With apologies for our long absence (we've both had non-Covid health problems) and assurances of our continued commitment to the show, here is a new episode in which Daniel chats with brilliant special guest Amanda Rogers (@MsEntropy on Twitter) about terrible Tom Metzger, his importance to the far-right movement, his continued relevance, and the dangerous way his legacy is often misunderstood and underestimated. Jack will be back soon with another chat with Rob from @TheRightPodcast about Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers. Content warnings. Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: Amanda Rogers on Twitter: @MsEntropy Amanda's Patreon: Ms Entropy is creating commentary and analysis on media, culture, politics and Qat | Patreon Our previous Tom Metzger episodes: I Don't Speak German: 75: Tom Metzger, Part 1 (libsyn.com) I Don't Speak German: 79: Tom Metzger Part 2 & The Origins of Online Hate (libsyn.com) Eiynah's GoFundMe: Fundraiser by Eiynah Nicemangos : Donate to help Eiynah (gofundme.com)
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe In In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German episode.
I don't know the number because we've recorded a few and haven't released them yet for various reasons.
Jack and I have both been having some health issues as of late, different health issues, neither of which are COVID-related, interestingly enough.
Yeah, so in lieu of knowing what number we're going to be talking to, I am presenting to you an interview today with someone that I've been very, frankly, intimidated by for quite a while.
Oh man, come on, I'm super nice!
I'm super nice!
No, no, no, no, no.
It is not.
It is not.
Like, I kind of get to the point of, like, sometimes in this world, I think, like, I actually know quite a bit about this white nationalism thing.
I'm, I'm down.
I'm, you know, I am, I am, you know, top tier, really a knowledgeable person.
And then I see your podcast and you've, people have tried to kill you before.
That's legit, like own it.
But then I see your Twitter and I'm like, oh, I am, I am but a small bean.
I must go and dig into Tom Metzger somewhere.
I'm just a crazy person.
It's like the, you know, Twitter is free therapy, basically.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
So anyway, today we are joined by, you saw it in the episode title, I presume, but today we are joined by Amanda Rogers.
I believe Miss Entropy on Twitter.
We can do your handles at the end.
That's a miss.
It's a miss.
I insist.
Did I say miss?
I apologize.
But no, we are going to be talking about Tom Metzger today and kind of do some deep dives because I know she's been doing a lot of work, working on a book, which I'm very interested in reading at some point in the near or distant future, whenever it's done.
But yeah, Amanda, please introduce yourself.
Hello, I'm really glad to be here.
I'm Amanda Rogers.
I'm at Mizentropy on Twitter.
And yeah, I mean, I think that sums me up pretty concisely, but did you want me to get into, you know, background?
Background, just whatever, whatever you think the audience might not know about you.
Oh, man.
Which is a full episode, I'm sure, but give us the short version.
Let's see.
I have a PhD from Emory, but it's not in anything related to this.
I've been interested in working on fascist politics and You know, white supremacist circles for a very long time due to personal life issues with this whole movement that date back to really my childhood very early on.
So, I work on political violence more broadly, and it's only recently that I've started to work on white supremacists in any professional capacity.
Before, I think about Three or four years ago, it had just been confined to essentially personal activism.
My main area of focus is the Middle East and North Africa.
So, you know, I kind of got sucked into working on political violence and all.
It's not what I wanted to be doing.
But, you know, sometimes your personal life bleeds over into your professional life because you're committed to the politics of both of those things.
And that is where I am at, essentially.
Wonderful.
And again, we've been chatting back and forth a bit here and there for, I think, a couple of years now, and I've long been wanting to bring you on.
I'm so excited to be here!
And today we're going to be talking about Tom Metzger.
So I guess, I mean, we've done, I've done a two-parter on Tom Metzger already, largely focusing on, you know, some of the kind of early cyber Cybercrime, I guess.
You know, that works.
The early ARPANET stuff that he was working on, or the the FighterNet stuff that he was with.
Also the, you know, the Louis Theroux documentary, kind of focused on kind of more kind of, you know, the highlights of Metzger.
But why don't, why don't you just kind of give us the priestess, kind of start with what should we know about Tom Metzger?
Well, I mean, the first thing that I would say, I think it's really helpful to think about, you know, this thing that we call the movement.
Because a lot of times when people talk about racist activism and white supremacists in the United States specifically, but also You know, more broadly, people don't really have a sense of what this thing called the movement is.
And what I mean by that is the sense of a genealogical sort of trajectory that frames, you know, political activism is.
Fused with racist, you know, politics at its core.
That's been passed down, basically, through a different ideological lineage over time.
What I mean to say is when you see, you know, racist violence and white supremacists covered in the media, oftentimes, most of the time, I would say, there's not very good coverage of a broader historical context.
So, it seems like You know, this is a phenomenon that just came out of nowhere fairly recently, and it's why people can get away with talking about Trump and Trump's role in fomenting white supremacist extremism, which, you know, if you have any sense of this thing called the movement or historical context whatsoever, you know that Trump is a symptom and not a cause.
But I think Metzger is a really important figure in thinking about the existence of this thing called the movement that connects You know, racist figures in the present that are involved in political violence back to the, I mean, pre-Vietnam War era of figures that sort of laid the groundwork, if that makes sense.
Absolutely.
A helpful way to think about who he was in the first place, because, you know, people argue all the time about whether or not a racist movement exists, in fact, which is You know, just fascinating to me because I don't know where they hang out, but... Wine bars.
Wine bars, surely.
Wine bars.
Sounds a lot nicer than Telegram and other things on the internet.
But anyway, I think what's important to talk about, in terms of where I think we should take the conversation, in thinking through who this person called Metzger was, is misconceptions about him.
Because I think that that's a good way to get his status within the movement as far as influence has gone.
And then also his overall influence within the movement and all the way to the contemporary generation.
So you see echoes of him.
He's really prescient in a lot of ways with his particular approach to activism.
And it's interesting that you bring up the Louis Theroux documentary because, I mean, we can talk about this later on, but, you know, That reflects only one component of his approach to racist, you know, mobilization.
And in fact, it's a really good dodge strategy.
So, essentially, Metzger was a media genius, which is very painful to say and excruciating to hear.
I recognize that.
But yeah, I think it would be helpful to talk about misconceptions surrounding him and then also His overall impact, really, when we break down the legacy of who he influenced and where and when.
Because a lot of the stuff that we see today is rarely credited to Metzger.
And again, I think that's largely because he's written off by a lot of people, at least in the public realm, as a buffoon or a clown or this irrelevant has-been.
Not necessarily in the movement itself, but definitely from the outside.
And things like Louis Theroux's documentary absolutely assisted in that.
And that That image of himself as this over the hill clown that really wasn't in touch with things and was like your fun racist grandpa that you disagree with, but I mean, I don't have a fun racist grandpa because personally I don't really find racist fun, but maybe that's just me.
So yeah, I think that the Thoreau documentary is really key as an opening to understand how savvy he was at manipulation of different media outlets far beyond just disseminating propaganda, which I think is something that people often fail to recognize about how these leaders within the movement actually operate.
I mean, I would like to differentiate just making fun of racists.
It's very fun.
That's that's a lot of what we do here.
But, you know, I agree with you that Tom Metzger did not did not did not seem like a fun guy to me.
