Part Two: How The Furries Fought The Nazis and Won

Part two of our look at the Furry Community, what the fandom means to them, and how their experiences dealing with the AltRight serve as a guidebook for surviving the Worst Year Ever.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Worst Year Ever, a production of I Heart Radio. Definitely,
the high point for this movement was late to right
before the Charlottesville rally. Um, they actually brought people to Charlottesville.
That was part of the community is They're like, hey,

(00:20):
we're getting together. We're gonna march with all our brothers
join us in Charlottesville. So I personally saw a major
increase around of just hateful messages, UM groups trying to
shut down events because they didn't like that there were
queer people there. Um, there was a lot of dock

(00:43):
sing um phone threats, people trying to get other people
fired from jobs. UM. The stolen Rocky Mountain fur Con
database was used to ducks hundreds of people and try
to get them fired for being gay or being furry.
So there was a pretty big escalation I would say

(01:05):
around the toteen time and throughout twenty seventeen, we figured
out strategies to get rid of it together. Everything so down, Down, Down,

(01:32):
Welcome back to our two part episode on the furry
community and how they've dealt with the rising Nazi threat.
I don't know what we'll title this yet, but that's
what it's about. This is part two of the series.
So if you haven't listened to part one, go back
and listen to it. Otherwise most of this will be nonsense,
so please do that now. The Midwest Profest chlorine gas

(01:53):
attack was big news online for a day or two,
but then it sort of faded off into the background.
One of the few relatively mainstream site to cover the
fall out at all was Vice in their two thousand
sixteen article c s I fur Fest. It was a
good piece and included valuable information from the local police
and the FBI, But that's basically it in terms of
long term coverage, uh, in terms of serious journalistic attention

(02:15):
being paid to the problem of rising extremism in the
furry community, try to put yourself in the shoes of
some of the people in this subculture. Some of your
friends were wounded or at least traumatized by a terrorist
attack launched by someone who is basically a Nazi. His
Nazi friends are making continued efforts to recruit young furries
all around you. What do you do? Stranded well outside
the main stream, the furies have had to develop their

(02:37):
own structures of support and self defense that includes their
own journalists Patch Oh fur that's his pseudonym, created dog
Patch Press, a furry news website, back in two thousand fourteen,
and for the last five years, it's offered daily updates
on furry culture and news, with a distinct emphasis on
tracking the rise of the alt furs and movements and
groups like the Furry Raiders. Patches work hasn't just informed

(02:59):
members of the furry community. His work is rigorous and
insightful enough that he's been sided by Rolling Stone, The
l a Times, Vice, Forbes, The Daily Dot, and Daily Costs.
He's also been cited by us here at Worst You're
ever because Patch is the reason we wound up at
Midwest FurFest in the first place. Patch reached out to
me on Twitter back in the fall of two thousand
nineteen when I retweeted some post about a certain alt

(03:21):
right grifter who we're not going to name against in
this podcast's attempt to register for the Midwest FurFest. We
started talking and he sent me over pages and pages
of archived conversations between alt furs who are fans of
that grifter discussing their plans to disrupt the convention. Patches
the first person who dug up Magnus Derridian's old deleted
but archived blog post about his stink bomb attack on

(03:42):
that bank. Over the years, he's done a really impressive
job of collecting and dispensing information about the Alt Fur
movement and its figureheads. Well. Patch worked to keep his
fellow Furies informed and get crucial information out to the
general population. Activists like Dio kept their head to the ground,
infiltrated fascist online spaces and gad their data. Well, for
a long time, I went around and I banged the

(04:03):
fucking pots and pans, and I'm like, I'm like, do
you see this ship that's going on? UM? And nobody listened.
And I also realized too that when I was infiltrated,
I couldn't. They had a public space called the lobby
that people anybody could enter in UM. To get out
of the lobby, you had to do your interview process

