Third Position

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Speaker 17 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Speaker 21 Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Speaker 23 Kennedy was killed.

Speaker 24 Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Speaker 25 Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

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Speaker 29 Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 28 In November of 2012, Barack Obama was re-elected as President of the United States.

Speaker 28 He beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney by a pretty good margin. pulling in 51.06%

Speaker 28 of the popular vote to Romney's 47.2.

Speaker 28 But if you add those numbers together, you'll only get 98.26,

Speaker 28 a number that doesn't include more than 2 million votes.

Speaker 28 Where do those votes go?

Speaker 28 American electoral politics are dominated by the two-party system. It's always been that way.
Before it was Republicans and Democrats and red states and blue states, we had Democrats and Whigs.

Speaker 28 And before that, we had Federalists and Democratic Republicans.

Speaker 28 It's always been nearly impossible for a third party or independent candidate to break through on the national stage, but they've always tried.

Speaker 28 There are long-standing third parties, ones you've probably seen on a ballot. Green Party, the Libertarian Party, and there are third parties that have come and gone, like Ross Perot's Reform Party.

Speaker 28 In every election cycle, there are tiny little groups you've never heard of putting up a candidate. They know they can't win, but they have a message they want to get out there.

Speaker 28 And technically, almost anyone can run for president, with or without a party.

Speaker 28 As long as you're a natural-born citizen over 35, all you have to do is raise some money and fill out some paperwork.

Speaker 28 Records from the Federal Election Commission show that in 2012, 280 people filled out that paperwork announcing their intention to run for president of the United States.

Speaker 28 One of those candidates was an aspiring filmmaker with no political experience

Speaker 28 and a lot of thoughts about who really did 9-11.

Speaker 28 I'm Molly Conger

Speaker 28 and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 28 I landed on this story in a roundabout kind of way. I guess I always do.

Speaker 28 If you listen to the last two episodes, I do have a confession to make.

Speaker 28 I left something out of that story.

Speaker 28 It just didn't fit neatly into the episodes and it would have been a confusing digression.

Speaker 28 Those episodes were about Devin Arthurs, the co-founder of Adam Waffen, who murdered two members of the group in 2017.

Speaker 28 And in those episodes, I told you that the earliest mentions of Adam Waffen online were in posts on a forum called Iron March.

Speaker 28 And that's still true, as far as I know. I didn't lie to you.

Speaker 28 But you might have assumed, based on what I said in those episodes, that the group's co-founders, Devin Arthurs and Brendan Russell, must have met on Iron March 2.

Speaker 28 That's a reasonable assumption. And like I said, I left some things out of the story.

Speaker 28 Because that's not where the pair pair first met.

Speaker 28 They met on a platform called Tiny Chat.

Speaker 28 Launched in 2009, Tiny Chat was a video chat room. As many as 12 users at a time could appear on video, and more users could watch and participate in a text chat down below.

Speaker 28 When they were interviewed by police on the night of the murders in 2017, Both Brandon Russell and Devin Arthurs specifically mentioned that they'd originally met on Tiny Chat.

Speaker 28 I dug up old 4chan posts from 2014 that show some screenshots of one particular tiny chat group.

Speaker 28 In what looks like a college dorm room, a user calling himself Odin is staring into his webcam.

Speaker 28 It's Brandon Russell.

Speaker 28 A year before he announced the formation of his neo-Nazi terrorist organization and years before he went to federal prison the first and then second times,

Speaker 28 he was 19 years old, sitting in his dorm room in Florida in an online chat room called Third Position.

Speaker 28 I don't have any particular interest in writing a third part of that story. This isn't actually a continuation of those two episodes.
This isn't about Brendan Russell or Adam Woffin.

Speaker 28 If you didn't listen to those episodes and you don't know what I'm talking about, Don't worry about it.

Speaker 28 But I was stuck on this idea of that third position tiny chat.

Speaker 28 How did a 14-year-old Devin Arthurs end up in a video chat room run by grown men talking about the political ideology of third positionism?

Speaker 28 I'm not going to answer those questions today.

Speaker 28 We're not really going to talk about that chat room at all. I'm just telling you how I ended up reading an unproduced screenplay about a brave and handsome patriot who uncovers the truth about 9-11.

Speaker 28 I promise these things are related.

Speaker 28 This story is about the man who wrote that awful screenplay, a man named Merlin Miller.

Speaker 28 In 2012, he was put forward as a presidential candidate by the American Third Position Party, the same group that was video chatting with teenage Nazis in 2014.

