May 7, 2026 • 44 mins
Molly answers some of your burning questions about important stuff, like a nazi's tuna casserole recipe, who came up with a rhyming phrase about fascist violence, and what kind of cake she's eating this week.
Sources:
Testa, M. Militant Anti-Fascism: A Hundred Years of Resistance. AK Press, 2015.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/m-testa-militant-anti-fascism
https://socialistworker.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/a-radical-guide-to-antifascism-LR-1.pdf
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/we-should-give-no-quarter-those-seeking-divide-us
https://www.thenation.com/podcast/society/ttom-donegan-friedan/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello and welcome to the May twenty
twenty six Question an Answer episode of Weird Little Guys. Today,
I'll be answering questions you all sent in to me
via email or on the show subreddit. This is a
(00:22):
special treat for me because it gives me a little
extra time this week to take a couple of days
off to celebrate my first wedding anniversary. Some of you
will probably skip this episode, no hard feelings, but if
you're a listener emails and the post and the subreddit
or any indication, a lot of you are profoundly curious
to hear me describe an excruciating detail what it's like
(00:45):
to look up old court records, as if you're not
getting enough of that in the regular episodes. I'm mostly kidding.
We're actually going to talk about a Nazi's tu nicastrole recipe.
You guys ask a lot of really thoughtful questions, some
about the show, a lot about me, and some questions
about sort of the process of making the show. So
(01:07):
I'm going to give the people what they want. As
I was looking back at my spreadsheet of past episodes,
it looks like this is the third Q and A
episode as we approached the two year mark of the
show's history. The first one was actually around this time
last year. Actually, because it was the week before my
wedding and they didn't quite have the situation under control.
(01:30):
I ended up not bothering with that seating chart. I
was so worried about. People sat wherever they wanted, And
you know what, it was fine. The servers found my
one vegan guest. Most of the people there knew each other.
The ASL interpreter knew who she was signing for. It
was fine. Maybe there's some kind of lesson to be
(01:51):
learned there. I don't know. I don't plan on having
any more weddings. So on to your questions. We'll get
some of the easy ones out of the way. First,
I mentioned that I'm doing this question an answer episode
because I'm going to be busy eating cake on the
(02:13):
day that I would normally be trying to finish writing
the episode. And one of you asked, what kind of cake?
That is such a good question. Actually, it's a funfetti
cake with a cookie dough filling. We're getting a reproduction
of the top layer of our wedding cake from the
original baker. This will be meaningless to almost everyone. But
(02:37):
if you live anywhere in central Virginia and someone you
care about doesn't eat gluten, you need to hear this.
Corazone Cakes in Richmond is the way to go. I mean,
wedding cakes usually suck, Let's be honest, they don't taste good,
they cost too much money, and gluten free cakes are
(02:58):
even worse. So if you can buy two, you're looking
at spending a month's rent to get something that tastes
like sawdust and circus peanuts. But that is not what
we got at all. It was so good. I almost
never recommend a product, or a service or a brand.
I mean, I'm not an influencer, I'm a serious journalist
(03:19):
or whatever. But Caitlin is such a sweetheart, and I
have been thinking about that cake for a full year.
It was so good. I'm even going to get a
birthday cake from her this year too. So the cake
we're recreating is, like I said, funfetti flavored with this
cookie dough filling between the layers. And I should take
(03:40):
this moment to publicly apologize to my husband for telling
him that this was a bad idea, that it was tacky,
that it was childish, that people would not like it
and that it was not suitable for a wedding. I mean,
the other layers were normal flavors. This was a compromise,
and those normal flavors they were great too. But the funfetti,
(04:01):
I mean, it was the star of the show. My
original stance on that cake was the wrongest I've ever been.
Everyone loved it, and I can't wait to have it again.
So that's that on cake. Another listener asked about my
last name specifically, you asked, do I ever say like
(04:23):
the eel? Now that you think about it, you are
probably joking because why would I say that? But the
answer is yeah, I do. I say that a lot,
Molly conger like the eel. And that's not actually a
helpful thing to say, because how many people are going
(04:43):
to hear that and say, oh, yes, the genus of eels.
I know exactly what you mean, and that helps me
spell it. It's not a point of reference that's useful.
But I do say it, and my first name is
actually so sometimes I'll say Madeline like the cookie, conger
(05:05):
like the eel. And honestly, I might be better off
learning the phonetic alphabet because Madeleines aren't a popular cookie,
and saying no no like in proost doesn't help either.
So if anybody has a better way of communicating that,
I'm all ears, and don't say Madeline like the little
(05:28):
French girl from the children's books that is spelled differently
in writing, though, I find it's easier to say conger
rhymes with longer, so I can avoid the dreaded conjure pronunciation. Okay,
another weird question from the subreddit Mollie, what is your
(05:51):
favorite glassware? I'm dying to know what the right answer
to this question is. I mean, I guess some people
are very classy and they have a favorite kind of glassware.
I googled the phrase types of glassware to make sure
I wasn't misunderstanding this, Like is there another meaning here
(06:11):
that I don't know about? But I think you're asking
about like fancy cups, right, like barware, like the different
kinds of cups you can serve fancy drinks in. And
I guess some people do have like a strong preference
for a highball glass or a champagne flute. I got that.
I'm not fancy though, not to harp on the wedding thing,
(06:35):
but we didn't even register for anything like that. I
think we got a single set of four very generic
wine glasses, not even like red wine or white wine specific.
And I know they get even more granular from there,
but these were just wine glasses regular. And of the
four I've already broken too, I wasn't even using them
(07:00):
when I broke them. It's not because I drank too
much wine out of them. I broke one in the
sink washing it, and I think I knocked the other
one over on the drying rack in a separate incident.
I'm a podcaster. I don't even get dressed most days.
I'm barely even human anymore. But there is an answer
(07:20):
to this question. My fixation at the moment is thirty
two ounce wide mouth ball canning jars. I don't want
to drink out of a cup. I will not use
any of the water bottles I have bought. Every morning,
I make myself two drinks, each one in a thirty
(07:41):
two ounce jar. One is a coffee that's mostly milk
and these giant ice cubes that I make in a
silicone mini muffin pan, and the other is ice water
with half a lemon, half a lime, and a big
fistful of mint leaves from the garden. My top favorite
jar right now. This one's just for water. It's a
(08:03):
sort of aqua blue color, like a teal, like a
blue green, And I think I must have stolen this
one from my mom's house, because you can't buy these
anymore and I only have one. Now, if you're big
into jars, you might be asking, is this an original
aqua ball jar from the nineteen twenties. No, of course not.
(08:26):
I think it's from the limited edition re release they
did of this color like a decade ago. But it's
such a pretty summary pale blue, like it's the color
of a swimming pool. So that is the best piece
of glassware in my house, hands down, in classic weird
(08:46):
little guy's fashion. I was going to tell you a
fun fact about ball jars being made by a company
that started out making jars, but it's actually mostly an
aerospace company. But when I looked all of that up
to get my fact straight to tell you about it,
it turned out to be more complicated than that Ball
(09:08):
jars haven't been made by the Ball Corporation since nineteen
ninety six, and the oft repeated fun fact that the
Ball Corporation is best known for its jars, while actually
being an aerospace company. That isn't even true anymore. They
did make the Kepler space telescope, but they sold off
(09:28):
their aerospace business two years ago so they could focus
more on their aluminum food packaging business, so they don't
make jars or space telescopes anymore. They make aluminum cans.
The Ball trademark on the jars was transferred in a
series of subsidiary spinoffs and mergers, and it's now owned
(09:50):
by the same company that owns Mister Coffee, rubber made
Yankee candle, and a German condom brand called Billy Boy.
So I feel kind of a trade. I liked thinking
about my drinking jar being connected to space telescopes, and
I just found out that's not true. Okay, Next up, tunicastrole.
