American Fart Party

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in 1995, a middle-aged former Marine decided to go back to school.

He'd been out of the service for years.

He'd already had an entire second career as a mining engineer.

But he was having trouble finding a job.

On the eve of the dot-com boom, he saw an opportunity for a new direction.

He enrolled at Arizona State University to study computers.

That first semester, he enrolled in a class called Introduction to Macintosh.

Through the university, he had unlimited access to the World Wide Web, accessible 24-7 at the school's on-campus computer center.

By day, he learned the basics of computer programming.

But at night, alone in the computer lab, he browsed the web.

It was there that he first discovered websites devoted to white nationalism.

He devoured the writings of Dr.

William Luther Pierce, the leader of the neo-Nazi group National Alliance.

He created an account on a forum for followers of the World Church of the Creator.

And within months, he was invited to meet in person with the leadership of the local chapters of both organizations.

Ralph Brandt enrolled in computer classes looking for a third act.

And I guess he got one.

I don't know how proficient he ever got at computer programming.

But in the 30 years since he first stumbled upon an online forum for racists, he's found purpose.

Now, at nearly 76 years old, he's the chairman of white nationalist group, angling for a comeback.

I'm Molly Conger,

and this is Weird Little Guys.

This week, more than ever, I have felt overwhelmed by the realization that this show doesn't really have individual episodes.

There are no self-contained stories with beginnings, middles, and ends.

This has all just been one

really long story that I'm telling out of order.

The last two main feed episodes, I told you a story about Merlin Miller.

A failed filmmaker who fell down a rabbit hole after 9-11, became obsessed with conspiracy theories, and ran for president in 2012 on the ticket of an openly white supremacist, fascist, eugenicist political party called the American Third Position Party.

And in that second episode, I hinted that the group behind his candidacy hasn't really gone away.

In the aftermath of Merlin Miller's disastrous run for president, the party rebranded.

Remember, the group originally formed out of the collapse of a California group called the Golden State Party, so named because it was mostly made up of members of the neo-Nazi skinhead group, the Golden State Skinheads.

So the Golden State Party collapsed in 2009, and they regrouped as the American Third Position Party in 2010, and then the group rebranded again as the American Freedom Party in December of 2012.

And my plan for the next episode, this one, the one you're listening to now, was just to speed run through the party's activities over the decade that followed, bringing us all the way back up to the present day and then be done with it.

But I think we're going to have to revisit some parts of this story in more depth some other time, maybe not next week.

As I was scrounging around compiling my notes and collecting filings from failed campaigns and watching grainy old videos of speeches at white nationalist summits held in hotel conference rooms and listening to Nazi podcasts at double speed, just wishing that they would get to the point.

I started to feel a little bit crazed.

I mean, that's not unusual, to be honest, that happens a lot.

It's maddening work for a variety of reasons.

But I kept coming across familiar names, familiar organizations,

people and places and things that I didn't expect to see in this story.

Finding connections to past episodes and to stories stories I haven't written yet.

There's a psychological phenomenon called apophenia.

It's a tendency to see patterns where they don't exist, to find connections between unrelated things, to see meaning in random stimuli.

In its most extreme form, It can be a symptom of mental illnesses like schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

But you also see it on display in the writings of conspiracy theorists.

And you've definitely seen it at work if you know someone with a gambling problem.

But it's a cognitive bias we all experience from time to time.

Seeing shapes in the clouds, seeing a man in the moon, finding meaning in coincidentally looking at your watch at 11-11.

We all get a little apophenia now and then.

And it's something I try to be really vigilant about.

Am I seeing connections in my research because they're real?

Or am I just getting that rush of recognition because at this point, I have at least a few pages of notes on almost every prominent white supremacist active in the United States for the last five decades and everything just feels a little familiar.

And theirs really is a small world.

Sometimes the same guy pops up in a few seemingly unrelated places Because there's only so many places for that guy to be if he's been active in the movement over the course of many years.

I try to keep that pretty front of mind so I don't drive myself completely mad, you know?

But sometimes,

sometimes it feels like everything is connected

because it is.

It's not a coincidence, it's not apophenia, it's not conspiratorial thinking, it's not my mind finally buckling under the weight of the horrors.

Sometimes, if you dig down deep enough, it's the same guy's name on all the paperwork.

