December 11, 2025 • 48 mins
This episode originally ran on October 17, 2024. There is a brief new introduction, but it's back at the top of your feed for listeners who didn't catch it the first time around. Today's regular episode picks up where this one left off.
Sources:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-supporters-who-stormed-us-capitol-begin-leave-prison-following-sweeping-2025-01-21/
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-the-arrested-and-their-stories
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-high-water-mark-of-the-jan.-6-prosecutions
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Tyler Bradley Dykes entered a guilty plea last year on the charge of burning an object with the intent to intimidate for his participation in the 2017 nazi torch march in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was sentenced to just six months and was probably expecting to see his parents waiting for him outside the jail on his scheduled release date... but it was the FBI who picked him up.
Sources:
https://atlantaantifa.org/2023/04/19/inside-southern-sons-active-club-part-i/
https://atlantaantifa.org/2023/04/19/inside-southern-sons-active-club-part-ii/
https://sunlight161.noblogs.org/technology-king-lowcountry-ceo-tyler-dykes-bluffton-sc-marine-nazi/
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67681795/united-states-v-dykes/
https://the-devils-advocates.ghost.io/burning-hate-bond-review/
https://the-devils-advocates.ghost.io/unite-the-right-marcher-pleads-guilty-to-j6-charges/
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/white-nationalist-active-clubs-1234835015/
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):
Cool Zone Media. Hello Molly here. If you're a longtime
Weird Little Guys listener, you might recognize this episode as
one you've heard before. But don't panic, it's not a
rerun week. There is a regular episode today. Two This
(00:27):
one is back at the top of your feed today
for your convenience, because if you haven't heard this one,
you might want to give it a listen alongside today's
regular episode. I write a lot of multi part stories,
but usually part two comes out the week after part one.
(00:47):
That's really the only way to do it. And there
are episodes I would love to write right now that
I'm putting off because I know the ending will change
if I just wait a little longer. But when I
wrote this episode in October of twenty twenty four, the
subject of the story was just a few days into
(01:09):
a nearly five year term in federal prison. I figured,
even if he did have a second act, it wouldn't
be for another few years. At least. This part of
the story was definitely over. But that five year prison
sentence ended three months later. On January twentieth, twenty twenty five,
(01:35):
within hours of being sworn into office for his second term,
Donald Trump pardoned more than fifteen hundred people who'd been
charged with federal crimes related to their participation in the
January sixth insurrection. With the stroke of a pen, he
erased the legal consequences of those actions, whether that consequence
(01:56):
had been a slap on the wrist for a misdemeanor
trespassing conviction or two decades in prison for seditious conspiracy.
Whatever they'd done, they were free to go. Technically, most
of them already were free. Four years into the investigation
and prosecution of the events of January sixth, there were
(02:20):
hundreds of defendants who'd already resolved their cases and completed
whatever sentence they'd been given. If they got any sentence
at all, Hundreds of those convicted weren't sentenced to any
period of incarceration. Most of the January sixth defendants still
in custody by twenty twenty five were outliers. They'd been
(02:42):
leaders or planners where they'd committed crimes of violence, they'd
used weapons, they were convicted of multiple felonies, and they
were going to be in there for a while. Within
twelve hours of the president's pardon, the Bureau of Prisons
released two hundred and eleven January sixth defendants who were
(03:04):
still in custody. Tyler Bradley Dykes was one of those
two hundred eleven. This episode from October of twenty twenty
four is about how he ended up in prison. Now
in twenty twenty five, he's running for Congress. Last week,
(03:29):
a jury in Alpamarole County, Virginia found Augustus Sole Invictus
guilty on the felony charge of burning an object with
the intent to intimidate for his participation in the Nazi
torch march at the University of Virginia on August eleventh,
twenty seventeen. This was not only the first trial conviction
(03:50):
for this charge, it was the first ever jury verdict
reached on a charge under Section eighteen point two dashed
four twenty three point oh one of the Virginia Code.
That law passed in two thousand and two in response
to the legal challenge to Virginia's crossburning statute by Pennsylvania
(04:10):
clansman Berry black I spent the last two episodes talking
about the history of cross burning in Virginia and the
life and legal battles of the man who brought about
this change to the law, and I told you that
until last year, that law had been sitting on the books,
all but untouched for two decades. I left you last
(04:32):
week with a terrifying image, a small group of students
surrounded by a sea of flames one summer night seven
years ago. I told you a few weeks ago that
this is a story I've been writing and rewriting for years.
I could fill six months worth of episodes with just
(04:52):
the stories of the men who carried those torches. The
years I've spent watching the same few minutes of history,
frame by frame from different angles, placing individual men within
that seething mass of violent intent taught me a lot
about the kinds of weird little guys that make up
a crowd like this. There are cops and criminals, soldiers
(05:16):
and soldiers of fortune, students and fathers, domestic abusers, realtors
and lawyers and small business owners, social media personalities, and
wanted fugitives. They're your neighbors, your weird cousin, that guy
at work you don't want to talk about politics with.
(05:39):
They're all just some guy. There were hundreds of them
there that night in August of twenty seventeen. But we'll
just start with one today. I'm Molly Conger. This is weird,
Little guys under You might think this episode is going
(06:15):
to be about Augustus and Victus. It isn't. There will
one day probably be a multi episode arc about the
man who calls himself the Attorney for the Damned. A
man whose name literally appears in the Miriam Webster Dictionary
in the example sentence for the term white nationalist. A
(06:39):
man who has been both a proud boy and a
presidential candidate, both a goat slaughtering, blood drinking wizard and
a traditionalist Catholic. A father of seven with two ex
wives and a string of police reports filed by wives, girlfriends,
and mistresses. An attorney who's list includes white supremacist paramilitaries,
(07:03):
Nazi street gangs, and antisemitic trolls. A man who once
renounced all of his worldly possessions and wandered off into
the desert, proclaiming himself to be a god and a prophet,
before quietly returning to Orlando to work at his father's
law office. But that day isn't today. His conviction last
(07:24):
week won't be the end of his story. I'm sure
of that, So I'll bide my time, because while Augustus
Invictus was the first person ever found guilty by a
jury of the crime of burning an object with the
intent to intimidate, he wasn't the first to be convicted.
Before his trial last week, there had already been five
(07:46):
guilty pleas by other members of that march. You see,
there is no statute of limitations on a felony in
the Commonwealth of Virginia. Whether or not that's wise or
really in the over all best interests of justice more
generally is a discussion for another day, and maybe for
another person, but it is the current state of affairs,
(08:10):
and Virginia is a southern state, the one time capital
of the Confederacy. Few states without a bloody history of
clan violence even have a law on the books that
makes it a crime to use a burning object as
a tool of intimidation. But we did have such a history,
and we do have the resulting law. So even though
(08:33):
that march in twenty seventeen feels like it was almost
a lifetime ago, it's not too late under Virginia law
to hold those men accountable. To date, twelve men who
marched that night have been charged under a Virginia law
that makes it a felony to burn an object with
the intent to intimidate. Five have pleaded guilty to it,
(08:58):
three have entered into pleagre reamons to the lesser charge
of disorderly conduct, one went to trial and got a
hung jury, and two cases remained pending. The first sentence
handed down in one of these cases was for Tyler
Bradley Dikes. His story touches on quite a few of
(09:19):
the recurring themes of this show. He was a US
Marine who was discharged for his involvement in extremist groups.
He attended this Nazi rally where he's on video, throwing
punches and Hitler salutes, and when he wasn't held accountable
for his actions, he went on to engage an even
more serious conduct, and now he's in federal prison. The
(09:43):
entire arc of his story can be summed up in
a single pair of images, I think like a pair
of Nazi bookends. First, there's Tyler Dikes on August eleventh,
twenty seventeen, standing at the base of the statue of
Thomas Jefferson, holding a torch in his left hand, with
his right arm extended in a Nazi salute. And then
(10:07):
there's Tyler Dykes again on January sixth, twenty twenty one,
on the steps of the Capitol Building, turning to face
the mob below after fighting his way up to the doors,
giving the same salute. A few months ago, Tyler Dykes
was handed a fifty seven month federal sentence for assaulting
(10:28):
police officers during the January sixth riot at the Capitol
in twenty twenty one. If you're trying to do some
math in your head right now, I'll tell you fifty
seven months is just shy of five years. But a
federal prison sentence is kind of like a baby in
that you always measure it in months, not years, and
(10:49):
only the people who have to deal with the time
in question feel like that makes any sense at all.
