CZM Rewind: Third Position & A Secret Third Thing

0:07 In November of 2012, Barack Obama was re-elected as President of the United States. He beat Republican challenger Mitt Romney by a pretty good margin, pulling in 51.06% of the popular vote to Romney's 47.2%. But if you add those numbers together, you'll only get 98.26% of the popular vote. a number that doesn't include more than 2 million votes.

0:34 Where did those votes go? American electoral politics are dominated by the two-party system. It's always been that way. Before it was Republicans and Democrats and red states and blue states. We had Democrats and Whigs. And before that, we had Federalists and Democratic Republicans. It's always been nearly impossible for a third party or independent candidate to break through on the national stage. But they've always tried. There are long-standing third parties, ones you've probably seen on a ballot. The Green Party, the Libertarian Party. And there are third parties that have come and gone, like Ross Perot's Reform Party.

1:15 In every election cycle, there are tiny little groups you've never heard of putting up a candidate. They know they can't win, but they have a message they want to get out there. And technically, almost anyone can run for president. with or without a party. As long as you're a natural-born citizen over 35, all you have to do is raise some money and fill out some paperwork. Records from the Federal Election Commission show that in 2012, 280 people filled out that paperwork announcing their intention to run for President of the United States. One of those candidates was an aspiring filmmaker with no political experience and a lot of thoughts about about who really did 9-11. I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

2:07 I landed on this story in a roundabout kind of way. I guess I always do.

2:29 If you listened to the last two episodes, I do have a confession to make. I left something out of that story. It just didn't fit neatly into the episodes, and it would have been a confusing digression. Those episodes were about Devin Arthurs, the co-founder of Atomwaffen, who murdered two members of the group in 2017. And in those episodes, I told you that the earliest mentions of Atomwaffen online were in posts on a forum called Iron March. And that's still true, as far as I know. I didn't lie to you. But you might have assumed, based on what I said in those episodes, that the group's co-founders, Devin Arthurs and Bren Russell, must have met on Iron March 2. That's a reasonable assumption. And like I said,

3:20 I left some things out of the story. Because that's not where the pair first met. They met on a platform called Tiny Chat. Launched in 2009, TinyChat was a video chatroom. As many as 12 users at a time could appear on video, and more users could watch and participate in a text chat down below. When they were interviewed by police on the night of the murders in 2017, both Brandon Russell and Devin Arthurs specifically mentioned that they'd originally met on TinyChat. I dug up old 4chan posts from 2014. that show some screenshots of one particular tiny chat group. In what looks like a college dorm room, a user calling himself Odin is staring into his webcam.

4:11 It's Brandon Russell. A year before he announced the formation of his neo-Nazi terrorist organization, and years before he went to federal prison the first and then second times, he was 19 years old, sitting in his dorm room in Florida, in an online chat room called Third Position. I don't have any particular interest in writing a third part of that story. This isn't actually a continuation of those two episodes.

4:41 This isn't about Brandon Russell or Adam Woffin. If you didn't listen to those episodes and you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it. But I was stuck on this idea of that Third Position tiny chat. How did a 14-year-old Devin Arthurs end up in a video chatroom run by grown men talking about the political ideology of third positionism? I'm not going to answer those questions today. We're not really going to talk about that chatroom at all. I'm just telling you how I ended up reading an unproduced screenplay about a brave and handsome patriot who uncovers the truth about 9-11. I promise these things are related. This story... is about the man who wrote that awful screenplay, a man named Merlin Miller. In 2012,

5:31 he was put forward as a presidential candidate by the American Third Position Party, the same group that was video chatting with teenage Nazis in 2014. One surviving promotional video for the chatroom actually repurposes Miller's 2012 campaign announcement video to advertise an upcoming chat featuring the party's chairman, an attorney named William Johnson. There are a lot of characters here who we will definitely see again in future episodes, so I won't dwell on them for too long now.

6:02 But let's get a little backstory. The American Third Position Party was an actual political party, registered with the Federal Election Commission. And it still exists today. Kind of. The group rebranded as the American Freedom Party, and they still have a website. although they terminated their federal electoral committee in 2020. As we so often see with extremist groups, there is this constant cycle of collapsing, rebranding, and splintering.

6:35 And that's how American Third Position was born. In 2009, a Nazi skinhead group in California found themselves in turmoil. Some Nazi skinheads, calling themselves Freedom 14, tried to organize a political party called the Golden State Party. But it all fell apart when the Orange County Register published a story revealing that the party's spokesman had been using a pseudonym to hide the fact that he had some violent felony convictions in his past. It's not totally clear to me why the Nazi skinheads found that to be a problem.

7:11 That's kind of their whole thing. But I guess it just won't do for your political party spokesman. Either way, the Golden State Party was dead in the water. And some of those skinheads weren't ready to give up on the idea of having a political party. So they got together to choose a new leader and a new name.

7:33 And they settled on the American Third Position Party. And the group would be chaired by a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles named William Johnson. Johnson has been on my list of weird little guys from the beginning. I never actually manage to pull from my list of episode ideas, because I always get distracted by some stray thought from the prior week's research, but I have to imagine we'll get to him eventually. He's a lawyer, and he's in the movement. But he's not really a movement lawyer. That's not the focus of his practice. He pitches in occasionally, sure. Sure.

8:15 His name shows up as the attorney of record on a trademark application for the Council of Conservative Citizens. And there's a Nazi in Pennsylvania who seems fond of CCing Johnson when he emails county employees to make public records requests. As though he thinks Johnson is his personal attorney, but he's not licensed to practice in Pennsylvania. But usually when I'm talking about a guy who is both an attorney and a career white nationalist, he's not really keeping those parts of his life separate. So I think he's a little unique in that respect. As an attorney, Johnson primarily represents Japanese companies doing business in the United States. He has a terribly common name, making it a little hard

8:59 to look him up on Pacer, but it doesn't look like he's taken very many cases to court. At least not in federal court. But in corporate law, there's a lot of law to be practiced outside the courtroom. He does have an active case in the Court of International Trade right now, but I couldn't possibly pretend to be interested in the court's opinion about whether his client's imported goods were properly classified under the tariff schedule. Apparently, the difference between raw dried seaweed and seaweed that has been prepared for human consumption by drying it is not just in the eye of the beholder. It is a 6% jump in tariff rate. Just how dry this seaweed really is isn't interesting. But his choice of co-counsel is. The

9:48 seaweed importer is almost certainly Johnson's client. This is the kind of client he represents. But the documents are actually being filed with the court by a movement lawyer who recently represented Johnson. members of Patriot Front. Small world, I guess. But we'll get to Glenn Allen's role in this story next week. Not the seaweed part. The Nazi part. The website for Johnson's L.A.-based law firm is almost entirely in Japanese.

