Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hey, I'm Mollikonger, and this is Weird
Speaker 1: Little Guys, the show where I finally get to tell
Speaker 1: someone who wants to listen about the weird new guy
Speaker 1: I've added to my not so metaphorical red string board.
Speaker 1: I've spent years researching and writing about far right extremism,
Speaker 1: hang out in their chat rooms, watch their live streams,
Speaker 1: and follow their court cases, stared deep into the abyss,
Speaker 1: poring over court documents, reading manifestos, and listening to some
Speaker 1: of the worst podcasts ever made. And I've sat in
Speaker 1: the silence of a mostly empty court room, feed away
Speaker 1: from men whose ideologies spurred them on to acts of
Speaker 1: truly shocking violence. You know what, They're all just some guy,
Speaker 1: however heinous the act, whoever hideous the hatred espoused, no
Speaker 1: matter how dark their desires. It's like the end of
Speaker 1: an episode of Scooby Doo. There never was a ghost
Speaker 1: or a swamp creature. There is no supernatural villain. He's
Speaker 1: just some god. The Confederate War reenactor building pipe bombs
Speaker 1: in his storage unit was also a member of several
Speaker 1: sex doll forms, with an online reputation for selling fake
Speaker 1: TV props on eBay, the extremely online Nazi conspiracy theorists
Speaker 1: who pled guilty to threatening a Charlesville City council candidate
Speaker 1: as a bowel problem, His mother wrote to the federal
Speaker 1: judge about concerned that he wouldn't be able to poop
Speaker 1: in prison. The sovereign citizen who bought a sowd Off
Speaker 1: shotgun from an undercover cop to carry out his plan
Speaker 1: to execute judges self publishes erotic furry fiction. The National
Speaker 1: guardsman planning to assassinate dozens of senators, journalists, and judges,
Speaker 1: kept his kill list and the same folder as the
Speaker 1: spreadsheet he used to track his steroid cycles. When federal
Speaker 1: agents rated the home of a once famous neo Nazi
Speaker 1: at four a m. They found him in bed in
Speaker 1: his underwear playing Pokemon. The secessionist who got arrested for
Speaker 1: bringing a gun to a Nazi rally spent years in
Speaker 1: court because his defense contracting business was defrauding the US
Speaker 1: Army in Afghanistan. You can laugh, honestly, I think we
Speaker 1: have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't
Speaker 1: mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy because
Speaker 1: the race warriors and Ethno state enthusiasts who spend their
Speaker 1: day's brainstorming ways to unravel the fabric of our society
Speaker 1: are a threat to be taken seriously. That's why I
Speaker 1: spend my days tracking them. But they aren't some unknowable,
Speaker 1: unspeakable evil. When you imagine the villains and the story
Speaker 1: is some separate category of entity, some completely foreign creature,
Speaker 1: some preternatural, ontological evil, you blind yourself to the possibility
Speaker 1: of the seeds of that evil that grow in your backyard.
Speaker 1: Because when you're looking for the monsters under the bed,
Speaker 1: you miss the ones at the dinner table. And my
Speaker 1: goal here is not to help you understand or relate
Speaker 1: to them or justify the paths they chose. I couldn't
Speaker 1: do that even if I wanted to, and I really
Speaker 1: don't want to. We have this terrible tendency to exceptionalize,
Speaker 1: and I think that's what's at the heart of true
Speaker 1: crime phenomenon. You know, we crave these stories that reassure
Speaker 1: us that people don't do terrible things monsters do. And
Speaker 1: you'd know a monster if he saw one, so you're safe.
Speaker 1: And in so many of these cases I've studied, I
Speaker 1: see letters and testimony from mothers and brothers and neighbors
Speaker 1: and friends, insisting that the man being sentenced for some
Speaker 1: sinister plot really is a good boy. Sure, he's pled
Speaker 1: guilty to painting a swastika on a Jewish preschool where
Speaker 1: he was found with bomb making supplies in his car.
Speaker 1: Or he spent years stalking and threatening his political enemies,
Speaker 1: and he's got a framed picture of Hitler on his dresser.
Speaker 1: He isn't like that, not really. He isn't the kind
Speaker 1: of person who would do something like this, But he is.
