August 23, 2019 • 37 mins
Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston for a reading of Chapter Seven of Robert's. 'The War on Everyone.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M what's making bad decisions my me? In the interim
between the six and the seventh chapter, Sophie stole the
case of Perrya that I was going to throw, so
I had to upgrade to a case of Lacroix, which
is roughly twice the size and mass. But before I
throw this Lacroix, which will come at the end of
(00:21):
our episode, I have a surprise thing that I'm gonna throw.
I found an open Yeah, didn't go everywhere, no, God
damn it. But now I've got a snack. I was
so excited what it was stealed pretty tight, thank you.
Sophie signaled that she had hidden the perry A underneath
(00:43):
a pillow. So now I'm gonna throw one of these two,
but I don't know which yet. But first, my coast,
I didn't introduce before throwing it things Katie stolen Cody Johnson.
That's right, that's who we are. We all just had
a snack attack in front of it. Cody is going
to be nomin sunflower seeds like Fox Molder in the
(01:04):
first several episodes of The X Files, but not after
that because they decided it was a bad thing character
to do. I were good change. It's not the best
thing to eat on. I guess there's there's absolutely nothing
that's good to eat on a microphone. No, but the
worst thing is probably sunflower seeds did the last time?
I know? Yesterday? I know, and I can already hear
(01:26):
the complaints the chapter seven the Digital Reich. Ye, yeah,
you know where that's going. In the years after the
Oklahoma City bombing, the white supremacist movement seemed to have
spent most of its fury. Nothing like Sea Drift occurred
in the late nineties. Nazi violence, when it happened, was
mostly focused around racist skinheads and groups like the White
(01:48):
Arean Resistance or the Hammerskin Nation. A group called the
Arian Republican Army robbed twenty two banks in the Midwest.
Several of them had ties to a Looham city, where
Tim McVeigh had also tried hide out after his attack.
But these and other eruptions of violence were dealt with
in short order. By the time the early two thousands
rolled along and the War on Terror kicked off, you
(02:09):
could be forgiven for thinking the white supermacist movement was
on its way out. Everything you Love will burn by
Vegas Tenhold chronicles the movement during this period. One of
the largest actions in these days was an eight man
march in Toledo by the National Socialist Movement. Putting it
together in march that large was the work of the
entire National organization, and they were so overwhelmed by counter
protesters that they never managed to take to the streets
(02:31):
and were back in Sea Drift. Lou Being met three
or four hundred kinsmen just to show up among town
of Texas. A two thousand and ten, the National Socialist
Movement held a gathering in Trent in New Jersey. Vegas
attended to chronicle the event, and the night before the march,
he was present when a group called Anti Racist Action
assaulted the Nazis as they ate dinner and a rented
meeting hall. The next day, the National Socialist Movement marched quote.
(02:53):
The entire route of the march was lined with National
Guard and riot police. They'd closed off every access point,
and no one was around to watch the Nazis trudge
along the wet streets while the rains soaked their black uniforms.
They arrived at a wide square in front of the
Capitol building. A few modest steps led up to the entrance,
and a small podium stood at the top. Police had
cordoned off the entire square in the distance the counterprotesters
had gathered. The police, fearing another showdown, kept them two
(03:14):
blocks away from the Nazis, just barely within shouting distance,
so the rally was reduced to a couple dozen neo
Nazis screaming obscenities at fifty or so anti racist down
the street, while the anti racist screamed right back. The
National Socialist Movement built itself as direct successors to George
Lincoln Rockwell's Party. In five years, they'd gone from being
able to make a nationwide gathering of eighty men down
to less than thirty. But looking at those numbers does
(03:37):
not give a full picture of the American fascist movement.
During this period, all the ability of old guard fascist
groups like the n s M and the Clan to
draw numbers had declined. The movement was deep in the
process of spreading to a new generation through new means.
In the last chapter, I mentioned John Ronson's Them. John's
book gives us a look at the movement in the
late nineteen nineties from the perspective of individuals like Alex Jones. Mr.
(03:59):
Jones first rose to prominence within the fringe right in
the middle late nineteen nineties, and his career illustrates the
first stages of what would grow to be known as
the alt right. Now on paper, Jones was a libertarian
or political independent who attacked Democrats and Republicans with equal vigor,
seeing both as agents of the nWo and the globalist elite.
You would not hear attacks on the Jews as an
(04:19):
ethnic group from Jones, nor would you see him sporting
a swastika. But if you dig in just a little bit,
there have always been connections between Alex Jones and the
fascist rite. At one point in Them, John tries to
infiltrate a meeting of the Builderberg Group with a writer
named Big Jim Tucker, editor of The Spotlight, Willis Carto's magazine.
Big Jim Tucker was a friend and a frequent guest
on Alex Jones's Info Wars in its early days. Like Jones,
(04:42):
Big Jim was obsessed with the Builderberg Group. He viewed
it as part of the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the globe.
Jones possessed the same beliefs, minus the j word. That
nineteen gathering at the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound
near Waco that I talked about in the last chapter
when John Ronson showed up with Randy Weaver will that
gag ring was a volunteer effort to rebuild the Branch
(05:02):
Davidian Church organized by twenty five year old Alex Jones.
He told the Oklahoman quote, We've had school teachers and
black single mothers, and auto mechanics and doctors. There was
even a Jewish rabbi out here one day helping us. Sure,
we've had folks in their camo and their camo hats,
and them with the malicious helping us too. One of
the men who gathered in Mount Carmel that day to
(05:22):
help Alex Jones was Colonel bow Gritz. Gritz was a
legendary figure in the Patriot movement, a decorated veteran, the
supposed inspiration behind the character John Rambo, and a hardcore
believer in Christian identity theology. In right before the Mount
Carmel meeting, he sent out this in an online bulletin
to his followers. Do you see the sign, the scent
of the stain and mark of the beast on America today,
(05:43):
Are you willing to submit and join the seed line
of Satan? Look to those who are openly Antichrist when
the world is promoting abortion, pornography, pedophilia, godless laws, adultery,
new wage, international banking, entertainment industry, and world publishing. Wherever
you find perversion of God's laws, you will find the
worship versa bow with their roots still in Babylonian mysticism.
So that's cool now. New age international banking, the entertainment industry,
(06:08):
and world publishing is a bit queer than just shouting Jews.
But beow Grits was more direct in a bulletin he
sent out a year later during the two thousand election, Jews,
feminists another liberal activists may install gore over an apathetic
moral majority. If so, runaway abortion, Antichrist, God and globalism
are certain. The first message was too subtle, YEA. Now
(06:29):
think about those messages as I read this quote that
Alex Jones as related in John Ronson's book Them, which
was said during that Mount Karmel meeting. The builder Burgers said,
Alex are the Roman Senate. It's a pyramid their way
up there below. Then you've got the I M. F
the World Bank, the United Nations, and then you've got
us down here, the cattle, the human resources, and Randy
Weaver is way out over there. See he left. They
(06:50):
hate that, so they scared the cattle back in the
pin See burn them out. I'm living in a place
where black helicopters a hundred and fifty miles south of
me are burning buildings, terrorizing people. And I'm the extremist
who says you're an extremist? I asked, that's Ronson speaking
the Anti Defamation League. He yelled, the A d L
or a bucket of black paint and a brush. They're
worse than the clan. They get massive funding from the globalist.
(07:10):
It doesn't matter if your girlfriend's Jewish, your little sister's Korean.
Anybody who wants to live free as a racist, the
A d L is the scum of the earth. Jones. Yeah,
Now he did a good job what he's trying to do. Yeah,
he's really succeeded. So these are more or less the
same beliefs that Alex Jones has been years broadcasting. The
millions of listeners around America in the late nineties and
(07:32):
early two thousand's viewed independently, Jones looks like a harmless
conspiracy theorist, but placed next to bou Grits, we can
see him for what he is, a way to ease
people into Christian identity style beliefs that lead inevitably to exterminationalist,
anti Semitic beliefs. Seventeen years later, I published a study
with the investigative journalism collective Belling Cat on how seventy
(07:54):
five fascist activists were initially red pilled to the cause.
My research was based on leaked internal converse nations where
these neo Nazis, klansmen, and other extremists discussed their ideological evolution.
Six of them credited Alex Jones with their red pilling.
That even had a name for it, taking the conspiracy pill.
There was an explicit understanding. Yeah, yeah, we call it
(08:16):
taking these conspiracy pill wild the things these people will
brag about. Yeah, yes, one user road, I don't give
a funk if you think it it being the secret
rulers of the world. Are aliens are not as long
as those aliens are Jewish at the end of the day. Yeah,
pretty explicit ridiculous obviously. Yeah, for those of us who
grew up online in the early OT. The last five
(08:37):
years or so have been a continuous dispiriting process of
watching outright fascist beliefs bubble up on places like Reddit
and four Chan. It seems at times as if the
Nazis had literally eaten the Internet we all knew and
loved as kids. This did not happen by accident. Alex
Jones is just one prong of a concerted digital power
grab that began before most of us knew the Internet existed.
