Speaker 1: Col Zone Media. In November of twenty twelve, Barack Obama
Speaker 1: was re elected as President of the United States. He
Speaker 1: beat Republican challenger Mit Romney by a pretty good margin,
Speaker 1: pully in fifty one point oh six percent of the
Speaker 1: popular vote to Romney's forty seven point two. But if
Speaker 1: you add those numbers together, he'll only get ninety eight
Speaker 1: point two six, a number that doesn't include more than
Speaker 1: two million votes. Where did those votes go? American electoral
Speaker 1: politics are dominated by the two party system. It's always
Speaker 1: been that way. Before it was Republicans and Democrats and
Speaker 1: red states and blue states, we had Democrats and Whigs,
Speaker 1: and before that we had Federalists and Democratic Republicans. It's
Speaker 1: always been nearly impossible for a third party or independent
Speaker 1: candidate to break through on the national stage, but they've
Speaker 1: always tried. There are long standing third parties ones you've
Speaker 1: probably seen, or a ballot Green Party, the Libertarian Party,
Speaker 1: and there are third parties that have come and gone,
Speaker 1: like Ross Perrot's Reform Party. In every election cycle. There
Speaker 1: are tiny little groups you've never heard of putting up
Speaker 1: a candidate. They know they can't win, but they have
Speaker 1: a message they want to get out there, and technically
Speaker 1: almost anyone can run for president with or without a party,
Speaker 1: as long as you are a natural born citizen over
Speaker 1: thirty five. All you have to do is raise some
Speaker 1: money and fill out some paperwork. Records from the Federal
Speaker 1: Election Commission show that in twenty twelve, two hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty people build out that paperwork announcing their intention to
Speaker 1: run for president of the United States. One of those
Speaker 1: candidates was an aspiring filmmaker with no political experience and
Speaker 1: a lot of thoughts about who really did know. Nine
Speaker 1: to eleven, I'm Molly Conger. This it's weirdly advised. I
Speaker 1: landed on this story in a roundabout kind of way.
Speaker 1: I guess they always do. If you listen to the
Speaker 1: last two episodes, I do have a confession to make.
Speaker 1: I left something out of that story. It just didn't
Speaker 1: fit neatly into the episodes, and it would have been
Speaker 1: a confusing digression. Those episodes were about Devon Arthur's, the
Speaker 1: co founder of Adam Woffin who murdered two members of
Speaker 1: the group in twenty seventeen, and in those episodes, I
Speaker 1: told you that the earliest mentions of Adam Waffen online
Speaker 1: were in posts on a forum called Iron March, and
Speaker 1: that's still true as far as I know. I didn't
Speaker 1: lie to you, but you might have assumed, based on
Speaker 1: what I said in those episodes that the group's co founders,
Speaker 1: Devin Arthurs and Brandon Russell must have met on Iron
Speaker 1: March two. That's a reasonable assumption. And like I said,
Speaker 1: I left some things out of the story because that's
Speaker 1: not where the pair first met. They met on a
Speaker 1: platform called tiny chat. Launched in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: tiny chat was a video chat room. As many as
Speaker 1: twelve users at a time could appear on video, and
Speaker 1: more users could watch and participate in a text chat
Speaker 1: down below. When they were interviewed by police on the
Speaker 1: night of the murders in twenty seventeen, both Brandon Russell
Speaker 1: and Devon Arthur's specifically mentioned that they'd originally met on
Speaker 1: tiny Chat. I dug up old four chan posts from
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen that show some screenshots of one particular tiny
Speaker 1: chat room. In what looks like a college dorm room,
Speaker 1: a user calling himself Odin is staring into his webcam.
Speaker 1: It's Brandon Russell, a year before he announced the formation
Speaker 1: of his neo Nazi terrorist organization, and years before he
Speaker 1: went to federal prison. The first and then second times,
Speaker 1: he was nineteen years old sitting in his dorm room
Speaker 1: in Florida in an online chat room called Third Position.
Speaker 1: I don't have any particular interest in writing a third
Speaker 1: part of that story. This isn't actually a continuation of
Speaker 1: those two episodes. This isn't about Brandon Russell or Adam Waffen.
Speaker 1: If you didn't listen to those episodes and you don't
Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it. But
Speaker 1: I was stuck on this idea of that third position
Speaker 1: tiny chat. How did a fourteen year old Devon Arthur
Speaker 1: send up in a video chat room run by grown
Speaker 1: men talking about the political ideology of third positionism. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to answer those questions today. We're not really
Speaker 1: going to talk about that chat room at all. I'm
Speaker 1: just telling you how I ended up reading an unproduced
Speaker 1: screenplay about a brave and handsome patriot who uncovers the
Speaker 1: truth about nine to eleven. I promise these things are related.
Speaker 1: This story is about the man who wrote that awful screenplay,
Speaker 1: a man named Merlin Miller. In twenty twelve, he was
Speaker 1: put forward as a presidential candidate by the American Third
Speaker 1: Position Party, the same group that was video chatting with
Speaker 1: teenage Nazis in twenty fourteen. One surviving promotional video for
Speaker 1: the chat room actually repurposes Miller's twenty twelve campaign announcement
Speaker 1: video to advertise an upcoming chat featuring the party's chairman,
Speaker 1: an attorney named William Johnson. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: characters here who we will definitely see again in future episodes,
Speaker 1: so I won't dwell on them for too long now.
