Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome back to It Could Happen Here.
I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and I'm joined today by a very special guest, Michael Edison Hayden.
Hi, how's it going, Thanks for being here.
You may know Mike from his work as an investigative journalist and an expert on far right extremism. He currently co hosts Posting Through It, a weekly news podcast with fellow veteran of the far right beat, Jared Holt. But today we're talking about his new book, Strange People on the Hill, How Extremism Tore apart a small American town.
It comes out April seventh, twenty twenty six, but you can go ahead and pre order it now anywhere you buy books, and make sure you ask for it at your local library and your local independent bookstore.
Mike, thanks so much for coming on. I'm excited to talk about this.
Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah.
I was worried that I wasn't gonna have time to read the whole book. I mean, you talk about this a lot in the book, right, the stresses of covering this beat.
But I sat down to read it, and I read it in one sitting. It is very com.
Wow, but it's not the book I thought it was, you know, So when your publicists sent this to me, I thought, oh, phenomenal. This is a book about Peter Brimlow and the Racism Castle in West Virginia. I would love to read a book about Peter Brimlow and the Racism Castle.
And it's not really is it?
Like the Brimlows are the strange people on the hill and they sort of stay on the hill, right. You have a couple of encounters with them in the book, but for the most part, it's a book about the town.
Yeah. Yeah, it's about the town. And I'm glad that you mentioned that. I really didn't want to write a book that was about these villains that have been, you know, populating our culture for the last ten plus years that just seem to get unlimited traction on social media. There's nothing wrong with talking about them, and there's nothing on over certainly reporting on them, because I did my share of that, you know, day in and day out when
I was with SBLC, for instance. I think that all that is important, and there's different ways to do it and do it effectively. But I think for a book. I wanted to focus more on what these people and this culture that is surrounding them is doing to everyday people.
Yeah, I was just I was so startled by what it wasn't and then so engrossed by what it was. But just quickly for the listeners, tell us what the book is not about. Tell us who Peter Brimlow is and v Dare and how they ended up with a castle.
Yeah, well it's not totally without him. I mean we do get a bit of information about it. Yeah, we meet him. Peter kind of came up as a financial reporter. That's the short way of understanding, you know, how he became America's most influential white nationalist. That's what SPOC labeled him, which has covered obviously in the book. And he became obsessed with immigration and in particular heart Seller, which brought
in tons of people from the developing the world. My mother came to the country in sixty eight, for example. That was like a you know, three years after a heart Seller, and I wouldn't have been born if not. She married a white guy and etcetera, etcetera. She came
from Egypt. So he became obsessed with this and kind of in the way that I know, you know a lot about these the way some of these minds work, Molly, but in the way that some people get obsessed with environmentalism and then they kind of expand that concern to sort of say, well, there's too many people, right, there's too many people. There's too many people. Well there's too
many brown people. That's what's destroying the environment. And then they become you know, sort of white nationalists minded, or anti grand immigrant minded. In Brimlo's case, I really think it was like a financial thing, just like this is putting all these different strains or whatever. And then it became the financial became less of a concern and the actual anti immigrant thing became bigger and bigger for him.
In nineteen ninety five, he publishes Alien Nation, which is a book that was actually praised to by people like David Frum, you know, the very same guy who's high hatting about Trump every day. It was considered socially acceptable, and then over time, I think people realized that the book had a very racist undercurrent, and it became beloved by Nazis, white nationalists, et cetera.
I think if people like David Frum had been honest with themselves. It was there all along. It was not a subtle undercurrent.
Fun A side about David Frum, which is that I did put it in the investigation into Stephen Miller's private emails. Miller shared posts by from on more than one occasion about like sort of anti Islam posts, which I think is interesting.
And I think what these people disagree most about is how loud you're supposed to say the quiet part.
Yeah, no, I really do think that that's true. So, you know, when Peter became more of a contentious figure, he founded Videir, which is a nonprofit that lasted for about quarter century. Recently died recently double that's covered in the book. It dies over the course of the narrative, and it was hugely influential, usually influential in changing the GOP.
And at the time when W. Bush was president, Brimlow was railing against the GOP to change, to move in this nativist direction, and eventually they listened to him.
And so the book sort of starts with you know, twenty nineteen, right, and Peter and his wife, Lydia Brimlow have purchased this gigantic castle in the small town of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Right. I guess it's not shakes, the medium sized castle. I don't know what the scale
for castles is. And so you become interested in their purchase of this castle, and you go to this town and you meet the people of Berkeley Springs, the people who are indifferent to their presence, the people who are organizing against their presence, and it's this really sort of engrossing story of just small town drama, this interpersonal drama of these like small business owners. And the castle is always there in the background, right, the strange people are
up on the hill. But it's a story about this small town struggle.
Yeah. I think we should just talk about the castle real quick, because it's beautiful, and I think that's a key thing. I hope when you read it you were like, oh, I want to go to Berkeley Springs now, which is I've had more than one person who read the book tell me.
That I'm going to wait till they leave.
I've also heard that too, But you know, I know the people who are there who despise the Brimlows and their ideology, and I wanted to make sure that they didn't feel let down by the book that they felt like at least honored to a degree because I really want them to be able to recover their business. Their business have suffered since Brimlos took over. But just a quick thing on this castle. It is absolutely beautiful. It should be like a national park or something. It has
that feel. It was built in eighteen eighty by a guy named Samuel Taylor Suit who made it for a very very young young girl. I think she's like seventeen or something like that.
It's fitting that Brimlow bought it for his much younger wife.
