After the 2012 election, the American Third Position Party rebranded. Not because their candidate lost, they expected that. But probably because their candidate didn't know what the party's name meant. Sources: https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/federalelections2012.pdf https://politicalresearch.org/2016/12/19/what-third-position https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/neofascism-european-style/ https://www.alternet.org/2008/07/surviving_a_weekend_with_americas_premiere_pro-white_activist_group# https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2016/10/18/former-mpd-chief-drue-lackey-dead-90/92349168/ Winkler, Martin M. Arminius the Liberator: Myth and Ideology. Oxford University Press, 2016. See 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.
Short on time but big on true crime, on a recent episode of the podcast Hunting for Answers, I highlighted the story of 19-year-old Lachey Dungey.
But she never knocked on that door.
She never made it inside.
And that text message would be the last time anyone would ever hear from her.
Listen to Hunting for Answers from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tune in to All the Smoke Podcast, where Matt and Stack sit down with former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Folks find it hard to hate up close.
And when you get to know people and you're sitting in their kitchen tables and they're talking like we're talking, you know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how Borak grew up, and you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race.
All the smoke featuring Michelle Obama.
To hear this podcast and more, open your free iHeartRadio app, search All The Smoke, and listen now.
Call Zone Media.
Call Zone Media.
In March of 2025, a few dozen white nationalists from across the country gathered at a castle in the mountains.
The meeting itself wasn't really a secret.
It had been announced months ahead of time.
But it was a private event, and the location was a closely guarded secret, shared only with those on the invite list.
At a lectern adorned with a golden eagle and flanked by flags bearing fascists and lightning bolts, speeches were made by movement leaders spanning generations, men in their 70s, nearing the end of their decades-long careers as white nationalist organizers, and men in their 20s, looking ahead to the movement's future.
During an afternoon break between speeches, the keynote speaker took off his suit jacket and bolo tie to oversee a shirtless bare knuckle boxing match on the lawn.
The American Freedom Party has changed its logo, its leadership, and even its name over the 15 years since it was first founded as the American Third Position Party.
But they are still who they've always been.
A handful of racists in suits whose inability to properly fill out paperwork keeps getting in the way of their dreams of a white ethnostate.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
I'm Molly Conger.
When we left off last week, we were talking about the strange, winding road that led a white nationalist group called the American Third Position Party to run a failed filmmaker for president in 2012.
By his own account, Merlin Miller had never been all that interested in politics.
That is, until he had his political awakening after 9-11.
He'd been trying unsuccessfully to sell the distribution rights to his second film, a western called Jericho, when he met a man who had served aboard the USS Liberty in 1967.
when the ship was bombed by the Israeli Air Force.
That man introduced Merlin Miller to the wide world of conspiracy theories surrounding the incident and connected him with Richard Thompson, a Navy veteran who'd recently helped finance a documentary about it.
For several years, Thompson and Miller discussed making a movie about the USS Liberty.
Not another documentary that had been done, but an action thriller set in the modern day.
connecting the conspiracy theories that have grown up around that incident with those about 9-11.
The screenplay was written and ready to go.
The movie was going to be called False Flag.
Miller would direct and produce it and Thompson was going to be the money man.
When Richard Thompson died unexpectedly in the summer of 2007, the project stalled out.
Without funding, he couldn't make the movie.
And it looks like he redirected some of that energy into the Ron Paul campaign.
Federal Election Commission records show that Merlin Miller made his first ever federal campaign contribution in November of 2007 when he gave Ron Paul $100.
He even threw his hat into the ring to be a Ron Paul delegate in Tennessee, but it doesn't look like he was chosen.
But he made a lot of new friends through the Paul campaign.
Admittedly, there's a bit of a blank space in my research here.
I couldn't tell you exactly what path he took down the road to political extremism between 2002 and 2007.
That part of the timeline is pretty sparse.
It's entirely possible that his descent into USS Liberty conspiracy theories brought him into contact with the political fringe long before he got involved with the Paul campaign in 2007.
