Lawfare Daily: The Explosive Mystery That Rocked Rural Georgia

[Intro]

Charles Minshew: It meant something different to lots of people. You know? There were people that loved it, people that thought it was quirky, and then people who just absolutely thought it needed to go away.

Benjamin Wittes: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare with Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien, Megan Nadolskiof Goat Rodeo, and Charles Minshew of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Tyler McBrien: This really, I think, made our task so much harder and made the task of the GBI so much harder. It's a monument hated by so many people with so many motives. Blown up by something that anyone can buy. Anyone. Anyone over 18.

Benjamin Wittes: Today we are talking the Georgia Guidestones, the mysterious Stonehenge of the United States that showed up in 1979 and got blown up in 2022. Who blew up the Guidestones? We may have an answer for you.

[Main Podcast]

So Tyler, first of all, why did you run off and do this project where you solve a terrorism incident with a publication other than Lawfare?

Tyler McBrien: Because you said no.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. Bad move on my part.

Tyler McBrien: But in all seriousness it's just such a Georgia story and, you know, teaming up with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was just, was very logical. It was a very a marriage of interests and needs. And then of course, you know, the bridge here is the wonderful people at Goat Rodeo who produce all of Lawfare, Lawfare’s podcasts, and now the AJC as well.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. So give us a little bit of the history of the project for those who have not listened to any of the episodes of who blew up the Guidestones. First of all, you wanna solve that problem for yourself 'cause it is now finished and it is amazing. But what are the Guidestones, or maybe I should say, what were the Guidestones and what led you to pursue a seven part narrative podcast about who blew them up?

Tyler McBrien: Well, initially it was sketched out as a sixth part, and so the seventh was a surprise twist, grand finale ending. But for those who don't know, the Georgia Guidestones were a bit of an odd monument in rural northeastern Georgia in a county called Elbert County with a very historic granite industry.

They were built in 1979 to 1980 by a man who used a pseudonym, R.C. Christian, and they were blown up in 2022 by still an unknown person or persons. There's been still no arrests at the time of this recording. There's been no arrests and no suspects named by law enforcement. The genesis of the project is that I also had grew up in Georgia.

I had heard about them growing up from first, from my sister actually. And they always were this magnet of conspiracy theories because of what was written on them, first. And then I think just conspiracy theories, beget conspiracy theories. And so they took on a life of their own until their eventual demise in 2022.

And it's just always been a story that stuck with me. And like, like any, I think hometown monument, I had never I always thought I could visit them. They'd always be there. There's massive monument of stone weighing thousands of tons of solid granite. But then someone blew them up and they were gone.

And I think this was part of my journey to try to make up for that or like reconstitute them in some way for myself. And luckily, I was talking to Ian and Megan about it. And they also, I think, you know, were interested and I they caught the bug too.

Benjamin Wittes: So let's use that to introduce the other two guests today.

Megan, how did you get involved in this project and had you ever heard of the Guidestones when Tyler first approached you about them?

Megan Nadolski: Yes. So I would just like to say here on this show that I'm the only one here right now that has actually seen the Georgia Guidestones before they were destroyed.

I'm with Tyler on weird and wonderful roadside monuments. I had no idea that they might have the dark past or origins that they had, but I went and took a weird picture in front of 'em. I'm on a surveillance, piece of surveillance footage somewhere that Charles might have helped dig up. But that's how—and the way that we started doing the project with Tyler was as all good Goat Rodeo projects started with an escalating series of drinks where Tyler got asked about a blank check if he could make anything what would he make?

And his first answer with Georgia Guidestones, and I said, I've been there, let's do it. You know? So,

Tyler McBrien: And I'll just add for Lawfare listeners the drinks in question here were following a panel event for the podcast Escalation, which Goat Rodeo produced and which I co-hosted with Nastia Lapatina. So it was just it was a quick handoff, one to the next.

Benjamin Wittes: Excellent. And Charles, how did you get roped into this merry band?

Charles Minshew: Well, the request to me first was, can you help us find some records about the explosion at the Guidestones? And I'm like, yeah, sure. I'll see what I can find. And I was thinking I was just setting up for a one one-hour interview and here I am still through episode seven.

Benjamin Wittes: Very cool. And so how did the Atlanta, more broadly, how did the Atlanta Journal Constitution get involved? It was, this is a local story for you guys, but I, as I understand it, this is something that Tyler and Megan approached the AJC about, not the other way around. Is that right?

Megan Nadolski: That is correct.