Speaker 28 One surviving promotional video for the chat room actually repurposes Miller's 2012 campaign announcement video to advertise an upcoming chat featuring the party's chairman, an attorney named William Johnson.

Speaker 28 There are a lot of characters here who we will definitely see again in future episodes, so I won't dwell on them for too long now.

Speaker 28 But let's get a little backstory.

Speaker 28 The American Third Position Party was an actual political party registered with the Federal Election Commission. And it still exists today, kind of.

Speaker 28 The group rebranded as the American Freedom Party, and they still have a website, although they terminated their Federal Electoral Committee in in 2020.

Speaker 28 As we so often see with extremist groups, there is this constant cycle of collapsing, rebranding, and splintering.

Speaker 28 And that's how American third position was born. In 2009, a Nazi skinhead group in California found themselves in turmoil.
Some Nazi skinheads, calling themselves Freedom 14,

Speaker 28 tried to organize a political party called the Golden State Party.

Speaker 28 But it all fell apart when the the Orange County Register published a story revealing that the party spokesman had been using a pseudonym to hide the fact that he had some violent felony convictions in his past.

Speaker 28 It's not totally clear to me why the Nazi skinheads found that to be a problem. That's kind of their whole thing, but I guess it just won't do for your political party spokesman.

Speaker 28 Either way, the Golden State Party was dead in the water. And some of those skinheads weren't ready to give up on the idea of having a political party.

Speaker 28 So they got together to choose a new leader and a new name.

Speaker 28 And they settled on the American Third Position Party. And the group would be chaired by a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles named William Johnson.

Speaker 28 Johnson has been on my list of weird little guys from the beginning.

Speaker 28 I never actually managed to pull from my list of episode ideas because I always get distracted by by some stray thought from the prior week's research, but I have to imagine we'll get to him eventually.

Speaker 28 He's a lawyer and he's in the movement, but he's not really a movement lawyer. That's not the focus of his practice.

Speaker 28 He pitches in occasionally, sure.

Speaker 28 His name shows up as the attorney of record on a trademark application for the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Speaker 28 And there's a Nazi in Pennsylvania who seems fond of CCing Johnson when he emails county employees to make public records requests, as though he thinks Johnson is his personal attorney, but he's not licensed to practice in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 28 But usually when I'm talking about a guy who is both an attorney and a career white nationalist,

Speaker 28 he's not really keeping those parts of his life separate. So I think he's a little unique in that respect.

Speaker 28 As an attorney, Johnson primarily represents Japanese companies doing business in the United States.

Speaker 28 He has a terribly common name, making it a little hard to look him up on PACER, but it doesn't look like he's taken very many cases to court. At least not in federal court.

Speaker 28 But in corporate law, there's a lot of law to be practiced outside the courtroom.

Speaker 28 He does have an active case in the Court of International Trade right now, but I couldn't possibly pretend to be interested in the court's opinion about whether his client's imported goods were properly classified under the tariff schedule.

Speaker 28 Apparently, the difference between raw dried seaweed and seaweed that has been prepared for human consumption by drying it is not just in the eye of the beholder. It is a 6% jump in tariff rate.

Speaker 28 Just how dry this seaweed really is isn't interesting. But his choice of co-counsel is.

Speaker 28 The seaweed importer is almost certainly Johnson's client. This is the kind of client he represents.

Speaker 28 But the documents are actually being filed with the court by a movement lawyer who recently represented members of Patriot Front.

Speaker 28 Small world, I guess.

Speaker 28 But we'll get to Glenn Allen's role in this story next week. Not the seaweed part, the Nazi part.

Speaker 28 The website for Johnson's LA-based law firm is almost entirely in Japanese. a language he appears to conduct most of his business in proficiently.

Speaker 28 He majored in Japanese at Brigham Young University and spent some time in Japan as a Mormon missionary.

Speaker 28 I don't speak any Japanese, so I can't really be the judge of such things.

Speaker 28 But in some of the videos on his website, at least to my ear, he has the sort of stilted cadence of a speaker who isn't terribly confident in his skills.

Speaker 28 I am, however, much better equipped to pass judgment on his other career, that of a professional racist.

Speaker 28 He's been splitting his time between the two for more than 40 years.

Speaker 28 He was admitted to the bar in 1981, and soon after that, he starts writing under the pseudonym James O. Pace.

Speaker 28 In 1985, as James O. Pace, he published a book called Amendment to the Constitution, Averting the Decline and Fall of America.

Speaker 28 The book lays out his argument for an amendment to the Constitution, this so-called Pace Amendment. And it would repeal the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S.
Constitution.

Speaker 28 He also proposes restricting U.S. citizenship to whites of European descent only.