But that's the point in time where he reappears in any record I can find.
By 2008, Merlin Miller was rubbing elbows with some of the big names in American racism.
That summer, he was a speaker at the Council of Conservative Citizens National Conference.
The archived version of that racist group's website shows that at some point, all of that year's speeches were uploaded, but the files haven't survived, and the attendee who uploaded some of them to YouTube must not have thought Merlin Miller's speech was very interesting because it isn't there.
Other speakers at that event included Drew Lackey.
the police officer who was famously photographed fingerprinting Rosa Parks after her arrest in Montgomery in 1955.
And he was also the officer who booked Martin Luther King after his arrest in 1956.
Lackey's speech too seems lost to the sands of time, but according to a write-up on Alternet, he talked about his book called Another View of the Civil Rights Movement, in which he calls Rosa Parks a communist agitator and dismisses the entire civil rights movement as a farce designed to intimidate and demoralize the police in America.
Alabama State Senator Charles Bishop's keynote speech was a rambling racist rant about Muhammad Obama.
And several of the other speakers listedd on the website are men who would go on to serve together on the board of the American Third Position Party.
Paul Fromm, Tom Sunich, and James Edwards.
And a few months after that, Merlin Miller packed a suitcase for another trip.
September 2, 2008.
You remember what you were doing that day, September 2, 2008?
Yes, up in Minneapolis.
Merlin Miller and another man who will come to these microphones, William Daniel Johnson, the chairman of the American Freedom Party, and yours truly, all three of us were in the Target Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
This came as a bit of a surprise to me.
None of the write-ups I could find about the early days of the party led me to believe that Merlin Miller had been involved with the group's actual founding, let alone hanging out with its founders more than a year before the group even existed.
But there it is, in his own words.
In May of 2013, he appeared on an episode of the American Freedom Party's new podcast.
It was a project they'd launched that spring as part of their rebranding after they changed the name from American Third Position.
third position to American Freedom Party.
And the man he's talking to is Jamie Kelso, one of the party's founders.
Kelso is, I know I say this all the time, he's the guy that's going to get his own episodes.
He is an incredibly odd man.
Before he was on the board of the American Third Position Party, he was a member of National Alliance for years.
In the early 2000s, he was David Duke's live-in personal assistant.
He was a moderator on Stormfront for a decade.
And when he was a much younger man, he was a member of Scientology's C-Org.
And in 2008, Jamie Kelso was traveling all over the country attending Ron Paul campaign events because he recognized their value as a recruitment pool for white nationalism.
And I guess he wasn't attending those events alone.
Like I said, I can't find much evidence that still exists online about the nature of Merlin Miller's relationship with the movement during those early years.
But he was close enough to Jamie Kelso and William Daniel Johnson by the fall of 2008 to be traveling with them.
Now Ron Paul did not become the president in 2008, obviously.
But Miller's involvement in the campaign had introduced him to new friends and new possibilities.
He'd failed to gain the support of Tennessee Republicans to become a primary delegate, just like he'd failed to make films in Hollywood.
This system seemed designed to prevent white men with traditional values from succeeding at anything.
And in that spirit, Merlin Miller founded a new film production company in 2009.
He'd produced his first film, A Place to Grow, in 1995 through his company Ozark Pictures.
His second film, Jericho, premiered in 2001 through his company Black Night Producductions.
But his new vision was going to require a new production company, Americana Pictures, a film company dedicated to making movies that promote, quote, traditional American ideals.
He announced the new venture in an essay on The Occidental Observer, a far-right publication edited by Kevin McDonald, another future founding member of the American Third Position Party.
In the essay, Miller asks, where are the good stories?
Where have our heroes gone?
Writing, quote, at one time we could discern right from wrong because stories promoted truth, justice, and liberty.
The world felt good when they ended happily or inspired us to overcome when they did not.
They made us want to be better people and live in a better world.
A world built by our European-American brethren.
