Do We Really Need to Talk About Kevin?
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Hey, I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys, the show where I tell you about the weird little guys trying to unravel the fabric of our society. I've spent years researching and writing about right-wing extremism, and I've never

It's pretty scary out there, I won't lie to you. But the guys trying to ruin life as we know it are also kind of freaks and losers. So, here's one of them. Okay, we're going to start this off with a pop quiz. I'm going to read you a quote, and I want you to tell me who said it. I'll give you a minute to think. It's multiple choice. To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. Was that A. Benjamin Franklin?

B. Voltaire. C. Socrates. Or D. A neo-Nazi pedophile on a white nationalist radio show in 1993. Now, if you guessed B, you're in good company. Well, no, it's not good company. The company is pretty terrible. I can't say bad company without getting lost on a tangent about Timothy McVeigh's obsession with the song Bad Company by the band Bad Company from their album Bad Company. So I won't say the company is bad, but...

It's a crowd. No, the answer is actually D, neo-Nazi pedophile Kevin Alfred Strome. And it's a slight paraphrase of something he said in an August 1993 broadcast of American Dissident Voices, the weekly radio program he hosted for the neo-Nazi group National Alliance. Strome was living on the group's West Virginia compound, 300 acres in the mountains near Hillsborough that they just call The Land. And he was serving as the right-hand man of the group's leader, his mentor, William Luther Pierce.

The broadcast was entitled, All of America Must Know the Terror That Is Upon Us, a name he borrowed from a speech given in 1959 by another one of his great influences, Ravillo P. Oliver. And the quote gets new life every now and again when it's incorrectly attributed to Voltaire. In the era of public discourse about whether wearing a mask was truly the most vile form of tyranny, it made the rounds as COVID deniers pushed back against public health guidelines.

Like in January of 2022, when Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massey posted, you mustn't question Fauci, for he is science. Accompanied by an image of the quote, and it was sort of laid over an image. I guess that's just a meme, right? Words on a picture. The picture was of a large disembodied hand pushing down on tiny little people that it was squishing.

That original image is actually an anti-child labor political cartoon from 1912. If you look at the uncropped version of the original picture, the sleeve has child labor employer written on it. You know, they used to label everything in a political cartoon. Ben Garrison didn't invent that. Australian Senator Cory Bernardi tweeted the quote back in 2015.

Contemporaneous reporting doesn't give me any insight into exactly who he felt he was being prevented from criticizing. But there was an article in The Guardian that same week about his belief that Australia should not admit any Syrian refugees because they might be terrorists. So I guess he felt he was being oppressed by refugees. Whatever it was about, he responded by not just deleting that tweet, but all of his tweets. And he did not tweet again for a while. Elon Musk has...

Unsurprisingly, done it at least twice. In November of 2022, Musk posted that he was so committed to free speech that he would not ban the account that was posting information about his private plane. He did actually ban the account a month later, but a user with a doge meme profile picture replied to that tweet. So you don't rule over us, but for us. Much wow. Accompanied by that same image that Thomas Massey posted, the big hand squishing the little people with the text of the quote.

And Musk replied to the Doge meme guy, that is my goal. After hundreds of commenters immediately pointed out that he was agreeing with a quote from a neo-Nazi, he deleted the reply without addressing it. Six months later, he tweeted the exact same picture. It was a screenshot from a meme page, so it was the exact same image bearing the quote, but the text underneath it showed someone had written, we need to rise up against children with leukemia. I guess the joke there is that you...

aren't allowed to criticize kids with cancer. That one's still up. I guess he thought that was funny. And maybe it does kind of sound like something Voltaire could have said. You know, he's not a huge fan of the Jews either. But we don't exactly know where the original misattribution to the French philosopher comes from. American etymologist Barry Popic wrote on his blog in 2012 that the quote seemed to appear kind of out of nowhere, with multiple quote-of-the-day websites featuring it in 2012, all attributing it to Voltaire.

The oldest attribution to Voltaire that Popek could find, super weird, was a 2007 post by a user named Suzanne on a forum for miniature horse breeders. But I think that has more to do with sort of the rickety architecture of the early internet than it is evidence that Suzanne and the mini horse ladies are anti-Semites, right? That we don't really have the ability to Google a lot of that sort of early internet posting, you know, Usenet forums and stuff.