Speaker 1: But let's get a little backstory. The American Third Position
Speaker 1: Party was an actual political party registered with the Federal
Speaker 1: Election Commission, and it still exists today kind of. The
Speaker 1: group rebranded as the American Freedom Party and they still
Speaker 1: have a website, although they terminated their federal electoral committee
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty. As we so often see with extremist groups,
Speaker 1: there is this constant cycle of collapsing, rebranding, and splintering,
Speaker 1: and that's how American Third Position was born. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, a Nazi skinhead group in California found
Speaker 1: themselves in turmoil. Some Nazi skinheads, calling themselves Freedom fourteen,
Speaker 1: tried to organize a political party called the Golden State Party,
Speaker 1: but it all fell apart when the Orange County Register
Speaker 1: published a story revealing that the party spokesman had been
Speaker 1: using a pseudonym I hide the fact that he had
Speaker 1: some violent felony convictions in his past. It's not totally
Speaker 1: clear to me why the Nazis skinheads found that to
Speaker 1: be a problem. That's kind of their whole thing, but
Speaker 1: I guess it just won't do for your political party spokesman.
Speaker 1: Either way, the Golden State Party was dead in the water,
Speaker 1: and some of those skinheads weren't ready to give up
Speaker 1: on the idea of having a political party, so they
Speaker 1: got together to choose a new leader and a new name,
Speaker 1: and they settled on the American Third Position Party, and
Speaker 1: the group would be chaired by a corporate lawyer in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles named William Johnson. Johnson has been on my
Speaker 1: list of Weird Little Guys from the beginning. I never
Speaker 1: actually managed to pull from my list of episode ideas
Speaker 1: because I always get distracted by some stray thought from
Speaker 1: the prior week's research. But I have to imagine we'll
Speaker 1: get to him eventually. He's a lawyer and he's in
Speaker 1: the movement, but he's not really a movement lawyer. That's
Speaker 1: not the focus of his practice. He pitches in occasionally. Sure,
Speaker 1: his name shows up as the attorney of record on
Speaker 1: a trademark application for the Council of Conservative Citizens. And
Speaker 1: there's a Nazi in Pennsylvania who seems fond of seeing
Speaker 1: Johnson when he emails county employees to make public records requests,
Speaker 1: as though he thinks Johnson is his personal attorney. But
Speaker 1: he's not licensed to practice in Pennsylvania. But usually when
Speaker 1: I'm talking about a guy who is both an attorney
Speaker 1: and a career white nationalist, he's not really keeping those
Speaker 1: parts of his life separate. So I think he's a
Speaker 1: little unique in that respect. As an attorney, Johnson primarily
Speaker 1: represents Japanese companies doing business in the United States. He
Speaker 1: has a terribly common name, making it a little hard
Speaker 1: to look him up on pacer. But it doesn't look
Speaker 1: like he's taken very many cases to court, at least
Speaker 1: not in federal court. But in corporate law, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of law to be practiced outside the courtroom. He
Speaker 1: does have an active case in the Court of International
Speaker 1: Trade right now, but I couldn't possibly pretend to be
Speaker 1: interested in the court's opinion about whether his client's imported
Speaker 1: goods were properly classified under the tariff schedule. Apparently, the
Speaker 1: difference between raw dried seaweed and seaweed that has been
Speaker 1: prepared for human consumption by drying it is not just
Speaker 1: in the eye of the beholder, it is a six
Speaker 1: percent jump in teriff right. Just how dry this seaweed
Speaker 1: really is isn't interesting, But his choice of co counsel
Speaker 1: is The seaweed importer is almost certainly Johnson's client. This
Speaker 1: is the kind of client he represents. But the documents
Speaker 1: are actually being filed with the court by a movement
Speaker 1: lawyer who recently represented members of Patriot Front. Small World,
Speaker 1: I guess. But we'll get to Glenn Allen's role in
Speaker 1: this story next week, not the seaweed part, the Nazi part.
Speaker 1: The website for Johnson's La based law firm is almost
Speaker 1: entirely in Japanese, a language he appears to conduct most
Speaker 1: of his business in proficiently. He majored in Japanese at
Speaker 1: Brigham Young University and spent some time in Japan as
Speaker 1: a Mormon missionary. I don't speak any Japanese, so I
Speaker 1: can't really be the judge of such things, But in
Speaker 1: some of the videos on his website, at least to
Speaker 1: my ear, he has the sort of stilted cadence of
Speaker 1: a speaker who isn't terribly confident in his skills. I am, however,
Speaker 1: much better equipped to pass judgment on his other career
Speaker 1: that of a professional racist. He's been splitting his time
Speaker 1: between the two for more than forty years. He was
Speaker 1: admitted to the bar in nineteen eighty one, and soon
Speaker 1: after that he starts writing under the pseudonym James O. Pace.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, as James O. Pace, he published
Speaker 1: a book called Amendment to the Constitution, Averting the Decline
Speaker 1: and Fall of America. The book lays out his argument
Speaker 1: for an amendment to the Constitution, this so called Pace Amendment,
Speaker 1: and it would repeal the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments to
Speaker 1: the US Constitution. He also proposes restricting U S citizenship
Speaker 1: to whites of European descent only. The second section of
Speaker 1: the proposed amendment reads, quote, no person shall be a
Speaker 1: citizen of the United States unless he is a non
Speaker 1: Hispanic white of the European race in whom there is
Speaker 1: no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one
Speaker 1: eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern
Speaker 1: a maa An, Indian, Malay, or other non European or
Speaker 1: non white blood. You might be asking why did it
Speaker 1: take an entire book to explain how that would work?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: For one thing, he had to devote quite a few
Speaker 1: pages to explaining exactly how the government would go about
Speaker 1: determining who was white. Are Armenians white? Are Iranians our Jews?
