April 16, 2026 • 39 mins
After losing his job, an ex-Disney employee tried to get his former employer's attention by hacking in and making strange updates to company files.
Original Air Date: 6.5.25
Sources:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69534211/united-states-v-scheuer/
https://www.eeoc.gov/what-you-can-expect-after-you-file-charge
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/us/disney-worker-prison-hacking.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hey everyone, Molly here. I hate to
do this to you, but, as you can probably hear
in my voice, i've been sick this week. It was
just one of those weeks where nothing went quite right.
(00:23):
It broke my glasses, I had to do my taxes,
I got a sinus infection, and you're getting a rerun.
But I promise we'll be back on track next week
as we finish up the story of the racist who
made a Confederate statue out of bathtubs and went to
YMCA Night Law School so he could be a more
effective segregationist. And if it's any consolation, I did get
(00:47):
some really exciting mail this week. I ordered the only
copy for sale anywhere of the pseudonymously authored, self published
novel by the now deceased real guy whose name was
borrowed for the main character of the Turner Diaries. I've
been reading it from my sick bed and it's not
(01:10):
very good at all. I can't wait to tell you
about it. In the meantime, don't forget to send me
your questions for next month's Q and A episode. You
can post them on the show subreddit or email them
to me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com.
You know the only rule by now, just don't post
(01:32):
something that's going to make you one of my weird
little guys. In June of twenty twenty four, Michael Schuyer
had a disagreement with a coworker. It isn't clear from
(01:53):
the court records, so I couldn't tell you exactly what
was said. He says there was a difference of opinion
over a workplace matter. But he's in federal prison and
two of his coworkers now have restraining orders against him,
So I'm inclined to believe there may be more to
the story than that. But that's all we know. That
(02:14):
minor workplace disagreement ruined Michael Schuer's life. Losing his job
was not only financially devastating, it was the death of
his lifelong dream of working for the Walt Disney Corporation.
And losing a job is never easy. It's a crushing blow.
You have to figure out how you're going to pay
(02:34):
the rent, how you're going to get healthcare, how you're
going to find a new job. I can't speak for everybody,
but I think I'm not alone in saying that. It's
also embarrassing, It hurts your feelings, your ego takes a
real hit, and for some people that just isn't something
they can move on from. I'm Molly conger in this
(03:02):
is weird, little guys. This is kind of a silly one.
(03:22):
Nobody gets hurt, nobody dies, nothing really bad actually happened.
I know. I said last week that I ended up
with the episode that came out because I was reaching
around for something quick, because the story I was trying
to write just felt unwieldy and I was having trouble
forcing it into the right shape. Well that's where we
(03:46):
still are this week. I'm still really fighting with something
I think is going to take a few more weeks
to hammer out into any kind of actual narrative. So
here we are again at the eleventh hour, and I
have nothing but a few dozen pages of odds and
ends about a story that spans fifty years, and so
I'm scrounging around for something else. I'm not asking for
(04:09):
your sympathy for anything. You probably have a real job
where you make something or help people, and my job
is just telling you a horrible little story. But all
I can tell you is the truth, and the truth
is sometimes I have no idea how I'm going to
force any more words out of my brain and into
this microphone. So all I've got this week is Michael Schweer.
(04:33):
And like I said, he didn't really hurt anybody. He
wasn't a member of any hate groups. As far as
I can tell, until last summer. He had no history
of any criminal conduct. I couldn't find so much as
a speeding ticket. He was squeaky clean. He was a
family man, married for nearly ten years, and the father
(04:55):
of three young children. But the course of action he
decided on after he got fired last summer is what
makes him a weird little guy. And I think he's
actually a tiny example of one of the emerging weird
little guy archetypes. I don't have a name for it yet.
(05:15):
I don't really have the weird little guy taxonomy mapped out,
but patterns are starting to appear in these stories. There
are distinct types of weird little guy, and one of
them is a kind of guy who can't accept when
he's wrong. More importantly, he can't accept being wronged. And
(05:39):
God help you if you have even a passing encounter
with this kind of guy. For some of them, the
perceived slight is so minor that it's not something I
think I would ever think about again, let alone devote
the rest of my life to getting revenge over it.
If you listen to the whole catalog of this show,
(06:01):
you've heard about some of these guys I'm thinking about,
people like Frank Sweeney from the pair of episodes back
in September. Frank was a lifelong neo Nazi, sure, but
mostly he was a con man. He ended up in
prison a couple of times for little frauds and cons,
things like putting ads in gun magazines for fancy guns
(06:24):
that he didn't actually own, and then accepting numerous buyers
money for these imaginary collector's items. Later in his life,
he cut the tails off of stray cats and sold
them to gullible people who thought they were buying fancy,
purebred tailless cats. He conned the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ,
and the Witness Protection Program into thinking that he was
(06:46):
helping them to apprehend an escaped Soviet spy that he'd
befriended in prison. He once tricked a mob lawyer into
flying him across the country and putting him up in
a nice hotel in exchange for testimony about a Chicago
mob boss he'd want shared a cell with. He loved
to lie. But more than that, I think the defining
(07:08):
characteristic of a guy like Frank Sweeney is his sense
of self righteous indignation. When he felt like someone had
wronged him, he made it his life's work to get
back at them, to hurt them back the way they'd
hurt him, and he did it in some really bizarre ways.
(07:32):
In the early nineties, when he was living in an
apartment in New Jersey, a family with children moved into
a neighboring apartment, and once he decided that the neighbors
were intentionally disregarding his requests to keep their children quiet,
he made it his life's mission to destroy the entire family.
He spread rumors that the father had HIV and that
(07:54):
he'd given it to his children. He shut off their
power at random. He filled the law their front door
with staples so they couldn't get into their home. He
had their mail routed to a random address in Iowa.
And he subscribed to their nine year old son to
pornographic magazines. And that's unhinged behavior. That is an unnecessary
(08:16):
escalation to the problem of a noisy fourth grader, and
it was all because he felt entitled to complete silence
in his apartment and total obedience from his neighbors. And
two decades after that, when he was already a very
old man, the stranger made a passing comment about how
(08:37):
he'd parked his car at the post office parking lot,
and instead of just letting it go like almost anyone
else on earth would, he spent three years stalking that
woman and her entire family, sending them threatening postcards, spreading
rumors that they'd engaged in sexually deviant behavior, that they
(08:58):
were drug addicts and criminals, and they were doing tax fraud.
Three years because she commented on how he had parked
his car. And then there was Walter Fitzpatrick from those
episodes back in November. He was the sovereign citizen who
tried to citizens arrest an entire courthouse in rural Tennessee
(09:20):
because they wouldn't help him indict President Barack Obama for treason.
