Molly Conger celebrates her anniversary with a unique Corazon Cakes dessert while addressing listener queries about her surname and favorite 32-ounce Ball jar. She notably shares a Nazi-era tuna casserole recipe from Earl Thomas, then decodes the fascist "suits and boots" strategy via Nick Griffin's 1997 essay. Finally, Conger details her seven-year campaign using Virginia's FOIA to force weekly Charlottesville City Council emails, framing this bureaucratic nuisance as her enduring civic contribution. Ultimately, the episode blends personal trivia with sharp political analysis, revealing how mundane habits intersect with extreme ideologies and persistent local activism. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Wedding Anniversary Cake00:06:43
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to the May 2026 question and answer episode of Weird Little Guys.
Today, I'll be answering questions you all sent in to me via email or on the show's subreddit.
This is a special treat for me because it gives me a little extra time this week to take a couple of days off to celebrate my first wedding anniversary.
Some of you will probably skip this episode, no hard feelings.
But if your listener emails and the post in the subreddit are any indication, a lot of you are profoundly curious to hear me describe in excruciating detail what it's like to look up old court records, as if you're not getting enough of that in the regular episodes.
I'm mostly kidding.
We're actually going to talk about a Nazi's tuna casserole recipe.
You guys asked a lot of really thoughtful questions, some about the show, a lot about me.
And some questions about sort of the process of making the show.
So, gonna give the people what they want.
As I was looking back at my spreadsheet of past episodes, it looks like this is the third QA episode as we approach the two year mark of the show's history.
The first one was actually around this time last year, actually, because it was the week before my wedding and they didn't quite have the situation under control.
I ended up not bothering with that seating chart I was so worried about.
People sat wherever they wanted.
And you know what?
It was fine.
The servers found my one vegan guest.
Most of the people there knew each other.
The ASL interpreter knew who she was signing for.
It was fine.
Maybe there's some kind of lesson to be learned there.
I don't know.
I don't plan on having any more weddings.
So, on to your questions.
We'll get some of the easy ones out of the way first.
I mentioned that I'm doing this question and answer episode because I'm going to be busy eating cake on the day that I would normally be trying to finish writing the episode.
And one of you asked, What kind of cake?
That is such a good question, actually.
It's a fun fetty cake with a cookie dough filling.
We're getting a reproduction of the top layer of our wedding cake from the original baker.
This will be meaningless to almost everyone, but if you live anywhere in central Virginia, And someone you care about doesn't eat gluten, you need to hear this.
Corazon cakes in Richmond is the way to go.
I mean, wedding cakes usually suck, let's be honest.
They don't taste good, they cost too much money, and gluten free cakes are even worse.
So if you combine the two, you're looking at spending a month's rent to get something that tastes like sawdust and circus peanuts.
But that is not what we got at all.
It was so good.
I almost never recommend a product or a service or a brand.
I mean, I'm not an influencer, I'm a serious journalist or whatever.
But Caitlin is such a sweetheart, and I have been thinking about that cake for a full year.
It was so good.
I'm even gonna get a birthday cake from her this year, too.
So, the cake we're recreating is, like I said, funfetti flavored with this cookie dough filling between the layers.
And I should take this moment to publicly apologize to my husband for telling him that this was a bad idea.
That it was tacky, that it was childish, that people would not like it, and that it was not suitable for a wedding.
I mean, the other layers were normal flavors.
This was a compromise.
And those normal flavors, they were great too.
But the funfetti, I mean, it was the star of the show.
My original stance on that cake was the wrongest I've ever been.
Everyone loved it.
And I can't wait to have it again.
So that's that on cake.
Another listener asked about my last name.
Specifically, you asked, do I ever say like the eel?
Now that I think about it, You were probably joking because why would I say that?
But the answer is yeah, I do.
I say that a lot.
Molly Conger, like the eel.
And that's not actually a helpful thing to say because how many people are going to hear that and say, oh, yes, the genus of eels?
I know exactly what you mean, and that helps me spell it.
It's not a point of reference that's useful.
But I do say it.
And my first name is actually Madeline, so sometimes I'll say Madeline, like the cookie, conquer, like the eel.
And honestly, I might be better off learning the phonetic alphabet because Madeleines aren't a popular cookie, and saying no, no, like in Proust doesn't help either.
