Speaker 1: Wol Zone Media. In March of twenty twenty five, an
Speaker 1: episode of this show disappeared. It only existed at all
Speaker 1: for a few weeks, and its absence was obvious because
Speaker 1: it was the second half of a story whose beginning
Speaker 1: is still there. A lot of you have asked what
Speaker 1: happened to that episode, and I can't exactly tell you that,
Speaker 1: not in any kind of satisfying detail, but I have
Speaker 1: finally rewritten and re recorded it. When an episode of
Speaker 1: a podcast disappears, with that explanation, it's only natural to
Speaker 1: speculate about what happened behind the scenes. Maybe there was
Speaker 1: some sort of scandal, plagiarism, information, sloppy research, factual errors,
Speaker 1: maybe some kind of offensive slip of the tongue. It's
Speaker 1: happened to other shows. Sometimes it gets addressed, and sometimes
Speaker 1: it doesn't. Sometimes it's not really something that can be
Speaker 1: aired out. If there's litigation of some kind, it's best
Speaker 1: to say nothing at all. None of those things happened here.
Speaker 1: That much I can promise you. I stand behind my
Speaker 1: research one hundred and ten percent. I have sources for
Speaker 1: my facts, and I try to be clear when I'm
Speaker 1: only offering up conjecture based on those facts. I try
Speaker 1: to be even clearer when I'm just bitballing. There was
Speaker 1: no inaccuracy. That sounds cocky, but it's true. I've been
Speaker 1: writing unflattering things about dangerous men for a long time now.
Speaker 1: I'm thorough and I'm careful, and one of the lessons
Speaker 1: I've learned over the years is that a lot of
Speaker 1: people don't really like it when you write honestly about
Speaker 1: the ugly things they've been doing and saying I'm used
Speaker 1: to that. So when a man with a history of
Speaker 1: violence and a long track record of vexatious litigation sent
Speaker 1: a vague but threatening sounding email about the episode, I
Speaker 1: wasn't surprised. I'm not going to name this man, and
Speaker 1: I would prefer that you not either, for reasons that
Speaker 1: I think will become obvious. He's never actually succeeded it
Speaker 1: seriously harming anyone as far as I can tell, and
Speaker 1: he's never made it very far in any of his
Speaker 1: many lawsuits. But he has been to jail, and he's
Speaker 1: had court ordered psychiatric treatment for this kind of behavior.
Speaker 1: Corporations tend to be pretty risk averse, and their lawyers
Speaker 1: even more so. The message was brief, but alarming, and
Speaker 1: the guys in the suits just didn't want to have
Speaker 1: anything to do with someone who, based on his history
Speaker 1: and this current behavior, seems like he might be in
Speaker 1: the middle of a serious mental health crisis. So the
Speaker 1: decision was made to take the episode down. I wasn't
Speaker 1: happy about it, but I get it. I'm a team
Speaker 1: player now, and that means that I understand these days.
Speaker 1: I'm not just gambling with my own wellbeing when I
Speaker 1: decide to play chicken with a conspiracy theorist. So for
Speaker 1: the last eight months or so, there's been an episode
Speaker 1: on the show's feed called Curtis Maynard Part One, but
Speaker 1: there is no episode called Curtis Maynard Part two. As
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five is coming to a close and I've
Speaker 1: been reflecting on the year past, I decided to fix that,
Speaker 1: which meant excising any mention of that man, who was
Speaker 1: really only ever a tangent in the story. Anyway, you
Speaker 1: might have assumed that the man who was upset about
Speaker 1: the episode was the subject of the episode. It wasn't.
Speaker 1: Curtis Maynard had no complaints about the episode, not that
Speaker 1: he shared with me. Anyway, he probably wouldn't have liked it,
Speaker 1: if he heard it, to be honest, but he didn't
Speaker 1: because he's dead. No, the man that I had to
Speaker 1: go back and cut out of this story was an
Speaker 1: interesting digression at best. He wasn't directly involved with the
Speaker 1: core storyline. He never even interacted directly with the weird
Speaker 1: little guy at the center of it. This man wouldn't
Speaker 1: warrant talking about it all if it weren't for his
Speaker 1: connection to a secondary character and a story about someone else.
Speaker 1: He is, luckily for us, not someone who matters at all.
Speaker 1: So now that I've hopefully dispelled the rumor that the
Speaker 1: episode was taken down because it contained factual statements about
Speaker 1: Ron Paul's connection to Neo Nazis and white supremacists, here
Speaker 1: is the original first half of that story to refresh
Speaker 1: your memory. The rewritten, re recorded lost episode will be
Speaker 1: right behind this one in the show's feed on your
Speaker 1: podcast app of choice. My editor Rory and I will
Speaker 1: be off next week for Thanksgiving, but I'll be back
Speaker 1: with new We're Little Guys in December. On the Saturday
Speaker 1: night before Labor Day two thousand three, Charter buses pulled
Speaker 1: into the lot at Cincinnati's Public Landing. Passengers streamed out
Speaker 1: of the buses one hundred and fifty or so, mostly
Speaker 1: older white men in suits, and they boarded the Delta Queen.
Speaker 1: It was a beautiful late summer evening for a dinner
Speaker 1: cruise down the Ohio River, and they'd spent all day
Speaker 1: cooped up inside in a rented ballroom at the Marriotte
Speaker 1: near the airport. They'd paid three hundred and seventy five
Speaker 1: dollars apiece to attend a weekend long conference called Real
Speaker 1: History USA, but the history they were interested in wasn't
Speaker 1: what any real historian would call real history at all.
Speaker 1: This was the fifth year in a row that disgraced
Speaker 1: historian and infamous Holocaust denier David Irving had brought anti
Speaker 1: Semites from around the world to Cincinnati. Over the years,
Speaker 1: He's been banned from entering Canada, Germany, Austria, Australia, New Zealand,
Speaker 1: and Lithuania, but he seemed to enjoy the Ohio River,
Speaker 1: and he came back to Cincinnati year after year. That weekend.
