It Could Happen Here · Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

Strange People on the Hill: An Interview with Michael Edison Hayden

April 1, 2026·56 min·5 clips

The FBI called to say someone was planning to assassinate him while his eight-year-old slurped a Slurpee in the back seat.

Molly Conger opens with Michael Edison Hayden and his book, Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town, out April 7, 2026. The conversation does not treat extremism as something distant. Hayden talks from inside the beat, where threats come through phones, platforms, and official warnings that still leave a person without much control. Conger gives those details room. The duty-to-warn call becomes the thing everything turns around, partly because it is so dry and partly because his 8-year-old is in the back seat with a cherry Slurpee. That image makes the danger feel less like a thriller and more like paperwork with teeth. Conger notes how disturbing this would sound to a normal listener. Hayden, meanwhile, sounds like someone describing a problem he had to keep managing. Then the history moves in. Photos tied to Alan Berg's killing, the Order, and David Lane pull older white-supremacist mythology into the present. The image has its own audience. Hayden and Conger talk about men drawn to taboo violence and the ritual charge of passing it around. Gab sits in the middle of that work. Hayden says he spent too much time there, but also found stories and sources by watching people post and threaten. Bowers enters by name. The point is blunt: covering the beat meant getting close to people who wanted that closeness to hurt. The outro turns practical, sending listeners to the book, Posting Through It, and its weekly churn of far-right news, Kash Patel talk, and strange AI fruits in feeds.

As heard by us

A grounded, unsettling conversation about far-right reporting and the threats that follow it home.

Molly Conger talks with Michael Edison Hayden about his book Strange People on the Hill, but the conversation is just as much about what far-right reporting does to the person doing it.

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Why you'd press play

Hayden received a duty-to-warn call while his kid slurped a cherry Slurpee in the back seat.

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