August 21, 2025 • 46 mins
In 2012, a newly formed white nationalist political party tried to get their candidate on the ballot. The American Third Position Party wanted Americans to vote for Merlin Miller, but how did the party end up picking him?
Sources:
https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2012.pdf#page=11
https://irehr.org/2018/06/14/what-is-the-american-freedom-party/
https://www.ocregister.com/2009/09/04/two-time-felon-runs-pro-white-political-group/
https://rosecityantifa.org/articles/meet-the-oregon-chapter-of-the-american-freedom-party-part-one/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/will-la-elect-a-ron-paul_b_104053
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d284
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. In November of twenty twelve, Barack Obama
was re elected as President of the United States. He
beat Republican challenger Mit Romney by a pretty good margin,
pully in fifty one point oh six percent of the
popular vote to Romney's forty seven point two. But if
(00:25):
you add those numbers together, he'll only get ninety eight
point two six, a number that doesn't include more than
two million votes. Where did those votes go? American electoral
politics are dominated by the two party system. It's always
been that way. Before it was Republicans and Democrats and
(00:45):
red states and blue states, we had Democrats and Whigs,
and before that we had Federalists and Democratic Republicans. It's
always been nearly impossible for a third party or independent
candidate to break through on the national stage, but they've
always tried. There are long standing third parties ones you've
probably seen, or a ballot Green Party, the Libertarian Party,
(01:09):
and there are third parties that have come and gone,
like Ross Perrot's Reform Party. In every election cycle. There
are tiny little groups you've never heard of putting up
a candidate. They know they can't win, but they have
a message they want to get out there, and technically
almost anyone can run for president with or without a party,
(01:32):
as long as you are a natural born citizen over
thirty five. All you have to do is raise some
money and fill out some paperwork. Records from the Federal
Election Commission show that in twenty twelve, two hundred and
eighty people build out that paperwork announcing their intention to
run for president of the United States. One of those
candidates was an aspiring filmmaker with no political experience and
(01:57):
a lot of thoughts about who really did know. Nine
to eleven, I'm Molly Conger. This it's weirdly advised. I
(02:23):
landed on this story in a roundabout kind of way.
I guess they always do. If you listen to the
last two episodes, I do have a confession to make.
I left something out of that story. It just didn't
fit neatly into the episodes, and it would have been
a confusing digression. Those episodes were about Devon Arthur's, the
(02:46):
co founder of Adam Woffin who murdered two members of
the group in twenty seventeen, and in those episodes, I
told you that the earliest mentions of Adam Waffen online
were in posts on a forum called Iron March, and
that's still true as far as I know. I didn't
lie to you, but you might have assumed, based on
(03:07):
what I said in those episodes that the group's co founders,
Devin Arthurs and Brandon Russell must have met on Iron
March two. That's a reasonable assumption. And like I said,
I left some things out of the story because that's
not where the pair first met. They met on a
platform called tiny chat. Launched in two thousand and nine,
(03:32):
tiny chat was a video chat room. As many as
twelve users at a time could appear on video, and
more users could watch and participate in a text chat
down below. When they were interviewed by police on the
night of the murders in twenty seventeen, both Brandon Russell
and Devon Arthur's specifically mentioned that they'd originally met on
(03:52):
tiny Chat. I dug up old four chan posts from
twenty fourteen that show some screenshots of one particular tiny
chat room. In what looks like a college dorm room,
a user calling himself Odin is staring into his webcam.
It's Brandon Russell, a year before he announced the formation
(04:15):
of his neo Nazi terrorist organization, and years before he
went to federal prison. The first and then second times,
he was nineteen years old sitting in his dorm room
in Florida in an online chat room called Third Position.
I don't have any particular interest in writing a third
(04:35):
part of that story. This isn't actually a continuation of
those two episodes. This isn't about Brandon Russell or Adam Waffen.
If you didn't listen to those episodes and you don't
know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it. But
I was stuck on this idea of that third position
tiny chat. How did a fourteen year old Devon Arthur
(04:58):
send up in a video chat room run by grown
men talking about the political ideology of third positionism. I'm
not going to answer those questions today. We're not really
going to talk about that chat room at all. I'm
just telling you how I ended up reading an unproduced
screenplay about a brave and handsome patriot who uncovers the
truth about nine to eleven. I promise these things are related.
(05:23):
This story is about the man who wrote that awful screenplay,
a man named Merlin Miller. In twenty twelve, he was
put forward as a presidential candidate by the American Third
Position Party, the same group that was video chatting with
teenage Nazis in twenty fourteen. One surviving promotional video for
(05:43):
the chat room actually repurposes Miller's twenty twelve campaign announcement
video to advertise an upcoming chat featuring the party's chairman,
an attorney named William Johnson. There are a lot of
characters here who we will definitely see again in future episodes,
so I won't dwell on them for too long now.
But let's get a little backstory. The American Third Position
(06:07):
Party was an actual political party registered with the Federal
Election Commission, and it still exists today kind of. The
group rebranded as the American Freedom Party and they still
have a website, although they terminated their federal electoral committee
in twenty twenty. As we so often see with extremist groups,
(06:29):
there is this constant cycle of collapsing, rebranding, and splintering,
and that's how American Third Position was born. In two
thousand and nine, a Nazi skinhead group in California found
themselves in turmoil. Some Nazi skinheads, calling themselves Freedom fourteen,
tried to organize a political party called the Golden State Party,
(06:53):
but it all fell apart when the Orange County Register
published a story revealing that the party spokesman had been
using a pseudonym I hide the fact that he had
some violent felony convictions in his past. It's not totally
clear to me why the Nazis skinheads found that to
be a problem. That's kind of their whole thing, but
(07:14):
I guess it just won't do for your political party spokesman.
Either way, the Golden State Party was dead in the water,
and some of those skinheads weren't ready to give up
on the idea of having a political party, so they
got together to choose a new leader and a new name,
and they settled on the American Third Position Party, and
(07:37):
the group would be chaired by a corporate lawyer in
Los Angeles named William Johnson. Johnson has been on my
list of Weird Little Guys from the beginning. I never
actually managed to pull from my list of episode ideas
because I always get distracted by some stray thought from
the prior week's research. But I have to imagine we'll
(07:59):
get to him eventually. He's a lawyer and he's in
the movement, but he's not really a movement lawyer. That's
not the focus of his practice. He pitches in occasionally. Sure,
his name shows up as the attorney of record on
a trademark application for the Council of Conservative Citizens. And
(08:21):
there's a Nazi in Pennsylvania who seems fond of seeing
Johnson when he emails county employees to make public records requests,
as though he thinks Johnson is his personal attorney. But
he's not licensed to practice in Pennsylvania. But usually when
I'm talking about a guy who is both an attorney
and a career white nationalist, he's not really keeping those
(08:43):
parts of his life separate. So I think he's a
little unique in that respect. As an attorney, Johnson primarily
represents Japanese companies doing business in the United States. He
has a terribly common name, making it a little hard
to look him up on pacer. But it doesn't look
like he's taken very many cases to court, at least
(09:05):
not in federal court. But in corporate law, there's a
lot of law to be practiced outside the courtroom. He
does have an active case in the Court of International
Trade right now, but I couldn't possibly pretend to be
interested in the court's opinion about whether his client's imported
goods were properly classified under the tariff schedule. Apparently, the
(09:26):
difference between raw dried seaweed and seaweed that has been
prepared for human consumption by drying it is not just
in the eye of the beholder, it is a six
percent jump in teriff right. Just how dry this seaweed
really is isn't interesting, But his choice of co counsel
is The seaweed importer is almost certainly Johnson's client. This
(09:51):
is the kind of client he represents. But the documents
are actually being filed with the court by a movement
lawyer who recently represented members of Patriot Front. Small World,
I guess. But we'll get to Glenn Allen's role in
this story next week, not the seaweed part, the Nazi part.
(10:13):
The website for Johnson's La based law firm is almost
entirely in Japanese, a language he appears to conduct most
of his business in proficiently. He majored in Japanese at
Brigham Young University and spent some time in Japan as
a Mormon missionary. I don't speak any Japanese, so I
can't really be the judge of such things, But in
(10:35):
some of the videos on his website, at least to
my ear, he has the sort of stilted cadence of
a speaker who isn't terribly confident in his skills. I am, however,
much better equipped to pass judgment on his other career
that of a professional racist. He's been splitting his time
(10:56):
between the two for more than forty years. He was
admitted to the bar in nineteen eighty one, and soon
after that he starts writing under the pseudonym James O. Pace.