Speaker 1: The answer is no. Obviously, the book is every bit
Speaker 1: as bad as you're imagining, and it did not need
Speaker 1: to be two hundred pages long. And after its publication
Speaker 1: he spent the latter half of the nineteen eighties running
Speaker 1: a group called the League of Pace Amendment Advocates, and
Speaker 1: he claimed that he was the group's spokesman, and he
Speaker 1: pretended that he'd met the author and just supported his ideas.
Speaker 1: When The La Times connected the dots that William Daniel
Speaker 1: Johnson was definitely James O. Pace, he denied it, telling
Speaker 1: the paper that James Pace was a pseudonym, but it wasn't.
Speaker 1: His Pace is a lawyer just like him, but Pace
Speaker 1: works outside of the country. He wouldn't say what Pace's
Speaker 1: real name was or what country he was allegedly living in.
Speaker 1: It's giving. My girlfriend goes to a different school, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't know her. He gave up on the League of
Speaker 1: Pay Advocates after someone bombed the group's office in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine. It was only a small bomb and it
Speaker 1: went off in the middle of the night when no
Speaker 1: one was there. No one was injured, and as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, it was never solved. Like I said,
Speaker 1: William Daniel Johnson is absolutely a weird little guy in
Speaker 1: his own right, so I won't linger here. But he
Speaker 1: was a well established figure in organized racism by the
Speaker 1: time those skinheads approached him to chair their rebranded political
Speaker 1: party in two thousand and nine. In fact, he was
Speaker 1: fresh off a very public loss in a two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight campaign for judge in the Superior Court of
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. The embarrassing defeat only raised his profile in
Speaker 1: the white nationalist community, though, and it came at a
Speaker 1: time of renewed interest in the movement in the idea
Speaker 1: of entering mainstream politics. His newly formed political party was
Speaker 1: led by respectable professionals, obscuring its origin in skinhead street
Speaker 1: fighting gangs. Johnson was an attorney with a jd from
Speaker 1: Columbia University. Tom Sunik, a Croatian born political scientist, had
Speaker 1: taught at several universities, and Kevin MacDonald was a professor
Speaker 1: of psychology at California State University. This was the era
Speaker 1: of the sutent Thai racist the Dapper Nazi. Richard Spencer
Speaker 1: had just started his alternative right dot com website. Matthew
Speaker 1: Heinbach was still a college student at Tawson University and
Speaker 1: he was leading a chapter of the White Supreme Group
Speaker 1: Youth for Western Civilization. Both men would go on to
Speaker 1: figure prominently in the twenty seventeen era alt right and
Speaker 1: the street violence that accompanied it, and in the early
Speaker 1: twenty tens, both of these men were frequent collaborators with
Speaker 1: members of the American Third Position Party. The party may
Speaker 1: have been a rebranding of a California skinhead group, but
Speaker 1: it couldn't have existed without the neo Nazi networking that
Speaker 1: was happening at Ron Paul campaign events. The Ron Paul
Speaker 1: Revolution never really took off, but his campaign provided fertile
Speaker 1: recruiting grounds for white nationalists in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: William Johnson was hosting pricey fundraising dinners for Paul's campaign.
Speaker 1: When he ran for judge in two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: His campaign manager was also the Paul campaign's California statewide coordinator.
Speaker 1: Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt professor and member of the Council
Speaker 1: of Conservative City who would go on to be a
Speaker 1: member of the party's board, was one of several high
Speaker 1: profile racists whose donations to the Paul campaign made headlines
Speaker 1: when he declined to refuse money from white nationalists. And
Speaker 1: it was through Ron Paul campaign events that Merlin Miller
Speaker 1: first met members of the American Third Position Party. Don't
Speaker 1: just take my word for it, though.
Speaker 3: Most of the founders, of course of the American Third Position,
Speaker 3: which have evolved into the American Freedom Party now grew
Speaker 3: out of the Ron Paul movement. But I think one
Speaker 3: of the major shortcomings of the Ron Paul platform was
Speaker 3: he really did not build very strongly on immigration. And
Speaker 3: it's probably the most destructive thing going on today to America,
Speaker 3: and as you suggested, it's altering the national character of
Speaker 3: our country.
Speaker 1: That's a conversation between Merlin Miller and American Third Position
Speaker 1: Party director Jamie Kelso back in twenty thirteen, he's saying
Speaker 1: something a lot of white nationalists, We're saying back then,
Speaker 1: they love Ron Paul, they love Ron Paul's platform, but
Speaker 1: he's just not going far enough in its first few years.
Speaker 1: And I guess now that I'm saying out loud every
Speaker 1: year since then as well, the party had trouble fielding candidates.