But after working in Hollywood, he came to realize that Hollywood was in the business of killing those heroes, of killing that American dream.
and propagandizing for a new world order.
Hollywood doesn't represent traditional Americans.
Instead, it, quote, seeks to destroy our European-American heritage and our Christian-based traditional values, and replace them with values that debace these traditional values and elevate minorities as paragons of virtue and wisdom.
He complains that despite graduating from a prestigious film school program, the industry had no place for people like him.
People with traditional values who refuse to denigrate Christianity and participate in the Jewish-controlled media.
Americana Pictures could be an alternative to Hollywood, making pro-white movies for pro-white audiences, developing their own talent by running screenwriting workshops.
When Americana Pictures launched in 2009, Miller had two projects in mind.
That unfunded film about the USS Liberty that he'd been working on for years, and one that he tentatively titled The Liberator.
The Liberator was a retelling of the story of Arminius, the Germanic chieftain who commanded a coalition of forces against the Romans at the Battle of Tudorburg Forest in 9 AD.
As part of an effort to drum up financial support for the films, Miller published a piece in the Barnes Review later that same year.
I know I'm always telling you about this seemingly infinite number of conspiracy theory blogs and Nazi newsletters and racist magazines, and they all probably run together.
But the Barnes Review has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as, quote, one of the most virulent anti-Semitic organizations around.
And most issues feature several articles devoted to Holocaust denial.
I mean, you'd think you'd run out of ways to talk about it, but they haven't.
This particular issue included the text of a speech made by Hitler in 1941, two articles about Hitler, an interview with the founder of a Greek fascist party, and an essay by Ingrid Zundel, wife of famous Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.
Miller's piece was about the historical figure of Arminius, and there was just a little box of text on the side of one page announcing that he would be making a film to tell this incredible story.
Okay, I'll admit, I don't ever think about the Roman Empire.
That's just never on my mind.
I don't know the story of Arminius.
I don't have the tiniest bit of interest in knowing more about how Publius Quintilius Verus committed suicide out of shame at having lost three Roman legions at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest.
I couldn't tell you if Merlin Miller's retelling of those events is historically accurate.
Maybe he's a Roman history buff, I don't know.
But I do think it's worth considering that his interest in the story of Arminius might be less about a love of 2,000-year-old Roman history and more about an interest in some slightly more recent history.
Arminius has long been a symbol of German national identity and German nationalism.
The American Pronunciation Guide Presents "How to Pronounce The World"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 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 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Join me every weekday as I share bite-size stories of missing and murdered black women and girls in America.
There are several ways we can all do better at protecting black women.
My contribution is shining a light on our missing sisters and amplifying their disregarded stories.
Stories like Tamika Anderson.
As she drove toward Galvez, she was in contact with several people, talking on the phone as she made her way to what should have been a routine transaction.
But Tamika never bought the car and she never returned home that day.
One podcast, one mission, save our girls.
Join the search as we explore the chilling cases of missing and murdered black women and girls.
Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network., iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out Behind the Flow, a podcast documentary series following the launch of San Diego Football Club.
We go behind the scenes and explore the stories of those involved.
San Diego coming to MLS is going to be a game changer because this region has been hungry for a men's professional soccer team.
We need veteran players and we need young players.
Like you're building a team from scratch, and so the succession plan of long term success needs to be defined.
We need to embrace this community.
When I was 13, my uncle took me to a qualifier and we watched Paraguay against Chile pouring rain just watching the fans jumping up and down I think that was definitely a watershed moment for me not only was that going to be my game but it was going to be my life listen to San Diego FC behind the flow now on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts For
my heart podcasts 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 predator.
Listen to The Turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Two plays written in the 19th century dramatizing the events of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, confusingly both called Die Hermannschlacht, were so wildly popular in Germany in the 1930s and 40s that it was shameful and scandalous to put them on stage for decades after the war.
In January of 1933, just weeks before Hitler was appointed chancellor, a party official gave him a gift, an illustrated copy of the Hermannschlacht.
