at captive populations in Central Asia, but at North America.

Since its inception in 1925, the Federal Communications Commission considered short wave off-limits to U.S. broadcasters. The 1949 law establishing the Voice of America prevented it from broadcasting domestically, to ensure a concerned Congress that the VOA would not be used as a propaganda tool on our nation's own populace.

"Any reception in the United States is not the intended area," said Tom Polzin, an electronics engineer with the FCC in Washington, D.C. But enforcement is lax, Polzin said, in large part because the FCC doesn't want to appear to be a censor.

McClintock said attempts to balance the federal budget by auctioning off frequencies, as well as the prohibitive costs of listening to every short-wave station all of the time, make what appears to be a hostile Clinton administration actually friendly to short wave.

"The government doesn't care about us. They don't care about what we do," said McClintock. "They are a big help for us. A lot of listeners do not know this, but (there is) a very pro-short-wave policy by executive order."

Despite being technically illegal, Americans broadcasting to Americans via short-wave has skyrocketed in '90s.

"There certainly has been an increase in the last five years," said Glen Hauser, a longtime observer of radio broadcasting worldwide. His World of Radio program airs weekly on several short-wave stations, including WWCR and Radio For Peace International in Costa Rica.

"Officially, the patriot groups' programming is aimed abroad. That even applied to domestic broadcasting," Hauser said. "Gradually, the word got out to religious and patriot groups as a cheap way to get an audience."

Many of these groups focus on what they call "The New World Order," an alleged conspiracy of international elites to create a one-world Communist government. A recent For The People broadcast, for example, discussed the possibility that AIDS and the Ebola virus are products of genetic engineering masterminded by Henry Kissinger and former Nazi doctors, with the goal of depopulating the world.

In fact, after the Oklahoma City bombing 1995, McClintock said short wave and the Internet were immediately blamed for creating the environment that led to the bombing itself.

"They ask, 'Don't you have a responsibility?' I love that question," McClintock said. The responsibility WWCR has is to freedom of speech, he answers.

But the program producers -- WWCR does not produce any of its own programming; it merely sells transmitter time -- have toned their rhetoric down just a bit. And broadcasts like Tom Valentine's Radio Free America are harder to find.

Many organizations have fled to the Internet, where costs can be measured in tens of dollars rather than thousands. Unlike short wave, the Internet allows for immediate and low-cost access to Patriot and White Nationalist documents, like The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (which supposedly lays out a 10-point Jewish plan to take over the world) and The Turner Diaries (a novel that tells the tale of a worldwide race war in the 1990s).

Some WWCR users are getting off the air altogether. Norm Resnick, of the American Freedom Network (AFN) in Johnstown, Colo., said his operation is giving up on short wave because of cost and the negative associations.

"We have zero tolerance for racism and anti-Semitism," said Resnick, who is Jewish. "The short-wave audience is certainly not what it used to be and we don't know at AFN if we want to appeal to that audience."

While Resnick said that AFN did once deal with sovereign citizenship and black helicopters - the "Patriot mythology" - AFN is becoming much more typically conservative.

"Are we going mainstream? Yes. If you were an advertiser and heard someone say they're civilly dead or from the Republic of Texas, would you want to advertise with us? No," Resnick said.

Besides, he added, short-wave broadcasting time can cost $200 an hour. Resnick said at one time AFN's short-wave bills were close to $150,000 a month.

By comparison, leasing a satellite transponder can cost less than $2,000 a month. AFN's preferred mode of distribution is now micro-FM stations, tiny 1-watt transmitters anyone can buy and set up without needing an FCC license. For less than $1,000, a potential broadcaster can be up and running.

"Satellite is a lot cheaper," said Steve Moran, the marketing director for AFN.

"They (the micro-FM stations) have about a 1-mile broadcast radius, more if you set the tower on a hill. They were designed for churches and schools, for the local community."

"We don't get paid a lot. We're doing this for the love of getting the message out, of getting people politically involved," Moran said. "If you are a church-going Christian, you get labeled an extremist. That's pretty sad."

Still, there are some pretty big voices out there who can afford to buy WWCR's time. South Carolina's R.G. Stair, who bills himself as "God's Last Prophet of the End Times," runs his Overcomer Ministry on two separate WWCR transmitters. Dr. Gene Scott, the Los Angeles preacher who lost his TV station in the early 1980s after a long fight with the FCC, not only rents satellite time and a WWCR transmitter, but also has several other transmitter sites worldwide, which he fills 24 hours a day with his unique mix of Protestant theology and mythology.

And then there are a dozen other preachers, hawking a full gospel and nothing but -- ignoring race, the United Nations and the Book of Revelation entirely.

"The programs don't all agree with each other, but that's OK," McClintock said, adding that WWCR has not only sold to rightist causes, but to leftist ones as well.

"We're sold out on all four transmitters. We don't just do good business practices, but moralistic business practices," McClintock said.

And the left is not that far behind. Monitor Radio -- the international broadcast service of the Christian Science Monitor -- is a kind-of short-wave National Public Radio during the week and a Christian Science ministry on Saturday.

Radio For Peace International, begun in the late 1980s with the same idealism with which the Pacifica Foundation founded KPFA in Berkeley in 1949, has grown louder over the years from its tiny studios in Costa Rica.

"We did this to create an international communication system via short-wave. To bring the world together, particularly the second and third world," said Richard Schneider, a co-founder of RFPI.

Schnieder said RFPI is committed to the spectrum of leftist causes: feminism, support of indigenous people, solving class and racial inequality. RFPI also rigorously covers international conferences like the recent UN Population Summit in Cairo.

Unlike WWCR, or some of the operations of World Harvest Radio International (WHRI), RFPI is funded almost entirely by foundations grants and gifts from listeners, rather than by selling air time to the highest bidder. Schneider said a little less than half of the station's programming is simply done without being paid for.

"We call ourselves 'Global Community Radio,' and justifiably so," Schnieder said.

With WWCR selling out its transmitters and RFPI set to upgrade its antenna this year and improve broadcasts to the United States, it would seem short wave has a rosy future. But with direct satellite audio broadcasting to portable, hand-held satellite receivers ready to start in Asia, many are foretelling the end of short wave in less than a generation.

"Short wave will be good for another 20 or 30 years all over the world," Schnieder said. "There are a lot of other ways to get news, but not a lot of ways to disseminate news in rural India. We're already planning ahead to see what our role will be in terms of international communications."

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