Title: Conspiracy Theories Come Back to Bite MAGA. Plus, The Final Episode of The Divided Dial.

Trump: We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus.

Micah Loewinger: To win the last election, the president and his allies blamed the "deep state" for all of society's ills.

Trump: The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Now that they're in power, the "MAGA faithful" are demanding the impossible.

Will Sommer: They love Trump, and they're very happy with a lot of what they're getting, but also, they're not getting everything. In part that's because a lot of their demands are impossible to deliver, things like arresting Hillary Clinton or finding proof that the FBI was involved with trying to assassinate Donald Trump, things like that.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, extremists find a home at one of the world's farthest-reaching radio stations based in Maine.

Allan Weiner: The KKK contacted us, and they were really pleasant and nice. I said, "Sure, we'll put you on the air," and they were very, very impressed.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Maria Bartiromo: You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. People don't believe it.

Micah Loewinger: Fox host Maria Bartiromo last weekend interviewing FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino.

Kash Patel: You know a suicide when you see one, and that's what that was.

Dan Bongino: He killed himself. I've seen the whole file. He killed himself.

Micah Loewinger: Former podcaster Bongino, who previously entertained conspiracy theories about the financier and alleged sex trafficker's death, now finds himself at odds with some of the MAGA Internet.

Will Sommer: They decided Dan has been captured by the "deep state." I saw reactions like, "DEEP STATE TRAITOR," in all caps.

Micah Loewinger: Will Sommer is a senior reporter at The Bulwark.

Will Sommer: Alex Jones of Infowars, he said, "I think he has been compromised."

Micah Loewinger: This fissure in the MAGA media world began after Trump's DOJ failed to produce new Epstein revelations in a timely manner after promising them earlier this year.

Reporter: The Republican House Oversight Committee sent multiple letters to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding the Epstein files be released.

Micah Loewinger: Then in late February, Bondi invited a group of far-right influencers to the White House to pick up flashy binders containing what she said was a batch of new records.

Male Speaker: They did this kind of grotesque photo shoot with it, and it only got worse when it turned out that essentially all of the material was already public.

Female Speaker: We're all waiting for bombshells, we're all waiting for juicy stuff, and that's not what's in this binder. That's not what's in this binder at all.

Micah Loewinger: Suffice to say the MAGA faithful were not pleased.

MAGA Faithful: It is the biggest disappointment, I think, that you'll find. It's mostly procedural jargon heavily, heavily redacted.

Micah Loewinger: Since then, Republican lawmakers and influencers have continued badgering the Trump administration, leading to this bizarre moment at the White House press briefing this week.

Liam Cosgrove (Reporter): I just wanted to highlight real quick, the death of Mark Middleton, who was a former Clinton White House aide-

Micah Loewinger: This is a writer with Zero Hedge, a far-right blog, on Monday.

Liam Cosgrove (Reporter): -who was found dead on a Clinton Foundation property. Anyways, that's just a lead-in to my question about the most famous Clinton-related suicide, which is that of Jeffrey Epstein.

Will Sommer: Thank goodness they got rid of the AP and Reuters and now we get Zero Hedge and their thoughts about the Clinton body count.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. For those of us who don't know who Zero Hedge is and what the Clinton body count is and why it matters, can you break it down?

Will Sommer: Sure. Zero Hedge started as a finance blog, but it also gets into a lot of like pro-Russia stuff, into conspiracy theories. Its logo is Brad Pitt in Fight Club, so that should kind of give you a sense of what we're working with here.

Micah Loewinger: I'll just jump in and say that the Biden administration actually accused Zero Hedge of publishing articles created by Moscow-controlled media. That's not exactly a good look.

Will Sommer: It's not a credible source. It's pretty fringe even by the standards of right-wing media. In terms of the Clinton body count, back to the first Bill Clinton campaign, this idea that the Clintons are connected to a lot of suspicious deaths. This became kind of an issue in the '90s with people like Webb Hubbell and Vince Foster, and there was this implication that Republicans seized on that perhaps these people were committing suicide or dying mysteriously to cover up some misdeed they had participated in with the Clintons.

Micah Loewinger: It seems to me that the Trump administration is kind of walking this funny line. On one hand, they're giving room and space to people to advance these conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein while at the same time kind of rebutting those conspiracy theories saying, "There's nothing more here, we can't give you any more, please go away." Which is it?

Will Sommer: [laughs] It's a great question. I mean, I think like so many things, they're happy for people to continue believing it as long as they don't make it too obvious. I mean, I think back to the 2020 campaign when Donald Trump was asked, "These QAnon people, they think you're at war with these deep state pedophiles. Then he said, "Well, what would be wrong with that?" This kind of strategic ambiguity, but you're right, I think someone like Dan Bongino or Kash Patel, they have a more direct problem, which is that people are getting mad at them personally. Whereas Donald Trump, worse comes to worst, he can always just fire them and replace them with someone new to take the heat.

Micah Loewinger: In April, you reported that when Kristi Noem took pro-Trump personality Chaya Raichik, also known as the creator of the Libs of TikTok account, on an ICE raid in Phoenix, Raichik got to wear an ICE officer badge on the raid ride-along, which conservatives were not super pleased with. Former 60 Minutes correspondent turned right-wing pundit Lara Logan, "Not sure what this is, but if this is today's 'journalism,' we are not better off." Then a writer for the right-wing conspiracy website Gateway Pundit called it, "Just embarrassing." Even as the MAGA media world sees its profile raised by the White House and by this administration, it doesn't like what it sees.