Remember earlier this year when I accidentally spent three months writing about white supremacist terrorism in apartheid South Africa?

If you can remember back that far, those episodes started with a vignette about this series of rallies held in 2012, organized by Monica Huggett-Stone's South Africa Project.

But the main rally, the big one, the one in Sacramento, Monica wasn't actually there.

The actual on-the-ground organizers in Sacramento were the Golden State Skinheads, the same group that originally approached William Daniel Johnson to remake their Golden State Party into the American Third Position Party.

And here's Mike Myers, the leader of the Golden State Skinheads, whose name is actually Michael Sessims, taking credit for that pro-apartheid rally when he gave a speech at the American Freedom Party conference a year later.

We have thrown rallies, filed for, and gained permits, and dealt with the logistics of planning many successful protests, like the National South Africa project last year in Sacramento, the anti-illegal immigration protests in Sacramento this year, and not to mention about half a dozen or so other activism-related events in just this past year alone.

And when I went back and looked at the pictures of those rallies in 2012, there's William Daniel Johnson in photos of the South Africa Project rally held in Los Angeles in February of 2012.

And it's no coincidence that William Daniel Johnson was a member of the board of directors at the Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, a non-profit founded by white supremacist lawyer Kyle Bristow, with the goal of being an ACLU for the alt-right.

The foundation raised the money for the series of lawsuits that Bristow filed against colleges and universities in 2017 to force them to allow Richard Spencer to speak on campus.

When that foundation fell apart, one of its other board members, a man whose name you've heard before, Augustus Solinvictus, tried to start something similar, and he called it the Conservative Legal Defense Fund.

That too is now defunct, but the incorporation paperwork for that group shows that American Freedom Party board members Jamie Kelso and William Daniel Johnson were not only involved, but they were using Johnson's law office as the mailing address.

And it's no coincidence that Nathan D'Amigo was invited to speak at the party's conference earlier this year.

He actually got his start in organized racism a decade ago as a member of the American Freedom Party.

Before he founded Identity Europa in 2016, he was leading the American Freedom Party's short-lived youth division, a group called National Youth Front.

Identity Europa didn't publicly maintain ties to the American Freedom Party, but it does appear to have originally just been a rebranding of National Youth Front after a similarly named but not racist group threatened to sue over the use of the name.

And here's Nathan D'AMigo in December of 2015 talking to Richard Spencer about the upcoming launch of a renamed National Youth Front.

This is just three months before he re-emerged as the leader of Identity Europa.

We're going to be looking at relaunching in a few months from now, and it's going to be, in a way, a much more mature organization.

It's going to be a European rights organization, explicitly.

Nathan D'Amigo's reappearance at this year's American Freedom Party conference was a little bit of a surprise to me.

He'd mostly stepped back from active organizing since the 2017 Unite the Right rally.

He filed for bankruptcy to try to get out from under a lawsuit filed against him and the other organizers of that deadly rally, but he lost the lawsuit in 2021, and a bankruptcy court ruled just last week that the judgment is not dischargeable in his bankruptcy case.

He is currently appealing that decision with the help of movement lawyer Glenn Allen.

Glenn Allen, you may recall from the last episode, was the Nazi lawyer who helped Merlin Miller start his American Eagle Party after he left the American Freedom Party.

And Nathan D'Amigo isn't the only Identity Europa member to resurface in connection with the American Freedom Party.

After Identity Europa collapsed for good in 2020, some former members returned to the group that spawned it, joining the American Freedom Party.

Notably, the party's current executive director is a former Identity Europa member who calls himself John Fassbender.

So there are a lot of threads to pull here, and there's no way to unravel the whole ball of yarn today.

So I suppose we should start with what the American Freedom Party even is.

Or rather, what it it is not

these views are not uh they're not weird uh they're not bad right and uh they're held by totally normal people

okay we're off to a bad start

that's the party's executive director john faspender

very unconvincingly claiming that they're not weird.

I don't buy it.

But that's not the only lie he tells on podcasts.

The American Freedom Party is not a duly registered national political party.

And that's a very specific claim that he makes in almost every interview.

It just isn't.

But Fastbender is quite adamant that it is.

Here he is boasting about it to Macedonian nationalist podcaster Nick Gilvy in late 2023.

