May 21, 2026 • 44 mins
The MAGA media is running with the President's theory that the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 wasn't real. That's offensive to anyone with a solid relationship with reality, but it's especially hurtful for the guys who worked very hard to plan that nazi rally.
Link to the September 29, 2025 episode of I Don't Speak German that was mentioned: https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/136-the-final-cantwell
https://eugeneantifa.noblogs.org/post/2019/06/28/davidzsutty/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IufVP9wHeUs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l4pUinLZ_0
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The FBI probably didn't expect to find their target awake
when they broke down the door at four in the morning.
Showing up before dawn is pretty standard practice when the
cops are trying to catch someone by surprise. Most people
are asleep at three or four in the morning, so
there won't be curious neighbors wandering over to see why
(00:29):
a dozen cop cars are staging at the end of
the block. And you probably won't hear them coming. Whether
you are up late or you have to be up early,
it's a decent bet that you're not ready for action
at that hour.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
You're less likely to.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
See them coming and do something rash like start destroying
evidence or meet them at the door with a loaded gun.
They'd rather find you blinking, sleepily, confused about the men
with rifles suddenly standing at the foot of your bed.
But on the morning of January twenty third, twenty twenty,
the man the FBI was there to arrest was awake.
(01:08):
He'd been talking a big talk for years. They knew
he had guns, and they knew he hated the government,
which explains the no knock warrant and the firepower. But
despite all his violent rhetoric. He wasn't up waiting for
the FEDS with a loaded gun. He was, by his
(01:29):
own account, lying in bed in his underwear, playing Pokemon
on Nintendo, and he went quietly. If anything, he was
happy to be of assistance to the FBI. He wasn't
an FBI infemant, not technically, but it wasn't for lack
(01:49):
of trying. He'd been sending the FBI unsolicited information for years,
completely oblivious to the fact that the only person he
was incriminating was himself. And now, in the wake of
these new revelations that someone in his old social circles
was a different kind of snitch, He's just one of
(02:09):
many men eager to clear his name.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
He couldn't have.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Been the Southern Poverty Law Center's informant, but he's ready
and willing, if not entirely able, to help the government
go after whoever was. I'm Molly Coner, and this is weird,
little guys. Last week we talked about the white supremacist
(02:54):
rally that was held in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of
twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
We talked about it again.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
It comes up a lot, but until last week, I
never really felt the need to clarify that it was real.
I mean, I figured we all knew it was real
looking at a crowd of thousands of people and saying
that's obviously a syop or a false flag or a
(03:23):
hoax or whatever. That's Alex jones territory. I mean, not
like that's the kind of thing Alex Jones would do. Literally,
specifically in this case, that is something Alex Jones did,
And we don't need to concern ourselves too much with
people who refuse to occupy our shared reality. But it
(03:45):
wasn't a conspiracy theory that got a lot of traction,
and even Alex Jones gave up on it pretty quickly,
so it wasn't really the kind of thing we needed
to concern ourselves with too much. You don't need to
chase down every rogue conspiracy theory confront it that was
true until recently. Not every conspiracy theory, or in this case,
(04:10):
a bad faith propaganda effort to make up a conspiracy theory,
requires our attention. I don't need to do an episode
telling you, for example, about the weirdos online who think
Heather Hire did die at the Nazi rally, but not
from being intentionally struck by a car. There is a
(04:30):
small contingent of guys online who think the government killed
her with a heart attack gun developed by the CIA
as a tool for covert assassinations. Obviously that's not true.
It doesn't even make sense. It's easily debunked with concrete,
provable facts that have been submitted as evidence in a
court of law, etc. It's not a common belief, it's
(04:54):
not at risk of becoming a common belief, and it's
not the kind of thing I would waste your time with.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
There are so many.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Conspiracy theories about the Unite the Right rally, but they've
been more or less confined to the fringes, guys who
were there or wish they had been, who can't let
go of the vision they'd had of this victorious march
through the streets of Charlottesville. Those kinds of conspiracy theories
(05:26):
come up now and again here on the show as
they're relevant to whatever we're talking about. I did a
whole episode last summer about some of the misinformation surrounding
how their hires murder, for example.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
But mostly the world has moved on.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Conspiracy theories about the Unite the Right Rally are pretty
limited in their spread because most people aren't still thinking
about a Nazi rally from nine years ago until last month.
Last week we talked about the new and indictment against
the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging they violated the law
(06:04):
in the way they handled payments made to sources within
the white nationalist movement, and one of those sources was
allegedly involved in organizing the Unite the Right rally, And
in last week's episode, we talked a little bit about
those allegations and how it's a gross misunderstanding of both
(06:25):
the indictment and the rally itself to say that the
existence of one paid source means the organization paying the
source was responsible for the rally.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And yet.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
And now they're finding out that the twenty twenty election
was totally rigged. And when you're looking at what, just
excuse me, how do you defend what just happened where
your Southern Law whatever it is, has given money to KKK.
They're supposed to protect.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
People, and they're paying all these people crookedness can be
millions of dollars, millions of dollars going to all these
people that they're supposed to be protecting from but they're
actually supporting them because they want to have companies that
they can protect and because they want to rig elections.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
That was all a rigged election.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
All of the things were Charlottesville, all of the stuff
that they did.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
That's not even the same clip I played last week.
The clip of the President saying the same thing last
week was from an episode of Sixty Minutes. This weird,
rambling conspiracy theory about the SPLC comes from a remark
the President made during a press conference about the war
(07:39):
in Lebanon. Not sure how this came up, and he's
not the only person making this wild claim that the
Southern Poverty Law Center totally faked a big Nazi rally
in twenty seventeen just to make him look bad so
the Democrats could rig the twenty twenty election. Three full
(07:59):
years Slater, And once the President started free associating criminal
allegations on television, the media machine that props him up
got to work trying to make it make sense. So
a day later, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt was
on Fox News clarifying the matter.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
Now you mentioned the Charlottesville hoax, John, It's a brilliant point,
because that is one of the most vicious and egregious
smears that has been used against President Trump over the
course of the past eleven years since he got himself
into politics. In this group funded some of the funders
of that hoax that not only the media ate up
(08:43):
like candy, but that the Democrats ran campaigns on. If
you recall, in twenty twenty, Joe Biden launched his campaign
for presidents on the basis of the Charlottesville hoax.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
The Charlottesville hoax, She's calling it the Charlottesville hoax, and
the same day she made those remarks on Fox, Levitt
also tweeted out a link to an article with the
headline Charlottesville the deceit underlying the Hoax, and the article
(09:21):
states as fact utterly unsubstantiated that the Southern Poverty Law
Center quote organized and financed the rally, and even claims
the nonprofit created entire hate groups out of thin air.
The article's author, Steve Cortes, was a senior advisor on
(09:42):
Trump's twenty sixteen and twenty twenty presidential campaigns, and his
twenty six year old daughter is currently the press secretary
at the Pentagon, a job I'm sure she got entirely
on her own merits. These talking points when out to
the MAGA media surrogates, and they ran with it. Matt Walsh,
(10:05):
Dave Ruben, a trio of completely unmemorable men who for
some reason still host something called the Charlie Kirk Show,
former NRA spokeswoman Dana Losch, some excruciatingly bad Joe Rogan
knockoff hosted by Fox News dlisters. I mean, it was
the top story on every show in the maga media world.
(10:28):
A congresswoman I've never heard of even went on a
YouTube show hosted by the guy that got kicked out
of Mumford and Sons for being a fascist. None of
that was a joke.
