April 24, 2025 • 43 mins
Molly answers questions submitted by listeners.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello listeners, Molly Conger here, I've got
something a little different for you this week, something a
little lighter. I will finally wrap up the South Africa
story arc next week, and that story will end the
(00:25):
way it began, with the President of the United States
peddling conspiracy theories about why genocide. But I'm going to
level with you, I just wasn't in the mood this
week to cut clips from audio of Jordan Peterson interviewing
a guy trying to sell real estate in a planned
Ethno state. That shit sucks, And I still haven't made
(00:45):
the seating chart for my wedding next week. I mentioned,
probably a month ago at this point now that I
was thinking about doing a listener Q and a episode
sometime soon, and then I promptly got lost down an
infinite series of bottomless side quests. I'm still lost down there,
but my attention has been pretty divided lately, and I
(01:06):
felt like this was the right week to try and
answer some of your questions. I combed through the questions
you all submitted on the Weird Little Guys subreddit, and
they seem to fall into a few main categories. There
are questions about me questions about my research and writing methodology,
about how the show gets made, and questions about the
(01:29):
lives of the Weird Little Guys. And I can answer
some of those for sure, but by far the most
common questions, both from you all on the subreddit and
from the groups of university students I've had the opportunity
to speak with in the last few months, are ones
I don't really have good answers for. They aren't questions
(01:50):
of fact. The answers aren't in a newspaper archive, they
aren't something I can dig up in the court records.
They're questions of the soul. I've been invited to speak
to students at the University of Richmond and the University
of Virginia a few times this semester, and every time,
regardless of what the subject of the class or of
(02:11):
the event is, no matter what I have prepared or
how the professor prompts the group, people always ask me
one question, in particular, Can people change? Can you bring
someone back once they've become the kind of guy who
might end up on an episode of Weird Little Guys.
(02:33):
The short answer is yes, Yes, of course they can.
There's always always hope. I believe that because I have to.
If I didn't, I don't think I could do this.
Maybe I shouldn't have started this with the hardest question,
(02:55):
especially if.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
I'm not even going to answer it.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
But I wanted to address it because I know it's
one A lot of you have asked yourselves as you
listen to the show, And like I said, I don't
have the answer, not really. I'm not a philosopher or
an ethicist or a theologian, not a psychologist or a sociologist,
and I don't have any direct experience in deradicalization, the
(03:20):
work of engaging with people who want to leave the
movement and supporting them in that process. But I think
the lack of a definitive answer to this question is
ultimately a good thing. If the question remains open, you
have to constantly revisit it, reassess it. I spend so
much of my time wading through the evidence that evil exists.
(03:44):
I should constantly re evaluate what I think that means.
And I've seen a lot of monstrous things. I've watched
live streamed mass murders and red manifestos. I've sat in
little courtrooms just feet away from men with massive stockpiles
of weapons who were planning mass casualty events and assassinations.
(04:06):
I've watched men who proudly call themselves Nazis, men who
worship Hitler laugh in the faces of their own victims,
fed a casual chat in a public park with a
member of rape Waffen. So maybe you don't expect me
to say this, but I absolutely still believe that every
(04:26):
single one of them is still human. They're still reachable.
There is still the possibility, however remote, that they could
wake up one day and realize they were wrong, that
they took a wrong turn and wound up down a
dead end following an ideology that hurts everyone, including themselves.
(04:48):
The catches they have to want to, and they rarely do.
Redemption isn't something that just happens to a guy. It's
something that's hard fought for and not always one and
if they're doing it right, you'll probably never know about it.
There are real life stories of people in the movement
(05:10):
who made one black friend or one Jewish friend, one
gay friend, whatever, and then realize that those kinds of
people are human and that led them to question and
then renounce their beliefs.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
It happens, but.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
That's a lot to ask of marginalized people. I'm not
telling you to go out there and love a Nazi
until he.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Loves you back.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
It doesn't usually work, and it doesn't sound like a
fulfilling way to spend your time. And there are some
splashy news stories every now and again about a former
neo Nazi on a redemption arc, but the real work
of making amends is quiet and boring and perhaps quite rare.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
I think, in.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Most cases, the best we can hope for it as
a half asked version. Guys who quit the movement and
just stop hurting other people. They don't really interrogate their
own past actions. They don't try to undo the harm
they did. They don't apologize, They just stop actively becoming worse.
(06:18):
And that's much more common. I think that happens all
the time. But there's no news story when a guy
gets bored of posting race war memes and drops out
of the terrorism planning chat. And I want to be clear,
I'm not talking about absolution.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
I don't mean that.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I believe every mass shooter has within him the possibility
of becoming the kind of guy you'd enjoy hanging out
with or trust with your children. It doesn't mean anyone
has to forgive him. I don't mean that their crimes
should go unpunished if they take back all the stuff
they said about Hitler, but I think we have to
leave the door open. The question one of you posted
(06:56):
on the subreddit reads, do you think there is a
point of no why turn for a person when former
friends and family have to give up trying to bring
a person back on the right track? And if so,
what defines that point? And this is a question you
have to answer for yourselves individually.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I don't think there.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Exists a specific, definitive goalpost here, a point of no return.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
But if there is someone.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Like this in your life, this question is yours to answer,
because there may come a point where you don't feel
safe continuing to engage with a friend or a loved
one who has turned towards extremism, And that's valid, But
I don't think that means that person is lost forever.
This is an opinion of mine that makes people pretty
(07:43):
mad sometimes, and that's okay. I won't tell you what
should be in your heart. I will never ask you
to forgive any of these men. Hell I don't, but
I do try to approach my work with hard eyes
and a soft heart. And what I mean by that
(08:04):
is I want to look clearly at the harm a
man has done, but hope for the day that he
sees that harm too. And with that out of the way,
let's get to some questions.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
I do have answers for.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
One of you asked, do you ever find information about
how the families of weird little guys feel about or
react to their actions? Do more of these guys get
cut off or willingly cut off ties with their relatives?
Or is it more of a family affair, like driving
your uncle to the insurrection? And this is a question
with a lot of answers. It sort of reminds me
(08:41):
of the opening line of Anna Karenna. Right, all happy
families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way, and every Nazis family deals with the problem.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
In their own way.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
But there are some broad categories here. You've got movement families,
families where the weird little guy was raised in an
environment where his beliefs were normal and encouraged. There are
families in denial where the parents don't believe it's that serious,
they don't want to acknowledge it, or they claim to
have had no idea what was going on. And then
(09:16):
there are the families that do cut ties or make
public disavowals of their relatives beliefs and actions. For listeners
who may have missed the episode, the question asker is
referring to their driving your uncle to the insurrection is
a reference to Matthew and Dale Huddle, the subjects of
the episode A short lived pardon from back in February.
(09:37):
Matthew Huddle was the recently pardoned January sixth defendant who
was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop
earlier this year. He wasn't really a true believer in anything,
but he went to the US capital on January sixth,
twenty twenty one with his uncle Dale, and Dale Huddle
was a man who had some pretty strong beliefs about
the government.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
His case is a bit of.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
An outlier within that first category, though, because I wouldn't
call the Huddles a movement family. Matthew just sort of
went along for the ride. But movement families are a
very real thing. There are plenty of people who didn't
need four Chan or telegram to get radicalized because it's
just how they were raised. I'm sure plenty of parents
(10:23):
were surprised when they saw photos of their sons on
the news after the Unite the Right rally, but not
all of them. Jacob Goodwin, one of the men convicted
for the brutal beating of a counter protester, got a
ride to the rally from his mother. After his arrest,
she went on a Nazi podcast to talk about his case,
and she said that during her last visit with him
(10:46):
in prison, she told him, quote, don't you ever tell
Mama you're sorry for being a good, honorable man. A
lot of the movement families I can think of off
the top of my head are ones that deserve their
own episodes. I know at least one listener on the
subreddit is absolutely dying for me to finally do an
(11:06):
episode about the Arkansas based neo Nazi Billy Roper. He
was raised in a clan family and now he's trying
to start a white separatist community for other movement families.
