040: What the Hell is Antifa? feat. Christopher Mathias

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Wanted to ask you about the based on your your your
knowledge, your background, yourclinical experience, what what
is the psychology of this mob violence?
When I see it, it it it like I, I.
Don't even recognize some of these.
They seem, they seem animalistic, is what I mean.

(00:22):
No, they're worse than animals. They're worse than animals
because animals. They just kill to eat, you know,
human beings. They have A twist in them that
makes them far worse than animals when they really get
going. Well, I think it's, I think you
really want to know what I think.
I think it's revenge against Godfor the crime of being.
That's really what I think. It's Cain and Cain and Abel.

(00:47):
It's like, oh, Abel's your, Abel's your guy.
God, how would I take him out inthe field and beat him to death?
How do you feel about that? All my sacrifices went on
rewarded. Yeah.
It's like, yeah, that's what it is at the bottom of the hell of
things. Welcome back to Posting Through

(01:37):
IT on Mike Hayden. I'm Jared Holt.
And with us for the whole episode, the entire thing, is a
personal friend of both of ours,Chris Mathias.
Chris is a reporter and author and now expert Antifa thanks to
his forthcoming book in Februaryto Catch a fascist.

(01:58):
He's also the coach, long time coach I would say in my fantasy
Football League anti fascist play action.
Chris, say hello, please. Hey, really good to be here.
I'm excited to talk about fantasy football.
How is anti fascist play action doing this year?
I, we were talking before we started recording.

(02:19):
Like I, I'm also in this fantasyFootball League.
My fantasy team name is the Epstein fumbles.
But but yeah, I just log in likeevery Tuesday or Wednesday and
click the optimize lineup button.
I, I don't know about football, but you're, you're more of a
football guy, right? I like to think I am, but every

(02:41):
year when I joined this league, I remember I'd actually know
nothing about football and I do the same thing and optimize
every week. But you know, anti fascist play
action is undefeated right now. Three and OH tied for first
place in the league, so. Well, that's that's exciting.
They're not going to be that waymuch longer if the Trump
administration gets its way. Yes, but the team is worried
about this executive order. For the for the cross section of

(03:04):
of extremist heads and and football heads, my team is Devon
8 Chan. So we've just got one shout out
this week of one of our members who just uses the screen name E
upgraded to the executive club tier E.

(03:24):
If you're listening, that means you get to recommend us a topic
to cover on the show and sponsora parody ad.
A link to Patreon is down in thedescription.
We've been really excited by just how many people have signed
up. I mean it's.
Been a busy couple weeks actually, which is really
awesome. I mean, it's really kind of
blown me away, honestly. I, I mean, I, I have modest

(03:49):
standards, I guess, but I, I feel so flattered and, and
validated that what we're doing here matters.
And hopefully this episode is going to continue in that
tradition. So we're here to talk about
Antifa. Antifa.
The reason we're talking about it today is because the Trump
administration, in the wake of of Charlie Kirk's killing, has

(04:11):
essentially declared war on antifascism in the US.
On September 22nd, there was a executive order titled
Designating Antifa as a DomesticTerrorist Organization.
And here's a little bit from that executive order.
This is how they describe anti fascism.

(04:31):
Antifa is a militaristic anarchist enterprise that
explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States
government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of
law. It uses illegal means to
organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism
nationwide To accomplish these goals.
This campaign involves coordinated efforts to obstruct

(04:54):
enforcement of federal law through arm standoffs with law
enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration
and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers
in routine doxing of and other threats against political
figures and activist. Antifa recruits, trains, and
radicalizes young Americans to engage in this violence and

(05:16):
suppression of political activity, then employs elaborate
means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its
operatives, conceal its funding and operations in an effort to
frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members, blah
blah. This too long.
I'm going to stop reading here. You guys get the gist.
The White House also put out a statement to accompany this

(05:38):
called. That one was titled President
Trump Isn't Backing on Down fromCrushing Radical left Violence,
in case there were any doubts that he was backing down.
I like that because it's, it's got this sort of like, it's just
like, Oh yeah, I'm, I'm totally not backing down.
It almost feels like he's completely checked out and
they're like, trust me, he's gotthis.
I didn't do fucking shit. A lot of the things that they do

(06:02):
seem to be in response. They're very online, the Trump
administration, right. And a lot of things they do seem
to be in response to some of thethings people say on X.
And like one big meme on X from the radical right is this thing
that says nothing ever happens. I don't know if you've ever seen
that. Whatever.
Yeah, they'll just nothing ever happens.
Hashtag nothing ever happens. They'll put it over like the
they'll superimpose that over pictures.

(06:24):
And it's just this idea that, you know, their, their, their
fascist ambitions are never really quite fulfilled by this
kind of grifting mega whatever. Yeah, so this statement they put
out assuring us Trump is not, he's not backing down from this.
Stop saying that. Who said that?

(06:45):
I didn't say that. You said that.
It's pretty insane, man. It reads like it could be an
anti no thread on X it it this is meant to accompany the
executive order. The body of it really kind of
seems meant to justify the executive order.

(07:05):
It lists out all these differentincidents that they claim are
examples of radicals, left wing violence.
There's some obvious stuff in here that I might agree with.
For example, a 2019 attack on a ICE facility in Tacoma, WA.
Sure. Yeah, the the person who did

(07:26):
that described himself that way.He was an anarchist as far as I
know. But most of what they describe
here as radical left, antifa or whatever is really just kind of
vaguely anarchist. And we'll talk with you, Chris,
later about this. Like, there's certainly overlaps
in these flavors, but it's not really, it's not really the

(07:50):
same, right? These are kind of distinct
ideas, right? And and then the last thing that
we'll talk about that the White House put out was a strategy.
This came out on September 25th,I believe this is the plan,
right? So you got this executive order,
you got this statement, and now you've got the strategy.

(08:12):
This was a memo that Trump sent to the Secretary of the Treasury
and the IRS commissioner, and what it asked them to do is
identify and disrupt. That is the language they use,
the financial networks that funddomestic terrorism and political
violence. I should note here that the only

(08:36):
political violence, the only domestic terrorism it mentions
in this memo is left wing. So, so this is kind of, I think
the first really solid, clear signal of like, what they plan
to do about it. Certainly I don't think it would
surprise anybody if there are people inside the FBI, you know,

(08:57):
huddled around tables over the weekend trying to figure out how
they're going to respond to this.
But the first signal of what is coming down the Pike is that
Department of Justice, the IRS, the Treasury, are taking a look
specifically at entities with money.
So one of the ones The New York Times reported this that they're

(09:19):
going to look at is Open Society's foundation.
And they're doing this kind of backwards too.
They're saying surely Open Society's Foundation, which is
the giant sort of money source on the left that is associated
with George Soros, right? They're saying, all right, this

(09:40):
is who we want find us somethingto get, which is very backwards
ideal of pursuing justice, right?
They're not finding the crimes and seeing who's responsible.
They're finding who they want tobe responsible and searching for
crimes. So this first move really seems
aimed at undercutting the nonprofit status, the financial

(10:03):
security, etcetera of left wing donors.
Famously anarchist. Open Societies Foundation.
Yeah, George Soros, black bloc militant, who can forget the
time he punched Richard Spencer in the face?
Chris, you've been, you know, keeping a close eye on this.
You've got the book coming out next year that's all about anti

(10:25):
fascism. I got to say I, I I don't think
you could have planned the release of your book any better.
It is it is grim situation, but did did you ever expect this to
happen? You know, I, I just know from
talking to Mike, writing a book,the process between, you know,
when you turn your final draft in and it goes to publication is

(10:47):
so long. I feel like if I wrote a book, I
would be constantly worried thatlike it would be outdated by the
time it hit the shelves. But I'm just curious your
thought on what's happening given that you spend so much
time looking into this. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's
absolutely wild. It's in a weird way, though the
book does kind of predict this alittle bit.

(11:08):
Like it's the I end up interviewing a lot of anti
fascists who by 2024 when Trump is re elected, are kind of going
further underground because they're kind of fearing exactly
this, like a resuscitated anti antifa panic and like one that
has, you know, is harsher than the previous panics.

(11:31):
And I think that's, you know, essentially what we're seeing.
Yeah. I mean, I in a way I wish the
book was a little less relevant,but no, I think it's by the
especially by February, you know, who knows where this will
have gone. Well, I think when we were first
talking both of us about our books, it was during, it may

(11:51):
have been during the Biden years, right.
Yeah. Wouldn't it have been?
So I mean, this is a huge change, right?
It's, I mean it's like a, a massive change and it's it, it
seems like, you know, the stock certainly went up considerably.
I think people are going to wantto read.
It more important than ever and it was already important
something about these executive orders.