And Walter Fitzpatrick had a long history of this kind
of grievance motivated behavior. He'd been banned from his congressman's
office after the receptionist had to get a restraining order
against him because he refused to accept that. They just
couldn't help him get a new trial in his Navy
(09:42):
court martial. And then there are the weird little guys
who try to use the courts to get their revenge,
becoming vexatious litigants, filing lawsuit after lawsuit against anyone who
says no to them. Guys like Robert Maller from a
few weeks ago, the one time arms dealer who shipped
hundreds of guns to Neo Nazis in South Africa. In
(10:04):
his quieter older years, he seems to work out his
anger by filing a constant stream of nuisance lawsuits. He
filed a lawsuit against the hospital that didn't perform his
elective surgery at the exact time they'd scheduled it. For
lawsuits against the guys from the table tennis club who
asked him to stop coming around because his behavior was frightening.
(10:26):
A lawsuit against the state because he didn't think it
was fair that he got a traffic ticket, lawsuit against
a restaurant for asking him not to let his dog
touch the food on the buffet. Like I said, I'm
still working on the taxonomy here, But I think these
are all, to some degree the same kind of guy.
(10:47):
The common denominator is that they can't handle discomfort. They
can't handle someone telling them no, they can't handle being wrong,
they can't handle not being the protect agonist of reality.
This is their story and we're just the characters in it.
We're supposed to behave the way he wants us to,
(11:10):
and if we don't, his reaction is not going to
be normal. And that's the mold that I think Michael
Scheuer fits into. He isn't, all things considered, really the
kind of guy I'm interested in. This isn't the kind
of story I would normally choose for an episode of
(11:31):
this show, because, like I said, he wasn't in any
kind of hate group and he didn't hurt anybody. But
I am interested in this kind of guy, the kind
of guy whose reaction to a pretty normal life event
is decidedly not normal at all. The kind of guy
(11:53):
who showed no other outward signs of being violent or hateful,
but when confirms hunted with an obstacle, suddenly reveals a
previously hidden and very peculiar interest in mass shootings and swastikas.
But I guess we should start at the beginning. Michael
(12:15):
Schuyer loved Disney. It had always been his dream to
work for the company. After graduating from Kent State in Ohio,
he moved to Orlando to try to get his foot
in the door. He started as a janitor and worked
his way up, and on this front, I guess you
do have to hand it to him. It looks like
(12:36):
he did the work. He had a dream and he
did the work to try to make it come true.
He had a college degree, but he was willing to
take an entry level job making up trash at a
theme park if that's what it took to be close
to Mickey Mouse. He continued working at Disney while he
earned his business degree, and slowly but surely, he worked
(12:59):
his way up from groundskeeper to cast member and eventually
got an office job at Disney. By twenty eighteen, he
was working as a financial systems analyst when COVID hit.
His job was one of many that were cut by
the company, and he spent the year that he was
laid off trying anything he could to get back in,
(13:21):
and he was eventually rehired as part of the team
doing technical support for computers. Installed on Disney cruise ships,
and in twenty twenty four, he was working on the
team tasked with designing and updating the menus and menu
signs used at Disney theme parks and resorts. In twenty
twenty four, Michael Schuer's wife gave birth to their third child.
(13:44):
I don't know if Michael Schuyer took advantage of the
full eight weeks of paternity leave that Disney claims to offer,
but I do know that he took paternity leave because
it was just a few days after returning from that
leave in June of twenty twenty four that the incident
took place. What exactly happened is in dispute. According to
(14:07):
his defense attorney, his version of events is this quote.
Shortly after returning to work, mister Schuyer voiced a difference
of opinion to his supervisor about a new process of
menu creation. He believed his team agreed with him, but
his supervisor did not. He met with his supervisor and
(14:28):
a disagreement occurred. Mister Scheuer had a panic attack during
the meeting. The next supervisor up the chain of command
stated to mister Schuyer that he did not threaten his supervisor,
but that mister Schuyer was going to be suspended. A
sworn statement from the supervisor in question, though, reads in
(14:48):
June twenty twenty four, Michael Schuer was terminated from employment
due to misconduct against me in which he threatened me
at work, and the government was prepared to present a
witness who would testify that his behavior had been aggressive
and threatening in the meeting that led to his termination.
And maybe that comes down to semantics. Maybe she perceived
(15:10):
his conduct as threatening without him actually making a direct threat.
That is technically different in the eyes of the law.
But I think any reasonable person can understand that if
you make your supervisor feel like she is in danger,
you might get fired. He was initially just sent home
(15:47):
and suspended, but after he sent an email to human
Resources described only as quote twenty four questions pertaining to
the suspension, which I'm sure had a very normal to,
the decision was made to terminate his employment with Disney.
And this is the point at which he crossed the
(16:08):
weird little guy rubicon. He was upset. It wasn't fair.
This was his dream. He loved Disney, he loved working
for Disney, and he needed that job. He needed the
health insurance. He had a family to take care of.
For God's sake, they just didn't understand. If they would
have heard him out, they would understand that they were
(16:31):
wrong to fire him, but they wouldn't take his calls.
He claims that he was unable to find an employment
lawyer willing to take his case. He says he quote
filed a complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
but did not get a quick response. He felt isolated
and depressed. He did not understand why nobody would speak
(16:54):
with him. And this is the explanation his attorney offered
for what happened. Next quote, he turned to what he
thought would get Disney to respond to him. I'm not
an expert in employment law, but I did look up
how long it usually takes to get a response from
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. If you file a complaint online,
(17:19):
the law says they have ten days to send notice
of the complaint to your former employer, and then once
they do that, the employer has thirty days from that
date to respond to it. The average complaint takes about
ten months to resolve start to finish. But he didn't
even wait thirty days before he decided to change tactics.
(17:41):
He started trying to get Disney's attention his own way
less than three weeks after he was fired. And so
you might be thinking, oh, he probably sent some weird
emails to his former co workers, right, Maybe he started
showing up outside the office or making a lot of
phone call And those are all reasonable guesses. Those are
(18:04):
things you might do if your stated goal was to
get someone's attention. No, what he decided to do is
much weirder, and honestly, I don't understand why he thinks
we would believe his claim that this was the only
thing he could think of that would get them to
call him again. From his lawyer quote, he started altering
(18:30):
Disney's menus to try to get their attention and respond
to him. Now, remember that was his job before he
was fired. He worked on the team responsible for designing, editing,
and updating the files used to print the menus at
restaurants and cafes at Disney parks and hotels. Once the
(18:50):
files were approved by the team at Disney, the physical
menus were printed by a Minnesota based print and marketing
company called Tailor Corporation. Just a few weeks after being fired,
Scheyer logged into the online application used by the print
company to manage the menu files. A lot of the
news coverage about this case refers to what he did
(19:11):
as hacking, in which I didn't realize is technically the
correct word for what happened. Hacking doesn't necessarily require any
particular set of skills or you know, it's not like
a nineties movie where they're tippy tapping on the keyboard
as all the numbers flash on the screen. No, it
just means any unauthorized access to a computer device or network.
