When Oath Keeper Darren Huff returned to Madisonville, Tennessee on April 20, 2010, he was planning to take control of the courthouse. It didn't quite work out that way. He didn't even see the inside of a courthouse until his own arrest a week later. Sources: https://www.politico.com/story/2010/04/army-birther-under-investigation-035823 https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/army-birther-lakin-released-from-leavenworth/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/04/26/gordon-liddy-on-shooting-from-the-lip/75754676-030f-4191-a9e3-a421855aea1f/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-six-g-gordon-liddy-the-126130442/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/08/roger-stone-kristin-davis-robert-mueller/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democratic-party-accuses-republicans-voter-intimidation-federal-court https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/attorney-for-birther-army-doc-is-former-gop-staffer-and-anti-gay-crusader https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/gan/press/2011/11-01-11.html https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/14/fewer-than-1-of-defendants-in-federal-criminal-cases-were-acquitted-in-2022/ https://time.com/archive/6597707/the-secret-world-of-extreme-militias/ https://www.thedailybeast.com/anti-vaxxers-charge-followers-to-join-fake-anthony-fauci-grand-jury/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4382623/fitzpatrick-v-bivins/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/5092131/united-states-v-huff-tv1/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Nå er det en linkup hos Coprix, og på torsdag får alle Coop-medlemmer pizza grandiosa til bare 30 kroner.
Kun på torsdag hos Coprix.
Fortort!
Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place.
Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Had enough of this country?
Ever dreamt about starting your own?
I planted the flag.
This is mine.
I own this.
It's surprisingly easy.
55 gallons of water, 500 pounds of concrete.
Or maybe not.
No country willingly gives up their territory.
Oh my God.
What is that?
Bullets.
Listen to Escape from Zakistan.
That's Escape from Z-A-Q-I-S-T-A-N on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.
This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.
Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.
Hey, you've been doing all that talking.
It's time to get rewarded for it.
Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech, brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.
Call Zone Media.
Call Zone Media.
On April 1, 2010, Fitzpatrick barged into a closed grand jury proceeding and attempted to place Monroe County grand jury foreman Gary Pettway under citizen's arrest.
Fitzpatrick had written up his own arrest warrant, charging Pettway with obstruction of justice for his refusal to issue an indictment against Barack Obama for treason.
Walter Fitzpatrick did not have the authority to draw up his own arrest warrants, any more than a county court an hour south of Knoxville had the authority to indict the president on a federal crime.
But none of that really mattered to the small crowd of supporters outside who were sure that they were closer than ever to arresting the president.
Darren Hough, an oath keeper from Georgia, was among those supporters.
He was standing by with his video camera, hoping to capture Fitzpatrick's victory against the corrupt county grand jury.
You have been notified, you have been told, Mr.
Pettway has just been placed under citizen's arrest.
My name is Walter Fitzpatrick.
I have just placed Mr.
Pettway under citizen's arrest.
You're going to have to step outside.
But when the doors opened again, it was not Gary Pettway who was being escorted out by the sheriff's deputies.
It was Walter Fitzpatrick.
We're leaving now, sir.
Why?
Because you just interrupted a court proceeding.
The rest of us would get arrested for that.
However, all of you think you're special.
So now we're leaving the courthouse.
And then what?
Then you're free to go.
Otherwise, you're going to get arrested today.
And I'm free to come back in.
No, sir.
I'm free.
And he could have just left.
As the deputy points out, he's kind of being treated with kid gloves here.
He's already broken the law, but nobody really wants to deal with this old crank and his fan club.
But instead of leaving, Fitzpatrick pivoted.
Now he's placing the sheriff himself under arrest.
In the audio recording, you can hear the deputy sigh dramatically as Fitzpatrick begins reading the officers their rights.
And they realize that the only way Fitzpatrick is leaving the building is in handcuffs.
Fitzpatrick was charged with interfering with a grand jury, resisting arrest, and inciting a riot.
He was held in the county jail over the weekend, during which time he reportedly refused to eat or drink, and was offered a $1,500 bond on the condition that he undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
On April 7, 2010, the day after Fitzpatrick was released, Darren Huff made the drive from his home in Georgia back up to Madisonville.
In a text message Huff sent a friend on his way home that night, he said he'd spent the day meeting with Fitzpatrick, going over the plan.
They were coordinating with multiple groups to show up for what Huff called Phase 2.
When Walter Fitzpatrick appeared for his court date on April 20th, he wasn't going to be alone.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This episode is about Darren Hough.
I mean, the last episode was supposed to be about Darren Hough.
That was the story I sat down to write in the first place.
But my vague recollection of the story of some Oath Keeper with a harebrained scheme to citizens arrest an entire county court turned up something a little more complicated.
That keeps happening.
It turns out history is always a little messy.
No one is really the sole protagonist in their own story.
Life doesn't really work that way.
But if you listened to last week's episode, now you have some context for the baffling confidence Walter Fitzpatrick and Darren Hough seemed to have in their plan.
They'd both been completely swept up in this nationwide right-wing mania of birtherism, the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was ineligible to serve as the President of the United States because he had been born in Kenya.
Walter Fitzpatrick, as bizarre and disconnected from reality as his ideas sound, was far from the only American who was barging into a court clerk's office every week to demand something be done about the president's acts of treason.
It was everywhere.
Everyone from Chuck Norris to Donald Trump was asking, is Barack Obama a natural-born citizen of the United States?
Politicians like Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich flirted with the idea, walking right up to the line and then claiming they'd misspoken or been misunderstood.
Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman said she would proudly produce her own birth certificate.
Alabama Senator Richard Shelby denied that he'd told a newspaper that he'd like to see Barack Obama's birth certificate.
Missouri Congressman Roy Blunt said he'd been taken out of context after telling a reporter that there was no legitimate reason for the president not to produce his birth certificate.
This wasn't something that existed only at the lunatic fringe of political discourse.
Mainstream politicians and celebrities were just asking questions, never mind the kinds of things their supporters might do to try to get answers.
