In 2012, a newly formed white nationalist political party tried to get their candidate on the ballot. The American Third Position Party wanted Americans to vote for Merlin Miller, but how did the party end up picking him? Sources:https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2012.pdf#page=11https://irehr.org/2018/06/14/what-is-the-american-freedom-party/https://www.ocregister.com/2009/09/04/two-time-felon-runs-pro-white-political-group/https://rosecityantifa.org/articles/meet-the-oregon-chapter-of-the-american-freedom-party-part-one/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/will-la-elect-a-ron-paul_b_104053 https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2013/08/two-american-freedom-party-leaders-speak-out-about-their-party/ https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d284 https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/middle-east/six-day-war-liberty.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.
My husband said, your dad's been killed.
This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.
I was just completely in shock.
Liz's father murdered.
and her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound.
It didn't feel real at all.
More than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.
We're still fighting.
Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeart radio app.
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
December 29, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.
The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.
Then, everything changed.
There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.
In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism.
Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're get your podcasts.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
From iHeartPodcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the Turning River Road.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
But in 2014, the youngest escaped.
Listen to the Turning River Road on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI fueled nightmare.
Someone was posting photos.
It was just me naked.
Well, not me, but me with someone else's body part.
This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope, about the rise of deep fake pornography and the battle to stop it.
Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Tape Podcast.
Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
CallZone Media In November of 2012, Barack Obama was re-elected as president.
as President of the United States.
He beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney by a pretty good margin, pulling in 51.06% of the popular vote to Romney's 47.2%.
But if you add those numbers together, you'll only get 98.26%, a number that doesn't include more than 2 million votes.
Where did those votes go?
American electoral politics are dominated by the two-party system.
It's always been that way.
Before it was Republicans and Democrats and red states and blue states, we had Democrats and Whigs.
And before that, we had Federalists and Democratic Republicans.
It's always been nearly impossible for a third party or independent candidate to break through on the national stage.
But they've always tried.
There are longstanding third parties, ones you've probably seen on a ballot.
Green Party, the Libertarian Party.
And there are third parties that have come and gone, like Ross Perot's Reform Party.
In every election cycle, there are tiny little groups you've never heard of putting up a candidate.
They know they can't win, but they have a message they want to get out there.
And technically, almost any.
Almost anyone can run for president, with or without a party.
As long as you're a natural-born citizen over 35, all you have to do is raise some money and fill out some paperwork.
Records from the Federal Election Commission show that in 2012, 280 people filled out that paperwork, announcing their intention to run for president of the United States.
One of those candidates was an aspiring filmmaker with no political experience.
and a lot of thoughts about who really did 9-11.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weirdly Guys.
I'm Molly Conger.
I landed on this story in a roundabout kind of way.
I guess I always do.
If you listen to the last two episodes, I do have a confession to make.
I left something out of that story.
It just didn't fit neatly into the episodes and it would have been a confusing digression.
Those episodes were about Devon Arthurs, the co-founder of Adam Waffen, who murdered two members of the group in 2017.
And in those episodes, I told you that the earliest mentions of Adam Waffen online were in posts on a forum called Iron March.
And that's still true, as far as I know.
I didn't lie to you.
But you might have assumed, based on what I said in those episodes, that the group's co-founders, Devin Arthurs and Brandon Russell, must have met on Iron March too.
That's a reasonable assumption.
And, like I said, I left some things out of the story.
Because that's not where the pair first met.
They met on a platform called TinyChat.
Launched in 2009, TinyChat was a video chat room.
As many as 12 users at a time could appear on video, and more users could watch and participate in a text chat down below.
When they were interviewed by police on the night of the murders in 2017, both Brandon Russell and Devin Arthurs specifically mentioned that they'd originally met on TinyChat.
I dug up old 4chan posts from 2014 that show some screenshots of one particular TinyChat group.
In what looks like a college dorm room, a user calling himself Odin is staring into his webcam.
It's Brandon Russell.
A year before he announced the formation of his neo-Nazi terrorist organization and years before he went to federal prison the first and then second times, he was 19 years old sitting in his dorm room in Florida in an online chat room called Third Position.
I don't have any particular interest in writing a third part of that story.
This isn't actually a continuation of those two episodes.
This isn't about Brandon Russell or Adam Waffen.
If you didn't listen to those episodes and you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it.