Well, actually, you know, the weird thing is, no, it's totally the reverse.
And I mean, I would not want to hang out with him, but like he He was, oh God, again, it's painful to say this.
He was actually incredibly charismatic and really funny in, you know, which I don't like saying, but.
Well, particularly on like the Race and Reason episodes, I think he comes across as this sort of like, kind of amiable host.
He does.
I know he did, I think he did Phil Donahue.
He did like, I think he did Geraldo.
I mean, he did a bunch of shows, right?
He did Geraldo, and that's when Geraldo's nose got broken.
Yeah.
I know people that know the guy that did that.
Anyway, long story.
He did Whoopi Goldberg, he did John McLaughlin, and actually it's interesting, and again we can come back to this later because it's really fascinating to me, and it's a great example of Metzger I hate to say not getting the credit that he deserves, but in terms of recognizing things and in how this movement operates and where certain things are coming from, I will say this even though it feels disgusting, Metzger really does not get the credit that he deserves and that's quite dangerous.
Right.
So, a perfect example is he was on the McLaughlin Show, I want to say in like The early 90s.
I can't remember the specific year, but it has to be like around 92.
And he held up a copy of James Mason's Siege on mainstream media on one of the most popular political talk shows of the day.
And basically, the whole Reed Siege thing isn't an Atomwaffen invention.
Metzger did it first on, I think, CNBC or something on The McLaughlin Show.
So, yeah, just a little anecdote, I think, that's really emblematic.
Oh yeah, and I interviewed Mason on at least one episode of Race and Reason.
Yes, before that.
Go ahead.
Oh no, it's okay.
I was going to say, are you familiar with Matthew's Hall that Metzger had?
Have you ever heard this before?
No.
Maybe I've read it, maybe it's back and deep in my memory, but I don't have it on hand.
I can't remember ever reading anything about this.
But anyway, so Metzger had a trailer on his property that he referred to as Matthews Hall, obviously after Bob Matthews of the Order.
But this is a place that he would bring the young skinheads and have them listen to essentially visiting speakers of the luminaries of the movement.
And I want to say it was 85, it could have been 84, but he actually hosted Mason in 84, 85.
And it was over the phone at the time because, you know, Mason wasn't really particularly, he didn't really get out much.
So Metzger in this introduction that he gives to Mason way back in the early 80s is talking about how they have been friends and correspondents for over a decade, right?
So Metzger's ties to James Mason are really, really crucial.
And it drives me up a wall because, you know, it's only recently that people outside of You know, ideologically motivated, racist, political, violent circles have talked about James Mason as an important influence.
But I mean, more to the point of this show and what drives me precisely crazy is that people credit Mason now as being way more influential, you know, in the past than he actually was.
It's Metzger who preserved his work and gave it a platform and really publicized it.
So it's only in the era of like the base and Atomwaffen that you have a popularization of Mason more generally.
In the skinhead days, most skinheads, you know, honestly didn't give a fuck about Mason.
If they'd heard of him, they didn't really care at all, right?
So Metzger really pushed Mason hard his entire life, and it wouldn't be until this contemporary era that he really, really gets a broad currency across the movement and even outside of it.
But again, that's at the hands of Metzger, who's been working on it since the 70s, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
And that feels like a very, like, I believe Zeskin's Blood and Politics, Mason doesn't even, like, his name doesn't even appear.
Right.
You know, and that's, that was, that was kind of weird when I was going through and doing those Mason episodes and going like, oh, let's, let's check in on Zeskin.
And, you know, Mason's not even there.
And it does, I don't know what it is.
It is strange.
Like, if you look at it when Zeskin was writing, Mason really wasn't that central of a figure.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, I mean, he is put down at best, right?
Right.
You get most of what Zeskin does.
I mean, I think that's a great book.
It has its flaws, but it definitely informs a lot of the work that I've done here, and it kind of put me in the right direction to be able to do this work.
But, you know, it really is kind of Zeskin following Duke around to a certain degree, right?
So if you weren't interacting with Duke, then you didn't really make the book that much, which I think is a very, you know, it kind of shows how all of us are kind of limited and, you know, just what we can accomplish with the hours that we have in our lives.
But no, what I find, and this is kind of jumping ahead, so I apologize, but something that I do want to put a pin in here is that I do get the sense from that the Atomwaffen and Boat Patrol crowd, Definitely.
We're kind of seeking out a kind of father figure who would sort of, they could glom onto for, you know, like the street cred to a degree.
You're absolutely right.
And Metzger actually appeared with Vic Mackey on a show, on a podcast before Metzger died.
I believe I even put the audio from that in the last Metzger episode, but I don't know.
We've done so many of these, I can't remember exactly what went into each one, but when you get Vic Mackey, you know, sitting and chatting with Tom Metzger and they're just talking about how great Metzger was the whole time.
I mean, there's a different world in which Metzger was the, you know, Metzger was the source of Adam Woffin as a Mason.
Well, he absolutely was.
I mean, the fact of the matter is, Brandon Russell first reached out to Metzger when he was looking for James Mason.
And, you know, they have, you know, Adam often had all these little bitch fights that would go on amongst them.
But back in the day, right before Iron March even got, like, taken down, Ray Denton was bragging about how when he was 11 or 12, he had an autographed copy of James Mason's Siege.
And he, like, I mean, I don't know if that's actually true.
I've heard from sources that that was just his bragging, but I think that's significant at the same time, because if the second leader of Atomwaffen is bragging about his ties to Mason as a literal child, right?
Right, yeah.
As a prepubescent, it shows you that by that point in time, Mason had gained currency among movement figures enough that you would want to situate yourself as someone that was close to him ideologically or familiar with his work.
But you see a lot of discussion.
I mean, I can get into this more, but there are tons of ties between Metzger and the Atomwaffen and BASE crowd.
I mean, people don't talk about this at all, and I have no idea why, but Metzger actually He was telling the folks that would go on and become AWD that Charlottesville was going to be a disaster and they shouldn't mobilize like that.
And in several Atomwaffen videos, they actually have Tom speeches that they're using over them.
They're also using references to Ryder trucks, which has a whole bunch to do with Metzger's ties to God.
What were those brothers names?
I can't remember at the moment, but anyway.
Yeah.
So yeah, he's got a lot of direct ties.
And yeah, in fact, Brandon Russell, before they were able to locate Mason, the first person they reached out to was Tom.
And there's a reason for that, right?
And that's namely that Tom had had, you know, he was close to Mason for years, but also He provided a platform for his ideas for decades.
And then there's additionally the fact that one thing that rarely gets recognized enough about Tom Metzger is the fact that even though the movement is notorious for infighting and, you know, all of these clashes, he was remarkably pragmatic in the sense of he talked a lot of shit on several people.
However, really the The vicious attacks that you see among other movement leaders, you don't see so much with Metzger.
I mean, he went after Covington really, really hard, and he went after Duke really hard.
And I have so many neo-Nazi nonsense stories about Metzger's relationship to Duke and all the shit talking they did.
It's hilarious.
But nonetheless, what I'm trying to say is there's a really ecumenical approach that's also very pragmatic that you find in Tom Metzger in the sense that he would always say, use what works.
So anything that he could propagate that would contribute to his broader agenda, he would absolutely utilize, even if he hated the person that came up with it.