So after an entire year of unsuccessfully petitioning his local county grand jury to bring charges against Barack Obama, Walter Fitzpatrick was frustrated.
And when he barged into that courtroom on April 1st, 2010, Oathkeeper Darren Huff and Sovereign Citizen Carl Swenson were among those waiting just outside.
And after the tables were turned that day with this citizen's arrest turning into just a citizen getting arrested...
Darren Hoff and Carl Swenson vowed to return, not just to support their friend at his next court date, but to carry out a bigger, better version of the plan.
You who have been on the fence must get off of that fence.
Please, go to the courthouse en masse and demand justice.
He is honoring his oath.
To all of you out there who have taken that oath, I ask you right now to honor yours.
Get down there, get him out of jail, and make sure that justice is served.
My name is Carl Swenson.
The call was put out.
If you believe in the cause, if you believe in the Constitution, you must stand with Walter Fitzpatrick against the Monroe County courts.
He was scheduled to appear on April 20th, and true patriots had an obligation to be there.
Between Fitzpatrick's release on the 6th and his court date on the 20th, they had just two weeks to prepare.
According to the court records, Darren Hough appeared in several videos about the events in Madisonville that were posted on Carl Swenson's website, riseupforamerica.com.
Archived pages of that site do still exist, and I can read the text on those pages, but the videos were all embedded with Flash Player, so Darren's calls to action may be lost to the sands of time.
But we have some pretty solid sources that can give us an idea of what was on Darren's mind during those two weeks.
Because Darren Huff has never once in his life shut his goddamn mouth.
On April 15th, Darren Huff stopped at the Chase Bank in Hiram, Georgia.
He ran a small business doing outdoor lighting, so he stopped by often to deposit checks.
According to Erica, the bank teller who testified at his trial, most of the employees at the branch knew him well enough to make friendly conversation, but if she was working, he would wait in her line even if another teller was free.
But that evening, he wasn't making his usual jokes.
He was deadly serious.
Erica testified that Huff just launched right into telling her about Walter Fitzpatrick and his upcoming trial in Madisonville, Tennessee, a situation she had no context for.
She'd never heard of Walter Fitzpatrick, and she'd never been to Madisonville, Tennessee.
She was the only teller at the counter.
The bank was about to close for the night, and suddenly this normally friendly customer is leaning over the counter telling her that he was going to be spending this weekend mounting an anti-aircraft gun to the back of his pickup truck because he and his militia were going to take over a small town in Tennessee on Tuesday.
The conversation got so intense that another employee went to go get the manager, Shane.
In his testimony at trial, Shane too said that Huff was a regular customer at the bank and over the years he'd gotten to know him a bit.
Sometime in 2009, Huff got really political.
And when he made small talk with the bank tellers, it was usually about his anti-government beliefs and various conspiracy theories.
So when another employee came to get him that night because Huff was making Erica uncomfortable, he probably wasn't surprised.
He tried guiding the conversation back to safer territory, asking Huff if he'd be taking his video camera with him again on this trip.
But the response was an alarming one.
Huff told him it would be kind of hard to hold the camera because he planned to be, quote, on the front line with two AK-47s.
He told the bank employees that they'd probably see him on the news next week.
And as he was leaving, he told Erica, it was nice knowing you if I never see you again.
Not to get ahead of myself, but I do want to jump ahead here and say Darren Huff would later accuse those two bank employees of lying under oath.
Obviously, there's no proving what was or wasn't said at the bank that evening.
But within hours of that interaction, Erica was on the phone with Madisonville, Tennessee, police chief Greg Breeden, and he recorded that phone call.
So we have a fairly contemporaneous recollection of what was said.
She relayed to Chief Breeden that Huff told her that he was intending to travel to Madisonville, Tennessee on April 20th for Walter Fitzpatrick's court hearing, that he would be armed with AK-47s and an anti-aircraft gun, that he would be with other militia members, and that the group intended to carry out citizens' arrests of various local officials and seize control of the courthouse.
And Darren Huff was found to be in possession of printed copies of those citizens' arrest warrants.
And he would later admit under oath that at that time he was in possession of an anti-aircraft gun and a pedestal mount that could be installed in the bed of his truck.
She would have had no way of knowing any of that at the time if he hadn't told her himself.
And she's on tape reporting it to the police long before she could have read anything in the news or been coached by an FBI agent to say these things.
Both Shane and Erica were, understandably, deeply unsettled by that interaction.
Immediately after leaving work that evening, Erica called a friend who worked in local government, who helped her find the phone number for the Madisonville, Tennessee Police Department.
Shane's wife urged him to call their own sheriff in Paulding County, Georgia.
And by the end of the night, both bank employees had shared their concerns with the police.
And by Monday, they'd met with FBI agents.
And it was on Monday, April 19th, the day before the planned occupation of Madisonville, Tennessee, that an FBI agent knocked on Darren Huff's front door.
Supervisory Special Agent Charles Reed, accompanied by a couple of deputies from the Paulding County Sheriff's Office, Just wanted to have a word with him.
And Darren Huff voluntarily stepped out onto his front porch, and he chatted with the agent for about as long as it took him to finish a cigarette.
It was a brief conversation.
Agent Reed recalls that Huff was pretty open about his plan to drive to Tennessee in the morning.
He said he'd have his Colt.45 on his hip and his AK-47 was in the truck.
He freely volunteered to the agent that he was a member of both the Oath Keepers and the Georgia militia.
He said that the plan was to execute citizen's arrest warrants and, quote, take back Madisonville.
But that the group would not resort to violence unless they were provoked.
When Darren Huff took the stand at his own trial, he recalled telling Agent Reed that evening that he'd love it if the FBI would be there in Madisonville.
Again, remember last week that letter that Walter Fitzpatrick sent the police chief of Madisonville before all of this got started?
He wasn't making threats.
He was inviting the police to be part of his plan.
And that's the same mindset Darren has here.
He even gave the FBI agent his business card.