Speaker 28 The second section of the proposed amendment reads, quote,

Speaker 28 No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay, or other non-European or non-white blood.

Speaker 28 You might be asking, why did it take an entire book to explain how that would work?

Speaker 28 Well, for one thing, he had to devote quite a few pages to explaining exactly how the government would go about determining who is white.

Speaker 28 Are Armenians white?

Speaker 28 Are Iranians? Are Jews?

Speaker 28 The answer is no, obviously.

Speaker 28 The book is every bit as bad as you're imagining, and it did not need to be 200 pages long.

Speaker 28 And after its publication, he spent the latter half of the 1980s running a group called the League of Pace Amendment Advocates.

Speaker 28 And he claimed that he was the group's spokesman. And he pretended that he'd met the author and just supported his ideas.

Speaker 28 When the LA Times connected the dots that William Daniel Johnson was definitely James O. Pace,

Speaker 28 he denied it, telling the paper that James Pace was a pseudonym, but it wasn't his.

Speaker 28 Pace is a lawyer, just like him, but Pace works outside of the country.

Speaker 28 He wouldn't say what Pace's real name was or what country he was allegedly living in.

Speaker 28 It's giving, my girlfriend goes to a different school, you wouldn't know her.

Speaker 28 He gave up on the League of Pace Amendment Advocates after someone bombed the group's office in 1989.

Speaker 28 It was only a small bomb, and it went off in the middle of the night when no one was there. No one was injured, and as far as I can tell, it was never solved.

Speaker 28 Like I said, William Daniel Johnson is absolutely a weird little guy in his own right, so I won't linger here.

Speaker 28 But he was a well-established figure in organized racism by the time those skinheads approached him to chair their rebranded political party in 2009.

Speaker 28 In fact, he was fresh off a very public loss in a 2008 campaign for judge in the Superior Court of Los Angeles.

Speaker 28 The embarrassing defeat only raised his profile in the white nationalist community, though. And it came at a time of renewed interest in the movement in the idea of entering mainstream politics.

Speaker 28 His newly formed political party was led by respectable professionals, obscuring its origin in skinhead street fighting gangs.

Speaker 28 Johnson was an attorney with a JD from Columbia University. Tom Sunik, a Croatian-born political scientist, had taught at several universities.

Speaker 28 And Kevin McDonald was a professor of psychology at California State University.

Speaker 28 This was the era of the suit-and-tie racist, the dapper Nazi.

Speaker 28 Richard Spencer had just started his alternativeright.com website.

Speaker 28 Matthew Heimbach was still a college student at Towson University, and he was leading a chapter of the white supremacist group Youth for Western Civilization.

Speaker 28 Both men would go on to figure prominently in the 2017 era alt-right and the street violence that accompanied it.

Speaker 28 And in the early 2010s, both of these men were frequent collaborators with members of the American Third Position Party.

Speaker 28 The party may have been a rebranding of a California skinhead group, but it couldn't have existed without the neo-Nazi networking that was happening at Ron Paul campaign events.

Speaker 28 The Ron Paul revolution never really took off, but his campaign provided fertile recruiting grounds for white nationalists.

Speaker 28 In 2007, William Johnson was hosting pricey fundraising dinners for Paul's campaign. When he ran for judge in 2008, his campaign manager was also the Paul campaign's California statewide coordinator.

Speaker 28 Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt professor and member of the Council of Conservative Citizens who would go on to be a member of the party's board, was one of several high-profile racists whose donations to the Paul campaign made headlines when he declined to refuse money from white nationalists.

Speaker 28 And it was through Ron Paul campaign events that Merlin Miller first met members of the American Third Position Party.

Speaker 28 Don't just take my word for it, though.

Speaker 33 Most of the founders, of course, of the American Third Position, which have evolved into the American Freedom Party now, grew out of the Ron Paul movement.

Speaker 33 But I think one of the major shortcomings of the Ron Paul platform was he really did not deal very strongly on immigration. And it's probably the most destructive thing going on today to America.

Speaker 33 And as you suggested, it's altering the national character of our country.

Speaker 28 That's a conversation between merlin miller and american third position party director jamie kelso back in 2013.

Speaker 28 he's saying something a lot of white nationalists were saying back then

Speaker 28 they love ron paul they love ron paul's platform

Speaker 28 but he's just not going far enough

Speaker 28 in its first few years and I guess now that I'm saying out loud, every year since then as well,

Speaker 28 the party had trouble fielding candidates.

Speaker 28 It's a tricky thing to do, even mainstream politics. Running for office is hard.
Convincing someone else to run for office is also very hard.

