December 5, 2024 • 53 mins
For over a decade, neo-Nazis and Klansmen were hand-delivering VHS tapes of a California-based public access TV show to local television stations in cities across the country. The stations had no choice but to run the show on local public access channels. The show's host, Tom Metzger, received a gift of $300,000 in 1984 that gave him the financial freedom to pursue his dream of delivering his racist message to as many Americans as possible, right through their television screens.
Sources:
Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Harvard University Press, 2018.
Flynn, Kevin, and Gary Gerhardt. The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America's Racist Underground Free Press ; Collier Macmillan, 1989.
Hamm, Mark S., and Cécile Van de Voorde. “Crimes Committed by Terrorist Groups: Theory, Research, and Prevention.” Trends in Organized Crime, vol. 9, no. 2, 2005
National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, Bigotry and Cable TV: Legal Issues and Community Responses (Institute Report No.3), Baltimore, Maryland: The Institute, 1988.
Bradley J. Howard, Pulling the Plug: Controversial Programming on Public Access Television and the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, 28 J. Marshall L. Rev. 399 (1995)
Rendahl, Stephen E.. "White Aryan Resistance: A Radical Communication System." North Dakota Journal of Speech & Theatre, vol. 4, no. 1, 1 Sep. 1991, pp. 44 - 52.
Rendahl, Stephen (1990). Media access and the radical right: Public access to "race and reason." Unpublished paper presented to the Central States Communication Association, Detroit, MI.
Spring/Summer 1989 issue of “No KKK No Fascist USA,” Newspaper of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC37_scans/37.nokkk.spr89.pdf
December 1985 issue of Searchlight magazine https://ia600700.us.archive.org/4/items/searchlight_126/searchlight_126.pdf
https://casetext.com/case/us-v-mahon-19
https://idavox.com/index.php/2020/12/10/american-strasser/
https://northernstar.info/16419/news/city/crusade-adds-fuel-to-flame-of-tensions/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-08-10-ca-99-story.html
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-02-13-me-23281-story.html
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-01-10-me-11091-story.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/16/us/klan-wins-a-battle-for-cable-tv.html
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
A little after sunset on December eighth, nineteen eighty four,
firefighters from the Island County, Washington Fire Department were standing
by in their truck on the side of Smuggler's Cove
Road on Whidbey Island, about an hour north of Seattle.
They'd been called in by an FBI swat team, but
there was no fire, not yet anyway. The agents were
(00:31):
more than thirty hours into an armed standoff, and they
were getting desperate to end things one way or another.
A volley of tear gas canisters didn't drive their subject out.
A helicopter buzzing just feet above the house didn't seem
to rattle him at all. He just fired his machine
gun through the roof, forcing the agents to call off
(00:52):
the helicopter for the sake of the pilot's safety. They
wanted to take their fugitive alive if they could, but
negotiations weren't getting them anywhere. After months spent tracking this
Nazi terror cell, they finally had its ring leader cornered.
Two other safe houses had been successfully raided the day before,
(01:13):
and several of the man's co conspirators his closest friends
were brought to the scene to reason with him. Communication
broke down pretty quickly after the other man inside the
house emerged ready to surrender. He was carrying a duffel
bag stuffed with forty thousand dollars in cash from one
of the group's robberies. Tucked into the cash and the
(01:34):
bag was a suicide note penned by the man firing
at them from the upstairs window. By the evening of
the first day of the standoff, Robert J. Matthews was
alone inside the house and he was ready to die
in it. When FBI agents finally got their hands on Matthews,
he was charred beyond recognition. The house had burned to
(01:57):
the foundation, Any evidence it may have contained was gone,
and Matthew's body had to be identified using dental X rays.
A series of daring armored car robberies had netted the
gang over four million dollars. Some of that money surely
burned alongside Matthews, but in the months before his death,
Robert Matthews took a cross country road trip handing out
(02:21):
bags of cash. Some of that money went to the
kinds of things you'd expect, buying land and keeping the
dream of the race war alive. By purchasing guns and
crates of grenades, and the majority of that money was
never fully accounted for, let alone recovered. But some of
those bags of cash went on some unexpected journeys. I'm
(02:47):
Molly Conger and this is weird, little guys. As the
(03:08):
sun set on the second day of the standoff on
Whidbey Island and the last day of Robert Matthews's life,
the decision was made to fire several flares into the house.
The flares would almost certainly set the house on fire.
The tear gas hadn't bothered Matthews. He had a gas mask,
but maybe his romantic visions of dyeing with his fingers
(03:30):
still on the trigger would go up in smoke if
the house burned. The fire truck was waiting at the
end of the driveway, ready to extinguish the flames as
soon as they had their men and handcuffs, so they'd
be able to recover any of the remaining cash from
the armored car robberies that may still be in the house.
At six thirty pm on December eighth, nineteen eighty four,
(03:51):
three flares were fired through a downstairs window. The glass
was already gone shattered to bits by bursts of gunfire
from boat sides, and as the agents had anticipated, a
fire broke out. But they hadn't accounted for the contents
of the room. The flares hadn't just ignited a sofa
(04:12):
or the curtains or a throw rug. They ignited cases
of ammunition. The controllable house fire they hoped with smoke
out their fugitive, turned into a towering inferno as the
flames reached a stockpile of explosives stored inside the home.
The firefighters waiting out on the street couldn't even approach
(04:33):
the house as crates of bullets fired themselves in the heat.
They could only watch as the house burned laid into
the night. Normally, this is the part of the episode
where I tell you, but that's the end of Robert
Matthew's story, and we have to start at the beginning.
But not today. Today we're starting after the end of
(04:56):
his story, partly because I'm still waiting on some archival
materials from a special collections library on the other side
of the country. My interlibrary loan is still pending. The
story of Robert Matthews and his Nazi bank robbery gang.
The order is forthcoming. Don't worry, that forty year old
(05:17):
story is still very much alive within the white supremacist movement.
Those fourteen words they're all so obsessed with were first
penned by David Lane while he was in prison for
the murder of Alan Berg. But as I started plotting
out the framework of that story, I got a little
lost down one hundred little rabbit holes. I had a
(05:39):
lot of new questions about things I'd never wondered about before.
If you're one of those listeners who wishes the show
had a more linear narrative and fewer characters and fewer tangents,
you're not going to like this one. But the story
of the Order has had such an impact on the
last forty years of white supremacist buy in America, there's
(06:02):
no honest way to tell it neatly. Because if there's
one thing I want this show to convey more than
anything else, is that there are no lone wolves. And
the myth of the lone wolf is so persistent, not
just because it is maybe somehow less frightening to think
(06:23):
of these acts of violence as some kind of completely
random freak accident, but also because we crave these concise
linear narratives. But if you tell any lone gunman's story
that way, it tends to absolve the ecosystem that formed
him and his network of accomplices. Think of this story
(06:45):
as a sort of introduction to a cast of characters
you'll be hearing about again. Just let me plant some
narrative seeds that will take a little time to grow.
So before I can tell you a story about how
a fifty cents lottery ticket purchased with a counterfeit ten
dollar bill at a liquor store in Philadelphia ended up
unraveling a network of Nazi terrorists, I want to talk
(07:08):
about where some of that stolen money ended up. Specifically,
I want to talk about public access television, four hundred
acres of undeveloped land and Appalachia, a racist chiropractor from Tampa,
and the nineteen eighty eight AT and T shareholders meeting.
(07:29):
Bear with me. What would you do if you suddenly
had four million dollars in dirty money? I think for
most of us, the first answer is something like I
would help my friends and my family. I'd fund worthwhile
projects and advance causes I believe in. And that's kind
(07:51):
of what our Nazi gang did here, but their friends
and family were also Nazis, and the causes they believed
in where things like arming an Aryan paramilitary force to
overthrow the government, etc. Robert Matthews was generous with this
ill gotten cash. He paid members of the group handsomely.
(08:15):
But the Order wasn't your average gang of thieves who
were out for themselves. They weren't trying to get rich.
They were trying to fund a movement, and Robert Matthews
wanted to be a sort of racist Robin Hood, stealing
from the Jewish controlled system to give to the downtrodden
Aryan Man. Accounts vary as to who received a share
(08:39):
of this stolen money, and most of those accounts are
from embittered rivals who turned state's witness, and those accounts
don't always match up across sources. For the most part,
the figures I'm using here are found within the nineteen
ninety book The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt.
The authors were able to secure cooperative interviews with some
(09:01):
former members of the Order, some of the recipients of
the money, and Robert Matthews's mistress, Zilla Craig. When there's
a discrepancy between the sources I'm using, I am defaulting
to those in Kathleen Blues bring the war home, which
is exhaustively researched and well footnoted. The whole story of
(09:21):
the string of robberies is one for another day, But
most of the money we're talking about here came from
a single score. On July nineteenth, nineteen eighty four, six
members of the Nazi group the Order loaded three point
eight million dollars in cash out of the back of
a Brinx armored car on Highway twenty near Yucaya, California.
(09:46):
Two weeks later, Robert Matthews left his wife and son
behind in Washington and loaded his pregnant mistress into a
used Pontiac Bonneville and drove east. Their first stop was
at a farm near Kaha to Michigan to visit Robert Myles.
Myles had once been an influential clan leader, rising to
(10:06):
the rank of Grand Dragon of the Realm of Michigan.
In nineteen seventy one, he bombed ten empty school buses
the week before a court ordered desegregation program was set
to begin in Pontiac, Michigan. Earlier that year, he and
four other clansmen forced a high school principle in Ipsilani
out of his car at gunpoint and literally tarred and
(10:29):
feathered the man. They doused a high school principle with
hot tar and coated him in chicken feathers. He'd been
driving home from a school board meeting where he was
advocating for the district to honor Martin Luther King Junior Day.
The years Myles spent in federal prison for those acts
(10:49):
did little to change his attitudes about race. By the
nineteen eighties, Myles's clan days were more or less behind
him his true calling as the pastor of a Christian
identity church that he called the Mountain Church of Jesus
Christ's Savior. He was also the Midwest coordinator for Richard
Butler's Aryan Nations and hosted Aryan Nations gatherings at his
(11:13):
farm in Michigan, and in August of nineteen eighty four,
Robert Matthews and his mistress spent the night on that farm.
