The first in a two part series on Tom Metzger (deceased), former Grand Dragon of the California Klan turned Neo-Nazi, pioneer of using cable-TV for propaganda and hate music to recruit young people. Content Warnings. This episode is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Mulugeta Seraw. Notes/Links: Louis Meets the Nazis (at BBC iPlayer): https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02q8d5v/louis-theroux-louis-and-the-nazis James Mason and Tom Metzger on Race and Reason: https://www.bitchute.com/video/C80lEHzlqfaB/ WAR website: https://resist.com/ SPLC on Tom Metzger: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/tom-metzger SPLC on Mulugeta Seraw case: https://www.splcenter.org/news/2020/10/25/remember-mulugeta-30-years-after-splc-lawsuit-life-and-legacy-man-killed-hate-group IDSG Ep 2 on David Duke: https://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/i-dont-speak-german-episode-2-david-duke Uprising podcast: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-uprising-a-guide-from-por-73255667/
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to white nationalists, white supremacists, and what
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And it's episode 75 of I Don't Speak German, but I wish I did because it's a beautiful language from a beautiful country filled with lovely people.
Yeah, but we are this week talking, again it's a two-parter, and we're talking about Tom Metzger, who's a very big subject.
But before we get into that, Well, the reviews are in from our last couple of episodes, our two-parter on the National Justice Party 25-point programme, and we've had quite a lot of good responses.
Yeah, no, we had a number of really nice responses from people, you know, tagging us on Twitter and tagging the IDSGpod Twitter account and saying very, very nice things about how much they appreciated it.
I got quite a few messages in my DMs, I'm still kind of going through some of that, kind of talking about how much they appreciated it.
And we're not gonna talk about any of those because like I we wouldn't want to we won't want to actually Acknowledge our fans who make us feel good instead.
I thought it would be I thought it would be worthwhile to go through The haters some bad reviews.
Yeah some bad reviews and You know very good for what I what I'm presuming is is good faith criticism and I'm taking these from the bang forum and Right, is this some sort of Roosh V thing?
The Bang Bus or whatever.
No, this is, so Bang is a brand of energy drinks in the US and they may be in your, I don't know, are they in your country as well?
I have no idea.
I don't think so, but it's been a long time since I immersed myself in the world of energy drinks.
Yeah, I'm not a big energy drink person.
I drink coffee every morning and that serves my purpose for me, but... I get my energy from more healthy places like cocaine and amphetamines and things like that.
Yes, indeed, indeed.
It is a brand of energy drinks and the TRS guys, I mean a while back, decided they were going to turn it into a meme.
Are they all 14?
site where they were always just apparently they just all got into bang at the same time right so they were drinking it on they were drinking on camera and on their microphone they were doing all kinds of i mean and so everything just became a bang reference and they just kind of keep it going are they are they all 14 yes yes they are yeah yeah because it's got a bunch of like fruity flavors and so they talk about how this one was good and this one was bad and it was just a meme you know in between the racism they would just talk about bang
and so uh when they brought back their internal forum their paywall forum they uh they always try to give it a cutesy name and it just became bang That's the name of the forum.
The Paywall Forum.
So this is a forum where only they can, you know, committed TRS guys can... The cost of this forum is $10 a month.
So you have to pay $10 a month in order to have access to this forum.
Or you have to know somebody who pays them $10 a month, or something to that effect.
As you should know, I have access to the paywall material, and therefore I have access to Bang.
So you're not blowing your cover or anything, are you?
I mean, you know, I post every now and then, and, you know, come and find me.
It'll be fine.
It's not like it's that hard to create a new email address and create a new account.
You know, it's a thing that happens.
But I thought we'd read a few of the comments that we got from this.
I checked it yesterday evening and there are currently five pages of comments about our two-part episode.
It started shortly after the first one.
It's always nice to have engagement from listeners.
I'm not gonna read it all, but I'll read you a kind of a representative sample.
There's one kind of like thing that I would like to actually address here.
Yeah.
And that is the, well, we'll get to that.
I want to first, let's laugh at them for a while first, because, you know, this is the one, I ran into this just a little bit ago.
I'm not gonna name anybody, and I'm not, you know, whatever, it doesn't matter, I'm not gonna give these people any advertisement, but these are all just kind of regular listeners of the shows.
He says, you know, number one, this podcast is calling my T-levels to drop.
He's calling us soy boys.
Number two, the entire podcast is the horse laugh fallacy.
And then he puts a link down to a logical fallacy page, the Appeal to Ridicule, right?
So what he's saying is, all we're doing is laughing at them without ever actually engaging with any of their actual points.
Which, we were mocking.
I'm not arguing that we weren't mocking, but we did actually criticize in some detail the points that they made.
The reason I point this one out first is that every other fucking comment is just making fun of me personally.
You know, for instance, somebody asks how long before Dan gives in and joins us.
It's only a matter of time at this point.
Suggestions for his active tenants, please.
Somebody else responds, Harper needs to shave the beard and workout slash diet until he actually has a chin.
They call me fat.
You're fat?
They have defeated me, logically, with logic and reason.
Yeah.
Clearly the Jews control the world, they call me fat.
Oh my goodness.
That's right.
They don't like my beard and my hat.
That's not a fallacy of any kind, is it?
Of course.
I'm gonna read this and I'm gonna trust Jack to just bleep this.
I was trying not to read the ones with actual slurs in it, but this one is just classic.
Again, much logic, much reason.
They posted a photo from my Twitter profile picture right now of me standing on the shore of Lake Michigan, and I'm wearing a hat.
And they always laugh at my hats.
I like hats.
Hats are cool.
But it's a gorgeous picture of Lake Michigan.
It's just a selfie of me kind of standing in front of the lake, and that's my current Twitter profile.
And so they post that, and then underneath it posts...
All of these fucking fat, fuck, cucklord, bearded, bugman, faggot, nigger, atheist, fedora tippers all look the same.
You don't look cool.
You don't look fuckable to any woman.
You look like a fucking fat, fuck, cucklord, bearded, bugman, faggot, nigger, atheist, fedora tipping piece of dog shit.
You look disgusting.
Shave that shit off your face.
Take that dumb hat off.
Go to the fucking gym.
Lay off the soy and go outside you fucking fat faggot.
Um...
Go outside, under a photograph of you standing- Of me standing outside!
Yeah, so up to their usual logical standard, I see, yeah.
Right, exactly, exactly.
I didn't realise Lake Michigan was in your living room, Daniel.
It is!
It turns out that's how wealthy I am.
The Jews pay me well by allowing me to own the entirety of Lake Michigan, and it's really just underneath a dome, you see.
Like a third of all the fresh water on the planet is owned personally by me, and this is how I choose to spend my time.
Also, another guy, he actually put in a little bit of effort to respond, and saying that you're lying about, and I'm not going to read this whole thing, but he's saying we're kind of lying about what Strike and Mike are actually saying, because what they're really saying, for instance, he says, they all complain that capitalism That we're not actually engaging with their critique of capitalism, for instance.
And we'll get to that here in a second.
But, like, for instance, he says, you know, like, Strike and Mike have always said, we're going to restructure the economy to offer full employment for white people and presumably for any non-whites in North America.
They also say that if automation is done, the wealth generated by the robots needs to be fairly distributed, not just put in the hands of the elite.
Now, they may have, over the course of the many thousands of hours of contents that these people have produced, said just the exact of those sentences.
It's not in the platform.
They didn't explicitly talk about automation and where the results of that would go.
In fact, they were very cagey about exactly what kind of economic system they were going to do, and they were self-contradictory.
Oh, bitty places.
I can only criticize them based on the things that they actually put on the platform, and the things that they used when defending the platform.
And if they're going to exclude African Americans and other ethnic minorities, despite respecting their rights, from being full citizens, something tells me they're not going to get a share of the benefits of automation.
Just a hunch.
Just a hunch.
Yeah.
You know, they got obsessed with the idea that I said these people don't know what the IWW is.
They don't know what the IWW is, but they got into a long debate amongst themselves about, like, about, you know, oh no, the AFL-CIO isn't much better.
It's actually worked for whites.
It's actually worked.
It's actually a working union, unlike the IWW.
Who knows what the IWW is anymore?
Plenty of people do, and if you had any understanding of what the left actually was, you might have some understanding of it.
You don't have to agree with the IWW and everything.
I don't agree fully with it.
I'm just saying it's a radical left organization that if you were interested at all in the things that happened on the left, you should probably be at least vaguely aware of.
Yeah.
That's great.
Status.
Yeah, it's great.
Let's see.
You do occasionally get the ones that say we should go on their show, that the TRS boys should invite us on to debate them or have a conversation at least.
Again, their fans say that often.
Striking Mike, never do.
Interesting.
Yeah, it's funny though.
I am not interested in going on the Daily Show or any of the other shows and having a conversation or debate with these people in the slightest.
No.
But it is interesting that they've never even tried to challenge me to that, so...
They make fun of my accent, they make fun of my... the fact that I say um a lot.
Make fun of that.
It's fine.
Do the guys on the Daily Show always speak completely fluently?
With no ums and ahs and pauses or anything like that?
