Molly answers your weird little questions and shares her personal conspiracy theory about who tried and failed to assassinate a nazi in 1967. Sources: Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, 'Mass Communication and Parasocial Interaction:Observations on Intimacy at a Distance', Psychiatry 19: 215-29, 1956https://www.participations.org/03-01-04-horton.pdf Nadora, Mikhaela, "Parasocial Relationships with Podcast Hosts" (2019). University Honors Theses. Paper 771.https://doi.org/10.15760/honors.789See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium.
Women began to go missing.
It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them.
The murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence.
Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle all the way.
Yo, yo, yo, yo.
Can we get Thanksgiving first among you?
What's up, y'all?
It's Kadim.
And Deval, the host of the Ellis EverAfter podcast.
This holiday season.
Tune out the noise and tune into Ellis EverAfter.
On Ellis EverAfter, we get real with our crew about family, love, and marriage.
And everything else in between.
Listen to Ellis EverAfter on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.
Follow Ellis EverAfter and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.
Thanksgiving isn't just about food.
It's a day for us to show up for one another.
It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other.
I'm Ellie Acani, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope.
I've always wanted us to have therapy, so this is such a beautiful opportunity.
Listen to season two of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello and welcome to the December 2025 Q&A episode of Weird Little Guys.
I was always planning to do a Q ⁇ A episode this month.
I think most of the shows in the CoolZone Media family do one of these around the end of the year.
But this one is coming a little early.
You probably noticed that there was an unexpected rerun a few weeks ago, and that's because I was very sick.
I had some sort of terrible virus and it knocked me out for like two weeks.
The worst part was the laryngitis.
I was on total vocal rest for more than a week, mostly because I couldn't have made a sound even if I wanted to.
It was torture.
Not just because that's literally my livelihood, but I love talking.
I mean, I have to talk for work.
You can't make a podcast without talking, but I just love talking recreationally.
I never stop talking.
So it was a nightmare.
Anyway, I lost two weeks of my life to the blanket fort on the couch, and then there's the general messiness of the holiday season.
So I'm all mixed up in backwards, but trying to get back on track.
We will hit the ground running in the new year with something fun and exciting.
But this month is just going to be a hodgepodge of different sorts of episodes.
The episode I have planned for next week is a sort of weird little guy roundup, just catching up with recent developments in the lives of some of the weird little guys I've been checking in on from time to time for years.
I originally had this episode and that episode switched on my calendar, but I think waiting one more week might be enough time to get some more updates in some of those stories.
So, for now, let's get to your questions.
I put out a call a few weeks ago and I've sorted the questions you all sent in into a few broad categories.
Questions about the process of making the show, questions about particular topics you'd like to see covered, and questions about me.
I won't be able to answer all of them specifically, but I am going to try to get to at least one of every flavor of questions that you guys had.
And honestly, most of what you guys asked is about me.
There were relatively few questions about particular weird little guys or the actual content of the show.
The overwhelming majority of the questions were about the nitty-gritty details of how I make the show, about my life and my process, and what I'm doing when I'm not writing the words you hear me saying softly into your headphones every week.
I think part of that is just a built-in selection bias, right?
The kind of listener who's going to bother to send in a question to a podcast isn't necessarily representative of the overall audience.
And those listeners are probably more likely to be invested in knowing what goes on behind the scenes.
But as I was sifting through those questions, I did spend some time ruminating on the nature of the parasocial relationship.
That one-sided relationship formed in the mind of someone who consumes a piece of mass media.
You know, that feeling of friendship and emotional intimacy you feel for someone you've never actually met.
It's not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm not calling any of you out.
You're okay.
It's perfectly normal to feel some level of connection to the people that you see or hear on a regular basis.
I think the term has a pretty nasty connotation because usually by the time you're talking about someone's parasocial relationship, it has gotten weird.
Like John Hinkley Jr. shooting Ronald Reagan because he was in love with Jodi Foster levels of weird, you know?
But I don't think there's anyone with access to the internet who doesn't have some low-level emotional connection to someone they've never met.
If you've ever been sad because a dog you follow on Instagram died, buddy, I got news for you.
You were in a parasocial relationship with a dog.
So as long as you're not neglecting your real-life relationships in favor of spending time online obsessing over some stranger whose videos you like to watch or letting that online stranger impact the way you live your life and you're not slipping into a delusion that they love you back, you're probably fine.
The term was coined in the 1950s by a pair of sociologists who were exploring the ways audiences form these relationships with TV and radio personalities.
And in the decades since, the ubiquity of mass media and the rise of online influencers, many of whom are intentionally cultivating that sense of intimacy with the audience, it's only intensified the kinds of parasocial connections people are experiencing.
And with a podcast, it really is kind of like having a little friend in your ear, right?
We're walking around together and I'm telling you a story.
It's just someone chatting away with you while you're doing your dishes or commuting to work.
I've been making my living writing for an online audience for almost a decade now.
So it's an interesting phenomenon that very much plays a role in my life.
So I think it's fascinating.
But that's not what we're here to talk about today.
You know, I can't resist reading a couple of journal articles for no reason, though.
So I'll put a link in the show notes to that original 1956 article that invented the term, as well as a 2019 university thesis about parasociality, specifically in podcasting, that I thought was interesting.
So those will be there if you want to read more about it.
But as far as what we're talking about here, I don't mind if you think of me as the friend in your ear for an hour a week.
