December 19, 2024 • 43 mins
You win, I'll talk to men -- and for part three of our manosphere series, it's two brilliant men who are experts in this space. After taking a wide look at the manosphere, Jamie speaks with FD Signifier and Robert Evans about their experience studying the manosphere, and what to expect in the near future. Our final part airs next week!
Follow FD Signifier's work: https://www.youtube.com/@FDSignifire
Follow Robert Evans' work: https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
That's going.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
It's stay Get excusa.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Sixteen sixteen. Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where
(00:59):
we talk to the Internet's characters of the day to
see how their moment affected them and what that says
about us in the Internet. However, we are not doing
that this week. This is a bonus episode in our
into the series. In our last episode, we took a
look at how the manisphere has developed in the last decade,
(01:22):
beginning with gamer Gate and the Ilavista killings in twenty fourteen,
all the way through now where Joe Rogan is getting
name checked at a fascist acceptance event. It's a journey.
And today I wanted to share two conversations I've had
with two really wonderful people who have been studying this
area for quite some time, which brings me to just
(01:43):
a little bit of housekeeping at the top, an apology
from me Ian if you could put on some like
YouTuber apology music. As I mentioned in my last episode,
I've been getting some kickback on this series for not
including the voices of men enough, and so to start
(02:03):
to also men listening, I just wanted to apologize if
you felt silenced or quite frankly attacked by my bitchy
little voice. You are valid, you are heard, you are kings.
And obviously you didn't listen to the end of the
last episode because I said that today I would be
(02:24):
speaking with two men who I admire very much. But still,
I'm sorry. I get it. You guys are like super
super busy. So let's get into it, shall we. Both
of my guests today are talented and prolific writers, and
in a very weird coincidence, both just released very thorough
analyzes of Diddy. First, I was really thrilled to get
(02:48):
the chance to speak with FD signifier, a YouTuber I
really admire who has been analyzing the Manisphere on his
channel four years and does something I've seen others consistently
struggle to do, which is hold empathy for men sucked
into that space while always prioritizing those most deeply affected
by it. Beginning with a closer look at the Black
(03:09):
Manisphere specifically, FD has gone on to look at the
world of in cells, speak to former members of the Manisphere,
take a look at how popular media reinforces these narratives,
and has taken a look at how the Manisphere prays
on the neurodivergent. Truly, if you take in anyone else's
work on this subject, let it be his. Here's my
(03:30):
talk with FD signifier.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
I am FD signifier. I am a YouTube video essayist.
For those who don't know what that is. We're kind
of a mix between a think of like the classic
newspaper editor like journalists, investigative journalists slash documentarian slash big
old nerd, theater kid type energy, a lot of that,
(03:54):
like mixing the one. I tend to focus on a
cross section of gender and masculine, any race, specifically black
issues and politics.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
And you also have an academic background in talking I
mean obviously not the manisphere explicitly, but that sort of
expanded universe because and I know you've said this in
your work too, it's really hard to define what we're
actually talking about.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah. Yeah, My master thesis was on spree shooters, and
as a product of studying that population, you end up
in the same place as a lot of the manisphere
red pill at right stuff, because they're all kind of,
as you alluded to, they're all kind of in the
same house, just in different rooms. Once you've kind of
(04:41):
broken down the function of one group you've sixty to
seventy five percent broken down the function of all of them.
So yeah, there's a lot there, and a lot of
it has to do explicitly with masculinity, So there's a
lot of there there.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So when you started tackling this topic explicitly more on
your channel, what led you to like, Okay, it's time
for me to dissect this topic. What were you not
seeing in those discussions at the beginning of this work
that you wanted to bring to the table.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
I'm older than much of my audience in all of
my peers, which creates a lot of distance but also
a lot of perspective, and so me as a married man,
father of two, it was hard for me to kind
of fathom that this was so serious. As I sat,
as I got more and more online, I was like, Oh,
this is actually way more serious than I thought. I
(05:30):
started seeing it boomerang back to my real life, where
I would have parents of other children say my son
brought home this and started saying this stuff about femoids
and all kinds of weird crap about women, and I'm like, oh,
I actually know that guy. H Yeah, let me maybe
this is a real thing that I should get into.
(05:51):
And then I also recognized, as I allude to earlier,
that no disrespect to a lot of my contemporaries, none
of them were really putting in useful analysis as to
the true causes and underlying elements. Nobody had really broken down,
like my first video is understanding the manisphere. It doesn't
take much, especially amongst you know, my audience, to say, yeah,
(06:14):
this is dumb. These people are dumb. Don't be like them.
It's more valuable, I think, long term, for more people
to have a developed analysis of how this world functions,
so that we can have a better tools for how
to make it not function anymore, and more explicitly, for parents,
(06:34):
for people who have these types of guys in their
lives to know what it is that is bringing them.
Like the first thing you'll see as a friend or
a peer or a parent is really like the fifth
step of the problem. Right when they start repeating these
talking points to you in real life, they've already been
deep in for a while where they get comfortable to.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
They're comfortable bringing up at school.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
They're evangelizing at that point. They're true believers if they've
gotten to that point. And so you know what things
that you miss up until that point, And like, if
you are educated enough to see those things, how do
you address them then? Better yet, what type of energy
and relationships can you be building in the home to
make this less likely with children and teenagers and peers
(07:21):
and friends. And we didn't really have much for that,
And so that's kind of one of the things I
hope to contribute to. One of the things that is
often a failure on our part to understand is that
these are actually very complex communities with very intelligent, nuanced contributors.
It requires like that level of respect to understand what's
(07:42):
going on. Otherwise you just won't know. They've built their
communities for the sole purpose of keeping normal people out
by being repulsive or cryptic in the way they engage
with each other.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
For you, in terms of like what the manisphere is
and what it's influence is, where does the story start,
I've gotten a lot of different answers to this question.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
So white supremacy, I mean, I mean, it's a big
part of it. It starts with patriarchy here in the States.
It starts with American exceptionalism to an extent, it starts
with Western ideology and thought. The impetus for how a
lot of this stuff becomes appealing to the young men
(08:24):
that get into it is they're outsiders. They're they're socially
ineffective for a variety of reasons. It might be because
they're just not that attractive or not as attractive as
some of their peers. They may be late social bloomers,
late physical bloomers. They may have genuine behavioral or mental
health issues that make it hard for them to socialize.
(08:47):
They may have a physical disability. They may be poor,
they may be a minority of some sort. All these
things could could contribute to a sense of otherness and
then the targeting of ostracism, and that contributes to the
desire to find places where you can feel belonging, community
(09:07):
and power. Not all cases, not all cases, but in
some of these cases, these young men become targeted by
these different communities, different grifters looking to get a quick
buck out of them. Mold, you're not feeling good about society,
Well take this class and I'll teach you how to
be a big baller or whatever Andrew Tate was selling.
Aside from offering them a false like solution to their problem,
(09:32):
the biggest thing that people don't get is that it
offers them belonging. People that stay the longest and fall
in the deepest is because that is where they found community.
If it's community built around misogyny or racism or something else, fine,
but it's more than the community they had, you know,
away from their keyboard. Michael Kimmel has some good stuff
(09:52):
on this. I have the obligatory point out that Michael
Kimmel has a me too, several me two cases out there,
and Michael Kimmel calls agrieved entitlement, which is connected to
a lot of this stuff. And it's you know, especially
for white, young white men who while this is a
very diverse community, people don't give you enough credit for
how diverse it is. But for white men in particular,
(10:13):
these young white boys are told that they're the you know,
the protagonist, the heroes of their own stories in all
of our media, it's in our mythology. And then they
grow up and find out, no, you're just a peon
at best. You're a worker, you know, and the people
that you know have the power over you. Their parents
also have the power over your parents, and their grandparents
have the power over your grandparents. And there's nothing you
(10:34):
could do about it. It just lends itself to a
unfortunate cocktail of toxic elements that for a handful of
these young men makes a edge lord creator talking about
how women shouldn't be able to vote and that'll fix
all our problems. It makes that appealing. So I, as
a young man, did not have a lot of success
(10:55):
with women. You know, I did not have any I'd
never had girlfriend in high school, have plenty of girls
I liked and I crushed on, no success. It wasn't
until halfway through college that I started to kind of
figure things out. And it was only after I had
done some traditionally masculine things to make myself just service
level more appealing to women. And there was a bitterness
there around that. There was a frustration, There was some
(11:18):
animosity and some misogyny involved in that experience. My general
theory is that most boys that end up in this
space even today grow out of it just by necessity
of continuing go on with life. That grow out of it,
they may have some residual effects. I'm not saying everybody
just completely perfectly grows out of it, but you grow
(11:39):
out of the danger zone, so to speak. But today,
it's just you don't have to as much Like I
had to grow out of that to get on with
my life, to go get a job, to continue to
try to find partners, partners in love, et cetera, et cetera,
to learn how to talk to women face to face
because there was no swiping left right. So like, there's
(12:01):
so much of our society has been atomized. I think
young men who have those challenges are never put in
positions to overcome them in productive ways. And then you
have this entire ecosystem of grifters who are collecting money
off of their pain, you know, and so that just
(12:23):
kind of makes it stronger, makes it hold longer. And
we're sitting here trying to figure out what to do
about it.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Now, what is the bait to draw, you know, people
into this space? And has it changed over time?