Speaker 28 It takes a lot of time, effort, and money.

Speaker 28 You have to put yourself out there.

Speaker 28 It's exhausting and potentially humiliating.

Speaker 28 And the kind of guy who's enthusiastic about running for office is an open white nationalist.

Speaker 28 Well,

Speaker 28 that kind of guy tends to be an absolute fucking weirdo who alienates everyone within earshot.

Speaker 28 When party member Ryan Murdaugh announced his candidacy for state representative in New Hampshire, people were disgusted.

Speaker 28 One letter to the editor from a Grafton resident called his candidacy a festering boil.

Speaker 28 Party member Harry Bertram made several spectacularly unsuccessful runs for office in West Virginia, including the 2011 special election for governor.

Speaker 28 I didn't do a whole lot of digging on Harry Bertram, but I did read the entirety of his 23-year posting history on Stormfront, and I have to say, he doesn't strike me as a strong communicator.

Speaker 28 And he appears to be at least a little bit involved with the Klan.

Speaker 28 But more importantly, his message just didn't resonate with West Virginians.

Speaker 28 It was coarse and overt.

Speaker 28 He ran ads that fear-mongered about white replacement, but he didn't have much else to offer outside of those racist conspiracy theories.

Speaker 28 One local news article from the Time quoted a West Virginia voter who said, illegal immigration just wasn't a top issue for her.

Speaker 28 In 2010, West Virginia was 94%

Speaker 28 white.

Speaker 28 The state is to this day dead last when it comes to the percentage of residents who are foreign-born and the percentage of residents who speak a language other than English at home.

Speaker 28 About 1.5% and 2.5%, respectively.

Speaker 28 So even if those voters don't like immigrants in theory,

Speaker 28 there's a decent chance they've never even seen one.

Speaker 28 He was a single-issue candidate. And that just wasn't the issue people cared most about.

Speaker 28 The party needed someone who who looked

Speaker 28 normal.

Speaker 28 Someone who could put on a suit and put together a sentence and pretend to address a real issue. Preferably, someone who wasn't publicly associated with another active hate group.

Speaker 28 Someone with a clean record and a good education.

Speaker 28 I mean, it doesn't matter who they pick, they're not going to win.

Speaker 28 But it isn't necessarily about winning, is it?

Speaker 34 It's harder for our our enemies to characterize us as complete outsiders and fringe kooks if we're on the ballots

Speaker 34 in a state election or a federal election.

Speaker 28 That was party director Jamie Kelso chatting with Richard Spencer back in 2013.

Speaker 28 And here's one of America's leading pseudo-intellectual racists, Jared Taylor. in a promotional video begging people to run for office as a member of the party.

Speaker 35 Running for office is one of the best ways to publicize our ideas and to reach people who may have never heard a sensible dissenting view about race.

Speaker 28 It's not about winning elections. It's about Trojan horsing white nationalist rhetoric into the conversation at every level, from county school board to president of the United States.

Speaker 28 After running Harry Bertram a couple times for state and local office in West Virginia, American Third Position wanted to break into national politics.

Speaker 28 And in the 2012 presidential election, they decided that Merlin Miller was the man for the job.

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Speaker 14 Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 15 I couldn't even believe it was real.

Speaker 17 Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Speaker 21 Just like my parents talk talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Speaker 23 Kennedy was killed.

Speaker 24 Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Speaker 25 Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Speaker 19 Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Speaker 29 Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 28 By his own telling, Merlin Miller wasn't very interested in politics for most of his life.

Speaker 28 He grew up in a working-class family in Iowa and became the first member of his family to graduate from college. He graduated from West Point in the class of 1974,

Speaker 28 and he had some pretty famous classmates.

Speaker 28 Astronaut Michael Clifford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, former Deputy Assistant Secretary General of NATO Matthew Climo, former NSA Director Keith Alexander, and four-star general Walter Sharp.

Speaker 28 And of course, former CIA director David Petraeus.

Speaker 28 I had to look up the graduating class of 1974 to get most of those names. But not that one.

Speaker 28 In almost every speech and interview I could find, spanning a decade, Merlin Miller mentions that he went to school with David Petraeus.

Speaker 28 I guess he thinks it makes him sound important.

Speaker 28 He knows a very important guy whose name has been on the news a lot, so that must mean something.

Speaker 28 And particularly back during the 2012 campaign cycle, David Petraeus was on the news quite a bit.

Speaker 28 So saying the name gives him some proximity to power, some proximity to legitimacy.

Speaker 28 Sometimes it feels like he wants the listener to assume that the pair have maintained some kind of relationship since graduation, but I don't think he ever outright says that.