It's kind of nice.
But like I say at the end of every episode, just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys, right?
And for the listener who asked if that sign-off is a direct response to something someone already did, no, it's just a precaution.
I've been online long enough to have been on the weird end of a parasocial bond.
But the listeners of this show have been pretty normal little guys so far.
And I appreciate that about you all.
All that to say, I did notice that trend in the questions, but I'm happy to answer your healthy, boundary-respecting questions about the little voice in your ear.
Just don't get any weird ideas, okay?
All right, rapid fire.
Let's knock out some of those questions about me.
My dachshunds, Buck and Otto, are doing great.
They turned nine in July and they're still going strong.
Otto actually just recently celebrated his fourth anniversary as the dog who conquered death.
Back in 2021, he suffered a ruptured disc in his spine, which is an unfortunate problem many dachshunds have.
And he was diagnosed with stage four intravertebral disc disease.
There was no precipitating injury.
His brother doesn't have this problem.
It's just bad luck.
And back when it happened, we weren't sure he would survive his emergency surgery.
And when he did, they told us he would never walk again.
But after a few weeks of lying on a blanket wearing a diaper, he got bored of being paralyzed and he just stood up.
So we celebrated the anniversary this year by taking him to the beach so he could run a million miles an hour in the sand.
He's doing great.
Can you see a picture of my office?
Absolutely not.
No, no.
But only because it's disgusting.
I dumped every piece of clothing I own onto the floor about two years ago because I was about to start sorting through it so I could get rid of the stuff I don't wear anymore.
But I never got to the second step.
So my office has had a foot deep pile of laundry that covers half the room and I've just been stepping over it for two entire years.
I am just days away from hanging those curtains I bought a year ago because I thought that would be good for sound dampening or whatever.
But at this point, I think the laundry pile is actually an integral part of the acoustic environment of the show.
I do have a desk, but I do not sit at it because it is covered in old mail.
I write and record the entire show in an IKEA chair I found next to someone's trash can.
And one of the bulbs in the overhead light has been burnt out since spring, I think.
I just close the door to my podcasting cave when people come over.
No one is allowed to see it.
I think this question might have something to do with the fact that Ed Zittron, the host of Better Offline, has posted pictures of the like incredible professional grade podcasting studio he built inside of his home.
I don't have that.
I don't have what Ed has.
That's phenomenal for him.
That's so weird.
I love that for him.
I have an Ikea chair that I found on the curb.
What is my go-to snack and drink when I'm working on the show?
Hmm.
Another disappointing answer, I fear.
The windowsill next to my trash chair has at least four cans of seltzer on it at all times.
The cans are at varying levels of emptiness and flatness.
Right now there are four cans.
None of them are the same brand somehow.
And one of them has definitely been open since early November.
I am going to finish it.
I'm not responsible for the food situation, thank God.
My husband usually tiptoes in to deliver these beautiful little snack plates with fruit and cheese, and he's done pretty much all of the cooking around here ever since the show launched and I became a round-the-clock computer gremlin in my podcasting cave.
And that brings us to my husband.
Several of you asked about him.
He's great.
If you're a longtime listener, you know that I took some time off in May to get married and go on a honeymoon.
It was phenomenal.
We went to Puerto Rico and I only got a little sunburned this time.
I was careful because last year when we went to visit his family down there, I found out that some white people can unlock a special secret level of sunburn that makes you very physically ill.
So honestly, shout out to the Caribbean for developing a natural defense against the gringo.
I have no choice but to respect that.
For the most part, when you hear a voice on the show that isn't mine, it's actual archival audio.
I go to a lot of trouble to make that true.
So it's usually a real recording of the weird little guy we're talking about.
When there is no audio of the quote that I want read in a voice that isn't mine, though, it's almost always either my husband or the show's editor, Rory.
There was an episode last year, early this year, early 2025, that had some quotes from the president, and Rory did a phenomenal Trump impression that made some of you very mad.
But what you may not have realized is that when my husband is doing a voice, it's also a carefully studied impression.
Right?
Like you recognize the Trump impression, but when he does some obscure white supremacist no one's ever heard of, you don't realize that he's actually doing an amazing impression.
He's weirdly good at them.
And he is very excited for the day that he gets to show off his upsettingly accurate impressions of William Luther Pierce and Jared Taylor.
Just please don't ask him to do his Alex Jones.
He's really good at it and I hate it.
Okay, someone asked, what is my favorite dinosaur?
I don't have one.
But I wanted to have a cool answer to this question.
So, I texted my brother to ask what a cool dinosaur would be to say is my favorite because he knows a lot about dinosaurs.
And he gave me some good answers, you know, some specific vibes that I could evoke with different choices, very well thought out.
But I realized it would be dishonest to claim that dino knowledge as my own.
So I am going to cheat and say my favorite dinosaur is that bird that bit Jayar Bolsonaro a few years ago.
Birds are dinosaurs, and that bird in particular, the one that bit Bolsonaro really hard, is my favorite.
I think it was a Rhea.
It's like a small emu.
It's not an emu, it's like a small guy that looks like an emu.
I think it was a rhea.
Anyway, he's my favorite.
Quite a few of you submitted questions related to my physical safety and my mental well-being, which is really sweet of you.
I'm fine.
I mean, to the extent that any of us are fine, right?
I live in the United States.