Speaker 1: Speakers ranged from notorious to obscure, but they all shared
Speaker 1: a passion for Nazi Germany. Brigham Young University professor Tom
Speaker 1: Catherall had to cancel at the last minute due to
Speaker 1: a health concern, and I'm sure the attendees were devastated
Speaker 1: to miss his presentation on Hermann Goering's love of model Trains.
Speaker 1: Over lunch at the Marriotte on Saturday, they watched Lenny
Speaker 1: Riefenstahl's Victory of the Faith, the less famous predecessor to
Speaker 1: her infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The
Speaker 1: conference program notes that Reefenstahl is quote still going strong
Speaker 1: at over one hundred and Irving said that Riefenstah sends
Speaker 1: her greetings to the conference's attendees. David Irving couldn't have
Speaker 1: known then that his friend would actually die later that week.
Speaker 1: On Sunday morning, the conference resumed with presentations from Donald Bustian,
Speaker 1: an adjunct professor at Southern Arkansas University and founding member
Speaker 1: of a group called Scholars for Nine to eleven Truth.
Speaker 1: Before lunch, Charles Pravaan, a theologian whose anti contraception writing
Speaker 1: is highly regarded by adherents of the Quiverful movement, opined
Speaker 1: on the possibility that a self published book by an
Speaker 1: American Jew was actually to blame for Hitler's policies in Germany,
Speaker 1: and that afternoon, David Irving gave the stage to a
Speaker 1: young protege, an up and coming white nationalist blogger who'd
Speaker 1: recently finished his master's degree at Texas A and M University.
Speaker 1: Curtis Maynard presented his master's thesis on a lesser known
Speaker 1: incident from World War II. The one hundred and four
Speaker 1: page thesis doesn't actually mention the Holocaust a single time.
Speaker 1: It's not about that. It's about a nineteen forty three
Speaker 1: German air raid on US naval vessels docked at Bari, Italy.
Speaker 1: But the old man in the Marriott conference room probably
Speaker 1: spent most of their Sunday afternoons watching the History Channel,
Speaker 1: so I'm sure they enjoyed hearing a dry resitation of
Speaker 1: facts about planes and ships. Either way. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and three, Curtis Maynard was a rising star in the
Speaker 1: revisionist history community. Sharing the stage with David Irving was
Speaker 1: a great honor for an aspiring white supremacist writer, and
Speaker 1: in certain circles his writing was well regarded and is
Speaker 1: sometimes still remembered. But Curtis Maynard is best remembered for
Speaker 1: how his story ends At the wheel of a nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four Lincoln Sedan crashing a ditch with a bullet
Speaker 1: hole in his head. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird,
Speaker 1: little guys. When I started writing this episode, I thought
Speaker 1: the story of Curtis Maynard would revolve around the revisionist
Speaker 1: historians and pseudo intellectuals he admired. But instead I spent
Speaker 1: most of this week reconstructing one man's disastrous downward spiral
Speaker 1: after getting into a flame war on a form thread
Speaker 1: about Ron Paul. I think, at its core, this is
Speaker 1: a story about lies, not just the lies of dishonest scholarship.
Speaker 1: No listener to this show needs to be told this,
Speaker 1: But the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews, roma queer people, communists,
Speaker 1: and political dissidents were shot, gassed, and starved to death
Speaker 1: by Nazi Germany. I have no interest at all in
Speaker 1: engaging with the revisionist history of David Irving and his ilk.
Speaker 1: There's no debate to be had there, although we will
Speaker 1: wade through a bit of the swamp they inhabit. No,
Speaker 1: this is a story about smaller lies, about the gossip
Speaker 1: and rumors that live in the comments on twenty year
Speaker 1: old blog posts and ancient threads on hateful online forums
Speaker 1: about internes, scene squabbles for clout on Nazi message boards,
Speaker 1: and debate within the white power movement about what kind
Speaker 1: of messaging will actually advance their cause. And it's a
Speaker 1: story that ends in a despicable, tragic act of domestic violence.
Speaker 1: A woman was murdered, a child was shot, and children
Speaker 1: lost their parents. It's a story about the violent speech
Speaker 1: of violent men, men who talk about mass murder and genocide,
Speaker 1: and how sometimes those men cross the threshold into real
Speaker 1: world violence. This is some I spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time thinking about. It's unavoidable. Really, I spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time studying the digital debris left behind after the fact,
Speaker 1: after a man like this stops posting and starts loading
Speaker 1: his gun. But that's almost always where I start reading.
Speaker 1: I'm looking back in time. I already know what he did.
Speaker 1: A few months ago, I started researching for an episode
Speaker 1: about a different man, a different murderer. I realized something
Speaker 1: that seems obvious now, I just never really thought about
Speaker 1: it this way before. When I study the internet footprint
Speaker 1: of a killer, I'm looking at a fossil of sorts,
Speaker 1: these posts preserved in stone, evidence of where he once was,
Speaker 1: But those online ecosystems are thriving, busy places full of
Speaker 1: people who read those posts the day they were made,
Speaker 1: people who responded to them. So what is for me
Speaker 1: some kind of artifact? Was once an actual conversation between
Speaker 1: real people who really knew each other, And when one
Speaker 1: of them logs off for the last time, the ones
Speaker 1: left behind processed that violence right there in the same
Speaker 1: digital forum they'd spent years chatting. The story they got
Speaker 1: me thinking about this particular genre of online conversation is
Speaker 1: when I haven't finished. Fraser Glenn Miller murdered three people
Speaker 1: in Kansas in twenty fourteen. He died in prison convicted
Speaker 1: of those murders, but he was also a suspect in
Speaker 1: three other murders in nineteen eighty seven, and was a
Speaker 1: central figure in the Greensboro massacre, where Nazis and klansmen
Speaker 1: murdered five communist organizers in nineteen seven nine. He didn't
Speaker 1: pull the trigger in nineteen seventy nine, and nobody ever
Speaker 1: approved he did in eighty seven, but he played a
Speaker 1: part in those deaths. His hands were unclean long before
Speaker 1: he opened fire in Overland Park. It's a long and
Speaker 1: complicated story with mountains of archival material left to consume
Speaker 1: before I'm ready to write it. But on the day
Speaker 1: Miller started shooting outside a Jewish community center in Kansas,
Speaker 1: his peers saw the news. Within an hour of the shooting.