But I was stuck on this idea of that third-position tiny chat.
How did a 14-year-old Devin Arthur send up in a video chat room run by grown men talking about the political ideology of third-positionism?
I'm not going to answer those questions today.
We're not really going to talk about that chat room at all.
I'm just telling you how I ended up reading an unproduced screenplay about a brave and handsome patriot who uncovers the truth about 9-11.
I promise these things are related.
This story is about the man who wrote that awful screenplay, a man named Merlin Miller.
In 2012, he was put forward as a presidential candidate by the American Third Position Party, the same group that was video chatting with teenage Nazis in 2014.
One surviving promotional video for the chat room actually repurposes Miller's 2012 campaign announcement video to advertise an upcoming chat featuring the party's chairman, an attorney named William Johnson.
There are a lot of characters here who we will definitely see again in future episodes, so I won't dwell on them for too long now.
But let's get a little backstory.
The American Third Position Party was an actual political party registered with the Federal Election Commission.
And it still exists today, kind of.
The group rebranded as the American Freedom Party, and they still have a website, although they terminated their Federal Electoral Committee in 2020.
As we so often see with extremist groups, there is this constant cycle of collapsing, rebranding, and splintering.
And that's how American Third Position was born.
In 2009, a Nazi skinhead group in California found themselves in turmoil.
Some Nazi skinheads calling themselves Freedom 14 tried to organize a political party called the Golden State Party.
But it all fell apart when the Orange County Register published a story revealing that the party's spokesman had been using a pseudonym to hide the fact that he had some violent felony convictions in his past.
It's not totally clear to me why the Nazi skinheads found that to be a problem.
That's kind of their whole thing.
But I guess it just won't do for your political party's spokesman.
Either way, the Golden State Party was dead in the water.
And some of those skinheads weren't ready to give up on the idea of having a political party.
So they got together to choose a new leader and a new name.
And they settled on the American Third Position Party.
And the group would be chaired by a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles named William Johnson.
Johnson has been on my list of weird little guys.
from the beginning.
I never actually managed to pull from my list of episode ideas because I always get distracted by some stray thought from the prior week's research, but I have to imagine we'll get to him eventually.
He's a lawyer and he's in the movement, but he's not really a movement lawyer.
That's not the focus of his practice.
He pitches in occasionally, sure.
His name shows up as the attorney of record on a trademark application for the Council of Conservative Citizens.
And there's a Nazi in Pennsylvania who seems fond of CCing Johnson when he emails county employees to make public records requests, as though he thinks Johnson is his personal attorney, but he's not licensed to practice in Pennsylvania.
But usually when I'm talking about a guy who is both an attorney and a career white nationalist, he's not really keeping those parts of his life separate.
So I think he's a little unique in that respect.
As an attorney, Johnson primarily represents Japanese companies doing business in the United States.
He has a terribly common name, making it a little hard to look him up on Pacer, but It doesn't look like he's taken very many cases to court, at least not in federal court.
But in corporate law, there's a lot of law to be practiced outside the courtroom.
He does have an active case in the Court of International Trade right now, but I couldn't possibly pretend to be interested in the court's opinion about whether his clients' imported goods were properly classified under the tariff schedule.
Apparently, the difference between raw dried seaweed and seaweed that has been prepared for human consumption by drying it is not just in the eye of the beholder.
It is a 6% jump in tariff rate.
Just how dry this seaweed really is isn't interesting.
But his choice of co-counsel is.
The seaweed importer is almost certainly Johnson's client.
This is the kind of client he represents.
But the documents are actually being filed with the court by a movement lawyer who recently represented members of Patriot Front.
Small world, I guess.
But we'll get to Glen Allen's role in this story next week.
Not the seaweed part, the Nazi part.
The website for Johnson's LA-based law firm is almost entirely in Japanese.
a language he appears to conduct most of his business in proficiently.
He majored in Japanese at Brigham Young University and spent some time in Japan as a Mormon missionary.
I don't speak any Japanese, so I can't really be the judge of such things.
But in some of the videos on his website, at least to my ear, he has the sort of stilted cadence of a speaker who isn't terribly confident in his skills.
I am, however, much better equipped to pass judgment on his other career, that of a professional racist.
He's been splitting his time between the two for more than 40 years.
He was admitted to the bar in 1981, and soon after that, he starts writing under the pseudonym James O. Pace.