(12:12):
I saw Spencer Sunshine fantastic, I mean top of top of
the world researcher. We're going to have to have him
on some time. But he noticed that the Cato
Institute, which is a libertarian think tank is
criticizing the Trump administration over these
executive orders. So I, this doesn't seem too

(12:34):
popular. I I think anybody who bothers to
know what they are talking aboutknows that this sort of panic
against antifa is sort of a smokescreen for other things
that really have to do more withpolitically persecuting critics
of this administration or their political opponents, real and

(12:56):
perceived. If you've gotten any sense in
terms of, you know, what's the vibe check on this?
I if you go on XI mean you can see people salivating over this.
People like Andy know or like just licking the boot and being
like, please, Sir, please, I antifa punched me in the head
and my brain split in half. I I would love to help you, but

(13:18):
I just don't know that this is going to be received well.
I don't know I I'm just speculating here I guess, but.
Yeah, I mean, I I can't really get the temperature just yet.
I mean, like all of our old friends from previous anti
antifa panics are pretty stoked and you know, Owen Lanahan who
we can talk about later, I haven't seen what Pizza Kate

(13:40):
Jack has said about it yet. I think Sternovich is pretty
excited. Just like previous panics about
antifa, you know, it's always about creating a pretext to go
after whomever they deem antifa.And I think we'll get on to
this, but obviously MAGA on the far right has an incredibly
expansive definition of who constitutes Antifa compared to

(14:03):
the pretty vanishingly small amount of activists in America
who kind of identify as Antifa and are doing that work.
You know, I'm really excited to have you on to kind of explore
where this panic came from. You know, why did people start
freaking out about Antifa so many years ago to get us up to

(14:25):
this point? But the last thing that I want
to talk about before we dive in,there is a study from CSIS that
has been making the rounds. It got covered in the Atlantic,
NBC News. I was quoted in an NBC News
story. I I did not say a lot of nice

(14:45):
things about this study, but thequotes they picked out from me
are pretty tame. Have you seen this?
What what it is is, and some listeners might recognize that
once I start talking about it isa study that they say, you know,
the results of show that there is a surge in left wing

(15:05):
terrorism in recent years and a decline in right wing terrorism.
Have you seen this? Yeah, I I saw the Atlantic
headline getting shared around alot.
I think I said on our, our last premium episode, Jared, we, we
did a question and answer and wetalked to someone asked us
about, you know, where, where terrorism is going and things

(15:25):
like that. I, I don't think we can discount
the possibility that left wing terrorism is really growing and,
and, and might grow. And I, but the, the reason for
it is because there's a complete, in my opinion, a
complete vacuum of leadership from the liberal left to the,
you know, the whole spectrum really.
There's just like a complete vacuum of leadership.

(15:46):
People are feeling like elections don't matter.
They're worried about their, their right to vote being taken
away. And it's in the, in the near
future. And that filters down to people
who may be, have a propensity ofviolence in the 1st place.
So we can't totally discount it because of that.
I I agree. And I think it is on the tips of

(16:10):
everyone's tongue that, you know, things are just kind of
getting more militant across thespectrum.
As for this specific study, Jared, I think you've taken a
closer look. But my impression from far away
is that it's one of those thingswhere it's like the way the NYPD
talks about like the murder rateon the subway where like,
they'll say it's risen like 500%.

(16:32):
But that was from, you know, 1 murder to five murders in a
year. Is is that what's happening
here? Yeah, yeah.
I, I thought, you know, some of our listeners might have seen
this. I, I think a lot of us feel it
in the air. Like you said, Chris, things are
just getting more militant across the board.
There has seemed to be more violence kind of bringing out of

(16:54):
the excesses of the left movement in this country.
But as you also said, the baseline was zero or close to 0.
So even a handful of incidents feels like something's changing,
right, Even if it's statistically like a fluke.
And it's too early to know if this is going to be a trend or

(17:14):
if this is just some moment specifically has happened and
and this has happened. But here's what I told ABC about
this study. Be patient with me folks.
I'm going to get research nerdy.This This is why they pay me the
medium bucks. So the problem with this study
is its methodology. And the issue with this

(17:37):
methodology is 1, their definitions of left wing and
right wing violence and the factthat it leans on the old school
framework of terrorism, which has an extremely high bar and
should have a high bar for what is included.
And to be defined as terrorism, an act has to be committed with

(17:58):
the explicit goal of effecting some kind of political change or
having some kind of political result.
So a whole lot of violence that we see happening that that we
think of as political violence, things like school shootings
committed by teenagers that haveextreme racist and hateful
ideas. A lot of those, in fact, most of

(18:18):
those would probably not reach the bar of terrorism.
If somebody's loaded up on racist ideas and goes out and
attacks a bunch of migrants but doesn't do so with the illusion
that they're going to change theworld or they think that, but
they never stated that anywhere,well, then it's not terrorism,
right? So already the window, even if
the study is done perfectly, is so tight that it, it really is

(18:42):
just a, a very narrow, narrow sliver of the picture of the
threats that we face today. The other thing is methodology
aside, I had some issues with how things are coded.
It seemed that this is my take here, that a lot of right wing
incidents that I looked up because I just Googled some

(19:03):
things, you know, just Googled Nazi attack, white supremacist
attack. After I saw this and thought,
surely there can't be one attackthat's happened this year.
A lot of these, I think they afforded benefit of the doubt to
right wing attackers. You know, where they're like,
well, the exact motivation isn'ttotally clear and they didn't
afford that to left wing attackers.

(19:24):
So one of the ones they put in here is Luigi Mangione shooting
the CEO of United Healthcare. His political views, his exact
political views are still reallynot clear.
The state of New York tried to get a terrorism charge on Luigi
and they failed, right? So why is that being counted as
left wing terrorism? And from what I can tell, they

(19:45):
did that because of the target choice, right?
So there's, they're making assumptions about these left
wing attackers that I don't think they're making at an equal
rate for potential inclusion of right wing attackers.
The very last thing I'll say before I bore everybody with
this nerd ship A lot of mainstream media outlets are
just happy to regurgitate this stuff without calling somebody

(20:07):
like me. And having them explain what the
issues of a study like this might be.
And then even when I did to NBC,you know, it's what they used
from my interview with them, youknow, I don't think really
captured the entirety of what I said to them.
But it reminds me a little bit of 2020 when I feel like a lot

(20:29):
of analysts and journalists wereattributing, like, Boogaloo Boy
stuff to the left just because they would occasionally, like,
turn up at a Black Lives Matter demonstration.
For people who don't know, the boogaloo boys were, I mean
essentially like far right libertarian, is that the way you
would describe them? They were like, you know what,

(20:50):
what your your liberal aunt would call gun nuts.
Yeah, exactly. I, I think they're like kind of
acceleration is the gun nuts often, you know, had connections
to like white nationalist movements, but occasionally
would make these overtures wherethey would pretend like they had
a shared purpose with Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

(21:11):
And people just fell for that hook and sinker without really
digging into like their actual ideology.
I don't know. And also, like in 2020, I think
it was also CSIS that did the study that, you know, in the
previous 25 years, Antifa had killed no one and that the far
right had killed like 304 hundred people.

(21:33):
Generally they put out good stuff like like it's, it's solid
enough. So I was pretty surprised to see
this from them, especially from the analysts that that wrote
this. It it's really, I don't know if
it was rushed or what, but yeah,point is, I just wanted to
explain why people should hit pause before they they swallow

(21:53):
that study too fast. Well, maybe that's where the
clicks are right now. But yeah, if you're talking
about alternative media, I want to remind people that posting
through it is the most trusted name in news.
And we are going to just quicklyinterview Chris Matthias here
very briefly about his book. And then we're going to get to
the fun stuff, which is talking about sort of the history of

(22:13):
Antifa in the Magamind, like howthey how did they get here?
Where if they're so obsessed with us, you know, or at least
obsessed with the left in general.
Now I'm hearing in my head Mike Cernovich going, you know,
instead of saying gorilla mind saying keep your mind just
relined just. Relax.

(22:34):
It's OK, Just relax. And we're back.
Mike Cernovich danger of oh, hey, Shawna, I think Chris,
like, why don't you just tell usfor for starters, like what is
Antifa in general? Like I I think about like
there's this old thing about Casey Stengel when he first got

(22:55):
the Mets, like in 1962, it was like a bunch of scrubs.
And then supposedly his first speech was like, gentlemen, this
is a baseball, right? Like just starting from scratch.
What what, what is what, what isAntifa?
What is it? I think the interesting thing
and I think why MAG has been able to make Antifa to such a
boogeyman is because no one really knows what the fuck it is

(23:18):
included. Often times including like
people in the Antifa movement. It's like tough to define for
the most part. And the way I kind of define it
in the book is like this. It's a decentralized and largely
underground subculture of leftists.
You know, they variously identify as anarchist, socialist
and communist who are dedicated to combating the far right.

(23:42):
And, you know, they basically believe that fascists sometimes
need to be confronted in the streets and that can mean
violently. They believe that fascists
should have no platform to speakor organize.
And they believe. That interjected, but as far as
I know that's not true of everyone because there are a lot

(24:04):
of people who are who consider themselves anti fascist who also
are against violence. So I think this would be the the
distinction I, I would I would draw the distinction between I
would basically say antifa for the most part is militant anti
fascism, which distinguishes it from liberal anti fascism, which

(24:24):
is often nonviolent and believesin the power of the state and
law enforcement to combat fascism.
I think that is kind of, for me,the defining element of what
makes antifa Antifa is like A atleast a understanding that
militancy can work sometimes. That isn't to say that there

(24:45):
isn't disagreement among anti fascists about when violence
should be used. In fact, those discussions can
be very tedious. The I think what also confuses
the discussion and the definition around antifa is that
it can simultaneously refer to groups that self identify that
way. And there are like, you know,

(25:06):
multiple groups around the country that identify that way.
But also just kind of refers to a tradition of like a set of
tactics and practices in Americaand in Europe against combating
the far right and in America specifically, like, you know,
this modern iteration of Antifa can kind of be traced back to

(25:28):
the 80s and 90s with the with groups like the baldies and with
anti racist action, you know, which are these kind of young
militant punks who are basicallytrying to chase Nazis out of the
punk scene. And they do that successfully.
So they're obsessed, obviously with the violence, right?
And you know, any kind of footage of people going crazy,

(25:52):
like smashing a Bank of America window or whatever.
I don't even know if that's antifascist or if it's just left
wing, you know, chaos. But they're obsessed with that.
It seems to me though, from fromhaving, you know, had sources
who were, you know, consider themselves Antifa and things
like that. There's also a lot of just kind

