William Luther Pierce and the novel Hunter dissect neo-Nazi ideology, tracing connections between Pierce, Joseph Paul Franklin, and the Order of the Solar Temple. The analysis reveals how Pierce's 1987 acquittal fueled his fictionalized revenge fantasies in Hunter, while questioning the removal of Franklin's dedication in 1998 due to conflicting timelines regarding the Rainbow Girls murders. Ultimately, the episode suggests Pierce may have inspired real-world violence rather than merely documenting it, challenging the narrative that he was solely a victim of FBI surveillance. [Automatically generated summary]
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This Women's History Month, the podcast, Keep It Positive Sweetie, celebrates the power of women choosing healing, purpose, and faith, even when life gets messy.
Love, it's not a destination.
You have to work on it every day.
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I have several conversations with God, and I know why it took 20 years.
To hear this and more, listen to Keep It Positive Sweetie on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's the new me, and it's the old them.
This Women's History Month, the podcast, If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power.
My like tunnel vision of like, I gotta achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us.
If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything.
Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be.
So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear?
I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to.
I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success.
Listening is a form of love.
Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at sounditouttogether.org.
That's sounditouttoget.org.
Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal.
CoolZone Media.
Doubt About Franklin's Motive00:14:29
It was raining in the suburbs outside of Kansas City on April 13th, 2014.
Mindy Corporin's youngest son had a lacrosse game that morning, so she was out the door early.
As she left, she told her oldest son she loved him and wished him luck.
Her oldest son, 14-year-old Reet Underwood, was auditioning for Casey Superstar, an American Idol-style competition for high schoolers in the Kansas City area.
Her father had volunteered to drive him to the audition.
William Corporin was a few months away from retiring as a family physician, but he always made time to spend with his grandchildren on the weekends.
When the weather took a turn for the worse and the lacrosse game was called off, Mindy thought she might still be able to catch Reet's audition.
She arrived at the Jewish Community Center just a few minutes after her son and father had.
But they'd never made it inside.
She saw her father's truck in the parking lot, doors hanging wide open in the rain.
Across town, Jim Lomano was waiting for his wife Terry to come home so they could attend the evening mass together for Palm Sunday.
Terry Lomano, an occupational therapist who worked with visually impaired toddlers, had lunch every Sunday with her mother at the village Shalone retirement home.
Jim was expecting Terry home any minute when the police knocked on his door to tell him she'd been killed.
Reit Underwood, William Corporin, and Terry Lomano were dead.
William Corporin and his grandson Reet were shot in the parking lot of the Jewish Community Center, and Terry was shot in the parking lot outside of her mother's nursing home.
The killer reeked of whiskey when the police caught up to him an hour later.
The shootings had both been outside of buildings that primarily served the Jewish community.
But none of the victims had actually been Jewish.
For a moment, perhaps, there was a sliver of doubt about the shooter's motive.
But sitting alone, handcuffed in the back seat of a police cruiser, 73-year-old Frasier Glenn Miller looked right into the news camera set up across the street and made his intentions clear.
Shouting just two words.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
We are still talking about a book.
Really, really we are.
This episode is the second half of our examination of Hunter, the 1989 novel by William Luther Pierce.
This episode isn't about Frasier Glenn Miller.
It isn't about the 2014 shootings in Overland Park, Kansas.
It's about Hunter, the novel that was dedicated to serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin.
I bring up Miller again here today, not just because that mass shooting he carried out in 2014 was on Joseph Paul Franklin's birthday, a few months after Franklin was executed, after years of them exchanging letters and phone calls.
Not just because he'd become obsessed with Franklin over those years they corresponded after Franklin was locked up.
I've told you that already.
I bring him up again today because he wasn't just some guy who happened to become pen pals with a prisoner in his old age.
We've already spent six episodes talking about Joseph Paul Franklin, and I'm sick of him.
Our discussion of the book dedicated to him and loosely based on his crimes doesn't actually merit much further discussion of him in particular.
But in order to truly get into the mind of the man who wrote that book, we have to understand a little bit more about his world, about what was going on around him when he wrote it.
Some parts of this timeline may sound familiar to you already, but I think the secret to understanding this terrible novel can only be found by overlaying the timelines I've created for several different key figures in the movement.
The book's author, William Luther Pierce, was the founder and leader of a neo-Nazi organization called National Alliance.
He got his start in the movement in the mid-1960s working for George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party, which is where he was in 1969 when he met future serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin and mentored a young James Mason, the future author of Siege.
After George Lincoln Rockwell was assassinated in 1967, Pierce struggled to get along with Rockwell's successor, Matthias Kahl.
And Pierce was one of several high-profile departures from the party in 1970.
He went to work with Willis Cardo of Liberty Lobby for a bit, advising him specifically on Cardo's National Youth Alliance organization.
