Trump’s “Madman Theory” Is on Full Display in Iran

President Trump declared victory on Tuesday evening after negotiating a tenuous ceasefire with Iran. This after days of increasingly alarming rhetoric. The entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night. What happens when the madman theory of foreign policy is no longer so theoretical? From WNYC in New York, I'm Brooke Gladstone. Trump's geopolitical game of chicken has been attempted before by Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War. North Vietnam storms into Saigon and takes over the whole country, so the whole thing doesn't work. It's still madman theory gets talked about as if it is a reasonable strategy to employ. Plus, extremists find a home at one of the world's farthest reaching radio stations, based in Maine. The KKK contacted us, and they were really pleasant and nice, and I said, sure, we'll put you on the air. It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. Micah is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Over the past week, President Trump's messaging around the war with Iran has been something short of presidential. Let's review, starting last Sunday. Open the *** straight, you crazy bastards. That is President Trump's latest threat to Iran. The president now issuing a 48-hour ultimatum, calling on Iran to make a deal or reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump writing, time is running out, 48 hours before all hell will rain down. The president doubled down on his threat during his Monday press conference. The entire country could be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night. On Tuesday morning, he took to Truth Social. Posting on social media minutes ago, quote, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. Apocalypse loomed after sunset, and yet some news outlets seemed intent on parochial concerns more in tune with their branding. I mean, here's CNBC. The deadline that President Trump has set, 8 p.m., has threatened to destroy a civilization. How does an investor process that? Is it a bigger upside risk or downside risk? Then as the clock ticked down, both sides claimed victory. Breaking news, a last-minute deal tonight between the U.S. and Iran to stop the fighting at least temporarily. Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz at crucial oil shipping lane that has been choked off for weeks, and the U.S. will stop its attacks for at least two weeks. But then on Wednesday, we saw Israel destabilizing the ceasefire by continuing the deadly wave of strikes against Lebanon. It had pursued since the war began. This ceasefire agreement is not even 24 hours old, and there's signs that it's falling apart. Iranian state media reporting that Tehran is prepared to exit the ceasefire agreement if Israel continues its bombing, its air strikes. This sort of ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran holds at the time of this recording, and we end the week where we began, with Iran effectively in control of the Strait of Hormuz, ongoing strikes in the Middle East, and a military operation whose objectives shift with every passing presidential post or speech. But Trump's rhetoric echoes on, painting an unnerving picture of the brain connected to the arm connected to the finger on the nuclear button. Here's retired U.S. Army General Mark Hurtling reacting to Trump's first national address about the war. If I were a four-star general today in his military, I think I'd walk out of the room saying, we're all going to die because he doesn't know what he's doing. He has no frigging clue. Where are the people standing up and saying, enough? I mean, I don't care what your ideological background is. This guy does not have common sense. He just doesn't have a sense of reality. Bill Scher is the Politics Editor of the Washington Monthly and author of the recent column, Trump Believes in Madman Theory, but he's actually a madman. When Trump was campaigning, this was in October of 2024, meeting with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the question was posed to him, what would he do if there was a threat to Taiwan militarily? And Trump said, essentially, that President Xi wouldn't do that because he respects me and knows that I'm effing crazy. And what does this exchange reveal to you about Trump? Well, Trump has always deliberately cultivated a persona that he is crazy. He wanted his foreign adversaries to look at him as someone who could do something insane and therefore, given whatever concessions he wanted in a negotiation. But he also wanted to convey to a domestic audience, not really crazy. That he's a statesman worthy of the Nobel Prize. There's method to the madness. I only act this way to prevent war. You can go back to the first term where Nikki Haley, who was the ambassador, said in her memoir, she was about to speak with North Korean officials and he told her, make them think I'm crazy. And he once told his attorney general, William Barr, do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet, just the right amount of crazy? So it was always on his mind that he should burnish this persona, but with a positive end. To some extent, people have largely believed that. We didn't get into a military quagmire on his watch in his first term. But in the second term, Operation Midnight Hammer with Iran in 2025, the drug boat attack killed several dozen people without any evidence, but didn't cause any political problem for Donald Trump. He did the military operation that abducted the dictator of Venezuela without any obvious blowback to himself. That seemed to wet his appetite for a bigger strike with Iran, one that is much harder to contain and control, even though he's trying to find the off ramp right now. And so you look back at the past week where Trump threatens on social media, he's in a white-bath, Iran civilization, tells him to open the effing straight, you crazy bastard, or you'll be living in hell. And you get to a two week