November 20, 2025 • 55 mins
This episode originally ran on January 23, 2025. The second half of the story had to be taken down a few weeks later. That episode has now been rewritten and re-recorded. Before you listen to the newly released version of the lost episode, here's the original part one to refresh your memory.
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In 2010, a rising star in the small world of holocaust denial blogging murdered his ex-wife and then took his own life. This first chapter of his story follows his path from a troubled career as a registered nurse to his growing fame as a white supremacist blogger.
Sources:
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Lawyer-Lake-Jackson-murder-suicide-followed-1710794.php
http://www.thenation.com/article/arrows-war
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/americas-promise-ministries/
https://library.hungaricana.hu/en/view/Szittyakurt_USAHUN_1986/?pg=39&layout=s
https://www.bocskairadio.org/en/an-interview-with-akos-l-nagy-president-of-the-american-hungarian-federation/
Katalin Hasulyó-Pintz. Doctoral dissertation, Identity Preservation and Diaspora Relations in the USA: the Hungarian Community of New Brunswick, New Jersey. Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest 2020
https://collections.ushmm.org/oh_findingaids/RG-50.573.0005_tcn_en.pdf
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1465015471074263044.html
https://www.yadvashem.org/docs/international-commission-on-romania-holocaust.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Wol Zone Media. In March of twenty twenty five, an
episode of this show disappeared. It only existed at all
for a few weeks, and its absence was obvious because
(00:23):
it was the second half of a story whose beginning
is still there. A lot of you have asked what
happened to that episode, and I can't exactly tell you that,
not in any kind of satisfying detail, but I have
finally rewritten and re recorded it. When an episode of
(00:48):
a podcast disappears, with that explanation, it's only natural to
speculate about what happened behind the scenes. Maybe there was
some sort of scandal, plagiarism, information, sloppy research, factual errors,
maybe some kind of offensive slip of the tongue. It's
happened to other shows. Sometimes it gets addressed, and sometimes
(01:13):
it doesn't. Sometimes it's not really something that can be
aired out. If there's litigation of some kind, it's best
to say nothing at all. None of those things happened here.
That much I can promise you. I stand behind my
research one hundred and ten percent. I have sources for
(01:35):
my facts, and I try to be clear when I'm
only offering up conjecture based on those facts. I try
to be even clearer when I'm just bitballing. There was
no inaccuracy. That sounds cocky, but it's true. I've been
(01:55):
writing unflattering things about dangerous men for a long time now.
I'm thorough and I'm careful, and one of the lessons
I've learned over the years is that a lot of
people don't really like it when you write honestly about
the ugly things they've been doing and saying I'm used
(02:16):
to that. So when a man with a history of
violence and a long track record of vexatious litigation sent
a vague but threatening sounding email about the episode, I
wasn't surprised. I'm not going to name this man, and
I would prefer that you not either, for reasons that
(02:37):
I think will become obvious. He's never actually succeeded it
seriously harming anyone as far as I can tell, and
he's never made it very far in any of his
many lawsuits. But he has been to jail, and he's
had court ordered psychiatric treatment for this kind of behavior.
(03:02):
Corporations tend to be pretty risk averse, and their lawyers
even more so. The message was brief, but alarming, and
the guys in the suits just didn't want to have
anything to do with someone who, based on his history
and this current behavior, seems like he might be in
the middle of a serious mental health crisis. So the
(03:25):
decision was made to take the episode down. I wasn't
happy about it, but I get it. I'm a team
player now, and that means that I understand these days.
I'm not just gambling with my own wellbeing when I
decide to play chicken with a conspiracy theorist. So for
(03:47):
the last eight months or so, there's been an episode
on the show's feed called Curtis Maynard Part One, but
there is no episode called Curtis Maynard Part two. As
twenty twenty five is coming to a close and I've
been reflecting on the year past, I decided to fix that,
(04:08):
which meant excising any mention of that man, who was
really only ever a tangent in the story. Anyway, you
might have assumed that the man who was upset about
the episode was the subject of the episode. It wasn't.
Curtis Maynard had no complaints about the episode, not that
(04:29):
he shared with me. Anyway, he probably wouldn't have liked it,
if he heard it, to be honest, but he didn't
because he's dead. No, the man that I had to
go back and cut out of this story was an
interesting digression at best. He wasn't directly involved with the
(04:51):
core storyline. He never even interacted directly with the weird
little guy at the center of it. This man wouldn't
warrant talking about it all if it weren't for his
connection to a secondary character and a story about someone else.
He is, luckily for us, not someone who matters at all.
(05:16):
So now that I've hopefully dispelled the rumor that the
episode was taken down because it contained factual statements about
Ron Paul's connection to Neo Nazis and white supremacists, here
is the original first half of that story to refresh
your memory. The rewritten, re recorded lost episode will be
(05:37):
right behind this one in the show's feed on your
podcast app of choice. My editor Rory and I will
be off next week for Thanksgiving, but I'll be back
with new We're Little Guys in December. On the Saturday
(05:58):
night before Labor Day two thousand three, Charter buses pulled
into the lot at Cincinnati's Public Landing. Passengers streamed out
of the buses one hundred and fifty or so, mostly
older white men in suits, and they boarded the Delta Queen.
It was a beautiful late summer evening for a dinner
cruise down the Ohio River, and they'd spent all day
(06:21):
cooped up inside in a rented ballroom at the Marriotte
near the airport. They'd paid three hundred and seventy five
dollars apiece to attend a weekend long conference called Real
History USA, but the history they were interested in wasn't
what any real historian would call real history at all.
(06:42):
This was the fifth year in a row that disgraced
historian and infamous Holocaust denier David Irving had brought anti
Semites from around the world to Cincinnati. Over the years,
He's been banned from entering Canada, Germany, Austria, Australia, New Zealand,
and Lithuania, but he seemed to enjoy the Ohio River,
(07:03):
and he came back to Cincinnati year after year. That weekend.
Speakers ranged from notorious to obscure, but they all shared
a passion for Nazi Germany. Brigham Young University professor Tom
Catherall had to cancel at the last minute due to
a health concern, and I'm sure the attendees were devastated
(07:25):
to miss his presentation on Hermann Goering's love of model Trains.
Over lunch at the Marriotte on Saturday, they watched Lenny
Riefenstahl's Victory of the Faith, the less famous predecessor to
her infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The
conference program notes that Reefenstahl is quote still going strong
(07:46):
at over one hundred and Irving said that Riefenstah sends
her greetings to the conference's attendees. David Irving couldn't have
known then that his friend would actually die later that week.
On Sunday morning, the conference resumed with presentations from Donald Bustian,
an adjunct professor at Southern Arkansas University and founding member
(08:07):
of a group called Scholars for Nine to eleven Truth.
Before lunch, Charles Pravaan, a theologian whose anti contraception writing
is highly regarded by adherents of the Quiverful movement, opined
on the possibility that a self published book by an
American Jew was actually to blame for Hitler's policies in Germany,
(08:29):
and that afternoon, David Irving gave the stage to a
young protege, an up and coming white nationalist blogger who'd
recently finished his master's degree at Texas A and M University.
Curtis Maynard presented his master's thesis on a lesser known
incident from World War II. The one hundred and four
page thesis doesn't actually mention the Holocaust a single time.
(08:52):
It's not about that. It's about a nineteen forty three
German air raid on US naval vessels docked at Bari, Italy.
But the old man in the Marriott conference room probably
spent most of their Sunday afternoons watching the History Channel,
so I'm sure they enjoyed hearing a dry resitation of
facts about planes and ships. Either way. In two thousand
(09:15):
and three, Curtis Maynard was a rising star in the
revisionist history community. Sharing the stage with David Irving was
a great honor for an aspiring white supremacist writer, and
in certain circles his writing was well regarded and is
sometimes still remembered. But Curtis Maynard is best remembered for
(09:37):
how his story ends At the wheel of a nineteen
ninety four Lincoln Sedan crashing a ditch with a bullet
hole in his head. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird,
little guys. When I started writing this episode, I thought
(10:12):
the story of Curtis Maynard would revolve around the revisionist
historians and pseudo intellectuals he admired. But instead I spent
most of this week reconstructing one man's disastrous downward spiral
after getting into a flame war on a form thread
about Ron Paul. I think, at its core, this is
(10:33):
a story about lies, not just the lies of dishonest scholarship.
No listener to this show needs to be told this,
But the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews, roma queer people, communists,
and political dissidents were shot, gassed, and starved to death
by Nazi Germany. I have no interest at all in
(10:56):
engaging with the revisionist history of David Irving and his ilk.
There's no debate to be had there, although we will
wade through a bit of the swamp they inhabit. No,
this is a story about smaller lies, about the gossip
and rumors that live in the comments on twenty year
old blog posts and ancient threads on hateful online forums
(11:20):
about internes, scene squabbles for clout on Nazi message boards,
and debate within the white power movement about what kind
of messaging will actually advance their cause. And it's a
story that ends in a despicable, tragic act of domestic violence.
A woman was murdered, a child was shot, and children
(11:42):
lost their parents. It's a story about the violent speech
of violent men, men who talk about mass murder and genocide,
and how sometimes those men cross the threshold into real
world violence. This is some I spend a lot of
time thinking about. It's unavoidable. Really, I spend a lot
(12:06):
of time studying the digital debris left behind after the fact,
after a man like this stops posting and starts loading
his gun. But that's almost always where I start reading.
I'm looking back in time. I already know what he did.