And there are families like the Bellogs. Alan Bellog was
a member of the American Nazi Party in the seventies,
and he joined National Alliance in its very earliest days.
(11:28):
He worked for David Duke's campaign in nineteen eighty eight,
and he was the Pennsylvania unit leader for National Alliance
in the eighties. National Alliance founder William Luther Pearce told
his biographer quote Bellog would do things like staple Alliance
blackards to telephone polls, and he would punch out anybody
who gave him a bad time while he was doing it.
Sometimes this would result in legal difficulties, and one time,
(11:50):
when Bellog got fined five hundred dollars, I took up
a collection at one of our national conventions to pay
us fine. Alan Bellog's son, Warren was raised in the moment.
The father and son duo were in recent years founding
members of the now defunct neo Nazi group the National
Justice Party. When National Justice Party collapsed in twenty twenty three,
(12:12):
the current leader of National Alliance, Will Williams, wrote, Alan
Bellog had been a dedicated Alliance member for years and
as a good man, I met him and his son,
Warren when Warren was twelve years old. The Alliance will
leave the door cracked for good men like the Belllogs
to rejoin. The Belllogs attended the twenty seventeen Unite the
(12:32):
right rally here in Charlottesville together, but only Warren signed
his name to a federal lawsuit against the city for
failing to proactively facilitate the Nazi rally. His case was
dismissed by the Western District of Virginia, and that decision
was upheld by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals last year.
It's a very silly little lawsuit with no legal merit,
(12:55):
so I don't expect his recent petition to have it
heard by the Supreme Court. We'll go anywhere, but the
complaint itself is so laughable that maybe I'll do a
minisode on it. I think most families fall into the
second category, the ones who neither share nor denounce the
views of their family member. They either didn't know, didn't understand,
(13:18):
didn't think it was serious, didn't think he meant it,
or they just didn't want to see it. Some of
them are embarrassed by it, but others are indignant. They
don't understand why everyone is making such a big deal
out of this thing that they'd convince themselves was just
a harmless quirk of their otherwise very wonderful son.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
I see this most often in the.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Letters that mothers write to the judge after their son
is convicted of something horrible, but before he's sentenced. A
lot of these letters avoid this subject altogether, and they're
just sort of a list of his positive qualities. He's
a boy scout, he had a black best friend in
middle school. He moses grandmother's lawn, he's a good boy.
(14:01):
I can think of two cases actually where a defendant's
parent told the court that their son isn't actually a Nazi,
it's just that he's autistic and this is his special interest.
It's such a profoundly weird thing to say, and it's
wild that I've seen it twice. For the record, I
(14:23):
do know some people whose special interest is Nazi stuff,
but they aren't out there being Nazis. They're some of
the best anti fascist researchers. I think the most satisfying
part of this answer for the listener is going to
be the third category, families who publicly disavow their Nazi relative.
(14:45):
I'm sure there are plenty of families who disown a relative,
but a lot of that happens quietly. It's ugly business,
and most people don't air this kind of dirty laundry.
One of these stories made national news. Back in twenty seventeen,
on the Monday morning after the deadly Nazi rally here
in Charlottesville, a newspaper in Fargo, North Dakota published an
(15:07):
open letter from a father. The letter begins, my name
is Pierce Teft, and I am writing to all with
regards to my youngest son, Peter Teft, an avowed white nationalist.
He doesn't mince words, writing, I, along with all of
his siblings and his entire family, wish to loudly repudiate
(15:28):
my son's vile, hateful and racist rhetoric in actions. We
do not know specifically where he learned these beliefs. He
did not learn them at home. It's a pretty striking letter.
Like I said, most families stay quiet about this sort
of thing, but Teff's father felt it was his responsibility
to denounce his son, writing we have been silent up
(15:53):
until now, but we see now this was a mistake.
It was the silence of good people that allowed the
Nazis to flourish the first time around, and it is
the silence of good people that is allowing them to
flourish now. Peter Teft, my son is not welcome at
our family gatherings.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Any longer.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I pray my prodigal son will renounce his hateful beliefs
and return home then and only then, while I lay
out the feast. His hateful opinions are bringing hateful rhetoric
to his siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews, as well as
his parents. Why must we be guilty by association? Again,
none of his beliefs were learned at home. We do not,
never have, and never will accept his twisted worldview. He
(16:35):
once joked, the thing about us fascists is it's not
that we don't believe in freedom of speech. You can
say whatever you want. We'll just throw you in an oven, Peter,
you will have to shovel our bodies into.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
The oven too.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Please, Son, renounce the hate, accept in love all. And
that's kind of what I was getting at earlier about
leaving the door open. His family isn't saying they hate him,
just that they can't love him while he's busy hating
everyone else.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
The door is open. It's his choice. As C. S.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Lewis said, the doors of hell are locked from the inside.
And in the years since his father wrote that letter,
Peter Teft has continued to choose white nationalism over his family.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Most of the white.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Supremacists I can think of whose families have publicly spoken
out against them are movement leaders. That's obviously because there
just aren't news stories about random racists getting disowned. It's
only in the news if the Nazi is newsworthy, and
most families wouldn't make a public announcement about it unless
the situation was already public against their will. So the
(18:01):
examples that come most readily to mind are people like
Don Black, William Luther Peers, and Jared Taylor. I will
at some point have to do some episodes about Don Black,
the klansman who founded the neo Nazi forum Stormfront. That's
going to be a whole ordeal. It's a very long story.
(18:21):
But when it comes to public disavowals of a racist parent,
it's hard to beat the story of Adrianne Black. Her
recent book, The Klansman's Son is a fascinating read, and
I'll have to save the details for another day. But
she was as raised in the movement as it is
possible to be. Don Black was a movement leader, and
(18:43):
he was raising his son to be his successor. As
a child, Adrianne Black learned to code so she could
run the children's section of her father's Nazi website. She
attended conferences and rallies, and co hosted a Nazi radio
show with her father. She was a true believer until
she wasn't. She went away to college and met people
(19:05):
out in the real world that led her to question
the beliefs she'd been raised with, and then she publicly
denounced those beliefs in twenty thirteen in an open letter
published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. If you're looking
for her book, The Klansman's Son, it's published under her
former name R.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Derrick Black.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
The book was her public coming out as a transwoman.
William Luther Pierce, the founder of National Alliance and the
author of the Turner Diaries, had twin sons. One of
them is very private, but one of them, Kelvin Pierce,
published a memoir in twenty twenty called Sins of My Father,
and it is very much a personal memoir. It's about
(19:48):
his childhood and his recollection and the way he perceived
his father as a child. But it is a very
clear picture a terrible man. Interesting that both Kelvin Pierce
and Adrianne Black pivoted from private reflection on their fathers
to loud public denunciation at around the same time. They
(20:13):
both point to the Unite the Right rally in twenty
seventeen and the election of Donald Trump in twenty sixteen
as turning points. Helen Pierce wrote in his book quote
the swastikas and flaming torches brought back so many memories,
such visceral feelings that I knew I had to speak
out about the racism still so deeply rooted in our society.
(20:37):
In a New York Times opinion piece published right after
the twenty sixteen election, Adrian Black wrote that after hearing
Trump's campaign launch speech, in which he called Mexican immigrants
rapists quote, I spent the rest of the election wondering
how much my movement had set the stage for his.
Now I see the anger I was raised with rocking
(20:58):
the nation. And then there's Jared Taylor. I've mentioned him
a handful of times in passing. He's the white supremacist
writer behind American Renaissance. His father's disavowal of his son's
beliefs was less public than entire memoirs written by Kelvin
Pears from Adrian Black, but it's worth mentioning. Jared Taylor's
(21:23):
parents were Presbyterian missionaries. His mother's described in an old
newspaper article as a diehard liberal. His father, Reverend Archibald Taylor,
told a newspaper in nineteen ninety six that he could
no longer discuss politics with his son, and the reverend
attempted to set up meetings between his son and black
civil rights leaders like Reverend Louis Coleman in the hopes
(21:45):
of changing his son's mind. That article from nineteen ninety
six doesn't say if that meeting actually took place, but
if it did, I don't think Jared Taylor learned anything
from it. Another chunk of the questions you all sent
in we're about the process. How do I pick a
weird little guy? Where do I start? How do I
(22:06):
organize my notes? The answer to this is embarrassing. I
mean to other people have a good answer for this.
