Revisionist History Riverboat Cruise: Curtis Maynard, Pt .1

rented ballroom at the Marriotte near the airport. They'd paid three hundred and seventy five dollars apiece to attend a weekend long conference called Real History USA. But the history they were interested in wasn't what any real historian would call real history at all. This was the fifth year in a row that disgraced historian and infamous Holocaust denier David Irving had brought anti Semites from around the world

to Cincinnati. Over the years, he's been banned from entering Canada, Germany, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, and Lithuania, but he seemed to enjoy the Ohio River, and he came back to Cincinnati year after year that weekend speakers ranged from notorious to obscure, but

they all shared a passion for Nazi Germany. Brigham Young University professor Tom Catherall had to cancel at the last minute due to a health concern, and I'm sure the attendees were devastated to miss his presentation on Hermann Goering's love of model Trains. Over lunch at the Marriotte on Saturday, they watched Lenny Riefenstahl's Victory of the Faith, the less famous predecessor to her infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of

the Will. The conference program notes that Reefenstahl is quote still going strong at over one hundred and Irving said that Reefenstahal sends her greetings to the conference's attendees. David Irving couldn't have known then that his friend would actually die later that week. On Sunday morning, the conference resumed with presentations from Donald Bustian, an adjunct professor at Southern Arkansas University and founding member of a group called Scholars

for Nine to eleven Truth. Before lunch, Charles Pravaan, a theologian whose anti contraception writing is highly regarded by adherents of the Quiverful movement opined on the possibility that a self published book by an American Jew was actually to

blame for Hitler's policies in Germany. And that afternoon, David Irving gave the stage to a young protege, an up and coming white nationalist blogger who'd recently finished his master's degree at Texas A and M University, Curtis Maynard presented his master's thesis on a lesser known incident from World War II. The one hundred and four page thesis doesn't actually mentioned the Holocaust a single time. It's not about that. It's about a nineteen forty three German air raid on

US naval vessels docked at Bari, Italy. But the old man in the Marriott conference room probably spent most of their Sunday afternoons watching the History Channel, so I'm sure they enjoyed hearing a dry resitation of facts about planes and ships. Either way, in two thousand and three, Curtis Maynard was a rising star in the revisionist history community.

Sharing the stage with David Irving was a great honor for an aspiring white supremacist writer, and in certain circles his writing was well regarded and is sometimes still remembered, but Curtis Maynard is best remembered for how his story ends at the wheel of a nineteen ninety four Lincoln sedan crash in a ditch with a bullet hole in his head. I'm Molly Counger, and this is where the

little guys. When I started writing this episode, I thought the story of Curtis Maynard would revolve around the revisionist historians and pseudo intellectuals he admired, But instead I spent most of this week reconstructing one man's disastrous downward spiral after getting into a flame war on a form thread about Ron Paul. I think, at its core, this is a story about lies, not just the lies of dishonest scholarship. No listener to this show needs to be told this,

But the Holocaust did happen. Millions of Jews, roma queer people, communists, and political dissidents or shot, gassed and starved to death by Nazi Germany. I have no interest at all in engaging with the revisionist history of David Irving and his ilk. There's no debate to be had there, Although we will

wade through a bit of the swamp they inhabit. No, this is a story about smaller lies, about the gossip and rumors that live in the comments on twenty year old blog posts and ancient threads on hateful online forums, about interna scene, squabbles for clout on Nazi message boards, and debate within the white power movement about what kind of messaging will actually advance their cause. And it's a story that ends in a despicable, tragic act of domestic violence.

A woman was murdered, a child was shot, and children lost their parents. It's a story about the violent speech of violent men, men who talk about mass murder and genocide, and how sometimes those men cross the threshold into real world violence. This is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. It's unavoidable, really, I spend a lot of time studying the digital debris left behind after the fact, after a man like this stops posting and starts loading

his gun. But that's almost always where I start reading. I'm looking back in time. I already know what he did. A few months ago, I started researching for an episode about a different man, a different murderer. I realized something that seems obvious now. I just never really thought about it this way before. When I study the internet footprint of a killer, I'm looking at a fossil of sorts, these posts preserved in stone, evidence of where he once was.