Speaker 1: There were threads on Stormfront and Vanguard News, the two
Speaker 1: most popular Nazi message boards of the day, and in
Speaker 1: the immediate aftermath, a lot of the posters were celebrating
Speaker 1: they thought there were some dead Jews, in their words,
Speaker 1: but others were skeptical about initial reports that the shooter
Speaker 1: had yelled Hyle Hitler as officers handcuffed him, and then
Speaker 1: someone posted the news footage of that moment of the
Speaker 1: shooter yelling Kyle Hitler, and the shooter's face isn't terribly clear,
Speaker 1: as he's being shoved into the back of a police car.
Speaker 1: If you didn't know him, that blurry, poorly lit image
Speaker 1: wouldn't really look like anything at all. But they did
Speaker 1: know him. It was Brad Griffin, a prominent member of
Speaker 1: the secessionist group the League of the South, and a
Speaker 1: man I have my own history with who recognized Miller first.
Speaker 1: The shooter wasn't just one of their own, He was
Speaker 1: a prolific poster in their online community. He was someone
Speaker 1: they talked to every day, someone who'd been a significant
Speaker 1: figure in their movement for decades. And on both sites,
Speaker 1: users were searching for meaning, and some said they always
Speaker 1: knew this would happen, that he was going to crack
Speaker 1: one of these days and do something like this. Others
Speaker 1: insisted that the they knew would never do this and
Speaker 1: he must have been set up. Some celebrated, some were disappointed,
Speaker 1: but no one grieved for his victims. And those conversations
Speaker 1: seemed so unique to me, What a strange window into
Speaker 1: this terrible world. They're deeply troubling, of course, but surely
Speaker 1: those were an anomaly, I thought. But while I was
Speaker 1: researching for this episode, the story I'm circling around getting
Speaker 1: to this week, I saw it again because four years
Speaker 1: before Fraser Glenn Miller made his last post, that same
Speaker 1: online community reacted to the news that Curtis Maynard had
Speaker 1: murdered his ex wife and then taken his own life.
Speaker 1: But I suppose we should start at the end. On
Speaker 1: April twenty first, twenty ten, Curtis Boon Maynard was harassing
Speaker 1: his ex wife. It wasn't the first time they'd been
Speaker 1: divorced for a little over a year, and he hadn't
Speaker 1: reacted well to losing custody of their two daughters. I
Speaker 1: couldn't find any coverage that included the contents of any
Speaker 1: of those texts he sent Melissa Masa that day, but
Speaker 1: whatever it was, she was upset enough about the texts
Speaker 1: that she'd discussed them with a friend. That afternoon, at
Speaker 1: eight twenty pm, Melissa's neighbors heard gunshots. Her middle daughter,
Speaker 1: just twelve years old, ran to a neighbor's house with
Speaker 1: her two year old sister in her arms. A neighbor
Speaker 1: heard the commotion and came outside and saw Melissa, a
Speaker 1: thirty four year old mother of three, dead in her
Speaker 1: front yard. He was still taking in the sight of
Speaker 1: his neighbour's body there on the lawn when he noticed
Speaker 1: her ex husband, Curtis Maynard, pulling out of the driveway.
Speaker 1: We were dialed nine one one as he started his
Speaker 1: own car, following Maynard and providing his location to the dispatcher.
Speaker 1: Officers who arrived at the house found Melissa's oldest child,
Speaker 1: a sixteen year old daughter from a prior marriage inside.
Speaker 1: She survived, but she had been shot in the face
Speaker 1: by the man who had been her stepfather since she
Speaker 1: was a toddler. Curtis Maynard was driving seventy miles an
Speaker 1: hour down the highway when police caught up to him.
Speaker 1: He ended the chase without ever even stepping on the brakes.
Speaker 1: He shot himself in the head while he was still
Speaker 1: speeding down the dark road. With the driver dead at
Speaker 1: the wheel, his car slammed into an SUV that had
Speaker 1: pulled over onto the shoulder to get out of the
Speaker 1: way of the high speed chase. The mother and her
Speaker 1: two children inside were thankfully uninjured. The irresistible and unanswerable
Speaker 1: question in the aftermath of a tragedy like this is
Speaker 1: always why. Why did he murder his ex wife? Why
Speaker 1: did he shoot his stepdaughter in the face? Why did
Speaker 1: he take his own life? Why? Today? Why? Like this?
Speaker 1: And there are no answers. Nothing I can tell you
Speaker 1: will explain this, not for lack of trying, but I
Speaker 1: can try to understand who he was before the last
Speaker 1: day of his life. And pieced together the fragments of
Speaker 1: an online argument that seems to have been the beginning
Speaker 1: of the end of Curtis Maynard's dream of making a
Speaker 1: career out of being a racist blogger. I don't know
Speaker 1: exactly when Curtis Maynard decided he wanted to be a writer.
Speaker 1: He served briefly in the US Army after high school.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety two, at the age of twenty five,
Speaker 1: he got his associate's degree in nursing and began working
Speaker 1: as a registered nurse. In nineteen ninety six, while he
Speaker 1: was still married to his first wife, he started seeing
Speaker 1: the woman who had become his second wife and only
Speaker 1: murder victim. Melissa Mesa was actually still married to her
Speaker 1: first husband at the time, but they were separated, and
Speaker 1: Maynard would later say he'd believed she was already divorced.
Speaker 1: It's hard to piece together the particulars of a man's
Speaker 1: personal life so many years before he got online, but
Speaker 1: things were not going well. In nineteen ninety seven, just
Speaker 1: as his divorce from his first wife was finalized, a
Speaker 1: judge in Texas issued a bench warn't for him. He'd
Speaker 1: pled guilty to a dui in nineteen ninety four, and
Speaker 1: he got off easy. He didn't have to go to jail.