But the thing that is important to note here is the AJC has been covering the Guidestones since they went up. It started first as a features like, like we sort of talked about that quirky roadside attraction. It would be covered as we moved on through politics. A lot of the reporters at the AJC would cover it when it'd come up, because it did often.

And then finally it hit the front page of the news when it was blown up. So it made a lot of sense that this has been a story that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has been following all the way through. So they really were the only ones to do it.

Benjamin Wittes: And Charles, give us a brief history of the Guidestones for those for whom this all sounds like ancient Greek. Tyler mentions that they were put there mysteriously by somebody named R.C. Christian, and they were there until somebody blew them up a few years ago. What were they and what was the nature of the controversy about them?

Charles Minshew: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you as a student of Georgia history in eighth grade.

Growing up in South Georgia, we learned about the Georgia Guidestones as Georgia Stonehenge, but we never really learned about the messages written on the stones, just that this roadside oddity existed. So you're right. It was built in the late 1970s, early 1980s by this guy named R.C. Christian, who was only known to a, to one or two folks in Elbert County.

He had these kind of, just these ideals for how to guide humanity. You know, some people would say, well, it's to guide humanity after kind of a cataclysm. But as we dug deeper throughout the podcast, it was really that we found out, well, this guy believed in some pretty bad things. You know, there's some white supremacy at play.

There's, you know, some genocidal thoughts at play. It's not from this, you know, very beneficial view of humanity. It's from a really dark place and like, you know, just as mysteriously as they went up, they kind of mysteriously went away in July of 2022.

Benjamin Wittes: Tyler, you introduced the show by basically saying there are two mysteries here.

One is who put them there, and the other is who took 'em away. But one of the mysteries you solved pretty quickly because frankly somebody else had sort of already solved it. So let's dispense with that one at the outset. Who is R.C. Christian? Why did he put the Guidestones there and how did this stay secret for a long time until it didn't and you know, how did it come out, who they were?

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, this was really surprising to me. I tr I think we truly went into this investigation with these two bookends of mysteries in mind, and I didn't realize the first one had essentially been solved. But basically I would, I just add so R.C. Christian is a pseudonym used and for anyone who's interested in the occult or offshoots, sects of Christianity, some people theorize that this is code for Rosicrucianism and a lot of the precepts on the actual stones themselves comport with some teachings of Rosicrucianism, harmony with nature, that kind of thing.

But the, as Charles was saying, they immediately were a lightning rod of controversy, mostly because of the first precept which intrigues people to maintain humanity under 500 million. And even in 1980, that would take billions of people to die. So, so, you know, people always cast a weary eye at them because of, especially because of this one.

Charles also mentioned that it was called Georgia's Stonehenge or America's Stonehenge, and this is because R.C. Christian, in addition to writing out the precepts, also published a book, a manifesto of sorts, in which he explicitly referenced Stonehenge and said, ‘Well, the only problem with Stonehenge is that there was nothing written on it. We don't know what it meant.’ And so he took it upon himself to write on his.

But in the course of our early reporting, what we found was that there's a reporter, a very great reporter who's now at the AJC. His name is Thomas Lake. At the time he was writing for CNN right after I believe the Guidestones were exploded. He started poking into the same questions, and he stumbled upon. A bit of a fringe documentary that was released in 2015, I believe, but had been made in over the course of years by two evangelical Christian filmmakers with, I think it's fair to say, limited distribution.

But the film is called “Dark Clouds Over Elberton”—

Benjamin Wittes: And Elberton is the town where the Guidestones were located or outside of which they were located. Right?

Tyler McBrien: Exactly, yes. Yeah. So Elbert County is the county with all the granite quarries and the granite finishing sheds. And then Elberton is the town itself.

And they found this film, “Dark Clouds Over Elberton”. And in it it's a remarkable watch. It's, some of it's a bit hokey and cheesy, but I think that adds to the appeal. They essentially stumble upon the fact that they, I will, I'll make a long story short, they through some very interesting reporting they found.

That they're pretty sure that it's a man named Herbert Kersten or Robert Christian. Herbert Kersten, fairly similar from Fort Dodge, Iowa, who was an avowed eugenics. He was a supporter of William Shockley, who was the leader of the American Eugenicist movement. There's extensive correspondence between them.

And he also would write in support of Malthusian worries of population control in local newspapers. And then I think the kicker for a lot of us was that he was he wrote an endorsement letter, and I believe also donated to the campaign of David Duke, the former KKK grand wizard who was running for office.

