February 6, 2025 • 48 mins
In January of 2025, Matthew Huttle was one of nearly 1600 people to receive a pardon from Donald Trump for his participation in the January 6, 2021 riot. Less than a week later, he was dead - shot and killed in an altercation with a sheriff's deputy during a traffic stop in Indiana.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-the-arrested-and-their-stories
https://www.shu.edu/news/a-demographic-and-legal-profile-of-january-6-prosecutions.html
https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/tzm3576zdg/1/files/12dd7a26-cc10-4844-b141-05ee077ea97f
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-high-water-mark-of-the-jan.-6-prosecutions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q5nK0oUyXE&ab_channel=CBSChicago
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/us/politics/jan-6-rioter-shot-indiana-traffic-stop.html
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1828.pdf
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66637875/united-states-v-huttle/
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66637874/united-states-v-huttle/
Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home : The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Harvard University Press, 2018.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media on January twenty sixth, twenty twenty five.
Matthew Huddle died. That much we know for certain. Usually
I tell you a story that's old enough that the
ink is not only dry, but it's begun to fade
(00:23):
a little. The reports are in, the motions have been filed,
argued and ruled on. The official story is set in stone.
That's not the case today. As I'm writing this. There
are still questions left unanswered. There is a state police
investigation into an officer involved shooting still underway. But Matthew
(00:45):
Huddle is dead. That much we know. Just days before
he died, he'd gotten some long awaited good news. His
uncle Dale was coming home. Both men were among the
nearly sixteen hundred people pardoned by Donald Trump in one
of his first actions after being sworn in his president.
(01:06):
Matthew had already served his six month sentence, but when
the pardons came through, Dale Huddle was just a few
months in to a two and a half year term
at a prison in Illinois. On the afternoon that he died,
Matthew Huddle was driving somewhere in Jasper County, Indiana. I
don't know where he was going, but I do know
he wasn't supposed to be driving, and according to the
(01:28):
Jasper County Sheriff, he was speeding. I can only assume
that the altercation that allegedly ensued began after the sheriff's
deputy discovered that Huddle did not have a valid driver's license.
The deputy claims Huddle resisted when he tried to place
him under arrest, and it was during this altercation that
the sheriff says the deputy discovered that Huddle was in
possession of a firearm, which he was not legally allowed
(01:50):
to have, the final moments of Matthew Huddle's life will
eventually be settled in some sort of official report. Maybe
they'll release the deputy's body worn camera footage. Maybe his
family will file a lawsuit. The final page hasn't been
written yet. I don't have the answers. All I have
(02:12):
is a sad story, but a man who believed in
nothing and died on the side of Indiana State Road fourteenth.
I'm Molly Conger in This is Weird, Little Guys. At
(02:42):
noon on January sixth, twenty twenty one, President Donald Trump
took the stage at the Ellipse, a generally unremarkable patch
of grass between the White House and the Washington Monument.
More than fifty thousand of his supporters had been standing
out in the cold all morning waiting to hear from him.
For months, he'd stoked the fires of a growing conspiracy
(03:06):
the election had been stolen. He gave speeches, held rallies,
fired off late night tweets, and filed lawsuits for those
who wanted to believe. There seemed to be mountains of
evidence of a deep and systemic rot. But the lawsuits
were failing, the votes were counted, and time was running out.
(03:29):
Today was the day that Congress would have the final
say in the twenty twenty election, and less than two
miles away, legislators were taking their seats in the Capitol
Building to certify the election. The crowd at the Ellipse
had come from all over the country to be a
part of history, and as their president spoke, many of
them heard the permission they'd been waiting for.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
And we fight, We fight like hell.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going
to have country anymore.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
This profound corruption would have to be excised by force
before this grave injustice could be done. He'd all but
confirm that for them, And then, in the final seconds
of his speech, before he was played off the stage
by his favorite song, The Village People's Gay Anthem YMCA,
(04:25):
he gave the crowd their marching orders.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
I want to thank you all.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
God bless you, and God bless America.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Thank you all for being here. This is incredible. Thank
you very much.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Some in that crowd, perhaps anticipating the instructions he would
give at the end of his hour long speech, never
even heard him say that line. They'd already started walking
the mile and a half to their final destination that day,
the Capitol Building. Most certainly already know how that day ended.
(05:04):
Even if you live in a cave in the woods
without access to the internet, you can't possibly have escaped
this news. Thousands of Trump supporters descended on the United
States Capitol Building. They tore down police barricades, They engaged
in a pitched battle with the Capitol Police on the
steps outside, and some of them forced their way into
(05:24):
the building. People died. United States Capitol Police officer Brian
Sicknick passed away on January seventh after suffering a series
of strokes. His cause of death was eventually ruled to
be natural causes, though several neurologists have argued that the
events of the prior day almost certainly contributed to his death.
(05:46):
Qute On believer Ashley Babbitt was shot as she forced
her way into the building through a broken window. Roseanne
Boylen was trampled by the stampeding crowd, though her official
cause of death was ruled to be an amfetamine overdose.
And Kevin Greeson had a heart attack on the Capitol
grounds this week. As I was combing back through my
(06:09):
own videos of that afternoon, I discovered that I had
captured the moment that I realized I was watching a
man die.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Over the roar of the crowd.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
You can hear someone next to me say they've been
giving him chest compressions for way too long. And then
there's my own voice. I know it's my voice, but
I don't remember saying it from years in the past.
I heard myself say he's going to die, and a
few minutes after that, I saw his dead body being
(06:44):
carried away. Surely other people saw him too, but no
one seemed to react at all to the sight of
a corpse making its way through the crowd. Over the
last four years, federal charges were filed against nearly sixteen
hundred members of that crowd. Nearly thirteen hundred had been convicted,
(07:06):
with another three hundred cases still open as of the
four year anniversary of the riot. Those cases will never
go to trial, though, because last month, hours after being
sworn in as president for the second time, Donald Trump
issued a blanket pardon, pardoning almost every single one of them,
with the small exception of a handful of rioters who
(07:28):
only had their sentences commuted. There are those who would
rewrite the story of that day, people who would tell
you that it was a peaceful protest, that they were
patriots and tourists, that they couldn't have known that their
conduct was unlawful. I'm not sure there's anything I can
(07:49):
do to change anyone's mind. The evidence to the contrary
is readily available, but it's never seemed to matter. I
could tell you that I saw a man, eyes red
with pepper spray and wide with wild determination, pry a
metal drain grate out of the ground with the end
of an American flagpole, before pressing back into the fray
(08:12):
with his newly acquired weapon. I could tell you I
saw a man with a literal pitchfork sprinting down the
Capitol lawn. I could spend the next year covering a
different January sixth rider every week, painstakingly tracking their affiliations
with militias and white supremacist street gangs. But I don't
(08:34):
really want to. There's plenty of media about the men
who were there that day. Whole books have been written
about them, Whole podcasts have dedicated themselves to that work.
There are some weird little guys who ended up there
that day, but I'll get to But I can't bear
the thought of returning to that well for too many stories,
(08:59):
because one of those stories are kind of the same.
While the seditious conspiracy at the heart of the violence
was cooked up by oathkeepers and proud boys, men with
an ideological commitment to violence and ties to organized groups
dedicated to carrying it out, most of the crowd was
(09:19):
made up of men far too ordinary to be considered
a weird little guy. And maybe that in itself is
a subject worth exploring. How could an ordinary man end
up crawling over broken glass on his way to break
into a Senator's office. How could a reeltor from the
(09:40):
suburbs step over a woman's dead body in his haste
to physically confront a member of Congress. How did men
with back the blue bumper stickers on their brand new
forward pickup trucks end up fistfighting cops on the steps
of the Capitol. I don't think I'm equipped to answer
the but I can try to tell you the sad
(10:04):
story of how one of them ended up dead. Matthew
Huddle did not vote for Donald Trump in the twenty
twenty election. Perhaps he would have, It's impossible to say,
but he'd lost his right to vote years ago after
his first felony conviction. He struggled with alcohol addiction for
(10:28):
his entire adult life, racking up charges for driving while
intoxicated at a pretty alarming rate, and he was back
in jail for yet another dui in November of twenty
twenty when the election took place. He was fresh off
this stint in the county jail when his uncle Dale
asked him for a favor. He needed a ride to Washington,
(10:50):
d c. The reason given in the court documents is
that Dale, at sixty nine years old, had poor eyesight
and quote should not drive, especially at night. But I'm
not sure how to square that with the knowledge that
Dale was at that time employed as a delivery driver
(11:11):
at an auto parts store. Nor has any explanation offered
as to why Matthew agreed to drive his uncle seven
hundred miles from Indiana to DC without a valid driver's license.