I had to double-check here because Darren's business cards do come up again later, but it sounds like the business card he gave Agent Reed the night before the big day was just a normal business card, a real one for his outdoor lighting business.
It wasn't until after he was arrested that he got new business cards printed that said, Darren Huff, right-wing extremist and potential domestic terrorist.
But when he finished his cigarette, the conversation was over.
Agent Reed had no reason to arrest him.
Huff had expressed to him a plan to commit a federal crime, the one he would eventually be arrested for.
But he hadn't actually done it yet.
There was no federal crime here until Darren Huff put his guns in the truck and drove across the state line from Georgia into Tennessee with the intent to engage in a little civil disorder.
So Agent Reed left.
But another agent stayed nearby all night, watching and waiting for the truck to pull out of the driveway.
Darren Huff was under FBI surveillance when he hit the road just before dawn on April 20, 2010.
At 6.15 a.m., he was observed crossing the state line.
And just after 7 a.m., Tennessee State Trooper Michael Wilson followed Huff's truck as he took Exit 60 off I-75 towards Madisonville.
Whether or not Huff rolled through the stop sign at the bottom of the exit ramp is a matter of some debate.
But Trooper Wilson flashed his blue lights and pulled him over.
This traffic stop ends up being central to Huff's case on appeal, but it isn't where he got arrested.
He actually didn't even get a ticket.
But Trooper Wilson and Darren Huff spent over an hour together there on the shoulder of Tennessee Highway 68.
When Huff was asked to step out of the vehicle, he had his Colt 45 on his hip.
The officer unholstered the weapon, removed the magazine, checked the chamber, and put the weapon in his patrol car for safekeeping.
Darren Huff produced a valid Georgia driver's license, but he didn't have his truck's registration on him.
He assured the officer the gun was legal and handed him a piece of paper that he said was a gun carry permit.
In his testimony, the trooper said the document looked, quote, very unprofessional, and he was concerned it might not be real.
He spent an hour going back and forth with dispatch about this strange document and was never able to verify whether Huff actually had a valid carry permit for that gun.
And during that hour, while they were trying to sort it out, Darren Huff talked.
He talked a lot.
He ran his mouth the entire time.
And the entire conversation was recorded on the officer's dash cam, which was connected to a microphone on his uniform.
And in their conversation, Darren explained his whole plan.
They had arrest warrants for the grand jury foreman, the district attorney, the sheriff, the judge, Nancy Pelosi, etc.
He recommended some YouTube videos the officers should watch to learn more about Barack Obama's crimes.
And he told them they needed to be reading Walter Fitzpatrick's blog.
In the portions of this audio that I could find, the officers seem to be playing along.
They're mostly just letting him talk without interruption.
But occasionally they ask some questions about how exactly the plan is going to work.
And Darren's happy to explain.
Because he's actually going to need their help.
And then at that point, we'll be placed into custody and, you know, turn this man over to you.
I don't have handcuffs.
You know, so maybe we would need somebody like you guys there.
And I can't tell you how much I appreciate you guys listening.
Again, this is exactly like Fitzpatrick's letter to the police chief.
He's telling the cops what they plan to do and trying to get them to be a part of it.
The audio is a little fuzzy because they're standing on the side of the highway in the rain, but he wants the officers to agree to receive these prisoners once they've been citizens arrested.
But that wasn't all.
He was worried about a lot more than just the corrupt government in Monroe County, Tennessee.
He shared his concerns about the Affordable Care Act, which had just been signed into law a few weeks earlier.
Of course, he was upset that this was communism, obviously.
But more importantly, he was very worried because this law requires that all Americans be implanted with the mark of the beast, as foretold in Revelations.
Luke 10.18, Jesus says, And I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.
The Greek translation for lightning is Barak.
Now, Jesus didn't speak Greek.
He spoke Hebrew.
So you can look it up in the Hebrew.
It's still Barak.
And from heaven translates from Hebrew, O, or O, Bama.
So Jesus said, out of his own lips, I saw Satan as Barak and Bama.
He went on to explain that he was opposed to the war in the Middle East, though he notes that he does think, quote, Muslims suck, end quote, but also 9-11 was an inside job.
He tells the officers that they, who are all white men, are God's true chosen people, that Caucasians are the real Israelites, and biblical prophecy foretold the reestablishment of Israel in 1776.
Remember last week when we touched briefly on Christian identity?
That's what this is.
Darren Huff is a self-proclaimed pastor in the Christian identity movement.
He's standing there on the side of the highway, surrounded by cops, preaching Christian identity and trying to recruit them to the Oath Keepers.
It remains very unclear to me why the trooper gave Huff his gun back.
But he did.
At 8.13am, he handed Darren Huff a written warning, returned his Colt.45, and told him he was free to go.
The men shook hands and Huff thanked the officer, and he took a few steps back toward his truck before he stopped, turned around, and said, Let me pre-warn you.
If enough of us show up today, we are going to proceed forward in this citizen's arrest.
That's why I have my 45.
Ain't no government official going peacefully.
And then he slid his Colt 45 back into his holster, climbed into his pickup truck that said, Oath Keepers, all down one side, and drove the last few miles into Madisonville, Tennessee.
Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind.
Who did this?
And why?
And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where.
Where the crime happened.
I'm journalist Sloan Glass, and I host the new podcast, American Homicide.
We'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders.
And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story.
On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide-open New Mexico desert, the swampy Louisiana bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness.
And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets.
So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Is your country falling apart?
Feeling tired?
Depressed?
A little bit revolutionary?
Consider this.
Start your own country.
I planted the flag.
I just kind of looked out of like, this is mine.
I own this.
It's surprisingly easy.
55 gallons of water, 500 pounds of concrete.
Everybody's doing it.
I am King Ernest Emmanuel.
I am the Queen of Ladonia.
I'm Jackson I, King of Kaepernick.
I am the Supreme Leader of the Grand Republic of Mintonia.
Be part of a great colonial tradition.
Well, why can't I try my own country?
My forefathers did that themselves.
What could go wrong?
No country willingly gives up their territory.