So if anybody has a better way of communicating that, I'm all ears.
And don't say Madeline, like the little French girl from the children's books, that is spelled differently.
In writing, though, I find it's easier to say conger rhymes with longer, so I can avoid the dreaded conjure pronunciation.
Okay, another weird question from the subreddit.
Molly, what is your favorite glassware?
I'm dying to know what the right answer to this question is.
I mean, I guess some people are very classy and they have a favorite kind of glassware.
I Googled the phrase types of glassware to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding this.
Like, is there another meaning here that I don't know about?
But I think you're asking about fancy cups, right?
Like barware, like the different kinds of cups you can serve fancy drinks in.
And I guess some people do have a strong preference for a highball glass or a champagne flute.
I got that.
I'm not fancy, though.
Not to harp on the wedding thing, but we didn't even register for anything like that.
Vintage Ball Jars00:03:03
I think we got a single set of four very generic wine glasses.
Not even like red wine or white wine specific.
And I know they get even more granular from there, but these were just wine glasses, regular.
And of the four, I've already broken two.
I wasn't even using them when I broke them.
It's not because I drank too much wine out of them.
I broke one in the sink, washing it, and I think I knocked the other one over on the drying rack in a separate incident.
I'm a podcaster.
I don't even get dressed most days.
I'm barely even human anymore.
But there is an answer to this question.
My fixation at the moment is 32 ounce wide mouth ball canning jars.
I don't want to drink out of a cup.
I will not use any of the water bottles I have bought.
Every morning, I make myself two drinks, each one in a 32 ounce jar.
One is a coffee that's mostly milk and these giant ice cubes that I make in a silicone mini muffin pan.
And the other is ice water with half a lemon, half a lime, and a big fistful of mint leaves from the garden.
My top favorite jar right now.
This one's just for water.
It's a sort of aqua blue color, like a teal, like a blue green.
And I think I must have stolen this one from my mom's house because you can't buy these anymore, and I only have one.
Now, if you're big into jars, you might be asking is this an original aqua ball jar from the 1920s?
No, of course not.
I think it's from the limited edition re release they did of this color like a decade ago.
But it's such a pretty, summery, pale blue, like it's the color of a swimming pool.
So, that is the best piece of glassware in my house, hands down.
In classic Weird Little Guys fashion, I was going to tell you a fun fact about ball jars being made by a company that started out making jars, but is actually mostly an aerospace company.
But when I looked all of that up to get my facts straight to tell you about it, it turned out to be more complicated than that.
Ball jars haven't been made by the Ball Corporation since 1996.
And the oft repeated fun fact that the Ball Corporation is best known for its jars while actually being an aerospace company isn't even true anymore.
They did make the Kepler Space Telescope, but they sold off their aerospace business two years ago so they could focus more on their aluminum.
Food packaging business.
So, they don't make jars or space telescopes anymore.
They make aluminum cans.
Earl's Tuna Casserole00:03:37
The ball trademark on the jars was transferred in a series of subsidiary spinoffs and mergers, and it's now owned by the same company that owns Mr. Coffee, Rubbermaid, Yankee Candle, and a German condom brand called Billy Boy.
So, I feel kind of betrayed.
I liked thinking about my drinking jar being connected to space telescopes and I just found out that's not true.
Okay, next up, tuna casserole.
Several of you absolute freaks asked me for the full recipe that I found on Stormfront for a Nazi's favorite meal.
Specifically, this is the tuna casserole made by Earl Thomas.
Earl was William Luther Pierce's personal secretary in the 1970s.
And Pierce borrowed Earl's first name when he was trying to name the protagonist in his first novel, The Turner Diaries.
We talked a lot earlier this year about The Turner Diaries and the sequel Pierce wrote, Hunter.
And at the end of all that, I did a mini-sode about the real Earl, the man Earl Turner was named after, this Earl Thomas.
And in that mini, I mentioned an old stormfront post written by a Nazi who was Earl's roommate in the 70s.
And for whatever reason, one of the most specific Memories he shared about his time living with Earl was how much Earl loved tuna casserole.
I feel like you have to be making an insane amount of tuna casserole for that to be something someone remembers about you 35 years later.