Am I supposed to have a coherent process? There are
a whole university courses on things like research methodology, so
I guess there probably is a correct answer, But that's
(22:26):
not how I do things. I dropped out of college
because I'm not great at deadlines or following directions. So
I'm sure I missed some vital instruction on best practices
in research. No, I fear one of you hit on
the truth in your question. Someone submitted the question what
(22:46):
is the journey of finding a new weird little guy
to putting out a new episode?
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Do you have a process or a flow chart.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Of sorts that you follow or do you just go
off vibes and end up with a finished product? It's vibes.
I'm so sorry, but it is just vibes. When I
was talking to those university students, I wanted so badly
to be able to offer them some kind of useful
advice for doing this kind of research.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
But I have absolutely no idea.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
How I could advise you to proceed with a similar
project because I have no idea what I'm doing as
far as topic selection. Months ago, when the show was
still really new, I was a little worried that I
might not be able to come up with a good
idea every single week. I know there are plenty of
(23:33):
weird little guys out there, sure, but how many of
them would make a good story. So I made a
list of potential episode ideas, and I've got fifty or
sixty potential episode topics on that list, and some of
them would definitely be multi episode arcs.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I mean, that's probably two years.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Worth of episodes on the list, and I've never once
pulled a single idea off that list to actually do
an episode about. I just sort of float down the
river of my curiosity, and whatever little fragment of an
idea I get stuck on ends up as the starting
point for an episode. It's a little chaotic. Back in December,
(24:17):
I was trying to do a couple of episodes about
a group called the Order, a Nazi gang that hoped
to finance the race war through armed robbery. But I
never did because as I was putting together my notes
on their ringleader, Robert Matthews, it got distracted.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
I mean, there's a whole.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Story about the robberies, the murder of Alan Berg and Colorado,
the informant who betrayed them, Robert Matthews burned to death
during a standoff with federal agents. There were trials and appeals,
there's David Lane's prison writings, and I'm going to circle
back to all that because there's a lot there. But
back in December, when I thought that's what I was
(24:57):
going to write, I didn't write it at all. I
asked myself one little question about whatever happened to all
that money they.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Stole, and then I had no choice.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
I floated down the river and landed on a different
idea entirely that group, the Order, robbed a Brink's armored
car in the summer of nineteen eighty four and made
off with millions of dollars, and that money ended up
in a lot of hands. Robert Matthews himself drove cross
country handing out bags of cash to movement leaders, and
(25:31):
one of those bags of cash ended up with Tom Metzger.
And it was that bag of cash that knocked me
off course for nearly two months. First I got curious
about Metzger's public access TV show, and that made me
curious about other Nazis doing public access TV shows in
the eighties and nineties, and that led me to Herb Poinset,
the Florida chiropractor who not only hosted his own racist
(25:54):
public access TV show, but he was the shareholder representative
for that neo Nazi group who tried to get eight
ten and Tea to end its diversity programs in nineteen
eighty eight, and down that same rabbit hole was another
racist cable access TV show, a single episode of a
program called Clansas City Cable hosted by Dennis Mayhon.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
And then I got really lost.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
I spent five episodes tracking Dennis Mayhon's career as a
professional racist, from his early days in the Klan to
his relationship with an ATF informant who accused him of
helping plan the Oklahoma City bombing, to his eventual conviction
for sending a mailbomb to the diversity office of Scottsdale, Arizona.
And then suddenly it's two months later and I never
(26:41):
wrote the episode I started about Robert Matthews, and the
same thing happened again. In February. I sat down to
write an episode about Billy Roper. I really did. To
the person who keeps asking me to write about Billy Roper,
I really did start. I started my notes, I was
mapping out the timeline of his life, and then I
got hung up. I saw a picture of Billy at
(27:04):
a rally in Arkansas in twenty twelve, and I thought
I'd get a little background information about that rally and
it would get a paragraph or two in the episode,
and then all of a sudden, I'm six episodes deep
into a story about terrorism and apartheid South Africa.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
It just happens.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
So to the people asking if I think I might
ever run out of episode ideas, no, absolutely not. I
will never run out of episode ideas. The list of
potential episodes is actually growing exponentially because every episode turns
up a new side character, and I'm starting to realize
every guy in these stories has his own entire weird
(27:43):
situation going on, if you know how to dig deep.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Enough to find it.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
I wanted to As for organizing my research, this is
a similarly disappointing answer for anyone who thought I might
have any useful advice. I take all my notes in
Google Docs these days, and I don't know when they
added this feature. I feel like it was kind of recently,
but they let you add little tabs in the sidebar.
(28:21):
So I'll have a tab where I toss in all
the links to my sources, a tab where I just
list the names of every guy I come across, so
I can organize details about them as I see them
come up. I'll put notes related to a particular significant
incident or theme in the story in its own tab
so I can keep track of it. But the most important.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Tab is the timeline.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
I started doing this a few years ago when I
was doing a particularly deep dive on an individual that
I won't be doing an episode about until his story
is over, and that might be a while, but it's
become my go to starting point. I don't know what
I'm looking for until I find it, So when I
start building out a story about a guy, I just
(29:07):
throw every detail into a timeline, just a bulleted list
in chronological order, of every single piece of information that
I can find about his life, no matter how insignificant.
Sometimes there's huge gaps in the timeline, just large swaths
of a man's life where he's just not on paper.
(29:28):
But sometimes a guy has had enough contact with the
system that you can damn near pen him down day
by day for most of his adult life.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
I comb through.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Newspaper archives, court records, genealogical records, social media accounts, forum posts,
old blogs, anything and everything that I can get my
hands on.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
I won't use most of it. I know that a
lot of.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Us useless, but I need the whole picture in front
of me before anything comes into focus. I collect obituaries,
of family members, childhood yearbook photos, every parking ticket he's
ever gotten, things like a guy's mom's lawsuit against her
local McDonald's after she slipped and fell on a wet floor,
bankruptcy filings, filings in an ex wife's divorced from her
(30:15):
second husband, disciplinary records from the board of nursing bar complaints,
paperwork filed with the state for a small business, irs
forms for a nonprofit. He was on the board of
every donation made to any political candidate by everyone in
his immediate family. Everything, every piece of paper with his
name on it, from an old newspaper article about Frank
(30:37):
Sweeney's childhood pet armadillo to Dennis Mayhon's brothers weird letters
to the editor of their hometown newspaper. It all goes
on the timeline, and usually by the time I've got
five or ten pages of bullet points, I have a
much clearer idea of what the story is. And it's
rarely the story I thought I was writing. Come to
(30:59):
think of it, I don't think I've ever written an
episode that was even close to what I sat down
expecting to write. I've gotten a lot of really generous
offers from you, guys about wanting to help with the research.
I mean, even my producer Sophie has offered several times
to hire someone to help with the research.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
But I don't think it would help.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
I don't need someone to run down a particular set
of facts or summarize a book. There isn't a specific
concrete task I could even assign to someone. I mean,
if I didn't waste half the week chasing down every
loose end or writing page long biographies in my notes
about every tertiary character in the story, I would miss
(31:43):
a lot of what ends up being important. I mean,
think about those German mercenaries and the Monica Huggett episodes.