(19:34):
And he definitely was not authorized to be logging in.
But the company had actually just forgotten to change the
password to the administrative account, and once he logged into
that administrator's account, he created a new employee profile for
himself using a fake name, and then using that account
with a fake name, he logged in and he went
(19:58):
to town at least all of the font files for all
of the menus in the system, And this sounds like hell.
He didn't just change the fonts that were used in
the text of the menus. He changed the source files
for all of the fonts in every menu, so all
(20:21):
of the names of the fonts still appeared to be correct,
but those names were now connected to a corresponding file
for a different font, and he'd changed most of those
fonts to wing dings, the font that's just weird little symbols.
And because he'd altered the font files themselves, the system
(20:43):
then started pushing out this change to every single one
of the thousands of files ever uploaded to this system,
and this rendered the entire application completely useless for at
least a week. And so because this took the entire
system off line and rendered every single file useless, obviously
(21:04):
they noticed this immediately. Disney pretty quickly tracked down the
source of the problem and they changed all the passwords
so this couldn't happen again. But that didn't really stop him.
So now that one avenue had been closed off, he
just moved to a different strategy. If he couldn't log in,
(21:24):
he would make sure no one else could either. He
started small targeting those immediate supervisors, the ones who'd fired him,
and he used their log in names and entered random
incorrect passwords, making these repeated bad attempts to access the system,
which would then trigger the accounts to be locked out.
(21:45):
At first, he was just doing this manually, so you
have to imagine him sitting alone at his computer while
his chronically ill wife is trying to take care of
their three young children, one of whom is a newborn baby,
and he's just sitting there at his computer again and
again and again, typing in a random keyboard smash password
and hitting enter over it over and over again so
(22:09):
that his old boss can't access her email. Throughout August
and September of twenty twenty four, these attacks escalated, and
he eventually wrote a script to automate the process of
making these thousands and thousands of login attempts. On one
day alone, he made eight thousand login attempts across accounts
(22:31):
belonging to the four people that he thought were responsible
for firing him, and he eventually branched out to fourteen
different accounts, all of which belonged to members of the
team he'd worked on before he was fired. Over the
course of about a month, he made one hundred thousand
log in attempts, locking these employees out of their accounts
(22:52):
for days at a time. And around the same time
he's ramping up these attacks on his former co workers accounts,
he found a new way to mess with the menus.
Disney had changed all the passwords, so he couldn't access
the application that was used by the Disney production team anymore.
But the company that actually prints the finished menu files
(23:14):
had their own system. All finished menu files had to
be uploaded to the print company through a secure file
transfer protocol, so he made his own menu files and
uploaded them directly to the printer. His initial attempt to
get Disney's attention had made the menus unusable. They had
(23:37):
nonsense fonts, they wouldn't load the image files, or they
just came up as blank pages, so everyone noticed this.
This was a very obvious attempt, But this time around
he was a lot more subtle. If you're just looking
quickly at these files, you wouldn't notice there was anything wrong. Honestly,
(23:57):
they might have even made it all the way through
a proofreading process if you weren't being really meticulous. Because
he's just changing individual words. He's changing the prices by
a dollar or two. He removed an asterisk, he changed
the QR codes. They're just little changes, almost like maybe
he didn't want them to notice this time, And honestly,
(24:22):
some of them are kind of funny. I mean overall, yes,
this is a bad situation. He should not have done
any of this, But if he'd just stuck with immature
little jokes, the whole story would have a really different tone,
because it's hard to be mad about stuff like changing
cheesy grits to cheesy shits on the menu for a
(24:45):
cafe at Disney's old Key West resort, or changing shellfish
to hellfish, or changing the description of an English breakfast
tea from a psalm te to just ask tea is
a little bit funny. I'm not mad imagining an old
couple in Key West seeing cheesy shits on their menu.
(25:05):
It's whatever. But unfortunately, most of the changes were not
funny swear words. Most of the changes were modifications to
the allergen information on menu items across multiple dining locations,
removing alerts on menu items that contained potentially fatal food
allergens like peanuts. On other menus, he altered the region
(25:28):
listed for wine selections. That one sounds mostly harmless to me.
Not a wine stob, so I don't really care where
the grapes were grown. I'm not going to pretend I
can taste the difference. But he swapped out the actual
locations for places where well known mass shootings have occurred.
In one case, the shooting had been painfully recent. He
(25:52):
swapped out Willamette Valley on one wine for Appalachi High,
an unmistakable reference to a school shooting in Georgia that
it only just happened the week that he did that.
On another menu, he uploaded a small image of a swastika.
(26:24):
He would later claim that he never actually intended for
any of these altered files to get printed. He said
that he knew Disney employees reviewed every file and that
they would catch the alterations before they went to the printer.
He wasn't actually trying to poison any children with peanut allergies.
He just wanted Disney to call him. He didn't want
(26:47):
these menus to end up in anyone's hands. He just
wanted attention. But that claim falls apart by the time
he switched to a new mode of attack, He uploaded
altered files direct into the server that functioned as the
print queue for the company that printed the menus, So
by that point in the process, the printer is receiving
(27:09):
what they believe to be a file that has been
proofed and approved and is ready to print, and they did,
in fact print thousands of these altered menus and signs,
although by the time they did print these, the investigation
was coming to an end and the affected items were
destroyed before they were shipped out, and he wasn't hard
(27:31):
to catch. Immediately after the initial unauthorized access was detected,
Disney launched an internal investigation. Multiple employees interviewed during this
process brought up the fact that Michael Schoeyer had just
been fired. Further investigation showed the attacks had all been
made by someone using a VPN to mask their IP address,
(27:55):
but when they looked further back in the company logs,
they found that before he was fired, tired Michael Scheuer
had accessed his work email from home, and when he
did that, he had his VPN on, so he managed
to mask the true IP address of his home computer,
but because he used the same VPN throughout, he was
(28:16):
still using an IP address that was provably connected to him.
On September twenty third, twenty twenty four, multiple members of
the menu production team were locked out of their accounts. Again.
Someone was making hundreds and hundreds of attempts to access
their accounts using incorrect passwords. At twelve forty one pm
(28:40):
that afternoon, FBI agents knocked on Michael Schuer's front door.
They had a warrant to search his home and seize
his computers. At twelve forty six pm, the wave of
login attempts suddenly stopped, and it never started again. Two
minutes after that, Michael Schuyer answered his front door. He
(29:05):
claimed he was surprised to see the FBI there, but
he made a strange comment that he wouldn't have been
surprised if it was the local sheriff there to tell
him to stop sending emails that might be interpreted as threatening.