I mean, the man must have smelled like an old tuna sandwich.
He remembered this so clearly that he recited the recipe from memory.
But I didn't actually tell you that recipe in the episode.
And apparently, some of you really want to try Earl's Tuna Casserole.
So, according to H. Michael Barrett, the white supremacist who wrote a prospectus on how racists can effectively take over small towns, here's Earl's Tuna Casserole, shared in a QA posted on a Nazi message board in 2004.
Question What was Earl like on a personal basis?
He had an especially good sense of humor, liked to play practical jokes, and enjoyed big steaks or seafood.
He was also one of the very few party members with a vehicle and a girlfriend.
What else did Earl like to cook at home?
He especially liked tuna fish casserole, which was made this way a half package of long and flat style noodles.
Was first cooked in boiling water and strained.
Then, two undiluted cans of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup and a regular can of chicken of the sea tuna, the type with vegetable oil, were added into the same pot.
Then, all of this together was heated up again.
Unremarkable, honestly.
I mean, the man who Earl Turner is based on was just a regular guy sitting at home eating shitty tuna casserole.
Suits and Boots Origins00:15:52
But these are the special details that make Weird Little Guys the show that it is.
I mean, think back to episode one.
It ended with a gross anecdote about a Nazi pedophile locking himself in the bathroom for hours because he liked to eat pickles alone in the bathtub.
If information is available about a white supremacist's gross snack preferences, I will tell you about it.
That's the Weird Little Guys promise.
And I guess in the same vein, it wouldn't be an episode of Weird Little Guys, QA or not, if I didn't do more research than I meant to.
And so these are not all simple questions.
This one took me some time.
Several of you asked about the phrase suits and boots.
I've used it a few times on the show to describe the sort of fascist synergy between racist activists out in the streets carrying out acts of violence.
And the more polite sort of intellectual racists who work at think tanks or run for political office.
Typically, these two kinds of guys don't associate in public and they may even publicly denounce one another.
But they work together.
Sometimes, literally, they communicate and strategize together or get paid by the same people.
But even when the teamwork is more hands off, their efforts complement one another.
Generally speaking, in my understanding of the phrase and in the way that I use it, it refers to a particular strategy of respectable racists, nationalists, fascists, what have you, and the way that they keep their hands clean while knowing full well that their project doesn't work without street level violence.
It's Richard Spencer giving speeches in university auditoriums while quietly giving marching orders to Identity Europa.
It's far right extremist academics like Tom Sunich.
Praising Nazi skinheads at a meeting of the American Third Position Party.
It's segregationist politicians looking the other way while the Klan does what they both agree needs to be done.
Their political project doesn't work without the violence.
They just don't want to get blood on their suits.
They want their racist policies to look reasonable compared to the alternative.
While they quietly encourage that very alternative as a means to gain compliance for their policies.
It's a guy saying, We need segregationist policies so that there aren't violent confrontations in the streets, but that street violence is already happening and it serves the purpose of injuring, killing, imprisoning, and terrifying the Black population.
So maybe they'll just submit to those policies, right?
I think the phrase is fairly straightforward.
And it's always used in a pretty clear context when it comes up on the show.
But several of you asked where it comes from, and some of you even assumed that I coined it myself.
I can't take credit for it.
And given the likely origin I tracked down, I don't want to.
Admittedly, I'd never considered where it came from.
It just makes sense.
It's a useful construct, it rhymes, which is fun.
And I never looked deeper.
But your questions made me curious.
I think I probably picked it up from my husband, oddly enough.
I know he's been saying it for years, and God knows where he picked it up.
He consumes books like oxygen, so it could have been anywhere.
And once I started trying to track it down, I realized it isn't actually a common phrase, which I kind of assumed that it was.
It appears occasionally in other people's work on the far right.
I found it in some writing by L. Reeve, for example.
And it's clear what we mean when we use it, but it had to come from somewhere.
It's a bit of a tough one to track down since most uses of those words together, suits and boots, aren't talking about fascist political strategy, they're talking about outfits.
So I found a lot of articles about people in hazmat suits or children on snow days.
If you just search for this phrase, it's a lot of fashionable boots and not so much fascists in boots.
