Years before he set off on his three year killing spree, Joseph Paul Franklin left his home in Alabama to attend a nazi conference in Virginia. Sources: Mel Ayton, Dark Soul of the South: The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin, Potomac Press, Inc., 2011 Belew, Kathleen. Bring the War Home : The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Harvard University Press, 2018. Sunshine, Spencer (2024). Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege (1st ed.). New York, NY: Routledge Kaplan, Jeffrey. (2022). No Longer Alone: Lone Wolves, Wolf Packs, and Made for Web TV Specials. In: Perry, B., Gruenewald, J., Scrivens, R. (eds) Right-Wing Extremism in Canada and the United States . Palgrave Hate Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Saslow, Eli. Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist. Anchor, 2018. Malthaner, Stefan, et al. “Scattered Attacks: The Collective Dynamics of Lone-Actor Terrorism.” Perspectives on Politics, vol. 22, no. 2, Dec. 2023, pp. 463–80. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537592723002852. Bart Schuurman, Lasse Lindekilde, Stefan Malthaner, Francis O'Connor, Paul Gill & Noémie Bouhana (2017): End of the Lone Wolf: The Typology that Should Not Have Been, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2017.1419554 Pantucci, Rafaello. A Typology of Lone Wolves: Preliminary Analysis of Lone Islamist Terrorists. (London: International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), 2011): 14-31. Gardell, Mattias. “Lone Wolf Race Warriors and White Genocide.” Cambridge University Press, 2021. https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/NCITF-Final-Paper.pdf https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/movement-and-madman/#part01 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/11/20/november-mobilization/ https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/nixons-secret-plan-for-ending-the-vietnam-war-nuclear-annihilation-of-vietnam/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight.
You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story.
John has never been anything that gay, but he really tried hard not to be.
Listen to Atonement, the John Paul story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, hello, all my people.
What's up?
It's Questlove.
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with the one and only ASAP Rocky.
He reflects on his journey from Harlem roots to global icon status and discovering the hip-hop origin of his name.
The ledge was on the TV.
Rakim had the bucket hat kango joint on.
Possibly, that's Rakim.
That's who you named after.
I just was like, damn, that gotta swag.
But listen to the Questlove show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we've got some incredible guests like Kamale Nanjiani.
Let's start with your cat.
How is she?
She is not with us anymore.
She's great, great, great way to start.
Maybe you will cry.
Ross Matthews.
You know what kids always say to me?
Are you a boy or a girl?
Oh my God.
All the time.
It's so funny.
I know.
So I try to butch it up for kids so they're not confused.
Yeah, but that you're butching it up is basically like an angry woman.
Right now, I turn into B. Arthur.
Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of wife would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
They gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Each Marcher Carried00:03:03
Can you get someone to join your cult?
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming.
Is it a self-help miracle?
A shady hypnosis scam, or both.
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
It was already dark when the marcher set off on November 13th, 1969.
Thousands of people had gathered just outside the gates of Arlington National Cemetery outside of Washington, D.C. Each marcher carried a candle and a small placard.
At the head of the march, Judy Draws cupped her hands around the flame to shield it from the freezing wind.
The sign she carried said only, Donald Glenn Draws, Missouri.
At 23 years old, she'd been a mother for 10 months and a widow for seven.
For the next 39 hours, nearly 50,000 people walked from Arlington National Cemetery to the White House.
Each marcher carried with them the name of a United States service member killed in the war in Vietnam.
They didn't chant or sing.
The only sound came from the six drummers slowly tapping out a funeral cadence.
Inside the White House, Richard Nixon fumed.
As peace activists marched overnight in the freezing rain, he joked about sending a low-flying helicopter to blow out their candles.
By Saturday morning, half a million people were in Washington, D.C., demanding an end to the war.
It's easy to say now that they were right.
But in 1969, the widows and clergy and students who opposed the war were beaten and tearcast.
They were sneered at and called hippies and communists and traitors.
It wasn't just Richard Nixon who was upset by the demonstration.
The night before the three-day march against the war was scheduled to begin, a small group of neo-Nazis snuck into the DC offices of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, one of the groups organizing the event.
Whatever happened on the ninth floor of that office building on Vermont Avenue barely made the news, but it left a lasting impression on two teenage Nazis.
Acting Alone00:15:47
James Mason would go on to tell that story for years, including it several times in his book of essays extolling the virtues of terrorism.
For Joseph Paul Franklin, it was an introduction to a thrilling possibility.