(26:13):
of boring stuff like documentation and am I not, am I
not, am I missing that 'cause itseems like there's much more of
that in real life than any of that.
So almost like just research without being paid ID ING people
right big. Thing yeah.
So this is this is basically thecrux of my book, which is that,
you know, the Antifa and the public imagination is just these

(26:34):
militant radicals that are punching people.
But like, like Nazi punching constitutes like a fraction of
percentage of the work that Antifa does.
And the vast majority of the work they do is kind of, like
you said, can be kind of boring research, like really tedious
research. And you know, my book To Catch
Fascist is essentially about that research and the fact that

(26:57):
over the last 10 years, Antifa has docs or unmasked identified
thousands of synonymous and secret white supremacists who
often times were in real positions of power, be they
police officers or pastors or politicians.
And a lot of that work, you know, I said it can be boring,

(27:20):
which it certainly can. But a lot of that work is also
kind of exciting because it involves espionage and and
spying. And a good part of my book
follows a anti fascist activist that goes undercover into a Nazi
group into Patriot Front for about 5 or 6 months and then
fucks up their shit and essentially gets a lot of their

(27:43):
internal messages and ends up doxing, you know, maybe 80
members of patriot front. So essentially the book follows
different anti fascist spies whoinfiltrate these groups, end up
stealing all their messages and then kind of dismantling these
groups. So like when we think about

(28:03):
after the and we'll get to this,I'm sure, but you know, a lot of
groups were destroyed by doxing over the last 10 years and
specifically a lot of groups that were in Charlottesville in
2017. And then a lot like a group like
Identity Europa, which was kind of 100 members of Identity
Europa were, were identified because an anti fascist got into

(28:26):
their chats and downloaded theirchats.
And then these anti fascist researchers from across the
country were able to mine those chats for clues to reveal all of
these white supremacist real offline identities.
So, you know, that is kind of the crux of to catch fascist.
I've been pitching it as like ananti fascist spy thriller.

(28:47):
It's great. By the way, I just want to
interject. I've had the privilege of
getting a preview of it. It's it's great.
Now I'm just, and obviously I'm biased, I'm your friend, but.
Thanks Mike, it's a great book. Wait, I want to.
I want to. I want to just wedge something
in here actually quickly becauseyou mentioned doxing.
When you say that, I think you're referring to the
colloquial use of the word doxing, right?
Because doxing in sort of a criminal or pseudo criminal.

(29:12):
I don't know how it like the laws on every in every state
usually refers to like posting somebody's private information
with the purpose of harming them.
Right. So I've been docs for sure.
Like I remember getting docs on 8 Chan, Infinity Chan, whatever
it was, and it's definitely not like, Hey, I've I've uncovered
some nice information for you toreach about Michael Hayden.

(29:34):
But like you're talking about like the guy goes by the name,
like I don't know, peanut butteror something, right, I don't
know. Is his his code word online.
And then you're like, I know whopeanut butter is and you post
his ID and his job may be and like where where he's based, you
know, that sort of thing, but not necessarily always the full
amount of information phone number thing.

(29:55):
Right, exactly. Yeah.
So I think all three of us have probably been docs before.
I think, I think, I think V Dareeven did a series called Doxing
the Doctors. Doctors, I think actually we're
the. Three people in it.
What about the reunion squad? But at any rate, yeah, I'm I'm
glad you made that distinction because typically I think people

(30:17):
when they hear doxing, they think of posting someone's
private information as a way of inviting harassment.
When I say doxing in the anti fascist context, I'm referring
to unmasking previously pseudonymous white supremacists.
So people people that are hidingbehind pseudonyms and avatars
online to be white supremacists and to spread white supremacist

(30:40):
propaganda. It's the way I describe it in
the book is essentially the digital equivalent of ripping
the white hood off a Klansman. And or for example, I think in
the 80s and 90s, what a lot of punks that were fighting Nazis
in their communities did, would put Flyers up in their
neighborhoods on telephone polesthat said meet your local Nazi.

(31:02):
And it would be like a local Skinhead that they identified
and they they want to warn people about.
So that is kind of just the modern, the digital equivalent
of of that. So what I'm hearing is that
Antifa is a lot of different things to a lot of different
people. You've got the militant Antifa

(31:24):
that these are the people on thestreet dressed in all black.
You have like nerd core Antifa, which is, which is a lot of like
researchers and, and, you know, people that probably make great
journalists. If, if publications, you know,
we're still into, into the far right beat.

(31:45):
And then you've got like, I just, I just remember, I think
we both covered this rally and this might have been the first
time I actually met you in person, Chris, when we covered
that rally in Portland. I, I just remember talking to
like grandmothers who were like,I have a gay granddaughter.
I'm Antifa and I'm like, huh, OK, these are not people who are

(32:06):
like unloading bear Mace into the Proud Boys, you know?
So it's, it's, I, I think that'skind of the, the issue with
these executive orders, right, is that Antifa is like, how do
you know if somebody is Antifa? It's like, how do you know if
somebody is vegan? Well, they'll tell you quickly.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's such a, it's such a hard thing

(32:28):
to pin down. And, you know, I'm glad you
brought up the kind of grandmas in Portland because, you know, a
lot of the like anti fascist researchers I talked to for this
book who, you know, will use thesymbols for Antifa, you know,
the three arrows and the two flags and, and all this stuff.

(32:48):
You know, they're like soccer moms and, and and like, and
rednecks and, and, and there arelike the punks and of course,
but you know, some of these people are in their 60s.
Some of these people are young, as young as 18 or 19, and like,
the demographics are actually kind of all over the place and I
think would be surprising to a lot of people.

(33:09):
So yeah. So that's what Antifa is,
actually. Yeah.
How does MAGA imagine Antifa? Because I think I, I would like
you to kind of paint that out for us first and and then we'll
get into explaining how that came to be.
Man, we could talk about this for hours but.
Well, we're about to, you know, at least at least one hour

(33:34):
somewhere. Somewhere between one and two
hours. For sure.
Yeah. So in the MAGA imagination,
Antifa are these incredibly militaristic, highly regimented,
like hidden army of like black clad radicals that are roaming
the streets working around everycorner.
They're going to punch you for being Christian.

(33:58):
They're going to try to turn your kid trans.
They're, you know, basically themost extreme kind of fever dream
idea of the left. There's a lot of distance
between those two things, so I think we should spin back the
clock and figure out how we got there.

(34:29):
OK, so remember a world before Trump, there was also a world
where we weren't talking about Antifa.
I think that's an important distinction to make here, in
part because anti fascism arose against the threat of what many
perceived to be a fascist threat.
I think that's pretty reasonable, right?

(34:51):
That's often often gets lost in the right wing narrative.
But. Otherwise it would just be anti,
yeah. Trump gives his first kind of
talks about the wall and he starts talking about Mexican
people and a lot of it is comingfrom Ann Coulter's book.
And people like, hold on, this guy's a fascist, right?
He sounds like Mussolini or something like that when he

(35:14):
would do his rallies back then. I don't know if anybody
remembers these, but that was the first time I ever saw anti
fascist banners or signs, right?And then there were some people
who would go outside the thing and kind of stomp on cars and
there was disruption outside of these events.
And that was kind of like the very beginnings of it.
And I would imagine that's the first time the kind of people

(35:35):
who start later started to hype Antifa as a boogeyman first.
Got the idea of it. We're just sort of like, wait a
minute, we like this Trump guy. This is a problem for us.
We cannot have people out there talking about Trump in this
manner. One of the biggest ones and and
it's going down brings up bringsus up a lot.
We've had them on the show, 2016people call it the Battle of

(35:58):
Sacramento. Does anybody remember this one?
Yeah, at Berkeley, right, the school.
No, no no in Sacramento, CA. Yeah, yeah.
Where like 10 people get stabbed, Yeah.
It was out in front of the Sacramento State House and yeah,
there were 10 stabbings. Traditionalist Worker Party, if
anybody remembers them, were involved in this no longer.

(36:20):
Yeah. It's a real, it's a real
throwback. This was Matthew Heimbach, who
was. How would you describe Matthew
Heimbach, Chris? He's a bearded Nazi from Ohio
who cheated who slept with his brothers girlfriend.

