December 4, 2025 • 56 mins
Molly answers your weird little questions and shares her personal conspiracy theory about who tried and failed to assassinate a nazi in 1967.
Sources:
Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, 'Mass Communication and Parasocial Interaction:
Observations on Intimacy at a Distance', Psychiatry 19: 215-29, 1956
https://www.participations.org/03-01-04-horton.pdf
Nadora, Mikhaela, "Parasocial Relationships with Podcast Hosts" (2019). University Honors Theses. Paper 771.
https://doi.org/10.15760/honors.789
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello and welcome to the December twenty
twenty five Q and A episode of Weird Little Guys.
I was always planning to do a Q and A
episode this month. I think most of the shows in
(00:22):
the Cool Zone Media family do one of these around
the end of the year, but this one is coming
a little early. You probably noticed that there was an
unexpected rerun a few weeks ago, and that's because I
was very sick. I had some sort of terrible virus
and it knocked me out for like two weeks. The
(00:44):
worst part was the laryngitis. I was on total vocal
rest for more than a week, mostly because I couldn't
have made a sound even if I wanted to. It
was torture, not just because that's literally my livelihood, but
I love talking. I mean, I have to talk for work.
(01:05):
You can't make a podcast without talking, but I just
love talking recreationally. I never stopped talking, so it was
a nightmare. Anyway. I lost two weeks of my life
to the blanket fort on the couch. And then there's
the general messiness of the holiday season. So I'm all
(01:26):
mixed up in backwards but trying to get back on track.
We will hit the ground running in the new year
with something fun and exciting, but this month is just
going to be a hodgepodge of different sorts of episodes.
The episode I have planned for next week is a
sort of Weird Little Guy round up, just catching up
with recent developments in the lives of some of the
(01:48):
weird Little Guys I've been checking in on from time
to time for years. I originally had this episode and
that episode switched on my calendar, but I think waiting
one more week might be enough time to get some
more updates in some of those stories. So for now,
let's get to your questions. I put out a call
(02:13):
a few weeks ago, and I've sorted the questions you
all sent in into a few broad categories. Questions about
the process of making the show, questions about particular topics
you'd like to see covered, and questions about me. I
won't be able to answer all of them specifically, but
I am going to try to get to at least
(02:34):
one of every flavor of questions that you guys had,
And honestly, most of what you guys asked is about me.
There were relatively few questions about particular weird Little guys,
or the actual content of the show, the overwhelming majority
(02:56):
of the questions, or about the nitty gritty details of
how I make the show, about my life and my
process and what I'm doing when I'm not writing the
words you hear me saying softly into your headphones every week.
I think part of that is just a built in
selection bias, Right. The kind of listener is going to
(03:18):
bother to send in a question to a podcast isn't
necessarily representative of the overall audience, and those listeners are
probably more likely to be invested in knowing what goes
on behind the scenes. But as I was sifting through
those questions, I did spend some time ruminating on the
(03:38):
nature of the parasocial relationship that one sided relationship formed
in the mind of someone who consumes a piece of
mass media. You know, that feeling of friendship and emotional
intimacy you feel for someone you've never actually met. It's
not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not calling any of
(04:00):
you out. You're okay. It's perfectly normal to feel some
level of connection to the people that you see or
hear on a regular basis. I think the term has
a pretty nasty connotation because usually by the time you're
talking about someone's parasocial relationship, it has gotten weird. Like
(04:21):
John Hinckley Junior shooting Ronald Reagan because he was in
love with Jodie Foster levels of weird, you know. But
I don't think there's anyone with access to the Internet
who doesn't have some low level emotional connection to someone
they've never met. If you've ever been sad because a
dog you follow on Instagram died, buddy, I got news
(04:44):
for you. You were in a parasocial relationship with a dog.
So as long as you're not neglecting your real life
relationships in favor of spending time online obsessing over some
stranger who's videos you like to watch, or letting that
online strain impact the way you live your life, and
you're not slipping into a delusion that they love you back,
(05:06):
you're probably fine. The term was coined in the nineteen
fifties by a pair of sociologists who are exploring the
ways audiences form these relationships with TV and radio personalities,
and in the decades since the ubiquity of mass media
and the rise of online influencers, many of whom are
(05:27):
intentionally cultivating that sense of intimacy with the audience. It's
only intensified the kinds of parasocial connections people are experiencing,
and with a podcast, it really is kind of like
having a little friend in your ear. Right. We're walking
around together and I'm telling you a story. It's just
someone chatting away with you while you're doing your dishes
(05:50):
or commuting to work. I've been making my living writing
for an online audience for almost a decade now, so
it's an interesting phenomenon that very much plays a role
in my life. So I think it's fascinating. But that's
not what we're here to talk about today. You know,
I can't resist reading a couple of journal articles for
(06:11):
no reason, though, so I'll put a link in the
show notes to that original nineteen fifty six article that
invented the term, as well as a twenty nineteen university
thesis about parasociality specifically in podcasting that I thought was interesting.
So those will be there if you want to read
more about it. But as far as what we're talking
about here, I don't mind if you think of me
(06:34):
as the friend in your ear for an hour a week.
It's kind of nice, but like I say at the
end of every episode, just don't post anything that's going
to make you one of my weird little guys. Right,
And for the listener who asked if that sign off
is a direct response to something someone already did, No,
(06:56):
it's just a precaution. I've been online long enough to
have been on the weird end of a parasocial bond.
But the listeners of this show have been pretty normal
little guys so far, and I appreciate that about you. All.
All that to say, I did notice that trend in
(07:17):
the questions, but I'm happy to answer your healthy, boundary
respecting questions about the little voice in your ear. Just
don't get any weird ideas. Okay, all right, rapid fire,
let's knock out some of those questions about me. My docxins,
Buck and Otto are doing great. They turned nine in
(07:41):
July and they're still going strong. Otto actually just recently
celebrated his fourth anniversary as the dog who Conquered Death.
Back in twenty twenty one, he suffered a ruptured disc
in his spine, which is an unfortunate problem many docsins have,
and he was diagnosed with stage four intervertebral disease. There
(08:01):
was no precipitating injury. His brother doesn't have this problems.
It's just bad luck. And back when it happened, we
weren't sure he would survive his emergency surgery, and when
he did, they told us he would never walk again.
But after a few weeks of lying on a blanket
wearing a diaper, he got bored of being paralyzed and
(08:25):
he just stood up. So we celebrated the anniversary this
year by taking him to the beach so he could
run a million miles an hour in the sand. He's
doing great. Can you see a picture of my office?
Absolutely not, no, no, but only because it's disgusting. I
(08:47):
dumped every piece of clothing I own onto the floor
about two years ago because I was about to start
sorting through it so I could get rid of the
stuff I don't wear anymore. But I never got to
the second step up. So my office has had a
foot deep pile of laundry that covers half the room,
and I've just been stepping over it for two entire years.
(09:10):
I am just days away from hanging those curtains I
bought a year ago because I thought that would be
good for sound dampening or whatever. But at this point
I think the laundry pile is actually an integral part
of the acoustic environment of the show. I do have
a desk, but I do not sit at it because
(09:30):
it has covered an old male. I write and record
the entire show in an Ikea chair I found next
to someone's trash can, and one of the bulbs in
the overhead light has been burnt out since spring. I
think I just closed the door to my podcasting cave.
When people come over, no one is allowed to see it.
(09:53):
I think this question might have something to do with
the fact that Ed Zitron, the host of Better Offline,
has posted pictures of the like incredible professional greed podcasting
studio he built inside of his home. I don't have that.
I don't have what Ed has. That's phenomenal for him,
that's so weird. I love that for him. I have
(10:15):
an Ikea chair that I found on the curb. What
is my go to snack and drink when I'm working
on the show. Hmm, another disappointing answer. I fear the
windowsill next to my trash chair has at least four
cans of seltzer on it at all times, the cans
(10:35):
are at varying levels of emptiness and flatness. Right now,
there are four cans. None of them are the same
brand somehow, and one of them has definitely been open
since early November. I am going to finish it. I'm
not responsible for the food situation, thank god. My husband
(10:58):
usually tiptoes in to deliver these beautiful little snack plates
with fruit and cheese, and he's done pretty much all
of the cooking around here ever since the show launched,
and I became a round the clock computer gremlin in
my podcasting cave, and that brings us to my husband.
Several of you asked about him. He's great. If you're
(11:20):
a longtime listener, you know that I took some time
off in May to get married and go on a honeymoon.
It was phenomenal. We went to Puerto Rico and I
only got a little sunburned this time. I was careful
because last year when we went to visit his family
down there, I found out that some white people can
(11:42):
unlock a special, secret level of sunburn that makes you
very physically ill. So honestly, shout out to the Caribbean
for developing a natural defense against the gringo. I have
no choice but to respect that for the moment part.
When you hear a voice on the show that isn't mine,
(12:03):
it's actual archival audio. I go to a lot of
trouble to make that true, so it's usually a real
recording of the weird little guy we're talking about. When
there is no audio of the quote that I want
read in a voice that isn't mine, though, it's almost
always either my husband or the show's editor, Rory. There
(12:25):
was an episode last year early this year, early twenty
twenty five that had some quotes from the President, and
Rory did a phenomenal Trump impression that made some of
you very mad. But what you may not have realized
is that when my husband is doing a voice, it's
also a carefully studied impression, right, like you recognize the
(12:49):
Trump impression, but when he does some obscure white supremacist
no one's ever heard of, you don't realize that he's
actually doing an amazing impression. Weirdly good at them, and
he is very excited for the day that he gets
to show off his upsettingly accurate impressions of William Luther
(13:10):
Pierce and Jared Taylor just please don't ask him to
do his Alex Jones. He's really good at it and
I hate it. Okay. Someone asked what is my favorite dinosaur?
