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Hey, welcome

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to Weird Little Guys, a weekly show about the

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worst people you've never heard of. I'm

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your host, Molly Conger. I

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spent years researching and writing about far-right extremism.

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I hang out in their chat rooms, watch their live

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streams, follow their court cases. I've

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stared deep into the abyss, poring over

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court documents, reading manifestos, and listening to

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some of the worst podcasts ever made.

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And I've sat in the silence of a mostly empty courtroom,

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feet away from men whose hateful

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ideologies spurred them on to acts of

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shocking minds. And you

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know what? They're all just some

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guy. However heinous

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the act, however hideous the rhetoric, no

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matter how dark their desires, it's

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like the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo. There

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never was a ghost or a swamp creature. There

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is no supernatural villain. It's

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some guy. Like

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Gerald, for example. Back

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in 2017, Darryl Drake started sending

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letters. His first letter,

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sent just weeks after the deadly Nazi rally

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in Charlottesville, Virginia, demanded the

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cancellation of an annual Civil War reenactment,

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and threatened that the Unite the Right rally

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would look like a Sunday picnic by comparison

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if they didn't heed his demand. But

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they didn't cancel. So he put a

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pipe bomb in a tent. The

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bomb didn't go off, but the letters continued.

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And for over a year, members of the

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board of the Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation received

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letters with increasingly frightening threats. The

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letter writer said he'd kill one man's mother with a car bomb.

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He made graphic sexual threats toward someone's

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daughters. He threatened to

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feed ground-up glass to the horses ridden

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by vocabulary reenactors and drive trucks through

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parades. And all the

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letters were from Antifa. Or

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so the envelope said. But

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they weren't from Antifa. They were from

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a weird little guy named Gerald. He'd

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been kicked out of his Civil War reenactment unit

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a few years earlier, and like the Confederate soldier

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he dressed up as, he just couldn't

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let go of losing. He

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capitalized on the political tensions of

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2017, exploiting the hysteria around anti-fascist

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activism to get a very

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personal kind of revenge. The

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race warriors and ethno-state enthusiasts who spend their

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days brainstorming ways to unravel the fabric of

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our society are a threat to be

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taken seriously. That's why I've spent years

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researching them. But this

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won't just be a parade of horrors. I mean,

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it'll definitely kind of be that. But

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we're gonna laugh, too. I think we

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have to. Gerald dropped

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his first letter in the mail on his way to

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the airport for a solo European vacation. So

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the day somebody opened that letter threatening to shoot up

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the fake civil war, he was

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writing a five-star review of the Burger King

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he went to in Madrid. And

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the day the FBI raided his house, he

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was posting on a sextal forum. These

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are the weird little guys trying to ruin our

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lives, and I hope you'll join me for a

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little peek under their hoods. Listen

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to Weird Little Guys every Thursday on the

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iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

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your podcasts.