In four Louis Biam used money he'd received from Robert
(08:58):
Matthews's order to beate liberty Net yeah, an international network
of code word access message boards. The goal of liberty
Net was to link the white power movement together. It
was used to spread recruitment materials, and its establishment allowed
the movement to switch tactics quickly, as was seen after St.
S Park. It also included personnel ads and pen pal programs,
which could be as innocuous as connecting races for social purposes.
(09:21):
Was also useful in planning crimes. The ternet allowed Beam
to send racist propaganda into places where it was illegal,
like Canada in Germany. After setting up liberty Net, Beam
wrote finally we're all going to be linked together at
one point in time. Imagine, if you will, all the
great minds of the patriotic Christian movement linked together and
joined the one computer. Imagine any patriot in the country
being able to call up and access these mines. You
(09:43):
are online with the Arian nation's brain trust. It is
here to serve the folk. It has been said that
knowledge is power, which it most assuredly is. The computer
offers to those who become proficient in its use, power
undreamed of by the rulers of the past. Yeah, that's
like the beginning of the yeah yeah, f wors go
back further than most people would mean, starts the wars.
(10:07):
Yeah yeah. Computers were not cheap in the nineteen eighties.
Beams work required the modern equivalent of tens of thousands
of dollars and seed money. A single Apple computer costs
two thousand dollars at the time. Without the order, none
of this would have been possible. And while law enforcement
was diligent about trying to track down all the rocket
launchers and machine guns and explosive spot with the orders
all gotten games, they barely seemed to notice the computer
(10:29):
equipment that Louis Bean had bought Yeah, weird about that
classic underestimation. After all, why would the nineteen FBI care
if some Apple two's wound up gifted to Nazis around
the country. How could that cause a problem? I don't know.
Yeah yeah. By slightly over a decade later, Nazi efforts
online had crystallized into a cohesive and effective digital Reich.
(10:50):
Fascists were some of the first people to effectively harness
the power of the Internet in an organized way. The
book Nation and Race, edited by Jeffrey Kaplan and Torbjorgo,
includes a chat after that delves into the state of
the online white power movement at this time. They cite
Walter Benjamin, a scholar who wrote an essay about how
new technology like photography was harnessed by Nazism. Mass movements
(11:11):
are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by
the naked eye. A bird's eye view best captures gatherings
of hundreds of thousands, and even though such of you
may be accessible to the human eyes, it is to
the camera. The image received by the eye cannot be
enlarged the way a negative is enlarged. While photographs and
film best captured the character of the original Nazi movement,
it's modern descendant is best captured online and countless conversations
(11:33):
and debates across message boards, image boards, YouTube's comments sections,
and the like. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing,
and in response to the effectiveness with which anti racist
street movements like Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice shut down fascist
street gatherings, the Internet became increasingly central to the development
of American fascism. You know what's not central to the
development of American fascism. It's an amploy It's the products
(11:58):
and services that support their show. Sophie's had a good
ad Segway, Sophie's saying I did well. Yeah, I liked it.
You guys excited about this? Candon Lacroix, I'm gonna throw
increasingly nervous. Well, increasingly nervous is the right way to
feel when product We're back, We're back, We're back, We're back.
(12:26):
In the early nineteen nineties, Milton John Climb Jr. Was
a twenty five year old studying at St. Cloud University.
His school provided him with a free use net account,
and one of his professors rather accidentally gave him the
listing where he came upon Alt Dot, Skinheads and the
o Nazi newsgroup. Milton was one of the first young
men to become radicalized into fascism through the Internet. Climb
grew obsessed, spending hours a day writing thousands of newsgroup
(12:49):
posts and emails. He'd become a coordinator for several digitally
inclined fascists. Climb graduated in n and shortly thereafter had
his first face to face encounter with a member of
the movement, Lynn Young, William Pierce's secretary. She gave Climb
a check for five hundred dollars, which he used to
buy a computer to continue his work. Now that he
was no longer at the university. Climb never again met
(13:11):
another Nazi in person, but he continued his activities and
later that year wrote an essay on digital strategy that
he posted to the Arian Crusader Library's website. In it,
he wrote that the internet quote offers enormous opportunity for
the Arian resistance to disseminate our message to the unaware
and the ignorant. It is the only relatively uncensored, free
forum mass medium which we have available. The state cannot
(13:32):
yet stop us from advertising our ideas and organizations now
was the time to grasp the weapon, which is the net,
and wield it skillfully and wisely, while you may still
do so freely. He was right, never stop posting, never
stop posting. Perfect forum for loan wolves. Yeah Yeah, loan
wolves in the mid nineteen nineties, using at an early
predecessor to modern forum culture, was where most online discussions occurred.
(13:56):
The most critical Nazi destinations head names like all dot Nationalism,
dot white, all dot revolution, dot counter, alt dot skinhead,
and as a prelude to eight Chans pullboard alt dot politics.
This is all very much in line with the ideas
that Bayham had laid out a decade earlier, but Climb
wanted to see his fellow fascists move on from their
digital safe spaces and become what he called cyber guerrillas. Quote.
(14:20):
He decided they should quote take up positions on mainstream
groups except on our groups. Avoid the race issue. Sidestep
at as much as possible. We don't have time to
defend our stance on this issue against the comments of
hundreds of fools, liars, and degenerates who spouting the Jewish
line will slaughter our message with half troops, slander, and
the ever used sophistry that will hide that power level.
(14:42):
Climb's writing is particularly fascinating to me for the similarity
as I see between it and the things have encountered
in my own explorations of modern online Nazi haven eight chan.
Near the end of his essay, Climb rights, all of
my comrades and I, none of whom have ever met
face to face, share a unique camaraderie feeling as though
we have been friends for a long time. Selfless cooperation
occurs regul lily amongst my comrades for a variety of endeavors.
(15:02):
This feeling of comradeship is irrespective of national identity or
state borders. Now they love the word comrade. You do,
they do? Everybody loves the word comrade. Now. What Climb
expressed there is not so different from what Pawe Synagogue
shooter John Ernest related in the eighth Chan post he
made announcing the start of his rampage. It's been real, dudes.
(15:24):
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything.
Keep up the infographic red pill threats. I've only been
lurking for a year and a half. What I've learned
here is priceless. It's been an honor. Yeah, always keep posting,
Always keep posting until we start shooting. Yeah, So climbs
last line about feeling comrades ship across national barriers would
prove to be an eerie premonition of the future of
(15:45):
the international fascist movement, because during the late nineties and
early two thousand's, the American fascist movement went international in
a way it never had been before. Even back in
the thirties and forties, Italian, German, and Spanish fascism were
all very different beasts. One side effective propagate and that
started emanating out of the U S. As a result
of Beam's Liberty Net was that all the world sundry
fascists started getting on the same page. I found a
(16:07):
two thousand to study by Les Black published in the
Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies. Les interviewed an Irish
fascist with the Internet handle white wolf Quote. During the
height of his involvement in the movement, he was spending
five hours a day online. He lives in an Irish
town where there are virtually no visible minorities. He was
drawn to the white power movement through a fascination with Nazism.
He concluded, mostly Americans are on the net, but there
(16:28):
are British, Irish, and lots of others from different countries.
The net breaks down the distance. A person who is
living on a two thousand acre farm in Australia and
had nobody to talk to about his views suddenly understands
that he can link people who would never have met
and talk with them, plan with them, learn and teach
one other things, help each other. Our Ozzie friend, who
may be well removed from the rest of his comrades,
can nevertheless play a part in forwarding the agenda of
(16:48):
a group. Racists love the Internet, Yeah, they do. People
love the Internet. People do love the Internet. Yeah, it's
like that's I mean, it's no matter who you are,
you can find your group online. And then you have
people actively trying to Yeah, he's saying all the good
things on the internet, but not saying the dark thing
(17:08):
use it to do what they do. It's like when
you like when you talk about like isis recruitment and stuff.
I've been thinking that this entire book about how upset
I keep saying terrorist, but yeah, it's like isis recruitment? Yeah,
same basic strategy, going after the same pool of people.
Seventeen years later, a young man who might very well
(17:29):
have been the Aussie friend that White Wolf was talking about.