ceasefire, it's obviously very tenuous. Some are already arguing, well, this is just madman theory in practice. He says a really crazy thing, but he doesn't actually want to do the crazy thing. But the point I'm trying to make is he already did the crazy thing by going into the war in the first place. We've already lost the lives of nearly 4,000 people, injured 40,000 people without achieving any actual strategic objective. In fact, one could argue losing ground. Iran wasn't this much controlled the straight before this war, and now it is. And it's making tons more money from the oil that it sells. The problem with madman theory, if your bluff gets called, you're left with two very unpalatable choices. Do an incredibly crazy thing, or surrender and throw your word out the window. Right. Madman theory is really just redubbing playing chicken. Richard Nixon is credited with inventing it. In the memoirs of one of Nixon's top aides, H.R. Haldeman, who goes by Bob, he recounts an anecdote from the 1968 campaign, and the Vietnam War is in full swing. Nixon says to Haldeman, I call it the madman theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that for God's sake, Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry, and he has his hand on the nuclear button. And Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days, begging for peace. Nixon denied that he said this, but this is the strategy that was employed. Ho Chi Minh did not beg for peace in two days. They didn't budge at all. They didn't believe him. They didn't believe him. They felt that the American people had already turned on the war. Nixon did escalate the war for the entirety of his first term. Once again, in 1973, they then have a peace agreement that essentially withdraws American support for South Vietnam. And two years after that, North Vietnam storms into Saigon and takes over the whole country. So the whole thing doesn't work. Still, madman theory gets talked about as if it is a reasonable strategy to employ. Certainly, Trump has internalized it, but the theory behind it is very, very flawed. Nixon's attempt at the madman theory or tactic was an object of failure. Do you want to liken that experience to that of Trump's? Go back to North Korea in the first term. He talks about fire and fury. They do a handshake deal. North Korea still has the same nuclear weapons as it had before. And has tested them? Begun the process of developing longer range missiles? Trump likes to talk in a menacing manner and then follow with the handshake. But once you start dealing with an adversary like Iran, these are true believers. The Supreme Leader purposefully held a meeting in the wide open and said, I'm not going to go into hiding if I die, I die. Trump is calling it a regime change, but it's just different people's names behind the desk. How do you play a game of chicken with an adversary like that? It's no longer in any reasonable interpretation to get you to peace. Now, Trump and his loyalists claim victory. Trump just got Iran to cry uncle. They've been calling him crazy for making threats, but guess the threats worked. The straits on its way to being opened and Iran's promising to stop firing missiles and drones. His threats were so crazy that they wanted out. They blinked. I have a question for all the people who were losing their minds today and howling. You know, the President Trump should be hauled out of the White House in shackles and frog marched away to be tried for war crimes. Now that it worked, is he going to get an apology from them? Well, it all presumes that we've won something here. We don't have access to the straight of her moves. Energy prices are still heavily escalated and the global economy is still disrupted. The regime is still in place and there's no change to the status of the nuclear program. So they have presumably degraded their military to some degree. But that was always the easy part. Exactly. The challenge with any of these adversaries is asymmetrical warfare. They clearly have a capacity to use drones to cause damage and they have significant power over the global economy through the straight. That is unchanged by this. So there's the madman theory where Trump claims to be acting crazy as a means to an end. Then there's the alternate theory that he's truly as crazy as a soup sandwich, nuttier than a squirrel turd. Obviously, we don't know what condition he's in. We don't have a diagnosis. We won't for a while if we ever do. Still, despite the general benumbing of much of America to Trump's increasingly extreme rhetoric and peculiar affect, something is going on, right? In the past month, he has said, we don't need the straight reopened because we have plenty of oil and European countries should be tough enough to go get it themselves. That the straight will open naturally at the end of the conflict. Nothing we need to do about it. And then saying to Iran, open the effing straight, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell. The statements don't make sense. Whatever the mental affliction is that causes someone to behave this way, we're never going to find out. But I certainly think we have enough to see with the naked eye, this person's not fit to be commander in chief. If you had a majority of his cabinet members under the 25th amendment write a declaration asserting that, and then backed up by a two-thirds vote of the Congress, obviously Trump diaries would complain. But I think the average American voter would be like, yeah, I get it. But people who were beside themselves, that Joe Biden was experiencing cognitive decline. And look, I was a person who the Biden should withdraw after that terrible debate that he had. In the run up to the election. Cause there for a moment, because you went through a transformation because you believed your eyes. Yes. Well, what's very difficult when you're dealing with aging is how do you distinguish between what's an innocuous senior moment? You've mixed up the name, you forgot a