The Insurrectionist Running to Replace Nancy Mace

right wing extremists, aspiring terrorists, things of that nature. My domain is mostly guys you've never heard of because they failed to live up to their goal of becoming the next Hitler or whatever. It's funnier than it sounds, I swear, But unfortunately for all of us, sometimes one of those guys breaches containment talking about today, wants to be more than just one of the weird little guys trying to make a name for himself on the fringes of the

white nationalist movement. He wants to be a Congressman. He's trying to make himself everybody's problem, and that makes him part of what is happening here. Back in August, Representative Nancy Mace announced that she wouldn't seek reelection in South Carolina's first congressional district and she would instead focus on making a run for governor, And that announcement opened the floodgates.

All but one of the ten Republicans vying for the nomination to replace her filed their paperwork after the announcement. I don't pay a ton of attention to this sort of thing. It's not really my wheelhouse. But last month a man named Tyler Dikes joined the race, filing paperwork as a congressional candidate in Mace's district. Now, like I said, it's a crowded field. There are ten people in this primary,

and it's Nancy Mace's district. So being a little bit of a conspiracy theorist with an extremely right wing policy platform doesn't really set you apart. They all kind of blend together most years. I probably couldn't tell you a whole lot about every primary candidate in my own district, let alone won two states away. So on the surface, he's just another carbon copy America first Zelot trying to

fit this particular mold. He's created an image for his campaign that's not unlike Nancy Mace's and I guess that makes sense, right. These people voted for her, so maybe that's what works here. Tyler Dykes's campaign website is pretty similar to Nancy Mace's. They both emphasize their personal connection to military service. Nancy Mace graduated from the Citadel Military College and Hyler Dykes features photos of himself and his

Marine Corps dress blues. They both describe themselves as entrepreneurs and business owners, and they both hate immigrants so much that their lust for mass deportation isn't even confined only to the pages devoted to their position on the issue. It's in their candidate biographies, and they frame themselves as fighters.

There's a lot of fight based language, fighting for America, fighting for Christ, and they both really position their devotion to God as something they have to fight for and fight against the Christ hating whardes on the left to keep like this is something someone's trying to take from them. Their platforms are pretty similar to America first, South Carolina first, law and order, tough on crime, deport millions of people. Nancy Mace is running for governor on eliminating the state

income tax and if he gets to congress. Tyler Diyke says he wants to slash taxes too, But of the five main policy ideas on his congressional campaign website, the one that's about taxes the tax that he will cut as a congressman. He wrote that he will end property taxes now. Regardless of how you feel about property taxes, those are imposed by your state and local government. The federal government doesn't tax your property. So I guess he's

got that Republican tax cut spirit. But he's a little confused. But overall just another far right America First candidate trying to elbow his way into this attention economy. It's distasteful, it's bigoted, it's chrysto fascist, enophobic, poorly articulated, economically unsound, but it's not unique or interesting. These guys are a dime a dozen and they'll mostly be gone by the time the primaries end. But there is one really weird

thing about Tyler Diyke's campaign messaging. He keeps bringing up that he's not a Nazi. He wants you to know that no one's asking him this. He's bringing it up preemptively. I am not a Nazi. Letters that he mailed to the homes of hundreds of voters in his district are starting to raise questions he thinks are already answered in those letters.

the whole story. He's getting closer. It's definitely a little bit more about what specifically he was doing with his right arm at the top of the east stairs of the Capitol Building a little after two pm on January sixth, twenty twenty one. It's more about that than it is about his love of his family. He's getting warmer. See. The reason he keeps bringing up that he doesn't want to be called a Nazi is because there are Nazi allegations. But these allegations aren't just lies from the evil left

wing media. It's something he's been asked about by the FBI, by the DOJ, and the Marine Corps and police in multiple jurisdictions. Across several states. A lot of people are asking him about the Nazi thing, so it makes sense that he'd want to get out ahead of it and assure the voters that there's a good explanation when he brings up that innocent wave that's being taken out of

context to smear him as a Nazi. He's talking about a photograph, a particular photograph and one of many that federal prosecutors included in their sentencing memorandum after Tyler Dykes accepted a plea agreement in federal court, he pleaded guilty to two counts of assaulting an officer during the breach of the Capitol on January sixth, twenty twenty one. In exchange for his cooperation, the government dropped the other eight counts on the indictment. So in that sentencing memorandum there's

a picture. It's a still frame that was taken from a video, but obviously you can't put a video on paper, so it's just a still frame, and it shows a mass of people making their way up the east steps of the Capitol Building on the afternoon of January sixth. Whoever's taking the video was standing at the bottom of the stairs, so you're just seeing the backs of the people in this crowd who are walking up the stairs,

except for the figure in the center. In the center of the picture, at the top of the stairs, a very tall man in a black jacket and a gray mask has turned around so he's facing the plaza below, and he's sort of squared up facing down the stairs, and his right arm is completely extended at about a forty five degree angle, elbow straight wrists, straight, fingers together.