Speaker 1 (12:50):
It hasn't changed. It's panacea. It's I can I can
solve the problem. This is it's a classic. It's what
this what salespeople have done since the beginning of time.
You have a problem, I have a solution. The solution
is insert awful thing here. The problem is that the
problems are becoming maybe bigger and more more difficult to
(13:14):
address in any form of fashion. You know, the one
of the premitive conversations in the manisphere of red pill
whatever space is is, you know, income and being a
high value man and making money because you need money
to attract a mate. And that's just true, that's just reality.
If you have less money, you will have less options
in the dating market. That is more of a problem
(13:36):
in twenty twenty four, in our modern economy, in our
modern work world, where making more money is difficult, women
have gotten to a point where they can make their
own money. And we're not going back to the sixties
and fifties when a woman needed a man to survive.
And so you have a lot of dudes that never
develop personalities because they thought they would just have a
(13:57):
good job. There's so much to that, the dregs and
and scourge of late capitalism. But these young men who
grew up watching, you know, all these images of masculinity,
who grew up being taught all these things about masculinity,
they do not care. They want their tread wife and
their factory job back. They will literally tear everything down
(14:20):
trying to get it back. Tear everything except for the
thing that needs to be torn down trying to get
it back.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Even though I feel like sometimes the way that the
manisphere is sort of almost like scapegoated, is like, well
it was.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
That, that was that so, and there was nothing, And
that's what I'm alluding to. So there's something to the
fact that he went on Aiden Ross and Joe Rogan's
podcast that I think a lot of left leaning people
really underappreciate, like did not appreciate how significant that was.
There's something to that, But at the end of the day,
we're mostly just talking about racism and misogyny. Like it's
(14:53):
not that it's not that deep. There's an angle there
to discuss, but let's not I think a lot of
people are trying on purpose to miss the forest from
the trees. Then that require them to do some self
reflection on their own politics. We want to stick to
the manisphere.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
You famously hate to do that.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, the truth of the matter is the media is
informed by the culture. It's not the other way around.
And I think a lot of times because that's something
we can really respond to a control and it also
again alleviates responsibility on our part. We want to make
it seem like, well, my son started watching these manisphere
(15:32):
type people, and then suddenly he became a misogynist, and
I'm like, and I just want to be like, I
just want to let you know, if your son gets
in the manisphere, that's your fault. You have created an
environment where that seemed like a reasonable response to his
own pain and concerns and issues, and that is not
(15:53):
just the individual's fault. That's a cultural standard. The normous misogyny,
the norm is racism, the norm is in aphobia. Those
are American principles that we don't like to admit are there.
And so it of course individuals weaned in that culture,
in that environment are going to respond and without anyone
(16:14):
to kind of like, hey, nope, not here, not in
this house, not this community, not in this family, if
there's nothing to curtail that, it's going to be very
easy for those types of messages to resonate, for those
type of messengers to pull them into those spaces. And
so we have to do two things. One, we have
to be responsible with the culture and community we're producing
(16:38):
so that it's less likely to produced those types of things.
But the other big thing is we also have to
as as you know, as creators spend a little more
time celebrating and contributing to the creation of media. That's
just I talk about Star Trek. I wish I had
talked about like One Piece, which is an anime, and
so many other types of media that are about a
(16:59):
world that is more virtuous and kind of more gets
to like the type of world we're trying to create
through our politics, as opposed to we're going to comment
on how bad the world is through this dark white
guy who does edgy things and is really cool and
has a jacket and guns. But you know, you're not
supposed to want to be like them.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
But look at how the but the scorpion jacket, the
scorpion jacket.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
I also I wanted to go into your work on
the Black Manisphere. You're one of the few creators I've
seen who has really got into this and early. So
could you tell me a little bit about this space?
When did it crop up and how does it? Does
it function any differently than other Manisphere spaces?
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, So the Black Manisphere, they would say that they,
as a formal like online space, predate the Manisphere, which
I would agree with. The Black Manisphere comes out of
like a history of gender conflict within Black America between
black men and women, which is a byproduct of you know,
the history of racism, the dregs and results of slave ran,
Jim Crow segregation, etc. And just the genuine fact that
(18:06):
black men and women were never supposed to operate in
America as men and women the same way white people were.
And so that creates a just stew of issues and
conflicts as men black men are trying to pursue manhood
and masculinity in a way similar to white men do,
and as black women try to pursue femininity in a
(18:27):
way similar to white women do. And this creates all
these different venues for conflict that has historically made the
talk show with you know, why are all men dogs?
You know, why don't black women let a black man lead?
That's literally going back to the seventies, that's been a
(18:47):
thing in our media. And so the manisphere starts to
become a thing in the two thousands with the onset
of YouTube and the Internet communities, because now these men
who feel these things about black women, much like the
normal manosphere, can come together and start to voice their
issues YadA, YadA, YadA. Beyond that unique like origin point,
(19:12):
no how that kind of vacillates that throughout the culture.
It's not that different. It's still misogyny and masculine conflict.
It's still men and boys trying to claim a sense
of power in their masculinity through the denigration of women.
It's a little less racist most of the time, it's
a little less xenophobic most of the time. It's just
(19:33):
as misogynistic. There's a couple of differences, Like a lot
of the Black manisphere people, some of them try to
present themselves as pro black and pro black people, and
so they can kind of sneak things in in ways
that if you're not alert to it, you don't hear it.
So their misogyny can be very sublimated into like these
(19:54):
just classical images of masculinity and gender because there's a feeling, well,
black people's problems that the black family isn't in order,
which is true to an extent. There's validity to that statement.
So that's why black women need to stop worrying so
much about their education and stop telling black men what
to do. That it is so like it's oh there,
it is, oh exactly exactly. For me, talking about it
(20:16):
was almost more difficult because there's a thing that happens
when you kind of know your enemy, you cut deeper.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
You know that, I mean, but I think even what
you're describing like is a critical part of the work, right.
It is like processing your own feelings towards these spaces
and then figuring out what is a constructive way to
talk about it. Because I feel like, like you're saying, like,
even creators I enjoy, a lot of people blow through
the like let's just give the raw emotion to it,
(20:45):
as opposed to like really thinking about it, because your
work is so thorough and so thoughtful, and you're also thinking,
you know, coming from the perspective of a parent. My
sort of worry is that this is going to turn
into some kind of moral pan that will be deeply
unproductive and send people further, like send you know, young
(21:06):
men further into this think it.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
I don't think it'll get that real moral panic energy,
but I want to I want you to finish your question,
but I disagree that it'll ever be the true moral panic,
and I'll tell you why.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Oh please, Yes. My question was just if someone's listening
who is a parent or has someone in their life
who is clearly internalizing this stuff, where do you start
to address it.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
I'm of two minds that are I think probably need
to work together. I'm from a relatively traditional household where
things like child autonomy and privacy were not greatly respected
by my parents. Sure, and I think you have to
be open to that idea when it comes to monitoring
what your child is consuming on the internet. Maybe you
(21:50):
don't want to have like outright spy where you don't
want to be a full on police officer in your
own home to your child because that just creates them
being sneakier. But you definitely don't don't want to be complete,
like stop handing the tablet to your kids and saying
go nuts. These companies, these organizations, these the AI, the algorithms,
all these machines are trained to addict your child to
(22:13):
the screen and they do not care how they do that.