Speaker 1: It's a tricky thing to do, even mainstream politics. Running
Speaker 1: for office is hard. Convincing someone else to run for
Speaker 1: office is also very hard. It takes a lot of time, effort,
Speaker 1: and money. You have to put yourself out there. It's
Speaker 1: exhausting and potentially humiliating. And the kind of guy who's
Speaker 1: enthusiastic about running for office as an open white nationalist,
Speaker 1: well that kind of guy tends to be an absolute
Speaker 1: fucking weirdo who alienates everyone with an earshot. When party
Speaker 1: member Ryan Murdaw announced his candidacy for state representative in
Speaker 1: New Hampshire, people were disgusted. One letter to the editor
Speaker 1: from a Grafton resident called his candidacy a festering boil.
Speaker 1: Party member Harry Bertram made several spectacularly unsuccessful runs for
Speaker 1: office in West Virginia, including the twenty eleven special election
Speaker 1: for governor. I didn't do a whole lot of digging
Speaker 1: on Harry Bertram, but I did read the entirety of
Speaker 1: his twenty three year posting history on Stormfront, and I
Speaker 1: have to say he doesn't strike me as a strong communicator,
Speaker 1: and he appears to be at least a little bit
Speaker 1: involved with the clan. But more importantly, his message just
Speaker 1: didn't resonate with West Virginians. Was coarse and overt that
Speaker 1: fearmongered about white replacement, but he didn't have much else
Speaker 1: to offer outside of those racist conspiracy theories. One local
Speaker 1: news article from the time quoted a West Virginia voter
Speaker 1: who said illegal immigration just wasn't a top issue for her.
Speaker 1: In twenty ten, West Virginia was ninety four percent white.
Speaker 1: The state is to this day dead last when it
Speaker 1: comes to the percentage of residents who are foreign born
Speaker 1: and the percentage of residents who speak a language other
Speaker 1: than English at home, about one and a half percent
Speaker 1: and two and a half percent, respectively. So even if
Speaker 1: those voters don't like immigrants in theory, there's a decent
Speaker 1: chance they've never even seen one. It was a single
Speaker 1: issue candidate, and that just wasn't the issue people cared
Speaker 1: most about. The party needed someone who looked normal, someone
Speaker 1: who could put on a suit and put together a
Speaker 1: s sentence and pretend to address a real issue, preferably
Speaker 1: someone who wasn't publicly associated with another active hate group,
Speaker 1: someone with a clean record and a good education. I mean,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter who they pick, they're not going to win.
Speaker 1: But it isn't necessarily about winning, is it.
Speaker 2: It's harder for our enemies to characterize us as complete
Speaker 2: outsiders and fringe coops if we're on the ballot in
Speaker 2: a state election or a federal election.
Speaker 1: That was Party director Jamie Kelso chatting with Richard Spencer
Speaker 1: back in twenty thirteen. And here's one of America's leading
Speaker 1: pseudo intellectual racist, Jared Taylor, in a promotional video begging
Speaker 1: people to run for office. As a member of the party.
Speaker 4: Running for office is one of the best ways to
Speaker 4: publicize our ideas and to reach who may have never
Speaker 4: heard a sensible, dissenting view about race.
Speaker 1: It's not about winning elections. It's about trojanhorsing white nationalist
Speaker 1: rhetoric into the conversation at every level, from county school
Speaker 1: board to President of the United States. After running Harry
Speaker 1: bertram A couple times for state and local office in
Speaker 1: West Virginia, American Third Position wanted to break into national politics,
Speaker 1: and in the twenty twelve presidential election, they decided that
Speaker 1: Merlin Miller was the man for the job. By his
Speaker 1: own telling, Merlin Miller wasn't very interested in politics for
Speaker 1: most of his life. He grew up in a working
Speaker 1: class family in Iowa and became the first member of
Speaker 1: his family to graduate from college. He graduated from West
Speaker 1: Point in the class of nineteen seventy four, and he
Speaker 1: had some pretty famous classmates. Astronaut Michael Clifford, former Chairman
Speaker 1: of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, former Deputy
Speaker 1: Assistant Secretary General of NATO, Matthew Cleimo, former NSA director
Speaker 1: Keith Alexander, and four star General Walter Sharp, and of course,
Speaker 1: former CIA Director David Petreus. I had to look up
Speaker 1: the graduating class of nineteen seventy four to get most
Speaker 1: of those names, but not that one. In almost every
Speaker 1: speech and interview, I could find spanning a decade. Merlin
Speaker 1: Miller mentions that he went to school with David Petraeus.
Speaker 1: I guess he thinks it makes him sound important. He
Speaker 1: knows a very important guy whose name has been on
Speaker 1: the news a lot, so that must mean something. And
Speaker 1: particularly back during the twenty twelve Camps in Pain cycle,
Speaker 1: David Petraeus was on the news quite a bit, so
Speaker 1: saying the name gives him some proximity to power, some
Speaker 1: proximity to legitimacy. Sometimes it feels like he wants the
Speaker 1: listener to assume that the pair have maintained some kind
Speaker 1: of relationship since graduation. But I don't think he ever
Speaker 1: outright says that. In one interview, he says that in
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine he sent Betrayus Quote, a treatise
Speaker 1: that connected military, political, and media intrigues challenging many of
Speaker 1: the orthodoxies. Based on the context of the conversation and
Speaker 1: the fact that the interview was published on an anti
Speaker 1: Semitic conspiracy theory website, you can probably guess that he
Speaker 1: sent the general some weird essay about Jewish control of
Speaker 1: the media based on his use of the word treatise,
Speaker 1: though I'm pretty sure What he sent David Petraeus was
Speaker 1: a copy of his unpublished one hundred page manuscript called
Speaker 1: The American Dream. It's a document that he only ever
Speaker 1: refers to as a treatise, and that's the only place
Speaker 1: I can find him ever using that word. So I
Speaker 1: think that's what it was and has got everything you
Speaker 1: might expect. Communism is a Jewish conspiracy. Some parts of
Speaker 1: the Holocaust probably kind of happened, but maybe it wasn't
Speaker 1: actually that serious. The Federal Reserve and the IRS, or
Speaker 1: illegal scams perpetrated on the American people nine to eleven
Speaker 1: was a false flag orchestrated by Masad and the CIA.
