In 1977, Joseph Paul Franklin started his three year killing spree, but he wasn't the only neo-nazi who murdered for the movement that summer.Sources:Sunshine, Spencer. (2024). Neo-Nazi terrorism and countercultural fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege. Taylor & Francis.Pierce, Kelvin. Sins of My Father, Growing Up with America's Most Dangerous White Supremacist. Independently Published, 2020Mel Ayton, Dark Soul of the South: The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin, Potomac Press, Inc., 2011Gardell, Mattias. “Lone Wolf Race Warriors and White Genocide.” Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108609760.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.2017.1419554Jeffrey Kaplan (2014) Mel Ayton. Dark Soul of the South: The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin , Terrorism and Political Violence, 26:5, 855-857See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life 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.
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.
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband Mike was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics.
And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
I'm Bowen Yang, and I'm Matt Rogers, and we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
Open your free iHeartRadio app.
Did we mention it's free?
Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone.
America is in crisis.
And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr.
It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget.
I'm Hans Charles, our menelik Lamoomba.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
before he left for work on valentine's day joe hicks set a small heart-shaped box of candy a bouquet of flowers and a pink greeting card on his wife's dresser He'd grown up dirt poor, and he was proud of the life he'd built for himself and his family.
His three children were grown now, with five children of their own between them.
Looking for Fred Cowen00:15:05
By all accounts, Joe loved working at Neptune Worldwide Moving.
He'd been there for 21 years, working his way up from loading the trucks to driving them.
And he loved his truck so much that he carried a photograph of it in his wallet.
He was dead before 8 a.m.
Fred Holmes and James Green were shot and killed too, all before anyone could even comprehend what was happening.
Fred Cowan shot his first three victims before he said a word that morning.
He'd already killed three of his coworkers when he came across a fourth.
He lowered the rifle and said, Get out of here.
Go home.
And tell my mother not to come.
Unlike the first three men Cowan had seen that morning, this man was white.
As he hunted for his intended target, a Jewish dispatcher named Norman Bing, Cowan shot and killed Pariyatharu Varghese, a recent immigrant from India, and fatally wounded Joe Russo.
When the police arrived, he shot and killed the first officer to try to approach the building.
He never did find Norman Bing.
The standoff lasted all day.
At noon, he demanded the police bring him some lunch, hot cocoa and potato salad.
A little before 3 p.m., he shot himself in the head.
In the aftermath of the shooting, reporters tried to figure out who this man had been.
His elementary school teacher said he was bright and well-behaved and that he had excellent penmanship.
He'd been a Boy Scout.
He was quiet.
His parents were good people.
He was only joking when he said he'd like to shoot up a synagogue.
It was just an odd idiosyncrasy that sometimes after a few drinks, he'd ask you to call him Reinhardt, so he could pretend that he was his hero, Reinhard Heydrich.
He had a swastika tattoo and a massive gun collection.
Neighbors said he kept to himself, but they sometimes saw him trudging off into the woods for target practice, wearing a Nazi stormtrooper uniform.
He'd been in the army briefly, but he was given a general discharge after being court-martialed twice.
His cousin said he'd always loved Hitler, but no one ever thought he'd do something like this.
A search of his room in the attic of his parents' house turned up thousands of dollars worth of authentic Nazi memorabilia, a large cache of weapons, posters of Hitler, and stacks of racist and anti-Semitic books and newspapers.
It's a story I've read plenty of times, and it would be perfectly at home in a newspaper in 2026.
But Fred Cowan died in 1977.
I'm Molly Conger, his weird little guys.
This isn't actually an episode about Fred Cowan.
There's not a lot to say.
Everything anyone ever committed to paper about him was about the day he died.
He took his own life seven hours into a police standoff after he carried out a mass shooting in his workplace.
Reading through the reporting about his final hours, it really does feel so uncomfortably modern.
It sounds exactly like the kind of crime that could happen today, next week, or last month.
