May 15, 2023 • 35 mins
Robert, Gare, and Mia talk about the right's embrace of conspiracy theories about the Allen Texas mass shooting and how they've become unmoored from reality.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
It it's another mass shooting.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
There's no I don't, I don't don't.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
I don't have a good way to start this episode. Yeah,
but welcome toda can happened here a podcast that is
also just about mass shootings now because.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, great great world we live in with me is
Gah and Robert Hello.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hello, Yeah, so a Nazi killed a whole bunch of
people again.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
Yeah, in case there's been another one, we are we
are talking about the specific mass shooting in Alan, Texas
with the guy who was covered in swastika tattoos that
certain people are claiming as a fed.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Yeah, that happened on Sunday, May seventh. So I think
I think Mia has some details about what actually happened
to kind of put together, but for the majority that
we're actually going to be talking about people's reaction to this,
including some of the most influential people on the planet,
and the level of reality denial that is, it has
(01:08):
been bad before, it's just extra visible right now, and
it's visible to a degree that is pretty worrying, And
we felt it was worth talking about just because of
you know, whenever a reality fracture is big enough to
be like this noticeable that is always always an interesting
(01:30):
sign of where we are at as a culture.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, I think, so before we fully dive into that,
there's something that I do want to talk about like
briefly with this, which is that so like this is
you know, in the sort of mold of like white
premises killings. Is like, this is very very targeted and
non white people. So he shot one white guy who
was a security guard, and then he shot like three
(01:55):
Latino people and then for Asian people.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
And I don't know, I wanted to just sort of.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Like remind people that anti Asian violence is still like
a thing because everyone seems to have forgotten about it.
And you know, this is like I mean, I think
if you exclude the if you exclude the three in
California that were like also committed by Asian people's is
(02:20):
like the fourth mass shooting in two years that's been
at least half the victims of an Asian It fucking sucks,
I you know, I mean, we've talked about Antiasan violence
a decent amount on this show. None of the things
we've ever talked about have gotten any better. The only
sort of actual instrumental results of any of this is
(02:41):
that like violence against Asian people gets used as a
rhetorical cudgel to justify killing black people, which is fucking abhorrent.
And yeah, I just I just wanted to get this
in because the media has collectively forgotten that that was
the whole thing, and no one really talks about the
shooting in that framing, and I think it's important to
(03:01):
do so at least for a little bit.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
I think the.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Other thing to kind of just talk about it at
the top here. Latino white supremacists and Latino Nazis are
not They are not an uncommon thing. This is actually
quite common. Two of the most famous fascists in the
world right now, Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tario, are not white.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
No.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
I mean, just like, think about think about where I mean,
think about the fact that prior to World War Two,
Argentina spent a significant chunk of their defense budget bringing
over Nazis to train their military, which is a big
part of why so many Nazis escaped there via ratlines.
You know, we just did a series of episodes on
Alfredo Stressner, the fascist dictator of Paraguay who put up
(03:47):
and hid Joseph Mengola along with a bunch of other Nazis.
For a while, Mangola had citizenship in both Argentina and
in Paraguay. Like this is it's not uncommon. This is
not like a new thing. We're not It's not like
some sudden shift in the way that fascism works.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Even the shooter himself like posted memes about being a
Latino white supremacist, like it is a subculture big enough
that it has its own like meme of Vortex. So,
and the shooter was actively engaged in in said like
a medic culture.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
No. And it's also worth noting that a lot of
the same things that we talk about when we talk
about Nazi mass shooter culture in the United States, the
fact that a lot of shootings are kind of incited
on eight chan and four chan and similar boards, this
happens in Latin America. Brazil in particular, has a website
called degola Chan that has spawned at least a couple
of shootings. In the last year, They've had several more
(04:45):
mass shootings that are political in nature, that are kind
of driven by online fascists. Like this is not the
only place that this happened. Serbia just had a couple
as well. But like what this guy's doing is very
much just as the christ shooting was very much something
that occurred within the broader envelope of a transnational accelerationist
(05:07):
fascist movement, you know, the Allen shooting, as far as
we can tell what the information we have available, seems
to fit very well into that schema.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Okay, we should talk about the shooter a bit.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
So there's there's a sort of I don't know, there's
like a after every mass shooting, there's this sort of
like identification cycle thing that happens, where like a bunch
of musations use an organizations still try to figure out
who the shooter was. So I think, like the day after,
very very very like pretty soon after the shooting, there's
(05:41):
the New York Times runs an article that reveals that
the shooter has this like has an account on like
a kind of weird Russian social media site. And from
from that information, uh, Eric Toler, who's a bell researcher
at Belling Cat like tracks down the site and he
finds a bunch of wild stuff. He finds like, I mean,
(06:06):
obviously the shooters, like he finds it the shooters a Nazi.
He has like a swastika tattoo. He also has an
SS tattoo from the shooting. He's wearing like a right
wing Dusk squad patch like this, just like a whole
thing that the Proud Boys also do. It's like a
patch that says like rw D.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
Yeah, they sell RWDS patches. I mean, I think a
lot of it kind of comes out of some of
the discourse around Pinochet that goes back a few decades,
but at this point it's a much broader thing than that.
I've got a bunch of photos of Jeremy Berdarimo I
think is his name, who was one of the Proud Boys.
I believe he's the guy who got stabbed prior to
(06:43):
January sixth during one of the big riots in DC
after the twenty twenty election, but with the big RWDS
patch on his chest. And you can find like Tasitala Tozy,
who's an inveterate rioter with a Patriot prayer up in Portland,
would wear them all the time. They're and piece of
fascism merch.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, and you know, and and this this and also
you know the other thing that's kind of important that
gets found on this like social media site which okay,
I wish it's a kind of weird thing, like he
doesn't I don't know. The social media site seems like
he was basically using as like a journal, Like he
doesn't like follow people or like have followers, so he's
(07:25):
just sort of posting this stuff. He also finds a
bunch of clips of like Tim Poole videos, and so
this immediately sends the entire right into like, you know,
full on defense mode, right. You know, it turns out
it's it's not great for your brand with like the
(07:46):
sort of general array of people if it's being associated
with a guy who just did a mass shooting. So
Tim Poole responds to the other thing is there's there's
like a manifesto w on it, and Tim Poole responds
to this by I think I think what actually, like
legitimately what happened is he read the manifesto and there's
a thing in the manifesto of like talking about the
(08:06):
Nashville shooter being trans or like peifically about the Nasville shooter.