Yes, that's true. Yeah, there's a lot of like spiritual kind of woo woo stuff in in Berkeley Springs, and there's a lot of you know, superstition, and a lot of people really think that they are carrying on like some sort of ghost like thing would carry over from this relationship. But he made the castle for her, and he died and she took over and went bankrupt, and there was also allegedly a murder or something like that
that took place there. And then there's like this kind of turnover from people one generation the next trying to keep the castle going. It's always more expensive than it's Worth. It's beautiful. It overlooks the entire town. The town is tiny, gorgeous, looks like a great place to go on vacation. And if you imagine like four Berkeley Springs, the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty Times Square rolled into one, that's what the castle is. It's so tiny, and this is the
main landmark. This is the thing that everybody goes to and they go hiking around there and all this stuff. So this is a tourist town that attracts a lot of LGBQ people from places like Washington, DC, Baltimore, a lot of liberals, and all of a sudden you have this again SPOC labeled white nationalist, anti immigrant, nativist, whatever you want to call them. Couple buys this castle, right,
they decide to buy it. And the way they found it is because Lydia Brimlow, who is thirty seven years younger than Peter herself and started with him and when she was twenty or something like that and he was nearly sixty.
Right, she was an intern at the Heritage Foundation when they met.
Intriguing, Yeah, heritage and it's interesting, weird in any case, she finds it on Zillo and you remember this period very well, I know, But in twenty eighteen or so, it became very very difficult for these folks to stage events right.
For you know, for unknown reasons, not because they kept killing people.
I don't want to like derail this podcast by bringing up Jason Kessler, but Jason Kessler, who we both know very well, who is who secured the permit for the Unite the Right event, who has been at different times obsessed with both of us, I think were like in his top in his top op all list, Jason you know, was readily associated with Vidier because of his contributions to the site. And people knew that, and that may put even more pressure because theyre like, well, this Charlottesville guy, right,
they Unite the Right guy is Assai. So Vidio couldn't stage any events. They were very worried about counter demonstrators. I think that the counter demonstrators from that first MAGA era really put the fear of God into some of these people. They didn't, they were they were scared shitless of anti racist, anti fascists, And all of a sudden, you got a castle on Zillow, a million point four and it's got stone walls all over it and hey, we can hold our conferences here, and so that's how
they got it. They ended up getting it for that reason. And what happens to the town afterwards, I think is a minor tragedy in our culture that hasn't been paid attention to enough.
Yeah, it is this sort of microcosm of what happened to America. Right, we don't all have a racism castle in our town, but sort of the way this castle bears down on this little town kind of mirrors the way the influx of these extreme right wing ideas into the GOP, into the administration that governs all of us kind of is bearing down on us.
Yeah, that's very smart. I think that's true. I think that is one of the reasons that the story spoke to me so much that I wanted to pursue it for so long. Is it really felt like what everybody was going through in the town. And readers will learn this. Imagine business owners who are catering to many liberals there and stuck in Morgan County, which is seventy five percent Trump and ninety percent white, and they're panicking because they need to keep people going. In the press goes a
long way in Berkeley Springs. It's it's a little place. They don't know how to push back. Someone buys private property, what can you do? But they start to organize and try to figure out a way to urge Brimlow to leave or to make it so difficult for him that he leaves. And yes, it is absolutely a symbolism for
what everybody's going through. And there are people all over the country in places Red states where you might find people who you wouldn't expect kind of protesting against TESLA or something like that, and it could be kind of corny, these type of people who like corny online and easily ignored. They're all over the country feeling that exact dread that you're talking about, where something very like above them is bearing down and pushing values that don't align with theirs.
Right, it's such a specific story about Berkeley Springs, but at the same time, this could be almost any talent.
You know.
I'm sure you followed the story of what happened to ed, Oklahoma when the identity of Europa Guy got on their city council and it was this very local, small town struggle with these very specific local personalities butting heads. But the story's playing out in small towns all over America because everyone has, you know, if not a racism castle, everyone has a local racist who's making life hard for everyone.
Yeah, I mean they're sending right now. To use claviculars phrase the Yeah, I mean think about North Idaho, for example. I get a story for them for about from other Jones, and you know, they they have a long history with white supremacy and it's certainly dead red far right part of the country. But you have like anti semites like Dave Riley, it's right, Rebecca Hargraves and those people encroaching on their everyday politics. Right, they're trying to change the politics.
They're trying to integrate themselves, you know, coming from outside to take over, right.
I mean, it's the same thing, is what happened in West Virginia.
It's that these white supremacists are moving to these places because they have a perception about what it will be like when they get there, that everyone who's there will agree with me because they're mostly white.
That's why Dave Riley moved Idaho.
Yeah. When Peter Brimlo first moved to the Castle, he would repeatedly I think he would do it when people reach out for comment and be like, you know, Morgan County is seventy five percent voted for Trump, It's ninety percent white. It's you who have the problem, not us.
And if you're looking for a more optimistic thing here, I've gotten good reviews for the reviews that I've gotten, but they keep using like disturbing, like this is so scary, Like I think for us it's not as much because we've been living in it for in a more intimate way, right I.
Found it encouraging, yes, because you met these people who were doing their best in this like bizarre, fucked up situation, Like they didn't ask for a weird old British Nazi to buy.
The cat exactly.
They're doing their best, and I think that's beautiful.