10:18 a language he appears to conduct most of his business in proficiently. He majored in Japanese at Brigham Young University and spent some time in Japan as a Mormon missionary. I don't speak any Japanese, so I can't really be the judge of such things, but in some of the videos on his website, at least to my ear, he has the sort of stilted cadence of a speaker who isn't terribly confident in his skills. I am, however, much better equipped to pass judgment on his other career, that of a professional racist. He's been splitting his time between the two for more than 40 years. He was admitted to the bar in 1981, and soon after that, he starts writing under the pseudonym James O. Pace. In 1985, as James O. Pace, he published a book called Amendment

11:14 to the Constitution, averting the decline and fall of America. The book lays out his argument for an amendment to the Constitution, this so-called Pace Amendment, and it would repeal the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. He also proposes restricting U.S. citizenship to whites of European descent only.

11:39 The second section of the proposed amendment reads, quote, No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay, or other non-European or non-white blood.

12:06 You might be asking, why did it take an entire book to explain how that would work? Well, for one thing, he had to devote quite a few pages to explaining exactly how the government would go about determining who is white. Are Armenians white? Are Iranians? Are Jews? The answer is no, obviously. The book is every bit as bad as you're imagining, and it did not need to be 200 pages long.

12:37 And after its publication... He spent the latter half of the 1980s running a group called the League of Pace Amendment Advocates. And he claimed that he was the group's spokesman. And he pretended that he'd met the author and just supported his ideas. When the LA Times connected the dots that William Daniel Johnson was definitely James O. Pace, he denied it, telling the paper that James Pace was a pseudonym, but it wasn't his. Pace is a lawyer, just like him, but Pace works outside of the country. He wouldn't say what Pace's real name was, or what country he was allegedly living in. It's giving, my girlfriend goes to a different school, you wouldn't know her. He gave up on the League of Pace Amendment Advocates after someone bombed the

13:28 group's office in 1989. It was only a small bomb, and it went off in the middle of the night when no one was there. No one was injured, and as far as I can tell, it was never solved. Like I said, William Daniel Johnson is absolutely a weird little guy in his own right, so I won't linger here. But he was a well-established figure in organized racism by the time those skinheads approached him to chair their rebranded political party in 2009. In fact, He was fresh off a very public loss in a 2008 campaign for judge in the Superior Court of Los Angeles. The embarrassing defeat only raised his profile in the white nationalist community, though.

14:13 And it came at a time of renewed interest in the movement, in the idea of entering mainstream politics. His newly formed political party was led by respectable professionals, obscuring its origin in skinhead street-fighting gangs. Johnson was an attorney, with a J.D. from Columbia University. Tom Sunig, a Croatian-born political scientist, had taught at several universities. And Kevin MacDonald was a professor of psychology at California State University. This was the era of the suit-and-tie racist, the dapper Nazi.

14:50 Richard Spencer had just started his AlternativeRight.com website. Matthew Heimbach was still a college student at Towson University. and he was leading a chapter of the white supremacist group Youth for Western Civilization. Both men would go on to figure prominently in the 2017 era alt-right and the street violence that accompanied it. And in the early 2010s, both of these men were frequent collaborators with members of the American Third Position Party. The party may have been a rebranding of a California skinhead group, but it couldn't have existed without the neo-Nazi networking that was happening at Ron Paul campaign events. The Ron Paul revolution never really took off, but his campaign provided fertile recruiting grounds for white nationalists.

15:42 In 2007, William Johnson was hosting pricey fundraising dinners for Paul's campaign. When he ran for judge in 2008, his campaign manager was also the Paul campaign's California statewide coordinator. Virginia Abernethy, a Vanderbilt professor and member of the Council of Conservative Citizens who would go on to be a member of the party's board, was one of several high-profile racists whose donations to the Paul campaign made headlines when he declined to refuse money from white nationalists. And it was through Ron Paul campaign events that Merlin Miller first met members of the American Third Position Party. Don't just take my word for.

16:21 It, though.

16:25 Most of the founders, of course, of the American Third Position, which have evolved into the American Freedom Party now, grew out of the Ron Paul movement. But I think one of the major shortcomings of the Ron Paul platform was he really did not deal very strongly on immigration. And it's probably the most destructive thing going on today to America.

16:46 And as you suggested, it's altering the national character of our country.

16:54 That's a conversation between Merlin Miller and American Third Position Party director Jamie Kelso back in 2013. He's saying something a lot of white nationalists were saying back then. They love Ron Paul. They love Ron Paul's platform. But he's just not going far enough. In its first few years, and I guess now that I'm saying out loud, every year since then as well, the party had trouble fielding candidates.

17:27 It's a tricky thing to do, even in mainstream politics. Running for office is hard. Convincing someone else to run for office is also very hard. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money. You have to put yourself out there. It's exhausting and potentially humiliating. and the kind of guy who's enthusiastic about running for office as an open white nationalist. Well, that kind of guy tends to be an absolute fucking weirdo who alienates everyone with an earshot.

18:05 When party member Ryan Murdaugh announced his candidacy for state representative in New Hampshire, people were disgusted. One letter to the editor from a Grafton resident called his candidacy a festering boil. party member Harry Bertram made several spectacularly unsuccessful runs for office in West Virginia, including the 2011 special election for governor. I didn't do a whole lot of digging on Harry Bertram, but I did read the entirety of his 23-year posting history on Stormfront, and I have to say, he doesn't strike me as a strong communicator.

18:45 And he appears to be at least a little bit involved with the Klan. But more importantly, his message just didn't resonate with West Virginians. It was coarse and overt. He ran ads that fear-mongered about white replacement, but he didn't have much else to offer outside of those racist conspiracy theories. One local news article from the time quoted a West Virginia voter who said illegal immigration just wasn't a top issue for her. In 2010, West Virginia was 94% white the state is to this day dead last when it comes to the percentage of residents who are foreign-born and the percentage of residents who speak a language other than English at home. About 1.5% and 2.5% respectively. So even if those voters don't like immigrants in theory, there's

19:42 a decent chance they've never even seen one. He was a single-issue candidate, and that just wasn't the issue. people cared most about. The party needed someone who looked normal. Someone who could put on a suit and put together a sentence and pretend to address a real issue. Preferably someone who wasn't publicly associated with another active hate group.

20:10 Someone with a clean record and a good education. I mean, it doesn't matter who they pick. They're not going to win. But it isn't necessarily about winning, is it?

20:23 It's harder for our enemies to characterize us as complete outsiders and fringe kooks if we're on the ballot in a state election or a federal election.

20:38 That was party director Jamie Kelso chatting with Richard Spencer back in 2013. And here's one of America's leading pseudo-intellectual racists, Jared Taylor, in a promotional video begging people to run for office as a member of the party.

20:54 Running for office is one of the best ways to publicize our ideas and to reach people who may have never heard a sensible, dissenting view about race.

21:07 It's not about winning elections. It's about Trojan horsing white nationalist rhetoric into the conversation at every level, from county school board to president of the United States. After running Harry Bertram a couple times for state and local office in West Virginia, American Third Position wanted to break into national politics. And in the 2012 presidential election, they decided that Merlin Miller was the man for the job. By his own telling, Merlin Miller wasn't very interested in politics for most of his life. He grew up in a working-class family in Iowa and became the first member of his family to graduate from college. He graduated from West Point in the class of 1974, and he had some

22:07 pretty famous classmates. Astronaut Michael Clifford, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, former Deputy Assistant Secretary General of NATO Matthew Klimo, former NSA Director Keith Alexander, and four-star General Walter Sharp. And, of course, former CIA Director David Petraeus. I had to look up the graduating class of 1974 to get most of those names. But not that one. In almost every speech and interview I could find, spanning a decade, Merlin Miller mentions that he went to school with David Petraeus. I guess he thinks it makes him sound important. He knows a very important guy whose name has been on the news a lot.