They are 100% crystal clear BBC quality at all times.
Actually, they are pretty professional.
I mean, I'll say like they managed to fill the air pretty well, and they have enough kind of experience doing this at this point that they managed to, you know, there are sort of like neuro-linguistic tricks you can use to kind of convince yourself not to say I'm in awe, and I've been working on it.
I'm just really bad at it.
I never claimed to be a professional broadcaster.
They do a pretty good job, but they also don't do prep.
They fill the Time for six hours on their main show every week plus usually four hours of striking Mike and at least two hours of the other call-in show Every every week, so they're mostly just filling hours at this point and so we produce An hour hour and a half every week or two of a show that is designed to be you know Hopefully.
on point and actually has you know sort of a sort of a logic behind it whereas they uh fill hours and play videos and then laugh over them um so um you know it is it does always amuse me when they go why can't these guys get to the point now let me go listen to the next three hour striking mic where they just go off on tangents for three hours um yeah um there's a lot more to this um Um, I thought about just posting all these to my Twitter because it's hilarious.
Um, but, uh, I'm not.
But, uh, they did, uh, the one, the one kind of, like, I think, thing that we should maybe expand on slightly is something that you said.
And, I mean, I have a response to this.
I'm kind of springing this on you, but, um, That anti-semitism and anti-capitalism are incompatible, and they find that such a ridiculous statement, that like any human being could ever say that.
Well, who are the capitalists?
They're all Jews, and therefore, how can this be true?
You know, I heard names they had seen at the end, all these names, they're all Jews, they're all Jewish people who run the capital, and therefore, and so...
I will just say that there's a difference between a critique of capitalism that's built on the wrong people are in charge of the capitalist enterprises...
versus one that is an actual systemic critique of capitalism.
And a systemic critique of capitalism is the only kind of critique of capitalism that is actually a critique of capitalism.
If your point is, I like capitalism just fine, so long as it's people like me or people who I approve of are in charge, and nicer people are in charge of it, you're not actually making a critique of capitalism.
And that's just like, that's so fundamental that I just don't like, they don't see it though.
What they see is, well, if it wasn't for Jews controlling the banks, then, like, white people wouldn't do this to each other, and therefore, yadda yadda yadda, you know, things would be better.
You just gotta get rid of the Jews, because they're the ones actually benefiting from all these things.
It is just that kind of like fundamentally like poison the brain that they just can't see through that.
So please correct me or expound or whatever you want to do to that.
But that's kind of like my immediate response to that, you know, to just that idea.
It is simply not the case that capitalism is a Jewish phenomenon, that most capitalists are Jews, that it's run by Jews.
That is nonsense.
It is simply not the case that white people wouldn't do that to each other.
They do and have and are doing it.
Just look at all the people Donald Trump has fucked over in his life.
Yeah.
If you really think that, if your concept of capitalism, the thing that you say you're against, I'm against capitalism, right?
What you mean by capitalism is this big scam or conspiracy or whatever it is that's run by evil Jews.
You're not talking about capitalism.
You're not talking about the real world phenomenon of capitalism because that's just not true.
That's a racist fantasy.
And the other thing is that the vast majority of, firstly, the majority of capitalists are not Jews.
The vast majority of Jews are not capitalists, which means the vast majority of Jews are people that we need on side.
We need to be unified with them as people.
It's in our common interest to unify against actual capitalists and actual capitalism.
So if you're an anti-Semite, You're going to be excluding that section of the working class.
Just as if you're a racist, you're going to be excluding that vast section of the working class that's people of colour, people in the Global South, etc.
And on and on with all these groups.
So, yes, I stand by that completely.
Anti-capitalism, real anti-capitalism, is completely incompatible with anti-Semitism.
Firstly, if you're an anti-Semite because you think capitalism is a Jewish phenomenon, that's just insane, delusional, Factually, objectively, demonstrably ridiculous nonsense, aside from being racist, to the point where you're not just prejudiced against Jews, you don't have a fucking clue what capitalism actually is.
You don't know what the actual problem with it is.
And the other thing is that if you're an anti-Semite, you are just turning your back.
And of course, on that section of the people you need to unify with in struggle against capitalism, in furtherance of your common interests against capitalism as workers, etc.
And the other thing, of course, is that, yet another thing, is that Antisemitism never comes alone.
No bigotry comes alone.
Bigotries flock together.
If you're a bigot in one area, you're going to be a bigot in others.
And these people are living proof of that, aren't they?
Agreed, completely.
So, I think we can, I'll keep watching the thread until they find my account and ban me, and then I'll watch it from another account, I assume.
But yeah, until then I think we can move into the Tom Metzger conversation.
Now, of course they are going to say, like, you didn't respond to all our points and you just mocked us, and it's like, you're, you know, as long as you're fucking, like, As long as you're taking Mike Enoch seriously at all on this, you're not worth engaging.
He's just wrong on a responsible level.
Well, firstly, it's not true.
We did respond.
Yeah, no, we did.
They're just lying about that too, of course.
They would say we didn't, no matter what we did.
You know, if we released a four-hour podcast that was just us forensically going through, doing no mockery, no recites whatsoever, just us going through their points, so, you know, quote-unquote points, they'd still say we didn't engage with their arguments.
Because, and here's the thing, they're fascists, which means, A, they don't have a fucking clue what's going on, their ideas are delusional, and B, they're fucking liars.
So this is precisely why you don't engage with them, you oppose them.
And that's what I do, anyway.
But I oppose them from a standpoint of reality, which is, funnily enough, capitalism isn't a Jewish conspiracy.
Grow the fuck up!
They really are a bunch of 14-year-old boys who happen to be able to maintain gainful employment, for the most part.
Yeah.
All right.
Tom Metzger died on November 4th of this year, 2020.
Yes, he did.
And he's kind of long been on my long list of people to cover.
He's an incredibly important figure in a lot of ways.
And for no other reason than because he was involved in various sections of the movement for, I mean, since Arguably the late 60s until the time of his death.
So, you know, something like 50 years.
Yeah, a little over 50 years, like 54 years or so.
One of the issues I've had with doing a Tom Metzger episode, and certainly a pair of Tom Metzger episodes, is that I have not done the deepest of deep possible dives personally into his archives and his history.
That's partly because there's so much of it, and partly because As you start to kind of look at him a little more closely, he's kind of always a bridesmaid, never a bride, and all these things.
He's always kind of the second-run version of anything that he managed to kind of get a hold of.
But that said, there are some really important things that we should cover in his history, and we're taking the excuse of his death to just go ahead and do a pair of episodes.
In the second episode, we will be covering in some detail his use of the internet, which is stuff that's really interesting to me and Tom Metzger's background, because he was one of the pioneers in that.
And I think talking about what white power internet networks looked like in the BBS era in the mid-80s is exactly the kind of thing that I want to spend a lot of time on.
So we're going to kind of skip that for now, and we're going to do that in the next episode.
Instead, let's start with kind of the basic potted history of who Tom Metzger is.
He's born in 1938, so he's 12 years older than David Duke, with whom he had a long… Their careers kind of run in parallel in a lot of ways.
Metzger joins the army in the early 60s.
He serves, apparently, honorably.
He joins the John Birch Society, which we could probably do an episode of the John Birch Society at some point.
Although, I don't know, that's another, like, that's just kind of like more of the ancient history stuff.
It's very well covered.
But he joins the John Birch Society.
He works for, he kind of distributes leaflets for George Wallace, when George Wallace was running for president in 68, in California, where he lived.
He kind of starts out as kind of a right-wing Republican type, you know, not necessarily kind of an explicit white nationalist type, but kind of more on that range of things.
He starts getting involved with a number of people within kind of the far-right circles and joins the Klan in the early 70s.
I believe in 1975 is when he kind of officially joins the Klan.
After he meets a young man named David Duke.
He joins David Duke's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and later becomes kind of the Grand Dragon of the California branch of that organization.
And again, kind of like parallels David Duke for a few years.
He is involved in the Klan Border Watch, which we mentioned in Episode 2 when we talked about David Duke, which kind of was David Duke's first big claim to fame in the 70s.
I mean, this is an incident in which, you know, the Klan shows up at the border in San Diego as a way of, you know, they did a big publicity stunt to oppose illegal immigration, etc, etc.
And this is the thing that kind of brings David Duke to prominence for the first time.
Metzger does the same thing that Duke does in about 1980.
He goes a little bit more respectable mainstream.
He drops the robes, he leaves the clan officially, and starts to kind of wear a shirt and a tie, and he does a lot of beauty appearances.
And he spends most of the 80s up until probably the mid-90s as an occasional – he kind of enters like the talk show era in this real way.
And so he does like a ton of talk show appearances.
He does the – he does Geraldo.
He does like one of the – I think the first or second episode of Whoopi Goldberg had a very brief stint as a talk show host long before The View in I think the early 90s.
And he was I think the first or second guest on her show, which only ran for a handful of episodes.
So whatever.
But you can find all this stuff online.
If you Google for Tom Metzger or if you go onto YouTube and look for Tom Metzger's name, you will find copious talk show appearances from all over the place.
And again, there's so much material out there that it's kind of hard to kind of summarize in a In, you know, just a handful of, you know, a handful of linear statements, right?