And so this, you know, amounted to a very unsavory profile of a man who was putting his I, you know, his unsavory ideas out there and his racist ideas,

Benjamin Wittes: Although is, I mean, the idea that you wanna keep the population under 500 million is pretty unpleasant even in 1979 when there were only like four or five billion people in the world, but most of the guidestones precepts are pretty unobjectionable, right?

They're just like ‘be nice to nature.’

Tyler McBrien: Exactly. They're just kind of, some of it's just sensible advice. Some of it though, interestingly, does address law and governance calling for a world court calling for, to unite humanity under a new language. Kind of like a,

Benjamin Wittes: Like an Esperanto—

Tyler McBrien: Kind of thing—

Exactly. Yeah. And so I, you know, I did wonder if he was also this, I think it makes sense you know, of the time as well. But yeah, no, most of 'em are very unobjectionable to the point of just being kind of like, Woo-woo, just like nice things that are written

Benjamin Wittes: With a little bit of racism just sprinkled in.

Tyler McBrien: And eugenicists, right. We're inferring a lot of on the David thing. Yeah, exactly. But I will say also there, there is different interpretations of the maintain humanity under 500 million because he said he was writing for, these were Guidestones, as Charles was saying, for after the calamity in his time. This being what he, I think what he saw is an inevitable nuclear clash between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. So, so that was like guiding it for maintaining when we're we rebuild the world.

Benjamin Wittes: Gotcha. Alright, so set up by a woo-woo environmentalist, post-apocalyptic eugenics. It sits, there becomes a tourist attraction kind of gathering place for Wiccans and for people who want to do midnight rituals of one sort or another.

But it is always objected to by evangelical folks and eventually becomes a kind of obsessive focus of QAnon types. Charles, what's the, tell me about like what the sort of gathering storm of people who don't like the Guidestones over the course of the 90s and the current last couple decades, when did they become a thing that people were demanding be removed?

Charles Minshew: You know, I'd have to go back and look at when the first calls for removal happened. But they really, the, some of the calls began to grow, you know, around the same time in the, you know, mid 2010s when the kind of, you know, far right, alt-right groups kind of started to pop up. And you kind of saw some of this Christian nationalism rise to the top of the kind of discourse around the U.S.

That some of that same stuff started bubbling up locally. You can listen to Elbert County Board of Commissioner meeting minutes or read those minutes and the, even in the weeks leading up to the explosion in July of 2022, where there were folks who were coming to the meeting saying, you need to tear these down.

They're a monument to, you know, to Satan, people who were being really outspoken about it. And the government is like, well. It's there. You know, we're not gonna vote to tear this down. But you also have, you know, when you also have these situations where you look through the police reports of times that the officers actually went out to the Guidestones.

You know, we looked about three or four years before the explosion and found times where officers went out there and found what appeared to be chicken blood on the Guidestones or red paint. But you also had people who were filming music videos out at the Guidestones and in one unfortunate situation, even had a person who tried to take their own life out at the Guidestones and they survived as far as we know.

So it meant something different to lots of people, you know, there were people that loved it, people that thought it was quirky, and then people who just absolutely thought it needed to go away.

Megan Nadolski: Yeah. Charles, getting those records, Ben, those incident reports helped us build a bit of a timeline where along with the interviews with people, we were able to see, yes, it meant a lot of different things to different people.

But starting in around 2016, what the incidents that happened at the Stones started to sort of increase in severity. And in terms of how serious, you know, someone painted ‘you won't win’ in red spray paint. I believe it was around 2016 on the stones the suicide around or attempt around that time and things just sort of started to ratchet up.

We were able to really build a timeline from those reports to see a ratcheting up of incidents around the stones. And then online too, which it was really interesting to see the fever pitch.

Benjamin Wittes: Right. So I'm curious just how each of you felt about the stones. Were they a weird, cool roadside curiosity? Were they something that was, you know, spiritually interesting or important? Were they satanic and or a monument to eugenics? What did, like, what did you think about them?

Charles Minshew: I learned about them in middle school. Didn't think about 'em much again until they blew up in July, on July 6th. I was in the AJC newsroom when we heard about the explosion and was just like, wow, that's weird.

So in those intervening years, didn't think about it a lot. Like Tyler, I had moved, you know, I had moved back to Georgia in 2022. Did not do this, but I moved back in 2022 and wanted to visit and never got the chance.

Benjamin Wittes: Tyler, what did you make of 'em?