When I started flushing out the story, I knew those
Germans got arrested in nineteen ninety four after a shootout
with the police in South Africa, and that they'd been
staying at Monica's house. And that was probably enough information
(32:05):
for what ended up being a pretty brief moment in
the story I sat down to write. But digging around
in their lives took me in some incredible and very
unexpected directions. One of those Germans, Horst Cleans, had been
involved in a government backed terrorist organization in Namibia. Another
(32:27):
one of them, Alexander Nydlin, is still involved in writing
politics in Germany today, and I was able to find
and embed in the episode audio of him attending a
Nazi rally in Croatia in twenty seventeen. I wasn't looking
for any of that. I couldn't have asked someone else
to find it. I just had to go on my
(32:49):
own adventure and collect everything along the way. The most
important part of the process for me is doing the
research myself, because I don't know what I'm lofing looking for.
I spend most of the week just sort of browsing,
casting a wide net and pulling in mostly garbage. But
(33:10):
I have to collect everything and put it in order
before the story presents itself to me. I don't know
what the story is until I'm done finding it. I'm
sure there are better ways of going about this, but
this is how I have to do it. So if
you were one of the people asking questions about my process,
and you hope the answer would be some kind of
(33:32):
usable advice, I'm sorry. It really is just a sort
of relentless, aimless rooting around and vibes.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
It's mostly vibes.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
There were also some questions about what kinds of material
I might recommend to people who are interested in these subjects, books, podcasts,
other researchers whose work I enjoy. There are a lot
of books on the subject of white nationalism, whit premacy,
domestic extremism, what have you, and a lot of them
are really bad. The topic got popular in recent years
(34:08):
and it became marketable, and then a lot of people
with no business writing about it sold books. So you
can't just pick up any book off the shelf and
expect it to be valuable to you. But if you
want to read a book about the white power movement
in America, you have to read Kathleen Blue's Bring the
(34:28):
War Home. It's rare for rigorously researched academic writing to
also be a thrill to read, so you're really doing
yourself a disservice if you haven't read it. I've read
it more than once, and I keep my copy on
the floor next to the chair that I write in.
There are probably half a dozen episodes where I've picked
(34:48):
it up and flipped to the index.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
And found what I needed.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
And if you're really interested in the nitty gritty you
can't go wrong with Leonard Zeskin's Blood and Politics. It's
more of an encyclopedia than a beach read, but it's
probably the most comprehensive text out there on the subject
of American white nationalism. Zeskin was a giant in this space.
He found at the Institute for Research and Education on
(35:15):
Human Rights in nineteen eighty three. He was the US
correspondent for Searchlight magazine. He was the research director at
the Anti Clan Network, and he was an activist and
a human rights advocate, and he really shaped the way
that researchers think and write about the far right in
the United States. I was deeply saddened to hear he'd
passed away just a few days ago. And as long
(35:38):
as I'm recommending books, if you missed the interview I
did with Spencer Sunshine a few months back, do give
it a listen. His book Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural
Fascism is the first real exploration of siege the Nazi
Terrorism Handbook by James Mason. And I can't miss an
opportunity to recommend my dear friend Talia Lavin's books Culture
(36:01):
Warlords and Wild Faith. They both trace the ideological roots
of different strains of American extremism. As far as podcasts go,
there are so many podcasts. Everybody has one these days,
even me, And there are a lot of really good
ones out there, and so I hope everyone will forgive
(36:21):
me if I only recommend one. I'm not snubbing everyone else.
I just can't let myself ramble on about podcasts on
a podcast.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
That's just too much.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
I like to have a little audio going in my
headphones when I'm huttering around the house. So I listen
to a lot of podcasts, but I never miss an
episode of Knowledge Fight. If you've never listened to it,
the premise might sound a little off putting. It's one
guy telling another guy about episodes of Info Wars, just
(36:51):
two comedians talking about Alex Jones. It's fun and funny,
and it's so easy to listen to that you might
not even notice it first that Dan Freesen has painstakingly
researched every single lie that comes out of Jones's mouth,
and he can not only tell you what isn't true,
he breaks down why it isn't true and how that
(37:14):
particular lie functions in the right wing narrative.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
That's being constructed.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
It's been going on for years at this point, and
he's become probably the world's leading expert on Alex Jones,
which is probably not a title he aspired to as
a child.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Oh and actually I lied.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
I also have to recommend cool people who did cool stuff.
If you haven't heard Margaret kill Joy's show, imagine the
opposite of weird Little Guys. Aside from the fact that
it's just nice sometimes to hear a story about people
who aren't monsters.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
As someone who spends.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Way too much time researching, I know what it sounds
like when someone really digs deep to get the context
to bring a story to life. And I just love
Margaret's passion for stories of people who struggle to build
a better world. Okay, let's wrap things up with some
fun ones. You guys are honestly really sweet. A lot
(38:09):
of the questions on the reddit weren't even about researching races.
They were things like what's your favorite flavor of ice cream?
And I'll address that one head on. I like cookies
and cream, but not from the store. You don't like
to buy store brought cookies and cream. I like to
get plain vanilla ice cream. And add the cookies myself.
(38:30):
It's just better that way. Plus I have seliac disease,
so it's much cheaper to buy gluten free oreos and
add them to regular ice cream.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
There were several.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Questions about sweet treats. Actually, so I'm gonna let you
in on one of my most important life philosophies.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
I call it the little treat. It's very simple.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
If you have an opportunity for a little treat, something
harmless and affordable that won't take a lot of time
out of your day or a lot of money of
your wallet, and won't inconvenience anyone, you have to have
the little treat. Life is just too hard and overwhelming.
Just have a little treat sometimes. And little treat can
(39:13):
be anything. It doesn't have to be a sweet treat.
It can be putting on a fuzzy sweater right out
of the dryer, or going around the block just one
more time because the dogs are really enjoying the sunshine.
The important part of little treat philosophy is recognizing in
the moment that you have chosen to enjoy a little treat.
(39:35):
It's the only way to live.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
You have to do it.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
One of you wrote on the subreddit that a question
you like to ask people is what scared you as
a kid, and I love that. I bet you get
a lot of really weird answers to that. I was
never afraid of the monster in the closet. I actually
loved hanging out in my bedroom closet as a kid.
I made it into sort of a cozy, private cave
(40:00):
where I liked to read.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
But I was.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
So, so unbelievably scared of Bloody Mary. Very specifically, I
was traumatized at a very young age by the version
of the Bloody Mary story in the children's book Scary
Stories to Tell in the Dark.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
I think everyone my age.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Was traumatized by that book in one way or another.
But I couldn't keep a mirror in my bedroom until
I was in like high school.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I wish I was kidding.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
I still don't like to go in the bathroom with
the lights off. I'm thirty five years old, and I
have shrugged off very real death threats from guys in
very real murder cults, but I am, in fact a
little bit scared of going in the bathroom with the
lights off. I don't know what to tell you, and
(40:55):
of course several of you asked about my dogs. They
are the most important employees on the show. I couldn't
do it without them. I have two docs In's brothers,
named Otto and Buck. They'll be nine this summer, which
is kind of crazy because they're really just puppies. I
don't know how they could be puppies for nine years.
(41:15):
I post pictures of them from time to time on
Blue Sky if you'd like to see their sweet little faces.
There were so many questions I didn't get to. I'm
sure I'll do another Q and A episode eventually, but
I am thrilled to be wrapping this up before three am,
which is something I have not managed to do in months.
(41:37):
I've got to go see a man about some ponies
first thing in the morning, and I need to.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Start packing for my honeymoon.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
There will be a regular episode next week, but there'll
be a couple of reruns after that.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
I am so sorry.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
I'm trying to put together a couple of minisodes, like
little bite sized side stories that I'd like to get
out while I'm gone. But as I have just revealed
to you over the course of this Q and A,
I have no idea where I'm going or where I'll
end up, so it's hard to say what I'll end
up writing. Either way, there are many more Weird Little Guys,
(42:13):
and I will tell you about them eventually. Weird Little
Guys is a production of Fool Zoe Media and iHeartRadio.