If someone is doing something you don't like, you can hunt them down and hurt them.
i'm molly conger and this is weird little guys this is a story about a serial killer Part of it, anyway.
I'll be honest with you.
I had a hard time concentrating this week.
And when I ran out of time and sat down to write, I felt like I was out of words, actually.
I got bogged down in the details and my heart wasn't quite in it, but I did promise you a Nazi serial killer.
So we will start this story and get through as much of it as I can get onto the page before Rory starts asking where the file is.
Joseph Paul Franklin was a murderer.
I've written about murderers before, but this one's different.
He's not a mass shooter or a terrorist with a single mass casualty event or some guy who snapped and drove his car into a crowd.
This is a serial killer.
This is the first time that our weird little guy has been the subject of TV true crime documentary shows like Criminal Mindscape, FBI Files, and Mugshots.
He's been covered by true crime podcasts with names like Murder in America, Death Cast, True Murder, True Crime All the Time, Killer Stories, Murder Files Unsealed, Crime and Comedy, Serial Chillers, Momicide, and something called, Tequila She wrote, Limes, Crimes, and Murder Times.
I mean, there are a lot of true crime podcasts out there.
I don't know what's going on here.
And I didn't actually listen to any of those.
I'm sure they're all perfectly fine.
This is technically, I guess, a true crime podcast.
I mean, look at your podcast app.
That's where the show is categorized.
That's not how I would describe my work, but I can understand how that decision was made.
These stories are true, and there's usually a lot of crime.
I'm not trying to pick a fight with the marketing department or the true crime girlies, don't get me wrong.
I just think this show occupies a slightly different place in the information ecosystem.
But that's something I learned while I was writing it.
I didn't know what I was writing until I'd been writing it for a few months.
A year and a half ago, when I suddenly found myself responsible for writing a weekly podcast, I didn't know what it was about.
I mean, I had a general concept.
I wrote some pitch notes that someone approved the bones were there.
The idea was solid.
I love telling a story about a weird little guy.
That's why it's called that.
Sophie, our eternally patient executive producer, jotted that phrase down on a notepad during a meeting months before I had any plans of hosting my own show, because she noticed how often I use that particular phrase to describe some awful extremist whose life and crimes I'm excited to dig into.
She knew it was a good idea, and I knew she'd produced enough podcasts to know what she was talking about.
So I dove right into the deep end and committed to a production schedule that meant coming up with an exciting new idea every week.
I mean, how hard could it be?
I'd never done this before.
I have no idea what people want.
I wasn't sure what the tone was supposed to be or how to make coherent, interesting narratives out of my own peculiar and intense obsessions.
The first episode aired on August 8th, 2024.
And it was fine.
The second episode was already done and I was struggling that week to write the third one.
I actually don't care for the way that one came out, if we're being honest, but it was a learning curve.
And I was starting to panic.
Not even three episodes into this thing I had committed to and I'd hit a brick wall.
How was I supposed to come up with a new good idea every week?
But I'm a white woman in my 30s.
I've listened to true crime podcasts.
And if that's what the network thought the show was, then maybe that's what it was supposed to be.
Looking at the version history now on a Google document that's just called ideas, the very first bullet point I typed on August 9th, 2024 just says, Joseph Paul Franklin, Nazi serial killer.
I ordered a used copy of a book about him that afternoon.
And I started reading it the day it arrived.
I felt a little defeated, but maybe there's no shame in reading a book and then finding a way to repackage it in an interesting way.
Plenty of people do it.
A lot of shows don't cite their sources, but if you've read the book they're summarizing, you can spot it.
I got 39 pages in before I put the book down on the floor near the laundry pile in my office, and I left it there for 16 months.
Because on page 39 of Mel Ayton's book, Dark Soul of the South, The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin, Aiton describes a conversation Franklin had with another inmate at the federal prison where he was being held in 1981.
After I closed the book, I added a new bullet point to the list.
Frank Abbott Sweeney.
This offhand mention of a conversation between a serial killer and a con man in the prison yard had potential.
I needed to find out more about the guy bragging to the serial killer about his time as a Rhodesian mercenary.
I think that's when I realized that this could be fun.
I don't have to write stories I already know, or stories whose details all already exist in a book someone else already wrote or are spread across filings in a single docket in a single court case.
I can write stories that don't exist yet.