(36:42):
Was that the great? So that was the that was the end
undoing of tradition. That was the that was the
undoing. But yeah, he's the the head of
the traditionalist Workers Party, which kind of tried to do
this like third positionism thing where they like
appropriated the language of theleft and talked about like white
the white working class and white civil rights and shit.
But it was just like a straight up like Nazi that like attended

(37:03):
cross burnings and shit down South and like organized
Charlottesville and so on. Yeah, a goon squad.
A goon. Squad.
Racist Jelly Bean. Yeah.
So that was a big one because there was there was a lot of
violence involved there. I'm skipping over some other
ones. A lot of them happened in the
Pacific Northwest and California.
But there were there were these clashes started to form in

(37:26):
response to, you know, outspokenfascists in support of Trump
being out on the streets. Then there's J20 and this was
this was like, probably, you know, the biggest thing so far
in terms of forming Antifa in the mind of the media, Forming
Antifa in the mind of people on social media for a number of

(37:48):
reasons. You have people on the streets
or somebody set fire to a limousine.
If you recall their clashes withpolice.
Somebody smashed out the windowsof a Bank of America.
I had people putting like Waka Flocka Flame music in front of
images of people smashing thingsand sending it to me.
People were excited because theywere really pissed off about

(38:10):
Trump and Trump taking power, and they felt like the system
had failed them. But something else happened
there, Jared. I think the is the most viral
thing that is seared into a lot of people's minds from the J20
protest. You know, that happened during
the first Trump inauguration wasa image clip of Richard Spencer,

(38:34):
you know, at the time the star child of the alt right, just
getting his clock cleaned. You know, he's he's getting
interviewed in a suit with the little Pepe the Frog pin.
And then somebody in a black hoodie just clocks him right in
the head. I think it's, I think it's an
elbow to his like face or cheek,yeah.
It really rung his bell. You could just tell that he was

(38:56):
like, he was like, where the hell am I?
He's extremely dazed after that.Yeah.
And this, this was so viral, right?
I mean, does everybody remember that?
People were making it into like,they were, they were, you know,
doing it like song with the hedgehog with like, rings would
fall out with the hit. Like, I mean, there was just
like every possible meme imaginable.
But the other thing that would that came out of it.
And again, this isn't talking about building up Antifa in the

(39:20):
imagination of the American public.
Were all this dialogue about Is it OK to punch a Nazi?
Yeah. Remember that.
Oh my God, it was the obsession of every major newspapers op-ed
page. Yeah, there was.
There was like a million pieces.And like every journalist who
had resentment for Richard Spencer, the time had to just

(39:40):
kind of keep their mouths shut because, you know, I mean,
obviously you can't be out there.
Oh, yeah, you should punch him. But like, there were there was
this instinct, I think among many, many people just that they
were angry. They didn't like the fact that
these white supremacists had kind of just felt like they
could take over Washington, DC without any kind of
consequences. So that was like a really big

(40:02):
one because they're also, among other things, really, really
embarrassed the alt right or theradical right.
I mean, they were really, I mean, it was not a, it was not
great for them. Then we get into the, this, the,
the, the first waves of Antifa disinfo, which I know, Chris,
you have some stories about thisas well, but I just want to

(40:22):
introduce it by saying you got guys like Microchip, who is it?
Like just had a disinfo performer online who's
associates with a lot of radicalright figures.
His identity is known. We should probably cover him in
more detail on another podcast, but also a little guy named Jack
Pozobic, who at the time was kind of the understudy to Mike

(40:46):
Sternovich. He was not a very big figure.
Now he's he's a huge figure in Magalan.
Now he's become like a, a massive celebrity despite having
absolutely no charisma, no discernible charisma whatsoever.
But Jack was kind of just like he, he presented himself as a
sort of military guy, right? Serious American military guy,

(41:07):
and he would present things likeas news that were essentially
just disinfo. Yeah, I mean, Jack's thing was,
and I, I still regret not writing a piece about it at the
time. It would be hard to do because 4
Chan, like, you know, deletes itself after a certain time
period. But I would be monitoring 4 Chan

(41:30):
and I would see like threads getposted and then a few minutes
later Jack would just post whatever the thread said and be
like intelligence says that Hillary Rodham Clinton is stole
a plane and flew it to Georgia, the country.
And it's like, Oh yeah, I remember that thread.

(41:50):
Yeah, I saw that 5 minutes ago. Breaking news, Jack, you know,
but it but it ended up like likethere was no dumb bullshit that
Jack would not post. He didn't check anything and he,
as we covered in The Who the hell is Jack Pacific episode,
lied about his credentials, overplayed the ones that he does
have to be like. And you can trust me because I'm

(42:14):
a, you know, former Navy intelligence, former, former
firmer CBS News or whatever. Yeah.
Firmer CBS News he had in his bio forever.
And then and then of course, hey, let let's not let Jack
Dorsey off the hook because Twitter, of course, verified his
account and turned him into an actual guy in the eyes of many

(42:35):
people, despite the fact that hehad, you know, credentials that
were extraordinarily flimsy. And that's the nicest thing I
can say about his credentials. But like, one example of some of
the disinfo that they would publish around this time was
this thing called Destroy hate. And destroy hate was supposedly
an Antifa. It was it was supposedly an
Antifa campaign where they were going around on Memorial Day and

(42:59):
graffitiing the graves of World War Two soldiers at a sort of
anti military rate. It was supposed to make them
look crazy ridiculous, right? So fake antifa accounts would
crop up and then they would be like, oh, destroy hate.
We're going to destroy them. You know, we're going to we're
going to show these like World War 2, these dead World War Two

(43:20):
soldiers, like, you know, who's boss on right or whatever.
And then people like Jack would be like unbelievable, right?
And I can quote, tweet it with like whoever else is in his DM
who's doing this, these antifa fake.
Accounts Yeah, it it'd be like we we have to take action
against Beverly Hills Antifa. Right Beverly Hills Antifa.

(43:41):
Which, I'm sorry, just pump the brakes.
I'm sorry, Beverly Hills Antifa.Yeah, there was a Mar a Lago
Antifa, but there was, there were, there were some that that
seemed that really there there, there were some that were more
plausible. That was a, you know, Salt Lake
City Antifa, Detroit Antifa, right?
And these were accounts that trolls would make in order to

(44:01):
try to discredit leftist or discredit anti the anti Trump
movement, which at the time was very powerful.
Trump was was not, you know, he was not a super popular figure
in 2017. He's not the kind of he didn't
command the same level of respect on the right that he
does now, I think. And that is only come over time.

(44:24):
And so this was a real attempt to discredit that.
But you've seen Chris, you've seen in my opinion a much
funnier and even funnier than Beverly Hills Antifa.
You have seen a much funnier example of fake Antifa bullshit.
Yeah, I mean, it was kind of my one of the first far right
rallies I covered. I'm from Gettysburg, PA of

(44:46):
course you know, side of the bloodiest battle on American
soil. And in June 2017, there was a
fake rumor going around on Facebook claiming that Antifa
was coming to Gettysburg to to to the battlefield to piss on
Confederate grace. So about 100 neo Confederates,

(45:12):
Sons of Confederate Veterans, Klansmen, assorted MAGA people
turn up to the battlefield. But of course I know as someone
from Gettysburg, there are no Confederate marked Confederate
graves in Gettysburg. Seems like something someone
should have googled. Yes, so like if Antifa is coming

(45:32):
to Gettysburg to piss on Confederate graves, they won't
have anywhere to piss. But, you know, so me and my
reporting partner at the time, Andy Campbell, shout out, Andy,
go to cover this rally. And it's, you know, it's kind of
a farce. They pledge allegiance to the
Confederacy. They sing the national anthem.

(45:52):
Don't really see that that mightcontradict me.
And Andy still have this runningjoke where we'll be at a party
and we'll just scream freedom because that's what a lot of the
guys they were doing. But they were, you know,
essentially they're on piss patrol looking out for Antifa.
And when Andy and I actually arrived at the rally, it was so
funny because there was these armed militia dudes in full camo
carrying long guns, staring out of binoculars across the

(46:15):
battlefield looking for Antifa. Looking for piss specifically.
Looking for? Looking for.
Looking for the glimmer of that yellow stream?
Looking for a black figure and ayellow stream.
But of course, you know, Antifa doesn't show up.
It it rains for a bit, it's really hot and.
It cleans up the pitch. I love that it's all so hot and

(46:37):
it's. It's so hot so.
Sweaty in Gettysburg in the summer.
Like it's just so. Humid too, yeah.
And so at any rate, the funniestpart and kind of the perfect
coda to the day is that a one neo Confederate demonstrator,
someone who's there to protect the battlefield from this Antifa

(46:59):
scourge, is carrying a Confederate flag in his in a
flag holster on his belt. And I think when he puts the
flag back into his flag holster,it bumps his gun holster, which
then fires his pistol into his leg.
And freedom isn't free. Yeah, freedom.

(47:23):
Isn't free. Yeah, people who know that.
Yeah, so the the only blood spilled that day was a literally
self-inflicted gunshot. I need, I need someone to make
me a fan Cam using Beyoncé's freedom to like, I'm just like a
sudden like beer bellied neo Confederates shooting themselves
in the leg. Yeah.
Yeah. And like there there's like a

(47:44):
look like he had some funny quote when he was being taken
into the ambulance. I think at any rate that I can't
remember, but yeah. So at any rate, that was kind of
my first introduction into the anti Antifa panic and how
occasionally, sometimes it couldbe really funny.
It's not what I mean, nothing happened later that summer,
right? It was, it was totally cool.

(48:05):
The Antifa story went away. No, not really.
For people who are unfamiliar with the whole Charlottesville
saga, it actually started in May, if people remember that,
right? Like so the run up was actually
there was a first rally in May where they walked around the
statue and they felt pretty goodabout it.
These are like, all right, guys led by Richard Spencer, a lot of

(48:26):
white nationalists in the crowd like the Mike Penovich, those
type of guys. And they marched around and they
kind of make a big thing of the statue that they're going to
take down and they get hyped on it and they decide this was AW
for them. But like, let's push it.
Let's we're doing well. Let's keep the expansion going.
And they decide to make this really big event in

(48:49):
Charlottesville in August. And I know you covered that
really closely. I covered it from from New York
and and ABC and from the, you know, from The Newsroom there.
But yeah, tell me about that in the in the context of Antifa,
what Antifa did and also the wayit was perceived.
You know, it's interesting, in the lead up to Charlottesville
too, as people kind of call it, Antifa actually had a spy in the

(49:16):
Charlottesville planning server where they were documenting in
real time the kind of like bloodlust and murderous intent
of the people that were coming to Charlottesville.
And it's quite horrifying. And, you know, antifa tried to
warn the city of Charlottesville, the government,
of what these Nazis coming to town wanted to do, that they

(49:36):
wanted to kill people. And then, of course, the city
government doesn't really listen.
And what's these Nazis have a permit?
And we all know kind of sadly, what happens next.
Obviously the day in Charlottesville, there's all
this viral footage throughout the day of this horrible
violence occurring on like pitched battles in the streets.

