Cool Zone Media. On October twenty second, twenty twenty five, two men suddenly found themselves almost entirely unemployable. They didn't have the same job, they weren't even in the same state.
But the bad day they were both having on October twenty second was a consequence of a long and complicated series of events that started at the same time and at the same place for both of them, the evening of August eleventh, twenty seventeen, in an empty field behind the tennis courts at the University of Virginia, eight years after they marched with tiki torches on the eve of that deadly Nazi rally in Charlottesville. Men are now convicted felons.
One of them just had his law license suspended. The other is running for Congress. I'm Molly Conger and this is where little guys. This is an update to an old story, an episode that originally ran on October seventeenth, twenty twenty four, more than a year ago. That episode is back at the top of your feed today in case you missed it the first time, or if you
just want to revisit it alongside this one. That's an unusual choice, especially considering Every episode of this show is kind of part of the same long story told out of order. Every episode connects back to some other storyline, and they almost always feature some names I've mentioned before. It's a small world, and theirs is even smaller. You really can't talk about the lives of these weird little guys without seeing all the places where their lives intersect.
So if I re.
Ran every old episode that helps add context to the current one, I'd end up putting half the show's catalog up as reruns every month, and I think that would get overwhelming. In this case, though, it felt necessary because the man at the center of this story is trying to erase that chapter of his life, and he's trying to rebrand himself for a big second act. I don't think we should let him forget that part of his own story. But I didn't want to retell it all here.
I wanted to leave plenty of roomin this episode to talk about this new venture of his, and I didn't want to rehash the entirety of the old episode, but I wanted to make it easy for you to revisit that part of his story because the context is everything here. Obviously, I write a new episode of this show every week, but I'm never done thinking about the subjects I've written about in the past. There are court cases. I keep docket alerts on for guys whose custody status. I monitor groups,
I keep tabs on. I try to stay up to date on these weird little guys even after their episodes are done. And it's not usually a positive thing when there's something in the news that's relevant to the show.
When I sat down to start writing this script, it was Friday morning, and I had just seen on Blue Sky that one of you posted a news story about AT and T. The company had announced the end of their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and that listener connected that news story back to an episode of this show. It was an episode that had come out exactly a year ago, the Ku Kluks Cable Access TV episode on
December fifth, twenty twenty four. In that episode, I was talking about what happened to the millions of dollars that Nazi stole from a Brinks truck in nineteen eighty four, and that money ended up all over the place, but some of it wound up in the hands of William
Luther Pearce and his Nazi group National Alliance. They used the money to buy land in West Virginia where they built their Nazi compound, but they also bought ten thousand dollars worth of stock in AT and T. And they bought that stock for the express purpose of owning enough shares to introduce shareholder resolutions three years in a row. Starting in nineteen eighty eight, a neo Nazi showed up at the AT and T shareholders meeting and introduced a
resolution to end the company's affirmative action policies. If you're too young to remember that term, it was basically just the eighties version of what we call DEI today. In nineteen eighty eight, nineteen eighty nine, and nineteen ninety, shareholders at AT and T rejected a racist idea proposed to them by a literal neo Nazi. In twenty twenty five, it's the president attacking those diversity initiatives, and this time the company isn't fighting back.
None of these.
Stories that I tell on this show are ever really over, because history doesn't work like that, So we're sort of perpetually revisiting the events of the past and examining how they got us into the current political predicament. But today we're talking about a very specific update. Tyler Dikes is running for Congress and Augustus and Victus has finally been suspended from the Florida bar. On a surface level, these events are unrelated. I would argue, though, that they are
in fact developments in the same story. Tyler Diykes was the subject of that October twenty twenty four episode The one Then's back at the top of your feed today.
He attended the.
Unite the Right rally here in Charlottesville back in twenty seventeen and participated in the January sixth insurrection in twenty twenty one. He was arrested and convicted for participating in the twenty seventeen torch March in twenty twenty three, and on the day that.
He was supposed to be released from.