Matthews gave Miles three hundred thousand dollars in stolen cash
for use in his church, which included a prison ministry
aimed at radicalizing incarcerated white men through letter writing campaigns
and mailing them white power newsletters. In return, Myles gave
(11:36):
Matthews a letter of introduction to Fraser Glenn Miller. A
few days later, in Annengeer in North Carolina, Matthews knocked
on the front door of Fraser Glenn Miller, the leader
of the White Patriot Party. Robert Miles's letter of introduction
was enough to gain his trust, and he invited Matthews
and his mistress in for dinner. Later that night, Miller
(11:57):
met Matthews again, this time at a hotel. Miller was
suspicious of this generous offer of two hundred thousand dollars
in cash, concerned that Matthews may be an FBI informant
trying to entrap him in some kind of scheme. But
he did take the money, and ironically, it would be
Fraser Glenn Miller who would later turn state's witness, returning
(12:21):
most of the money to the government. He testified against
many of Matthew's associates and entered the witness protection program
as Fraser Glen Cross. But it's hard to stay in
the program if you can't leave the movement. Miller's story
is one better saved for his very own episode because
it ends with him dying of old age on death row.
(12:46):
This cross country road trip also included a night at
a hotel in Arlington, Virginia. It's no surprise that Robert
Matthews would pay a visit to William Luther Pearce. Honestly,
you'll be shocking if he hadn't. Matthews had been a
member of Pierce's National Alliance since nineteen seventy nine. It
was at the nineteen eighty three National Alliance General Convention
(13:08):
that he gave the fiery speech that kicked off the
formation of the Order just a year earlier, and the
Order took its name directly from the plot of Pierce's
novel The Turner Diaries. And on August sixth, nineteen eighty four,
Matthews handed his mentor a paperbag. The amount of cash
(13:28):
inside is usually put at fifty thousand dollars, although that
seems to trace back to a single statement made by
another member of the Order, man named Bruce Pearce, who
is not related Zillah Craig. Matthews's mistress witnessed this handoff,
but she was only able to say that it was
(13:48):
a quote large amount of money, and considering she had
seen Matthew's hand Robert Miles three hundred thousand dollars and
Fraser Glenn Miller two hundred thousand dollar that very same week,
I wonder what she means by a large amount. Tom Martinez,
a member of the Order who would turn informant, says
(14:09):
Matthews never disclosed how much money had given William Luther Pierce.
Like I said, the only figure ever offered is fifty
thousand dollars. I just really struggled to understand why he
would give his personal hero so little. Three weeks after
William Luther Pierce received that paper bag full of cash,
(14:31):
he announced at the nineteen eighty four National Alliance Annual
Convention that the group now had enough money to proceed
with his plan, which was to purchase three hundred and
sixty four acres in Hillsboro, West Virginia, and begin building
his compound. Headline. Speakers at that meeting included Kevin alfred Strom,
who you may remember as the pedophile from the first
(14:53):
episode of this show, and a chiropractor from Florida named
Herbert Poinsett. Penn and Herb were coming back to him,
Pierce paid ninety five thousand dollars, all in cash for
the land in West Virginia just a few weeks later.
Other recipients of generous gifts from the Order's coffers were
(15:15):
men like Michael Stanley Norris, who played a part in
the future Stormfront webmaster Don Black's hair brained scheme to
overthrow the government of a small Caribbean nation. That's a
story I'm really looking forward to telling. Louis Beam, the
man who popularized the concept of leaderless resistance, is said
to have gotten one hundred thousand dollars. Forty thousand went
(15:38):
to Richard Butler and his Aryan Nations, one hundred thousand
went to the Covenant the Sword in the Arm of
the Lord in Arkansas. An unnamed history professor in Columbus,
Ohio received an unknown amount of cash to fund a
White Power band. Dan Gamon, the pastor of a Christian
identity church in Missouri, got fifteen thousand. And there were
(16:01):
rumors that Matthews had left one or maybe two million
dollars with a lawyer in Denver for safekeeping. But nobody
knows who that might have been or how much it was.
But the money I've been working my way around to
is this three hundred thousand dollars gifted to California clansman
(16:23):
Tom Metzker. Tom Metzker is such a central figure in
so many stories of white power in America in the
eighties that I'm troubled by the need to condense his
biography for our purposes here. But he was a rising
star in the Klan in the seventies and organized his
(16:44):
own clan border patrols at the Mexican border in California,
a stunt that was later copied by Louis Beem and
David Duke in Texas. He ran for Congress in California's
forty third congressional district in nineteen eighty, winning the Democratic
primary but losing badly to the incumbent Republican. He was,
(17:04):
of course, disavowed by the entire Democratic establishment in California.
Even Governor Jerry Brown publicly endorsed the Republican in that race.
But guys like Metzger don't run to win. They run
for free access, to unlimited attention. And he got it.
(17:24):
And he ran again in nineteen eighty two, this time
for Senate, and he earned just two percent of the
vote in the primary. Gore Vidal, who I'd honestly forgotten
ever had political aspirations, came in at fifteen percent in
the same primary. Everybody knew Tom Metzker's name. A story
(17:46):
in the North County Times in Oceanside, California around that
same time period about a woman's passion for knitting includes
the line Metzger forty seven, who emphasizes she is not
related to Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger says she
was taught by her mother to knit forty three years ago.
(18:06):
Riding high on this attention, Metzger's movement aspirations evolved. He
left the clan behind and formed his own organization that
he originally called the White American Political Association. He quickly
renamed it White American Resistance and then finally White Aryan Resistance,
(18:26):
often just called war. But the attention was fading. He
was in the news all the time when he was
running for office, but in early nineteen eighty four, the
local paper was clowning on him for his poorly attended crossburnings,
running headlines like KKK gave crossburning. Nobody came about the
(18:47):
December nineteen eighty three cross burning ceremony in la where
Metzger had been arrested alongside Arian Nation's leader Richard Butler
and several members of the Order. The article notes that
while the first issues of his new White Arian Resistance
newspaper had been quote a slick tabloid on quality paper,
(19:08):
recent issues were down to just a single mimeographed sheet.
But his fortunes seemed to have changed just a few
months later. Just weeks after Tom Metzger would have received
that three hundred thousand dollars from the Order, the Daily
Times Advocate in Escondido, California ran a front page story
about Metzger's newest venture. He was going to be on TV.
(19:33):
Of course, Metzger had been on TV before. He loved
being on TV. He had debated IRV Rubin from the
Jewish Defense League on a local program in May. But
on September twenty eighth, nineteen eighty four, Tom Metzger wasn't
just on TV. He was hosting his own show.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Hello, I'm Tom Metzger, host of ra Race and Raisin
is a show dedicated to free speech, a small island
of free speech and a sea of controlled and managed news.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
The first episode of Race and Reason debuted that day
at four thirty five pm. It aired on Public Access
Channel twenty four in Poway, California, but Metzger promised that
he would soon be broadcast on public access channels throughout
the San Diego area. He claimed he already had deals
in the works to get the show on public access
channels in Orange County, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and Austin.
(20:36):
People weren't happy that The Klansman was going to be
on TV, but Metzger told the paper quote, I tell
you I would be a much better fellow to interview
people on television than I wouldn't be on the streets.
It's much easier on the public if you remember Ocean Side.
Ocean Side in this context is a reference to a
(20:56):
March nineteen eighty Clan rally that he led through largely
his Spanic neighborhood of Oceanside, California, just months after the
Greensboro massacre, where members of the American Nazi Party murdered
five communists in North Carolina. The Klansmen chanted, if the
Nazis don't get you, a Klansman will, and just as
(21:18):
they had in Greensboro, the police and Ocean side failed
to intervene as white supremacists violently attacked protesters. No one
was killed at the Ocean Side rally, thankfully, but at
least seven people were injured, including a news cameraman who
was bludgeoned with a large rock and a socialist organizer
named Bruce Kala who was beaten by a group of
(21:38):
klansmen with clubs. Kala had to be hospitalized for a
severe head injury and received two hundred stshes. The line
of riot cops seemed not to move at all until
a Klansman's Doberman lunged at one of them. The officers
shot and killed the dog. The article about the show's
(22:11):
debut quotes the public access manager for the cable company
saying we don't establish the guidelines. The city does. A
representative from another cable company said they hadn't been approached
yet by Metzger, but if asked, they probably would air
the program, saying if we say no to the clan,
then pretty soon we're saying no to another group. And
(22:34):
maybe they did have to air it. In nineteen eighty four,
the Cable Communications Act, written by Barry Goldwater, was passed.
Among other things, the bill barred cable operators from exercising
editorial control over the content aired on public access channels,
and it absolved the cable company of any liability for
(22:55):
the content aired on those non commercial, public, educational, and
government access chains as long as the show wasn't criminal
and it didn't violate basic standards of what's allowed on television.
The cable company was prohibited by law from refusing to
air the show just because it was racist. I feel
(23:15):
like there were episodes that a determined lawyer could have
fought to keep off the air as defamatory or incitement
to violence or something. But what incentive was there for
them to try. If they lost a fight like that,
they'd have to pay the racist for his trouble. But
(23:35):
if they aired it, no matter how bad it was,
they were completely shielded from liability. In articles about the
resulting public outcry, cable executives said, our hands are tied.
The director of Community Programming said when people called her
office to complain about Metzger's show, all she could do
(23:56):
was tell them that they would have to complain to
Metzker personally, and within months he made good on his promise.
Race and Reason was on public access channels and a
growing number of cities. In many communities, the public access
television program requires that local public access programming actually be local,
(24:18):
so he couldn't just mail these tapes to studios across
the country and expect them to air. To get around
this requirement, Metzger sold tapes of Race and Reason on
the back cover of every issue of his White aryan
resistance newsletter. Subscribers around the country could mail Metzger a
check for thirty five dollars and receive a VHS copy
(24:39):
of the show in the mail. By nineteen eighty nine,
he'd sweetened the deal. Any four episodes of Race and
Reason could be bundled together for just thirty nine ninety
five And that's in nineteen eighty nine dollars. Like that's
that's a wild amount of money to pay for a
thirty minute tape of some guy saying slurs. But once
(24:59):
you you had the tape, you could sponsor the show
on your own local public access channel. With this piecemeal
distribution system, it's hard to nail down how many episodes
ever existed and what order they aired in The episodes
that aired in any given city depended on which PHS
(25:20):
tapes your local racist bought out of a Nazi catalog
and even in his own home market. A TV guide
printed in November nineteen eighty five notes Metzker's program under
the public access offerings, but it's listed as quote airs infrequently.