In the sentencing memorandum written by his defense attorney, he's
just decribed as an impressionable young man. He was just
twenty one years old when he traveled to Washington, d C.
With his friends from church. They said he'd been influenced
(11:10):
by the NonStop media coverage and President Trump's social media
posts into believing that the election had been stolen. He
made incredibly poor decisions. His attorney conceded, but he never
planned to engage in any violence. He was just young
and impetuous, and he got caught up in the crowd.
(11:34):
He was a United States Marine. He was a boy scout,
quite literally. The defense sentencing memo cites his accomplishments as
an Eagle Scout. He was just a nice young man
who goes to church every Sunday and runs a small
IT services company and takes care of his elderly parents.
(11:55):
How could he possibly be the kind of person who
deserves to go to federal prison for making a little mistake.
But that wasn't quite the whole picture. Not that those
things aren't mostly true. They are, but it's a spit
shined image of a much darker situation. Tyler Dykes was
(12:18):
indeed a member of the United States Marine Corps. On
January sixth, twenty twenty one, he was a US Marine
when he wrenched the riot shield from the hands of
a US Capitol police officer and then used that shield
to force his way through the police line and into
the Capitol building. And he remained a United States Marine
(12:39):
until he was given an other than honorable discharge in
twenty twenty two. The revelations that unraveled his life came
out of order. He wasn't identified as a Unite the
Right attendee until twenty twenty two, after he'd already participated
in the January sixth riot in twenty twenty one. He
(13:00):
wasn't identified as the man putting swastika stickers around town
in twenty twenty until he was discharged from the Marines
for it in twenty twenty two, and he wasn't identified
as a participant in the January sixth riot until July
of twenty twenty three, after he'd been convicted for his
conduct at Unite the Right. The consequences of his actions
(13:22):
always seemed to come a little too late, after he'd
already been emboldened by an apparent lack thereof. At his
federal sentencing hearing a few months ago, he told the
judge that he was high on adrenaline during the Capitol
riot and said, I falsely believed that I would be
free of consequences. But maybe we should start at the
(13:46):
beginning rather than the end. In August of twenty seventeen,
Tyler Dykes was nineteen years old. He'd taken a year
off after high school and was living at home home
with his parents in North Carolina that summer after spending
his gap year abroad in Romania. He'd been accepted to
(14:07):
Cornell University and would be moving into his dorm at
the end of the month. Just a week before new
student orientation at Cornell, he took one last trip before
starting college. He came here to Charlottesville on the evening
of August eleventh, twenty seventeen. Tyler Dyke stood among the
(14:29):
hundreds of men who gathered at Nameless Field. It's a
confusing name, Nameless Field. It isn't nameless. It has a name.
The name is nameless Field. I wonder what kind of
who's on first type conversations happened over text message that
night as the crowd assembled. But there he was in
(14:53):
the field, down by the tennis courts behind the library,
and he was handed a torch, and he found a
place in line, and he marched. He chanted with the
crowd as this river of flames wound its way through
the university grounds. Blood and soil, Blood and soil. You
(15:20):
will not replace us, Jews will not replace us. Fuck off,
commis this is our town now, they shouted on the
empty streets as they passed empty buildings. Blood and soil,
blood and soil, blood and soil. They chanted until they
(15:46):
could taste the blood in their own mouths from shouting
themselves hoarse, blood and soil, until they saw blood red.
When the small group of students at the base of
the Thomas Jefferson Statue came into view, the streets had
been empty until the march filled them. The libraries were empty,
(16:10):
the dorms were empty. The academic and administrative buildings were empty.
But as the march reached the top of the rotunda steps,
looking down into the brick plaza below, they knew they
weren't alone anymore. They knew what they were doing. As
(16:30):
they came down those steps, each man, torch in hand,
had a moment. At the top of those stairs, each
marcher could see from that vantage point the tiny group
in the plaza below, students, many of them still just teenagers,
(16:53):
holding a home made banner that read UVA Students Against
White Supremacy, And in that moment on those steps, each
of them made the choice to follow the man in
front of him. As the march wound its way around
the statue, around the students, circling around, arching wide and
(17:18):
then tightening up, encircling them and closing them in. As
the ring of fire closed around the statue around those students,
the violence began almost immediately. Verbal altercations gave way to
fists shouted epithets were chased through the air by streams
(17:40):
of pepper spray. A lit torch was swung, making contact
with a counter protester trying to shield those terrified young people.
I've watched this video a hundred times, a thousand, maybe,
and I still flinch as the flame arcs towards someone
(18:00):
that I count among my closest friends. I tell you
that not to pull at your heart strings. You don't
need to know that that video still makes my chest
feel tight. I'm telling you because I want you to know.
I'm not objective about this. I don't pretend to be.
(18:20):
I don't want to be. I don't believe in this
myth of journalistic objectivity. Everybody has a thumb on the
scale somewhere. Most people just lie about it to you
or even to themselves. Of course, I have a bias here.
(18:44):
I live here. I've sat in courtrooms and in coffee shops,
and on long car rides and on living room couches
with people who are hurt that night. But even if
I had no connection to these people or to this place,
no secret that as a researcher of white supremacist violence
in America, my starting position is always against fascism, against Nazism,
(19:11):
against violence done in the name of white supremacy. And
I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of. As
sociologist and expert on political violence, doctor Peter Seemi, once
set on the stand, no one is ever surprised to
find out that a cancer researcher is interested in preventing cancer.
(19:33):
So yes, I have a stake in this, But you
do too. Maybe you don't know it yet, you don't
know these people. But I choose to betray my own
lack of objectivity here to get you to think about yours,
because I don't think you should be objective about this.
(19:56):
There is no special prize to be won by being
the most diligently neutral observer of fascist violence. You and I, listener,
We are not jurors. We are not ruling on the law.
We are people who have to live in this world.
You should feel something you can't shove down when you
(20:20):
see a man who proudly calls himself a Nazi. Swing
a flaming torch at someone who is trapped, someone whose
only crime is not wanting hate to go unchallenged in
a public square. And that's where Tyler Diykes was that night,
right at the center of this melee. As the air
(20:41):
filled with screams and the burning scent of pepper spray,
Tyler Diykes was fist fighting anyone he could reach. Videos
showed Dikes was the last one still fighting. He threw
the last punch of the night, even as everyone else
seemed to be coming to their senses. When the counter
(21:01):
protesters were finally able to escape from the mob, the
torch marchers took the statue. Several of them climbed the
plinth and cheered for the victory they'd won. Seeg Kile
Hail victory they shouted. Video shows Tyler Dikes pacing back
(21:22):
and forth in front of the statue, right arm extended
in a Nazi salute. After the deadly rally, the next morning,
(21:45):
Tyler Diykes went home. He started at Cornell a few
weeks later, but they didn't go well. He dropped out
after a few months and enlisted in the Marines instead,
and it seems like that may not have gone well either.
After a few months of training, he was discharged to
the Reserves and returned home, which was now South Carolina.
(22:08):
He started an IT company, calling himself the Technology King
of the Low Country, and made house calls to help
suburban grandparents set up their Wi Fi routers. And when
he wasn't troubleshooting a customer's computer or going to church,
he was hanging Swastika banners from highway overpasses with his
friends in the Southern Sons Active Club, a white supremacist
(22:30):
organization operating in Georgia and the Carolinas. A regional cell
of the larger international network of Active Clubs. These Active
clubs are, to put it succinctly, Nazi fight clubs. They
were inspired by Robert Rundo's Rise Above movement, the Southern
(22:50):
California based Nazi street fighting outfit that brawled their way
across the country at right wing political rallies throughout twenty seventeen.
There's no centralized leadership or organizational structure. Active clubs operate
regionally and are operationally independent from one another. They share
(23:11):
a love of mixed martial arts. Both as a hobby
and as training for a coming race war, and engage
in the kind of propaganda campaigns common among groups like
Patriot Front, so hanging banners with racist slogans from bridges
and plastering stickers on street signs and mailboxes around town.
(23:31):
There are active clubs all over the United States, Canada,
and Europe, as well as a faltering effort led by
Thomas Seole to get them going in Australia. Each club
operates independently, but they network and meet up even across
national borders, and there is quite a bit of cross
(23:51):
pollination between the active clubs and other violent white supremacist organizations.