Jail here, the doj unsealed a federal criminal complaint against him for January sixth. He was sentenced to fifty seven months in prison at the end of twenty twenty four, only to be released three months later after he received a presidential pardon alongside more than fifteen hundred other people who'd been charged with crimes related to the events of
January sixth. As for Augustus and Victus, he hasn't actually been covered in an episode of his own, but he has come up a fair number of times on the show. He's mentioned in that episode about Tyler Dikes because both men were convicted on the felony charge of burning an object with the intent to intimate for their participation in that Nazi torch march on August eleventh, twenty seventeen, at the University of Virginia, and that isn't the only time.
We've talked about him.
In the episode called an Accidental Nazi Rally from February of this year, he was one of the local organizers who stepped up to help an Islamophobic group put on a nationwide series of rallies against the boogeyman of Sharia law in the episode State Created Danger in May, he was the attorney who ghost wrote the lawsuit filed against the City of Charlottesville by two Nazis who thought the police should have proactively assisted them in putting on their rally.
In the episode stand Back and Stand By that aired in June, he was the attorney hired by Enrique Tario to represent several members of the Proud Boys who are currently suing the government for one hundred million dollars in damages for what they feel was an unfair prosecutor against them for orchestrating the events of January sixth. So it's a name you've probably heard before on this show, even if he hasn't officially been the subject of an episode.
Most of the times you've heard his name it had something to do with the fact that he's a practicing attorney. As of a few weeks ago, that's no longer the case. On October twenty second, twenty twenty five, a clerk at the Florida Supreme Court filed an order suspending Augustus Solenvictus from the Florida bar. The suspension came just over a year after his felony conviction, but they generously held off
until the State Court of Appeals dismissed his appeal. He was given just thirty days to wind down his practice in the best interests of his current clients. That same day, October twenty second, twenty twenty five, Tyler Diykes lost his job too. That afternoon, he tweeted, my name is Tyler Dikes I was pardoned by President Trump from my actions
on January sixth, and I was just fired again. The mass media relentlessly posts photos of my Nazi salute on the Capitol steps about how I was a violent neo Nazi terrorist. What makes me a Nazi? Loving my country, loving my family. This is probably the third job I've lost this year alone from this. Please, I need your help. Thanks to the lies in the media, I'm almost completely unable to make a living in anything that isn't politics, and that is their biggest mistake.
Do you know why?
It's a mistake that they attacked me so because now I have no choice but to enter politics and fight to make America great again. I don't have a choice. But like I said, these two events are unrelated. They don't have anything to do with each other except that
they share the same root cause. Augustus and Victus was suspended from the Florida Bar because suspension from the Florida Bar is automatic after a felony conviction, and Tyler Dykes was fired from a series of jobs in South Carolina after his release from prison because, despite that federal pardon, he had quite infamously been convicted of felonies related to his participation in two of the most infamous violent right wing extremist events in America in the current century, the
Unite the Right rally and the Insurrection. Now, I can't tell you for certain exactly why he lost his job this time around, but I don't think it would be a bad bed to put ten bucks on it, having something to do with his weird behavior at the No King's rally in Hilton Head a few days earlier. The details are different, sure, but if you connect all the dots, if you work backwards in each man's story, you'll end
up at the same place. They became unemployable on October twenty second, twenty twenty five, because they both lit that tiki torch in twenty seventeen, and then they never.
Stopped doubling down on it.
Where that doubling down is leading them, though, is where these stories split back off again. And neither of those stories are anywhere near over yet, so we'll just have to be satisfied with the middle of one of those stories today. How to catching a felony at a Nazi rally lost one man his licensed to practice law and
set another down the path to electoral politics. When Tyler Diykes made that post on October twenty second about losing his job, he included a link to a now deleted online fundraiser on the right leaning crowdfunding platform gives and Go.
Based on some of.
The other texts in that post, it sounds like the fundraiser was geared more towards soliciting money for his personal living expenses so he could devote himself full time to the nebulous work of politics. Generally, he's not actually announcing anything specific here, just that he's going to get into politics. And the portion of the post I quoted here doesn't include the strange way it began. The body of the message is in the first person, right. My name is
Tyler Dykes was pardoned. I was fired. But before that, the message is introduced as quote a message from our leader. The account that currently functions as his official Tyler Dykes for Congress campaign account didn't start.
Off that way.