number, and genuine cognitive decline. Cause there can be some overlap between the two things. And nothing had happened prior to the debate that made me question his ability to do the job. I don't have any reporting that Biden was incapable of executing a policy because of whatever his condition was. But certainly by the debate, that's when I said, look, you're not in a condition to run for this office again. Biden often made mistakes, even as a very young man. Exactly. Just like Trump. I mean, when he says something completely absurd, prices decreased 4,000%. And he says it over and over and over. That's just Trump, right? Trump has cultivated a reputation that he has no attachment to the truth. And so if he says something that's manifestly wrong, it doesn't matter, cause it's just the way the guy is. But whatever's going on there, it's now reaching a point where he's making policy decisions that are leading to people dying. In the case of Biden, I still can't connect anything going on with Biden's mind to a policy decision that was dangerous. Whereas with Trump, if I was in the position to do so, I wouldn't necessarily wait for the formal diagnosis. I would go to the 25th amendment right now, so no one else has to die. There are some people who think that the mainstream press is sanewashing Trump, putting the things he says and does in a sort of political or tactical context as if it were normal. Well, you saw this with Easter statement. When Trump says, we're going to blur out your civilization, open the effin' straight, you crazy bastards. And that gets reported as Trump makes threatening statement. I understand why you might call that sanewashing. Not just to pick on New York Times or the Associated Press, but I saw Al Jazeera do the same thing. Even they had this kind of traditional approach to trying to write a headline in a neutral way. And you could do that to such an extreme that you really miss what the story is and the story is that Trump did something that was manifestly crazy. The more that individual people say it at town halls, the more that columnists say it in opinion pieces, the elected officials say it on the House or Senate floor or in media interviews, the more it is said that will then lead to media coverage and build narrative. Shortly after Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday about wanting to end the civilization of Iran, there was a lot of rhetoric online about the 25th Amendment, as you said. In order for Democrats in Congress to invoke the 25th, they need actions from the vice president and a majority of the cabinet, so that ain't going to happen. So what's left? It's not like the public is being brainwashed to salute whatever Trump wants or does. His numbers are down, special elections are breaking very heavily Democrats way, in places of the country that you would not expect. Clearly people are very upset at the direction of the country. We've every reason to say publicly whatever's going on with Trump, he ain't right, that right now someone is in charge of the military that should not be in charge of the military. Bill, thank you so much. It's my pleasure, thank you. Bill Scher is the Politics Editor of the Washington Monthly and host of the History Podcast, when America worked. You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe-nominated Morning News Podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story are questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow Up First wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why. This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. U.S. and Israel's war with Iran has destroyed lives and infrastructure, played havoc with the global economy, and also spawned, no surprise, a meme war. AI Slop, emphasis on Slop, is being lobbed by both sides. We've all seen our government's video game come action film entry, but here's one shared by members of the Iranian government. It takes the form of a Lego movie and depicts Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as little yellow block headed Lego pieces. As high tech propagandas launched back and forth by the warring parties, another much older media joined the conversation, not as propaganda, but as a war fighting tool. You're hearing a man's voice reading numbers in Persian, a Cold War era tool known as a number station, used to send encoded messages long distances via shortwave radio transmission. This particular one started broadcasting within hours of the first salvo against Iran. Shortwave, the way less listened to, but way farther reaching cousin of AM and FM radio, was the subject of the second season of our series, The Divided Dial. Episode 3 was about a shortwave station that builds itself as a peace and love outfit, but in reality it broadcasts right wing hate and racism. Katie Thornton is the intrepid reporter and host of both Divided Dial series. She'll take it from here. 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 ran fans in their windows, wrapped wet towels around their necks and hit the beach, a 34-year-old man named Alan Weiner from Yonkers was out on the water. A 200-foot-long freighter. Then it's not a gleaming clippership, but a broken-down bucket which has drawn the attention of the federal government. It drew the fed's attention because of what was happening on board. There's a new rock station in town, well not really in town, really in the water, and it may be illegal. Alan was a tech-savvy hippie with round glasses and a long bowl cut in the style of Johnny Ramone. And together with his comrades, Alan had launched a pirate radio station. I'm the only people that have radio stations in New York or gigantic corporations. This is the only other way to do it, especially if you don't have much coin. This was not Alan 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. Radio New York International, they call themselves, with a rock and roll accent and a pacifist beat. With the stated goal of spreading peace, love, and understanding, Radio New York International broadcasts for listeners up and down the East Coast, and artists sent in records for them to play on the air. Alright, that's the Ramones here at R&I Radio New York International. As for the news media, they pulled out all the stops to cover the story. Channel 5 News has spread 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. From their first broadcast, Radio New York International taunted the Federal Communications Commission, kicking off their transmission with a topical song from the 1960s. Come on down, my folks, baby. Come on down where we can play. But after only four broadcast days, just as Alan and his first mate were starting to get their sea legs. Good evening, some defiant DJs who wanted to thumb their noses at Washington have instead gotten an FCC fist in the face. Federal agents did come on down to their boat. 