(50:00):
DeAndre Harris is beat in a parking garage by 5 white
supremacists with like flagpolesand stuff.
And DeAndre is black. Yeah, sorry, DeAndre is black
actually like and and a story there is that.
I was actually there for that and started to run towards
DeAndre, but as soon as I started to run, a Nazi would

(50:21):
start swinging around a pistol and it was I all of a sudden I
was staring down the barrel of apistol.
So I ducked by by the time I gotup, DeAndre was stumbling away.
But at any rate, you know, shortly after that, James Alex
Fields drives his Dodge Challenger into a group of anti

(50:43):
fascist demonstrators, injuries dozens of people and kills
Heather Heyer After in the in the wake of Charlottesville,
which kind of shocks not only the country but the whole world,
you know, this footage is going everywhere.
The far right in America feels alittle bit on the defensive and

(51:03):
they have to do something. It was an international story.
I mean, that's people forget that.
I mean, it was like, you know, all over Europe, I mean Asia,
people were, people were fascinated by what they were
seeing because it was so it justdidn't look like America.
Yeah, yeah. The far right had spent, you
know, all this time and effort supporting the Trump campaign.

(51:25):
The alt right moniker had been picked up all over the place.
And, you know, this was their big, you know, flagship event.
It was going to be the big event.
This the biggest white supremacist gathering of a
generation. And when they all got together,
the the world was disgusted and horrified.

(51:46):
Yeah. So I think it's also important
to note here that two days afterthe rally, Trump gives his
infamous very fine people remarkthat, you know, he says that
there are very fine people on both sides of this
demonstration, essentially indicating that some of these
Nazis are very fine people that were there to defend a statue,

(52:07):
which was bullshit. There is a prominent pro Trump
troll named Microchip who, you know, decides that it's time to
go on the offensive and, you know, kind of blame a lot of the
violence on Antifa. And what he does is he starts a
petition to the White House thatends up getting 300 / 300,000

(52:31):
signatures to designate Antifa domestic terror group.
And of course, you know, as we've already discussed a little
bit, there is no domestic terrordesignation in the US.
You can't designate domestic Group A terror group.
So he knows that the petition itself is bullshit, but like
that's not the point of it. And he gives this kind of

(52:52):
remarkable interview. Like when I, I went back and
read it, I was like, Oh my God, he like really spelled it all
out. He did not hide it at all.
And he basically tells politicalthe point of this petition is to
quote it was to bring our brokenside together after
Charlottesville and prop up Antifa as a punching bag.
So the narrative changed from I hate myself because we have neo

(53:15):
Nazis on our side to I really hate antifa.
Let's get along and tackle the terrorists and and then he says
you can call it an extreme form of what about ISM, which I think
is actually like a really succinct.
They're just telling you what they're doing.
And I was pointing that also as this was happening, Antifa is

(53:37):
enjoying a bit of stardom also in part because of, of, of the
genuine outpouring of grief and sympathy over Heather Hare in
the sense that like, well, that,you know, I think a lot of very
norm normy liberal, well, even centrist people were like, hey,
I mean, these people are standing up for what's decent

(53:57):
and good in this country. So I mean, the need to do that
is really strong. And I would just want to say
also our our RIP Heather hair. It is day and forever.
Yeah. So some stuff happens in the
immediate aftermath of of Charlesville to to put it
mildly. I think it's I think it's fair
to say that the alt right movement starts to fall apart

(54:20):
immediately after, although we don't see it right away.
Yeah. A few things happened when there
anybody remember the Vegas shooting?
That was one of the one of the first like crazy things that was
like there was like I mean it was like 60 people or something
like that. This guy killed from horrible in
the country music and because the majority of the people were
white, there were a lot of people floating that that was an

(54:41):
antifa event related event rightwhen I was like the IE the
disinfo was getting a lot sharper and more accurate right.
I remember Yvette Falacra. I don't know if anyone remember
her. She was from the from the I
think they're mostly in California.
I grew by any means necessary orbam, she was a middle school

(55:01):
teacher who had gotten into conflicts with these guys.
And that's I just make a note ofthat one just because it was the
first pressure campaign I recallto try to get someone fired for
being Antifa. So that was I just, I mentioned
that because because now, now look where we are.
But yeah, it was like a big, it was a big thing at that time.
And then there's my favorite story on this list.

(55:23):
Although there's so many unusualones, I think we were all here
for it. How many?
How many all like the the AntifaCivil War that was supposed to
take place on November 4th, 2017.
I was hoping we would talk aboutthis, yeah.
We would, I made my bread and butter at Newsweek reporting,
reporting on this thing because we, we would have these click

(55:43):
demands at Newsweek. And every time I would do a
story about the disinfo around the Antifa civil war, the
interest in it was so high that I would just get like a million
clicks. It was just I, I was so I was
like, shit, I'll do a new story every week about this.
But yeah, this was something that started from a flyer from a
group called Refuse Fascism, which is kind of like obscure,

(56:06):
like nothing group. And they were just like, yeah,
there's, I don't know what the the flyer said, but I'm going to
assume it said something like we're going to war on November
4th. There was just like to get a
bunch of people to rally or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, That group ended up Kid Aid.
I I wouldn't call him like totally obscure.
I think that group has grown a little bit like I.
Think, I think, I think they have to a little bit and.

(56:27):
It's like a revolutionary communist.
Party it's, it's the Revcom party and it's like Bhavakian
and like this. Yeah.
And so this is this is like a real this is this.
I don't want to get into in the weeds but basically like you
know, most like anti fascist antifa folks that I talked to.
Do not fuck with Revcom and Bhavakian.
It's a build. It's a bit cultish to my.

(56:47):
Understanding it's a call. It's like the refuse fascism
shit you see everywhere at like orange signs with black
lettering at like every rally. But anyway.
Wait, that's that's a revcom thing?
Yeah. I think so, yeah.
Shitting me. That's the origins come from
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They sort of like they wanted to
repackage and rebrand in the Trump era and they kind of.

(57:07):
Anyway, the point is that this is not, these are not like major
players on the left. These are not people who get
tons of donations or there's much interest, but basically
somebody digs this up on 4 Chan and on Twitter and like wherever
else and it starts to build withthis idea of Antifa is going to
war with the. They're probably still nursing

(57:30):
the bad footage of Richard Spencer getting punched, the bad
footage from Charlottesville andall this stuff.
And then they're really worried about war, I guess, or either
that or they want to make one happen.
And they start to like hype it, hype it, hype it.
And then eventually it goes to Alex Jones and he starts making
these announcements that are essentially like, well, now it's

(57:51):
in. We're here, We're here now.
Antifa, Civil war, November 4th.I hope all my patriots are
praying. I hope everybody's ready, right?
He gives heat. I love your Alex Jens.
Thank you. He, he starts to make these
announcements and then it becomes so friggin huge that
they're just talking about it non-stop.

(58:12):
And it leads to was it Lucian Wintrich I believe, who posts a
thing in in Gateway Pundit? It and it centers on this tweet.
It was a Crank T Nelson tweet I.Believe Yeah, it was a parody
tweet. Yeah, yeah.
And and and it's this parody tweet says can't wait for
November 4th when millions of Antifa super soldiers will

(58:36):
behead all white parents and small business owners in the
town square. So Gateway Pundit and I think it
was Lucian picks up this clearlyjoke tweet making fun of
conservatives who are like Antifa's waging a civil war.
They're going to come kill us all and runs it straight.
It's just like, beware, November4th, your town square.

(59:00):
It's so good. It's so good.
I mean, and yeah, I mean, it's just they had this this idea in
their head that like, ninjas were going to come in through
the windows and start killing people, right?
They're going to start killing grandmothers for being white or
whatever. And then, of course, on the day
of the event, there were like 30people milling around with a

(59:22):
bunch of far right guys ogling them.
And yeah, that was it. You know, I mean, that was that
was basically it. Yeah.
So the, the, the, the, the phrase, if you've ever heard the
phrase Antifa super soldier, it comes from that age.
So you like, you know, so it's like.
Which, incidentally, is the nameof a chapter in my book.

(59:43):
Yeah, perfect. That's perfect.
It's perfect. It's like the the old thing for
like, you know, it's like a red,red diaper baby.
Like I'm raising my child to be,you know, as a red diaper baby.
It's like, no, I'm raising my myson to be an antique sister.
OK. All right.
So, so around this time, you know, kind of really started in

(01:00:04):
2017. You start to see more clashes
popping up, specifically in the Pacific Northwest.
The Pacific Northwest has a veryrich history of anti fascist
organizing and some of that starts to crop up as the Trump
administration is under way. The Pacific Northwest

(01:00:27):
coincidentally also has a prettyrich history of weird far right
shit. So it starts to become the site
of St. clashes. The ones that I think most
people remember are the ones between anti fascists and proud
boys and and the mix of other far right militias and and weird

(01:00:50):
Christian groups and stuff that like would show up and
demonstrate with them. Talk to us about that period,
Chris. Because I, I feel like what
we've got until things really start churning here in a bigger
way is like the occasional clashof like there's some event and

(01:01:12):
anti fascia show up and brace hell for the event.
You've got that and paired with Facebook misinformation
swindling boomers into thinking you know, the the Antifa is
coming to destroy their, you know, freshly manicured lawn or
something. Right.

(01:01:33):
What's happening the Pacific Northwest?
How does it kind of shape the the panic as it would develop?
So I think specifically is here is when Portland really enters
the the spotlight. Basically you have the emergence
of groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.
Patriot Prayer is a little hard to describe.