He'd created the account a few weeks earlier, but it was originally called b C. Pat's Assembly, which is short for Beaufort County Patriots Assembly, and it is Beaufort in South Carolina, which was a surprise to me. There's a county with the same name in North Carolina, but in North Carolina it's Beaufort. But this is Beaufort. Don't email me about it. I looked it up. The domain for
Patriots Assembly dot com was purchased on October fifth. An early post on the Patriots Assembly Twitter account refer to Tyler Dikes as quote our leader or our chairman, or a prominent leader in our new organization. But after that October twenty second post, the account switches to first person language. He's no longer pretending to be an entire organization, He's just posting as himself now. And the very next day, on October twenty third, he posted a now deleted video
to the right leaning YouTube Knockoff Rumble. According to posts he made on other platforms announcing this video, it was an hour long and.
It was called the J six Marine.
They tried to silence Colan my story of persecution and why I'm fighting for christ and America. Honestly, whatever it was, it shouldn't have been an hour long, and it needed a more concise title. I mean, I'm not workshopping with the guy, but come on, but the video is gone, so I didn't have to watch it. His entire Rumble channel is actually gone now and I was only able to find a short clip of this video. Based on the clip, though he seemed to be workshopping a campaign message.
Here's the thing.
The reason that all of our.
Republicans sit in congressmen are sick. That we're sick and tired, right.
The reason they're not doing anything is because they are afraid of getting the same treatment that guy. They're afraid of doing deportations because they're afraid of the last They're afraid of the different attacks, the different phone calls, everything they'll get.
And that's why they're not doing anything.
And so let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen who are watching this, I'm not afraid.
He was entering politics, all right. He was working up to announcing that he's running for Congress. Like I said, I only have this brief clip of that hour long video, so I don't know what else might have been in there. I don't know what he said that made him want
to delete it afterwards. But if this clip is representative of the whole video, it pretty much lines up with other things that he's left online, like how he's really fixated on making sure you know that it's unfair and wrong to call him a Nazi.
And here's the thing.
They still call me a Nazi to this thick they still randomy is all these evil, horrific things. But let me tell you this, what makes me a Nazi? I love Christ, I love God, I love my country. I love my state, my family, in my community, and the entirety of the Low Country area. And that's why I live here because I.
Love you so much.
So does that make me a Nazi? Does love in your family? Does loving God? Does love in your country? Does that make you a Nazi? That makes you a Nazi?
Sophiets, this is the messaging he seems to have settled on. He's bravely standing up to people who call him a Nazi just because he's a good Christian man who loves his country. I guess he knows he's going to have to address the fact that people are calling him a Nazi, and he's chosen to do that in the most disingenuous way possible. On November fifth, he registered a domain for his campaign website and filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission.
He was officially throwing his hat into the ring for the Republican primary in South Carolina's first congressional district. That primary will be in June of twenty twenty six, and it's a crowded field, with nearly a dozen Republicans vying for the nomination, and there's no incumbent in the mix. The current representative in South Carolina's first district announced in August that she won't be seeking reelection. Nancy Mase is
running for governor instead. The first order of business for a new candidate, after filing the paperwork and making the website, is making the big announcement a launch party, right, You have to create excitement around the campaign. You want to recruit volunteers and get people to open their wallets. You can't run a campaign without money and volunteers, and this is your first shot at both of those. You're setting a tone for the campaign. You don't want your launch
party to flop. So the newly ed Dykes for Congress campaign, which is a name that sounds very cool but unfortunately doesn't mean what it sounds like at all, set about trying to generate buzz by mailing weird letters to people's homes all over the first district. Someone who listens to this show got one in their mailbox and sent me a picture of it.
Thank you for that.
It is a single sheet of regular white printer paper. It's not a slick, professionally printed campaign mailer, and it actually doesn't announce that he's running for office. It starts off with a big bold header that says our civilization is being destroyed, and it goes downhill fast from there. Civilization is being destroyed by communism, George Soros, christ Haters.
Et cetera. The usual further down the page.