But those online ecosystems are thriving, busy places, full of people who read those posts the day they were made, people who responded to them. So what is for me some kind of artifact was once an actual conversation between real people who really knew each other, And when one of them logs off for the last time, the ones left behind processed that violence right there in the same

digital forum they'd spent years chatting. The story they got me thinking about this particular genre of online conversation is when I haven't finished. Fraser Glenn Miller murdered three people in Kansas in twenty fourteen. He died in prison, convicted of those murders, but he was He was also a suspect in three other murders in nineteen eighty seven, and was a central figure in the Greensboro massacre, where Nazis and klansmen murdered five communist organizers in nineteen seventy nine.

He didn't pull the trigger in nineteen seventy nine, and nobody ever proved he did in eighty seven, but he played a part in those deaths. His hands were unclean long before he opened fire in Overland Park. It's a long and complicated story, with mountains of archival material left to consume before I'm ready to write it. But on the day Miller started shooting outside a Jewish community center in Kansas, his peers saw the news. Within an hour

of the shooting. There were threads on Stormfront and Vanguard News, the two most popular Nazi message boards of the day, and in the immediate aftermath, a lot of the posters

were celebrating. They thought there were some dead Jews, in their words, but others were skeptical about initial reports that the shooter had yelled Hyle Hitler as officers handcuffed him, and then someone posted the news footage of that moment of the shooter yelling Hyle Hitler, and the shooter's face isn't terribly clear, as he's being shoved into the back of a police car. If you didn't know him, that blurry, poorly lit image wouldn't really look like anything at all.

But they did know him. It was Brad Griffin, a prominent member of the secessionist group the League of the South, and a man I have my own history with who recognized Miller first. The shooter wasn't just one of their own. He was a prolific poster in their online community. He was someone they talked to every day, someone who'd been

a significant figure in their movement for decades. And on both sides, users were searching for meaning, and some said they always knew this would happen, that he was going to crack one of these days and do something like this. Others insisted that the man they knew would never do this and he must have been set up. Some celebrated, some were disappointed, but no one grieved for his victims. And those conversations seemed so unique to me. What a

strange window into this terrible world. They're deeply troubling, of course, but surely those were an anomaly, I thought. But while I was researching for this episode, the story I'm circling around getting to this week, I saw it again because four years before Fraser Glenn Miller made his last post, that same online community reacted to the news that Curtis Maynard had murdered his ex wife and then taken his own life. But I suppose we should start at the end.

On April twenty first, twenty ten, Curtis Boon Maynard was harassing his ex wife. It wasn't the first time they'd been divorced for a little over a year, and he hadn't reacted well to losing custody of their two daughters. I couldn't find any coverage that included the contents of any of those texts he sent Melissa Masa that day, but whatever it was, she was upset enough about the texts that she'd discussed them with a friend. That afternoon,

at eight twenty pm, Melissa's neighbors heard gunshots. Her middle daughter, just twelve years old, ran to a neighbor's house with her two year old sister in her arms. A neighbor heard the commotion and came outside and saw Melissa, a thirty four year old mother of three, dead in her front yard. He was still taking in the sight of his neighbor's body there on the lawn when he noticed her ex husband, Curtis Maynard, pulling out of the driveway.

The neighbor dialed nine when one as he started his own car following Maynard and providing his location to the dispatcher. Officers who arrived at the house found Melissa's oldest child, a sixteen year old daughter from a prior marriage inside. She survived, but she had been shot in the face by the man who had been her stepfather since she was a toddler. Curtis Maynard was driving seventy miles an hour down the highway when police caught.

Why did he shoot his stepdaughter in the face? Why did he take his own life?

