In 1990, a single episode of a public access show called "Klansas City Kable" aired in Kansas City, Missouri. The klansman who fought city council for his right to produce it was never prosecuted for the bombing campaign he claims to have carried out in the decade prior, but his long career as a professional racist took him all over the world before a years-long undercover operation finally put him away. Sources: Kennard, Matt. Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror. London: Verso. 2012 Newton, Michael. White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866. McFarland and Company 2014 https://www.spiegel.de/politik/vorwaerts-fuer-die-arische-rasse-a-14649b2e-0002-0001-0000-000013491440 https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/03/world/klan-seizes-on-germany-s-wave-of-racist-violence.html Ketter, Pia. "Zwischen Mord und Kreuzverbrennung. Der Rechte Rand, March/April 2016. Rink, Nina. "Anleitung zum »Rassenhass«" Der Rechte Rand, March/April 2016 Norton, Bill. "The Cop and the Klan." Star Magazine, October 9, 1988See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Om vi skal!
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Perfekt!
Både julegaver og nye klær på samme sted.
Jeg vil innom Nike, Lyko, Boss, Fallestad og Peak Performance.
56 butikker å velge mellom, og så er de søndagsåpent de tre siste helgene før julaften.
Oslo Fashion Outlet i Vestby, bare 25 minutter fra Oslo.
Always worth a trip!
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 out.
Listen to The Unborn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We want to speak out and we want this to stop.
Wow, very powerful.
I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry.
I really wanted to be a player boy, my dog.
He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star.
To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in.
It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated.
We're an army in comparison to him.
From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap 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 As the sun began to set on a cool fall evening in late September 1991, TV reporter Harold Spiegel was waiting nervously at the edge of the woods outside of a small town about an hour south of the nation's capital.
The reporter was waiting for more information about their destination that evening.
He'd received a tip about an event and managed to secure a meeting with some of the men who'd be attending.
They wouldn't tell him exactly where they were going, but after a short discussion in a parking lot, they allowed him to follow along.
He drove deeper and deeper into the countryside for half an hour before the men parked at the edge of the forest and got out.
More men arrived.
Some were wearing white robes and pointed hoods, the traditional garb of members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Others wore motorcycle jackets with SS patches on them and unfurled flags and banners with swastikas.
And then he followed them into the woods.
The reporter, alone in the woods with a few dozen Nazis and Klansmen, knew what these men were capable of.
A nearby town was in the throes of a week-long pogrom, with gangs of young neo-Nazis laying siege to apartment buildings that were home to Vietnamese and Mozambican immigrants.
In a clearing, the men surrounded a large wooden cross.
As it burned, a man in a leather jacket adorned with SS runes stood in the center of the circle and shouted, Sieg Heil, I come to you from America.
The cross was burning an hour south of the nation's capital, but the capital in question was Berlin.
Berlin.
Missouri Klansman Dennis Mahon was at the height of his career as a professional racist.
He had formed his own Klan group, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and he was Tom Metzger's right-hand man in the white Aryan resistance.
His trip to Germany promised to strengthen international ties between hate groups in Europe and the United States.
From the time he joined the Klan in 1980, his life story is inextricably intertwined with the history of the white power movement.
He made summertime visits to the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho.
He ran paramilitary training drills on a compound in Missouri.
He was hauled into court to testify in grand jury proceedings about the Oklahoma City bombing after a former girlfriend accused him of helping plan the attack.
He was an old man that the movement had mostly forgotten.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Last week, I said I wasn't sure if Dennis Mahon ever did try his hand at producing his own public access television program.
He was just a brief side character in a larger story about Tom Metzger, a Klansman and the founder of the white supremacist group White Aryan Resistance.
Metzger had received a generous gift in 1984. $300,000 in cash from the members of the Order, proceeds from their armored car robbery earlier that year.
And almost immediately after Metzger got this massive cash infusion, he set to work producing a virulently racist television show called Race and Reason.
His goal was to get his racist propaganda into the home of every working-class white man in America by way of public access TV. Across the country, Metzger's supporters dutifully ordered VHS tapes of the show and applied to broadcast it on their own local channels.