In this wall of text, which again is on a sheet of plain printer paper, civilization is in bold again, and this time it's spelled wrong. The letter also addresses the quote slander on the leftist news that has falsely labeled him a Nazi just because there's an out of context photograph of him waving to a friend from the steps of the Capitol Building. He closes the letter by inviting the recipient to attend a rally on November ninth
to find out who Tyler Dykes really is. I guess it's possible that there was more included in the envelope, but there's nothing I can see in any of the multiple photos I've seen of this letter that mentions this is a political campaign, there's no mention of him running for office, there's no mention of a particular group that funded the letter. It just says, hey, come to this event to hear this guy tell you about how much he loves God and hates Communism and how he's not
really a Nazi like they said in the newspaper. And each letter was signed by hand I assume by Tyler personally, in oddly childlike handwriting. Under the signature it reads US Marine Corps veteran business owner Pardoned J six Patriot. He also went door to door with a slightly nicer looking flier advertising the same event, and these two failed to disclose that the event had anything to do with a
political campaign. It was billed as a public assembly for upholding immigration law, affordable housing, safe streets, and American values. And again, based on the photographs I've seen of these flyers, they did not appear to even have his name on them. It seems like mainly weird letters to people's houses did not convince anybody it's a real my I am not a Nazi. Flyers are raising a lot of questions already answered by my flyers.
Type of situation.
You know, because despite his claim that the leftist news had been falsely smearing him as a Nazi simply for peacefully attending a political rally in our nation's capital one day in January, if you google his name, you're gonna see a lot more than that. And one of the people who got this letter made it her personal mission to make sure people understood what they were looking at.
A Beaufort resident who, according to her Facebook profile, is named Dawn, posted online a few days before the event that she'd found some troubling information about the man behind those letters. She posted screenshots of a few headlines about Dikes's legal troubles and suggested that the VFW hall where he planned to hold his event was not an appropriate venue for this well technically, she posted quote, He's being
hosted by our local veterans of Foreign Wars. Tyler Diys is a well documented troubled young man with a long history of violence and Nazi ideations. Our VFW must not understand the vile, dangerous cop attacking Cretan this lipless little shit is. She followed up in the comments on her post, saying that she'd called the VFW hall, and the man she spoke to hadn't been aware of Diykes's history of Nazi salutes and assaulting cops. He was pretty concerned to
hear about it. Not long after that phone call, the VFW canceled on Tyler Dikes. The campaign then scrambled to find a replacement venue and managed to book a conference room at the Hampton Inn in nearby Okty. But Dawn, this mysterious but determined woman on Facebook, caught wind of it, and she called them too. I didn't do a ton of digging on Dawn. I just scrolled through her Facebook and based on what I saw, I have to respect
the level of civic engagement here. When the manager at the Hampton Inn brushed her off over the phone, she printed out a packet that included several news stories about Tyler Dikes and she drove over to Okty to hand deliver it. The hotel canceled the event a few hours later. Just twenty four hours before his big launch party, Tyler Diykes was once again without a venue. He posted a very weird video on his Instagram. He's infuming mad, but
still determined to hold the event. At an undisclosed location that would only be revealed to his most loyal supporters by text message one hour before it was scheduled to begin, But Dawn already knew God bless her woman after my own heart. The morning of the ninth, she posted on Facebook that the event had been moved to a public park in the nearby town of Ridgeland. Not long after that, Tyler Dykes emailed her and said that he had reported
her to the police for harassment and death threats. He also posted on telegram that most of the people at the event would be veterans and that they had concealed carry permits implication there being everyone at the park will have a gun. But it seems the launch party ended up going off without a hitch at that public park in Ridgeland. There's only one picture of the party. It's a tightly cropped photo showing Tyler Diykes at a dress shirt and khakis, standing in what looks like an empty field.
I'm sure his throngs of armed supporters were just out of frame, and he's only respecting their privacy by showing absolutely no evidence that anyone was there. And I certainly wouldn't publicly speculate that his mom might have taken that picture.
I don't know.
On the day of the campaign launch event November ninth, a new fundraising page went up. The original fundraising campaign, the one launched on October twenty second before any political campaign had been formally announced or any candidacy statement filed, raised at least three one hundred twenty five dollars before it was deleted on November sixth, the day after the FEC paperwork was filed. The new fundraiser was also on gives and Go, which was a little surprising to me.