He also does a lot of these appearances with his son, John, who, if you recall, or if you're familiar with the history of Geraldo Rivera, In 1988, Geraldo Rivera brought some civil rights workers and some Klan guys onto his show to debate one another.
A fight ensues, and Geraldo's nose gets broken.
John Metzger is deeply involved in that.
So that's not Tom, that's John.
That's Tom's son.
And John and Tom kind of work together.
I'm not sure exactly when John kind of left the thing.
I haven't really seen a lot of references to him.
I'll kind of keep digging and see kind of what comes up, but at a certain point it seems like John decides to kind of leave this shit behind, but Tom never does.
Under other circumstances, I might be inclined to think kindly of the person that broke Geraldo Rivera's nose, but not in this case.
I'm not sure who actually broke the nose.
No, it's a thrown chair that does it, isn't it?
Yeah, I think it's just somebody throws a chair or whatever, and yeah, it's kind of one of those incidents.
But Metzger, Tom Metzger, is very well known, and he actually debated with John.
John and Tom both appeared on a Christopher Hitchens show in the 90s.
So, I mean, again, they kind of went everywhere.
I found some clips of him on the McLaughlin Report being interviewed by John McLaughlin.
I found, you know, I mean, he was all over the place.
He did a ton of appearances.
I think he did CNN.
So in addition to his sort of like media appearances in which he was expressing himself as this kind of radical, this kind of revolutionary wing of what David Duke was trying to sell more towards kind of Politicization, right?
So David Duke is trying to get people to vote for David Duke.
And this is also where Tom Metzger starts, but he kind of grows increasingly disenchanted with that as he loses a whole bunch of elections, or at least a handful of elections very, very badly.
And so he embraces a more revolutionary ethos.
Sorry, go ahead.
One of the crucial part of his electoral or, you know, attempted electoral career is that he got the Democratic nomination, didn't he?
Yeah, he did.
For some local office in California.
I forget exactly what it was.
To the shock of many people.
And then he's defeated by the Republican.
Right.
I mean, because, you know, in a lot of those districts, there's, you know, in these kind of very safe districts, you can basically get Yeah, if the Republicans gonna win by 90 points or the Democrats gonna win by 90 points, the other party just doesn't even put up a candidate, you know, and so a lot of these guys will kind of use that as a way of, you know, kind of getting on the debate stage and getting out there and kind of expressing their views, even though they know they're gonna get their ass kicked in the general election.
So this is something that you see as a kind of a general strategy.
Also, certainly in 1980, the Democratic Party was still in the transition away from Yeah, kind of Dixiecrat era.
So there's a little bit more.
It sounds a little bit more absurd today than it sounded then.
But I mean, expect the National Justice Party to try this at a certain point if they decide to start running candidates.
I'm sure they will find some safe Republican district, grab the Democratic nomination for some local office, and use it as a way of getting on TV.
I'm sure this is going to happen.
Yeah, yeah.
I was going to say, you know, Metzger has flirted with third position-esque positions, hasn't he?
He was a pretty explicitly third positionist at the end of his life.
He flirted with a lot of stuff.
He starts off as more of a tax protester type in the early 70s, just kind of generically anti-government.
That was kind of the beginning of his radicalization.
He says, and I've got a clip here we're going to play shortly, where he read Siege.
He met James Mason, and that kind of just intensified his radicalization.
He becomes even more of a kind of revolutionary as he kind of reads those newsletters and reads the book.
Yeah, this is it, because at various times he's claimed to be pro-left, pro-worker, pro-union, etc.
And he's all over the place.
I mean, he calls, like, Jack London one of the great socialist figures, and he's inspired by Jack London, etc., etc.
Yeah, there's a lot of kind of stuff out there where he's kind of been, again, all over the map, and always kind of, again, kind of the second-tier figure through a lot of this, you know?
Someone who was doing, you know, a bunch of kind of mainstream television appearances, but he wasn't as popular as David Duke.
So he gets noticed, but he's not noticed in the same way.
You know, he's kind of out there doing this revolutionary, you know, kind of really break-the-system stuff, but not as hardcore as James Mason.
So he's kind of a secondary figure to James Mason.
I checked Blood and Politics, which is the Leonard Zeskin book which I use for That's kind of a handy-dandy resource.
He is mentioned, the word Metzger appears I believe 94 times in the search, so that does kind of tell you a lot, but it's mostly where he's, again, kind of a secondary figure.
He's there, he's organizing, he's kind of doing things, but he's rarely kind of the star of the show.
In 1983, he founds a group called the White Aryan Resistance.
This becomes his major political party, or his major kind of political organizing, all the way up until the time of his death.
The White Aryan Resistance still has a webpage up even after his death.
It has a ton of his kind of radio appearances and TV appearances.
It has a full Or at least what appears to be pretty full, accounting of the Liberty Bell, which is a right-wing kind of Klan newsletter that was put out for something like 15 years in the 80s and 90s.
And at a certain point he goes to prison, or he doesn't go to prison, well he does go to prison, but At a certain point, uh, well, we should, we should talk about this.
This is, this is kind of the, sorry, I'm kind of laughing at it because I was trying to find the, uh, the funny in this, but, uh, there's no funny in this.
Um, there was a murder of a, of a young man, uh, named, um, Milageta Saraw.
And, uh, he was, uh, killed by a couple of, um, white Aryan resistance members on November 12th, 1988.
1988.
Apparently the three men with their girlfriends were wandering around.
They were carrying baseball bats.
They saw this guy who was an Ethiopian immigrant and beat him to death with baseball bats.
They go to trial.
They are quickly convicted of this crime.
And the This is in Portland, Oregon.
This is in Portland, Oregon, yes.
Which, you know, very much levels of resonance that we can get here from this story.
But Metzger claimed that the man did a civic duty by killing him.
And in Discovery, it was discovered that there were numerous exhortations that Metzger, for instance, would say, carry baseball bats instead of clubs because you have a plausible liability if you're caught by the cops, etc.
You can more likely claim self-defense.
The SPLC and the ADL get together.
They do a civil lawsuit.
Against Metzger and the white Aryan resistance and the various people involved and they succeeded trial and bankrupting Metzger and the organization and After 1990 which is when the civil suit came down Metzger works at a fraction of his former strength And I think even you know he was making TV appearances up until the mid 90s, but I think that really particularly after the Oklahoma City bombing there was a lot less sense of
Oh, like, let's bring on the kind of goofy white supremacist guy to do commentary on our talk shows.
And that seems to be kind of the key there that kind of prevented him from really going further.
But you can see a definite droop in his kind of notoriety after that.
The other big thing to know about him is that from the mid-1980s, I think from 1984 up until kind of the mid-90s, he did a regular public access talk show called Race and Reason.
And a whole bunch of those episodes are on YouTube and on BitChute, at least a few of them.
I would love to grab more of them as I've been looking through them.
There's not a whole lot out there, but there are quite a few episodes that are still excellent.
I know they're probably available by VHS if I were to order them from the White Area Resistance website.
If you wanted to go full hauntological.
If I wanted to just go and pay $20 a tape for Dead Man's 30-year-old television show, I'm sure I could do that.
But yeah, he did a bunch of public access.
And public access is one of those things that is pretty... I mean, he was allowed to Kind of go out and do the thing that he said and how does he always frame his episodes?
You know, this is the real free speech where we could say whatever we want.
They always fucking frame themselves as free speech warriors, right?
Yeah, that's the that's the literally the thing.
So he loses his house.
He loses his organization.
You know, the victims, the family of Sarah kind of get everything.
And that's kind of the big picture on Metzger, at least in terms of its, you know, the kind of peaks and valleys.
That's who Metzger is.
What most people, and if you have kind of a quickie, if you have some comments right there, I know I've just kind of talked for a while.
If there's anything that you think is unclear, please let me know now, because then we'll kind of go into the meat of the episode, right?
I would just say, it's very interesting, I don't think you're going to talk about this, it's very interesting to me that the Mulugeta Soror case, and by the way, I think this episode should be respectfully dedicated to the memory of Mulugeta Soror.
It's very interesting to me that it takes place in Portland, Oregon, which is a, as you say, a very resonant place at the moment with the Black Lives Matter uprising.
And it's a fascinating place in terms of its history.
It started as kind of an attempt to build a explicitly, by law, white-to-utopia.
And I would strongly recommend, I mean, we always do this, but I would strongly recommend people go and listen to the new podcast from Robert Evans, Uprising, which is about the Portland uprising.
And the first episode is all about why this happened in Portland.
And he goes into loads of the fascinating history of Portland in terms of the politics of race and racism in the United States.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
The other kind of big story, and I love this just because it fits into...
Again, kind of where the alt-right was going to be in, you know, 20 years since.
In 1991, he agreed to stop selling t-shirts of Bart Simpson in a Nazi uniform, with the words pure Nazi dude on them.
I have not been able to find the actual, I mean, if you go to Google Nazi Bart Simpson, you can find Memes all over the place.
I can't find a photo of the actual t-shirt He was selling I would love to get I would love to know exactly what that looked like It's just that's just one of those things that kind of tickles my the back of my brain from now And then it's like what did that what did that t-shirt?