22:55 So that must mean something. And particularly back during the 2012 campaign cycle, David Petraeus was on the news quite a bit. So saying the name gives him some proximity to power, some proximity to legitimacy. Sometimes it feels like he wants the listener to assume that the pair have maintained some kind of relationship since graduation, but I don't think he ever outright says that. In one interview, he says that in 2009, he sent Petraeus, quote, a treatise that connected military, political, and media intrigues, challenging many of the orthodoxies. Based on the context of the conversation... and the fact that the interview was published on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory website, you can probably guess that he sent

23:45 the general some weird essay about Jewish control of the media. Based on his use of the word treatise, though, I'm pretty sure what he sent David Petraeus was a copy of his unpublished 100-page manuscript called The American Dream. It's a document that he only ever refers to as a treatise, and that's the only place I can find him ever using that word. So I think that's what it was.

24:13 And it's got everything you might expect. Communism is a Jewish conspiracy. Some parts of the Holocaust probably kind of happened, but maybe it wasn't actually that serious. The Federal Reserve and the IRS were illegal scams perpetrated on the American people. 9-11 was a false flag orchestrated by Mossad and the CIA.

24:33 Illegal immigration is replacing white Americans and the Jews are behind that too. We have to crush the New World Order, etc.

24:41 You know.

24:44 Honestly, I wonder if he was a big InfoWars listener in the mid-aughts. Because this sounds like vintage Alex Jones. I guess there was this thriving blogosphere back then with all the same talking points, so he could have gotten it anywhere. Let's not give Alex Jones too much credit. I don't think David Petraeus ever wrote back. After graduating from West Point in 1974, Miller served six years in the Army. He spent a few years working for Michelin Tire Company, but in 1983, he had the opportunity to pursue his true passion, his childhood dream, filmmaking. He was accepted into an MFA program at the University of Southern California, And he was one of just 20 students admitted into that year's Peter Stark Producing Program, a specialized graduate degree

25:40 program within the film school that focused on film and television production. And here, too, he had some very famous classmates. Stacey Sher produced movies like Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, and Erin Brockovich. Neil Moritz would go on to produce movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cruel Intentions, and all of the Fast and Furious movies. Liz Glotzer is the president of a production company that makes television dramas for CBS. The program seems to produce a lot of producers. And Merlin Miller really did try to break into the industry. While he was at USC, he interned at Paramount. And after graduation, he had some Minor production roles in a couple of schlocky, low-budget movies in the

26:30 late 80s and early 90s. But he had a family to feed. He and his wife had four daughters by that time, and living in L.A. is expensive. You can't support a family of six working as a line producer on B-movies. The family relocated to Springfield, Missouri, and he took a job at Ozarks Technical Community College. But he didn't give up on his dreams. He started his own film production company, Ozark Pictures. And he made a movie.

27:04 He made a real movie with a budget of close to a million dollars, all secured through private investors. His first film, A Place to Grow, premiered at a theater in Springfield, Missouri in March of 1995. One of the film's big stars, Chris Christopherson's daughter Tracy, attended the premiere in Springfield. But her co-stars Wilford Brimley and a country singer called Boxcar Willie didn't make it. The movie didn't get wide release. It wasn't something people were seeing in theaters all over the country. And almost all of the press about the film was in Missouri newspapers who were writing about it as a local interest story because the film cast locals in most of the smaller roles. And in some of those articles, all the way back in 1995,

27:54 you can start to see the hints of what's coming. He told a reporter that he left Hollywood for the Ozarks to make movies that, quote, promote the ideals of Americana, end quote. Traditional family values for Midwestern audiences, you know? Twenty years later, in an interview with a Holocaust denier, he said pretty much the same thing. He just can't make movies with good family values out there in Hollywood.

28:24 Having graduated high in the class, I thought I might have some opportunities, but the only opportunities for people like me from the Midwest with traditional values was working independent films.

28:37 But he's speaking a little more freely this time than he did with that reporter from the newspaper in Springfield, Missouri, back in 1995. Because this time, he's speaking to Dave Gehary, a longtime friend of David Duke, and the proprietor of a small publishing company that prints mostly conspiracy theory books, including several by Jim Fetzer, a man who believes the moon landing, the Holocaust, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and the Unite the Right vehicular attack in Charlottesville were all hoaxes.

29:10 None of those things happened. After Fetzer lost a lawsuit brought by the father of a little boy killed in Sandy Hook, Gehary had to stop selling a book called Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. So in this conversation, that's who he's talking to. So Miller can be a little more explicit about what he means.

29:36 And I was disillusioned with the quality of films coming out of Hollywood and Black of true opportunities with somebody that I thought should have been able to get some opportunities, things going. There were 20 of us that graduated from my year group in USC and five were Jewish. And those five went on to make some incredible big motion pictures, not necessarily good motion pictures, but some very high profile motion pictures. And due to this very day, With one other exception, I'm the only other graduate from our class that still considers himself a part of the industry. And that's pretty typical of all of the year groups at USC and in the industry. So it's a very controlled environment.

30:16 In this interview in 2012, he says he's still in the industry, which is weird because I can't imagine what he thinks he means by that. He only ever made two movies. His second and final film, a western called Jericho, was released in 2001 by another production company he founded called Black Knight Productions. I found this one streaming somewhere, and I did try to watch it. I like to be thorough. I really did try, I promise. I put it on the TV one evening during dinner, but I couldn't finish it. I mean, it was just not good.

30:59 It had some actual stars, surprisingly, but there's just no getting over some hurdles. Mark Valli, who hadn't yet landed roles on shows like ER, Fringe, Boston Legal, and CSI, was mostly just a soap opera actor in the 90s.

31:16 And R.

31:16 Lee Ermey was in damn near a hundred movies. You might not know his name, But he's the Marine Corps drill sergeant in every movie you've ever seen with an older man playing a Marine Corps drill sergeant or some adjacent type of loud, vaguely military-coded authority figure.

31:36 That's R.

31:36 Lee Ermey, every time. I think he just said yes to everything. But even getting real actors for his movie could not salvage it. My poor husband, who is eternally supportive of my work and has... this seemingly infinite well of patience for my obsessions, looked so painfully bored that I just, I couldn't do it to him. I mean, he once sat through a made-for-TV movie starring a lesser Baldwin brother based on the autobiography of a neo-Nazi, and he didn't even complain when I talked through the entire movie, saying things like, well, that's not what really happened, and that character is actually an amalgamation of three different real guys.

32:22 So I take it very seriously if he's visibly pained by the terrors I've brought into our home. So I didn't watch Jericho, but I guess you could. And just like A Place to Grow, Jericho failed to get picked up for wider distribution. But in his efforts to market the film, Merlin Miller met a man who would change his life. It wasn't long after 9-11, when Merlin Miller had a meeting with a film buyer for Carmike Cinemas.