And one of the most fundamentally predictable ways they know
they can do that, and you can probably got this
one of videos is through making them upset, making them angry,
making them outrage. And one of the easiest way to
piss people off is to show them a woman doing
the thing a woman's not supposed to do. Like being
(22:34):
sexy but not but in public, or you know, wanting
more money than she's willing to work for some other Oh,
she cheated on her boyfriend and then rolled her eyes
like whatever. Like so many of the videos start with
girl does thing and then gets put in place by
alpha male. Like that's sixty percent of the video titles. Yeah,
(22:54):
and so when you're your twelve year old watches that, like,
stop letting them watch. That is what I'm getting to.
The Other thing is you have to be willing to dismantle.
And this is why I don't think it'll become a
true moral panic. Moral panics tend to be truly transgressive.
Misogyny isn't transgressive. Misogyny is reinforcing the social norm. Transgressive
(23:15):
is feminism, Transgressive is queer, transgressive is black. Like, so
those things create moral panics. Heavy metal created the moral
panic because it was counterculture and subversive and anti authoritarian
and all those things. This stuff is just a little too.
It's embarrassing little Timmy says something really misogynistic to his sister,
(23:38):
and now I have to deal with this at home.
And because it would shine such an ugly eye on
the true nature of some people's households and some communities.
I don't think it'll ever reach the true moral panic,
because according to certain people, this is what won the
election for Donald Trump. But to fully go back to
answering that question, you have to dismantle the utility of
(23:58):
this ideology in your their own home. And that doesn't
mean you have to become like a hardcore feminist and
read JUDITHH. Butler and Audie Lord. Just make it so
it's not so easy for misogyny to pass in your home.
Tell your brother in law to shut the fuck up
when he says something sexist and says it's a joke.
Build into goodness with your child, not based on their
(24:22):
ability to perform masculinity, but in their innate goodness. Let
them feel comfortable being emotional. Let them feel comfortable about crying.
Explain to them how corrosion it is when they like
a girl. Let them know you can like this girl.
She may not like you, and that's okay, And that
doesn't mean an think about you, and it definitely doesn't
mean anything about them. And challenge the stuff when you
see it. That, along with a slow of other things
(24:42):
that I don't have time to get into, is going
to be way more useful than even just sending them
one of my videos. One of my videos is more
for you to understand it so that you can address
it in reality. One of my mentors talked about the
fact that this isn't an issue of misinformation. This is
an issue of disinf The knowledge is out there. We
just have to get it in the right places and
(25:04):
get it into people's systems for real.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
FT Signifier, thank you so much for your time. This
is like, this is so wonderful. Thank you so much
to FT signifier. I cannot recommend his channel enough. And
when we come back, Thanking and Boisden, Robert Evans, Welcome
(25:36):
back to sixteenth minute. My cat ate wrapping paper and
I had to pay a medical professional seven hundred and
fifty dollars about it. And to close out part two
of our Manisphere series, I'm speaking with one of the
producers of this very show, Robert Evans, who's been both
reporting and commentating on Manisphere spaces, specifically extreme All to
(25:57):
Right spaces for years and famously connected a series of
mass shootings we discussed earlier to in cell forums. In
this house, we love Robert, and so here's our chat
because we've like talked about this before, and we've both
spent the better part of our lives on the internet.
When did you start seeing communities like this cropping up?
Speaker 1 (26:21):
You know?
Speaker 3 (26:21):
I started to see inklings of this in like late
twenty thirteen, and like the comments on Cracked articles right
where we would do pieces that were talking about like
rape survivors or the trans experience, and there would be
these like, you know, we would get a great response,
they got a lot of people reading them, but we
would get these like really weirdly hostile posts, and it
became clear I would get some emails too, you know,
(26:43):
So it became clear there was some more communities of
people who were like getting really angry because I was,
you know, I was more or less just a libertarian
at that point, a libertarian who had like voted for
Obama because Bush was a fucking disaster, right, But I
didn't really think about I didn't think about like writing,
you know, doing articles with like trans people about the
realities of transitioning as like a political act. I was
(27:03):
just like, oh, I don't know much about what it's
like to be trans. This is interesting, you know, but
it was pissing some people off a ton and so
I was like, well, this is odd, and it all
kind of crystallized in twenty fourteen, when back at Cracked,
we did a sketch comedy video, the premise of which was,
what if all of like the main websites on the
(27:24):
Internet today were kids in a high school? Right, okay?
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Twenty fourteen?
Speaker 3 (27:30):
I think it was yeah, ye, And you know, among
the things in that is we had eight chan as
a kid, eight Chan, which had just come about gamer.
I was aware of gamergait as it was happening. I
did not take it super seriously in its early stages,
like I got we all got some harassment, but it
was like these freaks on the internet are like angry
(27:51):
about girls. We've always known some of these people were there.
It was not clear to me at that immediate point
that this was like going to redefine how politics worked
in the country. Right when it became clear to me,
because those kids get kicked off a four chan, eight
chan is started and eight chan becomes their home. They
develop a board on eight chan called Baphomet, which is
(28:12):
where like harassment campaigns are architected. And this video comes
out and whoever wrote it, I forget which of our
writers like actually did the script, but they envisioned eight
chan as like this little nerdy kid who was just
constantly sexually harassing the popular girl who was the stand
in for Facebook, right, and like it was not a
(28:33):
super deep thing here, Like that was the joke, right,
is that like eight chan is the creepy kid harassing
the popular girl, right.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
I mean it is wild that there was a time
where Facebook was a hot girl.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Yes, this is a wildly different time, right.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
The blob from the end of the substance is how
I think of Facebook now.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Yeah, yeah, no, this was a very different period of time. Yeah,
but yeah, so we do that, and these kids on
eight chan find it. And they don't go after the
writer of the episode of the sketch, who was a man.
They don't go after the director I think it might
have had him Ganzer, but who was a guy. They
go after the girl playing Facebook, and they're like mailing
dead animals to her parents' house. They're sending her like
(29:11):
pizzas and death threats and like, and they're chronicling it
all live on Baphomet in like this thread that I
the day it starts, I find the thread and I'm
like archiving and clicking out. I wanted to report on it.
I calling David Bell, wanted to start filming a documentary
right then, I'm there. Like his premise, which I think
in retrospect maybe we should have done, would have been
(29:32):
like what is the Internet done to us? Right? But
we didn't in part because it would have directed more
harassment to this young woman, right like that That's why
ultimately it was like no one went, no one said
anything about it. But that is why, you know, in
twenty nineteen, my career like really was ignited in a
(29:52):
large way because of my reporting on eight chan during
the christ Church shooting. Well, I was I had been
stalking e I had about once or twice once every
month or two. I had been going by eight chan
and keeping an eye on how things were developing there.
Ever since twenty fourteen, as a result of guests, right like,
that's when I really got into looking at a lot
of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Okay, and as you were watching over there, I mean
like over the course of that like half decade, you know,
during which obviously a lot changes in that half decade.
I feel like my into this was showing my college
boyfriend and Anita Sarkisian video and him being like, you're
a fucking idiot. You're like feeling like, oh man, oh,
our edge Lord comedy is a joke to me, but
(30:34):
you you might actually mean what we're saying, you know
that kind of shit. When does it really feel like
these communities get empowered and start to escalate?
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Yeah, I mean it started fairly rapidly after that point,
which we know Bannon recognized the promise that these networks had.
When I started looking at them, they reminded me a
lot of you know, about twenty degrees darker than where
my friends and I had been in high school. Right
(31:04):
near the end of high school. My friends and I
I think, like most kids, I think honestly, like super
Bad is one of the movies that gets the way
we talked back then best. But like, you know, the
f slur was like every third word out of my
mouth and out of the mouth of like every kid
I knew, right like that is was just incredibly common, right.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Like most millennials are like recovering Edge Lord's to say, right.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Right, yeah, I remember on nine to eleven on something
Awful when one of the first things someone did was
like set the footage of the towers going down to
yackety sacks right like we were. So I saw, I recognized,
I saw familiarity in the way kids on eight chan
were talking. And what just kept happening every month is
(31:46):
like the Nazi stuff is like less and less absurdist
nihilist humor and more and more just Nazi stuff. And
it happened very quickly. Perhaps I think it always was
more serious than I had initially recognized. I think maybe
initially I saw it as a little less serious than
it was because it was so familiar, and you know,
(32:08):
I think it says a lot about how social media
traps us at certain ages by trapping us in social
circles and trapping us in patterns of talk and patterns
of like in mimetic patterns that can lock us at
periods of development, because you know, my friends and I
stopped talking that way very quickly after high school, because
(32:32):
we got out into the world and we made more
friends who like wouldn't stand for that shit and realize like, oh,
you actually don't talk like that. That's actually fucked up.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
You know.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
And I think it's harder for that to happen to
not everyone, but a lot of people it is easier
to fall into a loop. And some of this is
very intentional. Some of this is just some of these
different right wing you know, Nazi organizations realized the promise
that social media held for locking people into these loops.