In fact, we are currently the only

registered political party that expouses pro-white views in the United States right now.

There are plenty of pro-white organizations, but they do not have, say, ballot access,

the ability to run candidates, and so on and so forth.

So we take great pride in that.

It is something we work tirelessly to maintain.

And when he went on Gilvy's show again again in April of 2024, he made the same claim.

Yes, we are a political party.

We have gone through the process.

We have registered.

We have obtained the necessary signatures to obtain ballot access in various states across the country.

Here's Fastbender telling Nazi podcaster Nick Gregory about it in November of 2024.

The American Freedom Party is the only duly duly registered political party in the United States that is

with the ability to run candidates, that is to say,

which represents pro-white ideals, that is to say, American nationalist principles, white identitarian ideals.

Back in 2022, a member of the party's board told Ryan Sanchez, a Groiper-aligned Nazi podcaster who calls himself the culture war criminal, that their status as a federal political party did come with some downsides, like an inability to accept large anonymous cryptocurrency donations.

And as a

registered political party,

you know, with the federal elections commission, we

have some issues with crypto as well in terms of how much crypto we can take.

So crypto is not something we're doing right now directly through the party.

I know that's an important point.

There are some pretty specific rules, regulations, and laws about how a political party handles money.

I won't claim to know or understand all of them.

It can get pretty confusing.

But surely, the guy running a political party would have a passing familiarity with at least the broad strokes of how that sort of thing works, right?

One question was, what does it take to register as a political party?

Is the process complicated?

And then another person

pointed out that part of the reason of the LLC is that donations to parties are public record.

Do you have any comments on that?

Because I know that's something that people talk about all the time.

There is the OPSEC issue of like, if I send you the $50 for the year membership, right?

Is that publicly known?

Sure.

Well, I'll say this.

As far as, you know, the accounting aspect of it and as far as, you know, how information is, what information is public record and what information isn't, I couldn't give an accurate answer because it's just not my

level of understanding on that end of things in the party.

Definitely when it comes to finances and so on, I'm

pretty much ignorant.

That being said,

as far as

sending in donations and how it is to register as a political party, first of all,

it is a bit complicated.

It does require a lot of

basically

a lot of paperwork filing.

Oh dear.

In May of 2023, the party's executive director had no idea if membership dues are being reported as donations to a political party.

It doesn't sound like he knows what, if any, reporting is being done at all.

But he does know that despite the immense complexity of the paperwork, somebody definitely filed that paperwork that makes them a real political party.

And just one more.

This one is both very specific and extremely recent.

Fastbender was interviewed by a Canadian white nationalist and aspiring musician, Steve Hansen, just a few weeks ago.

There's no wiggle room here.

Fastbender clearly says the organization is a federally recognized political party.

Yeah, and,

you know, this is a, it's a federal political party, correct?

Correct.

But like I said, no, they're not.

I'll admit to you right now, I don't know how to run a political party either.

But I didn't put my face on a website claiming to.

So I think we can all agree to cut me some slack on the subject.

To be recognized as a political party, you have to register.

For state and local elections, that may just be at the state level.

and the rules in every state are different.

There are certain activities and fundraising thresholds where a state-level party committee may have to register with the Federal Election Commission, but honestly, I don't care enough to find out more about that.

And of course, to be a political party at the national level, well, you've got to file paperwork with the Federal Election Commission.

And they did

try.

I mean, anyone can fill out a form and send in a piece of paper.

That doesn't mean it worked.

Someone filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission last month to form the American FART Party, along with paperwork for a FART Party candidate committee running for Senate in Iowa.

That doesn't mean that the FART Party is real.

It just means technically somebody committed a federal crime, although it's extremely unlikely to be prosecuted.

The FART Party was obviously obviously someone's idea of a joke.

That's actually really common.

The FEC receives mountains of prank filings every year.

They revised the rules in 2016 just to make it a little bit easier to throw away the ones that were obviously and intentionally fictitious.

There were a record high number of fake filings that election cycle.

A teenager in Iowa who filed a statement of candidacy for D's nuts told ABC News in 2016:

One of the main reasons that I ultimately filed was because I found out they had little staff, resources, or authority, and we're supposed to trust these guys with our elections.

I have made it public that I've withdrawn from the race, but I do not apologize for what I did.