(10:17):
Several of you absolute freaks asked me for the full
recipe that I found on Stormfront for a Nazi's favorite meal. Specifically,
this is the tunicastlele made by Earl Thomas. Earl was
William Luther Pierce's personal secretary in the nineteen seventies, and
(10:37):
Pierce borrowed Earl's first name when he was trying to
name the protagonist in his first novel, The Turner Diaries.
We talked a lot earlier this year about The Turner
Diaries and the sequel Pierce wrote Hunter, And at the
end of all that, I did a minisode about the
real Earl the man Earl Turner was named after this
(10:58):
Earl Thomas, And in that minu I mentioned an old
Stormfront post written by a Nazi who was Earl's roommate
in the seventies, And for whatever reason, one of the
most specific memories he shared about his time living with
Earle was how much Earle loved tuna casserole. I feel
(11:18):
like you have to be making an insane amount of
tuna casserole for that to be something someone remembers about
you thirty five years later. I mean, the band must
have smelled like an old tuna sandwich. He remembered this
so clearly that he recited the recipe for memory. But
I didn't actually tell you that recipe in the episode.
(11:42):
And apparently some of you really want to try Earl's
tuna casserole. So according to H. Michael Barrett, the white
supremacist who wrote a prospectus on how racists can effectively
take over small towns. Here's Earl's tuna casserole shared in
(12:02):
a Q and A posted on a Nazi message board
in two thousand and four. Question what was Earle like
on a personal basis? Answer? He had an especially good
sense of humor, liked to play practical jokes, and enjoyed
big steaks or seafood. He was also one of the
(12:24):
very few party members with a vehicle and a girlfriend.
Question what else did Earle like to cook at home? Answer?
He especially liked tuna fish casserole, which was made this way.
A half package of long and flat style noodles was
(12:46):
first cooked in boiling water and strained. Then two undiluted
cans of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup and a regular
can of Chicken of the Sea tuna the type with
vegetable oil were added into the same pot. Then all
of this together was heated up again. Unremarkable, honestly, I mean,
(13:12):
the man who Earl Turner is based on was just
a regular guy sitting at home eating shitty tunic casserole.
But these are the special details that make weird little
guys the show that it is. I mean, think back
to episode one. It ended with a gross anecdote about
a Nazi pedophile locking himself in the bathroom for hours
(13:33):
because he liked to eat pickles alone in the bathtub.
If information is available about a white supremacist's gross snack preferences,
I will tell you about it. That's the Weird Little
Guy's promise, and I guess in the same vein it
(14:05):
wouldn't be an episode of Weird Little Guys Q and
A or not if I didn't do more research than
I meant to. And so these are not all simple questions.
This one took me some time. Several of you asked
about the phrase suits and boots. I've used it a
few times on the show to describe the sort of
(14:28):
fascist synergy between racist activists out in the streets carrying
out acts of violence and the more polite sort of
intellectual racists who work at think tanks or run for
political office. Typically, these two kinds of guys don't associate
in public, and they may even publicly denounce one another.
(14:49):
But they work together, sometimes literally. They communicate and strategize
together or get paid by the same people. But even
when the teamwork is more hands off, their efforts complement
one another. Generally speaking, in my understanding of the phrase
and in the way that I use it, it refers
(15:11):
to a particular strategy of respectable racists, nationalists, fascists, what
have you, and the way that they keep their hands
clean while knowing full well that their project doesn't work
without street level violence. It's Richard Spencer giving speeches and
(15:32):
university auditoriums while quietly giving marching orders to Identity Europa.
It's far right extremist academics like Tom Sunach praising Nazi
skinheads at a meeting of the American Third Position Party.
It's segregationist politicians looking the other way while the clan
does what they both agree needs to be done. Their
(15:54):
political project doesn't work without the violence. They just don't
want to get blood on their suits. They want their
racist policies to look reasonable compared to the alternative, while
they quietly encourage that very alternative as a means to
(16:15):
gain compliance for their policies. It's a guy saying we
need segregationist policies so that there aren't violent confrontations in
the streets, but that street violence is already happening, and
it serves the purpose of injuring killing and prisoning and
terrifying the black population. So maybe they'll just submit to
(16:36):
those policies, right. I think the phrase is fairly straightforward,
and it's always used in a pretty clear context when
it comes up on the show. But several of you
asked where it comes from, and some of you even
assumed that I coined it myself. I can't take credit
for it, and given the likely origin I track down
(17:00):
want to admittedly I'd never considered where it came from.
It just makes sense. It's a useful constructed rhymes, which
is fun, and I never looked deeper, but your questions
made me curious. I think I probably picked it up
(17:21):
from my husband. Oddly enough, I know he's been saying
it for years, and god knows where he picked it up.
He consumes books like Oxygen, so it could have been anywhere.
And once I started trying to track it down, I
realized it isn't actually a common phrase, which I kind
of assumed that it was. It appears occasionally in other
(17:43):
people's work on the far right. I found it in
some writing by l Reeve, for example, and it's clear
what we mean when we use it, but it had
to come from somewhere. It's a bit of a tough
one to track down, since most uses of those words together,
suits and boots aren't talking about fascist political strategy. They're
(18:08):
talking about outfits. So I found a lot of articles
about people in hazmat suits or children on snow days.
If you just search for this phrase, it's a lot
of fashionable boots and not so much fascists in boots.
So I thought about it a little bit because just
(18:31):
googling it wasn't really getting me anywhere. It's boots for
a reason, right, Boots is the word that was chosen
to represent the concept of the enforcer, this less respectable activist,
and you could interpret that to mean this is the
person that is outside, this is the person on the streets.
But I don't think it's boots just because that is
(18:55):
a kind of shoe that rhymes with suits, do you
know what I mean? This isn't to talking about someone
wearing shoes generally. It's a particular style. It brings to
mind the classic racist skinhead in his boots and braces.
So going into this, if I were to guess when
(19:15):
this phrase came into use, I would put my money
on it being a few decades old, certainly not older
than the late seventies and probably later than that. Like,
it has a eighties nineties feel to it to me,
because I think it's reasonable to assume that this dates
to a time when the street activist it calls to
(19:36):
mind is a racist skinhead, given that their boots were
a hallmark of their very specific visual aesthetic. And along
that same line of thinking, it kind of has a
British feel to it, right, The racist skinhead aesthetic originated
in the UK, so my head just kind of goes there.
But the phrase also just feels spiritually British to me.
(20:00):
I can't explain that a lot of you asked really
thoughtful and particular questions about my research process, so it's
only fair to reveal here that I located my starting
point for this investigation using vibes and guesswork, and we'll
call it informed intuition. And I'm not claiming I found
(20:25):
the answer, but I found an answer. Obviously the phrase
could pre date this time and place, but based on
the afternoon I spent working on this, which admittedly not
a long time, it appears the modern usage of this
phrase is in relation to an intentional strategy in the
mid nineties to rebrand fascism in France and the UK.
(20:50):
So our starting point here is this phrase that I've
been using, suits and boots, and I think that phrase
comes into use in junction with the one we're going
to talk about first. This strategy in the mid nineties
was called suits not Boots. I found several sources, almost
(21:11):
all of them authored by activists in the UK, referring
to this effort by that name. A pamphlet published in
twenty twenty four by the Socialist Workers Party in the
UK uses the phrase suits not boots to describe this
attempted rebrand in the nineteen nineties by Front National under
Jean Marie Le Pen, writing quote, they dropped talk of
(21:35):
fascist goals and focused on migration and Islamophobia. This strategy,
sometimes referred to as eurofascism, led some commentators to take
the fascists at their word and label them as post fascist,
believing that they had shed their fascist past. But despite
this suits not Boots detoxification strategy, they didn't draw the
(22:00):
fascist project. Jean Marie Le Penn saw the electoral work
as providing the opportunity to build a fascist base. The
twenty fifteen book Militant Anti Fascism one hundred Years of Resistance,
written by the pseudonymous British anti fascist m Testa, uses
the phrase the same way quote. The situation in mainland
(22:22):
Europe was changing with the rise of Le Penn in
France and later of yuruk Heider's Freedom Party in Austria.