A nineteen eighty six article in the Korvalis Gazette Times
(25:41):
says a local resident had been hand delivering a new
cassette to the station three times per week. The station
declined to publicly name the program sponsor, but it came
out anyway. Richard Masker had recently settled a lawsuit against
the city of Corvalis regarding his termination from the water
treatment plant nineteen eighty three. He felt that he'd been
(26:03):
discriminated against. They felt it was not appropriate for him
to have mailed Jewish residents of Cravallis cards on Hitler's
birthday that read, may his memory refresh your soul and
give you inspiration. Hyle Hitler. Articles about his firing make
a passing mention of the fact that the police closed
(26:24):
down the entire water treatment plant for several days after
he was let go, but they don't offer any explanation
for that. Masker pops up in some strange places later
on in his life, But this isn't a story about
guys who keep getting fired from water treatment plants. So
suffice it to say he did what many Nazis do
and move to Idaho. The first few episodes of Race
(26:48):
and Reason were filmed in Metzger's home, but as the
show evolved, the production quality began to improve. In nineteen
eighty six, he was using the public Access TV studio
at California State University. A student who worked in the
studio said he was so offended by the content that
he walked off the job. Students protest at Metzger's presence
on campus, but university president Jewel Plummer Cobb said, quote,
(27:13):
we should not stop it, regardless of how I may
feel about the content. The strength of America as the
first Amendment. The protests eventually forced Metzger off campus and
into a private studio. On the heels of the student
protests in California, officials in Spokane, Washington initially declined to
run an episode of Race and Reason featuring Ben Clausen,
(27:36):
the founder of the Nazi religion the Church of the Creator,
and the man who invented the term rahoa, a popular
shortened form of the phrase racial holy War. In July
of nineteen eighty seven, there were protests outside the Viacom
offices in Dublin, California, after a station agreed to run
tapes of Race and Reason that had been hand delivered
(27:57):
by a clansman named Clinton SIPs. A week later, Sipes
was arrested for handing out clan literature while wearing his
clan robes because the conditions of his parole for a
clan related armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon
prevented him from associating with the clan. Sipes later renounced
(28:17):
his views, founded a nonprofit to help young people leave
hate groups, and converted to Islam. By the end of
nineteen eighty seven, Metzger had been producing Race and Reason
for three years. It was airing intermittently around the country
in as many as fifty different cities. One particularly controversial
(28:37):
episode that year featured J. B. Stoner. Stoner was no
stranger to controversy. The FCC had to intervene to force
television stations to air his campaign ads when he ran
for Senate in nineteen seventy two. He's one of the
most unapologetically vicious racists you'll find in twentieth century politics,
(29:00):
and he ran for office repeatedly making public pronouncements like
being Jewish should be punishable by death, and black people
are more closely related to apes than humans. He was
so publicly vitriolic that even his fellow Nazis thought he
might be a government plant to make them all look bad.
(29:20):
But he was just like that, and he's stayed like
that until he died. In one of his last public
statements before the stroke that killed him, he said, a
person isn't supposed to apologize for being right. He was
convicted in nineteen eighty for a nineteen fifty eight bombing
of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He was
(29:42):
never prosecuted for at least a dozen other bombings of
synagogues and black churches he'd carried out in the fifties,
and he ended up serving just three years in prison.
His appearance on Metzger's show was filmed not long after
his release and was apparently just thirty minutes of the
most unhinged ranting about AIDS that you can imagine, because
(30:08):
by nineteen eighty seven, Stoner was leading a group that
he called the crusade against corruption. He said that white
people should celebrate AIDS because it had been sent to
rescue the white race from black people, Jews, and homosexuals,
although he typically used words, I won't say that nineteen
(30:29):
eighty seven episode with JB. Stoner on Metzger's show is gone.
As far as I can tell, I did find maybe
twenty or thirty episodes floating around in the ether, but
this isn't one of them, and that's probably for the best,
based on reporting about the battle over airing it in Idaho,
though I can match portions of what was said in
(30:52):
the episode to his speech that Stoner gave at the
Arian Nation's compound around the same time. Now, I love
a primary source. I go to great lengths to locate
archival footage, and I think it really adds some texture
to the show for you to hear some of these
men in their own words sometimes. But this, this is
(31:16):
not something I can play. I couldn't find a single
ten second stretch without a word that I'm not going
to be responsible for broadcasting. That old man was using
slurs at a truly unprecedented rate. One of the only
full phrases without a slur in It sums up what
(31:38):
you need to know.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
I think that Age is the greatest miracle that we've.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Had him about.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Nineteen hundred years.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
And this episode proved a bridge too far for the
cable provider in pocatelle Hoe. They'd been airing Race and
Reason on local public access for a year, already sponsored
by Aryan Nations member Stan Sorenson. It was a sensitive
time in a place that has long been a hotbed
of white supremacist activity. Richard Butler's Arian Nations compound was
(32:17):
in nearby Hayden Lake. In nineteen eighty six, the home
of Bill Wasmuth, a Catholic priest and the chairman of
the Kote and Eye County Task Force on Human Rights,
had been firebombed in response to his outspoken opposition to
racism and antisemitism. The TV station didn't want to rock
the boat. Honestly, they probably didn't want to die. But
(32:41):
this thirty minute frenzied rant from an elderly lunatic who
believed that Aids had been sent by God to kill
black people and to remind Aryan men that race mixing
is punishable by death. It was just too much. It
was too much. They didn't want to put this on TV,
so the television's conferred with their lawyers, and after a
(33:03):
lot of consideration, the lawyers said it's a close call,
but nothing in the episode breaks the law. At the
next meeting of the Pocatello City Council, some residents felt
the city should just cut all funding to Public Access
TV if that was the only way they could keep
Race and Reason off the air. They couldn't say no
(33:24):
to just one show, but they could end the Public
Access TV program entirely for everyone. Members of Pocatello's Human
Rights Advisory Council said they should call the racist bluff,
don't err it, let them sue, and the debate raged
in Pocatello. The show's producer, an enigmatic figure named Alexander Fox,
(33:49):
spent days meeting with the Pocatello City Attorney, and ultimately
he agreed to back down. He wasn't willing to fight
for it. He withdrew the tape. Paper articles around this
time refer to Alexander Fox as an attorney and the
show's producer, but I'm not one hundred percent sure he exists.
(34:13):
Most of the episodes of the show I was able
to find show a message at the end that Alexander
Fox with an E on the end holds the copyright
for the show. That doesn't always mean much. People love
to just put that symbol on things, but I figured
I'll check. And the only entry in the US Copyright
Office records for an Alexander Fox with an E on
(34:34):
the end is a nineteen eighty one application to copyright
a cassette tape called sex Files, and that's phyl Ees
sex Files. Alexander Fox is listed as a pseudonym for
David C. Wiley, which coincidentally happens to be the name
(34:57):
of the California man who often co hosted the show
with Metzger. Wiley was the applicant on the paperwork when
War applied for a permit to hold meetings in the
public park in Placentia, California, in nineteen eighty six, and
his name turns up in the documents that were recovered
by San Francisco police in nineteen ninety three when they
investigated the ADL for spying on thousands of people. Mixed
(35:21):
in with dossier's on Arab Americans and anti apartheid activists,
the ADL had also been keeping tabs on the Klan.
The police inventory of documents were covered in the search
lists Wiley's name on a page that includes items related
to the ADL's monitoring of California skinhead groups. So I
(35:41):
wonder if Alexander Fox, attorney for Tom Metzger, didn't have
the stomach for a legal fight over a segregationist's love
letter to AIDS because he wasn't a lawyer at all.
But I guess we'll never know. David Wiley dyed in
two thousand and seven. Pocatello called Metzger's bluff and they won.
(36:07):
But one of the options they considered was one that
some cities chose. You can't say no to a Nazi,
so you cancel it for everybody, And in nineteen eighty eight,
Kansas City, Missouri, did just that. They ended their entire
public access television program rather than air Metzger's show. A
(36:28):
group of klansmen had showed up at this studio with
a tape of Race and Reason in hand, and they
were told that, oh, sorry, the rules are that you
have to actually produce your own show here. You can't
show the tape. But apparently there was no such rule
on the books, and the city wasn't allowed to invent
new rules to enact a content based restriction on the show. So,
(36:51):
faced with the possibility of becoming known as Klansas City,
something that appeared in almost all of the articles about this,
UNSEL voted to eliminate public Access TV altogether. But this
time the bluff cock called it wasn't the possibly fictional
Alexander Fox who stepped in to represent the Missouri Knights
(37:14):
of the Ku Klux Klan. Although local clansman Dennis Mayhon
did tell the newspaper that he was getting legal advice
from Fox. No, Mayhon's legal representation in this case came
from the ACLU, and after a federal judge denied the
city's motion to dismiss the suit, they ended up settling
out of court and voted to restore the public access channel.
(37:38):
So in the end, after a year of push and pull,
the Klan was on TV and the city had to
pay one hundred thousand dollars. I'm not sure if Dennis
Mayhon ever did try his hand at making his own
public access show, but he is currently serving a forty
year sentence in federal prison for mailing a bomb to
(37:59):
the Scottsville office of Diversity and Dialogue in two thousand
and four. It's not at all relevant here to tell
you that he ended up in prison because the FBI
sent an informant to seduce him into confessing, or that
among the feminine wiles she employed to woo him into
her confidence was a risque photo of herself in a
(38:20):
white bikini top with a hand grenade nestled between her breasts.