In Matthew's own words, though he had nothing better to
do at the time, so he agreed. According to his defense.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Attorney, matt is not a true believer in any political movement.
He cannot legally vote, and he knows very little about
politics and does not follow it. He is somewhat distrustful
of the government in general, but he did not know
if the twenty twenty election was stolen or.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Not, so he claims he was only there that day
as something to do a favor for his uncle, and
he thought maybe he would be a historic event that
he could document through photos and video, and he did.
He took quite a bit of video that day, recording
(12:12):
himself as he and his uncle made their way down
the National Mall after listening to Trump's speech at the
Ellipse as the Capitol came into view, Matthew Huddle says,
allowed to no one in particular. We're going to see
if we can get inside. But moments later he turns
to his uncle Dale and says he's not sure they're
(12:33):
going to be able to get close because of the
police presence. His uncle replies, quote, I think we ought
to bum rush the Capitol building arrest them all. We've
got enough people to do that, and Matthew agrees they
could try to get close. By two pm, they were
(12:53):
deep within the mass of rioters at the base of
the steps at the west entrance of the Capitol. Police
on the steps firing flash bangs and tear gas canisters,
trying to keep the crowd at bay. In his video,
as described in the court filings, Matthew was surprised by
the flashbangs and asks if the cops are shooting a cannon.
(13:15):
I didn't manage to dig up the video evidence filed
in his case, but based on the description of flashbangs
and scattered chants of you say, you say, and it
being shortly after two pm, here's my best guess at
that exact moment being described, Oh yes, that is my
(13:57):
little squeal of surprise at the sound of the flash bangs.
I was having a weird afternoon and it was chaotic.
At this point, the crowd was starting to press forward
and engage with the officers. No longer a mere observer
of history, Matthew Huddle joined them. He and his uncle
(14:19):
Dale fought their way to the front of the crowd,
where rioters were tearing down the bike racks that had
been set out in a feeble attempt to keep people
off the stairs. As officers struggled to keep the metal
bike racks out of the hands of the men who
were trying to seize them as weapons, Dale Huddle lunged forward,
jabbing his wooden flagpole into an officer's stomach, knocking him
(14:40):
off his feet. During the battle on the stairs, Dale
is seen in an officer's body worn camera footage screaming
at them, saying things like, look back there, there's a
million of us. You think you can stop us, and
it's going to get real ugly if you don't let
us in. Man, it's going to get real U We're
(15:00):
coming in. And at some point he turns to his
nephew and points up at the Capitol building and he says,
we're going in the front door. But Dale Huddle never
did make it inside. The men got separated on the steps.
The officers who'd been trying to hold them at bay
retreated under attack, giving Matthew Huddle an opening to run
(15:23):
up the stairs, but Dale stayed behind and kept fighting.
Instead of taking his chance to climb the steps and
actually go inside, he followed the retreating officers, continuing the attack.
Another video shows the old man, red faced with tears
streaming from his eyes from pepper spray unloaded by a
(15:43):
rioter behind him, and he's charging toward an officer trying
to rip his gas mask off, and then he tries
to wrench the baton out of another officer's hands. With
his uncle preferring to stay behind and fight, Matthew followed
the crowd through the now open doors on the upper
West Terrace. In his own video, he says we're going
(16:07):
in as he crosses the threshold. And for sixteen minutes
he just wandered around in there. He didn't hurt anyone,
he didn't steal anything, he didn't break anything. He really
was just kind of wandering around. It's hard to square
(16:28):
the reality of the situation with his behavior. On one hand,
you have to assume he knew what he was doing
was wrong. He hadn't actually engaged in any of the
violence outside, but he knew full well he was only
standing inside that building because men like his uncle had
fought their way through a police line to clear the
path to the stairs. But once he's inside, he's trying
(16:53):
to chat up the cops. He sidles up to one
officer and casually asks him, has this ever happened to
you guys before he briefly joined in with a group
of guys just marching around chanting us say, us say.
Another rioter asked him if he knew what floor the
(17:15):
legislators were on, and, oddly, considering he claimed to know
nothing about the situation he'd found himself in that day,
he answered confidently the third floor. And then he thought
for a moment and turned to a nearby police officer
and asked the cop if the legislators had already gone
(17:36):
down to the basement, and by that point the Senate
chambers had indeed been evacuated through the underground tunnels. And
as the group piles into the elevator, leaving Huddle behind,
he turns back to his phone, which is still recording,
and he narrates into his video, they went up third
(17:56):
floor to the offices. He would later tell the FBI
that when he told that group of rioters they should
head up to the third floor, he was actually trying
to divert them away from members of Congress, who he
assumed were already being evacuated through the underground tunnels. Either way, though,
that is a curious level of insight into the building's
(18:19):
floor plans for a man who said he was just
somebody else's ride. After getting maced again, the novelty of
being inside the building seemed to have been wearing off.
Officers were relatively futilely trying to convince people to leave,
trying to direct them down a hallway and towards an exit,
(18:41):
and Huddle says into his video that he has a
bad feeling about that that might be a trap, so
he found his way to a different exit. Outside, he
found his uncle Dale again, and the two men just
hung around outside on the Capitol grounds for a few hours.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Went home.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
In the days after the Huddles returned home to Indiana,
the FBI set to work identifying the rioters. Those who
assaulted federal officers were understandably a high priority, and the
bureau released images of those suspects, each identified by the
letters AFO for assault on a Federal Officer and given
a unique number. Just three months after the riot, photos
(19:39):
of AFO two nine to nine went up on the
FBI's website. Over the next few months, more than a
dozen tips came in about AFO two nine nine, but
none of them were right. It sounds like it was
facial recognition that Gotdale Huddle. The charging documents just say
that law enforcement databases were used to match the images
(20:03):
to his passport photos, and by August, FBI agents were
watching Dale Huddle. They surveilled him at his home and
his workplace several times in late twenty twenty one. In
March of twenty twenty two, they approached his boss, who
identified Dale in several photos from the riot and provided
(20:23):
records showing he'd taken off work the week of January sixth,
twenty twenty one. Both Matthew and Dale Huddle were eventually
charged and arrested. In November of twenty twenty two. Dale
was picked up in the parking lot on his way
into work one morning, and Matthew was for reasons not
entirely clear to me arrested in Boise, Idaho, and both
(20:46):
men would eventually take plea agreements, just like over one
thousand others of the approximately thirteen hundred January sixth defendants
who'd been convicted before those blanket pardons. Matthew pled guilty
to a scene misdemeanor count of entering and remaining in
a restricted building and was sentenced to six months. He
finished serving that sentence in July of twenty twenty four.
(21:11):
Dale bled guilty to a single felony account of assaulting
an officer with a dangerous weapon, specifically for jabbing that
officer with his flagpole during the struggle on the stairs.
He was sentenced to thirty months in July of twenty
twenty four, meaning he was one of about two hundred
January sixth defendants who were actually still in federal custody
at the time of the pardons. And like I said,
(21:34):
almost everyone who is convicted led guilty, actually going to
trial in a federal criminal case is pretty rare, a
fact we've talked about before in other episodes. It's not
really a good system. There is a lot of pressure
to take a plea deal, and that may not always
be fair. In Dale's case, though, I think the plea
(21:58):
was absolutely the right call. A few days after his arrest,
after he'd been released on bond, a CBS News reporter
from Chicago, knocked on his door in a conversation that
lasted more than seven minutes, much to his attorney's dismay.
I'm sure the reporter pulled out a printed copy of
(22:20):
the criminal complaint. You know, they're saying that this is that,
this is you, that you know you have a flag
pole and that you're assaulting an officer.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Well, you know they were trying to take the pole
from me, the flag from me. As you can see,
they're bent over backwards trying to get the pole away.
That's what looks like an attack. It was not that thought. Okay.
So you're saying in court you'd like to see video. Absolutely,
I will see testimony and body camps as well. But
you you agree this is you? Absolutely, Okay. I'm not
(22:55):
ashamed of being there. It was our duty as patriots.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
First of all, never admit to a crime on camera,
even if you don't think you're guilty of it. Don't
say you did it, don't talk to the reporter. And
second of all, I'm not sure they were trying to
take my flag is a great defense given the context here.
Even if this picture did show an officer trying to
(23:24):
take Dale's flagpole away from him, it's not like he
was taking candy from a baby. Dale Huddle was not
the only man out there that day using his American
flag as a deeply ironic weapon. A link the criminal
complaint in the show notes, and you can see the
picture they're talking about on the second page. The officer
(23:46):
is leaning back, almost as if he could be engaging
in a sort of tug of war over the flagpole.