The evidence was turned over to the Bonners Ferry Police department. The hospital had their own investigation to conduct. They drug tested every hospital employee who had access to that cabinet. Sure, it's possible that a nurse who steals pain medication is just selling it, but there's a really good chance that whoever took that morphine was going to test positive for it. Everyone tested negative, well, everyone except for Curtis Maynard, who didn't show up for his shift on the day of

the drug test. In fact, he never came back.

solution or something like that. So the investigation was kicked off because two vials were physically missing from the cabinet, But in the end, it looks like a significant amount of morphine was actually missing, having been taken from the vials and replaced with something else.

with a valid license in Texas. When his oldest daughter was born in March of nineteen ninety eight, he was working as a nurse at a hospital in Corpus Christi. The Idaho Board of Nursing filed their formal complaint against him that summer, a year after the morphine first went missing.

Maynard never responded. After months of getting no response from Maynard, the Idaho Board of Nursing got a default order against him suspend his nursing license, and before the Texas Board of Nursing had a chance to suspend him, a standard practice in most professions where if you're disciplined by a board in one state, there is what's called reciprocal discipline

in most other states. But before Texas could do anything like that, he mailed them a letter saying I no longer desire to be licensed as a professional nurse, and he voluntarily relinquished his nursing license before it could be taken.

The bonners Ferry Herald, a newspaper in bonners Ferry, Idaho, ran several announcements in the summer of two thousand that Curtis Maynard was wanted on a felony warrant for possession of controlled substance and theft, but Idaho court records don't show that any criminal case was ever filed.

only field he had any real experience in. He had a baby and a common law wife to support, and he had a pretty serious addiction to alcohol and opiates. After twenty eight days of residential treatment for substance abuse, he did what a lot of people do when they have no idea what to do with their lives. He went to graduate school, enrolling in a master's program in history at Texas A and M University. I wish I

could tell you which came first. Did Curtis Maynard set out to write his master's thesis about a German air raid on US naval vessels in Italy because he had a genuine interest in this lesser known chapter of World War II history, and he accidentally stumbled upon David Irvings's work while he was researching or was he already familiar with the work of revisionist historians and hoping to add his voice.

Maynard's thesis isn't about the Holocaust. The word doesn't even appear in the paper. There's no mention of Jews, camps, gas chambers, nothing like that. The writing isn't great, in my opinion, but I think he could have produced a serviceable paper about a real historical event. I dropped out of college, so to be honest, I have no idea

how the thesis writing process works. Maybe there was no point at which someone read any of this in draft form and asked him, hey, why did you write quote Without the works of historians like Elkafrolic and David Irving, who conducted research in the former Soviet archives in Moscow, there is a distinct possibility that we would not be privy to the uncensored and unedited thoughts, ideas, and words of doctor Joseph Gerbels today.

a historian. In nineteen ninety three, Jewish history professor Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called Denying the Holocaust, The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, and in the book, David Irving was just one of a variety of figures within the Holocaust denial movement that Lipstat discusses, but he in particular took issue with her criticism of his work, and so in nineteen ninety six he filed a libel suit

against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher. David Irving is British, so he filed this lawsuit in the United Kingdom, and libel laws are different in the UK. I don't want to get into the weeds there.

hundred and forty page report on his findings. He read everything David Irving ever wrote, everything David Irving ever said about the things that he wrote, and ultimately Evans concluded that, in his expert opinion, everything David Irving had ever written was quote completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere in any of them to give a reliable

account of what he is talking or writing about. If we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past and to give as accurate representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian. And at the end of the trial, a judge agreed, writing that Irving had quote persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence end quote because he was ideologically motivated to portray Hitler in a positive light and.

a fine toothed comb. This wasn't the first time people had found inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his work, but they'd never been dissected quite like this. So all of these professors and historians had read all of his books, and they'd all written these reports, and they published those reports as books, and they talked to reporters, and now all of a sudden, it's very easy to find a laundry list of the debunked, made up, and outright fraudulent claims

that riddled his body of work. So, no, there's really no excuse in two thousand and three for citing David Irving as an expert on the history of the Third Reich. That's malpractice. But maybe his thesis adviser was in a hurry when she's still his bibliography, and she didn't notice that he'd cited David Irvings's book The Destruction of Convoy PQ. Seventeen, despite the fact that every copy of that book was withdrawn from the market in nineteen seventy after Irving loss