I think I think if you try to tune out the reality that we're all going through right now and just focus on, you know, your own private world, it can be scary because you're letting in Peter Brimlow and your chair head while you read the book, and you're you're you're seeing neighbors kind of turning on one another, and you're seeing me go through a mental health crisis
in the book. I mean, there's these are things that for for a normy that maybe a little bit you know, you may like the book, but you may be a final little disturbing. But for people like us who have kind of really been through stuff in this and seeing it up close on a regular basis, Look, what I like about the book is it's it's rare to like say, I'm going to praise some white people here, but like it's white people saying that they don't want to be
represented by these values, right. And I think that for me, as somebody who comes on outsider, I like, look so normal in New York. I'm just I'm just swarthy. But they are there there, I look like Osama bin Laden And I was gonna.
Say, environment, I don't think you pass as why as you do in New York.
It's very different. Yeah. Yeah, And I say, like, you know, when you see them, I mean, they they have a choice to just kind of say like, actually, yeah, we're you know, Peter Brimlow is standing up for my rights. He's standing up for me, he's speaking for me there. But a lot of people are not saying.
A guy who thinks a twenty eight hundred dollars political donation is a small amount. That's not the average West Virginian's idea of a small amount.
Yes, that is a good thing to pull out. Yes, you know. The other thing is the people who ultimately in the book tend to defend Brimlow or align with him, because basically the town is becomes completely divided, maybe irrevocably, so hopefully they'll come together one day. And it's still I think the tensions are still quite bad. Yeah, it's still happening. Even though Fidier dies at the end, the
Brimo still live there. The people who do are not like, yes, we believe full throated in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. We think that the Great Replacement that like, you know, I'm thinking about more extreme things that Brimlow has said.
No, they're just people who see a nice white man and his nice white wife and they were nice to me. And I don't understand why you're making life so hard.
Yeah, I mean Vvidier has published apologia about mass shooters' intentions basically right.
But so many of these these Brimlow defenders are just they're not saying what he said is okay, or I believe what he said. They're saying he was nice to me. Why are you making such a big deal out of this?
Yeah, I will clarify that. But they haven't said yes, mass shootings are good. They have condemned that, but they've also said that like this writing makes sense, right, and they're like when during the Tops Supermarket shooting in Buffalo in twenty twenty two, that's something I highlight in the book, Vder publishes something that's like, actually, like look what, look, how the Great Replacement has changed Buffalo. That was their response to ten black people getting shot.
Right. So Peter Briddole is very litigious, so we do have to be very specific here and say Peter Briddlo did not say it is good that Peyton Dendron shot up that supermarket. What he did say is if the Great Replacement weren't happening.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's look, and I think that going back to the people in the town, I don't think that they at every point be like that is good, that what he's saying here is good the Great Replacements. I'm fully on board with it. What they buy into is this profound friend enemy distinction that now hovers over our entire country, right where it's just sort of people who are friends of Maga and Trump are on one side, and then anybody who's at is my enemy.
And these more extreme talking points are sort of creeping into that space and they're not stopping it, you know.
Of course it's two sided. Of course there's like that that comes from the liberal left or wherever you want to whatever you want to call it. But I think in the case of the Brimlows, it's not the specifics. I remember asking one guy in the book whose name is Charlie Currier, and he owns a you know, a sort of a craft's shop at the corner of Berkeley Springs Park and it's right next to another main character of the book, Trey Johansson, who is you know, kind
of almost the most important person. And I asked Charlie. I was like, you know, so you met the Brimlows, you hung out with them. What was that like for Christmas and stuff like that? And I was like, well, how do you feel about the great replacement stuff? How do you feel about like the stuff he writes? And what he said was he's a writer. He's a writer like you. He's a journalist just like you. He's the same as you there's no difference, and he was very defensive.
Yikes.
You know, I think that framing is very useful for understanding why we can't seem to snap out of this current condition that we're in. When you're inside that bubble, that's the logic that works. It's like, this is the guy on our side. You know, we're defending the guy on our side. Right, that's a psychosis that kind of overshadows the entire narrative.
Right, So this story in this town plays out against the backdrop of the wider world. Right, So you know, your first visit to Berkeley Springs was right as COVID is starting, Right, it's the last time you left your New York apartment before lockdown.
You're in Berkeley Springs.
And as the story progresses, we see the twenty twenty uprising, and there's like a little blm rally in this tiny town. And then there's j six, and there's October seventh, there's the twenty twenty four presidential campaign and these big events in the world, and then there's these smaller events in the town, but interwoven with this sort of personal memoir, right that the world is in turmoil and so is your life.
Yeah, and all these threads sort of weave together.
Yeah, that's true regarding the events in the world and in the town. I'm glad that you brought that up. One thing I wanted to do with the book that I don't see done and enough, is just to understand that, like everything that we see, all these like viral trends and all this stuff filters down into everyday life. And I think when news is breaking or trends are happening, we only look at the news and the trends like that, and we rarely look at the impacts on our neighborhood.
Whereas you know, if you do a movie that's said in the eighties, you will see like the event a little bit more about like at the kitchen table, what the family is going through. As something happens nationally, right or so and so's it's almost like we need time to process. But this has a very clear time period, which is the period right before COVID to the twenty twenty four election, And it's enough in the past now that I think we can look at how these things
affected regular people in this in this town. Because every time you're seeing viral videos about black lives matter. That's impacting the way people act there. So you may have like five white people go stand on a street corner there with some signs after George Floyd's death, and that's like a huge deal in that town because it's like people are shocked by it or they want to they want to they want to harass those people after that.
So that was one factor. And as yeah, and as for as for myself, it also overlaps like probably the darkest time in my life. And that's not totally unrelated to Berkeley Springs in the sense that, like, you know, stuff at SPLC was like really really bad at the beginning of the book. Then they're not there in the second half, and my mental health was was just not
in a great place. I had spent, as you know, a lot of time with these guys, and I know you personally have dealt with a lot of threats and really, I mean as a woman, and I mean you're dealing with I imagine it's even scarier because.
