August 9, 2024 • 47 mins
Why do people keep posting that fake Voltaire quote and who is the pedophile who actually said it? Molly takes you back to the 90s, inside the Nazi compound where Kevin Strom started broadcasting a weekly antisemitic radio show.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hey, I'm Molly Conger and this is
Weird Little Guys, the show where I tell you about
the weird little guys trying to unravel the fabric of
our society. I've spent years researching and writing about writing extremism,
and it's pretty scary out there. I won't lie to you,
(00:24):
but the guys trying to ruin life as we know
it are also kind of freaks and losers. So here's
one of them. Okay, we're going to start this off
at the pop quiz. I'm going to read you a quote,
and I want you to tell me who said it.
I'll give you a minute to think. It's multiple choice
(00:45):
to learn who rules over you. Simply find out who
you are not allowed to criticize. Was that A Benjamin Franklin, B. Voltaire, C.
Socrates or D A neo Nazi pedophile on a white
nationalist radio show in nineteen ninety three. Now, if you
(01:07):
guessed B, you're in good company. Well, no, it's not
good company. The company is pretty terrible. I can't say
bad company without getting lost in a tangent about Timoth
mcfay's obsession with the song bad Company by the band
Bad Company from their album Bad Company. So I won't
say the company is bad, but it's a crowd. No,
(01:27):
the answer is actually d neo Nazi pedophile Kevin alfred Strom,
and it's a slight paraphrase of something he said in
an August nineteen ninety three broadcast of American Dissident Voices,
the weekly radio program he hosted for the neo Nazi
group National Alliance. Strome was living on the group's West
Virginia compound, three hundred acres in the mountains near Hillsboro
(01:48):
that they just call the Lamb, and he was serving
as the right hand band of the group's leader, his mentor,
William Luther Pierce. The broadcast was entitled all of America
must know the error that is upon us, a name
he borrowed from a speech given in nineteen fifty nine
by another one of his great influences, Revilo p Oliver,
and the quote gets new life every now and again
(02:10):
when it's incorrectly attributed to Voltaire. In the era of
public discourse about whether wearing a mask was truly the
most vile form of tyranny, it made the rounds as
COVID deniers pushed back against public health guidelines, like in
January of twenty twenty two, when Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massey
posted you mustn't question Fauci for he is science, accompanied
(02:31):
by an image of the quote, and it was sort
of laid over an image. I guess that's just a
meme words on a picture. The picture was of a
large disembodied hand pushing down on tiny little people that
it was squishing. That original image is actually an anti
child labor political cartoon from nineteen twelve. If you look
at the uncropped version of the original picture, the sleeve
(02:54):
has child labor employer written on it. You know they
used to label everything in a political cartoon. Garrison didn't
invent that. Australian Senator Corey Bernardi tweeted the quote back
in twenty fifteen. Contemporaneous reporting doesn't give me any insight
into exactly who he felt he was being prevented from criticizing.
But there was an article in the Guardian that same
(03:14):
week about his belief that Australia should not admit any
Syrian refugees because they might be terrorists. So I guess
he felt he was being oppressed by refugees but whatever
it was about. He responded by not just deleting that tweet,
but all of his tweets, and he did not tweet
again for a while. Elon Musk has unsurprisingly done it
(03:36):
at least twice. In November of twenty twenty two, Musk
posted that he was so committed to free speech that
he would not ban the account that was posting information
about his private plane. He did actually ban the account
a month later, but a user with a doge meme
profile picture replied to that tweet, so you don't rule
over us, but for us much wow, accompanied by that
(03:58):
same image that Thomas Massey the big hands squishing the
little people with the text of the quote, and Musk
replied to the Doge meme guy, that is my goal.
After hundreds of commenters immediately pointed out that he was
agreeing with a quote from a neo Nazi, he deleted
the reply without addressing it. Six months later, he tweeted
the exact same picture. It was a screenshot from a
(04:20):
meme page, so it was the exact same image bearing
the quote, but the text underneath it showed someone had
written we need to rise up against children with leukemia.
I guess the joke there is that you aren't allowed
to criticize kids with cancer. That one's still up. I
guess he thought that was funny, and maybe it does
kind of sound like something Voltaire could have said. You know,
(04:42):
he's not a huge fan of the Jews either. But
we don't exactly know where the original misattribution to the
French philosopher comes from. American etomologist Barry Popek wrote on
his blog in twenty twelve that the quote seemed to
appear kind of out of nowhere, with multiple Quote of
the Day websites featuring it in twenty twelve, all attributing
it to Voltaire. The oldest attribution to Voltaire that Pope
(05:04):
could find super weird it was a two thousand and
seven post by a user named Suzanne on a forum
for miniature horse breeders. But I think that has more
to do with sort of the rickety architecture of the
early Internet than it is evidence that Suzanne and the
mini horse ladies are anti semites. Right, that we don't
really have the ability to Google. A lot of that
(05:25):
sort of early Internet posting, Usenet forums and things like
that weren't indexing to Google, So I don't think it
came from the mini horse ladies, but I will admit
I spent half an afternoon digging through twenty year old
forum posts about miniature horse pedigrees trying to sniff out
secret Nazis and didn't find any. Mostly I just discovered
(05:47):
that some people buy the little shoes at Build a
Bear Workshop for their miniature horses because they fit perfectly,
and they're cheaper than the little sneakers they make for horses.
So if you need a little extra traction, if you're
taking a miniature horse inside, you could put Teddy Bear
sneakers on him. But whoever started it, I find it
hard to believe that the original misattribution was innocent. It's
(06:10):
not a line you could really just come across anywhere
on the wider Internet if you were the first person
to do this, And the actual author of the quote
seems to agree. In twenty seventeen, Kevin Strom addressed the issue,
writing in a post on the website for the neo
Nazi organization National Alliance, whoever hijacked my quote and put
it over Voltaire's signature liked what I was saying. He
(06:32):
understood my point, He understood that our secret rulers brook
no criticism of themselves or their agenda without exacting punishment.
He wanted to use the quote, but he didn't dare
attribute it correctly. He didn't dare make his point with
a quote from a known racist or anti Semite. Those
are in scare quotes, no matter how good the quote was.
(06:52):
He didn't dare follow my thoughts with my name. If
he did, he'd be attacked as being racist himself. There
might be personal a professional comment sequences. So he took
my idea and put it in the mouth of Voltaire.
Funny thing, is Voltaire, freethinker and honest observer as he was,
is as much of a racist and anti semit as
I am. But Voltaire has been safely dead for well
over two hundred years, and his contribution to the artistic
(07:14):
and intellectual development of our civilization is so great that
it will take quite some time for his legacy to
be race denounced or censored, as I'm sure the enemies
of life are aching to do. So. It was relatively
safe to quote Voltaire, but unsafe to quote Kevin Alfred Strome.
Fair enough, I think Kevin's onto something there, you know.
(07:34):
I hate to agree with him. But it isn't just
racism and anti Semitism that makes Strome an unsavory source
to quote, he is also a pedophile. Now, I know
you might be saying, and I know the legal department
is saying, that's kind of a strong word. Are you
sure you can say that? Well, yeah, I can. I'm
(07:55):
very sure because despite the entire section of his website
devoted to debunking the accusation, one of the exhibits filed
in the case that led to his stint in federal
prison for a possession of child pornography is a copy
of a contract he signed in the presence of a notary.
In September two thousand and six, at the request of
his second wife, Kevin Strom signed a document stating that
(08:16):
he would attend counseling sessions quote until such time that
such a qualified counselor will be able to indicate, too redacted,
that I am free from being sexually drawn to children,
or drawn to sexually explicit material of any kind concerning children,
or any other characteristics of being a pedophile. There's just
a lot going on there. I mean, first of all,
I don't know if you've had anything notarized, right you
(08:38):
sign a document in the presence of someone who is
certified by the state to say they saw you sign it,
so it's you know, there's no argument later about whether
that's really you who signed it, because you show them
your idea and they put the little stamp on it.
I usually get stuff notarized at the library. It's free.
Your town probably has it too. You make a little
appointment and the librarian can do it for you. It's great.
(08:59):
I love public library. I don't know where Kevin got
his pedophile contract notarized. I just can't imagine, like normally
you're looking at I don't know, mortgage documents and wills
or I had to send a document to a court
clerk to get online access to court records. Did she
read this? What a bad day at work. There's nothing
(09:21):
I can tell you that will make any sense of
a man's sexual attraction to his stepdaughter's nine year old classmate.
That's I can't do that. But I think there's some
sense in telling you a little bit about Kevin's life
up to that point. If you don't have the kind
of familiarity with white supremacist movements that ends conversations at
parties you've probably never heard of him, but he spent
(09:43):
most of his adult life as the indispensable right hand
of the man who wrote the novel that still serves
as a blueprint and a bible for white supremacists terror.
By his own telling, it was his high school history
teacher who set Kevin's Strome on the path through right
wing extremism, introducing him to the ultra conservative anti communist
group the John Birch s Society in the early seventies.
And it's probably no coincidence that the two men who
(10:04):
would have the biggest impact on his views as an
adult also came up through the JBS. Strome would later
serve as the personal archivist of Vilo p Oliver, a
founding member of the John Birch Society, although he was
later forced to leave the group he helped found in
nineteen sixty six after saying all the world's problems could
be solved if every Jew were vaporized. So it's not
(10:26):
that the John Birch Society wasn't anti Semitic. They just
didn't want him to say out loud exactly how anti
semitic they all were. It was just very embarrassing for
everyone and William Luther Pierce, the man whose Nazi compound
Strome lived and worked on for years, joined the American
Nazi Party after deciding that John Birch Society just wasn't
racist enough for him. It was a place for people
(10:48):
who hated communism to share ideas, and a lot of
those ideas were about how black and Jewish people were
actually to blame, and it was said at John Birch
Society meeting sometime in the late seventies when first encountered
members of the newly formed National Alliance. William Luther Pierce
founded National Alliance in nineteen seventy four after American Nazi
(11:08):
Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was shot in a laundromat
parking lot by a former follower. In sixty seven, Pierce
had a brief stint in the National Socialist White People's
Party That's kind of a mouthful, that's just a different
Nazi Party before joining up with Willis Cardo to lead
the National Youth Alliance. And National Youth Alliance was formed
by Cardo to focus on recruiting and radicalizing right wing
(11:30):
college students to sort of counter the influence of groups
like Students for a Democratic society, right, So it's it
was the TPUSA of the George Wallace campaign years in
the name of the greatest sigure that I've ever taught differ.