(01:01:53):
It's like a, it's a far right group that like is kind of
Christian. It's led by this guy Joey
Gibson. It is a real partner group to
the Proud Boys and it's based inVancouver, WA, which is across
the border from Portland. And what these groups end up
doing is that and, and kind of far right people from all over

(01:02:14):
the Northwest end up often converging on Portland to like
they say, like liberate Portlandfrom it's like awful progressive
leadership. They hold these like, quote,
free speech rallies in Portland.They begin to, to hold these
rallies, which is always just a pretext for hoping to get into

(01:02:34):
street fights. And of course, like, you know,
anti fascist do turn up to confront them and chase them off
the streets and 'cause they, youknow, from the anti anti fascist
perspective, they do kind of pose an immediate threat.
Like these guys are violent and they are associating with
straight up Nazis a lot of times.
But it kind of becomes a, a cycle like it they'll be clashes

(01:02:56):
at one rally and that will be the justification to hold
another rally. I remember once actually in
Portland, I saw like one of the far right dudes with like a army
helmet on and he had written allthe like battles he had been on
on his helmet. So like he had Battle of
Berkeley like written on his helmet, for example.
We're talking about guys that, you know, are allegedly there to

(01:03:19):
do free speech and support Trump, but they're turning up in
like full fucking body armor. They're carrying bear Mace, all
this stuff. I just wanted to quickly
interject also, so you know, as 20/17/2018 rolls around, there
are, you know, there's more bad news for the radical right in
the form of these mass shootings, right?

(01:03:41):
And that starts around 2018. If you recall the tree of life
terror attack, which was just cut and try talk about.
We were talking about ideology earlier.
I mean, it's cut and dry. The guy was on Gab, believed in
the great great replacement theory.
He thought Jews were causing it and he went out and murdered 11
Jewish people who were, you know, setting up for services.
Really grim type thing. And at the same time the the

(01:04:07):
MAGA world was also trying to wage a campaign about these
caravans coming through and and so forth and it didn't really do
as well as they wanted. And I really think that this
period of time where where Trumpism became associated with
violence and racism. Well, it was always associated

(01:04:27):
with racism, to be fair. But, you know, just this became
associated with these things. They leaned harder and harder on
the Antifa boogeyman. And it was in that sort of
atmosphere that a very unassuming fella named named

(01:04:48):
Andy, no. Shout out Andy, if you're
listening, I'm. Sure, he's listening.
What's up, Andy? Starts to make waves.
He's in the sort of, you know, those, those, those kind of
clashes around Pacific Northwestthat would that you just
mentioned. He's always kind of there and
he's always doing kind of, I guess you would call it citizen

(01:05:12):
journalism, right, where he's sort of filming.
And he's always trying to make the leftist or the people on the
side against the white supremacist look bad.
And to be fair, whenever you film a crowd of people in a
protest, you are going to find somebody who's going to look
bad. So there's always fodder and
people start to really, really, really hate this guy.

(01:05:35):
Well. Something else that he does that
people are taking specific issuewith him is like he'll film
himself walking around these protests and then you know,
he'll come across a table where people are signing up for an
e-mail list or something and he'll point the camera down.
And now you've got a bunch of names, e-mail addresses, phone

(01:05:57):
numbers and his followers who are there because they're they
want to see anti antifa content would really rain hell and
threaten and harass you don't anybody who was on these
streams. Does a really good flag Jared,
because he he really does. It's not, you know, journal.

(01:06:18):
Oh, I'm going to really documentthis.
It's almost like feeding information to the radical
right. It feels like it at least it
certainly feels like it to thoseof us who are watching it
online. And he's starting to really piss
people off. In the Pacific Northwest.
You have this very strange alliance between Andy, who is
Asian and openly gay and groups that are anti immigrant, right,

(01:06:46):
xenophobic and and vehemently anti LGBTQ, right?
Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer. I don't know.
There were all these different groups that were were mingling
in those days and a lot of tension I recall kind of built
for throughout 2018 and 2019 before in June of 2019.

(01:07:09):
Well, what happened exactly? He was at an event and then
there was all this talk about people going to throw milkshakes
on him, I believe, online, things like that.
And then I remember being in thegroup, a group DM or chat or
whatever it was with you, I'm sure Jared.
Chris. Was that the one that Jared and
I started like way back in 2017?Yeah.
I think it might have been, yeah.

(01:07:30):
Yeah, that was the one I just remembered.
There's a whole bunch of of of people who cover this material
all in that thing. And of course, Andy did his
usual thing where he kind of pretends he's this huge victim.
And he was like, oh, you know, look what they did.
They threw a milkshake on me. And I remember tweeting
something like it. You know, it looked like bird

(01:07:51):
shit. It was like a bunch of like,
white goo on his backpack or something.
And we're all making fun of it. And then all of a sudden, what
happened? Some people also, you know,
started physically punching Andyand they roughed him up pretty
bad. And that is where Andy really

(01:08:13):
pivots and is now not, you know,he goes from being this, you
know, look at me, I'm, I'm on the ground behind the scenes
exposing the radical left to being like the radical left.
So crazy they tried to kill a journalist.
And he even gets on fucking CNN for this shit, right?

(01:08:36):
He claims that these punches to the head I I believe, I think he
claimed he got a brain hemorrhage.
He did, yeah, Yeah. It looked, it looked, I mean, he
looked, they looked like they rang his bell pretty good, I
mean. He got, he got hit pretty good,
yeah. Can I can I give a quick
background about where Andy no came from?
Let's do it. That's all you hear, baby.

(01:08:57):
OK. I think it's kind of important
context, which is that, you know, he's a Portland State
student, graduate student, I think studying journalism, but
he works for the student newspaper.
And he, he ends up getting in this big scandal that gets
national attention because he posts a video of a Muslim
student speaking on campus. But he, like, omits a lot of

(01:09:17):
context and cuts it in a way that makes it sound like this
Muslim student saying something really extreme.
And the, like, Society for the SPJ, like the Society for
Professional Journalists, the student newspaper, like, accuses
him of violating that code of ethics and kind of kicks him off
the newspaper. This becomes like a story in

(01:09:38):
right wing media. He's like, claims he's silenced
for telling the truth. And then he writes this kind of
batshit article for the Wall Street Journal claiming that
London has been taken over by Muslims.
And then, you know, just kind ofbecomes this figure and, you
know, before the rally where he's kind of punched and
attacked. In the months leading up to

(01:09:59):
that, he had followed along and tagged along with Patriot Prayer
and the Proud Boys as they approach a bar in Portland
called Cider Riot, which is likean anti fascist hangout.
Yeah, this is like a big, this is a big thing, an anti fascist
lore. Yeah, exactly.
And unbeknownst to Andy, there is an anti fascist that is

(01:10:22):
undercover in Patriot Prayer at the time and he's filming and as
Andy knows, tagging along with Patriot Prayer and the Proud
Boys as they're approaching thisbar, Andy know can be seen
laughing along with them as they're preparing to attack this
bar and talking about, I think like what weapons they're going
to use and and so on and so forth.
Of course, in the ensuing skirmishes, Andy takes all this

(01:10:45):
footage that's really dramatic and makes it look like this
whole battle that ends up happening was instigated by
Antifa, which it did was not. And and like, and by the way,
like some anti fascists got really fucked up in that in that
skirmish, like, oh, I think I believe a woman like broke her
spine and and like this. It's it's really good

(01:11:06):
documentation. Eventually when this anti
fascist spies footage comes out and shows and he really kind of
in cahoots with patriot Prayer not being really.
Which he's to be religious to put it out there.
He's denied that he's clean. Of course.
He's, I mean, but, but anybody who's watched him for a very
long time can make up their own.Totally.

(01:11:29):
About it because he certainly islike that.
So, yeah, he gets that was greatcontext.
And he he he really makes his injury the kind of centerpiece
of his identity becomes like, you know, everything he does
after that is really based around I was beaten and I was
given a brain bleed and I had a brain injury.

(01:11:51):
And he's always just like my brain injury, like this way he
constantly brings things up. And there was this one tweet
that he had where he said that he was walking along and, and,
and all of a sudden he dropped his fruit and the brain injury
robbed him of the ability to hold his food.
I mean, these were things that Ithink a lot of people kind of

(01:12:12):
raised an eyebrow to, but nevertheless, it makes him into
this kind of guru about Antifa. And of course his, as you, as
you correctly alluded to, his, you know, his idea of Antifa is
completely biased and focused onthe idea of just promoting the,

(01:12:34):
the stereotype or the, the caricature.
I guess you would say that Trumpers want to hear.
Yeah, yeah. The the way conservative media
treats him after this, it's almost as if like by getting
punched in the head, like by an anti fascist, all kinds of like
anti fascist knowledge transferred to Andy.