But Dale's right about one thing. Pictures can be deceiving.
The officer isn't leaning back, he's falling down because an
old man poked him hard on the torso with a
(24:07):
big stick. And while Matthew's lawyers had argued that their
client had no real opinion on the twenty twenty election
one way or the other, that he simply found himself there,
Dale's lawyers did have to concede that he was a
true believer in that on camera interview right after his arrest,
he told the reporter that he still believed the election
(24:29):
had been stolen, and he believed he'd been following a
lawful order from his president.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
And do you believe that Trump invited you there and
that he wanted you to overthrow, invite us to go
down there? Issues seen out film, let your voices be heard? Okay,
But do you think he encouraged violence? Well, I just
sat there or stood there with half a million people
(24:56):
listening to a speech. And in that speech, both Juliani
and hisself said we were going to have to fight
like hell to save our country. Okay. Now, rather it
was a figure of speech or not, it wasn't taken
that way, right, You didn't take it as a figure
(25:16):
of speech.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
No, So they couldn't really say that he didn't mean it,
and instead they argued that he'd been tricked. He was
seventy years old in twenty twenty one. He was a
blue collar worker who didn't even own a computer. From
the defense sentencing memo, he is.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
Not knowledgeable about the Internet. He was not aware that
Facebook and other social media platforms use machine learning algorithms
to individualize ads and to dictate content based on previous cliques.
Mister Huddle believed that the news he was reading was
covering the general scope of mainstream media, and that it
was a representation of current events from his viewpoint. The
(26:02):
vast majority of the media agreed that the democratic process
had been undermined by fraud.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And I don't doubt that he and many men just
like him have absolutely rotted their brains on Facebook, clickbait
right wing news. I have no trouble believing that he
was trapped in a cycle of seeing nothing but memes
where a minion in a maga hat is spreading election
misinformation or links to stories on sites called patriot windnews
(26:35):
dot biz with headlines like deep state destroyed, new election lawsuit,
bombshell rocks DC swamp. I have a separate email account
where I get one hundred emails that look like that
every single day. I know exactly what his Facebook feed
looked like, so that part's probably true. But I wish
(26:55):
that the government, with their vast investigative resources, had dug
into a curious incident in Dale's past, because I don't
think this was the first time that dale Huddle got
worked up about the need to go to war with
the government. Now, to be clear, dale Huddle had no
criminal history. That's true. The government didn't miss something that
(27:19):
egregious and I'm even willing to believe the Defense memo
is being truthful when they say that at seventy years old,
Dale wasn't a member of any extremist groups. But I
found a picture, a single photograph taken on November fourteenth,
two thousand, and if I had the kinds of resources
(27:41):
that the government has, I would have tried to find
out more about this picture. It's just one picture in
the newspaper, snapped by an Associated Press photographer, and it's
a picture of Dale Huddle with a flag. Unlike the
photo of Dale using an American flag as a that
on January sixth, this photo shows a slightly younger Dale
(28:04):
Huddle and he's trying to figure out how to affix
his Gadsden flag, you know, the one with the snake
that doesn't want to be stepped on, and he's trying
to affix it to the window of a church. November fourteenth,
two thousand, was the first day of a ninety two
day standoff with US marshals at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple.
(28:28):
After years of litigation, a federal judge had finally given
the order for the church to vacate the premises for
seventeen years, the Indianapolis Baptist Temple under Pastor Greg Dixon,
had not been paying its taxes. You're probably saying, wait,
I thought churches were tax exempt, and they are. That's true.
(28:50):
Churches are generally speaking automatically exempt from federal income tax,
but if they have paid employees, they still have to
withhold and remit employment tax. And the Indianapolis Baptist Temple
had been refusing to do that since nineteen eighty four,
and so by the year two thousand they owed the
(29:11):
irs over six million dollars. And this was an intentional,
deliberate act. They didn't forget that they had to do
payroll tax. They didn't make a mistake. The church had
originally been incorporated in nineteen fifty and for almost thirty
four years the church had a valid employer identification number.
(29:34):
They filed paperwork with the state to keep their corporate
entity in good standing. They paid employment taxes to the
federal government. And then in nineteen eighty three, Greg Dixon,
who'd been the pastor at the church since nineteen fifty five,
changed his mind. He transferred all of the church's assets
into an unincorporated religious society and then he changed the
(29:58):
corporation's name, which had previous been Indianapolis Baptist Temple. He
changed it to Not a Church Incorporated, and so the
church itself no longer exists on paper at all. And
Dixon is using this not a Church corporate entity to
run a group called the American Coalition for Unregistered Churches.
(30:19):
It would later be known as the Unregistered Baptist Fellowship.
Greg Dixon believed that doing business with the federal government
was against his religion. Having to do things like tell
the irs that your church would like to be recognized
as a five oh one C three tax exempt entity
(30:39):
or filing paperwork with the state actually contravenes the authority
of Christ and if you make him do it, you're
violating his religious liberty. The unregistered Church movement wasn't just
refusing to pay their taxes. They wanted to avoid almost
any contact with the government. Churches shouldn't have to abide
by bill codes or zoning laws, or get fire inspections.
(31:04):
Babies shouldn't have birth certificates. A wedding shouldn't involve a
marriage license. In fact, no one should have any kind
of license. Many of the articles I found about this
movement make sure to add that they do believe that
they can use the United States Postal Service, but it
is a sin to use zip codes. The almost complete
(31:26):
overlap of guys who don't want to pay their taxes
and guys who are willing to take up arms against
the government is something I'll surely explore in depth in
an episode dedicated to some character in the tax protest
or movement, But the reason for it is probably pretty obvious,
and Pastor Greg Dixon wasn't just refusing to pay his taxes.
(31:49):
He wanted war. In nineteen ninety two, Greg Dixon gave
a speech at an event nicknamed the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous
after the siege at Ruby Ridge. A Christian identity preacher
in Colorado put out the call the disparate elements of
the radical right needed to put their heads together and
(32:10):
come up with a strategy. Klansmen, Neo Nazis, anti Semitic pastors,
militia leaders, Neo Confederates, tax protesters, bigots, and anti government
extremists of all stripes convened in Colorado, and all the
big names were there. Willie Muther Peers from National Alliance,
Richard Butler from Arian Nations, Louis Beam, Kirk Lyons, James Wickstrom.
(32:36):
As Kathleen Blue wrote in her book Bring the War Home,
the militia movement as we know it today emerged from
the leaders, organizations, and tactics of white power organization. And
this meeting is widely regarded as the birthplace of the
modern American militia movement. And so at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous,
(32:58):
just before Louis Beam's beach about leaderless resistance, pastor Greg
Dixon took the stage to call for the establishment of
Christian militias, declaring we are at war. And Greg Dixon
was hardly new to organized racism. In the nineteen seventies,
his church had hosted meetings of a group called Americans
(33:20):
for America, a KKK affiliated organization that opposed school integration.
Indiana's Grand Dragon Bill Cheney was a member of the congregation,
but in the early nineties he was at the bleeding
edge of a new frontier in white power. All that
to say, this old picture of Dale Huddle outside of
(33:43):
a church might sound terribly innocuous. Maybe that's his church,
and maybe he didn't know why his pastor wasn't paying
his taxes. But it was not. Dale Huddle isn't even Baptist.
He grew up Lutheran, but has been a member of
a non denominational megachurch called the Family Christian Center since
(34:04):
nineteen eighty eight, ever since his mother died.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
No.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Dale Huddle had no direct connection to this church that
I can find, but a call had been put out.
In September of two thousand. After years in court, a
judge gave the order they had until noon on November
fourteenth to get out of the building. The government was
taking possession of the property, and US Marshals were authorized
(34:31):
to use force if necessary. Michigan Militia leader Norman Olsen
ordered militias around the country to do their duty and
defend the church, telling his followers that this was going
to be Waco Part two. Charlie Puckett of the Kentucky
Militia was there on November fourteenth. As congregants waited for
the US marshals to arrive and with news crews rolling
(34:55):
in the parking lot, Pastor Dixon asked the contingent of
klansmen who showed up to s for him to maybe
stay outside the church, but he didn't ask them to
leave or disavow their support. And that's when this photo
was taken on November fourteenth, two thousand, parking lot full
(35:16):
of klansmen militia men standing by, and Dale Huddle is
outside the Indianapolis Baptist Temple trying to figure out how
to hang a Gadsden flag on the windows. He'd driven
two hours from his home in Crown Point and there
was no Facebook in two thousand. He didn't see a
(35:36):
meme that convinced him to go to Indianapolis. There's no
indication that he was a member of any of the
militia or clan groups that were there that day, but
it does seem quite possible that he got the same
message they did about showing up for Waco Part two,
and just so this threat isn't left hanging, the big
(35:58):
crowd that showed up on day one of the standoff
got board and went home. US marshals obviously did not
want Waco Part two, so they just kept their distance
and waited them out. It took three months, but in
February of two thousand and one they did seize the building.
