Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Onger. A few years back,

I did a series of stories about a walkie-talkie app called Zello, which I discovered had become

an organizing hub for far-right militia groups. I spent hundreds of hours listening in on their

recruitment interviews and planning meetings.

And I even recorded an Oathkeeper's leader discussing their group's secret plans to storm the

capital as they were breaking in on January 6th.

What I didn't know until recently is that long before Zello or the internet,

journalists monitored the rise of the

militia movement on shortwave radio. That's the subject of the second episode of the Divided

Dial, season two, hosted by Katie Thornton. Here's Katie. It took a lot of digging to put this

series together.

Digging through informal archives people had made of old shortwave radio shows, digitizing tapes, flipping through old broadcast schedules and super niche industry magazines.

And as I dug and flipped and digitized and listened, there was one station that jumped out at me.

Broadcast from the studios of Radio for Peace International.

Radio for Peace International.

It isn't around anymore, but it started in the 80s. and it stood out because, unlike most shortwave stations

at the time, it wasn't run by a government. It was a small not-for-profit outlet, broadcasting from

Costa Rica, mostly to the Americas and the Caribbean. On a little patch of land in the jungle, station

founder James Latham and his wife Deborah built their own

transmitters piece by piece with parts brought into the country in suitcases.

Their station hosted a Spanish-language feminist program and some progressive talk shows that

got mailed to them from the U.S. on cassette.

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