In nineteen eighty five, as James O. Pace, he published
a book called Amendment to the Constitution, Averting the Decline
(11:16):
and Fall of America. The book lays out his argument
for an amendment to the Constitution, this so called Pace Amendment,
and it would repeal the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments to
the US Constitution. He also proposes restricting U S citizenship
to whites of European descent only. The second section of
(11:39):
the proposed amendment reads, quote, no person shall be a
citizen of the United States unless he is a non
Hispanic white of the European race in whom there is
no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one
eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern
a maa An, Indian, Malay, or other non European or
(12:02):
non white blood. You might be asking why did it
take an entire book to explain how that would work?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Well?
Speaker 1 (12:14):
For one thing, he had to devote quite a few
pages to explaining exactly how the government would go about
determining who was white. Are Armenians white? Are Iranians our Jews?
The answer is no. Obviously, the book is every bit
as bad as you're imagining, and it did not need
(12:34):
to be two hundred pages long. And after its publication
he spent the latter half of the nineteen eighties running
a group called the League of Pace Amendment Advocates, and
he claimed that he was the group's spokesman, and he
pretended that he'd met the author and just supported his ideas.
(12:54):
When The La Times connected the dots that William Daniel
Johnson was definitely James O. Pace, he denied it, telling
the paper that James Pace was a pseudonym, but it wasn't.
His Pace is a lawyer just like him, but Pace
works outside of the country. He wouldn't say what Pace's
(13:14):
real name was or what country he was allegedly living in.
It's giving. My girlfriend goes to a different school, you
wouldn't know her. He gave up on the League of
Pay Advocates after someone bombed the group's office in nineteen
eighty nine. It was only a small bomb and it
went off in the middle of the night when no
one was there. No one was injured, and as far
(13:37):
as I can tell, it was never solved. Like I said,
William Daniel Johnson is absolutely a weird little guy in
his own right, so I won't linger here. But he
was a well established figure in organized racism by the
time those skinheads approached him to chair their rebranded political
party in two thousand and nine. In fact, he was
(14:01):
fresh off a very public loss in a two thousand
and eight campaign for judge in the Superior Court of
Los Angeles. The embarrassing defeat only raised his profile in
the white nationalist community, though, and it came at a
time of renewed interest in the movement in the idea
of entering mainstream politics. His newly formed political party was
(14:21):
led by respectable professionals, obscuring its origin in skinhead street
fighting gangs. Johnson was an attorney with a jd from
Columbia University. Tom Sunik, a Croatian born political scientist, had
taught at several universities, and Kevin MacDonald was a professor
of psychology at California State University. This was the era
(14:45):
of the sutent Thai racist the Dapper Nazi. Richard Spencer
had just started his alternative right dot com website. Matthew
Heinbach was still a college student at Tawson University and
he was leading a chapter of the White Supreme Group
Youth for Western Civilization. Both men would go on to
figure prominently in the twenty seventeen era alt right and
(15:08):
the street violence that accompanied it, and in the early
twenty tens, both of these men were frequent collaborators with
members of the American Third Position Party. The party may
have been a rebranding of a California skinhead group, but
it couldn't have existed without the neo Nazi networking that
was happening at Ron Paul campaign events. The Ron Paul
(15:33):
Revolution never really took off, but his campaign provided fertile
recruiting grounds for white nationalists in two thousand and seven,
William Johnson was hosting pricey fundraising dinners for Paul's campaign.
When he ran for judge in two thousand and eight.
His campaign manager was also the Paul campaign's California statewide coordinator.
(15:55):
Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt professor and member of the Council
of Conservative City who would go on to be a
member of the party's board, was one of several high
profile racists whose donations to the Paul campaign made headlines
when he declined to refuse money from white nationalists. And
it was through Ron Paul campaign events that Merlin Miller
(16:16):
first met members of the American Third Position Party. Don't
just take my word for it, though.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Most of the founders, of course of the American Third Position,
which have evolved into the American Freedom Party now grew
out of the Ron Paul movement. But I think one
of the major shortcomings of the Ron Paul platform was
he really did not build very strongly on immigration. And
it's probably the most destructive thing going on today to America,
(16:46):
and as you suggested, it's altering the national character of
our country.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
That's a conversation between Merlin Miller and American Third Position
Party director Jamie Kelso back in twenty thirteen, he's saying
something a lot of white nationalists, We're saying back then,
they love Ron Paul, they love Ron Paul's platform, but
he's just not going far enough in its first few years.
(17:18):
And I guess now that I'm saying out loud every
year since then as well, the party had trouble fielding candidates.
It's a tricky thing to do, even mainstream politics. Running
for office is hard. Convincing someone else to run for
office is also very hard. It takes a lot of time, effort,
(17:41):
and money. You have to put yourself out there. It's
exhausting and potentially humiliating. And the kind of guy who's
enthusiastic about running for office as an open white nationalist,
well that kind of guy tends to be an absolute
fucking weirdo who alienates everyone with an earshot. When party
(18:06):
member Ryan Murdaw announced his candidacy for state representative in
New Hampshire, people were disgusted. One letter to the editor
from a Grafton resident called his candidacy a festering boil.
Party member Harry Bertram made several spectacularly unsuccessful runs for
office in West Virginia, including the twenty eleven special election
(18:29):
for governor. I didn't do a whole lot of digging
on Harry Bertram, but I did read the entirety of
his twenty three year posting history on Stormfront, and I
have to say he doesn't strike me as a strong communicator,
and he appears to be at least a little bit
involved with the clan. But more importantly, his message just
(18:53):
didn't resonate with West Virginians. Was coarse and overt that
fearmongered about white replacement, but he didn't have much else
to offer outside of those racist conspiracy theories. One local
news article from the time quoted a West Virginia voter
who said illegal immigration just wasn't a top issue for her.
(19:17):
In twenty ten, West Virginia was ninety four percent white.
The state is to this day dead last when it
comes to the percentage of residents who are foreign born
and the percentage of residents who speak a language other
than English at home, about one and a half percent
and two and a half percent, respectively. So even if
(19:38):
those voters don't like immigrants in theory, there's a decent
chance they've never even seen one. It was a single
issue candidate, and that just wasn't the issue people cared
most about. The party needed someone who looked normal, someone
who could put on a suit and put together a
(19:59):
s sentence and pretend to address a real issue, preferably
someone who wasn't publicly associated with another active hate group,
someone with a clean record and a good education. I mean,
it doesn't matter who they pick, they're not going to win.
But it isn't necessarily about winning, is it.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
It's harder for our enemies to characterize us as complete
outsiders and fringe coops if we're on the ballot in
a state election or a federal election.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
That was Party director Jamie Kelso chatting with Richard Spencer
back in twenty thirteen. And here's one of America's leading
pseudo intellectual racist, Jared Taylor, in a promotional video begging
people to run for office. As a member of the party.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
Running for office is one of the best ways to
publicize our ideas and to reach who may have never
heard a sensible, dissenting view about race.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
It's not about winning elections. It's about trojanhorsing white nationalist
rhetoric into the conversation at every level, from county school
board to President of the United States. After running Harry
bertram A couple times for state and local office in
West Virginia, American Third Position wanted to break into national politics,
(21:30):
and in the twenty twelve presidential election, they decided that
Merlin Miller was the man for the job. By his
(21:51):
own telling, Merlin Miller wasn't very interested in politics for
most of his life. He grew up in a working
class family in Iowa and became the first member of
his family to graduate from college. He graduated from West
Point in the class of nineteen seventy four, and he
had some pretty famous classmates. Astronaut Michael Clifford, former Chairman
(22:12):
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, former Deputy
Assistant Secretary General of NATO, Matthew Cleimo, former NSA director
Keith Alexander, and four star General Walter Sharp, and of course,
former CIA Director David Petreus. I had to look up
the graduating class of nineteen seventy four to get most
(22:32):
of those names, but not that one. In almost every
speech and interview, I could find spanning a decade. Merlin
Miller mentions that he went to school with David Petraeus.