No one was injured, but Greg Dixon was carried out
(36:21):
on a stretcher because he refused to walk. So that's
a rather lengthy aside just to contextualize a single twenty
(36:42):
five year old photograph that doesn't prove anything at all,
But it left me wondering if the US Marshals had
taken a heavier handed approach at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple,
would I be looking at two photos twenty years apart
of Dale Huddle trying to skewer a cop with a flagpole.
(37:04):
His lawyers argued that he was just a confused old
man who didn't know how to use the internet, and
he got tricked into believing he needed to go to
DC to stop the steal. But the possibility that twenty
years earlier, some militia newsletter tricked him into thinking he
needed to stop a different theft, that of church property
by the irs, really changes the story for me. Back
(37:28):
in twenty twenty one, though, after the riote of the Capitol,
Matthew Huddle was just living his life as usual. Matthew
Huddle's life as usual involved getting charged three separate times
between July and November for driving with a suspended license
as a habitual offender whose driving privileges had been revoked
after repeated to UIs each new offense of this kind
(37:51):
was a felony. In August of that year, his son's
mother died of a drug overdose. He filed for bankruptcy
that same week, and filing show he owed more than
thirteen thousand dollars in child support to a different woman,
the mother of his daughter. Neither of those children were
in Matthew's custody after his conviction. In his January sixth case,
(38:13):
his lawyers wrote that he had a quote great relationship
with his son. I hope that's true, and even if
it's not, my heart breaks for a teenage boy who
lost his mother to an overdose in twenty twenty one,
he saw his father go to prison in twenty twenty three,
and then he lost his father entirely just last month.
(38:35):
But great is the only word used there to describe
a relationship that I suspect may have been more complicated
than that. In two thousand and nine, Matthew Huddle flew
into a rage after his son, who was just three
years old at the time, had what court records describe
as a bathroom accident. It's a very normal thing for
(38:58):
a three year old to do at that age. You're
still sending a change of pants with them to school
just in case. What's not normal, though, is beating a
toddler so severely that he can't sit down for a week,
and the court records call it a spanking. But nothing
I could find offered me any kind of explanation for
(39:21):
how a spanking could leave bruises on a child's neck.
After Huddle died last week, several of the articles I
read about his death quoted an attorney who had been
representing him in his dui cases for nearly twenty years,
and his lawyer says that the man he'd known was
not violent. I don't know what else you call this,
(39:46):
I guess in that lawyer's defense, it does look like
he'd hired a different attorney when he was charged with
beating his son and his son's mother. After Matthew Huddle
blood guilty in twenty twenty three to that single misdemeanor
charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building on
January sixth, his lawyers asked for a sentence of probation
(40:08):
with no jail time. They cited his lack of ideological
motivation for being there, his need to be there for
his children and his tragic backstory and struggle with alcoholism.
And there is a strange and tragic backstory here, but
they don't actually get into it in this court filing.
(40:29):
This part I pieced together from state court records, old newspapers,
and Facebook posts. After serving his sentence for beating his son,
he was released from jail in twenty thirteen, and he
very quickly took up with a new girlfriend. Based on
the apparent age of a photo of their daughter that
he posted online in twenty fifteen, she had to have
(40:50):
been pregnant with Huddle's child before she ended her marriage
to another man. I have said this before, comes up
often oddly, but I don't care about that. Her infidelity
is between her, her husband, and her boyfriend. I only
mention it because of a curious coincidence of dates. The
(41:14):
same week her divorce was finalized, someone shot Matthew Huddle.
There's a single mention in the local newspaper in February
twenty fifteen, just a few days after his daughter's mother
finalized her divorce, that Huddle had been shot in what
was only described as quote an incident between family members,
(41:37):
and The article quotes an officer who says that no
one was taken into custody at this time, and he
wouldn't say how the shooter was related to the victim.
I couldn't find any court records that indicated the charges
were ever filed against anyone, but I could only check
the names I thought of his suspects. So it's a
bit of a needle in a haystack whoever it was.
(41:58):
Though someone close to him shot Matthew in the back
of the knee and left him with a lifelong injury,
and three years later, in twenty eighteen, he was asleep
in his bed when he woke up to two men
beating him with baseball bats and hammers. The local newspaper
reported the attack was motivated by a child custody dispute.
(42:22):
One of the assailants, Kurt Falkenberg, was in a relationship
with the mother of Huddle's son. The other man was
Falkenberg's uncle, Jeffrey Martin, though the two men were only
a few years apart in age, and the men focused
their blows on Huddle's left leg because they knew he
had a metal rod in there from the surgeries he'd
(42:43):
gotten after getting shot in the leg in his last
domestic dispute. Much like the story of Matthew and Dale Huddle,
this story of a very stupid crime committed by an
uncle and a nephew ends tragically. As Falkenberg and Martin
fled the scene, they crashed. Falkenberg, who had been driving,
(43:05):
was pronounced dead at the scene. Officers responding to the
car accident, which put another driver in the hospital with
two broken legs, found an open bottle of whiskey in
Falkenburg's car, and they eventually found Jeffrey Martin passed out
drunk in a creek bed on the side of the road.
(43:25):
The following year, in twenty nineteen, Matthew Huddle was diagnosed
with cirrhosis of the liver. Twenty years of alcoholism had
finally caught up to him. The dui he got that
summer was the one that put him back in jail
until shortly before he drove to Washington, d c. In
January of twenty twenty one. Now I've read a lot
(43:46):
of sentencing memos. That's the document filed at the end
of a case after a guilty plea or a guilty verdict,
where each side makes their case one last time. Not
about guilt or innocence. Now that's settled, but about what
they think the punishment should be. And we have an
adversarial court system. Everyone is technically ethically bound to be honest,
(44:10):
and the purpose of the courts is supposed to be
to seek the truth, but really everyone is there to win,
to have their version of the truth ruled to be
the most true. So I'm really used to seeing a
defense attorney's sob story and a prosecutor's exaggeration. But I
wonder maybe if Matthew Huddle's lawyers really were telling a
(44:34):
mostly true story. He didn't vote, he couldn't. His family
doesn't seem very political. No one in his family has
ever donated so much as a dollar to any federal election.
And he did have a long history of making spectacularly
bad decisions and finding himself in some really outlandishly bad situation.
(45:01):
I mean, he got his legs broken in two unrelated
domestic disputes. That doesn't even sound possible. So maybe Matthew
Huddle is the only January sixth defendant who really did
end up there by accident with no ideological motivation or
violent intent. Plenty of them claimed that in court, and
(45:21):
it never really rings true. But maybe for Matthew Huddle,
wandering into the Capitol that day was just the same
kind of criminal accident he was often finding himself in,
like driving away without paying for a tank of gas
because he was too drunk to figure out how to
operate the payment system, but somehow not too drunk to drive.
(45:44):
When I first saw the news that had recently pardoned
January sixth defendant had been shot and killed while resisting
arrest during a traffic stop, I can't say that I
was surprised, but I was wrong in my initial assumption.
I figured a guy who found himself on that trajectory
would be I don't know, as sovereign citizen or a
guy who'd done real violence at the Capitol, a guy
(46:06):
who had violent plans for the future. Surely those two
facts about his life being at the Capitol that day
and dying the way that he did. Surely those two
facts would be directly related. But I'm not sure they are.
It's unwise to speculate about the altercation that may have
(46:27):
occurred in the minutes before Huddle was shot and killed
by a Jasper County Sheriff's deputy. I don't know what
happened there on the side of Indiana State Road fourteen.
We don't know what was said, or why things escalated,
or where exactly the deputy saw the gun, but I
do know that Matthew Huddle was due back in court
next week for a status conference on a stack of
(46:49):
still unresolved felony cases for driving without a license, just
days after getting his federal pardon. He was probably happy
for his uncle Dale, but he'd already done his federal time,
and now he was looking down the barrel at another
stay in the county jail, and when those blue lights
came on behind him, he probably knew that this would
(47:10):
be yet another felony charge. He had a long list
of state charges. A federal pardon did nothing for him.