Others took up the cause and produced their own original versions based on Metzger's idea.
One of the men who did both was a Klansman in Missouri named Dennis Mahon.
I didn't set out to write about Dennis this week.
I had something else in mind.
But I asked myself a question last week.
Did Dennis ever actually produce a show called Clansus City Cable?
I didn't have time last week for another tangent to find out about this.
I was following Tom Metzger and the Stolen Money.
But I just can't leave an itch like that.
Unscratched.
And it turns out he did.
And I found it.
A single 15-minute episode of Klanza City Cable aired in Kansas City, Missouri on April 3rd, 1990. We're going to discuss Klanza City Cable, which took two and a half years of sweat, blood, persecution, Getting fired from our jobs.
Getting harassed by feds.
Bombed.
Shot at.
Assaulted.
Death threats constantly.
But we've succeeded.
Just a quick note on pronunciation.
Dennis' last name, M-A-H-O-N, can be pronounced a variety of ways.
It's a common enough name, and I'm sure a lot of people say it a lot of different ways.
I've chosen the pronunciation used by his attorney in a 2015 oral argument before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Good morning, Mr. Chief Judge Thomas, and may it please the court.
I'm Daniel Kaplan.
I represent the appellant, Dennis Mahon.
Identical twin brothers, Daniel and Dennis Mahon, were born in Illinois in 1950. After high school, they both found their way into military service.
Daniel served in the U.S. Navy and the Coast Guard from 1970 to 1979. And Dennis was definitely in the Florida National Guard in the early 80s.
I know that.
And a lot of sources indicate that he spent time in the Army in the 70s, including a tour in Vietnam.
But I can't find that actually sourced to anything in particular.
It's just repeated a lot, often by Dennis himself.
Both brothers trained as and became aircraft mechanics.
Classified ads in Miami in 1972 showed that brothers were making a little money on the side teaching flying lessons.
By his own account, Dennis Mahon was already a Klansman by 1980, which is the year he joined National Alliance.
William Luther Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries was published in 1978, and it was often sold at gun shows, which is probably where Dennis picked up a copy in 1980. The book was eye-opening, but what he claims really radicalized him that year was the Mariel boat lift.
For six months in 1980, there was a mass exodus from Cuba.
By October, an estimated 125,000 Cubans and 25,000 Haitians arrived in South Florida.
In May of 1980 alone, 86,000 Cuban emigrants reached Florida.
During that chaotic month, Dennis Mahon was one of the Florida National Guardsmen assigned to assist in transporting the asylum seekers to processing centers.
In an interview with Matthew Kennard for his book Irregular Army, Mahon refers to that time period as, quote, the Haitian invasion, though in all likelihood the vast majority of the people he interacted with that month were Cuban.
Regardless, he was repulsed by these people that he had been deployed to help.
An older interview, one from 1988, attributes this shift in attitude to just being in Miami at all, saying, quote, All the brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking people made him feel like a stranger in his own land.
He was already a Klansman by then, so you can't really call this the origin story of his racism.
But in his mind, this is where things changed.
Something had to be done about this.
And then, he goes dark.
There is not a single trace of Dennis Mahon in the early to mid-80s.
I was tearing my hair out trying to find any evidence that he even existed after his 30th birthday.
I tried all my usual tricks and I came up empty-handed.
He was driving refugees to detention centers in Miami in May of 1980 and then...
nothing.
He's a ghost until he turns up in Kansas City in 1987, suddenly emerging as a Klan leader of some influence.
In a 1991 interview with a reporter from The Oklahoman, Mahon says, I was underground from 80 to 87. He'd spent those years doing things he can't talk about, things he can't do anymore now that he's a leader in the movement, telling the reporter, I don't regret doing them, but I realize I can't do those kinds of things now.
And this wasn't a one-off comment.
It wasn't bluster and bravado for a newspaper reporter.
Because I have a matching statement that he made 18 years later.
And he didn't know he had an audience that time.
In 2009, on a line he didn't know was tapped, Dennis Mahon was arguing with a friend.