I guess he thinks it makes him sound important. He
knows a very important guy whose name has been on
(22:54):
the news a lot, so that must mean something. And
particularly back during the twenty twelve Camps in Pain cycle,
David Petraeus was on the news quite a bit, so
saying the name gives him some proximity to power, some
proximity to legitimacy. Sometimes it feels like he wants the
(23:14):
listener to assume that the pair have maintained some kind
of relationship since graduation. But I don't think he ever
outright says that. In one interview, he says that in
two thousand and nine he sent Betrayus Quote, a treatise
that connected military, political, and media intrigues challenging many of
the orthodoxies. Based on the context of the conversation and
(23:39):
the fact that the interview was published on an anti
Semitic conspiracy theory website, you can probably guess that he
sent the general some weird essay about Jewish control of
the media based on his use of the word treatise,
though I'm pretty sure What he sent David Petraeus was
a copy of his unpublished one hundred page manuscript called
(24:00):
The American Dream. It's a document that he only ever
refers to as a treatise, and that's the only place
I can find him ever using that word. So I
think that's what it was and has got everything you
might expect. Communism is a Jewish conspiracy. Some parts of
the Holocaust probably kind of happened, but maybe it wasn't
(24:22):
actually that serious. The Federal Reserve and the IRS, or
illegal scams perpetrated on the American people nine to eleven
was a false flag orchestrated by Masad and the CIA.
Illegal immigration is replacing white Americans, and the Jews are
behind that too. We have to crush the New World Order, etc.
You know, honestly, I wonder if he was a big
(24:46):
Info warse listener in the mid auts because this sounds
like vintage Alex Jones. I guess there was this thriving
blogosphere back then with all the same talking points, so
he could have gotten it anywhere. Let's not give Alex
Jones too much credit. I don't think David Betraeus ever
wrote back after graduating from West Point nineteen seventy four,
(25:11):
Miller served six years in the Army. He spent a
few years working for Michel Entire Company, but in nineteen
eighty three he had the opportunity to pursue his true passion,
his childhood dream, filmmaking. He was accepted into an MFA
program at the University of Southern California, and he was
(25:32):
one of just twenty students admitted into that year's Peter
Stark Producing Program, a specialized graduate degree program within the
film school that focused on film and television production. And
here too he had some very famous classmates. Stacey Cher
produced movies like Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, and Aaron Brockovich.
(25:56):
Neil Morritz would go on to produce movies like I
Know What You Did Last Summer, Cruel Intentions, and all
of the Fast and Furious movies. Liz Glotzer is the
president of a production company that makes television dramas for CBS.
The program seems to produce a lot of producers and
(26:16):
Merlin Miller really did try to break into the industry.
While he was at USC, he interned at Paramount and
after graduation he had some minor production roles in a
couple of schlocky, low budget movies in the late eighties
and early nineties, but he had a family to feed.
He and his wife had four daughters by that time,
(26:38):
and living in la is expensive. You can't support a
family of six working as a line producer on b movies.
The family relocated to Springfield, Missouri, and he took a
job at Ozark's Technical Community College. But he didn't give
up on his dreams. He started his own film production company,
Ozark Pictures, and he made a movie. He made a
(27:04):
real movie with a budget of close to a million dollars,
all secured through private investors. His first film, A Place
to Grow, premiered at a theater in Springfield, Missouri, in
March of nineteen ninety five. One of the film's big stars,
Chris Christofferson's daughter Tracy, attended the premiere in Springfield, but
(27:25):
her co stars, Wilford Brimley and a country singer called
Boxcar Willie, didn't make it. The movie didn't get wide release.
It wasn't something people were seeing theaters all over the country,
and almost all of the press about the film was
in Missouri newspapers who were writing about it as a
local interest story because the film cast locals in most
(27:47):
of the smaller roles, and in some of those articles
all the way back in nineteen ninety five, you can
start to see the hints of what's coming. He told
a reporter that he left Hollywood for the Ozarks to
make movies that quote promote the ideals of Americana end
quote traditional family values for Midwestern audiences. You know. Twenty
(28:11):
years later, in an interview with a Holocaust denier, he
said pretty much the same thing. You just can't make
movies with good family values out there in Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Having graduated high in the class, I thought I might
have some opportunities. But the only opportunities for people like
me from the Midwest with traditional values was working independent films.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
But he's speaking a little more freely this time than
he did with that reporter from the newspaper in Springfield, Missouri,
back in nineteen ninety five, because this time he's speaking
to Dave Gaeheri, a longtime friend of David Duke and
the proprietor of a small publishing company that prints mostly
conspiracy theory books, including several by Jim Fetzer, a man
(28:59):
who believes the lending the Holocaust the Boston Marathon bombing,
the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings, the Pulse nightclub shooting,
and the Unite the rightvehicular attack in Charlottesville. We're all hoaxes.
None of those things happened. After Fetzer lost a lawsuit
brought by the father of a little boy killed in
Sandy Hook, Harry had to stop selling a book called
(29:20):
Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. So in this conversation, that's
who he's talking to. So Miller can be a little
more explicit about what he means.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
And I was disillusioned with the quality of films coming
out of Hollywood and lack of any true opportunities with
somebody that I thought should have been able to get
some opportunities things going. There were twenty of us that
graduated my year group in USC and five are Jewish,
and those five went on to make some incredible big
motion pictures, not necessarily good motion pictures, but some very
(29:56):
high profile motion pictures. And due to this very day,
with one other exception, I'm the only other graduate of
mar class that still considers himself a part of the industry.
And that's pretty typical of all of the year groups
at USA. And in the industry, so it's a very
controlled environment.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
In this interview in twenty twelve, he says he's still
in the industry, which is weird because I can't imagine
what he thinks he means by that he only ever
made two movies. His second and final film, a western
called Jericho, was released in two thousand and one by
another production company he founded, called Black Night Productions. I
(30:40):
found this one streaming somewhere, and I did try to
watch it. I like to be thorough. I really did try.
I promise I put it on the TV one evening
during dinner, but I couldn't finish it. I mean, it
was just not good. It had some actual star surprisingly,
(31:02):
but there's just no getting over some hurdles. Mark Valley,
who hadn't yet landed roles on shows like Er, Fringe,
Boston Legal and CSI, was mostly just a soap opera
actor in the nineties, and ar Lee Ermi was in
damn near a hundred movies. You might not know his name,
(31:23):
but he's the Marine Corps drill sergeant in every movie
you've ever seen with an older man playing a Marine
Corps drill sergeant or some adjacent type of loud, vaguely
military coded authority figure. That's Arlee ERMI every time I
think he just said yes to everything, but even getting
real actors for his movie could not salvage it. My
(31:47):
poor husband, who is eternally supportive of my work and
has this seemingly infinite well of patients for my obsessions,
looked so painfully bored that I just I could. I
couldn't do it to him. I mean, he once sat
through a made for TV movie starring a lesser Baldwin brother,
based on the autobiography of a neo Nazi, and he
(32:10):
didn't even complain when I talked through the entire movie,
saying things like, well, that's not what really happened, and
that character is actually an amalgamation of three different real guys.
So I take it very seriously if he's visibly pained
by the terrors I've brought into our home. So I
didn't watch Jericho, but I guess you could. And just
(32:34):
like a place to grow, Jericho failed to get picked
up for wider distribution, but in his efforts to market
the film, Merlin Miller met a man who would change
his life. It wasn't long after nine to eleven when
Merlin Miller had a meeting with a film buyer for
Carmike Cinemas. The buyer passed on the film, but they
(32:58):
got to talking about other things. None of the source
material I could find explains exactly how they got on
the subject. I don't know which one of them brought
up the Jewish question first, but someone did you see
as a much younger man before, he was the one
deciding which independent films you could see at a Carmike theater.
(33:21):
Bob Scarborough served three years in the Navy, and in
nineteen sixty seven, according to his obituary, Scarborough was a
cryptologist serving aboard the USS Liberty. On June eighth, nineteen
sixty seven, little over halfway through the Sixth Day War,
the Liberty was patrolling international waters off the coast of Egypt. Officially,
(33:45):
the United States was not involved in the Sixth Day War.
That was a war between Israel and everybody else, but
the American military is everywhere. So the USS Liberty was
about thirty miles off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula
when two unidentified jets appeared overhead. The jets made half
a dozen strafing runs over the Liberty firing on the vessel,
(34:10):
and then torpedo boats arrived and they too fired on
the Liberty. Thirty four members aboard the US Naval vessel
were killed and one hundred and seventy one more were injured.