That said, he was very interested in pushing Mason's work and was close to him to a certain degree until he died.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense.
So, we've been bouncing around a bit, which is great.
I think this is great.
But I do want to go back and I actually do want to ask a kind of foundational question just about the movement, quote unquote, which is, I think you and I might agree on this, but I'm not sure.
What would you say is the beginning of The movement and how does MetScare fit into that so firmly?
That was something that you were very sure that you wanted to discuss here.
So what are the origins of the movement in your mind?
The origins of the movement in my mind, I'm really glad that you asked this question because I find it really frustrating sometimes when I'm talking to, you know, people who are very conscious of the history of race in this country and consider themselves on the left.
When I talk about infiltration of law enforcement and the armed forces, people get really salty with me and start saying, OK, these are racist institutions.
You shouldn't even talk about infiltration because it exceptionalizes the norm, basically.
And while I'm empathetic to that in the In a historical sense, because it's factual, it's true, right?
Policing came out of slave patrols.
That's absolutely valid.
It's completely true.
But that said, we run the risk of making a very dangerous mistake when we don't recognize a very seminal shift In American racism.
And what I mean by that is the civil rights era.
In my opinion, this is the birth of what we call the quote unquote movement today for a few really important reasons.
Namely, you know, at the time of the civil rights movement, it's the first time that a broad array of white Americans saw on TV police abusing the hell out of Black people.
There was a certain amount of shocking the consciousness that, or the conscience, that went on in certain circles.
So, basically, the era of civil rights, really the idea of being racist assumed a moral valence like it never had had before.
So, basically, people began to be very ashamed of getting called that, whereas before civil rights it was something that people would have owned more easily.
And this is related to the idea that You know, after the passing of civil rights legislation, what you see happen is you see a public, there's a professional penalty, a personal penalty to be paid for those who are publicly racist, and that's not the case before.
So, what I would encourage people to think about is what do we think happened to all of the Klan police officers After the era of civil rights, do we think that they just woke up and said kumbaya?
Do we think there was investigation?
No, absolutely not, right?
So what I mean to say by calling attention to this is there's a shift after that era where basically racist mobilization has to go underground, has to operate in a clandestine manner, And has to essentially embrace a new set of strategies because there's a penalty to be paid and there are consequences for the same sorts of public engagement that had existed previously.
So, in my opinion, that's really when we can document something called the movement that exists outside of the quote-unquote mainstream racism of American society, if that makes sense.
Right, I don't think you're suggesting in any sense that the cops are not racist, that law enforcement is not.
But there's this separate thing that we're calling the movement that's the white nationalist movement.
I have to jump on you because I can't stand white nationalists.
We're laundering something very dangerous when we say nationalist after white, because the fact of the matter is these are white supremacists, you know?
White nationalism is something that can slip by, especially in the era of Marjorie Taylor Greene, right?
So I don't mean to like jump on your ass.
No, no, I agree.
I mean, you know, it's just too easy for people who don't even see themselves as being in bed with white supremacy to say, like, I'm white and I'm a nationalist.
What's wrong with that?
You know, and that's absolutely the outcome of very, very strategic calculations within the movement itself.
So I think we have a responsibility to police our language on that.
Yeah, so just to be on that, I would say that what we're seeing is, if you want to use the white supremacist or white power, you know, whatever version you want to use, that this kind of explicit white supremacist language has to go underground because the more institutional powers decided it was kind of bad optics to engage in that kind of rhetoric publicly.
And so, this does begin a kind of slow process of kind of unwinding this, you know, kind of separate thing that exists outside of the kind of ordinary race.
So, I think that was the point I was trying to get to, and maybe, you know, just possibly agreeing with you.
Although, if you have more of a disagreement there, then please let me know.
Oh, no, I'm not disagreeing at all!
I just want to highlight, like, again and again and again, I don't think that we can emphasize this enough for people that I mean, I tend to find it, honestly, an ideological litmus test that drives me crazy when people say, oh, but all of the police are racist, it's a racist system.
No, I agree that it's a racist system.
However, if you do not have the ability to differentiate, The covert, extreme, politically violent racist within the structural racist institution, you are going to be caught by surprise in very, very dangerous ways.
So to homogenize the police as uniformly racist, you know, for one, it erases the entire civil rights movement and it completely catches us off guard, basically, and has allowed, I think, in many ways,
It's allowed what we're seeing today in terms of more vocal, more public, blatant white supremacist groups to emerge because we've had so much, you know, dissimulation and deflection from people that basically have ignored, been able to ignore it because they were not paying enough attention to strategic shifts and how much racism differs in terms of the way that it's deployed, basically.
And I think that's really important to keep in mind.
No, yeah, absolutely.
And ultimately, some of the difference between the mainstreamers and the movementarians, as we've been kind of calling them around here, between the people who want to take over the system versus the people who want to see the system crash and burn, is sort of the people who think, well, we actually just want to take those institutions of power back the way we did.
We're not the movement.
We just want to be the instrument of power.
We want to hold those reins.
Versus people who seem to see that as maybe a lost cause and who want to just, you know, engage in the kind of wanton violence for whatever, you know, ideological or political reading.
Well, yeah.
So, I mean, I think that's basically like, that's the difference between the whole essentially conservative racist political mobilization and revolutionary.
You know, are you trying to create a new system or are you trying to reclaim one?
I think that that's a great point that also needs to be drawn.
So, totally in agreement there.
Great.
So, how does Mesker fit into all this?
Well, Metzger was very prescient in so many ways.
I think he really laid the foundations for a lot of what we see today.
I mean, people wouldn't call him specifically an accelerationist, but I think it's fair to say that he was.
Maybe it would be useful for me to kind of give a recap of his life history or an overview of his mobilization into racist politics.
Yeah, like, tell us who he is, where he comes from, because he starts off not as, not as doing the explicit racist stuff.
He starts off in a different place.
Yes and no.
It depends on which Metzger is talking and when, because he spends his past differently to different people.
One thing that he does say pretty uniformly is that his parents were not overtly racist.
That's not the family that he came from.
He's from Indiana originally, I believe.
He moved out to California at a fairly young age.
And started his TV repair business.
But I think what's more important in understanding his early life, Metzger was actually a savant with technological stuff.
And in particular, media and communication.
From the time he was very young, he actually was a savant at broadcasting over the radio.
And he had a ham radio station, I want to say, when he was 13 or 14.
And at that time, I believe it was World War II, and he was actually the youngest person in the States that was asked to volunteer to monitor radio waves for, you know, the enemy communication, what have you.
So this is something that- It looks like he was born in 1938 in Warsaw, Indiana.
I just looked it up, so.
Was he?
He was super young.
I mean, this is like, at least a narrative that he tells about himself.
I mean, if he's born in 38, he would have been, you know, seven years old when the war ended.
Yeah, I mean, it's crazy because now that I think about it, like, I mean, it's definitely the narrative that he tells about himself.
Have you ever stumbled across the Eye of the Storm by Jack Carter about Minsker?
I have not, no.
Well, I'm fascinated by this because allegedly it is a book about, it's a biography of Metzger.
However, Jack Carter, the quote-unquote journalist with a generic name who's writing this biography of Tom Metzger, happens to sound a lot like Tom in every single way.