(12:26):
A few months ago, I started researching for an episode
about a different man, a different murderer. I realized something
that seems obvious now, I just never really thought about
it this way before. When I study the internet footprint
of a killer, I'm looking at a fossil of sorts,
(12:47):
these posts preserved in stone, evidence of where he once was,
But those online ecosystems are thriving, busy places full of
people who read those posts the day they were made,
people who responded to them. So what is for me
(13:08):
some kind of artifact? Was once an actual conversation between
real people who really knew each other, And when one
of them logs off for the last time, the ones
left behind processed that violence right there in the same
digital forum they'd spent years chatting. The story they got
(13:33):
me thinking about this particular genre of online conversation is
when I haven't finished. Fraser Glenn Miller murdered three people
in Kansas in twenty fourteen. He died in prison convicted
of those murders, but he was also a suspect in
three other murders in nineteen eighty seven, and was a
(13:53):
central figure in the Greensboro massacre, where Nazis and klansmen
murdered five communist organizers in nineteen seven nine. He didn't
pull the trigger in nineteen seventy nine, and nobody ever
approved he did in eighty seven, but he played a
part in those deaths. His hands were unclean long before
he opened fire in Overland Park. It's a long and
(14:16):
complicated story with mountains of archival material left to consume
before I'm ready to write it. But on the day
Miller started shooting outside a Jewish community center in Kansas,
his peers saw the news. Within an hour of the shooting.
There were threads on Stormfront and Vanguard News, the two
most popular Nazi message boards of the day, and in
(14:40):
the immediate aftermath, a lot of the posters were celebrating
they thought there were some dead Jews, in their words,
but others were skeptical about initial reports that the shooter
had yelled Hyle Hitler as officers handcuffed him, and then
someone posted the news footage of that moment of the
(15:02):
shooter yelling Kyle Hitler, and the shooter's face isn't terribly clear,
as he's being shoved into the back of a police car.
If you didn't know him, that blurry, poorly lit image
wouldn't really look like anything at all. But they did
know him. It was Brad Griffin, a prominent member of
(15:24):
the secessionist group the League of the South, and a
man I have my own history with who recognized Miller first.
The shooter wasn't just one of their own, He was
a prolific poster in their online community. He was someone
they talked to every day, someone who'd been a significant
figure in their movement for decades. And on both sites,
(15:47):
users were searching for meaning, and some said they always
knew this would happen, that he was going to crack
one of these days and do something like this. Others
insisted that the they knew would never do this and
he must have been set up. Some celebrated, some were disappointed,
(16:09):
but no one grieved for his victims. And those conversations
seemed so unique to me, What a strange window into
this terrible world. They're deeply troubling, of course, but surely
those were an anomaly, I thought. But while I was
(16:30):
researching for this episode, the story I'm circling around getting
to this week, I saw it again because four years
before Fraser Glenn Miller made his last post, that same
online community reacted to the news that Curtis Maynard had
murdered his ex wife and then taken his own life.
(16:52):
But I suppose we should start at the end. On
April twenty first, twenty ten, Curtis Boon Maynard was harassing
his ex wife. It wasn't the first time they'd been
divorced for a little over a year, and he hadn't
reacted well to losing custody of their two daughters. I
(17:15):
couldn't find any coverage that included the contents of any
of those texts he sent Melissa Masa that day, but
whatever it was, she was upset enough about the texts
that she'd discussed them with a friend. That afternoon, at
eight twenty pm, Melissa's neighbors heard gunshots. Her middle daughter,
(17:36):
just twelve years old, ran to a neighbor's house with
her two year old sister in her arms. A neighbor
heard the commotion and came outside and saw Melissa, a
thirty four year old mother of three, dead in her
front yard. He was still taking in the sight of
his neighbour's body there on the lawn when he noticed
her ex husband, Curtis Maynard, pulling out of the driveway.
(18:00):
We were dialed nine one one as he started his
own car, following Maynard and providing his location to the dispatcher.
Officers who arrived at the house found Melissa's oldest child,
a sixteen year old daughter from a prior marriage inside.
She survived, but she had been shot in the face
by the man who had been her stepfather since she
(18:20):
was a toddler. Curtis Maynard was driving seventy miles an
hour down the highway when police caught up to him.
He ended the chase without ever even stepping on the brakes.
He shot himself in the head while he was still
speeding down the dark road. With the driver dead at
the wheel, his car slammed into an SUV that had
(18:41):
pulled over onto the shoulder to get out of the
way of the high speed chase. The mother and her
two children inside were thankfully uninjured. The irresistible and unanswerable
question in the aftermath of a tragedy like this is
always why. Why did he murder his ex wife? Why
(19:02):
did he shoot his stepdaughter in the face? Why did
he take his own life? Why? Today? Why? Like this?
And there are no answers. Nothing I can tell you
will explain this, not for lack of trying, but I
can try to understand who he was before the last
(19:22):
day of his life. And pieced together the fragments of
an online argument that seems to have been the beginning
of the end of Curtis Maynard's dream of making a
career out of being a racist blogger. I don't know
exactly when Curtis Maynard decided he wanted to be a writer.
He served briefly in the US Army after high school.
(19:45):
In nineteen ninety two, at the age of twenty five,
he got his associate's degree in nursing and began working
as a registered nurse. In nineteen ninety six, while he
was still married to his first wife, he started seeing
the woman who had become his second wife and only
murder victim. Melissa Mesa was actually still married to her
(20:06):
first husband at the time, but they were separated, and
Maynard would later say he'd believed she was already divorced.
It's hard to piece together the particulars of a man's
personal life so many years before he got online, but
things were not going well. In nineteen ninety seven, just
as his divorce from his first wife was finalized, a
(20:28):
judge in Texas issued a bench warn't for him. He'd
pled guilty to a dui in nineteen ninety four, and
he got off easy. He didn't have to go to jail.
All he had to do was complete the dui education program,
but he never did it, so maybe he skipped town
to avoid the benchwarn't. Maybe he was just looking for
(20:49):
a fresh start after his divorce. But just as he
was doing court in Corpus Christi, Texas, he got a
job at a hospital in Idaho in June of nineteen
ninety seven, right around the time Melissa probably would have
been realizing she was pregnant with Maynard's daughter. He did
something he should not have done. And I don't mean
(21:13):
impregnating a woman who was still married to another man.
I don't care about that. But according to a decision
from the Idaho Board of Nursing, one vial of demarole
and one vial of morphine went missing from the locked
narcotics cabinet at Boundary County Community Hospital on June twenty eighth,
nineteen ninety seven. Missing opiates are a big deal in
(21:37):
a hospital. They're not something that just gets misplaced and
shrugged off. It's not a lost pen. These things are
carefully accounted for these days. Everything's tracked in a computer system.
But even in the dark ages of the nineteen nineties,
every dose of an opiate had to be signed for.
(21:58):
There was a record where every drop of this was
supposed to be. If those vials were missing, someone had
to have taken them. An inventory was done to determine
if anything else was missing, and a few days later
it was discovered that two boxes, each containing ten vials
(22:18):
of morphine, had been tampered with. The evidence was turned
over to the Bonners Ferry Police department. The hospital had
their own investigation to conduct. They drug tested every hospital
employee who had access to that cabinet. Sure, it's possible
that a nurse who steals pain medication is just selling it,
(22:40):
but there's a really good chance that whoever took that
morphine was going to test positive for it. Everyone tested negative,
well everyone except for Curtis Maynard, who didn't show up
for his shift on the day of the drug test.
In fact, he never came back to work at all.
(23:15):
The police investigation would eventually determine that Maynard's fingerprints were
on the boxes that had been tampered with. The morphine
that should have been in those vials in that box
had all been replaced with what the Board of Nursing
decision only calls quote a benign substance, which I assume
is a saline solution or something like that. So the
(23:38):
investigation was kicked off because two vials were physically missing
from the cabinet, but in the end it looks like
a significant amount of morphine was actually missing, having been
taken from the vials and replaced with something else, And
so if he hadn't slipped up and stolen the vial
(24:00):
of demarole, they might never have noticed that he'd been
replacing morphine with saltwater, and hospital patients may have been
administered an unknown substance instead of their pain medication. By
the time those lab results came back, though Maynard had
already moved back to Texas, he was technically still a
(24:22):
registered nurse with a valid license in Texas. When his
oldest daughter was born in March of nineteen ninety eight,
he was working as a nurse at a hospital in
Corpus Christi. The Idaho Board of Nursing filed their formal
complaint against him that summer, a year after the morphine
first went missing. Maynard never responded. After months of getting
(24:45):
no response from Maynard, the Idaho Board of Nursing got
a default order against him, suspending his nursing license, and
before the Texas Board of Nursing had a chance to
suspend him. A standard practice in most professions, where if
you're disciplined by a board in one state, there is
what's called reciprocal discipline in most other states. But before
(25:05):
Texas could do anything like that, he mailed them a
letter saying I no longer desire to be licensed as
a professional nurse, and he voluntarily relinquished his nursing license
before it could be taken. The Bonners Ferry Herald, a
newspaper in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, ran several announcements in the
(25:26):
summer of two thousand that Curtis Maynard was wanted on
a felony warrant for possession of controlled substance and theft,
but Idaho court records don't show that any criminal case
was ever filed. I have to assume that's in relation
to the theft of the morphine three years earlier, but
I don't know how those pieces fit together. He did
(25:48):
move back to Idaho years later, but the five year
statute of limitations had already passed, so he was never
actually criminally charged in connection with the missing morphine. But
in nineteen ninety ane nine, Curtis Maynard had lost his
nursing license in Idaho and given it up in Texas.