Eurofascism increasingly looked towards a more respectable image or suits
not boots. So as the nineteen nineties progressed, modernisers within
the British National Party started to move away from the
ideas of the aging and unpopular John Tindall in favor
(22:45):
of the newer model. So we have multiple sources using
this phrase to describe this strategy in play in the nineties,
and the phrase suits not boots appears to have been
retroactively apoontplied in English by activists in the UK to
this effort in France under Jean Marie Le Penn and
his attempts to rebrand French fascism. But I think this phrase,
(23:11):
this actual organizational policy that went by this name, I
think it came from somewhere specific. Like I said, I
can't promise you this is the actual answer I only
spent a few hours on this, and I'm not an
expert on British nationalists, but I think I have a
decent guess and those of you begging me to take
(23:34):
the show international again are going to be thrilled to
hear this name. It's Nick Griffin. We'll have to come
back around to Nick Griffin in his own right one
of these days, but today isn't that day, to be
brief about it. He got involved with National Front in
the nineteen seventies. He joined the British National Party in
(23:55):
the nineteen nineties, and from nineteen ninety nine until he
was expelled from the party in twenty fourteen, he was
the leader of the British National Party. He's all a Coustenier,
a virulent Islamophobe, a big believer in the fourteen words
I mean, you get it. He's a fascist. But it
was under his leadership that the British National Party tried
(24:16):
to make their pivot from boots to suits based on
what Jean Marie Le Penn had already been doing in France,
and Nick Griffin called what he was doing suits, not boots.
That's a phrase that was used by the party and
not everybody was happy about it. I found an essay
(24:37):
in a British Nazi newsletter from two thousand and five,
angrily referring to this policy as Griffinism. Eddie Morrison, a
Yorkshire based Nazi activist, wrote quote, gone are marches, demos,
counter demos and anything else interesting and exciting. All the
talk now is of suits not boots. While I own
(24:58):
a suit, just the one, and a pair of Doc Martin's,
and I think there's room in British nationalism for both.
In fact, not just room, they're both parts of a whole. Morrison,
who according to a later issue of this same Nazi newsletter,
died in twenty twenty after falling down the stairs in
his own home and breaking his neck, was pretty clear
(25:19):
eyed in two thousand and five about the need for
suits and boots, writing quote, if we relyed on a
purely boots image, then we end up with a tough
street fighting organization which unfortunately would lack political direction in purpose.
If we have a purely suit image, as we have now,
then we have stacks of eggheads and intellectuals making policy,
(25:43):
but no way to implement that policy. Suits not boots.
That's the phrase used to describe this effort to rebrand
fascism in Europe in the nineteen nineties in the early
two thousands. So where does and come into play. We
have these French far right nationalists who're trying to distance
(26:03):
themselves from literal Nazism a few decades after the Second
World War. They're trying to clean up their image and
gain mainstream political support for their ideas, ideas which have
again not actually changed. They're just trying to look nicer.
And now we have these British Nazis who are getting
bored and restless that Nick Griffin won't let them have
(26:25):
black shirt parades and beat up random bystanders like they
used to. They're trying to do suits not boots. So
who looked at that and said no, we can have both.
It's suits and boots. I mean, it's impossible to say
who was the first person to say, why not both?
It's certainly an obvious progression. A twenty eighteen article in
(26:50):
the British socialist newspaper Morning Star about a recent anti
racist demonstration, recalls this British history of mass mobilization against
far extremists, writing quote, we beat them at Cable Street
in nineteen thirty six. We beat them in Lewisham and
elsewhere in the nineteen seventies, and we beat them in
the nineteen nineties when they put on suits and tried
(27:10):
to be respectable. Now they're back wearing suits and boots,
and we can beat them again suits and boots, same
guy as different outfits. This author is just stating the obvious.
They're not using this as a term of art. It's
just a description of what is happening. They've fought back
(27:32):
against boots, they've organized against suits, and it's clear that
today's fascists are using both tactics suits and boots. That's
probably as much explanation as the idea really needs. But
I kept looking. I did find a two thousand and
four issue of Voice of Freedom, that's the newspaper of
(27:53):
the British National Party, and in that November two thousand
and four issue there's a little blurb expressing outrage over
a recent television documentary that ran on Yorkshire TV in
August of two thousand and four. The program was called
Suits and Boots and it was about the British National Party.
(28:14):
According to the party's newspaper, they considered it a quote
hatchet job. I couldn't find any record of the existence
of this TV program outside of this complaint about it,
so I didn't watch it. But I assumed that Yorkshire
TV chose the name because it was kind of a
cheeky play on the party's own stated policy of suits
(28:36):
not boots. So they called the TV documentary suits and boots,
perhaps because it exposed that the group had not stopped
engaging in street level violence. But for all the complaining
inside the party about Griffin's policy of suits not boots,
the actual earliest usage of the phrase suits and boots
(29:00):
that I could find is an essay Nick Griffin wrote
himself in nineteen ninety seven, a few years before he
took control of the British National Party. The essay ran
in The Spearhead, a magazine edited by the British National
Party's leader at the time, John Tyndall, and in it
(29:21):
Griffin was opining about the situation in France for La
Penn's Front Nationale. Unto the subheading suits and Boots, he wrote, quote,
there is no doubt that the Front has benefited greatly
from putting forward smartly dressed, articulate candidates. This is simply
common sense, but It is equally a fact that the
(29:44):
party's Service dordre, the young men who stopped those polite
and reasonable spokesmen from getting their heads kicked in by
Marxist and Zionist thugs, still favor black, lace up boots,
black flight jackets, and short hair cuts. The fact that
they can usually keep a low profile in minibusses down
a nearby street is not so much a matter of policy,
but a reflection of the fact that past clashes have
(30:05):
taught the opposition that it is healthier not to interfere
with Front National meetings. It is certainly true that our
own lads in boots are nothing like as disciplined as
the Servis d'ordre, but they are nonetheless necessary. If a
lack of discipline sometimes causes problems, the solution is to
provide it, not to tell them to go away. Now,
(30:29):
the lads in boots that he's talking about here are
Combat eighteen, the Nazi Terra group that was originally formed
in the nineties to provide security for the British National Party.
And what he's saying here right, he's describing the situation
in France, saying that it's really working out for Le
Penn in Front Nationale to have these suits right. It's
(30:50):
common sense that's working for them. But it is equally
a fact that those suits are only safe, They're only
effective because there are a bunch of boots around the
corner waiting to kick in the heads of anybody who
stands in their way. He's saying, you need both. You
(31:11):
need suits and boots. And this final line, if a
lack of discipline sometimes causes problems, the solution is to
provide it, not to tell them to go away. He's saying,
the suits need to maintain discipline over the stormtroopers, the paramilitaries,
the stro mob Tilo right. The party needs street thugs.
(31:33):
It doesn't work without them. That's what he's saying. And
I think this essay is the origin point of the
concept I'm talking about when I say suits and boots.
I'm sure the phrase existed prior to this moment, but
like I said, the earliest I could find the phrase
in writing in this context is this essay by Nick
(31:53):
Griffin in nineteen ninety seven. So this is what I'm
talking about when I say suits and boots. It's guys
like Nick Griffin putting on a suit and pretending to
be shocked and upset that you'd accuse them of being
a racist when they know full well the guy with
the big swastika tattoo outside would break your skull with
a bat if you tried to interfere with this polite,
(32:14):
respectable Nazi meeting he's trying to have. That's what it means.