Charles Denman Koontz, a member of the Koontz family that founded the First National Bank of Omaha, is described by an ATF agent in court documents as, quote, a white supremacist and a friend of Dennis Mahon.
And he had been providing financial assistance to the Mahon brothers for some time.
In 2009, he was concerned that a woman Dennis had grown close to may be lying to him.
Koontz was right, of course.
That woman that he was worried about worked for the FBI. But Dennis didn't want to believe that.
In a rage, on that recorded line, he said, You don't know how many pipe bombs I've lit off.
You don't know how many transformers I've destroyed and put people out of power in the 80s.
Until I got outed.
In other recorded conversations with that FBI informant that Koontz had grown so wary of, Dennis Mahon claims that he bombed an abortion clinic, a Jewish community center, and various government offices during that time period.
But no concrete allegations have been made about his involvement in any particular incident.
What is consistent is the time period.
From 1980 to 1987...
He's a ghost.
A ghost in a white robe.
In 1987, he appears again in the public record, and with quite a splash.
He's not just a Klansman.
He's a very important Klansman.
Maybe whatever he did during those years underground gave him the credibility he needed in the movement to emerge fully formed as a public face, a man of some authority and influence.
Because by the time he resurfaces, he's the King Cleagle for the Missouri Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, if you remember your Klan vocabulary from the Barry Black episodes, a Klegel is a local Klan recruitment officer.
But a King Klegel is kind of like a Klan regional manager.
So he's overseeing the recruitment efforts by other Klegels in Missouri and he's managing the Klan's affairs in the state.
In 1988, the Kansas City Star's Star Magazine ran a lengthy feature story profiling J. Allen Moran, an exalted cyclops with the Missouri Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Between full-page photos of a glowering Klansman and his full regalia, veteran reporter Bill Norton wove the tale of a Platt County cop who radicalized quickly, losing his job and getting recruited into the Klan by Dennis Mahon in 1987. We're good to
town of Avella, Pennsylvania.
Jared and Christy Akron seemed 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 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, 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.
We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness, and we want this to stop.
Wow, very powerful.
I'm Ellie Flynn, and I'm an investigative journalist.
When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry.
I really wanted to be a playboy model.
Lingerie, topless.
I said, yes, please.
Because at the center of this murky world is an alleged predator.
You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior.
He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it.
He's everywhere and has been everywhere.
It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated.
Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in.
It's not just me.
We're an army in comparison to him.
Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
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.
Welcome to the Criminilia 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.
Music J. Allen Moran's first encounter with Dennis Mahon at a Christian identity church in Missouri in the spring of 1987 is the first place I find him again after the underground years.
And he's just arrived in Missouri to take on the role of King Cleagle after some time organizing new clan chapters in Oklahoma and Michigan.
J. Allen Moran was still an officer of the law when he showed up at that church, which made a lot of people uneasy.
It was Dennis Mahon's responsibility to feel him out.
Was this newcomer a true believer or a threat?
But the two men became close friends, bonding over their shared love of the white race.
Early in their friendship, Mahon told Moran that he'd been a suspect in bombings in at least three different cities.
Though if he told Moran which ones, Moran didn't repeat that to the reporter.
And it appears that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the kind of agents who might investigate a serial bomber, were keeping an eye on Mahon.
Because about six months into their friendship, J.L. Moran was called into his boss's office.
Flat City Police Chief Charles Masoner, a man apparently known as Chuggy to his friends, according to his obituary, was sitting in his office with an agent from the ATF. The agent had seen Moran passing out clan flyers with Dennis Mahon, and they had an ultimatum for him.
If he wanted to keep his job as a cop, he needed to play ball.
They wanted information about his new friend.
The ATF disputes Moran's claim that they tried to force him to plant a bomb in Mahon's trailer.
An agent told the Kansas City Star, quote, We never encourage anyone to commit a violation.
That just did not occur.
Now, would the ATF pressure someone to commit a crime?
I'm not saying it's out of the question.
But I don't think the ATF needed to plant a bomb in Mahon's trailer.
There were bombs in Mahon's trailer.
But Moran's story gets even stranger from there.