Speaker 1: All he had to do was complete the dui education program,
Speaker 1: but he never did it, so maybe he skipped town
Speaker 1: to avoid the benchwarn't. Maybe he was just looking for
Speaker 1: a fresh start after his divorce. But just as he
Speaker 1: was doing court in Corpus Christi, Texas, he got a
Speaker 1: job at a hospital in Idaho in June of nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety seven, right around the time Melissa probably would have
Speaker 1: been realizing she was pregnant with Maynard's daughter. He did
Speaker 1: something he should not have done. And I don't mean
Speaker 1: impregnating a woman who was still married to another man.
Speaker 1: I don't care about that. But according to a decision
Speaker 1: from the Idaho Board of Nursing, one vial of demarole
Speaker 1: and one vial of morphine went missing from the locked
Speaker 1: narcotics cabinet at Boundary County Community Hospital on June twenty eighth,
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven. Missing opiates are a big deal in
Speaker 1: a hospital. They're not something that just gets misplaced and
Speaker 1: shrugged off. It's not a lost pen. These things are
Speaker 1: carefully accounted for these days. Everything's tracked in a computer system.
Speaker 1: But even in the dark ages of the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: every dose of an opiate had to be signed for.
Speaker 1: There was a record where every drop of this was
Speaker 1: supposed to be. If those vials were missing, someone had
Speaker 1: to have taken them. An inventory was done to determine
Speaker 1: if anything else was missing, and a few days later
Speaker 1: it was discovered that two boxes, each containing ten vials
Speaker 1: of morphine, had been tampered with. The evidence was turned
Speaker 1: over to the Bonners Ferry Police department. The hospital had
Speaker 1: their own investigation to conduct. They drug tested every hospital
Speaker 1: employee who had access to that cabinet. Sure, it's possible
Speaker 1: that a nurse who steals pain medication is just selling it,
Speaker 1: but there's a really good chance that whoever took that
Speaker 1: morphine was going to test positive for it. Everyone tested negative,
Speaker 1: well everyone except for Curtis Maynard, who didn't show up
Speaker 1: for his shift on the day of the drug test.
Speaker 1: In fact, he never came back to work at all.
Speaker 1: The police investigation would eventually determine that Maynard's fingerprints were
Speaker 1: on the boxes that had been tampered with. The morphine
Speaker 1: that should have been in those vials in that box
Speaker 1: had all been replaced with what the Board of Nursing
Speaker 1: decision only calls quote a benign substance, which I assume
Speaker 1: is a saline solution or something like that. So the
Speaker 1: investigation was kicked off because two vials were physically missing
Speaker 1: from the cabinet, but in the end it looks like
Speaker 1: a significant amount of morphine was actually missing, having been
Speaker 1: taken from the vials and replaced with something else, And
Speaker 1: so if he hadn't slipped up and stolen the vial
Speaker 1: of demarole, they might never have noticed that he'd been
Speaker 1: replacing morphine with saltwater, and hospital patients may have been
Speaker 1: administered an unknown substance instead of their pain medication. By
Speaker 1: the time those lab results came back, though Maynard had
Speaker 1: already moved back to Texas, he was technically still a
Speaker 1: registered nurse with a valid license in Texas. When his
Speaker 1: oldest daughter was born in March of nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: he was working as a nurse at a hospital in
Speaker 1: Corpus Christi. The Idaho Board of Nursing filed their formal
Speaker 1: complaint against him that summer, a year after the morphine
Speaker 1: first went missing. Maynard never responded. After months of getting
Speaker 1: no response from Maynard, the Idaho Board of Nursing got
Speaker 1: a default order against him, suspending his nursing license, and
Speaker 1: before the Texas Board of Nursing had a chance to
Speaker 1: suspend him. A standard practice in most professions, where if
Speaker 1: you're disciplined by a board in one state, there is
Speaker 1: what's called reciprocal discipline in most other states. But before
Speaker 1: Texas could do anything like that, he mailed them a
Speaker 1: letter saying I no longer desire to be licensed as
Speaker 1: a professional nurse, and he voluntarily relinquished his nursing license
Speaker 1: before it could be taken. The Bonners Ferry Herald, a
Speaker 1: newspaper in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, ran several announcements in the
Speaker 1: summer of two thousand that Curtis Maynard was wanted on
Speaker 1: a felony warrant for possession of controlled substance and theft,
Speaker 1: but Idaho court records don't show that any criminal case
Speaker 1: was ever filed. I have to assume that's in relation
Speaker 1: to the theft of the morphine three years earlier, but
Speaker 1: I don't know how those pieces fit together. He did
Speaker 1: move back to Idaho years later, but the five year
Speaker 1: statute of limitations had already passed, so he was never
Speaker 1: actually criminally charged in connection with the missing morphine. But
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety ane nine, Curtis Maynard had lost his
Speaker 1: nursing license in Idaho and given it up in Texas.
Speaker 1: He was unable to work in the only field he
Speaker 1: had any real experience in. He had a baby and
Speaker 1: a common law wife to support, and he had a
Speaker 1: pretty serious addiction to alcohol and opiates. After twenty eight
Speaker 1: days of residential treatment for substance abuse, he did what
Speaker 1: a lot of people do when they have no idea
Speaker 1: what to do with their lives. He went to graduate school,
Speaker 1: enrolling in a master's program in history at Texas A
Speaker 1: and M University. I wish I could tell you which
Speaker 1: came first. Did Curtis Maynard set out to write his
Speaker 1: master's thesis about a German air raid on US naval
Speaker 1: vessels in Italy because he had a genuine interest in
Speaker 1: this lesser known chapter of World War II history, and
Speaker 1: he accidentally stumbled upon David Irving's work while he was researching.
Speaker 1: Or was he already familiar with the work of revisionist
Speaker 1: historians and hoping to add his voice to the choir.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure there's anyone left to ask, but whichever
Speaker 1: it was. By the time Maynard finished his thesis in
Speaker 1: the spring of two thousand and three, he wasn't just
Speaker 1: reading David Irvings's Holocaust denial works. They were corresponding. The
Speaker 1: thesis not only lists three of Irving's books in its bibliography,
Speaker 1: there are several footnotes indicating the source for a particular
Speaker 1: claim is an email exchange between Curtis Maynard and David Irving.