And it's not published by an actual press, it's published by WAR, Metzger's organization, and the introduction to the book is basically all about how, you know, everyone is out to get him and so they couldn't get a mainstream publisher, but he makes a claim about the material that I just said in that biography, which I've always thought is an autobiography anyway, but it's kind of one of those funny
Stories about him gives you an indication of basically something really critical about his approach to media, right?
Even potentially faking a journalist that wants to write a biography of him and gets blocked, right?
He incidentally talks about how this journalist is not racist himself, Allegedly.
Anyway, I still think Jack Carter's bullshit doesn't exist, but in the biography slash autobiography, he talks about this radio station when what he did, like, I mean, it might not have been, was it the Korean War?
I can't remember.
I mean, there was some conflict at the time, and I have not slept, so I'm incredibly incoherent today, and I apologize.
But there's an anecdote in the biography about him getting asked to monitor radio frequencies for shit or whatever.
Yeah, Korea would make sense, I think.
If he was supposed to be about 13, that would make sense.
Yeah.
Ironically, there's a story of Richard Feynman, who was obviously one of the greatest physicists of all time, despite being a sex pest, etc.
Have to stay in as Richard Feynman, but one of his stories was that he used to repair radios when he was about that age in the pre-World War II era.
I'd be worried about radio and television repairman, dude, I'm telling you.
Oh man, there was some Comcast guy that killed one of the customers when he went to install the cable recently, and I love that because where I was living in New York, we had to deal with them.
Anyway, so speaking of murderous Anyway, back to, okay, so Metzger is allegedly this savant with radio stuff when he's very young, and then when he goes into the military and he is deployed to Germany, posted in Germany, that's where, at some points, he says he developed a racist consciousness.
At other points in other forums, he dates it much later.
But what's significant about his period in the military, regardless of whether or not he developed his racist views then or later on in life, is that one of his jobs was monitoring, again, media frequencies and basically signals intelligence.
So we see throughout his life that media is a huge theme.
In many, many different capacities, even down to the choice of sustainable practical career path that he chooses.
I mean, he used to tell skinheads that they needed to learn a trade because that is something that's economically sustainable, that would contribute to the movement and help them support themselves and their families.
So, he would Defend his decision to have that TV repair shop over and over again under those premises.
So that's, I think, one thing that's really critical in understanding his trajectory in life.
But so he doesn't get involved in racist political activism until after he comes back from the military and comes back from his time in Germany.
And like so many other leaders in the movement, the same damn trajectory of first joining the John Birch Society and then becoming increasingly pissed off at the JBS refusal to tackle the quote-unquote Jewish question and or monitor what you're reading or dictate what you could read.
That's really what pissed Tom Metzger off the most is, I mean, he would talk about the refusal to discuss the Jewish question, but he also had a problem with Not feeling like he was allowed to read whatever the hell he wanted.
So it's too dogmatic for him.
He ended up leaving.
Then he fell into bed with David Duke.
And that's so many interesting stories about their relationship that I think are also key.
But anyway, essentially, after he breaks up with Duke, I mean, I think we should come back to this.
I think we should do another episode that's just Metzger and Duke, you know, the love story.
Oh my God, so much.
So much.
Like the story about Duke in the bikini or in the Speedo coming out and his coke problem and the plastic surgery.
Amazing.
Anyway, but so essentially Metzger and Duke have this breakup.
And then after Duke, Metzger starts what he describes as sort of a political action committee, but you wouldn't use that term back then, and it has the same acronym as WAR.
I can't remember the exact, you know, what it stood for precisely, but it was not as militant as white Aryan resistance.
So, first, after the break with Duke, he started Reaching out on the grounds of white civil rights.
We see this now all over the place within the alt-right and beyond, but Tom Metzger was one of the first to actually pioneer the discourse of white civil rights as being what he wanted to mobilize about.
This whole dissimulation-deflection bullshit about, we're not white supremacists, we're white nationalists, we don't hate people, we just want to be separate, right?
And then grounding that in these cherished values within the United States, right, like civil rights and First Amendment, free speech, etc.
Metzger was very much one of the pioneers of that same approach back in the 70s.
So, after he founds this You know, white political action committee, what have you.
He runs for office a couple times.
He's successful in one case, gets his ass handed to him and a bunch more, and then he decides to wash his hands of political activism and electoral politics as a path to power that's viable.
That's when he becomes slightly more militant, at least in terms of his public, what he's willing to say in public, right?
Right.
He starts moving more and more to the insurgent sort of revolutionary side of the movement.
He founds war, white Aryan resistance.
Basically, people say that this was Pierce, but I disagree.
Metzger was much more like the godfather to the skinheads than Pierce ever was, because Metzger actually didn't have the contempt For the youth that that pierced it.
Metzger was very much about the working class and the working man.
And this is another contribution that really needs to be understood about Metzger, because I think overall, when we talk about countering, you know, racist politics, one thing that is very much missing from many of our comrades on the left is an acknowledgment that this is much, much bigger than left, right or Democratic and Republican.
So this whole, you know, Metzger is one of the first racist leaders that was not characterized as conservative and Republican in the way that he voted.
He identified himself as a Democrat, ran as a Democrat.
And I think there's something really dangerous in assuming that only one party is subject to this kind of ideological conditioning, right?
And also, look at accelerationism, right?
It's something that transcends left-right, and as Metzger put it, one of his favorite slogans was, race is my religion.
And so I think, you know, this is what made him so ecumenical and so pragmatic.
That was his key concern.
And whoever would work with him on that final outcome, he was happy to deal with, even if he absolutely hated them.
So basically, you know, you see this real pragmatism come through in a bipartisan sort of approach to racist mobilization and not something else that you see, you know, develop at like a milestone in his life.
So yeah, you see him become more and more militant.
Then you have, after the murder of an Ethiopian student in Portland, Oregon in 88, you have the Southern Poverty Law Center go after Metzger in a civil suit and war, as well as Metzger's son, John.
And ultimately, the Southern Poverty Law Center wins this suit.
On behalf of Saraw's family, the Ethiopian student.
And, you know, war allegedly is bankrupt.
This is the point at which the public generally and a lot of people that honestly should know better, who talk about white power and are experts on the movement, completely write Metzger off and say that's the point at which he became irrelevant.
because the SPLC lawsuit basically devastated his credibility.
No one cared about him anymore.
He couldn't make money.
That's bullshit, though.
It's absolutely bullshit.
And it's really, really dangerous because Metzger himself, if you look at the speech he gave on the courthouse steps right after the judgment against him and John and War, a reporter said, why do you look so happy?
And he was with his wife.
He said, because we're going to go celebrate.
The reporter said, why are you celebrating like you just lost this significant case?
And the judgment against you is substantial.
And Metzger said, no, this is a victory for the movement.
And he went on to give this, it's really chilling in retrospect, and it pisses me off to no end that people don't acknowledge the significance of the words that he said that day, and then how it's impacted not just his approach to activism, but the entire movement after.
So on the corridor steps, his rebuttal is, this is a victory for the movement.
Don't you get it yet?
It's too late.
You know, we're in your schools.
We're on your school boards.
We're teaching your children.
We're in your police.
We're in your military.
What do you think happened to all the skinheads?
The seeds were planted.