Will Sommer: To be clear, they love Trump, and they're very happy with a lot of what they're getting, but also, they're not getting everything. In part, that's because a lot of their demands are impossible to deliver, things like arresting Hillary Clinton or finding proof that the FBI was involved with trying to assassinate Donald Trump, things like that. These are the kind of things that there is a lot of discontent brewing on the right. I think that these right-wing personalities or these influencers who are seen as more tied to the Trump administration or as sort of like the favored figures are taking a lot of the brunt of that.

Micah Loewinger: Beyond further damage to our information ecosystem, beyond the fact that a lot of energy and resources seems to be going towards just keeping right-wing conspiracy theorists at bay, are you seeing evidence that the functionality of the government is actually suffering in an attempt to appease these right-wing influencers?

Will Sommer: Sure. Here's one example. It's been reported that the Southern District of New York prosecutor's office essentially ground to a halt recently because so many of the employees there had been detailed by Pam Bondi towards redacting the Epstein files so they could finally be released.

Now, look, obviously the Epstein case is important, and ultimately, I'd like to see as many files about high-profile cases as possible, but at the same time, you have to think, "Is this really the most important thing going on for the top prosecutor's office in the country, that everything has to stop in what is, I think, pretty clearly an attempt to satisfy the attorney general's critics on right-wing Twitter and YouTube? I would argue probably not.

Micah Loewinger: There are so many storylines to keep track of for news consumers right now. For some of us, when we see a right-wing influencer in the press briefing room talking about some conspiracy theory we've never heard of, you might be inclined to kind of tune it out. Why do you think it's worth keeping a close eye on these people and their growing profile?

Will Sommer: I think the reality is, whether we like it or not, I think a lot of these right-wing media figures have a lot of sway over the government and can do things like sink bills by suddenly tweeting about them. They can change government policy or they can get people fired or get nominations sunk. We just saw, additionally, Laura Loomer criticized this woman who was up for surgeon general, and then her nomination got pulled. If you're interested in where the Trump administration is going, the direction of the country, I think, unfortunately, it's worthwhile keeping an eye on what these figures are up to and sort of what narratives they're promoting.

Micah Loewinger: Will, thank you very much.

Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Will Sommer is a senior reporter at The Bulwark.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, what the story of one station and one man tells us about shortwave radio in the Internet era. This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. If you've been following along for the past couple of weeks, you know that we've been airing the second season of our award-winning series The Divided Dial, hosted by Katie Thornton. This season it's all about the shortwaves, the way-less-listened to but way-farther-reaching cousin of AM and FM radio. Episodes 1 and 2 delved into the history of the medium. This week's installment brings us up to the present day, but the story starts almost 40 years ago. Here's Katie.

Katie Thornton: It was July of 1987 on a hot muggy Thursday in New York City. Temperatures had been climbing into the 90s all week, and as people all over the city ranfans in their windows, wrapped wet towels around their necks, and hit the beach, a 34-year-old man named Allan Weiner from Yonkers was out on the water on a ship, a 200-foot-long freighter.

Male Speaker: It's not a gleaming clipper ship but a broken-down bucket which has drawn the attention of the federal government.

Katie Thornton: It drew the Fed's attention because of what was happening on board.

Male Speaker: There's a new rock station in town-- Well, not really in town, really in the water, and it may be illegal.

Katie Thornton: Allan was a tech savvy hippie with round glasses and a long bowl cut in the style of Johnny Ramone, and together with his comrades, Allan had launched a pirate radio station.

Male Speaker: The only people that have radio stations in New York are gigantic corporations. This is the only other way to do it, especially if you don't have much coin.

Katie Thornton: This was not Allan Weiner's first time hijacking the airwaves. He'd been illegally broadcasting for half his life. First getting a knock on the door from the FCC when he was just a teenager, but this was by far his most ambitious effort.

Male Speaker: Radio New York International they call themselves, with a rock and roll accent and a pacifist [crosstalk].

Katie Thornton: With the stated goal of spreading peace, love, and understanding, and some good old American rock music. Radio New York International broadcast for listeners up and down the East Coast, and artists sent in records for them to play on the air.

Male Speaker: All right, Ramone is here at RNI (Radio New York International) [crosstalk].

Katie Thornton: As for the news media, they pulled out all the stops to cover the story.

News Reporter: Channel 5 News has spared no expense in tracking down these pirates. We've added this vessel to our investigative fleet. It's a duplicate of the one used on Miami Vice. With us is our Captain Fred Shaw. Fred--

Katie Thornton: From their first broadcast, Radio New York International taunted the Federal Communications Commission, kicking off their transmission with a [unintelligible 00:11:46] song from the 1960s.

♪ Come on down to my boat, baby. Come on down where we can play. ♪♪

Katie Thornton: But after only four broadcast days, just as Allan and his first mate were starting to get their sea legs,--

Reporter: Good evening. Some defiant DJs who wanted to thumb their noses at Washington have instead gotten an FCC fist in the face.

Katie Thornton: Federal agents did come on down to their boat.

Reporter: Shortly before 5:30 this morning, the Coast Guard and FCC engineers moved in. The FCC dismantled the radio equipment and the Coast Guard arrested the two RNI staffers on board, Ivan Rothstein and Allan Weiner.