And I think I think specifically he read that and
was like, oh shit, this is my out. I can
go back and talking about the Nashville shooter. Sure, And
so he starts, he starts this, there's this whole sort
of train of like right wing stuff about how all
(08:28):
of this is fake. So he starts arguing that, like
this isn't the guy's social media account. This this sort
of very very rapidly morphs into i mean just like
full on like Sandy hook shit. One of his employees
like tweets, why is the corporate press so threatened by
(08:49):
people questioning the authenticity of a Mexican neo Nazis Russian
social media account uncovered by state funded media? And this
because this immediately becomes the main line right state funded
media things. They're talking about Bell and Cap which.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
They're they're hopping on all of the tanky conspiracy StuffYeah
and running with it because Twitter is a is a
cultic milieu of conspiracy, and you can latch onto one
talking point to make you feel okay about denying an
entire like facet of reality, and then it becomes an
easy out.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, and we're gonna we're gonna circle back to like
specifically tanking.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
People get involved in this because they do.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
What they're doing is a little bit of like and uh,
an evolution from what what's what folks kind of in
the debating Christians about evolution and shit called the Gish gallop,
where the the the original idea of the Gish gallop was,
when you're arguing from a creationist perspective about stuff like,
you know, the age of the world, you bring up
so many different kind of topics, you know, from different
(09:49):
very niche issues, you have a carbon dating to, you know,
specific problems you have with like the way scientists are
interpreting specific fossils, and it's just too much detail for
somebody and like an ad hoc public argument to really
like counter at once. And kind of the evolution of
it is when you're dealing with something like this rather
than deal with the broader picture, which is there's just
a tremendous amount of evidence that this guy was a Nazi,
(10:12):
that this guy was motivated and kind of brought into
the community by a lot of content that guys like
Tim Poole make. Instead you focus on you pull up
one single thing that you can kind of like try
to get people to latch onto, and if you can
get them arguing about that thing, you can get them
to ignore the bigger picture, Like at least you can
distract attention from it, and it works. It works for
(10:34):
a lot of people. It's especially effective on social media.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, and unfortunately the social media platform that this is
mainly happening on his Twitter, which Elon Musk owns, and
Elon Musk immediately like decides that he's just fully in
on this shit, and he is, I mean she is
like like Elon Musk is is just actively promoting the
(10:57):
sort of weird conspiracy that basically what the sort of
right wing story about this becomes is that like, Okay,
Belling Cat is.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Is the CIA, and they're being paid.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
To create a like a false flag thing that Okay,
they're they're being paid to create a false flag to
make this guy look like a Nazi and a Timpoole
fan to distract people from the Nashville shooting, which is
just like the absolute nonsense. But you know, you you
(11:32):
immediately get into like that that Timpool employee again like
it like starts doing this whole like, uh, we are
enshrined like with liberty to freely scrutinize every claim. Just
this the sanctity of like every human being in America
like has the right to question stuff. It's like this
is like literally like literally word for word stuff Alex
Jones was saying in the Sandy Hook trial. But we've
(11:55):
gotten to the point where you just, you know, like
the sort of mainstream of the right just does this
about every time it's a writing mass shooting, and this
this particular time, it's been just everywhere.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Yeah, we're we're, we're gonna. There's no no, no smooth
way to break to ads in an episode about a
mass shooting. But that's what we're doing. We are back.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
I want to talk now a little bit more about
the actual exchanges that Musk was involved in and how
this narrative of like a syop and this whole narrative
around the shooting being a syeop, how that viewpoint got
inflated on Twitter because Musk controls where all of the
interactions go for tweets and actually like specifically get into
(12:49):
how this specific conspiracy is is a demonstration of how
much of just a separation from reality that people like
Musk are like actively actively working towards. One of the
main accounts that Musk was kind of like riffing off
of in this and who was like trying to like
feed Musk this type of stuff was the Redheaded libertarian
(13:11):
who works for Timpoole. She created a bunch of memes
about this shooting talking about how how this the guy
can't can't be a Nazi and he because he's Latino.
You know, why would someone use a Russian social media site?
Even tho it's actually very common for American coperties to
use Russian social media.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
We used to do an exercise at a trainings that
I did for Bellancat where people would go through and
use v Contacta, which is a Russian like kind of
Facebook clone, and you would kind of use geographical search
to find groups of like KKK members and shit in
the American South because it was really common with them
because it didn't have any kind of content moderation.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
So yeah, the types of like right wing content creators
who are within Musk's Twitter orbits pumping out all of
this stuff, right, and this is where muskeets all of
his information from. So he starts he starts like just
questioning the validity of this story, but then also specifically
targeting belling Cat, saying that didn't didn't didn't this story
(14:16):
come from Bellingat, which literally specializes in psychological operations, which
first of all is just a wild thing to say
when you're talking about it is specifically like an open
source journalism website, Like it's the most the most honest
way you could do journalism because it's given people the
tools to literally check all of the work themselves.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Like it's yeah, I mean this.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Is kind of like a minor as side. But one
of the things that happens here constantly with all these
people is they're like absolutely astounded, like like how how
how did Belling get possibly find this guy? It's like, well,
it's not that hard.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
It's really easy.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
The thing is right if if so, Like I am
not a journalist, right, I learned everything I know about
this from gare In like one night, and like I
have tracked down like Matthews media accounts and like before
the police got them. Like it's not that hard. But
the thing is it requires you to, even like just
a tiny tiny bit be a journalist. And not a
single one of these writing people has ever like done
(15:11):
journalism ever, and so like just like the tiniest bit
of journalism just like destroys their brains and they're like
they are physically incapable of comprehending how someone could have
done a journalism, and then they use this to sort
of feed their base because their base also just doesn't
understand how someone could do a journalism and this this this,
this lets you do this like cycle, Like, how could
they possibly have found this? They must have been given
it by the government. It's just like, No, all that.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Really comes down to is is who has who is
on their computer at the right time when this thing happens. Yeah,
whenever I find out or whenever I can id people,
it's always just like coincidence that the thing happens as
I'm already at my computer, so now I can look
into this thing, right, it is It is just who
has access to internet at the right time is the
(15:52):
way that we figure out, like who's gonna end up
ideing somebody?
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Yeah, it's it's a mix of that, and it's a
mix of just who has the patience and the motivation
to sit and comb through shit for hours and days,
which is the same thing that like, it's the same
thing at anti fascist activists have been doing for years,
you know, especially since Charlottesville, where you're just like I'm
going to watch the same videos of the same event
and find new ones and I'm going to spend three
(16:17):
years doing that and eventually I will catch a tattoo
or a shirt with a logo, and that will let
me id somebody, because you know, of the of the
different social media shit that I've been pulling up, like
it's it's it's not. It doesn't take like spice satellites.
It just takes motivation, being in the right place at
the right time and having nothing else to do.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Yeah, So eventually they started just kind of harping on
this term syop so pich obviously means psychological operation. But
what they mean when they say syop is that they
mean this was like a this is a false like
a manufactured government planned operation. That's what they actually mean,
right Like when in the conspiracy space, syop is is
(17:03):
more like a loaded term they don't actually refer to
like actual syops that get doning like against like you know,
you can look at like Cointel pro right, you can
look at you can look at various ways that the
FBI of the Army has done syops. But what they
mean when they say syop is this is like this
is a government conspiracy theory and it's a false narrative
that's been crafted to like change public opinions. So I
(17:26):
guess I guess these people Mia you mentioned how they're
making it sound like this was this was created to
distract from the Nashville shooting or just just they have
various like motivations for why they want to but it
the important part is that they could use this word
to just easily deny reality, and that is that is
kind of beyond like whatever motivations they have. It's just
(17:47):
easy for them and their ideology to just block off
this section of reality so that they don't have to
like people who are like, actually libertarians don't need to
like confront what the extent of their ideology actually means. Right,
you know, there's a there's certainly people who are like,
okay with mass shootings happening, or you know, are totally
fine with with with like non white people getting killed
(18:08):
in mass shootings. But there probably are certain libertarians who
don't actually like mass shootings. They don't actually like when
fascists go kill tons of people, and it's easier for
them sometimes just to block off this section and ignore
it than actually confront what their ideology means. So some
must kept saying this is either the weirdest story ever
or a very bad sy op. The answer is neither.