I was making a rocket with a black powder, you know, with explosive warheads.
Oh my God.
What is that?
Bullets.
Bullets.
We need help!
We need help!
We still have the off-road portion to go.
Listen to Escape from Zakistan.
And we're losing daylight fast.
That's Escape from Z-A-Qistan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to the leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.
Don't get me wrong though, I love technology.
I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.
I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.
Check out betteroffline.com.
The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.
This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.
Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.
Hey, you've been doing all that talking.
It's time to get rewarded for it.
Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
At five o'clock that morning, more than 50 police officers from multiple jurisdictions in and around Monroe County, Tennessee, gathered more than 50 police officers from multiple jurisdictions in and around Monroe County, There were FBI agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force and at least one representative from the Department of Homeland Security.
They'd been monitoring the online chatter about Walter Fitzpatrick's hearing at the courthouse at 9 a.m., and they were worried.
The intelligence they had was that as many as 600 people might be on their way to Madisonville, Tennessee.
me.
They had undercovers stationed in nearby businesses and snipers on rooftops.
One of those undercover officers was Mike Hall, the director of a regional violent crime task force in Tennessee.
In plain clothes, he got a table at Donna's, a cafe a block from City Hall, where Fitzpatrick's supporters would be meeting for breakfast.
And maybe the police should have known that they probably weren't expecting 600 armed militiamen if they knew that they had booked tables at Donna's Cafe.
But that's neither here nor there.
And by the time breakfast was over, barely 20 supporters were packed into the dining room, finishing their biscuits and coffee, as Darren Hough gave a rousing speech about taking his AK-47 down to the courthouse.
Carl Swenson's dead website isn't exactly easy to navigate, so maybe the whole speech was there at some point.
But I was only able to dig up an audio file of the first six minutes or so.
And it's pretty inspiring stuff.
So as a Christian, as Lieutenant Commander said, I'm chaplain for the Georgia militia, so I look at things a little bit differently, and I look at them basically.
And I told these guys, and I tell everybody, I'm not a very smart guy.
In fact, the only thing that I know about the Constitution are the first few amendments, those leave me the hell alone ones.
That's what I know, and I know them well enough to say, you're wrong.
You can't do this.
Over the sound of clinking forks on plates, the Christian Identity Militia chaplain explains that they are preparing for spiritual war, that we are already in the end times as foretold in Revelations.
See, the founding of the United States was biblical prophecy.
God knew that in 1776, the 13 tribes of Israel would be called back together as the 13 colonies.
Yes, 13.
I know it's 12.
12 tribes of Israel.
You know it's 12.
But Darren is counting Joseph's sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, separately.
That's why he thinks it's 13.
And I know that because he mentions Joseph's sons specifically.
Because otherwise I might have assumed he was talking about something different.
We don't need to get into the specifics here, but adherents of Christian identity believe that they are the real Israelites.
So they have to explain the existence of actual Jews some other way.
And that usually boils down to a theory that Ashkenazi Jews are actually descended from a Turkic race called the Khazars.
Christian identity guys really love this book from the 70s called The Thirteenth Tribe, which makes the case for this theory.
Honestly, please don't make me explain the Khazar hypothesis.
Every time I see a guy posting about Khazars, I'm just not having a good time.
But what Darren was saying might actually be weirder.
Jacob went like this, and he blessed them the way God intended him to bless them.
That crossing of the arms is on that flag.
That's where that cross comes from.
It has nothing to do with rednecks.
It has nothing to do with the Confederacy.
It has everything to do with God's chosen people.
Now this was a new one for me.
I've never heard this one before.
What he's saying here is that the Confederate flag symbolizes Jacob's blessing of Joseph's sons.
I don't know what the A to B to C here is, but I guess the Confederacy was the 13th tribe of Israel.
Honestly, I don't want to know.
I don't want to know.
That way lies madness.
So after his big speech, Darren Hough steps outside.
Mike Hall, our undercover officer, testified that he overheard Huff's conversation with a man that he doesn't name, but who, like Huff, was visibly armed.
And Huff laments to this man that he wishes they had more people, saying, quote,"...today would be a good day to do it, because it's raining and the police wouldn't expect them to make a move in the rain." And Darren Huff wasn't the only one who excused himself from the table after this speech.
Carl Swenson, our sovereign citizen and the primary instigator of the online uproar calling people to Madisonville, had a phone call to make.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here with my special guest, Lieutenant Colonel Terry Lakin and his attorney, Paul Jensen.
Colonel Lakin is the Army officer who has challenged the legitimacy of Barack Obama to act as Commander-in-Chief.
Also with me is Dr.
Jerome Corsi.
And going to Tennessee and Carl.
Carl, you're on the air.
That's right, it's Carl in Tennessee, and he was live on air with G. Gordon Liddy and Jerome Corsi.
I have to admit, I spent the better part of an afternoon chasing down this 15-year-old episode of Morning Talk Radio, so I am going to tell you about it.
On April 12, 2010, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Terry Lakin did not report for duty at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Instead, he drove to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., where he was read his rights by his commanding officer, Colonel Gordon Ray Roberts.
Lakin's unit deployed to Afghanistan that week without him.
The 18-year veteran wasn't afraid to return to Afghanistan.
This deployment would have been the seventh of his career and his second to Afghanistan.
In 2004, he was the Army's Flight Surgeon of the Year.
He'd been awarded a Meritorious Service Medal and a Bronze Star.
He was on track to be promoted to full colonel within the next year.
But he had come to realize that his deployment orders were unlawful.
Not on ideological grounds.
He wasn't protesting the war.
He hadn't suddenly become a peace activist after seeing the horrors of war firsthand.
No, no.
The doctor was refusing to deploy unless he could see the president's birth certificate.
I will disobey my orders to deploy because I, and I believe all servicemen and women, and the American people deserve the truth about President Obama's constitutional eligibility to the Office of Presidency and the Commander-in-Chief.
A week after disobeying his orders, Lieutenant Colonel Lakin appeared as a guest on the G. Gordon Liddy Show.