I'll get it out of the way right now. There's
no right way to talk about this. That part just now.
(34:33):
Those are the bare facts. Those are the facts that
everyone agrees on. But the incident in question is the
subject of decades of conspiracy theories, mostly ones repeated by
virulent anti Semites. You'll never catch me out here saying
the Holocaust deniers are making some valid points. That's not
what I'm saying. But while the official investigations conducted by
(34:57):
the US and Israeli governments are on the hard facts
right that the jets fired, the boats fired, the people died,
but the investigations don't agree on the nature of this situation.
For the bare facts here, I'm using sources like the
US Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command, and documents available
(35:19):
from the State Department's Office of the Historian, and declassified
documents available on the NSA's website. Not to say that
the US government is the arbiter of truth here, and
that those documents necessarily present the version of the truth
that is true. I'm just trying to convey that I
did go out of my way to make sure I
wasn't accidentally repeating something from a conspiracy theory website, because
(35:42):
it can be very hard to tell. The official explanation
from the Israeli government is that it was a mistake.
The pilots claimed that the ship wasn't flying a flag
and they thought the Liberty was an Egyptian vessel. Once
they realized the victims were screaming in English, they apologized
(36:04):
to the United States and paid a few million dollars
in compensation to the victims' families and a few million
more for the damage cost to the ship. But there
are a lot of unanswered questions here, and the problem
is that the only people you ever hear asking those
questions are absolutely bug fuck nuts, because this is a
(36:24):
favorite topic of obsession for Boomer anti Semites. It's a
real shame too, because there are some very uncomfortable holes
in the official narrative. But the way conspiracy theorists have
flooded the conversation on this makes it very hard to
trust most sources it is absolutely possible and I think necessary,
(36:48):
to ask questions about unjustified Israeli military aggression without being antisemitic. Unfortunately,
the average guy posting online about the US Liberty is
not interested in that distinction. So I'm not going to
talk any more about what may or may not have
really happened aboard the USS Liberty in June of nineteen
(37:10):
sixty seven, because for the purposes of this story, that
doesn't actually matter. The only thing that matters here is
that the event is a madness rune for a particular
flavor of conspiracy. Guy and Merlin Miller has said many
times that this conversation with Bob Scarborough about the USS
(37:31):
Liberty was his political awakening. It makes sense in a
way that he was infected by this single conversation. He'd
washed out of Hollywood and his independent film career was
one disappointment after another. He couldn't get funding, he felt
like the MPAA was giving his movies unfair ratings, he
(37:53):
couldn't get theatrical release, and his classmates whose careers were flourishing,
Come to think of it, they all had pretty Jewish
sounding last names, didn't they. It wasn't about talent or merit,
or that he wasn't working hard enough, or that he
wasn't making movies people wanted to watch. Oh, it couldn't
(38:13):
be that. This is about Jewish control of the media.
That's what's going on here and now, with nine to
eleven fresh in his mind and conspiracy theories sprouting like
mushrooms after a rain, here's this life altering revelation from
a man who says he lived through a false flag
attack carried out by the people that Merlin Miller is
(38:33):
already half convinced have it out for him. So he
started doing his own research and he got obsessed. Scarborough
(38:56):
soon introduced Merlin Miller to a friend of his, a
man named Richard S. Thompson. I couldn't actually find a
copy of a book Miller wrote in twenty sixteen, and
I think there may be more detail in there. But
my guess is Scarborough thought to connect him to Thompson,
not just so Miller would have someone else to talk
to about the USS Liberty, but because of their shared
(39:17):
interest in film. Richard Thompson had been heavily involved in
the production of a two thousand and two BBC documentary
about the USS Liberty, so maybe as Scarborough is telling Miller,
you know, I'm not interested in purchasing the rights to Jericho,
but I have this other opportunity for you. Talk to
my buddy Dick Thompson. He likes financing films. Thompson and
(39:43):
Miller did go on to become very close friends, and
he was, according to Miller, very interested in making a
movie together. According to that rambling one hundred page treatise
he wrote in two thousand and nine, that one I'm
pretty sure he mailed to General David BETREEUS, Thompson agreed
to finance a movie that would be produced and directed
(40:04):
by Merlin Miller. Again, according to Miller, Thompson announced his
intention to fund the film on Friday, June eighth, two
thousand and seven. That was the fortieth anniversary of the
incident on the USS Liberty and a few dozen surviving
crewman we're meeting up in Washington, d C. Now, as
(40:24):
far as I can tell, Richard S. Thompson was never
aboard the US S Liberty. He wasn't a crewman at
the time of the incident. He was definitely in the Navy.
I know that the announcement in the newspaper when he
married his wife in nineteen fifty four mentions it, and
so does his obituary. And his obituary does mention the Liberty,
(40:49):
but not in the context of his naval career. No,
it says he was a longtime supporter of the survivors
of the USS Liberty, so it's just something he had
had an interest in. A lot of the writing online,
written by people I think may not be fully grounded
(41:09):
in reality, assert without question that he worked in naval intelligence.
At least one rather fantastical book repeatedly refers to him
as a CIA asset. But none of this seems to
be corroborated by any outside source that I could find.
So I don't know exactly what Thompson was doing in
the Navy or how he came to know so much
(41:30):
about the USS Liberty, but either way, he was very
involved with this veterans group, and he was attending the
fortieth anniversary reunion in DC that weekend. On Sunday, he
left DC and began driving home to Florida. He made
it about halfway home. Again, I can't find any reporting
(41:53):
about the accident that was written by someone I know
believes the Holocaust happened so it's hard to say exactly
what happened, but somewhere in Florence County, South Carolina, Thompson
had a fatal single car accident. Even the conspiracy theorists
have to begrudgingly admit that there's no sign of foul play.
(42:16):
There's no actual reason to suspect this was anything but
an accident. He was a seventy six year old man
who had an exciting but probably exhausting weekend with his
old navy buddies, and then he got up at the
crack of dawn to make a thirteen hour drive home.
Halfway through the drive, he lost control of the vehicle
(42:37):
and crashed. But these people have questions. Did he fall
asleep or was it masad. Describing Thompson's death, Merilyn Miller wrote,
although foul play was not suspected, Dick had told me
if prior Israeli massad surveillance, and writing in the conspiracy
(43:01):
Theory rag American Free Press, Mark Glenn wrote that he
and many others were very suspicious about the death because
they believe Thompson was about to go public with information
that had never before been published. But again, there's no
indication there was anything suspicious about the accident, and this
(43:23):
same article by Mark Glenn includes this line as if
he had a premonition that his time was approaching. Thompson
recently made known to the Liberty Veterans Association that in
the event of his death, he did not want anyone
wasting money on flowers for his funeral, or rather that
such individuals should send money to the Liberty Veterans Association
so that the truth concerning the attacks in the US
(43:44):
s liberty could continue to emerge. So if he's telling
people what they should do if he dies and he's
seventy six years old, do you think he was secretly
assassinated by a foreign government staging a single car acttion
that had witnesses? Or do you think maybe his health
(44:04):
was failing and he did know his time was coming.
Hard to say which is more likely. I'm not the
betting kind, but if I had to, I'd wager it
was a car accident, distracted driving, heart attack, asleep at
the wheel, something tragic and routine, but however ordinary his
(44:28):
death was. It left Merlin Miller without funding to produce
his screenplay, an action thriller romance called False Flag, The
story of a brave and handsome reporter who uncovers the truth.
But the US is liberty and nine to eleven, and
he has to take matters into his own hands to
stop these false flags from causing World War three. I'm
(44:51):
afraid we'll have to pick back up there next week.
I got lost along the way again. I didn't even
get to Merlin Miller's actual presidential campaign. To be honest,
I don't think his heart was really in it. In
an interview shortly after he announced he was running, he
accidentally revealed to Richard Spencer that he didn't know what
the third position in American third position party even meant.
(45:17):
And just weeks before election day, he wasn't out there
pounding the pavement talking to voters. He was taking meetings
in Tehran trying to get Iranian funding for his conspiracy
theory movie. I'm not sure if he brought a copy
of his screenplay to the twenty minute private meeting he
had with Mahmun Amadinishad, but I do know he gave
(45:37):
the Iranian president a copy of his two thousand and
one Western Jericho on DVD. I wish Amadinashad was still
on Twitter. I would have loved to ask him if
he got past the first twenty minutes. Weird Little Guys
(46:08):
is a production at Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
written and recorded by me Molly Conger. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited
by the wildly talented Brory 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's nothing personal.