(42:34):
It's research, written, and recorded by me, Polly Conker. Our
executive producers are Sophie Litterman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(42:55):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys separated
it just don't post anything. It's going to make you
one of my Weird Little guys.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Mhm
Cool Zone Media. Hello listeners, Molly Conger here, I've got
something a little different for you this week, something a
little lighter. I will finally wrap up the South Africa
story arc next week, and that story will end the
(00:25):
way it began, with the President of the United States
peddling conspiracy theories about why genocide. But I'm going to
level with you, I just wasn't in the mood this
week to cut clips from audio of Jordan Peterson interviewing
a guy trying to sell real estate in a planned
Ethno state. That shit sucks, And I still haven't made
(00:45):
the seating chart for my wedding next week. I mentioned,
probably a month ago at this point now that I
was thinking about doing a listener Q and a episode
sometime soon, and then I promptly got lost down an
infinite series of bottomless side quests. I'm still lost down there,
but my attention has been pretty divided lately, and I
(01:06):
felt like this was the right week to try and
answer some of your questions. I combed through the questions
you all submitted on the Weird Little Guys subreddit, and
they seem to fall into a few main categories. There
are questions about me questions about my research and writing methodology,
about how the show gets made, and questions about the
(01:29):
lives of the Weird Little Guys. And I can answer
some of those for sure, but by far the most
common questions, both from you all on the subreddit and
from the groups of university students I've had the opportunity
to speak with in the last few months, are ones
I don't really have good answers for. They aren't questions
(01:50):
of fact. The answers aren't in a newspaper archive, they
aren't something I can dig up in the court records.
They're questions of the soul. I've been invited to speak
to students at the University of Richmond and the University
of Virginia a few times this semester, and every time,
regardless of what the subject of the class or of
(02:11):
the event is, no matter what I have prepared or
how the professor prompts the group, people always ask me
one question, in particular, Can people change? Can you bring
someone back once they've become the kind of guy who
might end up on an episode of Weird Little Guys.
(02:33):
The short answer is yes, Yes, of course they can.
There's always always hope. I believe that because I have to.
If I didn't, I don't think I could do this.
Maybe I shouldn't have started this with the hardest question,
(02:55):
especially if.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
I'm not even going to answer it.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
But I wanted to address it because I know it's
one A lot of you have asked yourselves as you
listen to the show, And like I said, I don't
have the answer, not really. I'm not a philosopher or
an ethicist or a theologian, not a psychologist or a sociologist,
and I don't have any direct experience in deradicalization, the
(03:20):
work of engaging with people who want to leave the
movement and supporting them in that process. But I think
the lack of a definitive answer to this question is
ultimately a good thing. If the question remains open, you
have to constantly revisit it, reassess it. I spend so
much of my time wading through the evidence that evil exists.
(03:44):
I should constantly re evaluate what I think that means.
And I've seen a lot of monstrous things. I've watched
live streamed mass murders and red manifestos. I've sat in
little courtrooms just feet away from men with massive stockpiles
of weapons who were planning mass casualty events and assassinations.
(04:06):
I've watched men who proudly call themselves Nazis, men who
worship Hitler laugh in the faces of their own victims,
fed a casual chat in a public park with a
member of rape Waffen. So maybe you don't expect me
to say this, but I absolutely still believe that every
(04:26):
single one of them is still human. They're still reachable.
There is still the possibility, however remote, that they could
wake up one day and realize they were wrong, that
they took a wrong turn and wound up down a
dead end following an ideology that hurts everyone, including themselves.
(04:48):
The catches they have to want to, and they rarely do.
Redemption isn't something that just happens to a guy. It's
something that's hard fought for and not always one and
if they're doing it right, you'll probably never know about it.
There are real life stories of people in the movement
(05:10):
who made one black friend or one Jewish friend, one
gay friend, whatever, and then realize that those kinds of
people are human and that led them to question and
then renounce their beliefs.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
It happens, but.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
That's a lot to ask of marginalized people. I'm not
telling you to go out there and love a Nazi
until he.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Loves you back.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
It doesn't usually work, and it doesn't sound like a
fulfilling way to spend your time. And there are some
splashy news stories every now and again about a former
neo Nazi on a redemption arc, but the real work
of making amends is quiet and boring and perhaps quite rare.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
I think, in.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Most cases, the best we can hope for it as
a half asked version. Guys who quit the movement and
just stop hurting other people. They don't really interrogate their
own past actions. They don't try to undo the harm
they did. They don't apologize, They just stop actively becoming worse.
(06:18):
And that's much more common. I think that happens all
the time. But there's no news story when a guy
gets bored of posting race war memes and drops out
of the terrorism planning chat. And I want to be clear,
I'm not talking about absolution.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
I don't mean that.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
I believe every mass shooter has within him the possibility
of becoming the kind of guy you'd enjoy hanging out
with or trust with your children. It doesn't mean anyone
has to forgive him. I don't mean that their crimes
should go unpunished if they take back all the stuff
they said about Hitler, but I think we have to
leave the door open. The question one of you posted
(06:56):
on the subreddit reads, do you think there is a
point of no why turn for a person when former
friends and family have to give up trying to bring
a person back on the right track? And if so,
what defines that point? And this is a question you
have to answer for yourselves individually.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I don't think there.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Exists a specific, definitive goalpost here, a point of no return.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
But if there is someone.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Like this in your life, this question is yours to answer,
because there may come a point where you don't feel
safe continuing to engage with a friend or a loved
one who has turned towards extremism, And that's valid, But
I don't think that means that person is lost forever.
This is an opinion of mine that makes people pretty
(07:43):
mad sometimes, and that's okay. I won't tell you what
should be in your heart. I will never ask you
to forgive any of these men. Hell I don't, but
I do try to approach my work with hard eyes
and a soft heart. And what I mean by that
(08:04):
is I want to look clearly at the harm a
man has done, but hope for the day that he
sees that harm too. And with that out of the way,
let's get to some questions.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
I do have answers for.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
One of you asked, do you ever find information about
how the families of weird little guys feel about or
react to their actions? Do more of these guys get
cut off or willingly cut off ties with their relatives?
Or is it more of a family affair, like driving
your uncle to the insurrection? And this is a question
with a lot of answers. It sort of reminds me
(08:41):
of the opening line of Anna Karenna. Right, all happy
families are alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way, and every Nazis family deals with the problem.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
In their own way.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
But there are some broad categories here. You've got movement families,
families where the weird little guy was raised in an
environment where his beliefs were normal and encouraged. There are
families in denial where the parents don't believe it's that serious,
they don't want to acknowledge it, or they claim to
have had no idea what was going on. And then
(09:16):
there are the families that do cut ties or make
public disavowals of their relatives beliefs and actions. For listeners
who may have missed the episode, the question asker is
referring to their driving your uncle to the insurrection is
a reference to Matthew and Dale Huddle, the subjects of
the episode A short lived pardon from back in February.
(09:37):
Matthew Huddle was the recently pardoned January sixth defendant who
was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop
earlier this year. He wasn't really a true believer in anything,
but he went to the US capital on January sixth,
twenty twenty one with his uncle Dale, and Dale Huddle
was a man who had some pretty strong beliefs about
the government.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
His case is a bit of.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
An outlier within that first category, though, because I wouldn't
call the Huddles a movement family. Matthew just sort of
went along for the ride. But movement families are a
very real thing. There are plenty of people who didn't
need four Chan or telegram to get radicalized because it's
just how they were raised. I'm sure plenty of parents
(10:23):
were surprised when they saw photos of their sons on
the news after the Unite the Right rally, but not
all of them. Jacob Goodwin, one of the men convicted
for the brutal beating of a counter protester, got a
ride to the rally from his mother. After his arrest,
she went on a Nazi podcast to talk about his case,
and she said that during her last visit with him
(10:46):
in prison, she told him, quote, don't you ever tell
Mama you're sorry for being a good, honorable man. A
lot of the movement families I can think of off
the top of my head are ones that deserve their
own episodes. I know at least one listener on the
subreddit is absolutely dying for me to finally do an
(11:06):
episode about the Arkansas based neo Nazi Billy Roper. He
was raised in a clan family and now he's trying
to start a white separatist community for other movement families.