In the end. It didn't matter who the president was.
But I guess it never really did matter to Matthew.
(47:40):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's research, written, and recorded by me Willy Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Littterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Rubuguy's podcast at gmail dot com. I will
(48:00):
definitely read it, but I'm not going to answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show.
We have the listeners on the Weird Little Guy subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my weird Little Guys.
Col Zone Media on January twenty sixth, twenty twenty five.
Matthew Huddle died. That much we know for certain. Usually
I tell you a story that's old enough that the
ink is not only dry, but it's begun to fade
(00:23):
a little. The reports are in, the motions have been filed,
argued and ruled on. The official story is set in stone.
That's not the case today. As I'm writing this. There
are still questions left unanswered. There is a state police
investigation into an officer involved shooting still underway. But Matthew
(00:45):
Huddle is dead. That much we know. Just days before
he died, he'd gotten some long awaited good news. His
uncle Dale was coming home. Both men were among the
nearly sixteen hundred people pardoned by Donald Trump in one
of his first actions after being sworn in his president.
(01:06):
Matthew had already served his six month sentence, but when
the pardons came through, Dale Huddle was just a few
months in to a two and a half year term
at a prison in Illinois. On the afternoon that he died,
Matthew Huddle was driving somewhere in Jasper County, Indiana. I
don't know where he was going, but I do know
he wasn't supposed to be driving, and according to the
(01:28):
Jasper County Sheriff, he was speeding. I can only assume
that the altercation that allegedly ensued began after the sheriff's
deputy discovered that Huddle did not have a valid driver's license.
The deputy claims Huddle resisted when he tried to place
him under arrest, and it was during this altercation that
the sheriff says the deputy discovered that Huddle was in
possession of a firearm, which he was not legally allowed
(01:50):
to have, the final moments of Matthew Huddle's life will
eventually be settled in some sort of official report. Maybe
they'll release the deputy's body worn camera footage. Maybe his
family will file a lawsuit. The final page hasn't been
written yet. I don't have the answers. All I have
(02:12):
is a sad story, but a man who believed in
nothing and died on the side of Indiana State Road fourteenth.
I'm Molly Conger in This is Weird, Little Guys. At
(02:42):
noon on January sixth, twenty twenty one, President Donald Trump
took the stage at the Ellipse, a generally unremarkable patch
of grass between the White House and the Washington Monument.
More than fifty thousand of his supporters had been standing
out in the cold all morning waiting to hear from him.
For months, he'd stoked the fires of a growing conspiracy
(03:06):
the election had been stolen. He gave speeches, held rallies,
fired off late night tweets, and filed lawsuits for those
who wanted to believe. There seemed to be mountains of
evidence of a deep and systemic rot. But the lawsuits
were failing, the votes were counted, and time was running out.
(03:29):
Today was the day that Congress would have the final
say in the twenty twenty election, and less than two
miles away, legislators were taking their seats in the Capitol
Building to certify the election. The crowd at the Ellipse
had come from all over the country to be a
part of history, and as their president spoke, many of
them heard the permission they'd been waiting for.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
And we fight, We fight like hell.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going
to have country anymore.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
This profound corruption would have to be excised by force
before this grave injustice could be done. He'd all but
confirm that for them, And then, in the final seconds
of his speech, before he was played off the stage
by his favorite song, The Village People's Gay Anthem YMCA,
(04:25):
he gave the crowd their marching orders.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
So let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
I want to thank you all.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
God bless you, and God bless America.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Thank you all for being here. This is incredible. Thank
you very much.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Some in that crowd, perhaps anticipating the instructions he would
give at the end of his hour long speech, never
even heard him say that line. They'd already started walking
the mile and a half to their final destination that day,
the Capitol Building. Most certainly already know how that day ended.
(05:04):
Even if you live in a cave in the woods
without access to the internet, you can't possibly have escaped
this news. Thousands of Trump supporters descended on the United
States Capitol Building. They tore down police barricades, They engaged
in a pitched battle with the Capitol Police on the
steps outside, and some of them forced their way into
(05:24):
the building. People died. United States Capitol Police officer Brian
Sicknick passed away on January seventh after suffering a series
of strokes. His cause of death was eventually ruled to
be natural causes, though several neurologists have argued that the
events of the prior day almost certainly contributed to his death.
(05:46):
Qute On believer Ashley Babbitt was shot as she forced
her way into the building through a broken window. Roseanne
Boylen was trampled by the stampeding crowd, though her official
cause of death was ruled to be an amfetamine overdose.
And Kevin Greeson had a heart attack on the Capitol
grounds this week. As I was combing back through my
(06:09):
own videos of that afternoon, I discovered that I had
captured the moment that I realized I was watching a
man die.
Speaker 3 (06:20):
Over the roar of the crowd.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
You can hear someone next to me say they've been
giving him chest compressions for way too long. And then
there's my own voice. I know it's my voice, but
I don't remember saying it from years in the past.
I heard myself say he's going to die, and a
few minutes after that, I saw his dead body being
(06:44):
carried away. Surely other people saw him too, but no
one seemed to react at all to the sight of
a corpse making its way through the crowd. Over the
last four years, federal charges were filed against nearly sixteen
hundred members of that crowd. Nearly thirteen hundred had been convicted,
(07:06):
with another three hundred cases still open as of the
four year anniversary of the riot. Those cases will never
go to trial, though, because last month, hours after being
sworn in as president for the second time, Donald Trump
issued a blanket pardon, pardoning almost every single one of them,
with the small exception of a handful of rioters who
(07:28):
only had their sentences commuted. There are those who would
rewrite the story of that day, people who would tell
you that it was a peaceful protest, that they were
patriots and tourists, that they couldn't have known that their
conduct was unlawful. I'm not sure there's anything I can
(07:49):
do to change anyone's mind. The evidence to the contrary
is readily available, but it's never seemed to matter. I
could tell you that I saw a man, eyes red
with pepper spray and wide with wild determination, pry a
metal drain grate out of the ground with the end
of an American flagpole, before pressing back into the fray
(08:12):
with his newly acquired weapon. I could tell you I
saw a man with a literal pitchfork sprinting down the
Capitol lawn. I could spend the next year covering a
different January sixth rider every week, painstakingly tracking their affiliations
with militias and white supremacist street gangs. But I don't
(08:34):
really want to. There's plenty of media about the men
who were there that day. Whole books have been written
about them, Whole podcasts have dedicated themselves to that work.
There are some weird little guys who ended up there
that day, but I'll get to But I can't bear
the thought of returning to that well for too many stories,
(08:59):
because one of those stories are kind of the same.
While the seditious conspiracy at the heart of the violence
was cooked up by oathkeepers and proud boys, men with
an ideological commitment to violence and ties to organized groups
dedicated to carrying it out, most of the crowd was
(09:19):
made up of men far too ordinary to be considered
a weird little guy. And maybe that in itself is
a subject worth exploring. How could an ordinary man end
up crawling over broken glass on his way to break
into a Senator's office. How could a reeltor from the
(09:40):
suburbs step over a woman's dead body in his haste
to physically confront a member of Congress. How did men
with back the blue bumper stickers on their brand new
forward pickup trucks end up fistfighting cops on the steps
of the Capitol. I don't think I'm equipped to answer
the but I can try to tell you the sad
(10:04):
story of how one of them ended up dead. Matthew
Huddle did not vote for Donald Trump in the twenty
twenty election. Perhaps he would have, It's impossible to say,
but he'd lost his right to vote years ago after
his first felony conviction. He struggled with alcohol addiction for
(10:28):
his entire adult life, racking up charges for driving while
intoxicated at a pretty alarming rate, and he was back
in jail for yet another dui in November of twenty
twenty when the election took place. He was fresh off
this stint in the county jail when his uncle Dale
asked him for a favor. He needed a ride to Washington,
(10:50):
d c. The reason given in the court documents is
that Dale, at sixty nine years old, had poor eyesight
and quote should not drive, especially at night. But I'm
not sure how to square that with the knowledge that
Dale was at that time employed as a delivery driver
(11:11):
at an auto parts store. Nor has any explanation offered
as to why Matthew agreed to drive his uncle seven
hundred miles from Indiana to DC without a valid driver's license.
In Matthew's own words, though he had nothing better to
do at the time, so he agreed. According to his defense.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Attorney, matt is not a true believer in any political movement.