I mean how professionally was that made?
I'm just curious.
I'm just very curious, but he did I mean, you know you also and we're gonna get into this here in a second, but the the The big thing that he kind of runs into after he's kind of radicalized, after he reads Siege, is that he does sort of push a lot more of that kind of lone wolf organizing, the kind of leaderless resistance.
Yeah.
Louis Bean, Gordon Baum, and he kind of gets deeply invested in that.
And a lot of the things that you kind of find him associated with in the 80s and 90s.
Are the various criminal trials of people who were, um, who got in trouble with the FBI effectively, uh, during this, during this time.
And, uh, the reason we're not going more into detail on that is that it ends up being a, I have to like prep for that for a while to sort of like get all the details in line because there are a whole lot of fucking trials that happened during this time period.
And they all run together in my head.
Um, but also, uh, it really is just a list of, it really is just a list of like, uh, Ex-person was arrested for, you know, hiding guns.
He went to trial this such and such a date.
He had this lawyer.
He did this thing.
Metzger was hanging around in the periphery at the time.
There's a whole lot of like stories like that, but there are a whole lot of stories like that.
Again, check out Blood and Politics.
Linda Zeskind goes through that and Pretty good detail, although he barely covers the the Sirocco.
I mean, it's he really just it's basically a paragraph and it's like after some people after you know members of the white areas It's killed a Ethiopian immigrant, you know, and it's just kind of more about sort of the more political machinations around it So that was I thought interesting because that book is so detailed in so many ways.
It really didn't cover that trial very well.
But what most people will probably remember, if they know Tom Metzger's name at all, is that there was a documentary, a BBC documentary in 2003 called Louis and the Nazis.
And this is where Louis Thoreau was part of his then kind of extant series in which he would kind of visit kooky people and ask them awkward questions and produce documentaries about them.
And I did re-watch this documentary.
It is very difficult to find in the United States.
I believe it's on BBC iPlayer, but I did manage to source it so I could re-watch it.
I didn't watch this in 2003, but I would have seen this in 2007 or so.
in like 2007 or so and um i did watch this in 2003 on first broadcast yeah i found it on like google video in 2007 or something because i remember i was you know i had a job where i just had you know some kind of like spare time to kill in the middle of the day and i didn't care if i watched a movie on my computer or something So, you know, if I could download, if I could get, like, Google Video, I could, like, watch this documentary with headphones in or whatever.
Memories.
Anyway, the documentary is structured, it's basically Louis Theroux, who is the son of Paul Theroux, the novelist.
Oh, is he?
I didn't know that.
Yeah, yeah, he is, he is.
Louis Theroux actually started off, like, he was doing stuff with TV Nation, which is Michael Moore's show in the 90s.
And I think that's where he first kind of ran across the American white supremacist movement and the white power movement.
And so I know he produced some segments in the 90s for Michael Moore Show, which I have not tracked down to watch.
Again, I used to watch TV Nation back when it was on first broadcast.
So you probably ran into it then I think I for whatever reason I never really watched TV nation It was never like kind of a big part of my I know I I know I saw it a bit it I think it was just like far enough down the cable dial that for whatever reason is never clicked with me, but Let's just start with this clip and I think this will kind of make clear some of the issues that this documentary has.
And so we're just going to start off here.
So what I've done here is I've cut the first maybe seven minutes of this into a kind of two and a half minute clip.
And this kind of indicates Louis' first meeting Metzger on screen and some of the early interactions that he has with Tom Metzger.
And you'll get a sense of the structure of the documentary by listening to these clips.
So let's just play this and go from there.
Hello.
Hello.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
You must be Tom.
And what branch of the government are you from?
I'm Tom.
I'm from the BBC, the broadcasting arm of the government.
Oh, the heavy duty boys.
Come on in.
I mean, are you a Nazi?
I think I'm more serious than most of the Nazis I've met.
I'm a Pan-Aryanist.
I believe in white people all over the world sticking together.
Here's the latest paper.
So this is the main work you do, really, is, um... Newspaper, internet... Laurie!
My long-lost little angel.
Who is Laurie?
Mary?
She's the youngest daughter.
Okay.
Hello, guys!
Hello!
How do you do?
I'm Louis.
Nice to meet you.
What do you do, Laurie?
I work at Starbucks.
Do you?
Can I go to school?
Do you consider yourself a racist?
No, but I think in everyone's own way that everyone is racist because my whole life, you know, all throughout school, kids, white, black, whatever, would hate me because of my last name.
Really?
Yeah.
You pointed at me.
No, well, I mean... Well, why would they do that?
Not because of you, but because, you know, Metzger.
I never hung any of those kids.
Ooh, you know, is your dad Tom?
Because they'd heard of Tom Metzger as a leading racist and... You know, even now today at work, you know, people talk about me.
Could you go out with a Jewish guy?
I mean, I can.
I'm of age.
I can, you know, do my own choices.
How would you feel about that?
Would you worry about what your dad would think?
Maybe a little, but not much.
I'm not gonna ask for his approval.
That wouldn't make me too happy.
Well, I'm not.
I know you're not.
What would you do, then?
Well, I would not have a Jew with my daughter in this house.
Slice of life with the Nazis!
Don't you know Nazis make pasta just the same as the rest of us do?
We're reproducing copyright material here with these clips so I think we're probably obliged to do a little bit of criticism.
Sure.
We always try to encapsulate these in criticism, even for the Nazi clips.
But yeah, I would hate to get a takedown notice from the BBC.
I will just say that I really hate this style of documentary.
I have a real intolerance for cringe comedy and the comedy of embarrassment, and I think the whole shtick of Louis Theroux As I say, I watched this at the time, and I watched several Louis Thoreau episodes.
You know, I remember watching the one about the Westboro Baptist Church, and I watched another one where he visits the Aryan Nations compound and stuff like that, and I watched them from a sense of interest in these issues, rather than a liking for this style.
I haven't got a problem with Louis himself, he's okay.
But I just really do not like this style of documentary because to me it's very much like cringe comedy.
The whole point is to kind of point and laugh at the freaks, you know?
Firstly, I don't think that's the right way to approach this topic.
I mean, I don't know how much you want to go into this.
The the subject of no, please feel free the subject of for instance Muller get us raw does not arise in the content in the con Right.
Well, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't come up exactly.
Yeah, we'll get into that here here in a second But we really don't get into any of the facts or reality about Tom Metzger.
What we do get is Louis Theroux following him around with a camera and just
Inviting the audience to laugh up their sleeve at this guy and to be uncomfortable along with like in that clip We've just played the daughter's discomfort is palpable and you really I mean I don't know anything about her or who she is or what sort of person she I couldn't find I couldn't find I mean I did I did not let do like a full people search on these but I did try to you know Google around and see if you know she was active in any way so as far as I know I
All of all of Metzger's kids just kind of fell away to whatever degree they were involved with stuff the stuff really Over the course of the last I mean this this this episode was 16 years ago, right?
Yeah, and You're the documentary was made 16 years ago, and it does seem that in the last 16 years there has been I mean I don't I don't see any kind of like direct contact between anybody These days yeah Well, he has survived by his wife, who was apparently the woman who spoke briefly in that clip.
I believe she's still alive, and she is his second wife.
And if you remember the documentary, she is significantly younger than Tom Metzger!
Yes, yeah.
His first wife died, I believe, which is tragic, of course.
And he was actually lit out of... he was serving a jail sentence.
Um, at the time he was sentenced to six months and, uh, for, um, I forget exactly what it was.
I think it was involvement in a cross burning was he, he wasn't, he was convicted of some crime related to that.
And, um, he got out after 45 days because she was dying, which, uh, you know, if it wasn't like a violent incineration of this neo-Nazi.
You'd be like, man, that's actually, you know, that's touching.
Yeah, I agree.
If only poor African-American men who stole $20 from the cash register got that much leniency on their synthesis.
Indeed, yeah, I have very mixed feelings about that.
I mean, I think that's the right approach, broadly speaking, but yeah, what an undeserving subject of that much understanding.
But yeah, there's a say the daughters.
It's just it's to me.
It's just skin crawlingly uncomfortable It just makes me very unhappy and I get the distinct impression from that that she's really that she's had a rough time being his daughter Yeah, I mean it does there.
I mean she's probably like 20 or 21 I mean she says she's in school and working at Starbucks and this is kind of the last time she appears in the documentary so I don't know anything about her, I don't want to speak for her about her, I don't know.
I'm just saying in that clip it makes me very uncomfortable.
I kind of watch these things these days with an eye towards production, in a weird way.
Yeah.
And as someone who kind of does some of this work of trying to document these people and trying to understand how to express this in ways that are not platforming them, but in ways that give you enough context for their actual history.
And you know, like, while the cringe comedy stuff, it's very 2003.
It's very 2003.
One thing that I – a more recent project that Louis Thoreau did was the My Scientology movie, which – in which he kind of actually starts asking questions of Scientologists and the – I forget what the name of the fucking church is.
But he starts asking questions there and he starts to get threatened by the church and it kind of becomes this kind of really interesting dynamic.