I have no idea what that means. That never comes
up again. He told the FBI agents that sure, he
(29:27):
definitely used his home computer to access systems related to
his job when he still worked there, and maybe he
logged into some work related stuff after he was fired,
just to get his old payst ubs, things like that,
but he couldn't think of any reason why they'd be
there asking him questions like that, And when they explained
to him why they were there and what they were investigating,
(29:51):
the outright denied having done anything of the sort. And
then he speculated that maybe Disney was framing him because
they were worried about him. The FBI took his computers
with them that day, but they didn't make an arrest.
A few days later, Michael Scheuer hired an attorney and
(30:12):
checked himself into an impatient mental health facility. Meanwhile, the
FBI was still building their case against him, including getting
a search warrant for his Google account. Then, on October
twenty second, twenty twenty four, a month after they searched
his house, Michael Schuer received an automated notice from Google
(30:33):
that they'd been served with a warrant for his account
and they would be complying with the order to turn
over his account information. Now, I imagine that's a really scary
email to get. I'm not sure what my initial reaction
would be in that situation. The right answer if this
happens to you is to call a lawyer. The extremely
(30:55):
wrong answer is to then type please explain this to
me at the top of the email, and then forward
that email to the FBI agent who was just at
your house, and then follow that up with another email
the next day demanding that the agent loop in the
victim of the crime. On the conversation so you can
get some answers about what's going on here. Perhaps an
(31:18):
even worse course of action in this situation would be
to then drive to your former boss's house in the
middle of the night and stand on his front porch,
making a thumbs up at his security camera, and then
just walking away. It's hard to say what you would
do in a stressful situation that you have never experienced before.
(31:39):
I don't want a Monday morning quarterback here. I like
to think that I would just call a lawyer. I
don't think that I would do all that other stuff.
But that is what Michael Scheyer did. The day after
he paid that ominous visit to his former supervisor, the
FBI rode up and filed the criminal complaint. Whatever timeline
(32:01):
they'd had in mind was irrelevant. Now this guy was
behaving unpredictably and they needed to go ahead and make
the arrest, probably in large part because he made that
strange nighttime visit to his former boss's house and then
the subsequent restraining orders granted to two of his former supervisors.
He was held without bond. After two months in jail,
(32:24):
he entered a plea agreement. He pled guilty to computer
hacking and identity theft, and was sentenced to thirty six
months in prison. During the three year period of supervised release.
After he gets out, he's not allowed to have any
contact with any of his victims. So that's those fourteen
co workers and the Disney Corporation in the grand scheme
(32:47):
of weird little guys. This is all pretty minor. Nobody
really got hurt. It cost about one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars to reprint the effected materials, and Disney estimates
that the ordeal cost them about six hundred thousand dollars
in total. I have to admit I don't particularly care
if the Walt Disney Corporation lost half a million dollars.
(33:10):
If the alterations hadn't been caught and those menus had
been sent out to the restaurants, someone could have gotten
seriously hurt. But they didn't, and according to Michael Schuyer,
he knew they wouldn't. I don't know that that's true.
It's impossible to say at this point, but again, in
(33:31):
the end, nothing really happened, did it. I initially came
across this case during my regular search for newly filed
cases containing certain keywords I like to look for. I
think in this case it was the word swastika. But
I don't actually really think that this guy's a Nazi.
(33:53):
I don't have any other evidence that points to that
swastika being a larger part of his life. When the
FBI came and took his computer away, there was a
file on his desktop called swastika dot png. He must
have googled the word swastika and then saved the image
that he wanted to use on the menu. It kind
(34:15):
of reminds me of early four chan culture. I don't
mean the four Chan of today. I mean way back
in the day before those guys were genuinely sincere neo
Nazis and mass murder enthusiasts. A lot of them were
just shit talking. They wanted to be extreme, they wanted
to be edgy. They wanted to post the most shocking,
fucked up stuff they could think of because that was
(34:36):
funny or thrilling or interesting. I guess so I'm inclined
to believe he put the swastika on the menu because
it was the worst thing he could think of, not
because he actually liked it. I mean, I hope that's
the case. I'm a little less generous when it comes
(34:57):
to the mass shooting thing, though. That's odd to me.
That feels like a manifestation of some nascent interest. I
don't know that that's something that would come immediately to
mind if you're just trolling and you have no existing
preoccupation with mass shootings. You know. But that's just my gut.
There's no evidence of anything at all about his motivations.
(35:22):
This is the only thing he ever did. He crashed
out at work, and it sent him into a tailspin
that ended in federal prison. The only glimpse into Michael
Schuer's motivation that I can offer you is this Reddit
post he made just a few days before the FBI
showed up at his house for the first time. On
a subreddit for people with social anxiety. He made a
(35:44):
post with the title reaching the end question mark. It's long,
but it reads, in part, the people involved in firing
me treated me like a criminal, me who is afraid
of everyone and just wants to blend into the background.
I was blown away how absolutely nobody cared about me.
(36:05):
Not one person from work reached out to check on me.
I'm sure part of the reason is because I'm a man,
and everyone just assumed I don't need anyone. Maybe the
other part is because I'm an awkward asshole. I have
no friends, no work connections, nothing. I've already determined I
will never work again. Nobody cares about me. He goes
(36:29):
on to say that he started therapy earlier that year,
but when he got fired, he realized it was too late,
too late for what is unclear, too late to change,
too late to make anything of his life. It has
a vaguely suicidal tone, but he doesn't actually express a
desire to harm himself. On the contrary, he seems fixated
(36:53):
on harming others, writing quote, every day since I was fired,
I sit around fuming, planning revenge because I feel so wronged.
But then I remember, maybe they aren't the problem. Maybe
it's me. I've always been afraid of everybody, but it's
everybody that's been afraid of me. And there it is,
(37:16):
isn't it. He said it himself because I feel so wronged.
It's remarkably self aware. It reminds me a lot of
what Frank Sweeney said when the cops finally searched his
house and discovered he'd been the one sending those threatening
postcards all those years, he just admitted it. He said
(37:40):
that woman in the parking lot had made him feel embarrassed,
and it made him feel better to know that he
was causing her distress and return. Be a weird little
guy is something that exists on a spectrum. I think
some of them are truly monsters. They kill, name, torture,
(38:02):
and terrorize. They carry out mass shootings and blow up
synagogues and daycares. They're trying to start a race war,
they want to barricade themselves on a compound and shoot
it out with the police, or they just want to
gain enough political power to punish their enemies. Those are
the guys I was thinking about when I started the show.
But there are weird little guys out there who are
(38:23):
much much littler, guys whose behavior fits the archetype but
only registers a little blit on the radar. And those
are the kinds of guys you're most likely to meet
one day. God willing, most of us will never meet
a mass shooter, but you probably will eventually encounter the
(38:44):
kind of guy who just can't take no for an answer,
so he puts a swastika on the menu at the
Mickey Mouse Cafe. Weird Little Guys is a production of
(39:08):
cools On Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written, and recorded
by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Litterman
and Malbert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly
talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange
(39:29):
conspiracy theories about the show with out the listeners on
the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't boast anything that's
going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys
Cool Zone Media. Hey everyone, Molly here. I hate to
do this to you, but, as you can probably hear
in my voice, i've been sick this week. It was
just one of those weeks where nothing went quite right.