Decades after dabbling at being an FBI agent, doing dirty tricks for Richard Dixon and spending a little time in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, Liddy really hit his stride as an extremely right wing talk radio host who regularly encouraged listeners to do things like shoot Liddy really hit his stride as an extremely right wing talk radio host who regularly Robert Evans put out a staggering six part series of episodes on G. Gordon Liddy on Behind the Bastards last year.
So if you're interested in hearing some outrageously racist clips of Liddy's radio show, I believe those are in part six. .
But today we're just talking about one episode of the G. Gordon Liddy Show.
The one that aired on April 20th, 2010.
Because that's the episode Carl Swenson called into during the second hour.
In the first hour of the show, Liddy interviewed Colonel Lakin and Lakin's attorney, a California personal injury lawyer named Paul Jensen.
You might be wondering why an army officer facing a court-martial would hire a civilian personal injury lawyer.
And that's a great question.
The answer is...
unclear.
In my experience, conspiracy theorists and extremists tend to hire attorneys who share their beliefs rather than ones who have, say, relevant experience in a particular area of law.
But in this case, it seems very worth mentioning that Paul Jensen was a longtime associate of, friend to, and occasional attorney for, Roger Stone.
In 2007, it was Paul Jensen, acting as Stone's attorney, who publicly released a copy of a letter the pair claimed they had sent to the FBI about Elliot Spitzer's alleged habit of wearing nothing but long black socks during his liaisons with sex workers.
And Jensen represented Stone in 2016 when he was sued over allegations that he'd been involved in a coordinated campaign of voter intimidation.
It was Jensen who drafted the paperwork to incorporate Stop the Steal in 2016.
So after this interview, G. Gordon Liddy opened the phones to hear from listeners on the subject of Barack Obama's birth certificate.
Caller after caller thanked Colonel Lakin for his courage and shared their own theories about how they could finally get to the truth of Barack Obama's birth.
And then, after an advertisement for gold coins, another birther called into the show.
But this one wasn't just sitting idly by while Barack Obama pretended to be the president.
Lieutenant Colonel, I want to thank you for everything you're doing, and I want to give you some encouragement here.
I'm in the city of Madisonville, Tennessee, right now in Monroe County, where they've had this area on lockdown with FBI, TDI, local police, and troopers, all because of Lieutenant Commander Walter Fitzpatrick.
And his attempts to affect arrest using a criminal complaint against Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, and in this case the grand jury members here in the town of Madison, Tennessee.
People are gathering now, but it is a tenuous situation at best.
Carl closed the call by saying things were getting pretty heated out there in Tennessee, and everything they were doing was, quote, in direct support of the message being pushed by Colonel Lakin and Liddy himself.
G. Gordon Liddy asked Carl to email the show's producer the video of Darren Huff's traffic stop so they could get that up on the website within the hour.
The next caller, Julie in Texas, was very worried about her sons.
They were active duty soldiers deployed overseas.
She wasn't worried about them being in the war.
She was worried that because their deployment orders had been issued by a false president that they could ultimately be liable for war crimes.
I didn't listen to the rest of the episode.
I don't know if they resolved that.
But after Darren's rousing speech to the assembled supporters and Carl's bold statements on a national radio show, they both had to admit that nothing was going to happen that day.
Their little crowd of 20 was outnumbered 3 to 1 by a very visible police presence.
And according to Walter Fitzpatrick's blog, a fair number of those supporters who turned up were middle-aged women, one of whom brought several minor children with her.
Darren had a truck full of guns and was bragging about how he had 400 rounds for his AK-47, but they just didn't have the numbers to do anything that day.
The only time anybody actually got close to the courthouse was when Darren Huff took a bag of biscuits over to a detective on the courthouse steps.
By the time Fitzpatrick's hearing was over, Darren was bored, he was tired, and he was ready to go home.
So everybody just left.
Nothing happened.
Nobody got arrested.
That night, Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes saw the video Carl Swenson posted online of Darren getting pulled over on his way to Madisonville.
The truck says, Oath Keepers, all down one side in huge letters.
You really can't miss it.
It's the official logo of the Oath Keepers.
And Rhodes called Swenson immediately and demanded he take the video down.
It was embarrassing.
And within days, Rhodes himself showed up to speak with Darren Hough in person.
He was furious.
He demanded to know why Hough was so intent on making Madisonville the flashpoint.
Now, Rhodes isn't the kind of guy who's actually concerned about there being a flashpoint.
He wants one.
That's the whole idea, right?
Eventually, the militia will come into some kind of conflict.
But this wasn't the one he wanted.
Because he thought Darren's ideas were foolish and embarrassing.
And he revoked Darren's Oath Keeper's membership.
Undeterred, though, Darren Huff returned to Tennessee a week later.
He had a paper map of the state of Tennessee, and he'd circled the location of the sheriff's offices in every county within a two-hour drive of Madisonville.
It's not clear how many sheriffs he actually managed to speak with, but when he pulled into a parking lot at a county office building in Lenore City, Tennessee, he happened to come across Loudoun County Sheriff Tim Guider and Cumberland County Sheriff Butch Burgess as they were getting out of their cars.
They were late for a meeting, so this conversation was short.
But Huff asked Sheriff Guider if he'd be willing to arrest a fellow sheriff.
At trial, Sheriff Guider couldn't really remember much about this brief interaction, but he said he probably told this stranger in a parking lot that he'd need to know more about a situation like that in order to make a determination.
But yes, hypothetically, he did have the authority to arrest another sheriff.
Darren Huff was trying to recruit law enforcement officers to assist with the plan.
He wasn't giving up.
But he was running out of time.
Fitzpatrick's next hearing was scheduled for May 4th, and he needed to find a sheriff who would be there to take his prisoners into custody.
He must not have had much success on the 28th, though, because two days later, on April 30th, he was back at it, driving around Tennessee, looking for sheriffs who believed in the Constitution.
He was up near Knoxville when he got pulled over This time around, there's no debate about whether or not he ran a stop sign.