I mean, electoral politics is not exactly my wheelhouse, and compliance with federal campaign finance laws is not something I'm interested in. But I've donated to a campaign before I've looked at a campaign fundraiser. They tend to use more traditional platforms. Technically, you could just set up a PayPal account, but that's not a good idea. Platforms like act Blue and wind red are as the names imply the leaving choices were Democratic and Republican campaigns, respectively, but there are
other options platforms like any dot and donor box. Most campaigns choose a fundraising platform specifically designed for election fundraising. It just makes compliance easier. The software automatically generates the reports you need. You know, every donor is being prompted to enter the information you're legally required to collect from them,
and they're designed with federal election law in mind. They've built in things like the legally required language for disclosing and detesting to the things the candidate is supposed to disclose and the donor is supposed to attest.
You know that paid.
Ford by or authorized by whatever campaign or committee, and the contribution rules the donor promises they're abiding by. And those platforms are compliant with current FEC regulations around reporting credit card processing fees, which may not be the case if you're using a fundraising site geared more toward personal fundraising. But gives end go has a special place in the
heart of many January sixth defendants and their supporters. The crowdfunding site was originally launched in twenty fourteen as an alternative to sites like gofund me because the founders felt that mainstream fundraising sites were biased against Christians. I mean, citation needed, but okay. When Tall Lavin spoke to the site's founders for a twenty twenty one article in the nation, they wouldn't give a firm answer to a question about
whether they'd support the clan. In the last five years, gives end go has become a haven for right wing extremists, QAnon, weirdos, people who got fired after some viral video of them saying the N word, Kyle Rittenhouse, Proud Boys, the twenty twenty two Canadian Trucker Convoy, guys, anti vax grifters, and of course January sixth defendants. People who got kicked off
every other fundraising website found refuge on gibsend go. So maybe it shouldn't be summarizing to me that the site is now pivoting to be the demand where they find it. They've added an optional donation page template for political campaigns, one that collects the federally mandated donor information like occupation
and employer. I took a quick look around the site, and I think Tyler Dykes is the only candidate for national office currently raising campaign funds on gibs end go, but there are a handful of state and local candidates fundraising there now. Like I said, I don't think you necessarily can't use a platform like gifts end go for federal election fundraising. It just seems like it opens you up to a world of possible problems. I am looking
forward to the Dykes campaigns first campaign finance filings. Will they report that first thirty one hundred dollars from the deleted fundraiser? Will they remember to report processing fees as expenditures. Will the cost of the flyers for the launch party be properly recorded as disbursements or maybe as in kind donations. Will he hire someone to replace his mom and dad as the committee's treasurer and designated agent. I can't wait to find out the campaign's first month has not been strong.
His first quarterly report isn't due to the FEC until the end of January. But because he's using a public fundraising page, I can tell you that as of end of day December eighth, the fundraiser shows three donations for a total of one hundred and seventy dollars and unrelated to the fundraising. I can also tell you that I accidentally discovered the list of bad words that gives end go hard codes into the page that will prevent you
from submitting the form. I mean, it's got the classic squear words you know ass ass, but the s's are dollar signs ass, but the s's are five's ass.
But there's an underscore between each letter.
Boob boobs, boobies, boobs, but the o's are zero's boobs with three o's boobs, with four o's boobs, with five o's boobs.
With seven o's.
I think you can leave a comment if you spelled boobs with six o's.
I didn't see that one on the list.
There's also a dizzying array of different ways someone might choose to express the N word, and a surprising number of unique terms, including variations on the word cock. And there are some surprises on there, like some of these words must have ended up on the band list because of a particular incident, because if you just sat down to make a list of swears, I really don't think it would occur to you to preemptively prevent the use
of the term fifty yard cunt punt. I mean, this is extremely funny to me, obviously, but the actual point here is this must be new because I've looked at a lot of gifts end go fundraisers and they did not use to prevent users from leaving comments that said Hyle Hitler, But now they do.
It's coded right into the site.
You can't type arian spelled right, or several varieties of wrong. You can't type KKK fourteen eighty eight, anti Semitic slurs, racial slurs, homophobic slurs. You can't type anything about.
Hitler at all.
They must have added this after all the news articles about Nazis leaving each other comments full of racial slurs when they're donating to each other's fundraisers for Nazi stuff. I means so much for free speech right, I guess even the free speech website doesn't need bad press. Aside from the lackluster fundraiser, the campaign's online presence sucks. I mean, aside from the messaging, which is obviously very bad. It is explicitly chrysto fascist. There's a lot of talk about deportation,
very very focused on deportation. But aside from that, aside from the messaging being evil, there's a lack of direction here. On the events page of the campaign website, it's just a giant AI generated picture of breakfast food. It's announcing an event called Dialogue with Tyler Diyke's, but under date, time and location, it just says TBD and it's been like that for weeks. I get that it can be hard to get a location for an event, but it's not hard to use a real photograph of a pancake.