Speaker 1: Illegal immigration is replacing white Americans, and the Jews are
Speaker 1: behind that too. We have to crush the New World Order, etc.
Speaker 1: You know, honestly, I wonder if he was a big
Speaker 1: Info warse listener in the mid auts because this sounds
Speaker 1: like vintage Alex Jones. I guess there was this thriving
Speaker 1: blogosphere back then with all the same talking points, so
Speaker 1: he could have gotten it anywhere. Let's not give Alex
Speaker 1: Jones too much credit. I don't think David Betraeus ever
Speaker 1: wrote back after graduating from West Point nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: Miller served six years in the Army. He spent a
Speaker 1: few years working for Michel Entire Company, but in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three he had the opportunity to pursue his true passion,
Speaker 1: his childhood dream, filmmaking. He was accepted into an MFA
Speaker 1: program at the University of Southern California, and he was
Speaker 1: one of just twenty students admitted into that year's Peter
Speaker 1: Stark Producing Program, a specialized graduate degree program within the
Speaker 1: film school that focused on film and television production. And
Speaker 1: here too he had some very famous classmates. Stacey Cher
Speaker 1: produced movies like Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, and Aaron Brockovich.
Speaker 1: Neil Morritz would go on to produce movies like I
Speaker 1: Know What You Did Last Summer, Cruel Intentions, and all
Speaker 1: of the Fast and Furious movies. Liz Glotzer is the
Speaker 1: president of a production company that makes television dramas for CBS.
Speaker 1: The program seems to produce a lot of producers and
Speaker 1: Merlin Miller really did try to break into the industry.
Speaker 1: While he was at USC, he interned at Paramount and
Speaker 1: after graduation he had some minor production roles in a
Speaker 1: couple of schlocky, low budget movies in the late eighties
Speaker 1: and early nineties, but he had a family to feed.
Speaker 1: He and his wife had four daughters by that time,
Speaker 1: and living in la is expensive. You can't support a
Speaker 1: family of six working as a line producer on b movies.
Speaker 1: The family relocated to Springfield, Missouri, and he took a
Speaker 1: job at Ozark's Technical Community College. But he didn't give
Speaker 1: up on his dreams. He started his own film production company,
Speaker 1: Ozark Pictures, and he made a movie. He made a
Speaker 1: real movie with a budget of close to a million dollars,
Speaker 1: all secured through private investors. His first film, A Place
Speaker 1: to Grow, premiered at a theater in Springfield, Missouri, in
Speaker 1: March of nineteen ninety five. One of the film's big stars,
Speaker 1: Chris Christofferson's daughter Tracy, attended the premiere in Springfield, but
Speaker 1: her co stars, Wilford Brimley and a country singer called
Speaker 1: Boxcar Willie, didn't make it. The movie didn't get wide release.
Speaker 1: It wasn't something people were seeing theaters all over the country,
Speaker 1: and almost all of the press about the film was
Speaker 1: in Missouri newspapers who were writing about it as a
Speaker 1: local interest story because the film cast locals in most
Speaker 1: of the smaller roles, and in some of those articles
Speaker 1: all the way back in nineteen ninety five, you can
Speaker 1: start to see the hints of what's coming. He told
Speaker 1: a reporter that he left Hollywood for the Ozarks to
Speaker 1: make movies that quote promote the ideals of Americana end
Speaker 1: quote traditional family values for Midwestern audiences. You know. Twenty
Speaker 1: years later, in an interview with a Holocaust denier, he
Speaker 1: said pretty much the same thing. You just can't make
Speaker 1: movies with good family values out there in Hollywood.
Speaker 3: Having graduated high in the class, I thought I might
Speaker 3: have some opportunities. But the only opportunities for people like
Speaker 3: me from the Midwest with traditional values was working independent films.
Speaker 1: But he's speaking a little more freely this time than
Speaker 1: he did with that reporter from the newspaper in Springfield, Missouri,
Speaker 1: back in nineteen ninety five, because this time he's speaking
Speaker 1: to Dave Gaeheri, a longtime friend of David Duke and
Speaker 1: the proprietor of a small publishing company that prints mostly
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory books, including several by Jim Fetzer, a man
Speaker 1: who believes the lending the Holocaust the Boston Marathon bombing,
Speaker 1: the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings, the Pulse nightclub shooting,
Speaker 1: and the Unite the rightvehicular attack in Charlottesville. We're all hoaxes.