Speaker 28 In In one interview, he says that in 2009, he sent Petraeus, quote, a treatise that connected military, political, and media intrigues, challenging many of the orthodoxies.

Speaker 28 Based on the context of the conversation and the fact that the interview was published on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory website, you can probably guess that he sent the general some weird essay about Jewish control of the media.

Speaker 28 Based on his use of the word treatise, though, I'm pretty sure what he sent David Petraeus was a copy of his unpublished 100-page manuscript called The American Dream.

Speaker 28 It's a document that he only ever refers to as a treatise, and that's the only place I can find him ever using that word.

Speaker 28 So I think that's what it was.

Speaker 28 And it's got everything you might expect. Communism is a Jewish conspiracy.
Some parts of the Holocaust probably kind of happened, but maybe it wasn't actually that serious.

Speaker 28 The Federal Reserve and the IRS were illegal scams perpetrated on the American people. 9-11 was a false flag orchestrated by Mossad and the CIA.

Speaker 28 Illegal immigration is replacing white Americans, and the Jews are behind that too. We have to crush the new world order, etc.

Speaker 28 You know.

Speaker 28 Honestly, I wonder if he was a big Infowars listener in the mid-aughts? Because this sounds like vintage Alex Jones.

Speaker 28 I guess there was this thriving blogosphere back then with all the same talking points, so he could have gotten it anywhere. Let's not give Alex Jones too much credit.

Speaker 28 I don't think David Petraeus ever wrote back.

Speaker 28 After graduating from West Point in 1974, Miller served six years in the Army. He spent a few years working for Michel Entire Company.

Speaker 28 But in 1983, he had the opportunity to pursue his true passion, his childhood dream,

Speaker 28 filmmaking.

Speaker 28 He was accepted into an MFA program at the University of Southern California, and he was one of just 20 students admitted into that year's Peter Stark producing program, a specialized graduate degree program within the film school that focused on film and television production.

Speaker 28 And here too, he had some very famous classmates.

Speaker 28 Stacey Scher produced movies like Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, and Aaron Brockovich.

Speaker 28 Neil Moritz would go on to produce movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cruel Intentions, and all of the Fast and Furious movies.

Speaker 28 Liz Glotzer is the president of a production company that makes television dramas for CBS.

Speaker 28 The program seems to produce a lot of producers.

Speaker 28 And Merlin Miller really did try to break into the industry.

Speaker 28 While he was at USC, he interned at Paramount. And after graduation, he had some minor production roles in a couple of schlocky, low-budget movies in the late 80s and early 90s.

Speaker 28 But he had a family to feed. He and his wife had four daughters by that time, and living in LA is expensive.
You can't support a family of six working as a line producer on B-movies.

Speaker 28 The family relocated to Springfield, Missouri, and he took a job at Ozark's Technical Community College.

Speaker 28 But he didn't give up on his dreams. He started his own film production company, Ozark Pictures.

Speaker 28 And he made a movie.

Speaker 28 He made a real movie with a budget of close to a million dollars, all secured through private investors.

Speaker 28 His first film, A Place to Grow, premiered at a theater in Springfield, Missouri in March of 1995.

Speaker 28 One of the film's big stars, Chris Christofferson's daughter Tracy, attended the premiere in Springfield. But her co-stars Wilford Brimley and a country singer called Boxcar Willie didn't make it.

Speaker 28 The movie didn't get wide release. It wasn't something people were seeing in theaters all over the country.

Speaker 28 And almost all of the press about the film was in Missouri newspapers who were writing about it as a local interest story because the film cast locals in most of the smaller roles.

Speaker 28 And in some of those articles, all the way back in 1995, you can start to see the hints of what's coming.

Speaker 28 He told a reporter that he left Hollywood for the Ozarks to make movies that, quote, promote the ideals of Americana, end quote. Traditional family values for Midwestern audiences, you know.

Speaker 28 20 years later, in an interview with a Holocaust denier, he said pretty much the same thing.

Speaker 28 You just can't make movies with good family values out there in Hollywood.

Speaker 39 Having graduated high in the class, I thought I might have some opportunities, but the only opportunities for people like me from the Midwest with traditional values was working independent films.

Speaker 28 But he's speaking a little more freely this time than he did with that reporter from the newspaper in Springfield, Missouri back in 1995.

Speaker 28 Because this time, he's speaking to Dave Geherry.

Speaker 28 a longtime friend of David Duke and the proprietor of a small publishing company that prints mostly conspiracy theory books, including several by Jim Fetzer, a man who believes the moon landing, the Holocaust, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and the Unite the Right vehicular attack in Charlottesville were all hoaxes.