a massive libel lawsuit. I have to wonder if his adviser noticed that he cited Irving's Destruction of Dresden, a book that had been a best seller in the nineteen sixties but completely fell apart under the slightest scrutiny. The entire book relies on a premise supported only by a document that turned out to have been a Nazi forgery, as well as the personal assurances of a man who had been a major general in the Wehrmacht. Apparently, just finishing a thesis at all, regardless of what it says,

is the biggest hurdle. Because Maynard graduated with a master's degree in May of two thousand and three, and just a few months after presenting him thesis to the committee at Texas A and M University, he presented it again, this time to the attendees of the Holocaust Denial Conference in Cincinnati. A few months after that conference, he applied

for the reinstatement of his nursing license in Idaho. He planned to work part time while enrolled in a history PhD program at the University of Idaho in Moscow, on the condition that he attended narcotics, anonymous meetings three times a week, submit to random drug tests, and receive quarterly evaluations of his performance. He was allowed to work in a nursing home near the university, but he left the PhD program after just a few months and moved back

to Texas again. But even as he's struggling to stay enrolled in school or keep a nursing job, his career as a professional racist is really starting to take off. In two thousand and seven, four years after David Irving invited him to share the stage at the Holocaust Denial Conference in Cincinnati, things were finally going well for Curtis Maynard. He was penn pals with Ernst Zundel, the German born Canadian whose criminal prosecutions in Germany and Canada had made

him one of the world's most famous Holocaust deniers. Maynard's blog, The Politically Correct Apostate, was banned by blogspot and word press every couple of months, but it always re emerged, and the readers followed him to each new url. He wrote prolifically, often publishing multiple pieces per day, and his content was cross posted on the websites of some big names in the movement, like David Duke, and John Denugen.

His writing appeared often on the website for Jeff Rentz, a talk radio guy that I think you could most quickly describe as a more explicitly Nazi version of Alex Jones. But you've probably never heard of Jeff Rentz because he got into a fight with Alex Jones in two thousand and nine that ended with Rents getting dumped by the

network that they shared, Genesis Communications. Alex Linder, the webmaster at Vanguard News Network, posted dozens of Maynard's pieces on his site, and in April of two thousand and seven, Linder called him quote one of the most active and powerful of a rising generation of white writers. In July of two thousand and seven, just weeks after his wife gave birth to their second child, Maynard traveled to Sandpoint, Idaho.

He was a guest at a conference hosted by America's Promise Minis, a Christian identity church funded by the sale of Holocaust denile literature. The keynote speaker at the conference was Michael Collins Piper, a regular contributor to the white nationalist publications American Free Press and The Spotlight. According to a write up about the event that was published in

American Free Press. Piper's speech was about Jewish control of American politics conspiracy theorist Mark Glenn performed an original musical number about Jewish domination of society with the help of his five oldest children, and I guess it's for the best. But I couldn't find any video of that.

minutes after arriving at the church that once again everything the mainstream media has said about North Idaho being a haven for violent extremists and malcontents is all a big lie, and that no better people can be found anywhere. I wouldn't expect a man like Michael Collins Piper to be honest about something like America's Promised Ministries. But I will point out that there is a reason he felt the need to counter the idea that the church was a

haven for violent extremists, because it was. In nineteen ninety six, four congregants of America's Promise Ministries bombed a Planned Parenthood in Spokane, Washington, and the offices of the newspaper The Spokesman Review during a crime spree that also involved several bank robberies. In nineteen ninety nine, a member of the church named Beauford Furrow shot several people at the Los Angeles Jewish Community Center before murdering a Filipino mailman as

he fled the scene. Those are both stories that deserve their own telling. Beauford Furrow, for one thing, was dating Bob Matthews's widow. But what I'm getting at here is that America's Promised Ministries was not just a church. It was a propaganda mill with a body count. But at this conference, Curtis Maynard was once again rubbing elbows with