In 1985, as James O. Pace, he published a book called Amendment to the Constitution, Averting the Decline and Fall of America.
The book lays out his argument for an amendment to the Constitution, this so-called Pace Amendment, and it would repeal the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
He also proposes restricting U.S. citizenship to whites of European descent only.
The second section of the proposed amendment reads, quote, No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay, or other non-European or non-white blood.
You might be asking, why did it take an entire book to explain how that would work?
Well, for one thing, He had to devote quite a few pages to explaining exactly how the government would go about determining who is white.
Are Armenians white?
Are Iranians?
Are Jews?
The answer is no, obviously.
The book is every bit as bad as you're imagining, and it did not need to be 200 pages long.
And after its publication, he spent the latter half of the 1980s running a group called the League of Pace Amendment Advocates.
And he claimed that he was the group's spokesman, and he pretended that he'd met the author and just supported his ideas.
When the LA Times connected the dots that William Daniel Johnson was definitely James O. Pace, he denied it, telling the paper that James Pace was a pseudonym but it wasn't his.
Pace is a lawyer, just like him, but Pace works outside of the country.
He wouldn't say what Pace's real name was or what country he was allegedly living in.
If skipping my girlfriend goes to a different school, you wouldn't know her.
He gave up on the League of Pace Amendment Advocates after someone bombed the group's office in 1989.
It was only a small bomb and it went off in the middle of the night when no one was there.
No one was injured and as far as I can tell it was never solved.
Like I said, William Daniel Johnson is absolutely a weird little guy in his own right, so I won't linger here.
But he was a well-established figure in organized racism by the time those skinheads approached him to chair their rebranded political party in 2009.
In fact, he was fresh off a very public loss in a 2008 campaign for judge in the Superior Court of Los Angeles.
The embarrassing defeat only raised his profile in the white nationalist community though, and it came at a time of renewed interest in the movement in the idea of entering mainstream politics.
His newly formed political party was led by respectable professionals, obscuring its origin in skinhead street fighting gangs.
Johnson was an attorney with a JD from Columbia University.
Tom Sunik, a Croatian-born political scientist, had taught at several universities.
And Kevin McDonald was a professor of psychology at California State University.
This was the era of the suit and tie racist.
the dapper Nazi.
Richard Spencer had just started his Alternativeright.com website.
Matthew Heimbach was still a college student at Towson University.
and he was leading a chapter of the white supremacist group Youth for Western Civilization.
Both men would go on to figure prominently in the 2017 era alt-right and the street violence that accompanied it.
And in the early 2010s, both of these men were frequent collaborators with members of the American Third Position Party.
The party may have been a rebranding of a California skinhead group, but it couldn't have existed.
without the neo-Nazi networking that was happening at Ron Paul campaign events.
The Ron Paul revolution never really took off, but his But his campaign provided fertile recruiting grounds for white nationalists.
In 2007, William Johnson was hosting pricey fundraising dinners for Paul's campaign.
When he ran for judge in 2008, his campaign manager was also the Paul campaign's California statewide coordinator.
Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt professor and member of the Council of Conservative Citizens who would go on to be a member of the party's board, was one of several high-profile racists whose donations to the Paul campaign made headlines when he declined to refuse money from white nationalists.
And it was through Ron Paul campaign events that Merlin Miller first met members of the American Third Position Party.
Don't just take my word for it, though.
Most of the founders, of course, of the American Third Position, which have evolved into the American Freedom Party now, grew out of the Ron Paul movement.
But I think one of the major shortcomings of the Ron Paul platform was he really didn't deal very strongly on immigration.
And it's probably the most destructive thing going on today to America.
And as you suggested, it's altering the national character of our country.
That's a conversation between Merlin Miller and American Third Position Party Director Jamie Kelso back in 2013.
He's saying something a lot of white nationalists were saying back then.
They love Ron Paul.
They love Ron Paul's platform.
But he's just not going far enough.
In its first few years, and I guess now that I'm saying out loud every year since then as well, The party had trouble fielding candidates.
It's a tricky thing to do, even in mainstream politics.
Running for office is hard.
Convincing someone else to run for office is also very hard.
It takes a lot of time, effort, and money.
You have to put yourself out there.
It's exhausting and potentially humiliating.
And the kind of guy who's enthusiastic about running for office is an open white nationalist.