(04:25):
and stuff like that, and then you had to do
other things to get higher ranks, to see other rooms UM,
to get deeper in UM. So they knew the lobby
was compromised, but they didn't know the rest of it
was compromised. Because that stuff I had to keep quiet about,
because if they knew it was compromised, they would stop
talking or they would look for who it was. So

(04:47):
I collected thousands of screenshots and I used there's a
discord history history tracker UM, which we used as a
bot and it dogs all of the server. So we
used that. We would crawl the server a couple of
times a week. Um, keep the logs and files. I've

(05:10):
got those on my computer still record all of that.
You know, I was contacting like the SPLC, you know,
if I saw anything that was like a law enforcement issue. Um.
You know, people talk about making bombs, people talking about
you know, meetups and training groups, that kind of thing.

(05:32):
And it's not coincidental that this all really got started
in because that's also the year and the rough time
of year that gamer Gate kicked off. If you're not
extremely online, you probably haven't heard about gamer Gate. It was,
in short, a far right reactionary movement among video game
fans who were angry that feminist video game critics had
started analyzing some of the troublesome gender issues in the

(05:54):
popular games. In a lot of ways, gamer Gate was
the inflection point of the modern alt right. People like
Steve Bannon and that guy we're not going to mention again,
jumped in to co op the movement because they saw
it as a potential source of new digital activists. Gammer
Gate wasn't just people getting angry about like video game
critics saying stuff they didn't like. It was a harassment
campaign that included hundreds of death threats against a number

(06:17):
of different critics, um dead animals and like letters written
in blood being mailed to people's doors. It got really
creepy and really out of hand really fast. Gamergate was
priming the pumping. Yeah, it got all these people ready.
It got them organized. They realized that they could have
some exert some force of power over others. They realized

(06:38):
that they could use fear and that they could terrorize
people into silence, into submission. They could get their way,
and if they banded together, if there were enough of them,
none of them would get caught because there were too many.
So you get hate mobs like that. And they learned

(07:02):
um and your constantly constantly seeing an evolution and adaptation
where they learned what works and what doesn't. They try
anything like that didn't work, or they see somebody else
do something and that was very effective. They pick up
the method, they move on. It took a while for
any of this to percolate out into mainstream culture. Because
the furry fandom is so deeply tied to the Internet,

(07:23):
they were kind of the canary in the coal mine
for all of the Nazi stuff that we're dealing with
today in America. Choope was there for the start of
it all, and he watched as his community mobilized itself
to combat the fascist creep. I think one of the
most effective ways was to uh use something like blockchain
on Twitter basically and start blocking these people, um that

(07:48):
had form groups intentionally targeting others. The alt furs, the
furry raiders had specific groups to say, Hey, here's someone
on Twitter we want to harass. Let's harass them constantly
for this whole year, and they would docks them harass
that specific person as much as possible, and they had

(08:09):
a chat room full of two to three people to
constantly harass all day long. So the blockchain on Twitter
worked pretty well. Monitoring their chat rooms, of course, is
something we've always had to do just to keep our
events safe from that kind of abuse. All of this

(08:30):
came to a head for the furries in around an
event in Colorado called the Rocky Mountain Fury Con. Yeah,
So Rocky Mountain fur Con is my local convention in Denver,
And basically it had issues because they had furry raiders
or all to write people on the board, and the

(08:51):
board wanted to give priority to these all right groups
to get the first booking of all the hotel rooms,
and and the other people on the board couldn't get
enough votes to vote these people off the board. So
it ended up causing a lot of frustration among the community,
like why does this alt right group get all the

(09:11):
rooms and no one else gets the rooms? Um, And
so there's a lot of I don't know, upset people
around that situation. Calls erupted from within the Colorado furry
contingent too. At the very least, band Nazis like Foxler
from attending the event. The convention organizers released a statement
that was basically the furry equivalent to President Trump's both

(09:34):
side speech after Charlottesville. Rocky Mountain fur Coon does not
support or condoned discrimination or violence in any of its forms,
and is saddened by the hatred and division that has
been caused by a small minority of our community on
both sides of this issue. Our sources aren't lying when
they say that the organizers of Rocky Mountain Fur Con
had a complicated history with the far right. The nonprofit