He was unable to work in the only field he
(26:09):
had any real experience in. He had a baby and
a common law wife to support, and he had a
pretty serious addiction to alcohol and opiates. After twenty eight
days of residential treatment for substance abuse, he did what
a lot of people do when they have no idea
what to do with their lives. He went to graduate school,
(26:30):
enrolling in a master's program in history at Texas A
and M University. I wish I could tell you which
came first. Did Curtis Maynard set out to write his
master's thesis about a German air raid on US naval
vessels in Italy because he had a genuine interest in
this lesser known chapter of World War II history, and
(26:52):
he accidentally stumbled upon David Irving's work while he was researching.
Or was he already familiar with the work of revisionist
historians and hoping to add his voice to the choir.
I'm not sure there's anyone left to ask, but whichever
it was. By the time Maynard finished his thesis in
the spring of two thousand and three, he wasn't just
(27:15):
reading David Irvings's Holocaust denial works. They were corresponding. The
thesis not only lists three of Irving's books in its bibliography,
there are several footnotes indicating the source for a particular
claim is an email exchange between Curtis Maynard and David Irving.
(27:36):
Maynard's thesis isn't about the Holocaust. The word doesn't even
appear in the paper. There's no mention of Jews, camps,
gas chambers, nothing like that. The writing isn't great in
my opinion, but I think he could have produced a
serviceable paper about a real historical event out of college.
(28:01):
So to be honest, I have no idea how the
thesis writing process works. Maybe there was no point at
which someone read any of this in draft form and
asked him, hey, why did you write quote? Without the
works of historians like Elkafrolic and David Irving, who conducted
research in the former Soviet archives in Moscow, there was
(28:23):
a distinct possibility that we would not be privy to
the uncensored and unedited thoughts, ideas and words of doctor
Joseph Gerbels today end quote because not only is that
not true, David Irving is not solely responsible for existing
works of scholarship on the Diaries of Joseph Gerbels. But
(28:45):
it's also just a really weird thing to say. There
must not be any feedback provided in the process, because
surely someone in the history department would have clocked it
as very inappropriate to drop this line. Quote. David Irving's
opinion cannot be dismissed easily, as he is a recognized
(29:08):
expert on the third Reich. End quote. I don't know
how to convey to you how not true that is.
That is the not truest thing that you could write
in your master's thesis or history. Now, you might have
(29:29):
been able to say it with a straight face in
the nineteen sixties. Maybe in the nineteen sixties you could
say David Irving is a recognized expert on the third Reich.
Maybe maybe you could still say it in the seventies
into the eighties. If you're reckless, if you're careless, if
you're not keeping up with current events, maybe you could
still say it in the eighties. But by two thousand,
(29:53):
everyone in the world knew that David Irving was not
a historian. Ninety three, Jewish history professor Deborah Lipstadt wrote
a book called Denying the Holocaust. The growing assault on
truth and memory, and in the book, David Irving was
just one of a variety of figures within the Holocaust
(30:14):
denial movement that Lipstat discusses, but he in particular took
issue with her criticism of his work, and so in
nineteen ninety six he filed a libel suit against Deborah
Lipstadt and her publisher. David Irving is British, so he
filed this lawsuit in the United Kingdom, and libel laws
(30:37):
are different in the UK. I don't want to get
into the weeds there. They just are. But even in England,
the truth is the best defense against an accusation like this.
It can't be libel if it's true. And so Lipstot's
lawyers hired Sir Richard Evans, a Cambridge University history professor
(31:01):
who is an actual historian of modern Germany, and Evans
spent two full years, with the help of full time
research assistance, producing a seven hundred and forty page report
on his findings. He read everything David Irving ever wrote,
(31:23):
everything David Irving ever said about the things that he wrote,
and ultimately Evans concluded that, in his expert opinion, everything
David Irving had ever written was quote completely worthless as history,
because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere in any of them
(31:45):
to give a reliable account of what he is talking
or writing about. If we mean by historian, someone who
is concerned to discover the truth about the past and
to give as accurate a representation of it as possible,
Irving is not a historian. And at the end of
the trial a judge agreed, writing that Irving had quote
(32:08):
persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence end quote,
because he was ideologically motivated to portray Hitler in a
positive light and deny the Holocaust. So he sued Deborah
Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier, saying that was libel,
(32:28):
and the judge said, that's not libel because legally you're
a Holocaust denier, And so we lost the libel lawsuit.
But even worse for David Irving than losing the lawsuit
and having to pay quite a large sum of money
was the fact that a small army of historians had
(32:50):
spent years going over his work with a fine toothed comb.
This wasn't the first time people had found inconsistency, said
inaccuracies in his work, but they'd never been dissected quite
like this. So all of these professors and historians had
read all of his books, and they'd all written these reports,
(33:13):
and they published those reports as books, and they talked
to reporters, and now all of a sudden, it's very
easy to find a laundry list of the debunked, made up,
and outright fraudulent claims that riddled his body of work.
So no, there's really no excuse in two thousand and
(33:35):
three for citing David Irving as an expert on the
history of the Third Reich. That's malpractice. But maybe his
thesis adviser was in a hurry when she skimmed his
bibliography and she didn't notice that he'd cited David Irving's
book The Destruction of Convoy PQ. Seventeen, despite the fact
(33:59):
that every of that book was withdrawn from the market
in nineteen seventy after Irving loss a massive libel lawsuit.
I have to wonder if his adviser noticed that he
cited Irving's Destruction of Dresden, a book that had been
a best seller in the nineteen sixties but completely fell
apart under the slightest scrutiny. The entire book relies on
(34:23):
a premise supported only by a document that turned out
to have been a Nazi forgery, as well as the
personal assurances of a man who had been a major
general in the Wehrmacht. Apparently, just finishing a thesis at all,
regardless of what it says, is the biggest hurdle. Because
(34:43):
Maynard graduated with a master's degree in May of two
thousand and three, and just a few months after presenting
his thesis to the committee at Texas A and M University,
he presented it again, this time to the attendees of
the Holocaust Denial conference in Cincinnati. A few months after
that conference, he applied for the reinstatement of his nursing
(35:03):
license in Idaho. He planned to work part time while
enrolled in a history PhD program at the University of
Idaho in Moscow. On the condition that he attended narcotics
anonymous meetings three times a week, submit to random drug tests,
and receive quarterly evaluations of his performance. He was allowed
to work in a nursing home near the university, but
(35:26):
he left the PhD program after just a few months
and moved back to Texas again. But even as he's
struggling to stay enrolled in school or keep a nursing job,
his career as a professional racist is really starting to
take off. In two thousand and seven, four years after
(36:01):
David Irving invited him to share the stage at the
Holocaust Denile Conference in Cincinnati, things were finally going well
for Curtis Maynard. He was pen pals with Ernst Zundel,
the German born Canadian whose criminal prosecutions in Germany and
Canada had made him one of the world's most famous
Holocaust deniers. Maynard's blog, The Politically Correct Apostate was banned
(36:28):
by blogspot and word Press every couple of months, but
it always re emerged, and the readers followed him to
each new url. He wrote prolifically, often publishing multiple pieces
per day, and his content was cross posted on the
websites of some big names in the movement, like David
(36:50):
Duke and John Denugen. His writing appeared often on the
website for Jeff Rentz, a talk radio guy that you
could most quickly describe as a more explicitly Nazi version
of Alex Jones. But you've probably never heard of Jeff
Rentz because he got into a fight with Alex Jones
(37:12):
in two thousand and nine that ended with Rents getting
dumped by the network that they shared, Genesis Communications. Alex Linder,
the webmaster at Vanguard News Network, posted dozens of Maynard's
pieces on his site, and in April of two thousand
and seven, Linder called him quote one of the most
(37:32):
active and powerful of a rising generation of white writers.
In July of two thousand and seven, just weeks after
his wife gave birth to their second child, Maynard traveled
to Sandpoint, Idaho. He was a guest at a conference
hosted by America's Promise Ministries, a Christian identity church funded
by the sale of Holocaust denile literature. The keynote speaker
(37:57):
at the conference was Michael Collins Piper, a red contributor
to the white nationalist publications American Free Press and The Spotlight.
According to a write up about the event that was
published in American Free Press, Fiber's speech was about Jewish
control of American politics conspiracy. Theorist Mark Glenn performed an
(38:18):
original musical number about Jewish domination of society with the
help of his five oldest children and I guess it's
for the best. But I couldn't find any video of that,
But I don't know, I'm kind of curious. But Glenn
was proud enough of this performance to include it in
(38:38):
his article about the conference, and the article mentions Manard
by name, calling him quote a well known writer dealing
with the issues similar to the themes covered at the conference,
the themes being I guess Jewish control of society, and
(38:59):
the write up ends the quote from Michael Collins Piper,
the keynote speaker, and he said of the conference quote,
it was obvious to me five minutes after arriving at
the church that once again everything the mainstream media has
said about North Idaho being a haven for violent extremists
and malcontents is all a big lie and that no
(39:22):
better people can be found anywhere. I wouldn't expect a
man like Michael Collins Piper to be honest about something
like America's Promised Ministries, but I will point out that
there is a reason he felt the need to counter
the idea that the church was a haven for violent
(39:42):
extremists because it was in nineteen ninety six, four congregants
of America's Promise Ministries bombed a planned Parenthood in Spokane, Washington,
and the offices of the newspaper The Spokesman Review during
a crimes breathe. But it also involved several bank robberies.
(40:03):
In nineteen ninety nine, a member of the church named
Buford Furrow shot several people at the Los Angeles Jewish
Community Center before murdering a Filipino mailman as he fled
the scene. Those are both stories that deserve their own telling.
Beauford Furrow, for one thing, was dating Bob Matthews's widow.
(40:24):
But what I'm getting at here is that America's Promised
Ministries was not just a church. It was a propaganda
mill with a body count. But at this conference, Curtis
Maynard was once again rubbing elbows with some very important racists.