I've read a line in the dusk and passed the
garment before the theater at Turner and I say segregation.
(11:54):
Now segregation, the MA and segregation however, and it was
originally spun off of Cardo's Youth for Wallace organization. But
obviously George Wallace did not become president in nineteen sixty eight,
and they didn't bring back segregation. And in what is
going to become a theme in this story, Cardow and
(12:15):
Pierce pretty quickly stopped getting along and eventually split entirely.
The faction that left with Pierce became National Alliance in
nineteen seventy four, and in seventy five Pierce started writing
the novel that is, unfortunately, his enduring legacy, The Turner Diaries.
We don't have to get super deep into it today.
(12:35):
I'm sure it will come up in most episodes of
this show. Unfortunately, you know, over the last fifty years,
this book has inspired a lot of race warriors. It
is a fictional novel, but it's the handbook for the
race war. It is a race war handbook in a
fictional trench coat. And it's not very good. And I
(12:56):
don't I mean, obviously it's not good, right. It is
a terrorism. It is sort of describing how to instigate
the race war and you know, kill the race traders
and kill the journalists and kill black people and Jewish people.
It's it is not good ideologically, obviously, but it's also
just really bad. It's messy. It was originally written in
(13:17):
a serialized format and then collected into one book, and
it's just it's disjointed. He's not a great writer. He's
not a great thinker. And Kevin Strom's first wife, Kirsten,
told an interviewer years later that when she first met
Pierce in nineteen eighty seven, she told him she had
just finished reading the Turner Diaries. You know, she's at
dinner with her husband and doctor Pierce. And this is
(13:39):
I'm sure a very big deal for her husband, who
is a National Alliance member, and I'm sure he hoped
that his wife would just behave you know, keep sweet,
just be the wife. And she tells doctor Piers, oh,
he just finished reading your book. And I didn't think
he was very good. She told him it was poorly written,
and I mean point for Kirsten, She's right. I just
(14:00):
can't imagine saying that to him. And it was through
Pierce that Strom first met Kirsten. She was married at
the time to a National Alliance member named Joseph McLaughlin.
In nineteen eighty seven, the day that Rudolph hes died,
Jo suggested that she call Pierce. So I wish I
could be a fly on the wall on this afternoon,
you know, he says to his young wife, Oh, I've
(14:21):
just heard that the Deputy Furr died. We should call
the leader of the Nazi cult that I'm in and
offer our condolences, I guess. But that's what they did,
and Pierce was very happy to hear from them. And
as they're talking, he's thinking, you know, I think Kevin
would really like this girl. Again, she's married, she's on
(14:44):
the phone with her husband. Her husband is the one
that prompted her to make this phone call. But he hears
her and thinks, I've got something better for her, because
I think it's hard to meet women when you're living
in an off the grid Nazi compound in the Mountains
of West Virginia. Pierce himself was known for selecting his
brides from catalogs of Eastern European women, but I guess
(15:05):
he thought he could pick one out for his boy,
Kevin over in Arlington, you know, a little closer to home.
A few months after that dinner where she told Pierce
she didn't care for his novel, Kirsten left her second husband, Joe,
and moved in with Kevin, and the couple was married
on Chinkite Island in nineteen ninety in a ceremony officiated
by William Luther Pearce. She wrote later in her memoir,
(15:26):
I guess you know she wasn't fully sort of removed
from society at this point. She was still existing in
the world when she married Kevin, and so her family
was at the wedding, and she describes feeling a little
bit embarrassed at the way doctor Pierce talked about race
in front of her family. Strange vows, and the marriage
(15:57):
was not a happy one. That's probably not a surprise
to you. Soon after the marriage, they moved out to
the land again. That's the big compound in West Virginia,
and she didn't love it there. She wasn't allowed to
watch TV, or read newspapers or consume any of what
her husband considered Jewish controlled media. They stocked wild food
(16:18):
and weapons, and she mainly tended to her home and
her children, but she says that she also helped out
around the compound by stuffing envelopes to mail out copies
of the group's propaganda, help fulfill orders for books. They
sold Pierce's book obviously, the Turner Diaries, and a number
of other sort of white nationalists publications and books. And
another task that she would pitch in with was they
(16:40):
made these sort of special waterproof PVC tubes that they
would sell to members, and the purpose of the tube
is to bury your guns underground so the federal government
can't get them. Right. So she's raising her children, she's
a housewife, she's making gun tubes for preppers and mailing
out copies of the terrorism Manual, you know, just young
(17:02):
mother stuff. And the paranoia on the compound was always there.
Why else are you living on a compound if you're
not a little bit paranoid. But after Ruby Ridge in
ninety two and Waco in ninety three, it became unbearable.
As she describes that you know, Kevin telling her things
like and you keep the children away from the windows.
They're going to shoot the children through the windows. Just
not prompted by anything, right, just the sort of constant
(17:26):
tension that the Feds are going to show up on
any day now and they're going to shoot you. You're
not going to shoot you like Ruby Ridge. It's just
not a great environment for a family. And on April nineteenth,
nineteen ninety five, Kevin came home early from work, and
she said he never did that. He was never around.
He would go off to his little workroom to make
his little Nazi radio show for you know, dawn to
(17:49):
dusk every day. He never came home early, but on
April nineteenth, nineteen ninety five, he did. I don't know
if that date means anything to normal people. It was
the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. And when he
came home from work that day on April nineteenth, he
didn't know yet. It hadn't hit the news yet what
the police found with Timothy McVeigh in the car when
(18:10):
he was arrested. He had his favorite passages from the
Turner Diaries on the car seat next to him, But
he did know that the bomber had called the National
Alliance Office just before detonating the bomb that killed two
hundred people. Kirsten writes in her memoir that Kevin came
home early from work again the next day, April twentieth,
nineteen ninety five. Came home in a hurry, and he
(18:34):
started packing up boxes and boxes of documents and tapes
and papers and reel to reel recordings of his pirate
radio broadcast Voice of Tomorrow and all of his QSL cards.
If you're a Ham radio guy, don't come for me.
I'm going to do my best here. QSL cards are
mostly a thing of the past now that we have
the Internet, but they were these sort of postcards that
(18:55):
Ham radio enthusiast and people in the pirate radio community
would send through the mail to exchange in from about
signal quality and strength. You'd write, you know, I am
in this location, I was listening to this broadcast on
this date, and this was the signal quality and in
the pirate radio world, these QSL cards are real collector's items,
but they're also a paper trail that the FCC would
love to have. It's sort of a record of what
(19:17):
you're listening to who you're communicating with, and he's been,
you know, running an illegal anti Semitic radio show for years. Anyway,
those are QSL cards, I think, And Kirsten said he
burned the boxes of QSL cards. So he's packing up
all these documents. He's burning the cards, and then he
fills the car up with these boxes of documents and
(19:37):
tapes and he drives several hours away to Stanton, Virginia,
and drives all over town, leaving these boxes in different
dumpsters in businesses. Right, so I guess you know. In
April of nineteen ninety five, the Big Lots dumpster received
potential evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing. Who knows, And
(19:58):
the worst thing really was that it ruined Hitler's birthday,
which was usually a very lively occasion on the compound.
It wasn't long after the bombing that the couple moved
to Rochester, Minnesota. They chose it because it was ninety
six percent white. Of course, it was in Rochester where
Kirsten gave birth to their third child, and it was
(20:19):
pretty clear that she was suffering from what was probably
postpartum depression. She describes an incident just weeks after giving
birth when she was allowed to listen to a little
bit of the radio to hear a weather report, and
she caught the tail end of a news story about
a young couple that killed their baby in a hotel
room to cover up the fact that they'd gotten pregnant.
And that's upsetting for anyone to hear. But I think
(20:39):
if you're a brand new mother, that's overwhelming, right. So
she's a new mother, she's holding her baby. She hears
about a baby that died, and she starts crying. I
think there's nothing more normal in the world than to
cry when you hear about a dead baby. But Kevin
yelled at her. He rebuked her for this, saying it
was good that the baby was dead because its mother
was Jewish. And it wasn't long after that that she
(21:00):
finally got up the courage to read a magazine article
about the Oklahoma City bombing. She obviously had very little
access to media and was afraid to find out more
about this. Anyway, she picked up a magazine and she's
leaping through it and she sees pictures, and she told
an interviewer later, I was thinking about this child being
held by a fireman doesn't look any different than my
(21:22):
son and he's covered with blood, and that whole idea
that there really isn't any difference, that children are children
all came to me. It all came together on that date.
And it was around this time that Kirsten spent some
time in a psychiatric hospital. Can't really blame her. I
can't imagine trying to integrate that into my psyche. And
(21:43):
she'd been begging for help for years, but Kevin didn't
believe in that kind of thing. She'd been prescribed antidepressants
after the birth of their second child, but he hadn't
allowed her to take them while she was in the hospital.
He left her and took the children. A year's long
custody battle followed, and even though he is an out
and out neo Nazi, it's not a secret at this point.
(22:04):
His name is in the newspaper next to William Luther
Peers and Timothy mcfay. He's the protege of the man
who wrote the book that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing.
He has no real job outside of editing a Nazi
magazine and ghostwriting for David Duke. In spite of all
of that, the battle ended in a draw. Years in
court right. She was only able to keep fighting this
(22:25):
custody battle because the SPLC helped her get a lawyer.