(09:55):
that officially managed the convention was Mid America Anthropomorphic and
Art Corporation. It was headed by Kendall Emory, also known
as Cahoky Learu, who, in addition to being a furry,
was a sovereign citizen. Sovereign citizens are a special corner
of the far right. They have bizarre and arcane beliefs
about the law, and in short, believe they don't have

(10:15):
to pay taxes or listen to cops. Law enforcement officers
regularly consider them one of the most dangerous groups in
the country because of all the shootouts they instigate. Kendall's
sovereign citizen beliefs likely influenced his sympathy for the alt
furs and furry raiders. It's also probably why Rocky Mountain
Fur Con failed to pay any taxes from two thousand
and eight to This was first reported as far as

(10:37):
we can tell, on another furry news site called flav Rock.
They note that Kendall slash Cohoki was forced to step
down as chairman of the convention in two thousand and eight,
when it was found out that he'd been convicted of
criminal sexual contact with a minor back in nine. Weird
how that keeps happening with these alt right guys? Huh. Anyway,
so this pedophile sovereign citizen and his buddies insisted on

(10:57):
making Rocky Mountain fur Con a say space for Nazis.
This understandably riled up folks like Deo Together Everything down.
From January two seventeen, Deal got on Twitter and commenting

(11:20):
on their upcoming Rocky Mountain fur Con, tweeted, can't wait
to punch Nazis. This was followed up by a response
from someone named Olivia Melas, who said watching you get
shot by someone defending themselves from unprovoked assault will be
far more entertaining. The discussion continued until someone asked Olivia
if she was really planning to bring a gun to
the convention. She said, in essence, maybe, oh god, yeah,

(11:42):
this was what threw me into the public eye. Deal
reported the threat both to Twitter and to law enforcement,
and this prompted a response from Kendall Emery and I
thought at first it was a troll. I'm like, what
the fuck is this thing? And it's like, we're gonna
seize your house, and we're gonna seize your wages, and
we're gonna put you in prison. You've been very bad.

(12:03):
We know you're on Twitter, and I'm like, okay. They
listed a couple other furry conventions as part of and
the furry writers as other people who were harmed by
my actions. I actually had to talk to like one
of the other heads of another convention. I'm like, were
you part of this letter? He's like, no, please never
contact me again. That looks really bad for legal and like,

(12:23):
that's fine, I'll never contact you again. Bease, don't contact me.
He's like, that's great. By So I got into trouble.
So the letter came to me. I google the name
signed to it because I'm like, this has to be
complete bullshit. Nobody would send you a sovereign citizen pants
on head crazy letter with a bloody thumb print. I

(12:43):
actually found a really fun analysis of this letter on
the legal blog Lawyers in Liquor. The author analyzes the
letter and calls it proof that quote some people have
insanity so strong it can bleed right the funk through
a first suit. Here's how he explains the red thumb print,
which he thinks was ink rather than blood. To this
sit the red ink and the thumb print add some
special magic because it shows they are a flesh and

(13:06):
blood person and not the corporate entity known as fur pants,
McGhee or whatever the funk this guy calls himself. This
whole incident wound up blowing into the mainstream media almost
as much as the chlorine attack on Midwest FurFest. In February,
Vice wrote an article title even Furries are Fighting Fascists.
It interviewed members of Furry Antifa, a loose organization that
had just started to coalesce around the resistance to people

(13:28):
like Foxler and the alt furs. In April, Rolling Stone
wrote that does the furrier community have a Nazi problem? Article,
and in May The Daily Beast published Nazis are tearing
the furry world apart. The police wound up investigating the
threats and determining that there was some danger to the community.
The hotel demanded the organizers of the con shell at
an extra two dollars for off duty cops to provide security,

(13:48):
and in the end Rocky Mountain fur Con had to
shut down. Eventually, they decided they couldn't deal with it anymore.
There's no way to get rid of the alt right
people on the board. So they shut down the convey
mention entirely. But that didn't end the fighting. Of course,
Foxler and the Furry Raiders were piste now, so in
the Colorado furry community organized a new Nazi free event Denver.