And there are families like the Bellogs. Alan Bellog was
a member of the American Nazi Party in the seventies,
and he joined National Alliance in its very earliest days.
(11:28):
He worked for David Duke's campaign in nineteen eighty eight,
and he was the Pennsylvania unit leader for National Alliance
in the eighties. National Alliance founder William Luther Pearce told
his biographer quote Bellog would do things like staple Alliance
blackards to telephone polls, and he would punch out anybody
who gave him a bad time while he was doing it.
Sometimes this would result in legal difficulties, and one time,
(11:50):
when Bellog got fined five hundred dollars, I took up
a collection at one of our national conventions to pay
us fine. Alan Bellog's son, Warren was raised in the moment.
The father and son duo were in recent years founding
members of the now defunct neo Nazi group the National
Justice Party. When National Justice Party collapsed in twenty twenty three,
(12:12):
the current leader of National Alliance, Will Williams, wrote, Alan
Bellog had been a dedicated Alliance member for years and
as a good man, I met him and his son,
Warren when Warren was twelve years old. The Alliance will
leave the door cracked for good men like the Belllogs
to rejoin. The Belllogs attended the twenty seventeen Unite the
(12:32):
right rally here in Charlottesville together, but only Warren signed
his name to a federal lawsuit against the city for
failing to proactively facilitate the Nazi rally. His case was
dismissed by the Western District of Virginia, and that decision
was upheld by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals last year.
It's a very silly little lawsuit with no legal merit,
(12:55):
so I don't expect his recent petition to have it
heard by the Supreme Court. We'll go anywhere, but the
complaint itself is so laughable that maybe I'll do a
minisode on it. I think most families fall into the
second category, the ones who neither share nor denounce the
views of their family member. They either didn't know, didn't understand,
(13:18):
didn't think it was serious, didn't think he meant it,
or they just didn't want to see it. Some of
them are embarrassed by it, but others are indignant. They
don't understand why everyone is making such a big deal
out of this thing that they'd convince themselves was just
a harmless quirk of their otherwise very wonderful son.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
I see this most often in the.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Letters that mothers write to the judge after their son
is convicted of something horrible, but before he's sentenced. A
lot of these letters avoid this subject altogether, and they're
just sort of a list of his positive qualities. He's
a boy scout, he had a black best friend in
middle school. He moses grandmother's lawn, he's a good boy.
(14:01):
I can think of two cases actually where a defendant's
parent told the court that their son isn't actually a Nazi,
it's just that he's autistic and this is his special interest.
It's such a profoundly weird thing to say, and it's
wild that I've seen it twice. For the record, I
(14:23):
do know some people whose special interest is Nazi stuff,
but they aren't out there being Nazis. They're some of
the best anti fascist researchers. I think the most satisfying
part of this answer for the listener is going to
be the third category, families who publicly disavow their Nazi relative.
(14:45):
I'm sure there are plenty of families who disown a relative,
but a lot of that happens quietly. It's ugly business,
and most people don't air this kind of dirty laundry.
One of these stories made national news. Back in twenty seventeen,
on the Monday morning after the deadly Nazi rally here
in Charlottesville, a newspaper in Fargo, North Dakota published an
(15:07):
open letter from a father. The letter begins, my name
is Pierce Teft, and I am writing to all with
regards to my youngest son, Peter Teft, an avowed white nationalist.
He doesn't mince words, writing, I, along with all of
his siblings and his entire family, wish to loudly repudiate
(15:28):
my son's vile, hateful and racist rhetoric in actions. We
do not know specifically where he learned these beliefs. He
did not learn them at home. It's a pretty striking letter.
Like I said, most families stay quiet about this sort
of thing, but Teff's father felt it was his responsibility
to denounce his son, writing we have been silent up
(15:53):
until now, but we see now this was a mistake.
It was the silence of good people that allowed the
Nazis to flourish the first time around, and it is
the silence of good people that is allowing them to
flourish now. Peter Teft, my son is not welcome at
our family gatherings.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Any longer.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
I pray my prodigal son will renounce his hateful beliefs
and return home then and only then, while I lay
out the feast. His hateful opinions are bringing hateful rhetoric
to his siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews, as well as
his parents. Why must we be guilty by association? Again,
none of his beliefs were learned at home. We do not,
never have, and never will accept his twisted worldview. He
(16:35):
once joked, the thing about us fascists is it's not
that we don't believe in freedom of speech. You can
say whatever you want. We'll just throw you in an oven, Peter,
you will have to shovel our bodies into.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
The oven too.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
Please, Son, renounce the hate, accept in love all. And
that's kind of what I was getting at earlier about
leaving the door open. His family isn't saying they hate him,
just that they can't love him while he's busy hating
everyone else.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
The door is open. It's his choice. As C. S.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
Lewis said, the doors of hell are locked from the inside.
And in the years since his father wrote that letter,
Peter Teft has continued to choose white nationalism over his family.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Most of the white.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Supremacists I can think of whose families have publicly spoken
out against them are movement leaders. That's obviously because there
just aren't news stories about random racists getting disowned. It's
only in the news if the Nazi is newsworthy, and
most families wouldn't make a public announcement about it unless
the situation was already public against their will. So the
(18:01):
examples that come most readily to mind are people like
Don Black, William Luther Peers, and Jared Taylor. I will
at some point have to do some episodes about Don Black,
the klansman who founded the neo Nazi forum Stormfront. That's
going to be a whole ordeal. It's a very long story.
(18:21):
But when it comes to public disavowals of a racist parent,
it's hard to beat the story of Adrianne Black. Her
recent book, The Klansman's Son is a fascinating read, and
I'll have to save the details for another day. But
she was as raised in the movement as it is
possible to be. Don Black was a movement leader, and
(18:43):
he was raising his son to be his successor. As
a child, Adrianne Black learned to code so she could
run the children's section of her father's Nazi website. She
attended conferences and rallies, and co hosted a Nazi radio
show with her father. She was a true believer until
she wasn't. She went away to college and met people
(19:05):
out in the real world that led her to question
the beliefs she'd been raised with, and then she publicly
denounced those beliefs in twenty thirteen in an open letter
published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. If you're looking
for her book, The Klansman's Son, it's published under her
former name R.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Derrick Black.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
The book was her public coming out as a transwoman.
William Luther Pierce, the founder of National Alliance and the
author of the Turner Diaries, had twin sons. One of
them is very private, but one of them, Kelvin Pierce,
published a memoir in twenty twenty called Sins of My Father,
and it is very much a personal memoir. It's about
(19:48):
his childhood and his recollection and the way he perceived
his father as a child. But it is a very
clear picture a terrible man. Interesting that both Kelvin Pierce
and Adrianne Black pivoted from private reflection on their fathers
to loud public denunciation at around the same time. They
(20:13):
both point to the Unite the Right rally in twenty
seventeen and the election of Donald Trump in twenty sixteen
as turning points. Helen Pierce wrote in his book quote
the swastikas and flaming torches brought back so many memories,
such visceral feelings that I knew I had to speak
out about the racism still so deeply rooted in our society.
(20:37):
In a New York Times opinion piece published right after
the twenty sixteen election, Adrian Black wrote that after hearing
Trump's campaign launch speech, in which he called Mexican immigrants
rapists quote, I spent the rest of the election wondering
how much my movement had set the stage for his.
Now I see the anger I was raised with rocking
(20:58):
the nation. And then there's Jared Taylor. I've mentioned him
a handful of times in passing. He's the white supremacist
writer behind American Renaissance. His father's disavowal of his son's
beliefs was less public than entire memoirs written by Kelvin
Pears from Adrian Black, but it's worth mentioning. Jared Taylor's
(21:23):
parents were Presbyterian missionaries. His mother's described in an old
newspaper article as a diehard liberal. His father, Reverend Archibald Taylor,
told a newspaper in nineteen ninety six that he could
no longer discuss politics with his son, and the reverend
attempted to set up meetings between his son and black
civil rights leaders like Reverend Louis Coleman in the hopes
(21:45):
of changing his son's mind. That article from nineteen ninety
six doesn't say if that meeting actually took place, but
if it did, I don't think Jared Taylor learned anything
from it. Another chunk of the questions you all sent
in we're about the process. How do I pick a
weird little guy? Where do I start? How do I
(22:06):
organize my notes? The answer to this is embarrassing. I
mean to other people have a good answer for this.