And I think at some point she sold photographs that
she had taken of other National Alliance members on the compound.
She sold them to the SPLC for enough money to
just keep trying, but shared custody. And so at the
end of those three years in court, Kevin was already
(22:45):
married to his second wife, Alicia. And it was Alicia
who came home one day to find her husband, Kevin,
sitting in front of his computer. He was completely nude
and fully erect. And I'm so I don't love having
to say that. I mean, I guess I chose to
say it. I did write this, but I don't like
(23:06):
the way that feels. But he was at his computer, naked,
rock hard and looking at pictures of little girls, clothed girls.
The girls had clothes on. Right. He had access to
child pornography. We know that, But on that particular day,
she walked in on him looking at what, under other
(23:29):
circumstances would have been perfectly normal photographs of children. These
were children they knew, right, family friends, the children of
other National Alliance members. Photos he'd taken of children in
their lives, friends of her daughters. But it wasn't normal
because of the you know, the totality of the circumstances here,
and that's what prompted the pedophilia contract. Because she'd already
(23:53):
caught him looking at actual child pornography the year before,
so she already she already knew, but this was a
bridge too far. These were children that he had access
to right when she caught him the year before looking
at the child pornography. They'd started going to marriage counseling,
but this was this was too much. She decided he
(24:14):
needed individual counseling to address this specifically, and she later
testified that it was at this point that she started
sleeping on the floor outside her daughter's bedroom. And his
marriage was not the only thing in Kevin's life that
was falling apart in two thousand and six. After William
Luther Pierce died in two thousand and two, National Alliance
was thrown into chaos. His handpicked successor, Eric Gleeb, was
(24:36):
losing control of the organization. In two thousand and four,
National Alliances Membership Coordinator quit, leaving behind a public letter
demanding an audit of the organization's finances, accusing Glebe of
mismanaging member dues. In April of two thousand and five,
Strong attempted a coup of sorts, getting dozens of signatures
on a letter demanding Glebe's resignation. Gleb responded by firing
(24:58):
him Barnough, but then he did actually step down just
a few days after that, leaving Sean Walker in charge
of National Alliance. And you know another sort of tangent here.
Gleeb would actually return as chairman just a year later
because Shawn Walker, the guy that took over for him
when he quit, had to go to prison on a
gun thing. So it's really just kind of a revolving door.
(25:20):
Nobody really knows who's in charge here, but Kevin's out.
But if this one thing these guys love, it is
a splinter group. So Kevin responds to being fired from
the organization he'd devoted his entire adult life to by
founding his own and he called it National Vanguard, which
is the same as the publication he'd been editing for
National Alliance for years. So he already was using the
(25:42):
name National Vanguard because that was National Alliance's publication that
he was in charge of, so he already owned a
domain easy for him, and some National Alliance chapters followed him.
So he's pretty busy trying to helm his newly formed
splinter group. He's traveling to chapters in different states trying
to shore up support. He's speaking, he's recruiting, and he's
just trying to get this thing off the ground. But
(26:04):
he's not so busy that he can't make time to
see the new love of his life, a nine year old.
In September two thousand and five, Kevin met one of
(26:24):
his stepdaughter's elementary school classmates, a girl identified in court
documents only as AA, which thankfully are not her real initials.
She was nine at the time, and I'll set your
mind at ease up front. He never touched her. There's
no allegation that he ever touched a child, so that's
(26:45):
some consolation, I think. And none of the naked photos
of children they found on his hard drive were of her.
Right again, there's no allegation that he ever took photos
of children who were naked. He just was weird about
taking photos of clothes. But he showed up at her
school so many times that her parents pulled her out
of private school and sent her back to public school.
(27:08):
He drove by her house, he sent her flowers and gifts,
and he wrote poems and love songs, and ultimately the
charge of sexual enticement of a miner, which was one
of the things he was originally charged with, was dismissed
Judge Norman Moon, who is shockingly still on the bench.
I saw Judge Moon not too long ago said there
(27:30):
was overwhelming evidence that Strom was attracted to the girl,
but that there wasn't sufficient evidence that he'd actually tried
to sexually coerce her. Right, So he's trying to romance
this child, but he didn't sexually coerce her. Right, He's
buying her flowers and showing up at her house, but
(27:50):
he didn't physically coerce her. And I don't know. I
don't know where the line is there. I'm not comfortable
with that. If a grown man is hiding behind a
tree outside of an elementary school trying to get close
to the child, he's writing poems about marrying, there's gotta
be something we could do about that, right, I don't know.
If a guy is taking time out of his busy
(28:11):
schedule meeting with David Duke and writing blog posts about
racial purity to download a little girls school schedule. There's
gotta be some kind of intervention. But even though Judge
Moon said it wasn't illegal to send romantic gifts to
a fifth grader, the behavior did prompt an investigation. His
wife is rightly very concerned. They start going to counseling.
(28:35):
She catches him looking at child pornography and tries to
call the police. And so here this is a little
he said, she said, right, So they both agreed that
there was an altercation. She says that she hit him
because she was trying to call the police, and then
he tried to stop her by choking her. This is
where the witness intimidation charge comes in that was ultimately
(28:57):
dropped at trial. But regardless of how it started, she
hit him over the head with the phone so hard
that he had to go to the hospital. So they
go back to marriage counseling. In July two thousand and six,
he announces he's taking a step back from his new
Nazi splinter group, citing family issues. You know the classic line,
I've got to take a step back from the work
to spend more time with my family. In this case,
(29:18):
it doesn't seem like spending more time with his family
is really in anybody's best interest. But he abandons National Vanguard.
He just doesn't have time for it right now. And
a month after that, unbeknownst to him, his wife gives
his computer hard drive to the police. In an October,
federal agents search his home. Notably, the FBI agents that
(29:42):
come to search his house are from the Joint Terrorism
Task Force. I don't know that child sex abuse material
usually involves the JTTF, but in this case it did,
and specifically, the agent on the warrant was a Charlesville
police officer on loan to the task force. Did I
mention that this takes place in Charlottesville. It's just it
(30:03):
doesn't seem right, does it. But the agent on the
warrant is Charlesville police officer who is on loan to
the JTTF. Brian O'Donnell and Alicia, that's Kevin's wife at
the time, claimed very publicly and for years that she
was sleeping with O'Donnell at the time of the trial,
and she even produced audio that she claims as a
(30:23):
recording of a phone call between the two of them
where they're talking about the affair. I won't tell you
with certainty that she was sleeping with the cop in
charge of investigating her pedophile husband. He has not admitted that.
I think he has denied that, but that was her
claim for many years. For what it's worth, she was
later arrested several times for stalking and doxing cops. Here
(30:46):
in the Charlottesville area, we have what's called the Jefferson
Area Drug Enforcement Task Force. It's a multi jurisdictional drug
enforcement unit. And she ran a blog devoted to doxing
the undercover cops that did drug stings. So again, you know,
you don't got to hand it to her. She is
not innocent in all of this. She was a true believer,
just like Kevin. But I don't know, running the cop
(31:08):
doxing blog not bad. Eventually, the ACLU actually took up
her case, defending her right to run a blog dedicated
to identifying undercovered drug officers. She spent a little bit
of time in jail, but I think ultimately she was
vindicated in her cop doxing blog. It's just such a
weird rabbit hole here. It's just such a strange side
(31:29):
tangent that has nothing to do with Kevin because he's
out of her life at this point, right, But just
a weird crossover. I wish I could go back in
time and see Tim Longo's the Charlesville police chief. Back
then he met with Alicia and just bagging tarries like
I can't make you right. You're not breaking the law.
We settled that, but please please log off. Please stop
posting pictures of cops, houses and cars. It's upsetting the boys.
(31:54):
Just bizarre, another strange crossover, Just totally bizarre. I guess
it's just a quirk of small town life. But it's
one of her many trials. The prosecutor was Denise Lunsford.
She was back then in the Prosecutor's office in al
Marle County. After working as a prosecutor, she would go
back to defense work and she was actually the court
(32:16):
appointed defense attorney at the James Alexfield's murder trial. So
just everything comes full circle, I guess. And O'Donnell, the
officer working Strome's case for the JTTF. Again, he denied
the affair. He says he was not sleeping with Alicia,
but he actually stayed on at the Charlesville Police Department
for another decade or so, long enough to serve as
(32:36):
one of the zone commanders for the police presence in
downtown Charlottesville on August twelfth, twenty seventeen. I'm not saying
any of this to start a conspiracy there. There's really
no conspiracy here. It's just a quirk of a little
city characters getting recycled. But circling back, I digress that
(32:57):
JTTF involvement in this small town child pornography case is
what fuels Strom's personal conspiracy theory that he was set up.
He maintains to this day that he was targeted by
the JTTF because they were unhappy with him or his
coverage of the two thousand and four federal trial of
Chester Doles. Of all the things to think that this
is about, I think that's just so stupid. Doles was
(33:20):
a longtime clansman, but by the early two thousands was
in leadership at National Alliance and he was on trial
for some kind of federal gun charge. He did something silly.
He was a felon for some prior hate crimes. He
wasn't supposed to have a gun. He did go to
prison again, got back out. He tried to run for
office in Georgia two years ago. Anyway, Strome attended the
(33:41):
trial to support Doles, obviously as a National Alliance member,
and he was also writing about the case for National
Alliances website to sort of help boost awareness of the
case because they were raising money for Doles's family. But
Strome says that at the courthouse a JGTF agent looked
at him and said, Strome, you're next. So he thinks
that they hated his blog so much that they tried
(34:03):
to send him to prison. I know, I'm saying that, like,
it's so stupid when I just told you that, like
his wife wrote a blog bit was so bad the
cops tried to send her to jail. But I just
don't think the FBI cared that much about his blog.
I really don't, because I've got a different theory I
found buried in this mountain of documents produced pursued into
a FOI request by Didas Secrets founder Ema Best, an
(34:27):
FBI memo dated April eighteenth, two thousand and five. Remember
that's the week of Kevin's attempted coup. So he's trying
to seize control of National Alliance from Eric Glebe, but
instead he gets fired and he splinters off National Vanguard.