The FEC is vastly underfunded, and while it seems like I have a burning hatred of the FEC, I actually support the FEC getting additional funding.

Thank you, D's nuts.

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And, like I said, it is technically against the law to knowingly file paperwork with the Federal Election Commission that contains false or fictitious information.

But enforcement is vanishingly rare.

Investigations tend to be limited to high-profile incidents involving real people, like fake paperwork filed in 2020 claiming to be authorized by Kanye West.

So, whether it's an obvious joke like the FART Party or someone who just honestly doesn't know what they're doing like the American Freedom Party, someone at the Federal Election Commission is reading every piece of paperwork that gets filed.

They're understaffed, underfunded, under-resourced in every way imaginable, but they process the paperwork.

And when the paperwork is inadequate, They send back something called a request for additional information, an RFAI.

It's a form letter.

It's not really personalized, but there's a little bit of text in there explaining exactly what was insufficient about your filing.

Maybe the committee treasurer forgot to sign it.

Maybe the number at the bottom of a column of dollar amounts isn't the correct sum.

Maybe they just don't think your name is really Jesus Christ or Forrest Gump.

Whatever it is, you'll get the RFAI.

And then you have a chance to file a corrected form.

Back in 2012, when Merlin Miller was running for president on the party's ticket, they did file some paperwork.

In April of that year, party chairman William Daniel Johnson filled out FEC Form 1,

the form for a statement of organization for a committee.

Now, remember, back then they were called the American Third Position Party, so he's filling out this form as the American Third Position National Committee.

Things started to go awry by page two.

There are check boxes for different types of committees.

Is this a party committee, a candidate committee?

If it's a candidate committee, is it the candidate's principal fundraising committee?

Is it a political action committee?

You have to choose, and you can only choose one.

Johnson checked too many boxes.

It took the FEC about two months to get back to him, but the letter offered some helpful clarification about which boxes you might check in different circumstances and explained that you can't check all of them.

And it also referred him to the relevant federal regulations.

Johnson then filed a corrected form indicating that, yes, he was trying to form a national party committee.

So that's it, right?

He did it.

He filled it out right.

Not quite.

Now that the form is properly filled out, it can actually be evaluated on the merits.

And it turns out, you can't just get a party started by filling out a form.

The FART Party's paperwork was filed, but it's going to get thrown out.

Filling out a form isn't a golden ticket to party recognition.

And the Federal Election Commission makes the final call on whether an organization has done enough political party stuff to be considered a political party.

Things like, do they engage in voter registration drives?

Do they have a national headquarters and state party committees?

Do they hold a national convention?

Are they actively seeking and successfully getting ballot access in multiple states for multiple candidates for office other than just the presidency?

There's no room for any of that on the form.

obviously.

So in order to be recognized as a national party committee, you have to formally request something called an advisory opinion from the Federal Election Commission.

According to the FEC, quote, advisory opinions are official commission responses to questions about how federal campaign finance law applies to specific factual situations.

From the webpage about the advisory opinion process, quote, anyone may request an advisory opinion as long as the requester is affected by the question he or she presents.

A requester cannot ask for an advisory opinion about someone else's activities, hypothetical situations, or general questions of law.

Advisory opinion requests must be in writing.

The request must include a complete description of all facts relevant to the specific transaction or activity.

And they're all public record.

The FEC's website has a searchable database of every advisory opinion since 1975.

The Commission informed the American Freedom Party in July of 2012 that they would need to get an advisory opinion before calling themselves a National Party committee.

And William Daniel Johnson wrote back in September of 2012 that he had requested one and he was just waiting for a decision.

But there's no official record that any opinion was ever sought by anyone involved.

I searched every combination of words and names.

I downloaded a spreadsheet that almost crashed my computer.

I looked at every request filed since 2010 just to be safe.

It's not there.

It's possible Johnson made some kind of attempt, like maybe he did write a letter saying,

make me a party.

But again, the request must include a complete description of all facts relevant to the specific transaction or activity.

And the database doesn't include requests that were insufficient for consideration.

So maybe he thinks he asked for an advisory opinion, but according to the official record, no, he did not.

But like I said, The FEC doesn't really have the resources to chase down every piece of non-compliant paperwork.

The American Freedom Party continued to file as though they were a national party committee, but they weren't actually raising any money, at least not that they really reported.