And while working for Cardo, Pierce formed Youth for Wallace, an organization aimed to counter the influence of left-wing organizations on college campuses and mobilize young people to campaign for segregationist George Wallace.
Pierce and Cardo had a falling out before too long, as fascists always do, and Pierce kept National Youth Alliance as his own.
By 1974, he'd moved on, forming his own neo-Nazi group called National Alliance.
In the Joseph Paul Franklin episodes, I struggled a bit to piece together a clear and coherent timeline of Franklin's movements and affiliations in the mid-1970s.
He was very definitely a member of the National Socialist White People's Party from 1969 through late 1971, at least.
And remember, National Socialist White People's Party is the name that the American Nazi Party took on in the late 60s.
It's the same group, and you'll sometimes hear the names used interchangeably.
But in Franklin's life, there's a little bit of a blank spot in 1972, 1973.
But after he left the National Socialist White People's Party, he shows back up as a member of the National States Rights Party from 1973 through 1975.
And at some point in the mid-1970s, he was briefly a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
And he claims that he left all of these groups because they weren't enough for him.
They were full of fakers and snitches and posers, and he was a man of action.
And he'd outgrown them.
And he had to move on.
That's what he says.
And in many cases, all we have is his word.
Ed Fields and J.B. Stoner, the men who were in charge of the National States Rights Party in that time period, both claimed they barely knew the man.
But as we discussed in those episodes, there is significant evidence that that was a bald-faced lie.
And both Fields and Stoner knew Franklin quite well.
But I left something out of those episodes.
Mostly because it might be nothing.
I mean, it feels a little bit uncouth to just guess in public.
I feel naked without facts and proof.
But I haven't been able to get this off my mind since I read it a few weeks ago.
So I'll at least offer it to you and let you decide if you think it means anything.
See, I know I said last week, I'm going to start making an effort to spend, I mean, just maybe 5% less time researching.
I spend way too much time just browsing, collecting information I know I definitely will not need, even in the most tangential sixth degree context establishing rabbit hole kind of way.
It's my emotional support research.
I just like to have a global picture before I focus on the details.
I got to scale it back a little bit because I would love to have time for friends and family and a hobby and be able to carry on a conversation that isn't about a mass shooting, you know.
The problem is, sometimes I find clues down there.
When I'm rooting around way off the beaten path, wasting my own time, sometimes there's a shit-covered diamond.
You know?
And I'm not sure if this is one of those times.
But in the days that I spent trying and mostly failing to figure out exactly how, when, and why, Joseph Paul Franklin switched from one Nazi group to another in 1973, I did quite a bit of reading about the National States' Rights Party.
It's not that moving from the National Socialist White People's Party to the National States' Rights Party is particularly surprising.
I mean, it's not a huge ideological swing.
In fact, if we're looking at the mid-1970s, right, Matthias Kahl is the head of the National Socialist White People's Party, but in the late 60s, before he came to the American Nazi Party, he'd been on the board at the National States' Rights Party.
The groups were very similar, and there were a lot of guys who'd been members of both at one time or another.
They believed mostly the same things.
They just dressed differently.
But I just wanted to understand why Franklin would have moved from the DC suburbs down to Atlanta.
How did he so suddenly become so committed to a new group that he was willing to uproot his life and move to be closer to his new leader?
In whichever episode it was that we talked about this, I had to be satisfied with a question mark.
Joseph Paul Franklin said he met J.B. Stoner and Jerry Ray in 1973.
And that was that.
J.B. Stoner was the chairman of the National States Rights Party, and Jerry Ray, brother of James Earl Ray, the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr., was Stoner's shadow, his assistant, his bodyguard, whatever the day required.
And he says he met them in 1973.
And I had to just be satisfied with the possibility that maybe Franklin saw Stoner give a speech at some meeting or another.
Maybe that's how they met.
J.B. Stoner was always traveling around and speaking at various Nazi meetings for other Nazi groups, so it's a strong possibility.
But there is another possibility.
Maybe William Luther Pierce introduced them.
Do I have any direct evidence of this?
No, not at this time.
This is one of those times that I'm going out on a limb.
I'm not telling you a fact that I am certain of.
I'm just offering you an intriguing possibility.
Because here, in the absence of hard evidence, there are some funny little breadcrumbs.
I mean, if you have the time and the patience and the mental derangement necessary to browse thousands of pages of heavily redacted old FBI files, there are some breadcrumbs.
J.B. Stoner and William Luther Pierce were friends.
They weren't just colleagues who encountered each other often in shared environments within the movement.
They were friends.
and across files for these individual men and the files kept on their various organizations over decades.
There are scattered references to them being spotted at rallies together throughout the 1970s.
I mean tiny little rallies, rallies with six, seven, maybe a dozen participants.
I don't mean they were just coincidentally both at the same big movement event.
They were together.
They were at these events together.
Within those FBI files, I found evidence that the pair were spotted together outside the White House specifically half a dozen times.