So I thought about it a little bit because just Googling it wasn't really getting me anywhere.
It's boots for a reason, right?
Boots is the word that was chosen to represent the concept of the enforcer, this less respectable activist.
And you could interpret that to mean this is the person that is outside, this is the person on the streets, but I don't think it's boots just because that is a kind of shoe that rhymes with suits.
Do you know what I mean?
This isn't talking about someone wearing shoes generally.
It's a particular style.
It brings to mind the classic racist skinhead in his boots and braces.
So, going into this, if I were to guess when this phrase came into use, I would put my money on it being a few decades old.
Certainly not older than the late 70s and probably later than that.
Like, it has an 80s, 90s feel to it to me.
Because I think it's reasonable to assume that this dates to a time when the street activist it calls to mind is a racist skinhead, given that their boots were a hallmark of their very specific visual aesthetic.
And along that same line of thinking, it kind of has a British feel to it, right?
The racist skinhead aesthetic originated in the UK, so my head just kind of goes there, but the phrase also just feels spiritually British to me.
I can't explain that.
A lot of you asked really thoughtful and particular questions about my research process, so it's only fair to reveal here that I located my starting point for this investigation using vibes and guesswork and we'll call it informed intuition.
And I'm not claiming I found the answer, but I found an answer.
Obviously, the phrase could predate this time and place, but based on the afternoon I spent working on this, which admittedly, not a long time.
It appears the modern usage of this phrase is in relation to an intentional strategy in the mid 90s to rebrand fascism in France and the UK.
So, our starting point here is this phrase that I've been using suits and boots.
And I think that phrase comes into use in conjunction with the one we're going to talk about first.
This strategy in the mid 90s was called suits, not boots.
I found several sources, almost all of them authored by activists in the UK, referring to this effort by that name.
A pamphlet published in 2024 by the Socialist Workers' Party in the UK uses the phrase suits, not boots, to describe this attempted rebrand in the 1990s by Front National under Jean Marine Le Pen, writing, They dropped talk of fascist goals and focused on migration and Islamophobia.
This strategy, sometimes referred to as Eurofascism, led some commentators to take the fascists at their word and label them as post fascist, believing that they had shed their fascist past.
But despite this suits not boots detoxification strategy, they didn't drop the fascist project.
Jean Marine Le Pen saw the electoral work as providing the opportunity to build a fascist base.
The 2015 book Militant Anti Fascism A Hundred Years of Resistance, written by the pseudonymous British anti fascist M. Testa, uses the phrase the same way.
Quote The situation in mainland Europe.
Was changing with the rise of Le Pen in France and later of Jurg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria.
Eurofascism increasingly looked towards a more respectable image, or suits not boots.
So, as the 1990s progressed, modernizers within the British National Party started to move away from the ideas of the aging and unpopular John Tyndall in favor of the newer model.
So, we have multiple sources using this phrase to describe this strategy in play in the 90s.
And the phrase, suits not boots, appears to have been retroactively applied in English by activists in the UK to this effort in France under Jean Marine Le Pen and his attempts to rebrand French fascism.
But I think this phrase, this actual organizational policy that went by this name, I think it came from somewhere specific.
Like I said, I can't promise you this is the actual answer.
I only spent a few hours on this, and I'm not an expert on British nationalists, but.
I think I have a decent guess, and those of you begging me to take the show international again are going to be thrilled to hear this name.
It's Nick Griffin.
We'll have to come back around to Nick Griffin in his own right one of these days, but today isn't that day.
To be brief about it, he got involved with National Front in the 1970s, he joined the British National Party in the 1990s, and from 1999 until he was expelled from the party in 2014, he was the leader of the British National Party.
He's a Holocaust denier, a virulent Islamophobe, a big believer in the 14 words.
I mean, you get it.
He's a fascist.
But it was under his leadership that the British National Party tried to make their pivot from boots to suits based on what Jean Marine Le Pen had already been doing in France.
And Nick Griffin called what he was doing suits, not boots.
That's a phrase that was used by the party.
And not everybody was happy about it.
I found an essay in a British Nazi newsletter from 2005 angrily referring to this policy as Griffinism.
Eddie Morrison, a Yorkshire based Nazi activist, wrote Gone are marches, demos, counter demos, and anything else interesting and exciting.