Katie Thornton: Allan was incensed as they took him off the ship in bracelets.

Allan Weiner: We weren't breaking any laws whatsoever. We feel we were completely a legal station, and now free-form rock and roll has been stuffed out.

Katie Thornton: They had anchored the boat just over four miles off the coast of Long Island, which per Allan's interpretation of the law, was international waters, but the government said that international waters started much further out.

Reporter: Weiner and another man have now been charged with illegally broadcasting rock and roll music and peace chatter.

Katie Thornton: Radio New York International was dead.

Reporter: The men who wanted your ears were chained, taken away, and could spend years in jail. You know how many robberies there were in this town last year, murders, burglaries? But two pirate DJs won't bother you anymore.

Katie Thornton: Allan ended up avoiding jail time for this stunt, in part thanks to the ACLU coming to his defense, but after years of trying to skirt around the FCC, this arrest did change something for Allan. It made him realize that if he wanted to get on the air for good, he'd have to go legit. Allan set out to get his own licensed station. The FCC dragged its feet for years, saying in the official record that it didn't want to give a license to Captain Hook, but in the late 1990s, what many people in the radio business considered to be the impossible happened. Allan, the pirate, won. In 1998, he launched WBCQ.

[music]

♪ The free-speech sound turned the whole world round. WBCQ, you're on the planet. ♪♪

Katie Thornton: It wasn't in the coveted corporatized market of New York City. It was in the 800-person blink-and-you'll-miss-it town of Monticello in far northern Maine. That was all right though, because Allan wasn't going for a local audience. He was going to use the shortwaves to bring the free-form peace and love mission of his pirate ship out to the world.

[music]

Katie Thornton: This is Season 2 of The Divided Dial from On the Media. I'm your host Katie Thornton. This season is all about shortwave radio, how it went from a utopian experiment in global communication to a tool of government and far-right propaganda and what a little-known battle playing out on the shortwaves today means for the future of our public airwaves. This episode, the story of one station and one man that tells us a lot about shortwave in the Internet era.

Last episode we learned how shortwave took a hit when the Internet came around, lots of stations closed, but WBCQ was just getting started. Today, it's one of the highest-powered privately owned broadcasting facilities on earth. How did Allan Weiner pull it off? The answer has to do with an absolutely giant antenna that reaches every continent, and how that antenna came to be up there in rural Maine and what it broadcasts, that was one of the most unexpected stories I dug up on my journey into the shortwaves. Because at WBCQ today, it's not all peace and love, man. Far from it.

Allan Weiner: Hello?

Katie Thornton: Early last year I reached out to Allan Weiner.

Katie Thornton: Hi, Allan, it's Katie calling.

Allan Weiner: Hello, Katie.

Katie Thornton: He mentioned that he and some of his engineering buddies would be gathering for last April's solar eclipse, which happened to pass directly over WBCQ. Offhandedly, he invited me along.

Allan Weiner: Yes, sure, come on up. You can't miss the station. It's got a ginormous antenna.

Katie Thornton: Other than a friend of mine who told me about the station, no one I knew had ever even heard of WBCQ, and I know a lot of radio freaks. I really wanted to know more, so I took Allan up on his offer.

Katie Thornton: Two miles ahead and one mile right. If I look north, northeast, I should see the tower.

GPS Automated Voice: Turn right onto Britton Road.

Katie Thornton: Okay. Holy shit. Well, he was not lying when he said, "You can't miss it." One of, if not the most powerful commercial broadcast stations in the world. No one's ever heard of it. No one even knows it's here, and I am closing an eye.

Allan Weiner: Now,-

Male Speaker at the Station: Yes.

Allan Weiner: -during totality, I'll remove the solar filter from the telescope. You can look at it in totality without the filter.

Katie Thornton: When I arrived at the station, Allan was there with his wife Angela, some friends, a farmer neighbor, and the station's engineer. They were warm and friendly. They'd lugged an assortment of wooden and plastic chairs out to the station's small parking lot and had an extra ready for me. They offered me sunscreen and eclipse-proof glasses.

Allan Weiner: We got 55.

Speaker at the Station: Ooh.

Katie Thornton: It was brisk, there was snow on the ground, but the skies were this perfect blue.

Male Speaker at the Station: Three minutes.

Male Speaker at the Station: Three minutes.

Male Speaker at the Station: Oh, there's barely anything left.

Male Speaker at the Station: It's a pinhole sun.

Male Speaker at the Station: Yes, pinhole.

Male Speaker at the Station: Rest in peace. Chris Cornell, what a beautiful man.

Katie Thornton: At one point, as it started to get darker, the automatic floodlights came on in the parking lot where we sat.

Male Speaker at the Station: Oh, look, the lights just come on.

Male Speaker at the Station: Yes, turn them off, would you?

[something falls on the ground]

Male Speaker at the Station: Oops.

Male Speaker at the Station: [crosstalk]

Katie Thornton: That was the sound of a station employee's handgun falling to the ground out of his back pocket when he got up to turn the lights off.

Male Speaker at the Station: This is it, this is it.

Katie Thornton: One of the guys who came up for the big event was named Tim. He has a long-running weekly show in WBCQ playing mostly rock and roll, sprinkled in with some funny skits and stories. Like Allan, he had long gray hair, though Tim's was notably more unkempt. Also, like Allan, Tim got his start in pirate radio a long time ago.