The story is not super weird. It's actually very very
(18:30):
explainable if you understand the mechanisms at play here, and
even just not a bad syo.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Yeah, I mean, it's not even like it's not on
it's like on the whole. It's not a particularly complicated
story like there are. It is not an uncommon thing.
I mean, the biggest, most recent one before this was
that shooting in New York at the grocery store that
was like a directly inspired Nazi attack. Like, this kind
(18:56):
of shit happens constantly in the United States. It doesn't choir,
nobody has to be secretly armed by the Feds. There's
an AR fifteen behind every bush in this country. It's
not hard for this kind of this kind of shit.
It's not hard to see where this like originates from.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah, so it's I mean, Muska just kept kept replying
to both Timpoole employee tweets tweets from the very blatantly
fascist account to end Wokeness, which Musk has been replying
to quite a quite often recently. So this and I
think the reason why we wanted to just talk about
(19:32):
this specifically, is just because of you, Like all of
these Musk tweets are getting like millions and millions of views,
if the view counter is any is anything to go by,
At the very least, he's in the top three accounts
with the highest engagement on Twitter. So these these types
of conspiracy theories are getting inflated to extremely high degrees
at least online, and the separation of reality online is
(19:55):
inflated for these mass shootings in a way that I
have not seen in quite a I have not seen
this much just denial of like information regarding mass shootings
in quite a long time. And it just the combination
of the stuff like the stuff with Belling Cat coming
from the tankies and how those conspiracies have now mashed
(20:15):
with all of these like neo fascist shit. It's a
combination of reality denial that is absolutely worrying for like
future mass shootings as well.
Speaker 4 (20:26):
It's a pivot in the kind of reality that's being denied.
You know, not, we have nothing to do with these
Nazis who are parroting some of the things that we
say about immigration. It's this is fundamentally not the attack
that you think it is. This is our enemies creating
an attack to try to make us look bad. Like
the fact that that you've always seen bits and pieces
(20:48):
of that, the fact that it's being parroted by the
wealthiest man on the planet using one of the biggest
information fire hoses that exists is completely novel.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yeah, because I mean a lot of these things, conspiracy
theories that specifically about like Eric Toler, we saw we
saw leftists and tankies bringing up the same stuff during
the UH, during the stuff with the Nazi National guardsmen
a month ago, So we have a lot of this
stuff has kind of been writing on the back of
that and just continued and accelerating, UH since then. It
(21:20):
appears there's a few outlets like Business Insider and blank
at themselves reporting that they are they are receiving basically
shadow bands on Twitter right now with their with their
with their account and their posts having a very limited reach.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
An interesting shadow band too, because it's not like it.
It appears, at least from what I've seen, that what
they're doing is they're making it so that when people
type Bellancat into the search bar nothing comes up, as
opposed to like throttling the reach of the actual posts
themselves trying to make it deliberately difficult for people to
actually look up information, which is interesting to me.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Yeah, and I guess it. I guess it's worth saying
that the police and Texas have confirmed everything about about
the shooters political beliefs and his new Nazi ties. And
he has a neo Nazi shit in his apartment. Obviously
his body is covered with neo Nazi tattoos. One of
the things that some of the kind of right wing
(22:18):
content creators were trying to do is that they were
trying to say that the specific pictures of the individual
that Belling Cat found online, that that these pictures were
not this person. They in fact that they were saying
they were saying that the shooter is just somebody else,
which was also proven wrong.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
But yeah, they also they also they did another classic
right wing thing, which is that they misidentified the shooter, yes,
and thought it was another guy with the same name because.
Speaker 4 (22:44):
Like and they misidentified the shooter, and they misidentified the
non Nazi tattoo that he had, Yes, because he had
a he had weirdly enough, like the city of Dallas's
seal tattooed on his hands. Yeah, I got a Texas tattoo.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
On his shoulder.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
Yeah, they like definitely, Like there were a lot of
conspiracy theories about that, and a lot of them related
to the fact that, like, the first photos we got
of the guy were like the kind of photos you
get of a dead man at a mass shooting that
someone takes through a window while sheltering, So it wasn't clear.
So they would take a picture of like a social
media picture of the tattoo on his hand, and then
a picture of him dead, and like the tattoo on
(23:23):
his hand in the picture of him dead was like blurrier,
and they were like, look, the lines aren't straight. They're
straight in the picture on his social media And it's like,
well yeah, because those were taken by very different cameras
in very different situations. Like you know how cameras work,
you know how this This is one.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
Of the funnier ones that one of these content creators
was doing, was they were they were posting the photos
of the Nazi tattoos that the shooter himself posted online,
being like, look how fresh these tattoos are.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
How can.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
If he had these tattoos for years, why do they
look so fresh at these photos? Because there right after.
Speaker 4 (24:01):
Him, Like you do when you get a tattoo. Yeah,
there's like I have tattoos pictures of me getting tattoos
from like fifteen years ago somewhere on my Facebook. Like
you could do the same thing, suspicious, Robert.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
One of the interesting things is that, like we see
the same thing with all of like all of the
worries around like deep faking stuff, like all of all
of the like weaponized on reality stuff. It doesn't need
to actually be convincing it. It doesn't need to be
good like like deep fakes don't need to be good quality.
You can you can post a meme of like a
picture of Biden's face and some text on it with
(24:39):
a quotation mark post on Facebook and millions of people
will believe that's just true. Like it doesn't need to
be real or convincing in order for it to have
it like an effect.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
And it's also it's not just about I think it's
it's thinking, like it's not just about convincing people. It's
not about making them believe it. This is like, this
is the thing that I tried to talk about years
ago during the eight Chance shooting. Shit posting. Part of
the goal is just to disrupt conversation. It's to make
people engage with the fake stuff. It's to make people
break kind of the lines of reasoning that they are
(25:11):
going in with, Like, it's to make people distract people
from the stuff that is really clear and obvious and
just kind of fracture the conversation, because the more that
you do that kind of the weaker you make the
response to what's happened, and the more kind of that
you can distract people from the degree of complicity that
(25:31):
the people in kind of the media sphere on the
right have for all of this shit.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Yeah, And I think that's why it's like specifically going
after the Billing Cat stuff has been really effective with
UP because like, like there are like people who I
am friends with in real life who like are convinced
that Billing Cat is a ciasiop like this is like
a like like really not insignificant portions of the left
believe this, yep. And that means that it's you know,
(25:56):
unbelievably difficult to form any kind of coherent response when
like half of the people who would only be.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Doing this stuff for like, oh, well they are actually CIA.