Brendan Tarrant drove to a mosque in christ Church, New
Zealand and gunned down more than fifty people. Like white Wolf,
Brinton was a loner, spending hours a day online building
a sense of rapport with his far from digital comrades
and fascism before finally deciding to take action. Now, the
thing that really shocked me when I started digging into
(17:49):
this research was how damned groundbreaking the fascists were in
their understanding of what online culture would become and how
to manipulate it. I'm going to quote from that book
that I quoted from earlier Nation and Race quote. This
arena has spawned its own language, im combines previous forms
of right wing organizing with new political strategies. C and
G various really referred to as the cyber Nationalist Group,
(18:10):
cyber Nazi Group, or Computer Nationalist Group, is the brainchild
of activist Jeff Foss. In his article entitled the C
and G an Idea for Online organization, A Complete division
of Labors outlined that assigns operatives particular roles within an
overall strategy Voss makes a distinction between idea men and
men of action. The former provide background information for the
latter to post within usenet. This manifesto outlines four different
(18:32):
types of foreground operative d I s S. A subtle
disseminator of information, places it on FTP sites and makes
subtle references to endorsements of such info on news, usually
pretending to be a disinterested observer. A pirate, a person
who will pirate an account for a one shot high
saturation dissemination of propaganda. An impersonator who impersonates the enemy,
posting embarrassing the left, infuriating the enemy. And an infiltrator
(18:55):
who infiltrates the enemy camp shipped out their hands over there,
ye man. Fascists were some of the first folks to
develop a cohesive strategy around what they called flaming. As
early as the researchers into online extremism her to realize
(19:15):
that quote a common endpoint used by right wing activists
is the stylized disclaimer I am not a Nazi. Those
same researchers also noted the use of mail bombs or
software that allowed fascists to deluse your recipient and hundreds
upon hundreds of pieces of spam email in order to
make an opponent's account functionally unusable. Twenty one years later,
when I wrote my first article critical of eight chan
and the lead up to the two thousand and sixteen election,
(19:36):
my work count was deluged in a massive flow of
spam emails, which why I still get emails from homeschooling
dot com every day now. Wyatt Caldenberg was an internet
activist affiliated with Tom Metzger's White Arian Resistance or WAR.
We haven't talked much about them in this audio book
because I had to limit my focus somewhere. But Tom
(19:57):
was a major part of the skin head movement as
well as an associative the Order. Back in the nineteen seventies,
he worked with David Duke to help organize the clan
border Watch. Why It helped spread War's message online and
gained infamy as one of the first proponents for what
would come to be known as brigading, disrupting other online
communities in an organized way. Why It wrote this ought
to bey our new tactic. Instead of hanging out around
(20:17):
the four racist news groups, we can hit news groups
as a mob. We cannot win when we are out
numbered by Jews. But if we go in as a group,
we can win with the average Joe six pack post
fact about black crime. Give them your update numbers, web addresses,
push books, newspapers, Yeah, what Yer's up. Fascist groups like
the Carolinian lords of the CAUCUSUS started going into news
(20:38):
groups dedicated to loneliness and people who had just ended relationships.
They went into news groups for popular musicians, and even
the news group for Denny's, which might as well just
be a support group for lonely people. Raids like this
were often just for the purpose of harassment, but over
the years fascists got better and better at spreading their
ideology in this way. They quickly hit upon the tactic
of hiding their beliefs is humor, retreating behind the shield
(20:59):
of we're just joke when people responded badly to their
rants about Jewish people or black on black crime, like
Hitler did earlier did earlier, Yeah it all ties together.
Christian identity theology also spread online in this period. I
found an article in the Journal of Black Studies written
by Tiny Sharp in two thousand. She noted the Internet
has become a primary means for disseminating information for these groups. Currently,
(21:20):
there are twenty five websites and thirteen news groups devoted
specifically to identity Christianity on the Worldwide Web, as well
as a hundred thirty other websites that are devoted to
similar and related topics. Individuals can tap into these websites
and find procedures for making bombs, obtain hate propaganda tracks,
and request catalogs that market White supermancist books and paraphernalia.
So that's cool. It's very cool, very cool. You know
(21:43):
what's even cooler than spreading Christian identity theology online in
the year two thousand tons of stuff? Man, Yes, lots,
including the products and services that support our show. Could
I could I get some of those those nuts some seeds? Yes,
places nuts? Oh wait no, almost that was really effective.
(22:04):
I just want I'll have something, all right, SOPHI and
are going to do the exchange of the lacroix A.
You throw me the idle and all through you the whip.
I have the perry at every time we do this,
(22:32):
zeck or audio man looks back at me with this
bailful look. Just what are you doing to the recording?
Great idea, you're like lording over We're back, and I'm
(22:52):
a villain stroking a case of Perry as if it's
a cat, And what are you about to do to
that Perry? I'm going to throw it and it will
be the last time I can throw something, because we've
done it way too much in this this episode series.
It's fun in the room. I know it's going to
wear on people in the recording, but you can't. You
can't edit audio, you can't cut this stuff out. It
(23:13):
turns out you can. Nope. I'm undecided. Bit by bit
and almost entirely in a decentralized manner, the digital right
came together in the early two thousand's. Law enforcement was
not just helpless to do anything. It's debatable whether or
not they even realized what was happening. Most of their
online efforts were spent keeping track of known quantities with
(23:34):
long standing online ties like Don Black and its popular
fascist website Stormfront. Now Stormfront is important. Nearly a hundred
hate crime murders have been traced to the site, but
the FBI wasn't even particularly good at monitoring them, which
is why nearly a hundred murders were traced to site.
In July two nineteen in response to a foire request,
the Beer admitted that they had somehow lost almost all
(23:57):
of their files on Stormfront. Internal files on like white
supremacist movement be lost, not worth Yeah, I can't think
of a theory, right, Cody. It sounds like you're about
to accuse the FBI, the bureau of whom a member
(24:17):
heroically was present during the Greensboro massacre and didn't do
anything to stop it. That you're going to accuse that
FBI of acting to defend the storm Front. I don't
know what I was thinking. I took the conspiracy pill,
you know what. I think the FBI is good and
Bob Mueller is going to save us. I yeah, man,
(24:39):
you're it's gonna be all. Everything's gonna be real good.
It's gonna be great. And go away in handcuffs that guy. Yeah.
So the FBI only did a quarter ass job of
monitoring the most obvious Nazis online, and if that's the case,
it's probably not surprising that they completely failed to notice
when fascists started infiltrating communities on websites like four chain
and Reddit. It happened slowly, camouflaged an irony and humor.
(25:01):
As a young man I was only vaguely aware of
the change is taking place in the digital spaces I've
grown up around. Holocaust jokes became more common, so did
racist humor. More than just growing more frequent, these jokes
grew more specific, evolving from jibes about Jewish people being
stingy with money clearly inspired by South Park, uh two
memes about how Hitler did nothing wrong, and image macros
that repeated bad science about race and i Q. In
(25:23):
two thousand eighteen, I found an article on The Observer
by holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder, and it he comments on
the use of irony and humor by fascist mainstream Their
views quote what the twenty one century culture is introduced
is that nothing is really serious. And that is an
interestingly dangerous idea, because if nothing is serious, you can
have this ambiguity where you can actually be doing something
very serious but you're pretending not to and you can
(25:45):
always fall back and say, well, that was just a joke,
because everything is just a joke. But of course you
don't really believe that everything is just a joke, or
you wouldn't be promoting fascism or white supremacy or whatever
it may be. Yeah, that's well said. Yeah, Tim designer
knows his fucking ships art quote. That's that too. I
should have brought it up, because I can't. I don't
remember it, but it describes that sort of like you
(26:06):
say it and then when it's a little too far,
like yeah, stoke challenge and then they sort of walk away. Yeah.
Whether or not you laugh determines whether or not at
a side, I was joking, Yeah, Mr prank bro, just
a prank bro. Don't you have a sense of humor? Yeah?
Four things on the internet rather suddenly boiled over into
(26:26):
the cultural phenomenon known as gamer Gate. On its surface,
gamer gate was a reaction to corruption to video games journalism.
In reality, it was an eruption of white and male
supremacist hatred, an attack on modernity and liberalism by an
army of young men who believed they've been wrong by society.
There has not yet been a great deal of research
into whether or not there was an organized attempt by
the white power movement to co opt gamer Gate, but
(26:47):
there is ample evidence that the ideas of that movement
quickly made it into popular memes spread by gamer gators.
During my research, I came across the threat on the
website cetera, filled with other confused digital natives trying to
figure out just what the get happened with gamer Gate.
One user posted a series of memes he'd saved during
that time. In retrospect, they seem to show a progressive
descent into white nationalism. The first is a propaganda poster
(27:09):
featuring a cartoon mascot of four chance pollboard Polina, advising
the annons of poll on how to effectively aid the movement.
Polina is blonde haired and blued eyed. At the top
of the poster are the words who is that girl?
Blonde haired, blue eyes, fair skin? Why it must be Polina.
Another meme from further on on the collection is significantly Nazi.