Tim: I was with my buddy and thought, "Hey, why not?" Each of us popped a tab of acid. We're starting to trip our brains off, so I ran next door and I grabbed a bunch of records and other stuff and a reel-to-reel tape machine and patch cables broadcasted on shortwave. I called it Radio Timtron Worldwide. It was just a goof.

Katie Thornton: Another friend of Allan's had been an engineer at the US-based Christian Science Monitor shortwave station which used to broadcast news and information to Eastern Europe during the Cold war.

Male Speaker: When the Berlin Wall came down, we got quite a few letters in thanking us for broadcasting. Makes me feel like I helped tear down the Berlin Wall.

Katie Thornton: At WBCQ, I got the full range of shortwavers' aspirations. Some of them wanted to use the power of this megaphone to promote democracy, others just to have a little fun, but for the time being, our focus was elsewhere, on the sky and the sun and the moon that was rapidly stepping into its path. Finally, the moment we'd been waiting for was here, and it was breathtaking.

Multiple Speakers at the Station: Ah.

Male Speaker at the Station: You can look at it.

Speaker at the Station: Oh my God.

Speaker at the Station: Look at that.

Speaker at the Station: The eye of God. How cool is that?

Multiple Speakers at the Station: That is it.

Male Speaker at the Station: I believe you can see the star.

Male Speaker at the Station: Yes, it looks like John Bonham's bass drumming--

[laughter]

Speaker at the Station: Yes.

Katie Thornton: Yes, the morning after the eclipse. Just woke up in the back of the minivan in the Walmart parking lot here in Houlton.

Katie Thornton: I don't know if you all know this about solar eclipses, but it's impossible to find a cheap hotel. It's impossible to find any hotel, especially all the way up here, 12 miles past the northern terminus of Interstate 95 which runs from Maine to Florida. I knew all this going into the trip, and I'd booked an RV with a heater, but it canceled on me at the last minute, so I rented a minivan from some guy in Boston and threw an air mattress in the back.

Katie Thornton: It's like 20 degrees last night. It was really cold. Made it, though, and--

Katie Thornton: I decided to go back to WBCQ because something wasn't adding up. During the eclipse, we sat in the shadow of this huge, shiny new antenna, but elsewhere on the property, radio equipment clanked away inside various trailers and falling down shacks. There were lots of old school buses and World War II era radar devices. Allan told me he uses them to search the skies for extraterrestrial life. A massive anti-aircraft gun was parked at one of the station's driveways. That big new antenna was just so out of place with the rest of the station. I wanted to know how it all came to be, so Allan and I chatted as he showed me around.

Allan Weiner: We're a free-speech radio station on shortwave, and we lease airtime to anyone.

Katie Thornton: What are you [crosstalk] charging them?

Allan Weiner: 50 bucks an hour. Yes, and that's what we were charging when we went on the air.

Katie Thornton: From the time WBCQ launched in 1998, anyone could buy airtime. Buy an hour every month, every week, every day. You pay. Allan will beam it out, and that $50-an-hour rate, it's kind of insanely affordable. For reference, I used to work at a small community radio station that charged $50 for a 30-second underwriting announcement. You know, those programming is supported by messages you hear. When WBCQ started, the exodus from shortwave was well underway.

About a fifth of Americans were already on the Internet, but despite that, there was still demand for affordable airtime, so WBCQ started adding more frequencies. This was all happening before they got the big new antenna, but the station could still reach pretty far, South America, even Antarctica. Folks bought airtime to play niche music shows, classic rock, deep cuts, even old wax cylinders and 78s, but as Allan quickly discovered, when you advertise yourself as a haven for free speech on a medium that was already home to militia leaders and extremists, that's who shows up.

Allan Weiner: The American Nazi Party. Do you know they were the one of the first people to sign up with us? They came to us, "Oh, free speech, put it on the air." I said, "Yes, no problem."

Katie Thornton: Allan's father was Jewish, and Allan was mostly raised Jewish, though his mother was Roman Catholic, but Allan thought of himself as a free-thinker, a First Amendment warrior, and having Nazis as paying customers, posed no ethical dilemmas for him, at least not at first.

Allan Weiner: We had a programmer that kept getting on the air and telling people to go out and kill the Jews, and I kept calling him up and going, "Look, you can't encourage people to go out and kill people. If that happens, you're going to go to jail, I'm going to go to jail because you we'd be complicit, and you can't do this." They wouldn't listen. Even my father heard that.

Katie Thornton: Allan's father did not like tuning in and hearing Nazis.

Allan Weiner: He called, he says, "Son, what are you--?" "Yes, I know, I know, I'm going to fix it."

Katie Thornton: After multiple warnings about the Nazis' explicit calls for violence, Allan pulled the broadcast--, citing the station's self-imposed hate speech policy.

Allan Weiner: Which basically says, "If you get on the air and encourage people to go out and hurt and harm other people, we're going to give you a warning. We're going to say, don't do that, and if they don't,--"

Katie Thornton: The Nazi Show was called American Dissident Voices, and when Allan cut it, it caused a stir. Deep in the archives of one popular shortwave show, I found a call-in that dealt with the cancellation head on.

Male Speaker: We're talking about American Dissident Voices being booted off of WBCQ.

Katie Thornton: The host was Bill Cooper. He was a hugely influential thought leader in the conspiracy and militia movements of the '90s. We heard some of his show on the last episode.

Bill Cooper: Good evening. You're on the air.

Mike: Yes, this is Mike in South Florida. Good evening, Bill.

Bill Cooper: Hi, Mike.

Mike: I don't agree with the person of WBCQ because he became judge and jury with no due process. If the radio station makes a claim that they will broadcast anybody's opinion, they should honor that promise. I lost a lot of respect for Al Weiner by him not honoring his promise. In Allan Weiner's case, he simply pulled the plug.

Bill Cooper: Yes, he sure-- he did that.

Katie Thornton: And then-

Bill Cooper: Good evening. You're on the air.

Allan Weiner: Hi, Bill, it's Allan Weiner.

Katie Thornton: -Allan called in.

Bill Cooper: Hi, Allan. Well, I think a lot of people out there are glad you called. I hope you understand this is not--

Katie Thornton: Allan told listeners that he alone was responsible for the decision but that axing the show violated every principle he held dear.

Allan Weiner: That everyone has a right to speak on the radio and everyone should be given that right. However, I did change the way I felt on that one specific program because I did get some input from a lot of other people, and the day I decided to pull it off, I knew it was a no-win situation. To all the listeners out there that hold me to my principles of allowing all voices on the air, I apologize and I am sorry, but in this one instance, and I plan to make it the last instance, I had to do it.

[music]

Katie Thornton: Allan did indeed make it the last instance. Hate groups kept coming to WBCQ, and Allan kept selling them airtime.

Allan Weiner: The KKK contacted us,-

Katie Thornton: Allan told me about this on my visit.

Allan Weiner: -and they were really pleasant and nice, and I said, "Sure, we'll put you on the air," and they were very, very impressed.

Katie Thornton: Maybe it was his own crystallizing free-speech absolutism or maybe it was the fact that it didn't take long for WBCQ to start feeling the economic squeeze of the Internet era, but Allan was quickly entering the business of shortwave extremism. Within a few years of launching, he welcomed a guy named Hal Turner, who used the shortwaves to call for violence.

Hal Turner: I advocate shooting and killing these Mexicans as they cross the border.

Katie Thornton: Turner also called for the murder of Jews, Black Americans, LGBTQ people, and politicians.

Hal Turner: We don't want to have to kill you, we hope to not have to kill you, but we can kill you, and if need be, we will kill you.

Katie Thornton: Hal Turner first made a name for himself as a frequent caller to Sean Hannity Show on the big AM station WABC in New York, but Hal went to shortwave because he felt AM and FM conservative talk had grown soft. On shortwave, he said whatever he wanted.

Hal Turner: There are, approaching on the horizon, situations where killing elected officials may be necessary. Well, what are a few lives in the grand scheme of liberty? Not a big deal.

Katie Thornton: But Allan's assortment of extremist talk shows and the occasional esoteric music program was far from a cash cow. Allan needed people to buy more time. He offered big discounts for hosts who bought airtime in bulk. A few, including Hal Turner, came to buy several hours most every day. At one point, Allan was even in talks with Radio Sputnik.

Allan Weiner: Sputnik is Russia, and they almost leased one of our transmitters--

Katie Thornton: To take a whole frequency, 24/7.

Katie Thornton: What happened with those [crosstalk]?

Allan Weiner: They decided not to go. I don't know why, because we really made them a good deal. See, we can see we can get people on--

Katie Thornton: One man did have a round-the-clock presence on one of WBCQ's frequencies. His name was Ralph Gordon Stair, also known as RG, also known as Brother Stair.

Ralph Gordon Stair: I don't believe there's a man on the face of the earth that is higher in spiritual authority in the kingdom of God than I am. I don't believe that.

Katie Thornton: Stair was a self-proclaimed prophet who preached an ultraconservative, homophobic, and misogynistic Christian ideology. He bought airtime on other shortwave stations too, and he didn't just use his show to preach. He also used it to recruit listeners from as far away as New Zealand to live with him on his farm in South Carolina. At the farm, the men wore long beards and the women always wore full-coverage skirts and had their hair in tightly wound buns.

People who visited have said that there were radios and loudspeakers set up in every one of the compound's buildings and on the fields so that followers would hear Stair's preaching even as they worked his land. Stair's flock took a pledge of poverty when they joined, giving their money to his Overcomer Ministry,

Ralph Gordon Stair: [crosstalk] the Overcomer radio broadcast.

Katie Thornton: At one point, Stair was spending $100,000 a month on shortwave and local radio broadcasts.

Ralph Gordon Stair: It's heard around the world seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Katie Thornton: In 2017, video surfaced of Stair molesting a 12-year-old girl during a sermon. More women came forward with reports of abuse. Stories and court cases from years prior came to light alleging everything from fraud to the improper burial of babies who died, apparently after Stair encouraged mothers to forego modern medical care in favor of faith healing.

Ralph Gordon Stair: You're dealing with a doctor. He won't tell you the truth. You better get away from him. [crosstalk]

Katie Thornton: Multiple people who escaped the Overcomer Ministry said RG Stair was running a cult.

Ralph Gordon Stair: -It's this deceit, this lying, this half-truth--

Katie Thornton: Thanks to survivors who spoke out, the FBI and local law enforcement investigated Stair, and later that year, they raided the farm.

Reporter: More victims brought their stories to police. Stair facing more charges of criminal sexual conduct, this time many involving children.

Katie Thornton: Stair's show was dropped from a bunch of local stations, but in Allan and his wife Angela's eyes, he still had a right to the airwaves, and yes, Stair bought lots of time on WBCQ, but it wasn't like he was making the station rich. Allan still couldn't always afford to repair or maintain equipment. He'd let go of staff.

Allan Weiner: The 50 bucks we get here and there, that doesn't pay the bills. It doesn't.

Katie Thornton: For WBCQ and a lot of shortwave stations that survived into the Internet era, this was the play offering a megaphone to religious extremists and the far right while still barely scraping by, but in 2018, everything changed at WBCQ. Coming up, Allan gets a huge leg up and that powerful new antenna from an unexpected source.

[music]

Katie Thornton: This is Season 2 of The Divided Dial from On the Media.

[music]

Katie Thornton: This is The Divided Dial from On the Media. I'm Katie Thornton. Right before the break, I was telling you about how WBCQ was struggling financially, but in 2018, that all changed.

Allan Weiner: That summer was great.

Katie Thornton: WBCQ got a many-million-dollar cash injection and that massive new antenna, it can pump out 500 kilowatts of power, 10 times as much as WBCQ's other signals. The town's electric system wasn't even powerful enough to support it, so Allan offered to split the cost of rewiring with the local government.

Allan Weiner: They're rewiring the town. I'd walk into the town office. "Well, thank you. We're getting all new power here for business and stuff. Thank you so much." "You're welcome. You're welcome."

Katie Thornton: The antenna weighs 200 tons and is gigantic at its base, like one of those redwood trees that you can drive through, except the electromagnetic frequencies this beast emits are known to jam up cars, computer systems, and stall them out, so you can't drive even near it. To anchor the antenna, they had to get a host of cement trucks to come in and put a footing down, 40 x 40 feet wide and 12 solid feet deep. The antenna is fully rotatable, sitting on a gargantuan ring bearing that can be turned to point in any direction, beaming shortwave radio signals to any continent on Earth.

Allan Weiner: Oh, I hear the motors.

Katie Thornton: There it goes.

Allan Weiner: Oh, there it goes. There it goes. Quite something.

Katie Thornton: That wild. Oh my goodness. It's like watching a skyscraper spin.

Allan Weiner: Yes, but listen to it, it's like a fine watch. They're going to the UK now. I think this is the only privately owned 500 kilowatter in the world because most of the 500 kilowatters that I know are either owned by the Catholic Church, the Vatican, or governments. By the time we got done with it, it cost about $8 million. Was it $8 million? Yes, I think it was $8 million.

Katie Thornton: Wow.

Allan Weiner: I think--

Katie Thornton: When the windfall came, WBCQ also got a bespoke new studio and transmitter building outfitted with an apartment with for a live-in engineer. People in the shortwave world had one question, "Who paid for this?" I mean, how did WBCQ, with their transmitters and falling down shacks and broadcast studio in a single wide trailer become a swanky, world class, enormously high-powered shortwave station? It turns out Allan's new backer was a group called World's Last Chance.

Member of World's Last Chance: This is WBCQ bringing World's Last Chance Radio to you from Monticello, Maine, USA.

Katie Thornton: They're an ultraconservative Christian End Times Ministry, and they preach, among other things, that the Earth is flat.

Member of World's Last Chance: We are talking flat Earth in the Bible. The Earth is flat, and God tells you so.

Katie Thornton: World's Last Chance was started in 2004 by an Egyptian cosmetics and food magnate turned religious leader named Galal Doss. At first, even Allan didn't think World's Last Chance was on the level.

Allan Weiner: They came to us, but they wanted superpower. "We really want to be with your station because you're free speech." I said, "Well, we can get you on the air. It's 50 kilowatts, blah-blah-blah." They said, "No, we don't want that. We want more power." I said, "Well, how much more power?" "At least 500,000 watts." I said, "We'd have to build that, and we'd have to charge you for it and all that, I mean that's millions of dollars." They said, "Fine." Well, that afternoon they wired me $30,000. I said, "Okay, these people are serious."

Katie Thornton: Some of what the ministry preaches is just downright strange or [crosstalk] really in the weeds about doctrine.

Member of World's Last Chance: Cosmologies and cosmogonies.

Member of World's Last Chance: Scholars have always known the truth, but it's been hidden.

Katie Thornton: For a while, World's Last Chance believed that Pope John Paul II was going to come back as the Antichrist.

Member of World's Last Chance: Shocking truth emerges. [crosstalk]

Katie Thornton: They also follow a strange combination, lunar-solar calendar, not the Gregorian calendar, so their Sabbath falls on different days from week to week.

Member of World's Last Chance: That Yahushua could not have been crucified on a Friday and most certainly was not resurrected on a Sunday, so we've got a conundrum.

Katie Thornton: In 2018, they took out full page text-only ads in places like People magazine and USA Today saying demons were going to come to Earth disguised as aliens to deceive Christians, but other things they broadcast have more clear overlap with the conspiratorial right. They are staunchly anti-establishment, especially since COVID.

Member of World's Last Chance: Well, let's be honest, we shouldn't be surprised that the church has failed to stand up to government dictates. I mean, the closer we get to the end, the more the fallen churches will spout the serpent's agenda.

Katie Thornton: They even link their flat Earth beliefs not just to extreme biblical literalism but to their anti-globalist agenda.

Member of World's Last Chance: The only kind of circumnavigation which could not happen on a flat Earth is north southbound. Both the North Pole and Antarctica are military enforced. No fly and no sail zones due to restrictions originating from none other than the United Nations.

Katie Thornton: World's Last Chance is very dubious, but it's not exactly a cult, though they do sometimes encourage their members to quit their jobs to dedicate themselves to the ministry. They don't appear to take money from their followers. They've never had what they refer to as an earthly headquarters, as in no sketchy farm. They say their members are spread literally over the four corners of the world. They bill themselves as a web-based ministry, and they have this janky website that looks straight out at the early Internet.

We're talking retro-futuristic graphics and pictorial backdrops with text-heavy blocks and a left-hand column of like 40 hyperlinks, but if World's Last Chance's website is less than convincing, their shortwave radio broadcast is top tier. It's super listenable, well produced, and among the slickest broadcasts on American shortwave today. Allan will be the first to tell you it's the religious programming that pays the bills. World's Last Chance as doomsday ministering is the key to it all. The ministry's payments, more or less, bankroll WBCQ's original operation. All the other frequencies with the free-speech programs that still roll in at 50 bucks a pop.

Allan Weiner: Well, all right, what's on the air now? This is on the air. [music] That's on the air. Radio Trump International is on the air.

Trump: You know, the polls came out.

Katie Thornton: Radio Trump International was one of Allan and Angela's shows which they ran leading up to the 2024 election.

Allan Weiner: We're Trump supporters, we are, and we've decided to take one of our channels, 5130, and we broadcast Radio Trump International 24 hours a day because we can.

Katie Thornton: Having a backer like World's Last Chance has also made it easier for Allan to keep broadcasting people like Brother RG Stair, a man he and Angela came to consider a friend.

Allan Weiner: What the government did to the beautiful people at the Overcomer, they raided the place like it was a Ruby Ridge.

Katie Thornton: Allan and Angela told me they don't believe the well-documented allegations of sexual assault.

Allan Weiner: They're a bunch of farmers, a bunch of cattle-raising, [crosstalk] goat-raising Christian people, tilling the soil, and they pretty much went in there and terrorized everyone.

Katie Thornton: Stair is dead now. He died in 2021 while awaiting trial, but his followers still live at the compound, and they still send the preacher's reruns to Allan to broadcast around the world all day, every day.

Allan Weiner: Brother Stair, he helped us keep BCQ on the air expand, and I always promised that we would keep him on the air no matter what, even if they didn't have money.

Katie Thornton: Allan knows that a lot of people would have considered him liberal in his early years. He knows that in some people's eyes he's made a shocking transformation from his days as a peacenik rock and roll pirate. For Allan's part, he says that his philosophy is the same today as it's always been, that people need to hear even the most hateful speech so that they can understand it and resist it.

Allan Weiner: My political science professor used to say that if you let things fester in the dark, they will fester and grow, but if you shine the light on them, the light will help expunge it and bring it out so people can say, "Hey, this is wrong. We don't agree with this. You shouldn't do this."

Katie Thornton: Were you all concerned about having those voices on the air, that it could lead to harm?

Allan Weiner: Well, we were, but we felt people need to have a right to know. I mean, it's shedding light. You really got to shed the light.

Katie Thornton: But I don't think that whole shedding the light thing really worked. Several of the hosts Allan has been running on WBCQ since the early days are still spewing racist, violent rhetoric like Hal Turner. Even though Allan says that Hal's toned it down since his days advocating that people kill immigrants, Hal is still on WBCQ five days a week. Anyway, Allan says Hal's show gets you thinking.

Allan Weiner: He gets you thinking without being specific.

Katie Thornton: Here's Allan with Angela on their radio show just last month, recycling tired critiques of rap music.

Allan Weiner: There are some cultures and maybe even races that are steeped in violence and proud of it.

Angela: The kind of music I believe it makes people angry.

Allan Weiner: Free speech, peace, love, and understanding, we talk about those things.

Angela: The understanding has gone too damn far-- Whoops, too far.

Allan Weiner: Too far.

Angela: It has. The understanding has kind of just gone too far, because everything in the world except for the love of God--

[music]

Katie Thornton: In some ways, Allan's transformation is not that remarkable. There are plenty of hippies who aged into libertarians or right-wingers, and it's not surprising that a lot of these guys use free speech as a cover for people to say whatever they want without any regard for truth or for consequences. To me, though, the remarkable part of Allan's story is that with shortwave, he has been able to get these hateful voices out to the far reaches of the globe. No board, no meaningful oversight from the FCC. Just him at his discretion.

Thanks in part to Allan Weiner, the demonstrably false, fatalistic, and paranoid programming of World's Last Chance, the hateful rhetoric of Hal Turner, the cultist preachings of RG Stair. That's a huge part of what shortwave listeners around the world hear as the voice of American broadcasting, and people are hearing this stuff almost every day. Allan gets letters or emails from listeners around the country and around the planet.

Allan Weiner: Just got one from China, came in this morning.

Katie Thornton: Oh. [crosstalk]

Allan Weiner: Yes, on email. They picked up the station. They really like the programming.

?Female Speaker: Wow. This one came in from Australia, "Dear Sir/Madam: Hope you had a nice Christmas holiday this year. I have Christmas alone, but listen, to your program makes me happy."

?Male Speaker: From Antwerp network, signal was nice and clear.