32:56 The buyer passed on the film, but they got to talking about other things. None of the source material I could find explains exactly how they got on the subject. I don't know which one of them brought up the Jewish question first, but someone did. You see, as a much younger man, Before he was the one deciding which independent films you could see at a Carmichael theater, Bob Scarborough served three years in the Navy. And in 1967, according to his obituary, Scarborough was a cryptologist serving aboard the USS Liberty. On June 8, 1967, a little over halfway through the Six-Day War, the Liberty was patrolling international waters off the coast of Egypt. Officially, the United States was not involved in the Six-Day War. That was a

33:49 war between Israel and everybody else. But the American military is everywhere. So the USS Liberty was about 30 miles off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula when two unidentified jets appeared overhead. The jets made half a dozen strafing runs over the Liberty, firing on the vessel. And then torpedo boats arrived, and they too fired on the Liberty, 34 members aboard the U.S. naval vessel were killed, and 171 more were injured. I'll get it out of the way right now. There's no right way to talk about this.

34:31 That part, just now, those are the bare facts. Those are the facts that everyone agrees on. But the incident in question is the subject of decades of conspiracy theories. Mostly ones repeated by virulent anti-Semites. You'll never catch me out here saying the Holocaust deniers are making some valid points.

34:53 That's not what I'm saying. But while the official investigations conducted by the U.S. and Israeli governments agree on the hard facts, right? That the jets fired, the boats fired, the people died. But the investigations don't agree on the nature of the situation. For the bare facts here, I'm using sources like the U.S. Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command and documents available from the State Department's Office of the Historian and declassified documents available on the NSA's website.

35:26 Not to say that the U.S. government is the arbiter of truth here and that those documents necessarily present the version of the truth that is true. I'm just trying to convey that I did go out of my way to make sure I wasn't accidentally repeating something from a conspiracy theory website. because it can be very hard to tell.

35:47 The official explanation from the Israeli government is that it was a mistake. The pilots claimed that the ship wasn't flying a flag, and they thought the Liberty was an Egyptian vessel. Once they realized the victims were screaming in English, they apologized to the United States and paid a few million dollars in compensation to the victims' families and a few million more for the damage caused to the ship.

36:13 But there are a lot of unanswered questions here. And the problem is, the only people you ever hear asking those questions are absolutely bug-fuck nuts. Because this is a favorite topic of obsession for boomer anti-Semites. It's a real shame, too, because there are some very uncomfortable holes in the official narrative.

36:36 But the way conspiracy theorists have flooded the conversation on this makes it very hard to trust most sources. it is absolutely possible, and I think necessary, to ask questions about unjustified Israeli military aggression without being anti-Semitic. Unfortunately, the average guy posting online about the USS Liberty is not interested in that distinction. So I'm not going to talk anymore about what may or may not have really happened aboard the USS Liberty in June of 1967. Because for the purposes of this story, That doesn't actually matter. The only thing that matters here is that the event is a madness rune for a particular flavor of conspiracy guy.

37:25 And Merlin Miller has said many times that this conversation with Bob Scarborough about the USS Liberty was his political awakening. It makes sense, in a way, that he was infected by this single conversation. He'd washed out of Hollywood, and his independent film career was one disappointment after another. He couldn't get funding. He felt like the MPAA was giving his movies unfair ratings. He couldn't get theatrical release. And his classmates, whose careers were flourishing? Come to think of it, they all had pretty Jewish-sounding last names, didn't they? It wasn't about talent, or merit, or that he wasn't working hard enough, or that he wasn't making movies people wanted to watch. No, it couldn't be that. This is about

38:15 Jewish control of the media. That's what's going on here. And now, with 9-11 fresh in his mind and conspiracy theories sprouting like mushrooms after a rain, here's this life-altering revelation from a man who says he lived through a false flag attack, carried out by the people, that Merlin Miller is already half-convinced to have it out for him.

38:37 So he started doing his own research. And he got obsessed. Scarborough soon introduced Merlin Miller to a friend of his, a man named Richard S. Thompson. I couldn't actually find a copy of a book Miller wrote in 2016, and I think there may be more detail in there. But my guess is Scarborough thought to connect him to Thompson, not just so Miller would have someone else to talk to about the USS Liberty, but because of their shared interest in film. Richard Thompson had been heavily involved in the production of a 2002 BBC documentary about the USS Liberty.

39:27 So maybe as Scarborough is telling Miller, you know, I'm not interested in purchasing the rights to Jericho, but I have this other opportunity for you. Talk to my buddy Dick Thompson. He likes financing films. Thompson and Miller did go on to become very close friends, and he was, according to Miller, very interested. in making a movie together.

39:53 According to that rambling, hundred-page treatise he wrote in 2009, that one I'm pretty sure he mailed to General David Petraeus, Thompson agreed to finance a movie that would be produced and directed by Merlin Miller. Again, according to Miller, Thompson announced his intention to fund the film on Friday, June 8, 2007.

40:14 That was the 40th anniversary of the incident on the USS Liberty and a few dozen surviving crewmen were meeting up in Washington, D.C. Now, as far as I can tell, Richard S. Thompson was never aboard the USS Liberty. He wasn't a crewman at the time of the incident. He was definitely in the Navy. I know that. The announcement in the newspaper when he married his wife in 1954 mentions it. And so does his obituary. And his obituary does mention Liberty... but not in the context of his naval career. No, it says he was a longtime supporter of the survivors of the USS Liberty. So it's just something he had an interest in. A lot of the writing online written by people I think may not be fully grounded in reality assert without question that he worked

41:12 in naval intelligence. at least one rather fantastical book repeatedly refers to him as a CIA asset. But none of this seems to be corroborated by any outside source that I could find, so I don't know exactly what Thompson was doing in the Navy or how he came to know so much about the USS Liberty. But either way, he was very involved with this veterans group, and he was attending the 40th anniversary reunion in D.C. that weekend.

41:43 On Sunday.

41:44 he left D.C. and began driving home to Florida. He made it about halfway home. Again, I can't find any reporting about the accident that was written by someone I know believes the Holocaust happened, so it's hard to say exactly what happened. But somewhere in Florence County, South Carolina, Thompson had a fatal single-car accident. Even the conspiracy theorists have to begrudgingly admit that There's no sign of foul play.

42:16 There's no actual reason to suspect this was anything but an accident. He was a 76-year-old man who had an exciting but probably exhausting weekend with his old Navy buddies. And then he got up at the crack of dawn to make a 13-hour drive home. Halfway through the drive, he lost control of the vehicle and crashed. But these people have questions.

42:41 Did he fall asleep?

42:43 Did he fall asleep? Or was it Mossad? Describing Thompson's death, Merlin Miller wrote, Although foul play was not suspected, Dick had told me of prior Israeli Mossad surveillance. And writing in the conspiracy theory rag American Free Press, Mark Glenn wrote that he and many others were very suspicious about the death because they believed Thompson was, quote, about to go public with information that that had never before been published.