Speaker 6 (10:40):
By the way, the rally in Charlottesville several years ago
in twenty seventeen, that was funded and organized by SPLC.
They paid the guy who did that two hundred and
seventy thousand dollars.
Speaker 7 (10:54):
That was it.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
The organizer, the organizer of that event, that was Wyoming
congressional Representative Harriet Hageman talking to Winston Marshall, who apparently
has a right wing YouTube talk show. Now, it was fake,
(11:15):
It wasn't real. There were no real Nazis there are
no real hate groups. Racism isn't even real. The Southern
Poverty Law Center made it up. But from a dozen
or so hours I spent skimming transcripts while playing these
videos at double speed, it seems like they were a
little thin on the details. Step one, Southern Poverty Law
(11:38):
Center pays a guy a bunch of money. Step two,
that guy organizes the rally all by himself. That's not clear.
Step three question mark, question mark. Step four huge Nazi
rally all fake? So were all the other guys tricked
into being there? Were they paid too? Do they know
(12:01):
it was fake? If they didn't know it was fake,
is it still a fake rally? Like if a thousand
guys showed up sincerely for a fake rally, doesn't that
become a real rally. Nobody's really dealing with this in
good faith because you can't. It's not meant to be
(12:24):
taken seriously or examined closely. It's meant to make the
casual viewer go yeah, fuck those commies trying to make
conservatives look bad. It's not meant to be analyzed Fans
of the Daily Wire or the Daily Signal or any
one of the dozens of functionally identical forgettably named administration
(12:47):
propaganda outlets. We'll scroll past one of these clips and say, yeah,
I always knew Democrats were the real racists, and they'll
move on with their day. For most people, they unite
the right rally with something distant. They saw it on
the news. They have a general vague awareness of it,
(13:11):
they saw a picture. It's easy to alter their perception
of the event because they don't think much about it.
You can reframe that reality without a lot of cognitive
dissonance because it wasn't a deeply rooted belief unless you
were there. Some of the people in the viewing audience
(13:35):
of your average right wing talk slop on YouTube do
have a very firm opinion about the events of August
eleventh and twelfth, twenty seventeen, because.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
They were there and all of this is really hurting
their feelings.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Take it from rally organizer Augustus and Victus the.
Speaker 7 (13:58):
Ultimate insult everything we've been through.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
The day the SPLC indictment came out, a lot of
these guys started posting they wanted to know who the
informant was. Of course, I'm sure they're all racking their
brains trying to remember what they said and to whom
and what incriminating information did they post in which chat rooms.
(14:27):
Our pencilss Pokemon player from the Cold Open was very
quick to post, as he always is when he's not
in jail. If I can be of any service to
the FBI on this, I'd love it. I don't have
any direct knowledge of who the SPLC agitators were, but
it's near certainly the case that I've interacted with those individuals,
and it would be my honor to cooperate with this
(14:48):
investigation fully. Christopher Catwell posted on telegram with a link
to a breaking news story about the indictment from Fox News.
No one ever actually gave a speech at the Unite
the Right rally on August twelfth, twenty seventeen. It got
out of control before it technically ever started. But if
(15:11):
the speeches had been given, his would have been awful.
Christopher Cantwell, the man you remember as the Crying Nazi,
if you remember him at all, was a headline speaker
and an organizer of the rally. He was perhaps eager
to proactively deny being the informant, given his deserved reputation
(15:37):
as an aspiring informant. He willingly approached the FBI repeatedly
for years, trying to use law enforcement to go after
his enemies, be they anti fascists or guys on his
own team that he'd had a falling out with. It
had never really worked. And that's why I'm pretty confident
(16:01):
he wasn't the paid informant. He's not worth paying for information.
The government didn't want the information he was trying to
give them. And whoever the SPLC's paid source at Unite
the Right was that person, according to the indictment, was
on the payroll from twenty fifteen through twenty twenty three.
(16:26):
Then Campwell was in federal prison for a good chunk
of that time. After his rest in twenty twenty, he
spent a bit of time in the communications management unit
at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. If you're working
on your red string board at home, you already have
a pin on the board for Marian. We discussed the
(16:48):
history of Marion and the use of its communications management
unit in one of the episodes about Nazi serial killer
Joseph Paul Franklin, But if you missed that discussion, the
communications management unit is a hard place to end up.
There are only two in the United States prison system,
(17:09):
one at Marion and one at Terre Haute. People incarcerated
in a CMU have very little access to the outside world.
There are extreme limitations on visitation, mail, and telephone usage.
What little communication they do have with the outside world
(17:29):
is heavily monitored by an FBI agent. Most of the
people in a CMU have been convicted of a crime
of terrorism or organized crime, or they've been communicating with
the outside world to orchestrate ongoing criminal activity or harassment
of people involved in their case, so bothering victims in
(17:51):
their families, threatening judges and prosecutors, things like that. Christopher
Cantwell ended up in federal prison for trying to extort
another Nazi into giving him the name of a third guy,
also a Nazi. They'd all been friends once, but they
(18:12):
weren't anymore, and he wanted to dos them. It is
a federal crime to threaten to harm someone's family if
they won't help you threaten a third guy in case
that wasn't obvious. It wasn't to Chris. It seems like
(18:33):
a bit of an overreaction to proactively park him in
the Communications Management Unit but he did have a history
of making Nazi podcasts from jail, using his phone privileges
and a friend on the outside. When he was locked
up here in Charlottesville for a little bit after assaulting
people at the Torch March the night before the Unite
(18:53):
the Right rally, he repeatedly threatened his victims via his
jail phone podcast, so maybe they were just trying to
get out ahead of a repeat performance. Either way, I
don't think the Southern Poverty Law Center was keeping in
touch with and paying a source whose mail and phone
(19:14):
calls were actively monitored by the FBI.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Catwell was at.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Marion during several of the years this unnamed source was
selling information to the Southern Poverty Law Center, And for
what it's worth, if they were paying a guy like
Catwell money like that.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Then they really were screwing over the donors.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Anything he had to say worth selling anybody was going
to come out of his mouth for free if you
listen long enough, because he is absolutely addicted to the
sound of his own voice and apparently to meth. He's
been struggling pretty badly lately with some drug and mental
health issues, so if he had any secrets left to spill.
(20:00):
He would have confessed them when he was manically revealing
that he used to publish gay erotica under a pseudonym
that he wrote about the sex he was having with
man he met on Grinder. He's not a man who
has any secrets left. I'll post a link in the
(20:29):
episode notes to the episode of my friend Daniel Harper's
podcast I Don't Speak German from a few months ago,
where we discussed Cantwell's weird turn late last year. It's
a very different listen, but I think you'll enjoy it.
All that to say, Christopher Cantwell isn't Field Source thirty seven,
(20:50):
and he doesn't know who was, or he would have
told us, But he is as always looking forward to
wasting some fbia's time yammering about his old enemies.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
So who could it be?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Because the government framed this conversation around f thirty seven
in the language of this person having been an organizer
of the rally, So people are naturally looking at this
list of big names, these leaders who could meaningfully be
called one of the rally's organizers, people like Jason Kessler,
the guy who actually had the permit, Richard Spencer, Augustus
(21:31):
and victus leaders from organizations that were present at the rally,
like the League of the South, Identity Europa, Traditionalist Workers Party,
the National Socialist Movement, Vanguard America. But it's just as
likely that the organizational involvement the government is alleging was
more minor than that, and it's not going to end
up being one of these main organizers at all. We
(21:53):
just don't know yet. Just as a quick aside, I've
seen a lot of these sort of big magga influencers
on Twitter, specifically people like Senator Mike Lee, who posts
as based Mike Lee, an embarrassing name from middle aged man.