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, it's funny. You know, Charles is reminding me of when we were reporting this, I had to kind of keep reminding myself that everyone in Elberton doesn't, they don't walk around all day just constantly thinking about the Guidestones.

They have jobs, they have lives. But when I started this project, I really was fascinated more so on just the reactions that they elicited in other people. You know, how they could just map on to the conspiracy theory du jour of whatever time period it was.

But then one, something hap—So over the course of the reporting, we found the Guidestones, the remnants of them, they were just essentially dumped at someone's quarry. I won't go into that too much 'cause I, it's a great part of the show. But from there, the person who had them gave me a small piece of the Guidestones and I had a few mishaps, a few unfortunate incidents, and so I started to sort of believe in the power and started joking, half-joking that I was cursed through a series of unfortunate events that occurred after I took the Guidestone piece back to my apartment in New York.

But I think that helped honestly with reporting this to try to meet these people where they are and to think and how they think, and. And take it seriously. I'm curious what Megan will say as well.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. Megan you were there, you actually saw them while they were still alive. What'd you make of them?

Megan Nadolski: Oh, well, I feel a little Ben, like you and I might be similar this way in that I think so it seems like so much of the world has been flattened recently that we sometimes forget just how weird and wonderful and different so many different like so many places are. And Georgia is certainly one of those places that entertains the weird and wonderful.

So at first without knowing anything, I was like, Charles, I feel a little actually dumb saying. But I didn't think much about what was on the Stones. I just thought they were very cool and huge. I mean, if you saw them in person, they really were stunning. And then I think we talked to the man who, alongside his father, hand-chiseled every letter onto those stones.

So then I started thinking about them really as like, you know, needing to be respected as the work of an artist, you know, or people that really cared and respected their craft and maybe also didn't think too much about a paying job, right? But then as things got much darker. It made me really think in general about monuments and what of what Charles was saying in the United States, which is, they mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but there is usually a, an original truth about what their intent was and why they were put up.

And it felt important to me that we and Tyler and the whole team here, that we really acknowledged that and then also took very seriously that someone took it into their own hands to blow them up. And I still feel very much that isn't something anyone should get to do. So,

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, so what happened the night of July 6th, 2022?

Is that right? Tyler? Give us the raw facts.

Tyler McBrien: Yes. Well first I'll say, I mean, to Megan's point, there was, I think at first at least, a bit of a struggle to establish the stakes here. And we can get into that later too. You know, it's a, there were no, fortunately there no one was hurt. There were no, no one was missing, et cetera. It was—

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. But a bomb went off.

Tyler McBrien: Exactly. Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: In the United States I used to think that like a bombing was a big deal and like, like. I dunno,

Tyler McBrien: Call me old fashioned.

Benjamin Wittes: It doesn't seem to me like there's that much stakes to establish somebody didn't like a public monument and blew it up.

Tyler McBrien: So I'll give you the facts of what was known publicly before we released the show. And we know this because there's surveillance footage that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation released to the public immediately after the bombing. But in the early morning hours of July 6th, around 3:50 am, a silver car pulls up.

It's, it pulls up, it's out of the side of the cameras though. You see someone, a figure walk up to the foot of the Guidestones with a container. They set the container down. Although they're, by that point, they're blocked by one of the Guidestones. Then they sort of skip off in a very odd way into the darkness of the tree line.

About 10 minutes elapses, there's a huge explosion from the container that was at the foot of the Guidestones. There's white smoke going everywhere, and it's pretty cinematic because there's the Guidestones were lit up at night. And then immediately you start to hear a car rev its engine and a silver car flashes across the screen and the smoke starts to settle and that's it.

And so then immediately, the, that day, later in the day, the local police show up. I believe ATF shows up as well. the GBI show up, they assess that the site is too dangerous to start their investigation because the explosion broke one of the six pieces. The rest were still standing, but very precariously.

There were a lot of cracks in the granite. So they brought a, I think a backhoe or some sort of bulldozer in, knocked them down, and then began their investigation.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright. Lot to talk about there. First of all, and this is one mystery, the show answers completely, which is what happened to them.

They kind of disappeared, and I believe it's in episode four, you guys find them. I'm not gonna ask you where they were, but how did you find them?