And one FBI surveillance report notes that Pierce had been tasked with snapping photos of Stoner's speech to a crowd of just 10 supporters on one occasion.
Other FBI memos note that the pair maintained a close working relationship and that they shared things like membership and mailing lists with one another, which is actually a very big deal in their circles.
Those mailing lists are the most valuable thing a hate group leader owned.
Pierce and the Serial Bomber00:03:57
And curiously, in the FBI files concerning Pierce's organization, National Alliance, there were a series of almost entirely redacted memos in the summer of 1974.
The portions that aren't obscured indicate that there was an investigation at that time concerning civil rights violations, seditious conspiracy, insurrection, plots to overthrow the government, and civil disorder.
The kind of thing Pierce was always talking about, honestly, right?
Starting a race war, murdering enough black people to start a civil war.
That's what that's talking about.
But whatever it was that the FBI was looking into, specifically, amidst those pages of redactions, there is an appendix that explains what the National States Rights Party was, implying that that is relevant to the information that is redacted because they were perhaps involved.
The piece that really got me thinking that Pierce could be the missing link between Franklin and the National States Rights Party is a redacted portion of a memo in the National States Rights Party file from early 1973.
And the memo is about someone whose name is redacted, but that person is the head of the National Youth Alliance.
And in 1973, that's William Luther Pierce.
It can only be William Luther Pierce.
And this man, whose name is Redacted, has reportedly been very successful at recruiting high school-age boys into the movement, using the National Youth Alliance to bring young men into white supremacist activity with the express intention of preparing them for membership in J.B. Stoner's National States Rights Party.
And that's Pierce to a T.
I mean, we know he was doing that.
He was a chicken hawk who preyed on impressionable teenagers.
He never would stick his own neck out, but he had an eye for finding boys who would.
James Mason was still in high school when Pierce encouraged him to leave home in Ohio and come live at the Nazi Party barracks in Virginia.
David Duke was freshly 19 when he was invited to his first Nazi convention where he first met Pierce.
Joseph Tomasi was barely 18 the first time he pops up in Pierce's FBI file.
Pierce was using him to run radio addresses in California containing extremely explicit and detailed calls for terrorism and murder.
Joseph Paul Franklin was still a teenager when he met William Luther Pierce.
William Luther Pierce was good at this.
He was good at convincing impressionable young men to act out his fantasies.
And according to the FBI, after William Luther Pierce left the National Socialist White People's Party, the arrangement was he would recruit boys and pass the ones with the most potential off to his friend J.B. Stoner.
And if you'll recall from some of those episodes about Joseph Paul Franklin, J.B. Stoner was a serial bomber.
And that memo was written in 1973, which happens to be the same year that Joseph Paul Franklin disappeared from the National Socialist White People's Party in the DC suburbs, met J.B. Stoner, and moved to Atlanta to work directly for Stoner.
It's the new me and it's the old them.
The New Me, Old Them00:03:07
Everybody's on their journey and your journey is different today.
This Women's History Month, the podcast, If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power.
I've been coming out of where I came from.
I'm from the Bronx.
I think I grew up really poor.
I didn't know that then because I very much used my creativity to romanticize life.
And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you step back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it.
So a lot of my life was like built out of like survival to get to the next place.
Like my drive, my like tunnel vision of like, I gotta be better.
I gotta achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us.
If You Knew Better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything.
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I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I said, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
Without this program, I'm a guy.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the Ceno Show, and listen now.
Hey there, folks.
Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
And we know there is a lot of news coming at you these days from the war with Iran to the ongoing Epstein fallout, government shutdowns, high-profile trials, and what the hell is that Blake lively thing about anyway?
We are on it every day, all day.
Follow us, Amy and TJ, for news updates throughout the day.
Listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Passing Off Promising Prospects00:14:36
The fact that Pierce was in the business of passing off his most promising prospects to other movement leaders was news to me.
But it was perhaps not actually a secret.
We don't have to get all the way into the background here.
I will do some episodes about Pioneer Little Europe eventually.
But for now, suffice it to say: Pioneer Little Europe, or PLE, is the name for the general idea that while it may be too hard to actually form a white ethno-state, white supremacists can successfully move into very small towns in large enough numbers that they essentially create a whites-only community in which they are able to exert a certain amount of political control.
This was the principle behind the very strange saga of the Nazi takeover of the town of Leith, North Dakota.
A story for another day, I promise.
I only bring it up now as a way to introduce the man who is credited with shaping the idea of Pioneer Little Europe, a man named Hamilton Michael Barrett.
Barrett wrote a treatise on the topic.
Well, he called it a prospectus.
It is actually just an 85-page slog made up mostly of lightly edited posts he'd previously made on Stormfront.
And buried somewhere in Chapter 4, a chapter called My Favorite Pro-White Cults, he's writing about his own past, which included a period of membership in the National Socialist White People's Party, which is where he first met William Luther Pierce.
