Molly Conger reveals that the fictional Earl Turner from The Turner Diaries was based on real American Nazi Earl Woosley Thomas Jr., who died in Maryland in 2023. Thomas, a former National Alliance co-founder and pseudonymous publisher of Holocaust denial works, allegedly sprayed red paint on civil rights activists in 1965 before leaving the party with William Luther Pierce in 1970. Despite his federal employment and literary ties to extremism, Thomas remained obscure until now, proving that even radical fiction often mirrors forgotten real-life figures. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world.
I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real world cafe right here in New York City.
There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.
Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you.
Anyone can now be an entrepreneur.
Anyone can build an app, and it's very empowering.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
It may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're trying to keep up with everything happening on and off the court, we've got you covered on the podcast, Flagrant and Funny.
You want to start with the first version for the Big Ten Coach of the Year?
Oh, what are you doing?
Would you like to ask me?
You're a Spartan.
Is that what I'm getting?
Exactly.
So whether your bracket is busted or you just want the real talk on what's happening during the tournament, open your free iHeartRadio app, search Flagrant and Funny with Carrie Champion and Jamal Hill and listen now.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeartWomen's Sports.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Rancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All Zone Media.
Love Trapped: The Real Earl00:12:20
We are moving on this week.
I swear.
This week's regular episode isn't about Joseph Paul Franklin or William Luther Pierce or the Turner Diaries or any of that.
I promise.
We're done with that for now.
But before we leave them behind, I just had to tell you one more thing.
Just a quick note.
Earl Turner was a real guy.
Kind of, anyway.
Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building trying to imitate Earl Turner.
Robert Matthews formed the order in an effort to bring the novel's events to life.
But before any of that, before the book was published, there was a real Earl.
William Luther Pierce named almost every character in his two novels after people he knew in real life.
And Earl Turner was no exception.
I'd always read that Earl was the name of his secretary in the early National Alliance days, but that's all anyone ever said.
Earl who?
Surely, there's an answer to this question.
The name turned out to be not that hard to find.
although the man himself has proven to be a little more elusive.
His name was Earl Woosley Thomas Jr.
He died in Maryland in 2023, just a few months shy of his 80th birthday.
Earl joined the American Nazi Party in the 1960s, when he was a young man in his 20s.
I couldn't tell you exactly what year he joined, but I suspect he was very deeply involved by 1965.
A story shared by one of his old associates describes an incident in which Earl and another stormtrooper were arrested for spraying red paint on some anti-war activists, but the charges were later dropped.
It doesn't say when this happened or where or who was sprayed, but that is a significant number of specific details, right?
Two arrested, charges dropped, red paint, anti-war protest.
And I found one incident that matches those details.
It was in August of 1965.
Newspaper accounts don't actually name the two Nazis who were arrested, and neither does the issue of Stormtrooper magazine that describes the incident.
But the men who were soaked in paint are actually very famous.
Labor lawyer Staughton Lind, student nonviolent coordinating committee leader Bob Moses, and pacifist activist David Dellinger.
I suppose it is possible that Earl threw paint on a different pacifist on some other day, but that was the only story I found that fit.
Later on in his career as a Nazi, Earl was one of several longtime members who left the organization with William Luther Pierce in 1970, after his big falling out with Matthias Kahl, the man who took over the party after George Lincoln Rockwell's death.
Between accounts from former members and references in FBI files, it looks like Earl worked for William Luther Pierce for a few years after that, following him from the National Socialist White People's Party to the National Youth Alliance and staying on with Pierce as he founded the National Alliance in 1974.
H. Michael Barrett, Earl's roommate from his American Nazi Party days, has written on several occasions that Earl, quote, got out of politics after that.
That's not entirely true, but I'm still working on nailing down the specifics of exactly how terribly untrue that is.
But this old Nazi roommate of Earl's did supply, by way of his long online posting history, some of the details I needed to confirm other things about Earl, like his career in publishing.