They tend to be on good terms with groups like
Patriot Front, and several notable active club members have ties
to Adam Waffen and Terogram. Andrew Takstov, the New Jersey
teenager and Terogram collective chat member arrested this summer, was
(24:12):
a member of an active club cell in New Jersey.
Active clubs in Finland are involved in paramilitary training of
Karelian separatist groups that fight alongside the Russian Volunteer Corps,
the same Nazi paramilitary group in Ukraine that Andrew Takestov
was on his way to join when he was arrested.
All that to say, this isn't just guys lifting weights
(24:36):
together and talking about their love of the white race.
Active Club members on multiple continents have been arrested for
acts of violence and for planning acts of terrorism. And
the reason I can tell you with an unusually high
degree of certainty that Tyler Dykes was a member of
the Southern Suns Active Club is because of one particular,
(25:00):
no good, very bad day that he had on March seventeenth,
twenty twenty three. You see, Tyler Dykes was indicted by
a grand jury in Virginia in February of twenty twenty three,
but he didn't know that nobody did. Grand juries are
(25:22):
secret things, and his indictment stayed sealed until he was
taken into custody. And with an out of state warrant,
you don't just send a local cop down to get him.
You could, I suppose, but they didn't. The local prosecutor
where the charge is filed can ask cops in the
city where they think he lives to go look for him,
(25:45):
but they aren't always super interested in doing. Some out
of town courts work for them. So oftentimes an out
of state warrant just sort of sits open, waiting for
you to step on it, like a rake on the ground.
If you've ever been pulled over, you've seen a cop
take your license and walk back to his car. He's
(26:06):
putting your name into a computer, and if you have
an open warrant, he's going to find it. If you
cross a border, or go through TSA, or get a
speeding ticket, or have really almost any kind of interaction
with a cop, they're going to run your name. And
in Tyler Dyke's case, he was sitting in an emergency
(26:27):
room in South Carolina making a police report about a
dog bite. Saint Patrick's Day is a big deal in Savannah, Georgia.
I'm not entirely sure why, and that wasn't a rabbit
hole I let myself pursue this week, but it is.
I'm sure there's some particular moment in history where the
(26:50):
city had an unusually high concentration of irishmen, and the
only lasting legacy is the nation's second most debaucherous green
beer soaked parade. I was in Savannah for Saint Patrick's
Day in two thousand and eight, but there was a
tornado that weekend and the blackout closed most of the bar,
so I don't think I got the full experience. And
(27:14):
in twenty twenty three, the Southern Sun's Active Club had
the brilliant idea that Saint Patrick's Day in Savannah would
be the perfect time and the perfect place to hang
a Nazi banner from a highway overpass, because all the
extra traffic in town meant more people would see their message.
Thanks to an Atlanta based anti fascist research collective, we
(27:37):
have an inside look at the private conversations Dykes and
his friends had that day as they were going about
trying to get that banner up. The day didn't start
off well. The group had some trouble locating a good
spot for their banner. They weren't the only ones who
anticipated heavy traffic from tourists heading into town for the holiday.
(28:01):
There were cops nearby several of the locations they'd hoped
to hit. When they finally found a suitable spot, Tyler
Dikes walked back to his car to get the tools
they would need to hang the banner, but before he
got back to his car, he encountered someone walking their dogs.
Diykes claims that he was mauled by three pit bulls,
(28:24):
but that seems like a bit of an over statement.
In the infiltrated group chat, he posted a photo of
a small, but unpleasant looking wound on his left pinky finger.
I feel like you'd come away with more than a
two inch cut on your little finger if you were
truly attacked by even one dog, let alone three pit bulls.
(28:47):
But we only have Tyler's word on this one. A
little before six pm, he texted the Southern Son's group
chat that he was headed to the hospital to have
his hand looked at. While he was waiting to be
seen at the hospital, he texted the group chat again
to let them know that the plan had gone awry
and unfortunately they hadn't been able to hang any of
(29:09):
the banners that day, writing quite literally, everything that could
possibly have gone wrong all happened at exactly the same time.
Half an hour later, though, something else went very wrong
for Tyler Dikes, and he texted the group again, I'm
being arrested by Virginia nuke my account. Dog bites like
(29:34):
gunshot wounds are something that hospital staff are required to
report to the authorities. While Tyler Diykes was waiting for
a doctor to look at his hand. An officer arrived
to take a police report. And when you talk to
a cop in some official capacity, he's going to run
your name. I can't even imagine his surprise when the
(29:58):
officer informed him that he was a wanted fugitive in
a state he hadn't visited in years. His hand was fine,
it seems, and he was taken directly into custody from
the emergency room that night. It took nearly a month
to arrange for his extradition back to Virginia, during which
time he remained in custody. When Tyler Diykes was finally
(30:34):
transported up to Virginia, his attorney asked for a bond hearing.
Makes sense. He'd been in custody for a month, and
it was at that April twenty twenty three bond hearing
that I first saw Tyler Dikes. At that hearing, Tyler
Dykes's father, Scott, took the stand to tell the judge
that if his son was allowed to return home with him,
(30:57):
he would ensure that his son stayed out of trouble,
would return for all of his court hearings. And then
the prosecutor handed Scott Dykes, A few pieces of paper?
Is that your son? He asked. Scott Dykes was still
staring down at the paper in his hands when he said, softly, reluctantly,
(31:21):
it looks like it could be. The pages in his
hands were printed out stills from security camera footage showing
a tall, dark haired young man putting up flyers with
swastikas on them in Sumter, South Carolina. In November of
twenty twenty. The prosecutor asked Scott Dikes if he knew
why his son had been discharged from the Marines. He
(31:44):
didn't know. Tyler had apparently not even told his parents
that he'd been given an other than honorable discharge. He
didn't tell his parents that he'd been interviewed by an
FBI agent from the Joint Terrorism Task Force in twenty nineteen,
or that he was a suspect in the case of
the Sumpter County swastika stickers in twenty twenty. The prosecutor
(32:08):
didn't ask Scott Dikes where his son was on January sixth,
twenty twenty one. Maybe he didn't know. He should have.
We know now that the FBI had been investigating Dikes's
involvement in the insurrection since December of twenty twenty one,
but they may not have shared that information with a
county prosecutor. It was Dikes's own messages in the chat
(32:32):
on the day of his arrest that left him in
jail without bond. After that hearing mere hours before his
arrest on Saint Patrick's day, he was demonstrating what they
call consciousness of guilt. That is, behavior that shows you
knew what you were doing was wrong. His messages show
(32:53):
that he had attempted to evade police in order to
find an overpass, which he planned to use tools to
damage for the purpose of unfurling a racist banner. Then,
upon learning of his arrest, he demonstrated a willingness to
destroy evidence, asking other members of the white supremacist group
to erase his participation, to nuke his account and delete
(33:15):
the chat so police couldn't read it on his phone
once it was checked into evidence. In his ruling denying bond,
the judge told Dikes that day, this court can't believe
you'll be on good behavior if released from custody. It
was barely a month later that Tyler Diykes decided to
plead guilty to the charge of burning an object with
(33:37):
the intent to intimidate. The judge handed down a sentence
of five years, the maximum under the statute, but suspended
all but six months of it. I don't know if
this is a common practice everywhere, but I see it
almost all the time here in Virginia. The judge gives
(33:58):
you a much longer sentence then he actually expects you
to serve, and you just serve that little bit of
your sentence, but that suspended portion hangs over you like
a sort of damocles that will fall if you get
into any trouble during some set period of good behavior.
With the time he'd already served before his extradition and
(34:18):
credit for good behavior, he was scheduled to be released
in July of twenty twenty three, just four months after
that terrible day in March. And here's where I wasted
a whole day of my life. I was curious to
see Tyler Diyke's walk out of the album Rall Charlesville
(34:38):
Regional Jail. I can't explain now why I felt like
that might be an interesting or important thing to see,
and in retrospect it really wouldn't have been. But I
knew his scheduled release date, and I live nearby. I
wasn't busy that day, so I thought i'd try. I
(35:00):
got up early and drove to the jail. I packed
snacks and drinks, and I was prepared to wait around
for a couple of hours. I talked to a few
people who'd been booked into ACRJ, and typically you get
released sometime before lunch. But the hours passed and they
(35:20):
kept passing. I finished all the snacks I brought got bored.