In the treatise, he writes: I eventually left the National Socialist White People's Party in 1970 when a major split occurred.
I was accompanied by the late Dr. William Pierce, who was the party's second in command, Robert Lloyd, who'd been third in command, and Pierce's secretary, Earl, for whom the Turner Diaries would eventually be named.
In some ways, the National Youth Alliance, which eventually became the National Alliance while I was there, was much closer to what I thought was the right approach.
But Earl, Lloyd, and myself all decided to leave when Dr. Pierce revealed that he was intent on publicly and privately encouraging our supporters, though never himself, into a high-risk lifestyle of revolutionary adventure.
This was an enormous disappointment to me, as I knew by then that only a conscious community would ever support anyone physically fighting for its existence.
I spoke to Pierce about this widely known dictum, and after realizing he was determined to generate martyrs anyway, I got out while there was still time to avoid any involvement in the unknown disaster that was surely to come.
And there it is again.
People close to Pierce all seem to agree, regardless of what he's telling his own biographer later, never mind the fact that he was never charged with, let alone convicted of a serious crime, or implicated in a conspiracy or satisfactorily linked to the actions of men in his orbit.
The people who are actually close to him are all saying, Yeah, in private, he talked a lot about terrorism.
In private, he fantasized about violence.
In private, he was telling people to do it.
And I went combing through H. Michael Barrett's old stormfront post, too.
There's more.
There's a lot of text that didn't make it into the prospectus.
He claims William Luther Pierce asked him to become a martyr.
I can't pin down exactly what year it was that Barrett became disillusioned with Pierce and they parted ways, but it had to have been in the late 1970s, after 75, at least, because Pierce didn't start writing the Turner Diaries until 1975.
And Barrett describes Pierce sending him out to do a little recon work to help with research for the book.
So the incident he's describing here had to have happened sometime in the latter portion of the mid-1970s.
And again, just grounding us in our broader timeline, remember that Joseph Paul Franklin started killing in 1977.
So in this undated incident, Barrett describes walking into Pierce's office one afternoon.
And Pierce says to him rather plainly, I need martyrs.
Barrett writes, quote, as Pierce presumed I'd be interested, he continued on about how he had a special understanding with the Reverend Butler of Aryan Nations.
Pierce was to locate the most committed people, noting all the sensitive inside business access that they had access to because it was on their membership application.
Then the Reverend Butler was to provide a role for them that didn't involve Pierce.
It didn't surprise me at all that he made this proposal.
And I know it was more than just the casual jest it was first couched as.
I was an idealist and had pretty much done absolutely everything asked of me in both the National Socialist White People's Party and the National Alliance.
So in the first half of the 1970s, the FBI knows that William Luther Pierce is recruiting young people and passing off the best prospects to J.B. Stoner.
In the latter half of the decade, one of his longtime associates says that he had the same arrangement with Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations.
So in both of these scenarios, he's sort of a terrorism talent scout.
He recruits these eager young Nazis, indoctrinates them, grooms them in some cases, and develops a sense for which ones have talent.
Which ones might be willing to do it.
And then he passes them off to someone else for the final preparation so his hands stay clean.
I've been reading a lot of his writing lately, and he's always writing about how his organization, National Alliance, was just about education, consciousness raising flyers, newsletters, not action.
And in Hunter, his novel, the character of Harry Keller, who is a version of Pierce, says the same thing, right?
The National League, the fictional group in the book, is about education.
It's about flyers.
It's about radio addresses, not action.
Pierce says in public, don't do what Earl Turner did.
Don't go off half-cocked.
Don't do anything.
And I guess that is a version of the truth.
He did not want his public-facing members to do anything.
He kept himself and the National Alliance at arm's length from the violence.
Robert Matthews had been a member of National Alliance for a few years, but Pierce claims Matthews left the group when he formed the Order.
So he's sort of air gapping the terror cells, right?
This is a separate thing from National Alliance.
It can't come back to him personally.
He's manufacturing the illusion of lone wolves.
Allegedly, I guess.
Like I said, there's no hard proof.
Not that I have anyway.
The FBI might have it.
All I have are breadcrumbs.
Possibilities.
The possibility exists here that it does mean something.
That in 1973, the FBI penned a memo noting that William Luther Pierce was recruiting and indoctrinating young men and funneling them into the National States Rights Party in 1973 was the same year that Joseph Paul Franklin, a man who'd known Pierce and worshipped him for years, joined that same organization.
But that's all just speculation.
You can decide if you think it means anything.
Coming back to our timeline, in 1975, William Luther Pierce started publishing one chapter at a time of what would become his first novel, The Turner Diaries.
In 1977, Joseph Paul Franklin started his three-year murder spree, ending with his arrest in 1980.
In 1983, William Luther Pierce encouraged a young protégé named Robert Matthews to give a speech at the annual National Alliance member convention.