But people like Senator Mike Lee are posting things implying
(22:15):
that they believe the informant is Thomas Rousseau, so posting
videos of Patriot Front marching saying you know the SPLC
at work. The problem with that is that is a
very stupid thing to say. Patriot Front was not at
the Unite the Right rally because Patriot Front did not
(22:36):
exist in August of twenty seventeen. So Patriot Front the
organization was not paid by the Southern Poverty Law Center
to be at Unite the Right because they didn't exist,
and they didn't exist until after Unite the Right because
they were a rebrand of Vanguard America. Because a murderer
(22:57):
marched with Vanguard America at Unite the Right. And so
Mike Lee defenders might be saying, Okay, well maybe it
wasn't Patriot Front, but the guy is the same, right,
Thomas Rousseau, the head of Patriot Front, was at Unite
the Right. He was there with Vanguard America. Sure, and
he does have very suspicious behavior. And people have accused
(23:17):
Thomas Russeau of being an informant for many years. The
problem is he can't be f thirty seven because he
was a miner in twenty fifteen. He was a child.
He was sixteen years old in twenty fifteen, and I
don't think the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying a
(23:38):
minor child.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
So it's not Thomas Rousseau.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
But aside from these sort of baseless allegations thrown out
by idiots, the actual men involved don't seem as frantic
to find out who the informant was as I assumed
they would be, not the way they might be if
the informant had been working for the government.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
You know, the guys who.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Actually planned that rally. They know what they did, and
they've already been sued for it. That lawsuit lasted for years.
Their planning chats have been poured over by scores of
lawyers and journalists and researchers. There isn't much the informant
could still have up their sleeve about unite the right.
(24:28):
They could still hurt them, It's too late for anyone
to file a new lawsuit, and new criminal charges are
extremely unlikely. This stitch can't really hurt them anymore. So
they care less about who the snitch is or what
further damage could come of this. Then they care about
(24:49):
making sure everyone knows it wasn't them. Not just because
they're not a snitch and being a snitch is a
terrible thing to be, but because the existence of this
informant is being used to prop up the narrative that
no one involved meant it. They don't want people to
(25:09):
think they're a snitch. But more importantly, they don't want
anyone to think that they weren't a true believer. They're
less upset that you think they might sell information. They're
upset the President said they aren't real Nazis because they are,
and they're proud of it. The day after the indictment
(25:31):
against the SBLC came down, a Twitter account with over
three hundred thousand followers called the Raw Egg Nationalist Quote
tweeted the FBI's post about the case. If you deliberately
wanted to make the American right look as bad as possible,
you couldn't have done a better job than Unite the Right.
It should come as no surprise that a major left
(25:53):
wing activist group is alleged to have given three hundred
thousand dollars to one of the organizers of the rally,
wrote the British far right influencer, whose real name is
Charles Cornishdale. But this idea, this idea that the Unite
the Right rally was faked by a left wing organization.
That's a MAGA media talking point, and that talking point
(26:17):
is selling.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Well in those spaces.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
But the guy selling carnivore diet cookbooks and great replacement
conspiracy theory to a white nationalist audience misjudged how well
it would sell for him.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
The replies are a mess.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Jim O'Brien, a Lead of the South member from Florida
who was arrested at the rally for carrying a concealed
handgun posted under his pseudonym Padrick Martin, and he said quote,
the vast majority of us were sincere participants. White nationalist
blogger and attorney David Zutty said the rally inspired him
(26:56):
to get involved in the movement. Sarah Dye posts from
the account for her coffee company above Time Coffee, posted
a sad face emoji saying she was disappointed the raw
egg nationalist would post something like this. Dye started that
coffee company after her farmer's market stall was boycotted by
patrons in Bloomington, Indiana when she was outed as a
(27:19):
member of Identity Europa. I mean, it's just wild under there.
Frank da Silva, a member of the Nazi terror group
The Order who spent most of the eighties and nineties
in federal prison for his role in the group's crimes,
scolded the British egg enthusiast, writing quote, your statement is
(27:42):
low brow and misses many tactical and strategic points. Racist
bloggers and retired terrorists agree, you just can't sell out
the brave white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville. I scrolled
long enough to find and at least a dozen comments
accusing the poster of being Jewish. It usually devolves into
(28:06):
that that's what always happens when Nazis are angry at
each other. And in the quote tweets, I found more
familiar faces, including rally organizer Augustus and Victus. Invictus seems
to be taking the accusation that he and the other
organizers were participating in the perpetration of a giant Democrat.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Hoax pretty personally.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
I mean, he's still actively appealing his felony conviction for
his participation in the Torch March. He is still facing
jail time, so it must sting a bit to hear
the mainstream right disrespect what he's sacrificed for the movement.
He is a Twitter Premium subscriber, so his post can
be as long as he wants, and his three hundred
(28:51):
word rant highlights his real role in the rally and
his continued involvement in the aftermath, not only his own
legal pri problems, but as an attorney, he offered legal
assistance to a number of his fellow rally attendees. Over
the years, every right wing influencer pushing this lie that
Unite the Right was an SPLC syop is dead to me,
(29:14):
he wrote, Invictus and raw Egg nationalists did make up
in the comments and dalist Info Wars third hour host
Harrison Smith invited Invictus to come on Info Wars. He
eagerly accepted, but sadly for him, it looks like they
didn't get that scheduled before Info Wars was taken off
(29:36):
the air a few days later. And Augustus Invictus isn't
the only rally organizer speaking out against the injustice of
being called a fake racist.
Speaker 7 (29:47):
You know, there's an old saying that the last has
no excuse me, no enemies. Excuse me, no enemies still
the far left, but we can't say that about the rye.
The rye, the respectable middle right never never owns up
to the fact that we exist. And if we do exist,
(30:09):
it's because we're just a bunch of Nazis that need
to be shelved all out out the door. And that's
why they could not defend us at Charlottesville. And now
what they're saying is, well, no wonder we didn't defend
them at Charlottesville. This was a Southern Party Law center
putting this thing on.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
To start with, that's Michael Hill, the president of the
League of the South. Well, they rebranded as the Southern
Nationalist League two years ago, probably in an effort to
protect their assets from the civil judgment and the lawsuit
they lost to the victims injured at the Nazi rally
(30:48):
they organized, so they'll still just be the League of
the South to me. But he's right, this is nothing new.
This is just the same knee jerk in pulse. Conservatives
have always had to say stupid stuff like well, did
you know the KKK was all Democrats? Sure, but what
(31:09):
was a Democrat in eighteen seventy two?
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
That clip comes from the third hour of an episode
of The Political Cesspool, a long running right wing podcast
hosted by James Edwards. If you remember the episode's last
fall about the American Third Position Party, Edwards was a
founding member of that organization in twenty ten, and he
served on the board until last year. Michael Hill spent
(31:36):
the remainder of the third hour chatting about Confederate History Month,
but before he called in, the show had a rotating
cast of people with something to say about Unite the Right.
In the first hour, they had Jason Kessler, the Ralli's
permit holder. In the second hour, they squeezed in four guests.