He cannot legally vote, and he knows very little about
politics and does not follow it. He is somewhat distrustful
of the government in general, but he did not know
if the twenty twenty election was stolen or.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Not, so he claims he was only there that day
as something to do a favor for his uncle, and
he thought maybe he would be a historic event that
he could document through photos and video, and he did.
He took quite a bit of video that day, recording
(12:12):
himself as he and his uncle made their way down
the National Mall after listening to Trump's speech at the
Ellipse as the Capitol came into view, Matthew Huddle says,
allowed to no one in particular. We're going to see
if we can get inside. But moments later he turns
to his uncle Dale and says he's not sure they're
(12:33):
going to be able to get close because of the
police presence. His uncle replies, quote, I think we ought
to bum rush the Capitol building arrest them all. We've
got enough people to do that, and Matthew agrees they
could try to get close. By two pm, they were
(12:53):
deep within the mass of rioters at the base of
the steps at the west entrance of the Capitol. Police
on the steps firing flash bangs and tear gas canisters,
trying to keep the crowd at bay. In his video,
as described in the court filings, Matthew was surprised by
the flashbangs and asks if the cops are shooting a cannon.
(13:15):
I didn't manage to dig up the video evidence filed
in his case, but based on the description of flashbangs
and scattered chants of you say, you say, and it
being shortly after two pm, here's my best guess at
that exact moment being described, Oh yes, that is my
(13:57):
little squeal of surprise at the sound of the flash bangs.
I was having a weird afternoon and it was chaotic.
At this point, the crowd was starting to press forward
and engage with the officers. No longer a mere observer
of history, Matthew Huddle joined them. He and his uncle
(14:19):
Dale fought their way to the front of the crowd,
where rioters were tearing down the bike racks that had
been set out in a feeble attempt to keep people
off the stairs. As officers struggled to keep the metal
bike racks out of the hands of the men who
were trying to seize them as weapons, Dale Huddle lunged forward,
jabbing his wooden flagpole into an officer's stomach, knocking him
(14:40):
off his feet. During the battle on the stairs, Dale
is seen in an officer's body worn camera footage screaming
at them, saying things like, look back there, there's a
million of us. You think you can stop us, and
it's going to get real ugly if you don't let
us in. Man, it's going to get real U We're
(15:00):
coming in. And at some point he turns to his
nephew and points up at the Capitol building and he says,
we're going in the front door. But Dale Huddle never
did make it inside. The men got separated on the steps.
The officers who'd been trying to hold them at bay
retreated under attack, giving Matthew Huddle an opening to run
(15:23):
up the stairs, but Dale stayed behind and kept fighting.
Instead of taking his chance to climb the steps and
actually go inside, he followed the retreating officers, continuing the attack.
Another video shows the old man, red faced with tears
streaming from his eyes from pepper spray unloaded by a
(15:43):
rioter behind him, and he's charging toward an officer trying
to rip his gas mask off, and then he tries
to wrench the baton out of another officer's hands. With
his uncle preferring to stay behind and fight, Matthew followed
the crowd through the now open doors on the upper
West Terrace. In his own video, he says we're going
(16:07):
in as he crosses the threshold. And for sixteen minutes
he just wandered around in there. He didn't hurt anyone,
he didn't steal anything, he didn't break anything. He really
was just kind of wandering around. It's hard to square
(16:28):
the reality of the situation with his behavior. On one hand,
you have to assume he knew what he was doing
was wrong. He hadn't actually engaged in any of the
violence outside, but he knew full well he was only
standing inside that building because men like his uncle had
fought their way through a police line to clear the
path to the stairs. But once he's inside, he's trying
(16:53):
to chat up the cops. He sidles up to one
officer and casually asks him, has this ever happened to
you guys before he briefly joined in with a group
of guys just marching around chanting us say, us say.
Another rioter asked him if he knew what floor the
(17:15):
legislators were on, and, oddly, considering he claimed to know
nothing about the situation he'd found himself in that day,
he answered confidently the third floor. And then he thought
for a moment and turned to a nearby police officer
and asked the cop if the legislators had already gone
(17:36):
down to the basement, and by that point the Senate
chambers had indeed been evacuated through the underground tunnels. And
as the group piles into the elevator, leaving Huddle behind,
he turns back to his phone, which is still recording,
and he narrates into his video, they went up third
(17:56):
floor to the offices. He would later tell the FBI
that when he told that group of rioters they should
head up to the third floor, he was actually trying
to divert them away from members of Congress, who he
assumed were already being evacuated through the underground tunnels. Either way, though,
that is a curious level of insight into the building's
(18:19):
floor plans for a man who said he was just
somebody else's ride. After getting maced again, the novelty of
being inside the building seemed to have been wearing off.
Officers were relatively futilely trying to convince people to leave,
trying to direct them down a hallway and towards an exit,
(18:41):
and Huddle says into his video that he has a
bad feeling about that that might be a trap, so
he found his way to a different exit. Outside, he
found his uncle Dale again, and the two men just
hung around outside on the Capitol grounds for a few hours.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Went home.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
In the days after the Huddles returned home to Indiana,
the FBI set to work identifying the rioters. Those who
assaulted federal officers were understandably a high priority, and the
bureau released images of those suspects, each identified by the
letters AFO for assault on a Federal Officer and given
a unique number. Just three months after the riot, photos
(19:39):
of AFO two nine to nine went up on the
FBI's website. Over the next few months, more than a
dozen tips came in about AFO two nine nine, but
none of them were right. It sounds like it was
facial recognition that Gotdale Huddle. The charging documents just say
that law enforcement databases were used to match the images
(20:03):
to his passport photos, and by August, FBI agents were
watching Dale Huddle. They surveilled him at his home and
his workplace several times in late twenty twenty one. In
March of twenty twenty two, they approached his boss, who
identified Dale in several photos from the riot and provided
(20:23):
records showing he'd taken off work the week of January sixth,
twenty twenty one. Both Matthew and Dale Huddle were eventually
charged and arrested. In November of twenty twenty two. Dale
was picked up in the parking lot on his way
into work one morning, and Matthew was for reasons not
entirely clear to me arrested in Boise, Idaho, and both
(20:46):
men would eventually take plea agreements, just like over one
thousand others of the approximately thirteen hundred January sixth defendants
who'd been convicted before those blanket pardons. Matthew pled guilty
to a scene misdemeanor count of entering and remaining in
a restricted building and was sentenced to six months. He
finished serving that sentence in July of twenty twenty four.
(21:11):
Dale bled guilty to a single felony account of assaulting
an officer with a dangerous weapon, specifically for jabbing that
officer with his flagpole during the struggle on the stairs.
He was sentenced to thirty months in July of twenty
twenty four, meaning he was one of about two hundred
January sixth defendants who were actually still in federal custody
at the time of the pardons. And like I said,
(21:34):
almost everyone who is convicted led guilty, actually going to
trial in a federal criminal case is pretty rare, a
fact we've talked about before in other episodes. It's not
really a good system. There is a lot of pressure
to take a plea deal, and that may not always
be fair. In Dale's case, though, I think the plea
(21:58):
was absolutely the right call. A few days after his arrest,
after he'd been released on bond, a CBS News reporter
from Chicago, knocked on his door in a conversation that
lasted more than seven minutes, much to his attorney's dismay.
I'm sure the reporter pulled out a printed copy of
(22:20):
the criminal complaint. You know, they're saying that this is that,
this is you, that you know you have a flag
pole and that you're assaulting an officer.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Well, you know they were trying to take the pole
from me, the flag from me. As you can see,
they're bent over backwards trying to get the pole away.
That's what looks like an attack. It was not that thought. Okay.
So you're saying in court you'd like to see video. Absolutely,
I will see testimony and body camps as well. But
you you agree this is you? Absolutely, Okay. I'm not
(22:55):
ashamed of being there. It was our duty as patriots.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
First of all, never admit to a crime on camera,
even if you don't think you're guilty of it. Don't
say you did it, don't talk to the reporter. And
second of all, I'm not sure they were trying to
take my flag is a great defense given the context here.
Even if this picture did show an officer trying to
(23:24):
take Dale's flagpole away from him, it's not like he
was taking candy from a baby. Dale Huddle was not
the only man out there that day using his American
flag as a deeply ironic weapon. A link the criminal
complaint in the show notes, and you can see the
picture they're talking about on the second page. The officer
(23:46):
is leaning back, almost as if he could be engaging
in a sort of tug of war over the flagpole.
But Dale's right about one thing. Pictures can be deceiving.