(14:10):
They decided they had to funk with it our first year.
The alt right group, the Furry Raiders decided, we're gonna
call the hotel book all the rooms at once with
a database of stolen identities from the previous convention. So
they booked for of the rooms. I think it was

(14:31):
a mounting close to sixty eight thou dollars worth of
revenue lost. And we had to try to convince the
hotel those were stolen identities from the last convention that
they used against our convention. This was a serious crime,
or at least it would have been if again, the

(14:51):
victims and perpetrators hadn't been people who like to dress
up as animals. Yeah, we actually called, uh, I don't know,
the Colorado bu Or of Investigation. UH, there's a division
for financial crimes. And once I told them it was
a Furry Convention, they stopped returning our calls. Fixing the

(15:11):
situation required Chip and his fellow organizers to spend dozens
and dozens of hours investigating the crime for themselves. He
sent us an enormous itemized folder filled with eyewitness testimony
from those who had heard Foxler discussed the plan, as
well as lists of all the fraudulent reservations that have
been posted inside a telegram group used by the Furry Raiders.
All this was necessary to convince the hotel to reverse
the charges so that they could, you know, hold the

(15:33):
event without having it booked up by fake people. They
also archived conversations from within that group, including one where
alt Furs discuss how to infiltrate the chat channels, where
Chip and his friends planned den for oblivious to the
fact that their own channel had been infiltrated. Car rights.
I would just use my old forsona since I haven't
been involved in fur in a long time anyway, Someone
named Bluemier responds, old forsonas are actually great for this,

(15:55):
they have established history. A little later in the thread,
someone named Husky Jack and he two suggests, if anything,
get connections to h Chan. Let the heat seem like
it's coming from the outside. Version the channel complain that
s g w's just want to shut down anyone who
happens to be a little right wing, and then one
of them drops in a quote from George Lincoln Rockwell,
Oh good, here it is by being a national socialist

(16:19):
with the swastika, I would also gather the only kind
of people I wanted around me, the tough, dedicated idealists
ready to fight for those ideals and give their lives
if necessary. And even more important, I would automatically scare
off the millions of blabber mouths, cowards, fools, and crackpots
which infests the rest of the movement. The swastika would

(16:39):
probably not bring me many supporters, but those who came
would be men. In other chat logs, help first discussed genocide,
extermination of transgender people, and a bunch of other horrible
stuff we are not going to read at length. The
point is that all of this documentation proves the central
point di O Chip and other furry anti fascists have
been making for years. These people are danger and allowing

(17:00):
them to participate in events like Midwest FurFest is also dangerous.
At least one alt for actually marched in Charlottesville alongside
a small army of fascists, one of whom committed a
terrorist attack by ramming his car into a crowd of
anti fascists and killing a young woman. Heather Highed. Welcome
Together Everything. In the very next year, two thou eighteen,

(17:29):
Magnus Deridian, the Confederate first suitor and the presumed corpriate
of the chlorine attack, showed up at Midwest Verfest. Again.
He was already banned from the convention and was not
supposed to be here. Um, so when he came, he
was trespassing. So he shows up. He is wearing a
first suit based on World War One, which is a

(17:51):
great way of not quite not quite being a Nazi,
but definitely scaring people who are already on edge. And
then he's throwing Nazi salutes in me the lobby and
yelling racial slurs. Security came up to him, which was

(18:12):
when he punched one of our pregnant security workers, and
she is by far one of the toughest people I've
ever met, despite her being nine months pregnant at that time. Yeah,
so she chases him, he runs flees the hotel, and

(18:33):
he's running, she's running after him. The cops nabbed him.
They have to take him out of first two. Well,
he's not wearing anything underneath, So the hotel donates a sheet,
and then you have a few hundred furries taking videos
and photos of this man in a sheet getting shoved
into a cop car and he spent the weekend in jail.