So in this FBI memo, which was written just days
before all of that happened, the agent writes National Alliance
(34:50):
fracturing continued and accelerated this weekend. And the agent speculates
that a splinter group led by a former staffer is
likely to form, And he actually writes a name, but
it's acted obviously, but based on the character wits, I
can't think of another guy whose name would fit. It's
a Kevin Strom length redaction, if you know what I'm saying.
(35:14):
The memos author advises agents to assess the potential of
a lone wolf acting out of frustration over the lack
of progress that organized groups have been able to make
in their goals, and the document concludes by saying, quote
to some degree, I believe that National Alliance had a
stabilizing effect on the majority of its members, and with
the growing instability of the organization, individual actions by these
(35:37):
people will become more difficult to anticipate and certainly more
difficult to cover with sources. So if you don't speak
cop right, what he's saying is that the collapse of
a group that size which had long relied on the
somewhat stabilizing effect of a charismatic leader, would make it
harder to infiltrate, harder to monitor, and harder to predict.
(36:00):
And some of these guys might do terrorism. Right that
if this group collapses, if they don't have the stability
and the framework of a leader keeping them in line,
they're gonna blow stuff up. And the FBI already had
an idea about strow right, It was sort of an
open secret for years that he was a little weird
(36:23):
about little girls. His ex wife Kirsten, spoke to the
FBI years earlier, though it's not clear what specific allegations
she made about his proclivities. In the nineties, he maintained
a personal website with an entire section dedicated to the
beauty of the White race, which, like, I mean, normal
enough for a Nazi, right, like the beauty of the
(36:43):
Aryan woman or whatever, like a Pinterest board for the
fourteen words. But it was weirder than that. Right, even
at the time and even within the movement. It raised
eyebrows because the pictures were not of adult women, right,
It was the beauty of Aryan little girls, again clothed
(37:04):
but weird, just kind of freak behavior. And Kirston wrote
in her memoir, which was published years before his arrest,
she's not writing this after she already knows she's writing
this prior to his arrest, that during their custody battle,
she actually went to the police about that section of
his website, and the police agreed that it was super unsettling,
(37:25):
but that ultimately it was not illegal because the girls
were clothed. She said in an interview later that Alicia,
the second wife, called her after Kevin got arrested. She
said that for the first two years of her marriage
she tried to figure out what was wrong with her,
and for the second two years she tried to figure
out what was wrong with him. The fact is he
(37:47):
wasn't interested in me either once we got married. You know,
often when someone gets arrested for something like this, people
come out of the word work and they say, oh,
I always knew something was kind of weird about that guy.
I always knew. Why didn't you say anything? First of all?
But in this case, we have sources that predate his arrest,
so this isn't a hindsight thing. People were saying this
(38:09):
for years. Some posts on a white nationalist message board
in two thousand and three discussed the photos. Even one
user writes, back some years ago, when Strom first came
on the internet, he ran a series of pictures of
young white girls which some people found objectionable, but I
did not. They weren't naked or in suggestive poses or
anything like that, And what the hell is wrong with
(38:30):
celebrating the beauty of the women of our race. Even
the other Nazis pushed back against that. They're like, I
don't know, man. The photos were of the children of
other National Alliance members. These aren't just random pictures of
kids he found online. These aren't stock photos. These are
photos he took of children in his life. Would photograph
(38:50):
children playing on the compound and post them online without
their parents' permission, which is weird enough. But the website
also had another section, so this is on a separate
page of the website, but it's on the website. There
were also photos of himself posing in what the users
on the message board call beefcake poses in underwear that
(39:13):
they describe as fruit of the looms. I'm so I'm
so sorry. Another exasperated user wrote, why why do these
things happen? Why even under the best of circumstances, the
movement always tainted with just a slight tinge of cadaverine smell.
Why are we constantly confronted with this kind of just
(39:35):
plain weird behavior, even among those who claim to be, and,
to our reluctant agreement, usually are the best people we've got.
Why can't we have so much as one single leader
who is just simply normal. Why must there always be
these little weird kibbles and bits, these little oddities, these
(39:55):
little bits of quirky behavior lurking in the background of
everything we do. Why must we always hold our breath
around our leaders, never knowing what horrible surprise lurks in
their past, waiting to spring out and piss all over
everything like a giggling, deranged baby. Why do we even bother?
Is this really truly the best we can do? And
to that, I say, I think so. Yeah, I think
(40:19):
it is the best they can do. The movement is
full of aspiring hitlers, but they're all just absolute fucking weirdohs,
even aside from the whole Nazi thing. So if the
FBI wanted to take out one head of this hydra
to cut off the potential for this splinter group to
further split one of the country's more powerful white supremacist organizations.
(40:39):
It wouldn't be hard, right, I'm saying that these two
things exist separately. He was already a pedophile. They had
an existing desire to prevent this splinter group from taking hold,
and they just kind of lucked out, right, Like, if
the cops might come after you, don't do them a
favor by doing other crimes, Like if you're a mob boss,
(41:03):
pay your taxes, right, Who knows? We do know Alicia
turned over that hard drive to the police, but it's
impossible to know if she did that of her own
volition or if she'd been approached by agents looking to
get him on something. Right, Both of those are very
easy to believe. He was horrible to her, you know,
by her account, he tried to choke her, he's looking
(41:25):
at child pornography. She's afraid for her daughter. I think that,
even on its own, is enough motivation for even a
true believer, a member of the movement, to say something
has to be done. This isn't acceptable. But it's also
very easy to believe that the FBI would approach her
and say, you know, we can help you if you
help us. Who knows. We'll never know. She would say
(41:49):
that she never did that, right. She says that she
didn't give any information to the police. But we know
that's not true because it's in court documents that she
voluntarily produced the hard trime. So we'll never really get
a straight answer. You know, he really just stepped on
a rake here. You know, maybe the Feds never would
have gotten involved at all if not for a little
(42:10):
girl's mother who called the police because some weird middle
aged man wouldn't stop showing up at her daughter's school. Ultimately,
Strome did plead guilty to one count of possessing child
pornography and was sentenced to twenty three months, with the
year he'd already served before pleading guilty. He was released
just a few months later in September of two thousand
and eight, and Strome was sort of in the wilderness
(42:32):
for a bit after his stint in prison. By twenty thirteen, though,
who is back in it with National Alliance. He registered
an account under his own name on the group's online forum,
and the following year Glebe steps down again, leaving William
White Williams the head of National Alliance, and he's still
in charge over there today of what's left of it.
(42:52):
And yes, that is William White. Williams, that is his name,
William W. Williams. Not to be confused with William White,
that is a Nazi for a different day, I promise,
though we'll get to William White anyway. Williams he was
a longtime Strome ally, so he brings him back into
the fold and reinstates him as the group's media director.
(43:15):
And he also introduced Strome to the woman who'd become
his third wife, Meredith Keller. And Keller started writing to
Williams in twenty twelve when she was still an undergraduate
in college, and Williams introduced her to Strome soon after. So,
just as William Luther Pierce had selected Kirsten for Kevin
back in nineteen eighty seven, the Alliance's new chairman's playing
(43:36):
matchmaker again again, Kevin's like fifty at this point and
she is just graduating college, so not illegal, but it
is weird. It is weird. And under the pseudonym Vanessa Neubauer,
Meredith served as the secretary for the Cosmotheist Church that's
the fake Nazi religion that William Luther Peers invented to
(43:56):
get tax exempt status after the IRS said no the
first time in nineteen seven eight. Strom's engagement to Meredith
was announced in an October twenty fifteen member newsletter, but
a police report two months later says she called the
police when he wouldn't let her leave the house when
she tried to end their relationship. No charges were filed,
and I guess the police having to come because you're
(44:19):
holding a woman hostage isn't a probation violation because there's
no documentation in his federal court file that he had
a police contact of this sort. Who knows. So he
didn't get in trouble and they didn't break up. The
couple attended one of the last Trump campaign rallies together
just two weeks before the twenty sixteen election. In a
(44:40):
broadcast of American Dissident Voices that week, Stroma pined that
Trump had opened the door for a full on Hitler
to emerge in the not too distant future, ending the
broadcast with optimism at the speed with which the Overton
window was shifting rightward, saying, never before has the window
of topics opened for public debate been moved so far
and so fast in our direction. Kevin and Meredith married
(45:04):
in twenty nineteen. There were some rumors of the weird
corners of the Internet that Strom had wanted to move
his new family back to the compound in West Virginia.
But everybody kind of said no to that, not because
they didn't want a convicted sex offender around the families
that live there. Now, that wasn't a big deal. They
don't think he was guilty, right, he was railroad and
(45:26):
it was fake whatever. But because of his mandatory sex
offender registration, that would mean that a photograph of the
compound would appear on the sex Offender Registry website, and
people weren't comfortable with that. I don't know if that's true.
I guess I shouldn't repeat Internet rumors, but take it
with a grainisal. The couple lived for several years in
(45:47):
a home provided to him by a supporter from New
Jersey before purchasing a house a few hours north of
the compound in a town outside of Pittsburgh. She gave
birth to their third child together, his sixth last summer.
As of last September, Strom is no longer under supervision
and no longer appears on the Sex Offender Registry. He
and his wife appear as signatories on documents filed with
(46:09):
the Pocahontas County Clerk in West Virginia approving the lease
of some land owned by the Cosmothius Church to a
third party in twenty eighteen. He still hosts American Dissonant Voices,
the weekly broadcast he started in nineteen ninety one, and
still posts regularly on the website of the foundering neo
Nazi organization that he's given his life to. So Voltaire
(46:32):
didn't say it. A life long adherent to the teachings
of one of America's most influential Nazi leaders, said it
from a little bunker in the mountains of West Virginia.