So like.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
Yes, the the Netherlands based CIA unit.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
Yeah, it's like, yeah, the I mean, like, at least
in the time I was there, the primary people funding
us was the Dutch post code lottery, like it's it's
it's I don't know, like.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Like almost every news organization they take grants where yeah,
where they can get them.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah, And like I want to specifically talk about the
ny D a tiny bit because people like, so the
main conspiracy is about like they like, at one point
they took they took a grant for the National Talent
for Democracy and like, yeah, those people do weird shit sometimes,
but they also for example, like if okay, so if
you're gonna have the line that every single person who's
taking money for the n D is a CIA thing,
(26:47):
like you have to accept that. For example, like the
pro Beijing Electoral Party in Hong Kong is a is
a cia op because they also got a ship ton
of any D money, right like they they like anyg
just gives money to a shit ton of people.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
It's definitely worth emphasizing that, like the initial groups that
are pushing the Bellankat conspiracies were all gray zone people
that are specifically specifically paid by the Russian government, like
because Russia was mad at Bellinkat for exposing their war crimes. Yeah,
and like that's where all of this stuff starts.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
There's I don't know how much point there is in
like laying into this specific thing too much. Would I
would remind you at all times when you are like
dealing with breaking news like this and there's a bunch
of different and there's a bunch of different kind of
like conflicting arguments about what's actually happening. Okham's raisor isn't
(27:40):
one hundred percent of the time the way to go.
But in a situation like this, you have two possibilities.
One is that a Nazi went on a killing spree,
as happens constantly, as has been happening since the Nazis
became a thing. The other possibility is that the federal
government for unclear reason and convinced a man to cover
(28:02):
his body in swastika tattoos and shoot random people at
a mall for gun control. That's not going to get
passed in the state of Texas. I don't know like
which of those seems likely to you.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
I did this thing like very deliberately to myself, like
about a year ago, where I was like I was
very deliberate like I'm going to like un conspiracy theory
my brain because you know, like there is a lot
of like like the kind of reasoning you get in
this stuff, which is like, hey, here's a thing that like,
quote unquote looks weird, so this whole thing must be suspect,
(28:49):
so it must be an op is like a really
really kind of like it's a really common kind of
reasoning now that just like a lot of people across
the entire politic conpectrum have and it's not actually a
good way to understand the world, like it's it simply
is not.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
We we live in an increasingly absurd world where every
single weird thing is more and more visible because of
the Internet, so we're more aware of how much weird
shit happens all the time, and stuff that and stuff
that may not not necessarily be weird because like everything,
there is an expert in every field who can who
can explain to you why this thing actually makes perfect sense,
and it's just people being exposed to things that they're
(29:26):
not usually that they're not used to. I think one
of the interesting one of the last things I think
we should like mention about this is just the influx
of how militant like neo Nazism or like visible ne Nazism,
has just been People have just been saying it's Feds
in an increasingly concerning way, like like I think, like
a last month, there was this viral video of a
(29:48):
whole bunch of Nazis stressed in red and black, I think,
protesting something. I forget the exact circumstances at the moment.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
I think it was.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
I think it was some drag related protest, But there
was this group of Nazis dressed in red and black
doing Nazi shit, And when you looked at any of
the videos on Twitter, you saw hundreds of replies from
people with blue check marks just calling them FEDS, saying,
oh wow, look at all these Feds. Well, oh, I
can't believe the FEDS are so busy today. Blah blah
blah blah blah. You know, it's it's like the one
hundred person NPC meme with them all wearing the blue
(30:21):
check work on the forehead saying it's the FEDS, just
because it's once we get to the point where we
have more Nazis doing mass shootings again the same way,
like there was an influx between like twenty seventeen to
twenty nineteen than twenty twenty, there was kind of a
dip because all all crime kind of had a dip.
As we're gonna go into the next next election cycle,
as things are gonna start looping again, when more and
(30:44):
more Nazis start doing shit, just how there's gonna be
a bigger swath of the population who just denies that's
what's happening, and that is gonna make make the problem
of Nazis probably a bit harder to deal with. I mean,
there will still be anti fascists doing their work to
like docs and IDP and and all that stuff, but
the amount of like visibility and the amount of traction
(31:05):
that that this level of reality denial is getting around
like militant neo Nazism and around Nazi killings will be
a kind of a new thing to navigate, or not
a new thing, but like it's a the problem will
be bigger than what it used to be.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
I wanted to kind of note one thing on on
the other side of the ideological spectrum and not to
equate the two. But there has been something kind of
concerning that I've been seeing crop up in liberal circles.
You may have noticed, kind of as a response to
all of the mass shootings and the generally consistent Republican
line that there's nothing to do except for be shittier
(31:42):
to marginalize people, that there's been kind of this like
focus in a lot of mainstream liberal media on articles
and the idea that you should spread pictures of victims
of shootings, and a focus on the amount of damage
that like a weapon like an AR fifteen does to
a human body. People can have their own opinion on
(32:04):
whether or not this is a helpful idea, but I
have noticed in sort of arguments I've been having with
people a troubling trend, which is when I talk about
the importance of doing stuff like taking stop the bleed training,
carrying things like tourniquets, I've gotten responses from a couple
of people that are like AR fifteens are so powerful
the wounds are not survivable, there's no point in doing this.
(32:25):
That is not the case. I have known dozens of
people who have been shot by AR fifteens, in some
cases in AR style weapons in some cases multiple times,
and larger weapons, and lived it is always worthwhile to
have stopped the bleed training and to carry equipment. If
you hear anyone saying that, please please correct them, because
whatever you think about gun control, it is very important
(32:48):
for people to know how to deal with those kind
of injuries, and it is important in the immediate wake
of an attack. One of the things that was really
unsettling is in the immediate wake of the Allen attack,
after the shooter was down, there was a couple of
people who ran in to try to provide life saving aid,
and a bunch more who took photos of the people
who had been wounded and killed. And it's possible that
(33:08):
if more of the people taking photos had gotten in
an attempted to provide aid, some of the people who
were injured might have survived. No way to know, but
always worth having that training. That's just something I've noticed.
Not to put it in the same moral universe as
trying to pretend your calls for violence aren't calls for violence,
but it is something that concerned me and that people
should maybe keep an eye on.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Yeah, I mean, I that was the case with the
Rittenhouse shootings. There was someone who basically had most of
their arm, yeah, blown off, but they did not die. Yeah,
So yeah, that is that is not true. And I've
watched a lot of the Rittenhouse footage and yeah, it is,
it is. It is nasty. Yeah, but no, that is that.
(33:51):
That is a good thing to note.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah, and also like.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
On just a fundamental human level, like do not let
yourself be consumed by the algorithm so much that your
first reaction to seeing someone get shot is you try
to film them, Like, yeah, we we need to be
better than this, Like we have watched people die because
of this, Like like this, this is not a thing
as society that we can continue to be doing. Like
(34:17):
we simply cannot. We simply have to act and not
like become part of a sort of like mass media
spectacle instead of doing something.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
Yeah, the footage of things is not going to change it,
especially with mass shootings. Footage and mass shootings usually actually
makes the problem worse, and it's mostly used by people
who want to be mass shooters.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
Yeah, I'm I that may be a conversation we should, uh,
we should expand on it a later date. But you know,
don't don't let the bastards grind you down. Take a
stop the bleed course, you know, bring a tourniquet with
you out in the world. These are these are action
items that that that you can do that might in
fact help. So that's going to be it for us today.
(35:03):
It could happen here Until next time, you know, keep
your head on this swivel.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
monthly at coolzonmedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Thanks for listening.
