A Secret Third Thing

and flanked by flags bearing fascies and lightning bolts. Speeches were made by movement leaders spanning generations, men in their seventies nearing the end of their decades long careers as white nationalist organizers, and men in their twenties looking ahead to the movement's future. During an afternoon break between speeches, the keynote speaker took off a suit jacket in bolow 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 fifteen years since it was first founded as the American Third Position Party, but they are still who they've always been, a handful of racists and suits whose inability to properly fill out paperwork keeps getting in the way of their dreams of a white ethno state. I'm Molly Conker. This this weird

little guy. 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 twenty twelve. By his own account, Merilyn Miller had never been all that interested in politics, that is, until he had his political awakening

after nine to eleven. 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 U s S. Liberty in nineteen sixty seven when the ship was bombed by the Israeli Air Force. Batman introduced Merlin Miller to the wide world of conspiracy theory surrounding the incident and connected him with Richard Thompson, a Navy veteran who had recently helped finance a documentary about it.

For several years, Thompson and Miller discussed making a movie about the US 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 nine to eleven, the screenplay was written and ready to go. The movie was going to be called False Flag. Miller would direct and produce it, and

Thompson was going to be the moneyman. When Richard Thompson died unexpectedly in the summer of tearwo thousand and seven, 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 two thousand and seven when he gave

Ron Paul one hundred dollars. He even threw his hat into the ring to be a Ron Paul delegate in Tennessee, but 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. I couldn't tell you exactly what path he took down the road to political extremism between two thousand and two and two thousand and seven. 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 two thousand and seven, but that's the point in time where he reappears in any record I can find. By two thousand and eight, 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 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 nineteen fifty five, and he was also the officer who booked Martin Luther King after his

arrest in nineteen fifty six. Lackey's speech, too, seems lost to the sands of time, but according to a write up on AlterNet, he talked about his book Bok 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 Mohammed 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, Paul Frome, Tom Sunich, and James Edwards. And a few months after that, Merlin Miller packed a suitcase for another trip.

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 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 two thousands, 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. And in two thousand and eight, 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 two thousand and eight to be traveling with them.

He'd produced his first film, A Place to Grow, in nineteen ninety five through his company Ozark Pictures. His second film, Jericho, premiered in two thousand and one through his company Black Knight Productions, But his new vision was going to require a new production company, 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 mac donald, 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 quote At one time, we could discern right from wrong because stories promoted truth, justice, and liberty. The world felt good when they ended happily,

or inspired us to overcome when they did not. They made us want to be better people and live in a better world, a world built by our European American brethren. 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, place 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. Americana Pictures could be an alternative to Hollywood, making pro white movies for pro wide audiences, developing their own talent by running screenwriting workshops. When Americana Pictures launched in two thousand and nine, 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 tutors Forrest in nine 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 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 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 nineteen forty one, two articles about Hitler, an interview with the founder of a Greek fascist party, and an essay by Ingrid Zundel, wife of famous Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. Miller's piece was about the historical figure of our Minius, and there 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 Tuteburg 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 two thousand year old Roman history and more about an interest in some slightly more recent history. Arminius has long been a symbol of German

national identity and German nationalism. Two plays written in the nineteenth century dramatizing the events of the Battle of Tuderberg Forest, confusingly, both called the Hermannschlacht, were so wildly popular in Germany in the nineteen thirties and forties that it was shameful and scandalous to put them on stage for decades after the war. In January of nineteen thirty three, 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 Tudeberg Forest. That same week, Hitler gave a speech comparing himself to Arminius, and when the text of that speech was published at a Nazi Party newspaper. It was accompanied by a picture of a statue of Arminius surrounded by swastikas. Nazi Party election posters in nineteen thirty three feature this imagery prominently, along with slogans like

Machtrei dos 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 four hundred pages long. I didn't have time to do more than skim it, admittedly, but it seems pretty clear the popularity of this story was at an all time high when it was rep purist in Nazi propaganda in nineteen thirties 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.

of propagandized false hoods. 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 two thousand and nine 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 the one by Ingrid Zundel. In two thousand and nine, her husband, Ernst Zundel 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 Eagles Studios, published a book about Arminius that had come out that year, and it wasn't just

a book project. 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 Arminia statue, the same one featured in Nazi propaganda posters in nineteen thirty three. But across Arminius's chest there's text that reads soon to

be a major motion picture. Ingrid Zundel 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 two thousand and nine, he even scouted locations. The pair hoped to film in Herman, Missouri, a small town settled by German immigrants and named after Arminius.

Locals and Herman 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. 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. 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 third, twenty twelve, he posted a candidate statement on Merlin Miller twenty twelve dot 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,

et cetera. 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 press relief. His language is more explicit, writing the American Third Position Party believes the time has come for a strong political party that explicitly advocates for the interests of white Americans. 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 those stormfront threads 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 twenty twelve, 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 twenty twelve, but they failed to 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 aid 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. 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 eighty seven hundred dollars. 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 listened 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? 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, 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 spend hours searching for an answer to on the party's website. Why third position?

political theory he's working with. This is a question with an actual answer, And Merlin Miller didn't know that.

his reasoning for the American third at that time. I've since grown not only accustomed to it, but I do like it because I see the Republican and the Democratic parties 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.

third thing? Here is fascism. Here's another member of the party offering his definition.

in twenty seventeen. But he actually has a very long history with the American Third Position Party. But that's something we'll get to itother day. The problem that Nathan Dimigo 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 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. It is. I'm sorry it is, 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. The socialism in national socialism 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 eighties and Matthew Heinbach in the twenty tens both pushed ideas that you could describe as third positionist, though I believe Heinbach specifically called himself a Strostrist, which I guess is technically a

slightly separate thing. 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 ethno state manifestos that honestly, I don't think it matters. Don't email me about it. At the nineteen eighty seven Aryan World Congress, Tom Metzger, the leader of White Arian 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. 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 essay 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. That group was founded by Nick Griffin after he split with National Affront, though he eventually left Third Position two had 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 Russian Tabloid a week before the election, he said they were thinking of changing it as soon as the election was over, 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. I'm not saying he doesn't know what he's advocating for. He does, 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 twenty twelve, 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, 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. I

don't know, n surprised 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 two thousand, seven hundred and one people. That's zero point zero percent of the vote. The FEC only

calculates it to one decimal place. A month after the election, Merlin Miller was invited to speak to a student group at a university campus in Maryland. Matthew Heinbach was a senior at Towson University and he'd recently formed a white student union. It wasn't his first foreign 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 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 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 twenty thirteen. 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 and a tough situation, talk about lessons learned 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 twenty fourteen, 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. 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 had 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. In the summer of twenty sixteen, as he's involved in Miller's American Eagle Party and making donations.

The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote an article about Glen Allen. He'd been in the movement for years, but he'd never been publicly identified before. The SBLC 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 pay 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 when I first encountered Merlin Miller. It wasn't in the context of the American Third Position Party or the American Freedom Party or the 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 Allan founded in twenty eighteen 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 Baylaw, 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 Goham Defense League, and he wrote amicus briefs for members

of the Rise Above movement. 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 Albmarole County, Virginia last year. Allan is currently representing Nathan Dimigo 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. 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 of Reality someday. Merlin Miller ran for president on the ticket of a Nazi party in twenty twelve,

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, 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. 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 nationalists publisher Peter Brimlaw and they're talking about making a real comeback.

listeners on the Red Lily Guy sub reddit. Just don't post anything that's gonna make you on my ru Little Guys h