You know, a guy who never had a girlfriend, joined the military because he had nothing better to do, loved Hitler, hated black people, hated Jewish people, and collected guns and Nazi memorabilia.
His neighbors say he's a nice guy.
The women who knew him say they were afraid of him.
And his parents just thought he was sick.
I've seen dozens of this exact guy.
But circling back to what we were talking about last time, about lone wolves.
Maybe Fred Cowan is the sort of mass shooter who is the only kind of person who could be realistically called the lone wolf, right?
I mean, he definitely acted alone.
Nobody told him to shoot his boss.
And that motivation is pretty personal.
He was angry at his dispatcher for suspending him over some disagreement at work.
He was looking for the guy who suspended him.
It's personal, not political.
It's a classic workplace rampage, right?
Maybe.
but he let his white co-workers leave.
He shot his black and Indian colleagues without saying a word to them as he moved through the building looking for his Jewish manager.
And the only white victims of that attack were the policeman and Joe Russo, a co-worker who was unfortunately just standing in the office when Cohen burst in already firing, thinking his manager would be in there.
And when Cowen's bedroom was searched, there mixed in with the boxes of ammunition and authentic Nazi SS helmets, they found a membership card.
He'd been a dues-paying member of a white supremacist organization called the National States Rights Party.
At his local bar, he was known for carrying around a stack of the party's newspaper, the Thunderbolt, and trying to convince other drinkers to take a copy.
Reached for comment, the group's founders said they'd never heard of him.
Ed Fields, a chiropractor and lifelong Klansman, repeatedly denied that Cowen could possibly have been a member of his organization.
When he was confronted with the existence of the membership card they'd mailed to him, Fields conceded that Cowan must have been a member at large and he certainly never attended a convention.
J.B. Stoner, the group's chairman and a man so racist even other neo-Nazis found him a bit abrasive, was even less forthcoming.
He claimed it was their policy not to comment on matters of membership.
And both men would do much the same dance a few years later when another member of their organization was implicated in mass murder targeting black and Jewish victims.
Like I said, this isn't an episode about Frederick Cowen.
We're still talking about Nazi serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin.
When we left off last time, it was 1969 and he was a young drifter living at the Nazi Party barracks in Virginia.
By the time he started killing eight years later in 1977, he had allegedly quit not only the National Socialist White People's Party, but he'd both joined and then quit the Ku Klux Klan and the National States Rights Party.
But the details are a little vague.
I did, as I typically do, quite a bit of reading about my weird little guy.
I read a biography that was written about him, and I browsed the news coverage in the court records related to his various trials.
I spent hours squinting my way through the blurry scans of his 500-page FBI file.
But I just couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing.
Mel Ayton's book about Franklin is well researched, don't get me wrong, and I don't think that he was so naive as to believe Joseph Paul Franklin was really a reliable narrator.
But for a lot of the story, Franklin is the only narrator.
He was a drifter.
He married twice, but he spent all of a couple of months living with either of his wives, and one of them didn't even know his real name.
His sisters were reasonably forthcoming with the FBI and occasionally with journalists, but they could only fill in so much.
Franklin spent a lot of time out there on his own, and we only had his word on what was going on inside of his mind during that three-year killing spree.
The killing started in 1977.
And in the years after he was caught in 1980, plenty of people asked him why he killed.
And they mostly seemed satisfied with his answer that he believed he was on a mission from God to save the white race and end race mixing and rid the world of black and Jewish people.
He was trying to start a race war.
But why?
What changed?
What pushed him all the way there?
He was macing hippies with his Nazi pals in Washington, D.C. in 1969.
So what was the progression of ideas and actions that connected that to what he would end up doing?
In the introduction to his biography of Franklin, Mel Ayton wrote, Franklin did not suddenly invent his mission.
He was tutored in it and provoked into it through the organizations he joined and the hate literature he studied.
And Aiton says he was intrigued by what was missing from existing accounts of Franklin's life.
And the book is a remarkably thorough biographical sketch of most of Franklin's life.