Speaker 1: Maynard's thesis isn't about the Holocaust. The word doesn't even
Speaker 1: appear in the paper. There's no mention of Jews, camps,
Speaker 1: gas chambers, nothing like that. The writing isn't great in
Speaker 1: my opinion, but I think he could have produced a
Speaker 1: serviceable paper about a real historical event out of college.
Speaker 1: So to be honest, I have no idea how the
Speaker 1: thesis writing process works. Maybe there was no point at
Speaker 1: which someone read any of this in draft form and
Speaker 1: asked him, hey, why did you write quote? Without the
Speaker 1: works of historians like Elkafrolic and David Irving, who conducted
Speaker 1: research in the former Soviet archives in Moscow, there was
Speaker 1: a distinct possibility that we would not be privy to
Speaker 1: the uncensored and unedited thoughts, ideas and words of doctor
Speaker 1: Joseph Gerbels today end quote because not only is that
Speaker 1: not true, David Irving is not solely responsible for existing
Speaker 1: works of scholarship on the Diaries of Joseph Gerbels. But
Speaker 1: it's also just a really weird thing to say. There
Speaker 1: must not be any feedback provided in the process, because
Speaker 1: surely someone in the history department would have clocked it
Speaker 1: as very inappropriate to drop this line. Quote. David Irving's
Speaker 1: opinion cannot be dismissed easily, as he is a recognized
Speaker 1: expert on the third Reich. End quote. I don't know
Speaker 1: how to convey to you how not true that is.
Speaker 1: That is the not truest thing that you could write
Speaker 1: in your master's thesis or history. Now, you might have
Speaker 1: been able to say it with a straight face in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties. Maybe in the nineteen sixties you could
Speaker 1: say David Irving is a recognized expert on the third Reich.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe you could still say it in the seventies
Speaker 1: into the eighties. If you're reckless, if you're careless, if
Speaker 1: you're not keeping up with current events, maybe you could
Speaker 1: still say it in the eighties. But by two thousand,
Speaker 1: everyone in the world knew that David Irving was not
Speaker 1: a historian. Ninety three, Jewish history professor Deborah Lipstadt wrote
Speaker 1: a book called Denying the Holocaust. The growing assault on
Speaker 1: truth and memory, and in the book, David Irving was
Speaker 1: just one of a variety of figures within the Holocaust
Speaker 1: denial movement that Lipstat discusses, but he in particular took
Speaker 1: issue with her criticism of his work, and so in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six he filed a libel suit against Deborah
Speaker 1: Lipstadt and her publisher. David Irving is British, so he
Speaker 1: filed this lawsuit in the United Kingdom, and libel laws
Speaker 1: are different in the UK. I don't want to get
Speaker 1: into the weeds there. They just are. But even in England,
Speaker 1: the truth is the best defense against an accusation like this.
Speaker 1: It can't be libel if it's true. And so Lipstot's
Speaker 1: lawyers hired Sir Richard Evans, a Cambridge University history professor
Speaker 1: who is an actual historian of modern Germany, and Evans
Speaker 1: spent two full years, with the help of full time
Speaker 1: research assistance, producing a seven hundred and forty page report
Speaker 1: on his findings. He read everything David Irving ever wrote,
Speaker 1: everything David Irving ever said about the things that he wrote,
Speaker 1: and ultimately Evans concluded that, in his expert opinion, everything
Speaker 1: David Irving had ever written was quote completely worthless as history,
Speaker 1: because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere in any of them
Speaker 1: to give a reliable account of what he is talking
Speaker 1: or writing about. If we mean by historian, someone who
Speaker 1: is concerned to discover the truth about the past and
Speaker 1: to give as accurate a representation of it as possible,
Speaker 1: Irving is not a historian. And at the end of
Speaker 1: the trial a judge agreed, writing that Irving had quote
Speaker 1: persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence end quote,
Speaker 1: because he was ideologically motivated to portray Hitler in a
Speaker 1: positive light and deny the Holocaust. So he sued Deborah
Speaker 1: Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier, saying that was libel,
Speaker 1: and the judge said, that's not libel because legally you're
Speaker 1: a Holocaust denier, And so we lost the libel lawsuit.
Speaker 1: But even worse for David Irving than losing the lawsuit
Speaker 1: and having to pay quite a large sum of money
Speaker 1: was the fact that a small army of historians had
Speaker 1: spent years going over his work with a fine toothed comb.
Speaker 1: This wasn't the first time people had found inconsistency, said
Speaker 1: inaccuracies in his work, but they'd never been dissected quite
Speaker 1: like this. So all of these professors and historians had
Speaker 1: read all of his books, and they'd all written these reports,
Speaker 1: and they published those reports as books, and they talked
Speaker 1: to reporters, and now all of a sudden, it's very
Speaker 1: easy to find a laundry list of the debunked, made up,
Speaker 1: and outright fraudulent claims that riddled his body of work.
Speaker 1: So no, there's really no excuse in two thousand and
Speaker 1: three for citing David Irving as an expert on the
Speaker 1: history of the Third Reich. That's malpractice. But maybe his
Speaker 1: thesis adviser was in a hurry when she skimmed his
Speaker 1: bibliography and she didn't notice that he'd cited David Irving's
Speaker 1: book The Destruction of Convoy PQ. Seventeen, despite the fact
Speaker 1: that every of that book was withdrawn from the market
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy after Irving loss a massive libel lawsuit.