Just a weird little guy who, according to one ex wife,
was known to disappear for hours locked in the bathroom,
eating pickles in the bathtub. Weird little Guys to production
(47:00):
Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit
our website Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you guy your podcasts
Cool Zone Media. Hey, I'm Molly Conger and this is
Weird Little Guys, the show where I tell you about
the weird little guys trying to unravel the fabric of
our society. I've spent years researching and writing about writing extremism,
and it's pretty scary out there. I won't lie to you,
(00:24):
but the guys trying to ruin life as we know
it are also kind of freaks and losers. So here's
one of them. Okay, we're going to start this off
at the pop quiz. I'm going to read you a quote,
and I want you to tell me who said it.
I'll give you a minute to think. It's multiple choice
(00:45):
to learn who rules over you. Simply find out who
you are not allowed to criticize. Was that A Benjamin Franklin, B. Voltaire, C.
Socrates or D A neo Nazi pedophile on a white
nationalist radio show in nineteen ninety three. Now, if you
(01:07):
guessed B, you're in good company. Well, no, it's not
good company. The company is pretty terrible. I can't say
bad company without getting lost in a tangent about Timoth
mcfay's obsession with the song bad Company by the band
Bad Company from their album Bad Company. So I won't
say the company is bad, but it's a crowd. No,
(01:27):
the answer is actually d neo Nazi pedophile Kevin alfred Strom,
and it's a slight paraphrase of something he said in
an August nineteen ninety three broadcast of American Dissident Voices,
the weekly radio program he hosted for the neo Nazi
group National Alliance. Strome was living on the group's West
Virginia compound, three hundred acres in the mountains near Hillsboro
(01:48):
that they just call the Lamb, and he was serving
as the right hand band of the group's leader, his mentor,
William Luther Pierce. The broadcast was entitled all of America
must know the error that is upon us, a name
he borrowed from a speech given in nineteen fifty nine
by another one of his great influences, Revilo p Oliver,
and the quote gets new life every now and again
(02:10):
when it's incorrectly attributed to Voltaire. In the era of
public discourse about whether wearing a mask was truly the
most vile form of tyranny, it made the rounds as
COVID deniers pushed back against public health guidelines, like in
January of twenty twenty two, when Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massey
posted you mustn't question Fauci for he is science, accompanied
(02:31):
by an image of the quote, and it was sort
of laid over an image. I guess that's just a
meme words on a picture. The picture was of a
large disembodied hand pushing down on tiny little people that
it was squishing. That original image is actually an anti
child labor political cartoon from nineteen twelve. If you look
at the uncropped version of the original picture, the sleeve
(02:54):
has child labor employer written on it. You know they
used to label everything in a political cartoon. Garrison didn't
invent that. Australian Senator Corey Bernardi tweeted the quote back
in twenty fifteen. Contemporaneous reporting doesn't give me any insight
into exactly who he felt he was being prevented from criticizing.
But there was an article in the Guardian that same
(03:14):
week about his belief that Australia should not admit any
Syrian refugees because they might be terrorists. So I guess
he felt he was being oppressed by refugees but whatever
it was about. He responded by not just deleting that tweet,
but all of his tweets, and he did not tweet
again for a while. Elon Musk has unsurprisingly done it
(03:36):
at least twice. In November of twenty twenty two, Musk
posted that he was so committed to free speech that
he would not ban the account that was posting information
about his private plane. He did actually ban the account
a month later, but a user with a doge meme
profile picture replied to that tweet, so you don't rule
over us, but for us much wow, accompanied by that
(03:58):
same image that Thomas Massey the big hands squishing the
little people with the text of the quote, and Musk
replied to the Doge meme guy, that is my goal.
After hundreds of commenters immediately pointed out that he was
agreeing with a quote from a neo Nazi, he deleted
the reply without addressing it. Six months later, he tweeted
the exact same picture. It was a screenshot from a
(04:20):
meme page, so it was the exact same image bearing
the quote, but the text underneath it showed someone had
written we need to rise up against children with leukemia.
I guess the joke there is that you aren't allowed
to criticize kids with cancer. That one's still up. I
guess he thought that was funny, and maybe it does
kind of sound like something Voltaire could have said. You know,
(04:42):
he's not a huge fan of the Jews either. But
we don't exactly know where the original misattribution to the
French philosopher comes from. American etomologist Barry Popek wrote on
his blog in twenty twelve that the quote seemed to
appear kind of out of nowhere, with multiple Quote of
the Day websites featuring it in twenty twelve, all attributing
it to Voltaire. The oldest attribution to Voltaire that Pope
(05:04):
could find super weird it was a two thousand and
seven post by a user named Suzanne on a forum
for miniature horse breeders. But I think that has more
to do with sort of the rickety architecture of the
early Internet than it is evidence that Suzanne and the
mini horse ladies are anti semites. Right, that we don't
really have the ability to Google. A lot of that
(05:25):
sort of early Internet posting, Usenet forums and things like
that weren't indexing to Google, So I don't think it
came from the mini horse ladies, but I will admit
I spent half an afternoon digging through twenty year old
forum posts about miniature horse pedigrees trying to sniff out
secret Nazis and didn't find any. Mostly I just discovered
(05:47):
that some people buy the little shoes at Build a
Bear Workshop for their miniature horses because they fit perfectly,
and they're cheaper than the little sneakers they make for horses.
So if you need a little extra traction, if you're
taking a miniature horse inside, you could put Teddy Bear
sneakers on him. But whoever started it, I find it
hard to believe that the original misattribution was innocent. It's
(06:10):
not a line you could really just come across anywhere
on the wider Internet if you were the first person
to do this, And the actual author of the quote
seems to agree. In twenty seventeen, Kevin Strom addressed the issue,
writing in a post on the website for the neo
Nazi organization National Alliance, whoever hijacked my quote and put
it over Voltaire's signature liked what I was saying. He
(06:32):
understood my point, He understood that our secret rulers brook
no criticism of themselves or their agenda without exacting punishment.
He wanted to use the quote, but he didn't dare
attribute it correctly. He didn't dare make his point with
a quote from a known racist or anti Semite. Those
are in scare quotes, no matter how good the quote was.
(06:52):
He didn't dare follow my thoughts with my name. If
he did, he'd be attacked as being racist himself. There
might be personal a professional comment sequences. So he took
my idea and put it in the mouth of Voltaire.
Funny thing, is Voltaire, freethinker and honest observer as he was,
is as much of a racist and anti semit as
I am. But Voltaire has been safely dead for well
over two hundred years, and his contribution to the artistic
(07:14):
and intellectual development of our civilization is so great that
it will take quite some time for his legacy to
be race denounced or censored, as I'm sure the enemies
of life are aching to do. So. It was relatively
safe to quote Voltaire, but unsafe to quote Kevin Alfred Strome.
Fair enough, I think Kevin's onto something there, you know.
(07:34):
I hate to agree with him. But it isn't just
racism and anti Semitism that makes Strome an unsavory source
to quote, he is also a pedophile. Now, I know
you might be saying, and I know the legal department
is saying, that's kind of a strong word. Are you
sure you can say that? Well, yeah, I can. I'm
(07:55):
very sure because despite the entire section of his website
devoted to debunking the accusation, one of the exhibits filed
in the case that led to his stint in federal
prison for a possession of child pornography is a copy
of a contract he signed in the presence of a notary.
In September two thousand and six, at the request of
his second wife, Kevin Strom signed a document stating that
(08:16):
he would attend counseling sessions quote until such time that
such a qualified counselor will be able to indicate, too redacted,
that I am free from being sexually drawn to children,
or drawn to sexually explicit material of any kind concerning children,
or any other characteristics of being a pedophile. There's just
a lot going on there. I mean, first of all,
I don't know if you've had anything notarized, right you
(08:38):
sign a document in the presence of someone who is
certified by the state to say they saw you sign it,
so it's you know, there's no argument later about whether
that's really you who signed it, because you show them
your idea and they put the little stamp on it.
I usually get stuff notarized at the library. It's free.
Your town probably has it too. You make a little
appointment and the librarian can do it for you. It's great.
(08:59):
I love public library. I don't know where Kevin got
his pedophile contract notarized. I just can't imagine, like normally
you're looking at I don't know, mortgage documents and wills
or I had to send a document to a court
clerk to get online access to court records. Did she
read this? What a bad day at work. There's nothing
(09:21):
I can tell you that will make any sense of
a man's sexual attraction to his stepdaughter's nine year old classmate.
That's I can't do that. But I think there's some
sense in telling you a little bit about Kevin's life
up to that point. If you don't have the kind
of familiarity with white supremacist movements that ends conversations at
parties you've probably never heard of him, but he spent
(09:43):
most of his adult life as the indispensable right hand
of the man who wrote the novel that still serves
as a blueprint and a bible for white supremacists terror.
By his own telling, it was his high school history
teacher who set Kevin's Strome on the path through right
wing extremism, introducing him to the ultra conservative anti communist
group the John Birch s Society in the early seventies.
And it's probably no coincidence that the two men who
(10:04):
would have the biggest impact on his views as an
adult also came up through the JBS. Strome would later
serve as the personal archivist of Vilo p Oliver, a
founding member of the John Birch Society, although he was
later forced to leave the group he helped found in
nineteen sixty six after saying all the world's problems could
be solved if every Jew were vaporized. So it's not
(10:26):
that the John Birch Society wasn't anti Semitic. They just
didn't want him to say out loud exactly how anti
semitic they all were. It was just very embarrassing for
everyone and William Luther Pierce, the man whose Nazi compound
Strome lived and worked on for years, joined the American
Nazi Party after deciding that John Birch Society just wasn't
racist enough for him. It was a place for people
(10:48):
who hated communism to share ideas, and a lot of
those ideas were about how black and Jewish people were
actually to blame, and it was said at John Birch
Society meeting sometime in the late seventies when first encountered
members of the newly formed National Alliance. William Luther Pierce
founded National Alliance in nineteen seventy four after American Nazi
(11:08):
Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was shot in a laundromat
parking lot by a former follower. In sixty seven, Pierce
had a brief stint in the National Socialist White People's
Party That's kind of a mouthful, that's just a different
Nazi Party before joining up with Willis Cardo to lead
the National Youth Alliance. And National Youth Alliance was formed
by Cardo to focus on recruiting and radicalizing right wing
(11:30):
college students to sort of counter the influence of groups
like Students for a Democratic society, right, So it's it
was the TPUSA of the George Wallace campaign years in
the name of the greatest sigure that I've ever taught differ.