(46:29):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys
Col Zone Media. In November of twenty twelve, Barack Obama
was re elected as President of the United States. He
beat Republican challenger Mit Romney by a pretty good margin,
pully in fifty one point oh six percent of the
popular vote to Romney's forty seven point two. But if
(00:25):
you add those numbers together, he'll only get ninety eight
point two six, a number that doesn't include more than
two million votes. Where did those votes go? American electoral
politics are dominated by the two party system. It's always
been that way. Before it was Republicans and Democrats and
(00:45):
red states and blue states, we had Democrats and Whigs,
and before that we had Federalists and Democratic Republicans. It's
always been nearly impossible for a third party or independent
candidate to break through on the national stage, but they've
always tried. There are long standing third parties ones you've
probably seen, or a ballot Green Party, the Libertarian Party,
(01:09):
and there are third parties that have come and gone,
like Ross Perrot's Reform Party. In every election cycle. There
are tiny little groups you've never heard of putting up
a candidate. They know they can't win, but they have
a message they want to get out there, and technically
almost anyone can run for president with or without a party,
(01:32):
as long as you are a natural born citizen over
thirty five. All you have to do is raise some
money and fill out some paperwork. Records from the Federal
Election Commission show that in twenty twelve, two hundred and
eighty people build out that paperwork announcing their intention to
run for president of the United States. One of those
candidates was an aspiring filmmaker with no political experience and
(01:57):
a lot of thoughts about who really did know. Nine
to eleven, I'm Molly Conger. This it's weirdly advised. I
(02:23):
landed on this story in a roundabout kind of way.
I guess they always do. If you listen to the
last two episodes, I do have a confession to make.
I left something out of that story. It just didn't
fit neatly into the episodes, and it would have been
a confusing digression. Those episodes were about Devon Arthur's, the
(02:46):
co founder of Adam Woffin who murdered two members of
the group in twenty seventeen, and in those episodes, I
told you that the earliest mentions of Adam Waffen online
were in posts on a forum called Iron March, and
that's still true as far as I know. I didn't
lie to you, but you might have assumed, based on
(03:07):
what I said in those episodes that the group's co founders,
Devin Arthurs and Brandon Russell must have met on Iron
March two. That's a reasonable assumption. And like I said,
I left some things out of the story because that's
not where the pair first met. They met on a
platform called tiny chat. Launched in two thousand and nine,
(03:32):
tiny chat was a video chat room. As many as
twelve users at a time could appear on video, and
more users could watch and participate in a text chat
down below. When they were interviewed by police on the
night of the murders in twenty seventeen, both Brandon Russell
and Devon Arthur's specifically mentioned that they'd originally met on
(03:52):
tiny Chat. I dug up old four chan posts from
twenty fourteen that show some screenshots of one particular tiny
chat room. In what looks like a college dorm room,
a user calling himself Odin is staring into his webcam.
It's Brandon Russell, a year before he announced the formation
(04:15):
of his neo Nazi terrorist organization, and years before he
went to federal prison. The first and then second times,
he was nineteen years old sitting in his dorm room
in Florida in an online chat room called Third Position.
I don't have any particular interest in writing a third
(04:35):
part of that story. This isn't actually a continuation of
those two episodes. This isn't about Brandon Russell or Adam Waffen.
If you didn't listen to those episodes and you don't
know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it. But
I was stuck on this idea of that third position
tiny chat. How did a fourteen year old Devon Arthur
(04:58):
send up in a video chat room run by grown
men talking about the political ideology of third positionism. I'm
not going to answer those questions today. We're not really
going to talk about that chat room at all. I'm
just telling you how I ended up reading an unproduced
screenplay about a brave and handsome patriot who uncovers the
truth about nine to eleven. I promise these things are related.
(05:23):
This story is about the man who wrote that awful screenplay,
a man named Merlin Miller. In twenty twelve, he was
put forward as a presidential candidate by the American Third
Position Party, the same group that was video chatting with
teenage Nazis in twenty fourteen. One surviving promotional video for
(05:43):
the chat room actually repurposes Miller's twenty twelve campaign announcement
video to advertise an upcoming chat featuring the party's chairman,
an attorney named William Johnson. There are a lot of
characters here who we will definitely see again in future episodes,
so I won't dwell on them for too long now.
But let's get a little backstory. The American Third Position
(06:07):
Party was an actual political party registered with the Federal
Election Commission, and it still exists today kind of. The
group rebranded as the American Freedom Party and they still
have a website, although they terminated their federal electoral committee
in twenty twenty. As we so often see with extremist groups,
(06:29):
there is this constant cycle of collapsing, rebranding, and splintering,
and that's how American Third Position was born. In two
thousand and nine, a Nazi skinhead group in California found
themselves in turmoil. Some Nazi skinheads, calling themselves Freedom fourteen,
tried to organize a political party called the Golden State Party,
(06:53):
but it all fell apart when the Orange County Register
published a story revealing that the party spokesman had been
using a pseudonym I hide the fact that he had
some violent felony convictions in his past. It's not totally
clear to me why the Nazis skinheads found that to
be a problem. That's kind of their whole thing, but
(07:14):
I guess it just won't do for your political party spokesman.
Either way, the Golden State Party was dead in the water,
and some of those skinheads weren't ready to give up
on the idea of having a political party, so they
got together to choose a new leader and a new name,
and they settled on the American Third Position Party, and
(07:37):
the group would be chaired by a corporate lawyer in
Los Angeles named William Johnson. Johnson has been on my
list of Weird Little Guys from the beginning. I never
actually managed to pull from my list of episode ideas
because I always get distracted by some stray thought from
the prior week's research. But I have to imagine we'll
(07:59):
get to him eventually. He's a lawyer and he's in
the movement, but he's not really a movement lawyer. That's
not the focus of his practice. He pitches in occasionally. Sure,
his name shows up as the attorney of record on
a trademark application for the Council of Conservative Citizens. And
(08:21):
there's a Nazi in Pennsylvania who seems fond of seeing
Johnson when he emails county employees to make public records requests,
as though he thinks Johnson is his personal attorney. But
he's not licensed to practice in Pennsylvania. But usually when
I'm talking about a guy who is both an attorney
and a career white nationalist, he's not really keeping those
(08:43):
parts of his life separate. So I think he's a
little unique in that respect. As an attorney, Johnson primarily
represents Japanese companies doing business in the United States. He
has a terribly common name, making it a little hard
to look him up on pacer. But it doesn't look
like he's taken very many cases to court, at least
(09:05):
not in federal court. But in corporate law, there's a
lot of law to be practiced outside the courtroom. He
does have an active case in the Court of International
Trade right now, but I couldn't possibly pretend to be
interested in the court's opinion about whether his client's imported
goods were properly classified under the tariff schedule. Apparently, the
(09:26):
difference between raw dried seaweed and seaweed that has been
prepared for human consumption by drying it is not just
in the eye of the beholder, it is a six
percent jump in teriff right. Just how dry this seaweed
really is isn't interesting, But his choice of co counsel
is The seaweed importer is almost certainly Johnson's client. This
(09:51):
is the kind of client he represents. But the documents
are actually being filed with the court by a movement
lawyer who recently represented members of Patriot Front. Small World,
I guess. But we'll get to Glenn Allen's role in
this story next week, not the seaweed part, the Nazi part.
(10:13):
The website for Johnson's La based law firm is almost
entirely in Japanese, a language he appears to conduct most
of his business in proficiently. He majored in Japanese at
Brigham Young University and spent some time in Japan as
a Mormon missionary. I don't speak any Japanese, so I
can't really be the judge of such things, But in
(10:35):
some of the videos on his website, at least to
my ear, he has the sort of stilted cadence of
a speaker who isn't terribly confident in his skills. I am, however,
much better equipped to pass judgment on his other career
that of a professional racist. He's been splitting his time
(10:56):
between the two for more than forty years. He was
admitted to the bar in nineteen eighty one, and soon
after that he starts writing under the pseudonym James O. Pace.