And that didn't exist before, and it's wonderful that we have it now.
But I don't think it actually answers the question raised by that original observation.
There's just a black hole where the details of his time in those groups should be.
It's hardly Aiton's fault.
I don't think his subject was interested in discussing that.
And when you're writing about a serial killer and the serial killer is willing to talk to you about his crimes, why would you risk the rapport you've built by pressing him for details about the precise circumstances of his resignation from the Ku Klux Klan?
So the book doesn't really answer my question.
Why did the killing start in 1977?
And why did he drive to Wisconsin, a state he had no clear connection to, to kill his first victims?
He spent close to a decade involved in organized, militant, neo-Nazi activity.
And then suddenly he just dropped off the radar and started hunting human beings.
This is the version of the truth that's usually presented as unquestionably reasonable.
And I was not satisfied with that.
Honestly, I was very frustrated.
I could tell you that there was a rerun last week because I wasn't feeling well and we had a bad ice storm and I spent a few days preparing for it and I kind of assumed we would lose power.
So maybe I didn't work as quickly as I could have because I figured I wouldn't be able to finish anyway if the power went out over the weekend and then it didn't.
That's true.
But I probably could have made it work if I hadn't been so damn frustrated at this hole in my timeline.
I always start with my timeline and I just couldn't work my way around this blank space.
There's no shortage of material about this man's life.
There's plenty of information about what he was doing once he started killing.
But there's just not a lot going on when it comes to what he was up to before that.
What was he doing the day he decided he was going to be a murderer?
A book about lone wolf terrorism written by a pair of FBI agents who helped catch the Unabomber describes Franklin as a clear example of the lone wolf terrorist.
But if you can't tell me what he was doing for the five years before those murders started, and the last place you do have him on paper before that is as a member of three different extremely violent white supremacist organizations, I just, I don't believe that.
That just can't be the answer.
You can't just hand wave away this mostly blank spot in his biography in the couple of years immediately before he murdered more than 20 people.
So I tried something a little different.
I have a handful of data points on the timeline during those years.
But in trying to fill in the gaps, instead of looking for him in the historical record, I tried to find what he would have been looking at during those years where I can't quite find him.
I read more than 100 issues of different neo-Nazi newsletters from the mid-1970s.
In particular, I was looking at what was going on in 1977 when Joseph Paul Franklin, just completely out of the blue and entirely on his own, happened to be one of four American neo-Nazis who tried to start the race war through mass murder.
Maybe there were others, but I found four.
First, there was Frederick Cowen.
He carried out a mass shooting at his workplace in New Rochelle, New York in February, targeting black and Jewish coworkers, killing six before taking his own life.
Two months later, his photo was on the cover of the National Socialist Bulletin, the newsletter for the National Socialist Movement.
That Nazi newsletter's editor, James Mason, praised Cowan's actions, though he lamented that Cowan hadn't actually managed to shoot his Jewish boss.
James Mason, for those of you making your own red string boards at home, is a name worth noting here.
He is best known now as the author of Siege, the collected essays of his pro-terrorism Nazi newsletter from the 1980s.
It became very popular again in the 2010s when it was required reading for new members of Adam Woffen.
In our current story, he's still a young man.
He was the teenager that Joseph Paul Franklin lived with for several months at the National Socialist White People's Party barracks in Virginia in 1969.
In the mid-70s, he served a brief stint in a workhouse for macing a young black girl in a Dairy Queen parking lot.
And when he got out, he co-founded his own Nazi group, the National Socialist Movement.
Raymond Schultz's Rise00:06:48
Mason later claimed in some of his personal correspondence that someone told him that Cowan had once visited the headquarters of the National Socialist White People's Party, but it is possible he made that up.
We do know for certain, though, from police records and from reporting at the time, that Cowan was a member of the National States' Rights Party at the time of the murders.
The party's chairman, J.B. Stoner, denied knowing Cowan and told reporters that his group didn't advocate violence and Cowan's actions had been entirely independent of the group.