I don't have one, but I wanted to have a
cool answer to this question, so I texted my brother
(13:32):
to ask what a cool dinosaur would be to say,
is my favorite? Because he knows a lot about dinosaurs,
and he gave me some good answers, you know, some
specific vibes that I could evoke with different choices. We're
very well thought out. But I realized it would be
dishonest to claim that dino knowledge as my own, so
(13:53):
I am going to cheat and say my favorite dinosaur
is that bird that Bitjyra Bolsnaro years ago. Birds are dinosaurs,
and that bird, in particular, the one that bit Bolsnorow
really hard, is my favorite. I think it was a raya.
It's like a small emu. It's not an emo. It's
(14:15):
like a small guy that looks like an emu. I
think it was a raya. Anyway, he's my favorite. Quite
a few of you submitted questions related to my physical
safety and my mental well being, which is really sweet
of you. I'm fine. I mean to the extent that
(14:35):
any of us are fine. Right, I live in the
United States. I could die in a mass shooting at
the grocery store tomorrow. As far as the possibility of
physical violence goes, Yeah, I guess I've probably got a
few more guys actively plotting my death specifically than the
(14:57):
average person might. But they've it's mostly been keeping it
themselves lately, and I really appreciate that. There was an
incident earlier this year where a weird little guy was
trying to like big dog me in a courtroom. He
sort of sidled up to me and said something he
probably thought about for an hour on the car ride there,
and that he hoped would be really startling and intimidating
(15:20):
to me. But at this point in my life, there's
nothing scary to me about a Nazi in poorly fitted
dress pants. I'm not going to pretend I'm bulletproof. I'm
not so naive that I think no harm can come
to me. I know what these guys are capable of
the kinds of things they want to do, the kinds
(15:42):
of things they talk about doing, the kinds of things
some of them have done. And I'll still be writing
about it when one of them goes and does another
unspeakable thing. I know that it's foolish to say that
they're all talk, but I also know a lot of
them are. A lot of them are a lot smaller
(16:04):
in person. And I don't mean physically. I'm not talking
about getting into a physical fight. I'm five feet tall
with my shoes on. But what I'm saying is there
were little guys. That's why the show's called that they're
so small in person. That's the whole point. They talk
big when it's online or at a rally with high energy,
(16:27):
or when they're with their friends, but in my experience,
most of them get stage fright if they actually get
the chance to say that shit out loud in a
quiet room. Back in twenty twenty three, I actually met
a guy who'd had some big talk about me online.
I may have told the story before, forgive me, but
(16:49):
he was in town because he'd been charged with a crime,
and that was something that really solidified for him that
being involved in the movement was a stupid way to
spend his life. He's probably still not not a white supremacist,
you know. I'm not saying he's reformed now, but he
was disengaging from active involvement in the movement, and that's
(17:12):
the best you can hope for sometimes. So by the
time we're standing there alone on the steps of the courthouse,
it had been a couple of years since he was
on a Nazi podcast talking with his Nazi friends about
the ways they would be interested in murdering me if
the opportunity presented itself. He look, I'm not gonna lie
to you. When I heard that the first time, hunched
(17:35):
over my computer alone late at night. Yeah, obviously it
scared me a little bit, right. It was very graphic,
and I didn't know exactly who those men were or
where they were. I didn't know if they had the
means to do the things they were talking about. So
(17:57):
I found out and that made it easier. And when
I finally met him in person, I wasn't afraid of him.
He seemed maybe a little bit afraid of me. It
was just a weird little guy, kind of a sad one.
(18:30):
Another question people ask a lot, is is it mentally
destructive to do this kind of research. That's a fair question,
and the answer changes depending on when you ask me.
I think, of course, it's horrible, right I'm a human being.
(18:51):
Of course, it makes me sick to read about child
sexual exploitation and hate crimes and mass murder, domestic violence
and genocide, war crimes and all the other things the
guys I write about are getting up to. It's not
light reading. To spend all weeks sifting through gore forums
trying to figure out who a mass shooter was chatting
(19:12):
with online and accidentally seeing so many pictures of dead children.
It's not fun to spend days on nazi forums trying
to reconstruct the social media history of a man who
killed his wife. I'm not going to tell you that
feels good, obviously. I think you know that, and it's
(19:32):
not something I would recommend that someone else do. I
would be concerned if someone I cared about was doing that.
But I'm fine. You know. I'm not bragging about some
kind of superior coping mechanism. I'm not better than you
or stronger than you. I don't even have any constructive
advice for you if this is something you're struggling with.
(19:54):
I don't know how to advise anyone else who's dealing
with vicarious trum of this kind of research. And that's
why I hate this question. I mean no offense. It
makes sense that you would ask it. I just hate
that I don't have a good answer for you. I
don't have any advice for you. I don't know why
(20:14):
it works, and I don't want you to think I'm
a sociopath when I tell you that I actually don't
struggle with this that much. I can turn it off.
But that's not to say I don't feel it. I'm
not a robot, I'm not a monster. I feel it,
and I feel it deeply when I'm allowing myself to
(20:38):
be in it. There are episodes where there is no
clean take, and there's no way around the fact that
I am audibly crying in the final edit, and that's okay,
but I already know that the horrors are out there.
I can't go back to not knowing about this, So
(21:00):
for me, there's some comfort in knowing that I can
piece it together. I can try to understand it and
hopefully help you understand it. You know, I could sit
here and be scared in the dark, or I can
try to shine a light into that scary darkness. It's
(21:21):
still scary, but at least I have something to do.
Like I said, I get asked this question every time
I'm in a position to be asked a question. I've
been asked this question a thousand times, and I don't
have a good answer for it, but I always land
(21:41):
more or less right here. It's ugly, and it's hard,
and I see things that I wish I hadn't seen,
but I think it's important to do anyway, and that
feeling of purpose makes it a little easier. Okay, enough
(22:01):
of that. By far, the most common type of question
was a sort of open ended one about how the
sausage gets made, how do I pick a guy, how
do I decide what the story is, how do I
find out everything there is to know about him? And
most importantly, how do I drag myself back to the
point of the story when it's so much more fun
(22:24):
to find out what's going on with this strange little
side character. I found halfway down a tangent about something
that's barely even connected to the story. I was trying
to tell you. A lot of you asked about that
part of the process in particular, and I love that.
Like I said, when I was sorting these questions into categories,
I was a little puzzled by the scarcity of questions
(22:45):
that were about some specific story. You guys, didn't really
ask me for more information about a story I already
told you. You asked me really open ended questions about
what kinds of things I haven't told you. And my
initial reaction to that was, like, I said, a reflection
(23:06):
on the nature of parasociality, right, Like why are those
the things you want to know? But I think there's
a more fun explanation for this. You trust the process.
You believe me when I tell you that I was
thorough in pursuing the interesting leads in the story I
did tell, and you liked it enough that you want
(23:27):
to know what cool stuff I couldn't cram into the episode.
Maybe I'm making that up, but if that is what's
going on, I like that. I know the show can
be a little tricky to follow sometimes because the side
quests are longer than the main journey. So I really
like knowing that at least some of you love that
(23:50):
as much as I do. I mean, look, if you
don't like it, if you just want dry facts in
chronological order, I don't know what to tell you. I
don't know why you're still here. I would tell you
you should just read a Wikipedia article or something. But
most of the stories I'm trying to tell don't really
exist anywhere else in that sort of format. We're going
(24:10):
on an adventure together. But I do want to answer
one question I did get that was a factual question
about a recent episode. Someone on the Reddit posted this
question a few weeks ago. They wrote, with the Frank
Smith mini series wrapping up, I assumed you would revisit
(24:32):
the fact that Rockwell shouted the Holy Father after a
previous attempt on his life. According to someone with him,
is there anything more to investigate there? Okay, the answer
is we'll never know. I threw everything I had at
this and I do have my own theory. But I
(24:56):
went digging for anything concrete to try to ulster that theory,
and it was nothing but fistfuls of sand, just grabbing
an innuendo and possibility and watching it slip through my fingers.
To refresh your memory, that listener is asking about something
that came up in the first episode about Frank Smith,
(25:17):
the episode from October sixteenth. Frank Smith was a member
of the American Nazi Party and he had extensive ties
to organized crime in New England that whole arc from
the episodes about John Patler, the man who assassinated George
Lincoln Rockwell, through the end of the Frank Smith arc
was nine full length episodes and one minisode. It was
(25:40):
over fifty thousand scripted words, and it took two months.
So I won't retell the whole story here. If you're
listening to me Naval Gaze like this, you surely listen
to those episodes, But just to refresh some of the details.
Remember from the John Patler episodes, he murdered George Lincoln
Rockwell in August of nineteen sixty seven, and he was
(26:04):
convicted of that murder a trial a few months later.
But two months before the murder, so in June of
nineteen sixty seven, Rockwell survived another attempt on his life.
Two months before he died, someone shot at him and missed.
(26:26):
And this prior incident doesn't get a lot of ink
in the biographies of Rockwell that I read, which seems
kind of odd to me. In most accounts, it sort
of vaguely implied that the most likely explanation is that
the guy who actually shot and killed him was also
(26:47):
the guy who tried and failed to shoot him. The
first time. That makes total sense, right, And as far
as the lack of investigation into that in the biographies,
I guess the fact that he actually got murdered really
overshadows anything else that happened to him that summer. But
(27:09):
you know, I'm never satisfied. So I found and read
the trial transcript. Patler appealed his conviction several times, so
the entire trial transcript was reproduced in the appellate record,
and it's over a thousand pages. And here's the thing.
John Patler had a really solid alibi the day someone
(27:32):
shot at George Lincoln Rockwell and missed. There's conspiracy theories
about whether he actually killed Rockwell. I think he did.
The evidence is pretty good that he actually did shoot
him in August, but the evidence just isn't there to
assert that he was the guy who tried the first time.
And the college student who was in the car with
(27:54):
Rockwell when this happened in June told the authorities that
as the bullet whizzed by them, Rockwell shouted something. He
said the Holy Father. That boy doesn't have any reason
to lie, at least none that seemed obvious to me. Right,
And if you remember those episodes. A lot of the
(28:16):
people in this story had very obvious reasons to lie.