(31:57):
Jim O'Brien, that League of the South guy who insists
on being addressed by his pseudonym even though everyone knows
it's Jim Glenn Allen, the attorney who lost his job
as a lawyer for the Baltimore Police Department when the
splc outed him as a member of the Nazi organization
National Alliance. Sam Dixon, a former Clan lawyer who attended
(32:17):
the Unite the Right rally and had a very close
relationship with Identity Europa in those days. And Augustus and Victus,
the Florida man who can no longer practice law due
to his felony conviction related to his conduct at the
Nazi rally he helped plan. I find this particular brand
of boomer style talk radio to be particularly painful, but
(32:41):
I listened to all three hours of it for you. Honestly,
I think even the hosts were pretty tired of the
show by the third hour, because you can hear them
playing the cut to break music over Michael Hill as
he's actually making kind of a cogent point.
Speaker 7 (32:58):
Well, I do believe that it's an attempt by the
mainstream MAGA conservatives to distance themselves from the people on
the hard riot Charlottesville, and this is a perfect way
for them to do that. But they're kind of cutting
their own throats because they're saying that there can be
no organic uprising, if you will, of white people acting
(33:22):
in white interests.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
The hosts are dullest dishwater. James Edward's co host Keith Alexander,
asked every single guest what they thought about the judge
assigned to the SPLC case at Alabama. The docket shows
it's been assigned to Judge Emily Marx.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
None of the.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Guests know anything about this judge or any judge really,
but Alexander brings it up at least half a dozen times,
trying to get something going with observations like this one.
Speaker 8 (33:59):
The first of all, this lady of this judge has
his name Marx, which makes me think she's non Irish
or this one, and it's being heard by a judge
with the last name of Marx. I guess it's Graucho's granddaughter.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
I think he's trying to get someone to play this
game with him where they speculate about whether judge Emily
Marx is a communist or Jewish. He's certainly implying she's
not white enough for his taste, saying she's non Irish,
and that statement came in the context of his observation
that that part of Alabama where she sits on the
(34:41):
bench is predominantly black. No one took the bait, though,
he just kept throwing it out there. And for what
it's worth, judge, Emily Marx is white. She was born
in Alabama in nineteen seventy three and was nominated to
the federal judiciary by Trump in his first term. And
(35:04):
her last name is spelled mr Ks, not Marx, like
Carl or Groucho. So I'm not sure why he was
trying so hard to make that joke work. I'm not
kidding fully six times, but listening to three hours of
(35:26):
Nazi talk radio wasn't a total waste of time. Remember
that minisod last week rally organizer Jason Kessler has filed
a defamation lawsuit against Kevin McGinnis over Gavin's accusation that
Kessler was the informant.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
He wasn't.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
There's just no way that's the case. But things were
said and lawsuits were filed, and in that lawsuit, Jason
Kessler is preceding pro se. He does not have a lawyer,
so there's no one there to remind him that making
a ton of public statements when you're upset is not
(36:02):
the move. And one of the things he said on
the show was that the government's claim that this informant
was involved in an online chat for leadership involved in
the rallies planning is pretty meaningless because there were a
thousand things that can be called a leadership chat group
in the months leading up to the rally. It's similar
to a point I made in the episode last week.
(36:25):
But he knows a little more than I do about
those chats because he ran them. Now, remember I said,
(36:48):
I've read a lot of these chats because they were
leaked by an infiltrator, not this paid informant, just some
brave anti fascist who joined watched, weighted and downloaded, and
they leaked the entire chat log to Unicorn Riot. But
they could only download the channels they had access to.
(37:12):
The leaked chat logs don't include invite only channels on
the Discord server that the infiltrator wasn't in, So I
haven't read those.
Speaker 9 (37:24):
There was a channel in the Discord where a lot
of people were communicating about United the Right called Leadership
Underscore Discussion, and I have the full records of that
because as soon as this controversy happened, I went and
I found my USB drive that has probably the last
(37:46):
remnants anywhere of a lot of evidence.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
I haven't read that channel, but the government probably has,
and the turnourneies in the civil lawsuit did too.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
They started out.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
With just the leagues, but they did eventually get full
access to the Discord server via subpoenas served on Discord.
And now apparently those private secret leadership chats are in
the possession of a reporter from the New York Post,
because apparently Jason Kessler thinks the New York Post is
(38:26):
going to be able to solve the mystery of who
the informant was, and he thinks the informant was in
that chat. Jason, Jason, I know we're enemies or whatever, but.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Send me the files. I think we both know.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
I have a better shot at figuring this out than
whoever you talk to at the New York Post. I'll
forgive you for that time you spat in my face.
If you send me the files.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Okay, come on, So.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
The conservative media ecosystem has decided it was a hoax,
and the far right guys who were still proud of
what they did are upset.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Where's the disconnect? Why is this happening?
Speaker 9 (39:10):
Conservatives are dumb?
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Oh oh, that is some astute analysis from a guy
with some skin in the game. That's Richard Spencer, one
of the masterminds behind the United the Right rally. Really,
if anyone could be said to be the primary organizer,
the person without whom the rally was not possible, I
think it's him. Sure, Jason Kessler got the permit, but
(39:39):
it was Richard's show. In the end, he gave the
only speech that was actually given that weekend after the
Torch march, he tried to climb the base of the
Thomas Jefferson statue and he spoke for about forty seconds.
That was all the time he had by the time
the crowd stopped shouting Hail Spencer, Hail Victory, doing their
(40:00):
Nazi salutes, and before the cops showed up to half
heartedly shoot them away.
Speaker 6 (40:08):
Right, A right.
Speaker 10 (40:10):
One, but now nine years later, crushed onto the costs
(40:31):
of his messy divorce and the millions of dollars he's
on the hook for in the civil lawsuit against him
and the other rally organizers.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Nobody see Kyling Richard Spencer anymore. He's kind of a
nobody now, and he's sort of constantly experimenting with a
rebrand as a reasonable conservative, and every now and then
some reporter falls for it. He just wants to be
relevant again. He's got this really boring sub stack and
(41:01):
I'm not going to read it to find out anymore.
So the day after the SBOC indictment came down, he
showed up on Gavin McGinnis's podcast. You may remember Gavin
McGinnis as the founder of the Proud Boys. He's not
involved in that organization anymore, but he's still just kind
of around. Once your whole life revolves around being unpleasant
(41:24):
and public for money, you're kind of stuck doing it forever.
But in his appearance on McGinnis's show, Richard Spencer made
a great point.
Speaker 9 (41:35):
Remember he said, conservatives are dumb.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
They're falling for this because it's a self serving conclusion.
It served the Conservative political project in twenty seventeen to
downplay the severity of the rally, and it serves the
conservative political project now to pretend it wasn't ever even real,
that it was just a gigantic psyop orchestrated by powerful
(42:03):
and manipulative liberal elites trying to trick you into thinking
Nazis are real. It serves the conservative political project now
to pretend there are no real Nazis, because the actual
rhetoric of the current administration is getting awfully close to
what those Nazis were shouting back then. Now, in twenty
(42:28):
twenty six, the government needs you to believe that there
are no Nazis because the government is doing some stuff
that might make you ask, hey, isn't that the kind
of stuff those Nazis were saying? If that big Nazi
rally was fake, if it was a nasty political trick
played by liberals and communists and other bad guys who
(42:51):
just want to make the president look bad, well, now,
don't you look silly? Aren't you being kind of ridiculous?
This can't be Nazi stuff because Nazis aren't even real.
I think most of the players in this game know
the rules. Well, actually, no, come to think of it,
some of the no name podcasters who are trapped inside
(43:13):
of a Fox News web only Content Studio. They don't
know what they're reading off the prompter, but the government
actors absolutely understand what they're doing, and some of the
cleverer Nazis see it too. Weird Little Guys it's a
(43:46):
production of coolsone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and
recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Brad Dickard. You can email me at Weird Little Guys
podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
(44:07):
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything
that's going to make you one of my Weird Little
guys
Cool zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
The FBI probably didn't expect to find their target awake
when they broke down the door at four in the morning.