43:18 But again, there's no indication there was anything suspicious about the accident, and this same article by Mark Glenn includes this line. As if he had a premonition that his time was approaching, Thompson recently made known to the Liberty Veterans Association that in the event of his death, he did not want anyone wasting money on flowers for his funeral, or rather that such individuals should send money to the Liberty Veterans Association so that the truth concerning the attacks on the USS Liberty could continue to emerge. So if he's telling people what they should do if he dies and he's 76 years old, do you think he was secretly assassinated by a foreign government, staging a single car accident that had witnesses? Or do you think maybe his

44:04 health was failing and he did know his time was coming? Hard to say which is more likely. I'm not the betting kind, but if I had to, I'd wager it was a car accident. Distracted driving, heart attack, asleep at the wheel, something tragic and routine. But however ordinary his death was, it left Merlin Miller without funding to produce his screenplay, an action thriller romance called False Flag. The story of a brave and handsome reporter who uncovers the truth about the U.S. 's liberty and 9-11. And he has to take matters into his own hands to stop these false flags from causing World War III. I'm afraid we'll have to pick back up there next week. I got lost along the way again. I didn't even get

44:57 to Merlin Miller's actual presidential campaign. To be honest, I don't think his heart was really in it. In an interview shortly after he announced he was running... he accidentally revealed to Richard Spencer that he didn't know what the third position in American Third Position Party even meant. And just weeks before Election Day, he wasn't out there pounding the pavement talking to voters. He was taking meetings in Tehran, trying to get Iranian funding for his conspiracy theory movie.

45:30 I'm not sure if he brought a copy of his screenplay to the 20-minute private meeting he had with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, But I do know he gave the Iranian president a copy of his 2001 western, Jericho, on DVD. I wish Ahmadinejad was still on Twitter. I would have loved to ask him if he got past the first 20 minutes.

46:05 In March of 2025, a few dozen white nationalists from across the country gathered at a castle in the mountains. The meeting itself wasn't really a secret. It had been announced months ahead of time. But it was a private event, and the location was a closely guarded secret, shared only with those on the invite list. At a lectern adorned with a golden eagle and flanked by flags bearing fascis and lightning bolts, speeches were made by movement leaders spanning generations.

46:36 Men in their 70s, nearing the end of their decades-long careers as white nationalist organizers. And men in their 20s, looking ahead to the movement's future. During an afternoon break between speeches, the keynote speaker took off a suit jacket and bolo tie to oversee a shirtless, bare-knuckle boxing match on the lawn. The American Freedom Party has changed its logo, its leadership, and even its name over the 15 years since it was first founded as the American Third Position Party.

47:06 but they are still who they've always been. A handful of racists in suits, whose inability to properly fill out paperwork keeps getting in the way of their dreams of a white ethnostate. I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

47:23 Weird Little Guys.

47:39 When we left off last week, we were talking about the strange winding road that led a white nationalist group called the American Third Position Party to run a failed filmmaker for president in 2012. By his own account, Merlin Miller had never been all that interested in politics. That is, until he had his political awakening after 9-11. He'd been trying unsuccessfully to sell the distribution rights to his second film, a Western called Jericho. when he met a man who had served aboard the USS Liberty in 1967, when the ship was bombed by the Israeli Air Force. That man introduced Merlin Miller to the wide world of conspiracy theories surrounding the incident, and connected him with Richard Thompson, a

48:22 Navy veteran who'd recently helped finance a documentary about it. For several years, Thompson and Miller discussed making a movie about the USS Liberty. Not another documentary. That had been done. but an action thriller set in the modern day, connecting the conspiracy theories that have grown up around that incident with those about 9-11. The screenplay was written and ready to go. The movie was going to be called False Flag.

48:51 Miller would direct and produce it, and Thompson was going to be the money man. When Richard Thompson died unexpectedly in the summer of 2007, the project stalled out. Without funding, he couldn't make the movie. And it looks like he redirected some of that energy into the Ron Paul campaign. Federal Election Commission records show that Merlin Miller made his first ever federal campaign contribution in November of 2007, when he gave Ron Paul $ 100. He even threw his hat into the ring to be a Ron Paul delegate in Tennessee, but it doesn't look like he was chosen. But he made a lot of new friends through the Paul campaign. Admittedly, there's a bit of a blank space in my research here.

49:37 I couldn't tell you exactly what path he took down the road to political extremism between 2002 and 2007. That part of the timeline is pretty sparse. It's entirely possible that his descent into USS Liberty conspiracy theories brought him into contact with the political fringe long before he got involved with the Paul campaign in 2007. But that's the point in time where he reappears in any record I can find. By 2008, Merlin Miller was rubbing elbows with some of the big names in American racism. That summer, he was a speaker at the Council of Conservative Citizens National Conference. The archived version of that racist group's website shows that, at some point, all of that year's speeches were uploaded, but the files haven't survived and the attendee

50:27 who uploaded some of them to YouTube must not have thought Merlin Miller's speech was very interesting because it isn't there. Other speakers at that event included Drew Lackey, the police officer who was famously photographed fingerprinting Rosa Parks after her arrest in Montgomery in 1955. And he was also the officer who booked Martin Luther King after his arrest in 1956.

50:52 Lackey's speech, too, seems lost to the sands of time. But according to a write-up on Alternet, he talked about his book, called Another View of the Civil Rights Movement. in which he calls Rosa Parks a communist agitator and dismisses the entire civil rights movement as a farce designed to intimidate and demoralize the police in America. Alabama State Senator Charles Bishop's keynote speech was a rambling racist rant about Muhammad Obama. And several of the other speakers listed on the website are men who would go on to serve together on the board of the American Third Position Party.

51:30 Paul Fromme, Tom Sunich, and James Edwards. And a few months after that, Merlin Miller packed a suitcase for another trip.

51:42 September 2nd, 2008. You remember what you were doing that day, September 2nd, 2008?

51:47 Yes, up in Minneapolis.

51:50 Merlin Miller and another man who will come to these microphones, William Daniel Johnson, the chairman of the American Freedom Party, and yours truly, All three of us were in the Target Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

52:09 This one came as a bit of a surprise to me. None of the write-ups I could find about the early days of the party led me to believe that Merlin Miller had been involved with the group's actual founding, let alone hanging out with its founders more than a year before the group even existed. But there it is, in his own words. In May of 2013, He appeared on an episode of the American Freedom Party's new podcast. It was a project they'd launched that spring as part of their rebranding after they changed the name from American Third Position to American Freedom Party. And the man he's talking to is Jamie Kelso, one of the party's founders. Kelso is, I know I say this all the time, he's the guy that's going to get his own episodes. He is

52:55 an incredibly odd man. Before he was on the board of the American Third Position Party, he was a member of National Alliance for years. In the early 2000s, he was David Duke's live-in personal assistant. He was a moderator on Stormfront for a decade. And when he was a much younger man, he was a member of Scientology's Sea Org.

53:19 And in 2008, Jamie Kelso was traveling all over the country attending Ron Paul campaign events. because he recognized their value as a recruitment pool for white nationalism. And I guess he wasn't attending those events alone. Like I said, I can't find much evidence that still exists online about the nature of Merlin Miller's relationship with the movement during those early years. But he was close enough to Jamie Kelso and William Daniel Johnson by the fall of 2008 to be traveling with them. Now, Ron Paul did not become the president in 2008, obviously. But Miller's involvement in the campaign had introduced him to new friends and new possibilities.