Why am I looking at a hideous, swarped plate of partially fused fruits and oblong egg yolks.
It's just sloppy.
And I searched for more information about the campaign. I looked at the online presence he created, the website, the Instagram, the Twitter, the telegram, and I looked in the mainstream news. I looked at local news in his area. I searched on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, rumble. I found one local newspaper article. You know, every time he's talking about his campaign, he says, I'm being attacked by the media. I'm being smeared by the media, you know, the leftist media.
It has it out for me. I'm being targeted.
I don't know, maybe I'm overlooking something, but I found a single local newspaper article. I also found a segment that was recorded by a local TV news outlet. It is a brief interview he gave back in October, but the segment never actually aired on TV. As he was talking to the reporter, someone else filmed it on their
cell phone and he posted that video to Instagram. But other than that, I only found a couple of interviews he's given in the last two months, and all of them were with right wing conspiracy weirdos whose content is only available in some bizarre, impossible to access place like a Twitter live broadcast or downloadable only on Telegram. It was while I was searching for these videos that I
found out people are still using Getter. It was a right wing Twitter knockoff that had a brief moment after the fall of Parlor in twenty twenty one, but before the rise of truth Social in twenty twenty two. I mean, if you asked me yesterday, I would have told you Getter isn't even on the Internet anymore. But apparently some
people are still on get Her. Two of the four campaign interviews I found were with a confused sounding woman who calls herself Violent Vixen, one was with a daily prayer broadcast put out by a Telegram channel that supports January sixth defendants in their families, and the fourth was with a conspiracy theorist named Anne vander Steele. She used to be pretty big in the QAnon community, but that's
not really the hot thing anymore. And I'll be honest, I did not watch enough and vander Steele to tell you what she's into these days.
But in all of.
These interviews, Tyler Diykes did not tell what I would consider to be the truth. He lied about the events leading up to him joining the Marines. He omitted any mention of why he is no longer a Marine. He pretends to address the Nazi allegations, but he's fighting a straw man. He's pretending everyone calling him a Nazi is just talking about January sixth, And he never mentions all the Nazi rallies he went to, or the Nazi groups he was a member of.
I had previously been at Cornell University at Atica, New York. I spent one semester there as an engineer in biomedical engineering. But while I was there, I was actually driven out and I left, and I did not read up and go back for the second semester because of how openly Communists that this staff and the faculty were.
Oh, Tyler, Tyler, that's not true. Come on, it is true that he enlisted in the Marines after one semester of college, but he wasn't driven out because of communism. He felt calculus and chemistry. His own lawyer put that in a memo and filed it in federal court. He started at Cornell in the fall of twenty seventeen, just a few weeks after he attended the Unit the Right
rally in Charlottesville. He was a straight A student in high school, but he found the college coursework much more challenging, and he failed two classes in his first semester, and because of that, Cornell did not allow him back for the spring semester. He was placed on academic leave, and instead of just taking that semester off to regroup and come back, he opted to drop out for good instead, and that's when he enlisted the Marines. It was math,
not communism, that drove him out of Cornell. As for his time in the Marines, well, he never actually says much about it. His campaign materials often feature a photo of him in his marine dress blues. He refers to him himself as a Marine Corps veteran, and he happily accepts the perfunctory thank you for your service he's often given in these interviews, but he doesn't say what that
service was. He says he fought for this country and that his time in the Marines made him the man he is today, but he never says that he was discharged to the reserves immediately following basic training. He was in the reserves from twenty eighteen until twenty twenty two, when he was given an other than honorable discharge. During his time in the Marine Corps Reserves, he was actively
involved in far right extremist activity. In January of twenty nineteen, he was interviewed by an FBI agent from the Joint Terrorism Task Force regarding his ties to domestic extremist groups.