Speaker 1: None of those things happened. After Fetzer lost a lawsuit
Speaker 1: brought by the father of a little boy killed in
Speaker 1: Sandy Hook, Harry had to stop selling a book called
Speaker 1: Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. So in this conversation, that's
Speaker 1: who he's talking to. So Miller can be a little
Speaker 1: more explicit about what he means.
Speaker 3: And I was disillusioned with the quality of films coming
Speaker 3: out of Hollywood and lack of any true opportunities with
Speaker 3: somebody that I thought should have been able to get
Speaker 3: some opportunities things going. There were twenty of us that
Speaker 3: graduated my year group in USC and five are Jewish,
Speaker 3: and those five went on to make some incredible big
Speaker 3: motion pictures, not necessarily good motion pictures, but some very
Speaker 3: high profile motion pictures. And due to this very day,
Speaker 3: with one other exception, I'm the only other graduate of
Speaker 3: mar class that still considers himself a part of the industry.
Speaker 3: And that's pretty typical of all of the year groups
Speaker 3: at USA. And in the industry, so it's a very
Speaker 3: controlled environment.
Speaker 1: In this interview in twenty twelve, he says he's still
Speaker 1: in the industry, which is weird because I can't imagine
Speaker 1: what he thinks he means by that he only ever
Speaker 1: made two movies. His second and final film, a western
Speaker 1: called Jericho, was released in two thousand and one by
Speaker 1: another production company he founded, called Black Night Productions. I
Speaker 1: found this one streaming somewhere, and I did try to
Speaker 1: watch it. I like to be thorough. I really did try.
Speaker 1: I promise I put it on the TV one evening
Speaker 1: during dinner, but I couldn't finish it. I mean, it
Speaker 1: was just not good. It had some actual star surprisingly,
Speaker 1: but there's just no getting over some hurdles. Mark Valley,
Speaker 1: who hadn't yet landed roles on shows like Er, Fringe,
Speaker 1: Boston Legal and CSI, was mostly just a soap opera
Speaker 1: actor in the nineties, and ar Lee Ermi was in
Speaker 1: damn near a hundred movies. You might not know his name,
Speaker 1: but he's the Marine Corps drill sergeant in every movie
Speaker 1: you've ever seen with an older man playing a Marine
Speaker 1: Corps drill sergeant or some adjacent type of loud, vaguely
Speaker 1: military coded authority figure. That's Arlee ERMI every time I
Speaker 1: think he just said yes to everything, but even getting
Speaker 1: real actors for his movie could not salvage it. My
Speaker 1: poor husband, who is eternally supportive of my work and
Speaker 1: has this seemingly infinite well of patients for my obsessions,
Speaker 1: looked so painfully bored that I just I could. I
Speaker 1: couldn't do it to him. I mean, he once sat
Speaker 1: through a made for TV movie starring a lesser Baldwin brother,
Speaker 1: based on the autobiography of a neo Nazi, and he
Speaker 1: didn't even complain when I talked through the entire movie,
Speaker 1: saying things like, well, that's not what really happened, and
Speaker 1: that character is actually an amalgamation of three different real guys.
Speaker 1: So I take it very seriously if he's visibly pained
Speaker 1: by the terrors I've brought into our home. So I
Speaker 1: didn't watch Jericho, but I guess you could. And just
Speaker 1: like a place to grow, Jericho failed to get picked
Speaker 1: up for wider distribution, but in his efforts to market
Speaker 1: the film, Merlin Miller met a man who would change
Speaker 1: his life. It wasn't long after nine to eleven when
Speaker 1: Merlin Miller had a meeting with a film buyer for
Speaker 1: Carmike Cinemas. The buyer passed on the film, but they
Speaker 1: got to talking about other things. None of the source
Speaker 1: material I could find explains exactly how they got on
Speaker 1: the subject. I don't know which one of them brought
Speaker 1: up the Jewish question first, but someone did you see
Speaker 1: as a much younger man before, he was the one
Speaker 1: deciding which independent films you could see at a Carmike theater.
Speaker 1: Bob Scarborough served three years in the Navy, and in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven, according to his obituary, Scarborough was a
Speaker 1: cryptologist serving aboard the USS Liberty. On June eighth, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, little over halfway through the Sixth Day War,
Speaker 1: the Liberty was patrolling international waters off the coast of Egypt. Officially,
Speaker 1: the United States was not involved in the Sixth Day War.
Speaker 1: That was a war between Israel and everybody else, but
Speaker 1: the American military is everywhere. So the USS Liberty was
Speaker 1: about thirty miles off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula
Speaker 1: when two unidentified jets appeared overhead. The jets made half
Speaker 1: a dozen strafing runs over the Liberty firing on the vessel,
Speaker 1: and then torpedo boats arrived and they too fired on
Speaker 1: the Liberty. Thirty four members aboard the US Naval vessel
Speaker 1: were killed and one hundred and seventy one more were injured.
Speaker 1: I'll get it out of the way right now. There's
Speaker 1: no right way to talk about this. That part just now.
Speaker 1: Those are the bare facts. Those are the facts that
Speaker 1: everyone agrees on. But the incident in question is the
Speaker 1: subject of decades of conspiracy theories, mostly ones repeated by
Speaker 1: virulent anti Semites. You'll never catch me out here saying
Speaker 1: the Holocaust deniers are making some valid points. That's not
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. But while the official investigations conducted by
Speaker 1: the US and Israeli governments are on the hard facts
Speaker 1: right that the jets fired, the boats fired, the people died,
Speaker 1: but the investigations don't agree on the nature of this situation.