Tyler McBrien: They sort of found us, I would say and it's actually, so it's in episode six, we've been, we had been monitoring social media, doing opensource investigation for a bit—

Local Facebook groups, we saw they were very active, so we posted in someone from the AJC posted in one of the Facebook groups that for Elberton and someone dm-ed us and said, I have the Guidestones at my quarry. They just appeared here when I got back from July 4th vacation in 2022, I thought he was pulling our leg. We, I got up, we got on the phone with him.

He started talking about lizard people almost right away. I sort of wrote him off and then he sent us photos with geotag with the, you know, time the metadata all checked out. So we, I flew, we flew down to Georgia and he had the goods and they were sure enough, just sitting at his quarry, a little overgrown at this point in disarray, in broken pieces.

But they were there.

Benjamin Wittes: Megan, are they cooler in broken pieces or cooler standing?

Megan Nadolski: I mean, they look like the 10 commandments, like broken into pieces in a random field bin. Like, they, I would say they're still, they would still be worth looking at. They're so wild.

Charles Minshew: You know, I was talking to some folks after that episode and I was told by someone in Elbert County that the quarry that they are at, or the quarry that they were, that they came from.

So the Guidestones are back where they started.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, that's kind of cool.

Charles Minshew: 40 plus years ago,

Tyler McBrien: Once I revealed that, I had a piece of the Guidestones and an actual auctioneer emailed me or someone who purported to be an auctioneer, you know, saying that there's some real money here. We could auction this off if you'd like.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. Alright, so next question. What do you use to blow up a giant monument, Charles? When you know, one of the first things you would wanna establish as an investigator is what kind of explosives would be used to do this? Who bought that kind of explosives? This is a quarry town, so everybody assumes that we're talking about dynamite from one of the quarries, but it turns out the story is a little different from that. So give us a story about the explosive forensics.

Charles Minshew: Yeah. So the first, you know, the first thing that GBI, ATF would've run down was, where's all the dynamite in Elbert County?

And it was all there. So it's like, okay, this investigation could be over pretty quickly. If we determine it's dynamite, we find the missing dynamite, we find the bomber well. We dug into it a little bit more and found out through explosive experts and through law enforcement sources that it was most likely probably Tannerite, which Tannerite is totally different from dynamite,

Benjamin Wittes: Right, so what is it?

Charles Minshew: So Tannerite is a binary mixture. Basically you have two kinds of powder, and I'm not a chemist, so I cannot remember what the two chemicals are right now, but you get powder that's in two different packets. You mix it together and you can do this in like half-pound or one-pound increments, and you shoot it with a high-powered rifle and it explodes.

It's really great for siting a gun if you are a hunter or something, you wanna see if your gun is actually hitting targets right on. I've used it in South Georgia, I've seen as much as 10 pounds of the stuff blow up. So in order to test this out, we saw how easy it is to buy Tannerite.

Benjamin Wittes: How much Tannerite would it take to blow up the Guidestones?

Charles Minshew: You know, we're not sure entirely, but we think it would take around 40, 50 pounds at least. Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: So what is 40, 50 pounds of Tannerite cost and where do you get it? And can you get it without attracting law? I mean law enforcement attention, that's not something you're going to use to check out a high-power rifle sighting, right?

What happens when you go and try to buy quantities of Tannerite in the volume that it would take to do something like this?

Charles Minshew: Well, I'm gonna just start this by saying as of today, April 28th, I have not been contacted by anybody in my local police or GBI for buying 20 pounds of the stuff back in January, so.

Benjamin Wittes: Like half of what you would need?

Charles Minshew: Yeah, half of what I would need. So I went to a sporting goods store up in Kennesaw, Georgia. So that's Northwest Atlanta metro area, for folks who aren't familiar. Walked into the store and it took me longer to actually, you know, find the stuff because I walked to the wrong side of the store.

And that's in episode four of the podcast. And I called Megan while I was in the store because I didn't want to be muttering like a crazy person, talking to myself. I saw the one-pound package, the five-pound package, and then kind of the big package, a 20-pound package of this stuff. It's all in little bags that's meant to be mixed together in small quantities.

But I walked out with 20-pounds. You know, the cashier didn't even know what I was buying. There was no ID check. There was no, no questions like, are you 18 or older? It was just—

Benjamin Wittes: So what does it cost?

Charles Minshew: I paid 120 bucks for 20 pounds,

Benjamin Wittes: So you could blow up the guidestones for 250?

Charles Minshew: Yeah, 250 bucks and, you know, you need access to a rifle,

Benjamin Wittes: But those are pretty common in rural—

Charles Minshew: Those are common in Georgia.

You don't need a permit for a gun. You don't need a permit for Tannerite in Georgia.