Showing up before dawn is pretty standard practice when the
cops are trying to catch someone by surprise. Most people
are asleep at three or four in the morning, so
there won't be curious neighbors wandering over to see why
(00:29):
a dozen cop cars are staging at the end of
the block. And you probably won't hear them coming. Whether
you are up late or you have to be up early,
it's a decent bet that you're not ready for action
at that hour.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
You're less likely to.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
See them coming and do something rash like start destroying
evidence or meet them at the door with a loaded gun.
They'd rather find you blinking, sleepily, confused about the men
with rifles suddenly standing at the foot of your bed.
But on the morning of January twenty third, twenty twenty,
the man the FBI was there to arrest was awake.
(01:08):
He'd been talking a big talk for years. They knew
he had guns, and they knew he hated the government,
which explains the no knock warrant and the firepower. But
despite all his violent rhetoric. He wasn't up waiting for
the FEDS with a loaded gun. He was, by his
(01:29):
own account, lying in bed in his underwear, playing Pokemon
on Nintendo, and he went quietly. If anything, he was
happy to be of assistance to the FBI. He wasn't
an FBI infemant, not technically, but it wasn't for lack
(01:49):
of trying. He'd been sending the FBI unsolicited information for years,
completely oblivious to the fact that the only person he
was incriminating was himself. And now, in the wake of
these new revelations that someone in his old social circles
was a different kind of snitch, He's just one of
(02:09):
many men eager to clear his name.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
He couldn't have.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Been the Southern Poverty Law Center's informant, but he's ready
and willing, if not entirely able, to help the government
go after whoever was. I'm Molly Coner, and this is weird,
little guys. Last week we talked about the white supremacist
(02:54):
rally that was held in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of
twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
We talked about it again.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
It comes up a lot, but until last week, I
never really felt the need to clarify that it was real.
I mean, I figured we all knew it was real
looking at a crowd of thousands of people and saying
that's obviously a syop or a false flag or a
(03:23):
hoax or whatever. That's Alex jones territory. I mean, not
like that's the kind of thing Alex Jones would do. Literally,
specifically in this case, that is something Alex Jones did,
And we don't need to concern ourselves too much with
people who refuse to occupy our shared reality. But it
(03:45):
wasn't a conspiracy theory that got a lot of traction,
and even Alex Jones gave up on it pretty quickly,
so it wasn't really the kind of thing we needed
to concern ourselves with too much. You don't need to
chase down every rogue conspiracy theory confront it that was
true until recently. Not every conspiracy theory, or in this case,
(04:10):
a bad faith propaganda effort to make up a conspiracy theory,
requires our attention. I don't need to do an episode
telling you, for example, about the weirdos online who think
Heather Hire did die at the Nazi rally, but not
from being intentionally struck by a car. There is a
(04:30):
small contingent of guys online who think the government killed
her with a heart attack gun developed by the CIA
as a tool for covert assassinations. Obviously that's not true.
It doesn't even make sense. It's easily debunked with concrete,
provable facts that have been submitted as evidence in a
court of law, etc. It's not a common belief, it's
(04:54):
not at risk of becoming a common belief, and it's
not the kind of thing I would waste your time with.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
There are so many.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Conspiracy theories about the Unite the Right rally, but they've
been more or less confined to the fringes, guys who
were there or wish they had been, who can't let
go of the vision they'd had of this victorious march
through the streets of Charlottesville. Those kinds of conspiracy theories
(05:26):
come up now and again here on the show as
they're relevant to whatever we're talking about. I did a
whole episode last summer about some of the misinformation surrounding
how their hires murder, for example.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
But mostly the world has moved on.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Conspiracy theories about the Unite the Right Rally are pretty
limited in their spread because most people aren't still thinking
about a Nazi rally from nine years ago until last month.
Last week we talked about the new and indictment against
the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging they violated the law
(06:04):
in the way they handled payments made to sources within
the white nationalist movement, and one of those sources was
allegedly involved in organizing the Unite the Right rally, And
in last week's episode, we talked a little bit about
those allegations and how it's a gross misunderstanding of both
(06:25):
the indictment and the rally itself to say that the
existence of one paid source means the organization paying the
source was responsible for the rally.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
And yet.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
And now they're finding out that the twenty twenty election
was totally rigged. And when you're looking at what, just
excuse me, how do you defend what just happened where
your Southern Law whatever it is, has given money to KKK.
They're supposed to protect.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
People, and they're paying all these people crookedness can be
millions of dollars, millions of dollars going to all these
people that they're supposed to be protecting from but they're
actually supporting them because they want to have companies that
they can protect and because they want to rig elections.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
That was all a rigged election.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
All of the things were Charlottesville, all of the stuff
that they did.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
That's not even the same clip I played last week.
The clip of the President saying the same thing last
week was from an episode of Sixty Minutes. This weird,
rambling conspiracy theory about the SPLC comes from a remark
the President made during a press conference about the war
(07:39):
in Lebanon. Not sure how this came up, and he's
not the only person making this wild claim that the
Southern Poverty Law Center totally faked a big Nazi rally
in twenty seventeen just to make him look bad so
the Democrats could rig the twenty twenty election. Three full
(07:59):
years Slater, And once the President started free associating criminal
allegations on television, the media machine that props him up
got to work trying to make it make sense. So
a day later, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt was
on Fox News clarifying the matter.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
Now you mentioned the Charlottesville hoax, John, It's a brilliant point,
because that is one of the most vicious and egregious
smears that has been used against President Trump over the
course of the past eleven years since he got himself
into politics. In this group funded some of the funders
of that hoax that not only the media ate up
(08:43):
like candy, but that the Democrats ran campaigns on. If
you recall, in twenty twenty, Joe Biden launched his campaign
for presidents on the basis of the Charlottesville hoax.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
The Charlottesville hoax, She's calling it the Charlottesville hoax, and
the same day she made those remarks on Fox, Levitt
also tweeted out a link to an article with the
headline Charlottesville the deceit underlying the Hoax, and the article
(09:21):
states as fact utterly unsubstantiated that the Southern Poverty Law
Center quote organized and financed the rally, and even claims
the nonprofit created entire hate groups out of thin air.
The article's author, Steve Cortes, was a senior advisor on
(09:42):
Trump's twenty sixteen and twenty twenty presidential campaigns, and his
twenty six year old daughter is currently the press secretary
at the Pentagon, a job I'm sure she got entirely
on her own merits. These talking points when out to
the MAGA media surrogates, and they ran with it. Matt Walsh,
(10:05):
Dave Ruben, a trio of completely unmemorable men who for
some reason still host something called the Charlie Kirk Show,
former NRA spokeswoman Dana Losch, some excruciatingly bad Joe Rogan
knockoff hosted by Fox News dlisters. I mean, it was
the top story on every show in the maga media world.
(10:28):
A congresswoman I've never heard of even went on a
YouTube show hosted by the guy that got kicked out
of Mumford and Sons for being a fascist. None of
that was a joke.
Speaker 6 (10:40):
By the way, the rally in Charlottesville several years ago
in twenty seventeen, that was funded and organized by SPLC.
They paid the guy who did that two hundred and
seventy thousand dollars.
