The Weird Little Guys Trying to Ruin Our Lives

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Hey, I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys, a 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, 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 courtroom, feet away from men whose ideology spurred them on to acts of truly shocking violence.

You know what?

They're all just some guy.

However heinous the act, however 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.

It's just some guy.

The Confederate war reenactor building pipe bombs in his storage unit was also a member of several sex doll forms with an online reputation for selling fake TV props on eBay.

The extremely online Nazi conspiracy theorist who pled guilty to threatening a Charlottesville City Council candidate has 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 sawed-off shotgun from an undercover cop to carry out his plan to execute judges self-publishes erotic furry fiction.

The National Guardsman planning to assassinate dozens of senators, journalists, and judges kept his kill list in the same folder as the spreadsheet he used to track his sterite cycles.

When federal agents raided the home of a once famous neo-Nazi at 4 a.m., they found him in bed, in 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 U.S.

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 the race warriors and ethnostate enthusiasts who spend their days 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 in the story as some separate category of entity, some completely foreign creature, 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 do that even if I wanted to, and I really don't want to.

But we have this terrible tendency to exceptionalize.

And I think that's what's at the heart of the 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 you saw one.

So you're safe.

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 or he was found with bomb-making supplies in his car or spent years stalking and threatening his political enemies and he's got a framed picture of Hitler on his dresser.

But 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 in court because he did.

And if 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, then 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 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.

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 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 was answering phones at the headquarters for the National Socialist White People's Party one afternoon in 1968, when he took a call from a 16-year-old in Ohio who was planning to murder his high school principal.

He invited the teen to come to Virginia instead for a Nazi internship of sorts.

And it was under Dr.

Pierce that a young James Mason grew into the man whose modern acolytes have murdered at least a dozen people and recently attempted to take out the power grid to start a race war.

In a strange twist of fate, William Luther Pierce did not answer the phone one morning in April of 1995.

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 D.C.

hours after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018, when Nicholas Giampa shot himself after murdering his ex-girlfriend's parents in 2017, when Devin Arthur murdered two of his roommates in 2017, 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 1968.

When Luke Kenna, Brian Tierney, and Michael Brown were plotting to rob a bank in 2022, they hoped 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 80s.

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 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, 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 Invictus 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 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 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 Does, a fifth generation Klansman, got out of prison in 1997, he told the Baltimore Sun 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 2022.

And when Augustus Invictus 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, who later went to prison for trying to hire someone to kill his wife with a 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 a neo-Nazi activist was arrested during a protest of Nelson Mandela's visit to Washington, D.C.

in 1990, police found detailed sketches in his pocket of the building where Mandela 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, 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 Charlottesville, 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 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 minutiae of that specific agenda item, I don't think.

but because there are generalizable lessons to be learned from the specific.

I'm in no position to make sweeping 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 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 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 at some point that you had.

They hoped to carry out attacks on synagogues, they planned mass shootings or built bombs.

They planned to take out the power grid or derail a train.

They threatened journalists 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 Hermann Göring.

Some 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 Führers 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 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 peek under their hoods.

Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Daily Variety, and listen now.

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