Am I supposed to have a coherent process? There are
a whole university courses on things like research methodology, so
I guess there probably is a correct answer, But that's
(22:26):
not how I do things. I dropped out of college
because I'm not great at deadlines or following directions. So
I'm sure I missed some vital instruction on best practices
in research. No, I fear one of you hit on
the truth in your question. Someone submitted the question what
(22:46):
is the journey of finding a new weird little guy
to putting out a new episode?
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Do you have a process or a flow chart.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Of sorts that you follow or do you just go
off vibes and end up with a finished product? It's vibes.
I'm so sorry, but it is just vibes. When I
was talking to those university students, I wanted so badly
to be able to offer them some kind of useful
advice for doing this kind of research.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
But I have absolutely no idea.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
How I could advise you to proceed with a similar
project because I have no idea what I'm doing as
far as topic selection. Months ago, when the show was
still really new, I was a little worried that I
might not be able to come up with a good
idea every single week. I know there are plenty of
(23:33):
weird little guys out there, sure, but how many of
them would make a good story. So I made a
list of potential episode ideas, and I've got fifty or
sixty potential episode topics on that list, and some of
them would definitely be multi episode arcs.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
I mean, that's probably two years.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
Worth of episodes on the list, and I've never once
pulled a single idea off that list to actually do
an episode about. I just sort of float down the
river of my curiosity, and whatever little fragment of an
idea I get stuck on ends up as the starting
point for an episode. It's a little chaotic. Back in December,
(24:17):
I was trying to do a couple of episodes about
a group called the Order, a Nazi gang that hoped
to finance the race war through armed robbery. But I
never did because as I was putting together my notes
on their ringleader, Robert Matthews, it got distracted.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
I mean, there's a whole.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Story about the robberies, the murder of Alan Berg and Colorado,
the informant who betrayed them, Robert Matthews burned to death
during a standoff with federal agents. There were trials and appeals,
there's David Lane's prison writings, and I'm going to circle
back to all that because there's a lot there. But
back in December, when I thought that's what I was
(24:57):
going to write, I didn't write it at all. I
asked myself one little question about whatever happened to all
that money they.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Stole, and then I had no choice.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
I floated down the river and landed on a different
idea entirely that group, the Order, robbed a Brink's armored
car in the summer of nineteen eighty four and made
off with millions of dollars, and that money ended up
in a lot of hands. Robert Matthews himself drove cross
country handing out bags of cash to movement leaders, and
(25:31):
one of those bags of cash ended up with Tom Metzger.
And it was that bag of cash that knocked me
off course for nearly two months. First I got curious
about Metzger's public access TV show, and that made me
curious about other Nazis doing public access TV shows in
the eighties and nineties, and that led me to Herb Poinset,
the Florida chiropractor who not only hosted his own racist
(25:54):
public access TV show, but he was the shareholder representative
for that neo Nazi group who tried to get eight
ten and Tea to end its diversity programs in nineteen
eighty eight, and down that same rabbit hole was another
racist cable access TV show, a single episode of a
program called Clansas City Cable hosted by Dennis Mayhon.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
And then I got really lost.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
I spent five episodes tracking Dennis Mayhon's career as a
professional racist, from his early days in the Klan to
his relationship with an ATF informant who accused him of
helping plan the Oklahoma City bombing, to his eventual conviction
for sending a mailbomb to the diversity office of Scottsdale, Arizona.
And then suddenly it's two months later and I never
(26:41):
wrote the episode I started about Robert Matthews, and the
same thing happened again. In February. I sat down to
write an episode about Billy Roper. I really did. To
the person who keeps asking me to write about Billy Roper,
I really did start. I started my notes, I was
mapping out the timeline of his life, and then I
got hung up. I saw a picture of Billy at
(27:04):
a rally in Arkansas in twenty twelve, and I thought
I'd get a little background information about that rally and
it would get a paragraph or two in the episode,
and then all of a sudden, I'm six episodes deep
into a story about terrorism and apartheid South Africa.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
It just happens.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
So to the people asking if I think I might
ever run out of episode ideas, no, absolutely not. I
will never run out of episode ideas. The list of
potential episodes is actually growing exponentially because every episode turns
up a new side character, and I'm starting to realize
every guy in these stories has his own entire weird
(27:43):
situation going on, if you know how to dig deep.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Enough to find it.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
I wanted to As for organizing my research, this is
a similarly disappointing answer for anyone who thought I might
have any useful advice. I take all my notes in
Google Docs these days, and I don't know when they
added this feature. I feel like it was kind of recently,
but they let you add little tabs in the sidebar.
(28:21):
So I'll have a tab where I toss in all
the links to my sources, a tab where I just
list the names of every guy I come across, so
I can organize details about them as I see them
come up. I'll put notes related to a particular significant
incident or theme in the story in its own tab
so I can keep track of it. But the most important.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Tab is the timeline.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
I started doing this a few years ago when I
was doing a particularly deep dive on an individual that
I won't be doing an episode about until his story
is over, and that might be a while, but it's
become my go to starting point. I don't know what
I'm looking for until I find it, So when I
start building out a story about a guy, I just
(29:07):
throw every detail into a timeline, just a bulleted list
in chronological order, of every single piece of information that
I can find about his life, no matter how insignificant.
Sometimes there's huge gaps in the timeline, just large swaths
of a man's life where he's just not on paper.
(29:28):
But sometimes a guy has had enough contact with the
system that you can damn near pen him down day
by day for most of his adult life.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
I comb through.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Newspaper archives, court records, genealogical records, social media accounts, forum posts,
old blogs, anything and everything that I can get my
hands on.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
I won't use most of it. I know that a
lot of.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
Us useless, but I need the whole picture in front
of me before anything comes into focus. I collect obituaries,
of family members, childhood yearbook photos, every parking ticket he's
ever gotten, things like a guy's mom's lawsuit against her
local McDonald's after she slipped and fell on a wet floor,
bankruptcy filings, filings in an ex wife's divorced from her
(30:15):
second husband, disciplinary records from the board of nursing bar complaints,
paperwork filed with the state for a small business, irs
forms for a nonprofit. He was on the board of
every donation made to any political candidate by everyone in
his immediate family. Everything, every piece of paper with his
name on it, from an old newspaper article about Frank
(30:37):
Sweeney's childhood pet armadillo to Dennis Mayhon's brothers weird letters
to the editor of their hometown newspaper. It all goes
on the timeline, and usually by the time I've got
five or ten pages of bullet points, I have a
much clearer idea of what the story is. And it's
rarely the story I thought I was writing. Come to
(30:59):
think of it, I don't think I've ever written an
episode that was even close to what I sat down
expecting to write. I've gotten a lot of really generous
offers from you, guys about wanting to help with the research.
I mean, even my producer Sophie has offered several times
to hire someone to help with the research.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
But I don't think it would help.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
I don't need someone to run down a particular set
of facts or summarize a book. There isn't a specific
concrete task I could even assign to someone. I mean,
if I didn't waste half the week chasing down every
loose end or writing page long biographies in my notes
about every tertiary character in the story, I would miss
(31:43):
a lot of what ends up being important. I mean,
think about those German mercenaries and the Monica Huggett episodes.