And they were kind of half-heartedly running candidates for president in 2016, but their paperwork was a mess and they weren't doing the work to actually get those candidates on ballots.

I mean, forget trying to convince the voters.

The party couldn't even convince their own candidates to stay in the race.

Or the party.

Their initial nominee was a man named Ken Gividin, but he dropped out in July of 2015, just a few months after being nominated.

The man they'd picked as his VP, Bob Whitaker, stepped up to take the presidential nomination, but he quit too in April of 2016.

He was mad that the party was pouring money into a political action committee to pay for racist robocalls supporting Donald Trump.

Bob Whitaker also died at age 76 not long after this, so maybe he just didn't have the stamina.

The next candidate on the list was Tom Bowie.

You might actually remember him from some viral YouTube videos a few years back in which he proudly accepts the title of Most Racist Man in America.

There's no evidence that his campaign ever raised or spent any money at all.

So, as far as expending their limited enforcement resources, it was probably just not worthwhile for the Federal Election Commission to follow up, unless and until there was any actual possibility of this party being meaningfully engaged in anything you could consider actual electoral activity.

So, they just kept filling out their paperwork wrong and filing it.

In 2019, the party was gearing up for the 2020 presidential election.

The candidate they chose this time around was a Christian identity pastor in Tennessee named Rick Tyler.

Tyler had run for office a handful of times before, never receiving more than a few thousand votes, but hope springs eternal, I guess.

He announced his candidacy in May of 2019 in a speech at the University of Tennessee.

The university was very clear with the press at the time that no one invited Rick Tyler to speak on campus.

He had simply rented out the alumni hall, which is something any member of the public can do, and the university had no legal avenue to refuse to rent it to him.

Shortly before Rick Tyler's poorly attended and heavily protested announcement in Tennessee, William Daniel Johnson wrote a letter to the Federal Election Commission.

Kind of.

He filed an amended statement of organization for the party, that FEC Form 1.

But stapled to the front of the form, he attached a letter.

I don't think that's an accepted form of communication with the Federal Election Commission.

Like, I don't think they'll reply to your letter if you just staple it to a form, but he tried.

And the letter reads as follows.

Gentlemen, the requests of this correspondence are made in conformity with the Freedom of Information Act, USC, paragraph 552, in accordance with which obligation of response is 20 days.

The American Freedom Party will be applying for FEC certification as a political party for the United States of America.

In order for the party to meet FEC legal requirements for certification, we require the FEC to forward to us post-haste, within the 20 days as allocated by statute, the exact requirements necessary to comply for FEC full certification for the 2020 election cycle.

We request that the provided FEC requirements as provided by the FEC be irrevocable and be used and applied to all applying or already approved political parties equally for the 2020 presidential election cycle.

That's definitely not how it works.

The Federal Election Commission doesn't do that.

You can't just write to them and ask them open-ended questions about how you should be doing election stuff.

Besides, why didn't he just Google it or hire a political consultant?

And didn't he already know the answer?

Remember back in 2012, seven years before this, they sent him a letter about the requirements.

He needs to get an advisory opinion, and he claimed he was working on it.

The rules had not changed in those seven years.

I'm not sure the FEC replied to his letter, though.

They did, however, a few months later, send another request for additional information letter, again informing the organization that what they need to do is get an advisory opinion before they can be considered a national party committee.

And Johnson again used the Federal Election Commission electronic filing system to send them a letter.

So his letter is preserved in the committee's filings.

And he wrote,

I don't understand what you request.

We only take in under $10,000 per year.

Do we need to petition the commission for an advisory opinion?

Should we check a different box on our forms?

Or use different forms?

We file Form 3X.

Your letter threatens enforcement action if our response is not adequate.

I don't want that, but I don't understand what the issue is.

And then, shortly after he filed that letter, they just stopped filing entirely.

Probably in part because they were feeling discouraged by their paperwork problems and they weren't actually raising any money to report.

But also, their candidate got arrested for tax evasion.

So, maybe their hearts just weren't in it anymore.

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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.

fame.

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

Kennedy was killed.

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

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But I just can't wrap my my head around Johnson's confusion here.

The guidance available on the FEC's website is clear enough.

He had been personally and directly notified about the need to request an advisory opinion back in 2012.