This wasn't a traffic stop.
There was a federal warrant for his arrest.
Whenever a homicide happens, two questions immediately come to mind.
Who did this?
And why?
And sometimes the answer to those questions can be found in the where.
Where the crime happened.
I'm journalist Sloane Glass, and I host the new podcast, American Homicide.
Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders.
And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story.
On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide-open New Mexico desert, the swampy Louisiana bayou, and the frozen Alaska wilderness.
And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets.
So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Is your country falling apart?
Feeling tired?
Depressed?
A little bit revolutionary?
Consider this.
Start your own country.
I planted the flag.
I just kind of looked out of like, this is mine.
I own this.
It's surprisingly easy.
55 gallons of water, 500 pounds of concrete.
Everybody's doing it.
I am King Ernest Emmanuel.
I am the Queen of Ladonia.
I'm Jackson I, King of Kaepernberg.
I am the supreme leader of the Grand Republic of Mentonia.
Be part of a great colonial tradition.
Well, why can't I trade my own country?
My forefathers did that themselves.
What could go wrong?
No country willingly gives up their territory.
I was making a rocket with a black powder, you know, with explosive warheads.
Oh my god.
What is that?
Bullets.
Bullets.
We need help!
We still have the off-road portion to go.
Listen to Escape from Zakistan.
And we're losing daylight fast.
That's Escape from Z-A-Qistan on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.
This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.
Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.
Hey, you've been doing all that talking.
It's time to get rewarded for it.
Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to the leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.
Don't get me wrong, though.
I love technology.
I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.
I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Check out betteroffline.com.
Check out betteroffline.com.
You probably don't believe me, but hang on a second.
Section 231 is Civil Disorders, and it covers three separate crimes that don't really go together.
A1 makes it a crime to teach someone else how to make or use a gun or a bomb if you know or have reason to know that they'll use that information in furtherance of a civil disorder.
A2, which was Darren's crime, makes it illegal to transport a firearm or a bomb across state lines if you know or have reason to know that the gun or explosive device is going to be used in a civil disorder.
And A3 makes it illegal to be in a cop's way during a civil disorder.
So that one doesn't really belong, right?
The first two are about guns and bombs, and the third one is just about being annoying.
But that's the one that's really gotten to work out in the last couple of years, because it was used in hundreds of January 6 cases.
But 18 U.S.C. 231A2 is...uncommon.
I mean, people get charged for doing this kind of thing, but usually they get charged with conspiracy to do whatever it was they were going to do when they got where they were going.
And then maybe they'll attack on some kind of gun crime.
And subsection A1 just doesn't make any sense at all.
There's already a whole separate law that makes it a crime to distribute information about bomb making.
And that one has a harsher penalty than this.
So I don't know why we need this one at all.
So I was confused by this choice of statute.
And I couldn't think of any place I'd ever seen this statute before.
And it turns out that's because I hadn't seen it before.
And I still haven't.
Even after looking pretty hard.
When Darren Huff appealed his conviction, it was noted in the appellate record that this particular statute had actually never been construed by an appellate court before.
So this was the first time a court of appeals was examining this statute.
But just because people don't get charged with this very often doesn't make it any less of a real law.
And it does pretty well describe what he did.
Because he didn't really do anything, did he?
But they were really worried that he might.
Or at least they were worried that he would continue to create situations where someone else might.
Because if you get enough anxious people with guns together enough times, eventually something is going to go wrong in a way that escalates pretty quickly.
So some federal agent or prosecutor got creative and they found a crime.
Because technically, yeah, he put guns in his truck and he drove to another state.
And when he was doing it, the plan that he had in his mind was that he was going to have that gun around in case the county judge didn't appreciate him barging into her courtroom.
So the intent is pretty clear.
He told anyone within earshot for two weeks what he was going to do.
He wanted to lead an armed mom onto the courthouse.
He made videos about it.
He told his bank teller.
He told a bunch of state troopers.
He gave a speech.
And you don't actually have to end up carrying out the plan to be guilty of showing up to the plan with a gun.
And in the end, a jury agreed.
They found Darren Huff guilty of interstate transportation of a firearm with the intention to use it unlawfully in furtherance of a civil disorder.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, and Darren had already completed his four-year sentence by the time the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2016.
Now, normally that's all I would really have to say about a criminal case.
We already talked all the way through the actual timeline of events, so you already know what happened.
And I just told you how the trial ended.
He was convicted by a jury, appealed unsuccessfully, and served a sentence.
But this trial is really just so special.
I mean, first of all, it went to trial.
That's pretty rare.
In 2022, just 2.3% of people charged with federal crimes actually went to trial.
But it's so much more than that.
Darren Hough really, really wanted to be in the driver's seat when it came to his criminal defense.
One thing you have to remember about Darren Hough is that he's got a little sovereign citizen in him.
He seems at times to take issue with that label, but when he was asked how he felt about the gold fringe on the flag at his trial, he was very evasive.
And in the year and a half between his arrest and his trial, he kept insisting that his public defenders file motions based on legal arguments that he had invented.
And when they refused to file some of the more bizarre ones, he fired them.
Or at least he tried to.
In March of 2011, his public defender was begging him to consider the plea deal they were being offered.
Explaining over and over again that it was the best deal he was going to get and the motions he was drafting on his own just don't have any basis in the law and they have no legal merit.
And they really seem to be trying to explain to him that you can't just file how you feel.
There has to be case law.
It has to be based in something.
And after months of bitter emails back and forth about, you know, we can't file stuff that you made up, and Darren's accusing them of working against him, the original public defenders file a motion to withdraw, saying that the relationship has soured irreparably and they can't continue.
And during this brief period of time before a new public defender could be appointed, Darren filed some of those motions he wanted.
The ones he wrote.
Including one that just reads, Comes the defendant in the above entitled action, Darren Wesley Huff, and moves the court to clarify its position on the Second Amendment U.S. Constitution.
And when his second public defender was assigned, a man named Scott Green, there were just three months to go before trial.