Well, that kind of guy tends to be an absolute fucking weirdo.
who alienates everyone within earshot.
When party member Ryan Murdoch announced his candidacy for state representative in New Hampshire, people were disgusted.
One letter to the editor from a Grafton resident called his candidacy a festering boil.
Party member Harry Bertram made several spectacularly unsuccessful runs for office in West Virginia, including the 2011 special election for governor.
I didn't do a whole lot of digging on Harry Bertram, but I did read the entirety of his 23-year posting history on Stormfront, and I have to say, he doesn't strike me as a strong communicator.
And he appears to be at least a little bit involved with the Klan.
But more importantly, his message just didn't resonate with West Virginians.
It was coarse and overt.
He ran ads that fearmongered about white replacement, but didn't have much else to offer outside of those racist conspiracy theories.
One local news article from the time quoted a West Virginia voter who said illegal immigration just wasn't a top issue for her.
In 2010, West Virginia was 94% white.
The state is to this day dead last when it comes to the percentage of residents who are foreign-born and the percentage of residents who speak a language other than English at home.
About 1.5% and 2.5% respectively.
So even if those voters don't like immigrants in theory, there's a decent chance they've never even seen one.
He was a single-issue candidate, and that just wasn't the issue people cared most about.
The party needed someone who looked normal.
could put on a suit and put together a sentence and pretend to address a real issue.
Preferably someone who wasn'tt publicly associated with another active hate group.
Someone with a clean record and a good education.
I mean, it doesn't matter who they pick.
They're not going to win.
But it isn't necessarily about winning, is it?
It's harder for our enemies to characterize us as complete outsiders and fringe cooks if we're on the ballot in a state election or a federal election.
That was party director Jamie Kelso chatting with Richard Spencer back in 2013.
And here's one of America's leading pseudo intellectual racists, Jared Taylor in a promotional video begging people to run for office as a member of the party.
Running for office is one of the best ways to publicize our ideas and to reach people who may have never heard a sensible dissenting view about race.
It's not about winning elections.
It's about Trojan horsing white nationalist rhetoric into the conversation at every level.
from county school board to president of the United States.
After running Harry Bertram a couple times for state and local office in West Virginia, America American Third Position wanted to break into national politics.
And in the 2012 presidential election, they decided that Merlin Miller is the man for the job.
Merlin Miller Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.
My husband comes back outside and he's shaking.
And he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.
And he said, your dad's been killed.
This is hands tied.
Tide, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgarth.
Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.
I was just completely in shock.
Her dad had been stabbed to death.
It didn't feel real at all.
For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.
There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.
Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
December 29, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.
The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.
Then, at 6:33 pm, everything changed.
There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.
Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal, glass.
The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.
In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay.
Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back.
In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight, that's harder to predict and even harder to stop.
Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.
Someone was posting photos of I was just me naked.
Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like mine own.
I wanted to throw up.
I wanted to scream.
It happened in Levittown, New York.
But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deep fake pornography.
This should be illegal, but what is this?
This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide.
I'm Margie Murphy.
And I'm Olivia Carvell.
This is Levittown, a new book podcast from iHeartPodcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope.
Listen to Livetown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast.
Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From iHeartPodcasts and Rococo Punch, this is The Turning, River Road.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to ten girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
Why did I think that way why did i allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and and thinking to the point that if i died for him that would be the greatest honor but in 2014 the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt for all those years you know he was the predator and i was the prey and then he became the prey Listen to the turning River Road on the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Music by Ben Thede By his own telling, Merlin Miller wasn't very interested in politics for most of his life.
He grew up in a working-class family in Iowa and became the first member of his family to graduate from college.
He graduated from West Point in the class of 1974, and he had some pretty famous classmates.
Astronaut Michael Clifford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, former Deputy Assistant Secretary General of NATO Matthew Clemo, former NSA Director Keith Alexander, and Four Star General Walter Sharp.
And, of course, Former CIA director David Petraeus.
I had to look up the graduating class of 1974 to get most of those names, but not that one.
In almost every speech and interview I could find, spanning a decade, Merlin Miller mentions that he went to school with David Petraeus.
I guess he thinks it makes him sound important.
He knows a very important guy whose name has been on the news a lot, so that must mean something.
And particularly back during the 2012 campaign cycle, David Petraeus was on the news quite a bit.