Benjamin Wittes: So why does anybody use high explosives? Or like, you know, why don't we have a lot more bombings in this country? It seems like a cheap, effective way to make a loud statement. I'm sound like I'm being cheeky, but I'm really not.

I'm, yeah. I'm curious why, you know, we have all these mass shootings, we have all these, you know, terrorist incidents. Why haven't the bad guys noticed Tannerite?

Megan Nadolski: Well, when we, two things when we did talk to an expert who had, you know, done the investigation on the Oklahoma City bombing or the Olympics bombing, one of the things he said, first of all, was that they are seeing Tannerite more and more. It is being used at an increasingly alarming pace that isn't a, you know necessarily a, something we took up with the podcast, but that is one of the things he wanted to talk about over and over again.

Second thing is that the guidance he gave us and that we were given over and over again is that bombings are very rare because of the type of person who wants to carry something like that out, you could blow yourself up easily. It isn't, like Charles just told you he's not a chemist, you know, it is a chemistry, you know, sort of experiment. So we just found that the profiles of someone who would do this, there weren't that many people, even though the access was, you know, they didn't even check his ID.

Benjamin Wittes: And Tyler what, other than the absence of dynamite missing led you to the idea that this was probably a Tannerite bombing.

Tyler McBrien: As Charles was saying, we, the bomb experts that we spoke to based on the site and the sound and the color of the smoke, for example, essentially was doing a visual forensic analysis of the surveillance video.

And so based on that with a high degree of confidence already we, we thought it was Tannerite, but that was actually a confirmation of a tip we got from a source in law enforcement who said that they essentially concluded that it was Tannerite. I think also the absence of the ATF is also a tell here.

The ATF, I believe showed up but left fairly quickly. I assume this is an assumption, I assume because they concluded it was Tannerite, which is, does not fall under, you know, the ATF’s concern. I, it would be a stretch to say that Tannerite is unregulated. It is very lightly regulated and it varies by state and of course the way in which this person used it is illegal. But buying the amounts to, to amass this quantity is easily done.

And so, I mean, this really, I think made our task so much harder and made the task of the GBI so much harder. It's a monument hated by so many people with so many motives blown up by something that anyone can buy. Anyone over 18.

Charles Minshew: Right. And I think one more thing that kind of pointed us to Tannerite, was if you've seen the surveillance video, you see a person carrying one of those heavy, like plastic totes, and that's all you need for Tannerite. You just need it in a contained place. You don't need any kind of like, you know, tape and a timer and wires and everything.

You just need a vessel and the powder, and then something to strike it with.

Tyler McBrien: And the last thing I'll say is that I mean, yeah, to your question Ben, some of the bad guys have figured it out as Megan was saying, and it has been used in—but it's also been used. There also have also been a lot of horrible accidents with Tannerite.

They've been used in gender reveals, even when used properly. It's a, it's an explosive. And so it's, that was a very concerning sort of side plot to this story of learning about Tannerite and it's very light regulations.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. I think one of the other reasons Tannerite has not been used in a lot of terrorist bombings is that you have to be in the immediate vicinity of the bombing to pull it off.

Right. So because it doesn't remotely detonate. You have to be within line of sight and that makes it unappealing from the vantage point of somebody who wants to plant a bomb and be five miles away, by the time it blows up, the time device is actually gives you time to escape. Whereas if you have to be within line of sight with a high-power rifle, your chances of getting caught, in rural Georgia at night is one thing, but if you're like, for example, at the Boston Marathon or you know, at other places where people wanna detonate bombs, that's a little bit more dicey.

So with all of that as a 40-minute prologue, Tyler, who blew up the Guidestones?

Tyler McBrien: I can say that we. We raised the question of, we, we found, you know, two people that we really think the GBI should have and probably still should look into.

There were a lot of things about them that experts told us to look out for. I'm being very careful with my words here, as you can tell. But—

Benjamin Wittes: Like all but confessing in voicemail messages. Like there's some stuff in there that in the last episode, which is now public, I mean it's a little bit more than circumstantial. They get really close to telling you, we did it.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, first, at first I'll say these two men, we only use their first names, Eric and Ken. They deny any involvement in the Guidestones bombing. But yes, to your point I got some voicemails. I had extensive conversations on the phone with both of them.

At times we're not seemingly able to just unequivocally deny their involvement later they did. But yeah, I mean there were some really—yeah I guess I'm curious, like Megan and Charles, what were the biggest things that jumped out when we started talking to them?