But you know, whatever you want to look at it,
the loops exist.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
I think a lot about how the role of like
ironic humor in the twenty tens kind of plays into this.
But again, it feels like at every stage of this,
or at least the way I see it, let me
know if you feel differently. Every time there's an escalation,
some people leave, and then other people double down and
get even more involved in the community and pull more
people in. You've written really cogently about how this like
(33:28):
escalation of it starts as a joke and becomes real
continued and at this point, I mean, is there any
spaces where it's still being treated as a joke at
this point?
Speaker 3 (33:39):
I don't know that it ever really was. I think
that there are. What you do see is a calving
off where the extremists get more extreme and less welcome elsewhere, right,
And you also see you see folks who had been
using someone who had been using some of that language
who had been yet edgelrds get like kind of adopting
more like you know, quote unquote woke language in part
(34:01):
to differentiate themselves from like the bigotry online. Right That's
the that's part of the story of partisanship. I'm not
saying that as a way to say, like, and so
the wokes are just as responsible for everything getting so divided.
I'm saying it's like a natural reaction. You see this
one group of people who used to play games with
and like bullshit with online become Nazis. You don't, you
(34:23):
want to make it very clear, I'm not one of them.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
I guess around Trump's first election there was this wave
of deplatforming of a lot of right wing and I
guess you could classify them as manisphere to some extent influencers,
and that I mean, at least I remember being positive
as like, well we've deplatformed them, Yeah, problems solved or
(34:48):
a lot of the you know, like rhetoric I was
engaging with during the Me Too movement was like we
just got have to get these guys away from us
and like out of these spaces, which was effective to
some point, but also they did not disappear into dust,
and a lot of them sort of doubled down. I
guess I'm curious of your feeling of that period of time,
(35:11):
of the time where there was this deplatforming movement. What
did this space learn from that?
Speaker 3 (35:19):
I mean, for one thing, to platforming never happened on
a significant coach and scale right like it it's a
little bit off, I think to say that, like the
platforming failed because like, well, we didn't do.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
It right, right, Like was it ever even possible it did?
Speaker 3 (35:33):
The individuals had their reach decreased for a while right
right now. Also, you know, one of the things is that,
like these are live conflicts. Alex Jones saw his reach collapse,
He lost a lot of money, and a lot of
people on the right readopted him and brought him closer
than he had been to folks who had power and
(35:53):
more kind of mainstream appeal, guys like Tucker Carlson, because that,
like that was what they saw is the smart direction
in the fight. Right, So it's not good enough. You
can never you can never just deploy a tool like
the platforming once and say well we did it, Joe,
you know, we're done, right, like they are, there's going
to be a counter move, and the counter moves against
(36:16):
guys like Jones number one, they all came too late, right.
Part of it is that could by the time Alex
Jones started getting deplatformed, he was so embedded in the
culture and so influential. You know, I don't know that
like any of the kind of airsats deplatforming, you know,
strategies that were adopted, could have really stopped him from
(36:39):
being someone whose voice mattered, right, Like, that's just a
reality of the situation. Some of it is that like
if you just kind of let this shit go on
for a while, it metastasizes until the point that it's terminal.
And ironically, I think there's a chance that like Alex
and a lot of these guys who have been more
on the we're going to wind up fighting the left
in the streets side of things have some trouble in
(37:01):
the coming years, as there's a lot less impetus, you know,
for Trump supporters to believe that's happening. But I don't
really know what's going to go down there. If you're
looking back, like what could have been done to have
stopped this, There's only one very clear answer to me,
and it is you need to put in legal consequences
for algorithms working the way they work. That's what should
(37:22):
have been illegal from the beginning, was algorithmically pushing people
towards shit like fucking the Boogaloo boys and militias and
towards like neo nazi, you know, race realist organizations exposing
children to that at scale in order to get engagement
hours and bring in ad revenue. If that had been
illegal from the beginning, if there had been immediate, severe
(37:42):
penalties that hurt the bottom line of these social media companies,
I think we'd be in a different situation now right now.
Would that ever have been that certainly didn't happen, So
would it ever have been politically viable?
Speaker 2 (37:55):
I don't know, especially with just how it's still not.
You know, every algorithm is still extremely opaque. There is
no incentive to indicate how your algorithm works at all.
This previous mid twenty tenh emphasis on we have to
deradicalize people before it's too late. I don't really see
that conversation happening now, is it because it's just kind
(38:18):
of too late to do that. Do you think that
that is still like a viable route in any way, Uh.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
Shit, I don't know. Yeah, I wish I had like
a clear answer to what the solution was. Here. The
best advice I can give people, don't listen to anyone
who is telling you number one, I have a really
clear and obvious solution. And number two, it happens to
(38:47):
comport with what this organization I am in has been
saying we should do all along. Just give us some money. Right,
Be very very not that there aren't like, for example,
I think a lot of the getting out of this
I think is going to I think unions are going
to be a very important part of that story. But
I also think like unions are also part.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Of the problem. Right.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
You can look at where the teamsters voted, you know,
in this last election.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Right.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
I just be very hesitant of people who come to
you peddling solutions and asking for your money.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
One thing we should take out of this is that
if the first thing out of anyone's mouth who comes
to you with the solution is so I need a donation.
While Harris raised three times as much as Trump and
look where that got her, don't do that. Be very
careful with who you listen to. If they're if they're
coming to you and saying I have a solution for you,
(39:37):
and it's by a gun. It's donate money to the
Democratic Party. It's this very simple thing, because what takes
us out of this is not going to be simple
and be hesitant to embrace people who come to you
with simple solutions.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Do you see this space continuing to grow? Where do
you see this sort of evolving into?
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Well, that's that's interesting because I you know, some of
these people right now have evolved into the like repeal
of the nineteen the Amendment. You know, freaks right, women
shouldn't be voting, and Trump just made a woman who's
clearly one of the only people he respects into his
White House chief of staff. And also I don't think
I don't see not that he's not going to put
through a bunch of policies that are bad for women,
(40:16):
but like a lot of women voted for him, so
I don't necessarily see him as being like, well, repealing
the nineteenth Amendment is my number one priority, right, he
likes winning elections, and I do think that a lot
of what he does once the own the Libs high
comes down and they see that they're not going to
get a lot of what they wanted because it's stupid
(40:36):
and because it doesn't benefit Trump to give it to them,
and he had no problem lying to any of them.
Trump is not particularly interested in giving you all of
these crazy things that you want, because like that's never
been his politics. Right, is Trump going to make us
a Catholic fascist state? I don't think Donald Trump gives
a shit about that. I don't think he's really an
into Catholicism, you know. I don't know if that's the
(40:59):
threat model. I think that's more freaks online. I think
that's more Nick Fuintz weirdness. And I think those guys,
you know, there's a chance they get really angry as
a result of, you know, as it becomes clear what
they're going to get and what they're not going to get.
I mean, I think in terms of explaining the Manisphere
to people, you say, it's a group of content creators
who are generally aligned by a financial alliance on selling
(41:24):
supplements to make people huge, selling advice on how to
pick up women. Their audience is largely frustrated young men
who think that they are not having all the sex
that they should have, and a lot of them have
gotten into kind of Nazi adjacent racial politics as part
of their general frustration at the things the world hasn't
given them, and they see that their alliance with the
(41:45):
right wing is because the right wing will make things
harder for women and make them more necessary again, you know,
Like I think that's important. Like these guys are very influential.
Millions and millions of people listen to them. It had
an impact on the election, right, Yeah, you.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
So much to Robert. I'm pretty sure he has a podcast,
but I don't remember what it's called. Check back with me,
all right, I know that was a lot of information.
I hope you're well. And next week we're going to
close this series out by talking to those affected by it,
young men who got out of the manisphere and the
people who are targeted by the Manisphere and what if
(42:24):
anything we can do to turn this around. We'll see
you then, and for your moment of fun, let's hold
some space for defying gravity.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Thank you.