So saying the name gives him some proximity to power, some proximity to legitimacy.
Sometimes it feels like he wants the listener to assume that the pair have maintained some kind of relationship since graduation, but I don't think he ever outright says that.
In one interview, he says that in 2009 he sent Petraeus, quote, a treatise that connected military, political, and media intrigues, challenging many of the orthodoxies.
Based on the context of the conversation and the fact that the interview was published on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory website, you can probably guess that he sent the general some weird essay about Jewish control of the media.
Based on his use of the word treatise though, I'm pretty sure what he sent David Petraeus was a copy of his unpublished hundred-page manuscript called The American Dream.
It's a document that he only ever refers to as a treatise, and that's the only place I can find him ever using that word.
So I think that's what it was.
And it's got everything you might expect.
Communism is a Jewish conspiracy.
Some parts of the Holocaust probably kind of happened, but maybe it wasn't actually that serious.
The Federal Reserve and the IRS were illegal scams perpetrated on the American people.
911 was a false flag orchestrated by Mossad and the CIA.
Illegal immigration is replacing white Americans, and the Jews are behind that too.
We have to crush the new world order, etc.
You know.
Honestly, I wonder if he was a big Infowars listener in the mid-auth, because this sounds like vintage Alex Jones.
I guess there was this thriving blogosphere back then with all the same talking points.
So he could have gotten it anywhere.
Let's not give Alex Jones too much credit.
I don't think David Petraeus ever wrote back.
After graduating from West Point in 1974, Miller served six years in the Army.
He spent a few years working for Michelin Tire Company, but in 1983, he had the opportunity to pursue his true passion, his childhood dream, filmmaking.
He was accepted into an MFA program at the University of Southern California, and he was one of just 20 students admitted into that year's Peter Stark Producing Program, a specialized graduate degree program within the film school that focused on film and television production.
And here too, he had some very famous classmates.
Stacey Scher produced movies like Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, and Aaron Brockovich.
Neil Moritz would go on to produce movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cruel Intentions, and all of the Fast and Furious movies.
Liz Glotzer is the president of a production company that makes television dramas for CBS.
The program seems to produce a lot of producers.
And Merlin Miller really did try to break into the industry.
While he was at USC, he interned at Paramount.
And after graduation, he had some minor production roles in a couple of schlocky low budget movies in the late 80s and early 90s.
But he had a family to feed.
He and his wife had four daughters by that time, and living in LA is expensive.
You can't support a family of six working as a line producer on B movies.
The family relocated to Springfield, Missouri, and he took a job at Ozark's Technical Community College.
But he didn't give up on his dreams.
He started his own film production company, Ozark Pictures.
And he made a movie.
He made a real movie with a budget of close to a million dollars, all secured through private investors.
His first film, A Place to Grow, premiered at a theater in Springfield, Missouri in March of 1995.
One of the film's big stars, Chris Kristofferson's daughter, Tracy, attended the premiere in Springfield.
But her co-stars Wilford Brimley and a country singer called Boxcar Willie didn't make it.
The movie didn't get wide release.
It wasn't something people were seeing in theaters all over the country.
And almost all of the press about the film was in Missouri newspapers who were writing about it as a local interest story, because the film cast locals in most of the smaller roles.
And in some of those articles, all the way back in 1995, you can start to see the hints of what's coming.
He told a reporter that he left Hollywood for the Ozarks to make movies that, quote, promote the ideals of Americana, end quote.
Traditional family values for Midwestern audiences, you know?
Twenty years later, in an interview with a Holocaust denier, he said pretty much the same thing.
You just can't make movies with good family values out there in Hollywood.
Having graduated high in the class, I thought I might have some opportunities, but the only opportunities for people like me from the Midwest with traditional values was working independent films.
But he's speaking a little more freely this time than he did with that reporter from the newspaper in Springfield, Missouri back in 1995.
Because this time, he's speaking to Dave Geherry, a longtime friend of David Duke, and the proprietor of a small publishing company that prints mostly conspiracy theory books, including several by Jim Fetzer, a man who believes the moon landing, the Holocaust, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and the Unite the Right vehicular attack in Charlottesville were all hoaxes.
None of those things happened.
After Fetzer lost a lawsuit brought by the father of a little boy killed in Sandy Hook, Geheri had to stop selling a book called Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.
So in this conversation, that's who he's talking to.