Megan Nadolski: I think, you know, in episode five, we, you know, in addition to looking for anyone who had prior experience with explosives, which we, one of the people we talk about does, and that, you know, that was really one of the first things we started to sort of hone in on.

The second thing was any involvement with Kandiss Taylor or any support of Kandiss Taylor? No,

Benjamin Wittes: we haven't talked about Kandiss Taylor yet. Yeah. But since you mentioned her. Explain who she is and what her relationship with this whole story is.

Megan Nadolski: Well, Kandiss Taylor is a politician from South Georgia.

During her race for governor back in, Tyler, Charles, 2020? 20—

Tyler McBrien: ’22? 2022,

Megan Nadolski: 2022, she decided to roll out her campaign platform with a series of of videos. She had 10 sort of orders, 10 executive orders, and she was looking for a 10th. She'd kind of figured out her nine, was looking for a 10th and had visited the Georgia Guidestones.

And as she explained to us, gotten a a very creepy eerie feeling. She does sort of subscribe to some QAnon type school of thoughts as well. And when it came time to make her campaign platform, she thought of the Georgia Guidestones and she made a video very cinematic. We've all seen it a couple times that mentioned that the Georgia Guidestones should come down if she were elected for Georgia Governor.

She’s sort of synonymous with the Georgia Guidestones.

Benjamin Wittes: So you're looking for people with explosives backgrounds who are supportive of Kandiss Taylor, or have some, what are your other criteria for likely, for your likely suspect?

Charles Minshew: Yeah, I mean, you know, we're looking for people who were in Elbert County, people who have history with explosive devices or know their way around firearms. We're looking for people who are supporters of Kandiss Taylor. We're looking for people who just have an axe to grind with people in Elbert County. Right.

And we find all of those in some of the places that we looked. Nothing that's definitive. We're not we don't have access to a case file, we don't have access to buckets of evidence.

We can just follow the thread and pull it until we can't pull anymore. And that's what we've done in episode seven.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah the last piece I'll say is that the getaway car that I mentioned earlier, we arrived at what we believe to be the most likely make and model a certain type of BMW. That's fairly, it's not very new.

And so there aren't so many on the road. And we did that through a series of, you know, ask crowdsourcing from car nerds on Reddit and downloading A 3D model and, you know, overlaying that. But we also found that these people would've had access to a BMW had bought and sold cars, fixed them.

Often European cars made mention in 2022 on a Facebook post of a POS BMW. So, so that was another big thing as well, chasing down the getaway car. And that also fit, or at least we didn't find anything that would've made it impossible for them for it to be them.

Benjamin Wittes: So what happens now, the Guidestones are back in a quarry.

Is anybody planning to do anything with them? Are they just gonna sit there? You know, is the quarry owner gonna create a tourist site out of the final resting place? What's a, what's the future of the Guidestones?

Megan Nadolski: Well, I think, you know, when we met with the man who has the Guidestones on his property, there was talk of donating them to a local museum, one of the local museums, the Elberton Granite Museum. There was also talk of, they'd make a very cool park. Tyler has actually, I think already written up a context plaque that's, you know, it's print ready. And so there, but when we did talk to folks in the town I don't know what might have changed for them.

It's really their choice. It's their community, it's their monument. They, there was a lot of fear that if they were to put the Guidestones back in any way, it would be something that might make them nervous as a target of a, especially if there are no arrests made of a future attack.

Benjamin Wittes: I wanna ask about why the investigation of this has been so desultory.

This happened in 2022, ATF, normally if there's a bombing. The Feds are, take that very seriously. ATF seems to have shown up and then wandered away. The Georgia Bureau of Investigations I mean, I think you guys account of the GBI investigation is just completely devastating in terms of the number of people who've been interviewed in terms of the signs of life.

So, Charles, I'm curious why you think both state and federal authorities were so uninterested in getting to the bottom of this over a pretty protracted period of time. Is it, 'cause nobody suspected that this was ISIS that did it. Is it, 'cause Tannerite is not that big a deal? What? Like what? What do you make of the fact that you guys probably solved this crime four years after it happened, and law enforcement's interest seemed so minimal.

Charles Minshew: Yeah I think it's a case of the GBI has quite a lot of stuff that they're actively working on and the case of the Guidestones, nobody died, nobody got hurt and there's a lot of stuff on their plate.