It's grosser anyway, is yeah, that's.
Grosser for sure, And I mean you're dealing with I mean, I can't even imagine the mentality of some of the guys who are messaging you and what their their private lives are like. So yeah, so yeah, I mean I had gone through it for a while on my end.
One example that is in twenty twenty one, I took my son to the batting cage and afterwards we went to seven to eleven and I got a call from a number in North Carolina and then it was an FBI agent and he's like, hey, I just want to you know, as a courtesy, you want to let you know that we have somebody who's like talking about assassinating you, and you know, do you have any questions like that?
Yeah?
I was like I do, but like my eight year old is like slurping on a you know, a cherry slurpee in the back seat.
That duty to warn thing is kind of a double edged sword, right, because they do have this legal obligation to inform you that there's a credible threat on your life, but like they're not going to give you enough information to make you feel empowered by knowing this information.
So it's like maybe I would.
Rather just not know.
Yeah.
Oh, it was like literally, if there's something I can do to mitigate this, can.
I just not know?
Yeah? It was horrible. It was hard. That is I think one of the things that the normy person would find deeply disturbing in the book. But like, yeah, I was dealing with that stuff all the time. I would get like, you know, I'd get people sending me photos of Alan Berg's shooting in the driveway. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but like he was the talk radio host who was killed by the members of the.
Order, killed by David Lane.
Yeah, and I would get that all the time. I must spent like months of just getting that from like random numbers and all this stuff.
Sometimes like a group of guys will get very into a particular image, and I can imagine the kind of guy that is very into the image of Alan Berg's corpse.
And it's not a nice guy.
I mean, it's it's taboo. It has like a pornographic quality to it.
But it harkens to a very specific era of the movement.
Like I can imagine there's a particular man who gravitates to that specifically.
Yeah, And I mean, like I remember getting threatened by Bowers, the guy who shot up like because I was on GAB all the time, as you know, to a fault, I think, but like you know, I mean, it got got a lot of stories out of it and sources. But yeah, because I was always dealing with those guys, and I was always posting on air and you know, trying to stir things up and see what it could shake loose for a story. And yeah, Bowers was just
some kind of idle thing. And so when the Tree of Life shooting happened, when he went out and said, you know, screw your optics, I'm going in right right, yeah, and I was like, I know this guy, that one dingo. Hell, So this was this was very traumatic for me. I've been holding pretty firm on this. I had a lot of manic tendencies in the sense of like I could just work constantly, and you just work around the clock,
work late at night, constantly doing investigative reporting. And I was on a mission because I was so angry about what had happened, you know, Unite the right. That's what that really triggered me. I had before then, I had been really open to pursuing a beat as a crime
reporter or on climate change. These were the kind of things that were like I had I had written features of previously, but it was it was after you night the right I got folks, and I really was like, I'm going to put all all my abilities into trying to create trouble for these guys, and yeah I did. And then when they pushed back, I guess I I wasn't mentally prepared for how scary it could be. And
it was lots of stuff. Then I went through a separation with my wife, which is fine, we're great friends, you know, but that was like another factor. And then also the SPLC thing, which we can talk about. But the main thing is that I reached a breaking point. I was I was happened to be in Berkeley Springs with some of the sources from the book when I had to go home and go to a psych ward and I went for three weeks, and like I diagnosed with bipolar there, which was a very useful diagnosis.
It makes it makes a big difference because I mean, especially it's bipolar if you're just taking an I depressance, like you're gonna be up shit creek.
Oh yeah, well the ANSWER's press is really screwed up my stomach and also made me like even more manic and stuff like that.
But the book is is a very frank, very very honest, very personal, and maybe this is why people found the book to be, you know, disturbing, because it is a very frank discussion of what it means to be the person who is for so many years in the thick of it, yeah, you know, not doing sort of objective detached reporting, but getting in there and mixing it up with these guys like really, you know, skin in the game, committed to the cause, doing investigative journalism in these spaces,
and I mean, I think we both are guilty of this. Over the years on this beat, there is this tendency to sort of you know, exchange war stories like oh, you know, I got this terrible threat, I got this terrible threat. You laugh it off, and it's like, you know, it's it's this sort of fact of life that you brush off, and you know, everyone says, oh, you're so brave, I could never do that, and you say, it's not a big deal.
I deal with it all the time.
Yeah, they say that for sure.
But then you go home and it is a big deal and people are not, Yeah, is honest about that as they could be. I mean, in part because admitting that it hurts you makes them double down. If they know they got you, they're going to keep digging in that spot. But like, we don't talk enough about the fact that this destroys us. Yeah, for sure, it's a very honest look at what happens when you bought him out on that.
And it's so much worse than just threats. I mean, you're constantly concerned that somebody is going to use law fair against you and try to.
Hurt your family and you have children.
Yeah, of course, you know, And I am extremely anal about legal stuff, Like I'm just like hyper, like I don't you know, I don't play games I like and so that's out just an example. It's like we published when I was with the SBOC, we published the identity of Matt Gebert, who is the state department official. I remember that guy.
I was actually going to bring him up.
I was going to bring up my gaber in terms of the number of guys who've moved to West Virginia because they think it's only white.