So Miller can be a little more explicit about what he means.
And I was disillusioned with the quality of films coming out of Hollywood and the lack of any true opportunities with someone that I thought should have been able to get some opportunities, things going.
There were twenty of us who graduated from my year group in USC and five were Jewish and those five went on to make some incredible big motion pictures, not necessarily good motion pictures, but some very high profile motion pictures and do to this very day.
With one other exception, I'm the only other graduate from our class that still considers himself a part of the industry and that's pretty typical of all the year groups at USC and in the industry, so it's a very controlled environment.
In this interview in 2012, he says he's still in the industry, which is weird because I can't imagine what he thinks he means by that.
He only ever made two movies.
His second and final film, a western called Jericho, was released in 2001.
by another production company he founded called Black Knight Productions.
I found this one streaming somewhere, and I did try to watch it.
I like to be thorough.
I really did try, I promise.
I put it on the TV one evening during dinner, but I couldn't finish it.
I mean, it was just not good.
It had some actual stars, surprisingly, but there's just no getting over some hurdles.
Mark Valley, who hadn't yet landed roles on shows like ER, Fringe, Boston Legal, and CSI, was mostly just a soap opera actor in the 90s.
And R. Lee Ermey was in damn near 100 movies.
You might not know his name, but he's the Marine Corps drill sergeant in every movie you've ever seen with an older man playing a Marine Corps drill sergeant or some adjacent type of loud, vaguely military-coded authority figure.
That's Arlie Ermey every time.
I think he just said yes to everything.
But even getting real actors for his movie could not salvage it.
My poor husband, who is eternally supportive of my work and has this seemingly infinite well of patience for my obsessions, looked so painfully bored that I just, I couldn't do it to him.
I mean, he once sat through a made-for-TV movie.
made for TV movie starring a lesser Baldwin brother based on the autobiography of a neo-Nazi, and he didn't even complain when I talked through the entire movie saying things like, well, that's not what really happened, and that character is actually an amalgamation of three different real guys.
So I take it very seriously if he's visibly pained by the terrors I've brought into our home.
So I didn't watch Jericho, but I guess you could.
And just like a place to grow, Jericho failed to get picked up for wider distribution.
But in his efforts to market the film, Merlin Miller met a man who would change his life.
It wasn't long after 9-11 when Merlin Miller had a meeting with a film buyer for Carmike Cinemas.
The buyer passed on the film, but they got to talking about other things.
None of the source material I could find explains exactly how they got on the subject.
I don't know which one of them brought up the Jewish question first, but someone did.
You see, as a much younger man, before he was the one deciding which independent films you could see at a Carmichael Theater, Bob Scarborough served three years in the Navy.
And in 1967, according to his obituary, Scarborough was a cryptologist serving aboard the USS Liberty.
On June 8, 1967, a little over halfway through the Six-Day War, the Liberty was patrolling international waters off the coast of Egypt.
Officially, the United States was not involved in the Six-Day War.
That was a war between Israel and everybody else.
But the American military is everywhere.
So the USS Liberty was about 30 miles off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula when two unidentified jets appeared overhead.
The jets made half a dozen strafing runs over the Liberty, firing on the vessel.
And then torpedo boats arrived, and they too fired on the Liberty.
34 members aboard the U.S. Naval vessel were killed, and 171 more were injured.
I'll get it out of the way right now.
There's no right way to talk about this.
That part, just now, those are the bare facts.
Those are the facts that everyone agrees on.
But the incident in question is the subject of conspiracy theories, mostly ones repeated by virulent anti-Semites.
You'll never catch me out here saying the Holocaust deniers are making some valid points.
That's not what I'm saying.
But while the official investigations conducted by the US and Israeli governments agree on the hard facts, right?
That the jets fired, the boats fired, the people died, but the investigations don't agree on the nature of the situation.
For the bare facts here, I'm using sources like the US Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command, command and documents available from the State Department's Office of the Historian and declassified documents available on the NSA's website.
Not to say that the U.S. government is the arbiter of truth here and that those documents necessarily present the version of the truth that is true.
I'm just trying to convey that I did go out of my way to make sure I wasn't accidentally repeating something from a conspiracy theory website because it can be very hard to tell.
The official explanation from the Israeli government is that it was a mistake.
The pilots claim that the ship wasn't flying a flag and they thought the liberty was an Egyptian vessel.