?Female Speaker: They have New York, Philadelphia, Australia.

?Allan Weiner: Got a bunch of Russian listeners too.

?Male Speaker: Here's one from Buffalo, New York-

Allan Weiner: And Antarctica at the Scientific--

?Male Speaker: "Dear Sir: On Saturday, September 23,--"

Katie Thornton: And people are still coming to Allan for a platform too. Within an hour of me first arriving at WBCQ, Allan's phone rang

[phone rings]

Allan Weiner: -nowhere. We pay attention to--

Katie Thornton: Yes. Okay, go ahead.

Allan Weiner: Hello?

Katie Thornton: As he disappeared out the door, I could hear Allan explaining his simple, well-worn policy to the shortwave curious caller. "Free-speech radio. Yes, we'll get you on the air. It's 50 bucks an hour."

[music]

Katie Thornton: WBCQ is just one station. There are about a dozen privately run shortwave stations operating out of the US today, and they're almost all owned or operated by religious groups, mostly the Christian right. There's one station out of Tennessee that seems to still mostly play sermons by Pete Peters. He was the white supremacist preacher you heard last episode who helped bring together the far reaches of the right in the 1990s. Like RG Stair, he is dead now too, though you wouldn't know it on shortwave, but while these fanatical voices might be some of the loudest on shortwave radio today, there are at least some shortwave listeners who want something else. We know because we asked.

Male Listener of Shortwave: Hello to the people at WNYC.

Katie Thornton: For several months, we've been running this show On the Media on WRMI. It's a shortwave station out of Florida and one of the few that isn't owned by a religious group. In the breaks, we've been asking people to get in touch to tell us about their shortwave experience.

Male Listener of Shortwave: As a little boy, I'd often run in to tell my mom and dad about something that they didn't read about until the next day in the paper when it broke.

Female Listener of Shortwave: I was a Peace Corps volunteer first in Micronesia, then in Sri Lanka. I listened to shortwave radio doing both tours, and I have listened to shortwave radio ever since.

Male Listener of Shortwave: There's something about tuning through the static and landing on real broadcasts from halfway across the world that just feels cool.

Katie Thornton: We did get emails from people all over the world, but for the most part, the voicemails we received were from North Americans. Over and over again, they told us the same thing, "Shortwave is a way to get out of your media bubble, to get out of the US and Western-centric news cycle."

Male Listener of Shortwave: It's a way to stay connected to the world, hear different perspectives.

Female Listener of Shortwave: I regularly listen to Radio Dabanga out of Sudan.

Male Listener of Shortwave: I love shortwave because of what it offers to people, the ability to freely access information no matter where you are in the world.

Katie Thornton: Often they said the broadcasts they hear most don't represent what they love about the medium.

[music]

Male Listener of Shortwave: What do you have today? Mostly you've got a lot of religion.

Male Listener of Shortwave: [unintelligible 00:47:44] shortwave radio, I feel just too much religious programming.

Male Listener of Shortwave: These days it falls into two categories, Christian preaching and far-right political radio type programming. I don't really like any the of that.

Male Listener of Shortwave: Thank you for broadcasting your program.

Male Listener of Shortwave: I did enjoy listening to your program a couple evenings ago.

Male Listener of Shortwave: That's the kind of content we need today on radio period, let alone shortwave radio.

Male Listener of Shortwave: It's been a welcome change of content versus the typical religion and talk radio that you hear on shortwave.

Male Listener of Shortwave: You have the freedom to do that, but we don't have a lot of cultural programming anymore on shortwave radio.

Male Listener of Shortwave: I don't always agree with your political views, but I still thought it was a very, very cool thing to find you guys. In fact, it made me appreciate the whole thing even more.

Katie Thornton: Next time on The Divided Dial, it turns out on these hollowed-out frequencies, pirate broadcasters have been hijacking the airwaves in droves with a more idealistic vision for shortwave, but that vision is getting pushback from a very unlikely source. Not the Federal Communications Commission, but a handful of finance bros who want to wrestle the airwaves away from the public.

Male Speaker: Who would have thought that shortwave is now fabulously valuable to Wall Street?

Male Speaker: The fact is, now Wall street is deeply invested in it, and so the question is, what is the FCC going to do about all of this?

Katie Thornton: On the final episode of this season, it's the battle playing out right now for our shortwaves between the pirates and the profiteers.

[music]

Katie Thornton: The Divided Dial is written and reported by me, Katie Thornton, and edited by OtM's executive producer, Katya Rogers. Music and sound design is by Jared Paul. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact-checking by Graham Haysha.

This series was made possible in part with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Special thanks this week to documentarian Joe Louis for talking with us about his time at the Overcomer. Special thanks, enormous thanks to everyone who responded to our call-out on WRMI. It was great to hear back from the shortwaves. We'll catch you next week.

Micah Loewinger: On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wong. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone will be back soon, we promise. I'm Micah Loewinger.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Hey, it's Micah. If you've been enjoying The Divided Dial series as much as we have, come join us in New York on June 11th for a very cool, very low-key live show that I'll be doing with Katie Thornton. We'll hear about the crazy lengths Katie went to, to bring these stories to life, and we'll talk about what our role is in keeping the public airwaves public. The event is on June 11th in New York. You can find more information at wnyc.org/events and in the show notes for today's podcast. Come and nerd out with us on all things radio. It's going to be really fun.

 

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