One of his better known essays, one called I Am
(40:45):
a Holocaust Denier and I Am Unafraid, was republished often
and by multiple outlets, even appearing in translation in an
Ohio based newspaper run by a group called the Hungaria
Freedom Fighter's Movement. There really is a community for everything,
I guess now. This little newspaper, Titya Kurt was published
(41:09):
from nineteen sixty eight until the death of its editor,
Tibor Mayor in twenty ten. Now, I'm not going to
pronounce a single Hungarian word or name correctly. I did try,
I looked them up, I watched videos. Don't email me
about it. And I'm not sure that the time I
(41:31):
spent down this rabbit hole will ever pay off in
any meaningful way. It's certainly not relevant to the story
I'm trying to tell here, but it's always a little
bit of a thrill to find a whole new genre
of guys I've never encountered before. So I know I'm
straying terribly from Curtis, but just humor me for a minute.
(41:55):
Curtis Maynard's essay appeared in a two thousand and seven
issue of CITYA Kurt and I wanted to get a
feel for the kind of newspaper it was, so I
browsed a few other issues in the couple of years.
On either side of two thousand and seven, I found
articles by Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for
Historical Review, an organization dedicated to Holocaust denial. There were
(42:19):
essays by klansman David Duke, and neo Nazi William Luther Pierce,
all of which had been translated into Hungarian. On the
back page, as is common in publications like this, they
offered books for sale. You could buy Hungarian language editions
of books by David Irving, David Duke, Pat Buchanan. You
(42:40):
could even buy DVDs of Lenny Reefinstall's Nazi propaganda films
with Hungarian subtitles. So, okay, I admit it. It got distracted,
I got lost. I wasted a lot of time copying
and pasting chunks of Hungarian Nazi news into Google Translate,
(43:01):
and I did find decades of issues of the paper itself,
issues spanning nineteen sixty eight till twenty ten, but there's
almost no mention of its existence, outside of the fact
that some university libraries have issues in their archives. I
found almost no information at all about the group behind
(43:21):
the paper. At a meeting of the United Nations General
Assembly in nineteen eighty one, the Hungarian un representative referred
to them briefly as a US based neo fascist group
dedicated in the spirit of Ferenz Salashi, the Nazi collaborator
installed as the nation's leader after the German occupation of
(43:41):
Hungary in nineteen forty four. There are no good fascists
that you could claim as a role model. You shouldn't
pick any of them, but this is a particularly bad one.
In the short few months that he was in power,
his Arrow Cross party worked directly with Adolph Eikman to
(44:01):
resume the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the camps, and
as Soviet troops closed in on the Hungarian capital, Arrow
Cross death squads carried out mass executions in the walled
ghettos of Budapest, shooting thousands, thousands of Hungarian Jews and
pushing their bodies into the Danube River. And in that
(44:24):
nineteen eighty one UN General Assembly meeting, the Hungarian representative
read aloud excerpts from this newspaper. The Hungaria freedom Fighters,
as they called themselves, said their goal was to reconquer
the historical living space of the Hungarian people, whose racial
purity they hold very dear, and they praised the regime
(44:47):
of Farin Salagi, calling his actions a brave attempt to
save the fatherland and its ancestral honor. Five years later,
in the December nineteen eighty six issue of citya Kre,
there is a brief note on the backpage thanking President
Ronald Reagan for his proclamation in support of the Hungarian
freedom fighters, the anti communist heroes of the nineteen fifty
(45:11):
six uprising. Most of what I found were issues of
Sitya Kurt, which is in Hungarian. I did find a
handful of issues of a companion newspaper in English called
The Fighter, and its first issue in nineteen sixty eight
featured a full page front page glowing endorsement of segregationist
(45:35):
George Wallace's presidential campaign, written by Sityakurt contributing editor Louis Molnar,
who was George Wallace's Ohio campaign chair, and according to
his obituary, he personally toppled the statue of Joseph Stalin
in the city square in Budapest in nineteen fifty six.
Hard to say, and the first issue of Sityakirt in Hungarian,
(46:00):
also published in nineteen sixty eight, announced the formation of
new chapters of a Hungarian nationalist paramilitary organization called the
Cross and Sword Movement. It had originally been founded a
few years earlier by a former Hungarian army officer named
Zultan Vasvari. And as I looked through more issues of
(46:20):
Sidya Kurt Most issues in the sixties and seventies list
Zultan Vasvari's home address in New Jersey in case you
want to send a cash donation to the paramilitary. In
an interview about her twenty seventeen documentary called Cold Warriors,
Hungarian American journalist Raka Pigniski said that the Cross and
(46:42):
Sword movement was not an anti Semitic organization. They were nationalists,
they were patriots. Were some of the members of the
Nazi collaborationist Arrow Cross Party, Yes, but that was in
the past. I didn't watch the documentary, I read the interview.
(47:03):
I am not sure I believe that. And maybe Zultan
Vasvari is a common name. I don't know. I've never
been to Hungary, so I can't rule out the possibility
that there were multiple Hungarian Army officers in World War
Two who had that name. But not only can I
(47:27):
not find any evidence that there were, I have pretty
convincing evidence that there were not multiple Sultan Vasvaris. A
few years ago, dida's Secrets founder Emma Best won a
foya battle with the federal government, and one of the
thousands of documents made available to the general public for
(47:50):
viewing as a result was a nineteen fifties era CIA
file that contained a seven hundred page book that they
had obtained from the Hungarian Army during World War II.
And the book lists every officer in Hungary's army in
nineteen forty four, every officer by name, rank, date of birth,
(48:12):
which medals they have when they began their service. Seven
hundred pages of Hungarian names, and there is only one
officer named Zultanvasvari and his date of birth is listed
as May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. Now I also found New
Jersey Department of Health records that show that a Zultan
(48:33):
Vasvari born May thirteenth, nineteen twelve died in Bergen County
in nineteen ninety. Okay, that set of facts is not
exactly earth shattering. There are interviews with Hungarian Americans who
have fond memories about learning to shoot rifles on a
farm owned by a man they called Uncle Zoli, and
those articles sometimes mentioned that he'd been an officer in
(48:55):
the war. But those fond memories shared in English language
sources sound like a very different Sultan Vasvari than the
man described in Romanian. In nineteen forty a Hungarian Army
officer named Zultan Baswari gave the order to massacre more
(49:17):
than one hundred and fifty Romanian civilians in the Transylvanian
village of Ep. An interview with Gavriel Bhutkavan, one of
the very few survivors of that massacre, has been transcribed
in the collections held by the Holocaust Museum. He describes
finding his eleven month old sister shot and crushed with
(49:38):
the butt of a rifle in her crib. His eleven
year old brother was shot in the back of the
head running from the soldiers. When the massacre was over,
Vasvari ordered his soldiers to dig a massive pit, burying
the victims in a mass grave. Most English language sources
about the massacre at Ep say that Vasvari was sentenced
(50:01):
to death for war crimes by the Romanian People's Tribunal
at Cluge after the war, and the source cited for
that does indeed name Baswari among those war criminals who
were sentenced to death at Cluche, but none of the
English language sources I could find mentioned that this Romanian
(50:23):
document also says that he was tried in absentia, and
at the time his sentence was pronounced, his current location
was not known. According to a two thousand and four
report of the International Holocaust Commission, in Romania, the people's
tribunals at Cluje and Bucharest sentenced over a hundred war
criminals to death, but it was largely symbolic. In one
(50:48):
mass trial, fewer than a third of those charged were
even accounted for, let alone present. Even among those who
were ever actually in custody, only a very small number
of those sentences wherever carried out. So technically those articles
aren't wrong. Zultan Vasvari was convicted of war crimes by
(51:12):
a Romanian tribunal, and he was sentenced to die, but
they left out the extremely important detail that when they
sentenced him to death, he wasn't there, They didn't know
where he was, and he was absolutely not actually executed
by the Romanian government. I struggled for entirely too long
(51:39):
with a blurry PDF in Romanian, considering that this is
so far beyond tangential to this story. But I'm going
to have to find a historian to talk to about this,
because I am having a hard time believing that a
Hungarian war criminal started a paramilitary organization in New Jersey.
(52:01):
Surely there was some other Zultan Vaswari born in Hungary
on May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. I must have made a mistake.
I've really lost the plot here. I got completely derailed
by the discovery of a Hungarian fascist newspaper in Ohio
running ads for a war criminals nationalist militia. Maybe, but
(52:23):
if you're looking for a Hungarian translation of David Duke's autobiography,
you might try looking at a used bookstore in Cleveland.
All that to say, circling back around, Curtis Maynard's Holocaust
denile essays were very popular among a wide variety of
(52:43):
the world's worst people in two thousand and seven. Within
the admittedly small world of racist conspiracy theory bloggers, Curtis
Maynard was really making a name for himself. He's only
nursing part time at this point. He picks up shift
on the weekends and spends weekdays at home with his
daughters while his wife worked as a chemical engineer. In
(53:06):
later angry screeds mail to his divorce attorney, he claims
he was the girl's primary caregiver and that the decision
was made jointly in the marriage that he would sacrifice
his career so the girls wouldn't have to go to daycare.