He claims the agents told him that the gun used to murder Missouri State Trooper Jimmy Linegar in 1985 had been registered to Dennis Mahon.
Which is a wild thing to say.
Jimmy Linegar initiated what he thought was a routine traffic stop, a little south of Branson, Missouri, on April 15, 1985. He didn't know he was pulling over David Tate, a member of that Nazi bank robbery gang, The Order.
And David Tate was a fugitive.
A grand jury in Seattle had just indicted him and 23 others for conspiracy and racketeering related to the order's robberies.
He was also wanted in Washington State on an older weapons charge.
He felt cornered.
So he opened fire on the two state troopers with a MAC-10, killing Linagar and wounding Allen Hines before fleeing on foot.
Tate was missing in the Ozarks for a week before officers spotted him drinking from a creek, hungry and confused.
David Tate is serving a life sentence in Missouri for first-degree murder.
And this is the only time I've ever seen Dennis Mahon's name dragged into that story.
Because the thing is, according to an opinion issued by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, the guns David Tate left behind in that van weren't registered to Dennis Mahon.
Because they weren't registered to anybody at all.
I mean, that was part of the problem.
He had a van full of unregistered guns.
But what an odd claim to make.
And where would Moran even get an idea like that?
Had Mahan been telling him stories about the Order?
Mahan's on record as having been a big fan of their work, but I can't find a claim anywhere else that he ever had his hands on any guns or money connected to the Order.
Did the ATF agent just make that up?
That seems unnecessary.
I guess we'll never know.
But regardless, the claim does make for a neat little narrative device in that magazine article.
You know, in 1987, the ATF is appealing to Moran's honor and loyalty to a fellow cop.
Surely you'll help us send Mahan to jail.
He was involved in the murder of a state trooper.
But Moran declined the offer.
He refused to assist the agents in any way, and he soon lost his job as a Platte City police officer.
And then, a year later, he's a rising star in the Ku Klux Klan, and he's telling this Kansas City Star magazine writer that men like David Tate, the man who murdered that state trooper, were heroes to him.
He told the reporter that he dreamed of a perfect Aryan nation where white men and women lived under God's law alone, a place where non-whites could only visit on work visas and anyone who stepped out of line could be executed.
In his vision of this white utopia, there would be statues lining a wide boulevard in the capital, statues of men who had killed in service of the ethnostate, After becoming fast friends in 1987, J. Allen Moran and Dennis Mahon got down to business.
Clan business.
And by January of 1988, they were trying to get on TV. Tom Metzger's Race and Reason program had been on the air in cities all over the country for a few years by then, with city after city begrudgingly taking their lawyers' advice.
If the Klan wants to be on public access TV, you have to let them.
And it was Metzger's Race and Reason program that Moran and Mahon were hoping to air in Kansas City.
The city initially rebuffed them by making up new rules.
When the men arrived at the studio with a VHS tape of Metzger's show, they were told that public access programming had to actually be produced in the studio by local residents.
They couldn't broadcast pre-recorded content.
And if they wanted to use the studio to record a show, they'd have to receive training from station employees on how to properly use all the equipment and, you know, we just don't actually have any openings for training right now.
So they're stalling.
No date is scheduled for this training and they can't make the show until they get the training.
You can make the show, but you have to get the training and it's just not time.
They're just kicking the can down the road, buying time while the Kansas City City Council meets with lawyers to try to figure out how to stop this.
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 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.
We want to speak out, we want to raise awareness, and we want this to stop.
Wow, very powerful.
I'm Ellie Flynn, and I'm an investigative journalist.
When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry.
I really wanted to be a Playboy model.
Lingerie, topless.
I said, yes, please.
Because at the center of this murky world is an alleged predator.
You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior.
He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it.
He's everywhere and has been everywhere.
It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated.
Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in.
It's not just me.
We're an army in comparison to him.
Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
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, wherever else you get your podcasts.
Check out betteroffline.com.
The conflict over what could be aired on TV in Kansas City caught the attention of Harry Jones, a journalism instructor at the University of Kansas.
He thought it would be a valuable learning opportunity for his students to hear from Moran and Mahan, saying it would be a lesson in challenging interviewing.