But even there, Thoreau is sort of dependent on there being another source of information.
So like the My Scientology movie from 2018 is very useful if you've already seen Going Clear.
And they make a really great two-point thing because Louis Thoreau can kind of get at the impressionistic, like what does it feel like to actually kind of be a part of this in a way that like a more traditional documentary can.
Can't but the more traditional documentary actually gives you like the scaffolding and the information you need in order to kind of understand What's actually happening?
Yeah, you know behind the scenes of what Louis Theroux is doing and I think that like it makes sense for Louis to do this in 2003 In the sense that at the time, there were all these kind of like, you know, big scare quote documentaries about like hate on the internet, you know, Stormfront and big letters and, you know, kind of big, you know, scary music and everything.
And at that point, the, you know, the white nationalist movement is on a definite downswing.
I mean, if you look at, you know, sort of the stuff that's kind of going on, I mean, we're hanging out in these people's houses and, you know, at one point we attend this like, oh, very well attended white power meetup among a bunch of skinheads.
And it's like 30 people listening to white power music, you know, in somebody's backyard.
I mean, this is kind of where the movement was.
And I think there was this sense that around that time period that you could kind of treat these people as cooks.
You know, you didn't have to sort of push that hard, particularly in the way that it was kind of being pushed hard at the time.
Yes.
I, you know, I would love to talk to, I mean, if anybody has a line on Louis Theroux, I would love to chat with him about this, honestly.
You know, I don't think that's gonna happen, but I would love to have a chat with him about some of the issues in the documentary and how he feels about it today.
That said, Going back to the production issue, what I found interesting is that Louis does not ask...
Tom Metzger, about any of his prior legal engagements.
He doesn't ask him about the history, he doesn't ask him much about how he wants to get into things.
It's more like, you just said something racist, don't you think that's racist?
Don't you think that's bad?
There's a lot of that kind of stuff.
Yeah, there's a bit not long after the bit you, or just before the bit you exerted, where Tom Metzger just comes out with the N-word.
And, again, you get the distinct impression that he's doing it deliberately to shock Louis, and Louis' response to that really is just to say, you know, please don't say that, I find it offensive.
Which is fair enough in itself, but it's not... Well, it's interesting that he asks him, would you not say that?
And then he says, well, this is my house, I'm gonna say it if I want to say it.
Yeah.
around me, like, as a personal favor.
Yeah.
Like, I admit that you have the right.
I'm not arguing that.
And he's always, like, unfailingly polite, and, like, that's part of his, like, power.
That's kind of the superpower is how he seems to be able to navigate this stuff.
Oh, yeah, I mean...
He's just overwhelmingly polite, right?
Louis Thoreau has this kind of weaponized Englishness, doesn't he?
This sort of stereotypical, polite, slightly awkward, half-a-dent quality that he weaponizes against people.
It's like if Hugh Grant were hanging out with Nazis for two weeks.
I dare say, if you would not mind, would you turn the swastika the other way?
Thank you very much.
I apologize, that was horribly offensive to everyone.
But what I find interesting is that he doesn't ask Tom Metzger about his history with the law or anything like that.
At least not that we see on camera.
I don't know how much extra footage is lying around.
What was made of this?
Can I ask something?
I don't know if you know or if you have an opinion about this, but given his financial problems and his obligation to pay reparations to Mulugeta Soror's family, was he paid to do this?
That is always a question with documentaries.
What were the financial considerations?
What did he get out of this?
Most documentarians, we consider it, you know, like, if you're going to incur costs on someone, like, if you're going to ask them to, like, travel expenses or something like that, is usually kind of, like, worth paying for, like, if, like, if I'm asking you to drive to Los Angeles and it's gonna cost you $200 worth of gas, we reimburse you for gas, but, like, it's usually not considered okay to actually provide people a actual, like, financial incentive to come on the thing.
I have no idea what the rules of the BBC are now and what they were at the time and how closely Louis Theroux might have honed to those.
I am assuming that everything was very much above board and that they withheld to ethical standards.
I've not seen any indication that they haven't.
Like, I haven't seen criticism of it on that level.
Most of the criticism I see is more on the kind of where we're landing of like, we didn't really ask a lot of questions about the history here.
I didn't mean to imply any... I think that's an artistic choice.
...any malfeasance on the part of Louis Theroux or the BBC.
There's a weird sort of begrudging vibe from Metzger the whole time.
He's obviously on board with this happening.
He lets the camera crew into his house.
He lets them follow him around on this trip to Mexico, et cetera, et cetera.
But there is this feeling of begrudging it, like, oh, it's you guys again.
I have to let you in.
I wonder if it was something that he agreed to out of... I don't know.
I don't know why he would agree to it.
I have an angle on this, right?
OK.
This is what I was getting to.
And that is, he doesn't ask Metzger about any of his prior convictions or anything like that.
But when he meets Metzger's manager, who was a very recently acquired manager from everything that we see, In the documentary.
This guy, John Marazzetti, I believe is his last name.
It's an Italian last name.
He meets this guy, and this guy is a former lawyer for cocaine dealers for working with Pablo Escobar.
And he goes to prison for a few years for his work being a lawyer for Pablo Escobar, for all intents and purposes.
And then gets out and says, well, I couldn't do that business anymore, so I have to do this now.
And he does ask John fairly pointed questions about, so what was it that you were doing?
And he asks John, Questions about Tom Metzger's material and about, like, does he find this offensive?
Is this something that you really want to be associated with?
Etc.
Etc.
And I see, I mean, again, very little from my not ton of research that I did in terms of, like, kind of tracking these people down.
But I see very few references to this guy past this documentary.
And so it strikes me, A, that there were some preconditions made that Tom Metzger had for What questions were not going to be asked in if he was going to allow them access to his home, right?
It sounds like he said, I'm not going to talk about previous criminal history, right?
Because it just doesn't come up, but it does come up with John.
But also, it seems like a lot of this might have been arranged by the new PR person was I heard about this, like, British guy in the BBC who was doing documentaries about weird people and said, like, hey, let's come on and we'll do a documentary about Tom Metzger, big scary Nazi guy, and I'll take you, we'll show you how he has black friends, karaoke, and he goes to Mexico and gets drunk on tequila.
Yeah.
And won't that be fun for your show?
And it does feel like, you know, John may have had a little bit more of the A little bit more agency in how this was put together than we're necessarily seeing on screen.
That's kind of the interesting part to me.
The other kind of half of the documentary is, and we're not going to get into this at all because this might be a kind of a future episode, but there's this pair of twins, Lam and Lynx, who were very young girls.
They were 11 years old at the time, and they were members of this like musical group called Prussian Blue.
Lam and Lynx have left the movement.
They left a few years later.
And I did find what looks to be Lam's Facebook page, which I am not, again, I'm not linking any of this.
I'm not telling you to go track her down.
Please, I have, I may know some people who know them, and I've been putting out some feelers, because I'd love to ask a few questions.
So if either one of them hears this, or anyone who is friends with them hears this, I would love to, I would love to just ask some very, very basic questions off mic, because I am kind of curious, and I am not Looking to pry into whatever your kind of current situation is.
No, no.
From what I saw, they look to be very lovely people.
Yeah, I was very pleased to see that they, by all accounts, out of this stuff now.
Yeah, and Louis Thoreau then came back to them kind of later on and interviewed them and some other stuff, and I have not, since I haven't done the Lynx and Lamb deep dive, I have not watched all that material I was focusing on Metzger here.
But no, I really doesn't like the good to see their own, you know, because it's very distressing.
Those sections are extremely distressing to watch.
Well, and distressing again, because the mother, the stage mother is sort of like warping their little brains.
And so there is this kind of sense of like.
You know, you do wonder, like, how much of this is, you know, the mom is like, and she even says, like, right now they're 11, but in a few years they're going to be 16, and every, you know, like, horny, young, racist boy is going to want to, you know, have a Prussian blue poster on his wall, and it's going to be a great recruitment tool, and so she's literally viewing it that way.
Now we even get a glimpse at the twins, the grandfather and the mom's father, who is an open Nazi.
His brand is literally, he's a rancher, his brand is a swastika, so.
Yeah.
Tells you what you need to know there.
Slight aside there, but I think that gives us a sense of sort of the production of the documentary and kind of what is and isn't said.
On the topic of what is and is not said, I think we should now move away from the Louis Thoreau, or the Louis and the Nazis documentary, and play some clips of Tom Metzger from other phases in his life.
We're not going to go too deep into this.
I'm not playing too many clips.
We're going to play some next week.
We'll see what comes up as I'm digging into more research.
He interviewed James Mason in 1993, after the first book release of Siege.
This does seem to be a big moment in Metzger's own history in terms of becoming increasingly radicalized, and I thought it might be worth playing just a little bit of that interview.
So we're going to do that now.
So this first voice here is James Mason, and then you'll hear Tom Metzger.
This is about two minutes long.
I would turn out for various major demonstrations around the East and things like that.
Were you around during the Skokie time when they were going to march in Skokie?
Yeah, this was 76 or 77.
This was a different group, however.
This was a splitter group.
Oh, that's true.
In fact, it was the first splitter group that turned into anything.