That's all it means. And so, in my search to
(32:37):
find every time this phrase has appeared in writing in
this particular political context, I was surprised to see this
phrase used in a twenty twenty three conversation between Moira
Donegan and jeep Here in the Nation, where Donagan used
it as a generic, politically neutral way of describing political
(32:58):
strategy that combines lawyers going to court. I'm people marching
in the streets. I mean she's not wrong, I guess
in the broadest, vaguest sense of the term divorced from
all past context, right. I mean she's talking about using
both standard political power and litigation in combination with street activism.
(33:23):
But I don't think this is a term we can
repurpose for general usage. These boots weren't made for walking,
you know, we're not talking about marching boots. We're talking
about curb stomping boots. Language evolves, I guess, but knowing
(33:47):
how this phrase evolved can help you decide what you
want to convey by using it. That was a fun
history for me to learn. I was excited to discover
the origin of a phrase I find so useful, So
thank you for asking that. I also got a couple
(34:07):
of questions about my work prior to Weird Little Guys
and my life outside the show. It comes up fairly
often that I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. Where I live
would probably come up here and there either way, just conversationally.
But given the subject matter of the show, the city
I live in is sometimes the setting of some detail
(34:29):
or another. So most of you probably know that I
live in Charlottesville, but it didn't occur to me until
I read some of these questions that a lot of
you have no idea what I was doing with my
time before I started podcasting. I mean, why would you.
That's not your responsibility to know. It's weird that I
(34:50):
had some vague notion that you might. It's just that
before I had this show. The thing that I was
doing before is the only reason anyone will have heard
of me. I used to live tweet Charlottesville City council meetings,
all of them, like every minute of them, from the
fall of twenty seventeen until the fall of twenty twenty four,
(35:12):
when I got too busy with the show. I just
live tweeted municipal government meetings. For a full seven years.
I spent a big chunk of my week every week
providing live commentary on local government. I mean city council
meetings always, but a rotating array of other local boards
(35:32):
and commissions too, Tree Commission, Planning Commission, the Towing Advisory Board,
school Board, police Civilian Review Board. I tried everything at
least a few times, and I was pretty consistent with
the ones I thought were interesting. It started out as
kind of an unhinged hobby, but I loved it, and
people seem to get a kick out of it. I
(35:54):
think I've mentioned it in passing before, but it's been
a while. I started doing it for the exact same
reason that I'm now an expert on right wing political
violence in the United States, because that happened where I live.
I started going to city council meetings a few days
after the Unite the Right rally. I didn't know anything
(36:16):
about anything, really, and I didn't understand what happened and
why it had been allowed to happen, and why it
happened here, and why we let it happen here. So
I started trying to figure out how my local government worked,
because that seemed like some kind of starting point. I
didn't know what else to do, so I just started
(36:37):
showing up at every meeting I could find, and I
just sat there for the first year or so. They
didn't really understand why I was there. I mean I
barely understood why I was there. The city council meetings, sure,
that makes sense. Those were packed back then. There were
Monday nights where we hit the fire Marshal's maximum capacity
(37:00):
city and city council chambers. But the other meetings, the
ones at like ten am on a Tuesday, I don't
know what I was doing there. I just wanted to
see it all. There were some meetings where it was
so obvious that no one from the public had ever
shown up before. People thought I was lost. More than
(37:23):
a few times they tried to kick me out of
the room, saying things like, oh, sorry, we have this
room reserved for a meeting. You'll have to leave, because
they couldn't imagine that it was possible that I was
there for the meeting. I mean, there were times that
people insisted that I couldn't be there, that there was
no public right to observe, that I would have to leave.
(37:46):
But I'm terribly stubborn. I'm kind of weird, and I
knew my rights, and I stayed in my little plastic
chair for years. I just sat there in a little
placeastic chair and looked at strangers talking about stuff I
didn't always understand. I learned a lot about particulars, sure,
(38:10):
things about trees, things about zoning, whatever. But more than anything,
it taught me how to write fast and think even faster.
I spent thousands of hours basically transcribing meetings with nothing
but two thumbs and an iPhone. I think the mandatory
brevity of the tweet format has probably had a permanent
(38:33):
impact on my writing style. But we don't need to
talk about that. And it's been so many years I
almost forgot this bit of my own lore. But if
you live in Charlottesville and you get an email newsletter
from the city notifying you about upcoming public meetings, that
is my lasting contribution to local civic engagement. So for
(38:59):
the first years that I was making a nuisance of
myself at these public meetings, I was having a hard
time figuring out which meetings were even happening and when
and where they would be held. I had to physically
go to city Hall several times a week to look
at a bulletin board where boards and commissions were supposed
to put a physical notice of any upcoming public meeting.
(39:23):
And even then, a lot of meetings took place without
any proper public notice, and a lot of the meetings
that were held didn't have agendas, and no one was
taking the minutes, and all of these things are required
by state law in Virginia. So I did what any
reasonable person would do in my shoes. I consulted the
(39:43):
Code of Virginia, and I found Title two point two
subtitle two, part Beach, Chapter thirty seven, Section two point
two Dash thirty seven oh seven. That's the section of
the state's Freedom of Information Act that pertains to notice
of and access to public meetings. And so armed with
that information, I made a grotesque nuisance of myself. With
(40:07):
some exceptions that we don't need to get into here.
State law requires public notice of public meetings three business
days before that meeting is held. That notice can be
in a newsletter, on a website, or on that bulletin board.
But the same code section also allows any person to
(40:29):
make a request in writing to receive personal, written, mailed
notification of every meeting. And since they were having so
much trouble getting the meetings on the bulletin board, I
exercised my right. I emailed every city department with my request,
(40:52):
listing all of the boards and commissions under their purview
that I would like to receive mailed notice for each
and every time they convened. Is that unhinged? Yeah? Yeah,
they would have to mail me like ten letters a week,
every week for a full calendar year. But it's in
(41:14):
the law, and violations of that code section carry a
civil penalty of five hundred dollars for the first infraction
and two thousand dollars for every subsequent infraction. And so
once I sent those emails, they had to find a
way to come into compliance, because if they didn't find
(41:36):
some way to satisfy the requirements under the law, they
would end up paying tens of thousands of dollars in
penalties to the state monthly. So I sent my emails
and I waited. Nobody answered me, so I waited. Ten
days later, the city's communications director sent me this email, quote, Molly,
(42:01):
starting mid afternoon tomorrow, we will send out the first
of what will be a weekly public notice email. This
will be a list of the public meetings on our
website calendar schedule for the next week. We will use
this to satisfy your request, which was sent to a
number of our staff, to notify you of all public meetings.
And they did. They send out those weekly public meeting
(42:22):
notice emails from July of twenty nineteen until late twenty
twenty five. They have since been replaced by the city's
bi weekly newsletter. That communications director isn't with the city anymore.
But I always strongly suspected he found me to be
a monstrous nuisance. Honestly, they all did. It was the
(42:43):
kind of situation where just about everyone at city Hall
would groan if they saw me coming, and I think
that's something to be proud of. I'm sure they still
have the bulletin board, but I haven't gone to see
it in years. I don't need it anymore. But I
have always said if something tragic happens to me. Don't
(43:04):
put my name on an honorary street sign or something,
no park benches. All I want is a little plaque
underneath the bulletin board the Mollyconger Memorial public Meeting notice board,
because being an absolute menace at Charlottesville City Hall for
seven years, I think that's how I want to be remembered.
(43:28):
Thank you so much to everyone who sent in a
question this time around. I know I didn't get to
all of them, and I'm sorry. I will try to
hang on to the ones we didn't get to, but
also don't be shy about sending them in again next
time there's a call for questions. I love hearing from you, guys,
and if there's anything you took away from today's episode,
I hope it is that anyone can become the kind
(43:50):
of person their mayor hates to see coming. Weird Little
Guys is the production of Cool Zoe Media and iHeartRadio.