And after that, you know, I mean, this was called Operation Appleseed by Metzger and people within the movement.
But basically, he had the strategy of he would have the violent skinheads that had records, let them go to prison, let them fuck shit up, basically, and, you know, commit violence.
And there was a specific set of incentives that he had to instigate this among young followers, but also a system of coercion for followers that had Taking him up on that and then face charges in court, but I'll get to that in a second.
But so the skinheads that were not felons or didn't have criminal records, Metzger would tell everybody, send me the clean ones.
Send me the clean ones.
He would meet with them in private, off the record, didn't keep records on this, because Metzger was, you know, again, hate to say it, but very smart and very strategically calculated.
So he would meet with quote-unquote clean Friends of racist skinheads that had criminal records, those are the guys that he would implant as infiltrators of whatever system.
Again, and this is a side note, but I think it's really key, infiltration and the threat of infiltration, especially with Operation Appleseed and Metzger's approach, is a lot more than just the military and the armed forces.
You can see the outcome of the plan that Metzger had when you look, for example, at The school board shit that's happening now with trans rights.
You know, these are the sending fascist actors and activists to infiltrate school boards and show up at meetings.
And this is something he was working on for half a century.
So what you see, too, is after the verdict or the judgment against him, rather, sorry, in the SPLC case, Metzger basically says that he has no reason anymore to keep his mouth shut.
That he's been bankrupted and this is a real opportunity for him because fuck it, free speech.
And after that point, he gets a lot more militant.
Before, in the years leading up, he had been more concerned about his image as far as the way that he framed himself when he went out for media engagements.
After that, he becomes just as vociferous and offensive and bold as he wanted to be.
Because at this point, He had been, he didn't feel like he had anything left to lose, which is super dangerous, right?
But also, you know, people wrote him off and that gave him so much freedom in terms of scrutiny and pulling what he pulled, getting away with what he got away with.
So I think these are crucial things, I would say, that matter about the trajectory of Tom Metzger's life.
If we're painting in broad strokes, you know, I mean, I can get into the specifics, but I think those are basically the bullet points, right?
He always has an interest in media, and media specifically as it pertains to political conflict.
And then after that, he wants to get involved in electoral politics, tries to embrace working within the system, becomes disillusioned with that, and slides towards the insurgency side of the movement.
So overall, I think that's a pretty, as Short as I can be and as clear as I can be with tracing his trajectory.
One thing I want to point out about his media strategy is that people think that I think there's a facile understanding of how white supremacists manipulate and exploit media platforms in the sense of like disseminating propaganda.
And that's writ large the point.
But what people miss is, especially with Tom Metzger, it was much more complex than just using a platform to spread your racist bullshit.
The media for Metzger functioned as an organ of political legitimacy?
In the sense that, you know, there was a mainstream audience that was interested and maybe if he could talk to the common man and he embraced, you know, speaking like a working class person, because that's how he identified, then maybe he could reach people.
So there was a propaganda aspect to it.
But if you look at his appearances on the major talk shows, one of his strategies is to show up with his son clean cut in a suit and tie and bring on with them these dirtbag skinheads.
So basically the function of that for the audience at home is to think comparatively, right?
Like these skinheads that are thugs and committing all this violence and shit.
Well, doesn't Tom Metzger, doesn't John Metzger look put together, you know, orderly and a lot more sensible and logical and basically it defangs them.
Right.
Because in comparison to the skinheads, they look like an option that's just concerned about white civil rights and separatism, not hate.
So that's very much how he framed himself.
So there was that aspect to media as well.
But he also and again, this goes back to what I've been saying about How prescient he was in laying the foundation for arguments that would be taken up by the movement and exist even today.
He was one of the first to really, really, really embrace the First Amendment free speech controversy angle.
And so people know about race and reason is this public access show that Metzger had.
But what they don't often know about is that Metzger would have his people call into the local public access channels and complain about the show.
So he would basically have these false flag complaints that he disseminated in local media.
So that he could stir up controversy and then, you know, cry foul that they were trying to push him off the air because of complaints, and he would go after public access shows and the First Amendment.
So, you know, that was another function of media, you know, as like a force multiplier for reclamation of like white Claims to American civic values, if that makes sense.
So that was another additional aspect of what he was really good at with the media.
So you see the payoff for people from as broad as Richard Spencer, right, all the way to AWD and beyond.
Right, and to call it out as being explicitly white, as opposed to, you know, using the coded terms, right?
Like, and that's a very big thing that's happening in a lot of the, you know, kind of former dregs of the alt-right, you know, these days, is, you know, ultimately they're just fighting for, like, the use of the word, like, in public, positively, by political figures.
So I know you wanted to talk about, like, the misconception that the skinheads were his biggest impact, Well, I mean, yeah, again, I think that his impact is sort of written off.
Again, people see him as a buffoon or a clown and irrelevant after Portland and only concerned with the skinheads, you know.
But really what he's doing across the course of his career is laying the foundations for all of the shit that we see now.
And the youth movement is a part of that.
There are other leaders who also embrace younger generations at the time of Metzger and before.
But I think where he really excelled is that He wasn't a micromanager and he wasn't full of contempt and attempting to basically insert himself and control the youth movement like a figure such as Pierce would do, right?
So, Metzger sort of gave permission to young people to run amok, I think would be a better way of putting it, and didn't try to control them.
He just sort of sought to empower young people to go out and commit racist violence and what have you, but not to make them his shock troops, as you often hear.
So, I think that's one of the reasons that he was extraordinarily successful in terms of getting younger people hooked on him, for the people that were, you know, because it's a lot more attractive when you're 18 and rebellious to go deal with a leader that's not trying to basically make you an Autonomaton of racist politics, right?
How do you, how do you think Metzger fits into, like, the legalist resistance idea?
I think that the term kind of gets thrown around in ways that are obscure.
So I think of the legalist resistance model as the sort of explicitly, we can't, we can't, as the white, the white supremacist, you know, we can't engage in actually building a militarized political movement with, you know, ranks and everything.
And so we work in like small cells that are, you know, kind of accountable to each other.
I mean, and this is another thing that, you know, someone that works on a lot of like Middle Eastern, North African stuff drives me up the fucking wall because, you know, leaderless resistance was beaming in 82 before anything else.
But anyway, so yeah, Metzger at the end of his life became very much in line with that.
And he was the lone wolf pioneer.
Basically, so he wrote a ton of stuff about lone wolves, you know, and I think that yeah yeah he absolutely fell into that towards definitely after breaking with Duke, you know, and after founding war certainly as white Aryan resistance he came into that, but
Essentially, he also was very much a fan of having basically a dual-tiered model of engagement, and what I mean by that is like the clandestine cells operating independently, and individuals even, like this lone wolf thing, because that's what most people within the movement recognize as significant in terms of Metzger's contribution, the lone wolf that he essentially added to Louis Beam's leaderless resistance.
But Beyond that, he advocated fronts.
So, political fronts where you could operate within, again, like infiltration, where you could operate within the system and push the Overton window and mainstream ideas at the same time as you had other people that were working in a revolutionary capacity.
So, I think it's a lot more complex than did he fall on the side of leaderless resistance or, you know, mainstreaming, because he did both.
But certainly after the SPLC judgment, he himself framed his activism as being entirely insurgent.