Speaker 28 None of those things happened.

Speaker 28 After Fetzer lost a lawsuit brought by the father of a little boy killed in Sandy Hook, Geharry had to stop selling a book called Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.

Speaker 28 So in this conversation, that's who he's talking to.

Speaker 28 So Miller can be a little more explicit about what he means.

Speaker 39 And I was disillusioned with the quality of films coming out of Hollywood and lack of any true opportunities with somebody that I thought should have been able to get some opportunities things going.

Speaker 39 There were 20 of us that graduated from a year group in USC, and five were Jewish.

Speaker 39 And those five went on to make some incredible big motion pictures, not necessarily good motion pictures, but some very high profile motion pictures and do to this very day.

Speaker 39 With one other exception, I'm the only other graduate from our class that still considers himself a part of the industry and that's pretty typical of all of the year groups at USC and in the industry.

Speaker 39 So it's a very controlled environment.

Speaker 28 In this interview in 2012, he says he's still in the industry,

Speaker 28 which is weird, because I can't imagine what he thinks he means by that.

Speaker 28 He only ever made two movies. His second and final film, a Western called Jericho, was released in 2001 by another production company he founded called Black Knight Productions.

Speaker 28 I found this one streaming somewhere, and I did try to watch it. I like to be thorough.
I really did try, I promise. I put it on the TV one evening during dinner,

Speaker 28 but I couldn't finish it.

Speaker 28 I mean, it was, it was just not good.

Speaker 28 It had some actual stars, surprisingly, but there's just no getting over some hurdles.

Speaker 28 Mark Valley, who hadn't yet landed roles on shows like ER, Fringe, Boston Legal, and CSI,

Speaker 28 was mostly just a soap opera actor in the 90s. And R.
Lee Ermey was in... damn near 100 movies.

Speaker 28 You might not know his name, but he's the Marine Corps Drill Sergeant in every movie you've ever seen with an older man playing a Marine Corps Drill Sergeant or some adjacent type of loud, vaguely military-coated authority figure.

Speaker 28 That's Arlie Ermey, every time.

Speaker 28 I think he just said yes to everything.

Speaker 28 But even getting real actors for his movie could not salvage it.

Speaker 28 My poor husband, who is eternally supportive of my work and has this seemingly infinite well of patience for my obsessions, looked so painfully bored that I just, I couldn't do it to him.

Speaker 28 I mean, he once sat through a made-for-TV movie starring a lesser Baldwin brother based on the autobiography of a neo-Nazi, and he didn't even complain when I talked through the entire movie, saying things like, well, that's not what really happened, and that character is actually an amalgamation of three different real guys.

Speaker 28 So I take it very seriously if he's visibly pained by the terrors I've brought into our home.

Speaker 28 So I didn't watch Jericho, but I guess you could.

Speaker 28 And just like A Place to Grow, Jericho failed to get picked up for wider distribution.

Speaker 28 But in his efforts to market the film, Merlin Miller met a man who would change his life.

Speaker 28 It wasn't long after 9-11 when Merlin Miller had a meeting with a film buyer for Carmike Cinemas.

Speaker 28 The buyer passed on the film, but they got to talking about other things.

Speaker 28 None of the source material I could find explains exactly how they got on the subject. I don't know which one of them brought up the Jewish question first,

Speaker 28 but someone did.

Speaker 28 You see, as a much younger man, Before he was the one deciding which independent films you could see at a Carmike theater, Bob Scarborough served three years in the Navy.

Speaker 28 And in 1967, according to his obituary, Scarborough was a cryptologist serving aboard the USS Liberty.

Speaker 28 On June 8th, 1967, a little over halfway through the Six-Day War, the Liberty was patrolling international waters off the coast of Egypt.

Speaker 28 Officially, the United States was not involved in the Six-Day War. That was a war between Israel and everybody else.

Speaker 28 But the American military is everywhere. So the USS Liberty was about 30 miles off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula when two unidentified jets appeared overhead.

Speaker 28 The jets made half a dozen strafing runs over the Liberty, firing on the vessel.

Speaker 28 And then torpedo boats arrived and they too fired on the Liberty.

Speaker 28 34 members aboard the U.S. naval vessel were killed, and 171 more were injured.

Speaker 28 I'll get it out of the way right now.

Speaker 28 There's no

Speaker 28 right way to talk about this.

Speaker 28 That part just now, those are the bare facts. Those are the facts that everyone agrees on.