(44:11):
It's research, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conker. Our
executive producers are Sophie Lettterman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer. It's
nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show
(44:31):
with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subredda. Just
don't post anything that's going to make you one of
my Weird Little Guys
Cool Zone Media. Hello and welcome to the May twenty
twenty six Question an Answer episode of Weird Little Guys. Today,
I'll be answering questions you all sent in to me
via email or on the show subreddit. This is a
(00:22):
special treat for me because it gives me a little
extra time this week to take a couple of days
off to celebrate my first wedding anniversary. Some of you
will probably skip this episode, no hard feelings, but if
you're a listener emails and the post and the subreddit
or any indication, a lot of you are profoundly curious
to hear me describe an excruciating detail what it's like
(00:45):
to look up old court records, as if you're not
getting enough of that in the regular episodes. I'm mostly kidding.
We're actually going to talk about a Nazi's tu nicastrole recipe.
You guys ask a lot of really thoughtful questions, some
about the show, a lot about me, and some questions
about sort of the process of making the show. So
(01:07):
I'm going to give the people what they want. As
I was looking back at my spreadsheet of past episodes,
it looks like this is the third Q and A
episode as we approached the two year mark of the
show's history. The first one was actually around this time
last year. Actually, because it was the week before my
wedding and they didn't quite have the situation under control.
(01:30):
I ended up not bothering with that seating chart. I
was so worried about. People sat wherever they wanted, And
you know what, it was fine. The servers found my
one vegan guest. Most of the people there knew each other.
The ASL interpreter knew who she was signing for. It
was fine. Maybe there's some kind of lesson to be
(01:51):
learned there. I don't know. I don't plan on having
any more weddings. So on to your questions. We'll get
some of the easy ones out of the way. First,
I mentioned that I'm doing this question an answer episode
because I'm going to be busy eating cake on the
(02:13):
day that I would normally be trying to finish writing
the episode. And one of you asked, what kind of cake?
That is such a good question. Actually, it's a funfetti
cake with a cookie dough filling. We're getting a reproduction
of the top layer of our wedding cake from the
original baker. This will be meaningless to almost everyone. But
(02:37):
if you live anywhere in central Virginia and someone you
care about doesn't eat gluten, you need to hear this.
Corazone Cakes in Richmond is the way to go. I mean,
wedding cakes usually suck, Let's be honest, they don't taste good,
they cost too much money, and gluten free cakes are
(02:58):
even worse. So if you can buy two, you're looking
at spending a month's rent to get something that tastes
like sawdust and circus peanuts. But that is not what
we got at all. It was so good. I almost
never recommend a product, or a service or a brand.
I mean, I'm not an influencer, I'm a serious journalist
(03:19):
or whatever. But Caitlin is such a sweetheart, and I
have been thinking about that cake for a full year.
It was so good. I'm even going to get a
birthday cake from her this year too. So the cake
we're recreating is, like I said, funfetti flavored with this
cookie dough filling between the layers. And I should take
(03:40):
this moment to publicly apologize to my husband for telling
him that this was a bad idea, that it was tacky,
that it was childish, that people would not like it
and that it was not suitable for a wedding. I mean,
the other layers were normal flavors. This was a compromise,
and those normal flavors they were great too. But the funfetti,
(04:01):
I mean, it was the star of the show. My
original stance on that cake was the wrongest I've ever been.
Everyone loved it, and I can't wait to have it again.
So that's that on cake. Another listener asked about my
last name specifically, you asked, do I ever say like
(04:23):
the eel? Now that you think about it, you are
probably joking because why would I say that? But the
answer is yeah, I do. I say that a lot,
Molly conger like the eel. And that's not actually a
helpful thing to say, because how many people are going
(04:43):
to hear that and say, oh, yes, the genus of eels.
I know exactly what you mean, and that helps me
spell it. It's not a point of reference that's useful.
But I do say it, and my first name is
actually so sometimes I'll say Madeline like the cookie, conger
(05:05):
like the eel. And honestly, I might be better off
learning the phonetic alphabet because Madeleines aren't a popular cookie,
and saying no no like in proost doesn't help either.
So if anybody has a better way of communicating that,
I'm all ears, and don't say Madeline like the little
(05:28):
French girl from the children's books that is spelled differently
in writing, though, I find it's easier to say conger
rhymes with longer, so I can avoid the dreaded conjure pronunciation. Okay,
another weird question from the subreddit Mollie, what is your
(05:51):
favorite glassware? I'm dying to know what the right answer
to this question is. I mean, I guess some people
are very classy and they have a favorite kind of glassware.
I googled the phrase types of glassware to make sure
I wasn't misunderstanding this, Like is there another meaning here
(06:11):
that I don't know about? But I think you're asking
about like fancy cups, right, like barware, like the different
kinds of cups you can serve fancy drinks in. And
I guess some people do have like a strong preference
for a highball glass or a champagne flute. I got that.
I'm not fancy though, not to harp on the wedding thing,
(06:35):
but we didn't even register for anything like that. I
think we got a single set of four very generic
wine glasses, not even like red wine or white wine specific.
And I know they get even more granular from there,
but these were just wine glasses regular. And of the
four I've already broken too, I wasn't even using them
(07:00):
when I broke them. It's not because I drank too
much wine out of them. I broke one in the
sink washing it, and I think I knocked the other
one over on the drying rack in a separate incident.
I'm a podcaster. I don't even get dressed most days.
I'm barely even human anymore. But there is an answer
(07:20):
to this question. My fixation at the moment is thirty
two ounce wide mouth ball canning jars. I don't want
to drink out of a cup. I will not use
any of the water bottles I have bought. Every morning,
I make myself two drinks, each one in a thirty
(07:41):
two ounce jar. One is a coffee that's mostly milk
and these giant ice cubes that I make in a
silicone mini muffin pan, and the other is ice water
with half a lemon, half a lime, and a big
fistful of mint leaves from the garden. My top favorite
jar right now. This one's just for water. It's a
(08:03):
sort of aqua blue color, like a teal, like a
blue green, And I think I must have stolen this
one from my mom's house, because you can't buy these
anymore and I only have one. Now, if you're big
into jars, you might be asking, is this an original
aqua ball jar from the nineteen twenties. No, of course not.
(08:26):
I think it's from the limited edition re release they
did of this color like a decade ago. But it's
such a pretty summary pale blue, like it's the color
of a swimming pool. So that is the best piece
of glassware in my house, hands down, in classic weird
(08:46):
little guy's fashion. I was going to tell you a
fun fact about ball jars being made by a company
that started out making jars, but it's actually mostly an
aerospace company. But when I looked all of that up
to get my fact straight to tell you about it,
it turned out to be more complicated than that Ball
(09:08):
jars haven't been made by the Ball Corporation since nineteen
ninety six, and the oft repeated fun fact that the
Ball Corporation is best known for its jars, while actually
being an aerospace company. That isn't even true anymore. They
did make the Kepler space telescope, but they sold off
(09:28):
their aerospace business two years ago so they could focus
more on their aluminum food packaging business, so they don't
make jars or space telescopes anymore. They make aluminum cans.
The Ball trademark on the jars was transferred in a
series of subsidiary spinoffs and mergers, and it's now owned
(09:50):
by the same company that owns Mister Coffee, rubber made
Yankee candle, and a German condom brand called Billy Boy.
So I feel kind of a trade. I liked thinking
about my drinking jar being connected to space telescopes, and
I just found out that's not true. Okay, Next up, tunicastrole.
(10:17):
Several of you absolute freaks asked me for the full
recipe that I found on Stormfront for a Nazi's favorite meal. Specifically,
this is the tunicastlele made by Earl Thomas. Earl was
William Luther Pierce's personal secretary in the nineteen seventies, and
(10:37):
Pierce borrowed Earl's first name when he was trying to
name the protagonist in his first novel, The Turner Diaries.
