For over a decade, neo-Nazis and Klansmen were hand-delivering VHS tapes of a California-based public access TV show to local television stations in cities across the country. The stations had no choice but to run the show on local public access channels. The show's host, Tom Metzger, received a gift of $300,000 in 1984 that gave him the financial freedom to pursue his dream of delivering his racist message to as many Americans as possible, right through their television screens. Sources: Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Harvard University Press, 2018. Flynn, Kevin, and Gary Gerhardt. The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America's Racist Underground Free Press ; Collier Macmillan, 1989. Hamm, Mark S., and Cécile Van de Voorde. “Crimes Committed by Terrorist Groups: Theory, Research, and Prevention.” Trends in Organized Crime, vol. 9, no. 2, 2005 National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence, Bigotry and Cable TV: Legal Issues and Community Responses (Institute Report No.3), Baltimore, Maryland: The Institute, 1988. Bradley J. Howard, Pulling the Plug: Controversial Programming on Public Access Television and the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, 28 J. Marshall L. Rev. 399 (1995) Rendahl, Stephen E.. "White Aryan Resistance: A Radical Communication System." North Dakota Journal of Speech & Theatre, vol. 4, no. 1, 1 Sep. 1991, pp. 44 - 52. Rendahl, Stephen (1990). Media access and the radical right: Public access to "race and reason." Unpublished paper presented to the Central States Communication Association, Detroit, MI. Spring/Summer 1989 issue of “No KKK No Fascist USA,” Newspaper of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC37_scans/37.nokkk.spr89.pdf December 1985 issue of Searchlight magazine https://ia600700.us.archive.org/4/items/searchlight_126/searchlight_126.pdf https://casetext.com/case/us-v-mahon-19 https://idavox.com/index.php/2020/12/10/american-strasser/ https://northernstar.info/16419/news/city/crusade-adds-fuel-to-flame-of-tensions/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-08-10-ca-99-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-02-13-me-23281-story.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/30/us/bill-wassmuth-61-an-ex-priest-who-fought-white-supremacists.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-01-10-me-11091-story.html https://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/16/us/klan-wins-a-battle-for-cable-tv.html https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2001/tim-and-sarah-gayman-discuss-growing-anti-semitic-christian-identity-movement?page=0%2C1 https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/20/us/racist-aryan-nations-group-inducts-new-disciples.html https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/chris-hobson-bruce-augustyniak-bruce-kala https://memorial.bellsystem.com/pdf/1988ATTar_Complete.pdf https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2010/04/22/white-supremacist-richard-barrett-murdered-mississippi-homeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Now it's a lincup with Coprix, and on Thursday for all Cop-us, pizza grandiosa to only 30 kroner.
Only on Thursday with Coprix.
For Tort!
From audio up the creators of Stephen King's strawberry spring comes The Unborn, a shocking true story.
My baby, please!
My babies!
One woman, two lives, and a secret she would kill to protect.
She went crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals.
Slaughtered them in front of the kids.
Tried to burn their house out.
Listen to The Unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarki.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme from poisoners to art thieves.
We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
Listen to Criminalia 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.
Call Zone Media A little after sunset on December 8th, 1984, firefighters from the Island County Washington Fire Department were standing by in their truck on the side of Smuggler's Cove Road on Whidbey Island, about an hour north of Seattle.
They'd been called in by an FBI SWAT team, but there was no fire.
Not yet, anyway.
The agents were more than 30 hours into an armed standoff, and they were getting desperate to end things, one way or another.
A volley of tear gas canisters didn't drive their subject out.
A helicopter buzzing just feet above the house didn't seem to rattle him at all.
He just fired his machine gun through the roof, forcing the agents to call off the helicopter for the sake of the pilot's safety.
They wanted to take their fugitive alive, if they could, But negotiations weren't getting them anywhere.
After months spent tracking this Nazi terror cell, they finally had its ringleader cornered.
Two other safe houses had been successfully raided the day before, and several of the man's co-conspirators, his closest friends, were brought to the scene to reason with him.
Communication broke down pretty quickly after the other man inside the house emerged, ready to surrender.
He was carrying a duffel bag stuffed with $40,000 in cash from one of the group's robberies.
Tucked into the cash in the bag was a suicide note penned by the man firing at them from the upstairs window.
By the evening of the first day of the standoff, Robert J. Matthews was alone inside the house, and he was ready to die in it.
When FBI agents finally got their hands on Matthews, he was charred beyond recognition.
The house had burned to the foundation.
Any evidence it may have contained was gone, and Matthews' body had to be identified using dental x-rays.
A series of daring armored car robberies had netted the gang over $4 million.
Some of that money surely burned alongside Matthews.
But in the months before his death, Robert Matthews took a cross-country road trip, handing out bags of cash.
Some of that money went to the kinds of things you'd expect, buying land and keeping the dream of the race war alive by purchasing guns and crates of grenades.
And the majority of that money was never fully accounted for, let alone recovered.
But some of those bags of cash went on some unexpected journeys.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
As the sun set on the second day of the standoff on Whidbey Island, and the last day of Robert Matthews' life, the decision was made to fire several flares into the house.
The flares would almost certainly set the house on fire.
The tear gas hadn't bothered Matthews.
He had a gas mask.
But maybe his romantic visions of dying with his fingers still on the trigger would go up in smoke if the house burned.