This kid didn't, and he didn't know that what he
heard Rockwell say wasn't just an exclamation. It was a name.
It was the nickname that Rockwell had given Frank Smith,
was a joke about the bullet holes in his chest
(28:37):
from a botched mob hit in nineteen sixty five. So
in that first episode about Frank, I sort of teased
the possibility that it was Frank who tried to shoot
Rockwell in June of nineteen sixty seven. But I never
came back to that. I just sort of left that hanging.
And that's what this listener is asking about so intriguing.
(29:01):
But there is absolutely fucking nothing there. There's nothing. It's bizarre.
I couldn't find any trace anywhere of anyone ever asking
this question. What could it possibly mean that when Rockwell
saw someone shooting at him, he yelled Frank's nickname. No
(29:22):
one's ever asked that. I can't find anything about it.
There's no record of anyone raising the possibility that maybe
Frank was there, that maybe the mafia had their own
beef with Rockwell. Like I said, most material about the
last few months of Rockwell's life just sort of breezes
past this kind of serious question who else wanted him dead?
(29:51):
Most of the competing theories about his actual death center
around the discord within the American Nazi Party. I won't
recover all of this, it's in the upp but there
were factions and rivalries and disagreements about the direction of
the Nazi Party and who should lead them, And most
of the information we have about those internal divisions comes
(30:11):
from the people involved in them. So the people pointing
fingers at each other within the party all have their
own shit to hide. In the accounts produced in biographies
of Rockwell, the authors spoke to those party members, including
people like Mantius Cole, the man who took over after
Rockwell died, and different biographers of Rockwell deal with these
(30:35):
accounts with varying levels of credulity and sometimes point out
that perhaps they have various motivations to tell versions of
the truth, but there's nothing else ever offered, and the
accounts that they gave those biographers more or less match
the kinds of testimony that was offered by American Nazi
Party members at John Paller's trial and decades later, William
(30:59):
Mouth their peers, gave his version of events to his
own biographer. And all of these men have very particular
motives for the versions of the truth that they're holding
on to, and they're all dead now. So I spent
probably fully one hundred hours agonizing over the blurry, heavily
(31:23):
redacted pages of the FBI file for Raymond Patriarca, the
head of the New England Mafia, and there's just enough
there to convince me that there's more there that I
don't have all the information about the extent to which
the mafia was involved with the American Nazi Party. I mean, sure,
(31:47):
we have memos about the times Frank Smith was reporting
back to Patriarcha about his relationship with Rockwell, but I
think there was more, and I can't prove it. I
don't like to tell you stuff I can't prove. I've
worked too hard to earn your trust. I don't want
to make stuff up and go tin foil hat on
(32:08):
you now. But you did ask, and I am dying
to speculate wildly. So here's my disclaimer. This does not
have my usual stamp of certainty on it. I'm not
stating this is fact. I can't support this with evidence.
(32:28):
I'm going rogue. Sometimes it is fun to believe something
a little crazy as a treat. So my conspiracy treat
for myself in this story is that I choose to
believe the mafia tried to have the head of the
American Nazi Party killed, but they sent a half blind
(32:49):
hit man to do it and he missed. Remember, Frank
had one glass eye for reasons I never discovered, and
he almost lost the other when the mafia tried to
have him killed in nineteen sixty five, so he does
not see well. And when he got into that shootout
with Christopher Vidnyevitch in nineteen sixty eight, they fired at
each other for half an hour and Frank never hit shit.
(33:15):
Here's the thing. George Lincoln Rockwell was a snitch famously,
so he didn't even really try to hide it. He
would tell you himself that he sometimes wrote letters to
the FBI to make them aware of people in the
movement whose activities he disapproved of. I found actual copies
(33:36):
of letters he wrote to Jay Edgar Hoover himself, listing
former members of his own party that he thought the
Bureau should investigate. This is a more egregious example than
I usually get. But this behavior is not actually uncommon.
There are a lot of guys in the movement who
(33:56):
are trying to inform on their rivals. I'm not even
talking about paid, recruited informants. The movement's full of those two.
I'm talking about guys who are just willingly freelance snitching
because they think they can leverage the force of the
government to try to take out a guy they don't like.
(34:18):
There's a fair amount of that going on to this day.
But Rockwell is the absolute king of writing letters to
the FBI to try to maneuver around within the movement.
So we know that he is doing that, and it
turns out the people he was dealing with did too,
(34:40):
because buried about four seven hundred and sixty three pages
into Raymond Patriarca's seventy nine hundred page FBI file is
a memo about a conversation Frank Smith had with the
mafia boss in March of nineteen sixty five. He's trying
to convince Patriarca that he needs to get into business
with the Nazi Party. This was around the time Rockwell
(35:02):
decided he was going to run for governor of Virginia,
and he had promised the mafia control of gambling and
loan sharking in the Naufolk area if he won. And
Frank wanted to set up a fake Nazi church on
his land in Maine so he could funnel money from
the mafia into the Nazi Party in a way that
would protect everyone involved. Right. That was all in the
(35:22):
episodes about Frank and he told Patriarcha at that meeting
in March that if they were going to do this,
they needed to be careful. Frank Smith was recorded on
an FBI wiretap saying that Rockwell had warned him that
he wouldn't hesitate to call the FBI if he found
out there was criminal activity going on. So Frank Smith
(35:47):
told Raymond Patriarca that they would need to be careful
not to reveal the extent of their illegal enterprise to Rockwell.
Two years later, someone took a shot at Rockwell and
they missed. One of the other things I do when
I'm researching an episode is I make a timeline. Just
(36:08):
anytime I have a date, I put it in a timeline.
I don't know if all these things are going to
be relevant, but they all go in just a bulleted
list in chronological order, And wouldn't you know, looking back
at that timeline, that failed hit on George Lincoln Rockwell
was a couple days after the FBI arrested Raymond Patriarca.
(36:30):
So sure, it makes good narrative sense to assume that
John Patler probably tried to kill Rockwell twice, But most
stories about June of nineteen sixty seven don't tell you
that Rockwell had threatened to snitch on the mafia and
that bullet just missed him the week a mob boss
(36:53):
got indicted. We'll never know, right, I mean, this version
of the story has just as many holes as any
of the others. There's no proving it either way. And
I could tell you the same story with a different inflection,
and we'd all leave just as convinced that some other
version of it was just as true. I do try
(37:17):
to be responsible with the facts, though, even when it's
no fun. But you have to admit it's kind of
fun to think about it this way, isn't it. I
will say one last word on this subject. If you
are the anonymous buyer who purchased a collection of George
Lincoln Rockwell's personal correspondence, specifically a series of letters he
(37:40):
exchanged with a Massachusetts man named George Parker in nineteen
sixty five. I will pay good money just to look
at a photocopy of those letters. I don't know who
bought them. There were two separate listings, so there's two
sets of these letters. God, I would love to see
them because the listing lies that they contain information about
(38:02):
Rockwell's relationship with the mafia, and that someone in Massachusetts,
potentially this George Parker character, is leaking information to him
about a state investigation into that relationship. I can't find
anything about this in the FBI files. I think it
may have been a criminal investigation in the state of Massachusetts,
(38:23):
but I need the letters. There's more to this story,
I'm sure, but I've exhausted my ability to track it down.
This one's staying in my pile of things I'll come
back to. I'm not done in trying to figure this out. Okay,
(38:57):
on the subject of things I have or have not
talked about on the show, let's go rapid fire through
some of the things you all want to hear more about.
Someone asked if I planned to cover any of the
weird little guys who participated in the January sixth insurrection. Yes,
there are two episodes that touch on that already. There
(39:18):
was a February sixth, twenty twenty five episode called a
Short Lived Pardon, followed by a brief update to that
same story a month later on March sixth. That episode
was about Matthew Huddle, the man who died after being
shot by police during a traffic stop just a week
after receiving his federal pardon for entering the Capitol on
January sixth. And before that, there was the October seventeen,
(39:43):
twenty twenty four episode called Burning Hate. That one was
about Tyler Diykes, a young man who marched here in
Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally in twenty seventeen,
and he entered the Capitol on January sixth, twenty twenty one.
He did jail time for both, which is toscussed in
the episode. But what is not discussed in that episode
(40:04):
but is coming up in next week's roundup is his
recent announcement that he is running for Congress. And that's
kind of why I foresee more episodes in the future
about January sixth, guys, because now that they're all pardoned,
we are unfortunately seeing a lot of them resurface. Right
They're either trying to get into media, they're trying to
(40:25):
get into politics. Some of them seem to be trying
to get back into prison. So I'm sure we will
wind up back with some of those guys eventually. That
same listener asked if I plan to cover any weird
little guys who happen to be women, and the answer
to that is also yes, but I don't know when.
(40:46):
The South Africa episodes that ran from the end of
February through the beginning of May of this year, we're
all centered around the main character of a woman named
Monica Huggetts Stone, and I'm sure there will be other
stories in the few with a female main character. They
just tend to be less frequent for a variety of reasons,
(41:07):
mainly right wing extremists are almost always violent misogynists. I'm
not saying women don't hold the same views as our
weird little guys, or that the movement doesn't include women.
They do, and it does. They just typically don't rise
(41:28):
to positions of power in the movement, and they are
less likely to carry out acts of extreme violence. The
movement has plenty of women in it, you just don't
hear a lot about them. Part of that is because
women's stories just don't get told, not just when we're
talking about white supremacists, I mean generally, right, history has
(41:51):
just as many women as it does men. But what
kinds of history stories do you hear? Monica Huggett Stone
was the central figure that eight episode arc about Neo
Nazi violence in the last decades of apartheid South Africa,
but it was much harder than it needed to be
to find actual information about this human woman at the
center of the story. People just aren't interested in what
(42:16):
women are doing. Will I cover Gary Louch? Great question. Yes, absolutely,
we're going to get to Gary. But a friend of
mine is writing a book that is definitely going to
feature Gary pretty heavily. So I think I'm going to
save myself the headache of doing the research myself and
(42:36):
just wait to buy a copy of her book, because
I know she has been deep in the archives, I
mean around the world in special collections archives, and she
even interviewed the farm Belt Feurer himself, So I should
ask her when that's coming out, Because I'm really looking
forward to it, but we will get to Gary. Someone
also asked, when is the Matt Hale episode. I don't know.