In nineteen eighty five, as James O. Pace, he published
a book called Amendment to the Constitution, Averting the Decline
(11:16):
and Fall of America. The book lays out his argument
for an amendment to the Constitution, this so called Pace Amendment,
and it would repeal the fourteenth and fifteenth Amendments to
the US Constitution. He also proposes restricting U S citizenship
to whites of European descent only. The second section of
(11:39):
the proposed amendment reads, quote, no person shall be a
citizen of the United States unless he is a non
Hispanic white of the European race in whom there is
no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one
eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern
a maa An, Indian, Malay, or other non European or
(12:02):
non white blood. You might be asking why did it
take an entire book to explain how that would work?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Well?
Speaker 1 (12:14):
For one thing, he had to devote quite a few
pages to explaining exactly how the government would go about
determining who was white. Are Armenians white? Are Iranians our Jews?
The answer is no. Obviously, the book is every bit
as bad as you're imagining, and it did not need
(12:34):
to be two hundred pages long. And after its publication
he spent the latter half of the nineteen eighties running
a group called the League of Pace Amendment Advocates, and
he claimed that he was the group's spokesman, and he
pretended that he'd met the author and just supported his ideas.
(12:54):
When The La Times connected the dots that William Daniel
Johnson was definitely James O. Pace, he denied it, telling
the paper that James Pace was a pseudonym, but it wasn't.
His Pace is a lawyer just like him, but Pace
works outside of the country. He wouldn't say what Pace's
(13:14):
real name was or what country he was allegedly living in.
It's giving. My girlfriend goes to a different school, you
wouldn't know her. He gave up on the League of
Pay Advocates after someone bombed the group's office in nineteen
eighty nine. It was only a small bomb and it
went off in the middle of the night when no
one was there. No one was injured, and as far
(13:37):
as I can tell, it was never solved. Like I said,
William Daniel Johnson is absolutely a weird little guy in
his own right, so I won't linger here. But he
was a well established figure in organized racism by the
time those skinheads approached him to chair their rebranded political
party in two thousand and nine. In fact, he was
(14:01):
fresh off a very public loss in a two thousand
and eight campaign for judge in the Superior Court of
Los Angeles. The embarrassing defeat only raised his profile in
the white nationalist community, though, and it came at a
time of renewed interest in the movement in the idea
of entering mainstream politics. His newly formed political party was
(14:21):
led by respectable professionals, obscuring its origin in skinhead street
fighting gangs. Johnson was an attorney with a jd from
Columbia University. Tom Sunik, a Croatian born political scientist, had
taught at several universities, and Kevin MacDonald was a professor
of psychology at California State University. This was the era
(14:45):
of the sutent Thai racist the Dapper Nazi. Richard Spencer
had just started his alternative right dot com website. Matthew
Heinbach was still a college student at Tawson University and
he was leading a chapter of the White Supreme Group
Youth for Western Civilization. Both men would go on to
figure prominently in the twenty seventeen era alt right and
(15:08):
the street violence that accompanied it, and in the early
twenty tens, both of these men were frequent collaborators with
members of the American Third Position Party. The party may
have been a rebranding of a California skinhead group, but
it couldn't have existed without the neo Nazi networking that
was happening at Ron Paul campaign events. The Ron Paul
(15:33):
Revolution never really took off, but his campaign provided fertile
recruiting grounds for white nationalists in two thousand and seven,
William Johnson was hosting pricey fundraising dinners for Paul's campaign.
When he ran for judge in two thousand and eight.
His campaign manager was also the Paul campaign's California statewide coordinator.
(15:55):
Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt professor and member of the Council
of Conservative City who would go on to be a
member of the party's board, was one of several high
profile racists whose donations to the Paul campaign made headlines
when he declined to refuse money from white nationalists. And
it was through Ron Paul campaign events that Merlin Miller
(16:16):
first met members of the American Third Position Party. Don't
just take my word for it, though.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Most of the founders, of course of the American Third Position,
which have evolved into the American Freedom Party now grew
out of the Ron Paul movement. But I think one
of the major shortcomings of the Ron Paul platform was
he really did not build very strongly on immigration. And
it's probably the most destructive thing going on today to America,
(16:46):
and as you suggested, it's altering the national character of
our country.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
That's a conversation between Merlin Miller and American Third Position
Party director Jamie Kelso back in twenty thirteen, he's saying
something a lot of white nationalists, We're saying back then,
they love Ron Paul, they love Ron Paul's platform, but
he's just not going far enough in its first few years.
(17:18):
And I guess now that I'm saying out loud every
year since then as well, the party had trouble fielding candidates.
It's a tricky thing to do, even mainstream politics. Running
for office is hard. Convincing someone else to run for
office is also very hard. It takes a lot of time, effort,
(17:41):
and money. You have to put yourself out there. It's
exhausting and potentially humiliating. And the kind of guy who's
enthusiastic about running for office as an open white nationalist,
well that kind of guy tends to be an absolute
fucking weirdo who alienates everyone with an earshot. When party
(18:06):
member Ryan Murdaw announced his candidacy for state representative in
New Hampshire, people were disgusted. One letter to the editor
from a Grafton resident called his candidacy a festering boil.
Party member Harry Bertram made several spectacularly unsuccessful runs for
office in West Virginia, including the twenty eleven special election
(18:29):
for governor. I didn't do a whole lot of digging
on Harry Bertram, but I did read the entirety of
his twenty three year posting history on Stormfront, and I
have to say he doesn't strike me as a strong communicator,
and he appears to be at least a little bit
involved with the clan. But more importantly, his message just
(18:53):
didn't resonate with West Virginians. Was coarse and overt that
fearmongered about white replacement, but he didn't have much else
to offer outside of those racist conspiracy theories. One local
news article from the time quoted a West Virginia voter
who said illegal immigration just wasn't a top issue for her.
(19:17):
In twenty ten, West Virginia was ninety four percent white.
The state is to this day dead last when it
comes to the percentage of residents who are foreign born
and the percentage of residents who speak a language other
than English at home, about one and a half percent
and two and a half percent, respectively. So even if
(19:38):
those voters don't like immigrants in theory, there's a decent
chance they've never even seen one. It was a single
issue candidate, and that just wasn't the issue people cared
most about. The party needed someone who looked normal, someone
who could put on a suit and put together a
(19:59):
s sentence and pretend to address a real issue, preferably
someone who wasn't publicly associated with another active hate group,
someone with a clean record and a good education. I mean,
it doesn't matter who they pick, they're not going to win.
But it isn't necessarily about winning, is it.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
It's harder for our enemies to characterize us as complete
outsiders and fringe coops if we're on the ballot in
a state election or a federal election.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
That was Party director Jamie Kelso chatting with Richard Spencer
back in twenty thirteen. And here's one of America's leading
pseudo intellectual racist, Jared Taylor, in a promotional video begging
people to run for office. As a member of the party.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
Running for office is one of the best ways to
publicize our ideas and to reach who may have never
heard a sensible, dissenting view about race.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
It's not about winning elections. It's about trojanhorsing white nationalist
rhetoric into the conversation at every level, from county school
board to President of the United States. After running Harry
bertram A couple times for state and local office in
West Virginia, American Third Position wanted to break into national politics,
(21:30):
and in the twenty twelve presidential election, they decided that
Merlin Miller was the man for the job. By his
(21:51):
own telling, Merlin Miller wasn't very interested in politics for
most of his life. He grew up in a working
class family in Iowa and became the first member of
his family to graduate from college. He graduated from West
Point in the class of nineteen seventy four, and he
had some pretty famous classmates. Astronaut Michael Clifford, former Chairman
(22:12):
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, former Deputy
Assistant Secretary General of NATO, Matthew Cleimo, former NSA director
Keith Alexander, and four star General Walter Sharp, and of course,
former CIA Director David Petreus. I had to look up
the graduating class of nineteen seventy four to get most
(22:32):
of those names, but not that one. In almost every
speech and interview, I could find spanning a decade. Merlin
Miller mentions that he went to school with David Petraeus.