The fire truck was waiting at the end of the driveway, ready to extinguish the flames as soon as they had their man in handcuffs, so they'd be able to recover any of the remaining cash from the armored car robberies that may still be in the house.
At 6.30 p.m.
on December 8, 1984, three flares were fired through a downstairs window.
The glass was already gone, shattered to bits by bursts of gunfire from both sides.
And as the agents had anticipated, a fire broke out.
But they hadn't accounted for the contents of the room.
The flares hadn't just ignited a sofa or the curtains or a throw rug.
They ignited cases of ammunition.
The controllable house fire they hoped would smoke out their fugitive turned into a towering inferno as the flames reached a stockpile of explosives stored inside the home.
The firefighters waiting out on the street couldn't even approach the house as crates of bullets fired themselves in the heat.
They could only watch as the house burned late into the night.
Normally, this is the part of the episode where I tell you, but that's the end of Robert Matthews' story, and we have to start at the beginning.
But not today.
Today we're starting after the end of his story.
Partly because I'm still waiting on some archival materials from a special collections library on the other side of the country.
My interlibrary loan is still pending.
The story of Robert Matthews and his Nazi bank robbery gang, The Order, is forthcoming.
Don't worry.
That 40-year-old story is still very much alive within the white supremacist movement.
Those 14 words they're all so obsessed with were first penned by David Lane while he was in prison for the murder of Allen Berg.
But as I started plotting out the framework of that story, I got a little lost down a hundred little rabbit holes.
I had a lot of new questions about things I'd never wondered about before.
If you're one of those listeners who wishes the show had a more linear narrative and fewer characters and fewer tangents, you're not gonna like this one.
But the story of the Order has had such an impact on the last 40 years of white supremacist violence in America, there's no honest way to tell it neatly.
Because if there's one thing I want this show to convey, more than anything else, is that there are...
No, lone wolves.
And the myth of the lone wolf is so persistent, not just because it is maybe somehow less frightening to think of these acts of violence as some kind of completely random freak accident, but also because we crave these concise, linear narratives.
But if you tell any lone gunman's story that way, it tends to absolve the ecosystem that formed him and his network of accomplices.
Think of this story as a sort of introduction to a cast of characters you'll be hearing about again.
Just let me plant some narrative seeds that will take a little time to grow.
So before I can tell you a story about how a 50-cent lottery ticket purchased with a counterfeit $10 bill at a liquor store in Philadelphia ended up unraveling a network of Nazi terrorists, I want to talk about where some of that stolen money ended up.
Specifically, I want to talk about public access television, 400 acres of undeveloped land in Appalachia, a racist chiropractor from Tampa, and the 1988 AT&T shareholders meeting.
Bear with me.
What would you do if you suddenly had $4 million in dirty money?
I think for most of us, the first answer is something like, I would help my friends and my family.
I'd fund worthwhile projects and advance causes I believe in.
And that's kind of what our Nazi gang did here.
But their friends and family were also Nazis.
And the causes they believed in were things like arming an Aryan paramilitary force to overthrow the government, etc., Robert Matthews Accounts
vary as to who received a share of this stolen money, and most of those accounts are from embittered rivals who turned state's witness.
And those accounts don't always match up across sources.
For the most part, the figures I'm using here are found within the 1990 book The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt.
The authors were able to secure cooperative interviews with some former members of the Order, some of the recipients of the money, and Robert Matthews' mistress, Zilla Craig.
When there's a discrepancy between the sources I'm using, I'm defaulting to those in Kathleen Ballou's Bring the War Home, which is exhaustively researched and well footnoted.
The whole story of the string of robberies is one for another day.
But most of the money we're talking about here came from a single score.
On July 19, 1984, six members of the Nazi group The Order loaded $3.8 million in cash out of the back of a Brinks-armored car on Highway 20 near Ukiah, California.
Two weeks later, Robert Matthews left his wife and son behind in Washington and loaded his pregnant mistress into a used Pontiac Bonneville and drove east.
Their first stop was at a farm near Cahocta, Michigan, to visit Robert Miles.
Miles had once been an influential clan leader, rising to the rank of Grand Dragon of the Realm of Michigan.
In 1971, he bombed 10 empty school buses the week before a court-ordered desegregation program was set to begin in Pontiac, Michigan.
Earlier that year, he and four other Klansmen forced a high school principal in Ypsilanti out of his car at gunpoint and literally tarred and feathered the man.
They doused a high school principal with hot tar and coated him in chicken feathers.
He'd been driving home from a school board meeting where he was advocating for the district to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The years Miles spent in federal prison for those acts did little to change his attitudes about race.
By the 1980s, Miles' clan days were more or less behind him.
His true calling was as the pastor of a Christian identity church that he called the Mountain Church of Jesus Christ Savior.
He was also the Midwest coordinator for Richard Butler's Aryan Nations and hosted Aryan Nations gatherings at his farm in Michigan.
And in August of 1984, Robert Matthews and his mistress spent the night on that farm.
Matthews gave Miles $300,000 in stolen cash for use in his church, which included a prison ministry aimed at radicalizing incarcerated white men through letter-writing campaigns and mailing them white power newsletters.
In return, Miles gave Matthews a letter of introduction to Frasier Glenn Miller.