But I think he really enjoyed the freedom of being
home on the internet all day. He posted thousands of
(53:28):
times that year on Nazi message boards, and he was
writing hundreds of blog posts about how the Jews control
the media, black people are doing all the violent crime,
the Holocaust never happened. I mean, he's churning them out,
and he's attending conferences, he's networking with movement leaders, he's
doing interviews on conspiracy theory radio shows about his friendship
(53:51):
with Ernstundel. His hard work is starting to pay off,
and he was just on the cusp of being a
real figure in professional racism. But then on December of
two thousand and seven, he got into an argument with
a former friend that would end up ruining everything. But
(54:15):
I lost too much time this week trying to translate
the records of a war crimes tribunal from Romanian, so
I'll have to pick back up next week with the
story of two Nazi bloggers trying to destroy each other
over a disagreement about Ron Paul. I really did mean
to get it all out in one I'm actually really
(54:35):
looking forward to revealing who it was that Maynard was
beefing with Weird Little Guys as a production of Cool
Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by
me Pomi Kunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and
(54:58):
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad dickerd.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal. You
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
(55:19):
on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit. Just don't post anything
that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.
Wol Zone Media. In March of twenty twenty five, an
episode of this show disappeared. It only existed at all
for a few weeks, and its absence was obvious because
(00:23):
it was the second half of a story whose beginning
is still there. A lot of you have asked what
happened to that episode, and I can't exactly tell you that,
not in any kind of satisfying detail, but I have
finally rewritten and re recorded it. When an episode of
(00:48):
a podcast disappears, with that explanation, it's only natural to
speculate about what happened behind the scenes. Maybe there was
some sort of scandal, plagiarism, information, sloppy research, factual errors,
maybe some kind of offensive slip of the tongue. It's
happened to other shows. Sometimes it gets addressed, and sometimes
(01:13):
it doesn't. Sometimes it's not really something that can be
aired out. If there's litigation of some kind, it's best
to say nothing at all. None of those things happened here.
That much I can promise you. I stand behind my
research one hundred and ten percent. I have sources for
(01:35):
my facts, and I try to be clear when I'm
only offering up conjecture based on those facts. I try
to be even clearer when I'm just bitballing. There was
no inaccuracy. That sounds cocky, but it's true. I've been
(01:55):
writing unflattering things about dangerous men for a long time now.
I'm thorough and I'm careful, and one of the lessons
I've learned over the years is that a lot of
people don't really like it when you write honestly about
the ugly things they've been doing and saying I'm used
(02:16):
to that. So when a man with a history of
violence and a long track record of vexatious litigation sent
a vague but threatening sounding email about the episode, I
wasn't surprised. I'm not going to name this man, and
I would prefer that you not either, for reasons that
(02:37):
I think will become obvious. He's never actually succeeded it
seriously harming anyone as far as I can tell, and
he's never made it very far in any of his
many lawsuits. But he has been to jail, and he's
had court ordered psychiatric treatment for this kind of behavior.
(03:02):
Corporations tend to be pretty risk averse, and their lawyers
even more so. The message was brief, but alarming, and
the guys in the suits just didn't want to have
anything to do with someone who, based on his history
and this current behavior, seems like he might be in
the middle of a serious mental health crisis. So the
(03:25):
decision was made to take the episode down. I wasn't
happy about it, but I get it. I'm a team
player now, and that means that I understand these days.
I'm not just gambling with my own wellbeing when I
decide to play chicken with a conspiracy theorist. So for
(03:47):
the last eight months or so, there's been an episode
on the show's feed called Curtis Maynard Part One, but
there is no episode called Curtis Maynard Part two. As
twenty twenty five is coming to a close and I've
been reflecting on the year past, I decided to fix that,
(04:08):
which meant excising any mention of that man, who was
really only ever a tangent in the story. Anyway, you
might have assumed that the man who was upset about
the episode was the subject of the episode. It wasn't.
Curtis Maynard had no complaints about the episode, not that
(04:29):
he shared with me. Anyway, he probably wouldn't have liked it,
if he heard it, to be honest, but he didn't
because he's dead. No, the man that I had to
go back and cut out of this story was an
interesting digression at best. He wasn't directly involved with the
(04:51):
core storyline. He never even interacted directly with the weird
little guy at the center of it. This man wouldn't
warrant talking about it all if it weren't for his
connection to a secondary character and a story about someone else.
He is, luckily for us, not someone who matters at all.
(05:16):
So now that I've hopefully dispelled the rumor that the
episode was taken down because it contained factual statements about
Ron Paul's connection to Neo Nazis and white supremacists, here
is the original first half of that story to refresh
your memory. The rewritten, re recorded lost episode will be
(05:37):
right behind this one in the show's feed on your
podcast app of choice. My editor Rory and I will
be off next week for Thanksgiving, but I'll be back
with new We're Little Guys in December. On the Saturday
(05:58):
night before Labor Day two thousand three, Charter buses pulled
into the lot at Cincinnati's Public Landing. Passengers streamed out
of the buses one hundred and fifty or so, mostly
older white men in suits, and they boarded the Delta Queen.
It was a beautiful late summer evening for a dinner
cruise down the Ohio River, and they'd spent all day
(06:21):
cooped up inside in a rented ballroom at the Marriotte
near the airport. They'd paid three hundred and seventy five
dollars apiece to attend a weekend long conference called Real
History USA, but the history they were interested in wasn't
what any real historian would call real history at all.
(06:42):
This was the fifth year in a row that disgraced
historian and infamous Holocaust denier David Irving had brought anti
Semites from around the world to Cincinnati. Over the years,
He's been banned from entering Canada, Germany, Austria, Australia, New Zealand,
and Lithuania, but he seemed to enjoy the Ohio River,
(07:03):
and he came back to Cincinnati year after year. That weekend.
Speakers ranged from notorious to obscure, but they all shared
a passion for Nazi Germany. Brigham Young University professor Tom
Catherall had to cancel at the last minute due to
a health concern, and I'm sure the attendees were devastated
(07:25):
to miss his presentation on Hermann Goering's love of model Trains.
Over lunch at the Marriotte on Saturday, they watched Lenny
Riefenstahl's Victory of the Faith, the less famous predecessor to
her infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The
conference program notes that Reefenstahl is quote still going strong
(07:46):
at over one hundred and Irving said that Riefenstah sends
her greetings to the conference's attendees. David Irving couldn't have
known then that his friend would actually die later that week.
On Sunday morning, the conference resumed with presentations from Donald Bustian,
an adjunct professor at Southern Arkansas University and founding member
(08:07):
of a group called Scholars for Nine to eleven Truth.
Before lunch, Charles Pravaan, a theologian whose anti contraception writing
is highly regarded by adherents of the Quiverful movement, opined
on the possibility that a self published book by an
American Jew was actually to blame for Hitler's policies in Germany,
(08:29):
and that afternoon, David Irving gave the stage to a
young protege, an up and coming white nationalist blogger who'd
recently finished his master's degree at Texas A and M University.
Curtis Maynard presented his master's thesis on a lesser known
incident from World War II. The one hundred and four
page thesis doesn't actually mention the Holocaust a single time.
(08:52):
It's not about that. It's about a nineteen forty three
German air raid on US naval vessels docked at Bari, Italy.
But the old man in the Marriott conference room probably
spent most of their Sunday afternoons watching the History Channel,
so I'm sure they enjoyed hearing a dry resitation of
facts about planes and ships. Either way. In two thousand
(09:15):
and three, Curtis Maynard was a rising star in the
revisionist history community. Sharing the stage with David Irving was
a great honor for an aspiring white supremacist writer, and
in certain circles his writing was well regarded and is
sometimes still remembered. But Curtis Maynard is best remembered for
(09:37):
how his story ends At the wheel of a nineteen
ninety four Lincoln Sedan crashing a ditch with a bullet
hole in his head. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird,
little guys. When I started writing this episode, I thought
(10:12):
the story of Curtis Maynard would revolve around the revisionist
historians and pseudo intellectuals he admired. But instead I spent
most of this week reconstructing one man's disastrous downward spiral
after getting into a flame war on a form thread
about Ron Paul. I think, at its core, this is
(10:33):
a story about lies, not just the lies of dishonest scholarship.
No listener to this show needs to be told this,
But the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews, roma queer people, communists,
and political dissidents were shot, gassed, and starved to death
by Nazi Germany. I have no interest at all in
(10:56):
engaging with the revisionist history of David Irving and his ilk.
There's no debate to be had there, although we will
wade through a bit of the swamp they inhabit. No,
this is a story about smaller lies, about the gossip
and rumors that live in the comments on twenty year
old blog posts and ancient threads on hateful online forums
(11:20):
about internes, scene squabbles for clout on Nazi message boards,
and debate within the white power movement about what kind
of messaging will actually advance their cause. And it's a
story that ends in a despicable, tragic act of domestic violence.
A woman was murdered, a child was shot, and children
(11:42):
lost their parents. It's a story about the violent speech
of violent men, men who talk about mass murder and genocide,
and how sometimes those men cross the threshold into real
world violence. This is some I spend a lot of
time thinking about. It's unavoidable. Really, I spend a lot
(12:06):
of time studying the digital debris left behind after the fact,
after a man like this stops posting and starts loading
his gun. But that's almost always where I start reading.
I'm looking back in time. I already know what he did.
(12:26):
A few months ago, I started researching for an episode
about a different man, a different murderer. I realized something
that seems obvious now, I just never really thought about
it this way before. When I study the internet footprint
of a killer, I'm looking at a fossil of sorts,
(12:47):
these posts preserved in stone, evidence of where he once was,
But those online ecosystems are thriving, busy places full of
people who read those posts the day they were made,
people who responded to them. So what is for me
(13:08):
some kind of artifact? Was once an actual conversation between
real people who really knew each other, And when one
of them logs off for the last time, the ones
left behind processed that violence right there in the same
digital forum they'd spent years chatting. The story they got
(13:33):
me thinking about this particular genre of online conversation is
when I haven't finished. Fraser Glenn Miller murdered three people
in Kansas in twenty fourteen. He died in prison convicted
of those murders, but he was also a suspect in
three other murders in nineteen eighty seven, and was a
(13:53):
central figure in the Greensboro massacre, where Nazis and klansmen
murdered five communist organizers in nineteen seven nine. He didn't
pull the trigger in nineteen seventy nine, and nobody ever
approved he did in eighty seven, but he played a
part in those deaths. His hands were unclean long before
he opened fire in Overland Park. It's a long and
(14:16):
complicated story with mountains of archival material left to consume
before I'm ready to write it. But on the day
Miller started shooting outside a Jewish community center in Kansas,
his peers saw the news. Within an hour of the shooting.