Speaker 1: For the bare facts here, I'm using sources like the
Speaker 1: US Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command, and documents available
Speaker 1: from the State Department's Office of the Historian, and declassified
Speaker 1: documents available on the NSA's website. Not to say that
Speaker 1: the US government is the arbiter of truth here, and
Speaker 1: that those documents necessarily present the version of the truth
Speaker 1: that is true. I'm just trying to convey that I
Speaker 1: did go out of my way to make sure I
Speaker 1: wasn't accidentally repeating something from a conspiracy theory website, because
Speaker 1: it can be very hard to tell. The official explanation
Speaker 1: from the Israeli government is that it was a mistake.
Speaker 1: The pilots claimed that the ship wasn't flying a flag
Speaker 1: and they thought the Liberty was an Egyptian vessel. Once
Speaker 1: they realized the victims were screaming in English, they apologized
Speaker 1: to the United States and paid a few million dollars
Speaker 1: in compensation to the victims' families and a few million
Speaker 1: more for the damage cost to the ship. But there
Speaker 1: are a lot of unanswered questions here, and the problem
Speaker 1: is that the only people you ever hear asking those
Speaker 1: questions are absolutely bug fuck nuts, because this is a
Speaker 1: favorite topic of obsession for Boomer anti Semites. It's a
Speaker 1: real shame too, because there are some very uncomfortable holes
Speaker 1: in the official narrative. But the way conspiracy theorists have
Speaker 1: flooded the conversation on this makes it very hard to
Speaker 1: trust most sources it is absolutely possible and I think necessary,
Speaker 1: to ask questions about unjustified Israeli military aggression without being antisemitic. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the average guy posting online about the US Liberty is
Speaker 1: not interested in that distinction. So I'm not going to
Speaker 1: talk any more about what may or may not have
Speaker 1: really happened aboard the USS Liberty in June of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, because for the purposes of this story, that
Speaker 1: doesn't actually matter. The only thing that matters here is
Speaker 1: that the event is a madness rune for a particular
Speaker 1: flavor of conspiracy. Guy and Merlin Miller has said many
Speaker 1: times that this conversation with Bob Scarborough about the USS
Speaker 1: Liberty was his political awakening. It makes sense in a
Speaker 1: way that he was infected by this single conversation. He'd
Speaker 1: washed out of Hollywood and his independent film career was
Speaker 1: one disappointment after another. He couldn't get funding, he felt
Speaker 1: like the MPAA was giving his movies unfair ratings, he
Speaker 1: couldn't get theatrical release, and his classmates whose careers were flourishing,
Speaker 1: Come to think of it, they all had pretty Jewish
Speaker 1: sounding last names, didn't they. It wasn't about talent or merit,
Speaker 1: or that he wasn't working hard enough, or that he
Speaker 1: wasn't making movies people wanted to watch. Oh, it couldn't
Speaker 1: be that. This is about Jewish control of the media.
Speaker 1: That's what's going on here and now, with nine to
Speaker 1: eleven fresh in his mind and conspiracy theories sprouting like
Speaker 1: mushrooms after a rain, here's this life altering revelation from
Speaker 1: a man who says he lived through a false flag
Speaker 1: attack carried out by the people that Merlin Miller is
Speaker 1: already half convinced have it out for him. So he
Speaker 1: started doing his own research and he got obsessed. Scarborough
Speaker 1: soon introduced Merlin Miller to a friend of his, a
Speaker 1: man named Richard S. Thompson. I couldn't actually find a
Speaker 1: copy of a book Miller wrote in twenty sixteen, and
Speaker 1: I think there may be more detail in there. But
Speaker 1: my guess is Scarborough thought to connect him to Thompson,
Speaker 1: not just so Miller would have someone else to talk
Speaker 1: to about the USS Liberty, but because of their shared
Speaker 1: interest in film. Richard Thompson had been heavily involved in
Speaker 1: the production of a two thousand and two BBC documentary
Speaker 1: about the USS Liberty, so maybe as Scarborough is telling Miller,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not interested in purchasing the rights to Jericho,
Speaker 1: but I have this other opportunity for you. Talk to
Speaker 1: my buddy Dick Thompson. He likes financing films. Thompson and
Speaker 1: Miller did go on to become very close friends, and
Speaker 1: he was, according to Miller, very interested in making a
Speaker 1: movie together. According to that rambling one hundred page treatise
Speaker 1: he wrote in two thousand and nine, that one I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure he mailed to General David BETREEUS, Thompson agreed
Speaker 1: to finance a movie that would be produced and directed
Speaker 1: by Merlin Miller. Again, according to Miller, Thompson announced his
Speaker 1: intention to fund the film on Friday, June eighth, two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven. That was the fortieth anniversary of the
Speaker 1: incident on the USS Liberty and a few dozen surviving
Speaker 1: crewman we're meeting up in Washington, d C. Now, as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, Richard S. Thompson was never
Speaker 1: aboard the US S Liberty. He wasn't a crewman at
Speaker 1: the time of the incident. He was definitely in the Navy.