Hitler not only loved the gift, but he responded, That's the idea, a second battle of Tudorburg Forest.
That same week, Hitler gave a speech comparing himself to Arminius.
And when the text of that speech was published in a Nazi party newspaper, it was accompanied by a picture of a statue of Arminius surrounded by swastikas.
Nazi party election posters in 1933 feature this imagery prominently, along with slogans like Machtfreig das Hermannsland, Free Hermann's country.
Hermann is the German variation of Arminius.
I picked up a copy of Arminius the Liberator, Myth and Ideology, a book by Martin Winkler, a classics professor at George Mason University, to get a better idea of where Arminius lives in the nationalist imagination.
It's 400 pages long, I didn't have time to do more than skim it, admittedly.
but it seems pretty clear.
The popularity of this story was at an all-time high when it was repurposed in Nazi propaganda in 1930s Germany.
I found what I needed in the book, but as I was flipping to the back to see if the last chapter was a convenient summary, which is often the case in academic texts, I found something else entirely.
The final chapter of Winkler's book is not a summary.
It's called Arminius and White Supremacy.
And it's about this.
It's about this art.
this article by Merlin Miller.
There's a picture of the front cover of this 2009 issue of the Barnes Review.
Winkler writes of Miller's article, quote, Miller explicitly but unconvincingly rejects propagandizing by means of falsehood.
But he also implies that Miller himself doesn't seem to realize that he's building his own story.
on a foundation of propagandized falsehoods.
In comparing Miller's use of the story to that Nazi propaganda, Winkler writes, quote, the similarities are astonishing, or rather, predictable.
The only difference is that Nazis saw Jews as the root of all their evils, while Miller is obsessed with non-white and racially mixed globalism.
To the Nazis, as to Miller, Arminius had laid the foundation of a superior West.
Later generations, especially contemporary ones, have lost this heritage and become victims of decadence and domination by others.
That spring 2009 issue of the Barnes Review is dedicated almost entirely to Arminius.
It's not just Merlin Miller's article.
Immediately following Miller's piece is the one by Ingrid Zundel.
In 2009, her husband Ernst Sundl was still in a German prison.
He'd been convicted of incitement of racial hatred.
And she writes that during his imprisonment, she felt moved to rekindle the spiritual flame by reviving the story of Arminius.
And her company, Soaring Eagle Studios, published a book about Arminius that had come out that year.
And it wasn't just a book project.
I didn't find an actual copy of this book, but I found one for sale on eBay and I saw a picture of the cover.
And the cover bears a picture of that Arminius statue, the same one featured in Nazi propaganda posters in 1933.
But across Arminius' chest, there's text that reads, soon to be a major motion picture.
Ingrid Zundel wrote in that Barnes Review article that she'd been having intense meetings with Merlin Miller, and they were collaborating on the film adaptation of the book.
In December 2009, he even scouted locations.
The pair hoped to film in Hermann, Missouri, a small town settled by German immigrants and named after Arminius.
Locals in Hermann were horrified to learn that the independent filmmaker wandering around town was a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
And the local newspaper printed a quote from Miller about his opposition to interracial marriage.
They didn't really need to worry though.
The movie never got made.
Americana Pictures never made any movies at all.
Both of the projects he'd hoped to produce, False Flag and The Liberator, were someone else's idea.
They were someone else's obsession.
He wasn't a subject matter expert on the USS Liberty.
He didn't have any meaningful connection to Arminius as a symbol of German nationalism, but he presented himself in these circles as someone who was going to break this system and make propaganda films for the white supremacist movement.
And I think he really wanted to.
He wanted to make movies.
It had been his dream since childhood.
It just never came together.
But what I've been trying to get to all this time was his run for president.
On January 3, 2012, he posted a candidate statement on merlinmiller2012.com.
It's nothing fighting back against the New World Order and the global elites.
He's very concerned about the ongoing demographic assault against traditional America, which is just a few extra words for white genocide.