Speaker 1: I have to wonder if his adviser noticed that he
Speaker 1: cited Irving's Destruction of Dresden, a book that had been
Speaker 1: a best seller in the nineteen sixties but completely fell
Speaker 1: apart under the slightest scrutiny. The entire book relies on
Speaker 1: a premise supported only by a document that turned out
Speaker 1: to have been a Nazi forgery, as well as the
Speaker 1: personal assurances of a man who had been a major
Speaker 1: general in the Wehrmacht. Apparently, just finishing a thesis at all,
Speaker 1: regardless of what it says, is the biggest hurdle. Because
Speaker 1: Maynard graduated with a master's degree in May of two
Speaker 1: thousand and three, and just a few months after presenting
Speaker 1: his thesis to the committee at Texas A and M University,
Speaker 1: he presented it again, this time to the attendees of
Speaker 1: the Holocaust Denial conference in Cincinnati. A few months after
Speaker 1: that conference, he applied for the reinstatement of his nursing
Speaker 1: license in Idaho. He planned to work part time while
Speaker 1: enrolled in a history PhD program at the University of
Speaker 1: Idaho in Moscow. On the condition that he attended narcotics
Speaker 1: anonymous meetings three times a week, submit to random drug tests,
Speaker 1: and receive quarterly evaluations of his performance. He was allowed
Speaker 1: to work in a nursing home near the university, but
Speaker 1: he left the PhD program after just a few months
Speaker 1: and moved back to Texas again. But even as he's
Speaker 1: struggling to stay enrolled in school or keep a nursing job,
Speaker 1: his career as a professional racist is really starting to
Speaker 1: take off. In two thousand and seven, four years after
Speaker 1: David Irving invited him to share the stage at the
Speaker 1: Holocaust Denile Conference in Cincinnati, things were finally going well
Speaker 1: for Curtis Maynard. He was pen pals with Ernst Zundel,
Speaker 1: the German born Canadian whose criminal prosecutions in Germany and
Speaker 1: Canada had made him one of the world's most famous
Speaker 1: Holocaust deniers. Maynard's blog, The Politically Correct Apostate was banned
Speaker 1: by blogspot and word Press every couple of months, but
Speaker 1: it always re emerged, and the readers followed him to
Speaker 1: each new url. He wrote prolifically, often publishing multiple pieces
Speaker 1: per day, and his content was cross posted on the
Speaker 1: websites of some big names in the movement, like David
Speaker 1: Duke and John Denugen. His writing appeared often on the
Speaker 1: website for Jeff Rentz, a talk radio guy that you
Speaker 1: could most quickly describe as a more explicitly Nazi version
Speaker 1: of Alex Jones. But you've probably never heard of Jeff
Speaker 1: Rentz because he got into a fight with Alex Jones
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine that ended with Rents getting
Speaker 1: dumped by the network that they shared, Genesis Communications. Alex Linder,
Speaker 1: the webmaster at Vanguard News Network, posted dozens of Maynard's
Speaker 1: pieces on his site, and in April of two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven, Linder called him quote one of the most
Speaker 1: active and powerful of a rising generation of white writers.
Speaker 1: In July of two thousand and seven, just weeks after
Speaker 1: his wife gave birth to their second child, Maynard traveled
Speaker 1: to Sandpoint, Idaho. He was a guest at a conference
Speaker 1: hosted by America's Promise Ministries, a Christian identity church funded
Speaker 1: by the sale of Holocaust denile literature. The keynote speaker
Speaker 1: at the conference was Michael Collins Piper, a red contributor
Speaker 1: to the white nationalist publications American Free Press and The Spotlight.
Speaker 1: According to a write up about the event that was
Speaker 1: published in American Free Press, Fiber's speech was about Jewish
Speaker 1: control of American politics conspiracy. Theorist Mark Glenn performed an
Speaker 1: original musical number about Jewish domination of society with the
Speaker 1: help of his five oldest children and I guess it's
Speaker 1: for the best. But I couldn't find any video of that,
Speaker 1: But I don't know, I'm kind of curious. But Glenn
Speaker 1: was proud enough of this performance to include it in
Speaker 1: his article about the conference, and the article mentions Manard
Speaker 1: by name, calling him quote a well known writer dealing
Speaker 1: with the issues similar to the themes covered at the conference,
Speaker 1: the themes being I guess Jewish control of society, and
Speaker 1: the write up ends the quote from Michael Collins Piper,
Speaker 1: the keynote speaker, and he said of the conference quote,
Speaker 1: it was obvious to me five minutes after arriving at
Speaker 1: the church that once again everything the mainstream media has
Speaker 1: said about North Idaho being a haven for violent extremists
Speaker 1: and malcontents is all a big lie and that no
Speaker 1: better people can be found anywhere. I wouldn't expect a
Speaker 1: man like Michael Collins Piper to be honest about something
Speaker 1: like America's Promised Ministries, but I will point out that
Speaker 1: there is a reason he felt the need to counter
Speaker 1: the idea that the church was a haven for violent
Speaker 1: extremists because it was in nineteen ninety six, four congregants
Speaker 1: of America's Promise Ministries bombed a planned Parenthood in Spokane, Washington,
Speaker 1: and the offices of the newspaper The Spokesman Review during
Speaker 1: a crimes breathe. But it also involved several bank robberies.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety nine, a member of the church named
Speaker 1: Buford Furrow shot several people at the Los Angeles Jewish
Speaker 1: Community Center before murdering a Filipino mailman as he fled
Speaker 1: the scene. Those are both stories that deserve their own telling.
Speaker 1: Beauford Furrow, for one thing, was dating Bob Matthews's widow.
Speaker 1: But what I'm getting at here is that America's Promised
Speaker 1: Ministries was not just a church. It was a propaganda
Speaker 1: mill with a body count. But at this conference, Curtis
Speaker 1: Maynard was once again rubbing elbows with some very important racists.
Speaker 1: One of his better known essays, one called I Am
Speaker 1: a Holocaust Denier and I Am Unafraid, was republished often
Speaker 1: and by multiple outlets, even appearing in translation in an
Speaker 1: Ohio based newspaper run by a group called the Hungaria
Speaker 1: Freedom Fighter's Movement. There really is a community for everything,
Speaker 1: I guess now. This little newspaper, Titya Kurt was published
Speaker 1: from nineteen sixty eight until the death of its editor,
Speaker 1: Tibor Mayor in twenty ten. Now, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: pronounce a single Hungarian word or name correctly. I did try,
Speaker 1: I looked them up, I watched videos. Don't email me
Speaker 1: about it. And I'm not sure that the time I
Speaker 1: spent down this rabbit hole will ever pay off in
Speaker 1: any meaningful way. It's certainly not relevant to the story
Speaker 1: I'm trying to tell here, but it's always a little
Speaker 1: bit of a thrill to find a whole new genre
Speaker 1: of guys I've never encountered before. So I know I'm
Speaker 1: straying terribly from Curtis, but just humor me for a minute.