Speaker 28 But the incident in question is the subject of decades of conspiracy theories. Mostly ones repeated by virulent anti-Semites.

Speaker 28 You'll never catch me out here saying the Holocaust deniers are making some valid points. That's not what I'm saying.

Speaker 28 But while the official investigations conducted by the U.S. and Israeli governments agree on the hard facts, right?

Speaker 28 That the jets fired, the boats fired, the people died, but the investigations don't agree on the nature of the situation.

Speaker 28 For the bare facts here, I'm using sources like the U.S.

Speaker 28 Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command and documents available from the State Department's Office of the Historian and declassified documents available on the NSA's website.

Speaker 28 Not to say that the US government is the arbiter of truth here and that those documents necessarily present the version of the truth that is true.

Speaker 28 I'm just trying to convey that I did go out of my way to make sure I wasn't accidentally repeating something from a conspiracy theory website because it can be very hard to tell.

Speaker 28 The official explanation from the Israeli government is that it was a mistake.

Speaker 28 The pilots claimed that the ship wasn't flying a flag and they thought the Liberty was an Egyptian vessel.

Speaker 28 Once they realized the victims were screaming in English, they apologized to the United States and paid a few million dollars in compensation to the victims' families and a few million more for the damage caused to the ship.

Speaker 28 But there are a lot of unanswered questions here.

Speaker 28 And the problem is the only people you ever hear asking those questions are absolutely bug fuck nuts. Because this is a favorite topic of obsession for boomer anti-Semites.

Speaker 28 It's a real shame, too, because there are some very uncomfortable holes in the official narrative.

Speaker 28 But the way conspiracy theorists have flooded the conversation on this makes it very hard to trust most sources.

Speaker 28 It is absolutely possible, and I think necessary, to ask questions about unjustified Israeli military aggression without being anti-Semitic.

Speaker 28 Unfortunately, the average guy posting online about the USS Liberty is not interested in that distinction.

Speaker 28 So I'm not going to talk anymore about what may or may not have really happened aboard the USS Liberty in June of 1967.

Speaker 28 Because for the purposes of this story, that doesn't actually matter.

Speaker 28 The only thing that matters here is that the event is a madness rune for a particular flavor of conspiracy guy.

Speaker 28 And Merlin Miller has said many times that this conversation with Bob Scarborough about the USS Liberty was his political awakening.

Speaker 28 It makes sense, in a way, that he was infected by this single conversation.

Speaker 28 He'd washed out of Hollywood and his independent film career was one disappointment after another.

Speaker 28 He couldn't get funding. He felt like the MPAA was giving his movies unfair ratings.
He couldn't get theatrical release.

Speaker 28 And his classmates whose careers were flourishing?

Speaker 28 Come to think of it, they all had pretty Jewish-sounding last names, didn't they?

Speaker 28 It wasn't about talent or merit or that he wasn't working hard enough or that he wasn't making movies people wanted to watch. No, it couldn't be that.
This is about Jewish control of the media.

Speaker 28 That's what's going on here.

Speaker 28 And now, with 9-11 fresh in his mind and conspiracy theories sprouting like mushrooms after a rain, here's this life-altering revelation from a man who says he lived through a false flag attack carried out by the people that Merlin Miller is already half convinced have it out for him.

Speaker 28 So he started doing his own research

Speaker 28 and he got obsessed.

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Speaker 28 Scarborough soon introduced Merlin Miller to a friend of his, a man named Richard S. Thompson.

Speaker 28 I couldn't actually find a copy of a book Miller wrote in 2016, and I think there may be more detail in there.

Speaker 28 But my guess is Scarborough thought to connect him to Thompson, not just so Miller would have someone else to talk to about the USS Liberty, but because of their shared interest in film.

Speaker 28 Richard Thompson had been heavily involved in the production of a 2002 BBC documentary about the USS Liberty.

Speaker 28 So maybe a Scarborough is telling Miller, you know, I'm not interested in purchasing the rights to Jericho,

Speaker 28 but I have this other opportunity for you.

Speaker 28 Talk to my buddy Dick Thompson. He likes financing films.

Speaker 28 Thompson and Miller did go on to become very close friends, and he was...

Speaker 28 According to Miller, very interested in making a movie together.

Speaker 28 According to that rambling 100-page treatise he wrote in 2009, that one I'm pretty sure he mailed to General David Petraeus, Thompson agreed to finance a movie that would be produced and directed by Merlin Miller.

Speaker 28 Again, according to Miller, Thompson announced his intention to fund the film on Friday, June 8th, 2007.