(01:12:57):
He ends up writing this book about Antifa that is like almost
entirely impassive voice and andvery loose with the facts.
I saw him speak one time at the Heritage Foundation, which that
was a trip. And he just, he double s down so

(01:13:17):
hard, so hard. He starts going to rallies less
and less and it really becomes like an aggregator.
So he aggregates other people's clips and and I should also say
this kind of sets off a wave of people that try to replicate the
Andy no model. After that.
Suddenly, you know, by the time 2020 runs around, you've got
people from the Daily Caller andyou know, all kinds of right

(01:13:39):
wing publications that they're sending out into protest to
basically do the Andy no thing of filming protesters and try to
make them look bad. And also independent people who
want to be the next Andy. No, there's like a whole bunch
of people who kind of spring up.I can keep track of all of them.
To be honestly, it's like a it'sjust like a peanut gallery of
randos. Last thing I have to say about

(01:14:01):
Andy now is that at some point he inexplicably developed a
British accent. So.
This. Was a brain injury.
So this is a real point of contention.
He claims that it's from his time in London, right?
I think growing up but. OK.
But I think it's. But it wasn't there, and then it
came back. And then it came back, yeah.
My my favorite Andy bit I got asif we're going to talk, we we

(01:14:23):
need to do an entire who the hell is of Andy?
No, and like, obviously, obviously we have to at some
point. I mean, he's just, he's he.
And you should. I mean, Hannah wrote a great
piece on. Yeah, she did.
Like, yeah, the only problem is we'd have like 12 people who
want to be on that one. But the there's there's one clip
somebody had of him where he's drinking tea on an interview and

(01:14:45):
like like he wants to give the image of like if him is like
this, this delicate tea sipper. But it appears to be that the
cup is empty where she's got a little English tea set thing and
he's like, yes, and and tea. And it's like it looks like he's
holding an empty cup as a proper.
Anyway, whatever, whatever. Can I say 11 more thing last

(01:15:05):
thing of? Course.
And which I think is important for the context of this past
week, which is that after he's punched, he becomes this cause
celeb, right? And he's on Fox News all the
time. And it's shortly after that that
in July of 2019, Ted Cruz and Bill Cassidy in the Senate
introduced a resolution to designate Antifa domestic terror

(01:15:27):
orc. That's like when this kind of
thing really gains traction again.
Thank you for getting us back ontrack.
I would have been talking about the team yet but for.
Another two hours. Of course, yeah.
But the the resolution cites what happened to Andy No.
And then to bring it back full circle again, you know, Proud
Boys in Patriot Prayer then decide to hold a rally in honor

(01:15:51):
of Andy No called the end domestic terror rally in
Portland. It's another really big rally in
August of 2019, and the morning of the rally, Trump tweets out a
message of support. And he tweets.
Major consideration is being given to naming Antifa an
organization of terror. Portland is being watched very

(01:16:12):
closely. Well, he's been talking about it
for a long time. So yes, a bunch of things
happen. I'm going to, I'm going to cut
through some stuff quickly here.One of them is in July of 2019.
There's that William Van Spronson incident where he's
killed after fire bombing and ICE detention center in Tacoma.

(01:16:33):
Then in August of 2019, the Dayton shooter.
Now it's important. Actually, I just need to do 1
little reverse on this, which is, you know, it's the day
before there was a white supremacist terror attack in El
Paso, TX in which two dozen people were targeted for being

(01:16:53):
Latino and killed by a very young man.
And you know, it was fall great replacement stuff.
And then the next day there was another shooting, a mass
shooting at Dayton. And this mass shooting in Dayton
I believe was family related or something like that.
Is that the? Moment, I think that's what
investigators definitely. Determined.

(01:17:16):
That it that it was that it was like a personal.
Well, I think if I remember correctly, he had was someone
that kind of been fantasizing about a mass shooting for a long
time, but not exact, explicitly ideological, yeah.
Well, look, he had he, he, he happened to be a, a fan of, of,
of left liberal people online. And he retweeted Jared Holt

(01:17:39):
once. And Jared knows that this was
quickly turned into a whole circus where was like, oh, Jared
Holt inspired the Dayton shooter.
Ridiculous. Defamatory.
Yeah. This guy was like kind of a
lefty shit poster, I guess, and retweeted some post I did

(01:18:01):
criticizing a local news segmentabout, I think it was cops
pulling people over to give themlike, free coupons for a drink
at the gas station or something and being like, damn, isn't this
so sweet? I'm like pulling people over
randomly. No, it's not.
I don't want a fucking beverage from the cops.
I want them to leave me alone. And like this is and I called it

(01:18:23):
like Copic Ganda or something. So obviously, you know, Andy
sees that and it's like Jared Holt is directly.
Implicated. In in the Dayton shooting.
Yeah, in the Dayton shooting. Well.
And, and eventually so like, I think I actually cut this from

(01:18:45):
the book, but had it in an earlier draft, but I didn't.
I forgot that like the FBI in a report a couple years later said
the shooter was not quote aligned with to any specific
ideological group, but a young man who fantasized about mass
shootings, serial killings and murder suicide for at least a
decade after a struggle with multiple mental health

(01:19:07):
stressors. Well, that doesn't stop Andy
from making a big deal of it, but also doesn't stop Jack
Pozobic from making a thing of it, who later wrote a book
called like Antifa and did a bunch of like very low rent
documentaries, really cringe documentaries.
But yeah, I mean, Jack, Jack hadthe Dayton shooter on the on the
book jacket of his Antifa book. So that, yeah, this is a little

(01:19:31):
bit, this becomes a bit bit of disinfo you're seeing you're I,
I think if listeners are pickingup on anything, there is a lot
of disinfo here. So there is a whole thing we go
through, which is this whole Antifa journalist thing, which
came from Owen Lenihan or reallyremembers that shit.
Where, where I, I think, I think, I think there's like a

(01:19:54):
rank he, he did some sort of thing where it was like based
upon Twitter or whatever the most Antifa journalists like
based upon, you know, whatever study he did of Twitter.
And, and I was really disappointed to finish second to
you. I believe you were #1 and I was
#2. And then they hate Luke O'Brien

(01:20:16):
so much he didn't come up on theon the list.
I guess he doesn't follow it, didn't follow enough Antifa
accounts or whatever by their methodology.
But like. But we must mention that Luke
O'Brien is unethical and is clearly is clearly motivated by
Antifa. But like, we won't talk too much
about ourselves. I just want to point out that
this was something we all dealt with.
Jared, I know you wrote a bit about it.

(01:20:37):
I think you debunked it at some point.
I wrote a piece for Columbia Journalism Review that they
threw a fucking fit over and it cost.
I guess Owen Lenihan had somehowfinagled his way and got lined
up to get like an actual think tank job and lost his job.
Because it was so bad. Like they pulled the offer
because they're like whoa, what the fuck?

(01:20:58):
For for for people who don't know like the full deal, Owen
Lenihan was a guy is a guy. He still exists.
He's in Ireland for some reason.He's obsessed with our politics
just like all these other like Ian Miles Chong and all these
other people who are just like they're super online and just
obsessed with American politics.And he used to play a character

(01:21:20):
called Prague Dad, progressive Dad, who is a sort of a
satirical character. At one point he took some very
embarrassing photos of himself with I guess was supposed to be
menstrual blood in his crotch where he was supposed to say
like dads bleed too or I don't remember what the thing it was
very cringe and embarrassing. I know Luke has many times
screenshot. Him and sent it.
Back to him over and over again.Be like, is this you Sir?

(01:21:43):
But yeah, that's who he was. And then all of a sudden he
tried to rebrand himself as an anti antifa expert.
Yeah, and in between those periods, right, he like who, who
was the biggest fan of Prague Dad?
Like the where it got pick up was like in the Daily Stormer
crowd. Like it was like neo Nazis who

(01:22:03):
thought this was funny. So he's like in all these group
chats with neo Nazis who are saying horrific racist shit.
And like, later he would claim, like, well, I was just there,
you know, like, as a researcher observing what?
It's bullshit, dude. These were his friends, OK?
And like, this was the circles he ran in.

(01:22:24):
And then all of a sudden he's like, I am an expert on
extremism. So I'm going to Fast forward to
2020, and yeah, there's a lot here.
I know, Chris, you're going to have some stuff to say.
Yeah. I just want to quickly note that
these Black Lives Matter events and also the riots that took
place that was also involved some anarchists these like that.

(01:22:49):
We talked about it many times onposting through it, but it just
has like it really captivates the the the mega imagination.
I think it really scares the shit out of Mega.
I can't believe that was five years ago now.
But like, that was like a revolutionary summer.
Like I remember like I could notwalk three blocks that summer in
Brooklyn without running into a demonstration for for for a

(01:23:12):
minute there. Like there were cop cars set on
fire, like pretty regularly. It was.
It was massive. I think like the New York Times
eventually called it one of the biggest demonstration movement
in history, in American history.Like millions of people took
part. There were there were also Black
Lives Matter events. And this is very important, I
think in towns all over the country, little towns, right?

(01:23:34):
And it, you know, I won't go offon my book, but there is there,
there is there is a part that takes place in Berkeley Springs,
WV. And there was like that was on
the map. And that's a town with like 800
people in it. I mean, it's got, you know, 809
hundred there were it, it was just all over the country.
There were a little, you know, towns and the counter to this,
and I'm sure you know, you, you'll have some thoughts about
this, Chris, Is that it? At least in Berkeley Springs and

(01:23:55):
I'm sure as elsewhere, they, they actually had for, for a
Black Lives Matter event that had a few dozen people at it,
400 armed. Yeah.
Right wing guys showed up in August of that summer because
they believed that there were anarchists being bussed in from
out of town, that they thought that their town was going to

(01:24:19):
kind of, you know, erupt into Portland.
Yeah, and I think this is a really important thing to bring
up, which is that in 2020, the anti Antifa panic is kind of
repackaged as like an outside agitators narrative on steroids.
So essentially as a way of like delegitimizing this mass

(01:24:44):
movement for black lives, which is really remarkable, the right
decides to blame the violence and the demonstrations on these
like anarchist radicals and and Antifa, which of course is just
completely false. Like because these
demonstrations were a organic mass uprising against police

(01:25:04):
murders of of black people. So the distraction that they're,
you know, they try to blame it on Antifa and like, sure, Antifa
groups are taking part, but it'slike a vanishingly small number
of the whole demonstration. But like you brought up, Mike,
again, this is, you know, like we've seen before in Gettysburg

(01:25:26):
and other places, these fake rumors of Antifa are a pretext
for these mass mobilizations of the far right, especially in the
Northwest, which will I mean, like in Idaho, there are armed
occupations by the far right by militias in Sandpoint, ID and in
Coeur d'Alene that are kind of really scary.