Speaker 4 (42:40):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Janie Lastus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lickderman and Robert Evans.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
Grant Crater and pet. Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson,
my cat's fleeing Casper, and my pet Rockberg, who will
outlive us all Bye.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
That's going.
Speaker 3 (00:13):
It's stay Get excusa.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Sixteen sixteen. Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where
(00:59):
we talk to the Internet's characters of the day to
see how their moment affected them and what that says
about us in the Internet. However, we are not doing
that this week. This is a bonus episode in our
into the series. In our last episode, we took a
look at how the manisphere has developed in the last decade,
(01:22):
beginning with gamer Gate and the Ilavista killings in twenty fourteen,
all the way through now where Joe Rogan is getting
name checked at a fascist acceptance event. It's a journey.
And today I wanted to share two conversations I've had
with two really wonderful people who have been studying this
area for quite some time, which brings me to just
(01:43):
a little bit of housekeeping at the top, an apology
from me Ian if you could put on some like
YouTuber apology music. As I mentioned in my last episode,
I've been getting some kickback on this series for not
including the voices of men enough, and so to start
(02:03):
to also men listening, I just wanted to apologize if
you felt silenced or quite frankly attacked by my bitchy
little voice. You are valid, you are heard, you are kings.
And obviously you didn't listen to the end of the
last episode because I said that today I would be
(02:24):
speaking with two men who I admire very much. But still,
I'm sorry. I get it. You guys are like super
super busy. So let's get into it, shall we. Both
of my guests today are talented and prolific writers, and
in a very weird coincidence, both just released very thorough
analyzes of Diddy. First, I was really thrilled to get
(02:48):
the chance to speak with FD signifier, a YouTuber I
really admire who has been analyzing the Manisphere on his
channel four years and does something I've seen others consistently
struggle to do, which is hold empathy for men sucked
into that space while always prioritizing those most deeply affected
by it. Beginning with a closer look at the Black
(03:09):
Manisphere specifically, FD has gone on to look at the
world of in cells, speak to former members of the Manisphere,
take a look at how popular media reinforces these narratives,
and has taken a look at how the Manisphere prays
on the neurodivergent. Truly, if you take in anyone else's
work on this subject, let it be his. Here's my
(03:30):
talk with FD signifier.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
I am FD signifier. I am a YouTube video essayist.
For those who don't know what that is. We're kind
of a mix between a think of like the classic
newspaper editor like journalists, investigative journalists slash documentarian slash big
old nerd, theater kid type energy, a lot of that,
(03:54):
like mixing the one. I tend to focus on a
cross section of gender and masculine, any race, specifically black
issues and politics.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
And you also have an academic background in talking I
mean obviously not the manisphere explicitly, but that sort of
expanded universe because and I know you've said this in
your work too, it's really hard to define what we're
actually talking about.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah. Yeah, My master thesis was on spree shooters, and
as a product of studying that population, you end up
in the same place as a lot of the manisphere
red pill at right stuff, because they're all kind of,
as you alluded to, they're all kind of in the
same house, just in different rooms. Once you've kind of
(04:41):
broken down the function of one group you've sixty to
seventy five percent broken down the function of all of them.
So yeah, there's a lot there, and a lot of
it has to do explicitly with masculinity, So there's a
lot of there there.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So when you started tackling this topic explicitly more on
your channel, what led you to like, Okay, it's time
for me to dissect this topic. What were you not
seeing in those discussions at the beginning of this work
that you wanted to bring to the table.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
I'm older than much of my audience in all of
my peers, which creates a lot of distance but also
a lot of perspective, and so me as a married man,
father of two, it was hard for me to kind
of fathom that this was so serious. As I sat,
as I got more and more online, I was like, Oh,
this is actually way more serious than I thought. I
(05:30):
started seeing it boomerang back to my real life, where
I would have parents of other children say my son
brought home this and started saying this stuff about femoids
and all kinds of weird crap about women, and I'm like, oh,
I actually know that guy. H Yeah, let me maybe
this is a real thing that I should get into.
(05:51):
And then I also recognized, as I allude to earlier,
that no disrespect to a lot of my contemporaries, none
of them were really putting in useful analysis as to
the true causes and underlying elements. Nobody had really broken down,
like my first video is understanding the manisphere. It doesn't
take much, especially amongst you know, my audience, to say, yeah,
(06:14):
this is dumb. These people are dumb. Don't be like them.
It's more valuable, I think, long term, for more people
to have a developed analysis of how this world functions,
so that we can have a better tools for how
to make it not function anymore, and more explicitly, for parents,
(06:34):
for people who have these types of guys in their
lives to know what it is that is bringing them.
Like the first thing you'll see as a friend or
a peer or a parent is really like the fifth
step of the problem. Right when they start repeating these
talking points to you in real life, they've already been
deep in for a while where they get comfortable to.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
They're comfortable bringing up at school.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
They're evangelizing at that point. They're true believers if they've
gotten to that point. And so you know what things
that you miss up until that point, And like, if
you are educated enough to see those things, how do
you address them then? Better yet, what type of energy
and relationships can you be building in the home to
make this less likely with children and teenagers and peers
(07:21):
and friends. And we didn't really have much for that,
And so that's kind of one of the things I
hope to contribute to. One of the things that is
often a failure on our part to understand is that
these are actually very complex communities with very intelligent, nuanced contributors.
It requires like that level of respect to understand what's
(07:42):
going on. Otherwise you just won't know. They've built their
communities for the sole purpose of keeping normal people out
by being repulsive or cryptic in the way they engage
with each other.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
For you, in terms of like what the manisphere is
and what it's influence is, where does the story start,
I've gotten a lot of different answers to this question.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
So white supremacy, I mean, I mean, it's a big
part of it. It starts with patriarchy here in the States.
It starts with American exceptionalism to an extent, it starts
with Western ideology and thought. The impetus for how a
lot of this stuff becomes appealing to the young men
(08:24):
that get into it is they're outsiders. They're they're socially
ineffective for a variety of reasons. It might be because
they're just not that attractive or not as attractive as
some of their peers. They may be late social bloomers,
late physical bloomers. They may have genuine behavioral or mental
health issues that make it hard for them to socialize.
(08:47):
They may have a physical disability. They may be poor,
they may be a minority of some sort. All these
things could could contribute to a sense of otherness and
then the targeting of ostracism, and that contributes to the
desire to find places where you can feel belonging, community
(09:07):
and power. Not all cases, not all cases, but in
some of these cases, these young men become targeted by
these different communities, different grifters looking to get a quick
buck out of them. Mold, you're not feeling good about society,
Well take this class and I'll teach you how to
be a big baller or whatever Andrew Tate was selling.
Aside from offering them a false like solution to their problem,
(09:32):
the biggest thing that people don't get is that it
offers them belonging. People that stay the longest and fall
in the deepest is because that is where they found community.
If it's community built around misogyny or racism or something else, fine,
but it's more than the community they had, you know,
away from their keyboard. Michael Kimmel has some good stuff
(09:52):
on this. I have the obligatory point out that Michael
Kimmel has a me too, several me two cases out there,
and Michael Kimmel calls agrieved entitlement, which is connected to
a lot of this stuff. And it's you know, especially
for white, young white men who while this is a
very diverse community, people don't give you enough credit for
how diverse it is. But for white men in particular,
(10:13):
these young white boys are told that they're the you know,
the protagonist, the heroes of their own stories in all
of our media, it's in our mythology. And then they
grow up and find out, no, you're just a peon
at best. You're a worker, you know, and the people
that you know have the power over you. Their parents
also have the power over your parents, and their grandparents
have the power over your grandparents. And there's nothing you
(10:34):
could do about it. It just lends itself to a
unfortunate cocktail of toxic elements that for a handful of
these young men makes a edge lord creator talking about
how women shouldn't be able to vote and that'll fix
all our problems. It makes that appealing. So I, as
a young man, did not have a lot of success
(10:55):
with women. You know, I did not have any I'd
never had girlfriend in high school, have plenty of girls
I liked and I crushed on, no success. It wasn't
until halfway through college that I started to kind of
figure things out. And it was only after I had
done some traditionally masculine things to make myself just service
level more appealing to women. And there was a bitterness
there around that. There was a frustration, There was some
(11:18):
animosity and some misogyny involved in that experience. My general
theory is that most boys that end up in this
space even today grow out of it just by necessity
of continuing go on with life. That grow out of it,
they may have some residual effects. I'm not saying everybody
just completely perfectly grows out of it, but you grow
(11:39):
out of the danger zone, so to speak. But today,
it's just you don't have to as much Like I
had to grow out of that to get on with
my life, to go get a job, to continue to
try to find partners, partners in love, et cetera, et cetera,
to learn how to talk to women face to face
because there was no swiping left right. So like, there's
(12:01):
so much of our society has been atomized. I think
young men who have those challenges are never put in
positions to overcome them in productive ways. And then you
have this entire ecosystem of grifters who are collecting money
off of their pain, you know, and so that just
(12:23):
kind of makes it stronger, makes it hold longer. And
we're sitting here trying to figure out what to do
about it.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Now, what is the bait to draw, you know, people
into this space? And has it changed over time?