The officer isn't leaning back, he's falling down because an
old man poked him hard on the torso with a
(24:07):
big stick. And while Matthew's lawyers had argued that their
client had no real opinion on the twenty twenty election
one way or the other, that he simply found himself there,
Dale's lawyers did have to concede that he was a
true believer in that on camera interview right after his arrest,
he told the reporter that he still believed the election
(24:29):
had been stolen, and he believed he'd been following a
lawful order from his president.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
And do you believe that Trump invited you there and
that he wanted you to overthrow, invite us to go
down there? Issues seen out film, let your voices be heard? Okay,
But do you think he encouraged violence? Well, I just
sat there or stood there with half a million people
(24:56):
listening to a speech. And in that speech, both Juliani
and hisself said we were going to have to fight
like hell to save our country. Okay. Now, rather it
was a figure of speech or not, it wasn't taken
that way, right, You didn't take it as a figure
(25:16):
of speech.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
No, So they couldn't really say that he didn't mean it,
and instead they argued that he'd been tricked. He was
seventy years old in twenty twenty one. He was a
blue collar worker who didn't even own a computer. From
the defense sentencing memo, he is.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
Not knowledgeable about the Internet. He was not aware that
Facebook and other social media platforms use machine learning algorithms
to individualize ads and to dictate content based on previous cliques.
Mister Huddle believed that the news he was reading was
covering the general scope of mainstream media, and that it
was a representation of current events from his viewpoint. The
(26:02):
vast majority of the media agreed that the democratic process
had been undermined by fraud.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
And I don't doubt that he and many men just
like him have absolutely rotted their brains on Facebook, clickbait
right wing news. I have no trouble believing that he
was trapped in a cycle of seeing nothing but memes
where a minion in a maga hat is spreading election
misinformation or links to stories on sites called patriot windnews
(26:35):
dot biz with headlines like deep state destroyed, new election lawsuit,
bombshell rocks DC swamp. I have a separate email account
where I get one hundred emails that look like that
every single day. I know exactly what his Facebook feed
looked like, so that part's probably true. But I wish
(26:55):
that the government, with their vast investigative resources, had dug
into a curious incident in Dale's past, because I don't
think this was the first time that dale Huddle got
worked up about the need to go to war with
the government. Now, to be clear, dale Huddle had no
criminal history. That's true. The government didn't miss something that
(27:19):
egregious and I'm even willing to believe the Defense memo
is being truthful when they say that at seventy years old,
Dale wasn't a member of any extremist groups. But I
found a picture, a single photograph taken on November fourteenth,
two thousand, and if I had the kinds of resources
(27:41):
that the government has, I would have tried to find
out more about this picture. It's just one picture in
the newspaper, snapped by an Associated Press photographer, and it's
a picture of Dale Huddle with a flag. Unlike the
photo of Dale using an American flag as a that
on January sixth, this photo shows a slightly younger Dale
(28:04):
Huddle and he's trying to figure out how to affix
his Gadsden flag, you know, the one with the snake
that doesn't want to be stepped on, and he's trying
to affix it to the window of a church. November fourteenth,
two thousand, was the first day of a ninety two
day standoff with US marshals at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple.
(28:28):
After years of litigation, a federal judge had finally given
the order for the church to vacate the premises for
seventeen years, the Indianapolis Baptist Temple under Pastor Greg Dixon,
had not been paying its taxes. You're probably saying, wait,
I thought churches were tax exempt, and they are. That's true.
(28:50):
Churches are generally speaking automatically exempt from federal income tax,
but if they have paid employees, they still have to
withhold and remit employment tax. And the Indianapolis Baptist Temple
had been refusing to do that since nineteen eighty four,
and so by the year two thousand they owed the
(29:11):
irs over six million dollars. And this was an intentional,
deliberate act. They didn't forget that they had to do
payroll tax. They didn't make a mistake. The church had
originally been incorporated in nineteen fifty and for almost thirty
four years the church had a valid employer identification number.
(29:34):
They filed paperwork with the state to keep their corporate
entity in good standing. They paid employment taxes to the
federal government. And then in nineteen eighty three, Greg Dixon,
who'd been the pastor at the church since nineteen fifty five,
changed his mind. He transferred all of the church's assets
into an unincorporated religious society and then he changed the
(29:58):
corporation's name, which had previous been Indianapolis Baptist Temple. He
changed it to Not a Church Incorporated, and so the
church itself no longer exists on paper at all. And
Dixon is using this not a Church corporate entity to
run a group called the American Coalition for Unregistered Churches.
(30:19):
It would later be known as the Unregistered Baptist Fellowship.
Greg Dixon believed that doing business with the federal government
was against his religion. Having to do things like tell
the irs that your church would like to be recognized
as a five oh one C three tax exempt entity
(30:39):
or filing paperwork with the state actually contravenes the authority
of Christ and if you make him do it, you're
violating his religious liberty. The unregistered Church movement wasn't just
refusing to pay their taxes. They wanted to avoid almost
any contact with the government. Churches shouldn't have to abide
by bill codes or zoning laws, or get fire inspections.
(31:04):
Babies shouldn't have birth certificates. A wedding shouldn't involve a
marriage license. In fact, no one should have any kind
of license. Many of the articles I found about this
movement make sure to add that they do believe that
they can use the United States Postal Service, but it
is a sin to use zip codes. The almost complete
(31:26):
overlap of guys who don't want to pay their taxes
and guys who are willing to take up arms against
the government is something I'll surely explore in depth in
an episode dedicated to some character in the tax protest
or movement, But the reason for it is probably pretty obvious,
and Pastor Greg Dixon wasn't just refusing to pay his taxes.
(31:49):
He wanted war. In nineteen ninety two, Greg Dixon gave
a speech at an event nicknamed the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous
after the siege at Ruby Ridge. A Christian identity preacher
in Colorado put out the call the disparate elements of
the radical right needed to put their heads together and
(32:10):
come up with a strategy. Klansmen, Neo Nazis, anti Semitic pastors,
militia leaders, Neo Confederates, tax protesters, bigots, and anti government
extremists of all stripes convened in Colorado, and all the
big names were there. Willie Muther Peers from National Alliance,
Richard Butler from Arian Nations, Louis Beam, Kirk Lyons, James Wickstrom.
(32:36):
As Kathleen Blue wrote in her book Bring the War Home,
the militia movement as we know it today emerged from
the leaders, organizations, and tactics of white power organization. And
this meeting is widely regarded as the birthplace of the
modern American militia movement. And so at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous,
(32:58):
just before Louis Beam's beach about leaderless resistance, pastor Greg
Dixon took the stage to call for the establishment of
Christian militias, declaring we are at war. And Greg Dixon
was hardly new to organized racism. In the nineteen seventies,
his church had hosted meetings of a group called Americans
(33:20):
for America, a KKK affiliated organization that opposed school integration.
Indiana's Grand Dragon Bill Cheney was a member of the congregation,
but in the early nineties he was at the bleeding
edge of a new frontier in white power. All that
to say, this old picture of Dale Huddle outside of
(33:43):
a church might sound terribly innocuous. Maybe that's his church,
and maybe he didn't know why his pastor wasn't paying
his taxes. But it was not. Dale Huddle isn't even Baptist.
He grew up Lutheran, but has been a member of
a non denominational megachurch called the Family Christian Center since
(34:04):
nineteen eighty eight, ever since his mother died.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
No.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Dale Huddle had no direct connection to this church that
I can find, but a call had been put out.
In September of two thousand. After years in court, a
judge gave the order they had until noon on November
fourteenth to get out of the building. The government was
taking possession of the property, and US Marshals were authorized
(34:31):
to use force if necessary. Michigan Militia leader Norman Olsen
ordered militias around the country to do their duty and
defend the church, telling his followers that this was going
to be Waco Part two. Charlie Puckett of the Kentucky
Militia was there on November fourteenth. As congregants waited for
the US marshals to arrive and with news crews rolling
(34:55):
in the parking lot, Pastor Dixon asked the contingent of
klansmen who showed up to s for him to maybe
stay outside the church, but he didn't ask them to
leave or disavow their support. And that's when this photo
was taken on November fourteenth, two thousand, parking lot full
(35:16):
of klansmen militia men standing by, and Dale Huddle is
outside the Indianapolis Baptist Temple trying to figure out how
to hang a Gadsden flag on the windows. He'd driven
two hours from his home in Crown Point and there
was no Facebook in two thousand. He didn't see a
(35:36):
meme that convinced him to go to Indianapolis. There's no
indication that he was a member of any of the
militia or clan groups that were there that day, but
it does seem quite possible that he got the same
message they did about showing up for Waco Part two,
and just so this threat isn't left hanging, the big
(35:58):
crowd that showed up on day one of the standoff
got board and went home. US marshals obviously did not
want Waco Part two, so they just kept their distance
and waited them out. It took three months, but in
February of two thousand and one they did seize the building.