He's outraged that patriots are being silenced by political correctness, etc.
At the bottom of the statement, he links to the party's website, but only after dropping a link to the site for Americana Pictures.
A week later, the party's chairman, William Daniel Johnson, issued the party's official press release.
His language is more explicit, writing, quote, The American Third Position Party believes the time has come for a strong political party that explicitly advocates for the interests of white Americans.
And posts started popping up on Stormfront, but it wasn't really a hot topic.
Most of the people posting enthusiastically about his candidacy on those Stormfront threads are people I can identify as party members.
Like a thread from Harry Bertram, the party's frequent candidate in West Virginia, offering to pay Stormfront members a dollar per name if they'll go out and collect signatures for the campaign.
In February of 2012, a month into the campaign's existence online, the party filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission.
Or at least they tried to.
They filed a statement of organization for a committee called Merlin Miller for President 2012.
But they failed to fill out the part of the form where you say who the candidate is.
And on the page where you check a box to indicate whether the committee is a candidate committee or a party committee, they checked both.
The FEC responded with a request for additional information and they tried again.
It wasn't until April that they filed forms to register the party itself with the FEC, and they didn't actually file a statement of candidacy for Miller until July.
It's a bit of a mess.
Almost everything they've ever filed is quickly followed by a reply from the FEC that they've done it wrong.
And they only ever raised $8,700.
As the party is fumbling with the paperwork behind the scenes, Merlin Miller is out there as the face of the party.
The American Third Position Party is running for president.
In every campaign interview I listen to, he talks about himself a lot.
That's normal for a candidate, right?
I mean, who is this guy?
Why should I vote for him?
But someone should have sat him down and broken the news that making two independent films over a decade ago and being really mad about the Federal Reserve aren't enough.
And it's just confusing that you keep rambling on about how you knew David Petraeus in college.
But he does it every time.
Most of these interviews are with friendly outlets, white nationalist fringe podcasts and conspiracy theorists who make Alex Jones look like a level-headed and professional broadcaster.
So he can regurgitate the talking points from the website without really getting cornered for the most part.
No one's asking him hard questions.
But in one interview in February, someone does ask a question that Heid actually spent hours searching for an answer to on the party's website.
Why third position?
Tell us a little bit about the third position.
You know, I think some people might be a little confused by that term.
I know when I hear third position, I almost think third way or takes me back to the 1930s or 20s or something, but I don't know, I mean, why did you choose that name and what are you trying to evoke by calling yourself a third position?
That's Richard Spencer.
By 2012, he was already the director of the National Policy Institute and he was the editor of his alternativeright dot com website, having coined the term alt-right a few years earlier.
at least by his account.
And for all the evil that man has visited upon this world, and my hometown in particular, he's not stup the brilliant philosopher he believes himself to be, don't get me wrong.
But he's read some books.
He is at least conversant in the political theory he's working with.
This is a question with an actual answer.
And Merlin Miller didn't know that.
You know, actually, the founding members of Bill Johnson, William Johnson, a LA attorney, is the chairman of the American Third Position Party.
And I believe it was Bill that came up with the name American Third Position.
And a year and a half, two years ago, I actually recommended he use the Americana Party because I didn't actually understand his reasoning for the American third at that time.
I've since then grown not only accustomed to it, but I do like it because I see the Republican and the Democratic parties as really being two heads of the same monster and we really don't have a voice, a party that represents the interests of the American people anymore.
Oh dear.
No, no, that wasn't the answer Richard Spencer was looking for.
It wasn't the answer I was looking for.
Third position isn't just some generic term.
It doesn't mean the party is offering itself up just generally as some kind of third option, he seems to think that third position just means not Republican, not Democrat, but a secret third thing.
I guess, come to think of it, you know, in the spirit of the secret third thing meme, kinda does.
The secret third thing here is fascism.
Here's another member of the party offering his definition.
Third positionism is not centrism.