I could die in a mass shooting at the grocery store tomorrow.
As far as the possibility of physical violence goes, yeah, I guess I've probably got a few more guys actively plotting my death specifically than the average person might.
But they've mostly been keeping it to themselves lately, and I really appreciate that.
There was an incident earlier this year where a weird little guy was trying to like big dog me in a courtroom.
He sort of sidled up to me and said something he probably thought about for an hour on the car ride there and that he hoped would be really startling and intimidating to me.
But at this point in my life, there's nothing scary to me about a Nazi in poorly fitted dress pants.
I'm not going to pretend I'm bulletproof.
I'm not so naive that I think no harm can come to me.
I know what these guys are capable of: the kinds of things they want to do, the kinds of things they talk about doing, the kinds of things some of them have done.
And I'll still be writing about it when one of them goes and does another unspeakable thing.
I know that it's foolish to say that they're all talk.
But I also know a lot of them are.
A lot of them are a lot smaller in person.
And I don't mean physically.
I'm not talking about getting into a physical fight.
I'm five feet tall with my shoes on.
But what I'm saying is they're weird little guys.
That's why the show's called that.
They're so small in person.
That's the whole point.
They talk big when it's online or at a rally with high energy or when they're with their friends.
But in my experience, most of them get stage fright if they actually get the chance to say that shit out loud in a quiet room.
Back in 2023, I actually met a guy who had had some big talk about me online.
I may have told this story before, forgive me, but he was in town because he'd been charged with a crime.
And that was something that really solidified for him that being involved in the movement was a stupid way to spend his life.
He's probably still not a white supremacist.
You know, I'm not saying he's reformed now, but he was disengaging from active involvement in the movement, and that's the best you can hope for sometimes.
So by the time we're standing there, alone on the steps of the courthouse, it had been a couple of years since he was on a Nazi podcast talking with his Nazi friends about the ways they would be interested in murdering me if the opportunity presented itself.
And look, I'm not going to lie to you.
When I heard that the first time, hunched over my computer alone late at night, yeah, obviously it scared me a little bit, right?
It was very graphic, and I didn't know exactly who those men were or where they were.
I didn't know if they had the means to do the things they were talking about.
So I found out, and that made it easier.
And when I finally met him in person, I wasn't afraid of him.
He seemed maybe a little bit afraid of me.
He was just a weird little guy.
Kind of a sad one.
In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.
After the terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.
Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer.
Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.
We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.
From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre season two, The Butcher of Moss, available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Atlanta is a spirit.
It's not just a city.
I didn't really have an interest in being on air.
I kind of was up there to try and infiltrate the building.
It's where Cronk was born in a club in the West End.
Boom World Star.
It was 559.
Where a tiny bar birthed a generation of rap stars, where preachers go viral and students at the HBCU turned heartbreak in the resurrection.
How do you get people to believe in something that's dead?
Where dreamers brought Hollywood to the South and hustlers bring their visions to create black wealth.
Nobody's rushing into relationships with you.
Where are you from?
They want to look you in the eye.
Where the future is nostalgia.
Talking to the chat GPT.
She like, you really the first lady to have a gangster girls take in Atlanta, Georgia.
Like, that's what separates you from a lot of people.
And I'm like, oh, what?
You are.
Atlanta doesn't wait for permission.
It builds its own spotlight.
I'm Big Rude.
Let us guide you through the stories behind Atlanta's most iconic moments.
Listen to Atlanta is on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.
Yo, yo, can we get a Thanksgiving first?
I'm hungry.
Hey, y'all, it's Caden and Deval, the host of Ellis Ever After Podcast.
This holiday season, whether you're cooking for the family, out buying gifts for the kids, or crowded in holiday traffic, tune out the noise and tune in to Ellis Ever After.
On Ellis Everafter, we get real with our crew about family.
If you're feeling like you're failing, that's probably because you're a good parent.
Friendship.
Be careful what you put in your body.
Move your body and love it the way you love them cars that house them clothes, them shoes, them brunches.
Love yourself.
Them brunches.
Loving marriage.
You know what's become attractive to me?
And it's because I've self-corrected and I guess I detoxified myself.
Accountability.
Like it has become so attractive to me and everything else in between.
I've told my most embarrassing moment on this podcast before, which was me taking a shit.
So listen to Ellis Everafter on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Robert Smith.
This is Jacob Goldstein.
And we used to host a show called Planet Money.
And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history and some of the worst people.
Horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business.
Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing.
It's like not having it at all.
Very simple, elegant lesson.
Make something people want.
First episode: How Southwest Airlines used cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business.
The most Texas story ever.
There's a lot of Mavericks in that story.
We're going to have Mavericks on the show.
We're going to have plenty of robber barons, so many robber barons.
And you know what?
They're not all bad.
And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked, like Thomas Edison and the Electric Show.
Listen to Business History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get it.
Another question people ask a lot is, is it mentally destructive to do this kind of research?
That's a fair question.
And the answer changes depending on when you ask me, I think.
Of course, it's horrible, right?
I'm a human being.
Of course, it makes me sick to read about child sexual exploitation and hate crimes and mass murder and domestic violence and genocide, war crimes, and all the other things the guys I write about are getting up to.
It's not light reading to spend all weeks sifting through gore forums trying to figure out who a mass shooter was chatting with online and accidentally seeing so many pictures of dead children.
