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Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hey, I'm Mollikonger, and this is Weird

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Speaker 1: Little Guys, the show where I finally get to tell

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Speaker 1: someone who wants to listen about the weird new guy

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Speaker 1: I've added to my not so metaphorical red string board.

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Speaker 1: I've spent years researching and writing about far right extremism,

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Speaker 1: hang out in their chat rooms, watch their live streams,

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Speaker 1: and follow their court cases, stared deep into the abyss,

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Speaker 1: poring over court documents, reading manifestos, and listening to some

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Speaker 1: of the worst podcasts ever made. And I've sat in

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Speaker 1: the silence of a mostly empty court room, feed away

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Speaker 1: from men whose ideologies spurred them on to acts of

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Speaker 1: truly shocking violence. You know what, They're all just some guy,

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Speaker 1: however heinous the act, whoever hideous the hatred espoused, no

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Speaker 1: matter how dark their desires. It's like the end of

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Speaker 1: an episode of Scooby Doo. There never was a ghost

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Speaker 1: or a swamp creature. There is no supernatural villain. He's

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Speaker 1: just some god. The Confederate War reenactor building pipe bombs

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Speaker 1: in his storage unit was also a member of several

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Speaker 1: sex doll forms, with an online reputation for selling fake

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Speaker 1: TV props on eBay, the extremely online Nazi conspiracy theorists

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Speaker 1: who pled guilty to threatening a Charlesville City council candidate

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Speaker 1: as a bowel problem, His mother wrote to the federal

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Speaker 1: judge about concerned that he wouldn't be able to poop

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Speaker 1: in prison. The sovereign citizen who bought a sowd Off

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Speaker 1: shotgun from an undercover cop to carry out his plan

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Speaker 1: to execute judges self publishes erotic furry fiction. The National

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Speaker 1: guardsman planning to assassinate dozens of senators, journalists, and judges,

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Speaker 1: kept his kill list and the same folder as the

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Speaker 1: spreadsheet he used to track his steroid cycles. When federal

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Speaker 1: agents rated the home of a once famous neo Nazi

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Speaker 1: at four a m. They found him in bed in

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Speaker 1: his underwear playing Pokemon. The secessionist who got arrested for

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Speaker 1: bringing a gun to a Nazi rally spent years in

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Speaker 1: court because his defense contracting business was defrauding the US

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Speaker 1: Army in Afghanistan. You can laugh, honestly, I think we

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Speaker 1: have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't

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Speaker 1: mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy because

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Speaker 1: the race warriors and Ethno state enthusiasts who spend their

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Speaker 1: day's brainstorming ways to unravel the fabric of our society

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Speaker 1: are a threat to be taken seriously. That's why I

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Speaker 1: spend my days tracking them. But they aren't some unknowable,

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Speaker 1: unspeakable evil. When you imagine the villains and the story

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Speaker 1: is some separate category of entity, some completely foreign creature,

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Speaker 1: some preternatural, ontological evil, you blind yourself to the possibility

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Speaker 1: of the seeds of that evil that grow in your backyard.

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Speaker 1: Because when you're looking for the monsters under the bed,

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Speaker 1: you miss the ones at the dinner table. And my

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Speaker 1: goal here is not to help you understand or relate

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Speaker 1: to them or justify the paths they chose. I couldn't

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Speaker 1: do that even if I wanted to, and I really

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Speaker 1: don't want to. We have this terrible tendency to exceptionalize,

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Speaker 1: and I think that's what's at the heart of true

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Speaker 1: crime phenomenon. You know, we crave these stories that reassure

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Speaker 1: us that people don't do terrible things monsters do. And

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Speaker 1: you'd know a monster if he saw one, so you're safe.

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Speaker 1: And in so many of these cases I've studied, I

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Speaker 1: see letters and testimony from mothers and brothers and neighbors

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Speaker 1: and friends, insisting that the man being sentenced for some

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Speaker 1: sinister plot really is a good boy. Sure, he's pled

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Speaker 1: guilty to painting a swastika on a Jewish preschool where

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Speaker 1: he was found with bomb making supplies in his car.

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Speaker 1: Or he spent years stalking and threatening his political enemies,

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Speaker 1: and he's got a framed picture of Hitler on his dresser.

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Speaker 1: He isn't like that, not really. He isn't the kind

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Speaker 1: of person who would do something like this, But he is.