Speaker 1 (12:50):
It hasn't changed. It's panacea. It's I can I can
solve the problem. This is it's a classic. It's what
this what salespeople have done since the beginning of time.
You have a problem, I have a solution. The solution
is insert awful thing here. The problem is that the
problems are becoming maybe bigger and more more difficult to
(13:14):
address in any form of fashion. You know, the one
of the premitive conversations in the manisphere of red pill
whatever space is is, you know, income and being a
high value man and making money because you need money
to attract a mate. And that's just true, that's just reality.
If you have less money, you will have less options
in the dating market. That is more of a problem
(13:36):
in twenty twenty four, in our modern economy, in our
modern work world, where making more money is difficult, women
have gotten to a point where they can make their
own money. And we're not going back to the sixties
and fifties when a woman needed a man to survive.
And so you have a lot of dudes that never
develop personalities because they thought they would just have a
(13:57):
good job. There's so much to that, the dregs and
and scourge of late capitalism. But these young men who
grew up watching, you know, all these images of masculinity,
who grew up being taught all these things about masculinity,
they do not care. They want their tread wife and
their factory job back. They will literally tear everything down
(14:20):
trying to get it back. Tear everything except for the
thing that needs to be torn down trying to get
it back.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Even though I feel like sometimes the way that the
manisphere is sort of almost like scapegoated, is like, well
it was.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
That, that was that so, and there was nothing, And
that's what I'm alluding to. So there's something to the
fact that he went on Aiden Ross and Joe Rogan's
podcast that I think a lot of left leaning people
really underappreciate, like did not appreciate how significant that was.
There's something to that, But at the end of the day,
we're mostly just talking about racism and misogyny. Like it's
(14:53):
not that it's not that deep. There's an angle there
to discuss, but let's not I think a lot of
people are trying on purpose to miss the forest from
the trees. Then that require them to do some self
reflection on their own politics. We want to stick to
the manisphere.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
You famously hate to do that.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, the truth of the matter is the media is
informed by the culture. It's not the other way around.
And I think a lot of times because that's something
we can really respond to a control and it also
again alleviates responsibility on our part. We want to make
it seem like, well, my son started watching these manisphere
(15:32):
type people, and then suddenly he became a misogynist, and
I'm like, and I just want to be like, I
just want to let you know, if your son gets
in the manisphere, that's your fault. You have created an
environment where that seemed like a reasonable response to his
own pain and concerns and issues, and that is not
(15:53):
just the individual's fault. That's a cultural standard. The normous misogyny,
the norm is racism, the norm is in aphobia. Those
are American principles that we don't like to admit are there.
And so it of course individuals weaned in that culture,
in that environment are going to respond and without anyone
(16:14):
to kind of like, hey, nope, not here, not in
this house, not this community, not in this family, if
there's nothing to curtail that, it's going to be very
easy for those types of messages to resonate, for those
type of messengers to pull them into those spaces. And
so we have to do two things. One, we have
to be responsible with the culture and community we're producing
(16:38):
so that it's less likely to produced those types of things.
But the other big thing is we also have to
as as you know, as creators spend a little more
time celebrating and contributing to the creation of media. That's
just I talk about Star Trek. I wish I had
talked about like One Piece, which is an anime, and
so many other types of media that are about a
(16:59):
world that is more virtuous and kind of more gets
to like the type of world we're trying to create
through our politics, as opposed to we're going to comment
on how bad the world is through this dark white
guy who does edgy things and is really cool and
has a jacket and guns. But you know, you're not
supposed to want to be like them.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
But look at how the but the scorpion jacket, the
scorpion jacket.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
I also I wanted to go into your work on
the Black Manisphere. You're one of the few creators I've
seen who has really got into this and early. So
could you tell me a little bit about this space?
When did it crop up and how does it? Does
it function any differently than other Manisphere spaces?
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, So the Black Manisphere, they would say that they,
as a formal like online space, predate the Manisphere, which
I would agree with. The Black Manisphere comes out of
like a history of gender conflict within Black America between
black men and women, which is a byproduct of you know,
the history of racism, the dregs and results of slave ran,
Jim Crow segregation, etc. And just the genuine fact that
(18:06):
black men and women were never supposed to operate in
America as men and women the same way white people were.
And so that creates a just stew of issues and
conflicts as men black men are trying to pursue manhood
and masculinity in a way similar to white men do,
and as black women try to pursue femininity in a
(18:27):
way similar to white women do. And this creates all
these different venues for conflict that has historically made the
talk show with you know, why are all men dogs?
You know, why don't black women let a black man lead?
That's literally going back to the seventies, that's been a
(18:47):
thing in our media. And so the manisphere starts to
become a thing in the two thousands with the onset
of YouTube and the Internet communities, because now these men
who feel these things about black women, much like the
normal manosphere, can come together and start to voice their
issues YadA, YadA, YadA. Beyond that unique like origin point,
(19:12):
no how that kind of vacillates that throughout the culture.
It's not that different. It's still misogyny and masculine conflict.
It's still men and boys trying to claim a sense
of power in their masculinity through the denigration of women.
It's a little less racist most of the time, it's
a little less xenophobic most of the time. It's just
(19:33):
as misogynistic. There's a couple of differences, Like a lot
of the Black manisphere people, some of them try to
present themselves as pro black and pro black people, and
so they can kind of sneak things in in ways
that if you're not alert to it, you don't hear it.
So their misogyny can be very sublimated into like these
(19:54):
just classical images of masculinity and gender because there's a feeling, well,
black people's problems that the black family isn't in order,
which is true to an extent. There's validity to that statement.
So that's why black women need to stop worrying so
much about their education and stop telling black men what
to do. That it is so like it's oh there,
it is, oh exactly exactly. For me, talking about it
(20:16):
was almost more difficult because there's a thing that happens
when you kind of know your enemy, you cut deeper.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
You know that, I mean, but I think even what
you're describing like is a critical part of the work, right.
It is like processing your own feelings towards these spaces
and then figuring out what is a constructive way to
talk about it. Because I feel like, like you're saying, like,
even creators I enjoy, a lot of people blow through
the like let's just give the raw emotion to it,
(20:45):
as opposed to like really thinking about it, because your
work is so thorough and so thoughtful, and you're also thinking,
you know, coming from the perspective of a parent. My
sort of worry is that this is going to turn
into some kind of moral pan that will be deeply
unproductive and send people further, like send you know, young
(21:06):
men further into this think it.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
I don't think it'll get that real moral panic energy,
but I want to I want you to finish your question,
but I disagree that it'll ever be the true moral panic,
and I'll tell you why.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Oh please, Yes. My question was just if someone's listening
who is a parent or has someone in their life
who is clearly internalizing this stuff, where do you start
to address it.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
I'm of two minds that are I think probably need
to work together. I'm from a relatively traditional household where
things like child autonomy and privacy were not greatly respected
by my parents. Sure, and I think you have to
be open to that idea when it comes to monitoring
what your child is consuming on the internet. Maybe you
(21:50):
don't want to have like outright spy where you don't
want to be a full on police officer in your
own home to your child because that just creates them
being sneakier. But you definitely don't don't want to be complete,
like stop handing the tablet to your kids and saying
go nuts. These companies, these organizations, these the AI, the algorithms,
all these machines are trained to addict your child to
(22:13):
the screen and they do not care how they do that.
And one of the most fundamentally predictable ways they know
they can do that, and you can probably got this
one of videos is through making them upset, making them angry,
making them outrage. And one of the easiest way to
piss people off is to show them a woman doing
the thing a woman's not supposed to do. Like being
(22:34):
sexy but not but in public, or you know, wanting
more money than she's willing to work for some other Oh,
she cheated on her boyfriend and then rolled her eyes
like whatever. Like so many of the videos start with
girl does thing and then gets put in place by
alpha male. Like that's sixty percent of the video titles. Yeah,
(22:54):
and so when you're your twelve year old watches that, like,
stop letting them watch. That is what I'm getting to.