It was hot as hell, and I didn't want to
run my car all day just for the AC so
I just sat there, sweating, waiting. I watched that damn
door like a hawk as the hours passed, and then
(35:45):
I got an email. I have all sorts of automated
email alerts set up related to court cases and custody
status of weird little guys all over the country, some
guys i'd just like to keep track of, or my
right about one day, or I don't know, just nosy.
So not a day goes by that I don't get
(36:07):
some notification that somebody's filed emotion, or they're appealing something,
or they've been transferred to another facility. It's always something,
and there it was a custody status change notification. I'd
been sitting in the jail barking lot for seven hours
waiting for a man who never did walk out the
(36:29):
front door. This email is to inform you that Tyler
Diykes with a fender number one zero six five one six' three,
three was released from custody On july, seventeenth twenty twenty.
Three the release reason is other law enforcement, agency other
(36:50):
law enforcement. Agency usually the email says bonded out or sentence,
served but this one said other law enforcement. Agency that
means he wasn't released at. All that means some kind
of cop from somewhere else picked him. Up he never
(37:15):
walked out the front door because he'd been driven out
the side entrance in a nondescript LOOKING suv with A
Us marshal at the. WHEEL i had to wait until
the following morning for the federal charging documents to show
up in the, System so it wasn't Until july of
twenty twenty three THAT i finally knew what THE fbi
(37:36):
had known for a year and a. Half Tyler dikes
fought his way into The capitol On january, sixth twenty twenty,
one he was charged in a ten count indictment with,
robbery civil, disorder two counts of, assaulting resisting or impeding
an officer with a dangerous, weapon entering or remaining in
(37:57):
a restricted, building disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted,
building engaging in physical violence in a restricted, building disorderly
conduct and a capitol, building engaging in physical violence in
a capitol, building and picketing in a capitol. Building he
was released on bond shortly after being transferred into federal,
custody and in addition to the standard rules of pre trial,
(38:19):
release the judge specifically mandated that he have no contact
with members of The Southern Sons Active club or any
related group while out on, bond and he was ordered
to live at his parents' home and keep to a strict.
Curfew In april of twenty twenty, four he accepted a
plea agreement that dropped eight of the ten charges of the,
(38:41):
indictment pleading guilty only to the two counts of, assaulting,
resisting or impeding certain, officers and with the dangerous weapon
element dropped with no. Trial some questions about this case
will probably never get. Answered In december of twenty twenty,
(39:02):
one THE fbi received an anonymous tip from someone who
Said dikes told them he had entered the capitol On january.
Sixth the full text of the tip is printed in
a filing by the. Government the suspect Is Tyler diykes
lives In, Bluffton South. CAROLINA i was With dikes and
we started talking about The january sixth. Attack we had
(39:26):
differing opinions about, it but was. Respectful he then told
me about how he went into the capitol with a
mask on with the other rioters and started beating up police.
Officers he states he was still in the military at the.
Time he said he has video evidence of him being,
there but he did not show me since we were
in a public. Setting he was there for fund and
(39:49):
wanting to make a. Statement he was there with other
group of, people but would not state. WHO i believe
he was telling the truth about, it AND i believe
he needs to be. Investigated the agent assigned to investigate
the tip confirmed the sources identification Of dikes through typical
investigative means things like issuing a subpoena to his cell phone,
(40:12):
provider comparing footage from the capitol to the, SUSPECTS dmv
photo and so. On but he had an extra source this,
time something AN fbi agent doesn't usually have at his
disposal when he investigates an anonymous tip like. This he
already knew What Tyler dikes looked. Like he had Met
(40:36):
Tyler dikes. Before the agent assigned to follow up on
this tip was the one who had Interviewed dikes In
january of twenty nineteen regarding his potential ties to domestic extremist.
Groups no additional information was offered in this affidavit about
(40:56):
the circumstances that prompted their first, meeting whether any follow
up investigation was, done or if that investigation was at
the request of or reported to The Marine, corps or
even which extremist group THE fbi believed he was involved
in in twenty, nineteen because it couldn't have been The
(41:18):
Southern Sun's Active. Club The Active club network didn't really
exist that early, on back In january of twenty, nineteen
and The Southern suns chapter certainly. Didn't the agent doesn't
give me even a crumb to work with, here SO
i don't, know and whatever it was about that wasn't
(41:41):
what led To dykes's discharge from The. Marines the military
records filed in this case are, sealed but references made
to them specifically cite Those november twenty twenty swastika flyers
In Sumter, County South carolina as the reason for his.
Discharge and that's as much creed information as we're likely
(42:01):
ever going to get about the reason for his removal
from the. Military in a text found on his phone
after his, Arrest dykes had sent a photo of his
discharged letter to Someone he claimed he was being discharged
quote for being incredibly political with my Fellow marines after
(42:22):
the twenty twenty, election incredibly. Political when he was interviewed
by the probation office for the pre sentenced investigation report
in his federal criminal, case he. Lied he told the
probation office that he was asked to leave the military
after not reporting for, drill and that wasn't the only
(42:45):
time he. Lied the government sentencing memorandum also indicates that
despite his willingness to plead guilty to the charges to
be honest about his conduct on that, day he was
not tr truthful in his final interview with federal. Agents
the terms of his plea agreement required his cooperation with
(43:06):
the ongoing investigation into the events Of january. Sixth part
of that agreement was a final debrief interview with federal,
agents which was conducted On june twenty, eighth twenty twenty.
Four in that, Interview dykes again told agents that he
left his home In South carolina mid morning On january
fifth and arrived IN dc that evening sometime after, dark
(43:32):
but early enough to have dinner with his friends before
checking into his hotel for the. Night and that's not
true because his cell phone tells a very different. Story
records obtained From verizon show that his phone was In, Marathon,
florida at three twenty pm On january. Fifth a little
(43:56):
before eight, pm he took a photo with his cell
phone of a slip printed by An American airlines kiosk
at The Miami, airport indicating that he would need to
see a ticket agent for. Assistance his phone pinged again
an hour outside his home In South carolina at twelve
thirty a. M On january. Sixth no clear conclusion is
(44:20):
drawn in the. Memo the prosecutor doesn't ride out exactly
what he thinks this, means but it appears That dykes
drove thirteen hundred miles from The Florida keys To, washington D.
C overnight after unsuccessfully trying to board a flight In.
Miami it would be very hard to forget driving for
(44:45):
twenty hours and then immediately fighting your way inside The
United States capitol even three years after the. Fact that's
not something you'd, forget is. It it seems far more
likely that he chose to conceal his activities in the
lead up To january, Sixth but why it seems unlikely
(45:10):
now that THE doj would choose to pursue additional, Charges although,
remember it is a federal crime to lie to AN fbi,
agent and it obviously wasn't something they cared enough about
to ask the judge to reject the plea, agreement which
they could. Have whatever he was hiding about his trip
(45:31):
To florida the day before the, insurrection he must have
felt like it was worth the possibility of a lot
of extra prison time to keep it to. Himself the
government sentencing memo also details some of what was found
On dike's. Phone in The Southern suns group, chat he
used the Name Nocturnal. Wolf the prosecutor who prepared the
(45:55):
memo included several examples of materials found on the phone
related to the pseudonym things About. Wolves one of those
little odds and ends about wolves was the front cover
of A terogram collective publication called Do it for The,
gram which bears the phrase faceless Lone. Wolf the prosecutor
(46:20):
makes no mention of the contents of the document or
the fact that it is a three hundred page manual
on how to commit varying acts of. Terrorism it seems
he was perhaps unaware that he'd stumbled across a piece
of Neo nazi terrorist. Propaganda there's no transcript of his
(46:42):
sentencing filed in the, case but NBC's RYAN. J riley
reported that Quote dykes did not distance himself from extremist,
ideologies nor did he say he no longer believes the
former president's lies about the. Election his biggest expression of
regret seemed to be for his elderly, parents who adopted
him as a child and who are still providing him
(47:03):
with a monthly. Allowance diykes was given a few months
to get his affairs in order after being sentenced to
fifty seven months back In. July the day before he
was scheduled to turn himself in to begin serving his.
Sentence he filed a last minute motion asking for just
one more. Month the reasons he gave were a series
(47:24):
of doctor's appointments that he needed to drive his eighty
six year old father. To the judge was unimpressed By
dikes's desire to drive his dad to the gastro enrologist
and denied the. Motion he reported to prison last week
On october, ninth twenty twenty. Four if you don't have
(47:44):
any disciplinary, issues you typically serve eighty five percent of federal,
time so he could be released as early As october
of twenty twenty, eight just in time for the next presidential.