Things like that weren't indexing to Google, so I don't think it came from the mini horse ladies. But I will admit I spent half an afternoon digging through 20-year-old forum posts about miniature horse pedigrees, trying to sniff out secret Nazis. I didn't find any. Mostly, I just discovered that some people buy the little shoes at Build-A-Bear Workshop for their miniature horses because they fit perfectly.

and they're cheaper than the little sneakers they make for horses. So if you need a little extra traction if you're taking a miniature horse inside, you could put teddy bear sneakers on him. But whoever started it, I find it hard to believe that the original misattribution was innocent. It's not a line you could really just come across anywhere on the wider internet if you were the first person to do this.

And the actual author of the quote seems to agree. In 2017, Kevin Strome addressed the issue, writing in a post on the website for the neo-Nazi organization National Alliance, "...whoever hijacked my quote and put it over Voltaire's signature liked what I was saying. He understood my point. He understood that our secret rulers brook no criticism of themselves or their agenda without exacting punishment."

He wanted to use the quote, but he didn't dare attribute it correctly. He didn't dare make his point with a quote from a known racist or anti-Semite. Those are in scare quotes. No matter how good the quote was, he didn't dare follow my thoughts with my name. If he did, he'd be attacked as being racist himself. There might be personal or professional consequences, so he took my idea and put it in the mouth of Voltaire.

Funny thing is, Voltaire, free thinker and honest observer as he was, is as much of a racist and anti-Semite as I am. But Voltaire has been safely dead for well over 200 years, and his contribution to the artistic and intellectual development of our civilization is so great that it will take quite some time for his legacy to be erased, denounced, or censored, as I'm sure the enemies of life are aching to do. So it was relatively safe to quote Voltaire, but unsafe to quote Kevin Alfred Strome.

Fair enough, I think Kevin's on to something there. You know, I hate to agree with him, but it isn't just racism and anti-Semitism that makes Strome an unsavory source to quote. He is also a pedophile. Now, I know you might be saying, and I know the legal department is saying, that's kind of a strong word. Are you sure you can say that? Well...

Yeah, I can. I'm very sure. Because despite the entire section of his website devoted to debunking the accusation, one of the exhibits filed on the case that led to his stint in federal prison for possession of child pornography is a copy of a contract he signed in the presence of a notary. In September 2006, at the request of his second wife, Kevin Strom signed a document stating that he would attend counseling sessions, quote, until such time that such a qualified counselor will be able to indicate to, redacted,

There's just a lot going on there. I mean, first of all, I don't know if you've had anything notarized, right? You sign a document in the presence of someone who is certified by the state to say they saw you sign it. So it's, you know, there's no argument later about whether that's really you who signed it because you showed them your ID and they put the little stamp on it.

I usually get stuff notarized at the library. It's free. Your town probably has it too. You make a little appointment and the librarian can do it for you. It's great. I love public libraries. I don't know where Kevin got his pedophile contract notarized. I just can't imagine. Like normally you're looking at, I don't know, mortgage documents and wills or I had to send a document to a court clerk to get online access to court records. Did she read this? What a bad day at work.

There's nothing I can tell you that will make any sense of a man's sexual attraction to his stepdaughter's nine-year-old classmate. That's, I can't do that. But I think there's some sense in telling you a little bit about Kevin's life up to that point. If you don't have the kind of familiarity with white supremacist movements that ends conversations at parties, you've probably never heard of him. But he spent most of his adult life as the indispensable right hand of the man who wrote the novel that still serves as a blueprint and a bible for white supremacist terror.

By his own telling, it was his high school history teacher who set Kevin Strome on the path to right-wing extremism, introducing him to the ultra-conservative anti-communist group, the John Birch Society, in the early 70s. And it's probably no coincidence that the two men who would have the biggest impact on his views as an adult also came up through the JBS.

Strome would later serve as the personal archivist of Ravilo P. Oliver, a founding member of the John Birch Society, although he was later forced to leave the group he helped found in 1966 after saying, "All the world's problems could be solved if every Jew were vaporized." So it's not that the John Birch Society wasn't anti-Semitic, they just didn't want him to say out loud exactly how anti-Semitic they all were. It was just very embarrassing for everyone.

And William Luther Pierce, the man whose Nazi compound Strome lived and worked on for years, joined the American Nazi Party after deciding the John Birch Society just wasn't racist enough for him. It was a place for people who hated communism to share ideas, and a lot of those ideas were about how Black and Jewish people were actually to blame. And it was at a John Birch Society meeting sometime in the late 70s when Strome first encountered members of the newly formed National Alliance.