(43:01):
I don't know. I mean there's gonna be one. There's
obviously gonna be one. Sometimes I find myself avoiding these
big name, weird little guys. You know, I haven't done
William Luther Pierce. I haven't done Matthew Hale. I haven't
actually done Bob Matthews, right. I sort of mentioned him
(43:21):
in passing and then went somewhere else Entirely, I feel
like I'm skipping these really big ones because I know
what kind of can of worms it's gonna open, and
it's gonna take me months to dig myself out. Like
once I really get into the deep lore about Matt
Hale and the World Church of the Creator, I know
(43:42):
I'm gonna end up with thirty new, weird little guys
whose whole lives I'm gonna have to map out before
I can move on. There's a lot going on there,
and we will get there. Because Matt Hale is still
in prison and occasionally filing weird motions with the court,
I'm signed up for docor alerts for him, so I
do check in on him from time to time, but
(44:04):
I'm just not ready. Will I ever cover weird little
guys abroad? Actually got a bunch of these people asking
about particular British, Australian, Canadian, and European individuals and groups
that they'd like to hear more about. And the answer
is yes, Yes, definitely. I'm very intrigued by the fascist international.
(44:29):
Nothing exists in a vacuum, right, there are no lone wolves,
and it turns out the wolf pack is international. You know,
my existing subject matter expertise is white supremacists in the
United States over the last sixty years or so. But
it seems like if you dig deep enough in any story,
there's some kind of international connection, and that's something I'd
(44:52):
like to explore more. Earlier this year, I spent three
months writing about South African Nazis and that story ended
up taking us all over the world. There were German
mercenaries in Croatia, there were guns smuggled through a port
in England by a British Nazi group, a South African
man wanted for murder in Namibia currently hiding out in England.
(45:14):
And American lobbyists who took money from the apartheid government.
There were a lot of people and groups in that
story I'd like to come back to and read more about.
And then at the end of last year in the
beginning of this year, I did a series of episodes
about Dennis Mahon and that clansman spent some time in Germany,
which I did discuss on the show, but I didn't
(45:37):
get into his deep connections to fascist groups in Canada.
And I'd still planned to come back to that Australian
Nazi who was deported after he tried to attack John
Patler in court after Rockwell's murder. He died under rather
mysterious circumstances in Rhodesia a few years later. So we'll
(45:58):
explore some Australian Nazis soon. What I consider covering reformed
weird little guys. That one's complicated. The answer isn't. No.
I'm not ruling it out. I'm not saying I'll never
do it, but it's something I would want to approach
(46:20):
very carefully. Just in general, I have a pretty bad
taste in my mouth about a lot of the popular
narratives about formers. A lot of the guys out there
who are making money taking speaking engagements talking about how
they used to be a Nazi. Those aren't guys I
want to talk to. Those are not guys whose opinions
(46:42):
I think are worth talking about, not all of them. Right,
I'm not saying that every guy with a publicist is
a grifter and a liar who's using a redemption arc
narrative to sell himself as an expert on political extremism,
and the kind of extremism he keeps talking about is
actually how the left is just as bad as the
stuff he used to do. Right, But I'm saying there
(47:03):
is a lot of that, and I don't think those
guys are really formers. I think if every story you
have to tell about your decades as a Nazi is
actually about how Antifa are the real enemy, you're not
a former Nazi. But that's just a hang up I
have about a couple guys in particular. I'm not saying
(47:25):
formers themselves are always acting in bad faith or that
they don't really exist. They do. They absolutely do, And
I've met some very decent people who are working very
hard to quietly make amends and grow as people and
really leave their past behind. People can get better, right,
(47:48):
People can change and I think those stories are important,
and I would like to find a way to tell
them responsibly, because that change has to come from inside
something that can grow out of a press release written
by a publicist and approved by an attorney. So the
answer to that is maybe, probably even. But it wouldn't
(48:13):
just be a one off interview about how making a
black friend cured a klansman and he's nice. Now, that's
not my kind of story. That's not a story I
would subject you to. I've seen a guy try to
sell that shit to a judge and I didn't believe
it when it was presented a sworn testimony, So I
wouldn't expect you to believe it on a podcast. I
(48:33):
do have a couple of formers in mind that I
would like to do a little bit more research about
the kind of story I would want to tell with
their help. There are a couple of people that I
think would be valuable to talk to about this. I'm
just I'm just not ready to do that right now.
There were kind of a surprising number of questions that
(48:55):
were just invitations to do my favorite thing, to wander
off topic. I'm still kind of self conscious about the
meandering nature of these stories, even though at this point
I recognize it as something that's integral to the show.
So I was really charmed by how many of you
(49:15):
just want to hear how far I can get from
the plot. It sounds like some of you are trying
to challenge me to dig my deepest hole yet, just
so you can watch me try to get back out
of it. The problem with answering those questions right now
is it would take two to three hundred hours. The
stuff that gets cut, the tangents that I have to
(49:38):
cut myself off from, those all kind of end up
piled up in a tab at the end of my
notes for each episode. There's this terrible, little, incomprehensible mess
of these half formed thoughts that I swear I'm going
to come back to because there's probably a whole episode
in there, or four or ten if I just let
(49:59):
myself keep going. One example of that that comes to
mind right now is a recent one. It's about Barbara
von Getz. She was the secretary for the American Nazi
Party who lived at the party's headquarters in the early
to mid sixties. She was also George Lincoln Rockwell's mistress
and the mother of his two daughters, who both died
(50:20):
in infancy of a genetic disorder. I talked a little
bit about her and about Rockwell's daughters in one of
the Frank Smith episodes, but before I wrote I think
like two paragraphs about Barbara, I spent a day or
two learning about her. Pretty much anyone who's discussed beyond
a passing mention gets this treatment. In the research process,
(50:44):
I like to make a family tree and go through
old newspapers for any mention of the person or any
of their immediate relatives. I'll check court records and places
where they've lived, and look at property and tax records.
If I can find them, I just sort of sketch
out the broad strokes of their life. Where have they been,
What were they doing before they showed up in this story?
(51:04):
Where did they go afterward? Do they have any meaningful
connection to anything else we might be interested in. I'm
not really looking for anything in particular. I'm just browsing,
and mostly I use none of this. I have half
a biography on a thousand guys I didn't even need.
(51:25):
But Barbara was such a question mark for me throughout
this story, right because I spent two months writing about
the last year of Rockwell's life, and there's not a
lot about her. I mean, she was the mistress and
personal secretary of the commander of the American Nazi Party.
She gave birth to and buried two of his children.
(51:48):
But that's kind of all she ever is in any
story about him. Women's stories just disappear, right. So I
was really curious about how she ended up so close
to one of the big leaders in the movement. And
it turns out her whole damn family was a bunch
(52:09):
of Nazis. Her sister and one of her brothers were
close to Otto Strausser, an actual Nazi. Like Otto Strausser
joined the Nazi Party in Germany in nineteen twenty five.
He is one of the two Strassers of Strasserism, and
Barbara's other brother spent time in Rhodesia in the nineteen
(52:32):
seventies as a mercenary. Her Nazi sister was inexplicably the
secretary at a mosque in Washington, d c. In the
nineteen seventies, which I only know because she was taken
hostage at that mosque during the Hanafi Siege of nineteen
seventy seven, and her brother Karl, fresh off his stint
(52:52):
as a race war mercenary, tried to negotiate for her release.
He went on to have a whole second act as
a fairly well known way. It's a premacist in Canada
in the eighties, and Barbara's nephew, the son of her
other brother, was arrested on Christmas Eve last year for
pouring whiskey into the holy water during midnight mass at
a Catholic church in Maryland. So I wasted a lot
(53:16):
of time on this. Obviously, I know a lot about
this family that I did not need or use in
that episode. I left all of that out because I
think I need to come back to this to sort
out what the hell is going on there. So for
those of you asking how far afield I tend to
get while I'm writing, I always make the family tree,
(53:39):
and sometimes it's a waste of time. Usually it's a
waste of time, but sometimes there's a Rhodesian mercenary and
two siblings who have long complicated relationships with Otto Strausser.
And that is why I will never stop wasting my
time researching stuff that doesn't make it into the episode.
(54:01):
I'll come back to it one day, But That is
absolutely enough for now. Those of you who are just
here for the Weird Little Guys, I'm sorry if I
disappointed you this week. But for the real writer die
listeners out there, the ones who like hearing about my
struggle to translate a Hungarian Nazi newspaper published by a
(54:22):
guy in Cincinnati, even though that has nothing to do
with what we're talking about, I hope this scratched that
itch for you at least a little bit. Next week
will be another episode that doesn't quite fit the usual mold.
I'll be checking back in on some of the Weird
Little Guys whose stories aren't over yet. Some of them
have come up on the show before and will be
(54:43):
familiar to you, and some of them are guys whose
episodes I'm not ready to write yet, but I can't
wait that long to introduce them into the Weird Little
Guys extended universe. It's something different, but I think it'll
still be fun. I promise I won't make a habit
of straying from the classic Weird Little Guys format you
know and love, but I am going to try a
(55:05):
few new things to get a little variety, and if
I'm being totally honest, I'm trying to figure out what
works in terms of redistributing the workload a little bit.
I love making this show, but I have to find
a way to make it a little more sustainable in
the long run, because I don't think I'm ever gonna
(55:26):
run out of Weird Little Guys. Weird Little Guys is
a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written,
and recorded by me while I hunger. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
by the wildly talented Wordy Gaigan. The theme music was
composed by Brad Diggert, and for the listener who asked
(55:49):
a question about that theme music, I will put a
link in the show notes to Brad's SoundCloud where you
can listen to the entire theme of the show. You
can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail
dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably
won't answer. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories
about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little
Guys severad it, but as always, don't post anything that's
(56:11):
going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys
Cool Zone Media. Hello and welcome to the December twenty
twenty five Q and A episode of Weird Little Guys.