Speaker 1: Curtis Maynard's essay appeared in a two thousand and seven
Speaker 1: issue of CITYA Kurt and I wanted to get a
Speaker 1: feel for the kind of newspaper it was, so I
Speaker 1: browsed a few other issues in the couple of years.
Speaker 1: On either side of two thousand and seven, I found
Speaker 1: articles by Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for
Speaker 1: Historical Review, an organization dedicated to Holocaust denial. There were
Speaker 1: essays by klansman David Duke, and neo Nazi William Luther Pierce,
Speaker 1: all of which had been translated into Hungarian. On the
Speaker 1: back page, as is common in publications like this, they
Speaker 1: offered books for sale. You could buy Hungarian language editions
Speaker 1: of books by David Irving, David Duke, Pat Buchanan. You
Speaker 1: could even buy DVDs of Lenny Reefinstall's Nazi propaganda films
Speaker 1: with Hungarian subtitles. So, okay, I admit it. It got distracted,
Speaker 1: I got lost. I wasted a lot of time copying
Speaker 1: and pasting chunks of Hungarian Nazi news into Google Translate,
Speaker 1: and I did find decades of issues of the paper itself,
Speaker 1: issues spanning nineteen sixty eight till twenty ten, but there's
Speaker 1: almost no mention of its existence, outside of the fact
Speaker 1: that some university libraries have issues in their archives. I
Speaker 1: found almost no information at all about the group behind
Speaker 1: the paper. At a meeting of the United Nations General
Speaker 1: Assembly in nineteen eighty one, the Hungarian un representative referred
Speaker 1: to them briefly as a US based neo fascist group
Speaker 1: dedicated in the spirit of Ferenz Salashi, the Nazi collaborator
Speaker 1: installed as the nation's leader after the German occupation of
Speaker 1: Hungary in nineteen forty four. There are no good fascists
Speaker 1: that you could claim as a role model. You shouldn't
Speaker 1: pick any of them, but this is a particularly bad one.
Speaker 1: In the short few months that he was in power,
Speaker 1: his Arrow Cross party worked directly with Adolph Eikman to
Speaker 1: resume the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the camps, and
Speaker 1: as Soviet troops closed in on the Hungarian capital, Arrow
Speaker 1: Cross death squads carried out mass executions in the walled
Speaker 1: ghettos of Budapest, shooting thousands, thousands of Hungarian Jews and
Speaker 1: pushing their bodies into the Danube River. And in that
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one UN General Assembly meeting, the Hungarian representative
Speaker 1: read aloud excerpts from this newspaper. The Hungaria freedom Fighters,
Speaker 1: as they called themselves, said their goal was to reconquer
Speaker 1: the historical living space of the Hungarian people, whose racial
Speaker 1: purity they hold very dear, and they praised the regime
Speaker 1: of Farin Salagi, calling his actions a brave attempt to
Speaker 1: save the fatherland and its ancestral honor. Five years later,
Speaker 1: in the December nineteen eighty six issue of citya Kre,
Speaker 1: there is a brief note on the backpage thanking President
Speaker 1: Ronald Reagan for his proclamation in support of the Hungarian
Speaker 1: freedom fighters, the anti communist heroes of the nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: six uprising. Most of what I found were issues of
Speaker 1: Sitya Kurt, which is in Hungarian. I did find a
Speaker 1: handful of issues of a companion newspaper in English called
Speaker 1: The Fighter, and its first issue in nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 1: featured a full page front page glowing endorsement of segregationist
Speaker 1: George Wallace's presidential campaign, written by Sityakurt contributing editor Louis Molnar,
Speaker 1: who was George Wallace's Ohio campaign chair, and according to
Speaker 1: his obituary, he personally toppled the statue of Joseph Stalin
Speaker 1: in the city square in Budapest in nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1: Hard to say, and the first issue of Sityakirt in Hungarian,
Speaker 1: also published in nineteen sixty eight, announced the formation of
Speaker 1: new chapters of a Hungarian nationalist paramilitary organization called the
Speaker 1: Cross and Sword Movement. It had originally been founded a
Speaker 1: few years earlier by a former Hungarian army officer named
Speaker 1: Zultan Vasvari. And as I looked through more issues of
Speaker 1: Sidya Kurt Most issues in the sixties and seventies list
Speaker 1: Zultan Vasvari's home address in New Jersey in case you
Speaker 1: want to send a cash donation to the paramilitary. In
Speaker 1: an interview about her twenty seventeen documentary called Cold Warriors,
Speaker 1: Hungarian American journalist Raka Pigniski said that the Cross and
Speaker 1: Sword movement was not an anti Semitic organization. They were nationalists,
Speaker 1: they were patriots. Were some of the members of the
Speaker 1: Nazi collaborationist Arrow Cross Party, Yes, but that was in
Speaker 1: the past. I didn't watch the documentary, I read the interview.
Speaker 1: I am not sure I believe that. And maybe Zultan
Speaker 1: Vasvari is a common name. I don't know. I've never
Speaker 1: been to Hungary, so I can't rule out the possibility
Speaker 1: that there were multiple Hungarian Army officers in World War
Speaker 1: Two who had that name. But not only can I
Speaker 1: not find any evidence that there were, I have pretty
Speaker 1: convincing evidence that there were not multiple Sultan Vasvaris. A
Speaker 1: few years ago, dida's Secrets founder Emma Best won a
Speaker 1: foya battle with the federal government, and one of the
Speaker 1: thousands of documents made available to the general public for
Speaker 1: viewing as a result was a nineteen fifties era CIA
Speaker 1: file that contained a seven hundred page book that they
Speaker 1: had obtained from the Hungarian Army during World War II.