(00:23):
It broke my glasses, I had to do my taxes,
I got a sinus infection, and you're getting a rerun.
But I promise we'll be back on track next week
as we finish up the story of the racist who
made a Confederate statue out of bathtubs and went to
YMCA Night Law School so he could be a more
effective segregationist. And if it's any consolation, I did get
(00:47):
some really exciting mail this week. I ordered the only
copy for sale anywhere of the pseudonymously authored, self published
novel by the now deceased real guy whose name was
borrowed for the main character of the Turner Diaries. I've
been reading it from my sick bed and it's not
(01:10):
very good at all. I can't wait to tell you
about it. In the meantime, don't forget to send me
your questions for next month's Q and A episode. You
can post them on the show subreddit or email them
to me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com.
You know the only rule by now, just don't post
(01:32):
something that's going to make you one of my weird
little guys. In June of twenty twenty four, Michael Schuyer
had a disagreement with a coworker. It isn't clear from
(01:53):
the court records, so I couldn't tell you exactly what
was said. He says there was a difference of opinion
over a workplace matter. But he's in federal prison and
two of his coworkers now have restraining orders against him,
So I'm inclined to believe there may be more to
the story than that. But that's all we know. That
(02:14):
minor workplace disagreement ruined Michael Schuer's life. Losing his job
was not only financially devastating, it was the death of
his lifelong dream of working for the Walt Disney Corporation.
And losing a job is never easy. It's a crushing blow.
You have to figure out how you're going to pay
(02:34):
the rent, how you're going to get healthcare, how you're
going to find a new job. I can't speak for everybody,
but I think I'm not alone in saying that. It's
also embarrassing, It hurts your feelings, your ego takes a
real hit, and for some people that just isn't something
they can move on from. I'm Molly conger in this
(03:02):
is weird, little guys. This is kind of a silly one.
(03:22):
Nobody gets hurt, nobody dies, nothing really bad actually happened.
I know. I said last week that I ended up
with the episode that came out because I was reaching
around for something quick, because the story I was trying
to write just felt unwieldy and I was having trouble
forcing it into the right shape. Well that's where we
(03:46):
still are this week. I'm still really fighting with something
I think is going to take a few more weeks
to hammer out into any kind of actual narrative. So
here we are again at the eleventh hour, and I
have nothing but a few dozen pages of odds and
ends about a story that spans fifty years, and so
I'm scrounging around for something else. I'm not asking for
(04:09):
your sympathy for anything. You probably have a real job
where you make something or help people, and my job
is just telling you a horrible little story. But all
I can tell you is the truth, and the truth
is sometimes I have no idea how I'm going to
force any more words out of my brain and into
this microphone. So all I've got this week is Michael Schweer.
(04:33):
And like I said, he didn't really hurt anybody. He
wasn't a member of any hate groups. As far as
I can tell, until last summer. He had no history
of any criminal conduct. I couldn't find so much as
a speeding ticket. He was squeaky clean. He was a
family man, married for nearly ten years, and the father
(04:55):
of three young children. But the course of action he
decided on after he got fired last summer is what
makes him a weird little guy. And I think he's
actually a tiny example of one of the emerging weird
little guy archetypes. I don't have a name for it yet.
(05:15):
I don't really have the weird little guy taxonomy mapped out,
but patterns are starting to appear in these stories. There
are distinct types of weird little guy, and one of
them is a kind of guy who can't accept when
he's wrong. More importantly, he can't accept being wronged. And
(05:39):
God help you if you have even a passing encounter
with this kind of guy. For some of them, the
perceived slight is so minor that it's not something I
think I would ever think about again, let alone devote
the rest of my life to getting revenge over it.
If you listen to the whole catalog of this show,
(06:01):
you've heard about some of these guys I'm thinking about,
people like Frank Sweeney from the pair of episodes back
in September. Frank was a lifelong neo Nazi, sure, but
mostly he was a con man. He ended up in
prison a couple of times for little frauds and cons,
things like putting ads in gun magazines for fancy guns
(06:24):
that he didn't actually own, and then accepting numerous buyers
money for these imaginary collector's items. Later in his life,
he cut the tails off of stray cats and sold
them to gullible people who thought they were buying fancy,
purebred tailless cats. He conned the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ,
and the Witness Protection Program into thinking that he was
(06:46):
helping them to apprehend an escaped Soviet spy that he'd
befriended in prison. He once tricked a mob lawyer into
flying him across the country and putting him up in
a nice hotel in exchange for testimony about a Chicago
mob boss he'd want shared a cell with. He loved
to lie. But more than that, I think the defining
(07:08):
characteristic of a guy like Frank Sweeney is his sense
of self righteous indignation. When he felt like someone had
wronged him, he made it his life's work to get
back at them, to hurt them back the way they'd
hurt him, and he did it in some really bizarre ways.
(07:32):
In the early nineties, when he was living in an
apartment in New Jersey, a family with children moved into
a neighboring apartment, and once he decided that the neighbors
were intentionally disregarding his requests to keep their children quiet,
he made it his life's mission to destroy the entire family.
He spread rumors that the father had HIV and that
(07:54):
he'd given it to his children. He shut off their
power at random. He filled the law their front door
with staples so they couldn't get into their home. He
had their mail routed to a random address in Iowa.
And he subscribed to their nine year old son to
pornographic magazines. And that's unhinged behavior. That is an unnecessary
(08:16):
escalation to the problem of a noisy fourth grader, and
it was all because he felt entitled to complete silence
in his apartment and total obedience from his neighbors. And
two decades after that, when he was already a very
old man, the stranger made a passing comment about how
(08:37):
he'd parked his car at the post office parking lot,
and instead of just letting it go like almost anyone
else on earth would, he spent three years stalking that
woman and her entire family, sending them threatening postcards, spreading
rumors that they'd engaged in sexually deviant behavior, that they
(08:58):
were drug addicts and criminals, and they were doing tax fraud.
Three years because she commented on how he had parked
his car. And then there was Walter Fitzpatrick from those
episodes back in November. He was the sovereign citizen who
tried to citizens arrest an entire courthouse in rural Tennessee
(09:20):
because they wouldn't help him indict President Barack Obama for treason.