A few days later, in Angier, North Carolina, Matthews knocked on the front door of Frasier Glenn Miller, the leader of the White Patriot Party.
Robert Miles' letter of introduction was enough to gain his trust, and he invited Matthews and his mistress in for dinner.
Later that night, Miller met Matthews again, this time at a hotel.
Miller was suspicious of this generous offer of $200,000 in cash, concerned that Matthews may be an FBI informant trying to entrap him in some kind of scheme.
But he did take the money.
And ironically, it would be Frasier Glenn Miller who would later turn state's witness, returning most of the money to the government.
He testified against many of Matthew's associates and entered the witness protection program as Frasier Glenn Cross.
But it's hard to stay in the program if you can't leave the movement.
Miller's story is one better saved for his very own episode, because it ends with him dying of old age on death row.
This cross-country road trip also included a night at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia.
It's no surprise that Robert Matthews would pay a visit to William Luther Pierce.
Honestly, it would be shocking if he hadn't.
Matthews had been a member of Pierce's National Alliance since 1979. It was at the 1983 National Alliance General Convention that he gave the fiery speech that kicked off the formation of the Order just a year earlier.
And the Order took its name directly from the plot of Pierce's novel, The Turner Diaries.
And on August 6, 1984, Matthews handed his mentor a paper bag.
The amount of cash inside is usually put at $50,000.
Although that seems to trace back to a single statement made by another member of the Order, a man named Bruce Pierce, who is not related.
Zilla Craig, Matthews' mistress, witnessed this handoff, but she was only able to say that it was a, quote, large amount of money.
And considering she'd seen Matthews hand Robert Miles $300,000 and Fraser Glenn Miller $200,000 that very same week, I wonder what she means by a large amount.
Tom Martinez, a member of the order who would turn informant, says Matthews never disclosed how much money he'd given William Luther Pierce.
Like I said, the only figure ever offered is $50,000.
I just really struggled to understand why he would give his personal hero so little.
Three weeks after William Luther Pierce received that paper bag full of cash...
He announced at the 1984 National Alliance Annual Convention that the group now had enough money to proceed with his plan, which was to purchase 364 acres in Hillsborough, West Virginia, and begin building his compound.
Headline speakers at that meeting included Kevin Alfred Strom, who you may remember as the pedophile from the first episode of this show, and a chiropractor from Florida named Herbert Poinsett.
Put a pin in Herb.
We're coming back to him.
Pierce paid $95,000 all in cash for the land in West Virginia just a few weeks later.
Other recipients of generous gifts from the Order's coffers were men like Michael Stanley Norris, who played a part in the future Stormfront webmaster Don Black's harebrained scheme to overthrow the government of a small Caribbean nation.
That's a story I'm really looking forward to telling.
Louis Beam, the man who popularized the concept of leaderless resistance, is said to have gotten $100,000.
$40,000 went to Richard Butler and his Aryan nations.
$100,000 went to the Covenant the Sword and the Arm of the Lord in Arkansas.
An unnamed history professor in Columbus, Ohio, received an unknown amount of cash to fund a white power band.
Dan Gaiman, the pastor of a Christian identity church in Missouri, got $15,000.
And there were rumors that Matthews had left $1 or maybe $2 million with a lawyer in Denver for safekeeping.
But nobody knows who that might have been or how much it was.
But the money I've been working my way around to is this $300,000 gifted to California Klansman Tom Metzger.
Tom Metzger is such a central figure in so many stories of white power in America in the 80s that I'm troubled by the need to condense his biography for our purposes here.
But he was a rising star in the Klan in the 70s and organized his own Klan border patrols at the Mexican border in California, a stunt that was later copied by Louis Beam and David Duke in Texas.
He ran for Congress in California's 43rd Congressional District in 1980, winning the Democratic primary but losing badly to the incumbent Republican.
He was, of course, disavowed by the entire Democratic establishment in California.
Even Governor Jerry Brown publicly endorsed the Republican in that race.
But guys like Metzger don't run to win.
They run for free access to unlimited attention.
And he got it.
And he ran again in 1982, this time for Senate.
And he earned just 2% of the vote in the primary.
Gore Vidal, who I'd honestly forgotten ever had political aspirations, came in at 15% in the same primary.
Everybody knew Tom Metzger's name.
A story in the North County Times in Oceanside, California, around that same time period, about a woman's passion for knitting, includes the line Metzger, 47, who emphasizes she is not related to Ku Klux Klan leader Tom Metzger, says she was taught by her mother to knit 43 years ago.
Riding high on this attention, Metzger's movement aspirations evolved.
He left the Klan behind and formed his own organization that he originally called the White American Political Association.
He quickly renamed it White American Resistance and then finally White Aryan Resistance, often just called war.
But the attention was fading.
He was in the news all the time when he was running for office, but in early 1984, the local paper was clowning on him for his poorly attended cross-burnings, running headlines like, KKK gave cross-burning, nobody came, about the December 1983 cross-burning ceremony in LA, where Metzger had been arrested alongside Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler and several members of the order.
The article notes that while the first issues of his new white Aryan resistance newspaper had been, quote, a slick tabloid on quality paper, recent issues were down to just a single mimeographed sheet.
But his fortune seemed to have changed just a few months later.
Just weeks after Tom Metzger would have received that $300,000 from the order, the Daily Times advocate in Escondido, California, ran a front-page story about Metzger's newest venture.