I can do my own original research and run headlong down every single rabbit hole, waste days reading old Nazi newsletters, piece together painstakingly detailed timelines, and follow my curiosity wherever it takes us, no matter how long it takes to finish the story.
Yeah, it's a true crime show, I guess, but that doesn't mean I'm beholden to the conventions of the genre.
I'm not interested in breathlessly recounting the details of every single murder and the trials as they were presented in the newspaper.
I want to find out about that failed mercenary who was addicted to mail fraud.
So now, almost half a million words into what I didn't realize at the outset was going to be a convoluted attempt at a comprehensive history of the American far right, I want to come back to that first bullet point on my list of ideas.
Not because I'm suddenly interested this week in telling you a straightforward true crime story about a serial killer, but because I see something else there now.
Because what have I been telling you all this time?
Everything is connected.
And there are no lone wolves.
Joseph Paul Franklin was a murderer.
And he was a racist.
And those two things cannot be disentangled.
He killed because he was trying to start a race war.
Officially, he was only convicted of eight murders.
Tony Schven and Alphonse Manning, an interracial couple in Madison, Wisconsin in 1977.
Gerald Gordon as he was leaving a bar mitzvah at a synagogue in St. Louis, Missouri in 1977.
William Bryant Tatum, a black man who was out to dinner with his white girlfriend in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1978.
Daryl Lane and Dante Evans Brown, two young black boys who snuck out of their grandmother's house to buy candy at the corner store in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1980.
And Theodore Fields Jr. and David Martin, young black men who were jogging with their white female friends at a park in Salt Lake City in 1980.
He was never prosecuted for more than a dozen other murders he either confessed to or was credibly linked to.
In the last eight months alone, right before his capture outside of a blood bank in Florida, he murdered 11 people across six states.
For three years, he roamed the country, robbing banks, building bombs, and shooting the enemies of the white race.
Interracial couples, Jewish people, black men and boys, and white women who dated black men.
He hunted them, preferring to shoot his victims from a distance.
Two of the men he shot but failed to kill were planned assassination attempts.
Pornographer Larry Flint and civil rights leader Vernon Jordan.
But for the most part, he just found parking lots to sit in and wait, hoping to spot an interracial couple.
And he acted alone.
That part's true.
He killed alone.
By the time he started killing, he was out there on the road on his own.
He wasn't part of an organized terror cell.
He wasn't taking orders.
He wasn't getting outside funding.
If anyone could be called a lone wolf, I guess it's him.
And you'll certainly find both journalists and academics who do call him that.
I can't blame them for it.
It makes sense, depending on what you think that means.
The problem is, no one knows what it means or if it means anything.
Academics in the field of terrorism studies have been using the phrase lone wolf for 30 years.
But it made its way into the scholarly lexicon by way of Tom Metzger, the leader of White Aryan Resistance.
Metzger was the one who popularized the term in the 90s.
And if you read what Metzger actually wrote about the idea, I don't understand why he would try to repurpose the term into something sincere.
He was pleading for plausible deniability.
In 1990, Tom Metzger was found civilly liable for inciting one of his followers to commit a hate crime murder.
He lost his house.
When he told the racists who read his newsletter to work alone, say nothing, don't join a group or go to meetings, and for God's sake, don't keep any records of your actions.
He was trying to avoid going back to court the next time a skinhead murdered someone after being trained and directed by top-ranking members of the organization he led.
Be a lone wolf just meant, keep killing, but keep me out of it.
And in the 30 years since the term first showed up in an academic journal, no one can actually agree on what they mean by it.
A 2015 report called Lone Wolf Terrorism from the National Security Critical Issue Task Force at Georgetown University has eight findings.
And finding number one is that there is no single definition of what the term means.
A 2011 paper in a Journal for the Study of Political Violence proposes four subcategories of the lone wolf.
The loner, the lone wolf, the lone wolf pack, and the lone attacker.
Of those four categories, only the loner is described as actually acting alone.
The other three subtypes are either acting in concert with a small group or are an individual who is in direct contact with a larger group while carrying out a physical act alone.
If three of the four subtypes of lone wolves are not alone at all, what are we talking about?
A 2017 paper in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism suggests that maybe it's time to reconsider the usefulness of the concept entirely.
Obviously, that is also my position.
Because somewhere in between completely isolated individual acts entirely on his own with no outside influence of any kind and organized networked group with a hierarchical structure and detailed written plans directs individual dues paying members to carry out specific acts, there lies the vast majority of actual political violence.