It's not fun to spend days on Nazi forums trying to reconstruct the social media history of a man who killed his wife.
I'm not going to tell you that feels good.
Obviously, I think you know that.
And it's not something I would recommend that someone else do.
I would be concerned if someone I cared about was doing that.
But I'm fine, you know?
I'm not bragging about some kind of superior coping mechanism.
I'm not better than you or stronger than you.
I don't even have any constructive advice for you if this is something you're struggling with.
I don't know how to advise anyone else who's dealing with vicarious trauma of this kind of research.
And that's why I hate this question.
I mean, no offense, it makes sense that you would ask it.
I just hate that I don't have a good answer for you.
I don't have any advice for you.
I don't know why it works.
And I don't want you to think I'm a sociopath when I tell you that I actually don't struggle with this that much.
I can turn it off.
But that's not to say I don't feel it.
I'm not a robot.
I'm not a monster.
I feel it and I feel it deeply when I'm allowing myself to be in it.
There are episodes where there is no clean take and there's no way around the fact that I am audibly crying in the final edit.
And that's okay.
But I already know that the horrors are out there.
I can't go back to not knowing about this.
So for me, there's some comfort in knowing that I can piece it together.
I can try to understand it and hopefully help you understand it.
You know, I could sit here and be scared in the dark, or I can try to shine a light into that scary darkness.
It's still scary, but at least I have something to do.
Like I said, I get asked this question every time I'm in a position to be asked a question.
I've been asked this question a thousand times, and I don't have a good answer for it.
But I always land more or less right here.
It's ugly and it's hard, and I see things that I wish I hadn't seen, but I think it's important to do anyway.
And that feeling of purpose makes it a little easier.
Okay, enough of that.
By far, the most common type of question was a sort of open-ended one about how the sausage gets made.
How do I pick a guy?
How do I decide what the story is?
How do I find out everything there is to know about him?
And most importantly, how do I drag myself back to the point of the story when it's so much more fun to find out what's going on with this strange little side character I found halfway down a tangent about something that's barely even connected to the story I was trying to tell you?
A lot of you asked about that part of the process in particular.
I love that.
Like I said, when I was sorting these questions into categories, I was a little puzzled by the scarcity of questions that were about some specific story.
You guys didn't really ask me for more information about a story I already told you.
You asked me really open-ended questions about what kinds of things I haven't told you.
And my initial reaction to that was, like I said, a reflection on the nature of parasociality, right?
Like, why are those the things you want to know?
But I think there's a more fun explanation for this.
You trust the process.
You believe me when I tell you that I was thorough in pursuing the interesting leads in the story I did tell.
And you liked it enough that you want to know what cool stuff I couldn't cram into the episode.
Maybe I'm making that up, but if that is what's going on, I like that.
I know the show can be a little tricky to follow sometimes because the side quests are longer than the main journey.
So I really like knowing that at least some of you love that as much as I do.
I mean, look, if you don't like it, if you just want dry facts in chronological order, I don't know what to tell you.
I don't know why you're still here.
I would tell you you should just read a Wikipedia article or something, but most of the stories I'm trying to tell don't really exist anywhere else in that sort of format.
We're going on an adventure together.
But I do want to answer one question I did get that was a factual question about a recent episode.
Someone on the Reddit posted this question a few weeks ago.
They wrote, With the Frank Smith miniseries wrapping up, I assumed you would revisit the fact that Rockwell shouted the Holy Father after a previous attempt on his life, according to someone with him.
Is there anything more to investigate there?
Okay, the answer is we'll never know.
I threw everything I had at this, and I do have my own theory.
But I went digging for anything concrete to try to bolster that theory, and it was nothing but fistfuls of sand, just grabbing an innuendo and possibility and watching it slip through my fingers.
To refresh your memory, that listener is asking about something that came up in the first episode about Frank Smith, the episode from October 16th.
Frank Smith was a member of the American Nazi Party and he had extensive ties to organized crime in New England.
That whole arc from the episodes about John Patler, the man who assassinated George Lincoln Rockwell, through the end of the Frank Smith arc was nine full-length episodes and one mini-sode.
It was over 50,000 scripted words and it took two months.
So I won't retell the whole story here.
If you're listening to me navel gaze like this, you surely listened to those episodes.
But just to refresh some of the details, remember from the John Patler episodes, he murdered George Lincoln Rockwell in August of 1967, and he was convicted of that murder at trial a few months later.
But two months before the murder, so in June of 1967, Rockwell survived another attempt on his life.
Two months before he died, someone shot at him and missed.
And this prior incident doesn't get a lot of ink in the biographies of Rockwell that I read, which seems kind of odd to me.
In most accounts, it's sort of vaguely implied that the most likely explanation is that the guy who actually shot and killed him was also the guy who tried and failed to shoot him the first time.
That makes total sense, right?
And as far as the lack of investigation into that in the biographies, I guess the fact that he actually got murdered really overshadows anything else that happened to him that summer.
But you know, I'm never satisfied.
So I found and read the trial transcript.
Patler appealed his conviction several times, so the entire trial transcript was reproduced in the appellate record, and it's over a thousand pages.
And here's the thing.
John Patler had a really solid alibi the day someone shot at George Lincoln Rockwell and missed.
There's conspiracy theories about whether he actually killed Rockwell.
I think he did.
The evidence is pretty good that he actually did shoot him in August.