William Luther Pierce founded National Alliance in 1974. After American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell was shot in a laundromat parking lot by a former follower in '67,

Pierce had a brief stint in the National Socialist White People's Party. That's kind of a mouthful. That's just a different Nazi party. Before joining up with Willis Cardo to lead the National Youth Alliance. And National Youth Alliance was formed by Cardo to focus on recruiting and radicalizing right-wing college students to sort of counter the influence of groups like Students for a Democratic Society, right? So it was the TPUSA of the George Wallace campaign years.

in the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. And it was originally spun off of Cardo's Youth for Wallace organization, but obviously George Wallace did not become president in 1968, and they didn't bring back segregation.

And in what is going to become a theme in this story, Cardo and Pierce pretty quickly stopped getting along and eventually split entirely. The faction that left with Pierce became National Alliance in 1974. And in 75, Pierce started writing the novel that is, unfortunately, his enduring legacy, The Turner Diaries. We don't have to get super deep into it today. I'm sure it will come up in

Most episodes of this show, unfortunately, you know, over the last 50 years, this book has inspired a lot of race warriors. It is a fictional novel, but it's the handbook for the race war. It is a race war handbook in a fictional trench coat. And it's not very good. And I don't, I mean, obviously it's not good, right? It is a terrorism handbook. It is...

I'm sort of describing how to instigate the race war and, you know, kill the race traitors and kill the journalists and kill black people and Jewish people. It's it is not good ideologically, obviously, but it's also just really bad. It's messy. It was originally written in a serialized format and then collected into one book. And it's just it's disjointed. He's not a great writer. He's not a great thinker.

And Kevin Strome's first wife, Kirsten, told an interviewer years later that when she first met Pierce in 1987, she told him she had just finished reading the Turner Diaries. You know, she's at dinner with her husband and Dr. Pierce, and this is, I'm sure, a very big deal for her husband, who is a National Alliance member.

And I'm sure he hoped that his wife would just behave, you know, keep sweet, just be the wife. And she tells Dr. Pierce, oh, I just finished reading your book. And I didn't think it was very good. She told him it was poorly written. And I mean, point for Kirsten, she's right. I just can't imagine saying that to him. And it was through Pierce that Strome first met Kirsten. She was married at the time to a National Alliance member named Joseph McLaughlin.

In 1987, the day that Rudolf Hess died, Joe suggested that she call Pierce. So I wish I could be a fly on the wall on this afternoon. You know, he says to his young wife, oh, I've just heard that the deputy Fuhrer died. We should call the leader of the Nazi cult that I'm in and offer our condolences, I guess. But that's what they did. And Pierce was very happy to hear from them.

And as they're talking, he's thinking, you know, I think Kevin would really like this girl. Again, she's married. She's on the phone with her husband. Her husband is the one that prompted her to make this phone call. But he hears her and thinks, I've got something better for her. Because I think it's hard to meet women when you're living in an off-the-grid Nazi compound in the mountains of West Virginia.

Pierce himself was known for selecting his brides from catalogs of Eastern European women, but I guess he thought he could pick one out for his boy Kevin over in Arlington, a little closer to home. A few months after that dinner where she told Pierce she didn't care for his novel, Kirsten left her second husband, Joe, and moved in with Kevin. The couple was married on Chincoteague Island in 1990 in a ceremony officiated by William Luther Pierce. She wrote later in her memoir, I guess, you know, she wasn't

sort of removed from society at this point. She was still existing in the world when she married Kevin, and so her family was at the wedding. And she describes feeling a little bit embarrassed at the way Dr. Pierce talked about race in front of her family. Strange vows. ♪

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And the marriage was not a happy one. That's probably not a surprise to you. Soon after the marriage, they moved out to the land. Again, that's the big compound in West Virginia. And she didn't love it there. She wasn't allowed to watch TV or read newspapers or consume any of what her husband considered Jewish-controlled media.

They stockpiled food and weapons, and she mainly tended to her home and her children, but she says that she also helped out around the compound by stuffing envelopes to mail out copies of the group's propaganda, help fulfill orders for books they sold online.

Pierce's book, obviously, The Turner Diaries and a number of other sort of white nationalist publications and books. And another task that she would pitch in with was they made these sort of special waterproof PVC tubes that they would sell to members. And the purpose of the tube is to bury your guns underground so the federal government can't get them. Right. So she's

Raising her children, she's a housewife, she's making gun tubes for preppers and mailing out copies of the terrorism manual. You know, just young mother stuff. And the paranoia on the compound was always there. I mean, why else are you living on a compound if you're not a little bit paranoid? But after Ruby Ridge in 92 and Waco in 93, it became unbearable. As she describes, you know, Kevin telling her things like, you know, keep the children away from the windows, they're going to shoot the children through the windows. Just not...

prompted by anything, right? Just the sort of constant tension that the feds are going to show up on any day now and they're going to shoot you. And they're going to shoot you like Ruby Ridge. It's just not a great environment for a family. And on April 19th, 1995, Kevin came home early from work. And she said he never did that. He was never around. He would go off to his little workroom to make his little Nazi radio show for, you know, dawn to dusk every day. He never came home early. But on April 19th, 1995, he did.

