Rodney Martin & Press TV

Rodney Martin (b. 1969) lives north of Los Angeles. He retired in 2009 from a firm that did land development and government relations, and he served for a time on the staff of a U.S. Congressman handling military and veteran issues. That congressional line is the one Press TV liked to use. On air he came across as a sober Washington hand. Iranian state media presented him as a former congressional staffer and political analyst based in Los Angeles, and in that costume he told their cameras the expected things. He called Trump’s team amateurish and juvenile and named Trump the most pro-Israel president in history, charging that he had appointed more pro-Zionist officials than all prior presidents combined. He told Press TV that American military moves against China showed the desperation of a dying empire. When the Press TV reporter Serena Shim died in a car crash in Turkey in 2014, Press TV quoted Martin, chairman of the American Nationalist Association, calling her death a CIA black operation.
The chyron hid the rest of him. Martin founded the American Nationalist Association and, in 2013, the American Nationalist Network, an internet radio station that interviewed European ethno-nationalist activists from the Golden Dawn to the National Alliance, and he claims particular knowledge of the German-American Bund and says some of his family belonged to it. When a rival in that world pressed him on labels, he said he described himself not as an American nationalist but only as a National Socialist. His group’s racial policy and twenty-five-point platform were patterned on National Socialist Germany. He turned up on Holocaust-revisionist programs with Carolyn Yeager and others to praise the films, the art, and the achievements of the Third Reich. So Press TV did to Martin what it did to E. Michael Jones and to Kevin Barrett. It gave a fringe figure a respectable title and let the title carry the message. Catholic intellectual. Arabist scholar. Former congressional staffer. The doorway changed. The line behind it did not.
Martin is the mirror opposite of Jones on the one question that organizes everything Jones built. The whole thread keeps returning to it. Jones is militantly aracial. He insists the Jew is defined by a rejection of Christ and not by blood, he wrote a book against Darwinian race-thinking, and he scolds the men who call themselves White Catholics. Martin is the pure biological racialist, the National Socialist, the man whose creed Jones treats as a category error. The two of them agree on almost nothing at the deep end. The nature of the Jew. The source of the West’s sickness. Whether the answer is the Cross or the race. Christianity or a revived paganism of blood. Set their first principles side by side and they are enemies.
And they shared a broadcaster and one sentence. Israel runs American foreign policy, and Zionist power is the enemy. That single conclusion was the whole of the overlap, and it was enough for Tehran. This is the finding from the usury pass and the sex pass arriving in its hardest form. The Iranian coalition of Western voices never ran on shared values. It ran on a shared foe. Jones the Catholic, Barrett the Muslim convert, Mark Dankof the Lutheran, and Martin the National Socialist could not have built a church or a party among them. They could all point at the same target, and the sponsor took the pointing finger and asked no questions about the hand.
On the bargain that I traced through Jones and Barrett, Martin is the floor. He brought the least. No shelf of serious books, no scholarly credential, no convert’s bridge, only a small membership-fee outfit that even his own niche mocked as thin and self-promoting, with rivals hinting he was a latecomer. One detractor asked what he was getting out of it beyond the thirty-dollar membership fees. His open National Socialism also capped his reach. Jones’s Catholic frame and Barrett’s professor’s diction let each man speak past the fringe into Christian and right-wing audiences who might never tune into a Third Reich appreciation hour. Martin had no such cover once you knew the rest. He was the most replaceable guest of all, a face with a flattering label, booked for a soundbite, holding the least to fall back on when the bookings stopped.
If my coda described Jones as a serious mind slowly spent by an audience that rewards only the naming of the enemy, Rodney Martin is the condition arrived at early, a man who came to the microphone with little seriousness to lose and offered the naming and nothing under it. I find no sign that he and Jones worked together or even thought much of each other, and given their first principles they had reason not to. They were co-tenants, not partners, two men planted at opposite ends of the Western fringe by the same landlord, so the same message could be carried to the religious traditionalist through one and to the racial nationalist through the other. Iran wanted the conclusion. It collected the men who would say it and let them keep their incompatible reasons.
Circa 2022, Martin stopped appearing on Iranian outlets. I do not know why. That whole ecosystem was falling apart in those years under sanctions and deplatforming, so the door may have closed on him rather than him walking out of it.
I have my own evidence about Martin, and it does not fit the record above. Rodney has come on my YouTube show. He sounded nothing like the man in the dossier. He said almost nothing about race, nothing warm about Iran, nothing hostile about Israel, and most of what he said about Jews was gracious and grateful. Before 2019 he was more of an online brawler, though that ran inside the internet blood sports of the day. So I have sat with two Rodney Martins, the one on the page and the one on my show, and I cannot fold them into one man.
I will not pretend the warm one cancels the documented one. He built the American Nationalist Association, gave it a racial policy and a platform modeled on Nazi Germany, and went on the air to praise the Third Reich. A man’s account of himself proves little in either direction. The label National Socialist does not settle what he is, and the courtesy he showed me does not settle it either.
And I have to say the hard part out loud. I am a Jewish host who likes the Rodney I know. If he shapes himself to a room, mine is one of the rooms he shapes for. So my shows are the least reliable witness to what he is when I am not watching. I saw something real. I also saw exactly what a careful man wants me to see.
People are complicated. Rodney might be the National Socialist he has claimed, or a man who has left it behind, or a man who becomes whatever the room rewards and settles into none of it. I have met one of those men. I have read about another.