Perhaps.
But Stoner's assurances of his organization's commitment to nonviolence ring a little hollow, considering he was about to be indicted for bombing a black church in Birmingham, which was just one of at least a dozen church and synagogue bombings he's believed to have carried out.
And even in his denial of involvement in Cowan's crimes, he offered no condemnation for them.
He told reporters he couldn't pass judgment on the man because he was likely provoked by his victims.
A few months after Cowen's massacre in New York, Raymond Schultz murdered a Jewish man in Chicago in May of 1977.
He killed Sidney Cohen using cyanide and then used cyanide to end his own life when police caught him.
After his death in the back of a police cruiser, they searched his home.
And in a basement police described as a bomb factory, they found a hit list with the names of other local Jews.
In that basement, full of bombs and poison, stacks of racist pamphlets and child sexual abuse material, they also found a homemade dungeon, a small, soundproof, escape-proof cell with walls eight inches thick.
It's not clear what it was for.
Raymond Schultz wasn't a name I'd seen before, but he was apparently quite well connected within the movement, having joined the American Nazi Party in 1960.
For several years, Schultz lived at the American Nazi Party office in Chicago and ran the party's bookstore.
At some point in the mid-60s, he was roommates with Matthias Kahl, a man who would eventually take over leadership of the American Nazi Party.
Later in the 60s, he left the American Nazi Party for the National States' Rights Party, and there too, he was more than a rank-and-file member.
I found an old issue of the party's newsletter, The Thunderbolt, with a photo of Schultz serving as master of ceremonies for a visit from the party's chairman, J.B. Stoner.
Later that summer, shortly after Schultz's death, the Nazi newsletter edited by James Mason praised both murderers.
Mason wrote that the group's publication served as a beacon for men who aspired to be like Schultz and Cowen.
In September of 1977 in Charlotte, North Carolina, members of the Jonesville African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church gathered for a Labor Day weekend picnic and softball game.
A 17-year-old boy in a Nazi uniform approached the black congregation on the lawn during the softball game and opened fire, killing the pitcher, a man in his 20s, and one spectator, a recently widowed young mother, and wounded two others before turning the gun on himself.
Officially, the police said Kenneth Wilson had no ties to any Nazi group.
Unofficially, the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the National Socialist Party claimed that the boy had applied for membership but hadn't finished the process.
Another member of the National Socialist Party said he recalled that the boy had been one of several high schoolers he'd met with, adding that the boy had ordered some material from their national office, though he denied attempting to recruit children.
In another issue of his newsletter published in October of 1977, James Mason again celebrated these murderers.
Now there were three.
Frederick Cowen, Raymond Schultz, and Kenneth Wilson.
They had killed black and Jewish people, and they had done so while very clearly representing their neo-Nazi beliefs.
They killed to send a message, and they hadn't been taken alive.
There was no one left to question, no case to solve, no networks to probe, just communities left in fear.
There is no defense from it.
It can't be stopped.
These killers cannot be detected.
There is no pattern that can be traced.
And it will continue and build, he wrote.
Each of those killers had acted alone.
But Mason was clear that he understood that there was a kind of symbiosis between these killers and the movements they sprang from, writing, quote, the task must be to coincide with these killings.
We must act in a manner to not only inspire these killings, but to complement them.
We must work in a duet with those forces we cannot control or anticipate.
When he wrote that essay in the fall of 1977, James Mason didn't include the fourth Nazi who had killed for the movement that year.
I mean, he couldn't have.
He didn't know about it yet.
But just a few weeks after he mailed out copies of his July newsletter, the one with the essay praising Cowan and Schultz and recognizing his own role as a beacon for other aspiring killers, his old friend Joseph Paul Franklin started killing too.
By the time the October newsletter went out, Franklin had already killed again.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life 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.
Proud Michael Epping Good00:02:55
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.
Welcome to the A Building.
I'm Hans Charles, our menel at Lumumba.