And that speech led to the formation of the Order, a Nazi terror group modeled and named after the group in the Turner Diaries.
After the Order robbed a Brink's truck in the summer of 1984, William Luther Pierce was one of many recipients of stolen cash.
Members of the Order traveled the country handing out big bags of money to movement leaders.
That had been the plan all along, funding the movement, getting money into the hands of men who would use it to buy land and guns, bombs, and to train their followers for the coming race war.
Just like the book.
It's come up a handful of times in past episodes that William Luther Pierce used his portion of the stolen money to purchase over 300 acres of undeveloped land in Hillsboro, West Virginia.
I'm not sure if I've mentioned in the past that Fraser Glenn Miller was also a recipient of the Order's generosity.
His White Patriots Party in North Carolina received $200,000 and he immediately set about using that money to purchase weapons that had been stolen from Fort Bragg.
And remember from the Joseph Paul Franklin episodes that 1984 was the year that Franklin was on trial in Tennessee for a 1977 synagogue bombing.
At the end of that trial, he stood up and shocked the courtroom by giving a statement against the advice of his attorneys, confessing to the bombing.
That dramatic performance in the courtroom was just days before the Order's most daring robbery.
After Pierce received the stolen money from Matthews in the fall of 1984, he paid $95,000 in cash for the land that would become his compound in the mountains of West Virginia, and he moved out to the property in 1985.
The FBI records are a bit sparse.
Pierce chose well.
The location was very remote, making it incredibly difficult to surveil.
The nearby town was small and close-knit, which would make it nearly impossible to embed an undercover in the community.
Everybody would notice some strange new guy.
The FBI resorted to combing through the local landfill, trying to find bags of trash that had originated on the compound.
Invoices from contractors painted a troubling picture: electric fencing, bunkers, underground tunnels.
Like Miller, Pierce was preparing for a coming war.
If a war was coming, though, the Order wasn't going to be there for it.
By the end of 1984, the Order was finished.
Robert Matthews died in a house fire during a standoff with the FBI.
The group's members, as well as dozens of associates, were rounded up and charged with a wide variety of federal crimes for their roles in the group's year-long nationwide crime spree.
The model of white revolution laid out in the Turner Diaries was obviously a failure.
Robert Matthews might have imagined that he was Earl Turner, and both men did die a fiery death.
But Earl Turner crashed a plane armed with a nuclear bomb into the Pentagon, allowing the Order to succeed at taking over the world and eliminate all non-white people.
Robert Matthews burnt to a crisp because the FBI accidentally fired a flare into a crate of hand grenades that he was keeping in the living room.
The book wasn't real life.
Didn't work.
And it was in 1984 that Pierce claims he wrote the first chapter of his second book, Hunter.
He doesn't say why he started in 84, and another source puts the date at 83, but either way, he put the idea away for a few years, and he finished and published it in 1989.
You can never really know what's in a man's heart, but I suspect he returned to the project in 1988 in the aftermath of the Fort Smith sedition trial.
In 1988, 14 prominent white supremacists were acquitted at trial after nearly two months of testimony alleging a wider conspiracy related to the crimes of the Order, as well as some alleged plots to commit terrorist attacks involving members of the Covenant the Sword and the Arm of the Lord.
The defendants were big names in the movement: Klansman Louis Beam, the guy who popularized the term leaderless resistance.
Robert Miles, a Christian identity leader in Michigan who once conspired to bomb school buses back in his Klan days, Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations, David Lane, the guy who invented the 14 words, Richard Wayne Snell of the Covenant the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, who was eventually executed for murdering a state trooper.
Snell's execution was perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, April 19th, 1995.
Big Names in the Movement00:03:16
The same day as the Oklahoma City bombing.
It's the new me and it's the old them.
Everybody's on their journey.
And your journey is different today.
This Woman's History Month, the podcast, If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes, spotlights women who turn missteps into momentum and lessons into power.
I think coming out of where I came from, I'm from the Bronx.
I think I grew up really poor.
I didn't know that then because I very much used my creativity to romanticize life.
And I'm like, my mom did a really good job of like, you step back and you're like, whoa, we, I don't know how we made it.
A lot of my life was like built out of like survival to get to the next place.
Like my drive, my like tunnel vision of like, I gotta be better.
I gotta achieve this was off the strengths of like, I want to make a better life for us.
If you knew better brings real talk from women who've lived it, unpacking career pivots, relationship lessons, and the mindset shifts that changed everything.
Listen to If You Knew Better with Amber Grimes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be.
So we asked kids, What do you want your parents to hear?
I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to.
I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success.
Listening is a form of love.
Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at soundedouttogether.org.
That's sounditouttogether.org.
Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
And without this program, I'm going to die.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the Ceno Show, and listen now.
This is Amy Roebach, alongside TJ Holmes from the Amy and TJ podcast.