But the evidence just isn't there to assert that he was the guy who tried the first time.
And the college student who was in the car with Rockwell when this happened in June told the authorities that as the bullet whizzed by them, Rockwell shouted something.
He said, the Holy Father.
That boy doesn't have any reason to lie, at least none that seemed obvious to me, right?
And if you remember those episodes, a lot of the people in this story had very obvious reasons to lie.
This kid didn't.
And he didn't know that what he heard Rockwell say wasn't just an exclamation.
It was a name.
It was the nickname that Rockwell had given Frank Smith.
It was a joke about the bullet holes in his chest from a botched mob hit in 1965.
So in that first episode about Frank, I sort of teased the possibility that it was Frank who tried to shoot Rockwell in June of 1967.
But I never came back to that.
I just sort of left that hanging.
And that's what this listener is asking about.
It's so intriguing, but there is absolutely fucking nothing there.
There's nothing.
It's bizarre.
I couldn't find any trace anywhere of anyone ever asking this question.
What could it possibly mean that when Rockwell saw someone shooting at him, he yelled Frank's nickname?
No one's ever asked that.
I can't find anything about it.
There's no record of anyone raising the possibility that maybe Frank was there, that maybe the mafia had their own beef with Rockwell.
Like I said, most material about the last few months of Rockwell's life just sort of breezes past this kind of serious question.
Who else wanted him dead?
Most of the competing theories about his actual death center around the discord within the American Nazi Party.
I won't recover all of this as in the episodes, but there were factions and rivalries and disagreements about the direction of the Nazi Party and who should lead them.
And most of the information we have about those internal divisions comes from the people involved in them.
So the people pointing fingers at each other within the party all have their own shit to hide.
In the accounts produced in biographies of Rockwell, the authors spoke to those party members, including people like Matthias Kohl, the man who took over after Rockwell died.
And different biographers of Rockwell deal with these accounts with varying levels of credulity and sometimes point out that perhaps they have various motivations to tell versions of the truth, but there's nothing else ever offered.
And the accounts that they gave those biographers more or less match the kinds of testimony that was offered by American Nazi Party members at John Patler's trial.
And decades later, William Luther Pierce gave his version of events to his own biographer.
And all of these men have very particular motives for the versions of the truth that they're holding on to.
And they're all dead now.
So I spent probably fully 100 hours agonizing over the blurry, heavily redacted pages of the FBI file for Raymond Patriarcha, the head of the New England Mafia.
And there's just enough there to convince me that there's more there.
That I don't have all the information about the extent to which the mafia was involved with the American Nazi Party.
I mean, sure, we have memos about the times Frank Smith was reporting back to Patriarch about his relationship with Rockwell.
But I think there was more.
And I can't prove it.
I don't like to tell you stuff I can't prove.
I've worked too hard to earn your trust.
I don't want to make stuff up and go tinfoil hat on you now.
But you did ask, and I am dying to speculate wildly.
So here's my disclaimer.
This does not have my usual stamp of certainty on it.
I'm not stating this as fact.
I can't support this with evidence.
I'm going rogue.
Sometimes it is fun to believe something a little crazy as a treat.
So my conspiracy treat for myself in this story is that I choose to believe the mafia tried to have the head of the American Nazi Party killed, but they sent a half-blind hitman to do it, and he missed.
Remember, Frank had one glass eye for reasons I never discovered, and he almost lost the other when the mafia tried to have him killed in 1965, so he does not see well.
And when he got into that shootout with Christopher Vidnevich in 1968, they fired at each other for half an hour and Frank never hit shit.
Here's the thing.
George Lincoln Rockwell was a snitch.
Famously so.
He didn't even really try to hide it.
He would tell you himself that he sometimes wrote letters to the FBI to make them aware of people in the movement whose activities he disapproved of.
I found actual copies of letters he wrote to J. Edgar Hoover himself, listing former members of his own party that he thought the Bureau should investigate.
This is a more egregious example than I usually get, but this behavior is not actually uncommon.
There are a lot of guys in the movement who are trying to inform on their rivals.
I'm not even talking about paid recruited informants.
The movement's full of those too.
I'm talking about guys who are just willingly freelance snitching because they think they can leverage the force of the government to try to take out a guy they don't like.
There's a fair amount of that going on to this day, but Rockwell was the absolute king of writing letters to the FBI to try to maneuver around within the movement.
So we know that he is doing that.
And it turns out the people he was dealing with did too.
Because buried about 4,763 pages into Raymond Patriarcha's 7,900-page FBI file is a memo about a conversation Frank Smith had with the mafia boss in March of 1965.
He's trying to convince Patriarcha that he needs to get into business with the Nazi party.
This was around the time Rockwell decided he was going to run for governor of Virginia.
And he had promised the mafia control of gambling and loan sharking in the Norfolk area if he won.
And Frank wanted to set up a fake Nazi church on his land in Maine so he could funnel money from the mafia into the Nazi party in a way that would protect everyone involved.
Right?
That was all in the episodes about Frank.
And he told Patriarcha at that meeting in March that if they were going to do this, they needed to be careful.
Frank Smith was recorded on an FBI wiretap saying that Rockwell had warned him that he wouldn't hesitate to call the FBI if he found out there was criminal activity going on.
So Frank Smith told Raymond Patriarcha that they would need to be careful not to reveal the extent of their illegal enterprise to Rockwell.