The government's caption reads still from video showing Dikes performing what appears to be the Sein Kyle's salute after he arrives on the landing in front of the East Rotunda doors. He maintains that he was waving to a friend. For what it's worth, I've seen a lot of these waves, and I know what it looks like to me, and regardless of what it looks like to you in this photograph, I have a video of him doing the exact same wave at a Nazi rally, so it's not just a picture.

He only served three of the fifty seven months he was sentenced to spend in prison before he was released in January of twenty twenty five. As a result of Trump's blanket pardons for the nearly sixteen hundred January sixth defendants. But that's not the issue here. He's not ashamed of being a January sixth defendant. That's a badge of honor.

That's not a problem. If he can spin this Nazi thing into a story that reinforces this narrative of brave January sixth patriots who are being persecuted by communists and liberals and the wop mob, it stops being a problem for the people whose attention and votes and donations he wants. So his story is pretty simple. All the people calling him a Nazi are lying. They're taking a single photograph out of context. It's not a Nazi salute. It's a wave.

And all of this, all of this Nazi talk, it's all just about this one single incident, this one picture, this one wave, and the government, the government is preventing him from proving that to.

things on January sixth. And she's excited to hear this, and she wants to see these videos because she would love to see proof that the government is persecuting our brave January sixth patriots. But there's one little problem.

order was almost universal. The government didn't want to publicly release stuff like the names of confidential informants, security footage from inside certain secure government areas, personal information about witnesses, just a laundry list of kinds of evidence that was likely to be produced in these cases that would be sensitive. So they're not saying they can't turn it over to the defense in discovery. They're just saying this stays between us, right,

This doesn't get released to the public. This was normal and it was routine, and it was agreed to by everyone involved. The Defense council agreed to this. So okay, off to a good start. I do see a protective

order on the docket. But if you skip down a year down to the bottom of the docket, to the end of the case, after the guilty plea, the government filed their exhibit list for the sentencing hearing, and in that document, the federal prosecutor wrote, the government does not object to any photo or video evidence being released to

the public. So of the exhibits they planned to show in court at sentencing, they said, it's okay if everyone sees these, the media can have these, And so the judge in turn asked defense counsel how they felt about that, and the defense replied, defendant Tyler Bradley Dyke's buy and through his attorneys, does not object to the video and photo evidence identified and the government's noticed ECF number forty

four being made publicly available. Defendant does subject to any public disclosure of his military records identified in Exhibit nineteen. And so the judge signed an order the exhibits that the government identified for the sentencing hearing, which the file names are in that document. It includes the video of the wave, the video of him grabbing the policeman's shield, the things he's saying he can't get based on the file names, those videos can absolutely be requested from the court.

These aren't under seal. There's not a gag order. He can request these and I think he should do that. There are a lot of videos on that exhibit list, and I'm sure people would like to decide for themselves if he's describing them faithfully. The only exhibit on that list for the Defense objected to making publicly available. The only one that remains sealed and isn't available for public

access are his military records. Those military records are specifically the ones related to the other than honorable discharge he received from the Marines. See those campaign flyers, the ones he was mailing to people's houses. They're all signed at the bottom. Tyler Dykes, US Marine Corps veteran business owner, pardoned J six's patriot On November tenth, the Marine Corps birthday. He posted a photo of himself in his dress blues

on the campaign's Instagram account. Being a Marine Corps veteran is as big a part of his campaign identity as talking about how he's not a Nazi. These are kind of the top two things. He's a marine, and he really wants you to know that Nazi stuff isn't true, and he was a marine. That's true. He definitely was

in the Marine Corps. But those military records that he doesn't want released would really undermine his narrative about being a proud honorable veteran who definitely isn't a Nazi, because they would show that he received an other than honorable discharge for participating in prohibited extremist activity on November eighth, twenty twenty, and that's in the file. I know that specifically is in that sealed file because in other documents that refer to it, that's all it says. I don't