And Walter Fitzpatrick had a long history of this kind
of grievance motivated behavior. He'd been banned from his congressman's
office after the receptionist had to get a restraining order
against him because he refused to accept that. They just
couldn't help him get a new trial in his Navy
(09:42):
court martial. And then there are the weird little guys
who try to use the courts to get their revenge,
becoming vexatious litigants, filing lawsuit after lawsuit against anyone who
says no to them. Guys like Robert Maller from a
few weeks ago, the one time arms dealer who shipped
hundreds of guns to Neo Nazis in South Africa. In
(10:04):
his quieter older years, he seems to work out his
anger by filing a constant stream of nuisance lawsuits. He
filed a lawsuit against the hospital that didn't perform his
elective surgery at the exact time they'd scheduled it. For
lawsuits against the guys from the table tennis club who
asked him to stop coming around because his behavior was frightening.
(10:26):
A lawsuit against the state because he didn't think it
was fair that he got a traffic ticket, lawsuit against
a restaurant for asking him not to let his dog
touch the food on the buffet. Like I said, I'm
still working on the taxonomy here, But I think these
are all, to some degree the same kind of guy.
(10:47):
The common denominator is that they can't handle discomfort. They
can't handle someone telling them no, they can't handle being wrong,
they can't handle not being the protect agonist of reality.
This is their story and we're just the characters in it.
We're supposed to behave the way he wants us to,
(11:10):
and if we don't, his reaction is not going to
be normal. And that's the mold that I think Michael
Scheuer fits into. He isn't, all things considered, really the
kind of guy I'm interested in. This isn't the kind
of story I would normally choose for an episode of
(11:31):
this show, because, like I said, he wasn't in any
kind of hate group and he didn't hurt anybody. But
I am interested in this kind of guy, the kind
of guy whose reaction to a pretty normal life event
is decidedly not normal at all. The kind of guy
(11:53):
who showed no other outward signs of being violent or hateful,
but when confirms hunted with an obstacle, suddenly reveals a
previously hidden and very peculiar interest in mass shootings and swastikas.
But I guess we should start at the beginning. Michael
(12:15):
Schuyer loved Disney. It had always been his dream to
work for the company. After graduating from Kent State in Ohio,
he moved to Orlando to try to get his foot
in the door. He started as a janitor and worked
his way up, and on this front, I guess you
do have to hand it to him. It looks like
(12:36):
he did the work. He had a dream and he
did the work to try to make it come true.
He had a college degree, but he was willing to
take an entry level job making up trash at a
theme park if that's what it took to be close
to Mickey Mouse. He continued working at Disney while he
earned his business degree, and slowly but surely, he worked
(12:59):
his way up from groundskeeper to cast member and eventually
got an office job at Disney. By twenty eighteen, he
was working as a financial systems analyst when COVID hit.
His job was one of many that were cut by
the company, and he spent the year that he was
laid off trying anything he could to get back in,
(13:21):
and he was eventually rehired as part of the team
doing technical support for computers. Installed on Disney cruise ships,
and in twenty twenty four, he was working on the
team tasked with designing and updating the menus and menu
signs used at Disney theme parks and resorts. In twenty
twenty four, Michael Schuer's wife gave birth to their third child.
(13:44):
I don't know if Michael Schuyer took advantage of the
full eight weeks of paternity leave that Disney claims to offer,
but I do know that he took paternity leave because
it was just a few days after returning from that
leave in June of twenty twenty four that the incident
took place. What exactly happened is in dispute. According to
(14:07):
his defense attorney, his version of events is this quote.
Shortly after returning to work, mister Schuyer voiced a difference
of opinion to his supervisor about a new process of
menu creation. He believed his team agreed with him, but
his supervisor did not. He met with his supervisor and
(14:28):
a disagreement occurred. Mister Scheuer had a panic attack during
the meeting. The next supervisor up the chain of command
stated to mister Schuyer that he did not threaten his supervisor,
but that mister Schuyer was going to be suspended. A
sworn statement from the supervisor in question, though, reads in
(14:48):
June twenty twenty four, Michael Schuer was terminated from employment
due to misconduct against me in which he threatened me
at work, and the government was prepared to present a
witness who would testify that his behavior had been aggressive
and threatening in the meeting that led to his termination.
And maybe that comes down to semantics. Maybe she perceived
(15:10):
his conduct as threatening without him actually making a direct threat.
That is technically different in the eyes of the law.
But I think any reasonable person can understand that if
you make your supervisor feel like she is in danger,
you might get fired. He was initially just sent home
(15:47):
and suspended, but after he sent an email to human
Resources described only as quote twenty four questions pertaining to
the suspension, which I'm sure had a very normal to,
the decision was made to terminate his employment with Disney.
And this is the point at which he crossed the
(16:08):
weird little guy rubicon. He was upset. It wasn't fair.
This was his dream. He loved Disney, he loved working
for Disney, and he needed that job. He needed the
health insurance. He had a family to take care of.
For God's sake, they just didn't understand. If they would
have heard him out, they would understand that they were
(16:31):
wrong to fire him, but they wouldn't take his calls.
He claims that he was unable to find an employment
lawyer willing to take his case. He says he quote
filed a complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
but did not get a quick response. He felt isolated
and depressed. He did not understand why nobody would speak
(16:54):
with him. And this is the explanation his attorney offered
for what happened. Next quote, he turned to what he
thought would get Disney to respond to him. I'm not
an expert in employment law, but I did look up
how long it usually takes to get a response from
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. If you file a complaint online,
(17:19):
the law says they have ten days to send notice
of the complaint to your former employer, and then once
they do that, the employer has thirty days from that
date to respond to it. The average complaint takes about
ten months to resolve start to finish. But he didn't
even wait thirty days before he decided to change tactics.
(17:41):
He started trying to get Disney's attention his own way
less than three weeks after he was fired. And so
you might be thinking, oh, he probably sent some weird
emails to his former co workers, right, Maybe he started
showing up outside the office or making a lot of
phone call And those are all reasonable guesses. Those are
(18:04):
things you might do if your stated goal was to
get someone's attention. No, what he decided to do is
much weirder, and honestly, I don't understand why he thinks
we would believe his claim that this was the only
thing he could think of that would get them to
call him again. From his lawyer quote, he started altering
(18:30):
Disney's menus to try to get their attention and respond
to him. Now, remember that was his job before he
was fired. He worked on the team responsible for designing, editing,
and updating the files used to print the menus at
restaurants and cafes at Disney parks and hotels. Once the
(18:50):
files were approved by the team at Disney, the physical
menus were printed by a Minnesota based print and marketing
company called Tailor Corporation. Just a few weeks after being fired,
Scheyer logged into the online application used by the print
company to manage the menu files. A lot of the
news coverage about this case refers to what he did
(19:11):
as hacking, in which I didn't realize is technically the
correct word for what happened. Hacking doesn't necessarily require any
particular set of skills or you know, it's not like
a nineties movie where they're tippy tapping on the keyboard
as all the numbers flash on the screen. No, it
just means any unauthorized access to a computer device or network.
(19:34):
And he definitely was not authorized to be logging in.
