Behind the Bastards - Introducing: Weird Little Guys

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Hi Behind the Bastards Fans! Take a listen to the trailer of our newest show, Weird Little Guys. About the show: Investigative journalist Molly Conger takes you beyond the headlines to examine some of the worst people on the planet, most of whom you’ve never heard of. These are the weird little guys trying to ruin life as we know it. Listen here and subscribe to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, welcome to Weird Little Guys, a weekly show about the worst people you've never heard of. I'm your host, Molly Conger. I spent years researching and writing about far-right extremism. I hang out in their chat rooms, watch their live streams, follow their court cases. I've stared deep into the abyss, poring over court documents, reading manifestos and listening to some of the worst podcasts ever made. And I've sat in the silence of a mostly empty courtroom, feet away from men whose hateful ideologies spurred them on to acts of shocking violence. And you know what?

They're all just some guy. However heinous the act, however hideous the rhetoric, no matter how dark their desires. It's like the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo. There never was a ghost or a swamp creature. There is no supernatural villain. It's some guy. Take Gerald, for example. Back in 2017, Gerald Drake started sending letters.

His first letter, sent just weeks after the deadly Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, demanded the cancellation of an annual Civil War reenactment, and threatened that the Unite the Right rally would look like a Sunday picnic by comparison if they didn't heed his demand. But they didn't cancel, so he put a pipe bomb in a tent. The bomb didn't go off, but the letters continued. And for over a year, members of the board of the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation received

letters with increasingly frightening threats. The letter writer said he'd kill one man's mother with a car bomb. He made graphic sexual threats towards someone's daughters. He threatened to feed ground-up glass to the horses ridden by the cavalry reenactors and drive trucks through parades. And all the letters were from Antifa, or so the envelope said. But they weren't from Antifa. They were from a weird little guy named Gerald. He'd been kicked out of his Civil War reenactment unit a few years earlier, and like the Confederate

soldier he dressed up as, he just couldn't let go of losing. He capitalized on the political tensions of 2017, exploiting the hysteria around anti-fascist activism to get a very personal kind of revenge. The race warriors and ethnostate enthusiasts who spend their days brainstorming ways to unravel the fabric of our society are a threat to be taken seriously. That's why I've spent years researching them. But this won't just be a parade of horrors. I mean, it'll definitely kind of be that. But we're gonna laugh, too.

I think we have to. Gerald dropped his first letter in the mail on his way to the airport for a solo European vacation. So the day somebody opened that letter threatening to shoot up the fake civil war, he was writing a five-star review of the Burger King he went to in Madrid. And the day the FBI raided his house, he was posting on a sex doll forum.

These are the weird little guys trying to ruin our lives. And I hope you'll join me for a little peek under their hoods. Listen to Weird Little Guys every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.