This is an idea we've bumped up against a few times on the show.
But revisiting the story of Joseph Paul Franklin really sent me back to the academic literature on the subject.
And it's something we'll talk more about next week.
He acted alone.
I don't dispute that.
But he could not have acted in this way without the earlier influence of these groups that he was a member of.
And after those actions, the ones he did take alone, he became a symbol within those same groups, inspiring other men to do as he'd done and act alone.
You can call him a lone wolf if you want, but he's in conversation with the pack.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I ended up digging Mel Ayton's biography of Franklin back out of that pile of sweaters under my office chair because over the year I spent writing about other things, I kept coming across his name more often than I would have expected to, given the initial presentation of him as a pretty bog standard serial killer who just happened to also be a Nazi.
The man who would become serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin was born James Clayton Vaughan Jr. in Mobile, Alabama on April 13th, 1950.
Franklin And The Klan00:05:02
He had a terrible childhood with abusive alcoholic parents.
But that's a chunk of this story usually trotted out to elicit sympathy from jurors or try to explain to you how someone could become so violent.
It's well covered in Aiton's book, and that is probably the source for this section of his biography and most of the true crime podcast episodes about him.
I don't usually waste time on a Nazi's childhood sob story, but it does seem to be fairly well corroborated that he had a miserable time growing up.
Trying to make sense of Franklin's life is a minefield.
The most thorough account is Mel Aiten's book.
He spent years writing it and he corresponded with Franklin and interviewed him multiple times.
In any piece of media about Franklin produced after the book was published after 2011, a surprising number of the quotes they use are pulled directly from Aiton's book, from the recorded interviews between them.
In his introduction, Aiton cautions the reader up front that he was able to access a lot of primary source material, police files, trial transcripts, prison records, interviews with people who knew Franklin.
But the best source of information about what Franklin did when he was alone is Franklin himself.
And Aiton calls him a notorious fabricator and manipulator.
This is something I see in a lot of material produced by or about Nazis.
He's lying on purpose, and the lies he's telling don't necessarily stay consistent over time.
He's just saying whatever feels good or whatever he thinks will get him what he wants in the moment where he's saying it.
And other times, the person relaying the information is wrong by accident.
People get confused.
They forget.
They confidently say things that were never true, just because there's an FBI agent sitting in a chair in their living room drinking a cup of coffee, asking them for details about things they didn't think were important at the time, and now they're just talking nonsense.
When his sisters were questioned about his whereabouts in the weeks before his arrest in 1980, one of them told the FBI she was quite sure he'd moved away to Washington, D.C. in 1965, and he'd been 17 or 18 at the time, and he'd joined the Klan before he left.
None of those things are true, and some of them aren't even possible.
She wasn't being malicious.
She was just wrong.
And you can sort of untangle things like that.
You can give her a pass on the year.
It had been more than a decade.
He probably moved from Alabama to the DC area in 1968, not 1965.
And in 1968, he would have been 18.
And by 1968, he was already a card-carrying member of a hate group.
But it wasn't the Klan.
If I had to guess, I think she probably had some vague understanding at the time that her brother had joined some kind of unsavory organization, some kind of hate group.
And she probably learned later on that he did join the Klan.
And being from Alabama, she would have had some general knowledge about the Klan.
That is probably the hate group that would come first to her mind.
So she just assumed that was the one he'd joined first.
The organization he joined around the time he dropped out of high school wasn't the Klan.
It was the National Socialist White People's Party, the name of the newly rebranded American Nazi party.
In 1968, just before he turned 18, he married a 16-year-old girl he'd gotten pregnant.
In the four months they lived together after their shotgun wedding, he beat her mercilessly and started bringing home Nazi pamphlets.
By spring, he'd left her behind in Alabama and moved to Virginia to become an active member of the party.
He was gone before his daughter was even born.
I'm John Polk.
For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight.
Shining a Light on Ex-Games00:03:47
Once upon a time, I was on 60 Minutes Oprah, the front cover of Newsweek.
And you might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story.
So join me as I peel back the layers and expose what happened to me in the midst of conversion therapy to shine a light on what the ex-game movement does to people and the pain it continues to cause.
I'd lost 150 pounds because if I couldn't control my sexuality, I was going to control my weight.
It sounded like, and this is the word I used, a cult.
And as I look too, at the harm I did from within it.
Listen to Atonement, the John Paul story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of wife would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Can you get someone to join your cult?
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.
NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.
Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.