I've read a line in the dusk and passed the
garment before the theater at Turner and I say segregation.
(11:54):
Now segregation, the MA and segregation however, and it was
originally spun off of Cardo's Youth for Wallace organization. But
obviously George Wallace did not become president in nineteen sixty eight,
and they didn't bring back segregation. And in what is
going to become a theme in this story, Cardow and
(12:15):
Pierce pretty quickly stopped getting along and eventually split entirely.
The faction that left with Pierce became National Alliance in
nineteen seventy four, and in seventy five Pierce started writing
the novel that is, unfortunately, his enduring legacy, The Turner Diaries.
We don't have to get super deep into it today.
(12:35):
I'm sure it will come up in most episodes of
this show. Unfortunately, you know, over the last fifty years,
this book has inspired a lot of race warriors. It
is a fictional novel, but it's the handbook for the
race war. It is a race war handbook in a
fictional trench coat. And it's not very good. And I
(12:56):
don't I mean, obviously it's not good, right. It is
a terrorism. It is sort of describing how to instigate
the race war and you know, kill the race traders
and kill the journalists and kill black people and Jewish people.
It's it is not good ideologically, obviously, but it's also
just really bad. It's messy. It was originally written in
(13:17):
a serialized format and then collected into one book, and
it's just it's disjointed. He's not a great writer. He's
not a great thinker. And Kevin Strom's first wife, Kirsten,
told an interviewer years later that when she first met
Pierce in nineteen eighty seven, she told him she had
just finished reading the Turner Diaries. You know, she's at
dinner with her husband and doctor Pierce. And this is
(13:39):
I'm sure a very big deal for her husband, who
is a National Alliance member, and I'm sure he hoped
that his wife would just behave you know, keep sweet,
just be the wife. And she tells doctor Piers, oh,
he just finished reading your book. And I didn't think
he was very good. She told him it was poorly written,
and I mean point for Kirsten, She's right. I just
(14:00):
can't imagine saying that to him. And it was through
Pierce that Strom first met Kirsten. She was married at
the time to a National Alliance member named Joseph McLaughlin.
In nineteen eighty seven, the day that Rudolph hes died,
Jo suggested that she call Pierce. So I wish I
could be a fly on the wall on this afternoon,
you know, he says to his young wife, Oh, I've
(14:21):
just heard that the Deputy Furr died. We should call
the leader of the Nazi cult that I'm in and
offer our condolences, I guess. But that's what they did,
and Pierce was very happy to hear from them. And
as they're talking, he's thinking, you know, I think Kevin
would really like this girl. Again, she's married, she's on
(14:44):
the phone with her husband. Her husband is the one
that prompted her to make this phone call. But he hears
her and thinks, I've got something better for her, because
I think it's hard to meet women when you're living
in an off the grid Nazi compound in the Mountains
of West Virginia. Pierce himself was known for selecting his
brides from catalogs of Eastern European women, but I guess
(15:05):
he thought he could pick one out for his boy,
Kevin over in Arlington, you know, a little closer to home.
A few months after that dinner where she told Pierce
she didn't care for his novel, Kirsten left her second husband, Joe,
and moved in with Kevin, and the couple was married
on Chinkite Island in nineteen ninety in a ceremony officiated
by William Luther Pearce. She wrote later in her memoir,
(15:26):
I guess you know she wasn't fully sort of removed
from society at this point. She was still existing in
the world when she married Kevin, and so her family
was at the wedding, and she describes feeling a little
bit embarrassed at the way doctor Pierce talked about race
in front of her family. Strange vows, and the marriage
(15:57):
was not a happy one. That's probably not a surprise
to you. Soon after the marriage, they moved out to
the land again. That's the big compound in West Virginia,
and she didn't love it there. She wasn't allowed to
watch TV, or read newspapers or consume any of what
her husband considered Jewish controlled media. They stocked wild food
(16:18):
and weapons, and she mainly tended to her home and
her children, but she says that she also helped out
around the compound by stuffing envelopes to mail out copies
of the group's propaganda, help fulfill orders for books. They
sold Pierce's book obviously, the Turner Diaries, and a number
of other sort of white nationalists publications and books. And
another task that she would pitch in with was they
(16:40):
made these sort of special waterproof PVC tubes that they
would sell to members, and the purpose of the tube
is to bury your guns underground so the federal government
can't get them. Right. So she's raising her children, she's
a housewife, she's making gun tubes for preppers and mailing
out copies of the terrorism Manual, you know, just young
(17:02):
mother stuff. And the paranoia on the compound was always there.
Why else are you living on a compound if you're
not a little bit paranoid. But after Ruby Ridge in
ninety two and Waco in ninety three, it became unbearable.
As she describes that you know, Kevin telling her things
like and you keep the children away from the windows.
They're going to shoot the children through the windows. Just
not prompted by anything, right, just the sort of constant
(17:26):
tension that the Feds are going to show up on
any day now and they're going to shoot you. You're
not going to shoot you like Ruby Ridge. It's just
not a great environment for a family. And on April nineteenth,
nineteen ninety five, Kevin came home early from work, and
she said he never did that. He was never around.
He would go off to his little workroom to make
his little Nazi radio show for you know, dawn to
(17:49):
dusk every day. He never came home early, but on
April nineteenth, nineteen ninety five, he did. I don't know
if that date means anything to normal people. It was
the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. And when he
came home from work that day on April nineteenth, he
didn't know yet. It hadn't hit the news yet what
the police found with Timothy McVeigh in the car when
(18:10):
he was arrested. He had his favorite passages from the
Turner Diaries on the car seat next to him, But
he did know that the bomber had called the National
Alliance Office just before detonating the bomb that killed two
hundred people. Kirsten writes in her memoir that Kevin came
home early from work again the next day, April twentieth,
nineteen ninety five. Came home in a hurry, and he
(18:34):
started packing up boxes and boxes of documents and tapes
and papers and reel to reel recordings of his pirate
radio broadcast Voice of Tomorrow and all of his QSL cards.
If you're a Ham radio guy, don't come for me.
I'm going to do my best here. QSL cards are
mostly a thing of the past now that we have
the Internet, but they were these sort of postcards that
(18:55):
Ham radio enthusiast and people in the pirate radio community
would send through the mail to exchange in from about
signal quality and strength. You'd write, you know, I am
in this location, I was listening to this broadcast on
this date, and this was the signal quality and in
the pirate radio world, these QSL cards are real collector's items,
but they're also a paper trail that the FCC would
love to have. It's sort of a record of what
(19:17):
you're listening to who you're communicating with, and he's been,
you know, running an illegal anti Semitic radio show for years. Anyway,
those are QSL cards, I think, And Kirsten said he
burned the boxes of QSL cards. So he's packing up
all these documents. He's burning the cards, and then he
fills the car up with these boxes of documents and
(19:37):
tapes and he drives several hours away to Stanton, Virginia,
and drives all over town, leaving these boxes in different
dumpsters in businesses. Right, so I guess you know. In
April of nineteen ninety five, the Big Lots dumpster received
potential evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing. Who knows, And
(19:58):
the worst thing really was that it ruined Hitler's birthday,
which was usually a very lively occasion on the compound.
It wasn't long after the bombing that the couple moved
to Rochester, Minnesota. They chose it because it was ninety
six percent white. Of course, it was in Rochester where
Kirsten gave birth to their third child, and it was
(20:19):
pretty clear that she was suffering from what was probably
postpartum depression. She describes an incident just weeks after giving
birth when she was allowed to listen to a little
bit of the radio to hear a weather report, and
she caught the tail end of a news story about
a young couple that killed their baby in a hotel
room to cover up the fact that they'd gotten pregnant.
And that's upsetting for anyone to hear. But I think
(20:39):
if you're a brand new mother, that's overwhelming, right. So
she's a new mother, she's holding her baby. She hears
about a baby that died, and she starts crying. I
think there's nothing more normal in the world than to
cry when you hear about a dead baby. But Kevin
yelled at her. He rebuked her for this, saying it
was good that the baby was dead because its mother
was Jewish. And it wasn't long after that that she
(21:00):
finally got up the courage to read a magazine article
about the Oklahoma City bombing. She obviously had very little
access to media and was afraid to find out more
about this. Anyway, she picked up a magazine and she's
leaping through it and she sees pictures, and she told
an interviewer later, I was thinking about this child being
held by a fireman doesn't look any different than my
(21:22):
son and he's covered with blood, and that whole idea
that there really isn't any difference, that children are children
all came to me. It all came together on that date.
And it was around this time that Kirsten spent some
time in a psychiatric hospital. Can't really blame her. I
can't imagine trying to integrate that into my psyche. And
(21:43):
she'd been begging for help for years, but Kevin didn't
believe in that kind of thing. She'd been prescribed antidepressants
after the birth of their second child, but he hadn't
allowed her to take them while she was in the hospital.
He left her and took the children. A year's long
custody battle followed, and even though he is an out
and out neo Nazi, it's not a secret at this point.
(22:04):
His name is in the newspaper next to William Luther
Peers and Timothy mcfay. He's the protege of the man
who wrote the book that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing.
He has no real job outside of editing a Nazi
magazine and ghostwriting for David Duke. In spite of all
of that, the battle ended in a draw. Years in
court right. She was only able to keep fighting this
(22:25):
custody battle because the SPLC helped her get a lawyer.
And I think at some point she sold photographs that
she had taken of other National Alliance members on the compound.