So I think that if there's interest within the GBI, it just kind of fell down their priority list. Like, we'll come to it when we get a tip. We'll come to it when we get more information. We spent a lot of time trying to get in touch with the GBI, Megan and Tyler went to their office in Athens and we've had lots of phone calls.

And then when we do go down this rabbit hole to talking about the two folks in episode seven. We reached out to the GBI again and they talked to us that time. You know, we told them what we knew and it wasn't on the record, sort of investigative interview where they were asking us questions twice about what we knew and why we were so concerned that we would get our company security involved and that we would come to the GBI with information about these two people.

Tyler McBrien: The short answer is we don't know because we had such a difficult time getting the GBI to talk to us, my charitable interpretation here is that, as Charles was saying, they had a lot on their plate. The—I found some local reporting at the time from January 2022 that said that the GBI’s lab had a backlog of 29,000 cases.

I'm sure a lot of them were violent crimes that involved like bodily harm or death or something that are higher priority. I think they were just getting inundated with tips from conspiracy theorists, they didn't take it seriously. It was just a bunch of rocks blown up in a field. And then I think the, my, you know, my less charitable interpretation is I was, as I was getting to, is that they just, they didn't care.

They didn't take it seriously. Which I think was hard for some people in Elberton to swallow 'cause they wanted closure. It was also a serious explosion, successful explosion in their town. It's a much more visceral thing for them. And so, yeah, I, I don't know. I and I think the last thing I would say is it did, it seemed solvable to a lot of people.

There's surveillance footage, there's a getaway car, there's a person you know, on camera putting it down. So I think all of that just led to just very, a lot of confusion over what the investigation was doing or not.

Megan Nadolski: Yeah, and I'll just say, Ben, I think one thing I is, if all of those things are true, that they didn't take it very seriously, or it wasn't a priority, or they had a giant case log. I mean, we understand you know, open records laws. We, we get that. But there was also at the same time, this extreme stonewalling that went on as we tried to ask for any information about if it, we couldn't quite get a straight answer.

Either it was very consequential and they had something in their pocket that they were following or they didn't care at all. And if they didn't care at all, then why? Why this total lack of wanting to work with the Atlanta Journal Constitution on this effort. It just really didn't square for me.

Benjamin Wittes: And what do we know about the current state of the investigation? You went and shared a bunch of information with them, now you've shared that information with the public.

What do we know about where, what the status of this duo is in front of the GBI?

Tyler McBrien: So, so first I'll say the episode came out today as of the time of recording, so something may happen in the next few days, but the current status is that the case is still open and that they I need to, this may not be the exact quote, but the GBI told us on the record after we told 'em about these people, these two men, that it's an, these active lead that they're looking into.

And I think that's about all.

Benjamin Wittes: And when you say it is an active lead, is it an active lead because you told them about it? Or is it an active lead because they already knew about these guys?

Tyler McBrien: My guess is the former, they told us on the record that they, I, that they had not heard of these names before we told—

Benjamin Wittes: I see.

Tyler McBrien: —them. I see.

Benjamin Wittes: I see. So, Charles, one last question before I let you guys all go. What happened to the Tannerite after you guys were done with the show? Do you still have it?

Charles Minshew: You know, it's something that we discussed. You know, we had lots of conversations with our attorneys, with our publisher, law enforcement.

We were really thinking about how do we get rid of this stuff? 'cause you know, the best way to get rid of it is to blow it up. But lots of people didn't want us to do that. Instead, it was bad idea. So it's, still setting in a box in an undisclosed location, only to me. And we're waiting to deal with it.

Tyler McBrien: That's season two.

Charles Minshew: Of who blew up the Tannerite.

Benjamin Wittes: Well, we are going to leave it there. Congratulations to all three of you. The show is who blew up the Guidestones. There is a. I would say a boatload of stuff that we did not talk about in this show, including the fact that this isn't the first monument in Elberton that has been ripped down and kind of disappeared. There's a history of this and it all does connect back to race. And there's just a million interesting threads here You can listen to. Charles buying 20 pounds of Tannerite. You can hang out with Tyler as he visits the Guidestones in an overgrown field. It's a really interesting, entertaining and ultimately very important piece of work 'cause it's an unsolved act of terrorism.

Thank you, Tyler, Charles, and Megan for joining us today.

Tyler McBrien: Thanks for having us, Ben. This was great.

Megan Nadolski: Thanks, Ben.

Charles Minshew: Thanks a lot.

[Outro]

Benjamin Wittes: The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a material supporter of Lawfare at our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters.

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