He even claimed to have done it.

So obviously he knew he needed to do it.

But the most galling thing about this feigned ignorance is

he knows someone who knows how to do this.

This isn't foreign territory.

When I was looking through the database of advisory opinions, I looked specifically for any opinion on this particular subject, some kind of third-party group trying to get recognition as a national political party.

I wanted to see what those requests look like, how often this is happening, and how the Federal Election Commission is evaluating them.

The Green Party's request was initially denied in 1996, but when they reapplied in 2001, they were granted National Party status.

The Reform Party went through the process in 1998.

The Constitution Party, which was originally called the U.S.

Taxpayers Party, was denied in 1992, but tried again in 1995 and gained party status.

So I'm flipping through these opinions and these applications, and it's clear that the American Freedom Party wouldn't qualify even if they had tried.

But they could have at least looked to these past applications to see how they were supposed to structure this and what kinds of party activities they should be aiming for if they wanted to qualify.

But maybe William Daniel Johnson didn't think to search the database for inspiration.

But why didn't he just ask the party's executive director?

Not John Fassbender.

He's still, I think, in high school at this point.

But from 2010 to 2014, the American Freedom Party's executive director was a man named Don Wassell.

And from 1987 until 1995,

Don Wassell was the executive director of another party, the Populist Party.

When the Populist Party ran David Duke for president in 1988,

Don Wassell submitted the party's request for an advisory opinion.

So in 2012, when the party got that letter,

why was it a shock?

I mean, the Populist Party didn't get National Party status, so I'm not saying Wassal would have been good at it or that he would have succeeded.

But it does at least appear as though he successfully stated the party's case to the degree that was possible in 1988.

And that's something Johnson doesn't seem to have even tried to do.

By the end of the summer of of 2020, the American Freedom Party had voluntarily terminated their committee with the Federal Election Commission,

and they've never re-filed.

There is no currently active committee associated with that name, nor any committee I can find associated with the names of any current or former member of their board of directors.

They never successfully gained federal recognition as a national party, but at least until 2020, they could point to those forms and pretend.

Now they're not even trying.

I guess it is possible that Fastbender is telling the truth about gaining ballot access or party recognition in individual states.

Although I can find no evidence of it, and he never says which states.

Every state has its own rules.

And they don't all have good websites.

But I dug around on the Board of Elections site for a dozen or so states that I believe they have some connection to.

And I couldn't find anything recent.

In California, the only state that has easily searchable records of all requests filed with the state for party status,

they only ever tried once in 2015.

In California, a party attempting to qualify for recognition has to submit signed affidavits from 0.33%

of the total number of registered voters in the state.

So in 2016, that would have meant around 57,000 signatures.

They submitted five.

Not 5,000,

not 500, literally 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

They got five signatures.

So even though I don't have numbers that detailed from other states, there's no state whose rules would reward that level of effort.

Every state requires at least some thousands of signatures, even the Dakotas.

The American Freedom Party doesn't even have a corporate entity behind it anymore.

The party incorporated in North Dakota in 2017,

but board member Jamie Kelso stopped filing the paperwork in 2019 and the state dissolved the corporation in 2021.

The California branch that Johnson incorporated in 2019 was forfeited in 2020 for a failure to file reports.

They very recently updated their membership application page, removing any clear reference to how much it costs or how you can make that payment.

But until June of 2025, the website instructed applicants to mail a check for $50

to a UPS store mailbox in New York City.

They don't sell shirts or stickers or hats.

You can't pay online.

You can't make a donation.

They aren't even asking for money, which seems hard to believe, but I looked everywhere.

Aside from that recently removed page on the website with instructions to make checks out to the American Freedom Party, there's no publicly visible information about how you could give them money, even if you wanted to.

And that seems like it would be a pretty big problem.

How can you expect to recruit younger members if the only way to get involved is to mail a paper check?

That's a real barrier to entry in the 21st century.

But

maybe the logistics aren't a big deal because there aren't very many members even trying to pay those dues.

They don't hold public events.

So there's no way to even guess how many members they might have.

The group's channel on the messaging app Telegram has about 3,000 members, but that has almost no correlation to actual group membership.

Patriot Front, for example, has 17,000 followers on Telegram and probably just a few hundred members nationwide.