When I started flushing out the story, I knew those
Germans got arrested in nineteen ninety four after a shootout
with the police in South Africa, and that they'd been
staying at Monica's house. And that was probably enough information
(32:05):
for what ended up being a pretty brief moment in
the story I sat down to write. But digging around
in their lives took me in some incredible and very
unexpected directions. One of those Germans, Horst Cleans, had been
involved in a government backed terrorist organization in Namibia. Another
(32:27):
one of them, Alexander Nydlin, is still involved in writing
politics in Germany today, and I was able to find
and embed in the episode audio of him attending a
Nazi rally in Croatia in twenty seventeen. I wasn't looking
for any of that. I couldn't have asked someone else
to find it. I just had to go on my
(32:49):
own adventure and collect everything along the way. The most
important part of the process for me is doing the
research myself, because I don't know what I'm lofing looking for.
I spend most of the week just sort of browsing,
casting a wide net and pulling in mostly garbage. But
(33:10):
I have to collect everything and put it in order
before the story presents itself to me. I don't know
what the story is until I'm done finding it. I'm
sure there are better ways of going about this, but
this is how I have to do it. So if
you were one of the people asking questions about my process,
and you hope the answer would be some kind of
(33:32):
usable advice, I'm sorry. It really is just a sort
of relentless, aimless rooting around and vibes.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
It's mostly vibes.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
There were also some questions about what kinds of material
I might recommend to people who are interested in these subjects, books, podcasts,
other researchers whose work I enjoy. There are a lot
of books on the subject of white nationalism, whit premacy,
domestic extremism, what have you, and a lot of them
are really bad. The topic got popular in recent years
(34:08):
and it became marketable, and then a lot of people
with no business writing about it sold books. So you
can't just pick up any book off the shelf and
expect it to be valuable to you. But if you
want to read a book about the white power movement
in America, you have to read Kathleen Blue's Bring the
(34:28):
War Home. It's rare for rigorously researched academic writing to
also be a thrill to read, so you're really doing
yourself a disservice if you haven't read it. I've read
it more than once, and I keep my copy on
the floor next to the chair that I write in.
There are probably half a dozen episodes where I've picked
(34:48):
it up and flipped to the index.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
And found what I needed.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
And if you're really interested in the nitty gritty you
can't go wrong with Leonard Zeskin's Blood and Politics. It's
more of an encyclopedia than a beach read, but it's
probably the most comprehensive text out there on the subject
of American white nationalism. Zeskin was a giant in this space.
He found at the Institute for Research and Education on
(35:15):
Human Rights in nineteen eighty three. He was the US
correspondent for Searchlight magazine. He was the research director at
the Anti Clan Network, and he was an activist and
a human rights advocate, and he really shaped the way
that researchers think and write about the far right in
the United States. I was deeply saddened to hear he'd
passed away just a few days ago. And as long
(35:38):
as I'm recommending books, if you missed the interview I
did with Spencer Sunshine a few months back, do give
it a listen. His book Neo Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural
Fascism is the first real exploration of siege the Nazi
Terrorism Handbook by James Mason. And I can't miss an
opportunity to recommend my dear friend Talia Lavin's books Culture
(36:01):
Warlords and Wild Faith. They both trace the ideological roots
of different strains of American extremism. As far as podcasts go,
there are so many podcasts. Everybody has one these days,
even me, And there are a lot of really good
ones out there, and so I hope everyone will forgive
(36:21):
me if I only recommend one. I'm not snubbing everyone else.
I just can't let myself ramble on about podcasts on
a podcast.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
That's just too much.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
I like to have a little audio going in my
headphones when I'm huttering around the house. So I listen
to a lot of podcasts, but I never miss an
episode of Knowledge Fight. If you've never listened to it,
the premise might sound a little off putting. It's one
guy telling another guy about episodes of Info Wars, just
(36:51):
two comedians talking about Alex Jones. It's fun and funny,
and it's so easy to listen to that you might
not even notice it first that Dan Freesen has painstakingly
researched every single lie that comes out of Jones's mouth,
and he can not only tell you what isn't true,
he breaks down why it isn't true and how that
(37:14):
particular lie functions in the right wing narrative.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
That's being constructed.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
It's been going on for years at this point, and
he's become probably the world's leading expert on Alex Jones,
which is probably not a title he aspired to as
a child.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Oh and actually I lied.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
I also have to recommend cool people who did cool stuff.
If you haven't heard Margaret kill Joy's show, imagine the
opposite of weird Little Guys. Aside from the fact that
it's just nice sometimes to hear a story about people
who aren't monsters.
Speaker 2 (37:47):
As someone who spends.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
Way too much time researching, I know what it sounds
like when someone really digs deep to get the context
to bring a story to life. And I just love
Margaret's passion for stories of people who struggle to build
a better world. Okay, let's wrap things up with some
fun ones. You guys are honestly really sweet. A lot
(38:09):
of the questions on the reddit weren't even about researching races.
They were things like what's your favorite flavor of ice cream?
And I'll address that one head on. I like cookies
and cream, but not from the store. You don't like
to buy store brought cookies and cream. I like to
get plain vanilla ice cream. And add the cookies myself.
(38:30):
It's just better that way. Plus I have seliac disease,
so it's much cheaper to buy gluten free oreos and
add them to regular ice cream.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
There were several.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Questions about sweet treats. Actually, so I'm gonna let you
in on one of my most important life philosophies.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
I call it the little treat. It's very simple.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
If you have an opportunity for a little treat, something
harmless and affordable that won't take a lot of time
out of your day or a lot of money of
your wallet, and won't inconvenience anyone, you have to have
the little treat. Life is just too hard and overwhelming.
Just have a little treat sometimes. And little treat can
(39:13):
be anything. It doesn't have to be a sweet treat.
It can be putting on a fuzzy sweater right out
of the dryer, or going around the block just one
more time because the dogs are really enjoying the sunshine.
The important part of little treat philosophy is recognizing in
the moment that you have chosen to enjoy a little treat.
(39:35):
It's the only way to live.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
You have to do it.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
One of you wrote on the subreddit that a question
you like to ask people is what scared you as
a kid, and I love that. I bet you get
a lot of really weird answers to that. I was
never afraid of the monster in the closet. I actually
loved hanging out in my bedroom closet as a kid.
I made it into sort of a cozy, private cave
(40:00):
where I liked to read.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
But I was.
Speaker 1 (40:04):
So, so unbelievably scared of Bloody Mary. Very specifically, I
was traumatized at a very young age by the version
of the Bloody Mary story in the children's book Scary
Stories to Tell in the Dark.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
I think everyone my age.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Was traumatized by that book in one way or another.
But I couldn't keep a mirror in my bedroom until
I was in like high school.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
I wish I was kidding.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
I still don't like to go in the bathroom with
the lights off. I'm thirty five years old, and I
have shrugged off very real death threats from guys in
very real murder cults, but I am, in fact a
little bit scared of going in the bathroom with the
lights off. I don't know what to tell you, and
(40:55):
of course several of you asked about my dogs. They
are the most important employees on the show. I couldn't
do it without them. I have two docs In's brothers,
named Otto and Buck. They'll be nine this summer, which
is kind of crazy because they're really just puppies. I
don't know how they could be puppies for nine years.
(41:15):
I post pictures of them from time to time on
Blue Sky if you'd like to see their sweet little faces.
There were so many questions I didn't get to. I'm
sure I'll do another Q and A episode eventually, but
I am thrilled to be wrapping this up before three am,
which is something I have not managed to do in months.
(41:37):
I've got to go see a man about some ponies
first thing in the morning, and I need to.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
Start packing for my honeymoon.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
There will be a regular episode next week, but there'll
be a couple of reruns after that.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
I am so sorry.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
I'm trying to put together a couple of minisodes, like
little bite sized side stories that I'd like to get
out while I'm gone. But as I have just revealed
to you over the course of this Q and A,
I have no idea where I'm going or where I'll
end up, so it's hard to say what I'll end
up writing. Either way, there are many more Weird Little Guys,
(42:13):
and I will tell you about them eventually. Weird Little
Guys is a production of Fool Zoe Media and iHeartRadio.
(42:34):
It's research, written, and recorded by me, Polly Conker. Our
executive producers are Sophie Litterman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
(42:55):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys separated
it just don't post anything. It's going to make you
one of my Weird Little guys.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Mhm
Host
Molly Conger
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