54:07 He'd failed to gain the support of Tennessee Republicans to become a primary delegate, just like he'd failed to make films in Hollywood. This system seemed designed to prevent white men with traditional values from succeeding at anything. And in that spirit, Merlin Miller founded a new film production company in 2009. He'd produced his first film, A Place to Grow, in 1995 through his company Ozark Pictures. His second film, Jericho, premiered in 2001 through his company Black Knight Productions. But his new vision was going to require a new production company.

54:45 Americana Pictures, a film company dedicated to making movies that promote, quote, traditional American ideals. He announced the new venture in an essay on The Occidental Observer, a far-right publication edited by Kevin MacDonald, another future founding member of the American Third Position Party. In the essay, Miller asks, Where are the good stories? Where have our heroes gone? Writing, At one time, we could discern right from wrong because stories promoted truth, justice, and liberty. The world felt good when they ended happily.

55:24 But after working in Hollywood, he came to realize that Hollywood was in the business of killing those heroes, of killing that American dream, and propagandizing for a new world order. Hollywood doesn't represent traditional Americans. Instead, it, quote, seeks to destroy our European-American heritage and our Christian-based traditional values, and replace them with values that debase these traditional values and elevate minorities as paragons of virtue and wisdom. He complains that, despite graduating from a prestigious film school program, the industry had no place for people like him. People with traditional values, who refused to denigrate Christianity and participate in the Jewish-controlled media.

56:22 Americana Pictures could be an alternative to Hollywood, making pro-white movies for pro-white audiences, developing their own talent by running screenwriting workshops. When Americana Pictures launched in 2009, Miller had two projects in mind. That unfunded film about the USS Liberty that he'd been working on for years, and one that he tentatively titled The Liberator. The Liberator was a retelling of the story of Arminius, the Germanic chieftain who commanded a coalition of forces against the Romans at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD. As part of an effort to drum up financial support for the films, Miller published a piece in the Barnes Review later that same year. I know I'm always telling you about this

57:12 seemingly infinite number of conspiracy theory blogs and Nazi newsletters and racist magazines, and they all probably run together. But the Barnes Review has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as, quote, one of the most virulent anti-Semitic organizations around. And most issues feature several articles devoted to Holocaust denial. I mean, you'd think you'd run out of ways to talk about it, but they haven't. This particular issue included the text of a speech made by Hitler in 1941, two articles about Hitler, an interview with the founder of a Greek fascist party, and an essay by Ingrid Zündel. wife of famous Holocaust denier Ernst Söndal. Miller's piece was about the historical figure of Arminius, and there

58:00 was just a little box of text on the side of one page announcing that he would be making a film to tell this incredible story. Okay, I'll admit, I don't ever think about the Roman Empire. That's just never on my mind. I don't know the story of Arminius. I don't have the tiniest bit of interest in knowing more about how Publius Quintilius Verus committed suicide out of shame at having lost three Roman legions at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. I couldn't tell you if Merlin Miller's retelling of those events is historically accurate. Maybe he's a Roman history buff. I don't know. But I do think it's worth considering that his interest in the story of Arminius might be less about a love of 2,000-year-old Roman

58:48 history than and more about an interest in some slightly more recent history. Arminius has long been a symbol of German national identity and German nationalism. Arminius Two plays written in the 19th century dramatizing the events of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, confusingly both called Die Hermannschlacht, were so wildly popular in Germany in the 1930s and 40s that it was shameful and scandalous to put them on stage for decades after the war. In January of 1933, just weeks before Hitler was appointed chancellor, a party official gave him a gift, an illustrated copy of the Hermannschlacht. Hitler not only loved the gift, but he responded, that's the idea, a second battle of Teutoburg Forest. That same week, Hitler

59:55 gave a speech comparing himself to Arminius. And when the text of that speech was published in a Nazi Party newspaper, it was accompanied by a picture of a statue of Arminius surrounded by swastikas. Nazi Party election posters in 1933 featured this imagery prominently, along with slogans like Macht frei das Hermannsland, free Hermann's country. Hermann is the German variation of Arminius. I picked up a copy of Arminius the Liberator, Myth and Ideology, a book by Martin Winkler, a classics professor at George Mason University, to get a better idea of where Arminius lives in the nationalist imagination. It's 400 pages long. I didn't have time to do more than skim it, admittedly. But it seems pretty clear. The popularity

1:00:51 of this story was at an all-time high when it was repurposed in Nazi propaganda in 1930s Germany. I found what I needed in the book. But as I was flipping to the back to see if the last chapter was a convenient summary, which is often the case in academic texts, I found something else entirely. The final chapter of Winkler's book is not a summary. It's called Arminius and White Supremacy. And it's about this. It's about this article by Merlin Miller. there's a picture of the front cover of this 2009 issue of the Barnes Review. Winkler writes of Miller's article, quote, Miller explicitly but unconvincingly rejects propagandizing by means of falsehood. But he also implies that Miller himself doesn't seem to realize that he's building his

1:01:50 own story on a foundation of propagandized falsehoods. In comparing Miller's use of the story to that Nazi propaganda, Winkler writes, quote, The similarities are astonishing, or rather, predictable. The only difference is that Nazis saw Jews as the root of all their evils, while Miller is obsessed with non-white and racially mixed globalism. To the Nazis, as to Miller, Arminius had laid the foundation of a superior West. Later generations, especially contemporary ones, have lost this heritage and become victims of decadence and domination by others. That spring 2009 issue of the Barnes Review is dedicated almost entirely to Arminius. It's not just Merlin Miller's article. Immediately following Miller's piece is

1:02:41 the one by Ingrid Sundell. In 2009, her husband Ernst Sundell was still in a German prison. He'd been convicted of incitement of racial hatred. And she writes that during his imprisonment, she felt moved to rekindle the spiritual flame by reviving the story of Arminius. And her company, Soaring Eagle Studios, published a book about Arminius that had come out that year. And it wasn't just a book project.

1:03:11 I didn't find an actual copy of this book, but I found one for sale on eBay and I saw a picture of the cover. And the cover bears a picture of that Arminius statue the same one featured in Nazi propaganda posters in 1933. But across Arminius' chest, there's text that reads, Soon to be a major motion picture.

1:03:35 Ingrid Zündel wrote in that Barnes Review article that she'd been having intense meetings with Merlin Miller, and they were collaborating on the film adaptation of the book. In December 2009, he even scouted locations. The pair hoped to film in Hermann, Missouri, a small town settled by German immigrants and named after Arminius.

1:03:57 Locals in Hermann were horrified to learn that the independent filmmaker wandering around town was a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, and the local newspaper printed a quote from Miller about his opposition to interracial marriage. They didn't really need to worry, though. The movie never got made.

1:04:17 Americana Pictures never made any movies at all. Both of the projects he'd hoped to produce, False Flag and The Liberator, were someone else's idea. They were someone else's obsession. He wasn't a subject matter expert on the USS Liberty. He didn't have any meaningful connection to Arminius as a symbol of German nationalism. But he presented himself in these circles as someone who was going to break the system and make propaganda films for the white supremacist movement. And I think he really wanted to. He wanted to make movies.