Speaker 1: And the book lists every officer in Hungary's army in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty four, every officer by name, rank, date of birth,
Speaker 1: which medals they have when they began their service. Seven
Speaker 1: hundred pages of Hungarian names, and there is only one
Speaker 1: officer named Zultanvasvari and his date of birth is listed
Speaker 1: as May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. Now I also found New
Speaker 1: Jersey Department of Health records that show that a Zultan
Speaker 1: Vasvari born May thirteenth, nineteen twelve died in Bergen County
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety. Okay, that set of facts is not
Speaker 1: exactly earth shattering. There are interviews with Hungarian Americans who
Speaker 1: have fond memories about learning to shoot rifles on a
Speaker 1: farm owned by a man they called Uncle Zoli, and
Speaker 1: those articles sometimes mentioned that he'd been an officer in
Speaker 1: the war. But those fond memories shared in English language
Speaker 1: sources sound like a very different Sultan Vasvari than the
Speaker 1: man described in Romanian. In nineteen forty a Hungarian Army
Speaker 1: officer named Zultan Baswari gave the order to massacre more
Speaker 1: than one hundred and fifty Romanian civilians in the Transylvanian
Speaker 1: village of Ep. An interview with Gavriel Bhutkavan, one of
Speaker 1: the very few survivors of that massacre, has been transcribed
Speaker 1: in the collections held by the Holocaust Museum. He describes
Speaker 1: finding his eleven month old sister shot and crushed with
Speaker 1: the butt of a rifle in her crib. His eleven
Speaker 1: year old brother was shot in the back of the
Speaker 1: head running from the soldiers. When the massacre was over,
Speaker 1: Vasvari ordered his soldiers to dig a massive pit, burying
Speaker 1: the victims in a mass grave. Most English language sources
Speaker 1: about the massacre at Ep say that Vasvari was sentenced
Speaker 1: to death for war crimes by the Romanian People's Tribunal
Speaker 1: at Cluge after the war, and the source cited for
Speaker 1: that does indeed name Baswari among those war criminals who
Speaker 1: were sentenced to death at Cluche, but none of the
Speaker 1: English language sources I could find mentioned that this Romanian
Speaker 1: document also says that he was tried in absentia, and
Speaker 1: at the time his sentence was pronounced, his current location
Speaker 1: was not known. According to a two thousand and four
Speaker 1: report of the International Holocaust Commission, in Romania, the people's
Speaker 1: tribunals at Cluje and Bucharest sentenced over a hundred war
Speaker 1: criminals to death, but it was largely symbolic. In one
Speaker 1: mass trial, fewer than a third of those charged were
Speaker 1: even accounted for, let alone present. Even among those who
Speaker 1: were ever actually in custody, only a very small number
Speaker 1: of those sentences wherever carried out. So technically those articles
Speaker 1: aren't wrong. Zultan Vasvari was convicted of war crimes by
Speaker 1: a Romanian tribunal, and he was sentenced to die, but
Speaker 1: they left out the extremely important detail that when they
Speaker 1: sentenced him to death, he wasn't there, They didn't know
Speaker 1: where he was, and he was absolutely not actually executed
Speaker 1: by the Romanian government. I struggled for entirely too long
Speaker 1: with a blurry PDF in Romanian, considering that this is
Speaker 1: so far beyond tangential to this story. But I'm going
Speaker 1: to have to find a historian to talk to about this,
Speaker 1: because I am having a hard time believing that a
Speaker 1: Hungarian war criminal started a paramilitary organization in New Jersey.
Speaker 1: Surely there was some other Zultan Vaswari born in Hungary
Speaker 1: on May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. I must have made a mistake.
Speaker 1: I've really lost the plot here. I got completely derailed
Speaker 1: by the discovery of a Hungarian fascist newspaper in Ohio
Speaker 1: running ads for a war criminals nationalist militia. Maybe, but
Speaker 1: if you're looking for a Hungarian translation of David Duke's autobiography,
Speaker 1: you might try looking at a used bookstore in Cleveland.
Speaker 1: All that to say, circling back around, Curtis Maynard's Holocaust
Speaker 1: denile essays were very popular among a wide variety of
Speaker 1: the world's worst people in two thousand and seven. Within
Speaker 1: the admittedly small world of racist conspiracy theory bloggers, Curtis
Speaker 1: Maynard was really making a name for himself. He's only
Speaker 1: nursing part time at this point. He picks up shift
Speaker 1: on the weekends and spends weekdays at home with his
Speaker 1: daughters while his wife worked as a chemical engineer. In
Speaker 1: later angry screeds mail to his divorce attorney, he claims
Speaker 1: he was the girl's primary caregiver and that the decision
Speaker 1: was made jointly in the marriage that he would sacrifice
Speaker 1: his career so the girls wouldn't have to go to daycare.
Speaker 1: But I think he really enjoyed the freedom of being
Speaker 1: home on the internet all day. He posted thousands of
Speaker 1: times that year on Nazi message boards, and he was
Speaker 1: writing hundreds of blog posts about how the Jews control
Speaker 1: the media, black people are doing all the violent crime,
Speaker 1: the Holocaust never happened. I mean, he's churning them out,
Speaker 1: and he's attending conferences, he's networking with movement leaders, he's
Speaker 1: doing interviews on conspiracy theory radio shows about his friendship
Speaker 1: with Ernstundel. His hard work is starting to pay off,
Speaker 1: and he was just on the cusp of being a
Speaker 1: real figure in professional racism. But then on December of
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven, he got into an argument with
Speaker 1: a former friend that would end up ruining everything. But
Speaker 1: I lost too much time this week trying to translate
Speaker 1: the records of a war crimes tribunal from Romanian, so
Speaker 1: I'll have to pick back up next week with the
Speaker 1: story of two Nazi bloggers trying to destroy each other
Speaker 1: over a disagreement about Ron Paul. I really did mean
Speaker 1: to get it all out in one I'm actually really
Speaker 1: looking forward to revealing who it was that Maynard was
Speaker 1: beefing with Weird Little Guys as a production of Cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by
Speaker 1: me Pomi Kunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and
Speaker 1: Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Speaker 1: Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad dickerd.
Speaker 1: You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
Speaker 1: gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
Speaker 1: almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal. You
Speaker 1: can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
Speaker 1: on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit. Just don't post anything
Speaker 1: that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.