He was going to be on TV. Of course, Metzger had been on TV before.
He loved being on TV. He had debated Irv Rubin from the Jewish Defense League on a local program in May.
But on September 28, 1984, Tom Metzger wasn't just on TV. He was hosting his own show.
Hello, I'm Tom Metzger, host of Race and Reason.
Race and Reason is a show dedicated to free speech, a small island of free speech in a sea of controlled and managed news.
The first episode of Race and Reason debuted that day at 4.35pm.
It aired on Public Access Channel 24 in Poway, California.
But Metzger promised that he would soon be broadcast on public access channels throughout the San Diego area.
He claimed he already had deals in the works to get the show on public access channels in Orange County, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, and Austin.
People weren't happy that the Klansman was going to be on TV. But Metzger told the paper, quote, Oceanside, in this context, is a reference to a March 1980 Klan rally that he led through a largely Hispanic neighborhood of Oceanside, California.
Just months after the Greensboro massacre, where members of the American Nazi Party murdered five communists in North Carolina, the Klansmen chanted, If the Nazis don't get you, a Klansman will.
And just as they had in Greensboro, the police in Oceanside failed to intervene as white supremacists violently attacked protesters.
No one was killed at the Oceanside rally, thankfully.
But at least seven people were injured, including a news cameraman who was bludgeoned with a large rock and a socialist organizer named Bruce Kala, who was beaten by a group of Klansmen with clubs.
Kala had to be hospitalized for a severe head injury and received 200 stitches.
The line of riot cops seemed not to move at all.
Until a klansman's doberman lunged at one of them.
The officer shot and killed the dog.
In the quiet town of Avella, Pennsylvania, Jared and Christy Akron seem to have it all.
A whirlwind romance, a new home and twins on the way.
What no one knew was that Christy was hiding a secret so shocking it would tear their world apart.
My babies, please!
My babies!
One woman, two lives, and the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine.
They had her as one of the suspects, but they could never prove it.
You're going to get jealous.
You don't come with us right now.
Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling myself, nobody's that crazy.
Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything.
A story of the lengths we go to protect our darkest secrets.
She went batshit crazy and shot and killed all her farm animals.
Slaughtered them in front of the kids.
Tried to burn their house down.
Audio Up presents The Unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, listeners.
I'm Sloane Glass, the host of American Homicide, a podcast where we take you across the country to investigate some of America's deadliest crimes.
We'll explore how these murders are shaped by their unique landscapes and, in turn, how these tragedies have shaped the fabric of these American communities forever.
And you can get access to all episodes of American Homicide 100% ad-free and one week early through the iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.
So don't wait.
Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.
Welcome to the Criminalia podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarki.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, everything from poisoners and pirates to art thieves and snake oil products and those who made and sold them.
We uncover the stories and secrets of some of history's most compelling criminal figures, including a man who built a submarine as a getaway vehicle.
Yep, that's a fact.
We also look at what kinds of societal forces were at play at the time of the crime, from legal injustices to the ethics of body snatching, to see what, if anything, might look different through today's perspective.
And be sure to tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in custom-made cocktails and mocktails inspired by the stories.
There's one for every story we tell.
Listen to Criminalia 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, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Check out betteroffline.com.
The article about the show's debut quotes the public access manager for the cable company, saying, We don't establish the guidelines, the city does.
A representative from another cable company said they hadn't been approached yet by Metzger, but if asked, they probably would air the program.
saying, if we say no to the Klan, then pretty soon we're saying no to another group.
And maybe they did have to air it.
In 1984, the Cable Communications Act, written by Barry Goldwater, was passed.
Among other things, the bill barred cable operators from exercising editorial control over the content aired on public access channels.
And it absolved the cable company of any liability for the content aired on those non-commercial public educational and government access channels.
As long as the show wasn't criminal and it didn't violate basic standards of what's allowed on television...
The cable company was prohibited by law from refusing to air the show just because it was racist.
I feel like there were episodes that a determined lawyer could have fought to keep off the air as defamatory or incitement to violence or something.
But what incentive was there for them to try?
If they lost a fight like that, they'd have to pay the racist for his trouble.
But if they aired it, no matter how bad it was, they were completely shielded from liability.
In articles about the resulting public outcry, cable executives said, our hands are tied.
The director of community programming said when people called her office to complain about Metzger's show, all she could do was tell them that they would have to complain to Metzger personally.
And within months, he made good on his promise.
Race and Reason was on public access channels in a growing number of cities.
In many communities, the public access television program requires that local public access programming actually be local.
So he couldn't just mail these tapes to studios across the country and expect them to air.
To get around this requirement, Metzger sold tapes of Race and Reason on the back cover of every issue of his White Aryan Resistance newsletter.
Subscribers around the country could mail Metzger a check for $35 and receive a VHS copy of the show in the mail.
By 1989, he'd sweeten the deal.
Any four episodes of Race and Reason could be bundled together for just $39.95.
And that's in 1989 dollars.
Like, that's a wild amount of money to pay for a 30-minute tape of some guy saying slurs.
But once you had the tape, you could sponsor the show on your own local public access channel.
With this piecemeal distribution system, it's hard to nail down how many episodes ever existed and what order they aired in.
The episodes that aired in any given city depended on which VHS tapes your local racist bought out of a Nazi catalog.