Yeah, we'll get there in a second. But I just say it, like before I published that story, even though I'd been through a million lawyers and like every I mean, we just went through everything and stuff like that. I bought a pack of cigarettes, which I never do, you know, I don't want to get into my stomach thing too deeply. But it was not working. It was not working at all that day. It was August seventh, twenty nineteen, and I was like, literally I was I was clammy. I
was sweating. I had never seen his face. He kept all of his pictures offline. But I had the goods. I knew I had everything. But yet at the same this is one doubt. It's like, what if it's not him because I don't have the face match forget threats, that level of stress of just you know, it's just
like I checked everything, right. I Like you think, think about the you're trying to leave the house for a long trip or something like that, and it's like, you know that thought, Oh yeah, like should I leave the gas stove on when I was you know, when I was boiling something for my kids or whatever. Like that's the way it, right. It's like a sort of you like you memorize the entire investigative feature and you're like going through it and there's like, oh, oh, you know,
is that that right? Did I check that? And I'm like, yes, I did.
Oh, I know, I know that.
I know that feeling exacty drives my husband crazy when I say things like I'd rather get shot than be wrong in public.
Yeah, no, it's true. It's it's true, Like I don't I don't want to. Yeah, you don't want to be wrong. And also you don't want to give these people a chance for anything. And you mentioned Brimlow is very litigious.
Not usually very successfully. No, no, but that doesn't matter, No, it doesn't matter. Yeah, but it's stressful to report on him because of that, because he just he will use it as a tactic and stuff like that. And I gave I also gave the brimlos I should point out many, many opportunities to talk to me and more detail about everything, and they didn't want to.
But you do speak to him several times in the book.
Yeah, I do, I do much to his displeasure. Well, I was just to say, like, yeah, I mean all that really led up to me going to the psych word and that and the the SBOC thing, which is bas my relationship with SBOC is like I was probably the most well known person there apology because I've had a social media presence and I was doing a lot of spokesperson work, So I was like on TV a bunch and stuff like that.
So whenever someone's mad at the organization, they're going to take it out on you.
Yeah. And really, for a good part of the early years there after Heidi left, we didn't even have a director of the intelligence project, so you know, I would just get thrown into a lot of TV radio stuff like that. And you know, they treated me great. I mean they had got my pay raise multiple times and promoted and stuff like that. And I kept breaking investigative stories. And then when we started to have problems where we were,
they started to limit our ability to publish stories. They really became very risk averse.
Which is so contrary to my image of what this institution is for. Yeah, both like functionally and morally.
Yeh. Yeah.
As a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Los Center, you didn't have mental health coverage. You couldn't a real therapist. Yeah, that's horrific. That's a human rights abuse to make you look at gabble. They had not get you a therapists.
They were giving us like the app stuff, which is not going to cut it.
No, but you need like a five hundred dollars an hour. Yeah, New York analyst.
Was a psychiatrist. You know, it's okay, like you know, somebody.
Good, but they should be covering that.
Yeah, no, they were not. And there's just a whole bunch of stuff. There were a bunch of safety issues, no doubt, Anna case, my dear colleagues, still my colleague, even though I'm not there anymore. You know, she went to go Carver, Ameron and Tennessee and like a bunch of proud boys like basically chased her down right. There was no security plan. There was a woman named Susan Cork was the intelligence project director at that time, and she was just you know, how to lunch. You just
didn't do anything. As far as I could tell.
Things like what happened to Hannah, Like stuff like that happens to me.
I expected. I'm out there by myself.
I have no plan. It's just me, I have no plan.
It was so startling to me to hear that, like Hannah is out there operating without a net too.
There was no plan for her safety.
Yeah, there was nothing. And so one of the first things I did was I helped shepherd a grievance about this, and it was effective because I think that got Cork put on like a performance improvement plan. And then after that everything changed at work. I went from betting the favored person to being repeatedly at target of what did you do? Why did you do this? Like it was really I mean to add on the already stressful situation that I was in. It was just like your tone
in a meeting. And then there was the thing about that was there was like a verbal warning or something that was they actually bothered to write out, which was quite stupid. If you're doing a verbal warning, you shouldn't put it in print. And sure enough we found in there that, like all of the dialogue that was in there, was completely fabricated and made up.
And so for the listener.
So discussed in the book a little bit is the fact that the Southern Poverty Lossoner was engaging in unionvesting. Yes, that's right, so you know you were dealing with retaliation for union activity in the workplace.
Retaliation for union activity. It was really bad. It happened a second time after that, when I was covering the trial Doug Mackie character we can save for another day, for another day, and it was really bad and the stress was really getting to me, and I had a panic attack which I've never had before, while I was in the shower, and I told them about that, and Susan Cork and the person above her, his name is
An Beeson. I told him about that, and then they responded by turning around and disciplining me again, almost like to say, like, we've got them on the ropes now, let's really like make them quit.
Say eighty a violation.
Yeah, And every time we do this, we'd summon the union and we'd make it as hairy for them as possible to do what they're doing. But there's limits to what you can do. Really, when they want to try to do these sort of things, they pushed it as far as they wanted to go, which is after the summer of twenty twenty three, there was a Hamas attack on Israel, and you know, I have Arabs in my family, I have my mother's side, including Palestinians. You know, I
was distraught about this whole situation. Was it was adding another thing on top of it, and watching the retaliation, which became a genocide very quickly, did not improve my mood. Obviously, It was very stressful to see that stuff, and Hannah invited me to sign a thing about you know, it was just sort of like asking writers to sign on Israel's and apartheid state, you know, calling for a ceasefire.
Writers for the seasfire.
Yeah, I remember, and.
Free Beacon familiar with that wonderful politician.
It still comes up in the first few pages of your Google results.
Thank you for nothing.
Yeah, I know, but this the book should push it back.
The book Free Beacon like came out with this thing and it was like SBLC spokesperson you know, blames Israel for Hermas violence or something like that.