And in those three months, he did his job.
He filed motions to suppress the statements Darren made during the traffic stop, motions to prevent the prosecution from bringing up his extremist beliefs, the kinds of things you'd expect to see.
And he seemed to be humoring his client when it came to some of his unique ideas about the law.
But like the attorneys before him, he wasn't willing to put his name on nonsense.
And after another round of these emails back and forth, where this exasperated attorney is trying to explain to him that motions have to be based on the law, Darren threatened to fire him, writing, If you do not have the courage or kahunas necessary to represent me, then please let me know.
I think that's supposed to say kahunas, but it says K-A-H-U-N-A-S. Kahunas.
Maybe that's a regional variation?
He means balls.
And that email is included in this bizarre 15-page document that he submitted to the court complaining about and trying to fire his lawyer.
But he ends the document by saying, quote, I don't really know where to start with that.
That's really not how it works.
And this lawyer tried to withdraw from the case, saying, you know, he doesn't want me to be his lawyer anymore.
This is not working out.
I can't do this.
And the judge said, no.
They were too close to trial.
They would just have to work it out because they're going to trial together.
And Green really does seem to have done his best here.
On the eve of the trial, he filed five separate documents, each one called Mr.
Huff's Special Request, and they were sort of fanciful jury instructions.
It probably will not surprise you that Mr.
Green declined to continue working with Darren on his appeal.
And Darren's attitude did not improve once he was in federal prison.
One email he sent his new lawyer, Mr.
Gully, during the appeal starts off by accusing Gully of withholding the trial transcripts, but they just hadn't been made yet.
It takes a long time to produce those.
But he writes to his lawyer, I am thus left to wonder whether you are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or if you possibly received your degree from a remedial online school, or that you simply take me for a fool.
You, sir, have made a mockery of the system that purports to provide me with effective assistance of counsel.
Later in the same email, he explains to his lawyer that the government can't charge him with a gun crime because he exists outside of the federal government's jurisdiction on such matters.
And then he threatens to have his attorney indicted, disbarred, and institutionalized.
Mr.
Gulley's response to this letter doesn't seem to be in the appellate record, but from what I can see, he did the best he could with a losing case.
We'd be doing episodes about Walter Fitzpatrick and his entourage for weeks, if I told you every weird thing that I found.
But I can't resist just a few more, if you'll indulge me.
When Fitzpatrick finally did get arraigned in Monroe County for that original April 1st attempt to arrest the grand jury foreman, It did not go well.
The judge that he'd accused of treason was presiding, and as she's flipping through the exhibits, sort of glancing over the paperwork and the citizen's arrest warrants, she noted that the court clerk, Miss Cook, was accused by Fitzpatrick of some pretty serious crimes.
And so the judge turns to the clerk, who's there in the courtroom, and says, Miss Cook, have you been levying war against the United States?
And the clerk says, I don't think so, Your Honor.
And I wish that I had an audio recording of this.
I just have the transcript.
But Fitzpatrick is having a lot of outbursts during this hearing.
And at this point, he says, Are you making fun of me?
Is that what's going on here?
Am I being mocked?
And they just ignore him and continue the proceeding.
I would have loved to have seen it.
And I wish the officer who testified at Huff's trial had been more specific about exactly who it was that he overheard Darren Huff talking to in the morning of April 20th outside Donna's Cafe.
Huff had a quiet conversation with someone about calling off the operation that day.
The officer did mention that Huff was speaking to a man with a revolver on his hip, and that the man had gotten out of a PT Cruiser with Georgia license plates.
Carl Swenson's from Georgia, but I know Carl Swenson was driving a 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid that day.
Trust me, I checked.
I've got a state trooper on tape calling in his plates when they saw him on the highway.
And in his blog, Walter Fitzpatrick thanked by name most of the people who showed up there that day.
And most of them were women.
And very few of them were from Georgia.
But we do know for sure that Bill Lohman, a Marine Corps veteran and crane operator from Waco, Georgia, was there that day.
And you'd be a fool to believe Bill Lohman would walk as far as his own mailbox without a gun.
So if I had to put money on it, I think the person Darren Huff was making tactical decisions with was the same man who'd accompanied him to Walter's house two weeks earlier when they put this whole plan together.
A fellow member of the Georgia Militia and the Oath Keepers.
Now, my main wheelhouse is not the militia movement.
So I can't say I'm surprised I'd never heard of Bill Luman before, and I didn't have any real prior knowledge about the Georgia militia.
But in some old blog posts, Luman is referred to as a leader in the Georgia militia.
That may have just been his local chapter.
There were at least a dozen units around the state of this larger group calling itself the Georgia militia.
And his name does not appear in the court record for the four members of the Georgia militia who were arrested in 2011 for a plot that included plans to blow up the federal building in Atlanta and maybe murder government officials with ricin.
And just a side note, if you do try to Google Georgia white supremacist ricin attack, the more recent result you'll get is for an unrelated white supremacist plot to carry out a biological terrorist attack.
In that case, in 2017, a neo-Nazi had actually successfully created the deadly poison, but he accidentally exposed himself to it So he showed up at the emergency room before he could actually hurt anybody else.
But this is not that one.
This is the one from 2011.
But again, Bill Luman, nothing to do with the ricin attacks.
Just the same militia.
And I found an old event for a tea party picnic in North Carolina in 2013 that lists Blumen as a speaker, and his title in the program is Constitutionalist Icon from Georgia.
And he appeared on stage with such heroes of the Patriot movement as James Renwick Manship.
That name is not familiar to you, I'm sure, but you might remember the photo of the guy in the George Washington costume wading into the reflecting pool at the Capitol during the January 6th riot as a sort of symbolic crossing the Delaware moment.
But my favorite Manship moment is the time he showed up at my local library dressed as Thomas Jefferson and refused to break character as he ranted in the first person about how he never had sexual relations with enslaved women.
And Bill Luman is very much still around and active in the same kinds of conspiracy spaces.