It it's another mass shooting.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
There's no I don't, I don't don't.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
I don't have a good way to start this episode. Yeah,
but welcome toda can happened here a podcast that is
also just about mass shootings now because.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, great great world we live in with me is
Gah and Robert Hello.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hello, Yeah, so a Nazi killed a whole bunch of
people again.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
Yeah, in case there's been another one, we are we
are talking about the specific mass shooting in Alan, Texas
with the guy who was covered in swastika tattoos that
certain people are claiming as a fed.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Yeah, that happened on Sunday, May seventh. So I think
I think Mia has some details about what actually happened
to kind of put together, but for the majority that
we're actually going to be talking about people's reaction to this,
including some of the most influential people on the planet,
and the level of reality denial that is, it has
(01:08):
been bad before, it's just extra visible right now, and
it's visible to a degree that is pretty worrying, And
we felt it was worth talking about just because of
you know, whenever a reality fracture is big enough to
be like this noticeable that is always always an interesting
(01:30):
sign of where we are at as a culture.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Yeah, I think, so before we fully dive into that,
there's something that I do want to talk about like
briefly with this, which is that so like this is
you know, in the sort of mold of like white
premises killings. Is like, this is very very targeted and
non white people. So he shot one white guy who
was a security guard, and then he shot like three
(01:55):
Latino people and then for Asian people.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
And I don't know, I wanted to just sort of.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Like remind people that anti Asian violence is still like
a thing because everyone seems to have forgotten about it.
And you know, this is like I mean, I think
if you exclude the if you exclude the three in
California that were like also committed by Asian people's is
(02:20):
like the fourth mass shooting in two years that's been
at least half the victims of an Asian It fucking sucks,
I you know, I mean, we've talked about Antiasan violence
a decent amount on this show. None of the things
we've ever talked about have gotten any better. The only
sort of actual instrumental results of any of this is
(02:41):
that like violence against Asian people gets used as a
rhetorical cudgel to justify killing black people, which is fucking abhorrent.
And yeah, I just I just wanted to get this
in because the media has collectively forgotten that that was
the whole thing, and no one really talks about the
shooting in that framing, and I think it's important to
(03:01):
do so at least for a little bit.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
I think the.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Other thing to kind of just talk about it at
the top here. Latino white supremacists and Latino Nazis are
not They are not an uncommon thing. This is actually
quite common. Two of the most famous fascists in the
world right now, Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tario, are not white.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
No.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
I mean, just like, think about think about where I mean,
think about the fact that prior to World War Two,
Argentina spent a significant chunk of their defense budget bringing
over Nazis to train their military, which is a big
part of why so many Nazis escaped there via ratlines.
You know, we just did a series of episodes on
Alfredo Stressner, the fascist dictator of Paraguay who put up
(03:47):
and hid Joseph Mengola along with a bunch of other Nazis.
For a while, Mangola had citizenship in both Argentina and
in Paraguay. Like this is it's not uncommon. This is
not like a new thing. We're not It's not like
some sudden shift in the way that fascism works.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Even the shooter himself like posted memes about being a
Latino white supremacist, like it is a subculture big enough
that it has its own like meme of Vortex. So,
and the shooter was actively engaged in in said like
a medic culture.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
No. And it's also worth noting that a lot of
the same things that we talk about when we talk
about Nazi mass shooter culture in the United States, the
fact that a lot of shootings are kind of incited
on eight chan and four chan and similar boards, this
happens in Latin America. Brazil in particular, has a website
called degola Chan that has spawned at least a couple
of shootings. In the last year, They've had several more
(04:45):
mass shootings that are political in nature, that are kind
of driven by online fascists. Like this is not the
only place that this happened. Serbia just had a couple
as well. But like what this guy's doing is very
much just as the christ shooting was very much something
that occurred within the broader envelope of a transnational accelerationist
(05:07):
fascist movement, you know, the Allen shooting, as far as
we can tell what the information we have available, seems
to fit very well into that schema.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Okay, we should talk about the shooter a bit.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
So there's there's a sort of I don't know, there's
like a after every mass shooting, there's this sort of
like identification cycle thing that happens, where like a bunch
of musations use an organizations still try to figure out
who the shooter was. So I think, like the day after,
very very very like pretty soon after the shooting, there's
(05:41):
the New York Times runs an article that reveals that
the shooter has this like has an account on like
a kind of weird Russian social media site. And from
from that information, uh, Eric Toler, who's a bell researcher
at Belling Cat like tracks down the site and he
finds a bunch of wild stuff. He finds like, I mean,
(06:06):
obviously the shooters, like he finds it the shooters a Nazi.
He has like a swastika tattoo. He also has an
SS tattoo from the shooting. He's wearing like a right
wing Dusk squad patch like this, just like a whole
thing that the Proud Boys also do. It's like a
patch that says like rw D.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
Yeah, they sell RWDS patches. I mean, I think a
lot of it kind of comes out of some of
the discourse around Pinochet that goes back a few decades,
but at this point it's a much broader thing than that.
I've got a bunch of photos of Jeremy Berdarimo I
think is his name, who was one of the Proud Boys.
I believe he's the guy who got stabbed prior to
(06:43):
January sixth during one of the big riots in DC
after the twenty twenty election, but with the big RWDS
patch on his chest. And you can find like Tasitala Tozy,
who's an inveterate rioter with a Patriot prayer up in Portland,
would wear them all the time. They're and piece of
fascism merch.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, and you know, and and this this and also
you know the other thing that's kind of important that
gets found on this like social media site which okay,
I wish it's a kind of weird thing, like he
doesn't I don't know. The social media site seems like
he was basically using as like a journal, Like he
doesn't like follow people or like have followers, so he's
(07:25):
just sort of posting this stuff. He also finds a
bunch of clips of like Tim Poole videos, and so
this immediately sends the entire right into like, you know,
full on defense mode, right. You know, it turns out
it's it's not great for your brand with like the
(07:46):
sort of general array of people if it's being associated
with a guy who just did a mass shooting. So
Tim Poole responds to the other thing is there's there's
like a manifesto w on it, and Tim Poole responds
to this by I think I think what actually, like
legitimately what happened is he read the manifesto and there's
a thing in the manifesto of like talking about the
(08:06):
Nashville shooter being trans or like peifically about the Nasville shooter.