It's 1969.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America was out of breaking point.
Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.
In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Alma Mada, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.
It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
To be in what we really thought was a revolution.
I mean, people were dying.
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
This story is about protest.
It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics.
And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
I'm Bowen Yang, and I'm Matt Rogers, and we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
Open your free iHeartRadio app.
Did we mention it's free?
Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now.
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband Mike was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
So keep this secret.
For so many years, he's like a seasoned pro.
This is a story about the end of a marriage, but it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark.
You're a dangerous person who preys on vulnerable and trusting people.
You're proud of Michael Epping good.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
For Every Act00:06:35
Now, to be clear, I'm not trying to insinuate some direct connection between any of these four killers.
Or any communication between those killers and some movement leader who explicitly, directly...
and individually told them to carry out some specific act.
Aside from their friendship back in 1969, there's nothing that suggests that Joseph Paul Franklin and James Mason met again, or even that they communicated directly until Mason started writing Franklin in prison after his arrest.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about context.
The story of Joseph Paul Franklin's murder spree is meaningless without that.
A straightforward police procedural true crime type retelling of his crimes is certainly an interesting story.
It would hold your attention.
There's a lot of action.
But I don't think you'd learn anything from it.
That is, to me, the least interesting part of the story.
Because in that version of the story, he's just a lone wolf.
Everybody says so.
But I just don't buy that explanation.
If you're a longtime listener, you know this term riles me up.
I hate it.
I don't believe in lone wolves.
It doesn't mean anything.
No one can agree on what this means.
It originated in white power propaganda and it was adopted into the academic parlance without preserving that incredibly important context.
I would spend a lot less time railing against the use and abuse of the term if I didn't see it everywhere.
Every time a neo-Nazi builds a bomb or shoots a bunch of innocent people, well, he's a lone wolf.
The term emerged in Klan newsletters.
It was popularized by the leader of a Nazi skinhead network.
It migrated into academic papers by counterterrorism scholars.
And now I see it in the news and in court documents and being used by the average person to describe these unthinkable acts of violence.
And I get it.
I get why people like to say it.
It's very hard to comprehend, let alone explain, the kind of violent attack that gets labeled this way.
But my crusade against this term is about more than just the fact that it doesn't mean anything.
It's about more than just pedantry.
Even if academics could convene and settle once and for all on some kind of actual definition, I wouldn't want it.
Let them write whatever they need to in their conference papers, but we have to stop saying it.
I think we love to call a guy a lone wolf because it feels better to believe that.
It absolves us of the burden of finding out more or of taking any responsibility for the state of the world in which these terrible things are happening or of demanding any kind of accountability from law enforcement or the government officials or the groups these men came from.
Just a lone wolf.
Nothing anybody could have done, really.
Couldn't have seen it coming.
It's basically just kind of a freak accident at the end of the day, you know?
It lets us believe that as awful as these things are, they're just random.
Sometimes terrible things just happen.
Sometimes a guy just does something like that.
Nobody really knows why.
Maybe they're crazy.
Maybe some people are just born evil.
What can anybody do about that?
It lets you avoid asking if there's something more going on here, if there is some deeper problem.
If you just have lone wolves, maybe you don't have a Nazi problem or a racism problem.
Bad things just happen sometimes.
Really similar, but surely entirely unrelated bad things just keep happening.
And every time it happens, it's just a fluke.
When I was researching the history of cross burnings for an episode a while back, I read a surprising number of news stories from all over the South, spanning decades, that describe a pretty straightforward act of racial intimidation.
A cross was burned on someone's property, on a public roadway, or on a hillside where everyone in town could see it.
Sometimes there was even a note left or a Klan newsletter.
Even worse, maybe a little bit of dynamite left at the base.
And in small towns all over the South, newspaper editors printed some policeman's assurance that this is just some kind of joke because we don't have the Klan here.
This might look like the kind of thing a Klansman would do, but that's something that happens somewhere else.
We don't have racial terror here.