Once they realized the victims were screaming in English, they apologized to the United States and paid a few million dollars in compensation to the victims' families and a few million more for the damage caused to the ship.
But there are a lot of unanswered questions here.
And the problem is the only people you ever hear asking those questions are absolutely bug-fuck nuts.
because this is a favorite topic of obsession for boomer antisemites.
It's a real shame, too, because there are some very uncomfortable holes in the official narrative.
But the way conspiracy theorists have flooded the conversation on this makes it very hard to trust most sources.
It is absolutely possible and I think necessary to ask questions about unjustified Israeli military aggression without being anti-Semitic.
Unfortunately, the average guy posting online about the USS Liberty is not interested in that distinction.
So I'm not going to talk anymore about what may or may not have really happened aboard the USS Liberty in June of 1967.
Because for the purposes of this story, that doesn't actually matter.
The only thing that matters here is that the event is a madness rune for a particular flavor of conspiracy guy.
And Merlin Miller has said many times that this conversation with Bob Scarborough about the USS Liberty was his political awakening.
It makes sense, in a way, that he was infected by this single conversation.
He'd washed out of Hollywood and his independent film career was one disappointment after another.
He couldn't get funding.
He felt like the MPAA was giving his movies unfair ratings.
He couldn't get theatrical release.
And his classmates whose careers were flourishing?
Come to think of it.
They all had pretty Jewish-sounding last names, didn't they?
It wasn't about talent or merit or that he wasn't working hard enough or that he wasn't making movies people wanted to watch.
No, it couldn't be that.
This is about Jewish control of the media.
That's what's going on here.
And now, with 9-11 fresh in his mind and conspiracy theories sprouting like mushrooms after a rain, here's this life-altering revelation from a man who says he lived through a false flag attack carried out by the people that Merlin Miller is already half convinced have it out for him.
So he started doing his own research.
And he got obsessed.
Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.
My husband comes back outside and he's shaking.
And he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.
And he said, your dad's been killed.
This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Milgarth.
Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.
I was just completely in shock.
Her dad had been stabbed to death.
It didn't feel real at all.
For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.
There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.
Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The End December 29, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.
The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, children gripping their new Christmas toys.
Then, at 6:33 pm, everything changed.
There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.
Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal, glass.
The injured were being loaded into ambulances.
Just a chaotic, chaotic scene.
In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay, terrorism.
Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back.
In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight, that's harder to predict and even harder to stop.
Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2020, A group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.
Someone was posting photos.
Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like mine own.
I wanted to throw up.
I wanted to scream.
It happened in Levittown, New York.
But reporting this series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography.
This should be illegal, but what is this?
This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide.
I'm Margie Murphy.
And I'm Olivia Carvell.
This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeartPododcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope.
Listen to Livetown on Bloomberg's Big Take Podcast.
Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From iHeartPodcasts and Rococo Punch, this is The Turning, River Road.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to ten girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
Why did I think that way?
Why did I allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and thinking to the point that if I died for him that would be the greatest honor?
But in 2014, the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt.
For all those years, you know, he was the predator and I was the prey.
And then he became the prey.
Listen to The Turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Scarborough soon introduced Merlin Miller to a friend of his, a man named Richard S. Thompson.
I couldn't actually find a copy of a book Miller wrote in 2016, and I think there may be more detail in there.
But my guess is Scarborough thought to connect him to Thompson, not just so Miller would have someone else to talk to about the USS Liberty, but because of their shared interest in film.
Richard Thompson had been heavily involved in the production of a 2002 BBC documentary about the USS Liberty.
So maybe as Scarborough is telling Miller, you know, I'm not interested in purchasing the rights to Jericho, but I have this other opportunity for you.
Talk to my buddy Dick Thompson.
He likes financing films.
Thompson and Miller did go on to become very close friends and he was, according to Miller, very interested in making a movie together.
According to that rambling 100-page treatise he wrote in 2009, that one I'm pretty sure he mailed to General David Petraeus, Thompson agreed to finance a movie that would be produced and directed by Merlin Miller.
Again, according to Miller, Thompson announced his intention to fund the film on Friday, June 8, 2007.
That was the 40th anniversary of the incident on the USS Liberty, and a few dozen surviving crewmen were meeting up in Washington, D.C. Now, as far as I can tell, Richard S. Thompson was never aboard the USS Liberty.