Speaker 7 (10:54):
That was it.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
The organizer, the organizer of that event, that was Wyoming
congressional Representative Harriet Hageman talking to Winston Marshall, who apparently
has a right wing YouTube talk show. Now, it was fake,
(11:15):
It wasn't real. There were no real Nazis there are
no real hate groups. Racism isn't even real. The Southern
Poverty Law Center made it up. But from a dozen
or so hours I spent skimming transcripts while playing these
videos at double speed, it seems like they were a
little thin on the details. Step one, Southern Poverty Law
(11:38):
Center pays a guy a bunch of money. Step two,
that guy organizes the rally all by himself. That's not clear.
Step three question mark, question mark. Step four huge Nazi
rally all fake? So were all the other guys tricked
into being there? Were they paid too? Do they know
(12:01):
it was fake? If they didn't know it was fake,
is it still a fake rally? Like if a thousand
guys showed up sincerely for a fake rally, doesn't that
become a real rally. Nobody's really dealing with this in
good faith because you can't. It's not meant to be
(12:24):
taken seriously or examined closely. It's meant to make the
casual viewer go yeah, fuck those commies trying to make
conservatives look bad. It's not meant to be analyzed Fans
of the Daily Wire or the Daily Signal or any
one of the dozens of functionally identical forgettably named administration
(12:47):
propaganda outlets. We'll scroll past one of these clips and say, yeah,
I always knew Democrats were the real racists, and they'll
move on with their day. For most people, they unite
the right rally with something distant. They saw it on
the news. They have a general vague awareness of it,
(13:11):
they saw a picture. It's easy to alter their perception
of the event because they don't think much about it.
You can reframe that reality without a lot of cognitive
dissonance because it wasn't a deeply rooted belief unless you
were there. Some of the people in the viewing audience
(13:35):
of your average right wing talk slop on YouTube do
have a very firm opinion about the events of August
eleventh and twelfth, twenty seventeen, because.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
They were there and all of this is really hurting
their feelings.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Take it from rally organizer Augustus and Victus the.
Speaker 7 (13:58):
Ultimate insult everything we've been through.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
The day the SPLC indictment came out, a lot of
these guys started posting they wanted to know who the
informant was. Of course, I'm sure they're all racking their
brains trying to remember what they said and to whom
and what incriminating information did they post in which chat rooms.
(14:27):
Our pencilss Pokemon player from the Cold Open was very
quick to post, as he always is when he's not
in jail. If I can be of any service to
the FBI on this, I'd love it. I don't have
any direct knowledge of who the SPLC agitators were, but
it's near certainly the case that I've interacted with those individuals,
and it would be my honor to cooperate with this
(14:48):
investigation fully. Christopher Catwell posted on telegram with a link
to a breaking news story about the indictment from Fox News.
No one ever actually gave a speech at the Unite
the Right rally on August twelfth, twenty seventeen. It got
out of control before it technically ever started. But if
(15:11):
the speeches had been given, his would have been awful.
Christopher Cantwell, the man you remember as the Crying Nazi,
if you remember him at all, was a headline speaker
and an organizer of the rally. He was perhaps eager
to proactively deny being the informant, given his deserved reputation
(15:37):
as an aspiring informant. He willingly approached the FBI repeatedly
for years, trying to use law enforcement to go after
his enemies, be they anti fascists or guys on his
own team that he'd had a falling out with. It
had never really worked. And that's why I'm pretty confident
(16:01):
he wasn't the paid informant. He's not worth paying for information.
The government didn't want the information he was trying to
give them. And whoever the SPLC's paid source at Unite
the Right was that person, according to the indictment, was
on the payroll from twenty fifteen through twenty twenty three.
(16:26):
Then Campwell was in federal prison for a good chunk
of that time. After his rest in twenty twenty, he
spent a bit of time in the communications management unit
at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. If you're working
on your red string board at home, you already have
a pin on the board for Marian. We discussed the
(16:48):
history of Marion and the use of its communications management
unit in one of the episodes about Nazi serial killer
Joseph Paul Franklin, But if you missed that discussion, the
communications management unit is a hard place to end up.
There are only two in the United States prison system,
(17:09):
one at Marion and one at Terre Haute. People incarcerated
in a CMU have very little access to the outside world.
There are extreme limitations on visitation, mail, and telephone usage.
What little communication they do have with the outside world
(17:29):
is heavily monitored by an FBI agent. Most of the
people in a CMU have been convicted of a crime
of terrorism or organized crime, or they've been communicating with
the outside world to orchestrate ongoing criminal activity or harassment
of people involved in their case, so bothering victims in
(17:51):
their families, threatening judges and prosecutors, things like that. Christopher
Cantwell ended up in federal prison for trying to extort
another Nazi into giving him the name of a third guy,
also a Nazi. They'd all been friends once, but they
(18:12):
weren't anymore, and he wanted to dos them. It is
a federal crime to threaten to harm someone's family if
they won't help you threaten a third guy in case
that wasn't obvious. It wasn't to Chris. It seems like
(18:33):
a bit of an overreaction to proactively park him in
the Communications Management Unit but he did have a history
of making Nazi podcasts from jail, using his phone privileges
and a friend on the outside. When he was locked
up here in Charlottesville for a little bit after assaulting
people at the Torch March the night before the Unite
(18:53):
the Right rally, he repeatedly threatened his victims via his
jail phone podcast, so maybe they were just trying to
get out ahead of a repeat performance. Either way, I
don't think the Southern Poverty Law Center was keeping in
touch with and paying a source whose mail and phone
(19:14):
calls were actively monitored by the FBI.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Catwell was at.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Marion during several of the years this unnamed source was
selling information to the Southern Poverty Law Center, And for
what it's worth, if they were paying a guy like
Catwell money like that.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Then they really were screwing over the donors.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Anything he had to say worth selling anybody was going
to come out of his mouth for free if you
listen long enough, because he is absolutely addicted to the
sound of his own voice and apparently to meth. He's
been struggling pretty badly lately with some drug and mental
health issues, so if he had any secrets left to spill.
(20:00):
He would have confessed them when he was manically revealing
that he used to publish gay erotica under a pseudonym
that he wrote about the sex he was having with
man he met on Grinder. He's not a man who
has any secrets left. I'll post a link in the
(20:29):
episode notes to the episode of my friend Daniel Harper's
podcast I Don't Speak German from a few months ago,
where we discussed Cantwell's weird turn late last year. It's
a very different listen, but I think you'll enjoy it.
All that to say, Christopher Cantwell isn't Field Source thirty seven,
(20:50):
and he doesn't know who was, or he would have
told us, But he is as always looking forward to
wasting some fbia's time yammering about his old enemies.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
So who could it be?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Because the government framed this conversation around f thirty seven
in the language of this person having been an organizer
of the rally, So people are naturally looking at this
list of big names, these leaders who could meaningfully be
called one of the rally's organizers, people like Jason Kessler,
the guy who actually had the permit, Richard Spencer, Augustus
(21:31):
and victus leaders from organizations that were present at the rally,
like the League of the South, Identity Europa, Traditionalist Workers Party,
the National Socialist Movement, Vanguard America. But it's just as
likely that the organizational involvement the government is alleging was
more minor than that, and it's not going to end
up being one of these main organizers at all. We
(21:53):
just don't know yet. Just as a quick aside, I've
seen a lot of these sort of big magga influencers
on Twitter, specifically people like Senator Mike Lee, who posts
as based Mike Lee, an embarrassing name from middle aged man.