And I think that's the same thing we're doing when we slap the lone wolf label on one of these attacks to avoid asking scary follow-up questions.
This might look like part of a broader project to violently enforce white supremacy, but don't worry.
It was just some disturbed young man who came up with this on his own.
This isn't connected to anything.
You don't need to worry about it.
This has become sort of a central theme of the show.
This is sort of part of my mission at this point, that for every weird little guy who acted alone in his plan to carry out some kind of act of terror, I want to peel back a few layers and see how it connects.
Who was he talking to?
Who was he reading?
What inspired him?
Where did he learn to build that bomb?
Where did he get that gun?
Who was his mentor?
Where did he get those ideas?
Who was he hoping to impress?
It only takes one set of hands to build a pipe bomb and just one finger to pull a trigger.
But these things aren't random.
They don't just happen.
For every one man who just makes it happen, there is an entire network of people encouraging it to happen.
So despite the abundance of existing literature describing Joseph Paul Franklin as the archetypal lone wolf, what if I told you, for the hundredth time, there are no lone wolves.
Not really.
Networks Encouraging Tragedy00:02:40
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life 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.
Welcome to the A Building.
I'm Hans Charles, our mental icle Mumbai.
It's 1969.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America was at a breaking point.
Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.
In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Alma Mada, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.
It featured two prominent figures in Black history: Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
To be in what we really thought was a revolution.
I mean, people would die.
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
This story is about protest.
It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics.
And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
I'm Bowen Yang, and I'm Matt Rogers, and we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
Open your free iHeartRadio app.
Did we mention it's free?
Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now.
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Saskia's Awakening00:15:36
Her husband Mike was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
To keep this secret for so many years, he's like a seasoned pro.
This is a story about the end of a marriage, but it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark.
You're a dangerous person who preys on vulnerable and trusting people.
Your Predator Michael Lepping good.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
One of the intriguing facts about Franklin's life that I knew going into this was that William Luther Pierce, the author of the Turner Diaries, would later dedicate a book to Franklin.
Years after Franklin was caught, Pierce wrote his second and final novel, Hunter.
He denies basing the story on Franklin's crimes, of course, but he's a habitual liar.
Or he was.
He's very dead now.
It's almost silly that he would even bother lying about this.
Not only are some key elements of the plot direct retellings of Franklin's real-life crimes, he quite literally dedicated the book to the man.
His name is inside the cover in some editions.
It says, to Joseph Paul Franklin, the lone hunter who saw his duty as a white man and did what a responsible son of his race must do.
Now, his first book, The Turner Diaries, the book that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, is about working within an organization.
But Hunter is about a lone wolf.
The protagonist, Oscar Yeager, carries out a similar string of murders to those committed by Franklin in real life, targeting interracial couples, Jews, and then escalating to more high-profile targets.
Something that Franklin did attempt to do but did not succeed at.
From there, the fictional version drifts off into a convoluted plot involving an anti-Semitic FBI agent who blackmails the killer into helping him eliminate Jewish control of the FBI, but we can set that aside for now.
At the end of the book, the protagonist murders the FBI agent and decides to go back underground.
It ends with the line, time to do some more hunting.
The book wasn't published until 1989, although Pierce claims he wrote the first chapter in 1984.
So there's no indication here that he had personal knowledge of the crimes as they were happening.
By the time he started writing this, Franklin was in prison and the details of his crimes were readily available in the newspaper.
But dedicating it to him seems uncharacteristically sentimental, based on my knowledge of the man.
William Luther Pierce's son, Kelvin Pierce, wrote in his own memoir, Dad said he dedicated the book to him because, quote, he is the kind of person I would like to be.
But that quote has a citation.
It appears that this isn't something Kelvin is saying he heard his father say, but rather something his father is quoted as having said to his own biographer.
And Kelvin doesn't actually have the quote right in his book.
If you go to where Pierce actually said this to his biographer in the book Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds, Pierce said he identified with the novel's protagonist, Oscar Yeager, because he is the kind of person I would like to be.