And even in his own home market, a TV guide printed in November 1985, notes Metzger's program under the public access offerings, but it's listed as, quote,"...heirs infrequently." A 1986 article in the Corvallis Gazette Times says a local resident had been hand-delivering a new cassette to the station three times per week.
The station declined to publicly name the program's sponsor, but it came out anyway.
Richard Masker had recently settled a lawsuit against the city of Corvallis regarding his termination from the water treatment plant in 1983. He felt that he'd been discriminated against.
They felt it was not appropriate for him to have mailed Jewish residents of Corvallis cards on Hitler's birthday that read, May his memory refresh your soul and give you inspiration, Heil Hitler.
Articles about his firing make a passing mention of the fact that the police closed down the entire water treatment plant for several days after he was let go, but they don't offer any explanation for that.
Masker pops up in some strange places later on in his life, but this isn't a story about guys who keep getting fired from water treatment plants, so suffice it to say he did what many Nazis do and moved to Idaho.
The first few episodes of Race and Reason were filmed in Metzger's home, but as the show evolved, the production quality began to improve.
In 1986, he was using the public-access TV studio at California State University.
A student who worked in the studio said he was so offended by the content that he walked off the job.
Students protested Metzger's presence on campus, but university president Jewel Plummer Cobb said, quote, We should not stop it.
Regardless of how I may feel about the content, the strength of America is the First Amendment.
The protests eventually forced Metzger off campus and into a private studio.
On the heels of the student protests in California, officials in Spokane, Washington, initially declined to run an episode of Race and Reason featuring Ben Klassen, the founder of the Nazi religion The Church of the Creator, and the man who invented the term Rahoa, a popular shortened form of the phrase racial holy war.
In July of 1987, there were protests outside the Viacom offices in Dublin, California, after a station agreed to run tapes of race and reason that had been hand-delivered by a Klansman named Clinton Sipes.
A week later, Sipes was arrested for handing out Klan literature while wearing his Klan robes, because the conditions of his parole for a Klan-related armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon prevented him from associating with the Klan.
Sipes later renounced his views, founded a non-profit to help young people leave hate groups, and converted to Islam.
By the end of 1987, Metzger had been producing Race and Reason for three years.
It was airing intermittently around the country in as many as 50 different cities.
One particularly controversial episode that year featured J.B. Stoner, Stoner was no stranger to controversy.
The FCC had to intervene to force television stations to air his campaign ads when he ran for Senate in 1972. He's one of the most unapologetically vicious racists you'll find in 20th century politics.
And he ran for office repeatedly, making public pronouncements like, being Jewish should be punishable by death, and black people are more closely related to apes than humans...
He was so publicly vitriolic that even his fellow Nazis thought he might be a government plant to make them all look bad.
But he was just like that.
And he stayed like that until he died.
In one of his last public statements before the stroke that killed him, he said, a person isn't supposed to apologize for being right.
He was convicted in 1980 for a 1958 bombing of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
He was never prosecuted for at least a dozen other bombings of synagogues and black churches he'd carried out in the 50s.
And he ended up serving just three years in prison.
His appearance on Metzger's show was filmed not long after his release and was apparently just 30 minutes of the most unhinged ranting about AIDS that you can imagine.
*music* Because by 1987, Stoner was leading a group that he called the Crusade Against Corruption.
He said that white people should celebrate AIDS because it had been sent to rescue the white race from black people, Jews, and homosexuals.
Although he typically used words, I won't say.
That 1987 episode with J.B. Stoner on Metzger's show is gone, as far as I can tell.
I did find maybe 20 or 30 episodes floating around in the ether, but this isn't one of them.
And that's probably for the best.
Based on reporting about the battle over airing it in Idaho, though, I can match portions of what was said in the episode to a speech that Stoner gave at the Aryan Nations compound around the same time.
Now, I love a primary source.
I go to great lengths to locate archival footage.
And I think it really adds some texture to the show for you to hear some of these men in their own words.
Sometimes.
But this?
This is not something I can play.
I couldn't find a single 10-second stretch without a word that I'm not going to be responsible for broadcasting.
That old man was using slurs at a truly unprecedented rate.
One of the only full phrases without a slur in it sums up what you need to know.
I think that AIDS is the greatest miracle that we've had in about 1900 years.
And this episode proved a bridge too far for the cable provider in Pocatello, Idaho.
They'd been airing Race and Reason on local public access for a year already, sponsored by Aryan Nations member Stan Sorensen.
It was a sensitive time in a place that has long been a hotbed of white supremacist activity.
Richard Butler's Aryan Nations compound was in nearby Hayden Lake.
In 1986, the home of Bill Wasmuth, a Catholic priest and the chairman of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Rights, had been firebombed in response to his outspoken opposition to racism and anti-Semitism.
The TV station didn't want to rock the boat.
Honestly, they probably didn't want to die.
But this 30-minute frenzied rant from an elderly lunatic who believed that AIDS had been sent by God to kill black people and to remind Aryan men that race mixing is punishable by death, it was just too much.
It was too much.
They didn't want to put this on TV. So the television station conferred with their lawyers.
And after a lot of consideration, the lawyers said, it's a close call, but nothing in the episode breaks the law.
At the next meeting of the Pocatello City Council, some residents felt the city should just cut all funding to public access TV, if that was the only way they could keep race and reason off the air.