Speaker 28 That was the 40th anniversary of the incident on the USS Liberty, and a few dozen surviving crewmen were meeting up in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 28 Now, as far as I can tell, Richard S. Thompson was never aboard the USS Liberty.
He wasn't a crewman at the time of the incident.

Speaker 28 He was definitely in the Navy. I know that.

Speaker 28 The announcement in the newspaper when he married his wife in 1954 mentions it, and so does his obituary.

Speaker 28 And his obituary does mention the Liberty,

Speaker 28 but not in the context of his naval career.

Speaker 28 No, it says he was a longtime supporter of the survivors of the USS Liberty. So it's just something he had an interest in.

Speaker 28 A lot of the writing online written by people I think may not be fully grounded in reality assert without question that he worked in naval intelligence.

Speaker 28 At least one rather fantastical book repeatedly refers to him as a CIA asset.

Speaker 28 But none of this seems to be corroborated by any outside source that I could find. So I don't know exactly what Thompson was doing in the Navy or how he came to know so much about the USS Liberty.

Speaker 28 But either way, he was very involved with this veterans group, and he was attending the 40th anniversary reunion in DC that weekend.

Speaker 28 On Sunday, he left DC and began driving home to Florida.

Speaker 28 He made it about halfway home.

Speaker 28 Again, I can't find any reporting about the accident that was written by someone I know believes the Holocaust happened, so it's hard to say exactly what happened.

Speaker 28 But somewhere in Florence County, South Carolina, Thompson had a fatal single car accident.

Speaker 28 Even the conspiracy theorists have to begrudgingly admit that there's no sign of foul play.

Speaker 28 There's no actual reason to suspect this was anything but an accident.

Speaker 28 He was a 76-year-old man who had an exciting but probably exhausting weekend with his old Navy buddies. And then he got up at the crack of dawn to make a 13-hour drive home.

Speaker 28 Halfway through the drive, he lost control of the vehicle and crashed.

Speaker 28 But these people have questions.

Speaker 28 Did he fall asleep?

Speaker 28 Or was it Mossad?

Speaker 28 Describing Thompson's death, Merlin Miller wrote, Although foul play was not suspected, Dick had told me of prior Israeli Mossad surveillance.

Speaker 28 And writing in the conspiracy theory rag American Free Press, Mark Glenn wrote that he and many others were very suspicious about the death because they believe Thompson was, quote, about to go public with information that had never before been published.

Speaker 28 But again, there's no indication there was anything suspicious about the accident, and this this same article by Mark Glenn includes this line.

Speaker 28 As if he had a premonition that his time was approaching, Thompson recently made known to the Liberty Veterans Association that in the event of his death, he did not want anyone wasting money on flowers for his funeral, but rather that such individuals should send money to the Liberty Veterans Association so that the truths concerning the attacks on the USS Liberty could continue to emerge.

Speaker 28 So if he's telling people what they should do if he dies and he's 76 years old, do you think he was secretly assassinated by a foreign government staging a single car accident that had witnesses?

Speaker 28 Or do you think maybe his health was failing and he did know his time was coming?

Speaker 28 Hard to say which is more likely.

Speaker 28 I'm not the betting kind, but if I had to, I'd wager it was A car accident.

Speaker 28 Distracted driving, heart attack, asleep at the wheel, something tragic and routine.

Speaker 28 But however ordinary his death was, it left Merlin Miller without funding to produce his screenplay.

Speaker 28 An action thriller romance called False Flag, the story of a brave and handsome reporter who uncovers the truth about the USS Liberty and 9-11.

Speaker 28 And he has to take matters into his own hands to stop these false flags from causing World War III.

Speaker 28 I'm afraid we'll have to pick back up there next week. I got lost along the way again.
I didn't even get to Merlin Miller's actual presidential campaign.

Speaker 28 To be honest, I don't think his heart was really in it.

Speaker 28 In an interview shortly after he announced he was running, he accidentally revealed to Richard Spencer that he didn't know what the third position in American third position party even meant.

Speaker 28 And just weeks before Election Day, he wasn't out there pounding the pavement talking to voters.

Speaker 28 He was taking meetings in Tehran, trying to get Iranian funding for his conspiracy theory movie.

Speaker 28 I'm not sure if he brought a copy of his screenplay to the 20-minute private meeting he had with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,

Speaker 28 but I do know he gave the Iranian president a copy of his 2001 Western, Jericho, on DVD.

Speaker 28 I wish Ahmadinejad was still on Twitter. I would have loved to ask him if he got past the first 20 minutes.

Speaker 28 Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Licherman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 28 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.

Speaker 28 I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

Speaker 28 Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.

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