But the company had actually just forgotten to change the
password to the administrative account, and once he logged into
that administrator's account, he created a new employee profile for
himself using a fake name, and then using that account
with a fake name, he logged in and he went
(19:58):
to town at least all of the font files for all
of the menus in the system, And this sounds like hell.
He didn't just change the fonts that were used in
the text of the menus. He changed the source files
for all of the fonts in every menu, so all
(20:21):
of the names of the fonts still appeared to be correct,
but those names were now connected to a corresponding file
for a different font, and he'd changed most of those
fonts to wing dings, the font that's just weird little symbols.
And because he'd altered the font files themselves, the system
(20:43):
then started pushing out this change to every single one
of the thousands of files ever uploaded to this system,
and this rendered the entire application completely useless for at
least a week. And so because this took the entire
system off line and rendered every single file useless, obviously
(21:04):
they noticed this immediately. Disney pretty quickly tracked down the
source of the problem and they changed all the passwords
so this couldn't happen again. But that didn't really stop him.
So now that one avenue had been closed off, he
just moved to a different strategy. If he couldn't log in,
(21:24):
he would make sure no one else could either. He
started small targeting those immediate supervisors, the ones who'd fired him,
and he used their log in names and entered random
incorrect passwords, making these repeated bad attempts to access the system,
which would then trigger the accounts to be locked out.
(21:45):
At first, he was just doing this manually, so you
have to imagine him sitting alone at his computer while
his chronically ill wife is trying to take care of
their three young children, one of whom is a newborn baby,
and he's just sitting there at his computer again and
again and again, typing in a random keyboard smash password
and hitting enter over it over and over again so
(22:09):
that his old boss can't access her email. Throughout August
and September of twenty twenty four, these attacks escalated, and
he eventually wrote a script to automate the process of
making these thousands and thousands of login attempts. On one
day alone, he made eight thousand login attempts across accounts
(22:31):
belonging to the four people that he thought were responsible
for firing him, and he eventually branched out to fourteen
different accounts, all of which belonged to members of the
team he'd worked on before he was fired. Over the
course of about a month, he made one hundred thousand
log in attempts, locking these employees out of their accounts
(22:52):
for days at a time. And around the same time
he's ramping up these attacks on his former co workers accounts,
he found a new way to mess with the menus.
Disney had changed all the passwords, so he couldn't access
the application that was used by the Disney production team anymore.
But the company that actually prints the finished menu files
(23:14):
had their own system. All finished menu files had to
be uploaded to the print company through a secure file
transfer protocol, so he made his own menu files and
uploaded them directly to the printer. His initial attempt to
get Disney's attention had made the menus unusable. They had
(23:37):
nonsense fonts, they wouldn't load the image files, or they
just came up as blank pages, so everyone noticed this.
This was a very obvious attempt, But this time around
he was a lot more subtle. If you're just looking
quickly at these files, you wouldn't notice there was anything wrong. Honestly,
(23:57):
they might have even made it all the way through
a proofreading process if you weren't being really meticulous. Because
he's just changing individual words. He's changing the prices by
a dollar or two. He removed an asterisk, he changed
the QR codes. They're just little changes, almost like maybe
he didn't want them to notice this time, And honestly,
(24:22):
some of them are kind of funny. I mean overall, yes,
this is a bad situation. He should not have done
any of this, But if he'd just stuck with immature
little jokes, the whole story would have a really different tone,
because it's hard to be mad about stuff like changing
cheesy grits to cheesy shits on the menu for a
(24:45):
cafe at Disney's old Key West resort, or changing shellfish
to hellfish, or changing the description of an English breakfast
tea from a psalm te to just ask tea is
a little bit funny. I'm not mad imagining an old
couple in Key West seeing cheesy shits on their menu.
(25:05):
It's whatever. But unfortunately, most of the changes were not
funny swear words. Most of the changes were modifications to
the allergen information on menu items across multiple dining locations,
removing alerts on menu items that contained potentially fatal food
allergens like peanuts. On other menus, he altered the region
(25:28):
listed for wine selections. That one sounds mostly harmless to me.
Not a wine stob, so I don't really care where
the grapes were grown. I'm not going to pretend I
can taste the difference. But he swapped out the actual
locations for places where well known mass shootings have occurred.
In one case, the shooting had been painfully recent. He
(25:52):
swapped out Willamette Valley on one wine for Appalachi High,
an unmistakable reference to a school shooting in Georgia that
it only just happened the week that he did that.
On another menu, he uploaded a small image of a swastika.
(26:24):
He would later claim that he never actually intended for
any of these altered files to get printed. He said
that he knew Disney employees reviewed every file and that
they would catch the alterations before they went to the printer.
He wasn't actually trying to poison any children with peanut allergies.
He just wanted Disney to call him. He didn't want
(26:47):
these menus to end up in anyone's hands. He just
wanted attention. But that claim falls apart by the time
he switched to a new mode of attack, He uploaded
altered files direct into the server that functioned as the
print queue for the company that printed the menus, So
by that point in the process, the printer is receiving
(27:09):
what they believe to be a file that has been
proofed and approved and is ready to print, and they did,
in fact print thousands of these altered menus and signs,
although by the time they did print these, the investigation
was coming to an end and the affected items were
destroyed before they were shipped out, and he wasn't hard
(27:31):
to catch. Immediately after the initial unauthorized access was detected,
Disney launched an internal investigation. Multiple employees interviewed during this
process brought up the fact that Michael Schoeyer had just
been fired. Further investigation showed the attacks had all been
made by someone using a VPN to mask their IP address,
(27:55):
but when they looked further back in the company logs,
they found that before he was fired, tired Michael Scheuer
had accessed his work email from home, and when he
did that, he had his VPN on, so he managed
to mask the true IP address of his home computer,
but because he used the same VPN throughout, he was
(28:16):
still using an IP address that was provably connected to him.
On September twenty third, twenty twenty four, multiple members of
the menu production team were locked out of their accounts. Again.
Someone was making hundreds and hundreds of attempts to access
their accounts using incorrect passwords. At twelve forty one pm
(28:40):
that afternoon, FBI agents knocked on Michael Schuer's front door.
They had a warrant to search his home and seize
his computers. At twelve forty six pm, the wave of
login attempts suddenly stopped, and it never started again. Two
minutes after that, Michael Schuyer answered his front door. He
(29:05):
claimed he was surprised to see the FBI there, but
he made a strange comment that he wouldn't have been
surprised if it was the local sheriff there to tell
him to stop sending emails that might be interpreted as threatening.
I have no idea what that means. That never comes
up again. He told the FBI agents that sure, he
(29:27):
definitely used his home computer to access systems related to
his job when he still worked there, and maybe he
logged into some work related stuff after he was fired,
just to get his old payst ubs, things like that,
but he couldn't think of any reason why they'd be
there asking him questions like that, And when they explained
to him why they were there and what they were investigating,
(29:51):
the outright denied having done anything of the sort. And
then he speculated that maybe Disney was framing him because
they were worried about him. The FBI took his computers
with them that day, but they didn't make an arrest.