1:04:55 It had been his dream since childhood. It just never came together. But what I've been trying to get to all this time was his run for president. On January 3rd, 2012, he posted a candidate statement on MerlinMiller2012. com. It's nothing special. He's fighting back against the New World Order and the global elites... He's very concerned about the ongoing demographic assault against traditional America, which is just a few extra words for white genocide. He's outraged that patriots are being silenced by political correctness, etc. At the bottom of the statement, he links to the party's website. But only after dropping a link to the site for Americana Pictures. A week later, the party's chairman, William Daniel Johnson, issued the party's official

1:05:53 press release. His language is more explicit, writing, And posts started popping up on Stormfront, but it wasn't really a hot topic. Most of the people posting enthusiastically about his candidacy on the Stormfront threads said, are people I can identify as party members. Like a thread from Harry Bertram, the party's frequent candidate in West Virginia, offering to pay Stormfront members a dollar per name if they'll go out and collect signatures for the campaign. In February of 2012, a month into the campaign's existence online, the party filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission. Or at least they tried to. They filed a statement of organization for a committee, called Merlin Miller for President 2012. But they failed to

1:06:52 fill out the part of the form where you say who the candidate is. And on the page where you check a box to indicate whether the committee is a candidate committee or a party committee, they checked both. The FEC responded with a request for additional information, and they tried again. It wasn't until April that they filed forms to register the party itself with the FEC, And they didn't actually file a statement of candidacy for Miller until July.

1:07:22 It's a bit of a mess. Almost everything they've ever filed is quickly followed by a reply from the FEC that they've done it wrong. And they only ever raised $ 8, 700. As the party is fumbling with the paperwork behind the scenes, Merlin Miller is out there as the face of the party. the American Third Position Party is running for president. In every campaign interview I listen to, he talks about himself a lot. That's normal for a candidate, right? I mean, who is this guy? Why should I vote for him?

1:08:00 But someone should have sat him down and broken the news that making two independent films over a decade ago and being really mad about the Federal Reserve aren't enough. And it's just confusing that you keep rambling on about how you knew David Petraeus in college. But he does it every time. Most of these interviews are with friendly outlets.

1:08:25 White nationalist fringe podcasts and conspiracy theorists who make Alex Jones look like a level-headed and professional broadcaster. So he can regurgitate the talking points from the website without really getting cornered for the most part. No one's asking him hard questions. But in one interview in February, someone does ask a question that I'd actually spent hours searching for an answer to on the party's website. Why third position?

1:08:56 Tell us a little bit about the third position. Uh, You know, I think some people might be a little confused by that term. I know when I hear third position, I almost think third way or takes me back to the 1930s or 20s or something. But I don't know. I mean, why did you choose that name? And what are you trying to evoke by calling yourself a third position?

1:09:23 That's Richard Spencer. By 2012, he was already the director of the National Policy Institute, and he was the editor of his AlternativeRight.com website, having coined the term alt-right a few years earlier, at least by his account. And for all the evil that man has visited upon this world, and my hometown in particular, he's not stupid. I mean, he's not the brilliant philosopher he believes himself to be, don't get me wrong. But he's read some books. He is at least conversant in the political theory he's working with.

1:10:01 This is a question with an actual answer. And Merlin Miller didn't know that.

1:10:09 You know, actually, the founding members of Bill Johnson, William Johnson, an L.A. attorney, is the chairman of the American Third Position Party. And I believe it was Bill that came up with the name American Third Position.

1:10:20 Right.

1:10:21 A year and a half, two years ago, I actually recommended he use the Americana Party because I didn't actually understand his reasoning for the American third at that time. I've since then grown not only accustomed to it, but I do like it because I see the Republican and Democratic parties as as really being two heads of the same monster. And we really don't have a voice party that represents the interests of the American people anymore.

1:10:50 Oh, dear.

1:10:52 No, no, that wasn't the answer Richard Spencer was looking for. It wasn't the answer I was looking for. Third position isn't just some generic term for third party. It doesn't mean the party is offering itself up just generally as some kind of third option. He seems to think that third position just means not Republican, not Democrat, but a secret third thing. I guess, come to think of it, you know, in the spirit of the secret third thing meme, kind of does. The secret third thing here is fascism.

1:11:34 Here's another member of the party offering his definition.

1:11:40 Third positionism is not centrism. Third positionists understand the false dialectic that liberal capitalist regimes establish to split the electorate and maintain their oligarchic rule through fiscal power. This capitalist dialectic separates nationalism from socialism, ensuring the two positions are never united under one political party.

1:12:11 Now I think He probably thinks he sounds very clever here. But I'm not sure he actually comprehends the words he's using. But it is closer. He's a little closer. That's Nathan D'Amico, speaking at the party's national convention earlier this year. And if you're familiar with Nathan D'Amico's name, you may remember him as the founder of Identity Europa, the neo-Nazi organization that started popping up on college campuses in and was marching here in Charlottesville in their white polo shirts in 2017.

1:12:46 But he actually has a very long history with the American Third Position Party. But that's something we'll get to another day. The problem that Nathan D'Amico and Merlin Miller and others in the party are running into when they try to define third positionism is that most people aren't using it sincerely. I mean, maybe they don't actually know what it means at all, like Merlin Miller. Or they're just using it as a branding strategy because it sounds more intellectual and more rooted in history and tradition and less crude than saying, I'm an ultra-nationalist neo-fascist. And you'll also see a lot of disingenuous descriptions of the third position as being a sort of ideological melding of both

1:13:34 left-wing and right-wing ideas. It's not a left or right-wing ideology. It combines a bit of both. Like Merlin Miller was saying, it's not aligned with either of the two traditional polls. It's not Democrat or Republican. It's neither left nor right. But that's a lie.

1:13:52 It is.

1:13:52 I'm sorry.

1:13:53 It is.

1:13:53 And I think most people who say that know it. I'm no political theorist, but advocating for policies that benefit the working class? But only the white working class because everyone else is dead, deported, disenfranchised, or enslaved? That's not a left-wing policy idea. The anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism of a third positionist isn't inherently left-wing. It's in service of nationalism.

1:14:24 The socialism in national socialism policy wasn't sincere, and it wasn't for everyone. When these people say that they aren't left or right, they mean they're so far right you can't see them on the spectrum anymore. They're fascists. American fascists like Tom Metzger in the 80s and Matthew Heimbach in the 2010s both pushed ideas that you could describe as third positionist. Though, I believe Heimbach specifically called himself a strasserist, which I guess is technically a slightly separate thing.

1:15:09 It's sometimes described as a precursor to third positionism, but they're used so interchangeably by guys who are trying to bring an air of intellectualism to their ethnostate manifestos that, honestly, I don't think it matters. Don't email me about it. At the 1987 Aryan World Congress, Tom Metzger, the leader of white Aryan resistance, was talking about third positionism when he said this, quote, War is dedicated to the white working people, the farmers, the white poor. This is a working class movement. Our problem is with monopoly capitalism. The Jews first went with capitalism and then created their Marxist game.