(18:54):
In wider American society, the years since the bloody Charlottesville
rally have been years of steady growth and regular attacks
by members of the fascist right. In two thousand, nineteen eight,
Chan Birth, originally by Gamergate, inspired no less than four
white nationalist terrorist attacks and three nations. The Proud Boys
have been allowed to work security at Trump rallies. A
neo Nazi terrorists social network called The Base has started

(19:16):
putting up flyers offering weapons, training and camaraderie to other
interested fascists. But over in Furreedom, the story has been
really different, and that is why we think non Furrey
Americans need to pay attention to folks like Deo and Chip.
They and their fellow furry anti fascists have been extremely
effective at shutting the Nazis out of their community, and
they did it on their own without the police and

(19:38):
largely without the media. All it took was sustained activism
and a broad commitment to keep Nazis out of their community.
I think that the phrase have done the bus they
can and I am proud of the way the community organized,
the way everyone is aware. Um Like here, people were
worried about the Proud Boys coming up. So I watched people.

(19:59):
Nobody told them to do this, Nobody asked them to
do this, but people went around and they said, Okay,
what I'm gonna do is they're gonna check on my
friends and make sure that all of my friends get
to their hotel room every night and that they're safe.
And if I walk alone at night, I'm not going
to do that. I'm gonna take a buddy. We're gonna
walk together. I watched people who were a little bit bigger,

(20:20):
a little bit more well built, are like, hey, you
know you're small. Are you walking a little tonight? Can
I come with you? I think you're fine, but just
in case, And you see that community coming together. We
build each other up and we protect us. They don't
just protect us, they also try to dissolve the line
between us and them, going into hostility is high, Misinformation

(20:44):
is everywhere, bad actors, global people, isolated kids looking for
answers for their struggles and often finding those answers from liars. Well,
the furry community doesn't necessarily focus on the radicalization. They
are conscious of the radicalization pipeline and they try to
stop it in its tracks. I found that personally. My
belief is that inoculating people with hey, do you recognize

(21:06):
what this is before it takes what? So if some
you see your friend who posts a weird meme, you're like,
do you know what that's referencing? Do you understand what
you're going with? And they're like, I don't what what
do you mean? I thought it was just funny, And
you're like, well, actually that reference is about something else,

(21:27):
Like that's a reference to, you know, the white genocide theory.
That's a reference to the Turner Diaries. That's a reference
to the unflush shooter, you know. And people go, oh,
I didn't know. I thought it was just funny. My
friend posted it to me, And you're like, well, you
might want to be very careful about what that friend

(21:48):
shares with you, and maybe you can help pull them
from the brink. I pull you from the brink. You
pull them from the braink we pull each other. There
have been mixed results in the community, but some results
are still good results. They look for people and provide
space to discuss certain ideological pools or in some cases
straight out racism, and then we moved to a better community. UM.

(22:10):
I tried for a while too. I made a chat
group and we pulled people out of these larry groups,
and with mixed success, tried to I'm not life after hate,
I will pipe for a living. I'm not a therapist. UM,

(22:32):
but we tried to offer them a group where it
was had some control of moderatorship. So we're like, okay,
we understand that you are coming out of this toxic culture.
We understand that you are not going to be okay immediately.
You are going to carry this baggage and we're going
to help you unpack it. So you're gonna come into

(22:53):
this group. We're gonna decompress. You can talk about this stuff,
you know, but if you throw at a racial slur,
we're gonna say, hey man, why are you using that
kind of languish? Does it really need to be said?
You know? Why are you why are you using it
are you angry? And usually it's like, yeah, man, I'm sorry,

(23:14):
I just lost my head. I was upset, and you know,
I threw it out there. It's a knee jerk reaction
I have. But sometimes, and this right here is so important.
For the worst year ever, it's overwhelmingly more helpful to
interact with somebody in person, human to human and show
them some kindness, give them an opening. Dio mentioned a
kid who was in the group the Main Chat, which