I was always planning to do a Q and A
episode this month. I think most of the shows in
(00:22):
the Cool Zone Media family do one of these around
the end of the year, but this one is coming
a little early. You probably noticed that there was an
unexpected rerun a few weeks ago, and that's because I
was very sick. I had some sort of terrible virus
and it knocked me out for like two weeks. The
(00:44):
worst part was the laryngitis. I was on total vocal
rest for more than a week, mostly because I couldn't
have made a sound even if I wanted to. It
was torture, not just because that's literally my livelihood, but
I love talking. I mean, I have to talk for work.
(01:05):
You can't make a podcast without talking, but I just
love talking recreationally. I never stopped talking, so it was
a nightmare. Anyway. I lost two weeks of my life
to the blanket fort on the couch. And then there's
the general messiness of the holiday season. So I'm all
(01:26):
mixed up in backwards but trying to get back on track.
We will hit the ground running in the new year
with something fun and exciting, but this month is just
going to be a hodgepodge of different sorts of episodes.
The episode I have planned for next week is a
sort of Weird Little Guy round up, just catching up
with recent developments in the lives of some of the
(01:48):
weird Little Guys I've been checking in on from time
to time for years. I originally had this episode and
that episode switched on my calendar, but I think waiting
one more week might be enough time to get some
more updates in some of those stories. So for now,
let's get to your questions. I put out a call
(02:13):
a few weeks ago, and I've sorted the questions you
all sent in into a few broad categories. Questions about
the process of making the show, questions about particular topics
you'd like to see covered, and questions about me. I
won't be able to answer all of them specifically, but
I am going to try to get to at least
(02:34):
one of every flavor of questions that you guys had,
And honestly, most of what you guys asked is about me.
There were relatively few questions about particular weird Little guys,
or the actual content of the show, the overwhelming majority
(02:56):
of the questions, or about the nitty gritty details of
how I make the show, about my life and my
process and what I'm doing when I'm not writing the
words you hear me saying softly into your headphones every week.
I think part of that is just a built in
selection bias, Right. The kind of listener is going to
(03:18):
bother to send in a question to a podcast isn't
necessarily representative of the overall audience, and those listeners are
probably more likely to be invested in knowing what goes
on behind the scenes. But as I was sifting through
those questions, I did spend some time ruminating on the
(03:38):
nature of the parasocial relationship that one sided relationship formed
in the mind of someone who consumes a piece of
mass media. You know, that feeling of friendship and emotional
intimacy you feel for someone you've never actually met. It's
not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not calling any of
(04:00):
you out. You're okay. It's perfectly normal to feel some
level of connection to the people that you see or
hear on a regular basis. I think the term has
a pretty nasty connotation because usually by the time you're
talking about someone's parasocial relationship, it has gotten weird. Like
(04:21):
John Hinckley Junior shooting Ronald Reagan because he was in
love with Jodie Foster levels of weird, you know. But
I don't think there's anyone with access to the Internet
who doesn't have some low level emotional connection to someone
they've never met. If you've ever been sad because a
dog you follow on Instagram died, buddy, I got news
(04:44):
for you. You were in a parasocial relationship with a dog.
So as long as you're not neglecting your real life
relationships in favor of spending time online obsessing over some
stranger who's videos you like to watch, or letting that
online strain impact the way you live your life, and
you're not slipping into a delusion that they love you back,
(05:06):
you're probably fine. The term was coined in the nineteen
fifties by a pair of sociologists who are exploring the
ways audiences form these relationships with TV and radio personalities,
and in the decades since the ubiquity of mass media
and the rise of online influencers, many of whom are
(05:27):
intentionally cultivating that sense of intimacy with the audience. It's
only intensified the kinds of parasocial connections people are experiencing,
and with a podcast, it really is kind of like
having a little friend in your ear. Right. We're walking
around together and I'm telling you a story. It's just
someone chatting away with you while you're doing your dishes
(05:50):
or commuting to work. I've been making my living writing
for an online audience for almost a decade now, so
it's an interesting phenomenon that very much plays a role
in my life. So I think it's fascinating. But that's
not what we're here to talk about today. You know,
I can't resist reading a couple of journal articles for
(06:11):
no reason, though, so I'll put a link in the
show notes to that original nineteen fifty six article that
invented the term, as well as a twenty nineteen university
thesis about parasociality specifically in podcasting that I thought was interesting.
So those will be there if you want to read
more about it. But as far as what we're talking
about here, I don't mind if you think of me
(06:34):
as the friend in your ear for an hour a week.
It's kind of nice, but like I say at the
end of every episode, just don't post anything that's going
to make you one of my weird little guys. Right,
And for the listener who asked if that sign off
is a direct response to something someone already did, No,
(06:56):
it's just a precaution. I've been online long enough to
have been on the weird end of a parasocial bond.
But the listeners of this show have been pretty normal
little guys so far, and I appreciate that about you. All.
All that to say, I did notice that trend in
(07:17):
the questions, but I'm happy to answer your healthy, boundary
respecting questions about the little voice in your ear. Just
don't get any weird ideas. Okay, all right, rapid fire,
let's knock out some of those questions about me. My docxins,
Buck and Otto are doing great. They turned nine in
(07:41):
July and they're still going strong. Otto actually just recently
celebrated his fourth anniversary as the dog who Conquered Death.
Back in twenty twenty one, he suffered a ruptured disc
in his spine, which is an unfortunate problem many docsins have,
and he was diagnosed with stage four intervertebral disease. There
(08:01):
was no precipitating injury. His brother doesn't have this problems.
It's just bad luck. And back when it happened, we
weren't sure he would survive his emergency surgery, and when
he did, they told us he would never walk again.
But after a few weeks of lying on a blanket
wearing a diaper, he got bored of being paralyzed and
(08:25):
he just stood up. So we celebrated the anniversary this
year by taking him to the beach so he could
run a million miles an hour in the sand. He's
doing great. Can you see a picture of my office?
Absolutely not, no, no, but only because it's disgusting. I
(08:47):
dumped every piece of clothing I own onto the floor
about two years ago because I was about to start
sorting through it so I could get rid of the
stuff I don't wear anymore. But I never got to
the second step up. So my office has had a
foot deep pile of laundry that covers half the room,
and I've just been stepping over it for two entire years.
(09:10):
I am just days away from hanging those curtains I
bought a year ago because I thought that would be
good for sound dampening or whatever. But at this point
I think the laundry pile is actually an integral part
of the acoustic environment of the show. I do have
a desk, but I do not sit at it because
(09:30):
it has covered an old male. I write and record
the entire show in an Ikea chair I found next
to someone's trash can, and one of the bulbs in
the overhead light has been burnt out since spring. I
think I just closed the door to my podcasting cave.
When people come over, no one is allowed to see it.
(09:53):
I think this question might have something to do with
the fact that Ed Zitron, the host of Better Offline,
has posted pictures of the like incredible professional greed podcasting
studio he built inside of his home. I don't have that.
I don't have what Ed has. That's phenomenal for him,
that's so weird. I love that for him. I have
(10:15):
an Ikea chair that I found on the curb. What
is my go to snack and drink when I'm working
on the show. Hmm, another disappointing answer. I fear the
windowsill next to my trash chair has at least four
cans of seltzer on it at all times, the cans
(10:35):
are at varying levels of emptiness and flatness. Right now,
there are four cans. None of them are the same
brand somehow, and one of them has definitely been open
since early November. I am going to finish it. I'm
not responsible for the food situation, thank god. My husband
(10:58):
usually tiptoes in to deliver these beautiful little snack plates
with fruit and cheese, and he's done pretty much all
of the cooking around here ever since the show launched,
and I became a round the clock computer gremlin in
my podcasting cave, and that brings us to my husband.
Several of you asked about him. He's great. If you're
(11:20):
a longtime listener, you know that I took some time
off in May to get married and go on a honeymoon.
It was phenomenal. We went to Puerto Rico and I
only got a little sunburned this time. I was careful
because last year when we went to visit his family
down there, I found out that some white people can
(11:42):
unlock a special, secret level of sunburn that makes you
very physically ill. So honestly, shout out to the Caribbean
for developing a natural defense against the gringo. I have
no choice but to respect that for the moment part.
When you hear a voice on the show that isn't mine,
(12:03):
it's actual archival audio. I go to a lot of
trouble to make that true, so it's usually a real
recording of the weird little guy we're talking about. When
there is no audio of the quote that I want
read in a voice that isn't mine, though, it's almost
always either my husband or the show's editor, Rory. There
(12:25):
was an episode last year early this year, early twenty
twenty five that had some quotes from the President, and
Rory did a phenomenal Trump impression that made some of
you very mad. But what you may not have realized
is that when my husband is doing a voice, it's
also a carefully studied impression, right, like you recognize the
(12:49):
Trump impression, but when he does some obscure white supremacist
no one's ever heard of, you don't realize that he's
actually doing an amazing impression. Weirdly good at them, and
he is very excited for the day that he gets
to show off his upsettingly accurate impressions of William Luther
(13:10):
Pierce and Jared Taylor just please don't ask him to
do his Alex Jones. He's really good at it and
I hate it. Okay. Someone asked what is my favorite dinosaur?
I don't have one, but I wanted to have a
cool answer to this question, so I texted my brother
(13:32):
to ask what a cool dinosaur would be to say,
is my favorite? Because he knows a lot about dinosaurs,
and he gave me some good answers, you know, some
specific vibes that I could evoke with different choices. We're
very well thought out. But I realized it would be
dishonest to claim that dino knowledge as my own, so
(13:53):
I am going to cheat and say my favorite dinosaur
is that bird that Bitjyra Bolsnaro years ago. Birds are dinosaurs,
and that bird, in particular, the one that bit Bolsnorow
really hard, is my favorite. I think it was a raya.