Election Weird Little guys is a production Of Cool Zone
(48:08):
media And. iHeartRadio it's, researched written and recorded by, Me Molly.
Conger our executive producers Are Sophie lichterman And Robert. Evans
the show is edited by the wildly Talented Rory. Gagan
the theme music was composed By Brad. Dickard you can
email me At Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot.
COM i will definitely read, it BUT i almost certainly
(48:30):
will not answer. It it's nothing. PERSONAL i don't answer
any of my. Emails you can exchange conspiracy theories about
the show with other listeners on The Weird Little guys.
Subreddit just don't post anything that's going to make you
one of My Weird Little guys
Cool Zone Media. Hello Molly here. If you're a longtime
Weird Little Guys listener, you might recognize this episode as
one you've heard before. But don't panic, it's not a
rerun week. There is a regular episode today. Two This
(00:27):
one is back at the top of your feed today
for your convenience, because if you haven't heard this one,
you might want to give it a listen alongside today's
regular episode. I write a lot of multi part stories,
but usually part two comes out the week after part one.
(00:47):
That's really the only way to do it. And there
are episodes I would love to write right now that
I'm putting off because I know the ending will change
if I just wait a little longer. But when I
wrote this episode in October of twenty twenty four, the
subject of the story was just a few days into
(01:09):
a nearly five year term in federal prison. I figured,
even if he did have a second act, it wouldn't
be for another few years. At least. This part of
the story was definitely over. But that five year prison
sentence ended three months later. On January twentieth, twenty twenty five,
(01:35):
within hours of being sworn into office for his second term,
Donald Trump pardoned more than fifteen hundred people who'd been
charged with federal crimes related to their participation in the
January sixth insurrection. With the stroke of a pen, he
erased the legal consequences of those actions, whether that consequence
(01:56):
had been a slap on the wrist for a misdemeanor
trespassing conviction or two decades in prison for seditious conspiracy.
Whatever they'd done, they were free to go. Technically, most
of them already were free. Four years into the investigation
and prosecution of the events of January sixth, there were
(02:20):
hundreds of defendants who'd already resolved their cases and completed
whatever sentence they'd been given. If they got any sentence
at all, Hundreds of those convicted weren't sentenced to any
period of incarceration. Most of the January sixth defendants still
in custody by twenty twenty five were outliers. They'd been
(02:42):
leaders or planners where they'd committed crimes of violence, they'd
used weapons, they were convicted of multiple felonies, and they
were going to be in there for a while. Within
twelve hours of the president's pardon, the Bureau of Prisons
released two hundred and eleven January sixth defendants who were
(03:04):
still in custody. Tyler Bradley Dykes was one of those
two hundred eleven. This episode from October of twenty twenty
four is about how he ended up in prison. Now
in twenty twenty five, he's running for Congress. Last week,
(03:29):
a jury in Alpamarole County, Virginia found Augustus Sole Invictus
guilty on the felony charge of burning an object with
the intent to intimidate for his participation in the Nazi
torch march at the University of Virginia on August eleventh,
twenty seventeen. This was not only the first trial conviction
(03:50):
for this charge, it was the first ever jury verdict
reached on a charge under Section eighteen point two dashed
four twenty three point oh one of the Virginia Code.
That law passed in two thousand and two in response
to the legal challenge to Virginia's crossburning statute by Pennsylvania
(04:10):
clansman Berry black I spent the last two episodes talking
about the history of cross burning in Virginia and the
life and legal battles of the man who brought about
this change to the law, and I told you that
until last year, that law had been sitting on the books,
all but untouched for two decades. I left you last
(04:32):
week with a terrifying image, a small group of students
surrounded by a sea of flames one summer night seven
years ago. I told you a few weeks ago that
this is a story I've been writing and rewriting for years.
I could fill six months worth of episodes with just
(04:52):
the stories of the men who carried those torches. The
years I've spent watching the same few minutes of history,
frame by frame from different angles, placing individual men within
that seething mass of violent intent taught me a lot
about the kinds of weird little guys that make up
a crowd like this. There are cops and criminals, soldiers
(05:16):
and soldiers of fortune, students and fathers, domestic abusers, realtors
and lawyers and small business owners, social media personalities, and
wanted fugitives. They're your neighbors, your weird cousin, that guy
at work you don't want to talk about politics with.
(05:39):
They're all just some guy. There were hundreds of them
there that night in August of twenty seventeen. But we'll
just start with one today. I'm Molly Conger. This is weird,
Little guys under You might think this episode is going
(06:15):
to be about Augustus and Victus. It isn't. There will
one day probably be a multi episode arc about the
man who calls himself the Attorney for the Damned. A
man whose name literally appears in the Miriam Webster Dictionary
in the example sentence for the term white nationalist. A
(06:39):
man who has been both a proud boy and a
presidential candidate, both a goat slaughtering, blood drinking wizard and
a traditionalist Catholic. A father of seven with two ex
wives and a string of police reports filed by wives, girlfriends,
and mistresses. An attorney who's list includes white supremacist paramilitaries,
(07:03):
Nazi street gangs, and antisemitic trolls. A man who once
renounced all of his worldly possessions and wandered off into
the desert, proclaiming himself to be a god and a prophet,
before quietly returning to Orlando to work at his father's
law office. But that day isn't today. His conviction last
(07:24):
week won't be the end of his story. I'm sure
of that, So I'll bide my time, because while Augustus
Invictus was the first person ever found guilty by a
jury of the crime of burning an object with the
intent to intimidate, he wasn't the first to be convicted.
Before his trial last week, there had already been five
(07:46):
guilty pleas by other members of that march. You see,
there is no statute of limitations on a felony in
the Commonwealth of Virginia. Whether or not that's wise or
really in the over all best interests of justice more
generally is a discussion for another day, and maybe for
another person, but it is the current state of affairs,
(08:10):
and Virginia is a southern state, the one time capital
of the Confederacy. Few states without a bloody history of
clan violence even have a law on the books that
makes it a crime to use a burning object as
a tool of intimidation. But we did have such a history,
and we do have the resulting law. So even though
(08:33):
that march in twenty seventeen feels like it was almost
a lifetime ago, it's not too late under Virginia law
to hold those men accountable. To date, twelve men who
marched that night have been charged under a Virginia law
that makes it a felony to burn an object with
the intent to intimidate. Five have pleaded guilty to it,
(08:58):
three have entered into pleagre reamons to the lesser charge
of disorderly conduct, one went to trial and got a
hung jury, and two cases remained pending. The first sentence
handed down in one of these cases was for Tyler
Bradley Dikes. His story touches on quite a few of
(09:19):
the recurring themes of this show. He was a US
Marine who was discharged for his involvement in extremist groups.
He attended this Nazi rally where he's on video, throwing
punches and Hitler salutes, and when he wasn't held accountable
for his actions, he went on to engage an even
more serious conduct, and now he's in federal prison. The
(09:43):
entire arc of his story can be summed up in
a single pair of images, I think like a pair
of Nazi bookends. First, there's Tyler Dikes on August eleventh,
twenty seventeen, standing at the base of the statue of
Thomas Jefferson, holding a torch in his left hand, with
his right arm extended in a Nazi salute. And then
(10:07):
there's Tyler Dykes again on January sixth, twenty twenty one,
on the steps of the Capitol Building, turning to face
the mob below after fighting his way up to the doors,
giving the same salute. A few months ago, Tyler Dykes
was handed a fifty seven month federal sentence for assaulting
(10:28):
police officers during the January sixth riot at the Capitol
in twenty twenty one. If you're trying to do some
math in your head right now, I'll tell you fifty
seven months is just shy of five years. But a
federal prison sentence is kind of like a baby in
that you always measure it in months, not years, and
(10:49):
only the people who have to deal with the time
in question feel like that makes any sense at all.
In the sentencing memorandum written by his defense attorney, he's
just decribed as an impressionable young man. He was just
twenty one years old when he traveled to Washington, d C.
With his friends from church. They said he'd been influenced
(11:10):
by the NonStop media coverage and President Trump's social media
posts into believing that the election had been stolen. He
made incredibly poor decisions. His attorney conceded, but he never
planned to engage in any violence. He was just young
and impetuous, and he got caught up in the crowd.