You didn't need to know that, but I know it,
and now you do too. People protested in Cincinnati, Chicago,
(38:49):
Corpus Christi, Pocatello, Fullerton, and in cities across the country,
But for an entire decade, Tom Metzger's Race and Reason
aired on public access television. Not even the lawsuit that
all but destroyed White Area and Resistance could stop production
of Race and Reason. In nineteen ninety, a Portland jury
(39:09):
agreed that Metzger was liable for inciting war members to
commit acts of violence against minorities, specifically in the death
of Mulagettas Arrah, an Ethiopian college student murdered by war
members in nineteen eighty eight. Metzger lost his house, but
he kept making the show, if only intermittently. In nineteen
ninety three, Metzger interviewed James Mason about the recent release
(39:32):
of his book Siege, the book that remains to this
day the white terrorist's handbook.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
And at this point you've moved away from the mass strategy,
totally concentrating on the revolutionary struggle.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
What few potential revolutionaries we had left out of the
old movement were my targets for this propaganda that I
included in the original Sea Monthly publication.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
But Tom Metzger wasn't the only racist who understood the
power of this tool he'd figured out how to use.
Dozens of his followers dutifully ordered copies of VHS tapes
to broadcast Metzger's Race and Reason on their own local channels,
But some supporters took it a step further. They didn't
just copy the tapes, they copied the model and made
(40:26):
their own shows. Looking back for a moment to Pocatello.
The first episode of Race and Reason that aired in Pocatella, Idaho,
a year before the controversy with JB. Stoner and his
enthusiasm for racial cleansing through HIV took me by surprise.
It's the only episode of Metzger's original run of the
(40:47):
show that didn't feature Metzger at all. The guest host
in the episode that aired in Pocatello, Idaho in nineteen
eighty six was Roy Frankhauser. Roy Frankause, the Klansman from Pennsylvania,
the same Roy Frankhauser that formed a clan splinter group
in western Pennsylvania in the early nineties and found himself
(41:08):
at odds with Keystone Knights Grand Dragon Barry Black. That
Roy Frankauser. If you missed the episodes I did in
October about Barry Black, this means nothing to you, but
I was surprised to see Roy again. What a small world.
On Race and Reason. Frankhauser was interviewing Richard Barrett, a
(41:29):
Mississippi attorney who led a white supremacist group called the
Nationalist Movement. Frankauser would go on to host his own
shows on Public Access TV in Pennsylvania, one called White
Forum and one called Roy Frankhauser Presents Race and Reason,
though it's unclear from the newspaper articles if that was
actually an original show hosted by frank Hauser or if
(41:52):
he just sort of popped his name onto the Metzger
reruns that he was sponsoring. I couldn't find any episodes.
I guess if you have episodes of racist public access
TV from reading Pennsylvania in the early nineties, I do
want to see them, Please email them to me. And
(42:13):
that Mississippi attorney that he was interviewing on that episode
also went on to host his own show called Airlink,
which was broadcast in as many as sixty cities at
its height in the nineties. Richard Barrett unsuccessfully sued the
city of Houston in nineteen ninety nine over their policy
of charging one hundred dollars per hour for public access
broadcasts that were produced outside the Houston area. Barrett was
(42:38):
murdered in twenty ten by his neighbor, a young black man,
who claimed Barrett dropped his pants and demanded a sex
act from him. I'm not a huge fan of what
sounds a little bit like a gay panic defense. I'll
love that. Not weighing in on the killer's motivations here,
but it may have happened. Barrett had long been rumored
(42:59):
to be gay, and after his death, fellow Nazi Don
Black said Barrett was quote an obvious old queen. Ask
anyone who ever met him and former National Alliance member
and longtime David Duke Lackey Ron Doggett had a similar
public access program in Richmond, Virginia, all through the nineties.
(43:21):
His was called Race and Reality, but it was indistinguishable
from Metzger's Race and Reason. In the mid eighties, doctor
Herbert Poinsett was one of many of Metzger's fans around
the country who was dutifully taking VHS tapes of Metzger's
show to his local TV station each week. But by
(43:42):
nineteen eighty eight he'd made several guest appearances on the show,
and within a year he'd produced more than forty episodes
of his own weekly show, also called Race and Reason,
broadcast on public Access TV in Tampa. When his name
first appeared in the paper as the local crank broadcasting
Metzker's show in Atlanta, he told the Atlanta Constitution that
(44:05):
he had quote no clan ties whatsoever, And I guess
that's probably true. It's probably technically true. I can't find
any evidence that Herbert Pointsett was ever in the Ku
Klux Klan, but he was absolutely a Nazi. There's really
no doubt about that. His name appears in passing In
(44:28):
some of the personal writings of Ben Klassen, the founder
of the Church of the Creator, he seems to have
been a personal friend of Classen's in the early eighties
before he moved his Nazi church from Florida up to
North Carolina. And remember, maybe half an hour ago or so,
when I told you to put a pin in herb.
He was the headline speaker at the nineteen eighty four
(44:50):
annual convention for William Luther Pierce's National Alliance. There's a
lovely photo in an issue of the National Alliance bulletin
that shows Pointset next to an ecstatic looking Kevin Alfred Strom.
I mean, Strome is just beaming. He's holding up a
copy of The Best of Attack. It was a compilation
(45:11):
of the National Alliance newspaper from the seventies that Strome
had just finished editing. But even if I didn't have
this photo of Herbert Poinsett looking a little uncomfortable sitting
next to Kevin Strome, I'd still know beyond a shadow
of doubt that he was a National Alliance member of
some importance, someone that William Luther Pierce placed a great
(45:32):
deal of trust in that photo of Poinset. In Strome
was taken some time over Labor Day weekend in nineteen
eighty four. William Luther Pierce had received that paper bag
full of cash from Robert Matthews just a few weeks earlier,
and it was at this meeting in Arlington that Pierce
announced to his followers that he finally had enough money
(45:53):
to purchase that three hundred and sixty four acre plot
in Hillsboro, West Virginia. In October. He paid ninety five
one thousand dollars, all in cash for the property. Pierce
maintained until his death that he had not received any
of the proceeds from the Order's robberies, but his own
son notes in his memoir that there isn't really any
other explanation for his sudden ability to afford the land.
(46:17):
But William Luther Pierce made another big purchase in the
mid eighties. For a man who kept his guns buried
underground so the government wouldn't know he had them, a
stock portfolio wasn't really his style, even if he had
money to invest, which by all accounts, he did not.
Investing in the system that he spent his life railing
(46:40):
against really doesn't seem like him. But in nineteen eighty six,
he purchased one hundred shares of stock in AT and T,
and that would have cost him over ten thousand dollars.
In April of nineteen eighty eight, William Luther Pierce sent
Herbert Poinset to represent his Neo Nazi organization at the
(47:02):
annual AT and T shareholders meeting. As a shareholder, National
Alliance could submit a proposal to be considered by all
the other shareholders at the meeting. It used to be
that anyone owning even a single share of a company
stock could submit a proposal like this, but the rules
changed in the eighties, and that probably explains the size
(47:23):
of Pearce's purchase and the fact that he sat on
it for two years. You have to own a certain
amount of stock and for a certain amount of time
before you're allowed to submit proposals. So they made the
buy and they sat on their investment until the time came.
The nineteen eighty eight shareholders meeting was on April twentieth,
(47:44):
Hitler's birthday. That had to be a good omen because
they were going to make AT and T end its
affirmative Action program. When National Alliance submitted their proposal, ahead
of the April twentieth, nineteen eighty eight shareholders meeting, AT
and T sought to have it excluded, but two weeks
ahead of the meeting, the Securities and Exchange Commission denied
(48:06):
the request. The Nazi proposal was going in the proxy statement.
I can only find AT and T annual proxy statements
going back thirty years in the SEC's online database, so
unfortunately I don't have the original document that was presented
to the shareholders what. According to reporting at the time,
every AT and T shareholder was presented with a statement
(48:29):
that argued that black workers were intellectually inferior and that
hiring minorities had a negative impact on white workers. Chairman
of the board Robert Allen denounced the proposal during the meeting, saying,
as a shareholder of a sufficient number of AT and
T shares, this organization has a right to offer a
share owner proposal, but we find the intent and wording
(48:52):
of this proposal highly objectionable. Especially objectionable is the argument
that some of our employees, because of their race, are
less qualified than other. This proposal is completely contrary to
the policies, the culture, and the character of AT and T.
It is in the proxy only because we could not
convince the Securities and Exchange Commission to allow us to
drop it. Okay, nice words, Robert Allen, but he followed
(49:18):
that up by also encouraging shareholders to vote against a
competing proposal brought by a black AT and T executive
named Alex Tillman, who was asking AT and T to
expand the company's commitment to promoting more women in minorities.
Both proposals failed. AT and T shareholders were ninety one
percent against ending affirmative action and ninety four percent against
(49:41):
expanding it. After the meeting, Pointsett told reporters, we lost
one battle, but the war has just started. We want
to get the vast majority of white people in this
country to wake up to see that they are being
displaced by people who shouldn't be taken over their jobs.
Both Tillman and National Alliance submitted their proposals again at
the nineteen eighty nine shareholders meeting. This time, the Nazis
(50:05):
got just eight point one percent support, down from eight
point six the year before, and Tilman's proposal for more
diversity garnered support from just four percent of shareholders, down
from six the year before. With so little support. Tilman
was not allowed to submit the proposal again in nineteen ninety,
(50:26):
but National Alliance did. National Alliance submitted the proposal for
a third time in nineteen ninety, this time getting eight
point eight percent of shareholders to agree that the company
should end its affirmative action program. So the third time
they tried it, they got the most votes in favor.
I mean, it's still not a high number, but the
(50:47):
number was going up if they tried it a fourth time.
Though I couldn't find it. Herbert Pointsett kept broadcasting Race
and Reason from Tampa through the mid nineties. I can
only find a handful of episodes. I think he ended
up producing more episodes of the show than Metzger ever did,
(51:08):
but he wasn't as famous, so very few of them
have survived. Most of the ones that can still be
found show point Set wearing a suit, talking straight into
the camera, and sitting in front of a wall covered
by two flags side by side, Confederate flag and a
Nazi flag. Daniel Ruth, a journalist who appears to still
(51:32):
be writing for the Tampa Bay Times, routinely tore into
point Set and his column in the nineties. One column
in nineteen ninety three bears the headline third Rate Third
Reich Cable Show. Another column waxes poetic about the quote
delusional ramblings of local Nazi chiropractor and cable access carbuncle
(51:52):
Herb point Set. Herbert Pointset disappears from the record by
the late nineties, and he died in two thousand and three.