They couldn't say no to just one show, but they could end the public access TV program entirely for everyone.
Members of Pocatello's Human Rights Advisory Council said they should call the racist bluff.
Don't air it.
Let them sue.
And the debate raged in Pocatello.
The show's producer, an enigmatic figure named Alexander Fox, spent days meeting with the Pocatello city attorney, and ultimately he agreed to back down.
He wasn't willing to fight for it.
He withdrew the tape.
Newspaper articles around this time refer to Alexander Fox as an attorney and the show's producer.
But I'm not 100% sure he exists.
Most of the episodes of the show I was able to find show a message at the end that Alexander Fox, with an E on the end, holds the copyright for the show.
That doesn't always mean much.
People love to just put that symbol on things.
But I figured, I'll check.
And the only entry in the U.S. Copyright Office records for an Alexander Fox, with an E on the end, is a 1981 application to copyright a cassette tape called Sex Files.
And that's P-H-Y-L-E-S, Sex Files.
Alexander Fox is listed as a pseudonym for David C. Wiley, which, coincidentally, happens to be the name of the California man who often co-hosted the show with Metzger.
Wiley was the applicant on the paperwork when War applied for a permit to hold meetings in the public park in Placentia, California in 1986. And his name turns up in the documents that were recovered by San Francisco police in 1993 when they investigated the ADL for spying on thousands of people.
Mixed in with dossiers on Arab Americans and anti-apartheid activists, the ADL had also been keeping tabs on the Klan.
The police inventory of documents recovered in the search lists Wiley's name on a page that includes items related to the ADL's monitoring of California skinhead groups.
So, I wonder if Alexander Fox, attorney for Tom Metzger, didn't have the stomach for a legal fight over a segregationist's love letter to AIDS because he wasn't a lawyer at all.
But I guess we'll never know.
David Wiley died in 2007. Bocatello called Metzger's bluff, and they won.
But one of the options they considered was one that some cities chose.
You can't say no to a Nazi, so you cancel it for everybody.
And in 1988, Kansas City, Missouri did just that.
They ended their entire public access television program rather than to air Metzger's show.
A group of Klansmen had showed up at the studio with a tape of Race and Reason in hand, and they were told that, oh, sorry, the rules are that you have to actually produce your own show here.
You can't show the tape.
But apparently there was no such rule on the books.
And the city wasn't allowed to invent new rules to enact a content-based restriction on the show.
So faced with the possibility of becoming known as Klans' city, something that appeared in almost all of the articles about this, the city council voted to eliminate public access TV altogether.
But this time, the bluff got called.
It wasn't the possibly fictional Alexander Fox who stepped in to represent the Missouri Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, although local Klansman Dennis Mahon did tell the newspaper that he was getting legal advice from Fox.
No, Mahon's legal representation in this case came from the ACLU. And after a federal judge denied the city's motion to dismiss the suit, they ended up settling out of court and voted to restore the public access channel.
So, in the end, after a year of push and pull, the Klan was on TV, and the city had to pay $100,000.
I'm not sure if Dennis Mahon ever did try his hand at making his own public access show, but he is currently serving a 40-year sentence in federal prison for mailing a bomb to the Scottsville Office of Diversity and Dialogue in 2004. It's not at all relevant here to tell you that he ended up in prison because the FBI sent an informant to seduce him into confessing,
or that among the feminine wiles she employed to woo him into her confidence was a risque photo of herself in a white bikini top with a hand grenade nestled between her breasts.
You didn't need to know that, but I know it, and now you do too.
In the quiet town of Avella, Pennsylvania, Jared and Christy Akron seem to have it all.
A whirlwind romance, a new home and twins on the way.
What no one knew was that Christy was hiding a secret so shocking it would tear their world apart.
911 response, what's your emergency?
My babies, please!
My babies!
One woman, two lives, and the truth more terrifying than anyone could imagine.
They had her as one of the suspects, but they could never prove it.
You're going to go to jail if you don't come with us right now.
Throughout this whole thing, I kept telling myself, nobody's that crazy.
Uncover the chilling mystery that will leave you questioning everything.
A story of the lengths we go to protect our darkest secrets.
She went batshit crazy, shot and killed all her farm animals, slaughtered them in front of the kids.
Tried to burn their house down.
Audio Up presents The Unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, listeners.
I'm Sloane Glass, the host of American Homicide, a podcast where we take you across the country to investigate some of America's deadliest crimes.
We'll explore how these murders are shaped by their unique landscapes and, in turn, how these tragedies have shaped the fabric of these American communities forever.
And you can get access to all episodes of American Homicide 100% ad-free and one week early through the iHeart True Crime Plus subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.
So don't wait.
Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.
Welcome to the Criminalia podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarchi.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, everything from poisoners and pirates to art thieves and snake oil products and those who made and sold them.
We'll be right back.
That's a fact.
We also look at what kinds of societal forces were at play at the time of the crime, from legal injustices to the ethics of body snatching, to see what, if anything, might look different through today's perspective.
And be sure to tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in custom-made cocktails and mocktails inspired by the stories.
There's one for every story we tell.
Listen to Criminalia 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.
People protested in Cincinnati, Chicago, Corpus Christi, Pocatello, Fullerton, and in cities Corpus Christi, Pocatello, Fullerton, and in cities across the country.