I don't know if that date means anything to normal people. It was the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. And when he came home from work that day on April 19th, he didn't know yet. It hadn't hit the news yet what the police found with Timothy McVeigh in the car. When he was arrested, he had his favorite passages from the Turner Diaries on the car seat next to him. But he did know that the bomber had called the National Alliance office just before detonating the bomb that killed 200 people.

Kirsten writes in her memoir that Kevin came home early from work again the next day, April 20th, 1995. Came home in a hurry, and he started packing up boxes and boxes of documents and tapes and papers and reel-to-reel recordings of his pirate radio broadcast, Voice of Tomorrow, and all of his QSL cards. If you're a ham radio guy, don't come for me. I'm going to do my best here. QSL cards are mostly a thing of the past now that we have the internet, but they were these sort of

Postcards that ham radio enthusiasts and people in the pirate radio community would send through the mail to exchange information about signal quality and strength. You'd write, you know, "I am in this location, I was listening to this broadcast on this date, and this was the signal quality." And in the pirate radio world, these QSL cards are real collector's items.

But they're also a paper trail that the FCC would love to have. It's sort of a record of what you're listening to, who you're communicating with. And he's been running an illegal anti-Semitic radio show for years. Anyway, those are QSL cards. I think. And Kirsten said he burned the boxes of QSL cards. So he's packing up all these documents. He's burning the cards. And then he fills the car up with these boxes of documents and tapes. And he drives several hours away to Stanton, Virginia...

and drives all over town, leaving these boxes in different dumpsters in businesses, right? So I guess, you know, in April of 1995, the Big Lots dumpster received potential evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing. Who knows? And the worst thing, really, was that it ruined Hitler's birthday, which was usually a very lively occasion on the compound. It wasn't long after the bombing that the couple moved to Rochester, Minnesota. They chose it because it was 96% white, of course.

It was in Rochester where Kirsten gave birth to their third child. And it was pretty clear that she was suffering from what was probably postpartum depression. She describes an incident just weeks after giving birth when she was allowed to listen to a little bit of the radio to hear a weather report. And she caught the tail end of a news story about a young couple that killed their baby in a hotel room to cover up the fact that they'd gotten pregnant.

And that's upsetting for anyone to hear, but I think if you're a brand new mother, that's overwhelming, right? So she's a new mother. She's holding her baby. She hears about a baby that died and she starts crying. I think there's nothing more normal in the world than to cry when you hear about a dead baby. But Kevin yelled at her. He rebuked her for this, saying it was good that the baby was dead because its mother was Jewish.

And it wasn't long after that that she finally got up the courage to read a magazine article about the Oklahoma City bombing. She, you know, obviously had very little access to media and was afraid to find out more about this anyway. She picked up a magazine and she's leafing through it and she sees pictures. And she told an interviewer later, I was thinking about this child being held by a fireman. Doesn't look any different than my son. And he's covered with blood.

And that whole idea that there really isn't any difference, that children are children, all came to me. It all came together on that date. And it was around this time that Kirsten spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. Can't really blame her. I can't imagine trying to integrate that into my psyche. And she'd been begging for help for years, but Kevin didn't believe in that kind of thing. She'd been prescribed antidepressants after the birth of their second child, but he hadn't allowed her to take them. While she was in the hospital, he left her and took the children.

A years-long custody battle followed. And even though he is an out-and-out neo-Nazi, right, it's not a secret at this point, his name is in the newspaper next to William Luther Pierce and Timothy McVeigh. He's the protege of the man who wrote the book that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing. He has no real job outside of editing a Nazi magazine and ghostwriting for David Duke. In spite of all of that, the battle ended in a draw.

years in court, right? She was only able to keep fighting this custody battle because the SPLC helped her get a lawyer. And I think at some point she sold photographs that she had taken of other National Alliance members on the compound. She sold them to the SPLC for enough money to just keep trying. But she had custody. And so at the end of those three years in court, Kevin was already married to his second wife, Alicia. And it was Alicia who came home one day to find her husband, Kevin, sitting in front of his computer.

