Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hey, welcome to Weird Little Guys, a
Speaker 1: weekly show about the worst people you've never heard of.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Molly Conger. I spent years researching and
Speaker 1: writing about far right extremism. I hang out in their
Speaker 1: chat rooms, watch their live streams, follow their court cases.
Speaker 1: I've stared deep into the abyss, pouring over court documents,
Speaker 1: reading manifestos, and listening to some of the worst podcasts
Speaker 1: ever made. And I've sat in the silence of a
Speaker 1: mostly empty courtroom, feet away from men whose hateful ideology
Speaker 1: spurred them on to acts of shocking violence. And you
Speaker 1: know what, They're all just some guy, however heinous the act,
Speaker 1: whoever hideous the rhetoric, no matter how dark their desires.
Speaker 1: It's like the end of an episode of Scooby Doo.
Speaker 1: There never was a ghost or a swamp creature. There
Speaker 1: is no supernatural villain. It's some guy. Dick Gerald. For example,
Speaker 1: back in twenty seventeen, Daryl Drake's started sending letters. His
Speaker 1: first letter, sent just weeks after the deadly Nazi rally
Speaker 1: in Charlesville, Virginia, demanded the cancelation of an annual Civil
Speaker 1: War reenactment and threatened that the Unite the Right rally
Speaker 1: would look like a Sunday picnic by comparison if they
Speaker 1: didn't heed his demand. But they didn't cancel, so he
Speaker 1: put a pipe bomb in a tent. The bomb didn't
Speaker 1: go off, but the letters continued, and for over a year,
Speaker 1: members of the board at the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation
Speaker 1: received letters with increasingly frightening threats. The letter writer said
Speaker 1: he'd kill one man's mother with a car bomb. He
Speaker 1: made graphic sexual threats towards someone's doughs. He threatened to
Speaker 1: feed ground up glass to the horses ridden by the
Speaker 1: Cavalry reenactors and drive trucks through parades. And all the
Speaker 1: letters were from Antifa, or so the envelope said. But
Speaker 1: they weren't from Antifa. They were from a weird little
Speaker 1: guy named Gerald. He'd been kicked out of his Civil
Speaker 1: War reenactment unit a few years earlier, and like the
Speaker 1: Confederate soldier he dressed up as he just couldn't let
Speaker 1: go of losing. He capitalized on the political tensions of
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, exploiting the hysteria around anti fascist activism to
Speaker 1: get a very personal kind of revenge. The race warriors
Speaker 1: and ethno state enthusiasts who spend their day's brainstorming ways
Speaker 1: to unravel the fabric of our society are a threat
Speaker 1: to be taken seriously. That's why I've spent years researching them.
Speaker 1: But this won't just be a parade of horrors. I mean,
Speaker 1: it'll definitely kind of be that, but we're gonna laugh too.
Speaker 1: I think we have to. Darrel dropped his first letter
Speaker 1: in the mail on his way to the airport for
Speaker 1: a solo European vacation. So the day somebody opened that
Speaker 1: letter threatening to shoot up the fake Civil War, he
Speaker 1: was writing a five star review of the Burger King
Speaker 1: who went to in Madrid. In the day the FBI
Speaker 1: raided his house, he was posting on a sex doll forum.
Speaker 1: These are the weird little guys trying to ruin our lives,
Speaker 1: and I hope you'll join me for a little peak
Speaker 1: under their hoods. Listen to Weird Little Guys every Thursday
Speaker 1: on the iHeart You app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts.