This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

Cool Zone Media.

On a Sunday evening in late June of 1980, a small group of supporters took their seats in a little office space in Arlington, Virginia.

The meeting wasn't anything particularly special, at least not as far as history remembers.

There were certainly meetings in that office on other evenings that would change the course

of the White Power movement, but this wasn't one of them.

I couldn't even tell you who all was there.

I don't think it matters.

On that summer evening in June of 1980,

William Luther Pierce was giving a long-winded speech

to a handful of assembled members of his neo-Nazi organization.

This wasn't special either.

He was hardly a man known for his brevity.

He'd just returned from a few out-of-town speaking engagements,

addressing a Holocaust denial organization in New York

and visiting supporters in Chicago.

And he recounted for his little audience in the office

how successful the events had been.

But he was frustrated.

In his public appearances, he was walking a very thin rhetorical line of plausible deniability.

And the crowds just couldn't quite parse it.

He seemed to be discouraging any kind of radical action,

...