It's about engineering consciousness.
Mind games is the story of NLP.
Its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to mind games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every January, we're encouraged to start over.
But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply?
What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help?
I'm Mike DeLaRocha, host of Sacred Lessons.
This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures we're taught to carry alone.
We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care.
If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you.
Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.
Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.
New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever.
I am Matt, and I'm Joel.
We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there.
If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen.
Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Needed Ride in Birmingham00:11:24
One of the frustrating things about my insatiable need to create the perfect timeline of a weird little guy's life isn't just that he's a forgetful liar.
He was a drifter.
I'm used to my weird little guys telling their self-serving lies or mixing up the details of some event that was years ago.
But usually when things don't line up, you can tell there's a piece missing.
You know where you need to start digging around to try to find an explanation, to find some other source to compare it to, and then weigh those competing truths.
But for some of the gaps in the narrative of Franklin's life, some of these completely illogical sequences of events, it's not because the facts we have are wrong.
They're right.
They just don't make sense because the way he was living didn't make sense.
He bought cars out of newspaper classified ads using stolen cash and registered them with a rotating list of aliases.
He lived in motels under fake names.
His family didn't know where he was.
He moved constantly and for no discernible reason.
He went years without having a fixed address or a job.
His second wife didn't even know that he'd somehow managed to legally marry and divorce her using an entirely fictitious identity.
She and her daughter lived with a last name that he'd printed on a fake ID.
He would take off for weeks at a time to rob banks and murder teenagers.
And she thought he was a plumber named Jim Cooper.
She didn't find out his real name until the FBI took him into custody, when he called her from jail to let her know where he was.
And then he broke the news about who he was, and he told her he really had committed all 12 of the murders they were accusing him of.
All that to say, I don't know why he was living in Birmingham in August of 1969, or if he was living in Birmingham in August of 1969.
He really did abandon his first wife in Mobile in the middle of 1968.
And he does seem to have moved to Virginia at that time.
But he must not have stayed.
He was back in Alabama to sign divorce papers in January of 1969.
And in June, he was arrested in Mobile for disorderly conduct.
In all the interviews I found, all the articles and recollections from other people, I couldn't find anyone asking him directly, what were you doing that year?
I mean, why would they?
Right?
True crime stories are concerned with the crimes, and he didn't start killing until 1977.
His FBI file doesn't seem to have been concerned about where he lived in 1969.
I know how much he paid for a hat he bought at a country Westernware store in Virginia in 1977 because a decade later, a detective in Wisconsin tracked down the store clerk who worked there that year and she remembered having it in inventory.
But 500 pages of reports and memos show a remarkable lack of curiosity about what he was doing during his first year as a Nazi.
But either way, at the end of the summer of 1969, he was in Birmingham, Alabama.
And he must not have had a car because he needed a ride back to Virginia.
And the man who gave it to him was David Duke.
In 1969, the National Socialist White People's Party was struggling to forge ahead after the death of George Lincoln Rockwell two years earlier.
They'd already been in the process of rebranding from the American Nazi Party before Rockwell was assassinated by a former member.
And there was some splitting in the aftermath of his death.
The party's new leader, Matthias Kale, announced in early 1969 that they would be holding the first ever party congress that fall.
Attendance would be required.
They needed to tighten up.
Local chapters were ordered to start submitting reports of their activities.
New members would have to be interviewed in person at headquarters in Virginia.
And everyone needed to get up to date on their dues.
Kale needed to consolidate power and try to gain some momentum if the party hoped to outlive its founder.
And 1969 was the same year that they formed the youth wing called the National Socialist Liberation Front under the guidance of William Luther Pierce.
He was very focused on recruiting eager teenage boys.
And his messaging in those days was far more explicitly violent than the kind of messaging he would claim later in life when some of those young men had grown into terrorists.
I found old copies of the National Socialist Bulletin, the party newsletter, that were published that year.
In issues published every two weeks from May until August, the bulletin reminded members that if there was any way they could possibly get to Virginia on Labor Day weekend, there was no excuse not to attend the party congress.
Registration was just $2 or $1 for students, and there would be floor space for sleeping bags if you couldn't afford a motel.
The party office would coordinate with attendees to arrange for carpooling.
Down in Alabama, there were at least two members who needed a ride.
Don Black was newly 16 and he'd just finished his junior year of high school.
He was still years away from trying to coup the government of an island nation or founding Stormfront.