We talked a lot earlier this year about The Turner
Diaries and the sequel Pierce wrote Hunter, And at the
end of all that, I did a minisode about the
real Earl the man Earl Turner was named after this
(10:58):
Earl Thomas, And in that minu I mentioned an old
Stormfront post written by a Nazi who was Earl's roommate
in the seventies, And for whatever reason, one of the
most specific memories he shared about his time living with
Earle was how much Earle loved tuna casserole. I feel
(11:18):
like you have to be making an insane amount of
tuna casserole for that to be something someone remembers about
you thirty five years later. I mean, the band must
have smelled like an old tuna sandwich. He remembered this
so clearly that he recited the recipe for memory. But
I didn't actually tell you that recipe in the episode.
(11:42):
And apparently some of you really want to try Earl's
tuna casserole. So according to H. Michael Barrett, the white
supremacist who wrote a prospectus on how racists can effectively
take over small towns. Here's Earl's tuna casserole shared in
(12:02):
a Q and A posted on a Nazi message board
in two thousand and four. Question what was Earle like
on a personal basis? Answer? He had an especially good
sense of humor, liked to play practical jokes, and enjoyed
big steaks or seafood. He was also one of the
(12:24):
very few party members with a vehicle and a girlfriend.
Question what else did Earle like to cook at home? Answer?
He especially liked tuna fish casserole, which was made this way.
A half package of long and flat style noodles was
(12:46):
first cooked in boiling water and strained. Then two undiluted
cans of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup and a regular
can of Chicken of the Sea tuna the type with
vegetable oil were added into the same pot. Then all
of this together was heated up again. Unremarkable, honestly, I mean,
(13:12):
the man who Earl Turner is based on was just
a regular guy sitting at home eating shitty tunic casserole.
But these are the special details that make weird little
guys the show that it is. I mean, think back
to episode one. It ended with a gross anecdote about
a Nazi pedophile locking himself in the bathroom for hours
(13:33):
because he liked to eat pickles alone in the bathtub.
If information is available about a white supremacist's gross snack preferences,
I will tell you about it. That's the Weird Little
Guy's promise, and I guess in the same vein it
(14:05):
wouldn't be an episode of Weird Little Guys Q and
A or not if I didn't do more research than
I meant to. And so these are not all simple questions.
This one took me some time. Several of you asked
about the phrase suits and boots. I've used it a
few times on the show to describe the sort of
(14:28):
fascist synergy between racist activists out in the streets carrying
out acts of violence and the more polite sort of
intellectual racists who work at think tanks or run for
political office. Typically, these two kinds of guys don't associate
in public, and they may even publicly denounce one another.
(14:49):
But they work together, sometimes literally. They communicate and strategize
together or get paid by the same people. But even
when the teamwork is more hands off, their efforts complement
one another. Generally speaking, in my understanding of the phrase
and in the way that I use it, it refers
(15:11):
to a particular strategy of respectable racists, nationalists, fascists, what
have you, and the way that they keep their hands
clean while knowing full well that their project doesn't work
without street level violence. It's Richard Spencer giving speeches and
(15:32):
university auditoriums while quietly giving marching orders to Identity Europa.
It's far right extremist academics like Tom Sunach praising Nazi
skinheads at a meeting of the American Third Position Party.
It's segregationist politicians looking the other way while the clan
does what they both agree needs to be done. Their
(15:54):
political project doesn't work without the violence. They just don't
want to get blood on their suits. They want their
racist policies to look reasonable compared to the alternative, while
they quietly encourage that very alternative as a means to
(16:15):
gain compliance for their policies. It's a guy saying we
need segregationist policies so that there aren't violent confrontations in
the streets, but that street violence is already happening, and
it serves the purpose of injuring killing and prisoning and
terrifying the black population. So maybe they'll just submit to
(16:36):
those policies, right. I think the phrase is fairly straightforward,
and it's always used in a pretty clear context when
it comes up on the show. But several of you
asked where it comes from, and some of you even
assumed that I coined it myself. I can't take credit
for it, and given the likely origin I track down
(17:00):
want to admittedly I'd never considered where it came from.
It just makes sense. It's a useful constructed rhymes, which
is fun, and I never looked deeper, but your questions
made me curious. I think I probably picked it up
(17:21):
from my husband. Oddly enough, I know he's been saying
it for years, and god knows where he picked it up.
He consumes books like Oxygen, so it could have been anywhere.
And once I started trying to track it down, I
realized it isn't actually a common phrase, which I kind
of assumed that it was. It appears occasionally in other
(17:43):
people's work on the far right. I found it in
some writing by l Reeve, for example, and it's clear
what we mean when we use it, but it had
to come from somewhere. It's a bit of a tough
one to track down, since most uses of those words together,
suits and boots aren't talking about fascist political strategy. They're
(18:08):
talking about outfits. So I found a lot of articles
about people in hazmat suits or children on snow days.
If you just search for this phrase, it's a lot
of fashionable boots and not so much fascists in boots.
So I thought about it a little bit because just
(18:31):
googling it wasn't really getting me anywhere. It's boots for
a reason, right, Boots is the word that was chosen
to represent the concept of the enforcer, this less respectable activist,
and you could interpret that to mean this is the
person that is outside, this is the person on the streets.
But I don't think it's boots just because that is
(18:55):
a kind of shoe that rhymes with suits, do you
know what I mean? This isn't to talking about someone
wearing shoes generally. It's a particular style. It brings to
mind the classic racist skinhead in his boots and braces.
So going into this, if I were to guess when
(19:15):
this phrase came into use, I would put my money
on it being a few decades old, certainly not older
than the late seventies and probably later than that. Like,
it has a eighties nineties feel to it to me,
because I think it's reasonable to assume that this dates
to a time when the street activist it calls to
(19:36):
mind is a racist skinhead, given that their boots were
a hallmark of their very specific visual aesthetic. And along
that same line of thinking, it kind of has a
British feel to it, right, The racist skinhead aesthetic originated
in the UK, so my head just kind of goes there.
But the phrase also just feels spiritually British to me.
(20:00):
I can't explain that a lot of you asked really
thoughtful and particular questions about my research process, so it's
only fair to reveal here that I located my starting
point for this investigation using vibes and guesswork, and we'll
call it informed intuition. And I'm not claiming I found
(20:25):
the answer, but I found an answer. Obviously the phrase
could pre date this time and place, but based on
the afternoon I spent working on this, which admittedly not
a long time, it appears the modern usage of this
phrase is in relation to an intentional strategy in the
mid nineties to rebrand fascism in France and the UK.
(20:50):
So our starting point here is this phrase that I've
been using, suits and boots, and I think that phrase
comes into use in junction with the one we're going
to talk about first. This strategy in the mid nineties
was called suits not Boots. I found several sources, almost
(21:11):
all of them authored by activists in the UK, referring
to this effort by that name. A pamphlet published in
twenty twenty four by the Socialist Workers Party in the
UK uses the phrase suits not boots to describe this
attempted rebrand in the nineteen nineties by Front National under
Jean Marie Le Pen, writing quote, they dropped talk of
(21:35):
fascist goals and focused on migration and Islamophobia. This strategy,
sometimes referred to as eurofascism, led some commentators to take
the fascists at their word and label them as post fascist,
believing that they had shed their fascist past. But despite
this suits not Boots detoxification strategy, they didn't draw the
(22:00):
fascist project. Jean Marie Le Penn saw the electoral work
as providing the opportunity to build a fascist base. The
twenty fifteen book Militant Anti Fascism one hundred Years of Resistance,
written by the pseudonymous British anti fascist m Testa, uses
the phrase the same way quote. The situation in mainland
(22:22):
Europe was changing with the rise of Le Penn in
France and later of yuruk Heider's Freedom Party in Austria.