She sold them to the SPLC for enough money to
just keep trying, but shared custody. And so at the
end of those three years in court, Kevin was already
(22:45):
married to his second wife, Alicia. And it was Alicia
who came home one day to find her husband, Kevin,
sitting in front of his computer. He was completely nude
and fully erect. And I'm so I don't love having
to say that. I mean, I guess I chose to
say it. I did write this, but I don't like
(23:06):
the way that feels. But he was at his computer, naked,
rock hard and looking at pictures of little girls, clothed girls.
The girls had clothes on. Right. He had access to
child pornography. We know that, But on that particular day,
she walked in on him looking at what, under other
(23:29):
circumstances would have been perfectly normal photographs of children. These
were children they knew, right, family friends, the children of
other National Alliance members. Photos he'd taken of children in
their lives, friends of her daughters. But it wasn't normal
because of the you know, the totality of the circumstances here,
and that's what prompted the pedophilia contract. Because she'd already
(23:53):
caught him looking at actual child pornography the year before,
so she already she already knew, but this was a
bridge too far. These were children that he had access
to right when she caught him the year before looking
at the child pornography. They'd started going to marriage counseling,
but this was this was too much. She decided he
(24:14):
needed individual counseling to address this specifically, and she later
testified that it was at this point that she started
sleeping on the floor outside her daughter's bedroom. And his
marriage was not the only thing in Kevin's life that
was falling apart in two thousand and six. After William
Luther Pierce died in two thousand and two, National Alliance
was thrown into chaos. His handpicked successor, Eric Gleeb, was
(24:36):
losing control of the organization. In two thousand and four,
National Alliances Membership Coordinator quit, leaving behind a public letter
demanding an audit of the organization's finances, accusing Glebe of
mismanaging member dues. In April of two thousand and five,
Strong attempted a coup of sorts, getting dozens of signatures
on a letter demanding Glebe's resignation. Gleb responded by firing
(24:58):
him Barnough, but then he did actually step down just
a few days after that, leaving Sean Walker in charge
of National Alliance. And you know another sort of tangent here.
Gleeb would actually return as chairman just a year later
because Shawn Walker, the guy that took over for him
when he quit, had to go to prison on a
gun thing. So it's really just kind of a revolving door.
(25:20):
Nobody really knows who's in charge here, but Kevin's out.
But if this one thing these guys love, it is
a splinter group. So Kevin responds to being fired from
the organization he'd devoted his entire adult life to by
founding his own and he called it National Vanguard, which
is the same as the publication he'd been editing for
National Alliance for years. So he already was using the
(25:42):
name National Vanguard because that was National Alliance's publication that
he was in charge of, so he already owned a
domain easy for him, and some National Alliance chapters followed him.
So he's pretty busy trying to helm his newly formed
splinter group. He's traveling to chapters in different states trying
to shore up support. He's speaking, he's recruiting, and he's
just trying to get this thing off the ground. But
(26:04):
he's not so busy that he can't make time to
see the new love of his life, a nine year old.
In September two thousand and five, Kevin met one of
(26:24):
his stepdaughter's elementary school classmates, a girl identified in court
documents only as AA, which thankfully are not her real initials.
She was nine at the time, and I'll set your
mind at ease up front. He never touched her. There's
no allegation that he ever touched a child, so that's
(26:45):
some consolation, I think. And none of the naked photos
of children they found on his hard drive were of her.
Right again, there's no allegation that he ever took photos
of children who were naked. He just was weird about
taking photos of clothes. But he showed up at her
school so many times that her parents pulled her out
of private school and sent her back to public school.
(27:08):
He drove by her house, he sent her flowers and gifts,
and he wrote poems and love songs, and ultimately the
charge of sexual enticement of a miner, which was one
of the things he was originally charged with, was dismissed
Judge Norman Moon, who is shockingly still on the bench.
I saw Judge Moon not too long ago said there
(27:30):
was overwhelming evidence that Strom was attracted to the girl,
but that there wasn't sufficient evidence that he'd actually tried
to sexually coerce her. Right, So he's trying to romance
this child, but he didn't sexually coerce her. Right, He's
buying her flowers and showing up at her house, but
(27:50):
he didn't physically coerce her. And I don't know. I
don't know where the line is there. I'm not comfortable
with that. If a grown man is hiding behind a
tree outside of an elementary school trying to get close
to the child, he's writing poems about marrying, there's gotta
be something we could do about that, right, I don't know.
If a guy is taking time out of his busy
(28:11):
schedule meeting with David Duke and writing blog posts about
racial purity to download a little girls school schedule. There's
gotta be some kind of intervention. But even though Judge
Moon said it wasn't illegal to send romantic gifts to
a fifth grader, the behavior did prompt an investigation. His
wife is rightly very concerned. They start going to counseling.
(28:35):
She catches him looking at child pornography and tries to
call the police. And so here this is a little
he said, she said, right, So they both agreed that
there was an altercation. She says that she hit him
because she was trying to call the police, and then
he tried to stop her by choking her. This is
where the witness intimidation charge comes in that was ultimately
(28:57):
dropped at trial. But regardless of how it started, she
hit him over the head with the phone so hard
that he had to go to the hospital. So they
go back to marriage counseling. In July two thousand and six,
he announces he's taking a step back from his new
Nazi splinter group, citing family issues. You know the classic line,
I've got to take a step back from the work
to spend more time with my family. In this case,
(29:18):
it doesn't seem like spending more time with his family
is really in anybody's best interest. But he abandons National Vanguard.
He just doesn't have time for it right now. And
a month after that, unbeknownst to him, his wife gives
his computer hard drive to the police. In an October,
federal agents search his home. Notably, the FBI agents that
(29:42):
come to search his house are from the Joint Terrorism
Task Force. I don't know that child sex abuse material
usually involves the JTTF, but in this case it did,
and specifically, the agent on the warrant was a Charlesville
police officer on loan to the task force. Did I
mention that this takes place in Charlottesville. It's just it
(30:03):
doesn't seem right, does it. But the agent on the
warrant is Charlesville police officer who is on loan to
the JTTF. Brian O'Donnell and Alicia, that's Kevin's wife at
the time, claimed very publicly and for years that she
was sleeping with O'Donnell at the time of the trial,
and she even produced audio that she claims as a
(30:23):
recording of a phone call between the two of them
where they're talking about the affair. I won't tell you
with certainty that she was sleeping with the cop in
charge of investigating her pedophile husband. He has not admitted that.
I think he has denied that, but that was her
claim for many years. For what it's worth, she was
later arrested several times for stalking and doxing cops. Here
(30:46):
in the Charlottesville area, we have what's called the Jefferson
Area Drug Enforcement Task Force. It's a multi jurisdictional drug
enforcement unit. And she ran a blog devoted to doxing
the undercover cops that did drug stings. So again, you know,
you don't got to hand it to her. She is
not innocent in all of this. She was a true believer,
just like Kevin. But I don't know, running the cop
(31:08):
doxing blog not bad. Eventually, the ACLU actually took up
her case, defending her right to run a blog dedicated
to identifying undercovered drug officers. She spent a little bit
of time in jail, but I think ultimately she was
vindicated in her cop doxing blog. It's just such a
weird rabbit hole here. It's just such a strange side
(31:29):
tangent that has nothing to do with Kevin because he's
out of her life at this point, right, But just
a weird crossover. I wish I could go back in
time and see Tim Longo's the Charlesville police chief. Back
then he met with Alicia and just bagging tarries like
I can't make you right. You're not breaking the law.
We settled that, but please please log off. Please stop
posting pictures of cops, houses and cars. It's upsetting the boys.
(31:54):
Just bizarre, another strange crossover, Just totally bizarre. I guess
it's just a quirk of small town life. But it's
one of her many trials. The prosecutor was Denise Lunsford.
She was back then in the Prosecutor's office in al
Marle County. After working as a prosecutor, she would go
back to defense work and she was actually the court
(32:16):
appointed defense attorney at the James Alexfield's murder trial. So
just everything comes full circle, I guess. And O'Donnell, the
officer working Strome's case for the JTTF. Again, he denied
the affair. He says he was not sleeping with Alicia,
but he actually stayed on at the Charlesville Police Department
for another decade or so, long enough to serve as
(32:36):
one of the zone commanders for the police presence in
downtown Charlottesville on August twelfth, twenty seventeen. I'm not saying
any of this to start a conspiracy there. There's really
no conspiracy here. It's just a quirk of a little
city characters getting recycled. But circling back, I digress that
(32:57):
JTTF involvement in this small town child pornography case is
what fuels Strom's personal conspiracy theory that he was set up.
He maintains to this day that he was targeted by
the JTTF because they were unhappy with him or his
coverage of the two thousand and four federal trial of
Chester Doles. Of all the things to think that this
is about, I think that's just so stupid. Doles was
(33:20):
a longtime clansman, but by the early two thousands was
in leadership at National Alliance and he was on trial
for some kind of federal gun charge. He did something silly.
He was a felon for some prior hate crimes. He
wasn't supposed to have a gun. He did go to
prison again, got back out. He tried to run for
office in Georgia two years ago. Anyway, Strome attended the
(33:41):
trial to support Doles, obviously as a National Alliance member,
and he was also writing about the case for National
Alliances website to sort of help boost awareness of the
case because they were raising money for Doles's family. But
Strome says that at the courthouse a JGTF agent looked
at him and said, Strome, you're next. So he thinks
that they hated his blog so much that they tried
(34:03):
to send him to prison. I know, I'm saying that, like,
it's so stupid when I just told you that, like
his wife wrote a blog bit was so bad the
cops tried to send her to jail. But I just
don't think the FBI cared that much about his blog.
I really don't, because I've got a different theory I
found buried in this mountain of documents produced pursued into
a FOI request by Didas Secrets founder Ema Best, an
(34:27):
FBI memo dated April eighteenth, two thousand and five. Remember
that's the week of Kevin's attempted coup. So he's trying
to seize control of National Alliance from Eric Glebe, but
instead he gets fired and he splinters off National Vanguard.