He spent the last two decades of his life trying
to get famous for being racist. But I'd never heard
of him at all until I started poking around William
Muther Pierce's finances, which is where I started. All of
(52:14):
this was just an accident because I got distracted wondering
about where all that money went. I really did start
off trying to write about the bank robberies and the murders.
But looking back now, I think the money spent on
years of loud public propaganda had a far greater and
longer lasting impact than ten times the amount of money
(52:36):
spent on guns, because the government would end up taking
most of the guns purchased with the stolen money. But
propagandists like Tom Metzger kept Robert Matthews's dream alive, telling
a generation of racists that it was time for War.
(53:00):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
(53:22):
I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will
not answer it. It's nothing personal. I don't answer any
of my emails. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
A little after sunset on December eighth, nineteen eighty four,
firefighters from the Island County, Washington Fire Department were standing
by in their truck on the side of Smuggler's Cove
Road on Whidbey Island, about an hour north of Seattle.
They'd been called in by an FBI swat team, but
there was no fire, not yet anyway. The agents were
(00:31):
more than thirty hours into an armed standoff, and they
were getting desperate to end things one way or another.
A volley of tear gas canisters didn't drive their subject out.
A helicopter buzzing just feet above the house didn't seem
to rattle him at all. He just fired his machine
gun through the roof, forcing the agents to call off
(00:52):
the helicopter for the sake of the pilot's safety. They
wanted to take their fugitive alive if they could, but
negotiations weren't getting them anywhere. After months spent tracking this
Nazi terror cell, they finally had its ring leader cornered.
Two other safe houses had been successfully raided the day before,
(01:13):
and several of the man's co conspirators his closest friends
were brought to the scene to reason with him. Communication
broke down pretty quickly after the other man inside the
house emerged ready to surrender. He was carrying a duffel
bag stuffed with forty thousand dollars in cash from one
of the group's robberies. Tucked into the cash and the
(01:34):
bag was a suicide note penned by the man firing
at them from the upstairs window. By the evening of
the first day of the standoff, Robert J. Matthews was
alone inside the house and he was ready to die
in it. When FBI agents finally got their hands on Matthews,
he was charred beyond recognition. The house had burned to
(01:57):
the foundation, Any evidence it may have contained was gone,
and Matthew's body had to be identified using dental X rays.
A series of daring armored car robberies had netted the
gang over four million dollars. Some of that money surely
burned alongside Matthews, but in the months before his death,
Robert Matthews took a cross country road trip handing out
(02:21):
bags of cash. Some of that money went to the
kinds of things you'd expect, buying land and keeping the
dream of the race war alive. By purchasing guns and
crates of grenades, and the majority of that money was
never fully accounted for, let alone recovered. But some of
those bags of cash went on some unexpected journeys. I'm
(02:47):
Molly Conger and this is weird, little guys. As the
(03:08):
sun set on the second day of the standoff on
Whidbey Island and the last day of Robert Matthews's life,
the decision was made to fire several flares into the house.
The flares would almost certainly set the house on fire.
The tear gas hadn't bothered Matthews. He had a gas mask,
but maybe his romantic visions of dyeing with his fingers
(03:30):
still on the trigger would go up in smoke if
the house burned. The fire truck was waiting at the
end of the driveway, ready to extinguish the flames as
soon as they had their men and handcuffs, so they'd
be able to recover any of the remaining cash from
the armored car robberies that may still be in the house.
At six thirty pm on December eighth, nineteen eighty four,
(03:51):
three flares were fired through a downstairs window. The glass
was already gone shattered to bits by bursts of gunfire
from boat sides, and as the agents had anticipated, a
fire broke out. But they hadn't accounted for the contents
of the room. The flares hadn't just ignited a sofa
(04:12):
or the curtains or a throw rug. They ignited cases
of ammunition. The controllable house fire they hoped with smoke
out their fugitive, turned into a towering inferno as the
flames reached a stockpile of explosives stored inside the home.
The firefighters waiting out on the street couldn't even approach
(04:33):
the house as crates of bullets fired themselves in the heat.
They could only watch as the house burned laid into
the night. Normally, this is the part of the episode
where I tell you, but that's the end of Robert
Matthew's story, and we have to start at the beginning.
But not today. Today we're starting after the end of
(04:56):
his story, partly because I'm still waiting on some archival
materials from a special collections library on the other side
of the country. My interlibrary loan is still pending. The
story of Robert Matthews and his Nazi bank robbery gang.
The order is forthcoming. Don't worry, that forty year old
(05:17):
story is still very much alive within the white supremacist movement.
Those fourteen words they're all so obsessed with were first
penned by David Lane while he was in prison for
the murder of Alan Berg. But as I started plotting
out the framework of that story, I got a little
lost down one hundred little rabbit holes. I had a
(05:39):
lot of new questions about things I'd never wondered about before.
If you're one of those listeners who wishes the show
had a more linear narrative and fewer characters and fewer tangents,
you're not going to like this one. But the story
of the Order has had such an impact on the
last forty years of white supremacist buy in America, there's
(06:02):
no honest way to tell it neatly. Because if there's
one thing I want this show to convey more than
anything else, is that there are no lone wolves. And
the myth of the lone wolf is so persistent, not
just because it is maybe somehow less frightening to think
(06:23):
of these acts of violence as some kind of completely
random freak accident, but also because we crave these concise
linear narratives. But if you tell any lone gunman's story
that way, it tends to absolve the ecosystem that formed
him and his network of accomplices. Think of this story
(06:45):
as a sort of introduction to a cast of characters
you'll be hearing about again. Just let me plant some
narrative seeds that will take a little time to grow.
So before I can tell you a story about how
a fifty cents lottery ticket purchased with a counterfeit ten
dollar bill at a liquor store in Philadelphia ended up
unraveling a network of Nazi terrorists, I want to talk
(07:08):
about where some of that stolen money ended up. Specifically,
I want to talk about public access television, four hundred
acres of undeveloped land and Appalachia, a racist chiropractor from Tampa,
and the nineteen eighty eight AT and T shareholders meeting.
(07:29):
Bear with me. What would you do if you suddenly
had four million dollars in dirty money? I think for
most of us, the first answer is something like I
would help my friends and my family. I'd fund worthwhile
projects and advance causes I believe in. And that's kind
(07:51):
of what our Nazi gang did here, but their friends
and family were also Nazis, and the causes they believed
in where things like arming an Aryan paramilitary force to
overthrow the government, etc. Robert Matthews was generous with this
ill gotten cash. He paid members of the group handsomely.
(08:15):
But the Order wasn't your average gang of thieves who
were out for themselves. They weren't trying to get rich.
They were trying to fund a movement, and Robert Matthews
wanted to be a sort of racist Robin Hood, stealing
from the Jewish controlled system to give to the downtrodden
Aryan Man. Accounts vary as to who received a share
(08:39):
of this stolen money, and most of those accounts are
from embittered rivals who turned state's witness, and those accounts
don't always match up across sources. For the most part,
the figures I'm using here are found within the nineteen
ninety book The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt.
The authors were able to secure cooperative interviews with some
(09:01):
former members of the Order, some of the recipients of
the money, and Robert Matthews's mistress, Zilla Craig. When there's
a discrepancy between the sources I'm using, I am defaulting
to those in Kathleen Blues bring the war home, which
is exhaustively researched and well footnoted. The whole story of
(09:21):
the string of robberies is one for another day, But
most of the money we're talking about here came from
a single score. On July nineteenth, nineteen eighty four, six
members of the Nazi group the Order loaded three point
eight million dollars in cash out of the back of
a Brinx armored car on Highway twenty near Yucaya, California.
(09:46):
Two weeks later, Robert Matthews left his wife and son
behind in Washington and loaded his pregnant mistress into a
used Pontiac Bonneville and drove east. Their first stop was
at a farm near Kaha to Michigan to visit Robert Myles.
Myles had once been an influential clan leader, rising to
(10:06):
the rank of Grand Dragon of the Realm of Michigan.
In nineteen seventy one, he bombed ten empty school buses
the week before a court ordered desegregation program was set
to begin in Pontiac, Michigan. Earlier that year, he and
four other clansmen forced a high school principle in Ipsilani
out of his car at gunpoint and literally tarred and
(10:29):
feathered the man. They doused a high school principle with
hot tar and coated him in chicken feathers. He'd been
driving home from a school board meeting where he was
advocating for the district to honor Martin Luther King Junior Day.
The years Myles spent in federal prison for those acts
(10:49):
did little to change his attitudes about race. By the
nineteen eighties, Myles's clan days were more or less behind
him his true calling as the pastor of a Christian
identity church that he called the Mountain Church of Jesus
Christ's Savior. He was also the Midwest coordinator for Richard
Butler's Aryan Nations and hosted Aryan Nations gatherings at his
(11:13):
farm in Michigan, and in August of nineteen eighty four,
Robert Matthews and his mistress spent the night on that farm.
Matthews gave Miles three hundred thousand dollars in stolen cash
for use in his church, which included a prison ministry
aimed at radicalizing incarcerated white men through letter writing campaigns
and mailing them white power newsletters. In return, Myles gave
(11:36):
Matthews a letter of introduction to Fraser Glenn Miller. A
few days later, in Annengeer in North Carolina, Matthews knocked
on the front door of Fraser Glenn Miller, the leader
of the White Patriot Party. Robert Miles's letter of introduction
was enough to gain his trust, and he invited Matthews
and his mistress in for dinner. Later that night, Miller
(11:57):
met Matthews again, this time at a hotel. Miller was
suspicious of this generous offer of two hundred thousand dollars
in cash, concerned that Matthews may be an FBI informant
trying to entrap him in some kind of scheme. But
he did take the money, and ironically, it would be
Fraser Glenn Miller who would later turn state's witness, returning
(12:21):
most of the money to the government. He testified against
many of Matthew's associates and entered the witness protection program
as Fraser Glen Cross. But it's hard to stay in
the program if you can't leave the movement. Miller's story
is one better saved for his very own episode because
it ends with him dying of old age on death row.