Two years later, someone took a shot at Rockwell and they missed.
One of the other things I do when I'm researching an episode is I make a timeline.
Just anytime I have a date, I put it in a timeline.
I don't know if all these things are going to be relevant, but they all go in just a bulleted list in chronological order.
And wouldn't you know, looking back at that timeline, that failed hit on George Lincoln Rockwell was a couple days after the FBI arrested Raymond Patriarcha.
So, sure, it makes good narrative sense to assume that John Patler probably tried to kill Rockwell twice.
But most stories about June of 1967 don't tell you that Rockwell had threatened to snitch on the mafia.
And that bullet just missed him the week a mob boss got indicted.
We'll never know, right?
I mean, this version of the story has just as many holes as any of the others.
There's no proving it either way.
And I could tell you the same story with a different inflection, and we'd all leave just as convinced that some other version of it was just as true.
I do try to be responsible with the facts, though, even when it's no fun.
But you have to admit, it's kind of fun to think about it this way, isn't it?
I will say one last word on this subject.
If you are the anonymous buyer who purchased a collection of George Lincoln Rockwell's personal correspondence, specifically a series of letters he exchanged with a Massachusetts man named George Parker in 1965, I will pay good money just to look at a photocopy of those letters.
I don't know who bought them.
There were two separate listings.
So there's two sets of these letters.
God, I would love to see them because the listing implies that they contain information about Rockwell's relationship with the mafia and that someone in Massachusetts, potentially this George Parker character, was leaking information to him about a state investigation into that relationship.
I can't find anything about this in the FBI files.
I think it may have been a criminal investigation in the state of Massachusetts, but I need the letters.
There's more to this story, I'm sure, but I've exhausted my ability to track it down.
This one's staying in my pile of things I'll come back to.
I'm not done trying to figure this out.
In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.
The terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.
Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer.
Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.
We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.
From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2, The Butcher of Moss, available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
May 24th, 1990.
A pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.
I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded.
I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.
In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why?
She received death threats before the bombing.
She received more threats after the bombing.
The men and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against vlogging practices in Northern California.
They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.
The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture, it was the way of life.
I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.
Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Atlanta is a spirit.
It's not just a city.
I didn't really have an interest in being on air.
I kind of was up there to just try and infiltrate the building.
It's where Cronk was born in a club in the West End.
Four World Star.
It was 559.
Where a tiny bar birthed a generation of rap stars, where preachers go viral and students at the HBCU turned heartbreaking to resurrection.
How do you get people to believe in something that's dead?
Where dreamers brought Hollywood to the South and hustlers bring their visions to create black wealth.
Nobody's rushing into relationships with you.
Where are you from?
They want to look you in the eye.
Where the future is nostalgia.
Talk to my chat GPT.
She like, you really the first lady to have a gangster girls take in Atlanta, Georgia.
Like, that's what separates you from a lot of people.
And I'm like, oh, what?
You are.
Atlanta doesn't wait for permission.
It builds its own spotlight.
I'm Big Rude.
Let us guide you through the stories behind Atlanta's most iconic moments.
Listen to Atlanta is on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.
I'm hungry.
Hey, y'all, it's Kadine and Deval, the host of Ellis Everafter Podcast.
This holiday season, whether you're cooking for the family, out buying gifts for the kids, or crowded in holiday traffic, tune out the noise and tune in to Ellis Everafter.
On Ellis Everafter, we get real with our crew about family.
If you're feeling like you're failing, that's probably because you're a good parent.
Friendship.
Be careful what you put in your body, move your body, and love it the way you love them cars, that house, them clothes, them shoes, them brunches.
Love yourself, them brunches, loving marriage.
You know what's become attractive to me?
And it's because I've self-corrected and I guess I detoxified myself.
Accountability.
Like it has been so attractive to me and everything else in between.
I've told my most embarrassing moment on this podcast before, which was me taking a shit as a listen to Ellis Everafter on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Okay, on the subject of things I have or have not talked about on the show, let's go rapid fire through some of the things you all want to hear more about.
Someone asked if I planned to cover any of the weird little guys who participated in the January 6th insurrection.
Yes.
There are two episodes that touch on that already.
There was a February 6th, 2025 episode called A Short-Lived Pardon, followed by a brief update to that same story a month later on March 6th.
That episode was about Matthew Huddle, the man who died after being shot by police during a traffic stop just a week after receiving his federal pardon for entering the Capitol on January 6th.
And before that, there was the October 17, 2024 episode called Burning Hate.
That one was about Tyler Dykes, a young man who marched here in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally in 2017, and he entered the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
He did jail time for both, which is discussed in the episode.
But what is not discussed in that episode, but is coming up in next week's roundup, is his recent announcement that he is running for Congress.
And that's kind of why I foresee more episodes in the future about January 6th, guys.
Because now that they're all pardoned, we are unfortunately seeing a lot of them resurface, right?
They're either trying to get into media, they're trying to get into politics, some of them seem to be trying to get back into prison.
So I'm sure we will wind up back with some of those guys eventually.
That same listener asked if I planned to cover any weird little guys who happened to be women.
And the answer to that is also yes.
But I don't know when.
The South Africa episodes that ran from the end of February through the beginning of May of this year were all centered around the main character of a woman named Monica Huggett Stone.
And I'm sure there will be other stories in the future with a female main character.