And I think I think specifically he read that and
was like, oh shit, this is my out. I can
go back and talking about the Nashville shooter. Sure, And
so he starts, he starts this, there's this whole sort
of train of like right wing stuff about how all
(08:28):
of this is fake. So he starts arguing that, like
this isn't the guy's social media account. This this sort
of very very rapidly morphs into i mean just like
full on like Sandy hook shit. One of his employees
like tweets, why is the corporate press so threatened by
(08:49):
people questioning the authenticity of a Mexican neo Nazis Russian
social media account uncovered by state funded media? And this
because this immediately becomes the main line right state funded
media things. They're talking about Bell and Cap which.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
They're they're hopping on all of the tanky conspiracy StuffYeah
and running with it because Twitter is a is a
cultic milieu of conspiracy, and you can latch onto one
talking point to make you feel okay about denying an
entire like facet of reality, and then it becomes an
easy out.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yeah, and we're gonna we're gonna circle back to like
specifically tanking.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
People get involved in this because they do.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
What they're doing is a little bit of like and uh,
an evolution from what what's what folks kind of in
the debating Christians about evolution and shit called the Gish gallop,
where the the the original idea of the Gish gallop was,
when you're arguing from a creationist perspective about stuff like,
you know, the age of the world, you bring up
so many different kind of topics, you know, from different
(09:49):
very niche issues, you have a carbon dating to, you know,
specific problems you have with like the way scientists are
interpreting specific fossils, and it's just too much detail for
somebody and like an ad hoc public argument to really
like counter at once. And kind of the evolution of
it is when you're dealing with something like this rather
than deal with the broader picture, which is there's just
a tremendous amount of evidence that this guy was a Nazi,
(10:12):
that this guy was motivated and kind of brought into
the community by a lot of content that guys like
Tim Poole make. Instead you focus on you pull up
one single thing that you can kind of like try
to get people to latch onto, and if you can
get them arguing about that thing, you can get them
to ignore the bigger picture, Like at least you can
distract attention from it, and it works. It works for
(10:34):
a lot of people. It's especially effective on social media.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Yeah, and unfortunately the social media platform that this is
mainly happening on his Twitter, which Elon Musk owns, and
Elon Musk immediately like decides that he's just fully in
on this shit, and he is, I mean she is
like like Elon Musk is is just actively promoting the
(10:57):
sort of weird conspiracy that basically what the sort of
right wing story about this becomes is that like, Okay,
Belling Cat is.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Is the CIA, and they're being paid.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
To create a like a false flag thing that Okay,
they're they're being paid to create a false flag to
make this guy look like a Nazi and a Timpoole
fan to distract people from the Nashville shooting, which is
just like the absolute nonsense. But you know, you you
(11:32):
immediately get into like that that Timpool employee again like
it like starts doing this whole like, uh, we are
enshrined like with liberty to freely scrutinize every claim. Just
this the sanctity of like every human being in America
like has the right to question stuff. It's like this
is like literally like literally word for word stuff Alex
Jones was saying in the Sandy Hook trial. But we've
(11:55):
gotten to the point where you just, you know, like
the sort of mainstream of the right just does this
about every time it's a writing mass shooting, and this
this particular time, it's been just everywhere.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Yeah, we're we're, we're gonna. There's no no, no smooth
way to break to ads in an episode about a
mass shooting. But that's what we're doing. We are back.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
I want to talk now a little bit more about
the actual exchanges that Musk was involved in and how
this narrative of like a syop and this whole narrative
around the shooting being a syeop, how that viewpoint got
inflated on Twitter because Musk controls where all of the
interactions go for tweets and actually like specifically get into
(12:49):
how this specific conspiracy is is a demonstration of how
much of just a separation from reality that people like
Musk are like actively actively working towards. One of the
main accounts that Musk was kind of like riffing off
of in this and who was like trying to like
feed Musk this type of stuff was the Redheaded libertarian
(13:11):
who works for Timpoole. She created a bunch of memes
about this shooting talking about how how this the guy
can't can't be a Nazi and he because he's Latino.
You know, why would someone use a Russian social media site?
Even tho it's actually very common for American coperties to
use Russian social media.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
We used to do an exercise at a trainings that
I did for Bellancat where people would go through and
use v Contacta, which is a Russian like kind of
Facebook clone, and you would kind of use geographical search
to find groups of like KKK members and shit in
the American South because it was really common with them
because it didn't have any kind of content moderation.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
So yeah, the types of like right wing content creators
who are within Musk's Twitter orbits pumping out all of
this stuff, right, and this is where muskeets all of
his information from. So he starts he starts like just
questioning the validity of this story, but then also specifically
targeting belling Cat, saying that didn't didn't didn't this story
(14:16):
come from Bellingat, which literally specializes in psychological operations, which
first of all is just a wild thing to say
when you're talking about it is specifically like an open
source journalism website, Like it's the most the most honest
way you could do journalism because it's given people the
tools to literally check all of the work themselves.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Like it's yeah, I mean this.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Is kind of like a minor as side. But one
of the things that happens here constantly with all these
people is they're like absolutely astounded, like like how how
how did Belling get possibly find this guy? It's like, well,
it's not that hard.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
It's really easy.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
The thing is right if if so, Like I am
not a journalist, right, I learned everything I know about
this from gare In like one night, and like I
have tracked down like Matthews media accounts and like before
the police got them. Like it's not that hard. But
the thing is it requires you to, even like just
a tiny tiny bit be a journalist. And not a
single one of these writing people has ever like done
(15:11):
journalism ever, and so like just like the tiniest bit
of journalism just like destroys their brains and they're like
they are physically incapable of comprehending how someone could have
done a journalism, and then they use this to sort
of feed their base because their base also just doesn't
understand how someone could do a journalism and this this this,
this lets you do this like cycle, Like, how could
they possibly have found this? They must have been given
it by the government. It's just like, No, all that.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Really comes down to is is who has who is
on their computer at the right time when this thing happens. Yeah,
whenever I find out or whenever I can id people,
it's always just like coincidence that the thing happens as
I'm already at my computer, so now I can look
into this thing, right, it is It is just who
has access to internet at the right time is the
(15:52):
way that we figure out, like who's gonna end up
ideing somebody?
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Yeah, it's it's a mix of that, and it's a
mix of just who has the patience and the motivation
to sit and comb through shit for hours and days,
which is the same thing that like, it's the same
thing at anti fascist activists have been doing for years,
you know, especially since Charlottesville, where you're just like I'm
going to watch the same videos of the same event
and find new ones and I'm going to spend three
(16:17):
years doing that and eventually I will catch a tattoo
or a shirt with a logo, and that will let
me id somebody, because you know, of the of the
different social media shit that I've been pulling up, like
it's it's it's not. It doesn't take like spice satellites.
It just takes motivation, being in the right place at
the right time and having nothing else to do.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Yeah, So eventually they started just kind of harping on
this term syop so pich obviously means psychological operation. But
what they mean when they say syop is that they
mean this was like a this is a false like
a manufactured government planned operation. That's what they actually mean,
right Like when in the conspiracy space, syop is is
(17:03):
more like a loaded term they don't actually refer to
like actual syops that get doning like against like you know,
you can look at like Cointel pro right, you can
look at you can look at various ways that the
FBI of the Army has done syops. But what they
mean when they say syop is this is like this
is a government conspiracy theory and it's a false narrative
that's been crafted to like change public opinions. So I
(17:26):
guess I guess these people Mia you mentioned how they're
making it sound like this was this was created to
distract from the Nashville shooting or just just they have
various like motivations for why they want to but it
the important part is that they could use this word
to just easily deny reality, and that is that is
kind of beyond like whatever motivations they have. It's just
(17:47):
easy for them and their ideology to just block off
this section of reality so that they don't have to
like people who are like, actually libertarians don't need to
like confront what the extent of their ideology actually means. Right,
you know, there's a there's certainly people who are like,
okay with mass shootings happening, or you know, are totally
fine with with with like non white people getting killed
(18:08):
in mass shootings. But there probably are certain libertarians who
don't actually like mass shootings. They don't actually like when
fascists go kill tons of people, and it's easier for
them sometimes just to block off this section and ignore
it than actually confront what their ideology means. So some
must kept saying this is either the weirdest story ever
or a very bad sy op. The answer is neither.