(11:34):
He was a United States Marine. He was a boy scout,
quite literally. The defense sentencing memo cites his accomplishments as
an Eagle Scout. He was just a nice young man
who goes to church every Sunday and runs a small
IT services company and takes care of his elderly parents.
(11:55):
How could he possibly be the kind of person who
deserves to go to federal prison for making a little mistake.
But that wasn't quite the whole picture. Not that those
things aren't mostly true. They are, but it's a spit
shined image of a much darker situation. Tyler Dykes was
(12:18):
indeed a member of the United States Marine Corps. On
January sixth, twenty twenty one, he was a US Marine
when he wrenched the riot shield from the hands of
a US Capitol police officer and then used that shield
to force his way through the police line and into
the Capitol building. And he remained a United States Marine
(12:39):
until he was given an other than honorable discharge in
twenty twenty two. The revelations that unraveled his life came
out of order. He wasn't identified as a Unite the
Right attendee until twenty twenty two, after he'd already participated
in the January sixth riot in twenty twenty one. He
(13:00):
wasn't identified as the man putting swastika stickers around town
in twenty twenty until he was discharged from the Marines
for it in twenty twenty two, and he wasn't identified
as a participant in the January sixth riot until July
of twenty twenty three, after he'd been convicted for his
conduct at Unite the Right. The consequences of his actions
(13:22):
always seemed to come a little too late, after he'd
already been emboldened by an apparent lack thereof. At his
federal sentencing hearing a few months ago, he told the
judge that he was high on adrenaline during the Capitol
riot and said, I falsely believed that I would be
free of consequences. But maybe we should start at the
(13:46):
beginning rather than the end. In August of twenty seventeen,
Tyler Dykes was nineteen years old. He'd taken a year
off after high school and was living at home home
with his parents in North Carolina that summer after spending
his gap year abroad in Romania. He'd been accepted to
(14:07):
Cornell University and would be moving into his dorm at
the end of the month. Just a week before new
student orientation at Cornell, he took one last trip before
starting college. He came here to Charlottesville on the evening
of August eleventh, twenty seventeen. Tyler Dyke stood among the
(14:29):
hundreds of men who gathered at Nameless Field. It's a
confusing name, Nameless Field. It isn't nameless. It has a name.
The name is nameless Field. I wonder what kind of
who's on first type conversations happened over text message that
night as the crowd assembled. But there he was in
(14:53):
the field, down by the tennis courts behind the library,
and he was handed a torch, and he found a
place in line, and he marched. He chanted with the
crowd as this river of flames wound its way through
the university grounds. Blood and soil, Blood and soil. You
(15:20):
will not replace us, Jews will not replace us. Fuck off,
commis this is our town now, they shouted on the
empty streets as they passed empty buildings. Blood and soil,
blood and soil, blood and soil. They chanted until they
(15:46):
could taste the blood in their own mouths from shouting
themselves hoarse, blood and soil, until they saw blood red.
When the small group of students at the base of
the Thomas Jefferson Statue came into view, the streets had
been empty until the march filled them. The libraries were empty,
(16:10):
the dorms were empty. The academic and administrative buildings were empty.
But as the march reached the top of the rotunda steps,
looking down into the brick plaza below, they knew they
weren't alone anymore. They knew what they were doing. As
(16:30):
they came down those steps, each man, torch in hand,
had a moment. At the top of those stairs, each
marcher could see from that vantage point the tiny group
in the plaza below, students, many of them still just teenagers,
(16:53):
holding a home made banner that read UVA Students Against
White Supremacy, And in that moment on those steps, each
of them made the choice to follow the man in
front of him. As the march wound its way around
the statue, around the students, circling around, arching wide and
(17:18):
then tightening up, encircling them and closing them in. As
the ring of fire closed around the statue around those students,
the violence began almost immediately. Verbal altercations gave way to
fists shouted epithets were chased through the air by streams
(17:40):
of pepper spray. A lit torch was swung, making contact
with a counter protester trying to shield those terrified young people.
I've watched this video a hundred times, a thousand, maybe,
and I still flinch as the flame arcs towards someone
(18:00):
that I count among my closest friends. I tell you
that not to pull at your heart strings. You don't
need to know that that video still makes my chest
feel tight. I'm telling you because I want you to know.
I'm not objective about this. I don't pretend to be.
(18:20):
I don't want to be. I don't believe in this
myth of journalistic objectivity. Everybody has a thumb on the
scale somewhere. Most people just lie about it to you
or even to themselves. Of course, I have a bias here.
(18:44):
I live here. I've sat in courtrooms and in coffee shops,
and on long car rides and on living room couches
with people who are hurt that night. But even if
I had no connection to these people or to this place,
no secret that as a researcher of white supremacist violence
in America, my starting position is always against fascism, against Nazism,
(19:11):
against violence done in the name of white supremacy. And
I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of. As
sociologist and expert on political violence, doctor Peter Seemi, once
set on the stand, no one is ever surprised to
find out that a cancer researcher is interested in preventing cancer.
(19:33):
So yes, I have a stake in this, But you
do too. Maybe you don't know it yet, you don't
know these people. But I choose to betray my own
lack of objectivity here to get you to think about yours,
because I don't think you should be objective about this.
(19:56):
There is no special prize to be won by being
the most diligently neutral observer of fascist violence. You and I, listener,
We are not jurors. We are not ruling on the law.
We are people who have to live in this world.
You should feel something you can't shove down when you
(20:20):
see a man who proudly calls himself a Nazi. Swing
a flaming torch at someone who is trapped, someone whose
only crime is not wanting hate to go unchallenged in
a public square. And that's where Tyler Diykes was that night,
right at the center of this melee. As the air
(20:41):
filled with screams and the burning scent of pepper spray,
Tyler Diykes was fist fighting anyone he could reach. Videos
showed Dikes was the last one still fighting. He threw
the last punch of the night, even as everyone else
seemed to be coming to their senses. When the counter
(21:01):
protesters were finally able to escape from the mob, the
torch marchers took the statue. Several of them climbed the
plinth and cheered for the victory they'd won. Seeg Kile
Hail victory they shouted. Video shows Tyler Dikes pacing back
(21:22):
and forth in front of the statue, right arm extended
in a Nazi salute. After the deadly rally, the next morning,
(21:45):
Tyler Diykes went home. He started at Cornell a few
weeks later, but they didn't go well. He dropped out
after a few months and enlisted in the Marines instead,
and it seems like that may not have gone well either.
After a few months of training, he was discharged to
the Reserves and returned home, which was now South Carolina.
(22:08):
He started an IT company, calling himself the Technology King
of the Low Country, and made house calls to help
suburban grandparents set up their Wi Fi routers. And when
he wasn't troubleshooting a customer's computer or going to church,
he was hanging Swastika banners from highway overpasses with his
friends in the Southern Sons Active Club, a white supremacist
(22:30):
organization operating in Georgia and the Carolinas. A regional cell
of the larger international network of Active Clubs. These Active
clubs are, to put it succinctly, Nazi fight clubs. They
were inspired by Robert Rundo's Rise Above movement, the Southern
(22:50):
California based Nazi street fighting outfit that brawled their way
across the country at right wing political rallies throughout twenty seventeen.
There's no centralized leadership or organizational structure. Active clubs operate
regionally and are operationally independent from one another. They share
(23:11):
a love of mixed martial arts. Both as a hobby
and as training for a coming race war, and engage
in the kind of propaganda campaigns common among groups like
Patriot Front, so hanging banners with racist slogans from bridges
and plastering stickers on street signs and mailboxes around town.
(23:31):
There are active clubs all over the United States, Canada,
and Europe, as well as a faltering effort led by
Thomas Seole to get them going in Australia. Each club
operates independently, but they network and meet up even across
national borders, and there is quite a bit of cross
(23:51):
pollination between the active clubs and other violent white supremacist organizations.
They tend to be on good terms with groups like
Patriot Front, and several notable active club members have ties
to Adam Waffen and Terogram. Andrew Takstov, the New Jersey
teenager and Terogram collective chat member arrested this summer, was
(24:12):
a member of an active club cell in New Jersey.
Active clubs in Finland are involved in paramilitary training of
Karelian separatist groups that fight alongside the Russian Volunteer Corps,
the same Nazi paramilitary group in Ukraine that Andrew Takestov
was on his way to join when he was arrested.
All that to say, this isn't just guys lifting weights
(24:36):
together and talking about their love of the white race.