But for an entire decade, Tom Metzger's Race and Reason aired on public access television.
Not even the lawsuit that all but destroyed white Aryan resistance could stop production of Race and Reason.
In 1990, a Portland jury agreed that Metzger was liable for inciting war members to commit acts of violence against minorities, specifically in the death of Mullah Gettasara, an Ethiopian college student murdered by war members in 1988.
Metzger lost his house.
but he kept making the show, if only intermittently.
In 1993, Metzger interviewed James Mason about the recent release of his book, Siege, the book that remains to this day the White Terrorist's Handbook.
And at this point you've moved away from the mass strategy.
Completely.
Totally concentrating on the revolutionary struggle.
What few potential revolutionaries we had left out of the old movement were my targets for this propaganda that I included in the original Siege monthly publication.
But Tom Metzger wasn't the only racist who understood the power of this tool he'd figured out how to use.
Dozens of his followers dutifully ordered copies of VHS tapes to broadcast Metzger's race and reason on their own local channels.
But some supporters took it a step further.
They didn't just copy the tapes.
They copied the model and made their own shows.
Looking back for a moment to Pocatello, the first episode of Race and Reason that aired in Pocatello, Idaho, a year before the controversy with J.B. Stoner and his enthusiasm for racial cleansing through HIV, took me by surprise.
It's the only episode of Metzger's original run of the show that didn't feature Metzger at all.
The guest host in the episode that aired in Pocatello, Idaho in 1986 was Roy Frankhauser.
Roy Frankhauser, the Klansman from Pennsylvania.
The same Roy Frankhauser that formed a Klan splinter group in Western Pennsylvania in the early 90s and found himself at odds with Keystone Knights Grand Dragon Barry Black?
That Roy Frankhauser?
If you missed the episodes I did in October about Barry Black, this means nothing to you, but I was surprised to see Roy again.
What a small world.
On Race and Reason, Frank Hauser was interviewing Richard Barrett, a Mississippi attorney who led a white supremacist group called the Nationalist Movement.
Frankhauser would go on to host his own shows on public access TV in Pennsylvania.
One called White Forum, and one called Roy Frankhauser Presents Race and Reason.
Though it's unclear from the newspaper articles if that was actually an original show hosted by Frankhauser, or if he just sort of popped his name onto the Metzger reruns that he was sponsoring.
I couldn't find any episodes.
I guess if you have episodes of racist public access TV from Reading, Pennsylvania in the early 90s, I do want to see them.
Please email them to me.
And that Mississippi attorney that he was interviewing on that episode also went on to host his own show called Air Link, which was broadcast in as many as 60 cities at its height in the 90s.
Richard Barrett unsuccessfully sued the city of Houston in 1999 over their policy of charging $100 per hour for public access broadcasts that were produced outside the Houston area.
Barrett was murdered in 2010 by his neighbor, a young black man who claimed Barrett dropped his pants and demanded a sex act from him.
I'm not a huge fan of what sounds a little bit like a gay panic defense.
I don't love that, not weighing in on the killer's motivations here.
But it may have happened.
Barrett had long been rumored to be gay.
And after his death, fellow Nazi Don Black said Barrett was, quote, an obvious old queen.
Ask anyone who ever met him.
And former National Alliance member and longtime David Duke lackey Ron Doggett had a similar public access program in Richmond, Virginia, all through the 90s.
His was called Race and Reality, but it was indistinguishable from Metzger's Race and Reason.
In the mid-80s, Dr. Herbert Poinsett was one of many of Metzger's fans around the country who was dutifully taking VHS tapes of Metzger's show to his local TV station each week.
But by 1988, he'd made several guest appearances on the show.
And within a year, he'd produced more than 40 episodes of his own weekly show, also called Race and Reason, broadcast on Public Access TV in Tampa.
When his name first appeared in the paper as the local crank broadcasting Metzger's show in Atlanta, he told the Atlanta Constitution that he had, quote, no Klan ties whatsoever.
And I guess that's probably true.
It's probably technically true.
I can't find any evidence that Herbert Poinsett was ever in the Ku Klux Klan, but he was absolutely a Nazi.
There's really no doubt about that.
His name appears in passing in some of the personal writings of Ben Klassen, the founder of the Church of the Creator.
He seems to have been a personal friend of Klassen's in the early 80s, before he moved his Nazi church from Florida up to North Carolina.
And remember maybe half an hour ago or so, when I told you to put a pin in Herb?
He was the headline speaker at the 1984 annual convention for William Luther Pierce's National Alliance.
There's a lovely photo in an issue of the National Alliance Bulletin that shows Poinsett sitting next to an ecstatic-looking Kevin Alfred Strom.
I mean, Strom is just beaming.
He's holding up a copy of The Best of Attack.
It was a compilation of the National Alliance newspaper from the 70s that Strom had just finished editing.
But even if I didn't have this photo of Herbert Poinsett looking a little uncomfortable sitting next to Kevin Strom, I'd still know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was a National Alliance member of some importance, someone that William Luther Pierce placed a great deal of trust in.
That photo of Poinsett and Strom was taken sometime over Labor Day weekend in 1984. William Luther Pierce had received that paper bag full of cash from Robert Matthews just a few weeks earlier.
And it was at this meeting in Arlington that Pierce announced to his followers that he finally had enough money to purchase that 364-acre plot in Hillsborough, West Virginia.