All the talk now is of suits, not boots.
Well, I own a suit, just the one, and a pair of Doc Martens, and I think there's room in British nationalism for both.
In fact, not just room, they're both parts of a whole.
Morrison, who, according to a later issue of this same Nazi newsletter, died in 2020 after falling down the stairs in his own home and breaking his neck, was pretty clear eyed in 2005 about the need for suits and boots.
Writing, If we relied on a purely boots image, then we end up with a tough street fighting organization which unfortunately would lack political direction and purpose.
If we have a purely suit image, as we have now, then we have stacks of eggheads and intellectuals making policy.
But no way to implement that policy.
Suits, not boots.
That's the phrase used to describe this effort to rebrand fascism in Europe in the 1990s and the early 2000s.
So, where does and come into play?
We have these French far right nationalists who are trying to distance themselves from literal Nazism a few decades after the Second World War.
They're trying to clean up their image and gain mainstream political support for their ideas, ideas which have, again, not actually changed.
They're just trying to look nicer.
Now we have these British Nazis who are getting bored and restless that Nick Griffin won't let them have black shirt parades and beat up random bystanders like they used to.
They're trying to do suits, not boots.
So, who looked at that and said, no, we can have both?
It's suits and boots.
I mean, it's impossible to say who was the first person to say, why not both?
It's certainly an obvious progression.
A 2018 article in the British socialist newspaper Morningstar about a recent anti racist demonstration.
Recalls this British history of mass mobilization against far right extremists, writing, We beat them at Cable Street in 1936, we beat them in Lewisham and elsewhere in the 1970s, and we beat them in the 1990s when they put on suits and tried to be respectable.
Now they're back, wearing suits and boots, and we can beat them again.
Suits and boots.
Same guys, different outfits.
This author is just stating the obvious.
They're not using this as a term of art.
It's just a description of what is happening.
They've fought back against boots, they've organized against suits, and it's clear that today's fascists are using both tactics suits and boots.
That's probably as much explanation as the idea really needs, but I kept looking.
I did find a 2004 issue of Voice of Freedom, that's the newspaper of the British National Party.
And in that November 2004 issue, there's a little blurb.
Expressing some outrage over a recent television documentary that ran on Yorkshire TV in August of 2004.
The program was called Suits and Boots, and it was about the British National Party.
According to the party's newspaper, they considered it a, quote, hatchet job.
I couldn't find any record of the existence of this TV program outside of this complaint about it, so I didn't watch it.
But I assume that Yorkshire TV chose the name because it was kind of a cheeky play.
On the party's own stated policy of suits, not boots.
So they called the TV documentary Suits and Boots, perhaps because it exposed that the group had not stopped engaging in street level violence.
But for all the complaining inside the party about Griffin's policy of suits, not boots, the actual earliest usage of the phrase suits and boots that I could find is an essay.
Nick Griffin wrote himself in 1997, a few years before he took control of the British National Party.
Front National Strategy00:03:51
The essay ran in The Spearhead, a magazine edited by the British National Party's leader at the time, John Tyndall.
And in it, Griffin was opining about the situation in France for Le Pen's Front National.
Under the subheading, Suits and Boots, he wrote, quote, There is no doubt that the Front has benefited greatly from putting forward smartly dressed, articulate candidates.
This is simply common sense.
But it is equally a fact that the party's service d'ordre, the young men who stopped those polite and reasonable spokesmen from getting their heads kicked in by Marxist and Zionist thugs, still favor black lace up boots, black flight jackets, and short haircuts.
The fact that they can usually keep a low profile in minibuses down a nearby street is not so much a matter of policy, but a reflection of the fact that past clashes have taught the opposition that it is healthier not to interfere with Front National meetings.
It is certainly true that our own lads in boots, Are nothing like as disciplined as the service d'ordre, but they are nonetheless necessary.
If a lack of discipline sometimes causes problems, the solution is to provide it, not to tell them to go away.
Now, the lads in boots that he's talking about here are Combat 18, the Nazi terror group that was originally formed in the 90s to provide security for the British National Party.
And what he's saying here, right, he's describing the situation in France, saying that.
It's really working out for Le Pen and Front National to have these suits, right?
It's common sense.