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 R&I staffers on board. Ivan Rothstein and Alan Lena. Alan was incensed as they took him off the ship in bracelets. We weren't breaking any laws whatsoever. We feel we were completely illegal, stationed, and now free, you know, free-form rock and roll has been stuffed out. They had anchored the boat just over four miles off the coast of Long Island, which, per Alan's interpretation of the law, was international waters. But the government said that international waters started much further out. Weiner and another man have now been charged with illegally broadcasting rock and roll music and peace chatter. Radio New York International was dead. 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. We'll bother you anymore. Alan 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 Alan. It made him realize that if he wanted to get on the air for good, he'd have to go legit. Alan 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, Alan, the pirate, won. And in 1998, he launched WBCQ. It wasn't in the coveted, corporatized market of New York City. It was in the 800-person Blinken-Yulmisset town of Monticello, in far northern Maine. That was all right, though, because Alan wasn't going for a local audience. He was going to use the short waves to bring the free-form, peace-and-love mission of his pirate ship out to the world. Hello. Early last year, I reached out to Alan Wiener. Hi, Alan. It's Katie calling. Hello, Katie. And 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. Come on up. You can't miss the station. It's going to try enormous antenna. 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 took Alan up on his offer. One mile ahead, two miles ahead and one mile right. So if I look northeast, I should see the tower. Oh, shh. 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'm closing an eye. Now, during totality, I'll remove the solar filter from the telescope. You can look at it in totality without the filter. When I arrived at the station, Alan was there with his wife, Angela, some friends, a farmer neighbor, and the station's engineer. They offered me sunscreen and eclipse-proof glasses. Three minutes. Oh, there's barely anything left. It's a pinhole sun. Pinhole sun piece. Chris Cornell, what a beautiful man. One of the guys who came up for the big event was named Tim. He has a long-running weekly show on WBCQ, playing mostly rock and roll sprinkled in with some funny skits and stories. Like Alan, he had long gray hair, though Tim's was notably more on-kempt. And also like Alan, Tim got his start in pirate radio. A long time ago. I was with my buddy and said, hey, why not? Each of us popped a tab of acid. Now we're starting to trip our brains off. So I ran next door and I grabbed a bunch of records and a reel-to-reel tape machine and patch cables and broadcasted on shortwave. I called it Radio Timtron worldwide. It was just a goof. Another friend of Alan'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. When the Berlin Wall came down, we got quite a few letters in thanking us for broadcasting. It makes me feel like I helped tear down the Berlin Wall. At WBCQ, I got the full range of shortwaivers' 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. You can look at it. Oh my God. Look at that. The eye of God. How cool is that? That is it. It looks like John Barnum's bass drum in Cygdia. 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. Alan 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 Alan and I chatted as he showed me around. We're a free speech radio station on shortwave, and we lease airtime to anyone. 50 bucks an hour. And that's what we were charging when we went on the air. From the time WBCQ launched in 1998, anyone could buy airtime. Buy an hour every month, every week, every day. You pay. Alan will beam it out. 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 in 78s. But as Alan 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. The American Nazi Party. Do you know they were the one of the first people to sign up for this? They came to us, oh, free speech? Right on the air? I said, yep, no problem. His father was Jewish and Alan was mostly raised Jewish, though his mother was Roman Catholic. But Alan 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. We had a programmer that kept getting on the air and telling people to go out and kill the Jews. I kept calling them 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 we'd be complicit and you can't do this. They wouldn't listen. Even my father heard that. Alan's father did not like tuning in and hearing Nazis. He called, he says, son, what are you, I know, I know, I'm going to fix it. After multiple warnings about the Nazis' explicit calls for violence, Alan pulled the broadcast, citing the station's self-imposed hate speech policy. Which basically says, if you get on the air and encourage people to go out 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, pfft. The Nazis' show was called American Dissident Voices. And when Alan 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. We're talking about American Dissident Voices being booted off of WBCQ. The host was Bill Cooper. He was a hugely influential thought leader in the conspiracy and militia movements of the 90s. Good evening, you're on the air. Yeah, this is Mike in South Florida. Good evening, Bill. Hi, 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. He simply pulled the plug. Yeah, he certainly did that. And then? Good evening, you're on the air. Hi, Bill. It's Alan Wiener. Alan called in. Hi, Alan. Well, you know, I think a lot of people out there are glad you called. I hope you understand this is not... Alan told listeners that he alone was responsible for the decision, but that axing the show violated every principle he held dear. 