And there is so much news, information, commentary coming at you all day and from all over the place.
What's fact, what's fake, and sometimes what the F.
So let's cut the crap, okay?
Follow the Amy and TJ podcast, a one-stop news and pop culture shop to get you caught up and on with your day.
And listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Misconceptions About Cooperation00:15:06
The rest of those 14 defendants are assorted associates of either the Order or the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord.
But William Luther Pierce isn't on that list.
William Luther Pierce was not charged in this case, alleging a larger conspiracy surrounding the crimes of the Order.
He was investigated, but not indicted, not charged, not put on trial.
The FBI subpoenaed his bank records in 1985, presumably looking for evidence of that big pile of cash he'd received from Robert Matthews.
But somehow, he wasn't on the list when the indictments came down in April of 1987.
A memo in his FBI file shows that a few months later, FBI headquarters denied a request from the Pittsburgh Field Office to continue their investigation into him.
They were denied permission to continue investigating what was going on at his compound.
And his file went dormant for a while.
At the Fort Smith trial, the government's case relied heavily on a pair of cooperating witnesses.
One of the men who'd gotten a lot of money from the order's robbery had agreed to turn state's witness in exchange for a sweetheart deal on some criminal charges of his own.
Frasier Glenn Miller sang like a bird on the stand in exchange for a reduced sentence on some weapons charges.
He served a few years and was released with a new identity into the witness protection program.
The government also relied on cooperative testimony from Jim Ellison, the leader of the Covenant the Sword and the Arm of the Lord.
But it wasn't enough.
Weeks of testimony from inside the movement.
People testifying about stolen money, plans to commit acts of terrorism, proof that money had changed hands and been used to purchase weapons.
None of it mattered.
The jury didn't buy it.
It was too far-fetched.
There can't be a nationwide network of white supremacists hell-bent on starting a race war.
That's crazy.
Besides, why should we believe the testimony of two guys who were only testifying here to save their own skin?
The jury just couldn't believe it.
So the Nazis won.
All of the defendants at the Fort Smith sedition trial were acquitted.
But it was a hollow kind of victory.
I mean, half of them were already in prison anyway.
And the leaders who'd gotten through the experience with their freedom intact had been battered by it.
After the trial, a reporter asked Robert Miles what impact the case had had on the white supremacist movement.
And Miles answered, What movement?
What's left after this?
The jury hadn't convicted them, but the FBI had gone through their underwear drawers, metaphorically speaking.
And literally, probably, come to think of it.
But their bank records, their mail, their trash, everything had been dragged out into the open.
And men they trusted had testified against them.
It makes sense to think that William Luther Pierce, even though he wasn't charged, would have been shaken by the case.
So maybe that's why he sat down to finish his second novel.
The Turner Diaries had been about the power of an organization.
Members of the order working together fought the system and they brought about the revolution.
They won.
But now, in the wake of this real-life experience, after watching this trial, organizations are obviously dangerous, right?
It was the fact that these men were organized, they had membership organizations, they had so many associates, that was what hurt them.
So Hunter abandons the idea of the organization.
It is an ode to the fantasy of unchecked violence.
And if you'll indulge me for one more brief excursion into the realm of speculation, positioning all of these bits and pieces of historical context together like this, I started to wonder if there's another element of the plot of Hunter that was autobiographical.
Last week, we talked about the broad strokes of the plot of Hunter and about how Pierce really isn't that creative.
A lot of the elements of the novel are pulled from his own real life, right?
The character of Kevin Linden is obviously based on his real-life right-hand man, Kevin Strome.
The protagonist Oscar Jaeger is carrying out crimes that share very specific details with the real-life crimes of Joseph Paul Franklin.
But also, big chunks of his fictional biography match real life details about Pierce.
The character Harry Keller leads an organization called the National League, and that's obviously National Alliance.
The way Harry Keller talks about National League is identical to the way Pierce talks about National Alliance in his own newsletters.
And interestingly, it seems like both Oscar Jaeger and Harry Keller are Pierce.
He wrote himself into both of these characters.
And when those two characters argue with each other about the value of running a technically legal neo-Nazi organization that keeps crime at arm's length, he's using these two characters to externalize his own inner turmoil.
They're both him and he is at war with himself.
Oscar Jaeger is in love with a beautiful mathematician and is anxious about sharing the fullness of his racist ideology and terrorist activities with her.
But in the book, he ultimately does share this with her and she accepts him.
Harry Keller, on the other hand, is happily married to a woman who works in the National League office.
And this is Pierce again working out his own inner turmoil.
Jaeger's relationship with Adelaide is an impossible fantasy version of Pierce's first marriage.
His real first wife, a math professor, was never involved in the movement, and he started writing the book shortly after leaving her.
Oscar Jaeger's fear that Adelaide could never understand his mission proved unnecessary and Adelaide stayed with him.