A few days later, Michael Scheuer hired an attorney and
(30:12):
checked himself into an impatient mental health facility. Meanwhile, the
FBI was still building their case against him, including getting
a search warrant for his Google account. Then, on October
twenty second, twenty twenty four, a month after they searched
his house, Michael Schuer received an automated notice from Google
(30:33):
that they'd been served with a warrant for his account
and they would be complying with the order to turn
over his account information. Now, I imagine that's a really scary
email to get. I'm not sure what my initial reaction
would be in that situation. The right answer if this
happens to you is to call a lawyer. The extremely
(30:55):
wrong answer is to then type please explain this to
me at the top of the email, and then forward
that email to the FBI agent who was just at
your house, and then follow that up with another email
the next day demanding that the agent loop in the
victim of the crime. On the conversation so you can
get some answers about what's going on here. Perhaps an
(31:18):
even worse course of action in this situation would be
to then drive to your former boss's house in the
middle of the night and stand on his front porch,
making a thumbs up at his security camera, and then
just walking away. It's hard to say what you would
do in a stressful situation that you have never experienced before.
(31:39):
I don't want a Monday morning quarterback here. I like
to think that I would just call a lawyer. I
don't think that I would do all that other stuff.
But that is what Michael Scheyer did. The day after
he paid that ominous visit to his former supervisor, the
FBI rode up and filed the criminal complaint. Whatever timeline
(32:01):
they'd had in mind was irrelevant. Now this guy was
behaving unpredictably and they needed to go ahead and make
the arrest, probably in large part because he made that
strange nighttime visit to his former boss's house and then
the subsequent restraining orders granted to two of his former supervisors.
He was held without bond. After two months in jail,
(32:24):
he entered a plea agreement. He pled guilty to computer
hacking and identity theft, and was sentenced to thirty six
months in prison. During the three year period of supervised release.
After he gets out, he's not allowed to have any
contact with any of his victims. So that's those fourteen
co workers and the Disney Corporation in the grand scheme
(32:47):
of weird little guys. This is all pretty minor. Nobody
really got hurt. It cost about one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars to reprint the effected materials, and Disney estimates
that the ordeal cost them about six hundred thousand dollars
in total. I have to admit I don't particularly care
if the Walt Disney Corporation lost half a million dollars.
(33:10):
If the alterations hadn't been caught and those menus had
been sent out to the restaurants, someone could have gotten
seriously hurt. But they didn't, and according to Michael Schuyer,
he knew they wouldn't. I don't know that that's true.
It's impossible to say at this point, but again, in
(33:31):
the end, nothing really happened, did it. I initially came
across this case during my regular search for newly filed
cases containing certain keywords I like to look for. I
think in this case it was the word swastika. But
I don't actually really think that this guy's a Nazi.
(33:53):
I don't have any other evidence that points to that
swastika being a larger part of his life. When the
FBI came and took his computer away, there was a
file on his desktop called swastika dot png. He must
have googled the word swastika and then saved the image
that he wanted to use on the menu. It kind
(34:15):
of reminds me of early four chan culture. I don't
mean the four Chan of today. I mean way back
in the day before those guys were genuinely sincere neo
Nazis and mass murder enthusiasts. A lot of them were
just shit talking. They wanted to be extreme, they wanted
to be edgy. They wanted to post the most shocking,
fucked up stuff they could think of because that was
(34:36):
funny or thrilling or interesting. I guess so I'm inclined
to believe he put the swastika on the menu because
it was the worst thing he could think of, not
because he actually liked it. I mean, I hope that's
the case. I'm a little less generous when it comes
(34:57):
to the mass shooting thing, though. That's odd to me.
That feels like a manifestation of some nascent interest. I
don't know that that's something that would come immediately to
mind if you're just trolling and you have no existing
preoccupation with mass shootings. You know. But that's just my gut.
There's no evidence of anything at all about his motivations.
(35:22):
This is the only thing he ever did. He crashed
out at work, and it sent him into a tailspin
that ended in federal prison. The only glimpse into Michael
Schuer's motivation that I can offer you is this Reddit
post he made just a few days before the FBI
showed up at his house for the first time. On
a subreddit for people with social anxiety. He made a
(35:44):
post with the title reaching the end question mark. It's long,
but it reads, in part, the people involved in firing
me treated me like a criminal, me who is afraid
of everyone and just wants to blend into the background.
I was blown away how absolutely nobody cared about me.
(36:05):
Not one person from work reached out to check on me.
I'm sure part of the reason is because I'm a man,
and everyone just assumed I don't need anyone. Maybe the
other part is because I'm an awkward asshole. I have
no friends, no work connections, nothing. I've already determined I
will never work again. Nobody cares about me. He goes
(36:29):
on to say that he started therapy earlier that year,
but when he got fired, he realized it was too late,
too late for what is unclear, too late to change,
too late to make anything of his life. It has
a vaguely suicidal tone, but he doesn't actually express a
desire to harm himself. On the contrary, he seems fixated
(36:53):
on harming others, writing quote, every day since I was fired,
I sit around fuming, planning revenge because I feel so wronged.
But then I remember, maybe they aren't the problem. Maybe
it's me. I've always been afraid of everybody, but it's
everybody that's been afraid of me. And there it is,
(37:16):
isn't it. He said it himself because I feel so wronged.
It's remarkably self aware. It reminds me a lot of
what Frank Sweeney said when the cops finally searched his
house and discovered he'd been the one sending those threatening
postcards all those years, he just admitted it. He said
(37:40):
that woman in the parking lot had made him feel embarrassed,
and it made him feel better to know that he
was causing her distress and return. Be a weird little
guy is something that exists on a spectrum. I think
some of them are truly monsters. They kill, name, torture,
(38:02):
and terrorize. They carry out mass shootings and blow up
synagogues and daycares. They're trying to start a race war,
they want to barricade themselves on a compound and shoot
it out with the police, or they just want to
gain enough political power to punish their enemies. Those are
the guys I was thinking about when I started the show.
But there are weird little guys out there who are
(38:23):
much much littler, guys whose behavior fits the archetype but
only registers a little blit on the radar. And those
are the kinds of guys you're most likely to meet
one day. God willing, most of us will never meet
a mass shooter, but you probably will eventually encounter the
(38:44):
kind of guy who just can't take no for an answer,
so he puts a swastika on the menu at the
Mickey Mouse Cafe. Weird Little Guys is a production of
(39:08):
cools On Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written, and recorded
by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Litterman
and Malbert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly
talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange
(39:29):
conspiracy theories about the show with out the listeners on
the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't boast anything that's
going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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