Speaker 1: I know that the announcement in the newspaper when he
Speaker 1: married his wife in nineteen fifty four mentions it, and
Speaker 1: so does his obituary. And his obituary does mention the Liberty,
Speaker 1: but not in the context of his naval career. No,
Speaker 1: it says he was a longtime supporter of the survivors
Speaker 1: of the USS Liberty, so it's just something he had
Speaker 1: had an interest in. A lot of the writing online,
Speaker 1: written by people I think may not be fully grounded
Speaker 1: in reality, assert without question that he worked in naval intelligence.
Speaker 1: At least one rather fantastical book repeatedly refers to him
Speaker 1: as a CIA asset. But none of this seems to
Speaker 1: be corroborated by any outside source that I could find.
Speaker 1: So I don't know exactly what Thompson was doing in
Speaker 1: the Navy or how he came to know so much
Speaker 1: about the USS Liberty, but either way, he was very
Speaker 1: involved with this veterans group, and he was attending the
Speaker 1: fortieth anniversary reunion in DC that weekend. On Sunday, he
Speaker 1: left DC and began driving home to Florida. He made
Speaker 1: it about halfway home. Again, I can't find any reporting
Speaker 1: about the accident that was written by someone I know
Speaker 1: believes the Holocaust happened so it's hard to say exactly
Speaker 1: what happened, but somewhere in Florence County, South Carolina, Thompson
Speaker 1: had a fatal single car accident. Even the conspiracy theorists
Speaker 1: have to begrudgingly admit that there's no sign of foul play.
Speaker 1: There's no actual reason to suspect this was anything but
Speaker 1: an accident. He was a seventy six year old man
Speaker 1: who had an exciting but probably exhausting weekend with his
Speaker 1: old navy buddies, and then he got up at the
Speaker 1: crack of dawn to make a thirteen hour drive home.
Speaker 1: Halfway through the drive, he lost control of the vehicle
Speaker 1: and crashed. But these people have questions. Did he fall
Speaker 1: asleep or was it masad. Describing Thompson's death, Merilyn Miller wrote,
Speaker 1: although foul play was not suspected, Dick had told me
Speaker 1: if prior Israeli massad surveillance, and writing in the conspiracy
Speaker 1: Theory rag American Free Press, Mark Glenn wrote that he
Speaker 1: and many others were very suspicious about the death because
Speaker 1: they believe Thompson was about to go public with information
Speaker 1: that had never before been published. But again, there's no
Speaker 1: indication there was anything suspicious about the accident, and this
Speaker 1: same article by Mark Glenn includes this line as if
Speaker 1: he had a premonition that his time was approaching. Thompson
Speaker 1: recently made known to the Liberty Veterans Association that in
Speaker 1: the event of his death, he did not want anyone
Speaker 1: wasting money on flowers for his funeral, or rather that
Speaker 1: such individuals should send money to the Liberty Veterans Association
Speaker 1: so that the truth concerning the attacks in the US
Speaker 1: s liberty could continue to emerge. So if he's telling
Speaker 1: people what they should do if he dies and he's
Speaker 1: seventy six years old, do you think he was secretly
Speaker 1: assassinated by a foreign government staging a single car acttion
Speaker 1: that had witnesses? Or do you think maybe his health
Speaker 1: was failing and he did know his time was coming.
Speaker 1: Hard to say which is more likely. I'm not the
Speaker 1: betting kind, but if I had to, I'd wager it
Speaker 1: was a car accident, distracted driving, heart attack, asleep at
Speaker 1: the wheel, something tragic and routine, but however ordinary his
Speaker 1: death was. It left Merlin Miller without funding to produce
Speaker 1: his screenplay, an action thriller romance called False Flag, The
Speaker 1: story of a brave and handsome reporter who uncovers the truth.
Speaker 1: But the US is liberty and nine to eleven, and
Speaker 1: he has to take matters into his own hands to
Speaker 1: stop these false flags from causing World War three. I'm
Speaker 1: afraid we'll have to pick back up there next week.
Speaker 1: I got lost along the way again. I didn't even
Speaker 1: get to Merlin Miller's actual presidential campaign. To be honest,
Speaker 1: I don't think his heart was really in it. In
Speaker 1: an interview shortly after he announced he was running, he
Speaker 1: accidentally revealed to Richard Spencer that he didn't know what
Speaker 1: the third position in American third position party even meant.
Speaker 1: And just weeks before election day, he wasn't out there
Speaker 1: pounding the pavement talking to voters. He was taking meetings
Speaker 1: in Tehran trying to get Iranian funding for his conspiracy
Speaker 1: theory movie. I'm not sure if he brought a copy
Speaker 1: of his screenplay to the twenty minute private meeting he
Speaker 1: had with Mahmun Amadinishad, but I do know he gave
Speaker 1: the Iranian president a copy of his two thousand and
Speaker 1: one Western Jericho on DVD. I wish Amadinashad was still
Speaker 1: on Twitter. I would have loved to ask him if
Speaker 1: he got past the first twenty minutes. Weird Little Guys
Speaker 1: is a production at Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
Speaker 1: written and recorded by me Molly Conger. Our executive producers
Speaker 1: are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited
Speaker 1: by the wildly talented Brory Gagan. The theme music was
Speaker 1: composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me at Weird
Speaker 1: Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
Speaker 1: read it, but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal.
Speaker 1: You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
Speaker 1: listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
Speaker 1: anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Speaker 1: Little Guys