No one was injured, but Greg Dixon was carried out
(36:21):
on a stretcher because he refused to walk. So that's
a rather lengthy aside just to contextualize a single twenty
(36:42):
five year old photograph that doesn't prove anything at all,
But it left me wondering if the US Marshals had
taken a heavier handed approach at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple,
would I be looking at two photos twenty years apart
of Dale Huddle trying to skewer a cop with a flagpole.
(37:04):
His lawyers argued that he was just a confused old
man who didn't know how to use the internet, and
he got tricked into believing he needed to go to
DC to stop the steal. But the possibility that twenty
years earlier, some militia newsletter tricked him into thinking he
needed to stop a different theft, that of church property
by the irs, really changes the story for me. Back
(37:28):
in twenty twenty one, though, after the riote of the Capitol,
Matthew Huddle was just living his life as usual. Matthew
Huddle's life as usual involved getting charged three separate times
between July and November for driving with a suspended license
as a habitual offender whose driving privileges had been revoked
after repeated to UIs each new offense of this kind
(37:51):
was a felony. In August of that year, his son's
mother died of a drug overdose. He filed for bankruptcy
that same week, and filing show he owed more than
thirteen thousand dollars in child support to a different woman,
the mother of his daughter. Neither of those children were
in Matthew's custody after his conviction. In his January sixth case,
(38:13):
his lawyers wrote that he had a quote great relationship
with his son. I hope that's true, and even if
it's not, my heart breaks for a teenage boy who
lost his mother to an overdose in twenty twenty one,
he saw his father go to prison in twenty twenty three,
and then he lost his father entirely just last month.
(38:35):
But great is the only word used there to describe
a relationship that I suspect may have been more complicated
than that. In two thousand and nine, Matthew Huddle flew
into a rage after his son, who was just three
years old at the time, had what court records describe
as a bathroom accident. It's a very normal thing for
(38:58):
a three year old to do at that age. You're
still sending a change of pants with them to school
just in case. What's not normal, though, is beating a
toddler so severely that he can't sit down for a week,
and the court records call it a spanking. But nothing
I could find offered me any kind of explanation for
(39:21):
how a spanking could leave bruises on a child's neck.
After Huddle died last week, several of the articles I
read about his death quoted an attorney who had been
representing him in his dui cases for nearly twenty years,
and his lawyer says that the man he'd known was
not violent. I don't know what else you call this,
(39:46):
I guess in that lawyer's defense, it does look like
he'd hired a different attorney when he was charged with
beating his son and his son's mother. After Matthew Huddle
blood guilty in twenty twenty three to that single misdemeanor
charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building on
January sixth, his lawyers asked for a sentence of probation
(40:08):
with no jail time. They cited his lack of ideological
motivation for being there, his need to be there for
his children and his tragic backstory and struggle with alcoholism.
And there is a strange and tragic backstory here, but
they don't actually get into it in this court filing.
(40:29):
This part I pieced together from state court records, old newspapers,
and Facebook posts. After serving his sentence for beating his son,
he was released from jail in twenty thirteen, and he
very quickly took up with a new girlfriend. Based on
the apparent age of a photo of their daughter that
he posted online in twenty fifteen, she had to have
(40:50):
been pregnant with Huddle's child before she ended her marriage
to another man. I have said this before, comes up
often oddly, but I don't care about that. Her infidelity
is between her, her husband, and her boyfriend. I only
mention it because of a curious coincidence of dates. The
(41:14):
same week her divorce was finalized, someone shot Matthew Huddle.
There's a single mention in the local newspaper in February
twenty fifteen, just a few days after his daughter's mother
finalized her divorce, that Huddle had been shot in what
was only described as quote an incident between family members,
(41:37):
and The article quotes an officer who says that no
one was taken into custody at this time, and he
wouldn't say how the shooter was related to the victim.
I couldn't find any court records that indicated the charges
were ever filed against anyone, but I could only check
the names I thought of his suspects. So it's a
bit of a needle in a haystack whoever it was.
(41:58):
Though someone close to him shot Matthew in the back
of the knee and left him with a lifelong injury,
and three years later, in twenty eighteen, he was asleep
in his bed when he woke up to two men
beating him with baseball bats and hammers. The local newspaper
reported the attack was motivated by a child custody dispute.
(42:22):
One of the assailants, Kurt Falkenberg, was in a relationship
with the mother of Huddle's son. The other man was
Falkenberg's uncle, Jeffrey Martin, though the two men were only
a few years apart in age, and the men focused
their blows on Huddle's left leg because they knew he
had a metal rod in there from the surgeries he'd
(42:43):
gotten after getting shot in the leg in his last
domestic dispute. Much like the story of Matthew and Dale Huddle,
this story of a very stupid crime committed by an
uncle and a nephew ends tragically. As Falkenberg and Martin
fled the scene, they crashed. Falkenberg, who had been driving,
(43:05):
was pronounced dead at the scene. Officers responding to the
car accident, which put another driver in the hospital with
two broken legs, found an open bottle of whiskey in
Falkenburg's car, and they eventually found Jeffrey Martin passed out
drunk in a creek bed on the side of the road.
(43:25):
The following year, in twenty nineteen, Matthew Huddle was diagnosed
with cirrhosis of the liver. Twenty years of alcoholism had
finally caught up to him. The dui he got that
summer was the one that put him back in jail
until shortly before he drove to Washington, d c. In
January of twenty twenty one. Now I've read a lot
(43:46):
of sentencing memos. That's the document filed at the end
of a case after a guilty plea or a guilty verdict,
where each side makes their case one last time. Not
about guilt or innocence. Now that's settled, but about what
they think the punishment should be. And we have an
adversarial court system. Everyone is technically ethically bound to be honest,
(44:10):
and the purpose of the courts is supposed to be
to seek the truth, but really everyone is there to win,
to have their version of the truth ruled to be
the most true. So I'm really used to seeing a
defense attorney's sob story and a prosecutor's exaggeration. But I
wonder maybe if Matthew Huddle's lawyers really were telling a
(44:34):
mostly true story. He didn't vote, he couldn't. His family
doesn't seem very political. No one in his family has
ever donated so much as a dollar to any federal election.
And he did have a long history of making spectacularly
bad decisions and finding himself in some really outlandishly bad situation.
(45:01):
I mean, he got his legs broken in two unrelated
domestic disputes. That doesn't even sound possible. So maybe Matthew
Huddle is the only January sixth defendant who really did
end up there by accident with no ideological motivation or
violent intent. Plenty of them claimed that in court, and
(45:21):
it never really rings true. But maybe for Matthew Huddle,
wandering into the Capitol that day was just the same
kind of criminal accident he was often finding himself in,
like driving away without paying for a tank of gas
because he was too drunk to figure out how to
operate the payment system, but somehow not too drunk to drive.
(45:44):
When I first saw the news that had recently pardoned
January sixth defendant had been shot and killed while resisting
arrest during a traffic stop, I can't say that I
was surprised, but I was wrong in my initial assumption.
I figured a guy who found himself on that trajectory
would be I don't know, as sovereign citizen or a
guy who'd done real violence at the Capitol, a guy
(46:06):
who had violent plans for the future. Surely those two
facts about his life being at the Capitol that day
and dying the way that he did. Surely those two
facts would be directly related. But I'm not sure they are.
It's unwise to speculate about the altercation that may have
(46:27):
occurred in the minutes before Huddle was shot and killed
by a Jasper County Sheriff's deputy. I don't know what
happened there on the side of Indiana State Road fourteen.
We don't know what was said, or why things escalated,
or where exactly the deputy saw the gun, but I
do know that Matthew Huddle was due back in court
next week for a status conference on a stack of
(46:49):
still unresolved felony cases for driving without a license, just
days after getting his federal pardon. He was probably happy
for his uncle Dale, but he'd already done his federal time,
and now he was looking down the barrel at another
stay in the county jail, and when those blue lights
came on behind him, he probably knew that this would
(47:10):
be yet another felony charge. He had a long list
of state charges. A federal pardon did nothing for him.
In the end. It didn't matter who the president was.
But I guess it never really did matter to Matthew.
(47:40):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's research, written, and recorded by me Willy Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Littterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Rubuguy's podcast at gmail dot com. I will
(48:00):
definitely read it, but I'm not going to answer it.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show.
We have the listeners on the Weird Little Guy subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my weird Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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