But people like Senator Mike Lee are posting things implying
(22:15):
that they believe the informant is Thomas Rousseau, so posting
videos of Patriot Front marching saying you know the SPLC
at work. The problem with that is that is a
very stupid thing to say. Patriot Front was not at
the Unite the Right rally because Patriot Front did not
(22:36):
exist in August of twenty seventeen. So Patriot Front the
organization was not paid by the Southern Poverty Law Center
to be at Unite the Right because they didn't exist,
and they didn't exist until after Unite the Right because
they were a rebrand of Vanguard America. Because a murderer
(22:57):
marched with Vanguard America at Unite the Right. And so
Mike Lee defenders might be saying, Okay, well maybe it
wasn't Patriot Front, but the guy is the same, right,
Thomas Rousseau, the head of Patriot Front, was at Unite
the Right. He was there with Vanguard America. Sure, and
he does have very suspicious behavior. And people have accused
(23:17):
Thomas Russeau of being an informant for many years. The
problem is he can't be f thirty seven because he
was a miner in twenty fifteen. He was a child.
He was sixteen years old in twenty fifteen, and I
don't think the Southern Poverty Law Center was paying a
(23:38):
minor child.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
So it's not Thomas Rousseau.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
But aside from these sort of baseless allegations thrown out
by idiots, the actual men involved don't seem as frantic
to find out who the informant was as I assumed
they would be, not the way they might be if
the informant had been working for the government.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
You know, the guys who.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Actually planned that rally. They know what they did, and
they've already been sued for it. That lawsuit lasted for years.
Their planning chats have been poured over by scores of
lawyers and journalists and researchers. There isn't much the informant
could still have up their sleeve about unite the right.
(24:28):
They could still hurt them, It's too late for anyone
to file a new lawsuit, and new criminal charges are
extremely unlikely. This stitch can't really hurt them anymore. So
they care less about who the snitch is or what
further damage could come of this. Then they care about
(24:49):
making sure everyone knows it wasn't them. Not just because
they're not a snitch and being a snitch is a
terrible thing to be, but because the existence of this
informant is being used to prop up the narrative that
no one involved meant it. They don't want people to
(25:09):
think they're a snitch. But more importantly, they don't want
anyone to think that they weren't a true believer. They're
less upset that you think they might sell information. They're
upset the President said they aren't real Nazis because they are,
and they're proud of it. The day after the indictment
(25:31):
against the SBLC came down, a Twitter account with over
three hundred thousand followers called the Raw Egg Nationalist Quote
tweeted the FBI's post about the case. If you deliberately
wanted to make the American right look as bad as possible,
you couldn't have done a better job than Unite the Right.
It should come as no surprise that a major left
(25:53):
wing activist group is alleged to have given three hundred
thousand dollars to one of the organizers of the rally,
wrote the British far right influencer, whose real name is
Charles Cornishdale. But this idea, this idea that the Unite
the Right rally was faked by a left wing organization.
That's a MAGA media talking point, and that talking point
(26:17):
is selling.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Well in those spaces.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
But the guy selling carnivore diet cookbooks and great replacement
conspiracy theory to a white nationalist audience misjudged how well
it would sell for him.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
The replies are a mess.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Jim O'Brien, a Lead of the South member from Florida
who was arrested at the rally for carrying a concealed
handgun posted under his pseudonym Padrick Martin, and he said quote,
the vast majority of us were sincere participants. White nationalist
blogger and attorney David Zutty said the rally inspired him
(26:56):
to get involved in the movement. Sarah Dye posts from
the account for her coffee company above Time Coffee, posted
a sad face emoji saying she was disappointed the raw
egg nationalist would post something like this. Dye started that
coffee company after her farmer's market stall was boycotted by
patrons in Bloomington, Indiana when she was outed as a
(27:19):
member of Identity Europa. I mean, it's just wild under there.
Frank da Silva, a member of the Nazi terror group
The Order who spent most of the eighties and nineties
in federal prison for his role in the group's crimes,
scolded the British egg enthusiast, writing quote, your statement is
(27:42):
low brow and misses many tactical and strategic points. Racist
bloggers and retired terrorists agree, you just can't sell out
the brave white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville. I scrolled
long enough to find and at least a dozen comments
accusing the poster of being Jewish. It usually devolves into
(28:06):
that that's what always happens when Nazis are angry at
each other. And in the quote tweets, I found more
familiar faces, including rally organizer Augustus and Victus. Invictus seems
to be taking the accusation that he and the other
organizers were participating in the perpetration of a giant Democrat.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Hoax pretty personally.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
I mean, he's still actively appealing his felony conviction for
his participation in the Torch March. He is still facing
jail time, so it must sting a bit to hear
the mainstream right disrespect what he's sacrificed for the movement.
He is a Twitter Premium subscriber, so his post can
be as long as he wants, and his three hundred
(28:51):
word rant highlights his real role in the rally and
his continued involvement in the aftermath, not only his own
legal pri problems, but as an attorney, he offered legal
assistance to a number of his fellow rally attendees. Over
the years, every right wing influencer pushing this lie that
Unite the Right was an SPLC syop is dead to me,
(29:14):
he wrote, Invictus and raw Egg nationalists did make up
in the comments and dalist Info Wars third hour host
Harrison Smith invited Invictus to come on Info Wars. He
eagerly accepted, but sadly for him, it looks like they
didn't get that scheduled before Info Wars was taken off
(29:36):
the air a few days later. And Augustus Invictus isn't
the only rally organizer speaking out against the injustice of
being called a fake racist.
Speaker 7 (29:47):
You know, there's an old saying that the last has
no excuse me, no enemies. Excuse me, no enemies still
the far left, but we can't say that about the rye.
The rye, the respectable middle right never never owns up
to the fact that we exist. And if we do exist,
(30:09):
it's because we're just a bunch of Nazis that need
to be shelved all out out the door. And that's
why they could not defend us at Charlottesville. And now
what they're saying is, well, no wonder we didn't defend
them at Charlottesville. This was a Southern Party Law center
putting this thing on.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
To start with, that's Michael Hill, the president of the
League of the South. Well, they rebranded as the Southern
Nationalist League two years ago, probably in an effort to
protect their assets from the civil judgment and the lawsuit
they lost to the victims injured at the Nazi rally
(30:48):
they organized, so they'll still just be the League of
the South to me. But he's right, this is nothing new.
This is just the same knee jerk in pulse. Conservatives
have always had to say stupid stuff like well, did
you know the KKK was all Democrats? Sure, but what
(31:09):
was a Democrat in eighteen seventy two?
Speaker 1 (31:13):
Anyway.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
That clip comes from the third hour of an episode
of The Political Cesspool, a long running right wing podcast
hosted by James Edwards. If you remember the episode's last
fall about the American Third Position Party, Edwards was a
founding member of that organization in twenty ten, and he
served on the board until last year. Michael Hill spent
(31:36):
the remainder of the third hour chatting about Confederate History Month,
but before he called in, the show had a rotating
cast of people with something to say about Unite the Right.
In the first hour, they had Jason Kessler, the Ralli's
permit holder. In the second hour, they squeezed in four guests.
(31:57):
Jim O'Brien, that League of the South guy who insists
on being addressed by his pseudonym even though everyone knows
it's Jim Glenn Allen, the attorney who lost his job
as a lawyer for the Baltimore Police Department when the
splc outed him as a member of the Nazi organization
National Alliance. Sam Dixon, a former Clan lawyer who attended
(32:17):
the Unite the Right rally and had a very close
relationship with Identity Europa in those days. And Augustus and Victus,
the Florida man who can no longer practice law due
to his felony conviction related to his conduct at the
Nazi rally he helped plan. I find this particular brand
of boomer style talk radio to be particularly painful, but
(32:41):
I listened to all three hours of it for you. Honestly,
I think even the hosts were pretty tired of the
show by the third hour, because you can hear them
playing the cut to break music over Michael Hill as
he's actually making kind of a cogent point.