There were threads on Stormfront and Vanguard News, the two
most popular Nazi message boards of the day, and in
(14:40):
the immediate aftermath, a lot of the posters were celebrating
they thought there were some dead Jews, in their words,
but others were skeptical about initial reports that the shooter
had yelled Hyle Hitler as officers handcuffed him, and then
someone posted the news footage of that moment of the
(15:02):
shooter yelling Kyle Hitler, and the shooter's face isn't terribly clear,
as he's being shoved into the back of a police car.
If you didn't know him, that blurry, poorly lit image
wouldn't really look like anything at all. But they did
know him. It was Brad Griffin, a prominent member of
(15:24):
the secessionist group the League of the South, and a
man I have my own history with who recognized Miller first.
The shooter wasn't just one of their own, He was
a prolific poster in their online community. He was someone
they talked to every day, someone who'd been a significant
figure in their movement for decades. And on both sites,
(15:47):
users were searching for meaning, and some said they always
knew this would happen, that he was going to crack
one of these days and do something like this. Others
insisted that the they knew would never do this and
he must have been set up. Some celebrated, some were disappointed,
(16:09):
but no one grieved for his victims. And those conversations
seemed so unique to me, What a strange window into
this terrible world. They're deeply troubling, of course, but surely
those were an anomaly, I thought. But while I was
(16:30):
researching for this episode, the story I'm circling around getting
to this week, I saw it again because four years
before Fraser Glenn Miller made his last post, that same
online community reacted to the news that Curtis Maynard had
murdered his ex wife and then taken his own life.
(16:52):
But I suppose we should start at the end. On
April twenty first, twenty ten, Curtis Boon Maynard was harassing
his ex wife. It wasn't the first time they'd been
divorced for a little over a year, and he hadn't
reacted well to losing custody of their two daughters. I
(17:15):
couldn't find any coverage that included the contents of any
of those texts he sent Melissa Masa that day, but
whatever it was, she was upset enough about the texts
that she'd discussed them with a friend. That afternoon, at
eight twenty pm, Melissa's neighbors heard gunshots. Her middle daughter,
(17:36):
just twelve years old, ran to a neighbor's house with
her two year old sister in her arms. A neighbor
heard the commotion and came outside and saw Melissa, a
thirty four year old mother of three, dead in her
front yard. He was still taking in the sight of
his neighbour's body there on the lawn when he noticed
her ex husband, Curtis Maynard, pulling out of the driveway.
(18:00):
We were dialed nine one one as he started his
own car, following Maynard and providing his location to the dispatcher.
Officers who arrived at the house found Melissa's oldest child,
a sixteen year old daughter from a prior marriage inside.
She survived, but she had been shot in the face
by the man who had been her stepfather since she
(18:20):
was a toddler. Curtis Maynard was driving seventy miles an
hour down the highway when police caught up to him.
He ended the chase without ever even stepping on the brakes.
He shot himself in the head while he was still
speeding down the dark road. With the driver dead at
the wheel, his car slammed into an SUV that had
(18:41):
pulled over onto the shoulder to get out of the
way of the high speed chase. The mother and her
two children inside were thankfully uninjured. The irresistible and unanswerable
question in the aftermath of a tragedy like this is
always why. Why did he murder his ex wife? Why
(19:02):
did he shoot his stepdaughter in the face? Why did
he take his own life? Why? Today? Why? Like this?
And there are no answers. Nothing I can tell you
will explain this, not for lack of trying, but I
can try to understand who he was before the last
(19:22):
day of his life. And pieced together the fragments of
an online argument that seems to have been the beginning
of the end of Curtis Maynard's dream of making a
career out of being a racist blogger. I don't know
exactly when Curtis Maynard decided he wanted to be a writer.
He served briefly in the US Army after high school.
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In nineteen ninety two, at the age of twenty five,
he got his associate's degree in nursing and began working
as a registered nurse. In nineteen ninety six, while he
was still married to his first wife, he started seeing
the woman who had become his second wife and only
murder victim. Melissa Mesa was actually still married to her
(20:06):
first husband at the time, but they were separated, and
Maynard would later say he'd believed she was already divorced.
It's hard to piece together the particulars of a man's
personal life so many years before he got online, but
things were not going well. In nineteen ninety seven, just
as his divorce from his first wife was finalized, a
(20:28):
judge in Texas issued a bench warn't for him. He'd
pled guilty to a dui in nineteen ninety four, and
he got off easy. He didn't have to go to jail.
All he had to do was complete the dui education program,
but he never did it, so maybe he skipped town
to avoid the benchwarn't. Maybe he was just looking for
(20:49):
a fresh start after his divorce. But just as he
was doing court in Corpus Christi, Texas, he got a
job at a hospital in Idaho in June of nineteen
ninety seven, right around the time Melissa probably would have
been realizing she was pregnant with Maynard's daughter. He did
something he should not have done. And I don't mean
(21:13):
impregnating a woman who was still married to another man.
I don't care about that. But according to a decision
from the Idaho Board of Nursing, one vial of demarole
and one vial of morphine went missing from the locked
narcotics cabinet at Boundary County Community Hospital on June twenty eighth,
nineteen ninety seven. Missing opiates are a big deal in
(21:37):
a hospital. They're not something that just gets misplaced and
shrugged off. It's not a lost pen. These things are
carefully accounted for these days. Everything's tracked in a computer system.
But even in the dark ages of the nineteen nineties,
every dose of an opiate had to be signed for.
(21:58):
There was a record where every drop of this was
supposed to be. If those vials were missing, someone had
to have taken them. An inventory was done to determine
if anything else was missing, and a few days later
it was discovered that two boxes, each containing ten vials
(22:18):
of morphine, had been tampered with. The evidence was turned
over to the Bonners Ferry Police department. The hospital had
their own investigation to conduct. They drug tested every hospital
employee who had access to that cabinet. Sure, it's possible
that a nurse who steals pain medication is just selling it,
(22:40):
but there's a really good chance that whoever took that
morphine was going to test positive for it. Everyone tested negative,
well everyone except for Curtis Maynard, who didn't show up
for his shift on the day of the drug test.
In fact, he never came back to work at all.
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The police investigation would eventually determine that Maynard's fingerprints were
on the boxes that had been tampered with. The morphine
that should have been in those vials in that box
had all been replaced with what the Board of Nursing
decision only calls quote a benign substance, which I assume
is a saline solution or something like that. So the
(23:38):
investigation was kicked off because two vials were physically missing
from the cabinet, but in the end it looks like
a significant amount of morphine was actually missing, having been
taken from the vials and replaced with something else, And
so if he hadn't slipped up and stolen the vial
(24:00):
of demarole, they might never have noticed that he'd been
replacing morphine with saltwater, and hospital patients may have been
administered an unknown substance instead of their pain medication. By
the time those lab results came back, though Maynard had
already moved back to Texas, he was technically still a
(24:22):
registered nurse with a valid license in Texas. When his
oldest daughter was born in March of nineteen ninety eight,
he was working as a nurse at a hospital in
Corpus Christi. The Idaho Board of Nursing filed their formal
complaint against him that summer, a year after the morphine
first went missing. Maynard never responded. After months of getting
(24:45):
no response from Maynard, the Idaho Board of Nursing got
a default order against him, suspending his nursing license, and
before the Texas Board of Nursing had a chance to
suspend him. A standard practice in most professions, where if
you're disciplined by a board in one state, there is
what's called reciprocal discipline in most other states. But before
(25:05):
Texas could do anything like that, he mailed them a
letter saying I no longer desire to be licensed as
a professional nurse, and he voluntarily relinquished his nursing license
before it could be taken. The Bonners Ferry Herald, a
newspaper in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, ran several announcements in the
(25:26):
summer of two thousand that Curtis Maynard was wanted on
a felony warrant for possession of controlled substance and theft,
but Idaho court records don't show that any criminal case
was ever filed. I have to assume that's in relation
to the theft of the morphine three years earlier, but
I don't know how those pieces fit together. He did
(25:48):
move back to Idaho years later, but the five year
statute of limitations had already passed, so he was never
actually criminally charged in connection with the missing morphine. But
in nineteen ninety ane nine, Curtis Maynard had lost his
nursing license in Idaho and given it up in Texas.
He was unable to work in the only field he
(26:09):
had any real experience in. He had a baby and
a common law wife to support, and he had a
pretty serious addiction to alcohol and opiates. After twenty eight
days of residential treatment for substance abuse, he did what
a lot of people do when they have no idea
what to do with their lives. He went to graduate school,
(26:30):
enrolling in a master's program in history at Texas A
and M University. I wish I could tell you which
came first. Did Curtis Maynard set out to write his
master's thesis about a German air raid on US naval
vessels in Italy because he had a genuine interest in
this lesser known chapter of World War II history, and
(26:52):
he accidentally stumbled upon David Irving's work while he was researching.
Or was he already familiar with the work of revisionist
historians and hoping to add his voice to the choir.