Eurofascism increasingly looked towards a more respectable image or suits
not boots. So as the nineteen nineties progressed, modernisers within
the British National Party started to move away from the
ideas of the aging and unpopular John Tindall in favor
(22:45):
of the newer model. So we have multiple sources using
this phrase to describe this strategy in play in the nineties,
and the phrase suits not boots appears to have been
retroactively apoontplied in English by activists in the UK to
this effort in France under Jean Marie Le Penn and
his attempts to rebrand French fascism. But I think this phrase,
(23:11):
this actual organizational policy that went by this name, I
think it came from somewhere specific. Like I said, I
can't promise you this is the actual answer I only
spent a few hours on this, and I'm not an
expert on British nationalists, but I think I have a
decent guess and those of you begging me to take
(23:34):
the show international again are going to be thrilled to
hear this name. It's Nick Griffin. We'll have to come
back around to Nick Griffin in his own right one
of these days, but today isn't that day, to be
brief about it. He got involved with National Front in
the nineteen seventies. He joined the British National Party in
(23:55):
the nineteen nineties, and from nineteen ninety nine until he
was expelled from the party in twenty fourteen, he was
the leader of the British National Party. He's all a Coustenier,
a virulent Islamophobe, a big believer in the fourteen words
I mean, you get it. He's a fascist. But it
was under his leadership that the British National Party tried
(24:16):
to make their pivot from boots to suits based on
what Jean Marie Le Penn had already been doing in France,
and Nick Griffin called what he was doing suits, not boots.
That's a phrase that was used by the party and
not everybody was happy about it. I found an essay
(24:37):
in a British Nazi newsletter from two thousand and five,
angrily referring to this policy as Griffinism. Eddie Morrison, a
Yorkshire based Nazi activist, wrote quote, gone are marches, demos,
counter demos and anything else interesting and exciting. All the
talk now is of suits not boots. While I own
(24:58):
a suit, just the one, and a pair of Doc Martin's,
and I think there's room in British nationalism for both.
In fact, not just room, they're both parts of a whole. Morrison,
who according to a later issue of this same Nazi newsletter,
died in twenty twenty after falling down the stairs in
his own home and breaking his neck, was pretty clear
(25:19):
eyed in two thousand and five about the need for
suits and boots, writing quote, if we relyed on a
purely boots image, then we end up with a tough
street fighting organization which unfortunately would lack political direction in purpose.
If we have a purely suit image, as we have now,
then we have stacks of eggheads and intellectuals making policy,
(25:43):
but no way to implement that policy. Suits not boots.
That's the phrase used to describe this effort to rebrand
fascism in Europe in the nineteen nineties in the early
two thousands. So where does and come into play. We
have these French far right nationalists who're trying to distance
(26:03):
themselves from literal Nazism a few decades after the Second
World War. They're trying to clean up their image and
gain mainstream political support for their ideas, ideas which have
again not actually changed. They're just trying to look nicer.
And now we have these British Nazis who are getting
bored and restless that Nick Griffin won't let them have
(26:25):
black shirt parades and beat up random bystanders like they
used to. They're trying to do suits not boots. So
who looked at that and said no, we can have both.
It's suits and boots. I mean, it's impossible to say
who was the first person to say, why not both?
It's certainly an obvious progression. A twenty eighteen article in
(26:50):
the British socialist newspaper Morning Star about a recent anti
racist demonstration, recalls this British history of mass mobilization against
far extremists, writing quote, we beat them at Cable Street
in nineteen thirty six. We beat them in Lewisham and
elsewhere in the nineteen seventies, and we beat them in
the nineteen nineties when they put on suits and tried
(27:10):
to be respectable. Now they're back wearing suits and boots,
and we can beat them again suits and boots, same
guy as different outfits. This author is just stating the obvious.
They're not using this as a term of art. It's
just a description of what is happening. They've fought back
(27:32):
against boots, they've organized against suits, and it's clear that
today's fascists are using both tactics suits and boots. That's
probably as much explanation as the idea really needs. But
I kept looking. I did find a two thousand and
four issue of Voice of Freedom, that's the newspaper of
(27:53):
the British National Party, and in that November two thousand
and four issue there's a little blurb expressing outrage over
a recent television documentary that ran on Yorkshire TV in
August of two thousand and four. The program was called
Suits and Boots and it was about the British National Party.
(28:14):
According to the party's newspaper, they considered it a quote
hatchet job. I couldn't find any record of the existence
of this TV program outside of this complaint about it,
so I didn't watch it. But I assumed that Yorkshire
TV chose the name because it was kind of a
cheeky play on the party's own stated policy of suits
(28:36):
not boots. So they called the TV documentary suits and boots,
perhaps because it exposed that the group had not stopped
engaging in street level violence. But for all the complaining
inside the party about Griffin's policy of suits not boots,
the actual earliest usage of the phrase suits and boots
(29:00):
that I could find is an essay Nick Griffin wrote
himself in nineteen ninety seven, a few years before he
took control of the British National Party. The essay ran
in The Spearhead, a magazine edited by the British National
Party's leader at the time, John Tyndall, and in it
(29:21):
Griffin was opining about the situation in France for La
Penn's Front Nationale. Unto the subheading suits and Boots, he wrote, quote,
there is no doubt that the Front has benefited greatly
from putting forward smartly dressed, articulate candidates. This is simply
common sense, but It is equally a fact that the
(29:44):
party's Service dordre, the young men who stopped those polite
and reasonable spokesmen from getting their heads kicked in by
Marxist and Zionist thugs, still favor black, lace up boots,
black flight jackets, and short hair cuts. The fact that
they can usually keep a low profile in minibusses down
a nearby street is not so much a matter of policy,
but a reflection of the fact that past clashes have
(30:05):
taught the opposition that it is healthier not to interfere
with Front National meetings. It is certainly true that our
own lads in boots are nothing like as disciplined as
the Servis d'ordre, but they are nonetheless necessary. If a
lack of discipline sometimes causes problems, the solution is to
provide it, not to tell them to go away. Now,
(30:29):
the lads in boots that he's talking about here are
Combat eighteen, the Nazi Terra group that was originally formed
in the nineties to provide security for the British National Party.
And what he's saying here right, he's describing the situation
in France, saying that it's really working out for Le
Penn in Front Nationale to have these suits right. It's
(30:50):
common sense that's working for them. But it is equally
a fact that those suits are only safe, They're only
effective because there are a bunch of boots around the
corner waiting to kick in the heads of anybody who
stands in their way. He's saying, you need both. You
(31:11):
need suits and boots. And this final line, if a
lack of discipline sometimes causes problems, the solution is to
provide it, not to tell them to go away. He's saying,
the suits need to maintain discipline over the stormtroopers, the paramilitaries,
the stro mob Tilo right. The party needs street thugs.
(31:33):
It doesn't work without them. That's what he's saying. And
I think this essay is the origin point of the
concept I'm talking about when I say suits and boots.
I'm sure the phrase existed prior to this moment, but
like I said, the earliest I could find the phrase
in writing in this context is this essay by Nick
(31:53):
Griffin in nineteen ninety seven. So this is what I'm
talking about when I say suits and boots. It's guys
like Nick Griffin putting on a suit and pretending to
be shocked and upset that you'd accuse them of being
a racist when they know full well the guy with
the big swastika tattoo outside would break your skull with
a bat if you tried to interfere with this polite,
(32:14):
respectable Nazi meeting he's trying to have. That's what it means.
That's all it means. And so, in my search to
(32:37):
find every time this phrase has appeared in writing in
this particular political context, I was surprised to see this
phrase used in a twenty twenty three conversation between Moira
Donegan and jeep Here in the Nation, where Donagan used
it as a generic, politically neutral way of describing political
(32:58):
strategy that combines lawyers going to court. I'm people marching
in the streets. I mean she's not wrong, I guess
in the broadest, vaguest sense of the term divorced from
all past context, right. I mean she's talking about using
both standard political power and litigation in combination with street activism.