(12:46):
This cross country road trip also included a night at
a hotel in Arlington, Virginia. It's no surprise that Robert
Matthews would pay a visit to William Luther Pearce. Honestly,
you'll be shocking if he hadn't. Matthews had been a
member of Pierce's National Alliance since nineteen seventy nine. It
was at the nineteen eighty three National Alliance General Convention
(13:08):
that he gave the fiery speech that kicked off the
formation of the Order just a year earlier, and the
Order took its name directly from the plot of Pierce's
novel The Turner Diaries. And on August sixth, nineteen eighty four,
Matthews handed his mentor a paperbag. The amount of cash
(13:28):
inside is usually put at fifty thousand dollars, although that
seems to trace back to a single statement made by
another member of the Order, man named Bruce Pearce, who
is not related Zillah Craig. Matthews's mistress witnessed this handoff,
but she was only able to say that it was
(13:48):
a quote large amount of money, and considering she had
seen Matthew's hand Robert Miles three hundred thousand dollars and
Fraser Glenn Miller two hundred thousand dollar that very same week,
I wonder what she means by a large amount. Tom Martinez,
a member of the Order who would turn informant, says
(14:09):
Matthews never disclosed how much money had given William Luther Pierce.
Like I said, the only figure ever offered is fifty
thousand dollars. I just really struggled to understand why he
would give his personal hero so little. Three weeks after
William Luther Pierce received that paper bag full of cash,
(14:31):
he announced at the nineteen eighty four National Alliance Annual
Convention that the group now had enough money to proceed
with his plan, which was to purchase three hundred and
sixty four acres in Hillsboro, West Virginia, and begin building
his compound. Headline. Speakers at that meeting included Kevin alfred Strom,
who you may remember as the pedophile from the first
(14:53):
episode of this show, and a chiropractor from Florida named
Herbert Poinsett. Penn and Herb were coming back to him,
Pierce paid ninety five thousand dollars, all in cash for
the land in West Virginia just a few weeks later.
Other recipients of generous gifts from the Order's coffers were
(15:15):
men like Michael Stanley Norris, who played a part in
the future Stormfront webmaster Don Black's hair brained scheme to
overthrow the government of a small Caribbean nation. That's a
story I'm really looking forward to telling. Louis Beam, the
man who popularized the concept of leaderless resistance, is said
to have gotten one hundred thousand dollars. Forty thousand went
(15:38):
to Richard Butler and his Aryan Nations, one hundred thousand
went to the Covenant the Sword in the Arm of
the Lord in Arkansas. An unnamed history professor in Columbus,
Ohio received an unknown amount of cash to fund a
White Power band. Dan Gamon, the pastor of a Christian
identity church in Missouri, got fifteen thousand. And there were
(16:01):
rumors that Matthews had left one or maybe two million
dollars with a lawyer in Denver for safekeeping. But nobody
knows who that might have been or how much it was.
But the money I've been working my way around to
is this three hundred thousand dollars gifted to California clansman
(16:23):
Tom Metzker. Tom Metzker is such a central figure in
so many stories of white power in America in the
eighties that I'm troubled by the need to condense his
biography for our purposes here. But he was a rising
star in the Klan in the seventies and organized his
(16:44):
own clan border patrols at the Mexican border in California,
a stunt that was later copied by Louis Beem and
David Duke in Texas. He ran for Congress in California's
forty third congressional district in nineteen eighty, winning the Democratic
primary but losing badly to the incumbent Republican. He was,
(17:04):
of course, disavowed by the entire Democratic establishment in California.
Even Governor Jerry Brown publicly endorsed the Republican in that race.
But guys like Metzger don't run to win. They run
for free access, to unlimited attention. And he got it.
(17:24):
And he ran again in nineteen eighty two, this time
for Senate, and he earned just two percent of the
vote in the primary. Gore Vidal, who I'd honestly forgotten
ever had political aspirations, came in at fifteen percent in
the same primary. Everybody knew Tom Metzker's name. A story
(17:46):
in the North County Times in Oceanside, California around that
same time period about a woman's passion for knitting includes
the line Metzger forty seven, who emphasizes she is not
related to Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger says she
was taught by her mother to knit forty three years ago.
(18:06):
Riding high on this attention, Metzger's movement aspirations evolved. He
left the clan behind and formed his own organization that
he originally called the White American Political Association. He quickly
renamed it White American Resistance and then finally White Aryan Resistance,
(18:26):
often just called war. But the attention was fading. He
was in the news all the time when he was
running for office, but in early nineteen eighty four, the
local paper was clowning on him for his poorly attended crossburnings,
running headlines like KKK gave crossburning. Nobody came about the
(18:47):
December nineteen eighty three cross burning ceremony in la where
Metzger had been arrested alongside Arian Nation's leader Richard Butler
and several members of the Order. The article notes that
while the first issues of his new White Arian Resistance
newspaper had been quote a slick tabloid on quality paper,
(19:08):
recent issues were down to just a single mimeographed sheet.
But his fortunes seemed to have changed just a few
months later. Just weeks after Tom Metzger would have received
that three hundred thousand dollars from the Order, the Daily
Times Advocate in Escondido, California ran a front page story
about Metzger's newest venture. He was going to be on TV.
(19:33):
Of course, Metzger had been on TV before. He loved
being on TV. He had debated IRV Rubin from the
Jewish Defense League on a local program in May. But
on September twenty eighth, nineteen eighty four, Tom Metzger wasn't
just on TV. He was hosting his own show.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Hello, I'm Tom Metzger, host of ra Race and Raisin
is a show dedicated to free speech, a small island
of free speech and a sea of controlled and managed news.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
The first episode of Race and Reason debuted that day
at four thirty five pm. It aired on Public Access
Channel twenty four in Poway, California, but Metzger promised that
he would soon be broadcast on public access channels throughout
the San Diego area. He claimed he already had deals
in the works to get the show on public access
channels in Orange County, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and Austin.
(20:36):
People weren't happy that The Klansman was going to be
on TV, but Metzger told the paper quote, I tell
you I would be a much better fellow to interview
people on television than I wouldn't be on the streets.
It's much easier on the public if you remember Ocean Side.
Ocean Side in this context is a reference to a
(20:56):
March nineteen eighty Clan rally that he led through largely
his Spanic neighborhood of Oceanside, California, just months after the
Greensboro massacre, where members of the American Nazi Party murdered
five communists in North Carolina. The Klansmen chanted, if the
Nazis don't get you, a Klansman will, and just as
(21:18):
they had in Greensboro, the police and Ocean side failed
to intervene as white supremacists violently attacked protesters. No one
was killed at the Ocean Side rally, thankfully, but at
least seven people were injured, including a news cameraman who
was bludgeoned with a large rock and a socialist organizer
named Bruce Kala who was beaten by a group of
(21:38):
klansmen with clubs. Kala had to be hospitalized for a
severe head injury and received two hundred stshes. The line
of riot cops seemed not to move at all until
a Klansman's Doberman lunged at one of them. The officers
shot and killed the dog. The article about the show's
(22:11):
debut quotes the public access manager for the cable company
saying we don't establish the guidelines. The city does. A
representative from another cable company said they hadn't been approached
yet by Metzger, but if asked, they probably would air
the program, saying if we say no to the clan,
then pretty soon we're saying no to another group. And
(22:34):
maybe they did have to air it. In nineteen eighty four,
the Cable Communications Act, written by Barry Goldwater, was passed.
Among other things, the bill barred cable operators from exercising
editorial control over the content aired on public access channels,
and it absolved the cable company of any liability for
(22:55):
the content aired on those non commercial, public, educational, and
government access chains as long as the show wasn't criminal
and it didn't violate basic standards of what's allowed on television.
The cable company was prohibited by law from refusing to
air the show just because it was racist. I feel
(23:15):
like there were episodes that a determined lawyer could have
fought to keep off the air as defamatory or incitement
to violence or something. But what incentive was there for
them to try. If they lost a fight like that,
they'd have to pay the racist for his trouble. But
(23:35):
if they aired it, no matter how bad it was,
they were completely shielded from liability. In articles about the
resulting public outcry, cable executives said, our hands are tied.
The director of Community Programming said when people called her
office to complain about Metzger's show, all she could do
(23:56):
was tell them that they would have to complain to
Metzker personally, and within months he made good on his promise.
Race and Reason was on public access channels and a
growing number of cities. In many communities, the public access
television program requires that local public access programming actually be local,
(24:18):
so he couldn't just mail these tapes to studios across
the country and expect them to air. To get around
this requirement, Metzger sold tapes of Race and Reason on
the back cover of every issue of his White aryan
resistance newsletter. Subscribers around the country could mail Metzger a
check for thirty five dollars and receive a VHS copy
(24:39):
of the show in the mail. By nineteen eighty nine,
he'd sweetened the deal. Any four episodes of Race and
Reason could be bundled together for just thirty nine ninety
five And that's in nineteen eighty nine dollars. Like that's
that's a wild amount of money to pay for a
thirty minute tape of some guy saying slurs. But once
(24:59):
you you had the tape, you could sponsor the show
on your own local public access channel. With this piecemeal
distribution system, it's hard to nail down how many episodes
ever existed and what order they aired in The episodes
that aired in any given city depended on which PHS
(25:20):
tapes your local racist bought out of a Nazi catalog
and even in his own home market. A TV guide
printed in November nineteen eighty five notes Metzker's program under
the public access offerings, but it's listed as quote airs infrequently.