I'm not sure there's anyone left to ask, but whichever
it was. By the time Maynard finished his thesis in
the spring of two thousand and three, he wasn't just
(27:15):
reading David Irvings's Holocaust denial works. They were corresponding. The
thesis not only lists three of Irving's books in its bibliography,
there are several footnotes indicating the source for a particular
claim is an email exchange between Curtis Maynard and David Irving.
(27:36):
Maynard's thesis isn't about the Holocaust. The word doesn't even
appear in the paper. There's no mention of Jews, camps,
gas chambers, nothing like that. The writing isn't great in
my opinion, but I think he could have produced a
serviceable paper about a real historical event out of college.
(28:01):
So to be honest, I have no idea how the
thesis writing process works. Maybe there was no point at
which someone read any of this in draft form and
asked him, hey, why did you write quote? Without the
works of historians like Elkafrolic and David Irving, who conducted
research in the former Soviet archives in Moscow, there was
(28:23):
a distinct possibility that we would not be privy to
the uncensored and unedited thoughts, ideas and words of doctor
Joseph Gerbels today end quote because not only is that
not true, David Irving is not solely responsible for existing
works of scholarship on the Diaries of Joseph Gerbels. But
(28:45):
it's also just a really weird thing to say. There
must not be any feedback provided in the process, because
surely someone in the history department would have clocked it
as very inappropriate to drop this line. Quote. David Irving's
opinion cannot be dismissed easily, as he is a recognized
(29:08):
expert on the third Reich. End quote. I don't know
how to convey to you how not true that is.
That is the not truest thing that you could write
in your master's thesis or history. Now, you might have
(29:29):
been able to say it with a straight face in
the nineteen sixties. Maybe in the nineteen sixties you could
say David Irving is a recognized expert on the third Reich.
Maybe maybe you could still say it in the seventies
into the eighties. If you're reckless, if you're careless, if
you're not keeping up with current events, maybe you could
still say it in the eighties. But by two thousand,
(29:53):
everyone in the world knew that David Irving was not
a historian. Ninety three, Jewish history professor Deborah Lipstadt wrote
a book called Denying the Holocaust. The growing assault on
truth and memory, and in the book, David Irving was
just one of a variety of figures within the Holocaust
(30:14):
denial movement that Lipstat discusses, but he in particular took
issue with her criticism of his work, and so in
nineteen ninety six he filed a libel suit against Deborah
Lipstadt and her publisher. David Irving is British, so he
filed this lawsuit in the United Kingdom, and libel laws
(30:37):
are different in the UK. I don't want to get
into the weeds there. They just are. But even in England,
the truth is the best defense against an accusation like this.
It can't be libel if it's true. And so Lipstot's
lawyers hired Sir Richard Evans, a Cambridge University history professor
(31:01):
who is an actual historian of modern Germany, and Evans
spent two full years, with the help of full time
research assistance, producing a seven hundred and forty page report
on his findings. He read everything David Irving ever wrote,
(31:23):
everything David Irving ever said about the things that he wrote,
and ultimately Evans concluded that, in his expert opinion, everything
David Irving had ever written was quote completely worthless as history,
because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere in any of them
(31:45):
to give a reliable account of what he is talking
or writing about. If we mean by historian, someone who
is concerned to discover the truth about the past and
to give as accurate a representation of it as possible,
Irving is not a historian. And at the end of
the trial a judge agreed, writing that Irving had quote
(32:08):
persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence end quote,
because he was ideologically motivated to portray Hitler in a
positive light and deny the Holocaust. So he sued Deborah
Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier, saying that was libel,
(32:28):
and the judge said, that's not libel because legally you're
a Holocaust denier, And so we lost the libel lawsuit.
But even worse for David Irving than losing the lawsuit
and having to pay quite a large sum of money
was the fact that a small army of historians had
(32:50):
spent years going over his work with a fine toothed comb.
This wasn't the first time people had found inconsistency, said
inaccuracies in his work, but they'd never been dissected quite
like this. So all of these professors and historians had
read all of his books, and they'd all written these reports,
(33:13):
and they published those reports as books, and they talked
to reporters, and now all of a sudden, it's very
easy to find a laundry list of the debunked, made up,
and outright fraudulent claims that riddled his body of work.
So no, there's really no excuse in two thousand and
(33:35):
three for citing David Irving as an expert on the
history of the Third Reich. That's malpractice. But maybe his
thesis adviser was in a hurry when she skimmed his
bibliography and she didn't notice that he'd cited David Irving's
book The Destruction of Convoy PQ. Seventeen, despite the fact
(33:59):
that every of that book was withdrawn from the market
in nineteen seventy after Irving loss a massive libel lawsuit.
I have to wonder if his adviser noticed that he
cited Irving's Destruction of Dresden, a book that had been
a best seller in the nineteen sixties but completely fell
apart under the slightest scrutiny. The entire book relies on
(34:23):
a premise supported only by a document that turned out
to have been a Nazi forgery, as well as the
personal assurances of a man who had been a major
general in the Wehrmacht. Apparently, just finishing a thesis at all,
regardless of what it says, is the biggest hurdle. Because
(34:43):
Maynard graduated with a master's degree in May of two
thousand and three, and just a few months after presenting
his thesis to the committee at Texas A and M University,
he presented it again, this time to the attendees of
the Holocaust Denial conference in Cincinnati. A few months after
that conference, he applied for the reinstatement of his nursing
(35:03):
license in Idaho. He planned to work part time while
enrolled in a history PhD program at the University of
Idaho in Moscow. On the condition that he attended narcotics
anonymous meetings three times a week, submit to random drug tests,
and receive quarterly evaluations of his performance. He was allowed
to work in a nursing home near the university, but
(35:26):
he left the PhD program after just a few months
and moved back to Texas again. But even as he's
struggling to stay enrolled in school or keep a nursing job,
his career as a professional racist is really starting to
take off. In two thousand and seven, four years after
(36:01):
David Irving invited him to share the stage at the
Holocaust Denile Conference in Cincinnati, things were finally going well
for Curtis Maynard. He was pen pals with Ernst Zundel,
the German born Canadian whose criminal prosecutions in Germany and
Canada had made him one of the world's most famous
Holocaust deniers. Maynard's blog, The Politically Correct Apostate was banned
(36:28):
by blogspot and word Press every couple of months, but
it always re emerged, and the readers followed him to
each new url. He wrote prolifically, often publishing multiple pieces
per day, and his content was cross posted on the
websites of some big names in the movement, like David
(36:50):
Duke and John Denugen. His writing appeared often on the
website for Jeff Rentz, a talk radio guy that you
could most quickly describe as a more explicitly Nazi version
of Alex Jones. But you've probably never heard of Jeff
Rentz because he got into a fight with Alex Jones
(37:12):
in two thousand and nine that ended with Rents getting
dumped by the network that they shared, Genesis Communications. Alex Linder,
the webmaster at Vanguard News Network, posted dozens of Maynard's
pieces on his site, and in April of two thousand
and seven, Linder called him quote one of the most
(37:32):
active and powerful of a rising generation of white writers.
In July of two thousand and seven, just weeks after
his wife gave birth to their second child, Maynard traveled
to Sandpoint, Idaho. He was a guest at a conference
hosted by America's Promise Ministries, a Christian identity church funded
by the sale of Holocaust denile literature. The keynote speaker
(37:57):
at the conference was Michael Collins Piper, a red contributor
to the white nationalist publications American Free Press and The Spotlight.
According to a write up about the event that was
published in American Free Press, Fiber's speech was about Jewish
control of American politics conspiracy. Theorist Mark Glenn performed an
(38:18):
original musical number about Jewish domination of society with the
help of his five oldest children and I guess it's
for the best. But I couldn't find any video of that,
But I don't know, I'm kind of curious. But Glenn
was proud enough of this performance to include it in
(38:38):
his article about the conference, and the article mentions Manard
by name, calling him quote a well known writer dealing
with the issues similar to the themes covered at the conference,
the themes being I guess Jewish control of society, and
(38:59):
the write up ends the quote from Michael Collins Piper,
the keynote speaker, and he said of the conference quote,
it was obvious to me five minutes after arriving at
the church that once again everything the mainstream media has
said about North Idaho being a haven for violent extremists
and malcontents is all a big lie and that no
(39:22):
better people can be found anywhere. I wouldn't expect a
man like Michael Collins Piper to be honest about something
like America's Promised Ministries, but I will point out that
there is a reason he felt the need to counter
the idea that the church was a haven for violent
(39:42):
extremists because it was in nineteen ninety six, four congregants
of America's Promise Ministries bombed a planned Parenthood in Spokane, Washington,
and the offices of the newspaper The Spokesman Review during
a crimes breathe. But it also involved several bank robberies.
(40:03):
In nineteen ninety nine, a member of the church named
Buford Furrow shot several people at the Los Angeles Jewish
Community Center before murdering a Filipino mailman as he fled
the scene. Those are both stories that deserve their own telling.
Beauford Furrow, for one thing, was dating Bob Matthews's widow.
(40:24):
But what I'm getting at here is that America's Promised
Ministries was not just a church. It was a propaganda
mill with a body count. But at this conference, Curtis
Maynard was once again rubbing elbows with some very important racists.
One of his better known essays, one called I Am
(40:45):
a Holocaust Denier and I Am Unafraid, was republished often
and by multiple outlets, even appearing in translation in an
Ohio based newspaper run by a group called the Hungaria
Freedom Fighter's Movement. There really is a community for everything,
I guess now. This little newspaper, Titya Kurt was published
(41:09):
from nineteen sixty eight until the death of its editor,
Tibor Mayor in twenty ten. Now, I'm not going to
pronounce a single Hungarian word or name correctly. I did try,
I looked them up, I watched videos. Don't email me
about it. And I'm not sure that the time I
(41:31):
spent down this rabbit hole will ever pay off in
any meaningful way. It's certainly not relevant to the story
I'm trying to tell here, but it's always a little
bit of a thrill to find a whole new genre
of guys I've never encountered before. So I know I'm
straying terribly from Curtis, but just humor me for a minute.