And just the audacity to accuse you of anti Semitism for a signing this letter, you know, supporting a ceasefire. I've read that letter. It's it's it's not an anti Semitic letter. It is calling it what it is and just asking for a ceasefire. Right, And you have spent a decade writing about anti Semitic violence.
Well, there's there's tons of there's there's tons of anti Zionist Jews on there. I mean, there's probably more than anything else. But you know, when this, when this came out, I was really pissed. Obviously it had a racist undertone. I mean, Hannah was mentioned, but it was mostly about me. And then there instead of a picture of me they used they used like one of those pictures of Moss looking like Cobra from CI Joe and with like a rocket launcher and.
Write implying that you, as as a man of Arab descent, are an anti Semitic terrorist. Yeah, basically and good faith stuff.
Adding to I would say, this is also complex because you know, my family basically fled because of threats from Islamic terrorism, right, so this is even more like, you know, to align me with that necessarily is not my not ideal, even though I'm in like, you know, I'm sure I have a very more more nuanced idea of what HOMAS is than that author. The point is it's just, I mean, it's just basically to do that and then rather than SBOC like cares so much about social justice and racism.
Rather than seize the opportunity to differentiate themselves from the psychosis that the ADL has descended into. As you know, because those two organizations sort of exist in the same space, they're often used in the same sentence, and the ADL has really lost a lot of credibility in the last few years.
I don't think they have any credibility because of those.
So instead of differentiating themselves from that, they chose to discipline you.
Yeah, they did. And it was that was when I, like I said, mental health was like all the factors that we've just discussed mentioned And then I was happened to be in Berkeley Springs when I reached a point where I was like, you know, I was, I was suicidal and trigger warning for people. I apologize, but that's the truth, and came back and I had to spend this sort of Christmas break period there where I lost you know, they ultimately terminated me. It was a Title
seven violation in terms of discrimination. Well we'll get into what happened effort. And then when people found out what happened, the union started to write things, you know, to management. There was all this internal dialogue happening while I was in a psych word with like no access to anything, and almost everybody in my line of managers was pushed out and given buyouts allegedly Quirk this woman and Beeson and now the CEO.
Is they exposed themselves to some serious liability there.
Yeah, they got off easy in many ways. Yeah, they disposed of me, but I threatened suit with a lawyer, wonderful lawyer who she was great Jewish woman from New York and was as tough as nails, and yeah, I mean I got a good settlement out of it, which is, you know, I would have preferred just to be able to just continue doing my job.
Though it's heartbreaking to remember that.
You know, even these progressive nonprofits that are fighting for what we believe, they're using you up and spitting you out to Yeah, oh sure, they're doing union busting. They're firing you for having a mental health crisis. They're opposed to you exercising your free speech off the clock, the kinds of things you just you don't want to see from an organization like the SPLC.
Yeah, they had to retract my termination and assign into a layoff. And then you know, I had to retract labor claims I had made, which would have gone nowhere as soon as the Trump administration took over. Anyway, that's heartbreaking, which I saw coming in twenty twenty four to a degree. So yeah, like that happened. And then bringing it back to Berkeley Springs. I was told not to go anywhere,
but I needed to keep working on the book. So it was like a week after I got out of the hospital, I came back down there, and then the folks who I had been working with since twenty twenty when the Brimlas first arrived, they kind of took me in and nurse me back to health. So that's why it's I feel like unified in the narrative, and we're able to explore what happened to me psychologically and what happens is and them psychologically as this other stuff is happening. See.
I guess I understand why some of the reviewers call it disturbing. But that sort of full circle, that sort of personal closure. You know, obviously things weren't ideal, right, you lost your job, but I don't know, things came full circle and the people that you went there to write about took care of you, and you, I don't know, you all.
Continue along your way as the world falls apart.
I don't think that they come all cross as like perfect either. I mean, like that's what I'm really hopeful for.
No, I mean they're all complicated people.
You know, I wanted to avoid like the sort of wishy washy utopian like I'm an ally you know, and it's like, yeah, actually, the people who are allies have all kinds of issue that marital problems. Maybe some of them are like behave badly in one thing or whatever.
We're all people trying to live. It's really a question of what this particular ideology that has been foisted upon us very rapidly by the likes of Steve Bannon and Brimlow and others right it was a it was a collective push to take the existing right wing monstar and set it in this direction. What this is doing to us.
It's a very intimate look at what that is like for individual people. You know, we were all experiencing having right wing violence foisted upon us from above, but this is I don't know. There were these like small moments of like physical intimacy, like when you're you're at the castle for the party and you know, you and Peter Brimlow are exchanging like this lighthearted moment and you reach
out and you put your hand on his shoulder. Instinctively, when you're sharing laughter with someone, you put out, you put your hand on his shoulder, and like you know recoiled immediately and didn't know why you had done that with this like tiny moment of physical intimacy that you know this was a person, sure, or the transgender mushroom farmer Lisa Marie who sought out Lydia Brimlow at church and shook her hand during the rite of peace, like I would have loved to have seen that.
She's so cool by the way, you should have her on.
She's awesome, she sounds amazing.
I would love to meet Lisa Marie.
Well, I'll tell you about her in a second. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean Brimlo is behaving in a very I mean he has like an infuncular kind of vibe like in person when he's not angry with you. And I'm sure that for people who know him in a friendly way in the movement that he's he's fun.
You know, he likes to drink room temperature Vanka.
He is always talking like this. He sounds like he's always had her for your drinks. Probably, Yes, he has that British way of just some kind of dry remark about things going to pot like you know, I'm sure it's fun for people who know him, and you know, you're in that space and any kind of party thing or whatever you can let go for a second. And for a second I felt not that, like I felt like, oh, this is my friend, or it is more than I'm.