Here it's based around an old labor movement political cartoon
(27:31):
pyramid of a modern capitalist system, showing laborers on the
very bottom being exploited by the classes above them. In
the gamer Gate adaptation, gamers are the bottom of the pyramid,
with games journalists above them, critical theorist social justice warriors
like Anita Sarkeesian above them, cultural Marxist academia above them,
and then fasts alone's a top represented by an Illuminati
(27:51):
eye symbol. We don't see explicit anti Semitism in this cartoon,
but it is there subtly in the caricature drawings of
Jewish video game critics. It's clear at this point that
some white power talking points had started to mutate to
better appeal to modern and extremely online youths. Yeah, especially
more effective because it's like that dork fantasy ship gamers. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
(28:14):
we're just joking. We're just joking, same like source of
resentment to that and yeah, something gravitate towards it's the
KKK do Loser stuff. Yeah, I know exactly, and it's
it's it's especially frustrating because it's so it is clear
that that's there is a connection there. Um, but because
(28:36):
it's a lot of image boards like four Chan, it
disappears really quickly. Um, so there's less record of that
time of the sort of the proto what's going on. Yeah,
we'll have all these up on our website behind the
Bastards dot com and of course the War on Everyone
dot Com, which I have not plugged enough in this series.
We're just we're just eventually the harassment of video game
(28:59):
journe Listen critics, most of whom were women grew severe
and illegal enough that four chan exiled its gamer gators.
Many of them migrated to eight chan, and over the
next several years they grew more radical and more explicitly fascist,
until eventually they were openly planning for how to cause
a new Holocaust. It's impossible to know how much of
the ironic fascist hip postings started off innocently and how
much of it was seated by white power activists, but
(29:21):
we know they were engaging in that behavior purposefully for
more than twenty years, and in the years after gamer Gate,
this work has paid dividends. The true danger of the
digital Reich was best expressed by Alex Curtis, the publisher
of an extremist neo Nazi magazine and self proclaimed lone
wolf of hate. In the early two thousands, he wrote
of his hope that quote some well placed arians will
one day cause some serious wreckage A thousand Timothy mcveigh's
(29:44):
would end any semblance of stability in this racially corrupt society.
There's got to find enough of lone wolves yep, connected
by some magic computer thing, some historical echo that won't
go away. Yah um continue. No, we have not yet
reached a thousands of Mathew mcphase thankfully. But we have
(30:05):
seen a market increase in the amount of right wing
domestic terror over the last several years. And yeah, yeah,
and it certainly seems to be driven largely by online radicalization.
Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter, was radicalized
in part on gab, social network for Nazis. He announced
the start of his rampage there. Six months later, the
Paways Synagogue shooter announced the start of his rampage on
a Chan, as had the christ shooters six weeks prior.
(30:28):
There are other names in the roll call of Internet
inspired fascist violence. The Adam Often terrorist group, responsible for
three murders so far, started off with extremely online Nazis
working to form a terror cell. In imitation of the
book Siege, written by James Mason, we talked briefly about
Mason and Siege at the start of this book. He
was a student of William Pierce, and Siege might thus
be understood as a more academic accompanying text to the
(30:49):
Turner Diaries, where the Diaries proposes fiction, Siege outlines and
strategic depth. Mason advocates for leaderless resistance and lone wolf
style attacks. The lone wolf cannot be detected, can not
be prevented, and seldom can be traced. If I were
asked by any one of my opinion on what to
look for or hope for next, I would tell them
a wave of killings or assassinations of system bureaucrats by
roving gunmen who have their strategy well mapped out in advance,
(31:11):
and while not impossible to stop. Early in two thousand nineteen,
Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Hasson was caught planning this exact
sort of attack. He had a cash of weapons and
AMMO and a kill list of journalists and Democratic politicians.
Hassan was obsessed with the manifesto of Anders Brevick, a
right wing shooter who murdered dozens of students in Newtoy
and Norway. We don't know when where he first came
into contact with that manifesto, but spreading it has been
(31:33):
a priority of online fascists for years. In the wake
of the christ Choot shooting, fascists have started spreading Brentan
Terrence manifesto as well. The Paways Synagogue shooters cited both
manifestos as inspirations for his attack. In his own rampage
thought on h CHAN the Poway shooters stated his desire
to beat Terrence high score. In this we see echoes
of Eric Harris, the Columbine shooter, who was obsessed with
(31:55):
beating Timothy mcphay's high score. Right now as I read this,
violent armed men and h ND's pole board in numerous
Discord chat rooms are plotting for WATTE that they might
beat their heroes and win a high score of their own.
On telegram. The Bowl Patrol, a group of young fascists
dedicated to Charleston Church shooter Dylan Rufe, celebrates sat Rufe
and fantasize about neuva acts of violence in his name.
(32:16):
The early Harvest and Blood These Young Men Will reap
was sewn by Louie Beam, William Pearce, and Bob Matthews. Now,
though there is no need for an organization to buy
up arms and plan terror attacks, the order proved to
be less resilient than the completely decentralized radicalization and killing
machine made possible by the advent of the Internet. The
Internet has given the White Power movement a steady supply
(32:36):
of armed and ready young killers, living cruise missiles who
strike unpredictably. It targets around the country bit by bit.
Their attacks chisel away at our sense of security, our
national stability, and our trust in each other. It took decades,
but Louis Beam and his comrades did bring the war
home to all of us and against all of us. Yeah.
Cool chapter. Yeah, it's just it's just the game of
(33:08):
thing is so interesting. Yeah, and and and apparent it's
like gamers, but like there's that element that it that
it's drawn to. And like with the Donny Field shooting
live streaming it like that's you're you're broadcasting a video game. Yeah, exactly,
You're trying to make it look like Call of Duty
and then you get the high score talk and then
(33:28):
it accelerates it even more horrifying to see it all
laid out so linear like this. The single biggest surprise
to me and researching this was when I came upon
the fact that um Eric Harris had specifically stated his
desire to beat Timothy mcveigh's kill count, like realizing like, oh,
that part it's the same thing, like it really all
(33:48):
of it, like the like that's the probably look at
this so much is like separated and like even as
far back as like the fact that like the Nazis
trying to recruit kids on the Internet, Like one of
the guys doing that had his computer bought for him
by William Pierce's National Alliance, the guy who wrote The
Turner Diaries, the book which inspired Timothy McVeigh, which inspired
Eric Harris, which inspired seventy nine other mass shooters. Like yeah,
(34:11):
it's a whole it's a whole web. It's really hard
to it's really hard to describe to lay out because
there's so much I had to leave out, Like I
could I could have done this whole thing about I
could have done a whole seven part episode on like
Alex Jones's ties to explicit terrorists. Like that's the one
of the most frustrating things because it's like once you
once you see it, it's not you see it everywhere.
Once you see it, you see it where it is,
(34:33):
you realize how big it is. Yeah yeah, um, and
it's yeah, it's so upsetting. It is upsetting. What's even
more upsetting is that it's time for me to throw
the peria or yeah, yeah, you better move away from
that point because that's where I'm gonna check it at
no it's okay, it's okay, al right, guys, Cody, I
(34:55):
need you to get close to your microphone and describe
this as I do it. No one seems thrilled about it.
Sophie's hiding it's not really hot, and she just sort
of like sleeping. Oh I'm looking through the chair. I'm
really not doing a great job. Robert stood up, two
hands on the perry a winding up, taking a few breaths,
(35:18):
throwing it. Three hands fell out. Hay shouted. That was
so anti climactic. Well, it popped. It's just a new
way to open up a box, a little of perry. Yeah,
it worked. Now we have one for everybody. I dare
you to open it all if you're worried. Was for nothing?
Did you film it? There's one for each of us.
Here we go. I don't want one, Yeah, I just
(35:41):
prefer throwing it. Oh yeah, pretty, you should open it now, though,
I mean to see nothing complete disappointing about this has
been disappointing except for you, Robert, refreshing and your work. Well,
can I have some good you know what? Yeah, in
(36:05):
the moment, I'm going to close it real quick. Get
Cody closes things really meticulously and well, so I'm not
surprised that it didn't open when you threw it against
the wall. You're gonna make sure it's closed. What I'm
surprised about is what good audio content our choices in
(36:26):
this eight part seven parts, Cody dropped a bunch out
of the bag. I got them. It's fine. Well, guys,
I don't really want to. I just want everybody to read.
I guess you already listened to the book. People to
read the book. It's a topic that everybody aware of.
(36:47):
I don't know. I'm really glad we did this. I'm
glad we did this too. I wish we hated myself
during it. Yeah, yeah, I didn't smoke earlier. But I
wish we didn't smoke earlier too. But you know, we
all learned things. We take these just like I apologize,
let's not say just like nope, just like Louis Speed. Okay,
(37:08):
that's I guess what we learned. So some more news.
Name is Cody, and my name's behind the Bastards dot com,
the website where you can find the sources for this podcast.
You can also find it on the War on Everyone
dot com. You can buy shirts on to public dot
(37:29):
com by looking for behind the Bastards. We have a
Twitter at at bastards pod and an Instagram at the
same name, disgusted. So you're proud. Oh yeah, because I
remember too. Finally either at all. Well, guys, time to
go online. Yeah. I just threw some seeds at coding.