(41:55):
Curtis Maynard's essay appeared in a two thousand and seven
issue of CITYA Kurt and I wanted to get a
feel for the kind of newspaper it was, so I
browsed a few other issues in the couple of years.
On either side of two thousand and seven, I found
articles by Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for
Historical Review, an organization dedicated to Holocaust denial. There were
(42:19):
essays by klansman David Duke, and neo Nazi William Luther Pierce,
all of which had been translated into Hungarian. On the
back page, as is common in publications like this, they
offered books for sale. You could buy Hungarian language editions
of books by David Irving, David Duke, Pat Buchanan. You
(42:40):
could even buy DVDs of Lenny Reefinstall's Nazi propaganda films
with Hungarian subtitles. So, okay, I admit it. It got distracted,
I got lost. I wasted a lot of time copying
and pasting chunks of Hungarian Nazi news into Google Translate,
(43:01):
and I did find decades of issues of the paper itself,
issues spanning nineteen sixty eight till twenty ten, but there's
almost no mention of its existence, outside of the fact
that some university libraries have issues in their archives. I
found almost no information at all about the group behind
(43:21):
the paper. At a meeting of the United Nations General
Assembly in nineteen eighty one, the Hungarian un representative referred
to them briefly as a US based neo fascist group
dedicated in the spirit of Ferenz Salashi, the Nazi collaborator
installed as the nation's leader after the German occupation of
(43:41):
Hungary in nineteen forty four. There are no good fascists
that you could claim as a role model. You shouldn't
pick any of them, but this is a particularly bad one.
In the short few months that he was in power,
his Arrow Cross party worked directly with Adolph Eikman to
(44:01):
resume the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the camps, and
as Soviet troops closed in on the Hungarian capital, Arrow
Cross death squads carried out mass executions in the walled
ghettos of Budapest, shooting thousands, thousands of Hungarian Jews and
pushing their bodies into the Danube River. And in that
(44:24):
nineteen eighty one UN General Assembly meeting, the Hungarian representative
read aloud excerpts from this newspaper. The Hungaria freedom Fighters,
as they called themselves, said their goal was to reconquer
the historical living space of the Hungarian people, whose racial
purity they hold very dear, and they praised the regime
(44:47):
of Farin Salagi, calling his actions a brave attempt to
save the fatherland and its ancestral honor. Five years later,
in the December nineteen eighty six issue of citya Kre,
there is a brief note on the backpage thanking President
Ronald Reagan for his proclamation in support of the Hungarian
freedom fighters, the anti communist heroes of the nineteen fifty
(45:11):
six uprising. Most of what I found were issues of
Sitya Kurt, which is in Hungarian. I did find a
handful of issues of a companion newspaper in English called
The Fighter, and its first issue in nineteen sixty eight
featured a full page front page glowing endorsement of segregationist
(45:35):
George Wallace's presidential campaign, written by Sityakurt contributing editor Louis Molnar,
who was George Wallace's Ohio campaign chair, and according to
his obituary, he personally toppled the statue of Joseph Stalin
in the city square in Budapest in nineteen fifty six.
Hard to say, and the first issue of Sityakirt in Hungarian,
(46:00):
also published in nineteen sixty eight, announced the formation of
new chapters of a Hungarian nationalist paramilitary organization called the
Cross and Sword Movement. It had originally been founded a
few years earlier by a former Hungarian army officer named
Zultan Vasvari. And as I looked through more issues of
(46:20):
Sidya Kurt Most issues in the sixties and seventies list
Zultan Vasvari's home address in New Jersey in case you
want to send a cash donation to the paramilitary. In
an interview about her twenty seventeen documentary called Cold Warriors,
Hungarian American journalist Raka Pigniski said that the Cross and
(46:42):
Sword movement was not an anti Semitic organization. They were nationalists,
they were patriots. Were some of the members of the
Nazi collaborationist Arrow Cross Party, Yes, but that was in
the past. I didn't watch the documentary, I read the interview.
(47:03):
I am not sure I believe that. And maybe Zultan
Vasvari is a common name. I don't know. I've never
been to Hungary, so I can't rule out the possibility
that there were multiple Hungarian Army officers in World War
Two who had that name. But not only can I
(47:27):
not find any evidence that there were, I have pretty
convincing evidence that there were not multiple Sultan Vasvaris. A
few years ago, dida's Secrets founder Emma Best won a
foya battle with the federal government, and one of the
thousands of documents made available to the general public for
(47:50):
viewing as a result was a nineteen fifties era CIA
file that contained a seven hundred page book that they
had obtained from the Hungarian Army during World War II.
And the book lists every officer in Hungary's army in
nineteen forty four, every officer by name, rank, date of birth,
(48:12):
which medals they have when they began their service. Seven
hundred pages of Hungarian names, and there is only one
officer named Zultanvasvari and his date of birth is listed
as May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. Now I also found New
Jersey Department of Health records that show that a Zultan
(48:33):
Vasvari born May thirteenth, nineteen twelve died in Bergen County
in nineteen ninety. Okay, that set of facts is not
exactly earth shattering. There are interviews with Hungarian Americans who
have fond memories about learning to shoot rifles on a
farm owned by a man they called Uncle Zoli, and
those articles sometimes mentioned that he'd been an officer in
(48:55):
the war. But those fond memories shared in English language
sources sound like a very different Sultan Vasvari than the
man described in Romanian. In nineteen forty a Hungarian Army
officer named Zultan Baswari gave the order to massacre more
(49:17):
than one hundred and fifty Romanian civilians in the Transylvanian
village of Ep. An interview with Gavriel Bhutkavan, one of
the very few survivors of that massacre, has been transcribed
in the collections held by the Holocaust Museum. He describes
finding his eleven month old sister shot and crushed with
(49:38):
the butt of a rifle in her crib. His eleven
year old brother was shot in the back of the
head running from the soldiers. When the massacre was over,
Vasvari ordered his soldiers to dig a massive pit, burying
the victims in a mass grave. Most English language sources
about the massacre at Ep say that Vasvari was sentenced
(50:01):
to death for war crimes by the Romanian People's Tribunal
at Cluge after the war, and the source cited for
that does indeed name Baswari among those war criminals who
were sentenced to death at Cluche, but none of the
English language sources I could find mentioned that this Romanian
(50:23):
document also says that he was tried in absentia, and
at the time his sentence was pronounced, his current location
was not known. According to a two thousand and four
report of the International Holocaust Commission, in Romania, the people's
tribunals at Cluje and Bucharest sentenced over a hundred war
criminals to death, but it was largely symbolic. In one
(50:48):
mass trial, fewer than a third of those charged were
even accounted for, let alone present. Even among those who
were ever actually in custody, only a very small number
of those sentences wherever carried out. So technically those articles
aren't wrong. Zultan Vasvari was convicted of war crimes by
(51:12):
a Romanian tribunal, and he was sentenced to die, but
they left out the extremely important detail that when they
sentenced him to death, he wasn't there, They didn't know
where he was, and he was absolutely not actually executed
by the Romanian government. I struggled for entirely too long
(51:39):
with a blurry PDF in Romanian, considering that this is
so far beyond tangential to this story. But I'm going
to have to find a historian to talk to about this,
because I am having a hard time believing that a
Hungarian war criminal started a paramilitary organization in New Jersey.
(52:01):
Surely there was some other Zultan Vaswari born in Hungary
on May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. I must have made a mistake.
I've really lost the plot here. I got completely derailed
by the discovery of a Hungarian fascist newspaper in Ohio
running ads for a war criminals nationalist militia. Maybe, but
(52:23):
if you're looking for a Hungarian translation of David Duke's autobiography,
you might try looking at a used bookstore in Cleveland.
All that to say, circling back around, Curtis Maynard's Holocaust
denile essays were very popular among a wide variety of
(52:43):
the world's worst people in two thousand and seven. Within
the admittedly small world of racist conspiracy theory bloggers, Curtis
Maynard was really making a name for himself. He's only
nursing part time at this point. He picks up shift
on the weekends and spends weekdays at home with his
daughters while his wife worked as a chemical engineer. In
(53:06):
later angry screeds mail to his divorce attorney, he claims
he was the girl's primary caregiver and that the decision
was made jointly in the marriage that he would sacrifice
his career so the girls wouldn't have to go to daycare.
But I think he really enjoyed the freedom of being
home on the internet all day. He posted thousands of
(53:28):
times that year on Nazi message boards, and he was
writing hundreds of blog posts about how the Jews control
the media, black people are doing all the violent crime,
the Holocaust never happened. I mean, he's churning them out,
and he's attending conferences, he's networking with movement leaders, he's
doing interviews on conspiracy theory radio shows about his friendship
(53:51):
with Ernstundel. His hard work is starting to pay off,
and he was just on the cusp of being a
real figure in professional racism. But then on December of
two thousand and seven, he got into an argument with
a former friend that would end up ruining everything. But
(54:15):
I lost too much time this week trying to translate
the records of a war crimes tribunal from Romanian, so
I'll have to pick back up next week with the
story of two Nazi bloggers trying to destroy each other
over a disagreement about Ron Paul. I really did mean
to get it all out in one I'm actually really
(54:35):
looking forward to revealing who it was that Maynard was
beefing with Weird Little Guys as a production of Cool
Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by
me Pomi Kunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and
(54:58):
Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented
Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad dickerd.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal. You
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
(55:19):
on the Weird Little Guy's 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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