It's like a small emu. It's not an emo. It's
(14:15):
like a small guy that looks like an emu. I
think it was a raya. Anyway, he's my favorite. Quite
a few of you submitted questions related to my physical
safety and my mental well being, which is really sweet
of you. I'm fine. I mean to the extent that
(14:35):
any of us are fine. Right, I live in the
United States. I could die in a mass shooting at
the grocery store tomorrow. As far as the possibility of
physical violence goes, Yeah, I guess I've probably got a
few more guys actively plotting my death specifically than the
(14:57):
average person might. But they've it's mostly been keeping it
themselves lately, and I really appreciate that. There was an
incident earlier this year where a weird little guy was
trying to like big dog me in a courtroom. He
sort of sidled up to me and said something he
probably thought about for an hour on the car ride there,
and that he hoped would be really startling and intimidating
(15:20):
to me. But at this point in my life, there's
nothing scary to me about a Nazi in poorly fitted
dress pants. I'm not going to pretend I'm bulletproof. I'm
not so naive that I think no harm can come
to me. I know what these guys are capable of
the kinds of things they want to do, the kinds
(15:42):
of things they talk about doing, the kinds of things
some of them have done. And I'll still be writing
about it when one of them goes and does another
unspeakable thing. I know that it's foolish to say that
they're all talk, but I also know a lot of
them are. A lot of them are a lot smaller
(16:04):
in person. And I don't mean physically. I'm not talking
about getting into a physical fight. I'm five feet tall
with my shoes on. But what I'm saying is there
were little guys. That's why the show's called that they're
so small in person. That's the whole point. They talk
big when it's online or at a rally with high energy,
(16:27):
or when they're with their friends, but in my experience,
most of them get stage fright if they actually get
the chance to say that shit out loud in a
quiet room. Back in twenty twenty three, I actually met
a guy who'd had some big talk about me online.
I may have told the story before, forgive me, but
(16:49):
he was in town because he'd been charged with a crime,
and that was something that really solidified for him that
being involved in the movement was a stupid way to
spend his life. He's probably still not not a white supremacist,
you know. I'm not saying he's reformed now, but he
was disengaging from active involvement in the movement, and that's
(17:12):
the best you can hope for sometimes. So by the
time we're standing there alone on the steps of the courthouse,
it had been a couple of years since he was
on a Nazi podcast talking with his Nazi friends about
the ways they would be interested in murdering me if
the opportunity presented itself. He look, I'm not gonna lie
to you. When I heard that the first time, hunched
(17:35):
over my computer alone late at night. Yeah, obviously it
scared me a little bit, right. It was very graphic,
and I didn't know exactly who those men were or
where they were. I didn't know if they had the
means to do the things they were talking about. So
(17:57):
I found out and that made it easier. And when
I finally met him in person, I wasn't afraid of him.
He seemed maybe a little bit afraid of me. It
was just a weird little guy, kind of a sad one.
(18:30):
Another question people ask a lot, is is it mentally
destructive to do this kind of research. That's a fair question,
and the answer changes depending on when you ask me.
I think, of course, it's horrible, right I'm a human being.
(18:51):
Of course, it makes me sick to read about child
sexual exploitation and hate crimes and mass murder, domestic violence
and genocide, war crimes and all the other things the
guys I write about are getting up to. It's not
light reading. To spend all weeks sifting through gore forums
trying to figure out who a mass shooter was chatting
(19:12):
with online and accidentally seeing so many pictures of dead children.
It's not fun to spend days on nazi forums trying
to reconstruct the social media history of a man who
killed his wife. I'm not going to tell you that
feels good, obviously. I think you know that, and it's
(19:32):
not something I would recommend that someone else do. I
would be concerned if someone I cared about was doing that.
But I'm fine. You know. I'm not bragging about some
kind of superior coping mechanism. I'm not better than you
or stronger than you. I don't even have any constructive
advice for you if this is something you're struggling with.
(19:54):
I don't know how to advise anyone else who's dealing
with vicarious trum of this kind of research. And that's
why I hate this question. I mean no offense. It
makes sense that you would ask it. I just hate
that I don't have a good answer for you. I
don't have any advice for you. I don't know why
(20:14):
it works, and I don't want you to think I'm
a sociopath when I tell you that I actually don't
struggle with this that much. I can turn it off.
But that's not to say I don't feel it. I'm
not a robot, I'm not a monster. I feel it,
and I feel it deeply when I'm allowing myself to
(20:38):
be in it. There are episodes where there is no
clean take, and there's no way around the fact that
I am audibly crying in the final edit, and that's okay,
but I already know that the horrors are out there.
I can't go back to not knowing about this, So
(21:00):
for me, there's some comfort in knowing that I can
piece it together. I can try to understand it and
hopefully help you understand it. You know, I could sit
here and be scared in the dark, or I can
try to shine a light into that scary darkness. It's
(21:21):
still scary, but at least I have something to do.
Like I said, I get asked this question every time
I'm in a position to be asked a question. I've
been asked this question a thousand times, and I don't
have a good answer for it, but I always land
(21:41):
more or less right here. It's ugly, and it's hard,
and I see things that I wish I hadn't seen,
but I think it's important to do anyway, and that
feeling of purpose makes it a little easier. Okay, enough
(22:01):
of that. By far, the most common type of question
was a sort of open ended one about how the
sausage gets made, how do I pick a guy, how
do I decide what the story is, how do I
find out everything there is to know about him? And
most importantly, how do I drag myself back to the
point of the story when it's so much more fun
(22:24):
to find out what's going on with this strange little
side character. I found halfway down a tangent about something
that's barely even connected to the story. I was trying
to tell you. A lot of you asked about that
part of the process in particular, and I love that.
Like I said, when I was sorting these questions into categories,
I was a little puzzled by the scarcity of questions
(22:45):
that were about some specific story. You guys, didn't really
ask me for more information about a story I already
told you. You asked me really open ended questions about
what kinds of things I haven't told you. And my
initial reaction to that was, like, I said, a reflection
(23:06):
on the nature of parasociality, right, Like why are those
the things you want to know? But I think there's
a more fun explanation for this. You trust the process.
You believe me when I tell you that I was
thorough in pursuing the interesting leads in the story I
did tell, and you liked it enough that you want
(23:27):
to know what cool stuff I couldn't cram into the episode.
Maybe I'm making that up, but if that is what's
going on, I like that. I know the show can
be a little tricky to follow sometimes because the side
quests are longer than the main journey. So I really
like knowing that at least some of you love that
(23:50):
as much as I do. I mean, look, if you
don't like it, if you just want dry facts in
chronological order, I don't know what to tell you. I
don't know why you're still here. I would tell you
you should just read a Wikipedia article or something. But
most of the stories I'm trying to tell don't really
exist anywhere else in that sort of format. We're going
(24:10):
on an adventure together. But I do want to answer
one question I did get that was a factual question
about a recent episode. Someone on the Reddit posted this
question a few weeks ago. They wrote, with the Frank
Smith mini series wrapping up, I assumed you would revisit
(24:32):
the fact that Rockwell shouted the Holy Father after a
previous attempt on his life. According to someone with him,
is there anything more to investigate there? Okay, the answer
is we'll never know. I threw everything I had at
this and I do have my own theory. But I
(24:56):
went digging for anything concrete to try to ulster that theory,
and it was nothing but fistfuls of sand, just grabbing
an innuendo and possibility and watching it slip through my fingers.
To refresh your memory, that listener is asking about something
that came up in the first episode about Frank Smith,
(25:17):
the episode from October sixteenth. Frank Smith was a member
of the American Nazi Party and he had extensive ties
to organized crime in New England that whole arc from
the episodes about John Patler, the man who assassinated George
Lincoln Rockwell, through the end of the Frank Smith arc
was nine full length episodes and one minisode. It was
(25:40):
over fifty thousand scripted words, and it took two months.
So I won't retell the whole story here. If you're
listening to me Naval Gaze like this, you surely listen
to those episodes, But just to refresh some of the details.
Remember from the John Patler episodes, he murdered George Lincoln
Rockwell in August of nineteen sixty seven, and he was
(26:04):
convicted of that murder a trial a few months later.
But two months before the murder, so in June of
nineteen sixty seven, Rockwell survived another attempt on his life.
Two months before he died, someone shot at him and missed.
(26:26):
And this prior incident doesn't get a lot of ink
in the biographies of Rockwell that I read, which seems
kind of odd to me. In most accounts, it sort
of vaguely implied that the most likely explanation is that
the guy who actually shot and killed him was also
(26:47):
the guy who tried and failed to shoot him. The
first time. That makes total sense, right, And as far
as the lack of investigation into that in the biographies,
I guess the fact that he actually got murdered really
overshadows anything else that happened to him that summer. But
(27:09):
you know, I'm never satisfied. So I found and read
the trial transcript. Patler appealed his conviction several times, so
the entire trial transcript was reproduced in the appellate record,
and it's over a thousand pages. And here's the thing.
John Patler had a really solid alibi the day someone
(27:32):
shot at George Lincoln Rockwell and missed. There's conspiracy theories
about whether he actually killed Rockwell. I think he did.
The evidence is pretty good that he actually did shoot
him in August, but the evidence just isn't there to
assert that he was the guy who tried the first time.
And the college student who was in the car with
(27:54):
Rockwell when this happened in June told the authorities that
as the bullet whizzed by them, Rockwell shouted something. He
said the Holy Father. That boy doesn't have any reason
to lie, at least none that seemed obvious to me. Right,
And if you remember those episodes. A lot of the
(28:16):
people in this story had very obvious reasons to lie.
This kid didn't, and he didn't know that what he
heard Rockwell say wasn't just an exclamation. It was a name.