The story is not super weird. It's actually very very
(18:30):
explainable if you understand the mechanisms at play here, and
even just not a bad syo.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Yeah, I mean, it's not even like it's not on
it's like on the whole. It's not a particularly complicated
story like there are. It is not an uncommon thing.
I mean, the biggest, most recent one before this was
that shooting in New York at the grocery store that
was like a directly inspired Nazi attack. Like, this kind
(18:56):
of shit happens constantly in the United States. It doesn't choir,
nobody has to be secretly armed by the Feds. There's
an AR fifteen behind every bush in this country. It's
not hard for this kind of this kind of shit.
It's not hard to see where this like originates from.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah, so it's I mean, Muska just kept kept replying
to both Timpoole employee tweets tweets from the very blatantly
fascist account to end Wokeness, which Musk has been replying
to quite a quite often recently. So this and I
think the reason why we wanted to just talk about
(19:32):
this specifically, is just because of you, Like all of
these Musk tweets are getting like millions and millions of views,
if the view counter is any is anything to go by,
At the very least, he's in the top three accounts
with the highest engagement on Twitter. So these these types
of conspiracy theories are getting inflated to extremely high degrees
at least online, and the separation of reality online is
(19:55):
inflated for these mass shootings in a way that I
have not seen in quite a I have not seen
this much just denial of like information regarding mass shootings
in quite a long time. And it just the combination
of the stuff like the stuff with Belling Cat coming
from the tankies and how those conspiracies have now mashed
(20:15):
with all of these like neo fascist shit. It's a
combination of reality denial that is absolutely worrying for like
future mass shootings as well.
Speaker 4 (20:26):
It's a pivot in the kind of reality that's being denied.
You know, not, we have nothing to do with these
Nazis who are parroting some of the things that we
say about immigration. It's this is fundamentally not the attack
that you think it is. This is our enemies creating
an attack to try to make us look bad. Like
the fact that that you've always seen bits and pieces
(20:48):
of that, the fact that it's being parroted by the
wealthiest man on the planet using one of the biggest
information fire hoses that exists is completely novel.
Speaker 3 (20:58):
Yeah, because I mean a lot of these things, conspiracy
theories that specifically about like Eric Toler, we saw we
saw leftists and tankies bringing up the same stuff during
the UH, during the stuff with the Nazi National guardsmen
a month ago, So we have a lot of this
stuff has kind of been writing on the back of
that and just continued and accelerating, UH since then. It
(21:20):
appears there's a few outlets like Business Insider and blank
at themselves reporting that they are they are receiving basically
shadow bands on Twitter right now with their with their
with their account and their posts having a very limited reach.
Speaker 4 (21:35):
An interesting shadow band too, because it's not like it.
It appears, at least from what I've seen, that what
they're doing is they're making it so that when people
type Bellancat into the search bar nothing comes up, as
opposed to like throttling the reach of the actual posts
themselves trying to make it deliberately difficult for people to
actually look up information, which is interesting to me.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Yeah, and I guess it. I guess it's worth saying
that the police and Texas have confirmed everything about about
the shooters political beliefs and his new Nazi ties. And
he has a neo Nazi shit in his apartment. Obviously
his body is covered with neo Nazi tattoos. One of
the things that some of the kind of right wing
(22:18):
content creators were trying to do is that they were
trying to say that the specific pictures of the individual
that Belling Cat found online, that that these pictures were
not this person. They in fact that they were saying
they were saying that the shooter is just somebody else,
which was also proven wrong.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
But yeah, they also they also they did another classic
right wing thing, which is that they misidentified the shooter, yes,
and thought it was another guy with the same name because.
Speaker 4 (22:44):
Like and they misidentified the shooter, and they misidentified the
non Nazi tattoo that he had, Yes, because he had
a he had weirdly enough, like the city of Dallas's
seal tattooed on his hands. Yeah, I got a Texas tattoo.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
On his shoulder.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
Yeah, they like definitely, Like there were a lot of
conspiracy theories about that, and a lot of them related
to the fact that, like, the first photos we got
of the guy were like the kind of photos you
get of a dead man at a mass shooting that
someone takes through a window while sheltering, So it wasn't clear.
So they would take a picture of like a social
media picture of the tattoo on his hand, and then
a picture of him dead, and like the tattoo on
(23:23):
his hand in the picture of him dead was like blurrier,
and they were like, look, the lines aren't straight. They're
straight in the picture on his social media And it's like,
well yeah, because those were taken by very different cameras
in very different situations. Like you know how cameras work,
you know how this This is one.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
Of the funnier ones that one of these content creators
was doing, was they were they were posting the photos
of the Nazi tattoos that the shooter himself posted online,
being like, look how fresh these tattoos are.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
How can.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
If he had these tattoos for years, why do they
look so fresh at these photos? Because there right after.
Speaker 4 (24:01):
Him, Like you do when you get a tattoo. Yeah,
there's like I have tattoos pictures of me getting tattoos
from like fifteen years ago somewhere on my Facebook. Like
you could do the same thing, suspicious, Robert.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
One of the interesting things is that, like we see
the same thing with all of like all of the
worries around like deep faking stuff, like all of all
of the like weaponized on reality stuff. It doesn't need
to actually be convincing it. It doesn't need to be
good like like deep fakes don't need to be good quality.
You can you can post a meme of like a
picture of Biden's face and some text on it with
(24:39):
a quotation mark post on Facebook and millions of people
will believe that's just true. Like it doesn't need to
be real or convincing in order for it to have
it like an effect.
Speaker 4 (24:48):
And it's also it's not just about I think it's
it's thinking, like it's not just about convincing people. It's
not about making them believe it. This is like, this
is the thing that I tried to talk about years
ago during the eight Chance shooting. Shit posting. Part of
the goal is just to disrupt conversation. It's to make
people engage with the fake stuff. It's to make people
break kind of the lines of reasoning that they are
(25:11):
going in with, Like, it's to make people distract people
from the stuff that is really clear and obvious and
just kind of fracture the conversation, because the more that
you do that kind of the weaker you make the
response to what's happened, and the more kind of that
you can distract people from the degree of complicity that
(25:31):
the people in kind of the media sphere on the
right have for all of this shit.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Yeah, And I think that's why it's like specifically going
after the Billing Cat stuff has been really effective with
UP because like, like there are like people who I
am friends with in real life who like are convinced
that Billing Cat is a ciasiop like this is like
a like like really not insignificant portions of the left
believe this, yep. And that means that it's you know,
(25:56):
unbelievably difficult to form any kind of coherent response when
like half of the people who would only be.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
Doing this stuff for like, oh, well they are actually CIA.
So like.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
Yes, the the Netherlands based CIA unit.