A nineteen eighty six article in the Korvalis Gazette Times
(25:41):
says a local resident had been hand delivering a new
cassette to the station three times per week. The station
declined to publicly name the program sponsor, but it came
out anyway. Richard Masker had recently settled a lawsuit against
the city of Corvalis regarding his termination from the water
treatment plant nineteen eighty three. He felt that he'd been
(26:03):
discriminated against. They felt it was not appropriate for him
to have mailed Jewish residents of Cravallis cards on Hitler's
birthday that read, may his memory refresh your soul and
give you inspiration. Hyle Hitler. Articles about his firing make
a passing mention of the fact that the police closed
(26:24):
down the entire water treatment plant for several days after
he was let go, but they don't offer any explanation
for that. Masker pops up in some strange places later
on in his life, But this isn't a story about
guys who keep getting fired from water treatment plants. So
suffice it to say he did what many Nazis do
and move to Idaho. The first few episodes of Race
(26:48):
and Reason were filmed in Metzger's home, but as the
show evolved, the production quality began to improve. In nineteen
eighty six, he was using the public Access TV studio
at California State University. A student who worked in the
studio said he was so offended by the content that
he walked off the job. Students protest at Metzger's presence
on campus, but university president Jewel Plummer Cobb said, quote,
(27:13):
we should not stop it, regardless of how I may
feel about the content. The strength of America as the
first Amendment. The protests eventually forced Metzger off campus and
into a private studio. On the heels of the student
protests in California, officials in Spokane, Washington initially declined to
run an episode of Race and Reason featuring Ben Clausen,
(27:36):
the founder of the Nazi religion the Church of the Creator,
and the man who invented the term rahoa, a popular
shortened form of the phrase racial holy War. In July
of nineteen eighty seven, there were protests outside the Viacom
offices in Dublin, California, after a station agreed to run
tapes of Race and Reason that had been hand delivered
(27:57):
by a clansman named Clinton SIPs. A week later, Sipes
was arrested for handing out clan literature while wearing his
clan robes because the conditions of his parole for a
clan related armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon
prevented him from associating with the clan. Sipes later renounced
(28:17):
his views, founded a nonprofit to help young people leave
hate groups, and converted to Islam. By the end of
nineteen eighty seven, Metzger had been producing Race and Reason
for three years. It was airing intermittently around the country
in as many as fifty different cities. One particularly controversial
(28:37):
episode that year featured J. B. Stoner. Stoner was no
stranger to controversy. The FCC had to intervene to force
television stations to air his campaign ads when he ran
for Senate in nineteen seventy two. He's one of the
most unapologetically vicious racists you'll find in twentieth century politics,
(29:00):
and he ran for office repeatedly making public pronouncements like
being Jewish should be punishable by death, and black people
are more closely related to apes than humans. He was
so publicly vitriolic that even his fellow Nazis thought he
might be a government plant to make them all look bad.
(29:20):
But he was just like that, and he's stayed like
that until he died. In one of his last public
statements before the stroke that killed him, he said, a
person isn't supposed to apologize for being right. He was
convicted in nineteen eighty for a nineteen fifty eight bombing
of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He was
(29:42):
never prosecuted for at least a dozen other bombings of
synagogues and black churches he'd carried out in the fifties,
and he ended up serving just three years in prison.
His appearance on Metzger's show was filmed not long after
his release and was apparently just thirty minutes of the
most unhinged ranting about AIDS that you can imagine, because
(30:08):
by nineteen eighty seven, Stoner was leading a group that
he called the crusade against corruption. He said that white
people should celebrate AIDS because it had been sent to
rescue the white race from black people, Jews, and homosexuals,
although he typically used words, I won't say that nineteen
(30:29):
eighty seven episode with JB. Stoner on Metzger's show is gone.
As far as I can tell, I did find maybe
twenty or thirty episodes floating around in the ether, but
this isn't one of them, and that's probably for the best,
based on reporting about the battle over airing it in Idaho,
though I can match portions of what was said in
(30:52):
the episode to his speech that Stoner gave at the
Arian Nation's compound around the same time. Now, I love
a primary source. I go to great lengths to locate
archival footage, and I think it really adds some texture
to the show for you to hear some of these
men in their own words sometimes. But this, this is
(31:16):
not something I can play. I couldn't find a single
ten second stretch without a word that I'm not going
to be responsible for broadcasting. That old man was using
slurs at a truly unprecedented rate. One of the only
full phrases without a slur in It sums up what
(31:38):
you need to know.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
I think that Age is the greatest miracle that we've.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Had him about.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
Nineteen hundred years.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
And this episode proved a bridge too far for the
cable provider in pocatelle Hoe. They'd been airing Race and
Reason on local public access for a year, already sponsored
by Aryan Nations member Stan Sorenson. It was a sensitive
time in a place that has long been a hotbed
of white supremacist activity. Richard Butler's Arian Nations compound was
(32:17):
in nearby Hayden Lake. In nineteen eighty six, the home
of Bill Wasmuth, a Catholic priest and the chairman of
the Kote and Eye County Task Force on Human Rights,
had been firebombed in response to his outspoken opposition to
racism and antisemitism. The TV station didn't want to rock
the boat. Honestly, they probably didn't want to die. But
(32:41):
this thirty minute frenzied rant from an elderly lunatic who
believed that Aids had been sent by God to kill
black people and to remind Aryan men that race mixing
is punishable by death. It was just too much. It
was too much. They didn't want to put this on TV,
so the television's conferred with their lawyers, and after a
(33:03):
lot of consideration, the lawyers said it's a close call,
but nothing in the episode breaks the law. At the
next meeting of the Pocatello City Council, some residents felt
the city should just cut all funding to Public Access
TV if that was the only way they could keep
Race and Reason off the air. They couldn't say no
(33:24):
to just one show, but they could end the Public
Access TV program entirely for everyone. Members of Pocatello's Human
Rights Advisory Council said they should call the racist bluff,
don't err it, let them sue, and the debate raged
in Pocatello. The show's producer, an enigmatic figure named Alexander Fox,
(33:49):
spent days meeting with the Pocatello City Attorney, and ultimately
he agreed to back down. He wasn't willing to fight
for it. He withdrew the tape. Paper articles around this
time refer to Alexander Fox as an attorney and the
show's producer, but I'm not one hundred percent sure he exists.
(34:13):
Most of the episodes of the show I was able
to find show a message at the end that Alexander
Fox with an E on the end holds the copyright
for the show. That doesn't always mean much. People love
to just put that symbol on things, but I figured
I'll check. And the only entry in the US Copyright
Office records for an Alexander Fox with an E on
(34:34):
the end is a nineteen eighty one application to copyright
a cassette tape called sex Files, and that's phyl Ees
sex Files. Alexander Fox is listed as a pseudonym for
David C. Wiley, which coincidentally happens to be the name
(34:57):
of the California man who often co hosted the show
with Metzger. Wiley was the applicant on the paperwork when
War applied for a permit to hold meetings in the
public park in Placentia, California, in nineteen eighty six, and
his name turns up in the documents that were recovered
by San Francisco police in nineteen ninety three when they
investigated the ADL for spying on thousands of people. Mixed
(35:21):
in with dossier's on Arab Americans and anti apartheid activists,
the ADL had also been keeping tabs on the Klan.
The police inventory of documents were covered in the search
lists Wiley's name on a page that includes items related
to the ADL's monitoring of California skinhead groups. So I
(35:41):
wonder if Alexander Fox, attorney for Tom Metzger, didn't have
the stomach for a legal fight over a segregationist's love
letter to AIDS because he wasn't a lawyer at all.
But I guess we'll never know. David Wiley dyed in
two thousand and seven. Pocatello called Metzger's bluff and they won.
(36:07):
But one of the options they considered was one that
some cities chose. You can't say no to a Nazi,
so you cancel it for everybody, And in nineteen eighty eight,
Kansas City, Missouri, did just that. They ended their entire
public access television program rather than air Metzger's show. A
(36:28):
group of klansmen had showed up at this studio with
a tape of Race and Reason in hand, and they
were told that, oh, sorry, the rules are that you
have to actually produce your own show here. You can't
show the tape. But apparently there was no such rule
on the books, and the city wasn't allowed to invent
new rules to enact a content based restriction on the show. So,
(36:51):
faced with the possibility of becoming known as Klansas City,
something that appeared in almost all of the articles about this,
UNSEL voted to eliminate public Access TV altogether. But this
time the bluff cock called it wasn't the possibly fictional
Alexander Fox who stepped in to represent the Missouri Knights
(37:14):
of the Ku Klux Klan. Although local clansman Dennis Mayhon
did tell the newspaper that he was getting legal advice
from Fox. No, Mayhon's legal representation in this case came
from the ACLU, and after a federal judge denied the
city's motion to dismiss the suit, they ended up settling
out of court and voted to restore the public access channel.
(37:38):
So in the end, after a year of push and pull,
the Klan was on TV and the city had to
pay one hundred thousand dollars. I'm not sure if Dennis
Mayhon ever did try his hand at making his own
public access show, but he is currently serving a forty
year sentence in federal prison for mailing a bomb to
(37:59):
the Scottsville office of Diversity and Dialogue in two thousand
and four. It's not at all relevant here to tell
you that he ended up in prison because the FBI
sent an informant to seduce him into confessing, or that
among the feminine wiles she employed to woo him into
her confidence was a risque photo of herself in a
(38:20):
white bikini top with a hand grenade nestled between her breasts.
You didn't need to know that, but I know it,
and now you do too. People protested in Cincinnati, Chicago,
(38:49):
Corpus Christi, Pocatello, Fullerton, and in cities across the country,
But for an entire decade, Tom Metzger's Race and Reason
aired on public access television. Not even the lawsuit that
all but destroyed White Area and Resistance could stop production
of Race and Reason. In nineteen ninety, a Portland jury
(39:09):
agreed that Metzger was liable for inciting war members to
commit acts of violence against minorities, specifically in the death
of Mulagettas Arrah, an Ethiopian college student murdered by war
members in nineteen eighty eight. Metzger lost his house, but
he kept making the show, if only intermittently. In nineteen
ninety three, Metzger interviewed James Mason about the recent release
(39:32):
of his book Siege, the book that remains to this
day the white terrorist's handbook.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
And at this point you've moved away from the mass strategy,
totally concentrating on the revolutionary struggle.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
What few potential revolutionaries we had left out of the
old movement were my targets for this propaganda that I
included in the original Sea Monthly publication.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
But Tom Metzger wasn't the only racist who understood the
power of this tool he'd figured out how to use.