Third positionists understand the false dialectic that liberal capitalist regimes establish to split the electorate and maintain their oligarchic rule through fiscal power.
This capitalist dialectic separates nationalism from socialism, ensuring the two positions are never united under one political party.
Now I think he probably thinks he sounds very clever here, but I'm not sure he actually comprehends the words he's using, but it is closer.er.
That's Nathan DeMeego, speaking at the party's national convention earlier this year.
And if you're familiar with Nathan DeMeego's name, you may remember him as the founder of Identity Europa, the neo-Nazi organization that started popping up on college campuses and was marching here in Charlottesville in their white polo shirts in 2017.
But he actually has a very long history with the American Third Position Party.
But that's something we'll get to another day.
The problem that Nathan DeMeego and Merlin Miller and others in the party are running into when they try to define third positionism is that most people aren't using it sincerely.
I mean maybe they don't actually know what it means at all like Merlin Miller or they're just using it as a branding strategy because it sounds more intellectual and more rooted in history and tradition and less crude than saying I'm an ultranationalist neo-fascist.
And you'll also see a lot of disingenuous descriptions of the third position as being a sort of ideological melding of both left-wing and right-wing ideas.
It's not a left or right-wing ideology, it combines a bit of both.
Like Merlin Miller was saying, it's not aligned with either of the two traditional polls.
It's not Democrat or Republican.
It's neither left nor right.
But that's a lie.
It is.
I'm sorry.
It is.
And I think most people who say that know it.
I'm no political theorist, but advocating for policies that benefit the working class?
But only the white working class because everyone else is dead, deported, disenfranchised, or enslaved, that's not a left-wing policy idea.
The anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism of a thirdird-positionist isn't inherently left-wing.
It's in service of nationalism.
The socialism in national socialism wasn't sincere and it wasn't for everyone.
When these people say that they aren't left or right, they mean they're so far right you can't see them on the spectrum anymore.
They're fascists.
*music*
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 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Join me every weekday as I share bite-size stories of missing and murdered black women and girls in America.
There are several ways we can all do better at protecting black women.
My contribution is shining a light on our missing sisters and amplifying their disregarded stories.
Stories like Tamika Anderson.
As she drove toward Galvez, she was in contact with the several people, talking on the phone as she made her way to what should have been a routine transaction.
But Tamika never bought the car.
And she never returned home that day.
One Podcast, One Mission, Save Our Girls.
Join the search as we explore the chilling cases of missing and murdered black women and girls.
Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Check out Behind the Flow, a podcast documentary series following the launch of San Diego Football Club.
We go behind the scenes and explore the stories of those involved.
San Diego coming to MLS is going to be a game changer because this region has been hungry for a men's professional soccer team.
We need veteran players and we need young players.
Like you're building a team from scratch, and so the succession plan of long term success needs to be defined.
We need to embrace this community.
When I was thirteen, my uncle took me to a qualifier and we watched Paraguay against Chile, pouring rain, just watching the fans.
jumping up and down.
I think that was definitely a watershed moment for me.
Not only was that going to be my game, but it was going to be my life.
Listen to San Diego FC Behind the Flow now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
For iHeart Podcasts 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.
American fascists like Tom Metzger in the 80s and Matthew Heimbach in the 2010s both pushed ideas that you could describe as third positionist.
Though I believe Heimbach specifically called himself a strasserist, which I guess is technically
It's sometimes described as a precursor to third-positionism, but they're used so interchangeably by guys who are trying to bring an air of intellectualism to their ethno-state manifestos that honestly I don't think it matters don't email me about it at the 1987 Aryan World Congress Tom Metzger the leader of white Aryan resistance was talking about third positionism when he said this quote war is dedicated to the white working people the farmers the white poor this
is a working class movement our problem is with monopoly capitalism The Jews first went with capitalism and then created their Marxist game.
You go for the throat of the capitalist.
You must go for the throat of the corporates.
You take the game away from the left.
It's our game.
We're not going to fight your whore wars anymore.