He was completely nude and fully erect. And I'm so... I don't love having to say that. I mean, I guess I chose to say it. I did write this, but I don't like the way that feels. But he was at his computer, naked, rock hard, and looking at pictures of little girls. Clothed girls. The girls had clothes on, right? He had access to child pornography. We know that. But on that particular day, she walked in on him looking at what...

Under other circumstances, would have been perfectly normal photographs of children. These were children they knew, right? Family, friends, the children of other National Alliance members, photos he'd taken of children in their lives, friends of her daughters. But it wasn't normal because of the, you know, the totality of the circumstances here. And that's what prompted the pedophilia contract.

Because she'd already caught him looking at actual child pornography the year before, so she already knew. But this was a bridge too far. These were children that he had access to, right? When she caught him the year before looking at the child pornography, they'd started going to marriage counseling. But this was too much. She decided he needed individual counseling to address this specifically.

And she later testified that it was at this point that she started sleeping on the floor outside her daughter's bedroom. And his marriage was not the only thing in Kevin's life that was falling apart in 2006. After William Luther Pierce died in 2002, National Alliance was thrown into chaos.

His hand-picked successor, Eric Glebe, was losing control of the organization. In 2004, National Alliance's membership coordinator quit, leaving behind a public letter demanding an audit of the organization's finances, accusing Glebe of mismanaging member dues. In April of 2005, Strome attempted a coup of sorts, getting dozens of signatures on a letter demanding Glebe's resignation. Glebe responded by firing him. Fair enough.

But then he did actually step down just a few days after that, leaving Sean Walker in charge of National Alliance. And, you know, another sort of tangent here, Glebe would actually return as chairman just a year later because Sean Walker, the guy that took over for him when he quit, had to go to prison on a gun thing. So it's really just kind of a revolving door. Nobody really knows who's in charge here. But Kevin's out. But if there's one thing these guys love, it is a splinter group.

So Kevin responds to being fired from the organization he devoted his entire adult life to by founding his own. And he called it National Vanguard, which is the same as the publication he'd been editing for National Alliance for years. So he already was using the name National Vanguard because that was National Alliance's publication that he was in charge of. So he already owned a domain. Easy for him.

And some National Alliance chapters followed him. So he's pretty busy trying to helm his newly formed splinter group. He's traveling to chapters in different states, trying to shore up support. He's speaking, he's meeting, recruiting. And he's just trying to get this thing off the ground. But he's not so busy that he can't make time to see the new love of his life, a nine-year-old. ♪

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That includes our introductory five-piece system, free gifts, free shipping, and a 60-day money-back guarantee. All of that available at MeaningfulBeauty.com. In September 2005, Kevin met one of his stepdaughter's elementary school classmates. A girl identified in court documents only as AA, which thankfully are not her real initials. She was nine at the time. And I'll set your mind at ease up front. He never touched her.

There's no allegation that he ever touched a child. So that's some consolation, I think. And none of the naked photos of children they found on his hard drive were of her, right? Again, there's no allegation that he ever took photos of children who were naked. He just was weird about taking photos of clothed children. But he showed up at her school so many times that her parents pulled her out of private school and sent her back to public school.

He drove by her house. He sent her flowers and gifts, and he wrote poems and love songs. And ultimately, the charge of sexual enticement of a minor, which was one of the things he was originally charged with, was dismissed. Judge Norman Moon, who is, shockingly, still on the bench, I saw Judge Moon not too long ago, said there was overwhelming evidence that Strome was attracted to the girl, but that there wasn't sufficient evidence that he'd actually tried to sexually coerce her.

Right. So he's trying to romance this child, but he didn't sexually coerce her. Right. He's buying her flowers and showing up at her house, but he didn't physically coerce her. And I don't I don't know. I don't know where the line is there. I just I'm not comfortable with that.

If a grown man is hiding behind a tree outside of an elementary school trying to get close to the child he's writing poems about marrying, there's got to be something we could do about that, right? I don't know. If a guy is taking time out of his busy schedule meeting with David Duke and writing blog posts about racial purity to download a little girl's school schedule, there's got to be some kind of intervention.

But even though Judge Moon said it wasn't illegal to send romantic gifts to a fifth grader, the behavior did prompt an investigation. His wife is rightly very concerned. They start going to counseling. She catches him looking at child pornography and tries to call the police. And so here, this is a little he said, she said, right? So they both agree that there was an altercation. She says that she hit him because she was trying to call the police.