The agent's affidavit doesn't say which groups. He hadn't joined the Marines yet when he attended the Unite the Right rally in twenty seventeen, but he was a Marine a year later when he was one of a tiny handful of attendees at the anniversary rally in Washington, d C. In twenty eighteen, and he was a Marine when he stormed the Capitol in January of twenty twenty one. The exact date of his discharge from the Marine Corps isn't clear.
When he was arrested in Virginia in twenty twenty three, the prosecutor referred to his discharge as having been quote last year, so I assume it must have been sometime in twenty twenty two. The records related to his discharge were filed under SEAL in his federal criminal case, but unredacted filings that refer to them specify that his discharge was because of something he did on November eighth, twenty twenty, and whatever that something was had to do with participating
in prohibited extremist activity. Like I said, the paperwork itself is filed under SEAL, but I happen to know that on November eighth, twenty twenty, a security camera in Sumter County, South Carolina, captured footage of a man who looks exactly like Tyler Dikes taping up swastika flyers outside local businesses. He doesn't mention any of this when he's asked about his service in those campaign interviews, obviously, and when a federal probation officer asked him about it in twenty twenty four,
he lied. He said that he was asked to leave the Marines because he failed to show up for drill, so he was at a Nazi rally. In twenty seventeen. He was at another Nazi rally in twenty eighteen. He was interviewed by counter terrorism in twenty nineteen. He was caught on camera putting up Nazi flyers in twenty twenty, and the Marine Corps ultimately discharged him for that in twenty twenty two. By the time he was arrested in twenty twenty three for intimidating counter protesters with a lit torch.
Back in twenty seventeen, he was a member of an extremist group called the Southern Sun's Active Club, And all of this was in that first episode.
But I missed something.
There was one filing in his federal court case with an important detail that I missed the first time around. In a follow up to the original sentencing memorandum, the government added a few more details to their list of things Dykes had done in the past that would seem to indicate his involvement in extremist activity. Most of them were the things we've already talked about, the things I
already know, but this one was new. It reads November December twenty twenty Dyke's travels from South Carolina to bad Axe, Michigan, to participate in a field training exercise run by an organization called the Base. The Base is a United States based racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist group with cells in the United States and reported ties abroad. The Base encourages the hastening of a race war and aims to establish a white ethno state through violence against non white
minority groups and the US government. Oh dear, we haven't had any reason to get into the Base yet. It hasn't really come up on the show.
I think I did.
Mention it in passing on an older episode, but I wasn't really telling you anything about the Base. I just mentioned that I was at a hearing once for one of the members of the group who'd been arrested before he could enact his plan to kickstart a race war in twenty twenty.
It was a whole thing.
I don't remember why I was telling you about that hearing, but it was the day I walked out of the bathroom at the green Belt, Maryland Federal Court Building with my dress tucked into my tights. And it was the same day that I grabbed that FBI agent's phone out of his hand because he couldn't figure out how to turn it off, and he was just fumbling with it and fidgeting and pressing the buttons and doing it wrong.
And I didn't want the judge to get mad at the gallery because someone's phone was on, so.
I just did it for him.
I told you about that, but I don't think I actually told you anything about the base, so that paragraph in that document is interesting. I hadn't had any reason up until this moment to think Tyler Dykes had been involved with the BASS, but I'm not sure the date is right. I know the government is never going to tell me anything juicy about a terrorist organization, and there's
no point even asking. But I wish that someone could just confirm for me whether that's a typo, because I really think they had to have meant twenty nineteen not twenty twenty. I know that there was a paramilitary training exercise at the compound in bad Axe, Michigan, over the weekend of November thirtieth to December first, twenty nineteen. There was supposed to be another one in December of twenty twenty, but it didn't happen because the FBI raided the property
in October of twenty twenty. If members of the base did get together in December of twenty twenty. Half the group wouldn't have made it because they were in federal custody and wherever the meetup happened, it couldn't have been the proper pretty in bad acts. So either as a TYPO and they met twenty nineteen, or there's something else going on here entirely that I have no other documentation about, and I have a lot more questions. I'm leaning towards TYPO.