That's working for them.
But it is equally a fact that those suits are only safe.
They're only effective because there are a bunch of boots around the corner waiting to kick in the heads of anybody who stands in their way.
He's saying, you need both.
You need suits and boots.
And this final line, If a lack of discipline sometimes causes problems, the solution is to provide it, not to tell them to go away.
He's saying the suits need to maintain discipline over the stormtroopers, the paramilitaries, the sturmob Tylo, right?
The party needs street thugs.
It doesn't work without them.
That's what he's saying.
And I think this essay is the origin point of the concept I'm talking about when I say suits and boots.
I'm sure the phrase existed prior to this moment, but like I said, The earliest I could find the phrase in writing in this context is this essay by Nick Griffin in 1997.
So, this is what I'm talking about when I say suits and boots.
It's guys like Nick Griffin putting on a suit and pretending to be shocked and upset that you'd accuse them of being a racist when they know full well the guy with the big swastika tattoo outside would break your skull with a bat if you tried to interfere with this polite, respectable Nazi meeting he's trying to have.
That's what it means.
That's all it means.
And so, in my search to find every time this phrase has appeared in writing in this particular political context, I was surprised to see this phrase used in a 2023 conversation between Moira Donegan and Jeet here in The Nation, where Donegan used it as a generic, politically neutral way of describing political strategy that combines lawyers going to court and people marching in the streets.
City Council Meetings00:09:15
I mean, she's not wrong, I guess, in the broadest sense.
Vaguest sense of the term, divorced from all past context, right?
I mean, she's talking about using both standard political power and litigation in combination with street activism.
But I don't think this is a term we can repurpose for general usage.
These boots weren't made for walking, you know?
We're not talking about marching boots, we're talking about curb stomping boots.
Language evolves, I guess.
But knowing how this phrase evolved can help you decide what you want to convey by using it.
That was a fun history for me to learn.
I was excited to discover the origin of a phrase I find so useful.
So thank you for asking that.
I also got a couple of questions about my work prior to Weird Little Guys and my life outside the show.
It comes up fairly often that I live in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Where I live would probably come up here and there, either way, just conversationally, but given the subject matter of the show, the city I live in is sometimes the setting of some detail or another.
So most of you probably know that I live in Charlottesville.
But it didn't occur to me until I read some of these questions that a lot of you have no idea what I was doing with my time before I started podcasting.
I mean, Why would you?
That's not your responsibility to know.
It's weird that I had some vague notion that you might.
It's just that before I had this show, the thing that I was doing before is the only reason anyone would have heard of me.
I used to live tweet Charlottesville City Council meetings.
All of them, like every minute of them, from the fall of 2017 until the fall of 2024 when I got too busy with the show.
Live tweeted municipal government meetings.
For a full seven years, I spent a big chunk of my week, every week, providing live commentary on local government.
I mean, city council meetings, always, but a rotating array of other local boards and commissions too.
Tree commission, planning commission, the towing advisory board, school board, police civilian review board, I tried everything at least a few times.
And I was pretty consistent with the ones I thought were interesting.
It started out as kind of an unhinged hobby, but I loved it, and people seemed to get a kick out of it.
I think I've mentioned it in passing before, but it's been a while.
I started doing it for the exact same reason that I'm now an expert on right wing political violence in the United States because it happened where I live.
I started going to city council meetings a few days after the Unite the Right rally.
I didn't know anything about anything, really, and I didn't understand what happened.
And why it had been allowed to happen, and why it happened here, and why we let it happen here.
So I started trying to figure out how my local government worked because that seemed like some kind of starting point.
I didn't know what else to do, so I just started showing up at every meeting I could find and I just sat there.
For the first year or so, they didn't really understand why I was there.
I mean, I barely understood why I was there.
The city council meetings, sure, that makes sense.
Those were packed back then.
There were Monday nights where we hit the fire marshal's maximum capacity in city council chambers.
But the other meetings?
The ones at like 10 a.m. on a Tuesday?
I don't know what I was doing there.
I just, I just wanted to see it all.
There were some meetings where it was so obvious that no one from the public had ever shown up before.
People thought I was lost.
More than a few times, they tried to kick me out of the room, saying things like, Oh, sorry, we have this room reserved for a meeting, you'll have to leave.