And perhaps part of Pierce wishes that could have been true.
So these two characters sort of represent this split within himself, right?
Oscar Jaeger is successfully able to continue this relationship with the woman that represents Pierce's first wife.
And Harry Keller, the other half of this split version of Pierce, is married to the secretary at National League.
The woman Pierce left his first wife for was his secretary at National Alliance.
And by the time the book was finished, that woman had left him too because she didn't want to move out to a compound in the mountains.
So Keller and Jaeger are living different versions of Pierce's own fantasies.
There's fiction in there, absolutely.
I mean, it gets pretty far-fetched when it comes to the murders and the bombings that the protagonist is able to pull off.
And the stuff about black people across the country secretly conspiring to rise up simultaneously one day and slit the throats of random white people, that's made up.
But there is a powerful thread of autobiography and semi-autobiographical wish fulfillment.
Pierce wishes he could have been like Joseph Paul Franklin.
And that's why he made the Franklin character an idealized version of himself.
We talked about that.
So if the book's protagonist is a wish fulfillment version of reality, what if the book's antagonist has some basis in reality too?
I didn't get too deep into the plot last week, but a few weeks into Oscar Jaeger's murder spree, an FBI agent solves the case.
Instead of arresting Jaeger, Agent William Ryan extorts him, using Jaeger to carry out assassinations of his choosing.
At the end of the novel, Jaeger has finally had enough and he kills the agent, thus allowing him to return to his chosen life of murdering interracial couples and Jews at random.
I'm not saying that's specifically based in reality, not literally.
But if the novel's two main characters are manifestations of Pierce's psychic turmoil about his own relationships, the way he runs his organization, his desire for violence, is it possible that the struggle between his self-insert character of Oscar Jaeger and what is essentially a highly dramatized, fictionalized FBI handler?
Is it possible that has some connection to something he's struggling with in real life?
Right, I don't mean I think it's possible there was a real-life agent William Ryan who was literally extorting Pierce into committing murders for him.
That's fiction.
But what if this is a highly dramatized, fictionalized psychodrama of sorts representative of his feelings of impotence and being controlled by an FBI handler?
The character of the FBI agent doesn't appear in the first chapter, the chapter written in 1984, but he dominates the rest of the novel.
A novel Pierce wrote in 1988, shortly after the FBI closed their investigation into him, and the decision was made not to charge him in connection with the alleged conspiracy involving the crimes of the Order.
The Order, remember, was based on a novel he wrote.
It was started by a man he mentored.
The original call to arms for the group was made in a speech he encouraged Robert Matthews to give and it was given at the annual member conference for Pierce's organization.
He paid cash for nearly 400 acres of land weeks after meeting with Matthews, weeks after Matthews robbed a brinkstruck.
It doesn't actually make any sense at all that Pierce was not indicted with the others in 1987.
But that's all there is.
Just breadcrumbs.
Just unanswered questions.
All I can offer you is the timeline.
And I pulled Fraser Glenn Miller back into the story to illustrate a particular point.
Cooperating with the U.S. government does not mean he gave up his commitment to the movement.
I mean, he didn't care if he wrecked the movement, if it meant saving his own skin, sure, but he still believed all the same things.
He didn't change his mind about anything.
And it didn't mean the government had any real control over him long term.
Not necessarily.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what it means when someone cooperates.
All too often, it's a man who isn't as smart as he thinks he is, who thinks he can win coming and going.
He thinks he can get what he needs from the government without compromising his values too much.
He thinks he can use the state as both a sword and a shield, feeding them just enough to keep them off his back and himself out of trouble, and maybe take out some of his rivals.
Miller nearly put half the leaders in the movement in prison just to shave a few years off his own sentence.
But in his old age, he was still so committed to Joseph Paul Franklin's vision of a race war that he tried to finish what Franklin started.
And it's easy to imagine he's not the only man who ever found himself in that position, right?
Cooperating with the government that you are so dedicated to overthrowing.
It's interesting to think about.
It reminds me of an FBI memo I read back in 2024 when I was researching the first episode of this show.
After William Luther Pierce died in 2002, there was a lot of infighting about who would take over leadership of National Alliance.
And apparently, the FBI was very worried about his absence.
That if the group splintered, if they did not have the kind of central leadership Pierce had provided, that there would be terrorist attacks.
They no longer had the kind of inside sourcing they'd once had within the group.
If Pierce was occasionally slipping information to the feds about his own members, it wouldn't be surprising.
He would have learned that from his own mentor, George Lincoln Rockwell.
Rockwell wrote directly to J. Edgar Hoover on multiple occasions to provide the names of members he no longer wanted around.
I don't know.
It's a little thin.
But the way Pierce writes about Oscar Jaeger's battle of wills with Agent Ryan and the immense satisfaction in Jaeger's final triumph over the agent when he kills him.