(23:37):
was led by the people directly trying to funnel people
into the alt right, and she told this wonderful story
that I think speaks so well to how young people
men specifically, are desperate for any community and can easily
get swept up and manipulated and brought into groups of hate.
But how a little connection and understanding from someone who
cares can change everything. Here's Deo. It's funny too. When we,

(23:59):
for I first saw him, he was welding a lead
filled mace to club me to death. And when his
friend is like, hey, I gotta get him out of
this um, he thinks you're gonna murder him, So I'm
gonna like bring him to you, and you say hi,
and then he'll realize that you're not going to murder
him because he's been told by these alt right groups
that you're a violent, sadist who was going to murder

(24:21):
him on sight. So we meet and this poor kid
is shaking like a leaf. He's like, oh, shoot your deal.
And I'm like, hey, buddy, I saw your welding. He's like, oh,
you saw the mace. I'm like, yeah, you know, I
don't really want to talk about the whole mace thing,
but I liked your welds. Where did you learn that?
He's like, oh, I had a little class in high school.

(24:44):
I'm like, that's a great skill. Are you doing anything
with it? Are you thinking about going into the traits?
Have you thought about apprenticeship? Are you thinking about college?
He's like, I actually I wasn't sure. You know, my
dad died a couple of years ago and I've been lost.
I'm like, yeah, that happens to a lot of people. Well,
if you're thinking about a trade, I'm a journeyman, and

(25:05):
I think apprenticeship is a great way to go. You know,
you don't have the college kind of debt, but I
like jo Wolves, I think you have really good potential.
Do you want to talk about steel. He's like, He's like, yeah,
that's that's actually been really nice. So we had a
nice little group check there in the lobby of the Hyatt,
and he let down his guard over time. You know,

(25:26):
we're talking about well, so I'm talking about he made
himself like plate armor. Like this happened a year before
our interview, and just about twelve hours before we sat
down with Dio. He found me last night and he's like,
I'm really glad you got me out. I still don't
like you at all. I'm like, that's great. I'm so
happy for you. You look healthier. He's like, yeah, I

(25:47):
put on weight. Did you notice. I'm like, yeah, I
think he got taller too. He's like eighteen now, and
he's so little socially awkward. I had a couple of
friends came up to me and he takes a will,
sat back and he stares at the group. You know,
he wants to be in on it. You know, you
try to involve people like that. Like we said, they
don't focus on the radicalization because they're more worried about

(26:10):
protecting their community, but the love and compassion they have
within the fandom, their own animal instincts, if you will,
are still effective in reaching out and helping people who
are lost something to remember. They want to be in
on it, and I don't think this conversation is complete
without taking time to examine what the furry fandom means
to the people who are a part of it. Some

(26:31):
of you may remember from the audio diary that we
released back in December, the story of us taking a
break from interviews to grab lunch at a fancy restaurant
near the convention center. One of us wanted to be there,
but we were tired and it was the closest option.
And I remember sitting there, Robert had just been shamed
by the Major d for not using the right soup spoon,

(26:52):
and just feeling floored by the juxtaposition between this fancy
restaurant and the welcoming, non judgmental community we had just
spent two days with. The difference was palpable. This is
from Lucky. Cons have always been kind of that um
avenue of self expression for me. You know, Um, I
was a closeted bisexual man and have now flourished, i'd

(27:17):
say in discovered myself thanks to this fandom, and these
cons kind of allow me to feel okay with that,
you know, and I meet a lot of nice people
who are also okay with me being who I am,
and and that's what it means to everyone. Each person
we spoke with mentioned in their own way just how
the furry community allowed them to truly be themselves, to

(27:39):
be open, to be accepted, most of them for the
first time without judgment. I think the furry fandom means
a lot to me. It's unlike a church. You can
kind of define what it is on your own, so
you can say, you know, this is what the fanom
means to me. It's a personal presentation of myself, where
as a religion says you have to follow these guidelines