It happens more than you think. But also a lot of guys who were in the base during that time period got arrested. I mean, whether or not the government meant twenty nineteen or twenty twenty. If Tyler Diys was involved in the base during that time period either year, he was friends with at least one informant. There's no getting around that the FBI was in possession of a lot of cell phones and computers that belonged to members of the base got arrested during that time period, and
several cells of that group were infiltrated or monitored. The cell arrested in Maryland for plotting to start the Civil War was wiretapped. The cell arrested in Georgia for plotting to murder and anti fascist activists, and his wife had an undercover agent in their crew. The guys living on the compound in Michigan got raided. So I feel like
the government definitely knew Tyler Dykes was there. And I don't just mean they know it now in this document they wrote in twenty twenty four, I mean they knew it then. This isn't a recent discovery. So why is this single paragraph and a last minute addend him to a sentencing memorandum the only place this has ever come up?
If the FBI knew then that he was a member of a domestic extremist organization actively plotting to kick off the Race War, a group that was explicitly seeking to recruit members of the United States military to carry out acts of terrorism, why did the Marine Corps wait two more year years to discharge him? Great question I wish
I could tell you. As Ever, this new piece of information leaves me with more questions than it answers, but it does seem to go pretty far in rebutting Tyler Dykes's claim that the people calling him a Nazi are being unfair, So.
Quite interesting you know, my experience is anily six For example, I brandeded the neo Nazi domestic terrorists because of a wave.
Every time he tries to hit back on being called a Nazi, he says he was just waving. He's referring to a specific photograph, one that was used in the criminal complaint filed in his federal case. After fighting his way to the top of the steps of the Capitol Building on January sixth, he turned around and well, he says, he would It's just a still photo. But i know what it looks like to me, and I've seen a
lot of photos of guys doing this. Here's the thing, though, that's not the only reason people are calling him a Nazi. As someone running for office hoping to capture the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, it's safe for him to be proud of being a January sixth defendant. There are large segments of the MAGA base that eat it up when you say that you're a brave MAGA patriot who stepped up to defend Donald Trump on January sixth, and the woke mob is just trying to cancel you
because you love America right. So if he can blur the truth and convince people that, oh, yeah, I'm being called a Nazi, but only because of this cool thing I did that you like. That will work for him, That's good for him. There's a degree of martyrdom associated with being a January sixth defendant.
He suffered for the cause.
He believed in MAGA, and he was willing to put himself on the line. He rarely misses an opportunity to mention that he was a January sixth defendant. He also repeatedly implies that he was the victim of a violent police rate on his home when the FBI came to arrest him on the January sixth charges. This is a popular refrain in that community. It is part of the martyrdom narrative. But in one interview, he was asked to recount that harrowing tale, and he's forced to clarify that actually,
he wasn't home when that happened. He doesn't mention that not only was he not home that day, he hadn't been home in months because he was in jail for a felon he committed at a Nazi rally. So he's trying to downplay the Nazi allegations by saying it's just a smear against him for his brave, patriotic behavior at the insurrection. The problem is, even if you believe he was just waving on January sixth, there's video of him throwing Hitler salutes at a Nazi rally in twenty seventeen.
I can show you photos and video from multiple angles. He wasn't waving on August eleventh, twenty seventeen, and there's no wiggling out of that one. And really we're not just talking about how many times he gave the old stiff arm salute during a riot. He wasn't just some regular Republican voter who got carried away on January sixth. He was a member of at least two different Nazi groups. And that's just what the government has been willing to
corroborate on the record. He can post pictures of himself in his marine dress blues on Instagram if he wants, but he received an other than honorable discharge for doing Nazi stuff with his Nazi friends, and the Nazi conduct in question took place before January sixth, twenty twenty one. He wants voters to think he's being unfairly labeled a Nazi for going to the Capitol in January sixth, but the United States Marine Corps seems to be saying that
he was a Nazi before that. I don't have a huge amount of faith in the voters that elected Nancy Mace, but it's a crowded primary field and those people have other options. I'm not actually worried about Tyler Dyke's winning his primary. That's extremely unlikely. But I am really not looking forward to a political landscape littered with guys like this, Guys who are trying to kick in the Overton window like it's an actual window on the northwest side of
the Capitol Building. I ended up having to cut a few thousand words about Augustus and Victus and his suspension from the Florida Bar. It looks like we'll have to wait until next week to talk about the ways the paths these two men have taken have diverged since they marched together in twenty seventeen. Weird Little Guys. It's a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me while I hunger. Our executive producers
are Sophi Le Treman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Bory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at weirdlu Guy's podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.