It was the nickname that Rockwell had given Frank Smith,
was a joke about the bullet holes in his chest
(28:37):
from a botched mob hit in nineteen sixty five. So
in that first episode about Frank, I sort of teased
the possibility that it was Frank who tried to shoot
Rockwell in June of nineteen sixty seven. But I never
came back to that. I just sort of left that hanging.
And that's what this listener is asking about so intriguing.
(29:01):
But there is absolutely fucking nothing there. There's nothing. It's bizarre.
I couldn't find any trace anywhere of anyone ever asking
this question. What could it possibly mean that when Rockwell
saw someone shooting at him, he yelled Frank's nickname. No
(29:22):
one's ever asked that. I can't find anything about it.
There's no record of anyone raising the possibility that maybe
Frank was there, that maybe the mafia had their own
beef with Rockwell. Like I said, most material about the
last few months of Rockwell's life just sort of breezes
past this kind of serious question who else wanted him dead?
(29:51):
Most of the competing theories about his actual death center
around the discord within the American Nazi Party. I won't
recover all of this, it's in the upp but there
were factions and rivalries and disagreements about the direction of
the Nazi Party and who should lead them, And most
of the information we have about those internal divisions comes
(30:11):
from the people involved in them. So the people pointing
fingers at each other within the party all have their
own shit to hide. In the accounts produced in biographies
of Rockwell, the authors spoke to those party members, including
people like Mantius Cole, the man who took over after
Rockwell died, and different biographers of Rockwell deal with these
(30:35):
accounts with varying levels of credulity and sometimes point out
that perhaps they have various motivations to tell versions of
the truth, but there's nothing else ever offered, and the
accounts that they gave those biographers more or less match
the kinds of testimony that was offered by American Nazi
Party members at John Paller's trial and decades later, William
(30:59):
Mouth their peers, gave his version of events to his
own biographer. And all of these men have very particular
motives for the versions of the truth that they're holding
on to, and they're all dead now. So I spent
probably fully one hundred hours agonizing over the blurry, heavily
(31:23):
redacted pages of the FBI file for Raymond Patriarca, the
head of the New England Mafia, and there's just enough
there to convince me that there's more there that I
don't have all the information about the extent to which
the mafia was involved with the American Nazi Party. I mean, sure,
(31:47):
we have memos about the times Frank Smith was reporting
back to Patriarcha about his relationship with Rockwell, but I
think there was more, and I can't prove it. I
don't like to tell you stuff I can't prove. I've
worked too hard to earn your trust. I don't want
to make stuff up and go tin foil hat on
(32:08):
you now. But you did ask, and I am dying
to speculate wildly. So here's my disclaimer. This does not
have my usual stamp of certainty on it. I'm not
stating this is fact. I can't support this with evidence.
(32:28):
I'm going rogue. Sometimes it is fun to believe something
a little crazy as a treat. So my conspiracy treat
for myself in this story is that I choose to
believe the mafia tried to have the head of the
American Nazi Party killed, but they sent a half blind
(32:49):
hit man to do it and he missed. Remember, Frank
had one glass eye for reasons I never discovered, and
he almost lost the other when the mafia tried to
have him killed in nineteen sixty five, so he does
not see well. And when he got into that shootout
with Christopher Vidnyevitch in nineteen sixty eight, they fired at
each other for half an hour and Frank never hit shit.
(33:15):
Here's the thing. George Lincoln Rockwell was a snitch famously,
so he didn't even really try to hide it. He
would tell you himself that he sometimes wrote letters to
the FBI to make them aware of people in the
movement whose activities he disapproved of. I found actual copies
(33:36):
of letters he wrote to Jay Edgar Hoover himself, listing
former members of his own party that he thought the
Bureau should investigate. This is a more egregious example than
I usually get. But this behavior is not actually uncommon.
There are a lot of guys in the movement who
(33:56):
are trying to inform on their rivals. I'm not even
talking about paid, recruited informants. The movement's full of those two.
I'm talking about guys who are just willingly freelance snitching
because they think they can leverage the force of the
government to try to take out a guy they don't like.
(34:18):
There's a fair amount of that going on to this day.
But Rockwell is the absolute king of writing letters to
the FBI to try to maneuver around within the movement.
So we know that he is doing that, and it
turns out the people he was dealing with did too,
(34:40):
because buried about four seven hundred and sixty three pages
into Raymond Patriarca's seventy nine hundred page FBI file is
a memo about a conversation Frank Smith had with the
mafia boss in March of nineteen sixty five. He's trying
to convince Patriarca that he needs to get into business
with the Nazi Party. This was around the time Rockwell
(35:02):
decided he was going to run for governor of Virginia,
and he had promised the mafia control of gambling and
loan sharking in the Naufolk area if he won. And
Frank wanted to set up a fake Nazi church on
his land in Maine so he could funnel money from
the mafia into the Nazi Party in a way that
would protect everyone involved. Right. That was all in the
(35:22):
episodes about Frank and he told Patriarcha at that meeting
in March that if they were going to do this,
they needed to be careful. Frank Smith was recorded on
an FBI wiretap saying that Rockwell had warned him that
he wouldn't hesitate to call the FBI if he found
out there was criminal activity going on. So Frank Smith
(35:47):
told Raymond Patriarca that they would need to be careful
not to reveal the extent of their illegal enterprise to Rockwell.
Two years later, someone took a shot at Rockwell and
they missed. One of the other things I do when
I'm researching an episode is I make a timeline. Just
(36:08):
anytime I have a date, I put it in a timeline.
I don't know if all these things are going to
be relevant, but they all go in just a bulleted
list in chronological order, And wouldn't you know, looking back
at that timeline, that failed hit on George Lincoln Rockwell
was a couple days after the FBI arrested Raymond Patriarca.
(36:30):
So sure, it makes good narrative sense to assume that
John Patler probably tried to kill Rockwell twice, But most
stories about June of nineteen sixty seven don't tell you
that Rockwell had threatened to snitch on the mafia and
that bullet just missed him the week a mob boss
(36:53):
got indicted. We'll never know, right, I mean, this version
of the story has just as many holes as any
of the others. There's no proving it either way. And
I could tell you the same story with a different inflection,
and we'd all leave just as convinced that some other
version of it was just as true. I do try
(37:17):
to be responsible with the facts, though, even when it's
no fun. But you have to admit it's kind of
fun to think about it this way, isn't it. I
will say one last word on this subject. If you
are the anonymous buyer who purchased a collection of George
Lincoln Rockwell's personal correspondence, specifically a series of letters he
(37:40):
exchanged with a Massachusetts man named George Parker in nineteen
sixty five. I will pay good money just to look
at a photocopy of those letters. I don't know who
bought them. There were two separate listings, so there's two
sets of these letters. God, I would love to see
them because the listing lies that they contain information about
(38:02):
Rockwell's relationship with the mafia, and that someone in Massachusetts,
potentially this George Parker character, is leaking information to him
about a state investigation into that relationship. I can't find
anything about this in the FBI files. I think it
may have been a criminal investigation in the state of Massachusetts,
(38:23):
but I need the letters. There's more to this story,
I'm sure, but I've exhausted my ability to track it down.
This one's staying in my pile of things I'll come
back to. I'm not done in trying to figure this out. Okay,
(38:57):
on the subject of things I have or have not
talked about on the show, let's go rapid fire through
some of the things you all want to hear more about.
Someone asked if I planned to cover any of the
weird little guys who participated in the January sixth insurrection. Yes,
there are two episodes that touch on that already. There
(39:18):
was a February sixth, twenty twenty five episode called a
Short Lived Pardon, followed by a brief update to that
same story a month later on March sixth. That episode
was about Matthew Huddle, the man who died after being
shot by police during a traffic stop just a week
after receiving his federal pardon for entering the Capitol on
January sixth. And before that, there was the October seventeen,
(39:43):
twenty twenty four episode called Burning Hate. That one was
about Tyler Diykes, a young man who marched here in
Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally in twenty seventeen,
and he entered the Capitol on January sixth, twenty twenty one.
He did jail time for both, which is toscussed in
the episode. But what is not discussed in that episode
(40:04):
but is coming up in next week's roundup is his
recent announcement that he is running for Congress. And that's
kind of why I foresee more episodes in the future
about January sixth, guys, because now that they're all pardoned,
we are unfortunately seeing a lot of them resurface. Right
They're either trying to get into media, they're trying to
(40:25):
get into politics. Some of them seem to be trying
to get back into prison. So I'm sure we will
wind up back with some of those guys eventually. That
same listener asked if I plan to cover any weird
little guys who happen to be women, and the answer
to that is also yes, but I don't know when.
(40:46):
The South Africa episodes that ran from the end of
February through the beginning of May of this year, we're
all centered around the main character of a woman named
Monica Huggetts Stone, and I'm sure there will be other
stories in the few with a female main character. They
just tend to be less frequent for a variety of reasons,
(41:07):
mainly right wing extremists are almost always violent misogynists. I'm
not saying women don't hold the same views as our
weird little guys, or that the movement doesn't include women.
They do, and it does. They just typically don't rise
(41:28):
to positions of power in the movement, and they are
less likely to carry out acts of extreme violence. The
movement has plenty of women in it, you just don't
hear a lot about them. Part of that is because
women's stories just don't get told, not just when we're
talking about white supremacists, I mean generally, right, history has
(41:51):
just as many women as it does men. But what
kinds of history stories do you hear? Monica Huggett Stone
was the central figure that eight episode arc about Neo
Nazi violence in the last decades of apartheid South Africa,
but it was much harder than it needed to be
to find actual information about this human woman at the
center of the story. People just aren't interested in what
(42:16):
women are doing. Will I cover Gary Louch? Great question. Yes, absolutely,
we're going to get to Gary. But a friend of
mine is writing a book that is definitely going to
feature Gary pretty heavily. So I think I'm going to
save myself the headache of doing the research myself and
(42:36):
just wait to buy a copy of her book, because
I know she has been deep in the archives, I
mean around the world in special collections archives, and she
even interviewed the farm Belt Feurer himself, So I should
ask her when that's coming out, Because I'm really looking
forward to it, but we will get to Gary. Someone
also asked, when is the Matt Hale episode. I don't know.