some very important racists. One of his better known essays, one called I Am a Holocaust Denier and I Am Unafraid, was republished off and by multiple outlets, even appearing in translation in an Ohio based newspaper run by a group called the Hungaria Freedom Fighter's Movement. There really is a community for everything, I guess now. This little newspaper, Sitya Kurt, was published from nineteen sixty eight until the death of

its editor, Tibor Mayor in twenty ten. Now I'm not going to pronounce a single Hungarian word or name correctly. I did try. I looked them up, I watched videos. Don't email me about it, and I'm not sure that the time I spent down this rabbit hole will ever pay off in any meaningful way. It's certainly not relevant to the story I'm trying to tell here, but it's always a little bit of a thrill to find a

whole new genre of guys I've never encountered before. So I know I'm straying terribly from Curtis, but just humor me for a minute. Curtis Maynard's essay appeared in a two thousand and seven issue of citya Kurt, and I wanted to get a feel for the kind of newspaper it was, so I browsed a few other issues in the couple of years on either side of two thousand and seven, I found articles by Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, an organization dedicated to

Holocaust denial. There were essays by Klansman, David Duke, and Neo not c William Luther Pierce, all of which had been translated into Hungarian. On the back page, as is common in publications like this, they offered books for sale. You could buy Hungarian language editions of books by David Irving, David Duke, Pat Buchanan. You could even buy DVDs of Lenny Reefinstall's Nazi propaganda films with Hungarian subtitles. So, okay,

I admit it. It got distracted. I got lost. I wasted a lot of time copying and pasting chunks of Hungarian Nazi news into Google Translate. And I did find decades of issues of the paper itself, issues spanning nineteen sixty eight till twenty ten, but there's almost no mention of its existence, outside of the fact that some university libraries have issues in their archives. I found almost no

information at all about the group behind the paper. At a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in nineteen eighty one, the Hungarian UN representative referred to them briefly as a US based neo fascist group dedicated in the spirit of Ferenz Salashi, the Nazi collaborator installed as the nation's leader after the German occupation of Hungary in nineteen forty four.

particularly bad one. In the short few months that he was in power, his Aaro Cross party worked directly with Adolph Eikman to resume the deportation of Hungarian Jews to the camps, and as Soviet troops closed in on the Hungarian capital, Arrow Cross death squads carried out mass executions in the walled ghettos of Budapest, shooting thousands, thousands of Hungarian Jews and pushing their bodies into the Danube River. And in that nineteen eighty one UN General Assembly meeting,

the Hungarian representative read aloud excerpts from this newspaper. The Hungaria Freedom Fighters, as they called themselves, said their goal was to reconquer the historical living space of the Hungarian people, whose racial purity they hold very dear, and they praised the regime of Faren Salagi, calling him his actions a brave attempt to save the fatherland and its ancestral honor.

Five years later, in the December nineteen eighty six issue of Sitiakurt, there is a brief note on the backpage thanking President Ronald Reagan for his proclamation in support of the Hungarian freedom fighters, the anti communist heroes of the nineteen fifty six uprising. Most of what I found were

issues of Sitya Kurt, which is in Hungarian. I did find a handful of issues of a companion newspaper in English called The Fighter, and its first issue in nineteen sixty eight featured a full page front page glowing endorsement of segregationist George Wallace's presidential campaign, written by Sityakurt contributing editor Louis Molnar, who was George Wallace's Ohio campaign chair, and according to his obituary, he personally toppled the statue

Joseph Stalin in the city square in Budapest in nineteen fifty six. Hard to Say and the first issue of Sityakurt in Hungarian, also published in nineteen sixty eight, announced the formation of new chapters of a Hungarian nationalist paramilitary

organization called the Cross and Sword Movement. It had originally been founded a few years earlier by a former Hungarian army officer named Zultan Vasvari, and as I looked through more issues of Sitya Kurt, most issues in the sixties and seventies list Zultan Vasvari's home address in New Jersey in case you want to send a cash donation to

the paramilitary. In an interview about her twenty seventeen documentary called Cold Warriors, Hungarian American journalist Raka Pigniski said that the Cross and Sword Movement was not an anti Semitic organization. They were nationalists, they were patriots. Were some of the members of the Nazi collaborationist Arrow Cross Party, Yes, but that was in the past. I didn't watch the documentary, I read the interview. I am not sure I believe that, And maybe Zultan Vasvari is.