They just tend to be less frequent for a variety of reasons.
Mainly, right-wing extremists are almost always violent misogynists.
I'm not saying women don't hold the same views as our weird little guys, or that the movement doesn't include women.
They do, and it does.
They just typically don't rise to positions of power in the movement, and they are less likely to carry out acts of extreme violence.
The movement has plenty of women in it.
You just don't hear a lot about them.
Part of that is because women's stories just don't get told.
Not just when we're talking about white supremacists.
I mean, generally, right?
History has just as many women as it does men, but what kinds of history stories do you hear?
Monica Huggett Stone was the central figure in that eight-episode arc about neo-Nazi violence in the last decades of apartheid South Africa.
But it was much harder than it needed to be to find actual information about this human woman at the center of the story.
People just aren't interested in what women are doing.
Will I cover Gary Lauk?
Great question.
Yes, absolutely.
We're going to get to Gary.
But a friend of mine is writing a book that is definitely going to feature Gary pretty heavily.
So I think I'm going to save myself the headache of doing the research myself and just wait to buy a copy of her book because I know she has been deep in the archives.
I mean, around the world in special collections archives.
And she even interviewed the Farm Belt Führer himself.
So I should ask her when that's coming out because I'm really looking forward to it.
But we will get to Gary.
Someone also asked, when is the Matt Hale episode?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, there's going to be one.
There's obviously going to be one.
Sometimes I find myself avoiding these big name weird little guys.
You know, I haven't done William Luther Pierce.
I haven't done Matthew Hale.
I haven't actually done Bob Matthews, right?
I sort of mentioned him in passing and then went somewhere else entirely.
I feel like I'm skipping these really big ones because I know what kind of can of worms it's going to open and it's going to take me months to dig myself out.
Like once I really get into the deep lore about Matt Hale and the World Church of the Creator, I know I'm going to end up with 30 new weird little guys whose whole lives I'm going to have to map out before I can move on.
There's a lot going on there and we will get there because Matt Hale is still in prison and occasionally filing weird motions with the court.
I'm signed up for docket alerts for him, so I do check in on him from time to time, but I'm just not ready.
Will I ever cover weird little guys abroad?
I actually got a bunch of these, people asking about particular British, Australian, Canadian, and European individuals and groups that they'd like to hear more about.
And the answer is yes.
Yes, definitely.
I'm very intrigued by the fascist international.
Nothing exists in a vacuum, right?
There are no lone wolves, and it turns out the wolf pack is international.
You know, my existing subject matter expertise is white supremacists in the United States over the last 60 years or so.
But it seems like if you dig deep enough in any story, there's some kind of international connection, and that's something I'd like to explore more.
Earlier this year, I spent three months writing about South African Nazis, and that story ended up taking us all over the world.
There were German mercenaries in Croatia, there were guns smuggled through a port in England by a British Nazi group, a South African man wanted for murder in Namibia currently hiding out in England, and American lobbyists who took money from the apartheid government.
There were a lot of people and groups in that story I'd like to come back to and read more about.
And then at the end of last year, in the beginning of this year, I did a series of episodes about Dennis Mahan.
And that Klansman spent some time in Germany, which I did discuss on the show.
But I didn't get into his deep connections to fascist groups in Canada.
And I still plan to come back to that Australian Nazi who was deported after he tried to attack John Patler in court after Rockwell's murder.
He died under rather mysterious circumstances in Rhodesia a few years later, so we'll explore some Australian Nazis soon.
Would I consider covering reformed weird little guys?
That one's complicated.
The answer isn't no.
I'm not ruling it out.
I'm not saying I'll never do it.
But it's something I would want to approach very carefully.
Just in general, I have a pretty bad taste in my mouth about a lot of the popular narratives about formers.
A lot of the guys out there who are making money, taking speaking engagements, talking about how they used to be a Nazi, those aren't guys I want to talk to.
Those are not guys whose opinions I think are worth talking about.
Not all of them, right?
I'm not saying that every guy with a publicist is a grifter and a liar who's using a redemption arc narrative to sell himself as an expert on political extremism and the kind of extremism he keeps talking about is actually how the left is just as bad as the stuff he used to do, right?
But I'm saying there is a lot of that.
And I don't think those guys are really formers.
I think if every story you have to tell about your decades as a Nazi is actually about how Antifa are the real enemy, you're not a former Nazi.
But that's just a hang up I have about a couple guys in particular.
I'm not saying formers themselves are always acting in bad faith or that they don't really exist.
They do.
They absolutely do.
And I've met some very decent people who are working very hard to quietly make amends and grow as people and really leave their pasts behind.
People can get better, right?
People can change.
And I think those stories are important and I would like to find a way to tell them responsibly because that change has to come from inside.
It's not something that can grow out of a press release written by a publicist and approved by an attorney.
So the answer to that is maybe.
Probably even.
But it wouldn't just be a one-off interview about how making a black friend cured a Klansman and he's nice now.
That's not my kind of story.
That's not a story I would subject you to.
I've seen a guy try to sell that shit to a judge and I didn't believe it when it was presented as sworn testimony.
So I wouldn't expect you to believe it on a podcast.
I do have a couple of formers in mind that I would like to do a little bit more research about the kind of story I would want to tell with their help.
There are a couple of people that I think would be valuable to talk to about this.
I'm just, I'm just not ready to do that right now.