After campus protests forced him to rescind the invitation to appear on campus, the class was rescheduled.
22 journalism students were shuttled to an empty airplane hangar at a nearby regional airport for a class that looked more like a press conference.
The two Klansmen held court, expounding on their philosophies on race mixing and the evil influence exerted by Jewish people.
And then they took questions from the students.
Afterward, one student said the men's views were, quote, unrealistic and laughable.
And noted that they avoided answering certain questions, refusing to give any hard answers on the actual size of their organization, or exactly how they intended to remove Black and Jewish people from the land they would use for their ethnostate.
Another student said the men's remarks were,"...gross and obscene, and completely unprintable, particularly on the subject of Jews." All in all, the instructor viewed the event as a success, telling the paper that about a third of the students engaged in the interview practice and were vigorous and polite but persistent.
I'm sure the decision to hold the class in the end had nothing to do with the Klan's threats against the university after the invitation was originally withdrawn.
on.
Moran's threats to sue over a cancelled class probably didn't have them shaking in their boots.
But the promise of impending Klan rallies on campus was unappealing.
And it wasn't just the University of Kansas that he was threatening with lawsuits and Klan marches.
By the summer of 1988, Kansas City had voted to shut down their entire public access television station, rather than air the Klan's TV show.
The Klan's then responded by filing suit, with the backing of the ACLU. And soon after that suit was filed, the debate about what belongs on TV reached weekday afternoon's most-watched TV show.
In Kansas City recently, a civic battle erupted when council members voted to eliminate the public access channel rather than to allow the Klan to broadcast.
Dennis Mahan is a KKK official who wanted to be host of the Klans of City cable program, which would feature, among other things, footage from KKK rallies and cross burnings and, in Dennis' own words, an occasional safari through the black parts of Kansas City.
Defending Dennis and other Klan members' rights to free and equal opportunity to public access cable stations is American Civil Liberties' attorney, John Powell.
The September 1st, 1988 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show featured Tom Metzger, Dennis Mahon, and Dennis's ACLU attorney squaring off against C.T. Vivian, a man that Martin Luther King Jr. himself once called the greatest preacher to ever live, Reverend Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City City Councilman who was fighting to keep Mahon off the air, and an Orthodox rabbi.
The show was a bit of a circus, but that's obviously what they were going for.
Members of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee had packed the audience and managed to get several comments in as Oprah roamed the studio, soliciting questions.
John Brown, Anti-Klan Canadian, proud of it.
I'd like to ask this question.
Where does free speech end and the freedom to organize for murder begin?
Where do we draw the line?
I draw the line with Tom Metzger and the Ku Klux Klan.
Because behind the man in the three-piece suit is another man in a paramilitary uniform.
And those people are out there killing people.
That audience member was, tragically, more right than she could have known.
Just six weeks after that episode aired, an Ethiopian college student named Mulageta Saraw was beaten to death in Portland, Oregon, by three skinheads.
With help from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mulageta's family successfully sued Tom Metzger for $12 million.
Those murderers were exactly what the Oprah audience member predicted.
A paramilitary force behind a man in a three-piece suit.
They were members of white Aryan resistance who'd been incited to kill by Metzger's propaganda.
Mahon made a whole week out of his trip to Chicago to appear on Oprah.
The episode was filmed on a Thursday, but he spent the whole week in the city.
On Sunday, August 28th, he was the headline speaker at a white pride rally in Chicago's Marquette Park.
500 people turned up to hear speeches from Klansmen.
The event's organizers, a Klan chapter in Illinois, claimed they'd had no idea there was another event in Marquette Park that day.
Marquette Park is over 300 acres, and Klansmen aren't known for their courtesy or flawless event planning, so maybe they hadn't done it on purpose.
But that Sunday afternoon, they were sharing the park with several hundred people who had marched over together from a nearby church.
They were commemorating the August 1966 Marquette Park March, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., And history may not repeat, but it often does rhyme.
That march in 1966 was confronted by thousands of angry white people, some with Confederate flags and swastika banners.
And they pelted the marchers with objects, hitting Dr. King himself in the head with a rock.