So in this FBI memo, which was written just days
before all of that happened, the agent writes National Alliance
(34:50):
fracturing continued and accelerated this weekend. And the agent speculates
that a splinter group led by a former staffer is
likely to form, And he actually writes a name, but
it's acted obviously, but based on the character wits, I
can't think of another guy whose name would fit. It's
a Kevin Strom length redaction, if you know what I'm saying.
(35:14):
The memos author advises agents to assess the potential of
a lone wolf acting out of frustration over the lack
of progress that organized groups have been able to make
in their goals, and the document concludes by saying, quote
to some degree, I believe that National Alliance had a
stabilizing effect on the majority of its members, and with
the growing instability of the organization, individual actions by these
(35:37):
people will become more difficult to anticipate and certainly more
difficult to cover with sources. So if you don't speak
cop right, what he's saying is that the collapse of
a group that size which had long relied on the
somewhat stabilizing effect of a charismatic leader, would make it
harder to infiltrate, harder to monitor, and harder to predict.
(36:00):
And some of these guys might do terrorism. Right that
if this group collapses, if they don't have the stability
and the framework of a leader keeping them in line,
they're gonna blow stuff up. And the FBI already had
an idea about strow right, It was sort of an
open secret for years that he was a little weird
(36:23):
about little girls. His ex wife Kirsten, spoke to the
FBI years earlier, though it's not clear what specific allegations
she made about his proclivities. In the nineties, he maintained
a personal website with an entire section dedicated to the
beauty of the White race, which, like, I mean, normal
enough for a Nazi, right, like the beauty of the
(36:43):
Aryan woman or whatever, like a Pinterest board for the
fourteen words. But it was weirder than that. Right, even
at the time and even within the movement. It raised
eyebrows because the pictures were not of adult women, right,
It was the beauty of Aryan little girls, again clothed
(37:04):
but weird, just kind of freak behavior. And Kirston wrote
in her memoir, which was published years before his arrest,
she's not writing this after she already knows she's writing
this prior to his arrest, that during their custody battle,
she actually went to the police about that section of
his website, and the police agreed that it was super unsettling,
(37:25):
but that ultimately it was not illegal because the girls
were clothed. She said in an interview later that Alicia,
the second wife, called her after Kevin got arrested. She
said that for the first two years of her marriage
she tried to figure out what was wrong with her,
and for the second two years she tried to figure
out what was wrong with him. The fact is he
(37:47):
wasn't interested in me either once we got married. You know,
often when someone gets arrested for something like this, people
come out of the word work and they say, oh,
I always knew something was kind of weird about that guy.
I always knew. Why didn't you say anything? First of all?
But in this case, we have sources that predate his arrest,
so this isn't a hindsight thing. People were saying this
(38:09):
for years. Some posts on a white nationalist message board
in two thousand and three discussed the photos. Even one
user writes, back some years ago, when Strom first came
on the internet, he ran a series of pictures of
young white girls which some people found objectionable, but I
did not. They weren't naked or in suggestive poses or
anything like that, And what the hell is wrong with
(38:30):
celebrating the beauty of the women of our race. Even
the other Nazis pushed back against that. They're like, I
don't know, man. The photos were of the children of
other National Alliance members. These aren't just random pictures of
kids he found online. These aren't stock photos. These are
photos he took of children in his life. Would photograph
(38:50):
children playing on the compound and post them online without
their parents' permission, which is weird enough. But the website
also had another section, so this is on a separate
page of the website, but it's on the website. There
were also photos of himself posing in what the users
on the message board call beefcake poses in underwear that
(39:13):
they describe as fruit of the looms. I'm so I'm
so sorry. Another exasperated user wrote, why why do these
things happen? Why even under the best of circumstances, the
movement always tainted with just a slight tinge of cadaverine smell.
Why are we constantly confronted with this kind of just
(39:35):
plain weird behavior, even among those who claim to be, and,
to our reluctant agreement, usually are the best people we've got.
Why can't we have so much as one single leader
who is just simply normal. Why must there always be
these little weird kibbles and bits, these little oddities, these
(39:55):
little bits of quirky behavior lurking in the background of
everything we do. Why must we always hold our breath
around our leaders, never knowing what horrible surprise lurks in
their past, waiting to spring out and piss all over
everything like a giggling, deranged baby. Why do we even bother?
Is this really truly the best we can do? And
to that, I say, I think so. Yeah, I think
(40:19):
it is the best they can do. The movement is
full of aspiring hitlers, but they're all just absolute fucking weirdohs,
even aside from the whole Nazi thing. So if the
FBI wanted to take out one head of this hydra
to cut off the potential for this splinter group to
further split one of the country's more powerful white supremacist organizations.
(40:39):
It wouldn't be hard, right, I'm saying that these two
things exist separately. He was already a pedophile. They had
an existing desire to prevent this splinter group from taking hold,
and they just kind of lucked out, right, Like, if
the cops might come after you, don't do them a
favor by doing other crimes, Like if you're a mob boss,
(41:03):
pay your taxes, right, Who knows? We do know Alicia
turned over that hard drive to the police, but it's
impossible to know if she did that of her own
volition or if she'd been approached by agents looking to
get him on something. Right, Both of those are very
easy to believe. He was horrible to her, you know,
by her account, he tried to choke her, he's looking
(41:25):
at child pornography. She's afraid for her daughter. I think that,
even on its own, is enough motivation for even a
true believer, a member of the movement, to say something
has to be done. This isn't acceptable. But it's also
very easy to believe that the FBI would approach her
and say, you know, we can help you if you
help us. Who knows. We'll never know. She would say
(41:49):
that she never did that, right. She says that she
didn't give any information to the police. But we know
that's not true because it's in court documents that she
voluntarily produced the hard trime. So we'll never really get
a straight answer. You know, he really just stepped on
a rake here. You know, maybe the Feds never would
have gotten involved at all if not for a little
(42:10):
girl's mother who called the police because some weird middle
aged man wouldn't stop showing up at her daughter's school. Ultimately,
Strome did plead guilty to one count of possessing child
pornography and was sentenced to twenty three months, with the
year he'd already served before pleading guilty. He was released
just a few months later in September of two thousand
and eight, and Strome was sort of in the wilderness
(42:32):
for a bit after his stint in prison. By twenty thirteen, though,
who is back in it with National Alliance. He registered
an account under his own name on the group's online forum,
and the following year Glebe steps down again, leaving William
White Williams the head of National Alliance, and he's still
in charge over there today of what's left of it.
(42:52):
And yes, that is William White. Williams, that is his name,
William W. Williams. Not to be confused with William White,
that is a Nazi for a different day, I promise,
though we'll get to William White anyway. Williams he was
a longtime Strome ally, so he brings him back into
the fold and reinstates him as the group's media director.
(43:15):
And he also introduced Strome to the woman who'd become
his third wife, Meredith Keller. And Keller started writing to
Williams in twenty twelve when she was still an undergraduate
in college, and Williams introduced her to Strome soon after. So,
just as William Luther Pierce had selected Kirsten for Kevin
back in nineteen eighty seven, the Alliance's new chairman's playing
(43:36):
matchmaker again again, Kevin's like fifty at this point and
she is just graduating college, so not illegal, but it
is weird. It is weird. And under the pseudonym Vanessa Neubauer,
Meredith served as the secretary for the Cosmotheist Church that's
the fake Nazi religion that William Luther Peers invented to
(43:56):
get tax exempt status after the IRS said no the
first time in nineteen seven eight. Strom's engagement to Meredith
was announced in an October twenty fifteen member newsletter, but
a police report two months later says she called the
police when he wouldn't let her leave the house when
she tried to end their relationship. No charges were filed,
and I guess the police having to come because you're
(44:19):
holding a woman hostage isn't a probation violation because there's
no documentation in his federal court file that he had
a police contact of this sort. Who knows. So he
didn't get in trouble and they didn't break up. The
couple attended one of the last Trump campaign rallies together
just two weeks before the twenty sixteen election. In a
(44:40):
broadcast of American Dissident Voices that week, Stroma pined that
Trump had opened the door for a full on Hitler
to emerge in the not too distant future, ending the
broadcast with optimism at the speed with which the Overton
window was shifting rightward, saying, never before has the window
of topics opened for public debate been moved so far
and so fast in our direction. Kevin and Meredith married
(45:04):
in twenty nineteen. There were some rumors of the weird
corners of the Internet that Strom had wanted to move
his new family back to the compound in West Virginia.
But everybody kind of said no to that, not because
they didn't want a convicted sex offender around the families
that live there. Now, that wasn't a big deal. They
don't think he was guilty, right, he was railroad and
(45:26):
it was fake whatever. But because of his mandatory sex
offender registration, that would mean that a photograph of the
compound would appear on the sex Offender Registry website, and
people weren't comfortable with that. I don't know if that's true.
I guess I shouldn't repeat Internet rumors, but take it
with a grainisal. The couple lived for several years in
(45:47):
a home provided to him by a supporter from New
Jersey before purchasing a house a few hours north of
the compound in a town outside of Pittsburgh. She gave
birth to their third child together, his sixth last summer.
As of last September, Strom is no longer under supervision
and no longer appears on the Sex Offender Registry. He
and his wife appear as signatories on documents filed with
(46:09):
the Pocahontas County Clerk in West Virginia approving the lease
of some land owned by the Cosmothius Church to a
third party in twenty eighteen. He still hosts American Dissonant Voices,
the weekly broadcast he started in nineteen ninety one, and
still posts regularly on the website of the foundering neo
Nazi organization that he's given his life to. So Voltaire
(46:32):
didn't say it. A life long adherent to the teachings
of one of America's most influential Nazi leaders, said it
from a little bunker in the mountains of West Virginia.
Just a weird little guy who, according to one ex wife,
was known to disappear for hours locked in the bathroom,
eating pickles in the bathtub. Weird little Guys to production
(47:00):
Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit
our website Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on
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Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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