We've got one war and that's right here.
the same war the SA fought in Germany, right here, in the streets of America.
There's plenty to be written on the actual historical origin of the term in post-war Europe.
There are third-positionist, fascist, nationalist groups in Italy, the UK, Germany, and France, and it's a little bit different everywhere you go.
For the most part, it's branding.
I think if you had to trace an ideological lineage, The American Third Position is most closely connected to the British fascist group, International Third Position.
That group was founded by Nick Griffin after he split with National Front.
front, though he eventually left Third Position too and joined the British National Party.
But in the early days of the American Third Position Party, Nick Griffin was on their conference calls.
When Merlin Miller was asked about the party's name again in an interview with a Russian tabloid a week before the election, he said they were thinking of changing it as soon as the election was over.
And that did end up happening.
They rebranded it as the American Freedom Party just a few months later.
All that to say, Merlin Miller is hardly some innocent rube who got tricked into joining a Nazi party.
He knew what he was doing.
He hung around with these people for years before he put his name on that paperwork.
He's willing to say that he's a nationalist, and he openly advocates for all of the race-based nationalist policies that would make someone a white nationalist.
But he said that he doesn't care for the label because it has too much baggage.
I'm not saying he doesn't know what he's advocating for.
He does.
But I do think that he did not know that third position was an actual political ideology and not just a fun name.
I mean, he wanted to call the party the Americana Party, the same name he gave his pro-white film company.
And I think that tells us something too, that one little comment.
He thought the party should have the same name as his film company.
He links to his film company website on his official campaign materials.
He mentions that he's looking for funding for his movie False Flag in every interview.
In September of 2012, when he was in the home stretch of his presidential campaign, he spent a week in Tehran trying to pitch the movie to Iranian investors.
In a segment on Iranian TV that week, he spent more time talking about the movie than the party.
He wanted to sell the movie.
This was a convenient press junket.
That's the vibe I get anyway.
I don't know.
Unsurprisingly, he did not win.
He only made it onto the ballot as the American Third Position Party candidate in Colorado and New Jersey.
but he appeared on ballots in Tennessee as an independent candidate.
He also got a handful of right-in votes in Maryland and New York.
All told, Merlin Miller was the preferred presidential candidate of 2,701 people.
That's 0.0% of the vote.
The FEC only calculates it to 1 decimal place.
A month after the election, Merlin Miller was invited to speak to a student group at a university campus in Maryland.
Matthew Heinbach was a senior at Towson University, and he'd recently formed a white student union.
It wasn't his first foray into white nationalism, and I wish it had been his last.
He was already a member of the American Third Position Party.
party and he would go on to form and lead the traditionalist worker party perhaps following in this group's footsteps by actually registering his nazi group with the federal election commission you can look at committee filings on the fec's website to show that they expensed to the party the helmets that they wore to the unite the right rally in charlottesville but again a story for another day But after all this,
Merlin Miller sort of drifted away from this now rebranded American Freedom Party.
He appeared on an episode of the party's official podcast in May of 2013, when the party held a conference in July, I don't think he was there.
His absence wasn't specifically noted, but I found video of quite a few of the speeches.
And not only was he not one of them, but I was kind of surprised that the speeches didn't really talk about the campaign.
Even a failed campaign is something to talk about.
You know, a good leader would praise members of the organization for their hard work in a tough situation, talk about lessons learned and what they'll do differently next time, appreciate the sacrifice made by your candidate, something, I don't know.
It struck me as odd, but maybe I'm reading too much into it.
By 2014, Merlin Miller had officially parted ways with the American Freedom Party.
He formed his own party, calling it the American Eagle Party.
There's no public animosity here.
In a few speeches during this time period, Miller mentions in passing that he left his old party, which he doesn't usually name, because their focus was too narrow.
In one video, American Freedom Party chairman William Johnson says pretty plainly that his party speaks explicitly.
and Miller wanted to be more implicit about the same ideas.
So it's not an ideological shift.