And in 1988, the city of Chicago sent 800 police officers to keep these two events separate.
Officers on horseback blocked a contingent of Klansmen who broke off from the main event to try to antagonize the churchgoers.
Officers had to form a human barricade to hold back the Klansmen as the other rally dispersed.
Newspaper reports say there were no injuries, but they also report that a young black man, who appeared to have no idea that either event was happening in the park that day, had to be rescued by officers after Klansmen surrounded him, pelting him with rocks.
At least a dozen Klansmen were arrested for disorderly conduct, and one for punching a photographer.
But Dennis Mahon's trip to Chicago was a success.
He gave a speech to a crowd of hundreds of supporters, and he appeared on national television.
Everybody saw him.
Everybody.
Including his boss.
Oprah, I may lose my job for being on this show today.
Okay?
Okay, is that nice?
Are these gentlemen only welcome...
Oprah's studio audience cheered when Mahan said he may end up losing his job for appearing on the show.
In the context of the show, he's trying to make a point about how he's suffering for his political views, how he's constantly being punished for exercising his right to free speech.
He probably didn't actually think he was going to lose his job.
His employer, Trans World Airlines, said they'd known about his clan activities for some time.
He's not a subtle guy.
He was fired shortly after appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show, but it wasn't because they learned something new about their aircraft mechanic.
It was because he kept missing work.
His trip to Chicago in September was far from the only thing taking him away from his job at the Kansas City International Airport that year.
In February, he took a week off to go to Arkansas.
Klansmen and neo-Nazis from around the country were demonstrating outside the federal courthouse in Fort Smith, as the trial began for the 14 white supremacist leaders accused of seditious conspiracy.
The very first Aryan Fest, a kind of Nazi woodstock that Tom Metzger and his son John came up with, was held that summer.
A 1988 issue of Metzger's White Aryan Resistance newsletter says that over a hundred Nazis and skinheads from around the country spent three days in June on a farm in Oklahoma listening to white power music.
He describes a band called the Tulsa Midtown Boot Boys as, quote, one of the hottest white power bands this side of screwdriver.
A month later, in July, Mahon took a trip out to Idaho to give a speech at the Aryan World Congress.
And even when he wasn't traveling, he was busy.
In 1988, Mahon had a falling out with Tom Robb.
Robb was the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
He didn't like being called an imperial wizard.
I guess he thought that sounded silly, but I can't imagine why.
But he was the national director, and Mahon was a King Cleagle in the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
But as the sedition trial got underway at Fort Smith, Tom Robb thought it would be prudent for the Klan to publicly stand by only those defendants who he felt had a valid First Amendment defense.
He didn't want to be seen in public defending out-and-out terrorism.
That would be bad for business.
Dennis Mahon, on the other hand, was offering his full-throated support, not only for all of the defendants in the Fort Smith trial, but for all of the members of the order.
He publicly praised Robert Matthews, the gang's leader who had died in an armed standoff with the FBI, calling him a martyr.
And it was this disagreement about how much you can say out loud in public that you love terrorism that caused Dennis Mahon to split with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
And in 1988, he formed his own organization, calling it the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
It doesn't look like Dennis Mahon ever got a new full-time job after getting let go in the fall of 1988. But that just freed him up to spend more time organizing.
In 1989, he ran for alderman in Ward 1 of the Kansas City suburb of Northmore.
His candidate profile in the local newspaper says only, He does automotive work on a contract basis.
He could not be reached for additional information.
Fellow clansman Edward Eugene Stevens IV was running for alderman in Northmore's third ward.
Stephen's wife Cynthia ran for collector, and his father, Edward Eugene Stevens III, was running unopposed to keep his seat as Northmore's municipal judge.
Stevens' wife and father told the Kansas City Star that they were not members of the Klan, although no one denied that Edward Stevens IV was deeply involved in the Klan.
Two years later, after Rodney King was beaten by LAPD officers, Stevens and Mahon were responsible for mailing Klan recruitment flyers to police departments all over Los Angeles.