know what else is in that record. All I know for sure is that the stated reason for his other than honorable discharge is something that happened on November eighth, twenty twenty. Now, luckily for us, I know that on November eighth, twenty twenty, a security camera in Sumter County, South Carolina recorded footage of two men. One of the men looked exactly like Tyler Dikes. Even his father had

to agree it kind of did. And the men were putting up flyers with swastikas on them outside local businesses. I don't know if his military discharge records include anything else. Was it really just the flyers, just the one time with the swastika flyers and that was it. I don't know if the military was aware that he had been attending things like a paramilitary training weekend at a compounded Michigan hosted by members of the neo Nazi group the Base.

I don't know if there's a memo in there about the time in January of twenty nineteen that an FBI agent from the Joint Terrorism Task Force questioned him about his possible connections to domestic extremist groups. I don't know if the Marine Corps knew that he was one of just a handful of white nationalists who attended the Unite the Right Too, the flop of a Nazi rally held in Washington, d C. In twenty eighteen to commemorate the deadly rally that had happened a year earlier, and along

that same line of thought. I don't know if the Marine Corp knew back then the Tyler Dykes had attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlesville in twenty seventeen. I don't know if they saw the videos of him marching with a tea he torched, or the videos of him punching wildly at counter protesters that he'd helped trap in that sea of flames. And with the exception of the Unit the Right rally in twenty seventeen, which was before he enlisted. All of the rest of that conduct

occurred while Tyler Dykes was a Marine. He went to Nazi rallies, he joined Nazi groups, he put up Nazi flyers, he went to Nazi training camps to prepare for the race war, and he fought his way into the Capitol Building on January sixth. So, okay, yeah, he was a United States Marine. He can post that picture in his

uniform on his campaign website. I don't care. I'm not personally offended about him being a stain on the honor of the US military or whatever, but I think a lot of voters would feel like this isn't quite honest. By the time Tyler Dykes was arrested in twenty twenty three and extradited back to Virginia to face charges for men missing those counter protesters with a lit torch, he'd already been kicked out of the Marines. He had apparently hidden that fact from his parents, and there was a

lot they didn't know about their son. The day he was arrested in twenty twenty three, he'd been out with other members of a group called the Southern Sons Active Club a sort of white supremacist fight club for friendless young men. They were trying to hang Nazi banners from a highway overpass, but Tyler Dykes was bitten by a dog and had to go to the hospital instead. He eventually pleaded guilty to that felony charge in Almarle County, Virginia related to the torch March, and he spent a

few months in the local jail. On the day he was supposed to go home, he was picked up by

a federal marshal. The doj had waited until the last day of his sentence here to unseal the charges against him for January sixth, and after that he spent a year out on pre trial bond in that case, and then he eventually pleaded guilty to those charges in the summer of twenty twenty four, and he finally reported to federal prison in October of twenty twenty four, expecting to be there for almost five years, but he was released a few months later in January of this year after

receiving a federal pardon. And now he wants to go back to the Capitol Building, not as a rioter this time, but as a congressman. The campaign is barely a month old. He's using a right wing crowdfunding site for campaign donations, so you can see that he hasn't cracked two hundred dollars yet. The only photo of his launch party is so tightly cropped that you can only see the candidate himself standing in an empty field in a public park. I don't think there's a lot of grassroots excitement for

Tyler Diykes in South Carolina's first district. But if he does keep making the rounds, and if he ever ends up in front of a real reporter, I hope they'll ask him why doesn't he just produce those exhibits. The videos he's claiming are being kept from him under seal aren't. And if he's so against any exhibits being held back from the court of public opinion, he could go ahead and release the one he actually has in his own possession, the only one that is sealed. He has his own

discharge records show him to us. I'm dying to know how many of those Nazi rallies the Marine Corps knew about before they finally kicked him out. If you're interested in hearing more about this particular weird Little Guy. There are two episodes available right now over on the Weird

Little Guy's feed. It's a cool Zone Media show you can listen to wherever you get your podcasts, if you're in the Charleston area, or more importantly, if your conservative boomer parents are, it can't hurt to let folks know that one of your local candidates isn't being entirely forthcoming

about why people are calling him a Nazi. And wherever you're conservative parents live, maybe this is a useful example of the kind of thing you might find when you start gently scratching the surface of these America First candidates.