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Speaker 1: He literally is. He is exactly the kind of person

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Speaker 1: who would do something like this, because he is the

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Speaker 1: person that did something like this. We're all sitting here

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Speaker 1: in court because he did. And he isn't the kind

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Speaker 1: of person who would do this, if none of them

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Speaker 1: are the kind of man who would do this, Because

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Speaker 1: the only kind of man who would do this is

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Speaker 1: a monster. And where are the monsters. I'm not saying

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Speaker 1: you shouldn't be afraid of the monsters. I'm saying the

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Speaker 1: kind of fear we've cultivated makes us less vigilant and

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Speaker 1: less equipped to face them. And they don't exist in

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Speaker 1: a vacuum either. Every time some new shocking atrocious story

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Speaker 1: comes out. It's presented to us completely without context. Another

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Speaker 1: mass shooter, another guy with a kill list, another guy

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Speaker 1: with a manifesto, another rash of racist flyers and stickers,

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Speaker 1: another fascist group rallying downtown in a city near you.

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Speaker 1: But they're not rogue waves. They're people. They exist in

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Speaker 1: the same terrible present as the rest of us, and

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Speaker 1: they came out of the same complicated past. The difference

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Speaker 1: is the kind of future they hope to inflict on us.

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Speaker 1: We lose so much by letting these horrors wash over

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Speaker 1: us without any context to hold on to. And as

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Speaker 1: far as making an interesting podcast goes, there are some

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Speaker 1: strange quirks of history that just make for good storytelling,

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Speaker 1: Like how a young William Luther Pierce, years before he

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Speaker 1: set up a Nazi compound in West Virginia, was answering

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Speaker 1: phones at the headquarters for the National Socialist White People's

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Speaker 1: Party one afternoon in nineteen sixty eight when he took

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Speaker 1: a call from a sixteen year old in Ohio who

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Speaker 1: was planning to murder his high school principal. He invited

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Speaker 1: the teen to come to Virginia instead for a Nazi

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Speaker 1: internship of sorts and it was under doctor Pierce that

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Speaker 1: a young James Mason grew into the man whose modern

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Speaker 1: accolytes have murdered at least a dozen people and recently

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Speaker 1: attempted to take up the power grid to start a

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Speaker 1: race war. In a strange twist of fate, Willian Luther

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Speaker 1: Piers did not answer the phone one morning in April

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Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety five, But I don't think he would

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Speaker 1: have been able to talk Timothy McVeigh out of setting

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Speaker 1: off that bomb, even if he wanted to. When Edward

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Speaker 1: Clark shot himself in a public park in DC, hours

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Speaker 1: after the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, in twenty eighteen, when Nicholas

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Speaker 1: Giampa shot himself after murdering his ex girlfriend's parents, and

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Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, when Devin Arthur's murdered two of his roommates

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Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen, these weren't just troubled young men unconnected

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Speaker 1: from broader forces. These were militant neo Nazi accelerationists poisoned

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Speaker 1: by the messy, massive tome. James Mason could only have

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Speaker 1: written because he made that phone call. In nineteen sixty eight,

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Speaker 1: when Luke Kenna, Brian Tierney, and Michael Brown were plotting

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Speaker 1: to rob a bank in twenty twenty two. They hoped

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Speaker 1: to steal enough cash to set up a rural compound,

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Speaker 1: borrowing directly from the playbook of The Order, a short

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Speaker 1: lived white supremacist terrorist organization that carried out several armored

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Speaker 1: car robberies in the eighties. The money the Order stole

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Speaker 1: helped pay for a white supremacist paramilitary training camp in

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Speaker 1: Idaho and the compound in West Virginia where William Luther

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Speaker 1: Pierce would continue to shape the movement for decades. And

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Speaker 1: how can I tell you about my favorite jailhouse lawyer,

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Speaker 1: truly a vexatious litigant for the ages Bill White, without

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Speaker 1: reaching decades into the past to explain how he got there.

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Speaker 1: He's got a dozen lawsuits cooking at any given time,

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Speaker 1: trying to drown the FBI in paperwork to force them

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Speaker 1: to turn over records he believes will prove his theory

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Speaker 1: that the American neo Nazi movement is riddled with FBI informants.

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Speaker 1: And that's why he's in prison. He is in prison

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Speaker 1: for sending threats to a Florida prosecutor. In the very

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Speaker 1: first case, a young Augustus and Victus worked fresh out

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Speaker 1: of law school, and as shocking or unprecedented any revelation

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Speaker 1: of some new right wing horror may feel, it's all

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Speaker 1: very precedented. Newspapers ran fawning op eds about the rise

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Speaker 1: of Richard Spencer, calling him the dapper Nazi, the suit

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Speaker 1: and tie white supremacist who's presented to us as this

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Speaker 1: new softer racism in contrast with the skinheads and street

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Speaker 1: brawlers he was supposedly supplanting. But that surface level contrast,

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Speaker 1: obscuring private collaboration is as old as time. A council

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Speaker 1: of conservative citizens put on those suits and ties before

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Speaker 1: Richard was even born, publicly denouncing the uncouth racism and