In 2022, John Fassbunder claimed that membership was growing at, quote, an alarming rate.

But he wouldn't give a number.

Charles Lincoln III, a disbarred attorney who is occasionally listed on the party's FEC filings as their treasurer, said in a live stream last year that he'd been involved with the party since its founding, and he'd actually just come from a board meeting earlier that day.

But he had no idea how many members the group might have.

AFP, I don't know how to introduce the AFP, except it's a very small group.

It's basically the board and

a few members beside the board.

I don't know what our membership is.

Not only can he not even begin to guess how many members there might be,

he's never met one.

They might not exist.

Again, I can speak mostly for the board rather than the membership.

I don't really know any members who are not members of the board.

This was in February of 2024.

Lincoln claims to have been involved with the organization for 14

years.

He's attending board meetings.

He was responsible for the party's campaign finance reports when they were trying to run a candidate for president.

And he's never actually met a member of the party aside from the board of directors.

In another one of Lincoln's streams that same month, he had party chairman William Daniel Johnson on, and he characterized the number of members only as, quote,

not a whole lot.

So they're not really running candidates.

They're not really registered as a political party.

They don't want your money.

And their own chairman said last year that there aren't very many members.

So what are they doing?

I listened to every crumb of audio I could find from the last four years.

There's not a ton, but it's still more than I would have preferred to listen to.

The party went sort of dormant in 2020.

After they terminated their committee with the FEC, their presidential candidate got arrested, and their corporate entity was involuntarily dissolved, they didn't do much for a while.

In the fall of 2021, They were ready to announce to the world that they were back from their hiatus.

The reason being is we've been on hiatus for a long time now while we completely overhauled and relaunched the party.

It is completely unrecognizable from what it was a year ago.

Well, maybe not the world,

but a conference room full of racists attending the American Renaissance annual conference anyway.

The group had a new website, a couple new board members under 40, and they were ready to try again.

I felt like I was missing something.

I kept triple checking the dates on these videos because it just didn't make any sense.

From the fall of 2021 through interviews recorded this year in 2025,

they seem to be just constantly announcing that they're back.

It's happening any day now.

We're just about to announce something new and exciting.

We're back from our hiatus.

You haven't seen us in years and we're back now.

And it never happens.

In two interviews given over a year apart, FastBender boasts that the party is just about to launch a nationwide campus organization, a wing of the party for college students.

The plan was so close to being implemented

three years ago.

The website hasn't had a new article in almost a year.

They sometimes have a Twitter account, but it keeps getting banned for hate speech.

They hid information about their national convention behind a password on the website and never publicly posted any information about how an interested prospective member might inquire about attending.

That's not how political parties behave, but it isn't out of step with the standard MO of a group whose members don't want to be publicly associated with it.

Their executive director isn't even using his real name.

Jonathan Magnano started using the name Johann Fassbender in 2018 in private chats for Identity Europa members.

And aside from that smattering of candidates in the 2010s, you know, Merlin Miller in 2012, Harry Bertram for some state-level offices in West Virginia in 2011, 2012, that disastrous revolving door of candidates for president in 2016,

the party doesn't really run candidates.

Most of the campaigns publicly associated with the party aren't even on the ballot as American Freedom Party candidates, if they got on the ballot at all.

Current party chairman Ralph Brandt tried to run for city council in Mesa, Arizona in 2012, but he failed to collect the 233 signatures required to get his name on the ballot.

When Harry Bertram ran for office in West Virginia, he was usually just listed on the ballot as an independent candidate.

And instead of receiving funds labeled as being from his party, one significant cash infusion related to Bertram's 2011 campaign came in as an independent expenditure.

from the party's chairman in his personal capacity.

Which, again, I don't know a lot about elections, but that doesn't seem entirely in line with my understanding of campaign finance law.

I can't actually find anyone publicly claiming to be running as a member of the American Freedom Party at any time, in any place, in the last five years, since their big relaunch and recommitment.

But Vassbinder is constantly claiming it's happening.

He just can't tell you who the candidates are or where where they live or what they're running for.

So the party is fielding candidates,

but only secretly.

When he was asked last month how many candidates the party ran in the most recent election cycle, he finally gave a number.

Three.

So we had three.

Typically, the AFP holds our candidates' identities and their ties to the party relatively close for obvious reasons.