Active Club members on multiple continents have been arrested for
acts of violence and for planning acts of terrorism. And
the reason I can tell you with an unusually high
degree of certainty that Tyler Dykes was a member of
the Southern Suns Active Club is because of one particular,
(25:00):
no good, very bad day that he had on March seventeenth,
twenty twenty three. You see, Tyler Dykes was indicted by
a grand jury in Virginia in February of twenty twenty three,
but he didn't know that nobody did. Grand juries are
(25:22):
secret things, and his indictment stayed sealed until he was
taken into custody. And with an out of state warrant,
you don't just send a local cop down to get him.
You could, I suppose, but they didn't. The local prosecutor
where the charge is filed can ask cops in the
city where they think he lives to go look for him,
(25:45):
but they aren't always super interested in doing. Some out
of town courts work for them. So oftentimes an out
of state warrant just sort of sits open, waiting for
you to step on it, like a rake on the ground.
If you've ever been pulled over, you've seen a cop
take your license and walk back to his car. He's
(26:06):
putting your name into a computer, and if you have
an open warrant, he's going to find it. If you
cross a border, or go through TSA, or get a
speeding ticket, or have really almost any kind of interaction
with a cop, they're going to run your name. And
in Tyler Dyke's case, he was sitting in an emergency
(26:27):
room in South Carolina making a police report about a
dog bite. Saint Patrick's Day is a big deal in Savannah, Georgia.
I'm not entirely sure why, and that wasn't a rabbit
hole I let myself pursue this week, but it is.
I'm sure there's some particular moment in history where the
(26:50):
city had an unusually high concentration of irishmen, and the
only lasting legacy is the nation's second most debaucherous green
beer soaked parade. I was in Savannah for Saint Patrick's
Day in two thousand and eight, but there was a
tornado that weekend and the blackout closed most of the bar,
so I don't think I got the full experience. And
(27:14):
in twenty twenty three, the Southern Sun's Active Club had
the brilliant idea that Saint Patrick's Day in Savannah would
be the perfect time and the perfect place to hang
a Nazi banner from a highway overpass, because all the
extra traffic in town meant more people would see their message.
Thanks to an Atlanta based anti fascist research collective, we
(27:37):
have an inside look at the private conversations Dykes and
his friends had that day as they were going about
trying to get that banner up. The day didn't start
off well. The group had some trouble locating a good
spot for their banner. They weren't the only ones who
anticipated heavy traffic from tourists heading into town for the holiday.
(28:01):
There were cops nearby several of the locations they'd hoped
to hit. When they finally found a suitable spot, Tyler
Dikes walked back to his car to get the tools
they would need to hang the banner, but before he
got back to his car, he encountered someone walking their dogs.
Diykes claims that he was mauled by three pit bulls,
(28:24):
but that seems like a bit of an over statement.
In the infiltrated group chat, he posted a photo of
a small, but unpleasant looking wound on his left pinky finger.
I feel like you'd come away with more than a
two inch cut on your little finger if you were
truly attacked by even one dog, let alone three pit bulls.
(28:47):
But we only have Tyler's word on this one. A
little before six pm, he texted the Southern Son's group
chat that he was headed to the hospital to have
his hand looked at. While he was waiting to be
seen at the hospital, he texted the group chat again
to let them know that the plan had gone awry
and unfortunately they hadn't been able to hang any of
(29:09):
the banners that day, writing quite literally, everything that could
possibly have gone wrong all happened at exactly the same time.
Half an hour later, though, something else went very wrong
for Tyler Dikes, and he texted the group again, I'm
being arrested by Virginia nuke my account. Dog bites like
(29:34):
gunshot wounds are something that hospital staff are required to
report to the authorities. While Tyler Diykes was waiting for
a doctor to look at his hand. An officer arrived
to take a police report. And when you talk to
a cop in some official capacity, he's going to run
your name. I can't even imagine his surprise when the
(29:58):
officer informed him that he was a wanted fugitive in
a state he hadn't visited in years. His hand was fine,
it seems, and he was taken directly into custody from
the emergency room that night. It took nearly a month
to arrange for his extradition back to Virginia, during which
time he remained in custody. When Tyler Diykes was finally
(30:34):
transported up to Virginia, his attorney asked for a bond hearing.
Makes sense. He'd been in custody for a month, and
it was at that April twenty twenty three bond hearing
that I first saw Tyler Dikes. At that hearing, Tyler
Dykes's father, Scott, took the stand to tell the judge
that if his son was allowed to return home with him,
(30:57):
he would ensure that his son stayed out of trouble,
would return for all of his court hearings. And then
the prosecutor handed Scott Dykes, A few pieces of paper?
Is that your son? He asked. Scott Dykes was still
staring down at the paper in his hands when he said, softly, reluctantly,
(31:21):
it looks like it could be. The pages in his
hands were printed out stills from security camera footage showing
a tall, dark haired young man putting up flyers with
swastikas on them in Sumter, South Carolina. In November of
twenty twenty. The prosecutor asked Scott Dikes if he knew
why his son had been discharged from the Marines. He
(31:44):
didn't know. Tyler had apparently not even told his parents
that he'd been given an other than honorable discharge. He
didn't tell his parents that he'd been interviewed by an
FBI agent from the Joint Terrorism Task Force in twenty nineteen,
or that he was a suspect in the case of
the Sumpter County swastika stickers in twenty twenty. The prosecutor
(32:08):
didn't ask Scott Dikes where his son was on January sixth,
twenty twenty one. Maybe he didn't know. He should have.
We know now that the FBI had been investigating Dikes's
involvement in the insurrection since December of twenty twenty one,
but they may not have shared that information with a
county prosecutor. It was Dikes's own messages in the chat
(32:32):
on the day of his arrest that left him in
jail without bond. After that hearing mere hours before his
arrest on Saint Patrick's day, he was demonstrating what they
call consciousness of guilt. That is, behavior that shows you
knew what you were doing was wrong. His messages show
(32:53):
that he had attempted to evade police in order to
find an overpass, which he planned to use tools to
damage for the purpose of unfurling a racist banner. Then,
upon learning of his arrest, he demonstrated a willingness to
destroy evidence, asking other members of the white supremacist group
to erase his participation, to nuke his account and delete
(33:15):
the chat so police couldn't read it on his phone
once it was checked into evidence. In his ruling denying bond,
the judge told Dikes that day, this court can't believe
you'll be on good behavior if released from custody. It
was barely a month later that Tyler Diykes decided to
plead guilty to the charge of burning an object with
(33:37):
the intent to intimidate. The judge handed down a sentence
of five years, the maximum under the statute, but suspended
all but six months of it. I don't know if
this is a common practice everywhere, but I see it
almost all the time here in Virginia. The judge gives
(33:58):
you a much longer sentence then he actually expects you
to serve, and you just serve that little bit of
your sentence, but that suspended portion hangs over you like
a sort of damocles that will fall if you get
into any trouble during some set period of good behavior.
With the time he'd already served before his extradition and
(34:18):
credit for good behavior, he was scheduled to be released
in July of twenty twenty three, just four months after
that terrible day in March. And here's where I wasted
a whole day of my life. I was curious to
see Tyler Diyke's walk out of the album Rall Charlesville
(34:38):
Regional Jail. I can't explain now why I felt like
that might be an interesting or important thing to see,
and in retrospect it really wouldn't have been. But I
knew his scheduled release date, and I live nearby. I
wasn't busy that day, so I thought i'd try. I
(35:00):
got up early and drove to the jail. I packed
snacks and drinks, and I was prepared to wait around
for a couple of hours. I talked to a few
people who'd been booked into ACRJ, and typically you get
released sometime before lunch. But the hours passed and they
(35:20):
kept passing. I finished all the snacks I brought got bored.
It was hot as hell, and I didn't want to
run my car all day just for the AC so
I just sat there, sweating, waiting. I watched that damn
door like a hawk as the hours passed, and then
(35:45):
I got an email. I have all sorts of automated
email alerts set up related to court cases and custody
status of weird little guys all over the country, some
guys i'd just like to keep track of, or my
right about one day, or I don't know, just nosy.
So not a day goes by that I don't get
(36:07):
some notification that somebody's filed emotion, or they're appealing something,
or they've been transferred to another facility. It's always something,
and there it was a custody status change notification. I'd
been sitting in the jail barking lot for seven hours
waiting for a man who never did walk out the
(36:29):
front door. This email is to inform you that Tyler
Diykes with a fender number one zero six five one six' three,
three was released from custody On july, seventeenth twenty twenty.
