The Weird Little Guys Trying to Ruin Our Lives

Join host Molly Conger each week for a story about one of the aspiring little Führers of the suburbs, men whose actions altered the course of the lives of their victims, their families, and their communities… but whose stories are ultimately lost in the shuffle of too many middle American Hitlers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hey, I'm Mollikonger, and this is Weird
Little Guys, the show where I finally get to tell
someone who wants to listen about the weird new guy
I've added to my not so metaphorical red string board.
I've spent years researching and writing about far right extremism,

(00:22):
hang out in their chat rooms, watch their live streams,
and follow their court cases, stared deep into the abyss,
poring over court documents, reading manifestos, and listening to some
of the worst podcasts ever made. And I've sat in
the silence of a mostly empty court room, feed away
from men whose ideologies spurred them on to acts of
truly shocking violence. You know what, They're all just some guy,

(00:46):
however heinous the act, whoever hideous the hatred espoused, no
matter how dark their desires. It's like the end of
an episode of Scooby Doo. There never was a ghost
or a swamp creature. There is no supernatural villain. He's
just some god. The Confederate War reenactor building pipe bombs
in his storage unit was also a member of several

(01:07):
sex doll forms, with an online reputation for selling fake
TV props on eBay, the extremely online Nazi conspiracy theorists
who pled guilty to threatening a Charlesville City council candidate
as a bowel problem, His mother wrote to the federal
judge about concerned that he wouldn't be able to poop
in prison. The sovereign citizen who bought a sowd Off
shotgun from an undercover cop to carry out his plan

(01:28):
to execute judges self publishes erotic furry fiction. The National
guardsman planning to assassinate dozens of senators, journalists, and judges,
kept his kill list and the same folder as the
spreadsheet he used to track his steroid cycles. When federal
agents rated the home of a once famous neo Nazi
at four a m. They found him in bed in

(01:49):
his underwear playing Pokemon. The secessionist who got arrested for
bringing a gun to a Nazi rally spent years in
court because his defense contracting business was defrauding the US
Army in Afghanistan. You can laugh, honestly, I think we
have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't
mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy because

(02:11):
the race warriors and Ethno state enthusiasts who spend their
day's brainstorming ways to unravel the fabric of our society
are a threat to be taken seriously. That's why I
spend my days tracking them. But they aren't some unknowable,
unspeakable evil. When you imagine the villains and the story
is some separate category of entity, some completely foreign creature,

(02:31):
some preternatural, ontological evil, you blind yourself to the possibility
of the seeds of that evil that grow in your backyard.
Because when you're looking for the monsters under the bed,
you miss the ones at the dinner table. And my
goal here is not to help you understand or relate
to them or justify the paths they chose. I couldn't

(02:51):
do that even if I wanted to, and I really
don't want to. We have this terrible tendency to exceptionalize,
and I think that's what's at the heart of true
crime phenomenon. You know, we crave these stories that reassure
us that people don't do terrible things monsters do. And
you'd know a monster if he saw one, so you're safe.

(03:13):
And in so many of these cases I've studied, I
see letters and testimony from mothers and brothers and neighbors
and friends, insisting that the man being sentenced for some
sinister plot really is a good boy. Sure, he's pled
guilty to painting a swastika on a Jewish preschool where
he was found with bomb making supplies in his car.
Or he spent years stalking and threatening his political enemies,

(03:36):
and he's got a framed picture of Hitler on his dresser.
He isn't like that, not really. He isn't the kind
of person who would do something like this, But he is.
He literally is. He is exactly the kind of person
who would do something like this, because he is the
person that did something like this. We're all sitting here

(03:56):
in court because he did. And he isn't the kind
of person who would do this, if none of them
are the kind of man who would do this, Because
the only kind of man who would do this is
a monster. And where are the monsters. I'm not saying
you shouldn't be afraid of the monsters. I'm saying the
kind of fear we've cultivated makes us less vigilant and

(04:16):
less equipped to face them. And they don't exist in
a vacuum either. Every time some new shocking atrocious story
comes out. It's presented to us completely without context. Another
mass shooter, another guy with a kill list, another guy
with a manifesto, another rash of racist flyers and stickers,
another fascist group rallying downtown in a city near you.

(04:38):
But they're not rogue waves. They're people. They exist in
the same terrible present as the rest of us, and
they came out of the same complicated past. The difference
is the kind of future they hope to inflict on us.
We lose so much by letting these horrors wash over
us without any context to hold on to. And as
far as making an interesting podcast goes, there are some

(05:00):
strange quirks of history that just make for good storytelling,
Like how a young William Luther Pierce, years before he
set up a Nazi compound in West Virginia, was answering
phones at the headquarters for the National Socialist White People's
Party one afternoon in nineteen sixty eight when he took
a call from a sixteen year old in Ohio who
was planning to murder his high school principal. He invited

(05:22):
the teen to come to Virginia instead for a Nazi
internship of sorts and it was under doctor Pierce that
a young James Mason grew into the man whose modern
accolytes have murdered at least a dozen people and recently
attempted to take up the power grid to start a
race war. In a strange twist of fate, Willian Luther
Piers did not answer the phone one morning in April

(05:42):
of nineteen ninety five, But I don't think he would
have been able to talk Timothy McVeigh out of setting
off that bomb, even if he wanted to. When Edward
Clark shot himself in a public park in DC, hours
after the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, in twenty eighteen, when Nicholas
Giampa shot himself after murdering his ex girlfriend's parents, and
twenty seventeen, when Devin Arthur's murdered two of his roommates