And then he tried to stop her by choking her. This is where the witness intimidation charge comes in that was ultimately dropped at trial. But regardless of how it started, she hit him over the head with a phone so hard that he had to go to the hospital. So they go back to marriage counseling. In July 2006, he announces he's taking a step back from his new Nazi splinter group, citing family issues. You know, the classic line, I've got to take a step back from the work to spend more time with my family.

In this case, it doesn't seem like spending more time with his family is really in anybody's best interest. But he abandons National Vanguard. He just doesn't have time for it right now. And a month after that, unbeknownst to him, his wife gives his computer hard drive to the police. In October, federal agents search his home. And notably, the FBI agents that come to search his house are from the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

I don't know that child sex abuse material usually involves the JTTF, but in this case, it did. And specifically, the agent on the warrant was a Charlottesville police officer on loan to the task force. Did I mention that this all takes place in Charlottesville? It's just, it doesn't seem right, does it? But the agent on the warrant is Charlottesville police officer who is on loan to the JTTF, Brian O'Donnell.

And Alicia, that's Kevin's wife at the time, claimed very publicly and for years that she was sleeping with O'Donnell at the time of the trial. And she even produced audio that she claims is a recording of a phone call between the two of them where they're talking about the affair.

I won't tell you with certainty that she was sleeping with the cop in charge of investigating her pedophile husband. He has not admitted that. I think he has denied that. But that was her claim for many years. For what it's worth, she was later arrested several times for stalking and doxing cops. Here in the Charlottesville area, we have what's called the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force. It's a multi-jurisdictional organization.

drug enforcement unit. And she ran a blog devoted to doxing the undercover cops that did drug stings. So again, you know, you don't gotta hand it to her. She is not innocent in all of this. She was a true believer, just like Kevin. But I don't know, running the cop doxing blog, not bad. Eventually, the ACLU actually took up her case, defending her right to run a blog dedicated to identifying undercover drug officers. She spent a little bit of time in jail, but I think ultimately she was...

vindicated in her cop-doxing blog. It's just such a weird rabbit hole here. It's just such a strange side tangent that has nothing to do with Kevin because he's out of her life at this point, right? But just a weird crossover. I wish I could go back in time and see Tim Longo, who was the Charlottesville police chief back then. He met with Alicia and just begged her. He's like, I can't make you, right? You're not breaking the law. We settled that. But please, please log off. Please stop posting pictures of cops' houses and cars. It's upsetting the boys, right?

Just bizarre. Another strange crossover, just totally bizarre. I guess it's just a quirk of small town life, but it's one of her many trials. The prosecutor was Denise Lunsford. She was, back then, in the prosecutor's office in Almaral County. After working as a prosecutor, she would go back to defense work, and she was actually the court-appointed defense attorney at the James Alex Fields murder trial. So just everything comes full circle, I guess.

And O'Donnell, the officer working Strom's case for the GTTF, again, he denied the affair. He says he was not sleeping with Alicia, but he actually stayed on at the Charlottesville Police Department for another decade or so. Long enough to serve as one of the zone commanders for the police presence in downtown Charlottesville on August 12th, 2017. I'm not saying any of this to, like, start a conspiracy. There's really no conspiracy here. It's just a quirk of a little city. Characters getting recycled. But...

Circling back, I digress. That JTTF involvement in this small-town child pornography case is what fuels Strom's personal conspiracy theory that he was set. He maintains to this day that he was targeted by the JTTF because they were unhappy with him for his coverage of the 2004 federal trial of Chester Dolezal. Of all the things to think that this is about, I think that's just so stupid.

Doles was a longtime Klansman, but by the early 2000s was in leadership at National Alliance and he was on trial for some kind of federal gun charge. He did something silly. He was a felon for some prior hate crimes. He wasn't supposed to have a gun. He did go to prison again.

got back out. He tried to run for office in Georgia two years ago. Anyway, Strom attended the trial to support Doles, obviously, as a National Alliance member. And he was also writing about the case for National Alliance's website to sort of help boost awareness of the case because they were raising money for Doles' family. But Strom says that at the courthouse, a JGTF agent looked at him and said, "'Strom, you're next!'

Right, so he thinks that they hated his blog so much that they tried to send him to prison. I know I'm saying that like it's so stupid when I just told you that like his wife wrote a blog that was so bad the cops tried to send her to jail, but I just don't think the FBI cared that much about his blog. I really don't. Because I've got a different theory. I found, buried in this mountain of documents produced pursuant to a FOIA request by DDoS Secrets founder Emma Best, an FBI memo dated April 18th.