There were kind of a surprising number of questions that were just invitations to do my favorite thing, to wander off topic.
I'm still kind of self-conscious about the meandering nature of these stories, even though at this point, I recognize it as something that's integral to the show.
So I was really charmed by how many of you just want to hear how far I can get from the plot.
It sounds like some of you are trying to challenge me to dig my deepest hole yet just so you can watch me try to get back out of it.
The problem with answering those questions right now is it would take two to 300 hours.
The stuff that gets cut, the tangents that I have to cut myself off from, those all kind of end up piled up in a tab at the end of my notes for each episode.
There's this terrible little incomprehensible mess of these half-formed thoughts that I swear I'm going to come back to because there's probably a whole episode in there or four or 10 if I just let myself keep going.
One example of that that comes to mind right now is a recent one.
It's about Barbara von Goetz.
She was the secretary for the American Nazi Party who lived at the party's headquarters in the early to mid-60s.
She was also George Lincoln Rockwell's mistress and the mother of his two daughters who both died in infancy of a genetic disorder.
I talked a little bit about her and about Rockwell's daughters in one of the Frank Smith episodes.
But before I wrote, I think like two paragraphs about Barbara, I spent a day or two learning about her.
Pretty much anyone who's discussed beyond a passing mention gets this treatment in the research process.
I like to make a family tree and go through old newspapers for any mention of the person or any of their immediate relatives.
I'll check court records and places where they've lived and look at property and tax records if I can find them.
I just sort of sketch out the broad strokes of their life.
Where have they been?
What were they doing before they showed up in this story?
Where did they go afterward?
Do they have any meaningful connection to anything else we might be interested in?
I'm not really looking for anything in particular.
I'm just browsing.
And mostly I use none of this.
I have half a biography on a thousand guys I didn't even need.
But Barbara was such a question mark for me throughout this story, right?
Because I spent two months writing about the last year of Rockwell's life and there's not a lot about her.
I mean, she was the mistress and personal secretary of the commander of the American Nazi party.
She gave birth to and buried two of his children.
But that's kind of all she ever is in any story about him.
Women's stories just disappear, right?
So I was really curious about how she ended up so close to one of the big leaders in the movement.
And it turns out her whole damn family was a bunch of Nazis.
Her sister and one of her brothers were close to Otto Strasser, an actual Nazi, like Otto Strasser joined the Nazi Party in Germany in 1925.
He is one of the two Strassers of Strasserism.
And Barbara's other brother spent time in Rhodesia in the 1970s as a mercenary.
Her Nazi sister was inexplicably the secretary at a mosque in Washington, D.C. in the 1970s, which I only know because she was taken hostage at that mosque during the Hanafi siege of 1977, and her brother Carl, fresh off his stint as a race war mercenary, tried to negotiate for her release.
He went on to have a whole second act as a fairly well-known white supremacist in Canada in the 80s.
And Barbara's nephew, the son of her other brother, was arrested on Christmas Eve last year for pouring whiskey into the holy water during Midnight Mass at a Catholic church in Maryland.
So I wasted a lot of time on this.
Obviously, I know a lot about this family that I did not need or use in that episode.
I left all of that out because I think I need to come back to this to sort out what the hell is going on there.
So for those of you asking how far afield I tend to get while I'm writing, I always make the family tree.
And sometimes it's a waste of time.
Usually, it's a waste of time.
But sometimes, there's a Rhodesian mercenary and two siblings who have long, complicated relationships with Otto Strasser.
And that is why I will never stop wasting my time researching stuff that doesn't make it into the episode.
I'll come back to it one day.
But that is absolutely enough for now.
Those of you who are just here for the weird little guys, I'm sorry if I disappointed you this week.
But for the real ride or die listeners out there, the ones who like hearing about my struggle to translate a Hungarian Nazi newspaper published by a guy in Cincinnati, even though that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, I hope this scratched that itch for you, at least a little bit.
Next week will be another episode that doesn't quite fit the usual mold.
I'll be checking back in on some of the weird little guys whose stories aren't over yet.
Some of them have come up on the show before and will be familiar to you, and some of them are guys whose episodes I'm not ready to write yet.
But I can't wait that long to introduce them into the Weird Little Guys extended universe.
It's something different, but I think it'll still be fun.
I promise I won't make a habit of straying from the classic Weird Little Guys format you know and love, but I am going to try a few new things to get a little variety.
And if I'm being totally honest, I'm trying to figure out what works in terms of redistributing the workload a little bit.
I love making this show, but I have to find a way to make it a little more sustainable in the long run.
Because I don't think I'm ever going to run out of Weird Little Guys.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Corazon Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, while I conquer.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Gore Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
And for the listener who asked a question about that theme music, I will put a link in the show notes to Brad's SoundCloud where you can listen to the entire theme of the show.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast 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.
As always, don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jelton.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium.
Women began to go missing.
It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them.
The murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence.
Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanksgiving isn't just about food.
It's a day for us to show up for one another.
It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other.
I'm Elia Connie, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope.
I've always wanted us to have therapy, so this is such a beautiful opportunity.
Listen to season two of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein.
And we used to host a show called Planet Money.
And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history and some of the worst people.
Horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business.
First episode, How Southwest Airlines Used Cheap Seats and Free Whiskey to Fight Its Way into the Airlines.
The most Texas story ever.
Listen to Business History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