Speaker 1: He literally is. He is exactly the kind of person
Speaker 1: who would do something like this, because he is the
Speaker 1: person that did something like this. We're all sitting here
Speaker 1: in court because he did. And he isn't the kind
Speaker 1: of person who would do this, if none of them
Speaker 1: are the kind of man who would do this, Because
Speaker 1: the only kind of man who would do this is
Speaker 1: a monster. And where are the monsters. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: you shouldn't be afraid of the monsters. I'm saying the
Speaker 1: kind of fear we've cultivated makes us less vigilant and
Speaker 1: less equipped to face them. And they don't exist in
Speaker 1: a vacuum either. Every time some new shocking atrocious story
Speaker 1: comes out. It's presented to us completely without context. Another
Speaker 1: mass shooter, another guy with a kill list, another guy
Speaker 1: with a manifesto, another rash of racist flyers and stickers,
Speaker 1: another fascist group rallying downtown in a city near you.
Speaker 1: But they're not rogue waves. They're people. They exist in
Speaker 1: the same terrible present as the rest of us, and
Speaker 1: they came out of the same complicated past. The difference
Speaker 1: is the kind of future they hope to inflict on us.
Speaker 1: We lose so much by letting these horrors wash over
Speaker 1: us without any context to hold on to. And as
Speaker 1: far as making an interesting podcast goes, there are some
Speaker 1: strange quirks of history that just make for good storytelling,
Speaker 1: Like how a young William Luther Pierce, years before he
Speaker 1: set up a Nazi compound in West Virginia, was answering
Speaker 1: phones at the headquarters for the National Socialist White People's
Speaker 1: Party one afternoon in nineteen sixty eight when he took
Speaker 1: a call from a sixteen year old in Ohio who
Speaker 1: was planning to murder his high school principal. He invited
Speaker 1: the teen to come to Virginia instead for a Nazi
Speaker 1: internship of sorts and it was under doctor Pierce that
Speaker 1: a young James Mason grew into the man whose modern
Speaker 1: accolytes have murdered at least a dozen people and recently
Speaker 1: attempted to take up the power grid to start a
Speaker 1: race war. In a strange twist of fate, Willian Luther
Speaker 1: Piers did not answer the phone one morning in April
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety five, But I don't think he would
Speaker 1: have been able to talk Timothy McVeigh out of setting
Speaker 1: off that bomb, even if he wanted to. When Edward
Speaker 1: Clark shot himself in a public park in DC, hours
Speaker 1: after the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, in twenty eighteen, when Nicholas
Speaker 1: Giampa shot himself after murdering his ex girlfriend's parents, and
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, when Devin Arthur's murdered two of his roommates
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen, these weren't just troubled young men unconnected
Speaker 1: from broader forces. These were militant neo Nazi accelerationists poisoned
Speaker 1: by the messy, massive tome. James Mason could only have
Speaker 1: written because he made that phone call. In nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: when Luke Kenna, Brian Tierney, and Michael Brown were plotting
Speaker 1: to rob a bank in twenty twenty two. They hoped
Speaker 1: to steal enough cash to set up a rural compound,
Speaker 1: borrowing directly from the playbook of The Order, a short
Speaker 1: lived white supremacist terrorist organization that carried out several armored
Speaker 1: car robberies in the eighties. The money the Order stole
Speaker 1: helped pay for a white supremacist paramilitary training camp in
Speaker 1: Idaho and the compound in West Virginia where William Luther
Speaker 1: Pierce would continue to shape the movement for decades. And
Speaker 1: how can I tell you about my favorite jailhouse lawyer,
Speaker 1: truly a vexatious litigant for the ages Bill White, without
Speaker 1: reaching decades into the past to explain how he got there.
Speaker 1: He's got a dozen lawsuits cooking at any given time,
Speaker 1: trying to drown the FBI in paperwork to force them
Speaker 1: to turn over records he believes will prove his theory
Speaker 1: that the American neo Nazi movement is riddled with FBI informants.