(43:01):
I don't know. I mean there's gonna be one. There's
obviously gonna be one. Sometimes I find myself avoiding these
big name, weird little guys. You know, I haven't done
William Luther Pierce. I haven't done Matthew Hale. I haven't
actually done Bob Matthews, right. I sort of mentioned him
(43:21):
in passing and then went somewhere else Entirely, I feel
like I'm skipping these really big ones because I know
what kind of can of worms it's gonna open, and
it's gonna take me months to dig myself out. Like
once I really get into the deep lore about Matt
Hale and the World Church of the Creator, I know
(43:42):
I'm gonna end up with thirty new, weird little guys
whose whole lives I'm gonna have to map out before
I can move on. There's a lot going on there,
and we will get there. Because Matt Hale is still
in prison and occasionally filing weird motions with the court,
I'm signed up for docor alerts for him, so I
do check in on him from time to time, but
(44:04):
I'm just not ready. Will I ever cover weird little
guys abroad? Actually got a bunch of these people asking
about particular British, Australian, Canadian, and European individuals and groups
that they'd like to hear more about. And the answer
is yes, Yes, definitely. I'm very intrigued by the fascist international.
(44:29):
Nothing exists in a vacuum, right, there are no lone wolves,
and it turns out the wolf pack is international. You know,
my existing subject matter expertise is white supremacists in the
United States over the last sixty years or so. But
it seems like if you dig deep enough in any story,
there's some kind of international connection, and that's something I'd
(44:52):
like to explore more. Earlier this year, I spent three
months writing about South African Nazis and that story ended
up taking us all over the world. There were German
mercenaries in Croatia, there were guns smuggled through a port
in England by a British Nazi group, a South African
man wanted for murder in Namibia currently hiding out in England.
(45:14):
And American lobbyists who took money from the apartheid government.
There were a lot of people and groups in that
story I'd like to come back to and read more about.
And then at the end of last year in the
beginning of this year, I did a series of episodes
about Dennis Mahon and that clansman spent some time in Germany,
which I did discuss on the show, but I didn't
(45:37):
get into his deep connections to fascist groups in Canada.
And I'd still planned to come back to that Australian
Nazi who was deported after he tried to attack John
Patler in court after Rockwell's murder. He died under rather
mysterious circumstances in Rhodesia a few years later. So we'll
(45:58):
explore some Australian Nazis soon. What I consider covering reformed
weird little guys. That one's complicated. The answer isn't. No.
I'm not ruling it out. I'm not saying I'll never
do it, but it's something I would want to approach
(46:20):
very carefully. Just in general, I have a pretty bad
taste in my mouth about a lot of the popular
narratives about formers. A lot of the guys out there
who are making money taking speaking engagements talking about how
they used to be a Nazi. Those aren't guys I
want to talk to. Those are not guys whose opinions
(46:42):
I think are worth talking about, not all of them. Right,
I'm not saying that every guy with a publicist is
a grifter and a liar who's using a redemption arc
narrative to sell himself as an expert on political extremism,
and the kind of extremism he keeps talking about is
actually how the left is just as bad as the
stuff he used to do. Right, But I'm saying there
(47:03):
is a lot of that, and I don't think those
guys are really formers. I think if every story you
have to tell about your decades as a Nazi is
actually about how Antifa are the real enemy, you're not
a former Nazi. But that's just a hang up I
have about a couple guys in particular. I'm not saying
(47:25):
formers themselves are always acting in bad faith or that
they don't really exist. They do. They absolutely do, And
I've met some very decent people who are working very
hard to quietly make amends and grow as people and
really leave their past behind. People can get better, right,
(47:48):
People can change and I think those stories are important,
and I would like to find a way to tell
them responsibly, because that change has to come from inside
something that can grow out of a press release written
by a publicist and approved by an attorney. So the
answer to that is maybe, probably even. But it wouldn't
(48:13):
just be a one off interview about how making a
black friend cured a klansman and he's nice. Now, that's
not my kind of story. That's not a story I
would subject you to. I've seen a guy try to
sell that shit to a judge and I didn't believe
it when it was presented a sworn testimony, So I
wouldn't expect you to believe it on a podcast. I
(48:33):
do have a couple of formers in mind that I
would like to do a little bit more research about
the kind of story I would want to tell with
their help. There are a couple of people that I
think would be valuable to talk to about this. I'm
just I'm just not ready to do that right now.
There were kind of a surprising number of questions that
(48:55):
were just invitations to do my favorite thing, to wander
off topic. I'm still kind of self conscious about the
meandering nature of these stories, even though at this point
I recognize it as something that's integral to the show.
So I was really charmed by how many of you
(49:15):
just want to hear how far I can get from
the plot. It sounds like some of you are trying
to challenge me to dig my deepest hole yet, just
so you can watch me try to get back out
of it. The problem with answering those questions right now
is it would take two to three hundred hours. The
stuff that gets cut, the tangents that I have to
(49:38):
cut myself off from, those all kind of end up
piled up in a tab at the end of my
notes for each episode. There's this terrible, little, incomprehensible mess
of these half formed thoughts that I swear I'm going
to come back to because there's probably a whole episode
in there, or four or ten if I just let
(49:59):
myself keep going. One example of that that comes to
mind right now is a recent one. It's about Barbara
von Getz. She was the secretary for the American Nazi
Party who lived at the party's headquarters in the early
to mid sixties. She was also George Lincoln Rockwell's mistress
and the mother of his two daughters, who both died
(50:20):
in infancy of a genetic disorder. I talked a little
bit about her and about Rockwell's daughters in one of
the Frank Smith episodes, but before I wrote I think
like two paragraphs about Barbara, I spent a day or
two learning about her. Pretty much anyone who's discussed beyond
a passing mention gets this treatment. In the research process,
(50:44):
I like to make a family tree and go through
old newspapers for any mention of the person or any
of their immediate relatives. I'll check court records and places
where they've lived, and look at property and tax records.
If I can find them, I just sort of sketch
out the broad strokes of their life. Where have they been,
What were they doing before they showed up in this story?
(51:04):
Where did they go afterward? Do they have any meaningful
connection to anything else we might be interested in. I'm
not really looking for anything in particular. I'm just browsing,
and mostly I use none of this. I have half
a biography on a thousand guys I didn't even need.
(51:25):
But Barbara was such a question mark for me throughout
this story, right because I spent two months writing about
the last year of Rockwell's life, and there's not a
lot about her. I mean, she was the mistress and
personal secretary of the commander of the American Nazi Party.
She gave birth to and buried two of his children.
(51:48):
But that's kind of all she ever is in any
story about him. Women's stories just disappear, right. So I
was really curious about how she ended up so close
to one of the big leaders in the movement. And
it turns out her whole damn family was a bunch
(52:09):
of Nazis. Her sister and one of her brothers were
close to Otto Strausser, an actual Nazi. Like Otto Strausser
joined the Nazi Party in Germany in nineteen twenty five.
He is one of the two Strassers of Strasserism, and
Barbara's other brother spent time in Rhodesia in the nineteen
(52:32):
seventies as a mercenary. Her Nazi sister was inexplicably the
secretary at a mosque in Washington, d c. In the
nineteen seventies, which I only know because she was taken
hostage at that mosque during the Hanafi Siege of nineteen
seventy seven, and her brother Karl, fresh off his stint
(52:52):
as a race war mercenary, tried to negotiate for her release.
He went on to have a whole second act as
a fairly well known way. It's a premacist in Canada
in the eighties, and Barbara's nephew, the son of her
other brother, was arrested on Christmas Eve last year for
pouring whiskey into the holy water during midnight mass at
a Catholic church in Maryland. So I wasted a lot
(53:16):
of time on this. Obviously, I know a lot about
this family that I did not need or use in
that episode. I left all of that out because I
think I need to come back to this to sort
out what the hell is going on there. So for
those of you asking how far afield I tend to
get while I'm writing, I always make the family tree,
(53:39):
and sometimes it's a waste of time. Usually it's a
waste of time, but sometimes there's a Rhodesian mercenary and
two siblings who have long complicated relationships with Otto Strausser.
And that is why I will never stop wasting my
time researching stuff that doesn't make it into the episode.
(54:01):
I'll come back to it one day, But That is
absolutely enough for now. Those of you who are just
here for the Weird Little Guys, I'm sorry if I
disappointed you this week. But for the real writer die
listeners out there, the ones who like hearing about my
struggle to translate a Hungarian Nazi newspaper published by a
(54:22):
guy in Cincinnati, even though that has nothing to do
with what we're talking about, I hope this scratched that
itch for you at least a little bit. Next week
will be another episode that doesn't quite fit the usual mold.
I'll be checking back in on some of the Weird
Little Guys whose stories aren't over yet. Some of them
have come up on the show before and will be
(54:43):
familiar to you, and some of them are guys whose
episodes I'm not ready to write yet, but I can't
wait that long to introduce them into the Weird Little
Guys extended universe. It's something different, but I think it'll
still be fun. I promise I won't make a habit
of straying from the classic Weird Little Guys format you
know and love, but I am going to try a
(55:05):
few new things to get a little variety, and if
I'm being totally honest, I'm trying to figure out what
works in terms of redistributing the workload a little bit.
I love making this show, but I have to find
a way to make it a little more sustainable in
the long run, because I don't think I'm ever gonna
(55:26):
run out of Weird Little Guys. Weird Little Guys is
a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written,
and recorded by me while I hunger. Our executive producers
are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
by the wildly talented Wordy Gaigan. The theme music was
composed by Brad Diggert, and for the listener who asked
(55:49):
a question about that theme music, I will put a
link in the show notes to Brad's SoundCloud where you
can listen to the entire theme of the show. You
can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail
dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably
won't answer. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories
about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little
Guys severad it, but as always, don't post anything that's
(56:11):
going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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