Because

that's not to say that we don't run some candidates very openly as AFP, though.

We do.

There's validity in both.

But as far as we're concerned, it's about winning first and foremost.

If you need to run as a Democrat in an area, run as a Democrat.

If you need to run as a Republican, run as a Republican.

If the viability is there to run as the American Freedom Party openly,

run as the American Freedom Party.

So what does it mean to be a political party if you can't accept or spend money?

The board members don't even know if there are members of the party.

And it's so toxic to be associated with the brand that you can't even say the names of your own candidates.

In what way is that a political party?

Honestly, I don't know.

I'm trying so hard to figure out some kind of plausible theory of what's going on here to offer you.

Because usually the answer is grift.

Plain and simple.

But they aren't asking for money.

I don't get it.

The party does seem to be making another attempt to move forward.

They held a national convention in March of this year.

Again, because they can't convince their own members to publicly associate with the party, even the very limited number of carefully curated photos of the event have all of the attendees' faces blurred out.

On social media, they posted videos of just four speakers, and none of those speakers are in the party leadership.

At least not publicly.

There's no indication that their current chairman, Ralph Brandt, even attended.

It's not who was missing that really intrigued me, though.

It's who was there.

The keynote speaker at the party's convention wasn't a member of the board of directors.

It wasn't a past or current candidate for office on the party's ticket.

It was Thomas Rousseau, the leader of Patriot Front.

I couldn't tell you how many members of the American Freedom Party attended the convention, but photos show a contingent of about a dozen members of Patriot Front.

Front.

In December of 2024, just a few months before that convention in March, the American Freedom Party issued an official statement endorsing Patriot Front, declaring their values to be in seamless harmony and pledging to stand shoulder to shoulder, united by their shared vision.

This is, perhaps, a return to their roots.

The party originally grew out of a group of skinheads trying to find a way to look legitimate.

The white power movement has always had suits and boots.

That is, your respectable intellectual types, your Richard Spencer dapper, Nazi kind of guys, your hotel conference rooms full of middle-aged men watching a PowerPoint about the genetic superiority of the Aryan race, and

then it has their counterparts.

The street fighters, the black shirts, the men who hide their faces and wrap their knuckles.

The two groups often find themselves at odds, disagreeing about tactics and optics.

But they need each other.

And they know it.

All the way back in 2013, at the American Freedom Party Conference, board member Tom Sunich stood up to say something after the leader of the Golden State skinheads finished his remarks.

I would like to thank this young gentleman.

This is what I keep saying.

These are very good people.

I can do my job with my pen, with my cravat, with

my suit, and he can do his job.

But I know firsthand

he's a frontman.

He's a good people, and certainly they can come in handy just as we can come in handy.

So, folks, we're at your service.

Thank you very much.

I can do my job with my pen,

with with my suit,

and he can do his job.

Everyone in the room knows what that job is.

The job of the Nazi skinhead is violence.

Patriot Front's aesthetic is obviously very different from the classic neo-Nazi skinhead.

They aren't bald and tattooed.

They've abandoned the Doc Martens.

Culturally, they're very different from skinheads in their clean-cut khaki pants and matching jackets.

But politically,

I think the symbiosis proposed here is similar.

We'll do the paperwork and give speeches, and you'll march in the streets.

The American Freedom Party has never once succeeded.

in any of its endeavors.

And it's unclear what their future plans are at this point.

But it does look a little bit like there are some groups out there trying to, once again,

unite the right.

Hopefully this isn't a story we have to come back to.

At least not with a new ending.

I do hope to circle back on some of those intriguing loose ends in the middle, eventually.

For now, though, I'll leave you with this inspiring statement made by one of the speakers at that convention in March.

Sam Dixon has long since retired from his career as a lawyer for the Klan.

These days he makes the round speaking at white nationalist events all over the country and he runs a lucrative real estate business purchasing property tax debt and forcing old people out of their homes for pennies on the dollar.

He gave a rambling 30-minute speech managing to impart absolutely no wisdom gleaned from his 60 years in the movement.

But he had one very important message for the white nationalists attending that ethno-state party conference at a mysterious castle in West Virginia.

We are not weirdos.

We are normal.

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 Lichterman and Robert Evans.

The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gigan.

The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.

You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.

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.

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