Remember, that's the week of Kevin's attempted coup. So he's trying to seize control of National Alliance from Eric Glebe, but instead he gets fired and he splinters off National Vanguard. So in this FBI memo, which was written just days before all of that happened, the agent writes, National Alliance fracturing continued and accelerated this weekend. And the agent speculates that a splinter group led by a former staffer is likely to form.

And he actually writes a name, but it's redacted, obviously. But based on the character widths, I can't think of another guy whose name would fit. It's a Kevin Strome-length redaction, if you know what I'm saying. The memo's author advises agents to "...assess the potential of a lone wolf acting out of frustration over the lack of progress that organized groups have been able to make in their goals."

And the document concludes by saying, quote, So if you don't speak cop, right, what he's saying is that the collapse of a group that size, which had long relied on the somewhat stabilizing effect of a charismatic leader,

would make it harder to infiltrate, harder to monitor, and harder to predict. And some of these guys might do terrorism, right? That if this group collapses, if they don't have the stability and the framework of a leader keeping them in line, they're gonna blow stuff up. And the FBI already had an idea about Stroh, right? It was sort of an open secret for years that he was a little weird about little girls, right?

His ex-wife Kirsten spoke to the FBI years earlier, though it's not clear what specific allegations she made about his proclivities. In the 90s, he maintained a personal website with an entire section dedicated to the beauty of the white race. Which, like, I mean, normal enough for a Nazi, right? Like the beauty of the Aryan woman or whatever, like a Pinterest board for the 14 words, right?

But it was weirder than that, right? Even at the time and even within the movement, it raised eyebrows because the pictures were not of adult women, right? It was the beauty of Aryan little girls. Again, clothed, but weird. Just kind of freak behavior. And Kirsten wrote in her memoir, which was published years before his arrest, she's not writing this after she already knows, she's writing this prior to his arrest, that during their custody battle, she actually went to the police about that section of his website, right?

And the police agreed that it was super unsettling, but that ultimately it was not illegal because the girls were clothed. She said in an interview later that Alicia, the second wife, called her after Kevin got arrested. She said that for the first two years of her marriage, she tried to figure out what was wrong with her. And for the second two years, she tried to figure out what was wrong with him. The fact is, he wasn't interested in me either once we got married.

You know, often when someone gets arrested for something like this, people come out of the woodwork and they say, oh, I always knew something was kind of weird about that guy. I always knew. Why didn't you say anything? First of all.

But in this case, we have sources that predate his arrest. So this isn't a hindsight thing. People were saying this for years. Some posts on a white nationalist message board in 2003 discussed the photos, even. One user writes, back some years ago when Strome first came on the Internet, he ran a series of pictures of young white girls, which some people found objectionable. But I did not.

They weren't naked or in suggestive poses or anything like that. And what the hell is wrong with celebrating the beauty of the women of our race? Even the other Nazis pushed back against that. They're like, I don't know, man. The photos were of the children of other National Alliance members, right? These aren't just random pictures of kids he found online. These aren't stock photos. These are photos he took of children in his life. He would photograph children playing on the compound and post them online without their parents' permission, which is weird enough, right?

But the website also had another section, so this is on a separate page of the website. But it's on the website. There were also photos of himself posing in what the users on the message board call beefcake poses in underwear that they describe as fruit of the looms. I'm so, again, I'm so sorry. Another exasperated user wrote,

Why? Why do these things happen? Why, even under the best of circumstances, is the movement always tainted with just a slight tinge of cadaverine smell? Why are we constantly confronted with this kind of just plain weird behavior? Even among those who claim to be, and to our reluctant agreement usually are, the best people we've got. Why can't we have so much as one single leader who is just simply normal?

Why must there always be these little weird kibbles and bits, these little oddities, these little bits of quirky behavior lurking in the background of everything we do? Why must we always hold our breath around our leaders, never knowing what horrible surprise lurks in their past, waiting to spring out and piss all over everything like a giggling, deranged baby? Why do we even bother? Is this really, truly the best we can do? And to that I say, I think so. Yeah, I think it is the best they can do.

The movement is full of aspiring Hitlers, but they're all just absolute fucking weirdos, even aside from the whole Nazi thing. So if the FBI wanted to take out one head of this Hydra to cut off the potential for this splinter group to further split one of the country's more powerful white supremacist organizations, it wouldn't be hard, right? I'm saying that these two things exist separately. He was already a pedophile. They had an existing desire to prevent this splinter group from taking hold permanently.