And so you didn't look upon those as being legitimate?
Legitimacy...
I had begun to recognize legitimacy as being something that would hold you back.
Because after all, legitimate in the eyes of who?
Effectivity is what we needed, not legitimacy.
What did you think about the Skokie March?
It was a grandstand play for publicity.
And in the end, it exposed our weakness.
And they didn't march at all?
They didn't march, no.
Just publicity.
Just publicity.
Which we had, I had stuck my neck out time after time after time with the Arlington Group seeking publicity on the theory that if you show these people, that is the broad masses of Americans, that there is an alternative, give them a few facts they've been denied by the media, when things got bad enough, they would flock to us.
That's the conservative approach.
That was the theory.
But in reality, that's compared to throwing a bunch of lumber and bricks up in the air, hoping that when they come down, you'll have a house.
And it never quite worked.
There's plenty of groups that believe that today.
Well, they're stuck in the past.
Because you're not guaranteed they'll even follow you anyhow.
No.
They'll say, well, why do I want to follow you anyhow?
You know, there's a guarantee that they'll mass to your door.
And simply having the truth will not make you free.
That's true.
Only action.
It has to be well-informed action, but it must be action.
Truth never released any slave.
That's right.
These are two old men comparing war stories.
They're talking about the March in Skokie, Illinois, which was one of the larger events within the white power movement during that era, which didn't actually happen, but it was a big talking point for a number of years.
Nazis get a ton of publicity on it, and Mason and Metzger are saying, like, yeah, that was completely pointless, because you didn't actually do anything.
You just made a bunch of publicity, and you didn't actually hurt anybody.
You didn't do any action or anything in there.
No slave was ever freed by thought.
You gotta have action.
And I'm not saying they thought that, like, the marchers in Skokie should have, like, started shooting.
Metzger, the other... I mean, again, something that's very much left out of this documentary is that Metzger was a well-known street fighter.
He was not just a guy making leaflets.
In his day, he was very well-known, and in fact, most of the people in the documentary and the people who are followers of his are actual skinheads.
These are members of violent street gangs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this gets left out of Thoreau's perspective to a large degree.
Metzger is repeatedly linked to violent plots.
I don't think ever conclusively, except in the case of the Portland murder.
In the civil trial, right?
Yeah.
Even then, not criminally.
You know, he was always only civilly liable.
And we'll get into some of those details in the next episode.
Yeah.
Of some people he may or may not have been connected to in the 80s around his kind of computer networks.
Because there's some really kind of fishy stuff there.
But yeah, no, I mean, you know, again, sorry to play so long a clip of it.
But it does give you a sense of like what these guys, again, what these people say when they think we're not listening.
This is a public access television show that, you know, I guarantee you more people are listening to this podcast than ever watched that fucking interview.
Yeah.
I think even now it has fewer, like, there are fewer clicks on, like, the, I found that one on BitChute.
There are fewer clicks on the BitChute link than this episode will get.
So more people will listen to that clip from me playing it than listen to it on BitChute.
But we encase it with criticism, so I don't feel too badly about that.
But you know what it is?
Even in 1993, these are like a couple of old men comparing old war stories, right?
Yeah, yeah.
That's what this is.
What do you think about Skokie?
Yeah, that was just a bunch of losers.
It's very low energy.
Very low energy, very low energy.
Let's roll right into the next clip because this is, as far as I know, the very last kind of interview he ever gave in his life.
He did kind of continue producing his own podcasts up until at least just a few months ago.
I know he was kind of producing over the summer.
I'm not sure exactly when he stopped.
If there were health issues of order, if he went right up to the end, all of his stuff is behind a paywall.
And that is a paywall I am not behind, because I have no need to go back and listen to 20 years of white Aryan resistance CDs.
That's literally what he does.
He ships CDs to people.
And then at a certain point, he kind of started releasing them on mp3.
So they're mp3 CDs, but a lot of them are, I think, available online, finally.
But for years, he was just mailing out CDs to people.
But this is an interview he did in 2019 on a show which I will not name this show, but it is a Terragram show.
And there's a voice.
There's a voice.
You've got to recognize it isn't Tom Metzger's here.
So let's just go ahead and play this.
I didn't do any real editing.
There are no cuts here, but there were some.
At this point, this man was 83 years old, and he was talking very slowly.
He had long pauses in his speech.
So I did cut that back just a little bit, just to make it a little bit more bearable to listen to.
You'll also note that this was done over a DLive connection or some streaming service, and he cuts out a bit here and there.
We can make deals with the Black.
I'm not convinced of that anymore, Tom.
I don't think, I don't think that's viable.
I think, I think at the absolute, the best, absolute best case scenario would be deportation.
I don't, I don't see any kind of coexistence being possible.
No, no, no.
No, I look at it this way.
This is when conditions arise that will work for us is when we can make deals with them.
It can't come before a crash of the government and things like that.
I think we should just ignore them, Tom.
I think we should just ignore the blacks.
Well, you can't ignore them.
You can't ignore them.
There's too damn many of them.
You've got to have figured out one way or another.
Now, you don't have the power to ship them out of the country.
I mean, of course, they're totally protected by the ruling class.
They're weapons of the ruling class.
You have to figure out some way of dealing with them after the crash.
I mean, Siege is a great book.
I really, it really helped me too along to become even more radical.
And so, and I knew James and I met him a few times and met him when he went to prison over a girl.
These guys that get in trouble with girls, I mean, you know.
He's out now and he's supposedly operating a website and so forth, but we can't get any Siege books.
They haven't reprinted them.
And people keep asking me because I used to sell them, but I can't get them.
And so everybody should read Siege.
Wow, that's even worse audio quality and worse fluency of speech than us.
That's terrible.
Right, yeah.
I hope the boys in the TRS Forum and Bang!
have equally valid criticisms of Tom Metzger as they do of us.
Bang!
There's a bit in there about...
Yeah, what do we call it?
James Mason had a problem with a girl, as I recall.
Yeah!
What he means is, he really liked him young.
He liked him young like Epstein Young.
He was fooling around with some, like, 15-year-old girls.
15, 16-year-old girls.
And apparently went in and out of prison several times in the mid to late 90s over this shit.
And there's some stuff about, like, he was threatened.
Like, one of these girls had a Hispanic boyfriend.
And he had threatened the boyfriend at some point.
There's a lot of stuff in James Mason's history.
He was discovered with underage pornography on his computers.
Yeah, just some issues with a girl.
Just some issues with a girl.
Some issues with the go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was so much.
I actually listened to that a couple of times trying to find anything that was kind of clippable that was a little bit more spicy.
There's plenty of spicy stuff there, but it's mostly like him recounting in vaguely and completely kind of incoherent ways all the street fights he got into and all the people that he met over the years.
Because the people who are kind of fans of this particular podcast – oh, by the way, the voice that I was mentioning there, you heard Vic Mackey.
Vic Mackey's voice was – That was who he was hanging out with there on that podcast.
Just so I wanted to highlight that before we moved away from it.
But, you know, Metzger has a very long history of kind of all the street battles he won and all the people he fought.
But Mackey and the people in that movement are all people who are very familiar with sort of the longer history of the white power movement going back to the 60s and 70s.
Because they're all very invested in sort of George Lincoln Rockwell and some of these other guys.
actively looking to correct from the mistakes that the other people made in the past.
And so they were asking about these kind of old movement figures and like, oh, did you ever meet this guy?
Did you ever meet this guy?
What are your remembrances there?
I believe Mackie asked him something like, yeah, I've seen the three interviews that you did with James Mason on Race and Reason – I'm just wondering if there were any like backstory that you can give us, anything that you, you know, he's like a fanboy, like, yeah, give me all the dirt on James Mason.
There's a lot of that.
But, you know, I included the bit about, like, they're talking about, you know, what do we do with the black people?
And, you know, because, you know, another thing about Tom Metzger is he actually, you know, promoted Louis Farrakhan for a while.
And, you know, basically, we're going to work with the black nationalists against the Jews.
Sort of thing yeah, so there was a lot of there's a lot of that you get a lot of that kind of movement In various sections of this kind of like super far-right violent revolutionary white nationalist movement even today Again played that clip mostly just to give you a sense of 16 years later.
He's still in his shit.
He's still in this thing This is what he's saying when he's not being interviewed by somebody from the BBC.
Yeah, this is the this is the more This is the unfiltered version and also just to show you like he was old in 2003 But he really got there.
You can't blame a man for being old.
That is not good radio.
Not good radio.
It's non-great radio.
You can't blame a man for being old.
You can blame a man for being that old and still stuck in the same pathetic rut after all that time.
He could have just retired.
You had a perfectly good chance.
Just retire and spend the rest of your life You know, doing whatever it is you do.
One thing we didn't mention is he had a TV repair shop for most of his life.
Yeah.
And, yeah, that was how he made his living.
Which is… Like a Hispanic customer.
Absolutely fine.
Like a regular customer in the Louisian documentary, you know?
Like, yeah, go be a TV repairman.
Stop being an open racist and, you know, maybe your kids will come visit more often.
Yep, yep.
The world needs TV repairmen.
The world doesn't need Nazis.