So he's saying he would like to be Oscar Yeager, not Joseph Paul Franklin.
And this is said in the same conversation as his denial that Oscar Jaeger is based on Franklin.
So I wonder if Kelvin didn't actually make a mistake here.
He cited the quote down to the correct page number, so I know he read it.
I think he might be hinting that his dad is lying.
And it's clear to him that his father really did wish he could have been the one out there shooting interracial couples and black children.
So I have this black hole in my timeline, right?
Joseph Paul Franklin was an active member of the National Socialist White People's Party in 1969.
He's tear gassing hippies with James Mason.
And there's a few hazy scraps about his membership at the National States Rights Party in 1974.
He told Mel Ayton that he was only in the Klan for a couple of months in 1976, but I don't think he's right about the year.
And by the time he starts killing in 1977, he says he'd quit everything.
And after he's caught, no one claims him.
He's largely forgotten.
But the men who did remember him are pretty important figures.
James Mason mentions him throughout Siege, that collection of essays advocating for white revolution through terrorism.
William Luther Pierce dedicated an entire novel to him, a novel clearly intended to serve as an endorsement of Franklin's crimes and a handbook for recreating them.
He's not nobody.
And his actions were not his alone, even if he was alone when he did them.
I just feel like there's something missing here.
There's just not a lot of clear information about when and why he joined and then left each of these three organizations.
And the accounts of his life that even bother to address his membership in those organizations tend to paint his movement between them as indicative that he was not ideologically at home.
That he was joining and then quitting groups because he didn't fit in, or they weren't a good fit, or he wasn't welcome, or he couldn't get along, or he needed something different.
And some accounts claim that he was actually expelled from the National Socialist White People's Party, which I can't find any proof of.
One paper published in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence actually makes the claim that Franklin was kicked out of the National Socialist White People's Party for killing a dog.
And that's not true.
I mean, that is provably not true.
I can guarantee you this is false.
Because the dog in question was Gas Chamber.
The dog's name was Gas Chamber.
He was the mascot for the American Nazi Party in the early 60s.
And by all credible accounts, Gas Chamber was hit by a truck in 1963.
Franklin was in middle school in 63, and it would be several years before he showed up at the Nazi Party barracks in Virginia.
He couldn't have killed Gas Chamber.
The author seems to have mixed up which former member this rumor is about, because there were allegations that the dog had been strangled to death, but that rumor was about Dan Burros, the disgraced former member who later shot himself when the New York Times revealed his Jewish upbringing.
But again, those rumors don't surface until later when people are angry at Dan Burros.
At the time of Gas Chamber's unfortunate death, he was eulogized in the party newsletter, and his death really was an accident.
So there's information missing, and some of the information provided just isn't true.
Ayton's book relies on Franklin's own account, and he says he quit the National Socialist White People's Party because, quote, he began to see the Nazis as an organization that wasn't violent enough to assist him in what was quickly becoming his divine mission.
And he later quit both the Klan and the National States Rights Party because he felt the other members didn't take their ideology seriously and they were afraid to take action.
His time in all of these groups is implied to have been brief and of little consequence, that he left no mark there and he was a misfit.
People didn't remember him and the people that did said he wasn't important.
But I think this is part of why the origin of the term lone wolf is so important to keep in mind.
It was a term invented by white supremacists, by neo-Nazis, by these terrorists to distance themselves from the members of their organizations that they encourage to do acts of terrorism.
So that when they go out and do these things, you can say, that wasn't us, we don't know him.
So the fact that people are claiming they don't remember him, I think, is part of this overall narrative project rather than actual historical fact.
And I'll get a little bit more into the places where I was able to pin him down in these groups next week.
I started trying to fill in this timeline by working backwards, by reading the Nazi newsletters he would have been reading in the 70s.
His sister said that he was always a big fan of William Luther Pierce, which isn't surprising.
So he was probably a subscriber to Attack, the newspaper for Pierce's new organization, National Alliance.