But he was already pretty far along in his journey to becoming a full-fledged neo-Nazi.
Two years earlier, he found a racist book by a Christian identity preacher in his local library and he wrote to the publisher to request more books.
He got newsletters.
He ended up on mailing lists.
And one of the groups that showered him with buttons and flyers and newsletters was the National Socialist White People's Party.
He joined the party as a youth member by mail when he was just 15 years old.
When he got the newsletter in the spring of 1969 announcing the party congress, he was desperate to attend.
His parents were a little uneasy about it, but they said he could go.
They did draw the line at hitchhiking, though.
Don Black's parents waited with him in the parking lot of the bus station in Birmingham.
He'd done just as the newsletter asked.
He submitted his RSVP and $1 registration fee by mail, and he requested to be connected with another member he could corporal with.
Franklin arrived first.
Decades later, a few weeks before Franklin was executed by the state of Missouri, Don Black posted on Stormfront, that Nazi forum he founded in the 90s.
He said that Joseph Paul Franklin was the first white nationalist he ever actually met, but only by a few minutes.
Had it been much longer, he wrote, I probably would have gone home with my parents, who had driven me to the Birmingham bus station to meet up with my ride to Arlington.
They hadn't wanted me to go, but they at least wanted to meet these scary people I was going with.
Had they talked to Franklin those first few minutes, their worst fears would have been confirmed and they'd have made me go back home with them.
So luckily for Don Black and terribly unlucky for the world, Don Black's parents didn't have much time to chat with Joseph Paul Franklin because David Duke arrived a few minutes later.
In the late summer of 1969, David Duke and Joseph Paul Franklin were both 19 years old.
Franklin, who was still using his birth name, James Vaughan, was a high school dropout who had abandoned his pregnant 16-year-old wife.
David Duke was about to start his sophomore year at Louisiana State University.
Don Black claims he remembers being appalled by a quote, crudely drawn swastika tattoo on Franklin's arm.
But I wasn't able to find any source that confirms he would have had that tattoo at that time.
Memory is more about vibes than facts, though, as uneasy as that makes us to admit.
So even if Franklin didn't have a swastika tattoo on his arm in 1969, he definitely already had swastika tattoo energy.
The 16-year-old wife he'd abandoned a year earlier said he started sewing swastika patches onto his jackets in 1968.
He was crude and loud and he leered at women and girls and he swore and he spat and half of what he said was weighed down with racial slurs.
He was gross.
He wasn't the kind of guy you would let drive your son to a Nazi conference, even if you were for some reason letting someone drive your son to a Nazi conference.
But David Duke was a clean-cut, well-spoken young college student driving his family car.
In Eli Saslow's 2018 book, Rising Out of Hatred, he frames this 14-hour car ride as pretty formative for Don Black.
These were the first Nazis he'd ever met.
Before he even turned 16, he'd been ostracized at school and interviewed by the FBI for his involvement in the party.
But he'd never had a chance to actually talk about his views with anyone who agreed with him.
Let alone these kind of cool guys who were just a little bit older than him.
Asla wrote, By the time the three teenagers finally arrived in Arlington for the conference, a transformation had taken place.
Don no longer felt like a lone extremist searching for answers.
He was part of a movement.
A soldier for the cause.
I'm John Polk.
For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement.
The ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight.
Shining Light on X-Game Pain00:03:46
Once upon a time, I was on 60 Minutes Oprah, the front cover of Newsweek.
And you might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story.
So join me as I peel back the layers and expose what happened to me in the midst of conversion therapy to shine a light on what the X-Game movement does to people and the pain it continues to cause.
I had lost 150 pounds because if I couldn't control my sexuality, I was going to control my weight.
It sounded like, and this is the word I used, a cult.
And as I look too at the harm I did from within.
Listen to Atonement, the John Paul story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of wife would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Can you get someone to join your cult?
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.
NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.
Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.
It's about engineering consciousness.
Mind games is the story of NLP.
Its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all?
NLP might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to mind games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every January, we're encouraged to start over.
But what if this year is about slowing down and learning how to understand ourselves more deeply?
What if this year is about giving ourselves permission to feel what we've been holding and knowing that it's okay to ask for help?
I'm Mike DeLaRocha, host of Sacred Lessons.
This is a podcast for men navigating stress, emotional health, fatherhood, identity, and the unspoken pressures we're taught to carry alone.
We talk honestly about mental health, about healing generational wounds, and about learning how to show up with more presence and care.