And they just kind of lucked out, right? Like if the cops might come after you, don't do them a favor by doing other crimes. Like if you're a mob boss, pay your taxes, right? Who knows? We do know Alicia turned over that hard drive to the police, but it's impossible to know if she did that of her own volition or if she'd been approached by agents looking to get him on something, right?

Both of those are very easy to believe. He was horrible to her. You know, by her account, he tried to choke her. He's looking at child pornography. She's afraid for her daughter. I think that, even on its own, is enough motivation for even a true believer, a member of the movement, to say, something has to be done. This isn't acceptable. But it's also very easy to believe that the FBI would approach her and say, you know, we can help you if you help us. Who knows? We'll never know. She...

would say that she never did that, right? She says that she didn't give any information to the police, but we know that's not true because it's in court documents that she voluntarily produced the hard drive. So we'll never really get a straight answer. You know, he really just stepped on a rake here. You know, maybe the feds never would have gotten involved at all, if not for a little girl's mother who called the police because some weird middle-aged man wouldn't stop showing up at her daughter's school.

Ultimately, Strom did plead guilty to one count of possessing child pornography and was sentenced to 23 months. With the year he'd already served before pleading guilty, he was released just a few months later, in September of 2008. Strom was sort of in the wilderness for a bit after his stint in prison. By 2013, though, he was back in it with National Alliance. He registered an account under his own name on the group's online forum. In the following year, Glebe steps down again,

Leaving William White Williams, the head of National Alliance. And he's still in charge over there today of what's left of it. And yes, that is William White Williams. That is his name, William W. Williams. Not to be confused with William White. That is a Nazi for a different day, I promise, though. We'll get to William White. Anyway, Williams. He was a longtime Strome ally, so he brings him back into the fold and reinstates him as the group's media director.

And he also introduced Strome to the woman who would become his third wife, Meredith Keller. And Keller started writing to Williams in 2012 when she was still an undergraduate in college. And Williams introduced her to Strome soon after. So just as William Luther Pierce had selected Kirsten for Kevin back in 1987, the Alliance's new chairman is playing matchmaker again. And Kevin's like 50 at this point and she is just graduating college. So it's not illegal, but it is weird. It is weird.

And under the pseudonym Vanessa Neubauer, Meredith served as the secretary for the Cosmotheus Church. That's the fake Nazi religion that William Luther Pierce invented to get tax-exempt status after the IRS said no the first time in 1978. Strom's engagement to Meredith was announced in an October 2015 member newsletter. But a police report two months later says she called the police when he wouldn't let her leave the house when she tried to end their relationship. No charges were filed and...

I guess the police having to come because you're holding a woman hostage isn't a probation violation because there's no documentation in his federal court file that he had a police contact of this sort. Who knows? So he didn't get in trouble and they didn't break up. The couple attended one of the last Trump campaign rallies together just two weeks before the 2016 election.

In a broadcast of American Dissident Voices that week, Strom opined that Trump had opened the door for a full-on Hitler to emerge in the not-too-distant future, ending the broadcast with optimism at the speed with which the Overton window was shifting rightward, saying, Kevin and Meredith married in 2019.

There were some rumors on the weird corners of the internet that Strom had wanted to move his new family back to the compound in West Virginia. But everybody kind of said no to that. Not because they didn't want a convicted sex offender around the families that live there. No, that wasn't a big deal. They don't think he was guilty, right? He was railroaded. It was fake. Whatever. Whatever.

But because of his mandatory sex offender registration, that would mean that a photograph of the compound would appear on the sex offender registry website, and people weren't comfortable with that. I don't know if that's true. I guess I shouldn't repeat internet rumors. Take it with a grain of salt. The couple lived for several years in a home provided to him by a supporter from New Jersey before purchasing a house a few hours north of the compound in a town outside of Pittsburgh. She gave birth to their third child together, his sixth, last summer.

As of last September, Strom is no longer under supervision and no longer appears on the sex offender registry. He and his wife appear as signatories on documents filed with the Pocahontas County Clerk in West Virginia, approving the lease of some land owned by the Cosmotheus Church to a third party in 2018. He still hosts American Dissident Voices, the weekly broadcast he started in 1991, and still posts regularly on the website of the foundering neo-Nazi organization that he's given his life to. So Voltaire didn't say it.

a lifelong adherent to the teachings of one of America's most influential Nazi leaders, said it from a little bunker in the mountains of West Virginia. Just a weird little guy who, according to one ex-wife, was known to disappear for hours, locked in the bathroom, eating pickles in the bathtub.

Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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