A few years ago, Dida's Secrets founder Emma Best won a foya battle with the federal government, and one of the thousands of documents made available to the general public for as a result was a nineteen fifties era CIA file that contained a seven hundred page book that they had obtained from the Hungarian Army during World War II. And the book lists every officer in Hungary's army in nineteen forty four, every officer by name, rank, date of birth,

which medals they have when they began their service. Seven hundred pages of Hungarian names, and there is only one officer named Zultan Basvari and his date of birth is listed as May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. Now I also found New Jersey Department of Health records that show that a Zultanvaswari born May thirteenth, nineteen twelve died in Bergen County in nineteen ninety. Okay, that set of facts is not

exactly earth shattering. There are interviews with Hungarian Americans who have fond memories about learning to shoot rifles on a farm owned by a man they called Uncle Zoli. And those articles sometimes mentioned that he'd been an officer in the war, but those fond memories shared in English language sources sounded like a very different Sultan Vasvari than the

man described in Romanian. In nineteen forty, a Hungarian army officer named Zultan Baswari gave the order to massacre more than one hundred and fifty Romanian civilians in the Transylvanian village of Epe. An interview with Gavriel Bhutkavan, one of the very few survivors of that massacre, has been transcribed in the collections held by the Holocaust Museum. He describes finding his eleven month old sister shot and crushed with

the butt of a rifle in her crib. His eleven year old brother was shot in the back of the head running from the soldiers. When the massacre was over, ordered his soldiers to dig a massive pit, burying the

victims in a mass grave. Most English language sources about the massacre at Ep say that Vasvari was sentenced to death for war crimes by the Romanian People's Tribunal at Cluge after the war, and the source cited for that does indeed name Baswari among those war criminals who were sentenced to death at Cluche, but none of the English language sources I could find mentioned that this Romanian document also says that he was tried in absentia, and at

the time his sentence was pronounced, his current location was not known. According to a two thousand and four report of the International Holocaust Commission in Romania, the People's tribunals at Cluje and Bucharest sentenced over a hundred war criminals to death, but it was largely symbolic. In one mass trial, more than a third of those charged were even accounted for, let alone present. Even among those who were ever actually in custody, only a very small number of those sentences

were ever carried out. So technically those articles aren't wrong. Zoltan Vasvari was convicted of war crimes by a Romanian tribunal and he was sentenced to die, but they left out the extremely important detail that when they sentenced him to death, he wasn't there, They didn't know where he was, and he was absolutely not actually executed by the Romanian government. I struggled for entirely too long with a blurry PDF in Romanian. Considering that this is so far beyond tangential

to this story. But I'm going to have to find a history to talk to about this, because I am having a hard time believing that a Hungarian war criminal started a paramilitary organization in New Jersey. Surely there was some other Zultan Vasfari born in Hungary on May thirteenth, nineteen twelve. I must have made a mistake. I've really lost the plot here. I got completely derailed by the discovery of a Hungarian fascist newspaper in Ohio running ads for a war criminals nationalist militia.

part time at this point. He picks up shifts on the weekends and spends weekdays at home with his daughters while his wife worked as a chemical engineer. In later angry screeds mail to his divorce attorney, he claims he was the girl's primary caregiver and that the decision was made jointly in the marriage that he would sacrifice his career so the girls wouldn't have to go to daycare. But I think he really enjoyed the freedom of being

home on the internet all day. He posted thousands of times that year on Nazi message boards, and he was writing hundreds of blog posts about how the Jews control the media, black people are doing all the violent crime, the Holocaust never happened. I mean, he's churning them out, and he's attending conferences, he's networking with movement leaders, He's doing interviews on conspiracy theory radio shows about his friendship with Ernstundel.

disagreement about Ron Paul. I really did mean to get it all out in one I'm actually really looking forward to revealing who it was that Maynard was beefing with Weird Little Guys as a product of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Mollie Knger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The

theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.