He's just using a different communication style.
But the American Eagle Party was not long for this world.
It never ran a candidate, and the only money it ever raised came in the form of a couple of donations from friends.
An overwhelming majority of the funds raised by the group in its less than two years of existence was from one man, an attorney in Baltimore named Glenn Keith Allen.
In the summer of 2016, as he's involved in Miller's American Eagle Party and making donations, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote an article about Glen Allen.
He'd been in the movement for years, but he'd never been publicly identified before.
The SPLC had obtained internal accounting records from the neo-Nazi organization National Alliance, and those documents included receipts showing that Glen Allen had been a dues-paying member for years.
At the time they published the article, Allen was working as an attorney for the Baltimore Police Department, a job he quickly lost.
And this is actually where I first encountered Merlin Miller.
It wasn't in the context of the American Third Position Party or the American Freedom Party or the American Eagle Party.
I saw Merlin Miller's name for the first time years ago while I was putting together notes about Glenn Allen.
Merlin Miller is on the board of directors at a nonprofit Allen founded in 2018 with the stated purpose of providing legal assistance to victims of the thought police.
His words, not mine.
As an attorney, Glenn Allen has bravely defended the free speech rights of clients like Warren Baylow, the Nazi who tried to sue the city of Charlottesville for failing to roll out the red carpet for his Nazi rally, members of Patriot Front who were sued for defacing a mural of black tennis legend Arthur Ashe, members of the Goyem Defense League, and he wrote amicus briefs for members of the Rise Above movement.
His foundation has also been used to solicit donations for legal defense in cases they didn't officially take on.
like the criminal prosecution of Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau here in Albemarle County, Virginia last year.
Allen is currently representing Nathan DeMeego in his bankruptcy court battle to discharge the debt from a civil court judgment, a lawsuit filed against him as an organizer of the deadly Unite the Right rally.
And I actually mentioned Glenn Allen briefly last week.
He's co-counsel on William Daniel Johnson's dried seaweed tariff case.
I am on the edge of my seat waiting for a ruling on that one.
Merlin Miller is, to this day, on the board of directors at Allen's Foundation, where his bio describes him as a filmmaker.
He never did make any more movies, but according to his personal website, he still hopes to make False Flag a reality someday.
Merlin Miller ran for president on the ticket of a Nazi party in 2012.
But his heart was never really in it, I don't think.
I think he just wanted to get on TV and talk about how the Jewish-controlled media wouldn't let him make his movies.
The American Freedom Party, though, they moved on too.
When I started researching these episodes, All the articles about the group were old.
It looked like they were more or less defunct.
But I just wasn't looking in the right places.
Admittedly, I wasted a lot of time this week reading about Arminius, so I didn't get as far into the story as I'd intended.
But what I actually spent most of this week doing was listening to interviews with the new generation of the party's leadership.
In March of this year, the American Freedom Party recommitted.
They gathered at the castle in West Virginia owned by white nationalist publisher Peter Brimla.
and they're talking about making a real comeback.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Art Radio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Licherman 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 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 gonna make you one of my brutal guys.
The End 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 for answers.
We're still fighting.
Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Short on time, but big on true crime, on a recent episode of the podcast, Hunting for Answers, I highlighted the story of 19-year-old Lachey Dungey.
But she never knocked on that door.
She never made it inside.
And that text message.
would be the last time anyone would ever hear from her.
Listen to Hunting for Answers from the Black Effect Podcast Network 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 making, well, not me, but me with someone else's body part.
This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeartPodcasts, 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.
Tune in to All the Smoke Podcast, where Matt and Stack sit down with former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Folks find it hard to hate up close.
And when you get to know people and you're sitting in their kitchen tables and they're talking like we're talking, you know, you hear our story, how we grew up, how Barack grew up, and you get a chance for people to unpack and get beyond race.
All the smoke featuring Michelle Obama.
To hear this podcast and more, open your free iHeartRadio app, search all the smoke, and listen now.