(28:04):
to be in our religion. And I saw it as
a replacement for religion, where I could have a loving
community and I could express my creativity and I could
be myself in the furry fandom. Wearing one of my
first suits is representing some personalities, some attitude, some type

(28:24):
of flair that when I'm just in plain clothes while
I'm on the street with my family at work, I repressed.
But with my friends who are best majority of the furries,
it's I can open up and be candid and very spontaneous.
That last one was from Goku, who opened up to
us and shared that the Free Community had quite literally

(28:46):
saved his life. To tell you the truth, if I
hadn't find this fandom, I would have killed myself when
I was five years old. Between the death of his
father and mother and the loss of his home, Goku
was lost. He needed a reset, so he moved away
from New York and discovered the Free Fandom and phil Ladelphia.
That reset has been exponentially beneficial to me. Since I've

(29:06):
joined the Fury fandom, I found individuals who have changed
my life. You who have been friends since I've joined
this fandom, who are like family to me. I unfortunately
don't have much family left. And I say this very
often when I'm with close friends, that we may not
be related by blood, but for treating me as a

(29:30):
with respect, with dignity, um by listening to my stories,
and you are my family. And when someone tries to
break up your family, and I will not let negative
influences who are poisonous like the alt Right into a
family that I love, and I will do whatever I

(29:53):
can to prevent it. I'm not a violent individual. But
I will always raise my fist, raise a bet and
speak quite loud mouse. I think what Goku is expressing
here is something that like we all actually need very
badly deep down, which is a community of people that
we would be willing to like, fight and die for. Um.

(30:14):
I think a lot of people's problems and a lot
of the problems we have the extremism in this country
is that most people don't really have something like that
in their lives. And that's part of what makes violent
extremism so easy. It's what makes people so vulnerable to
being recruited by some of these groups because they give
you that the illusion of having that kind of a community.

(30:35):
And if you don't have real caring people around you,
a group that you identify with, that you feel safe with,
and that you're willing to protect, you can be pushed
to doing some pretty terrible things. Honestly, what I really
listened to him telling us this story, it gave me chills.
Over the course of this weekend, it became quite clear
to all of us that between the lessons they learned

(30:57):
protecting their subculture from the infiltration of the alt right,
there's successful efforts at de radicalization and their unwavering commitment
to protecting this fandom, which means so much to them.
The furry community is actually a perfect example of how
we can all survive the worst year ever. I love
that for our first real episodes. Yeah, it was not

(31:19):
what we expected, not at all to find, but it
was overwhelmingly positive the entire time. Yea. Yeah, we kind
of went into this project wanting to look at these
different subcultures to see how they were weathering and honestly,
how they were being warped by this this horrible thing
politically that is continuing to happen in this country, and

(31:39):
that will be so far, I'm certain the worst example
of And we didn't come across a community that had
been warped. We came across a community that had been
like battered and attacked and and damaged in some degrees
by all of this, but a community that had found
a way to survive and come out on the other
side stronger as a result of it, healed and forest

(32:00):
and ready. Yeah, and that's that's where the lessons life
for all of us. I actually think do said it
best and I can't think of a more fitting way
to end this episode. We all realize that we're on
the outskirts, that we're a little bit strange, but we're
strange together, and that solidarity makes us stronger. It makes

(32:24):
us more ready for trouble, It makes us more aware,
and it helps us if we need to talk to
each other. You go, hey, man, I saw you post
a weird meme. I don't think that's really healthy. Are
you feeling all right? Are you're having a hard time.
Let's talk about it, you know, come back from that brink,
come back into our group. I see you're not posting

(32:45):
a lot in the group chat, you know, or like, hey,
I made you a drawing of your first sauna. You know. Look,
it's us hugging. We're friends. You have friends, remember that
they'll feel lost and alone. Worst Year At is a
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

(33:06):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everything Everything
so dum again. I tried Daniel Lovely