It has the same sort of wish fulfillment energy I feel in his descriptions of the idealized version of his own life elsewhere in the book, as if he were imagining how satisfying it would be to be rid of the agent who was restricting his ability to run his Nazi activities his own way.
I don't know.
It's just a feeling.
I'll keep thinking about it.
And rounding out our timeline, we arrive in the late 90s.
Removing the Dedication Page00:06:28
It was actually very difficult to track down exactly when William Luther Pierce removed the dedication page from the novel.
Some sources just say it was later removed, but they don't say when.
Some sources say it was absent in the first edition and added later, which is not correct.
Other sources don't mention any discrepancy at all between editions of the book.
I had to look in some very weird places to find multiple scans of different editions of this book, but I can now say with confidence that Hunter was printed for the first time in 1989.
And a second printing of the first edition was done in spring of 1994.
And both printings of the first edition bear the dedication page to Joseph Paul Franklin.
The second edition, printed in 1998, is the first time the dedication page was gone from the text.
So for nine years, copies of Hunter had a dedication to Joseph Paul Franklin.
In 1998, there's no dedication.
And I found no explanation for this anywhere, not in any book or academic article.
But I did read a lot of Nazi forum posts.
In 2016, in a thread started by a man who'd taken it upon himself to create an audiobook of Hunter, an old friend of Pierce's weighed in on the issue.
Fred Streed actually died a couple of weeks ago, so I can't ask him about it.
But he was very close to Pierce.
He was on the board at National Alliance and he lived on the compound for more than a decade.
When Pierce died in 2002, Streed was the executor of his will.
So back in 2016, he responded to a poster who asked about the dedication.
He wrote, quote, the problem for Dr. Pierce was that JPF was confessing to murders he did not commit, including the Rainbow Girls.
So he removed the dedication and later printings.
There were several copies on hand that still had the dedication, and Dr. Pierce instructed the National Vanguard book staff to remove the dedication page by cutting it out with box cutters.
The Rainbow Girls here refers to Vicki Durian and Nancy Santamero, the two young white women Franklin killed in West Virginia in the summer of 1980.
They were hitchhiking to something called the Rainbow Gathering when he picked them up.
And Fred Streed made several other posts about this issue in that thread.
But the problem with what Streed is saying is it doesn't make sense.
Franklin had confessed to those murders in particular plenty of times.
He confessed to them for the first time in 1984.
So Streed is framing this as Pierce becoming exasperated in 1998 that Franklin is confessing to more murders simply to delay his execution, right?
This is a cowardly thing for him to do.
And he's upset that Franklin would falsely confess to the unacceptable act of murdering white women, right?
That you're undermining the cause by confessing to something so terrible as murdering a white woman.
But again, Franklin confessed to those murders for the first time in 1984, before Hunter was even published.
So if that was the problem, it never would have had the dedication.
And it's not just to delay his death sentence because the first time he confessed to those murders was 13 years before he was sentenced to death.
And these weren't the only white women he'd confessed to murdering.
And Pierce doesn't seem to have taken issue with Franklin's confessions to killing Rebecca Bergstrom or Mercedes Masters.
Just the Rainbow Girls.
And it didn't become a problem until 1998.
I suspect it had something to do with the fact that those murders took place in Pocahontas County.
That's the same county where Pierce was, by 1998, living in his big old Nazi compound.
He hadn't lived there in 1980 when the murders happened, right?
He wasn't there.
He didn't have anything directly to do with those murders.
That's not what I'm saying.
But in the 90s, when another man was falsely convicted for those murders and he was trying to get a new trial, and Joseph Paul Franklin was confessing to them again, and he was getting deposed, and he was being brought to court about those murders, and the man who was falsely convicted of them was about to get a new trial, and the murders are back in the news, and it's a big local news story in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.
Now it's a problem.
Now Pierce is upset that Franklin is drawing attention to the murders he'd committed so close to the compound.
I don't think William Luther Pierce was so foolish as to think he could sever their connection or avoid scrutiny about their relationship just by cutting out the dedication page.
I think he was an emotionally immature man who was angry that he could no longer control the killer he'd helped create.
He didn't want to be embarrassed by his creation.
He forced the staff on his Nazi compound to cut Joseph Paul Franklin's name out of his book with box cutters.
And most copies of the book you'll find today don't have the dedication page.
Until his death, Pierce would insist to anyone who asked that Hunter was absolutely not at all.
Based on the real-life crimes of Joseph Paul Franklin, and he simply did not want to discuss it.
And I knew that was a lie when I started writing this mini-series two months ago.
We all knew all along that he'd been inspired by Franklin's crimes.
Now, though, now I wonder if he was the one who inspired those crimes in the first place.
The Lie About Hunter00:02:51
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 WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
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It's the new me and it's the old them.
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The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be.
So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear?
I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to.
I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success.
Listening is a form of love.
Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at soundedouttoget.org.