Speaker 4 (26:09):
Yeah, it's like, yeah, the I mean, like, at least
in the time I was there, the primary people funding
us was the Dutch post code lottery, like it's it's
it's I don't know, like.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
Like almost every news organization they take grants where yeah,
where they can get them.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah, And like I want to specifically talk about the
ny D a tiny bit because people like, so the
main conspiracy is about like they like, at one point
they took they took a grant for the National Talent
for Democracy and like, yeah, those people do weird shit sometimes,
but they also for example, like if okay, so if
you're gonna have the line that every single person who's
taking money for the n D is a CIA thing,
(26:47):
like you have to accept that. For example, like the
pro Beijing Electoral Party in Hong Kong is a is
a cia op because they also got a ship ton
of any D money, right like they they like anyg
just gives money to a shit ton of people.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
It's definitely worth emphasizing that, like the initial groups that
are pushing the Bellankat conspiracies were all gray zone people
that are specifically specifically paid by the Russian government, like
because Russia was mad at Bellinkat for exposing their war crimes. Yeah,
and like that's where all of this stuff starts.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
There's I don't know how much point there is in
like laying into this specific thing too much. Would I
would remind you at all times when you are like
dealing with breaking news like this and there's a bunch
of different and there's a bunch of different kind of
like conflicting arguments about what's actually happening. Okham's raisor isn't
(27:40):
one hundred percent of the time the way to go.
But in a situation like this, you have two possibilities.
One is that a Nazi went on a killing spree,
as happens constantly, as has been happening since the Nazis
became a thing. The other possibility is that the federal
government for unclear reason and convinced a man to cover
(28:02):
his body in swastika tattoos and shoot random people at
a mall for gun control. That's not going to get
passed in the state of Texas. I don't know like
which of those seems likely to you.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
I did this thing like very deliberately to myself, like
about a year ago, where I was like I was
very deliberate like I'm going to like un conspiracy theory
my brain because you know, like there is a lot
of like like the kind of reasoning you get in
this stuff, which is like, hey, here's a thing that like,
quote unquote looks weird, so this whole thing must be suspect,
(28:49):
so it must be an op is like a really
really kind of like it's a really common kind of
reasoning now that just like a lot of people across
the entire politic conpectrum have and it's not actually a
good way to understand the world, like it's it simply
is not.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
We we live in an increasingly absurd world where every
single weird thing is more and more visible because of
the Internet, so we're more aware of how much weird
shit happens all the time, and stuff that and stuff
that may not not necessarily be weird because like everything,
there is an expert in every field who can who
can explain to you why this thing actually makes perfect sense,
and it's just people being exposed to things that they're
(29:26):
not usually that they're not used to. I think one
of the interesting one of the last things I think
we should like mention about this is just the influx
of how militant like neo Nazism or like visible ne Nazism,
has just been People have just been saying it's Feds
in an increasingly concerning way, like like I think, like
a last month, there was this viral video of a
(29:48):
whole bunch of Nazis stressed in red and black, I think,
protesting something. I forget the exact circumstances at the moment.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
I think it was.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
I think it was some drag related protest, But there
was this group of Nazis dressed in red and black
doing Nazi shit, And when you looked at any of
the videos on Twitter, you saw hundreds of replies from
people with blue check marks just calling them FEDS, saying,
oh wow, look at all these Feds. Well, oh, I
can't believe the FEDS are so busy today. Blah blah
blah blah blah. You know, it's it's like the one
hundred person NPC meme with them all wearing the blue
(30:21):
check work on the forehead saying it's the FEDS, just
because it's once we get to the point where we
have more Nazis doing mass shootings again the same way,
like there was an influx between like twenty seventeen to
twenty nineteen than twenty twenty, there was kind of a
dip because all all crime kind of had a dip.
As we're gonna go into the next next election cycle,
as things are gonna start looping again, when more and
(30:44):
more Nazis start doing shit, just how there's gonna be
a bigger swath of the population who just denies that's
what's happening, and that is gonna make make the problem
of Nazis probably a bit harder to deal with. I mean,
there will still be anti fascists doing their work to
like docs and IDP and and all that stuff, but
the amount of like visibility and the amount of traction
(31:05):
that that this level of reality denial is getting around
like militant neo Nazism and around Nazi killings will be
a kind of a new thing to navigate, or not
a new thing, but like it's a the problem will
be bigger than what it used to be.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
I wanted to kind of note one thing on on
the other side of the ideological spectrum and not to
equate the two. But there has been something kind of
concerning that I've been seeing crop up in liberal circles.
You may have noticed, kind of as a response to
all of the mass shootings and the generally consistent Republican
line that there's nothing to do except for be shittier
(31:42):
to marginalize people, that there's been kind of this like
focus in a lot of mainstream liberal media on articles
and the idea that you should spread pictures of victims
of shootings, and a focus on the amount of damage
that like a weapon like an AR fifteen does to
a human body. People can have their own opinion on
(32:04):
whether or not this is a helpful idea, but I
have noticed in sort of arguments I've been having with
people a troubling trend, which is when I talk about
the importance of doing stuff like taking stop the bleed training,
carrying things like tourniquets, I've gotten responses from a couple
of people that are like AR fifteens are so powerful
the wounds are not survivable, there's no point in doing this.
(32:25):
That is not the case. I have known dozens of
people who have been shot by AR fifteens, in some
cases in AR style weapons in some cases multiple times,
and larger weapons, and lived it is always worthwhile to
have stopped the bleed training and to carry equipment. If
you hear anyone saying that, please please correct them, because
whatever you think about gun control, it is very important
(32:48):
for people to know how to deal with those kind
of injuries, and it is important in the immediate wake
of an attack. One of the things that was really
unsettling is in the immediate wake of the Allen attack,
after the shooter was down, there was a couple of
people who ran in to try to provide life saving aid,
and a bunch more who took photos of the people
who had been wounded and killed. And it's possible that
(33:08):
if more of the people taking photos had gotten in
an attempted to provide aid, some of the people who
were injured might have survived. No way to know, but
always worth having that training. That's just something I've noticed.
Not to put it in the same moral universe as
trying to pretend your calls for violence aren't calls for violence,
but it is something that concerned me and that people
should maybe keep an eye on.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Yeah, I mean, I that was the case with the
Rittenhouse shootings. There was someone who basically had most of
their arm, yeah, blown off, but they did not die. Yeah,
So yeah, that is that is not true. And I've
watched a lot of the Rittenhouse footage and yeah, it is,
it is. It is nasty. Yeah, but no, that is that.
(33:51):
That is a good thing to note.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Yeah, and also like.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
On just a fundamental human level, like do not let
yourself be consumed by the algorithm so much that your
first reaction to seeing someone get shot is you try
to film them, Like, yeah, we we need to be
better than this, Like we have watched people die because
of this, Like like this, this is not a thing
as society that we can continue to be doing. Like
(34:17):
we simply cannot. We simply have to act and not
like become part of a sort of like mass media
spectacle instead of doing something.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
Yeah, the footage of things is not going to change it,
especially with mass shootings. Footage and mass shootings usually actually
makes the problem worse, and it's mostly used by people
who want to be mass shooters.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
Yeah, I'm I that may be a conversation we should, uh,
we should expand on it a later date. But you know,
don't don't let the bastards grind you down. Take a
stop the bleed course, you know, bring a tourniquet with
you out in the world. These are these are action
items that that that you can do that might in
fact help. So that's going to be it for us today.
(35:03):
It could happen here Until next time, you know, keep
your head on this swivel.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
monthly at coolzonmedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Thanks for listening.
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Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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