(37:50):
The episode is done.
M what's making bad decisions my me? In the interim
between the six and the seventh chapter, Sophie stole the
case of Perrya that I was going to throw, so
I had to upgrade to a case of Lacroix, which
is roughly twice the size and mass. But before I
throw this Lacroix, which will come at the end of
(00:21):
our episode, I have a surprise thing that I'm gonna throw.
I found an open Yeah, didn't go everywhere, no, God
damn it. But now I've got a snack. I was
so excited what it was stealed pretty tight, thank you.
Sophie signaled that she had hidden the perry A underneath
(00:43):
a pillow. So now I'm gonna throw one of these two,
but I don't know which yet. But first, my coast,
I didn't introduce before throwing it things Katie stolen Cody Johnson.
That's right, that's who we are. We all just had
a snack attack in front of it. Cody is going
to be nomin sunflower seeds like Fox Molder in the
(01:04):
first several episodes of The X Files, but not after
that because they decided it was a bad thing character
to do. I were good change. It's not the best
thing to eat on. I guess there's there's absolutely nothing
that's good to eat on a microphone. No, but the
worst thing is probably sunflower seeds did the last time?
I know? Yesterday? I know, and I can already hear
(01:26):
the complaints the chapter seven the Digital Reich. Ye, yeah,
you know where that's going. In the years after the
Oklahoma City bombing, the white supremacist movement seemed to have
spent most of its fury. Nothing like Sea Drift occurred
in the late nineties. Nazi violence, when it happened, was
mostly focused around racist skinheads and groups like the White
(01:48):
Arean Resistance or the Hammerskin Nation. A group called the
Arian Republican Army robbed twenty two banks in the Midwest.
Several of them had ties to a Looham city, where
Tim McVeigh had also tried hide out after his attack.
But these and other eruptions of violence were dealt with
in short order. By the time the early two thousands
rolled along and the War on Terror kicked off, you
(02:09):
could be forgiven for thinking the white supermacist movement was
on its way out. Everything you Love will burn by
Vegas Tenhold chronicles the movement during this period. One of
the largest actions in these days was an eight man
march in Toledo by the National Socialist Movement. Putting it
together in march that large was the work of the
entire National organization, and they were so overwhelmed by counter
protesters that they never managed to take to the streets
(02:31):
and were back in Sea Drift. Lou Being met three
or four hundred kinsmen just to show up among town
of Texas. A two thousand and ten, the National Socialist
Movement held a gathering in Trent in New Jersey. Vegas
attended to chronicle the event, and the night before the march,
he was present when a group called Anti Racist Action
assaulted the Nazis as they ate dinner and a rented
meeting hall. The next day, the National Socialist Movement marched quote.
(02:53):
The entire route of the march was lined with National
Guard and riot police. They'd closed off every access point,
and no one was around to watch the Nazis trudge
along the wet streets while the rains soaked their black uniforms.
They arrived at a wide square in front of the
Capitol building. A few modest steps led up to the entrance,
and a small podium stood at the top. Police had
cordoned off the entire square in the distance the counterprotesters
had gathered. The police, fearing another showdown, kept them two
(03:14):
blocks away from the Nazis, just barely within shouting distance,
so the rally was reduced to a couple dozen neo
Nazis screaming obscenities at fifty or so anti racist down
the street, while the anti racist screamed right back. The
National Socialist Movement built itself as direct successors to George
Lincoln Rockwell's Party. In five years, they'd gone from being
able to make a nationwide gathering of eighty men down
to less than thirty. But looking at those numbers does
(03:37):
not give a full picture of the American fascist movement.
During this period, all the ability of old guard fascist
groups like the n s M and the Clan to
draw numbers had declined. The movement was deep in the
process of spreading to a new generation through new means.
In the last chapter, I mentioned John Ronson's Them. John's
book gives us a look at the movement in the
late nineteen nineties from the perspective of individuals like Alex Jones. Mr.
(03:59):
Jones first rose to prominence within the fringe right in
the middle late nineteen nineties, and his career illustrates the
first stages of what would grow to be known as
the alt right. Now on paper, Jones was a libertarian
or political independent who attacked Democrats and Republicans with equal vigor,
seeing both as agents of the nWo and the globalist elite.
You would not hear attacks on the Jews as an
(04:19):
ethnic group from Jones, nor would you see him sporting
a swastika. But if you dig in just a little bit,
there have always been connections between Alex Jones and the
fascist rite. At one point in Them, John tries to
infiltrate a meeting of the Builderberg Group with a writer
named Big Jim Tucker, editor of The Spotlight, Willis Carto's magazine.
Big Jim Tucker was a friend and a frequent guest
on Alex Jones's Info Wars in its early days. Like Jones,
(04:42):
Big Jim was obsessed with the Builderberg Group. He viewed
it as part of the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the globe.
Jones possessed the same beliefs, minus the j word. That
nineteen gathering at the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound
near Waco that I talked about in the last chapter
when John Ronson showed up with Randy Weaver will that
gag ring was a volunteer effort to rebuild the Branch
(05:02):
Davidian Church organized by twenty five year old Alex Jones.
He told the Oklahoman quote, We've had school teachers and
black single mothers, and auto mechanics and doctors. There was
even a Jewish rabbi out here one day helping us. Sure,
we've had folks in their camo and their camo hats,
and them with the malicious helping us too. One of
the men who gathered in Mount Carmel that day to
(05:22):
help Alex Jones was Colonel bow Gritz. Gritz was a
legendary figure in the Patriot movement, a decorated veteran, the
supposed inspiration behind the character John Rambo, and a hardcore
believer in Christian identity theology. In right before the Mount
Carmel meeting, he sent out this in an online bulletin
to his followers. Do you see the sign, the scent
of the stain and mark of the beast on America today,
(05:43):
Are you willing to submit and join the seed line
of Satan? Look to those who are openly Antichrist when
the world is promoting abortion, pornography, pedophilia, godless laws, adultery,
new wage, international banking, entertainment industry, and world publishing. Wherever
you find perversion of God's laws, you will find the
worship versa bow with their roots still in Babylonian mysticism.
So that's cool now. New age international banking, the entertainment industry,
(06:08):
and world publishing is a bit queer than just shouting Jews.
But beow Grits was more direct in a bulletin he
sent out a year later during the two thousand election, Jews,
feminists another liberal activists may install gore over an apathetic
moral majority. If so, runaway abortion, Antichrist, God and globalism
are certain. The first message was too subtle, YEA. Now
(06:29):
think about those messages as I read this quote that
Alex Jones as related in John Ronson's book Them, which
was said during that Mount Karmel meeting. The builder Burgers said,
Alex are the Roman Senate. It's a pyramid their way
up there below. Then you've got the I M. F
the World Bank, the United Nations, and then you've got
us down here, the cattle, the human resources, and Randy
Weaver is way out over there. See he left. They
(06:50):
hate that, so they scared the cattle back in the
pin See burn them out. I'm living in a place
where black helicopters a hundred and fifty miles south of
me are burning buildings, terrorizing people. And I'm the extremist
who says you're an extremist? I asked, that's Ronson speaking
the Anti Defamation League. He yelled, the A d L
or a bucket of black paint and a brush. They're
worse than the clan. They get massive funding from the globalist.
(07:10):
It doesn't matter if your girlfriend's Jewish, your little sister's Korean.
Anybody who wants to live free as a racist, the
A d L is the scum of the earth. Jones. Yeah,
Now he did a good job what he's trying to do. Yeah,
he's really succeeded. So these are more or less the
same beliefs that Alex Jones has been years broadcasting. The
millions of listeners around America in the late nineties and
(07:32):
early two thousand's viewed independently, Jones looks like a harmless
conspiracy theorist, but placed next to bou Grits, we can
see him for what he is, a way to ease
people into Christian identity style beliefs that lead inevitably to exterminationalist,
anti Semitic beliefs. Seventeen years later, I published a study
with the investigative journalism collective Belling Cat on how seventy
(07:54):
five fascist activists were initially red pilled to the cause.
My research was based on leaked internal converse nations where
these neo Nazis, klansmen, and other extremists discussed their ideological evolution.
Six of them credited Alex Jones with their red pilling.
That even had a name for it, taking the conspiracy pill.
There was an explicit understanding. Yeah, yeah, we call it
(08:16):
taking these conspiracy pill wild the things these people will
brag about. Yeah, yes, one user road, I don't give
a funk if you think it it being the secret
rulers of the world. Are aliens are not as long
as those aliens are Jewish at the end of the day. Yeah,
pretty explicit ridiculous obviously. Yeah, for those of us who
grew up online in the early OT. The last five
(08:37):
years or so have been a continuous dispiriting process of
watching outright fascist beliefs bubble up on places like Reddit
and four Chan. It seems at times as if the
Nazis had literally eaten the Internet we all knew and
loved as kids. This did not happen by accident. Alex
Jones is just one prong of a concerted digital power
grab that began before most of us knew the Internet existed.