And Lone Wolf is what people, again, within the movement recognize as his fundamental contribution.
But it's really interesting because right after he died, Billy Roper did a couple, like a huge episode, at least one I can remember, talking about the credit that Metzger doesn't get for all of these different areas that essentially he's responsible for.
In the present.
So Billy Roper even credits him with the balkanization approach to the Pacific Northwest, you know, and all these other things.
And I think that's critical to recognize as well.
Yeah, no, Roper is a giant piece of shit that we have not talked about enough on this podcast.
But I think it's super important for people to realize that, you know, Roper was basically Pierce's protégé and Pierce didn't get along with Metzger.
However, that said, it's a great example of how pragmatic Metzger was in his approach, because he also operated as a mentor figure for Billy Roper.
To the point that he dedicated all of this time on his podcast to eulogizing Metzger.
You know, so I think most people that would write off these connections across the generations within movement history need to really stop and like do more research because Metzger's fucking everywhere and he has a hand in absolutely everything.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, it's amazing how, you know, it's very easy if you're just kind of looking at the surface, you know, that, like, Nick Fuentes does not talk about Tom Metzger, right?
But you can still see the influence from Metzger.
Well, Nick Fuentes doesn't have any reason to talk about, you know, he needs to talk about, like, Republicans and Republican issues and then, like, slide in that way.
Yeah, but, you know, it is interesting, like, Stryker?
Stryker, like right after Metzger died, you were seeing eulogies come out from people that you wouldn't necessarily expect them to.
Like Fuentes, I wouldn't have been surprised if he had said something about Metzger the same way.
But yeah, Stryker came out and said that one of the fundamental influences on him when he was coming into his own, as far as racist mobilization is concerned, was writing to Metzger when he was a young teen.
Yeah, Eric Stryker, Joseph Jordan, Eric Stryker, the same Stryker.
Oh yes, I was listening to Stryker just before we got on the call today.
I'm sorry, why would you do that to yourself?
Every day, Amanda, every day.
No, I mean like I'm one to point fingers, obviously not.
That reminds me too, I think something else that I want to say before I forget is Metzger was also one of the big pioneers in terms of the enemy of my enemy is my friend of operative politics within the movement.
So he would absolutely team with You know, ideological opponents and basically race separatist opponents in really interesting ways that I've gone almost entirely unnoticed.
And I think there's a parallel to say the Boogaloo Boys going on Jimmy Dore and framing themselves as a left wing sort of movement, you know, in terms of The dissimulation, again, and deflection that goes with operating alongside tokens of your enemy that are operating towards the same outcomes that you're seeking to achieve.
So a great example is one of the weirdest videos in my collection of extremely weird, crazy Tom Metzger shit, which is massive, by the way, is a video of him giving a keynote at a new Black Panther conference that he's invited to after the LA riots.
And there's just this, you know, listening to this shit is so uncomfortable already.
But in his address, there's a really weird moment at the end where the guy that has invited him, somebody in the audience asks a question about, okay, so we're black separatists, you're white separatists.
What happens, you know, when we get to the race wars?
And they laugh.
And they put their arms around each other and say, we'll get to it then, you know?
Which I think is, again, the example of his pragmatism, the cynicism that goes with that, and really, really, honestly fucking disgusting, you know?
Oh, absolutely.
He would partner with organizations like the New Black Panthers and have Spies, from his fucking tokens, that he absolutely was committed to genociding later on, operate as infiltrators of different organizations.
He did that a lot.
And then he had skinheads that did the same thing for the new Black Panther sometimes.
So yeah, he was also key in that kind of approach as well.
Yeah, you see a lot of this kind of handing out a Nation of Islam type material in some of these circles.
Oh yeah, he gave a speech and donated to Farrakhan, and Farrakhan brought him up on stage and shit.
And also, again, that's another media manipulative tactic that Musker excelled in, because he could use that not as just movement propaganda, but a way to provide a platform to draw people in from, you know, make them think twice.
And again, like framing himself as the working class white man in a way that that wasn't just right wing, but was broad, broad.
It is really weird.
It was like his attempt at racial solidarity, but racial separatist solidarity.
And I don't think that gets acknowledged enough because, you know, he he was doing that, too.
Yeah, no, I mean, Heimbach thought he was being real clever with this, like, one struggle national Bolshevik radio bullshit.
He's an absolute moron.
It's such a perfect neo-Nazi nonsense story that your wife cheated on you with your father-in-law.
she done on you with your father, like your father-in-law, like whatever. - There's no way to describe this without a diagram, ultimately. - No, no, it's just amazing.
It's absolutely amazing.
And also, ugh, God.
I mean, I could complain forever about the people that believed Heimbach when he said he was out.
But he did a whole podcast with Jesse Martin.
Oh, yes, I know, because I listened to it with a bunch of people and one of them was a former who had to leave the room.
Oh, yeah.
He was so he was like, I'm I'm physically wanting to be very violent right now because of like he was calling Pierce Dr. Pierce and the weird reverence that he was using and that those two walk on the right side or whatever.
Yeah, take a walk on the right side.
And like also really, really cute.
Like that's supposed to not be a clue to anybody, but whatever.
I mean, that's a different topic for another day.
Yeah, another day.
Well, again, there is, we'll put a link to the back catalog there where we talked about that.
But yeah, no, more misconceptions, anything else that we should definitely let the audience know?
Hell yes, all of them.
Okay, so another... You mean he wasn't just like kind of a doddering old man who couldn't find his way out of Mexico that one time?
Oh my god.
Well, speaking of Mexico, I think maybe we should talk about the Louis Theroux documentary at least a little bit.
Yes, of course, because this is really important.
Yeah, go ahead.
You know this strategy that we see with the alt-right of the Overton window and openly trying to push the mainstream further to the right?
Metzger, again, was the forefront of this.
So, after his little clan border watch thing with Duke, I don't know if you've ever seen or heard of the confrontation between him and Pat Buchanan.
Yeah, after the clan border watch thing, which, by the way, Metzger, of course, always says was his idea, and Duke at various points has claimed credit.
I mean, I do think it was Metzger, but I'm not gonna get into, like, why right now.
I have this affidavit from a lawsuit about basically border officials committing violence against migrants from the 70s, and I think it's 76 is what it dates to, but Metzger's talking about how basically he has INS infiltrated by the KKK and won't tell them how many people he has and talks about how he doesn't keep records, you know, so just as an aside, he's already very aware by the mid-70s of
How record-keeping fucks your organization, you shouldn't do it.
But he's also actively been infiltrating and seeding people by 1976, and he is on record about it, you know, in a sworn affidavit before the court.
So I think that's very significant in terms of tracking infiltration.
Also, what I was going to say about Pat Buchanan is Metzger is one of the first to really seed this whole idea of a border crisis and illegal immigration, quote unquote.
And Pat Buchanan, after the border watch campaign that he and Duke pull, goes to the border for a photo op and Metzger shows up and trolls the shit out of him.
Because that's, you know, who Tom Metzger was.
But you see, you know, conspicuously and consistently over his lifetime, him using the same techniques that we will see the alt-right later pick up and then other actors within the white supremacist, you know, political activist community, namely using the Overton window to shift people Over with your own goading, essentially.