No, it does not.
So, yeah, that's kind of all the Tom Metzger I have for you today.
I mean, there's plenty more to come for the next episode.
I did have one more clip from the Louis Theroux documentary, which I think indicates a direction that he might have gone had he chosen to go there.
This is another little bit from the Louis Theroux documentary, from the Louis and the Nazis documentary.
I think we've kicked this thing a few times, and I think we're going to, well, giving it
Praise where I think it deserves it and defending it where I think it deserves it But I think we're gonna have to kick it just one more time because there's a really interesting angle here that the documentary could have gone down and I think this Indicates the issues that the Rose approach has with kind of approaching this topic and the issue that like a lot of mainstream journalists should not spend a lot of time on
Who think you can just kind of walk in there and sort of let go, but don't you think you're a racist?
You know, don't you think that's bad?
Yeah.
Like, kind of the limits of this approach.
And so I'm gonna play this clip, and this one does have a slur in the middle.
I didn't want to cut around it, so hopefully we can bleep that for the final release.
We will.
But this is Skinhead, who had been a follower of MetScarce for 20 years.
Asking Louis Theroux a very, very pertinent question in his opinion.
So if I told you I was Jewish, would that create a problem between us?
Well, because you've got the camera right now, I'd allow you to stay.
If not, I'd probably kick your ass and put you in the street somewhere.
For real?
Pretty much, because a Jew wouldn't be here on my property.
Are you Jewish?
Do you mind if I don't answer that?
I'm not saying yes or no.
- - Am I here?
- That was so close.
- That's not, I'm not saying yes or no. - So you're on the fence?
You're on the fence.
I tell you what, I'm not a racist.
And I actually think it's wrong to be a racist.
And so I feel as though by saying whether I'm Jewish or not, I'm kind of in a way acknowledging the premise that it really matters when I think it shouldn't and it doesn't.
Now, we're leaving these ones alone.
These are for the girls.
I don't think we need as much water.
A little bit too much.
I wasn't sure how long I'd be welcome at the house, but I thought I'd enjoy it while it lasted.
As the afternoon passed, I could almost have convinced myself that I was feeling relaxed.
But something was still bothering Skip.
How about that?
Louie's a Jew.
We already know it.
I already know it.
You're a Jew.
That's why you got so much animosity.
Okay, we can't say you don't look like a Jew.
You're a Jew.
Don't not say I'm not because you think somebody's going to beat you up because it's not like that with us.
Why do you care?
Why would it make any difference to you whether I am or not?
Because I like to know who's been in my house.
We don't care if you're a Jew, a Christian, a f***ing big mix of whatever.
You do look kind of Jewish.
You got an accent like these lads.
He's not Jewish, I'll tell you that right now.
Look at his face, you know he's not Jewish.
He's not Jewish.
But you, frankly, we look at your face, but we would like to know.
We want to know if you're a f***ing Jew and if we'd let you into our house to film our f***ing everyday ritual, are you a f***ing Jew?
I don't feel as though, I mean maybe you disagree, I don't feel as though I've kind of compelled you to say anything.
I feel as though I've been respectful and I appreciate that you've let us into your house.
I'm not even debating the fact that you've been respectful to my house and to my people.
And I don't think I would, I honestly don't think I would interrogate you to the point where if you said I don't want to talk about that, I would say okay that's fine we'll talk about something else.
So I'd like you to respect me in the same way.
Can we turn the camera off for a second?
Pull the plug?
Pull the plug for a second?
What for?
Well, nothing crazy.
No, no, no, it's fine.
Just for free talk to not feel like we're being filmed about.
I would really rather not say.
I would really rather you tell me.
I've exposed myself.
I've exposed my family.
I've exposed my brothers, my sisters, and my children.
expose yourself now.
I'll also, I'll also, Andy, I'll also, so, um, so not there, right?
Yes, there is.
First of all, just the limits of the, I'm just going to be very polite to you, become very clear when there's a very clear question they want an answer to.
And he just sort of noncommittally refuses to answer, which only plays into their worst prejudices about him, not just as the kind of potential Jew.
But as a member of the media who has the camera and who gets to do whatever he wants to with the footage, right?
You know, like, he made an arrangement to come into their house and he's filming them, and this is something that documentarians, again, on a production level, What you have to be aware of is that you're ultimately asking a lot from your subjects, who are kind of giving themselves to you.
I mean, we can admit that these people are fucking skinhead Nazis, and they're all wearing, like, t-shirts from... Yeah, if you actually watch this, there's fucking swastikas everywhere in this garage.
Yeah, no, no.
There's swastikas, there's Confederate flags, battle flags, etc.
All over the place.
And there's this large group of people, this is a few days before the kind of big white power rally that we mentioned earlier, and they're sitting around, they're playing pool, they're drinking beer.
This is kind of, looks like kind of an average, you know, Saturday afternoon or something over there.
And he kind of comes in with a camera, and they start going, well, are you Jewish?
And it's, again, I don't know because he asked them, would it bother you if I told you I was Jewish, right?
And so I don't know if there was conversation before that, that instigated this, or, you know, again, it's kind of difficult to know from the editing kind of what was said off camera.
But I think it's interesting that their immediate thought is like, well, if you didn't have a camera on you, then things would go very differently than they're going right now.
And then at the end, they're like, yeah, can you turn that camera off?
You know, for all the criticism we can have of the finished product, you know, that's gotta be slightly terrifying, right?
Oh yeah, I mean, it's a viscerally scary moment in the documentary when he says that, you know, and you kind of, when you watch it for the first time, you kind of scream, don't turn the fucking camera off!
Whatever you do, don't turn the camera off.
Although, you know, for all that we know, I mean, you know, the whole, I mean, you know, film can be damaged.
Videotape can be damaged, right?
So, you know, anyway, Louis Theroux did indeed go on to live a long and have a healthy life up till today.
So we know he was not beaten to death in that garage.
Although it does.
There are some question marks there.
But I think it illustrates kind of the lack of understanding of, well, either lack of understanding or a lack of care, like if there's a manipulated moment.
To understand like what the ideology actually is and how him refusing to answer is going to play to their worst fears about him, right?
Because that's the whole thing is that the Jew slithers into your life and it manipulates you.
And it's this infectious presence that regardless of how – it's like the snake in the grass.
Regardless of how polite the Jewish person coming into your life is, they're ultimately here to subvert you.
They're here to destroy you.
They're doing an undue influence.
And despite the fact that you may feel like you're doing something that's helping your cause by allowing yourself to be filmed, by allowing yourself to be in this documentary, ultimately you have to purify.
Or something if you know that there has been a Jewish person around you so that you can explain to your terrified children that there's one of the deviled ones that's been in our presence, right?
and And the fact that he seems to not be aware of that reaction, or at least he's kind of feigning an ignorance to that reaction, does strike me as like, yeah, that's really, that illustrates the limit to this in a very real way for me.
It's like, I think it's a powerful moment, but wouldn't it be so much more interesting to explore that element?
Wouldn't it be more interesting to explore The details of what the ideology is and why they want to know so badly rather than to just sort of give us this very much more superficial look at, you know, asking them, how do you feel about it if I call you a racist?
I don't know.
Like it just, it feels like, you know, kind of rewatching it, I was like, man, there's a, there's a much more interesting documentary that could have been made here if you had explored that to a little bit more degree.
And I don't know how you feel about that.
Yeah, no, I agree.
There's a French expression, discourses de sordes, or dialogue de sordes, which kind of means two deaf men talking to each other.
It's probably a little bit offensive, but it refers to a conversation where people are talking to each other, but they're talking past each other.
You know, they can't hear each other.
And I think that's what we see there, which is, from Louis' point of view, that works perfectly for the point he's trying to make.
Again, there's this weaponized, reasonable politeness thing that he's doing, where he's saying, well, I don't see that it matters, so I'm not going to tell you.
I've been very polite.
I haven't pressed you on anything.
Well, and he even tries to do the, like, if I went somewhere that you didn't want me to go, I would respect your boundaries.
Which is kind of not what you want a documentary filmmaker to necessarily do, right?
Like that's kind of an issue in and of itself there.
Absolutely.
But then he expects this sort of reciprocity that they're not kind of bringing to this because ultimately he has all the power in this relationship as the big documentary filmmaker from the BBC.
A million times the audience that they do, right?
I think in fairness to him, he's making a point to us, to the audience, where he's saying, you know, I'm not getting the politeness and the reasonableness back.
I'm extending it all.
And yeah, there is a slight of hand there, because as you say, he's got the institution behind him and the audience behind him and stuff like that.
But he's saying, you know, I'm being Mr. Reasonable, I'm extending every courtesy, I'm extending every reasonableness, and I'm not getting it back.
So there's kind of a rhetorical point there being made with his intense politeness and his intense reasonableness.
The rhetorical point is, I'm showcasing how unreasonable their being, how unreasonable their attitude is.
I'm bending over backwards to be reasonable about this.
They don't even have to agree with me.
They just have to see my point the way I've seen their point, yeah?
And that works fine for making that point to himself and to the audience.
It's kind of a bit like with American History X.