Just talking exactly.
You know, people really bristle it that you know you're humanizing him. Well, yeah, because he's human. Humanizing doesn't mean excusing or you know, coming to appreciate it in any way.
It just means like he's human. So for most of the book, the strange people on the.
Hill are removed on the hill, but when you encounter them, there is this very human intimacy to these encounters.
And not only that, everybody has a rough go in this book, including that.
Getting raked over the coals by Letitia James well over the.
Course of this that there if you follow their their arc and their arcs throughout the book, but one particular arc, it starts with them really thinking they've got it, like this is like this is like high point of Vider's existence. They have a castle, they have a home base that they can use in perpetuity. After Brimla leaves, the movement can flourish and grow. This is like this is it. They got a Castle.
I mean, it would be the perfect place for white nationalists meet up. They haven't really used it that way that much, like every now and again, but like.
This is the best situation they've ever had, Like they're great, and they've also just coming off of getting a whole bunch of dark money donations from two people we don't know who they are, but it's like, you know, four point five mil in like one year through donors Trust,
and they're writing really high. And then by the end from the Letitia James investigation, it had not turned into a lawsuit yet by that point, under the pressure of that and just under the pressure of just everybody around them, you know, not wanting them to be there, they decided to dial down VideA altogether. And it still exists in the sense of, like the Twitter accounts still exists, and Brimlo is still writing on substack. Some of it is a legal thing to try to, you know, get them
out of the way of Letitia j Ames. But you know, they're really broken down. I mean, the videos that they published about their closing, I mean, it's just a laundry
list of things that add up to a defeat. I don't think they would disagree with that that they felt defeated by the end, and the people who were in the town who are so nice and sweet and wonderful and all this, they're laughing as you would, right as everybody talked about like when Trump dies, and everybody's like, oh, I'm going to do this when Trump dies and all
that stuff. Right, it's just liberation from that thing. But ultimately it's a really like if you just look at the Brimlows, it is, you know, it is a brutal fall by the end of the book.
Yeah, I mean ten years ago they were poised to be on top of the world and their ideas remain ascendant, but he himself has really fallen. Now he just has the flooded basement of his little racism castle.
Well, there's no solidarity on their side. I just oh god, that's what I saying.
Oh, that's one thing they will never happen.
I Mean, you get somebody who annoys me, who is a sort of anti fascion anti racists, who like annoys the shit out of me, but they they wind up like, you know, being targeted by somebody. I'm like, okay, well.
You're not going to gloat about their downfhones.
But not only that, but it's like now it's time to like, you know, support them. You know, that's the way I feel.
And they just don't do that. They don't do that for each other. They hate each other.
They're always malignant narcissists because it's always about cloying to the top, right, it's always trying to get power over other people.
I mean, everybody wants to be the crab at the top of the bucket, but you're still crabbing a goddamn bucket.
There's two strains of maga. I know, mega is a very broad term, and like one of them is really this kind of grift focused kind of cryptoweb three aligned aspect. We're just AI and this, and like a small number of people, like fifteen percent will go hoard a bunch of like fake coins or whatever things polymarket, like odds or whatever. They're all hoarding information to kind of beat
people in polymarket. And then the suckers they you know whatever, the o the rest of it, the bigger percentage of seventy five percent followers, they're taking their money and that's baga. That's a big part of bag. And then the other part is less concerned with money, although money is a
part of it. Is just ascending and pushing down from a power space, right, Like you just like to be in a place where they can have power over other people, and usually other people being designated by not looking like them, or not behaving like them, or not having the same kind of boyfriend's girlfriends whatever than them.
It's like, I mean, I couldn't be happier that Peter Brimlow is going to end his career on the bottom of the heap he was trying to climb.
Yeah, you know, yeah, and they'll be the I guarantee you there'll be more of an effort from us to define his legacy than from them, because they don't care. They don't care.
No, they will, they'll use you up and forget you.
Yeah, they don't care. We will. We will spend more time on him than so we I mean, we're talking about him right now. We have I have a host a podcast where we talk about these guys all the time time, right, so it's a girl. He's bringing up new guys. I think we're doing We're doing a full BIOEP on Stephen Miller soon. You know, they don't do that. They don't care. They're not like, here's the reason Stephen's great.
Like no, I mean Jason Kesslo disappeared from the internet a year ago and they don't talk about him anymore. Oh, It's it's like he never existed.
Yeah, I mean, but you know what, I hope he stays off that, you know what I mean. I try to find some forgiveness in my heart. You know, maybe it's the Catholic upbringing, whatever, but I try to find some even though he literally who knows what he did that was related to the threats I received because he wrote stuff about me.
I mean I think that that series he put on vdare that included information about you and your family certainly didn't help.
Yeah for sure. But you know, if he stays offline and he stays like this, like, I hope that he's getting some help.
That's all anyone ever asked.
I mean, that's all I was ever asking for from these guys. I'm not even holding out hope that you change your heart.
I just want you to stop doing.
Stuff about it, yeah, I mean, just stop trying to make everything worse.
Yes, yeah, really, Like I mean, but if he's out there and he's like I'm just gonna, like, you know, keep it quiet. And I have a hard time imagining that guy like finding any kind of change of heart. But it would be great if he just stayed, just stayed at everything and just lived his life. And you know, privately, I would I would feel some tiny crumb of respect for.
That God willing, God willing, and maybe, uh maybe Peter Rimo will log off forever eventually too.
Well, I mean based upon the age that that's yeah.
Well he's gonna he's gonna do a permanent log.