I guess he thinks it makes him sound important. He
knows a very important guy whose name has been on
(22:54):
the news a lot, so that must mean something. And
particularly back during the twenty twelve Camps in Pain cycle,
David Petraeus was on the news quite a bit, so
saying the name gives him some proximity to power, some
proximity to legitimacy. Sometimes it feels like he wants the
(23:14):
listener to assume that the pair have maintained some kind
of relationship since graduation. But I don't think he ever
outright says that. In one interview, he says that in
two thousand and nine he sent Betrayus Quote, a treatise
that connected military, political, and media intrigues challenging many of
the orthodoxies. Based on the context of the conversation and
(23:39):
the fact that the interview was published on an anti
Semitic conspiracy theory website, you can probably guess that he
sent the general some weird essay about Jewish control of
the media based on his use of the word treatise,
though I'm pretty sure What he sent David Petraeus was
a copy of his unpublished one hundred page manuscript called
(24:00):
The American Dream. It's a document that he only ever
refers to as a treatise, and that's the only place
I can find him ever using that word. So I
think that's what it was and has got everything you
might expect. Communism is a Jewish conspiracy. Some parts of
the Holocaust probably kind of happened, but maybe it wasn't
(24:22):
actually that serious. The Federal Reserve and the IRS, or
illegal scams perpetrated on the American people nine to eleven
was a false flag orchestrated by Masad and the CIA.
Illegal immigration is replacing white Americans, and the Jews are
behind that too. We have to crush the New World Order, etc.
You know, honestly, I wonder if he was a big
(24:46):
Info warse listener in the mid auts because this sounds
like vintage Alex Jones. I guess there was this thriving
blogosphere back then with all the same talking points, so
he could have gotten it anywhere. Let's not give Alex
Jones too much credit. I don't think David Betraeus ever
wrote back after graduating from West Point nineteen seventy four,
(25:11):
Miller served six years in the Army. He spent a
few years working for Michel Entire Company, but in nineteen
eighty three he had the opportunity to pursue his true passion,
his childhood dream, filmmaking. He was accepted into an MFA
program at the University of Southern California, and he was
(25:32):
one of just twenty students admitted into that year's Peter
Stark Producing Program, a specialized graduate degree program within the
film school that focused on film and television production. And
here too he had some very famous classmates. Stacey Cher
produced movies like Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, and Aaron Brockovich.
(25:56):
Neil Morritz would go on to produce movies like I
Know What You Did Last Summer, Cruel Intentions, and all
of the Fast and Furious movies. Liz Glotzer is the
president of a production company that makes television dramas for CBS.
The program seems to produce a lot of producers and
(26:16):
Merlin Miller really did try to break into the industry.
While he was at USC, he interned at Paramount and
after graduation he had some minor production roles in a
couple of schlocky, low budget movies in the late eighties
and early nineties, but he had a family to feed.
He and his wife had four daughters by that time,
(26:38):
and living in la is expensive. You can't support a
family of six working as a line producer on b movies.
The family relocated to Springfield, Missouri, and he took a
job at Ozark's Technical Community College. But he didn't give
up on his dreams. He started his own film production company,
Ozark Pictures, and he made a movie. He made a
(27:04):
real movie with a budget of close to a million dollars,
all secured through private investors. His first film, A Place
to Grow, premiered at a theater in Springfield, Missouri, in
March of nineteen ninety five. One of the film's big stars,
Chris Christofferson's daughter Tracy, attended the premiere in Springfield, but
(27:25):
her co stars, Wilford Brimley and a country singer called
Boxcar Willie, didn't make it. The movie didn't get wide release.
It wasn't something people were seeing theaters all over the country,
and almost all of the press about the film was
in Missouri newspapers who were writing about it as a
local interest story because the film cast locals in most
(27:47):
of the smaller roles, and in some of those articles
all the way back in nineteen ninety five, you can
start to see the hints of what's coming. He told
a reporter that he left Hollywood for the Ozarks to
make movies that quote promote the ideals of Americana end
quote traditional family values for Midwestern audiences. You know. Twenty
(28:11):
years later, in an interview with a Holocaust denier, he
said pretty much the same thing. You just can't make
movies with good family values out there in Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Having graduated high in the class, I thought I might
have some opportunities. But the only opportunities for people like
me from the Midwest with traditional values was working independent films.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
But he's speaking a little more freely this time than
he did with that reporter from the newspaper in Springfield, Missouri,
back in nineteen ninety five, because this time he's speaking
to Dave Gaeheri, a longtime friend of David Duke and
the proprietor of a small publishing company that prints mostly
conspiracy theory books, including several by Jim Fetzer, a man
(28:59):
who believes the lending the Holocaust the Boston Marathon bombing,
the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings, the Pulse nightclub shooting,
and the Unite the rightvehicular attack in Charlottesville. We're all hoaxes.
None of those things happened. After Fetzer lost a lawsuit
brought by the father of a little boy killed in
Sandy Hook, Harry had to stop selling a book called
(29:20):
Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. So in this conversation, that's
who he's talking to. So Miller can be a little
more explicit about what he means.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
And I was disillusioned with the quality of films coming
out of Hollywood and lack of any true opportunities with
somebody that I thought should have been able to get
some opportunities things going. There were twenty of us that
graduated my year group in USC and five are Jewish,
and those five went on to make some incredible big
motion pictures, not necessarily good motion pictures, but some very
(29:56):
high profile motion pictures. And due to this very day,
with one other exception, I'm the only other graduate of
mar class that still considers himself a part of the industry.
And that's pretty typical of all of the year groups
at USA. And in the industry, so it's a very
controlled environment.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
In this interview in twenty twelve, he says he's still
in the industry, which is weird because I can't imagine
what he thinks he means by that he only ever
made two movies. His second and final film, a western
called Jericho, was released in two thousand and one by
another production company he founded, called Black Night Productions. I
(30:40):
found this one streaming somewhere, and I did try to
watch it. I like to be thorough. I really did try.
I promise I put it on the TV one evening
during dinner, but I couldn't finish it. I mean, it
was just not good. It had some actual star surprisingly,
(31:02):
but there's just no getting over some hurdles. Mark Valley,
who hadn't yet landed roles on shows like Er, Fringe,
Boston Legal and CSI, was mostly just a soap opera
actor in the nineties, and ar Lee Ermi was in
damn near a hundred movies. You might not know his name,
(31:23):
but he's the Marine Corps drill sergeant in every movie
you've ever seen with an older man playing a Marine
Corps drill sergeant or some adjacent type of loud, vaguely
military coded authority figure. That's Arlee ERMI every time I
think he just said yes to everything, but even getting
real actors for his movie could not salvage it. My
(31:47):
poor husband, who is eternally supportive of my work and
has this seemingly infinite well of patients for my obsessions,
looked so painfully bored that I just I could. I
couldn't do it to him. I mean, he once sat
through a made for TV movie starring a lesser Baldwin brother,
based on the autobiography of a neo Nazi, and he
(32:10):
didn't even complain when I talked through the entire movie,
saying things like, well, that's not what really happened, and
that character is actually an amalgamation of three different real guys.
So I take it very seriously if he's visibly pained
by the terrors I've brought into our home. So I
didn't watch Jericho, but I guess you could. And just
(32:34):
like a place to grow, Jericho failed to get picked
up for wider distribution, but in his efforts to market
the film, Merlin Miller met a man who would change
his life. It wasn't long after nine to eleven when
Merlin Miller had a meeting with a film buyer for
Carmike Cinemas. The buyer passed on the film, but they
(32:58):
got to talking about other things. None of the source
material I could find explains exactly how they got on
the subject. I don't know which one of them brought
up the Jewish question first, but someone did you see
as a much younger man before, he was the one
deciding which independent films you could see at a Carmike theater.
(33:21):
Bob Scarborough served three years in the Navy, and in
nineteen sixty seven, according to his obituary, Scarborough was a
cryptologist serving aboard the USS Liberty. On June eighth, nineteen
sixty seven, little over halfway through the Sixth Day War,
the Liberty was patrolling international waters off the coast of Egypt. Officially,
(33:45):
the United States was not involved in the Sixth Day War.
That was a war between Israel and everybody else, but
the American military is everywhere. So the USS Liberty was
about thirty miles off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula
when two unidentified jets appeared overhead. The jets made half
a dozen strafing runs over the Liberty firing on the vessel,
(34:10):
and then torpedo boats arrived and they too fired on
the Liberty. Thirty four members aboard the US Naval vessel
were killed and one hundred and seventy one more were injured.
I'll get it out of the way right now. There's
no right way to talk about this. That part just now.