Where American History X is predicated on the idea that these guys are a growing threat, and this documentary is predicated upon the idea that these guys are a declining bunch of kooks, so they're different in that respect.
But in one respect, they're quite similar.
But they do make a very nice, like, despite they both have serious issues, they do make a very nice, like, double billing in a weird way.
Yeah.
But one thing they do... In fact, I said even at the time that the character, like, John Cameron Denton or whatever, the big neo-Nazi father figure guy in American History X. I'm pretty sure it's based on Tom Metzger.
Now, I can't find any documentation of that effect, but I would be astonished if it's not based on Tom Metzger.
It's very Tom Metzger-type.
I think we'll talk a little bit about why next time, won't we?
But yeah, the one thing that those two texts have in common is that they both They kind of take it for granted that the audience, the presumed viewer, already understands that these people are wrong, and why, right?
So Louis' point that he makes there, quite deftly, It works fine for him and it works fine for his presumed viewer.
It flies completely over the heads of the people he's talking to.
In the same way that what they're trying to say to him, and I'm not equating them, of course, they're completely in the wrong, but what they're trying to say to him flies completely past him because he doesn't get it.
And what they're trying to say to him, of course, is that, you know, no.
You haven't been polite and reasonable to us if you have infiltrated our home as a secret Jew.
That is what they're saying.
And to them, of course, that makes perfect sense.
And it's flying straight past him.
He understands that they're anti-Semitic, certainly, but he doesn't really get the details of why they feel the way they feel at that precise moment.
So, and he could have got that out of them, or investigated that, instead of making this rhetorical point through this sort of moment of freak showery and cringe comedy that, sure, it makes its rhetorical point, but it makes it to people that kind of already get it, and it doesn't dig any deeper into what's going on there.
And again, he does push John, the manager, Tom Metzger's manager, he does push him to some degree, on very sensitive topics, like trying to make him confront the reality of what Tom Metzger is putting out there in the world.
Which, John presumably knows much more than Louis is pretending to know, or does know.
It is hard to know how much Louis knows, like, how much kind of background research he did kind of going into this.
I would hope he did, like, you know, he was aware of some of the, uh, not just like, oh, that looks really racist sort of history, but no, this is the violent neo-nazi.
This is the weird thing, isn't it?
You kind of really do hope that he knows more than he's pretending he knows.
Right.
And there's no, because even though there's a segment, you know, there's a bit of, you know, voiceover there that you kind of get.
There are a few moments of that in the film, but not a lot, you know, and you really don't get, there's never, like it's not like this was ever going to be like kind of the talking head, you know, where you bring in the head of the SPLC to say, Well, Tom Metzger has a very violent history.
He was a man, he was invested in the neo-Nazi movement going back to the 70s.
Like, that's not what Louis Theroux was doing here.
No.
But some sense that, like, because he describes Metzger as...
You know, unlike the FBI and most wantedly, you know, kind of the top, you know, one of the most violent neo-Nazis in America, and then kind of presents you with like doddering old man getting drunk on tequila in Mexico, and then wants you to kind of contrast those kind of images without kind of understanding the way that these guys do have a media savvy, which you'd think that Thoreau, as someone who had some experience in this, even at that point, would have a little bit more knowledge of.
And I mean, I'm just interested.
I know he's kind of talked about some of this stuff in kind of later interviews and some of his later documentaries and stuff.
I know he's kind of come back to some of these topics.
And again, I just haven't kind of gone and found Louis Thoreau and kind of if he's ever, like, looked at these issues.
But I'd be really fascinated to know what he would do with this material today, if he would treat it differently.
Because I think he would.
I think he would have learned the lesson.
I think that making it in 2003 is very different than making it in 2020, for instance.
Yeah, there's a lot there.
I think he overestimates, in this documentary anyway, the extent to which just pointing out incongruity or hypocrisy matters.
Like, he makes a big deal about—he actually accuses Tom to his face in the car of being a hypocrite, because he says you went down to Mexico and you were mixing fine with people, etc.
And this really— I felt a genuine warmth between you and that brown man that you were speaking to.
Don't you think that makes you a hypocrite?
Yeah.
He doesn't do it in quite that many words, but it's essentially like what he's saying.
Yeah, and really... There's a real warmth there, you know.
It's as if, it is the, it is the, then you come to the flip side of the Sam Harris, well, I have black friends, so I can't be a racist.
Yeah.
You know?
Let me throw in the saying, what, you have, you have a, you have a Hispanic friend.
Doesn't this mean you can't be a racist?
It is this kind of like lack of...
You know, at least a performative understanding, right?
Yeah, and he really does seem to overestimate the extent to which that's interesting or a gotcha.
Because what could be more banal?
It doesn't mean anything.
It is very funny, to be fair, to see the most dangerous white supremacists in America singing karaoke in a bar filled with African-American people.
I don't know, like, maybe it's just because he's such an old, like, doddering man, or like, hanging around.
Like, him getting drunk in Mexico is probably, like, I actually do cackle a bit at that.
And then he's like, you wandered off, he says to his manager, he's like, you wandered off, I need to know where my people are at any given time, I could have been kidnapped!
I know, and I think there's a place for pointing out the ridiculousness and banality of these people and how their lives contradict the way they talk.
There's certainly a place for that, but I think there is a danger that, certainly with the studied lack of context that you find in this, That you end up, by undermining them in that way, you end up downplaying the danger that they represent.
I mean, we kind of talked about this thing already when we talked about the Errol Morris documentary, Mr. Death.
We talked about how Errol Morris, he cut the film and showed it to students and he was surprised by how sympathetic they came out to Looshta.
And how it didn't immediately come across to audiences the way he assumed it would.
And again, there's that assumed viewer that Lüchter was wrong in his claims about the Holocaust, and he goes back and he recuts it by adding in sections of an interview with Jan van Pelt, etc, etc.
So, in that instance, Errol Morris recognises that to just show people this kind of slice of life, yeah, it's very humanising, and it might show you the fundamental banality, or smallness, or ridiculousness, or just the humanity of these people, the normal humanity of these people underneath the monstrous claims and the monstrous rhetoric, etc.
But that's kind of not enough.
You do fundamentally need the context as well, otherwise you're going to end up being misleading, just by default.
Right.
I mean, I think it's... is it Truffaut?
It probably can't be Truffaut, who had the line, you know, every...
Every shot is truth, and every cut is a lie.
There's some famous, great… Yeah, I don't know who that is.
…European filmmaker.
I don't think it's Truffaut, because that doesn't make any sense.
But the idea that there is a… If you don't know anything about Truffaut, that doesn't make any sense.
I was going to say Godard, but that even makes less sense.
I was going to say.
Look at us.
Look at us doing French filmmakers.
You were using French language.
You know, that's us being all highfalutin, I guess.
But, you know, and so there is this kind of like, well, I'm going to point a camera and show an audience kind of what this is.
But then again, ultimately, you're also having to cut.
You also have to cut around things.
And by definition, what you choose to shoot and what you choose not to shoot.
Yeah.
It's part of the process, and you know, again, this is a little bit like kind of like a deep cut maybe in terms of like what I find interesting is sort of the how the documentary seems to be made and what things are asked versus not asked and how because like as someone who has to like deal with these kind of very similar questions on a smaller scale to be fair But in order to make this podcast, in order to cut in clips, in order to do all this stuff, I have to ask questions of like, you know, how we're treating this material, right?
And I know there are episodes we've done in the past which I would not do the same way again today, partly because we just, you know, had issues in production or partly because we had You know like the world has moved forward and so there's outdated material in some of the older episodes or you know just approach it wrong just did it wrong right you know yeah and so you know I don't know like that that that kind of fascinated me can rewatching this and that's kind of why I wanted to approach this first.
That's kind of an angle on the way he's treated in this documentary versus kind of who he really is.
And I think, I don't know.
For me, that's interesting.
I don't know.
The audience will tell me that we hated this episode and that's fine because I liked it.
That's all that matters.
Yeah, absolutely.
Support me on Patreon.
Yeah.
Allow me to do more of this.
We make these for us, not you.
Yeah, for us.
Yeah, that's fine.
Anyway.
Yeah, I think that's enough for now.
Next time we're going to talk about...
The early computer networks that Tom Metzger was deeply invested in, as early as 1984, possibly 1983.
There's a lot of missing documentation, let's just kind of put it that way, and some of the research that was going on around, even in the mid-80s, around these kinds of networks and some anti-fascist activity.
We're going to talk about all that stuff and what that means for today, how they use technology.
And we'll probably also touch a little bit on something that is very present in the documentary, which we didn't cover at all, which is kind of the white power music, white power metal bands that funded Tom Metzger's work and a lot of other white power metal bands that funded Tom Metzger's work and a lot of other So, all that next time.
All that next time, yeah, tune in for that.
Tom Metzger, pioneer of the internet.
Okay, that was... I mean legitimately, legitimately, so amazingly.
Anyway, continue.
No, I was... yeah, I'm just wrapping up.
That was episode 75.
Thank you very much for listening.
Listen to episode 76.
It'll be about the things Daniel just said.
And support us!
Give us money on Patreon, that's nice.
And tell people we're brilliant, because we are.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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