And I also think that one of the things that's very significant for people to know that they might not know is that if we're thinking about Metzger's influence on, well, the movement at large, but also specifically infiltration, and when Metzger really emerges onto the racist scene, he actually becomes known first in 1976,
For the Camp Pendleton KKK branch or cell or what what have you because he's he takes up the cause as a spokesman for the Camp Pendleton Marine KKK group and that's when he first gets like the public mic in broader Attention in broader circles of attention where he's talking about white civil rights and how come black troops can express, you know, black nationalism, but white people have no civil rights and whatever, whatever.
So, you know, already in the mid 70s, he's he's forging that territory in military bases, but also he's making recommendations for the Marines that got caught to spread the shit as they're getting transferred to new bases from the military response to this huge scandal that broke out at Pendleton.
But also, on top of that, this was the first time that DOD launched an investigation of racist extremism in the military.
It was after 76, and largely because of this particular nest of KKK infiltrators here in California.
So yeah, that's another thing I think is really crucial about him.
I also think that another The key area that isn't recognized enough that absolutely should be is Metzger's role in really pushing transnational mobilization networks in ways that, you know, Pierce has given some credit for doing this, but Metzger is actively sending, well, I mean, I'm thinking of one specific person in particular that I will not name who has since left the movement, but
He had one lieutenant that was active duty that he sent to Sweden that really helped build the architecture for what would become the fascist racist party now in Sweden.
Metzger was responsible to a considerable degree for sending people to help build that in the 80s and 90s, in addition through the music scene.
I think that's important to recognize.
He even had a hand in disseminating propaganda from Sweden to Germany through people like Dennis Nahon and his brother.
He went to Japan, I want to say it was, and worked with Japanese fascists back in the day also, which I've never heard anyone refer to.
You know, he built these ties across the world, too.
And let's see, what else?
Religion, I think, is another thing that should be mentioned about him.
Well, before I get to that, I'm trying to hit off all the marks before we have to wrap up, but balkanization strategy, I think I mentioned.
Metzger, the daughtering buffoon of the Louis Theroux documentary, Metzger was one of the first in the movement to publicly have a sense of humor.
which is obviously very lacking in racist circles.
But Metzger really was one of the first the just trolling bro approach.
Have you ever seen the actual Bart Simpson T-shirt or a photo of it?
Which one?
There's one that was famous in the early, like, 91 or 92.
He got a cease and desist because he was publishing Bart Simpson t-shirts.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is around the time that he had... This is super interesting.
The same time that he had hacked Super Mario Bros.
and made it Skinhead Mario, and it was playable on the website.
Wow, I never heard of that one.
Oh, he was like mega in terms of, you know, galvanizing people through popular culture as well.
Yeah, he's big into that.
But so the the just trolling bro shit, also him, the cartoons that were supposed to be funny and then would allow you to basically claim First Amendment and that people were overly easily offended of another thing that he did.
Let's see what else.
Also, yeah, the before I was getting to the religion thing, I think there's like one or two other things that.
So let me see.
Okay, yeah, the whole hagiography of the right wing and the way that the deceased are treated and taken up as, like, saints or what, you know, what you see now in terms of calling people saints.
He was big into that, but I mean, everybody in the right wing was, so that's not as important, but he would have, like, Bob Matthews tribute concerts a lot.
And things like that, keeping the memory of the dead martyrs before alive.
Related to that, Metzger ran the Prisoners of War program.
So people that went to prison for racist violence would be supported in letter writing campaigns and donations through Metzger and his networks.
And so there's a little bit of a goodwill campaign to that, and that you see later on taken up by, guess who, Matt Heimbach and company.
Through their dissimulation about, you know, right to a prisoner that ended up being right to a Nazi prisoner specifically, but we're not going to tell you that on the website.
So, Metzger pioneered that.
However, I also want to point out that That fits into, you know, he had this, I think I mentioned before, this carrot and stick approach to younger racists that he was drawing in and basically sending out.
So, he would incentivize committing acts of violence in the name of the movement by publishing in war that, you know, these great young white hopes of the future had, like, beat the shit out of whoever, and you would get, like, the dopamine rush of, you know, an article written about you.
And he would also record updates about that from the hotline phone system.
But he had the same sort of cunning approach to a way that you can create coercive mechanisms of control for the younger generation.
One thing that he would do that I don't think anyone is really aware of,
When a skinhead in particular was facing a prison sentence or, you know, any court trial for his activities, Metzger would basically say, unless you let me speak at your hearing or at your sentencing, I'm going to cut you off from the Prisoner of War POW network, and you're going to be in prison by yourself with no support from the outside racists, and everyone in the racist gangs inside will fucking hate you.
So, yeah, I mean, this is something that people don't talk about, but is really, really effective when we think about how, you know, the carceral system also contributes to especially these earlier generations.
So, I think that, and then, yeah, real quickly, I think the last thing, the last major point, just because we're, you know, so short on time that I think is worth bringing up, is that You know, his approach to religion is really interesting.
What you see a lot of times in the movement, I think, is leaders that are reticent to talk about a previous approach that they had before they changed their minds or disowned their past, but Metzger never did.
He would talk about his evolution quite openly.
So, he first went through a period of becoming a Christian identity minister when he was a member of the Klan.
And then, you know, over time, I think initially he rejected Christian identity and picked up, like, Wotanism and Paganism and Odin shit and all that.
And then eventually became a skinhead, or not a skinhead, sorry, an atheist.
And then he was just out and out, racist my religion.
So, he was very open to using religion in ways that parallel, you know, like the American Nazi Party with Rockwell, you know, where the identity label was something that you could use to sort of suck in just racist Christians and imbue them with a theological, you know, theological stance on racism as well.
But, so, Massacre played with that throughout his life, too.
So, he was really, really adaptable Yeah, I mean, it sounds, I mean, again, the idea that he's just sort of like throwing everything in a wall kind of concept just, you know, it just kind of comes back over and over again.
And so, I don't know, maybe that explains or at least, you know, maybe that's part of the reason why people who haven't looked into him deeply have a hard time kind of nailing him down because he doesn't seem to be any one thing.
He's kind of everything all at once.
He's a chameleon, absolutely.
It was really, really helpful to him.
I mean, if you think about the fact that, you know, people said nobody fucked with Metzger and he was, like, irrelevant from 1991 on.
But, like, he was communicating with Atomwaffen Division and talking about, like, strategies to Charlottesville, strategic approaches to Charlottesville.
Fucking come on.
Obviously, this guy did not lose his significance because he was trotted out all over the movement media circles over and over again until, like, the day he died.
You know, again, like the fact that he could operate all over the movement openly, right?
But the eye of people that supposedly watch the movement, I think, is a testament to how he operated strategically.
And related to that, I think it's really, really important for Anyone that purports to oppose this kind of ideology, you know, we can't afford to write them off as stupid and backwards and uneducated because, you know, the fact of the matter is some of them are extremely smart.
And just because you You disagree vehemently with the ideology and the mindset and all of these things doesn't mean that your opponent is stupid.
And in terms of coming up with the calculus to defeat something like that, I mean, I say this when I talk about ISIS, when I write about ISIS, if you make the mistake of demonizing your opponent to the point that you say that they're not capable of logic, That they are irrational, that they are stupid.
You're never going to see them coming.
And even remove the moral valuation from it, right?