The Other thing is you have to be willing to dismantle.
And this is why I don't think it'll become a
true moral panic. Moral panics tend to be truly transgressive.
Misogyny isn't transgressive. Misogyny is reinforcing the social norm. Transgressive
(23:15):
is feminism, Transgressive is queer, transgressive is black. Like, so
those things create moral panics. Heavy metal created the moral
panic because it was counterculture and subversive and anti authoritarian
and all those things. This stuff is just a little too.
It's embarrassing little Timmy says something really misogynistic to his sister,
(23:38):
and now I have to deal with this at home.
And because it would shine such an ugly eye on
the true nature of some people's households and some communities.
I don't think it'll ever reach the true moral panic,
because according to certain people, this is what won the
election for Donald Trump. But to fully go back to
answering that question, you have to dismantle the utility of
(23:58):
this ideology in your their own home. And that doesn't
mean you have to become like a hardcore feminist and
read JUDITHH. Butler and Audie Lord. Just make it so
it's not so easy for misogyny to pass in your home.
Tell your brother in law to shut the fuck up
when he says something sexist and says it's a joke.
Build into goodness with your child, not based on their
(24:22):
ability to perform masculinity, but in their innate goodness. Let
them feel comfortable being emotional. Let them feel comfortable about crying.
Explain to them how corrosion it is when they like
a girl. Let them know you can like this girl.
She may not like you, and that's okay, And that
doesn't mean an think about you, and it definitely doesn't
mean anything about them. And challenge the stuff when you
see it. That, along with a slow of other things
(24:42):
that I don't have time to get into, is going
to be way more useful than even just sending them
one of my videos. One of my videos is more
for you to understand it so that you can address
it in reality. One of my mentors talked about the
fact that this isn't an issue of misinformation. This is
an issue of disinf The knowledge is out there. We
just have to get it in the right places and
(25:04):
get it into people's systems for real.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
FT Signifier, thank you so much for your time. This
is like, this is so wonderful. Thank you so much
to FT signifier. I cannot recommend his channel enough. And
when we come back, Thanking and Boisden, Robert Evans, Welcome
(25:36):
back to sixteenth minute. My cat ate wrapping paper and
I had to pay a medical professional seven hundred and
fifty dollars about it. And to close out part two
of our Manisphere series, I'm speaking with one of the
producers of this very show, Robert Evans, who's been both
reporting and commentating on Manisphere spaces, specifically extreme All to
(25:57):
Right spaces for years and famously connected a series of
mass shootings we discussed earlier to in cell forums. In
this house, we love Robert, and so here's our chat
because we've like talked about this before, and we've both
spent the better part of our lives on the internet.
When did you start seeing communities like this cropping up?
Speaker 1 (26:21):
You know?
Speaker 3 (26:21):
I started to see inklings of this in like late
twenty thirteen, and like the comments on Cracked articles right
where we would do pieces that were talking about like
rape survivors or the trans experience, and there would be
these like, you know, we would get a great response,
they got a lot of people reading them, but we
would get these like really weirdly hostile posts, and it
became clear I would get some emails too, you know,
(26:43):
So it became clear there was some more communities of
people who were like getting really angry because I was,
you know, I was more or less just a libertarian
at that point, a libertarian who had like voted for
Obama because Bush was a fucking disaster, right, But I
didn't really think about I didn't think about like writing,
you know, doing articles with like trans people about the
realities of transitioning as like a political act. I was
(27:03):
just like, oh, I don't know much about what it's
like to be trans. This is interesting, you know, but
it was pissing some people off a ton and so
I was like, well, this is odd, and it all
kind of crystallized in twenty fourteen, when back at Cracked,
we did a sketch comedy video, the premise of which was,
what if all of like the main websites on the
(27:24):
Internet today were kids in a high school? Right, okay?
Speaker 2 (27:28):
Twenty fourteen?
Speaker 3 (27:30):
I think it was yeah, ye, And you know, among
the things in that is we had eight chan as
a kid, eight Chan, which had just come about gamer.
I was aware of gamergait as it was happening. I
did not take it super seriously in its early stages,
like I got we all got some harassment, but it
was like these freaks on the internet are like angry
(27:51):
about girls. We've always known some of these people were there.
It was not clear to me at that immediate point
that this was like going to redefine how politics worked
in the country. Right when it became clear to me,
because those kids get kicked off a four chan, eight
chan is started and eight chan becomes their home. They
develop a board on eight chan called Baphomet, which is
(28:12):
where like harassment campaigns are architected. And this video comes
out and whoever wrote it, I forget which of our
writers like actually did the script, but they envisioned eight
chan as like this little nerdy kid who was just
constantly sexually harassing the popular girl who was the stand
in for Facebook, right, and like it was not a
(28:33):
super deep thing here, Like that was the joke, right,
is that like eight chan is the creepy kid harassing
the popular girl, right.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
I mean it is wild that there was a time
where Facebook was a hot girl.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Yes, this is a wildly different time, right.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
The blob from the end of the substance is how
I think of Facebook now.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
Yeah, yeah, no, this was a very different period of time. Yeah,
but yeah, so we do that, and these kids on
eight chan find it. And they don't go after the
writer of the episode of the sketch, who was a man.
They don't go after the director I think it might
have had him Ganzer, but who was a guy. They
go after the girl playing Facebook, and they're like mailing
dead animals to her parents' house. They're sending her like
(29:11):
pizzas and death threats and like, and they're chronicling it
all live on Baphomet in like this thread that I
the day it starts, I find the thread and I'm
like archiving and clicking out. I wanted to report on it.
I calling David Bell, wanted to start filming a documentary
right then, I'm there. Like his premise, which I think
in retrospect maybe we should have done, would have been
(29:32):
like what is the Internet done to us? Right? But
we didn't in part because it would have directed more
harassment to this young woman, right like that That's why
ultimately it was like no one went, no one said
anything about it. But that is why, you know, in
twenty nineteen, my career like really was ignited in a
(29:52):
large way because of my reporting on eight chan during
the christ Church shooting. Well, I was I had been
stalking e I had about once or twice once every
month or two. I had been going by eight chan
and keeping an eye on how things were developing there.
Ever since twenty fourteen, as a result of guests, right like,
that's when I really got into looking at a lot
of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Okay, and as you were watching over there, I mean
like over the course of that like half decade, you know,
during which obviously a lot changes in that half decade.
I feel like my into this was showing my college
boyfriend and Anita Sarkisian video and him being like, you're
a fucking idiot. You're like feeling like, oh man, oh,
our edge Lord comedy is a joke to me, but
(30:34):
you you might actually mean what we're saying, you know
that kind of shit. When does it really feel like
these communities get empowered and start to escalate?
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Yeah, I mean it started fairly rapidly after that point,
which we know Bannon recognized the promise that these networks had.
When I started looking at them, they reminded me a
lot of you know, about twenty degrees darker than where
my friends and I had been in high school. Right
(31:04):
near the end of high school. My friends and I
I think, like most kids, I think honestly, like super
Bad is one of the movies that gets the way
we talked back then best. But like, you know, the
f slur was like every third word out of my
mouth and out of the mouth of like every kid
I knew, right like that is was just incredibly common, right.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Like most millennials are like recovering Edge Lord's to say, right.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Right, yeah, I remember on nine to eleven on something
Awful when one of the first things someone did was
like set the footage of the towers going down to
yackety sacks right like we were. So I saw, I recognized,
I saw familiarity in the way kids on eight chan
were talking. And what just kept happening every month is
(31:46):
like the Nazi stuff is like less and less absurdist
nihilist humor and more and more just Nazi stuff. And
it happened very quickly. Perhaps I think it always was
more serious than I had initially recognized. I think maybe
initially I saw it as a little less serious than
it was because it was so familiar, and you know,
(32:08):
I think it says a lot about how social media
traps us at certain ages by trapping us in social
circles and trapping us in patterns of talk and patterns
of like in mimetic patterns that can lock us at
periods of development, because you know, my friends and I
stopped talking that way very quickly after high school, because
(32:32):
we got out into the world and we made more
friends who like wouldn't stand for that shit and realize like, oh,
you actually don't talk like that. That's actually fucked up.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
You know.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
And I think it's harder for that to happen to
not everyone, but a lot of people it is easier
to fall into a loop. And some of this is
very intentional. Some of this is just some of these
different right wing you know, Nazi organizations realized the promise
that social media held for locking people into these loops.