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. And 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. Alan did indeed make it the last instance. Hate groups kept coming to WBCQ. And Alan kept selling them airtime. The KKK contacted us. Alan told me about this on my visit. And they were really pleasant and nice. And I said, yeah, we'll put you on the air. And they were very, very impressed. 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 Alan 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. I advocate shooting and killing these Mexicans as they cross the border. Turner also called for the murder of Jews, black Americans, LGBTQ people, and politicians. We don't want to have to kill you, but we can kill you. And if need be, we will kill you. Hal Turner first made a name for himself as a frequent caller to Sean Hannity's show on the big AM station W ABC in New York. But Hal went to shortwave because he felt AMNFM conservative talk had grown soft. On shortwave, he said whatever he wanted. 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. But Alan's assortment of extremist talk shows and the occasional esoteric music program was far from a cash cow. Alan 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, Alan was even in talks with Radio Sputnik. They almost leased one of our transmitters. To take a whole frequency, 24-7. Yeah, but what happened with those figures putting in conversation? They decided not to go. I don't know why, because we really made them a good deal. See, we can get people on. One man did have around-the-clock presence on one of WBCQ's frequencies. His name was Ralph Gordon Stair, also known as RG, also known as Brother 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. Stair was a self-proclaimed prophet who preached an ultra-conservative, 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. The Overcomer Radio Broadcast. At one point, Stair was spending $100,000 a month on shortwave and local radio broadcasts. It's heard around the world in days of week 24. 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 forgo modern medical care in favor of faith healing. You're dealing with a doctor. He won't tell you the truth. You better get away from him. Multiple people who escaped the Overcomer Ministry said R.G. Stair was running a cult. We can deal with truth. It's just deceit. It's lying. Thanks to survivors who spoke out, the FBI and local law enforcement investigated Stair, and later that year, they raided the farm. More victims brought their stories to police. Stair facing more charges of criminal sexual conduct this time, many involving children. Stair's show was dropped from a bunch of local stations, but in Allen and his wife, Angela's eyes, he still had a right to the airwaves. And yeah, Stair bought lots of time on WBCQ, but it wasn't like he was making the station rich. Allen still couldn't always afford to repair or maintain equipment. He'd let go of staff. You know, the 50 bucks we get here and there, it doesn't pay the bills. It doesn't. 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, Allen gets a huge leg up and that powerful new antenna from an unexpected source. This is season two of The Divided Dial from On The Media. This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, who is Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and what does he really want? There are people in Silicon Valley who think of Sam Altman as a villain. I think he is a complicated character. I think he often believes what he is saying in the moment. This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're listening to episode three of our series The Divided Dial, all about shortwave radio. Right before the break, we heard about how WBCQ was struggling financially. But in 2018, that all changed. Here's Katie. WBCQ got a many million dollar cash injection and that massive new antenna. It can pump out 500 kilowatts of power ten times as much as WBCQ's other signals. The town's electric system wasn't even powerful enough to support it, so Allen offered to split the cost of rewiring with the local government. 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. 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 by 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. Oh, I hear the motors. There it goes. Oh, there it goes. There it goes. Quite something. It's wild. Oh, my goodness. It's like watching a skyscraper spin. If I listen to it, it's like a flying watch. They're going to the UK now. I think this is the only privately owned 500 kilowater in the world, because most of the 500 kilowaters 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? Yeah, I think it was $8 million. Wow. When the windfall came, WBCQ also got a bespoke new studio and transmitter building outfitted with an apartment 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, Alan's new backer was a group called World's Last Chance. This is WBCQ, bringing world's last chance radio to you from Monticello, Maine, USA. They're an ultra-conservative Christian End Times ministry, and they preach, among other things, that the Earth is flat. We are talking flat Earth in the Bible. The Earth is flat, and God tells you so. World's Last Chance was started in 2004 by an Egyptian cosmetics and food magnate turned religious leader named Galal Dawes. At first, even Alan didn't think World's Last Chance was on the level. 