Remove the ethics from it of whether or not you're pro-racism or, you know, ambivalent or whatever.
Just from a matter of like cold, hard strategy, you can't underestimate the possibility that Maybe Metzger isn't just an idiot that's a clown.
Maybe he actually has something that's calculated in terms of a program that he's implementing.
Because if people had not written him off in the late 80s and early 90s, we wouldn't see a lot of the stuff that we see now.
But the fact of the matter is, he got away with tons of the stuff that he did precisely because people were eager to feel superior to blatantly, openly racist people by denigrating their intellect.
And that is massively mistaken.
And blows up in your face.
Right.
Yeah.
Cause then 30 years later we're still dealing with this shit.
And we're dealing with it in different iterations that in some ways are newer and smarter.
Yeah, I know.
It's more difficult to overthrow the thought paradigm of the post-civil rights, civil racism era.
And I say civil racism specifically as a pun, right?
The civility bullshit discourse.
It's much harder to tackle that kind of racism that operates covertly than it is to stand against it in public.
So yeah, I think that's personal to point out.
Yeah, I always say the ones that really worry me these days are the ones that know their history, right?
You know, Vic Mackey bringing on Tom Metzger was definitely, you know, kind of, and Vic Mackey would always talk as if, you know, he had, you know, he had read some of the same books you and I have read, etc.
You know, there was always a sense of like, you know, kind of background and you see that with some of these guys.
Sure, absolutely.
I was going to say, Joseph Jordan, aka Eric Stryker, actually claims to be one of those guys who had a copy of Siege from 2002, when he would have been 10 years old or something.
I love Nazi hipsters.
It's hilarious to me.
Back when it was cool.
Oh, you like James Mason?
Name five of his books.
It's ridiculous.
I love the little street cred things that they do.
It's very cute, boy.
Yeah, yeah, no, they really are just, you know, it's so much dick-measuring contest, ultimately.
It really is, and I love the fact that, like, speaking of dick-measuring contest, just because it's a nice neo-Nazi nonsense story to end on, did you follow the Telegram fight between Gypsy Crusader and Catboy Cammy, where somebody, like, spread a bunch of the photos from a livestream of Catboy Cammy in a pink tutu drinking out of a big black dildo?
This would have been like 2018, 2019 or something?
Yeah, this was like 2019, 2020, I think.
This is like around the time that Paul went to prison.
Yeah, so this is around the time that Nick Fuentes and Catboy Cammy had their little date thing, right?
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah, it was all.
Yeah, that was the Catboy Cammy had this like moment of relevance.
So yes, please.
Yeah.
And then like the feds got on his ass and he was like, shut up after that.
But it was a brief moment in the sun.
But like Icarus, he flew too close in his pink tutu, which I love.
Yes.
Yes.
And then also, I just have to say, because I think it's hilarious that this happened with Gypsy, you know, like I know neo-Nazis and, you know, other fuckers watch your show.
So I would like to give you guys a little bit of free advice.
You know, when your boy is getting sentenced on a Zoom, maybe don't pop on and scream racial slurs at his Jewish attorney, because I don't know if you know this or not, but that's not going to help him.
It's not going to help anybody, except for the sentencing arm.
I mean, it is free entertainment because, like, what a clown, you know?
Exactly.
Gypsy's followers are some of the most irritating on earth.
Yeah, Metzger.
Influence still being felt.
What a wang.
We only scratched the surface on this.
I really do want to do a full episode of just Amanda Rogers tells stories of Duke and Metzger.
Oh man, man.
Oh yeah.
If you would like to go ahead and tell the Banana Hammock story, I would love to hear it.
Oh my God, hold on.
I'm trying to think because there's so many.
I mean, I did a thread on Twitter about it.
You know that old meme of the two Desi dudes, the two guys, I think in India or Pakistan that were friends, and then one of them posted a picture of both of them, like, friendship ended with so-and-so.
Yeah.
Anyway, and I did that with Metzger and Duke, like, about their breakup.
But I think I talk about it, banana hammock stories in there, where Metzger Like, he goes on a podcast a couple years ago, it was close to his death, and it was supposed to be about Bob Matthews' legacy, and Metzger just loses his shit all of the sudden and goes on this massive David Duke rant and starts talking about how, like, the best part of it, what is it?
Okay, he says he first lost all respect for David Duke because David Duke got up randomly in the middle of, like, some rally and he just walked out in a Speedo for no fucking reason at all.
And he says that that's like when he did, like, that was his hard line with David Duke.
Do we know about what year that would have been?
Because I'm just trying to imagine.
I think it had to be like the mid, late 70s.
Okay, okay.
But so there's so much good shit about like their relationship that's absolutely hilarious.
In the era in which David Duke is writing masturbation manuals.
Sex Pest and Perv, it's amazing.
But Metzger, like there's a great cartoon in War that is basically, I mean if we're going to update it for now, he's essentially calling David Duke Kim Kardashian and like pointing out all of the plastic surgery that he says Duke has had in this cartoon.
Hilarious!
And then he also talks about How Duke has this huge coke habit and he had like the hide your wife shit with Duke and Metzger is really funny because for the purposes of like you know how basically all the movement leaders are huge hypocrites that bang everybody's wives and like all of that?
Metzger was one of the only ones that was impeccable as far as the his relationship with his wife and like Family were concerned.
He wasn't like a complete hoe that was Matt Parrott banging his, you know, son-in-law's new girlfriend or whatever that incestuous trash was.
But so let's see what else.
So Metzger wanted to strip search everyone at a rally one time.
Duke wouldn't let him.
And so Metzger started telling everybody in the movement that Duke was like a bisexual croc, I think he said.
And then another time he said that David Duke had like a boy toy that he kept on a houseboat, like tons of amazing stuff.
Yeah.
And then he said that Duke and his gay houseboat boy would like go clubbing in West Hollywood.
Tons of fun stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's great.
You know, this is the let them fight meme for me.
I hate that I know this stuff.
Yeah, I know.
The fact that you and I have this kind of stuff in our brains is just, you know.
I should have learned how to knit as a hobby, you know.
Really.
It's what makes this podcast worthwhile, ultimately.
So, Amanda, please, this has been great.
Come back anytime.
Tell us where we can find you.
I'm on Twitter and in your head rent-free, you know, I'm on Twitter at Ms.
Entropy.
Is there a way we can financially support you?
If you would like, I think I have the link to Patreon in my bio.
Please, if you are so inclined, go support Amanda Rogers because she is great and someone that I learn from regularly.
Right back at you!
Thanks again, Amanda.
Do you have a final thought for the audience before we sign off today?
Don't underestimate your opponent, basically.
I think that's my takeaway.
No matter how you want to feel about activism and opposing racist political mobilization, the feel-good shit doesn't matter as much as actually doing the work of thinking strategically and rationally and logically and coldly, frankly.
So, you can't dismiss The way that white supremacists operate as part of like one unified block that is racist America, unless you want it to continue because you're not going to understand how your enemy is moving.
And that's the worst thing that you can do.
100% agreed.
I think that's kind of the reason this podcast exists.
So again, thank you Amanda for coming on and we will be back.
We will definitely come back.
We will do this again sometime because it's great.
So cheers.
Yeah, I had an absolute blast.
That was I Don't Speak German.
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