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Speaker 1: open violence of the KKK, and just as his predecessors

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Speaker 1: before him, he wagged a finger at the masked vigilantes

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Speaker 1: in public, but in private he relied on the violence

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Speaker 1: they created. When Chester Doles, a fifth generation clansman, got

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Speaker 1: out of prison in nineteen ninety seven, he told the

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Speaker 1: Baltimore Son his days of cross burning were over. He

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Speaker 1: wanted to go into politics. He ended up going back

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Speaker 1: to prison a few years later, but he did make

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Speaker 1: a run at county office in Georgia in twenty twenty two,

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Speaker 1: and when Augustus and Victus took up the case of

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Speaker 1: a member of the Nazi gang the Rise Above movement,

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Speaker 1: he called himself the Attorney for the Damned, a name

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Speaker 1: he stole from Edgar Steele, the attorney for the Aryan Nations,

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Speaker 1: who later went to prison for trying to hire someone

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Speaker 1: to kill his wife with the car bomb. And when

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Speaker 1: Patriot Front members needed a lawyer, they turned to Glenn Allen,

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Speaker 1: a disgraced former attorney for the Baltimore Police Department. And

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Speaker 1: it wasn't the first time a white supremacist organization in

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Speaker 1: trouble turned to Glenn for help with doomed civil litigation.

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Speaker 1: When on neo Nazi activist was arrested during a protest

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Speaker 1: of Nelson Mandela's visit to Washington, d C. In nineteen ninety,

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Speaker 1: police found d tailed sketches in his pocket of the

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Speaker 1: building where Mendela was scheduled to speak when he tried

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Speaker 1: to sue the police department for wrongful arrest. It was

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Speaker 1: William Luther Pierce himself who hired Glenn Allen to represent him.

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Speaker 1: They understand the context that shapes their actions. Why shouldn't

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Speaker 1: we Some listeners may be familiar with my other passion,

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Speaker 1: live tweeting city council meetings. I know, I know that

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Speaker 1: feels like a really mismatched set of interests, but I

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Speaker 1: arrived at both obsessions at the same time for the

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Speaker 1: same reason. As a longtime resident of Charlesville, Virginia, I

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Speaker 1: found myself very suddenly needing to understand the nature of

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Speaker 1: American political violence and how and why my city government

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Speaker 1: let it happen here. In seven years of keeping in

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Speaker 1: a running online commentary of very mundane municipal government, I

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Speaker 1: found that, against all odds, people kind of like it.

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Speaker 1: People with no connection to my little city will pop

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Speaker 1: in and read a bit about it what's going on

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Speaker 1: at a budget hearing, not because they have any particular interest

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Speaker 1: in the minutia of that specific agenda item, I don't think,

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Speaker 1: but because there are generalizable lessons to be learned from

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Speaker 1: the specific I'm in no position to make sweeping generalizations

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Speaker 1: about the way government works, but you can come with

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Speaker 1: me while I show you how mine does. And I'm

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Speaker 1: not much of a political organizer myself, but I think

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Speaker 1: my coverage of local government has been useful to those

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Speaker 1: who are. You can't change the outcomes of a system

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Speaker 1: you don't understand, and I think we can do something

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Speaker 1: similar here. By stitching together these vignettes of these individual,

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Speaker 1: weird little guys, we can illuminate broader truths about the

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Speaker 1: ecosystem that creates them. Let's take the yarn from my

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Speaker 1: red string board and try to weave it into a

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Speaker 1: picture of modern American political violence. This is a show

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Speaker 1: about guys you've never heard of. Plenty of them wished

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Speaker 1: at some point that you had. They hope to carry

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Speaker 1: out attacks on synagogues. They planned mass shootings or built bombs.

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Speaker 1: They plan to take out the power grid or derail

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Speaker 1: a train. They threaten journalist and activists and politicians. They

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Speaker 1: wanted to lead a movement or die a martyr. They

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Speaker 1: wanted to start a race war. They wanted to be

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Speaker 1: remembered either as a Timothy McVeigh or a Harmungouri. Some

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Speaker 1: of them actually took action, some of them hurt or

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Speaker 1: even killed people. A lot of them just posted too

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Speaker 1: much online. These are just a few of the thousands

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Speaker 1: of aspiring little furres of the Suburbs, men whose actions

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Speaker 1: altered the course of the lives of their victims, families,

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Speaker 1: their communities, but whose stories are ultimately lost in the

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Speaker 1: shuffle of too many Middle American hitlers. These are the

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Speaker 1: weird little guys trying to destroy life as we know it,

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Speaker 1: and I hope you'll join me for a little peak

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Speaker 1: under their hoods. Weird Little Guys the production of cool

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Speaker 1: Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, to visit

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Speaker 1: our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on

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Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get here. Podcasts