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Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small Town
Investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden has spent years on the front lines documenting extremism in America. In his new book, Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small Town, Hayden tells the story of a quiet West Virginia town thrust into turmoil when a white nationalist organization moves its headquarters to a nearby 19th century castle.
At the center of the story are the neighbors who suddenly find their community reshaped by a VDARE, a group promoting conspiracy theories like the so-called “great replacement.” Hayden’s book provides a close look at how extremism is lived, contested, and resisted in real communities. As he embeds with locals, the line between observer and participant begins to blur, with personal and professional consequences. Our conversation comes as the Southern Poverty Law Center faces 11 federal fraud charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy. To money launder. The Justice Department alleges the SPLC secretly paid over $3 million dollars to informants tied to white supremacist groups like the KKK and Aryan Nations—while telling donors the funds were being used to fight those groups. The SPLC denies wrongdoing, saying the informant program was used to monitor threats.
Guest – Michael Hayden has worked as a politics writer for Newsweek and covered crime for VICE. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, ABC News, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. He co-hosts the podcast Posting Though It, and is a three-time grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
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Donald Trump’s wholesale attack on the American democracy, in general, and on freedom of speech and the right to dissent, in particular has reached epidemic proportions. We could literally spend the next half hour simply listing all of the unconstitutional Executive Orders he has issued and the unlawful steps his co-conspirators have taken to implement his dangerous policies of punishing free speech, muzzling the free press, and destroying academic freedom.
Resistance to Trump and his MAGA ideology has been widespread. More than 700 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration in his second term, resulting in over 150 TROs, preliminary injunctions, and final judgments against the administration. And the response from the American people has been equally admirable, with a series of nationwide – indeed worldwide – protests, culminating in No Kings Day on March 28, with 3300 events in all 50 states, with an unprecedented 8 million people participating, making it the largest single day of protest in American history.
The resistance has been driven by scores of large and small pro-democracy organizations across the country. One of those is Defending Rights & Dissent, a national civil liberties organization that defends the American people’s right to know and freedom to act through grassroots mobilization, public education, policy expertise, and advocacy journalism.
Guest – Nathan Fuller is Communications Manager for Defending Rights & Dissent and former Executive Director of the Courage Foundation, a whistleblower and journalist defense organization, where he campaigned on behalf of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale, Lauri Love, and several others. Nathan also led Assange Defense, the U.S. campaign to free WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was released from prison in 2024. Previously, Nathan was the courtroom reporter and press liaison for the Chelsea Manning Support Network, covering Manning’s entire court-martial in Fort Meade. Youtube Channel
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