But you know, whatever you want to look at it,
the loops exist.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
I think a lot about how the role of like
ironic humor in the twenty tens kind of plays into this.
But again, it feels like at every stage of this,
or at least the way I see it, let me
know if you feel differently. Every time there's an escalation,
some people leave, and then other people double down and
get even more involved in the community and pull more
people in. You've written really cogently about how this like
(33:28):
escalation of it starts as a joke and becomes real
continued and at this point, I mean, is there any
spaces where it's still being treated as a joke at
this point?
Speaker 3 (33:39):
I don't know that it ever really was. I think
that there are. What you do see is a calving
off where the extremists get more extreme and less welcome elsewhere, right,
And you also see you see folks who had been
using someone who had been using some of that language
who had been yet edgelrds get like kind of adopting
more like you know, quote unquote woke language in part
(34:01):
to differentiate themselves from like the bigotry online. Right That's
the that's part of the story of partisanship. I'm not
saying that as a way to say, like, and so
the wokes are just as responsible for everything getting so divided.
I'm saying it's like a natural reaction. You see this
one group of people who used to play games with
and like bullshit with online become Nazis. You don't, you
(34:23):
want to make it very clear, I'm not one of them.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
I guess around Trump's first election there was this wave
of deplatforming of a lot of right wing and I
guess you could classify them as manisphere to some extent influencers,
and that I mean, at least I remember being positive
as like, well we've deplatformed them, Yeah, problems solved or
(34:48):
a lot of the you know, like rhetoric I was
engaging with during the Me Too movement was like we
just got have to get these guys away from us
and like out of these spaces, which was effective to
some point, but also they did not disappear into dust,
and a lot of them sort of doubled down. I
guess I'm curious of your feeling of that period of time,
(35:11):
of the time where there was this deplatforming movement. What
did this space learn from that?
Speaker 3 (35:19):
I mean, for one thing, to platforming never happened on
a significant coach and scale right like it it's a
little bit off, I think to say that, like the
platforming failed because like, well, we didn't do.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
It right, right, Like was it ever even possible it did?
Speaker 3 (35:33):
The individuals had their reach decreased for a while right
right now. Also, you know, one of the things is that,
like these are live conflicts. Alex Jones saw his reach collapse,
He lost a lot of money, and a lot of
people on the right readopted him and brought him closer
than he had been to folks who had power and
(35:53):
more kind of mainstream appeal, guys like Tucker Carlson, because that,
like that was what they saw is the smart direction
in the fight. Right, So it's not good enough. You
can never you can never just deploy a tool like
the platforming once and say well we did it, Joe,
you know, we're done, right, like they are, there's going
to be a counter move, and the counter moves against
(36:16):
guys like Jones number one, they all came too late, right.
Part of it is that could by the time Alex
Jones started getting deplatformed, he was so embedded in the
culture and so influential. You know, I don't know that
like any of the kind of airsats deplatforming, you know,
strategies that were adopted, could have really stopped him from
(36:39):
being someone whose voice mattered, right, Like, that's just a
reality of the situation. Some of it is that like
if you just kind of let this shit go on
for a while, it metastasizes until the point that it's terminal.
And ironically, I think there's a chance that like Alex
and a lot of these guys who have been more
on the we're going to wind up fighting the left
in the streets side of things have some trouble in
(37:01):
the coming years, as there's a lot less impetus, you know,
for Trump supporters to believe that's happening. But I don't
really know what's going to go down there. If you're
looking back, like what could have been done to have
stopped this, There's only one very clear answer to me,
and it is you need to put in legal consequences
for algorithms working the way they work. That's what should
(37:22):
have been illegal from the beginning, was algorithmically pushing people
towards shit like fucking the Boogaloo boys and militias and
towards like neo nazi, you know, race realist organizations exposing
children to that at scale in order to get engagement
hours and bring in ad revenue. If that had been
illegal from the beginning, if there had been immediate, severe
(37:42):
penalties that hurt the bottom line of these social media companies,
I think we'd be in a different situation now right now.
Would that ever have been that certainly didn't happen, So
would it ever have been politically viable?
Speaker 2 (37:55):
I don't know, especially with just how it's still not.
You know, every algorithm is still extremely opaque. There is
no incentive to indicate how your algorithm works at all.
This previous mid twenty tenh emphasis on we have to
deradicalize people before it's too late. I don't really see
that conversation happening now, is it because it's just kind
(38:18):
of too late to do that. Do you think that
that is still like a viable route in any way, Uh.
Speaker 3 (38:25):
Shit, I don't know. Yeah, I wish I had like
a clear answer to what the solution was. Here. The
best advice I can give people, don't listen to anyone
who is telling you number one, I have a really
clear and obvious solution. And number two, it happens to
(38:47):
comport with what this organization I am in has been
saying we should do all along. Just give us some money. Right,
Be very very not that there aren't like, for example,
I think a lot of the getting out of this
I think is going to I think unions are going
to be a very important part of that story. But
I also think like unions are also part.
Speaker 1 (39:05):
Of the problem. Right.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
You can look at where the teamsters voted, you know,
in this last election.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Right.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
I just be very hesitant of people who come to
you peddling solutions and asking for your money.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
One thing we should take out of this is that
if the first thing out of anyone's mouth who comes
to you with the solution is so I need a donation.
While Harris raised three times as much as Trump and
look where that got her, don't do that. Be very
careful with who you listen to. If they're if they're
coming to you and saying I have a solution for you,
(39:37):
and it's by a gun. It's donate money to the
Democratic Party. It's this very simple thing, because what takes
us out of this is not going to be simple
and be hesitant to embrace people who come to you
with simple solutions.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
Do you see this space continuing to grow? Where do
you see this sort of evolving into?
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Well, that's that's interesting because I you know, some of
these people right now have evolved into the like repeal
of the nineteen the Amendment. You know, freaks right, women
shouldn't be voting, and Trump just made a woman who's
clearly one of the only people he respects into his
White House chief of staff. And also I don't think
I don't see not that he's not going to put
through a bunch of policies that are bad for women,
(40:16):
but like a lot of women voted for him, so
I don't necessarily see him as being like, well, repealing
the nineteenth Amendment is my number one priority, right, he
likes winning elections, and I do think that a lot
of what he does once the own the Libs high
comes down and they see that they're not going to
get a lot of what they wanted because it's stupid
(40:36):
and because it doesn't benefit Trump to give it to them,
and he had no problem lying to any of them.
Trump is not particularly interested in giving you all of
these crazy things that you want, because like that's never
been his politics. Right, is Trump going to make us
a Catholic fascist state? I don't think Donald Trump gives
a shit about that. I don't think he's really an
into Catholicism, you know. I don't know if that's the
(40:59):
threat model. I think that's more freaks online. I think
that's more Nick Fuintz weirdness. And I think those guys,
you know, there's a chance they get really angry as
a result of, you know, as it becomes clear what
they're going to get and what they're not going to get.
I mean, I think in terms of explaining the Manisphere
to people, you say, it's a group of content creators
who are generally aligned by a financial alliance on selling
(41:24):
supplements to make people huge, selling advice on how to
pick up women. Their audience is largely frustrated young men
who think that they are not having all the sex
that they should have, and a lot of them have
gotten into kind of Nazi adjacent racial politics as part
of their general frustration at the things the world hasn't
given them, and they see that their alliance with the
(41:45):
right wing is because the right wing will make things
harder for women and make them more necessary again, you know,
Like I think that's important. Like these guys are very influential.
Millions and millions of people listen to them. It had
an impact on the election, right, Yeah, you.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
So much to Robert. I'm pretty sure he has a podcast,
but I don't remember what it's called. Check back with me,
all right, I know that was a lot of information.
I hope you're well. And next week we're going to
close this series out by talking to those affected by it,
young men who got out of the manisphere and the
people who are targeted by the Manisphere and what if
(42:24):
anything we can do to turn this around. We'll see
you then, and for your moment of fun, let's hold
some space for defying gravity.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Thank you.
Speaker 4 (42:40):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Janie Lastus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lickderman and Robert Evans.
Speaker 2 (42:51):
The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
Grant Crater and pet. Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson,
my cat's fleeing Casper, and my pet Rockberg, who will
outlive us all Bye.
Host
Jamie Loftus
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com