Speaker 1: And that's why he's in prison. He is in prison
Speaker 1: for sending threats to a Florida prosecutor. In the very
Speaker 1: first case, a young Augustus and Victus worked fresh out
Speaker 1: of law school, and as shocking or unprecedented any revelation
Speaker 1: of some new right wing horror may feel, it's all
Speaker 1: very precedented. Newspapers ran fawning op eds about the rise
Speaker 1: of Richard Spencer, calling him the dapper Nazi, the suit
Speaker 1: and tie white supremacist who's presented to us as this
Speaker 1: new softer racism in contrast with the skinheads and street
Speaker 1: brawlers he was supposedly supplanting. But that surface level contrast,
Speaker 1: obscuring private collaboration is as old as time. A council
Speaker 1: of conservative citizens put on those suits and ties before
Speaker 1: Richard was even born, publicly denouncing the uncouth racism and
Speaker 1: open violence of the KKK, and just as his predecessors
Speaker 1: before him, he wagged a finger at the masked vigilantes
Speaker 1: in public, but in private he relied on the violence
Speaker 1: they created. When Chester Doles, a fifth generation clansman, got
Speaker 1: out of prison in nineteen ninety seven, he told the
Speaker 1: Baltimore Son his days of cross burning were over. He
Speaker 1: wanted to go into politics. He ended up going back
Speaker 1: to prison a few years later, but he did make
Speaker 1: a run at county office in Georgia in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: and when Augustus and Victus took up the case of
Speaker 1: a member of the Nazi gang the Rise Above movement,
Speaker 1: he called himself the Attorney for the Damned, a name
Speaker 1: he stole from Edgar Steele, the attorney for the Aryan Nations,
Speaker 1: who later went to prison for trying to hire someone
Speaker 1: to kill his wife with the car bomb. And when
Speaker 1: Patriot Front members needed a lawyer, they turned to Glenn Allen,
Speaker 1: a disgraced former attorney for the Baltimore Police Department. And
Speaker 1: it wasn't the first time a white supremacist organization in
Speaker 1: trouble turned to Glenn for help with doomed civil litigation.
Speaker 1: When on neo Nazi activist was arrested during a protest
Speaker 1: of Nelson Mandela's visit to Washington, d C. In nineteen ninety,
Speaker 1: police found d tailed sketches in his pocket of the
Speaker 1: building where Mendela was scheduled to speak when he tried
Speaker 1: to sue the police department for wrongful arrest. It was
Speaker 1: William Luther Pierce himself who hired Glenn Allen to represent him.
Speaker 1: They understand the context that shapes their actions. Why shouldn't
Speaker 1: we Some listeners may be familiar with my other passion,
Speaker 1: live tweeting city council meetings. I know, I know that
Speaker 1: feels like a really mismatched set of interests, but I
Speaker 1: arrived at both obsessions at the same time for the
Speaker 1: same reason. As a longtime resident of Charlesville, Virginia, I
Speaker 1: found myself very suddenly needing to understand the nature of
Speaker 1: American political violence and how and why my city government
Speaker 1: let it happen here. In seven years of keeping in
Speaker 1: a running online commentary of very mundane municipal government, I
Speaker 1: found that, against all odds, people kind of like it.
Speaker 1: People with no connection to my little city will pop
Speaker 1: in and read a bit about it what's going on
Speaker 1: at a budget hearing, not because they have any particular interest
Speaker 1: in the minutia of that specific agenda item, I don't think,
Speaker 1: but because there are generalizable lessons to be learned from
Speaker 1: the specific I'm in no position to make sweeping generalizations
Speaker 1: about the way government works, but you can come with
Speaker 1: me while I show you how mine does. And I'm
Speaker 1: not much of a political organizer myself, but I think
Speaker 1: my coverage of local government has been useful to those
Speaker 1: who are. You can't change the outcomes of a system
Speaker 1: you don't understand, and I think we can do something
Speaker 1: similar here. By stitching together these vignettes of these individual,
Speaker 1: weird little guys, we can illuminate broader truths about the
Speaker 1: ecosystem that creates them. Let's take the yarn from my
Speaker 1: red string board and try to weave it into a
Speaker 1: picture of modern American political violence. This is a show
Speaker 1: about guys you've never heard of. Plenty of them wished
Speaker 1: at some point that you had. They hope to carry
Speaker 1: out attacks on synagogues. They planned mass shootings or built bombs.
Speaker 1: They plan to take out the power grid or derail
Speaker 1: a train. They threaten journalist and activists and politicians. They
Speaker 1: wanted to lead a movement or die a martyr. They
Speaker 1: wanted to start a race war. They wanted to be
Speaker 1: remembered either as a Timothy McVeigh or a Harmungouri. Some
Speaker 1: of them actually took action, some of them hurt or
Speaker 1: even killed people. A lot of them just posted too
Speaker 1: much online. These are just a few of the thousands
Speaker 1: of aspiring little furres of the Suburbs, men whose actions
Speaker 1: altered the course of the lives of their victims, families,
Speaker 1: their communities, but whose stories are ultimately lost in the
Speaker 1: shuffle of too many Middle American hitlers. These are the
Speaker 1: weird little guys trying to destroy life as we know it,
Speaker 1: and I hope you'll join me for a little peak
Speaker 1: under their hoods. Weird Little Guys the production of cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, to visit
Speaker 1: our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get here. Podcasts