1:15:48 You go for the throat of the capitalist. You must go for the throat of the corporates. You take the game away from the left. It's our game. We're not going to fight your whore wars anymore. We've got one war, and that's right here. The same war the SA fought in Germany. Right here, in the streets of America. There's plenty to be written on the actual historical origin of the term in post-war Europe. There are third positionist, fascist nationalist groups in Italy, the UK, Germany, and France, and it's a little bit different everywhere you go. For the most part, It's branding. I think if you had to trace an ideological lineage, the American third position is most closely connected to the British fascist group International Third Position.

1:16:33 That group was founded by Nick Griffin after he split with National Front, though he eventually left Third Position too and joined the British National Party. But in the early days of the American Third Position Party, Nick Griffin was on their conference calls. When Merlin Miller was asked about the party's name again in an interview with a Russian tabloid a week before the election, he said they were thinking of changing it as soon as the election was over.

1:16:59 And that did end up happening. They rebranded as the American Freedom Party just a few months later. All that to say, Merlin Miller is hardly some innocent rube who got tricked into joining a Nazi party. He knew what he was doing. He hung around with these people for years before he put his name on that paperwork. He's willing to say that he's a nationalist and he openly advocates for all of the race-based nationalist policies that would make someone a white nationalist. But he said that he doesn't care for the label because it has too much baggage.

1:17:38 I'm not saying he doesn't know what he's advocating for.

1:17:42 He does.

1:17:44 But I do think that he did not know that third position was an actual political ideology and not just a fun name. I mean, he wanted to call the party the Americana Party, the same name he gave his pro-white film company. And I think that tells us something, too. That one little comment. He thought the party should have the same name as his film company. He links to his film company website on his official campaign materials. He mentions that he's looking for funding for his movie False Flag in every interview. In September of 2012, when he was in the home stretch of his presidential campaign, he spent a week in Tehran trying to pitch the movie to Iranian investors. In a segment on Iranian TV that week,

1:18:33 he spent more time talking about the movie than the party. He wanted to sell the movie. This was a convenient press junket. That's the vibe I get anyway.

1:18:45 I don't know.

1:18:48 Unsurprisingly, he did not win. He only made it onto the ballot as the American Third Position Party candidate in Colorado and New Jersey, but he appeared on ballots in Tennessee as an independent candidate. He also got a handful of write-in votes in Maryland and New York. All told, Merlin Miller was the preferred presidential candidate of 2,701 people.

1:19:15 That's 0.0% of the vote. The FEC only calculates it to one decibel place. A month after the election, Merlin Miller was invited to speak to a student group at a university campus in Maryland. Matthew Heimbach was a senior at Towson University, and he'd recently formed a white student union. It wasn't his first foray into white nationalism, and I wish it had been his last. He was already a member of the American Third Position Party, and he would go on to form and lead the Traditionalist Worker Party, perhaps following in this group's footsteps by actually registering his Nazi group with the Federal Election Commission. You can look at committee filings on the FEC's website to show that they expensed to the party. the helmets that they wore

1:20:08 to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. But again, a story for another day. But after all this, Merlin Miller sort of drifted away from this now-rebranded American Freedom Party. He appeared on an episode of the party's official podcast in May of 2013. When the party held a conference in July, I don't think he was there. His absence wasn't specifically noted, But I found video of quite a few of the speeches. And not only was he not one of them, but I was kind of surprised that the speeches didn't really talk about the campaign. Even a failed campaign is something to talk about. You know, a good leader would praise members of the organization for their hard work in a tough situation, talk about lessons learned

1:20:59 and what they'll do differently next time, appreciate the sacrifice made by your candidate, something, I don't know. It struck me as odd, but maybe I'm reading too much into it. By 2014, Merlin Miller had officially parted ways with the American Freedom Party. He formed his own party, calling it the American Eagle Party. There's no public animosity here. In a few speeches during this time period, Miller mentions in passing that he left his old party, which he doesn't usually name, because their focus was too narrow. In one video, American Freedom Party chairman William Johnson says pretty plainly that his party speaks explicitly. And Miller wanted to be more implicit about the same ideas. So it's not an ideological shift.

1:21:52 He's just using a different communication style. But the American Eagle Party was not long for this world. It never ran a candidate, and the only money it ever raised came in the form of a couple of donations from friends. An overwhelming majority of the funds raised by the group in its less than two years of existence was from one man, an attorney in Baltimore named Glenn Keith Allen.

1:22:22 In the summer of 2016, as he's involved in Miller's American Eagle Party and making donations, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote an article about Glenn Allen. He'd been in the movement for years, but he'd never been publicly identified before. the SPLC had obtained internal accounting records from the neo-Nazi organization National Alliance. And those documents included receipts showing that Glenn Allen had been a dues-paying member for years. At the time they published the article, Allen was working as an attorney for the Baltimore Police Department, a job he quickly lost. And this is actually where I first encountered Merlin Miller. It wasn't in the context of the American Third Position Party or the American Freedom Party or the

1:23:11 American Eagle Party. I saw Merlin Miller's name for the first time years ago while I was putting together notes about Glenn Allen. Merlin Miller is on the board of directors at a nonprofit Allen founded in 2018 with the stated purpose of providing legal assistance to victims of the thought police. His words, not mine. As an attorney, Glenn Allen has bravely defended the free speech rights of clients like Warren Bailaw, the Nazi who tried to sue the city of Charlottesville for failing to roll out the red carpet for his Nazi rally, members of Patriot Front who were sued for defacing a mural of black tennis legend Arthur Ashe, members of the Goyim Defense League, and he wrote amicus briefs for members of the Rise Above movement.

1:24:01 His foundation has also been used to solicit donations for legal defense in cases they didn't officially take on, like the criminal prosecution of Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau here in Albemarle County, Virginia last year. Allen is currently representing Nathan D'Amigo in his bankruptcy court battle to discharge the debt from a civil court judgment. A lawsuit filed against him as an organizer of the deadly Unite the Right rally.

1:24:28 And I actually mentioned Glenn Allen briefly last week. He's co-counsel on William Daniel Johnson's dried seaweed tariff case. I am on the edge of my seat waiting for a ruling on that one. Merlin Miller is, to this day, on the board of directors at Allen's Foundation, where his bio describes him as a filmmaker. He never did make any more movies. But according to his personal website, he still hopes to make False Flag a reality someday. Merlin Miller ran for president on the ticket of a Nazi party in 2012. But his heart was never really in it, I don't think. I think he just wanted to get on TV and talk about how the Jewish-controlled media wouldn't let him make his movies. The American Freedom Party, though,

1:25:21 they moved on too. When I started researching these episodes, all the articles about the group were old. It looked like they were more or less defunct But I just wasn't looking in the right places. Admittedly, I wasted a lot of time this week reading about Arminius, so I didn't get as far into the story as I'd intended.

1:25:45 But what I actually spent most of this week doing was listening to interviews with the new generation of the party's leadership. In March of this year, the American Freedom Party recommitted, They gathered at the castle in West Virginia, owned by white nationalist publisher Peter Brimelow. And they're talking about making a real comeback.

1:26:10 Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeart Radio.

1:26:27 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 Gagin. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com. I would 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.