Off eventually, permanent log off eventually. I've heard all kinds of gossip about from people in Berkeley Springs that Lydia really doesn't want to be associated with the white nationalist movement and really doesn't want us to be associated with the movement in general, if you want to give it another term that they might use, like dissit and write or whatever. She's I think I don't know this for a fact that she would never tell me directly. Think
about Lydia Bremlo. You're twenty years old. This very rich white husband comes by his old for you. He's like fifty seven, and he's recently lost his wife, Bremolo lost his first wife to cancer, and you're in the kind of heritage seeing you're kind of conservative yourself, and.
This guy conservative.
This is this is happening around a time in which alienation is still kind of acceptable.
I mean, at least in the heritage front set.
Sure, yeah, on the right it was kind of acceptable. But even you know, even if it's acceptable, the worst you could say about it. He's kind of a bad boy, like a bad you know, he's got right So it's sort of like, oh, edgy, he's like an edgy bad boy, and you kind of get indoctrinated into the movement that way. And you're in a marriage like I don't know, Like when I was like twenty something, I don't know. I
didn't know what the hell was going on. So you're in this marriage with this dude, and you have kids now, and you've seen the other side of it, the hell of it up close all the time, people shutting down the website. People there were hackers, there's all kinds of things that they're dealing with constantly. Everyone is telling you, everyone other than people in the movement are finding ways whenever they get a chance to speak to you. They're
telling you, you know, go fuck yourself. We hate this, right, we hate you. We don't like this stuff.
It's got to be discouraging.
I mean for years and then now all of a sudden, you're turning forty and you've got kids and you're looking at this. I mean, I personally would want to like just get as far away from it as possible. I mean, it just seems like it's just a depressing just you know.
Yeah, like I said, that's all I want for these people is that they stop doing harm in the world. And you know, if they have a change of heart, that's wonderful. Don't tell us about it. Yeah, just log off, just go be normal, go get a real job, stop being a Nazi. Just just go just go be a guy in the world.
Yeah, I would really like that. I think they're kind of entering now a sort of post Nazi phase.
M I mean, because they don't they don't have to be edgy anymore. They're the mainstream Republican politics.
Now you can be just you can just be a gracist Nazi at all the time. And that's why it's starting to mutate into like these like whole looks maxing and like, you know, which is like in cell but like we're not insuls anymore. We hammer our face whatever,
you know. I just think that they're now so they think they're such part of the culture, and it would be it'll be very interesting for me to see if there is a huge change after this, if we see sort of the Trump regime kind of fall, have a really hard fall, and some of this really starts to break up, what will happen and when people like look back at some of the stuff that's happening over the past like a few years, even as there's been this
tremendous explosion. If you look at the time from when the book ended, which is again on the election day, the day after the election, I'm twenty twenty four.
I mean, what a moment to end things.
Yeah, but if you look at that from there to now, you see like that was almost like an endpoint before this new culture that we're in now where you have the shootings in Minneapolis and it's just the outright violence, the blown up boats, all this stuff. I'm very curious to see our culture, if our culture can heal a little bit, how this stuff will be viewed.
Yeah, I mean, it is, like you said, it ends before the story is over. But I think, you know, as a portrait of that four year period in that town.
I mean, it's fascinating.
It is I think applicable to the world outside of Berkeley Springs, but it is a very intimate look at what it means for a weird, old racist blogger to move into the castle that looms above your coffee shop. Absolutely, I don't want to keep you forever, but I just want to remind the listener strange people on the Hill, how extremism for a part a Small American Town by Michael Edison Hayden comes out April.
Seventh, Yeah, April seventh.
April seventh.
You can pre order it now wherever books are sold, or you could just go to a bookstore on April seventh and pick a copy up. I'm going to go ahead and contact my local anarchists bookstore to make sure they have an order in for it, and I recommend you do the.
Same anarchist bookstore.
Better don't buy.
It on Amazon. I mean you can, but don't. Yeah, and tell your local library that you want them to buy a copy, because that matters too, and that gets this book into more people's hands, because not everybody can afford to buy a book, So yeah, requested at your local independent bookstore and your library if you can.
Yeah. I heard from friends that like at random places in Illinois and whatever, that they can find the book at their local library. They we'll be able to get it. So that's great. Please ask for it and yeah, and enjoy it. I think it'll have. My hope is it has long tail. There's some word of mouth about the era. So something to read, something to read not just now but also in the future.
Yeah, it's a fascinating pick, sure of a particular moment in time that has broader lessons I think. But Mike, thanks so much for coming on. Where can people find you online?
Thank you? You're so you're even cooler in person.
I just want to thank you.
Where can find me online? I'm in Blue Sky? What the hell is? What's I hate the Blue Sky handles? That was the one thing that you know, people complain about Blue Sky and it's like for me, it's like, what do you even want? Dude? Like you know, all this stuff is so bad, right, Like, what what do you even want? It's Michael E. Hayden dot b s k Y dot social s O c I A L. I'm still technically on Twitter at Michael E. Hayden, where
I've always been. You know, when I was writing the book and I was recovering from the mental health thing, I wasn't online at all for all twenty twenty four and so myke nice that like createred my my ex engagement. In any case, I don't like being on there too much, just for for anything other than research.
And people can find you every week on posting through Jared Hall.
Oh that's true. Yeah, just you know, just do that. You can listen to us talk about all kinds of things. We're talking about cospital, We're talking about the AI fruits that we keep finding on our feeds.
Now, all kinds of topics, the AI fruits. Oh my, thank you so much. And again by the book, You're gonna love it. Thanks Mallia, thanks so much.
Bye bye.
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