If you want a healthier relationship with yourself and the people you love, then Sacred Lessons is the podcast for you.
Listen to Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.
Follow Sacred Lessons with Mike DeLaRocha and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.
New Year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever.
I am Matt and I'm Joel.
We are from the How to Money podcast.
And every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there.
If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen.
Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Siege Of Reds During Moratorium00:14:22
According to the National Socialist Bulletin, 123 members of the National Socialist White People's Party attended the Party Congress.
I don't know if that's true.
There are some pictures in another newsletter that show a conference room full of chairs facing a speaker at a lectern.
A good number of the chairs are empty, and the room doesn't look like it could have held more than 50 people.
But maybe the rest of their friends were there just out of frame.
The descriptions of the speeches that ran in the newsletter sound pretty dull, but I really would have loved to have been a fly on the wall while the attendees socialized.
Right, we've got Don Black at his first ever Nazi event.
Teenage David Duke, a budding serial killer.
William Luther Pierce gave a speech, of course, as did Matthias Kahl.
Frank Collin, who was still serving as Midwest Party Coordinator, gave a report about Nazi activity in Chicago.
It would be about another year or so before he was ousted over rumors that he was Jewish.
And a few more years before he would kick off the controversy that led to the Skokie Supreme Court decision and inspire the famous Blues Brothers line, I hate Illinois Nazis.
And another few years before it was revealed that the rumors were true.
He had in fact been raised Jewish.
He was later convicted of child molestation.
And regardless of the actual attendance numbers, people did come in from all over.
John Beatty was there from Canada, where he led the Canadian National Socialist Party.
Joseph Tomasi, one of William Luther Pierce's teenage revolutionaries, gave a report on his work running the racist hotline over on the West Coast.
And this is where James Mason first met several of the men who would shape the worldview he laid out in siege years later.
In 1969, James Mason was a teenager too.
Like Don Black, he'd joined the party as a youth member by mail while still in high school.
A year before this conference, he'd written to the party headquarters to say that he was planning to murder his high school principal.
William Luther Pierce read his letter and offered him an alternative.
He invited this 17-year-old to leave Ohio and come live at the party office in Virginia.
The newsletters don't give much detail about the content of the speeches.
But years later, when James Mason sat down at his typewriter to tap out the newsletters that would eventually be collected into Siege, that favorite tome of accelerationist neo-Nazis in the 2010s, he recalled a scene from the room that weekend.
After William Luther Pierce's speech, he opened the floor to questions.
According to Mason, quote, one naive delegate asked what we should do with the white race traders.
He spoke not a word, but gesturing with thumb and index finger forming the barrel and hammer of a pistol being fired brought the entire assembly to its feet in the loudest outburst of cheering and applause heard during that three-day gathering.
So all the way back in 1983, James Mason is doing the and everybody clapped bit, right?
But more importantly, amidst all of this propaganda that we know they're being inundated with about killing black people, about killing Jewish people, somebody raised their hand and asked, what about the race traders?
What do we do about them?
What do we do about the white people who work against us?
Are they fair game?
And in front of this room of mostly very young men that he had personally recruited and groomed for violence, William Luther Pierce pantomimed firing a gun.
Pierce would later deny inspiring Franklin or being inspired by him to write his novel Hunter.
And I'm sure Franklin heard plenty of other Nazis advocate for murdering race traders in the years between this meeting and the first time he did it.
But there in that room in 1969, his leader put the idea in his head.
Maybe for the first time.
When the conference was over after the long weekend, Don Black had to go home.
He had to go back to high school.
But David Duke and Joseph Paul Franklin wanted to stick around for a bit.
So Don's parents bought him a plane ticket home.
James Mason stuck around too, obviously.
He lived there.
And for a few months, James Mason and Joseph Paul Franklin lived together in the party barracks in Northern Virginia.
The incident I described in the opening, that attack on the new mobilization office in November of 1969, is so strange to me.
I spent hours combing through newspaper archives trying to prove it happened at all.
I scrounged around for Marxist papers that would have been published during that time period.
I dug up old anti-war newsletters, student activist publications.
I looked hard because something must have happened.
There are multiple essays in Siege about the attack on the anti-war protesters.
James Mason recalls this as his favorite demonstration.
Years later, as he's writing Siege, as he's collecting his thoughts and formulating this strategy for white revolution, gassing those hippies in 1969 is one of his fondest memories.