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. I said, no, we don't want that. We want more power. I said, well, how much more power? I said, well, at least 500,000 watts. I said, well, we'd have to build that, and we'd have to charge it 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. Some of what the ministry preaches is just downright strange. Or really in the weeds about doctrine. Cosmologies and cosmology. The scholars have always known the truth, but it's been hidden. For a while, World's Last Chance believed that Pope John Paul II was going to come back as the Antichrist. Shocking truth emerges. They also follow a strange combination lunar solar calendar, not the Gregorian calendar. So their Sabbath falls on different days from week to week. The Yahushua could not have been crucified on a Friday and most certainly was not resurrected on a Sunday. So we've got a conundrum. 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. Well, let's be honest. I mean, we shouldn't be surprised that the churches 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. And they even link their flat Earth beliefs, not just to extreme biblical literalism, but to their anti-globalist agenda. 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-sale zones due to restrictions originating from none other than the United Nations. 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 build themselves as a web-based ministry, and they have this janky website that looks straight out at the early internet. We're talking retrofuturistic 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 stars of the world, it's super-listenable, well-produced, and among the slickest broadcasts on American shortwave today. Alan will be the first to tell you it's the religious programming that pays the bills. World's Last Chance's 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. Well, alright, what's on the air now? This is on the air. That's on the air. Radio Trump is the national is on the air. Radio Trump International was one of Alan and Angela's shows, which they ran leading up to the 2024 election. 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. Having a backer like World's Last Chance has also made it easier for Alan to keep broadcasting people like brother R.G. Stair. A man he and Angela came to consider a friend. What the government did to the beautiful people at the Overcom, they raided the place like it was a ruby ridge. Alan and Angela told me they don't believe the well-documented allegations of sexual assault. A bunch of farmers, a bunch of cattle raising, goat raising, Christian people, you know, tilling the soil. And they pretty much went in there and terrorized everyone. 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 Alan to broadcast around the world all day, every day. 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. Alan 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 Alan'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. Were you all concerned about having those voices on the air that it could lead to harm? Well, we were, but we felt people need to have a right to know. I mean, it's shedding light. You really gotta shed the light. But several of the hosts Alan has been running on WBCQ since the early days are still spewing racist, violent rhetoric. Like Hal Turner. Even though Alan says that Hal's toned it down since his days advocating that people kill immigrants, Hal's still on WBCQ five days a week. And anyway, Alan says Hal's show gets you thinking. He gets you thinking. Without being specific, Here's Alan with Angela on their radio show just last month, recycling tired critiques of rap music. There are some cultures and maybe even races that are steeped in violence and proud of it. I believe it makes people angry. I mean, free speech, peace, love and understanding. If the understand has gone too far. It has. The understand has kind of just gone too far because everything in the world except for the love of God. In some ways, Alan'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 Alan's story is that with shortwave, he's 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 Alan Wiener, the demonstrably false, fatalistic and paranoid programming of world's last chance, the hateful rhetoric of Hal Turner, the cultist preachings of R.G. 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, Alan gets letters or emails from listeners around the country and around the planet. Just got one from China. Came in this morning. Yeah, on email. They picked up the station, they really liked the programming. Wow, so this one came in from Australia. Dear Sir. Madam, hope you had a nice Christmas holiday. This year I have Christmas alone, but listening to your program makes me happy. From Antwerp Network, signal was nice and clear. They have New York, Philadelphia, Australia. Got a bunch of Russian listeners too. And here's one from Buffalo, New York. In Antarctica at the Scientific Center. Dear Sir, on Saturday, September 23rd. And people are still coming to Alan for a platform too. Within an hour of me first arriving at WBCQ, Alan's phone rang. Nowhere. So we pay attention to light. Yeah, okay. Here, go ahead. Hello? As he disappeared out the door, I could hear Alan explaining his simple, well-worn policy to the shortwave curious caller. Free speech radio. Yeah, we'll get you on the air. It's 50 bucks an hour. To hear all of the episodes of this series, just surf for the divided dial on your podcast app or go to our website onthemedia.org. And that's the show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Calendar and Candice Wong with help from Macy Hunsleyck-Barend. Travis Mannan is our video producer. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is produced by WNYC. Michael O'Engare will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.