Speaker 7 (32:58):
Well, I do believe that it's an attempt by the
mainstream MAGA conservatives to distance themselves from the people on
the hard riot Charlottesville, and this is a perfect way
for them to do that. But they're kind of cutting
their own throats because they're saying that there can be
no organic uprising, if you will, of white people acting
(33:22):
in white interests.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
The hosts are dullest dishwater. James Edward's co host Keith Alexander,
asked every single guest what they thought about the judge
assigned to the SPLC case at Alabama. The docket shows
it's been assigned to Judge Emily Marx.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
None of the.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Guests know anything about this judge or any judge really,
but Alexander brings it up at least half a dozen times,
trying to get something going with observations like this one.
Speaker 8 (33:59):
The first of all, this lady of this judge has
his name Marx, which makes me think she's non Irish
or this one, and it's being heard by a judge
with the last name of Marx. I guess it's Graucho's granddaughter.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
I think he's trying to get someone to play this
game with him where they speculate about whether judge Emily
Marx is a communist or Jewish. He's certainly implying she's
not white enough for his taste, saying she's non Irish,
and that statement came in the context of his observation
that that part of Alabama where she sits on the
(34:41):
bench is predominantly black. No one took the bait, though,
he just kept throwing it out there. And for what
it's worth, judge, Emily Marx is white. She was born
in Alabama in nineteen seventy three and was nominated to
the federal judiciary by Trump in his first term. And
(35:04):
her last name is spelled mr Ks, not Marx, like
Carl or Groucho. So I'm not sure why he was
trying so hard to make that joke work. I'm not
kidding fully six times, but listening to three hours of
(35:26):
Nazi talk radio wasn't a total waste of time. Remember
that minisod last week rally organizer Jason Kessler has filed
a defamation lawsuit against Kevin McGinnis over Gavin's accusation that
Kessler was the informant.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
He wasn't.
Speaker 2 (35:41):
There's just no way that's the case. But things were
said and lawsuits were filed, and in that lawsuit, Jason
Kessler is preceding pro se. He does not have a lawyer,
so there's no one there to remind him that making
a ton of public statements when you're upset is not
(36:02):
the move. And one of the things he said on
the show was that the government's claim that this informant
was involved in an online chat for leadership involved in
the rallies planning is pretty meaningless because there were a
thousand things that can be called a leadership chat group
in the months leading up to the rally. It's similar
to a point I made in the episode last week.
(36:25):
But he knows a little more than I do about
those chats because he ran them. Now, remember I said,
(36:48):
I've read a lot of these chats because they were
leaked by an infiltrator, not this paid informant, just some
brave anti fascist who joined watched, weighted and downloaded, and
they leaked the entire chat log to Unicorn Riot. But
they could only download the channels they had access to.
(37:12):
The leaked chat logs don't include invite only channels on
the Discord server that the infiltrator wasn't in, So I
haven't read those.
Speaker 9 (37:24):
There was a channel in the Discord where a lot
of people were communicating about United the Right called Leadership
Underscore Discussion, and I have the full records of that
because as soon as this controversy happened, I went and
I found my USB drive that has probably the last
(37:46):
remnants anywhere of a lot of evidence.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
I haven't read that channel, but the government probably has,
and the turnourneies in the civil lawsuit did too.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
They started out.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
With just the leagues, but they did eventually get full
access to the Discord server via subpoenas served on Discord.
And now apparently those private secret leadership chats are in
the possession of a reporter from the New York Post,
because apparently Jason Kessler thinks the New York Post is
(38:26):
going to be able to solve the mystery of who
the informant was, and he thinks the informant was in
that chat. Jason, Jason, I know we're enemies or whatever, but.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
Send me the files. I think we both know.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
I have a better shot at figuring this out than
whoever you talk to at the New York Post. I'll
forgive you for that time you spat in my face.
If you send me the files.
Speaker 1 (38:52):
Okay, come on, So.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
The conservative media ecosystem has decided it was a hoax,
and the far right guys who were still proud of
what they did are upset.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Where's the disconnect? Why is this happening?
Speaker 9 (39:10):
Conservatives are dumb?
Speaker 2 (39:15):
Oh oh, that is some astute analysis from a guy
with some skin in the game. That's Richard Spencer, one
of the masterminds behind the United the Right rally. Really,
if anyone could be said to be the primary organizer,
the person without whom the rally was not possible, I
think it's him. Sure, Jason Kessler got the permit, but
(39:39):
it was Richard's show. In the end, he gave the
only speech that was actually given that weekend after the
Torch march, he tried to climb the base of the
Thomas Jefferson statue and he spoke for about forty seconds.
That was all the time he had by the time
the crowd stopped shouting Hail Spencer, Hail Victory, doing their
(40:00):
Nazi salutes, and before the cops showed up to half
heartedly shoot them away.
Speaker 6 (40:08):
Right, A right.
Speaker 10 (40:10):
One, but now nine years later, crushed onto the costs
(40:31):
of his messy divorce and the millions of dollars he's
on the hook for in the civil lawsuit against him
and the other rally organizers.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Nobody see Kyling Richard Spencer anymore. He's kind of a
nobody now, and he's sort of constantly experimenting with a
rebrand as a reasonable conservative, and every now and then
some reporter falls for it. He just wants to be
relevant again. He's got this really boring sub stack and
(41:01):
I'm not going to read it to find out anymore.
So the day after the SBOC indictment came down, he
showed up on Gavin McGinnis's podcast. You may remember Gavin
McGinnis as the founder of the Proud Boys. He's not
involved in that organization anymore, but he's still just kind
of around. Once your whole life revolves around being unpleasant
(41:24):
and public for money, you're kind of stuck doing it forever.
But in his appearance on McGinnis's show, Richard Spencer made
a great point.
Speaker 9 (41:35):
Remember he said, conservatives are dumb.
Speaker 2 (41:41):
They're falling for this because it's a self serving conclusion.
It served the Conservative political project in twenty seventeen to
downplay the severity of the rally, and it serves the
conservative political project now to pretend it wasn't ever even real,
that it was just a gigantic psyop orchestrated by powerful
(42:03):
and manipulative liberal elites trying to trick you into thinking
Nazis are real. It serves the conservative political project now
to pretend there are no real Nazis, because the actual
rhetoric of the current administration is getting awfully close to
what those Nazis were shouting back then. Now, in twenty
(42:28):
twenty six, the government needs you to believe that there
are no Nazis because the government is doing some stuff
that might make you ask, hey, isn't that the kind
of stuff those Nazis were saying? If that big Nazi
rally was fake, if it was a nasty political trick
played by liberals and communists and other bad guys who
(42:51):
just want to make the president look bad, well, now,
don't you look silly? Aren't you being kind of ridiculous?
This can't be Nazi stuff because Nazis aren't even real.
I think most of the players in this game know
the rules. Well, actually, no, come to think of it,
some of the no name podcasters who are trapped inside
(43:13):
of a Fox News web only Content Studio. They don't
know what they're reading off the prompter, but the government
actors absolutely understand what they're doing, and some of the
cleverer Nazis see it too. Weird Little Guys it's a
(43:46):
production of coolsone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and
recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie
Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the
wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by
Brad Dickard. You can email me at Weird Little Guys
podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You
(44:07):
can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners
on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything
that's going to make you one of my Weird Little
guys
Host
Molly Conger
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