And even when he's not describing that particular incident, he writes often of Franklin, praising him as a man of action and something others should aspire to.
He mentions him for the first time in November of 1980, just a few days after Franklin was arrested.
In that first essay about Franklin, Mason described the early days of their friendship, writing, quote, I mainly recall the time in November of 1969 when we decided to put the Reds of DC under siege during their massive treason orgy known as the moratorium against the Vietnam War effort.
It was Vaughan because of his non-fascist appearance who went into the high-rise new Moab headquarters on Vermont Avenue alone and caused the place to be evacuated three times using gas bombs without being caught.
No one then guessed that we might be reading about him 11 years hence in such a manner.
May his luck hold now.
A year later, in another essay, he described the same incident, again referring to Franklin using the name he'd known him by, Vaughan.
I recall the night one of the most important missions of the year was in jeopardy because some of the men chosen to go out on it were refusing to be accompanied by Vaughn as part of the team that attacked the new Moab headquarters in Washington, D.C.
I was forced to call each one up individually and beg and plead, shame and cajole until I could get them to come to their senses and perform their duty.
More than once, I was hung up on and had to dial them right back up.
In the end, while the rest of us provided escort and the backup, it was Vaughan who caused the place to be evacuated and closed.
The essay attributes both Franklin's success and the other members' wariness of him to the same thing.
He didn't fit in.
He didn't have a regulation haircut or a party uniform.
He wasn't playing by the rules.
And this is foundational to Mason's ideology.
Get out there and do terrorism.
Prioritize action over all else.
Action over organization, action over doctrine.
Get out there and do something.
Just break something.
Just kill someone.
Watching this long-haired weirdo throw tear gas grenades into an office building while the stormtroopers waited in the car seems to have laid the groundwork for the kind of terror Mason encouraged for decades.
Just get out there and do it.
But did it actually happen?
I can't prove it.
And normally that would lead me to believe he's making it up.
But for some reason, I think something had to have happened.
This seems too central to Mason's worldview to be made up.
And I did find one single newspaper article that does describe members of the National Socialist White People's Party storming into the new Moab offices the night before the march.
So something happened.
But that article describes Nazis who looked like Nazis.
Not one lone long-haired weirdo, but big guys in matching coats and short hair and swastika lapel pins.
And it doesn't mention a gas attack or an evacuation or shutting the building down or three incursions.
It just describes one instance of a couple of guys coming in, handing out flyers and intimidating some of the women before they were escorted out.
Now, I do have to leave open the possibility that I can't find an article about anti-war activists getting tear gassed because there are thousands of articles about the cops tear gassing that same group that same week.
The keywords are pulling up a lot of unrelated content.
So maybe it's there and it's just buried.
In that one article I did find, they actually name the student activist who firmly asked the Nazis to leave.
And he's still alive.
And I found him online.
So I think I'm going to write to him and ask him if he remembers this happening.
Fingers crossed.
But whether or not an 80-year-old man remembers getting tear gassed by a Nazi serial killer in 1969, we'll pick back up next week with a Nazi adrift, joining different hate groups throughout the 1970s before waking up one Christmas morning and deciding it was time to start his one-man race war.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.
You can email me at WeirdLookEysPodcast 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 Guy subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
I'm John Polk.
For years, I was the poster boy of the conversion therapy movement, the ex-gay who married an ex-lesbian and traveled the world telling my story of how I changed my sexuality from gay to straight.
You might have heard my story, but you've never heard the real story.
John has never been anything but gay, but he really tried hard not to be.
Listen to Atonement, the John Paul story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of wife would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Can you get someone to join your cult?
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.
Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming.
Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both?
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, hello, all my people.
What's up?
It's Questlove.
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with the one and only ASAP Rocky.
He reflects on his journey from Harlem roots to global icon status and discovering the hip-hop origin of his name.
The ledge was on the TV.
Rakim had the bucket hat Kango joint on past like, that's Rakim.
That's who you named after.
I just damn that.
Gotta swag.
But listen to the Questlove Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we've got some incredible guests like Kamale Nanjiani.
Let's start with your cat.
How is she?
She is not with us anymore.
She's a great, great, great way to start.
Maybe you will cry.
Ross Matthews.
You know what kids always say to me?
Are you a boy or a girl?
Oh my God.
All the time.
It's so funny.
I know.
So I try to butch it up for kids so they're not confused.
Yeah, but you're butching it up is basically like an angry woman.
Right?
No, I turned it to be Arthur.
Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.