(33:23):
But I don't think this is a term we can
repurpose for general usage. These boots weren't made for walking,
you know, we're not talking about marching boots. We're talking
about curb stomping boots. Language evolves, I guess, but knowing
(33:47):
how this phrase evolved can help you decide what you
want to convey by using it. That was a fun
history for me to learn. I was excited to discover
the origin of a phrase I find so useful, So
thank you for asking that. I also got a couple
(34:07):
of questions about my work prior to Weird Little Guys
and my life outside the show. It comes up fairly
often that I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. Where I live
would probably come up here and there either way, just conversationally.
But given the subject matter of the show, the city
I live in is sometimes the setting of some detail
(34:29):
or another. So most of you probably know that I
live in Charlottesville, but it didn't occur to me until
I read some of these questions that a lot of
you have no idea what I was doing with my
time before I started podcasting. I mean, why would you.
That's not your responsibility to know. It's weird that I
(34:50):
had some vague notion that you might. It's just that
before I had this show. The thing that I was
doing before is the only reason anyone will have heard
of me. I used to live tweet Charlottesville City council meetings,
all of them, like every minute of them, from the
fall of twenty seventeen until the fall of twenty twenty four,
(35:12):
when I got too busy with the show. I just
live tweeted municipal government meetings. For a full seven years.
I spent a big chunk of my week every week
providing live commentary on local government. I mean city council
meetings always, but a rotating array of other local boards
(35:32):
and commissions too, Tree Commission, Planning Commission, the Towing Advisory Board,
school Board, police Civilian Review Board. I tried everything at
least a few times, and I was pretty consistent with
the ones I thought were interesting. It started out as
kind of an unhinged hobby, but I loved it, and
people seem to get a kick out of it. I
(35:54):
think I've mentioned it in passing before, but it's been
a while. I started doing it for the exact same
reason that I'm now an expert on right wing political
violence in the United States, because that happened where I live.
I started going to city council meetings a few days
after the Unite the Right rally. I didn't know anything
(36:16):
about anything, really, and I didn't understand what happened and
why it had been allowed to happen, and why it
happened here, and why we let it happen here. So
I started trying to figure out how my local government worked,
because that seemed like some kind of starting point. I
didn't know what else to do, so I just started
(36:37):
showing up at every meeting I could find, and I
just sat there for the first year or so. They
didn't really understand why I was there. I mean I
barely understood why I was there. The city council meetings, sure,
that makes sense. Those were packed back then. There were
Monday nights where we hit the fire Marshal's maximum capacity
(37:00):
city and city council chambers. But the other meetings, the
ones at like ten am on a Tuesday, I don't
know what I was doing there. I just wanted to
see it all. There were some meetings where it was
so obvious that no one from the public had ever
shown up before. People thought I was lost. More than
(37:23):
a few times they tried to kick me out of
the room, saying things like, oh, sorry, we have this
room reserved for a meeting. You'll have to leave, because
they couldn't imagine that it was possible that I was
there for the meeting. I mean, there were times that
people insisted that I couldn't be there, that there was
no public right to observe, that I would have to leave.
(37:46):
But I'm terribly stubborn. I'm kind of weird, and I
knew my rights, and I stayed in my little plastic
chair for years. I just sat there in a little
placeastic chair and looked at strangers talking about stuff I
didn't always understand. I learned a lot about particulars, sure,
(38:10):
things about trees, things about zoning, whatever. But more than anything,
it taught me how to write fast and think even faster.
I spent thousands of hours basically transcribing meetings with nothing
but two thumbs and an iPhone. I think the mandatory
brevity of the tweet format has probably had a permanent
(38:33):
impact on my writing style. But we don't need to
talk about that. And it's been so many years I
almost forgot this bit of my own lore. But if
you live in Charlottesville and you get an email newsletter
from the city notifying you about upcoming public meetings, that
is my lasting contribution to local civic engagement. So for
(38:59):
the first years that I was making a nuisance of
myself at these public meetings, I was having a hard
time figuring out which meetings were even happening and when
and where they would be held. I had to physically
go to city Hall several times a week to look
at a bulletin board where boards and commissions were supposed
to put a physical notice of any upcoming public meeting.
(39:23):
And even then, a lot of meetings took place without
any proper public notice, and a lot of the meetings
that were held didn't have agendas, and no one was
taking the minutes, and all of these things are required
by state law in Virginia. So I did what any
reasonable person would do in my shoes. I consulted the
(39:43):
Code of Virginia, and I found Title two point two
subtitle two, part Beach, Chapter thirty seven, Section two point
two Dash thirty seven oh seven. That's the section of
the state's Freedom of Information Act that pertains to notice
of and access to public meetings. And so armed with
that information, I made a grotesque nuisance of myself. With
(40:07):
some exceptions that we don't need to get into here.
State law requires public notice of public meetings three business
days before that meeting is held. That notice can be
in a newsletter, on a website, or on that bulletin board.
But the same code section also allows any person to
(40:29):
make a request in writing to receive personal, written, mailed
notification of every meeting. And since they were having so
much trouble getting the meetings on the bulletin board, I
exercised my right. I emailed every city department with my request,
(40:52):
listing all of the boards and commissions under their purview
that I would like to receive mailed notice for each
and every time they convened. Is that unhinged? Yeah? Yeah,
they would have to mail me like ten letters a week,
every week for a full calendar year. But it's in
(41:14):
the law, and violations of that code section carry a
civil penalty of five hundred dollars for the first infraction
and two thousand dollars for every subsequent infraction. And so
once I sent those emails, they had to find a
way to come into compliance, because if they didn't find
(41:36):
some way to satisfy the requirements under the law, they
would end up paying tens of thousands of dollars in
penalties to the state monthly. So I sent my emails
and I waited. Nobody answered me, so I waited. Ten
days later, the city's communications director sent me this email, quote, Molly,
(42:01):
starting mid afternoon tomorrow, we will send out the first
of what will be a weekly public notice email. This
will be a list of the public meetings on our
website calendar schedule for the next week. We will use
this to satisfy your request, which was sent to a
number of our staff, to notify you of all public meetings.
And they did. They send out those weekly public meeting
(42:22):
notice emails from July of twenty nineteen until late twenty
twenty five. They have since been replaced by the city's
bi weekly newsletter. That communications director isn't with the city anymore.
But I always strongly suspected he found me to be
a monstrous nuisance. Honestly, they all did. It was the
(42:43):
kind of situation where just about everyone at city Hall
would groan if they saw me coming, and I think
that's something to be proud of. I'm sure they still
have the bulletin board, but I haven't gone to see
it in years. I don't need it anymore. But I
have always said if something tragic happens to me. Don't
(43:04):
put my name on an honorary street sign or something,
no park benches. All I want is a little plaque
underneath the bulletin board the Mollyconger Memorial public Meeting notice board,
because being an absolute menace at Charlottesville City Hall for
seven years, I think that's how I want to be remembered.
(43:28):
Thank you so much to everyone who sent in a
question this time around. I know I didn't get to
all of them, and I'm sorry. I will try to
hang on to the ones we didn't get to, but
also don't be shy about sending them in again next
time there's a call for questions. I love hearing from you, guys,
and if there's anything you took away from today's episode,
I hope it is that anyone can become the kind
(43:50):
of person their mayor hates to see coming. Weird Little
Guys is the production of Cool Zoe Media and iHeartRadio.
(44:11):
It's research, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conker. Our
executive producers are Sophie Lettterman and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I
will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer. It's
nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show
(44:31):
with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subredda. Just
don't post anything that's going to make you one of
my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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