Earl W. Thomas Jr. is the American copyright holder on two English translations of works by the infamous French Holocaust denier Paul Rossignier.
Under the pseudonym Wayland Smith, he holds a copyright for a text called Richard Wagner, Alberich, Loki, and the Jews.
I don't know exactly what that is, but a copy of it is held in a collection called Anti-Semitica at the University of Florida Special Collections Library, so we can guess.
The pseudonym Wayland Smith is obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek.
It's a reference to an unfinished opera libretto by Wagner based on the Germanic folk legend of Weyland the Blacksmith.
Earl's publishing company, Bibliophile Legion Books, published one of his own books, too.
An out-of-print text called The History of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in Postage Stamps and Postal Stationery.
It sounds thrilling, and I did try to find a copy, but I came up empty.
All I found were some old Usenet posts in a group for people who collect postage stamps from Nazi Germany, and they were complaining that the book is impossible to find.
Curiously, in an interview given by Barrett, that old roommate of Earl's, Earl is described as a federal employee.
I know he was in the Air Force in the early 60s.
I doubt he stayed on in the military.
But if he moved to the DC suburbs, maybe he did work for the federal government.
I don't know what kind of work he did or for how long, or if H. Michael Barrett is even telling the truth here.
But if Earl worked for the government, that would explain why his name is completely absent from old party newsletters.
I mean, if he was an original card-carrying member of Rockwell's American Nazi Party and he'd been arrested in service of the party, it is odd that his name never shows up in an issue of Stormtrooper magazine.
I couldn't find a trace of him.
If he were trying to stay off his employer's radar, though, that makes a little more sense.
And that might be why it's been such an uphill battle to find much of anything about who Earl Woosley Thomas Jr. was, outside of his filings with the U.S. Copyright Office.
He's a bit of a ghost.
According to H. Michael Barrett, though, Earl loved Bruce Lee movies.
The only record he could remember Earl buying during the years they lived together was Simon and Garfunkel.
And Earl loved tuna casserole.
He loved it so much that Barrett could recite Earl's recipe from memory even decades later.
He apparently preferred his canned tuna packed in oil, not water.
There are a lot of blank spots in the notes I've started for Earl.
I'll probably come back to him one of these days.
Maybe there are some clues in the novel he wrote.
Back in the 1970s, William Luther Pierce borrowed Earl's name for the protagonist of the Turner Diaries, a novel Pierce published under a pseudonym.
And just two years before Earl Thomas died, he published a novel of his own under a pseudonym.
And I'm waiting for my copy to come in the mail.
Just a quick announcement before you go.
I'm planning on doing another QA episode soon.
Hopefully in the first week of May, so I can take a few days off to celebrate my first wedding anniversary.
You guys were so patient with me last year.
You endured two reruns in a row while I got married and took my honeymoon.
I don't plan on making a big deal out of it every year, don't worry.
It's just kind of special the first time you have an anniversary, you know?
I don't intend to make you listen to a rerun this time around, but a fun little QA episode gives me a little breathing room, and you guys always have so many more questions that I know what to do with, and some of them are really fun.
So you can make your way on over to the Weird Little Guys subreddit and add your question to the QA thread that I'll set up over there.
Or you can email me your questions directly at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.
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.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world.
I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real-world cafe right here in New York City.
There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you.
Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work for you.
Anyone can now be an entrepreneur.
Anyone can build an app, and it's very empowering.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're trying to keep up with everything happening on and off the court, we've got you covered on the podcast, Flagrant and Funny.
You want to start with the first version for the Big Tier Coach of the Year?
Oh, what?
Would you like to shoot a shot?
You're a Spartan.
Is that what I'm saying?
Exactly.
So whether your bracket is busted or you just want the real talk on what's happening during the tournament, open your free iHeartRadio app, search Flagrant and Funny with Carrie Champion and Jamal Hill and listen now.
Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeartWomen's Sports.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.