He posts, give or take, a hundred times a day, every day, on Trump's Truth Social platform.
And all of his posts are in all caps.
He starts every day by posting this message.
Good morning, patriots and grassroots warriors that are standing up for our constitution and precious way of life.
Good morning to all veterans that serve honorably.
Semper Fi, my fellow Marines.
May America bless God again into our nation, our homes, and our hearts.
Heart emoji.
Seriously, he posts that every morning.
He's very committed.
And he still thinks Barack Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim.
He still posts a lot about hanging people for treason.
But the reasons have shifted.
You know, COVID, Ukraine, election fraud, whatever.
As I'm writing this, right now, he's still posting.
He posted a picture of a Marine shaking hands with a dog, and there was a post this evening that was a screenshot from Braveheart with the text, Confirm Matt Gaetz or Else, written over Mel Gibson's face.
His last post was a thread documenting the progress of his homemade banana nut bread.
At the time of recording, I can report that he added cream cheese icing to it, and it was, quote, stellar.
He's pretty popular over there on Truth Social.
He was even re-truthed last year by Donald Trump himself after posting some incoherent theory about stolen votes from the 2020 election.
Well, he wasn't re-truthed.
He was quote-truthed?
Whatever the Truth Social equivalent of a quote-tweet is.
Luman had suggested that the people responsible for the Dominion voting machines should be tried for treason.
And Trump quoted the post, adding, A lot has been made of this lately.
What do you think?
And that must have been a huge day for Bill.
The post went pretty viral.
A lot of the keyboard warriors out here posting 17 memes a day about January 6 political prisoners absolutely still believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
And Walter Fitzpatrick went on to try his whole citizen's arrest thing in neighboring McMinn County, too.
He was eventually convicted of perjury and extortion there.
As well as getting some more charges in Monroe County after he stole the grand jury rolls.
Those stolen documents were located by the FBI in the Connecticut home of Sharon Rondeau, the conspiracy theory blogger whose commitment to questioning the citizenship of politicians has remained strong over the years.
She is still asking questions about Ilhan Omar and Kamala Harris.
Fitzpatrick published a memoir last year about his quest for justice in his 1990 court-martial.
I didn't read it.
It's like 400 pages long.
He's in his 70s now, and he still occasionally updates his blog, Jag Hunters.
The most recent post is just a link to someone else's video, and it's just like a mind-numbing 30-minute mash-up of clips...
I can't even really explain it.
It's like actual footage of Trump rallies mixed in with like MyPillow commercials, a TikTok video of someone doing the Macarena, but the lyrics have been changed to be about Donald Trump.
I don't know.
I tapped out when it got to a clip of Russell Brand praying with Tucker Carlson.
I guess what I'm getting at here is these guys don't go away.
The cause of the day changes, whether it's 9-11 truth, birtherism, COVID denial, QAnon, Stop the Steal.
But it's a lot of the same core ideas.
And honestly, it's a lot of the same individual guys.
In one newspaper photo of Walter Fitzpatrick outside of the courthouse after a hearing in McMinn County in 2014, the man standing next to him is Field McConnell.
Enfield McConnell is a former commercial airline pilot who retired in 2006 after refusing to submit to a neurological exam.
He had become obsessed with the idea that 9-11 was an inside job and was convinced that Boeing had rigged all of their planes with explosives and they were planning an upcoming 9-11-style attack.
In 2019, he got really into QAnon.
An attorney in Florida who represents the family of a missing child had to get a restraining order against him after he made a series of YouTube videos threatening to kill her and accusing her of having trafficked the missing child.
The day I'm recording this, he was a guest on a podcast hosted by a small-scale QAnon influencer.
I would tell you what they talked about, but it kind of sounded like he was calling in from the bottom of the ocean.
This episode took me days longer to write than it should have, because every new name I turned up in the comments on a 15-year-old blog post took me on some long, strange path that some character in this story had taken in the years since.
There are no lone wolves.
No one is self-radicalizing in a vacuum.
People don't just wake up one day and drive three hours with a camcorder and a truck full of guns for no reason at all.
And with each passing week, as I immerse myself in the archives, piecing together one weird little guy's story at a time, the clearer the connective tissue between them becomes.
But for all the weird twists and turns in this strange tale of the birther militia trying to take over a small town in Tennessee, the best thing I found buried in all of these documents was this moment from the trial when Darren Hough took the stand himself.
The prosecutor had asked him about some business cards that he made after his arrest.
On the front it said, And on the back, there was a picture of a gun.
So on cross-examination, Huff's defense attorney was trying to elicit testimony that would show the jury that those business cards were obviously a joke, that this was just his sense of humor.
So he asked Darren about some shirts.
And Darren gave the following answer.
I had a friend who had a t-shirt shop.
And I said, can you make me a couple of shirts?
Because apparently this government wants to label me.
The first one that he had made me said, I am the God-fearing, gun-toting, flag-waving, right-wing extremist the government warned you about.
And the other one said, I finally made Homeland Security's potential domestic terrorist wash list, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
Obviously, the point behind them was for humor, and they have been received as such.
Another one that was one of my initial shirts said, Patriotism is not a spectator sport.
And then there's something that I have never seen in an official federal court transcript before.
As this big bearded militia man is describing his funny terrorism shirts, the court reporter types in parentheses, witness crying.
She put it on the record that he cried.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagin.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide.
In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story.
Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Had enough of this country?
Ever dreamt about starting your own?
I planted the flag.
This is mine.
I own this.
It's surprisingly easy.
55 gallons of water, 500 pounds of concrete.
Or maybe not.
No country willingly gives up their territory.
Oh my God.
What is that?
Bullets.
Listen to Escape from Zakistan.
That's Escape from Z-A-Q-I-S-T-A-N on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech, brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.
The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming.
This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.
Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.
Hey, you've been doing all that talking.
It's time to get rewarded for it.
Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.
Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets.
How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time, he didn't even say hello?
And what if your past itself was a secret, and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child?
These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our 11th season of Family Secrets.
Listen to season 11 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