He wasn't a crewman at the time of the incident.
He was definitely in the Navy, I know that.
The announcement in the newspaper when he married his wife in 1954 mentions it.
And so does his obituary.
And his obituary does mention the Liberty, but not in the context of his naval career.
No, it says he was a longtime supporter of the survivors of the USS Liberty.
So it's just something he had an interest in.
A lot of the writing online written by people I think may not be fully grounded in reality assert without question that he worked in naval intelligence.
At least one rather fantastical book repeatedly refers to him as a CIA asset.
But none of this seems to be corroborated by any outside source that I could find.
So I don't know exactly what Thompson was doing in the Navy or how he came to know so much about the USS Liberty.
But either way, he was very involved with this veterans group and he was attending the 40th anniversary reunion in DC that weekend.
On Sunday, he left DC and began driving home to Florida.
He made it about halfway home.
Again, I can't find any reporting about the accident that was written by someone I know believes the Holocaust happened, so it's hard to say exactly what happened.
But somewhere in Florence County, South Carolina, Thompson had a fatal single car accident.
Even the conspiracy theorists have to begrudgingly admit that there's no sign of foul play.
There's no actual reason to suspect this was anything but an accident.
He was a 76-year-old man who had an exciting but probably exhausting weekend with his old Navy buddies, and then he got up at the crack of dawn to make a 13-hour drive home.
Halfway through the drive, he lost control of the vehicle and crashed.
But these people have questions.
Did he fall asleep?
Or was it Mossad?
Describing Thompson's death, Merlin Miller wrote, although foul play was not suspected, Dick had told me of prior Israeli Mossad surveillance.
And writing in the conspiracy theory rag American Free Press, Mark Glenn wrote that he and many others were very suspicious about the death.
because they believed Thompson was, quote, about to go public with information that had never before been published.
But again, there's no indication there was anything suspicious about the accident, and this same article by Mark Glen includes this line.
As if he had a premonition that his time was approaching, Thompson recently made known to the Liberty Veterans Association that in the event of his death, he did not want anyone wasting money on flowers for his funeral, but rather that such individuals should send money to the Liberty Veterans Association so that the truth concerning the attacks on the USS Liberty could continue to emerge.
So if he's telling people what they should do if he dies and he's 76 years old, do you think he was secretly assassinated by a foreign government staging a single car accident that had witnesses?
Or do you think maybe his health was failing and he did know his time was coming?
Hard to say which is more likely.
I'm not the betting kind, but if I had to, I'd wager it was a car accident.
Distracted driving, heart attack, asleep at the wheel, something tragic and routine.
But however ordinary his death was, It left Merlin Miller without funding to produce his screenplay.
An action thriller romance called False Flag.
The story of a brave and handsome reporter who uncovers the truth about the USS Liberty and 9-11.
And he has to take matters into his own hands to stop these false flags from causing World War III.
I'm afraid we'll have to pick back up there next week.
I got lost along the way again.
I didn't even get to Merlin Miller's actual presidential campaign.
To be honest, I don't think his heart was really in it.
In an interview shortly after he announced he was running, He accidentally revealed to Richard Spencer that he didn't know what the third position in American Third Position Party even meant.
And just weeks before election day.
He wasn't out there pounding the pavement talking to voters.
He was taking meetings in Tehran, trying to get Iranian funding for his conspiracy theory movie.
I'm not sure if he brought a copy of his screenplay to the 20-minute private meeting he had with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But I do know he gave the Iranian president a copy of his 2001 western, Jericho, on DVD.
I wish Ahmadinejad was still on Twitter.
I would have loved to ask him if he got past the first 20 minutes.
Music 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 Murray Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, 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 Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.
My husband said, your dad's been killed.
This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.
I was just completely in shock.
Liz's father murdered and her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound.
It didn't feel real at all.
Well, more than a decade on, she's still searching for answers.
We're still fighting.
Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The End December 29, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.
The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.
Then, everything changed.
There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.
In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism.
Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
From iHeart Podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is The Turning River Road.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
But in 2014, the youngest escaped.
Listen to The Turning River Road on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go.
In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.
Someone was posting photos.
It was just me naked.
Well, not me, but me with someone else's body part.
This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope, about the rise of deep fake pornography and the battle to stop it.
Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take Podcast.
Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