In the midst of what appeared to have been a fairly lackluster campaign for aldermen in 1989, Dennis Mahon was still fighting the Kansas City City Council over his public access TV show.
The city hoped to get his lawsuit dismissed.
But after a federal judge denied their motion and set a trial date for September, they decided to just settle instead.
That summer, the city council voted to reinstate the public access channel.
They signed a settlement agreement with the Klansmen for $97,000.
Mahon would go on to press his luck trying to get Tom Metzger's Race and Reason program on other public access channels in the region, threatening to bring in white supremacist leaders like Tom Metzger himself and Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler to stage protests outside the studios if they didn't capitulate.
And on April 3rd, 1990, the first and only episode of his very own show aired in Kansas City.
The episode is not quite 15 minutes long, and the opening frames are garbled.
There's colored bars sort of flickering over the Klansmen, and the audio is choppy.
But it opens on a Klansman in a red robe with his face entirely covered by a red hood.
And he greets the viewer with this message.
City by city.
We're going where we want.
Saying what we want.
And nobody, nobody's going to stop us.
Our country was born out of bloodshed.
And from that bloodshed was the birth of the Ku Klux Klan.
After his introduction, ending with a shout of white power punctuated by a Hitler salute, the Klansman in red sort of shuffles out of frame and Dennis Mahon walks in.
He's wearing a bright teal Klan robe with a red cape, but no hood.
What follows is a rambling complaint about how unfair the process has been to get the show on the air.
And then he lays out a plan for what the show will be.
Episodes will feature footage from Klan rallies, and they'll have guests with differing perspectives.
And he promises to feature what he calls, quote, racial comedians.
Because, quote, we all like good racial jokes.
I don't know who we is, Dennis.
He hoped to have episodes featuring interviews with his friends, people like Tom Metzger and Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler.
But he also wanted to feature people with other ideas, people like Louis Farrakhan.
But he never did book any guests.
The only episode of Klanza City Cable was taped at the American Cablevision Studio on Main Street in downtown Kansas City just a few days before it aired.
While Mahon was recording, his supporters waited outside, standing guard.
There was no demonstration.
There was no protest.
The public outcry was over.
It had been going on for years.
Nobody showed up.
I doubt anyone had any particular idea that the program was even being recorded in an office building on a Thursday afternoon.
But one of the two dozen Klansmen standing on Main Street waiting for Dennis to come out pulled a gun on a black pedestrian, prompting 911 calls.
In the end, 19 Klansmen were taken into custody in the 15 minutes it took Dennis to record the episode.
Most of them were released without charges.
The incident prompted American Cablevision to announce a plan to update their rules for using the studio.
They were hoping to ban guns on the premises and require all visitors to sign in.
There's no follow-up I can find on whether they ended up implementing any changes to the rules, but it didn't matter.
Dennis got what he wanted.
He didn't actually want the responsibility of creating a weekly television program.
He was a man of action, not words.
Now Tom Metzger was a committed propagandist.
But Dennis Mahon just wanted to force everyone to submit to the Klan.
And now that they had, he didn't have to make any more episodes.
He proved his point.
I had every intention of getting all the way through the early 90s in this first episode, but I have to confess that I got in a little too deep researching the latter half of the story when I should have been writing the first half and it's now very late at night and I need to deliver this recording to Rory before he wakes up.
Dennis Mahon has only just begun to cause problems at this point.
So you'll have to come back next week to hear about the Klansman's attempt to frighten black children with a bad Mr. Rogers impression, his efforts to start Klan chapters in Germany in the time he got deported from Canada, the conspiracy theories linking him to the Oklahoma City bombing, and the exotic dancer who spent four years gaining his trust, secretly recording him until he said enough to tie him to a mail bomb in Arizona.
And there's also a very weird guy with a compound in the Ozarks.
He hides his guns in the many natural caves around his property.
Three 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 unless it is about how I pronounce the name of the city.
I'll definitely read your email, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guy subreddit.
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.
We 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.
We want to speak out and we want this to stop.
Wow, very powerful.
I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry.
I really wanted to be a player boy, my dog.
He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star.
To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in.
It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated.
We're an army in comparison to him.
From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap 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.