And if he was reading ATT ⁇ CK in 1975, he was almost certainly following along with each new chapter of the Turner Diaries.
And maybe his old friendship with James Mason inspired him to subscribe to the paper Mason was editing, the National Socialist Bulletin.
Or maybe one of Mason's other projects like the National Socialist, The Stormer, or the White Workers Bulletin.
If he was feeling a little messy and he wanted to see some drama, maybe he was willing to pay a dollar to read the White Power Report, published by a faction that had split off during a feud with Mason.
Maybe he read Joseph Tomasi's short-lived National Socialist Review.
As a member of the National States' Rights Party, I know for a fact that he read the Thunderbolt religiously by reading the things he was reading, making sense of the world that he lived in, consuming the information that he would have been immersed in about the shifting landscape of organizations and leaders and the alliances and feuds between them and their fixations and the kind of violence they were encouraging and the kind of innuendo they were using,
his choices seem a lot less random.
In the summer of 1977, William Luther Pierce penned an article in Attack about a judge in Wisconsin.
He compared a recent ruling that the judge made to the kind of behavior that inspired the protagonist of the Turner Diaries to enact violent retribution.
A few weeks later, Joseph Paul Franklin committed his first murder.
He was on his way to that judge's home in Madison, Wisconsin, when he got distracted by a pair of teenage girls trying to hitchhike to the mall.
He picked the girls up, and after dropping them off at the mall, his mission to assassinate the judge just fell apart completely.
He was in a hurry to get back on the road, and he felt like the car in front of him in the parking lot was driving slowly on purpose, surely just to bother him.
So he honked.
And the other car pulled into a parking spot eventually.
And as he passed it, he saw the couple inside.
It was a young black man and his white, blonde girlfriend.
He was already having a very stressful day.
And now these race mixers are antagonizing him.
In his mind, at least.
And mixed-race couples are one of his least favorite things.
He has a documented history of getting into altercations with mixed-race couples.
So it seems likely that when the man started walking towards Franklin's car, it was because he was saying something to them.
He was probably shouting something gross.
And maybe on a different day, in a different circumstance, he would have just left it at shouted racial slurs.
Maybe he would have maced them.
He'd done that before.
But sitting there on the passenger seat was a stolen 357 Magnum, the gun he planned to use to kill the judge.
And if that man walked all the way over to the car to confront him, he would probably notice the bag full of cash in the back seat.
Franklin had committed a bank robbery a few days earlier.
And if he saw the cash, he would definitely see the box of explosives and he would probably call the police.
Franklin couldn't risk it.
He was there on a mission.
So he fired, hitting the man twice.
When he eventually confessed to this, it sounded like shooting the woman was just an afterthought.
In my frustrating quest to fill in the blanks in the timeline in Franklin's life, the pieces started to take the shape of a different sort of animal.
Not a lone wolf, but some kind of poorly trained dog that had escaped from the yard.
His choices weren't random.
They were just kind of poorly thought out.
He would later claim that he felt he'd been assigned this mission by God, but I think his inspiration was from somewhere a lot closer to home.
He wanted to be an assassin, and he ended up panicking in a mall parking lot.
He never did make it to the judge's house, but once he started killing, he didn't stop.
It turned out it was a hell of a lot easier to kill the enemies of the white race.
If you didn't worry too much about who died, look at the Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
Black History Month Podcast00:02:42
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.
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It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
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They gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
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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?
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Or both.
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband Mike was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics.
And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
I'm Bowen Yang, and I'm Matt Rogers, and we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
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Black history lives in our stories, our culture, and the conversations we still having today.
This Black History Month, the podcast I didn't know.
Maybe you didn't either, digs into the moments, perspectives, and experiences that don't always make the textbook.
Let me tell you about Garrett Morgan.
Bruh had to pretend he didn't even exist just to sell his own invention.
Listen to I didn't know.
Maybe you didn't either.
From the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or simply wherever you get your podcast.