Three the release reason is other law enforcement, agency other
(36:50):
law enforcement. Agency usually the email says bonded out or sentence,
served but this one said other law enforcement. Agency that
means he wasn't released at. All that means some kind
of cop from somewhere else picked him. Up he never
(37:15):
walked out the front door because he'd been driven out
the side entrance in a nondescript LOOKING suv with A
Us marshal at the. WHEEL i had to wait until
the following morning for the federal charging documents to show
up in the, System so it wasn't Until july of
twenty twenty three THAT i finally knew what THE fbi
(37:36):
had known for a year and a. Half Tyler dikes
fought his way into The capitol On january, sixth twenty twenty,
one he was charged in a ten count indictment with,
robbery civil, disorder two counts of, assaulting resisting or impeding
an officer with a dangerous, weapon entering or remaining in
(37:57):
a restricted, building disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted,
building engaging in physical violence in a restricted, building disorderly
conduct and a capitol, building engaging in physical violence in
a capitol, building and picketing in a capitol. Building he
was released on bond shortly after being transferred into federal,
custody and in addition to the standard rules of pre trial,
(38:19):
release the judge specifically mandated that he have no contact
with members of The Southern Sons Active club or any
related group while out on, bond and he was ordered
to live at his parents' home and keep to a strict.
Curfew In april of twenty twenty, four he accepted a
plea agreement that dropped eight of the ten charges of the,
(38:41):
indictment pleading guilty only to the two counts of, assaulting,
resisting or impeding certain, officers and with the dangerous weapon
element dropped with no. Trial some questions about this case
will probably never get. Answered In december of twenty twenty,
(39:02):
one THE fbi received an anonymous tip from someone who
Said dikes told them he had entered the capitol On january.
Sixth the full text of the tip is printed in
a filing by the. Government the suspect Is Tyler diykes
lives In, Bluffton South. CAROLINA i was With dikes and
we started talking about The january sixth. Attack we had
(39:26):
differing opinions about, it but was. Respectful he then told
me about how he went into the capitol with a
mask on with the other rioters and started beating up police.
Officers he states he was still in the military at the.
Time he said he has video evidence of him being,
there but he did not show me since we were
in a public. Setting he was there for fund and
(39:49):
wanting to make a. Statement he was there with other
group of, people but would not state. WHO i believe
he was telling the truth about, it AND i believe
he needs to be. Investigated the agent assigned to investigate
the tip confirmed the sources identification Of dikes through typical
investigative means things like issuing a subpoena to his cell phone,
(40:12):
provider comparing footage from the capitol to the, SUSPECTS dmv
photo and so. On but he had an extra source this,
time something AN fbi agent doesn't usually have at his
disposal when he investigates an anonymous tip like. This he
already knew What Tyler dikes looked. Like he had Met
(40:36):
Tyler dikes. Before the agent assigned to follow up on
this tip was the one who had Interviewed dikes In
january of twenty nineteen regarding his potential ties to domestic extremist.
Groups no additional information was offered in this affidavit about
(40:56):
the circumstances that prompted their first, meeting whether any follow
up investigation was, done or if that investigation was at
the request of or reported to The Marine, corps or
even which extremist group THE fbi believed he was involved
in in twenty, nineteen because it couldn't have been The
(41:18):
Southern Sun's Active. Club The Active club network didn't really
exist that early, on back In january of twenty, nineteen
and The Southern suns chapter certainly. Didn't the agent doesn't
give me even a crumb to work with, here SO
i don't, know and whatever it was about that wasn't
(41:41):
what led To dykes's discharge from The. Marines the military
records filed in this case are, sealed but references made
to them specifically cite Those november twenty twenty swastika flyers
In Sumter, County South carolina as the reason for his.
Discharge and that's as much creed information as we're likely
(42:01):
ever going to get about the reason for his removal
from the. Military in a text found on his phone
after his, Arrest dykes had sent a photo of his
discharged letter to Someone he claimed he was being discharged
quote for being incredibly political with my Fellow marines after
(42:22):
the twenty twenty, election incredibly. Political when he was interviewed
by the probation office for the pre sentenced investigation report
in his federal criminal, case he. Lied he told the
probation office that he was asked to leave the military
after not reporting for, drill and that wasn't the only
(42:45):
time he. Lied the government sentencing memorandum also indicates that
despite his willingness to plead guilty to the charges to
be honest about his conduct on that, day he was
not tr truthful in his final interview with federal. Agents
the terms of his plea agreement required his cooperation with
(43:06):
the ongoing investigation into the events Of january. Sixth part
of that agreement was a final debrief interview with federal,
agents which was conducted On june twenty, eighth twenty twenty.
Four in that, Interview dykes again told agents that he
left his home In South carolina mid morning On january
fifth and arrived IN dc that evening sometime after, dark
(43:32):
but early enough to have dinner with his friends before
checking into his hotel for the. Night and that's not
true because his cell phone tells a very different. Story
records obtained From verizon show that his phone was In, Marathon,
florida at three twenty pm On january. Fifth a little
(43:56):
before eight, pm he took a photo with his cell
phone of a slip printed by An American airlines kiosk
at The Miami, airport indicating that he would need to
see a ticket agent for. Assistance his phone pinged again
an hour outside his home In South carolina at twelve
thirty a. M On january. Sixth no clear conclusion is
(44:20):
drawn in the. Memo the prosecutor doesn't ride out exactly
what he thinks this, means but it appears That dykes
drove thirteen hundred miles from The Florida keys To, washington D.
C overnight after unsuccessfully trying to board a flight In.
Miami it would be very hard to forget driving for
(44:45):
twenty hours and then immediately fighting your way inside The
United States capitol even three years after the. Fact that's
not something you'd, forget is. It it seems far more
likely that he chose to conceal his activities in the
lead up To january, Sixth but why it seems unlikely
(45:10):
now that THE doj would choose to pursue additional, Charges although,
remember it is a federal crime to lie to AN fbi,
agent and it obviously wasn't something they cared enough about
to ask the judge to reject the plea, agreement which
they could. Have whatever he was hiding about his trip
(45:31):
To florida the day before the, insurrection he must have
felt like it was worth the possibility of a lot
of extra prison time to keep it to. Himself the
government sentencing memo also details some of what was found
On dike's. Phone in The Southern suns group, chat he
used the Name Nocturnal. Wolf the prosecutor who prepared the
(45:55):
memo included several examples of materials found on the phone
related to the pseudonym things About. Wolves one of those
little odds and ends about wolves was the front cover
of A terogram collective publication called Do it for The,
gram which bears the phrase faceless Lone. Wolf the prosecutor
(46:20):
makes no mention of the contents of the document or
the fact that it is a three hundred page manual
on how to commit varying acts of. Terrorism it seems
he was perhaps unaware that he'd stumbled across a piece
of Neo nazi terrorist. Propaganda there's no transcript of his
(46:42):
sentencing filed in the, case but NBC's RYAN. J riley
reported that Quote dykes did not distance himself from extremist,
ideologies nor did he say he no longer believes the
former president's lies about the. Election his biggest expression of
regret seemed to be for his elderly, parents who adopted
him as a child and who are still providing him
(47:03):
with a monthly. Allowance diykes was given a few months
to get his affairs in order after being sentenced to
fifty seven months back In. July the day before he
was scheduled to turn himself in to begin serving his.
Sentence he filed a last minute motion asking for just
one more. Month the reasons he gave were a series
(47:24):
of doctor's appointments that he needed to drive his eighty
six year old father. To the judge was unimpressed By
dikes's desire to drive his dad to the gastro enrologist
and denied the. Motion he reported to prison last week
On october, ninth twenty twenty. Four if you don't have
(47:44):
any disciplinary, issues you typically serve eighty five percent of federal,
time so he could be released as early As october
of twenty twenty, eight just in time for the next presidential.
Election Weird Little guys is a production Of Cool Zone
(48:08):
media And. iHeartRadio it's, researched written and recorded by, Me Molly.
Conger our executive producers Are Sophie lichterman And Robert. Evans
the show is edited by the wildly Talented Rory. Gagan
the theme music was composed By Brad. Dickard you can
email me At Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot.
COM i will definitely read, it BUT i almost certainly
(48:30):
will not answer. It it's nothing. PERSONAL i don't answer
any of my. Emails you can exchange conspiracy theories about
the show with other listeners on The Weird Little guys.
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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