Dozens of his followers dutifully ordered copies of VHS tapes
to broadcast Metzger's Race and Reason on their own local channels,
But some supporters took it a step further. They didn't
just copy the tapes, they copied the model and made
(40:26):
their own shows. Looking back for a moment to Pocatello.
The first episode of Race and Reason that aired in Pocatella, Idaho,
a year before the controversy with JB. Stoner and his
enthusiasm for racial cleansing through HIV took me by surprise.
It's the only episode of Metzger's original run of the
(40:47):
show that didn't feature Metzger at all. The guest host
in the episode that aired in Pocatello, Idaho in nineteen
eighty six was Roy Frankhauser. Roy Frankause, the Klansman from Pennsylvania,
the same Roy Frankhauser that formed a clan splinter group
in western Pennsylvania in the early nineties and found himself
(41:08):
at odds with Keystone Knights Grand Dragon Barry Black. That
Roy Frankauser. If you missed the episodes I did in
October about Barry Black, this means nothing to you, but
I was surprised to see Roy again. What a small world.
On Race and Reason. Frankhauser was interviewing Richard Barrett, a
(41:29):
Mississippi attorney who led a white supremacist group called the
Nationalist Movement. Frankauser would go on to host his own
shows on Public Access TV in Pennsylvania, one called White
Forum and one called Roy Frankhauser Presents Race and Reason,
though it's unclear from the newspaper articles if that was
actually an original show hosted by frank Hauser or if
(41:52):
he just sort of popped his name onto the Metzger
reruns that he was sponsoring. I couldn't find any episodes.
I guess if you have episodes of racist public access
TV from reading Pennsylvania in the early nineties, I do
want to see them, Please email them to me. And
(42:13):
that Mississippi attorney that he was interviewing on that episode
also went on to host his own show called Airlink,
which was broadcast in as many as sixty cities at
its height in the nineties. Richard Barrett unsuccessfully sued the
city of Houston in nineteen ninety nine over their policy
of charging one hundred dollars per hour for public access
broadcasts that were produced outside the Houston area. Barrett was
(42:38):
murdered in twenty ten by his neighbor, a young black man,
who claimed Barrett dropped his pants and demanded a sex
act from him. I'm not a huge fan of what
sounds a little bit like a gay panic defense. I'll
love that. Not weighing in on the killer's motivations here,
but it may have happened. Barrett had long been rumored
(42:59):
to be gay, and after his death, fellow Nazi Don
Black said Barrett was quote an obvious old queen. Ask
anyone who ever met him and former National Alliance member
and longtime David Duke Lackey Ron Doggett had a similar
public access program in Richmond, Virginia, all through the nineties.
(43:21):
His was called Race and Reality, but it was indistinguishable
from Metzger's Race and Reason. In the mid eighties, doctor
Herbert Poinsett was one of many of Metzger's fans around
the country who was dutifully taking VHS tapes of Metzger's
show to his local TV station each week. But by
(43:42):
nineteen eighty eight he'd made several guest appearances on the show,
and within a year he'd produced more than forty episodes
of his own weekly show, also called Race and Reason,
broadcast on public Access TV in Tampa. When his name
first appeared in the paper as the local crank broadcasting
Metzker's show in Atlanta, he told the Atlanta Constitution that
(44:05):
he had quote no clan ties whatsoever, And I guess
that's probably true. It's probably technically true. I can't find
any evidence that Herbert Pointsett was ever in the Ku
Klux Klan, but he was absolutely a Nazi. There's really
no doubt about that. His name appears in passing In
(44:28):
some of the personal writings of Ben Klassen, the founder
of the Church of the Creator, he seems to have
been a personal friend of Classen's in the early eighties
before he moved his Nazi church from Florida up to
North Carolina. And remember, maybe half an hour ago or so,
when I told you to put a pin in herb.
He was the headline speaker at the nineteen eighty four
(44:50):
annual convention for William Luther Pierce's National Alliance. There's a
lovely photo in an issue of the National Alliance bulletin
that shows Pointset next to an ecstatic looking Kevin Alfred Strom.
I mean, Strome is just beaming. He's holding up a
copy of The Best of Attack. It was a compilation
(45:11):
of the National Alliance newspaper from the seventies that Strome
had just finished editing. But even if I didn't have
this photo of Herbert Poinsett looking a little uncomfortable sitting
next to Kevin Strome, I'd still know beyond a shadow
of doubt that he was a National Alliance member of
some importance, someone that William Luther Pierce placed a great
(45:32):
deal of trust in that photo of Poinset. In Strome
was taken some time over Labor Day weekend in nineteen
eighty four. William Luther Pierce had received that paper bag
full of cash from Robert Matthews just a few weeks earlier,
and it was at this meeting in Arlington that Pierce
announced to his followers that he finally had enough money
(45:53):
to purchase that three hundred and sixty four acre plot
in Hillsboro, West Virginia. In October. He paid ninety five
one thousand dollars, all in cash for the property. Pierce
maintained until his death that he had not received any
of the proceeds from the Order's robberies, but his own
son notes in his memoir that there isn't really any
other explanation for his sudden ability to afford the land.
(46:17):
But William Luther Pierce made another big purchase in the
mid eighties. For a man who kept his guns buried
underground so the government wouldn't know he had them, a
stock portfolio wasn't really his style, even if he had
money to invest, which by all accounts, he did not.
Investing in the system that he spent his life railing
(46:40):
against really doesn't seem like him. But in nineteen eighty six,
he purchased one hundred shares of stock in AT and T,
and that would have cost him over ten thousand dollars.
In April of nineteen eighty eight, William Luther Pierce sent
Herbert Poinset to represent his Neo Nazi organization at the
(47:02):
annual AT and T shareholders meeting. As a shareholder, National
Alliance could submit a proposal to be considered by all
the other shareholders at the meeting. It used to be
that anyone owning even a single share of a company
stock could submit a proposal like this, but the rules
changed in the eighties, and that probably explains the size
(47:23):
of Pearce's purchase and the fact that he sat on
it for two years. You have to own a certain
amount of stock and for a certain amount of time
before you're allowed to submit proposals. So they made the
buy and they sat on their investment until the time came.
The nineteen eighty eight shareholders meeting was on April twentieth,
(47:44):
Hitler's birthday. That had to be a good omen because
they were going to make AT and T end its
affirmative Action program. When National Alliance submitted their proposal, ahead
of the April twentieth, nineteen eighty eight shareholders meeting, AT
and T sought to have it excluded, but two weeks
ahead of the meeting, the Securities and Exchange Commission denied
(48:06):
the request. The Nazi proposal was going in the proxy statement.
I can only find AT and T annual proxy statements
going back thirty years in the SEC's online database, so
unfortunately I don't have the original document that was presented
to the shareholders what. According to reporting at the time,
every AT and T shareholder was presented with a statement
(48:29):
that argued that black workers were intellectually inferior and that
hiring minorities had a negative impact on white workers. Chairman
of the board Robert Allen denounced the proposal during the meeting, saying,
as a shareholder of a sufficient number of AT and
T shares, this organization has a right to offer a
share owner proposal, but we find the intent and wording
(48:52):
of this proposal highly objectionable. Especially objectionable is the argument
that some of our employees, because of their race, are
less qualified than other. This proposal is completely contrary to
the policies, the culture, and the character of AT and T.
It is in the proxy only because we could not
convince the Securities and Exchange Commission to allow us to
drop it. Okay, nice words, Robert Allen, but he followed
(49:18):
that up by also encouraging shareholders to vote against a
competing proposal brought by a black AT and T executive
named Alex Tillman, who was asking AT and T to
expand the company's commitment to promoting more women in minorities.
Both proposals failed. AT and T shareholders were ninety one
percent against ending affirmative action and ninety four percent against
(49:41):
expanding it. After the meeting, Pointsett told reporters, we lost
one battle, but the war has just started. We want
to get the vast majority of white people in this
country to wake up to see that they are being
displaced by people who shouldn't be taken over their jobs.
Both Tillman and National Alliance submitted their proposals again at
the nineteen eighty nine shareholders meeting. This time, the Nazis
(50:05):
got just eight point one percent support, down from eight
point six the year before, and Tilman's proposal for more
diversity garnered support from just four percent of shareholders, down
from six the year before. With so little support. Tilman
was not allowed to submit the proposal again in nineteen ninety,
(50:26):
but National Alliance did. National Alliance submitted the proposal for
a third time in nineteen ninety, this time getting eight
point eight percent of shareholders to agree that the company
should end its affirmative action program. So the third time
they tried it, they got the most votes in favor.
I mean, it's still not a high number, but the
(50:47):
number was going up if they tried it a fourth time.
Though I couldn't find it. Herbert Pointsett kept broadcasting Race
and Reason from Tampa through the mid nineties. I can
only find a handful of episodes. I think he ended
up producing more episodes of the show than Metzger ever did,
(51:08):
but he wasn't as famous, so very few of them
have survived. Most of the ones that can still be
found show point Set wearing a suit, talking straight into
the camera, and sitting in front of a wall covered
by two flags side by side, Confederate flag and a
Nazi flag. Daniel Ruth, a journalist who appears to still
(51:32):
be writing for the Tampa Bay Times, routinely tore into
point Set and his column in the nineties. One column
in nineteen ninety three bears the headline third Rate Third
Reich Cable Show. Another column waxes poetic about the quote
delusional ramblings of local Nazi chiropractor and cable access carbuncle
(51:52):
Herb point Set. Herbert Pointset disappears from the record by
the late nineties, and he died in two thousand and three.
He spent the last two decades of his life trying
to get famous for being racist. But I'd never heard
of him at all until I started poking around William
Muther Pierce's finances, which is where I started. All of
(52:14):
this was just an accident because I got distracted wondering
about where all that money went. I really did start
off trying to write about the bank robberies and the murders.
But looking back now, I think the money spent on
years of loud public propaganda had a far greater and
longer lasting impact than ten times the amount of money
(52:36):
spent on guns, because the government would end up taking
most of the guns purchased with the stolen money. But
propagandists like Tom Metzger kept Robert Matthews's dream alive, telling
a generation of racists that it was time for War.
(53:00):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
(53:22):
I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will
not answer it. It's nothing personal. I don't answer any
of my emails. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.