(34:33):
Those are the bare facts. Those are the facts that
everyone agrees on. But the incident in question is the
subject of decades of conspiracy theories, mostly ones repeated by
virulent anti Semites. You'll never catch me out here saying
the Holocaust deniers are making some valid points. That's not
what I'm saying. But while the official investigations conducted by
(34:57):
the US and Israeli governments are on the hard facts
right that the jets fired, the boats fired, the people died,
but the investigations don't agree on the nature of this situation.
For the bare facts here, I'm using sources like the
US Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command, and documents available
(35:19):
from the State Department's Office of the Historian, and declassified
documents available on the NSA's website. Not to say that
the US government is the arbiter of truth here, and
that those documents necessarily present the version of the truth
that is true. I'm just trying to convey that I
did go out of my way to make sure I
wasn't accidentally repeating something from a conspiracy theory website, because
(35:42):
it can be very hard to tell. The official explanation
from the Israeli government is that it was a mistake.
The pilots claimed that the ship wasn't flying a flag
and they thought the Liberty was an Egyptian vessel. Once
they realized the victims were screaming in English, they apologized
(36:04):
to the United States and paid a few million dollars
in compensation to the victims' families and a few million
more for the damage cost to the ship. But there
are a lot of unanswered questions here, and the problem
is that the only people you ever hear asking those
questions are absolutely bug fuck nuts, because this is a
(36:24):
favorite topic of obsession for Boomer anti Semites. It's a
real shame too, because there are some very uncomfortable holes
in the official narrative. But the way conspiracy theorists have
flooded the conversation on this makes it very hard to
trust most sources it is absolutely possible and I think necessary,
(36:48):
to ask questions about unjustified Israeli military aggression without being antisemitic. Unfortunately,
the average guy posting online about the US Liberty is
not interested in that distinction. So I'm not going to
talk any more about what may or may not have
really happened aboard the USS Liberty in June of nineteen
(37:10):
sixty seven, because for the purposes of this story, that
doesn't actually matter. The only thing that matters here is
that the event is a madness rune for a particular
flavor of conspiracy. Guy and Merlin Miller has said many
times that this conversation with Bob Scarborough about the USS
(37:31):
Liberty was his political awakening. It makes sense in a
way that he was infected by this single conversation. He'd
washed out of Hollywood and his independent film career was
one disappointment after another. He couldn't get funding, he felt
like the MPAA was giving his movies unfair ratings, he
(37:53):
couldn't get theatrical release, and his classmates whose careers were flourishing,
Come to think of it, they all had pretty Jewish
sounding last names, didn't they. It wasn't about talent or merit,
or that he wasn't working hard enough, or that he
wasn't making movies people wanted to watch. Oh, it couldn't
(38:13):
be that. This is about Jewish control of the media.
That's what's going on here and now, with nine to
eleven fresh in his mind and conspiracy theories sprouting like
mushrooms after a rain, here's this life altering revelation from
a man who says he lived through a false flag
attack carried out by the people that Merlin Miller is
(38:33):
already half convinced have it out for him. So he
started doing his own research and he got obsessed. Scarborough
(38:56):
soon introduced Merlin Miller to a friend of his, a
man named Richard S. Thompson. I couldn't actually find a
copy of a book Miller wrote in twenty sixteen, and
I think there may be more detail in there. But
my guess is Scarborough thought to connect him to Thompson,
not just so Miller would have someone else to talk
to about the USS Liberty, but because of their shared
(39:17):
interest in film. Richard Thompson had been heavily involved in
the production of a two thousand and two BBC documentary
about the USS Liberty, so maybe as Scarborough is telling Miller,
you know, I'm not interested in purchasing the rights to Jericho,
but I have this other opportunity for you. Talk to
my buddy Dick Thompson. He likes financing films. Thompson and
(39:43):
Miller did go on to become very close friends, and
he was, according to Miller, very interested in making a
movie together. According to that rambling one hundred page treatise
he wrote in two thousand and nine, that one I'm
pretty sure he mailed to General David BETREEUS, Thompson agreed
to finance a movie that would be produced and directed
(40:04):
by Merlin Miller. Again, according to Miller, Thompson announced his
intention to fund the film on Friday, June eighth, two
thousand and seven. That was the fortieth anniversary of the
incident on the USS Liberty and a few dozen surviving
crewman we're meeting up in Washington, d C. Now, as
(40:24):
far as I can tell, Richard S. Thompson was never
aboard the US S Liberty. He wasn't a crewman at
the time of the incident. He was definitely in the Navy.
I know that the announcement in the newspaper when he
married his wife in nineteen fifty four mentions it, and
so does his obituary. And his obituary does mention the Liberty,
(40:49):
but not in the context of his naval career. No,
it says he was a longtime supporter of the survivors
of the USS Liberty, so it's just something he had
had an interest in. A lot of the writing online,
written by people I think may not be fully grounded
(41:09):
in reality, assert without question that he worked in naval intelligence.
At least one rather fantastical book repeatedly refers to him
as a CIA asset. But none of this seems to
be corroborated by any outside source that I could find.
So I don't know exactly what Thompson was doing in
the Navy or how he came to know so much
(41:30):
about the USS Liberty, but either way, he was very
involved with this veterans group, and he was attending the
fortieth anniversary reunion in DC that weekend. On Sunday, he
left DC and began driving home to Florida. He made
it about halfway home. Again, I can't find any reporting
(41:53):
about the accident that was written by someone I know
believes the Holocaust happened so it's hard to say exactly
what happened, but somewhere in Florence County, South Carolina, Thompson
had a fatal single car accident. Even the conspiracy theorists
have to begrudgingly admit that there's no sign of foul play.
(42:16):
There's no actual reason to suspect this was anything but
an accident. He was a seventy six year old man
who had an exciting but probably exhausting weekend with his
old navy buddies, and then he got up at the
crack of dawn to make a thirteen hour drive home.
Halfway through the drive, he lost control of the vehicle
(42:37):
and crashed. But these people have questions. Did he fall
asleep or was it masad. Describing Thompson's death, Merilyn Miller wrote,
although foul play was not suspected, Dick had told me
if prior Israeli massad surveillance, and writing in the conspiracy
(43:01):
Theory rag American Free Press, Mark Glenn wrote that he
and many others were very suspicious about the death because
they believe Thompson was about to go public with information
that had never before been published. But again, there's no
indication there was anything suspicious about the accident, and this
(43:23):
same article by Mark Glenn includes this line as if
he had a premonition that his time was approaching. Thompson
recently made known to the Liberty Veterans Association that in
the event of his death, he did not want anyone
wasting money on flowers for his funeral, or rather that
such individuals should send money to the Liberty Veterans Association
so that the truth concerning the attacks in the US
(43:44):
s liberty could continue to emerge. So if he's telling
people what they should do if he dies and he's
seventy six years old, do you think he was secretly
assassinated by a foreign government staging a single car acttion
that had witnesses? Or do you think maybe his health
(44:04):
was failing and he did know his time was coming.
Hard to say which is more likely. I'm not the
betting kind, but if I had to, I'd wager it
was a car accident, distracted driving, heart attack, asleep at
the wheel, something tragic and routine, but however ordinary his
(44:28):
death was. It left Merlin Miller without funding to produce
his screenplay, an action thriller romance called False Flag, The
story of a brave and handsome reporter who uncovers the truth.
But the US is liberty and nine to eleven, and
he has to take matters into his own hands to
stop these false flags from causing World War three. I'm
(44:51):
afraid we'll have to pick back up there next week.
I got lost along the way again. I didn't even
get to Merlin Miller's actual presidential campaign. To be honest,
I don't think his heart was really in it. In
an interview shortly after he announced he was running, he
accidentally revealed to Richard Spencer that he didn't know what
the third position in American third position party even meant.
(45:17):
And just weeks before election day, he wasn't out there
pounding the pavement talking to voters. He was taking meetings
in Tehran trying to get Iranian funding for his conspiracy
theory movie. I'm not sure if he brought a copy
of his screenplay to the twenty minute private meeting he
had with Mahmun Amadinishad, but I do know he gave
(45:37):
the Iranian president a copy of his two thousand and
one Western Jericho on DVD. I wish Amadinashad was still
on Twitter. I would have loved to ask him if
he got past the first twenty minutes. Weird Little Guys
(46:08):
is a production at Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched,
written and recorded by me Molly Conger. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited
by the wildly talented Brory 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's nothing personal.
(46:29):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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