In October, he paid $95,000 all in cash for the property.
Pierce maintained until his death that he had not received any of the proceeds from the Order's robberies, but his own son notes in his memoir that there isn't really any other explanation for his sudden ability to afford the land.
But William Luther Pierce made another big purchase in the mid-80s.
For a man who kept his guns buried underground so the government wouldn't know he had them, a stock portfolio wasn't really his style.
Even if he had money to invest, which by all accounts he did not, investing in the system that he spent his life railing against really doesn't seem like him.
But in 1986, he purchased 100 shares of stock in AT&T, and that would have cost him over $10,000.
In April of 1988, William Luther Pierce sent Herbert Poinsett to represent his neo-Nazi organization at the annual AT&T shareholders meeting.
As a shareholder, National Alliance could submit a proposal to be considered by all the other shareholders at the meeting.
It used to be that anyone owning even a single share of a company's stock could submit a proposal like this.
But the rules changed in the 80s and that probably explains the size of Pierce's purchase and the fact that he sat on it for two years.
You have to own a certain amount of stock and for a certain amount of time before you're allowed to submit proposals.
So they made the buy and they sat on their investment until the time came.
The 1988 shareholders meeting was on April 20th.
Hitler's birthday.
That had to be a good omen.
Because they were going to make AT&T end its affirmative action program.
When National Alliance submitted their proposal ahead of the April 20th, 1988 shareholders meeting, AT&T sought to have it excluded.
But two weeks ahead of the meeting, the Securities and Exchange Commission denied the request.
The Nazi proposal was going in the proxy statement.
I can only find AT&T annual proxy statements going back 30 years in the SEC's online database, so unfortunately I don't have the original document that was presented to the shareholders.
But according to reporting at the time, every AT&T shareholder was presented with a statement that argued that Black workers were intellectually inferior and that hiring minorities had a negative impact on white workers.
Chairman of the board, Robert Allen, denounced the proposal during the meeting, saying, This proposal is completely contrary to the policies,
the culture and the character of AT&T. It is in the proxy only because we could not convince the Securities and Exchange Commission to allow us to drop it.
Okay.
Nice words, Robert Allen.
But he followed that up by also encouraging shareholders to vote against a competing proposal brought by a Black AT&T executive named Alex Tillman, who was asking AT&T to expand the company's commitment to promoting more women and minorities.
Both proposals failed.
AT&T shareholders were 91% against ending affirmative action and 94% against expanding it.
After the meeting, Poinsett told reporters, We lost one battle, but the war has just started.
We want to get the vast majority of white people in this country to wake up to see that they are being displaced by people who shouldn't be taking over their jobs.
Both Tillman and National Alliance submitted their proposals again at the 1989 shareholders meeting.
This time, the Nazis got just 8.1% support, down from 8.6% the year before.
And Tillman's proposal for more diversity garnered support from just 4% of shareholders, down from 6% the year before.
With so little support, Tillman was not allowed to submit the proposal again in 1990. But National Alliance did.
National Alliance submitted the proposal for a third time in 1990. This time getting 8.8% of shareholders to agree that the company should end its affirmative action program.
So the third time they tried it, they got the most votes in favor.
I mean, it's still not a high number, but the number was going up.
If they tried it a fourth time, though, I couldn't find it.
Herbert Poinsett kept broadcasting Race and Reason from Tampa through the mid-90s.
I can only find a handful of episodes.
I think he ended up producing more episodes of the show than Metzger ever did.
But he wasn't as famous, so very few of them have survived.
Most of the ones that can still be found show Poinsett wearing a suit, talking straight into the camera, and sitting in front of a wall covered by two flags side by side.
Confederate flag and a Nazi flag.
Daniel Ruth, a journalist who appears to still be writing for the Tampa Bay Times, routinely tore into Poinsett and his column in the 90s.
One column in 1993 bears the headline, Third Rate Third Reich Cable Show.
Another column waxes poetic about the, quote, delusional ramblings of local Nazi chiropractor and cable access carbuncle Herb Poinsett.
Herbert Poinsett disappears from the record by the late 90s, and he died in 2003.
He spent the last two decades of his life trying to get famous for being racist, but I'd never heard of him at all until I started poking around William Luther Pierce's finances.
Which is where I started.
All of this was just an accident, because I got distracted wondering about where all that money went.
I really did start off trying to write about the bank robberies and the murders, but looking back now, I think the money spent on years of loud public propaganda had a far greater and longer-lasting impact than ten times the amount of money spent on guns.
Because the government would end up taking most of the guns purchased with the stolen money.
But propagandists like Tom Metzger kept Robert Matthews' dream alive, telling a generation of racists that it was time for war.
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 Gagan.
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.
It's nothing personal.
I don't answer any of my emails.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's gonna make you one of my weird little guys.
Just don't post anything that's gonna make you one of my weird little guys.
From audio up, the creators of Stephen King's Strawberry Spring, comes The Unborn, a shocking true story.
My babies, please!
My babies!
One woman, two lives, and a secret she would kill to protect.
She went crazy.
Shot and killed all her farm animals.
Slaughtered them in front of the kids.
Tried to burn their house down.
Listen to The Unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarki.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme from poisoners to art thieves.
We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
Listen to Criminalia 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.