(06:03):
in twenty seventeen, these weren't just troubled young men unconnected
from broader forces. These were militant neo Nazi accelerationists poisoned
by the messy, massive tome. James Mason could only have
written because he made that phone call. In nineteen sixty eight,
when Luke Kenna, Brian Tierney, and Michael Brown were plotting
to rob a bank in twenty twenty two. They hoped

(06:25):
to steal enough cash to set up a rural compound,
borrowing directly from the playbook of The Order, a short
lived white supremacist terrorist organization that carried out several armored
car robberies in the eighties. The money the Order stole
helped pay for a white supremacist paramilitary training camp in
Idaho and the compound in West Virginia where William Luther
Pierce would continue to shape the movement for decades. And

(06:47):
how can I tell you about my favorite jailhouse lawyer,
truly a vexatious litigant for the ages Bill White, without
reaching decades into the past to explain how he got there.
He's got a dozen lawsuits cooking at any given time,
trying to drown the FBI in paperwork to force them
to turn over records he believes will prove his theory
that the American neo Nazi movement is riddled with FBI informants.

(07:08):
And that's why he's in prison. He is in prison
for sending threats to a Florida prosecutor. In the very
first case, a young Augustus and Victus worked fresh out
of law school, and as shocking or unprecedented any revelation
of some new right wing horror may feel, it's all
very precedented. Newspapers ran fawning op eds about the rise

(07:30):
of Richard Spencer, calling him the dapper Nazi, the suit
and tie white supremacist who's presented to us as this
new softer racism in contrast with the skinheads and street
brawlers he was supposedly supplanting. But that surface level contrast,
obscuring private collaboration is as old as time. A council
of conservative citizens put on those suits and ties before

(07:53):
Richard was even born, publicly denouncing the uncouth racism and
open violence of the KKK, and just as his predecessors
before him, he wagged a finger at the masked vigilantes
in public, but in private he relied on the violence
they created. When Chester Doles, a fifth generation clansman, got
out of prison in nineteen ninety seven, he told the

(08:13):
Baltimore Son his days of cross burning were over. He
wanted to go into politics. He ended up going back
to prison a few years later, but he did make
a run at county office in Georgia in twenty twenty two,
and when Augustus and Victus took up the case of
a member of the Nazi gang the Rise Above movement,
he called himself the Attorney for the Damned, a name
he stole from Edgar Steele, the attorney for the Aryan Nations,

(08:36):
who later went to prison for trying to hire someone
to kill his wife with the car bomb. And when
Patriot Front members needed a lawyer, they turned to Glenn Allen,
a disgraced former attorney for the Baltimore Police Department. And
it wasn't the first time a white supremacist organization in
trouble turned to Glenn for help with doomed civil litigation.
When on neo Nazi activist was arrested during a protest
of Nelson Mandela's visit to Washington, d C. In nineteen ninety,

(08:59):
police found d tailed sketches in his pocket of the
building where Mendela was scheduled to speak when he tried
to sue the police department for wrongful arrest. It was
William Luther Pierce himself who hired Glenn Allen to represent him.
They understand the context that shapes their actions. Why shouldn't
we Some listeners may be familiar with my other passion,

(09:21):
live tweeting city council meetings. I know, I know that
feels like a really mismatched set of interests, but I
arrived at both obsessions at the same time for the
same reason. As a longtime resident of Charlesville, Virginia, I
found myself very suddenly needing to understand the nature of
American political violence and how and why my city government
let it happen here. In seven years of keeping in

(09:44):
a running online commentary of very mundane municipal government, I
found that, against all odds, people kind of like it.
People with no connection to my little city will pop
in and read a bit about it what's going on
at a budget hearing, not because they have any particular interest
in the minutia of that specific agenda item, I don't think,
but because there are generalizable lessons to be learned from

(10:06):
the specific I'm in no position to make sweeping generalizations
about the way government works, but you can come with
me while I show you how mine does. And I'm
not much of a political organizer myself, but I think
my coverage of local government has been useful to those
who are. You can't change the outcomes of a system
you don't understand, and I think we can do something

(10:27):
similar here. By stitching together these vignettes of these individual,
weird little guys, we can illuminate broader truths about the
ecosystem that creates them. Let's take the yarn from my
red string board and try to weave it into a
picture of modern American political violence. This is a show
about guys you've never heard of. Plenty of them wished

(10:48):
at some point that you had. They hope to carry
out attacks on synagogues. They planned mass shootings or built bombs.
They plan to take out the power grid or derail
a train. They threaten journalist and activists and politicians. They
wanted to lead a movement or die a martyr. They
wanted to start a race war. They wanted to be
remembered either as a Timothy McVeigh or a Harmungouri. Some

(11:13):
of them actually took action, some of them hurt or
even killed people. A lot of them just posted too
much online. These are just a few of the thousands
of aspiring little furres of the Suburbs, men whose actions
altered the course of the lives of their victims, families,
their communities, but whose stories are ultimately lost in the

(11:33):
shuffle of too many Middle American hitlers. These are the
weird little guys trying to destroy life as we know it,
and I hope you'll join me for a little peak
under their hoods. Weird Little Guys the production of cool
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, to visit
our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on

(11:56):
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get here. Podcasts