In four Louis Biam used money he'd received from Robert
(08:58):
Matthews's order to beate liberty Net yeah, an international network
of code word access message boards. The goal of liberty
Net was to link the white power movement together. It
was used to spread recruitment materials, and its establishment allowed
the movement to switch tactics quickly, as was seen after St.
S Park. It also included personnel ads and pen pal programs,
which could be as innocuous as connecting races for social purposes.
(09:21):
Was also useful in planning crimes. The ternet allowed Beam
to send racist propaganda into places where it was illegal,
like Canada in Germany. After setting up liberty Net, Beam
wrote finally we're all going to be linked together at
one point in time. Imagine, if you will, all the
great minds of the patriotic Christian movement linked together and
joined the one computer. Imagine any patriot in the country
being able to call up and access these mines. You
(09:43):
are online with the Arian nation's brain trust. It is
here to serve the folk. It has been said that
knowledge is power, which it most assuredly is. The computer
offers to those who become proficient in its use, power
undreamed of by the rulers of the past. Yeah, that's
like the beginning of the yeah yeah, f wors go
back further than most people would mean, starts the wars.
(10:07):
Yeah yeah. Computers were not cheap in the nineteen eighties.
Beams work required the modern equivalent of tens of thousands
of dollars and seed money. A single Apple computer costs
two thousand dollars at the time. Without the order, none
of this would have been possible. And while law enforcement
was diligent about trying to track down all the rocket
launchers and machine guns and explosive spot with the orders
all gotten games, they barely seemed to notice the computer
(10:29):
equipment that Louis Bean had bought Yeah, weird about that
classic underestimation. After all, why would the nineteen FBI care
if some Apple two's wound up gifted to Nazis around
the country. How could that cause a problem? I don't know.
Yeah yeah. By slightly over a decade later, Nazi efforts
online had crystallized into a cohesive and effective digital Reich.
(10:50):
Fascists were some of the first people to effectively harness
the power of the Internet in an organized way. The
book Nation and Race, edited by Jeffrey Kaplan and Torbjorgo,
includes a chat after that delves into the state of
the online white power movement at this time. They cite
Walter Benjamin, a scholar who wrote an essay about how
new technology like photography was harnessed by Nazism. Mass movements
(11:11):
are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by
the naked eye. A bird's eye view best captures gatherings
of hundreds of thousands, and even though such of you
may be accessible to the human eyes, it is to
the camera. The image received by the eye cannot be
enlarged the way a negative is enlarged. While photographs and
film best captured the character of the original Nazi movement,
it's modern descendant is best captured online and countless conversations
(11:33):
and debates across message boards, image boards, YouTube's comments sections,
and the like. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing,
and in response to the effectiveness with which anti racist
street movements like Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice shut down fascist
street gatherings, the Internet became increasingly central to the development
of American fascism. You know what's not central to the
development of American fascism. It's an amploy It's the products
(11:58):
and services that support their show. Sophie's had a good
ad Segway, Sophie's saying I did well. Yeah, I liked it.
You guys excited about this? Candon Lacroix, I'm gonna throw
increasingly nervous. Well, increasingly nervous is the right way to
feel when product We're back, We're back, We're back, We're back.
(12:26):
In the early nineteen nineties, Milton John Climb Jr. Was
a twenty five year old studying at St. Cloud University.
His school provided him with a free use net account,
and one of his professors rather accidentally gave him the
listing where he came upon Alt Dot, Skinheads and the
o Nazi newsgroup. Milton was one of the first young
men to become radicalized into fascism through the Internet. Climb
grew obsessed, spending hours a day writing thousands of newsgroup
(12:49):
posts and emails. He'd become a coordinator for several digitally
inclined fascists. Climb graduated in n and shortly thereafter had
his first face to face encounter with a member of
the movement, Lynn Young, William Pierce's secretary. She gave Climb
a check for five hundred dollars, which he used to
buy a computer to continue his work. Now that he
was no longer at the university. Climb never again met
(13:11):
another Nazi in person, but he continued his activities and
later that year wrote an essay on digital strategy that
he posted to the Arian Crusader Library's website. In it,
he wrote that the internet quote offers enormous opportunity for
the Arian resistance to disseminate our message to the unaware
and the ignorant. It is the only relatively uncensored, free
forum mass medium which we have available. The state cannot
(13:32):
yet stop us from advertising our ideas and organizations now
was the time to grasp the weapon, which is the net,
and wield it skillfully and wisely, while you may still
do so freely. He was right, never stop posting, never
stop posting. Perfect forum for loan wolves. Yeah Yeah, loan
wolves in the mid nineteen nineties, using at an early
predecessor to modern forum culture, was where most online discussions occurred.
(13:56):
The most critical Nazi destinations head names like all dot Nationalism,
dot white, all dot revolution, dot counter, alt dot skinhead,
and as a prelude to eight Chans pullboard alt dot politics.
This is all very much in line with the ideas
that Bayham had laid out a decade earlier, but Climb
wanted to see his fellow fascists move on from their
digital safe spaces and become what he called cyber guerrillas. Quote.
(14:20):
He decided they should quote take up positions on mainstream
groups except on our groups. Avoid the race issue. Sidestep
at as much as possible. We don't have time to
defend our stance on this issue against the comments of
hundreds of fools, liars, and degenerates who spouting the Jewish
line will slaughter our message with half troops, slander, and
the ever used sophistry that will hide that power level.
(14:42):
Climb's writing is particularly fascinating to me for the similarity
as I see between it and the things have encountered
in my own explorations of modern online Nazi haven eight chan.
Near the end of his essay, Climb rights, all of
my comrades and I, none of whom have ever met
face to face, share a unique camaraderie feeling as though
we have been friends for a long time. Selfless cooperation
occurs regul lily amongst my comrades for a variety of endeavors.
(15:02):
This feeling of comradeship is irrespective of national identity or
state borders. Now they love the word comrade. You do,
they do? Everybody loves the word comrade. Now. What Climb
expressed there is not so different from what Pawe Synagogue
shooter John Ernest related in the eighth Chan post he
made announcing the start of his rampage. It's been real, dudes.
(15:24):
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything.
Keep up the infographic red pill threats. I've only been
lurking for a year and a half. What I've learned
here is priceless. It's been an honor. Yeah, always keep posting,
Always keep posting until we start shooting. Yeah, So climbs
last line about feeling comrades ship across national barriers would
prove to be an eerie premonition of the future of
(15:45):
the international fascist movement, because during the late nineties and
early two thousand's, the American fascist movement went international in
a way it never had been before. Even back in
the thirties and forties, Italian, German, and Spanish fascism were
all very different beasts. One side effective propagate and that
started emanating out of the U S. As a result
of Beam's Liberty Net was that all the world sundry
fascists started getting on the same page. I found a
(16:07):
two thousand to study by Les Black published in the
Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies. Les interviewed an Irish
fascist with the Internet handle white wolf Quote. During the
height of his involvement in the movement, he was spending
five hours a day online. He lives in an Irish
town where there are virtually no visible minorities. He was
drawn to the white power movement through a fascination with Nazism.
He concluded, mostly Americans are on the net, but there
(16:28):
are British, Irish, and lots of others from different countries.
The net breaks down the distance. A person who is
living on a two thousand acre farm in Australia and
had nobody to talk to about his views suddenly understands
that he can link people who would never have met
and talk with them, plan with them, learn and teach
one other things, help each other. Our Ozzie friend, who
may be well removed from the rest of his comrades,
can nevertheless play a part in forwarding the agenda of
(16:48):
a group. Racists love the Internet, Yeah, they do. People
love the Internet. People do love the Internet. Yeah, it's
like that's I mean, it's no matter who you are,
you can find your group online. And then you have
people actively trying to Yeah, he's saying all the good
things on the internet, but not saying the dark thing
(17:08):
use it to do what they do. It's like when
you like when you talk about like isis recruitment and stuff.
I've been thinking that this entire book about how upset
I keep saying terrorist, but yeah, it's like isis recruitment? Yeah,
same basic strategy, going after the same pool of people.
Seventeen years later, a young man who might very well
(17:29):
have been the Aussie friend that White Wolf was talking about.