Because they couldn't imagine that it was possible that I was there for the meeting.
I mean, there were times that people insisted that I couldn't be there, that there was no public right to observe, and that I would have to leave.
But I'm terribly stubborn.
I'm kind of weird.
And I knew my rights, and I stayed in my little plastic chair.
For years, I just sat there in a little plastic chair and looked at strangers talking about stuff I didn't always understand.
I learned a lot about.
Particulars, sure, things about trees, things about zoning, whatever.
But more than anything, it taught me how to write fast and think even faster.
I spent thousands of hours basically transcribing meetings with nothing but two thumbs and an iPhone.
I think the mandatory brevity of the tweet format has probably had a permanent impact on my writing style, but we don't need to talk about that.
And it's been so many years, I almost forgot this bit of my own lore.
But if you live in Charlottesville and you get an email newsletter from the city notifying you about upcoming public meetings, that is my lasting contribution to local civic engagement.
So, for the first two years that I was making a nuisance of myself at these public meetings, I was having a hard time figuring out which meetings were even happening and when and where they would be held.
I had to physically go to City Hall several times a week.
To look at a bulletin board where boards and commissions were supposed to put a physical notice of any upcoming public meeting.
And even then, a lot of meetings took place without any proper public notice.
And a lot of the meetings that were held didn't have agendas, and no one was taking the minutes.
And all of these things are required by state law in Virginia.
So I did what any reasonable person would do in my shoes I consulted the Code of Virginia.
And I found Title 2.2, Subtitle 2, Part B, Chapter 37, Section 2.2 3707.
That's the section of the state's Freedom of Information Act that pertains to notice of and access to public meetings.
And so, armed with that information, I made a grotesque nuisance of myself.
With some exceptions that we don't need to get into here, state law requires public notice of public meetings three business days before that meeting is held.
That notice can be in a newsletter, on a website, or on that bulletin board.
But the same code section also allows any person to make a request in writing to receive personal, written, mailed notification of every meeting.
And since they were having so much trouble getting the meetings on the bulletin board, I exercised my right.
I emailed every city department with my request, listing all of the boards and commissions under their purview that I would like to receive.
Mailed notice for each and every time they convened.
Is that unhinged?
Yeah.
Yeah, they would have to mail me like 10 letters a week every week for a full calendar year.
But it's in the law.
And violations of that code section carry a civil penalty of $500 for the first infraction and $2,000 for every subsequent infraction.
And so once I sent those emails, They had to find a way to come into compliance.
Because if they didn't find some way to satisfy the requirements under the law, they would end up paying tens of thousands of dollars in penalties to the state monthly.
So I sent my emails and I waited.
Nobody answered me.
So I waited.
Ten days later, the city's communications director sent me this email Quote, Molly, starting mid afternoon tomorrow, we will send out the first of what will be a weekly public notice email.
This will be a list of the public meetings on our website calendar scheduled for the next week.
We will use this to satisfy your request, which was sent to a number of our staff to notify you of all public meetings.
Weekly Public Notices00:02:30
And they did.
They sent out those weekly public meeting notice emails from July of 2019 until late 2025.
They've since been replaced by the city's bi weekly newsletter.
That communications director isn't with the city anymore, but.
I always strongly suspected he found me to be a monstrous nuisance.
Honestly, they all did.
It was the kind of situation where just about everyone at City Hall would groan if they saw me coming.
And I think that's something to be proud of.
I'm sure they still have the bulletin board, but I haven't gone to see it in years.
I don't need it anymore.
But I have always said if something tragic happens to me, don't put my name on an honorary street sign or something, no park benches.
All I want is a little plaque underneath that bulletin board.
The Molly Conger Memorial Public Meeting Notice Board.
Because being an absolute menace at Charlottesville City Hall for seven years, I think that's how I want to be remembered.
Thank you so much to everyone who sent in a question this time around.
I know I didn't get to all of them, and I'm sorry.
I will try to hang on to the ones we didn't get to, but also don't be shy about sending them in again next time there's a call for questions.
I love hearing from you guys.
And if there's anything you took away from today's episode, I hope it is that anyone can become the kind of person their mayor hates to see coming.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conker.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lectureman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
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.