Brendan Tarrant drove to a mosque in christ Church, New
Zealand and gunned down more than fifty people. Like white Wolf,
Brinton was a loner, spending hours a day online building
a sense of rapport with his far from digital comrades
and fascism before finally deciding to take action. Now, the
thing that really shocked me when I started digging into
(17:49):
this research was how damned groundbreaking the fascists were in
their understanding of what online culture would become and how
to manipulate it. I'm going to quote from that book
that I quoted from earlier Nation and Race quote. This
arena has spawned its own language, im combines previous forms
of right wing organizing with new political strategies. C and
G various really referred to as the cyber Nationalist Group,
(18:10):
cyber Nazi Group, or Computer Nationalist Group, is the brainchild
of activist Jeff Foss. In his article entitled the C
and G an Idea for Online organization, A Complete division
of Labors outlined that assigns operatives particular roles within an
overall strategy Voss makes a distinction between idea men and
men of action. The former provide background information for the
latter to post within usenet. This manifesto outlines four different
(18:32):
types of foreground operative d I s S. A subtle
disseminator of information, places it on FTP sites and makes
subtle references to endorsements of such info on news, usually
pretending to be a disinterested observer. A pirate, a person
who will pirate an account for a one shot high
saturation dissemination of propaganda. An impersonator who impersonates the enemy,
posting embarrassing the left, infuriating the enemy. And an infiltrator
(18:55):
who infiltrates the enemy camp shipped out their hands over there,
ye man. Fascists were some of the first folks to
develop a cohesive strategy around what they called flaming. As
early as the researchers into online extremism her to realize
(19:15):
that quote a common endpoint used by right wing activists
is the stylized disclaimer I am not a Nazi. Those
same researchers also noted the use of mail bombs or
software that allowed fascists to deluse your recipient and hundreds
upon hundreds of pieces of spam email in order to
make an opponent's account functionally unusable. Twenty one years later,
when I wrote my first article critical of eight chan
and the lead up to the two thousand and sixteen election,
(19:36):
my work count was deluged in a massive flow of
spam emails, which why I still get emails from homeschooling
dot com every day now. Wyatt Caldenberg was an internet
activist affiliated with Tom Metzger's White Arian Resistance or WAR.
We haven't talked much about them in this audio book
because I had to limit my focus somewhere. But Tom
(19:57):
was a major part of the skin head movement as
well as an associative the Order. Back in the nineteen seventies,
he worked with David Duke to help organize the clan
border Watch. Why It helped spread War's message online and
gained infamy as one of the first proponents for what
would come to be known as brigading, disrupting other online
communities in an organized way. Why It wrote this ought
to bey our new tactic. Instead of hanging out around
(20:17):
the four racist news groups, we can hit news groups
as a mob. We cannot win when we are out
numbered by Jews. But if we go in as a group,
we can win with the average Joe six pack post
fact about black crime. Give them your update numbers, web addresses,
push books, newspapers, Yeah, what Yer's up. Fascist groups like
the Carolinian lords of the CAUCUSUS started going into news
(20:38):
groups dedicated to loneliness and people who had just ended relationships.
They went into news groups for popular musicians, and even
the news group for Denny's, which might as well just
be a support group for lonely people. Raids like this
were often just for the purpose of harassment, but over
the years fascists got better and better at spreading their
ideology in this way. They quickly hit upon the tactic
of hiding their beliefs is humor, retreating behind the shield
(20:59):
of we're just joke when people responded badly to their
rants about Jewish people or black on black crime, like
Hitler did earlier did earlier, Yeah it all ties together.
Christian identity theology also spread online in this period. I
found an article in the Journal of Black Studies written
by Tiny Sharp in two thousand. She noted the Internet
has become a primary means for disseminating information for these groups. Currently,
(21:20):
there are twenty five websites and thirteen news groups devoted
specifically to identity Christianity on the Worldwide Web, as well
as a hundred thirty other websites that are devoted to
similar and related topics. Individuals can tap into these websites
and find procedures for making bombs, obtain hate propaganda tracks,
and request catalogs that market White supermancist books and paraphernalia.
So that's cool. It's very cool, very cool. You know
(21:43):
what's even cooler than spreading Christian identity theology online in
the year two thousand tons of stuff? Man, Yes, lots,
including the products and services that support our show. Could
I could I get some of those those nuts some seeds? Yes,
places nuts? Oh wait no, almost that was really effective.
(22:04):
I just want I'll have something, all right, SOPHI and
are going to do the exchange of the lacroix A.
You throw me the idle and all through you the whip.
I have the perry at every time we do this,
(22:32):
zeck or audio man looks back at me with this
bailful look. Just what are you doing to the recording?
Great idea, you're like lording over We're back, and I'm
(22:52):
a villain stroking a case of Perry as if it's
a cat, And what are you about to do to
that Perry? I'm going to throw it and it will
be the last time I can throw something, because we've
done it way too much in this this episode series.
It's fun in the room. I know it's going to
wear on people in the recording, but you can't. You
can't edit audio, you can't cut this stuff out. It
(23:13):
turns out you can. Nope. I'm undecided. Bit by bit
and almost entirely in a decentralized manner, the digital right
came together in the early two thousand's. Law enforcement was
not just helpless to do anything. It's debatable whether or
not they even realized what was happening. Most of their
online efforts were spent keeping track of known quantities with
(23:34):
long standing online ties like Don Black and its popular
fascist website Stormfront. Now Stormfront is important. Nearly a hundred
hate crime murders have been traced to the site, but
the FBI wasn't even particularly good at monitoring them, which
is why nearly a hundred murders were traced to site.
In July two nineteen in response to a foire request,
the Beer admitted that they had somehow lost almost all
(23:57):
of their files on Stormfront. Internal files on like white
supremacist movement be lost, not worth Yeah, I can't think
of a theory, right, Cody. It sounds like you're about
to accuse the FBI, the bureau of whom a member
(24:17):
heroically was present during the Greensboro massacre and didn't do
anything to stop it. That you're going to accuse that
FBI of acting to defend the storm Front. I don't
know what I was thinking. I took the conspiracy pill,
you know what. I think the FBI is good and
Bob Mueller is going to save us. I yeah, man,
(24:39):
you're it's gonna be all. Everything's gonna be real good.
It's gonna be great. And go away in handcuffs that guy. Yeah.
So the FBI only did a quarter ass job of
monitoring the most obvious Nazis online, and if that's the case,
it's probably not surprising that they completely failed to notice
when fascists started infiltrating communities on websites like four chain
and Reddit. It happened slowly, camouflaged an irony and humor.
(25:01):
As a young man I was only vaguely aware of
the change is taking place in the digital spaces I've
grown up around. Holocaust jokes became more common, so did
racist humor. More than just growing more frequent, these jokes
grew more specific, evolving from jibes about Jewish people being
stingy with money clearly inspired by South Park, uh two
memes about how Hitler did nothing wrong, and image macros
that repeated bad science about race and i Q. In
(25:23):
two thousand eighteen, I found an article on The Observer
by holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder, and it he comments on
the use of irony and humor by fascist mainstream Their
views quote what the twenty one century culture is introduced
is that nothing is really serious. And that is an
interestingly dangerous idea, because if nothing is serious, you can
have this ambiguity where you can actually be doing something
very serious but you're pretending not to and you can
(25:45):
always fall back and say, well, that was just a joke,
because everything is just a joke. But of course you
don't really believe that everything is just a joke, or
you wouldn't be promoting fascism or white supremacy or whatever
it may be. Yeah, that's well said. Yeah, Tim designer
knows his fucking ships art quote. That's that too. I
should have brought it up, because I can't. I don't
remember it, but it describes that sort of like you
(26:06):
say it and then when it's a little too far,
like yeah, stoke challenge and then they sort of walk away. Yeah.
Whether or not you laugh determines whether or not at
a side, I was joking, Yeah, Mr prank bro, just
a prank bro. Don't you have a sense of humor? Yeah?
Four things on the internet rather suddenly boiled over into
(26:26):
the cultural phenomenon known as gamer Gate. On its surface,
gamer gate was a reaction to corruption to video games journalism.
In reality, it was an eruption of white and male
supremacist hatred, an attack on modernity and liberalism by an
army of young men who believed they've been wrong by society.
There has not yet been a great deal of research
into whether or not there was an organized attempt by
the white power movement to co opt gamer Gate, but
(26:47):
there is ample evidence that the ideas of that movement
quickly made it into popular memes spread by gamer gators.
During my research, I came across the threat on the
website cetera, filled with other confused digital natives trying to
figure out just what the get happened with gamer Gate.
One user posted a series of memes he'd saved during
that time. In retrospect, they seem to show a progressive
descent into white nationalism. The first is a propaganda poster
(27:09):
featuring a cartoon mascot of four chance pollboard Polina, advising
the annons of poll on how to effectively aid the movement.
Polina is blonde haired and blued eyed. At the top
of the poster are the words who is that girl?
Blonde haired, blue eyes, fair skin? Why it must be Polina.
Another meme from further on on the collection is significantly Nazi.
Here it's based around an old labor movement political cartoon
(27:31):
pyramid of a modern capitalist system, showing laborers on the
very bottom being exploited by the classes above them. In
the gamer Gate adaptation, gamers are the bottom of the pyramid,
with games journalists above them, critical theorist social justice warriors
like Anita Sarkeesian above them, cultural Marxist academia above them,
and then fasts alone's a top represented by an Illuminati
(27:51):
eye symbol. We don't see explicit anti Semitism in this cartoon,
but it is there subtly in the caricature drawings of
Jewish video game critics. It's clear at this point that
some white power talking points had started to mutate to
better appeal to modern and extremely online youths. Yeah, especially
more effective because it's like that dork fantasy ship gamers. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
(28:14):
we're just joking. We're just joking, same like source of
resentment to that and yeah, something gravitate towards it's the
KKK do Loser stuff. Yeah, I know exactly, and it's
it's it's especially frustrating because it's so it is clear
that that's there is a connection there. Um, but because
(28:36):
it's a lot of image boards like four Chan, it
disappears really quickly. Um, so there's less record of that
time of the sort of the proto what's going on. Yeah,
we'll have all these up on our website behind the
Bastards dot com and of course the War on Everyone
dot Com, which I have not plugged enough in this series.
We're just we're just eventually the harassment of video game
(28:59):
journe Listen critics, most of whom were women grew severe
and illegal enough that four chan exiled its gamer gators.
Many of them migrated to eight chan, and over the
next several years they grew more radical and more explicitly fascist,
until eventually they were openly planning for how to cause
a new Holocaust. It's impossible to know how much of
the ironic fascist hip postings started off innocently and how
much of it was seated by white power activists, but
(29:21):
we know they were engaging in that behavior purposefully for
more than twenty years, and in the years after gamer Gate,
this work has paid dividends. The true danger of the
digital Reich was best expressed by Alex Curtis, the publisher
of an extremist neo Nazi magazine and self proclaimed lone
wolf of hate. In the early two thousands, he wrote
of his hope that quote some well placed arians will
one day cause some serious wreckage A thousand Timothy mcveigh's
(29:44):
would end any semblance of stability in this racially corrupt society.
There's got to find enough of lone wolves yep, connected
by some magic computer thing, some historical echo that won't
go away. Yah um continue. No, we have not yet
reached a thousands of Mathew mcphase thankfully. But we have
(30:05):
seen a market increase in the amount of right wing
domestic terror over the last several years. And yeah, yeah,
and it certainly seems to be driven largely by online radicalization.
Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter, was radicalized
in part on gab, social network for Nazis. He announced
the start of his rampage there. Six months later, the
Paways Synagogue shooter announced the start of his rampage on
a Chan, as had the christ shooters six weeks prior.
(30:28):
There are other names in the roll call of Internet
inspired fascist violence. The Adam Often terrorist group, responsible for
three murders so far, started off with extremely online Nazis
working to form a terror cell. In imitation of the
book Siege, written by James Mason, we talked briefly about
Mason and Siege at the start of this book. He
was a student of William Pierce, and Siege might thus
be understood as a more academic accompanying text to the
(30:49):
Turner Diaries, where the Diaries proposes fiction, Siege outlines and
strategic depth. Mason advocates for leaderless resistance and lone wolf
style attacks. The lone wolf cannot be detected, can not
be prevented, and seldom can be traced. If I were
asked by any one of my opinion on what to
look for or hope for next, I would tell them
a wave of killings or assassinations of system bureaucrats by
roving gunmen who have their strategy well mapped out in advance,
(31:11):
and while not impossible to stop. Early in two thousand nineteen,
Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Hasson was caught planning this exact
sort of attack. He had a cash of weapons and
AMMO and a kill list of journalists and Democratic politicians.
Hassan was obsessed with the manifesto of Anders Brevick, a
right wing shooter who murdered dozens of students in Newtoy
and Norway. We don't know when where he first came
into contact with that manifesto, but spreading it has been
(31:33):
a priority of online fascists for years. In the wake
of the christ Choot shooting, fascists have started spreading Brentan
Terrence manifesto as well. The Paways Synagogue shooters cited both
manifestos as inspirations for his attack. In his own rampage
thought on h CHAN the Poway shooters stated his desire
to beat Terrence high score. In this we see echoes
of Eric Harris, the Columbine shooter, who was obsessed with
(31:55):
beating Timothy mcphay's high score. Right now as I read this,
violent armed men and h ND's pole board in numerous
Discord chat rooms are plotting for WATTE that they might
beat their heroes and win a high score of their own.
On telegram. The Bowl Patrol, a group of young fascists
dedicated to Charleston Church shooter Dylan Rufe, celebrates sat Rufe
and fantasize about neuva acts of violence in his name.
(32:16):
The early Harvest and Blood These Young Men Will reap
was sewn by Louie Beam, William Pearce, and Bob Matthews. Now,
though there is no need for an organization to buy
up arms and plan terror attacks, the order proved to
be less resilient than the completely decentralized radicalization and killing
machine made possible by the advent of the Internet. The
Internet has given the White Power movement a steady supply
(32:36):
of armed and ready young killers, living cruise missiles who
strike unpredictably. It targets around the country bit by bit.
Their attacks chisel away at our sense of security, our
national stability, and our trust in each other. It took decades,
but Louis Beam and his comrades did bring the war
home to all of us and against all of us. Yeah.
Cool chapter. Yeah, it's just it's just the game of
(33:08):
thing is so interesting. Yeah, and and and apparent it's
like gamers, but like there's that element that it that
it's drawn to. And like with the Donny Field shooting
live streaming it like that's you're you're broadcasting a video game. Yeah, exactly,
You're trying to make it look like Call of Duty
and then you get the high score talk and then
(33:28):
it accelerates it even more horrifying to see it all
laid out so linear like this. The single biggest surprise
to me and researching this was when I came upon
the fact that um Eric Harris had specifically stated his
desire to beat Timothy mcveigh's kill count, like realizing like, oh,
that part it's the same thing, like it really all
(33:48):
of it, like the like that's the probably look at
this so much is like separated and like even as
far back as like the fact that like the Nazis
trying to recruit kids on the Internet, Like one of
the guys doing that had his computer bought for him
by William Pierce's National Alliance, the guy who wrote The
Turner Diaries, the book which inspired Timothy McVeigh, which inspired
Eric Harris, which inspired seventy nine other mass shooters. Like yeah,
(34:11):
it's a whole it's a whole web. It's really hard
to it's really hard to describe to lay out because
there's so much I had to leave out, Like I
could I could have done this whole thing about I
could have done a whole seven part episode on like
Alex Jones's ties to explicit terrorists. Like that's the one
of the most frustrating things because it's like once you
once you see it, it's not you see it everywhere.
Once you see it, you see it where it is,
(34:33):
you realize how big it is. Yeah yeah, um, and
it's yeah, it's so upsetting. It is upsetting. What's even
more upsetting is that it's time for me to throw
the peria or yeah, yeah, you better move away from
that point because that's where I'm gonna check it at
no it's okay, it's okay, al right, guys, Cody, I
(34:55):
need you to get close to your microphone and describe
this as I do it. No one seems thrilled about it.
Sophie's hiding it's not really hot, and she just sort
of like sleeping. Oh I'm looking through the chair. I'm
really not doing a great job. Robert stood up, two
hands on the perry a winding up, taking a few breaths,
(35:18):
throwing it. Three hands fell out. Hay shouted. That was
so anti climactic. Well, it popped. It's just a new
way to open up a box, a little of perry. Yeah,
it worked. Now we have one for everybody. I dare
you to open it all if you're worried. Was for nothing?
Did you film it? There's one for each of us.
Here we go. I don't want one, Yeah, I just
(35:41):
prefer throwing it. Oh yeah, pretty, you should open it now, though,
I mean to see nothing complete disappointing about this has
been disappointing except for you, Robert, refreshing and your work. Well,
can I have some good you know what? Yeah, in
(36:05):
the moment, I'm going to close it real quick. Get
Cody closes things really meticulously and well, so I'm not
surprised that it didn't open when you threw it against
the wall. You're gonna make sure it's closed. What I'm
surprised about is what good audio content our choices in
(36:26):
this eight part seven parts, Cody dropped a bunch out
of the bag. I got them. It's fine. Well, guys,
I don't really want to. I just want everybody to read.
I guess you already listened to the book. People to
read the book. It's a topic that everybody aware of.
(36:47):
I don't know. I'm really glad we did this. I'm
glad we did this too. I wish we hated myself
during it. Yeah, yeah, I didn't smoke earlier. But I
wish we didn't smoke earlier too. But you know, we
all learned things. We take these just like I apologize,
let's not say just like nope, just like Louis Speed. Okay,
(37:08):
that's I guess what we learned. So some more news.
Name is Cody, and my name's behind the Bastards dot com,
the website where you can find the sources for this podcast.
You can also find it on the War on Everyone
dot com. You can buy shirts on to public dot
(37:29):
com by looking for behind the Bastards. We have a
Twitter at at bastards pod and an Instagram at the
same name, disgusted. So you're proud. Oh yeah, because I
remember too. Finally either at all. Well, guys, time to
go online. Yeah. I just threw some seeds at coding.
(37:50):
The episode is done.
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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