(01:25:48):
Like where there are armed militiamen carrying are like
long guns walking around town for a week at a time.
And in Oregon and Washington State, you see these far right
militias starting to make checkpoints on the road to ask
people about their political beliefs when they're driving

(01:26:08):
through because there is a narrative that Antifa is
starting wildfires across the West.
There is another story where a there is a bus or a trailer of a
family on vacation and the dad is black and he's driving
through. It's actually the town where

(01:26:29):
they shot Twin Peaks. I'm blanking on the the name
right now but. And he gets out at like a
convenience store and all the sudden is surrounded by these
militia dudes who are asking himif he's antifa and he tries to
calmly explain that he's not. It's like.
The Civil War movie or whatever.Yeah, no, totally.

(01:26:49):
And he ends up, you know, him and his family try to go camping
and they end up getting getting followed and chased by these
armed militiamen and eventually have to like, abandoned their
vacation, like the daughter thinks they're about to die.
But like this is like how out ofcontrol the anti antifa panic

(01:27:11):
gets in 2020. Like one more quick example is
Martin Giugino in Buffalo who ifyou guys remember was a very old
man who attended a Black Lives Matter demonstration.
He's literally like the only demonstrator left in this city
square in Buffalo when riot copsapproach.

(01:27:33):
And he is a non violent protester.
He's part of the Catholic Workermovement.
He is a very devout Catholic man.
He actually turned up to the rally to he wanted to kneel with
police officers and pray with them.
That's why he turned up. And he approaches the riot cops

(01:27:53):
as they're coming forward and they knock him over.
He falls over and cracks his skull.
And it's like you can hear it inthe video.
You can hear a skull crack. And this video goes super viral,
obviously, because it's kind of becomes representative of how
brutal the police are being thatsummer.
And in the next day, own one American News Network starts

(01:28:18):
publishing this crazy shit, calling him Antifa and saying
that like, you know, had this radical history.
And within a short time after that, Trump tweets that this
guy, this old man, Catholic, peaceful, nonviolent is Antifa.
And I think it demonstrates exactly how the definition of
who is Antifa is really startingto grow.

(01:28:40):
That's insane and adding to it at the same time we're going to
get we're we're this is we're kind of meshing together some
stuff that happened in the spring, summer of 2020 here.
This info continues and gets hotand heavy.
Jack Pozobic tweets out and it got widely shared that he had a
source or whatever that said that there were bombs planted

(01:29:02):
behind the Korean War memorial. This was because there were a
lot of anti Trump protests therethere, there's been reporting, I
think will summer did a story orsomething like that that said
that there was that this was nottrue.
And then in order to try to validate Jack's claim, Ian Miles
Chong spoke up and said like, no, I've I I've verified this.

(01:29:22):
It's like, Oh, well, thank God that Ian Miles Chong.
We won't, we won't give to Ian Miles Chong here, but just thank
God Ian Miles Chong. Have you guys done an?
Episode about him What happened?Have you done an episode about
him? But we we need to but so.
There's too many people, not enough time.
Yeah, so, so in this atmosphere,there's a fire at St.

(01:29:43):
John's Church, which is the closest major church to the
White House. People are really worked up.
They are gassing protesters outside the White House.
There are officers on horseback,I believe, chasing people down.
And in that whirlwind, Trump makes his first kind of

(01:30:05):
declaration publicly on Twitter that Antifa is a terror org.
Right. Yeah.
So this is kind of the second time I guess he's he's done
this. And I think this is where we
really see how this anti Antifa panic is working is that it
becomes also not only a pretext for the state and for police to

(01:30:27):
crack down on these demonstrations.
But also I would argue, I think Trump is signaling to his
supporters and to vigilantes andto far right groups that it's
kind of open season on Antifa and you should be showing up to
oppose these demonstrations by the end of 2020.

(01:30:47):
There's a lot of evidence of thefar right often in with the
blessing of law enforcement in certain communities, like we
talked about attacking Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
One last 2020 point before we start skipping ahead in time.
Things are going to speed up here towards the end, but there

(01:31:07):
is this extrajudicial shooting, I don't know how to put it, of
Michael Ranholm. And.
Towards the end of of summer 2020, there are these clashes
between Patriot Prayer and ProudBoys and Antifa, right, that are
happening almost every weekend. I remember at monitoring at that
time, I'm sure Jared, you were doing it, Chris, you were doing

(01:31:29):
it. We just, you know, just being
online, you were, you were awareon the weekends it was going to
get hot and then something wouldhappen.
They would come in with their trucks and their flags.
It was election season, etcetera.
And then this self-described Antifa anarchist Michael
Rainhall pulls out a gun and shoots a member of Patriot
Prayer and you could see it on the video.

(01:31:51):
It's what appears to to happen there.
And he kind of briefly goes intohiding and there's a lot of call
for justice and Trump demands retribution.
And all we know about this is that I guess a big cluster of US
marshals goes out to wherever heis actually believe.

(01:32:12):
Earlier in the day, he even interviewed a vice, Michael
Randall or, or or around the same time, which helped, I think
tip off his location. And they shoot him to death.
And by all accounts, his gun wasstill in his back pocket at the
time he was shot. Yeah, the New York Times said

(01:32:32):
like a visual investigation, andwe still don't know much about
what happened, but their investigation did kind of
conclude, well, what the police said happened isn't what
happened, right? But what?
But what happened? We're not sure.
I, I think it's also important, I think to note that Trump after

(01:32:54):
this happened at a rally, said we sent in the US Marshals, took
15 minutes, it was over 15 minutes, it was over.
We got them. They knew who he was.
They didn't want to arrest him. And 15 minutes that ended.
So it's like. Basically, he's talking like he
killed Osama bin Laden. Yes, exactly.
Like he is kind of explicitly saying that this was without a

(01:33:17):
doubt an extrajudicial killing, like by his death swap.
So it's election time at the endof 2020.
After this doesn't go so good for Trump, he loses.
We see the Antifa stuff spiral again around the Stop the Steel
movement. Every Stop the Steel Movement

(01:33:38):
event is scared of counter demonstrators.
There's three big Stop the Steelevents in DC.
Everybody knows about the Capital riot, but there was one
in November that was called I think that one was the Million
Mega March. Yeah, there's one in December
that was might have also been a mega March, but it's a Stop the

(01:34:02):
Steal event at this point. And then there's the one in
January on January 6th. At those first two events they
attract so many far right figures.
You've got Proud Boys, militia folks, whatever, all showing up
to participate in this stuff andthere's an anti fascist

(01:34:23):
contention that is counter protesting them at night.
On both occasions it leads to some skirmishes in the street.
I believe that December 1 actually ended up I, I think
some people went to the hospital.
It got it got pretty nasty at both of these events or, or I

(01:34:43):
guess at all of these events really, Trump flew over in the
helicopter or drove his motorcade past, you know, kind
of endorsed these events. So by the time the Capitol riot
shows up, a kind of underappreciated element, I
think of what was happening before they stormed the Capitol,
was that all this firepower, allof it like this call to arms.

(01:35:08):
The reason so many far right groups were on the ground in DC
for the Capitol riot was this idea that Antifa was going to
like kill them all at the protest and they had to like
they were going to defend against Antifa.
And then when it became clear that like Mike Pence was not
down with the plan to be like, well, technically, but I, I

(01:35:32):
don't certify the election, whenit became clear Mike Pence like
wasn't really willing to do that, then all that attention
like turned to the capital and anti fascist didn't really
demonstrate on January 6th. It was clear like early on it
was going to get nasty. So it was like these guys had
all this pent up energy, all these weapons and went to the

(01:35:54):
capital, right. And then once they did raid the
capital, who did they blame? Chris.
Thanks so much for asking, Jared.
They blamed Antifa and and it's a it's really remarkable.
I remember, like I did a story for HuffPost in the weeks after

(01:36:16):
J6 where I, like, identified probably like 60, like lawmakers
that were at the rally and some of whom had charged, you know,
stormed the capital. And I took, I made sure to do a
tally of how many of them blamedAntifa afterwards.
And I think about half of them did.
I'm like, it's like, it's actually wild to look back and

(01:36:39):
think about how many conspiracies were swirling
around about antifa after January 6th because you know, in
the in, it's not like it is now where January 6th is like this
event that is celebrated on the right in the the weeks
immediately after a storm in thecapital, the right was on the
defensive again because everyonewas shocked.

(01:37:01):
So they needed they reached for their go to boogeyman once again
and they reached for Antifa and they kind of served its purpose
for a minute. You know, like there's all this,
all this like this deep, like revisionist history of January
6th is emerges where there's allthese conspiracy theories,

(01:37:21):
including on Tucker Carlson thatare talking about anti fascist
provocateurs, agent provocateursthat were there stirring up the
the rally. There's like kind of conflicting
conspiracy theories. They're simultaneously blaming
Antifa and blaming the FBI for like stirring up the violence of
January 6th. And then, of course, you know,

(01:37:42):
as, as the years go on, I don't want to get too far ahead, but
they start to blame Antifa less and less.
And it turns out was January 6thgood.
Do we want to take credit for that?
And that's, that's what they do.They, they're, they're not,
they're not ashamed of it anymore.
They, they want to take credit for it.
And Tifa was not involved anymore.
I just want to also very quicklyinterject because we're we're

(01:38:04):
we're going long here, but I think our listeners, if, if
you're into this already, you'regoing to stick for the whole
thing. But Jack Pozobic was among the
people who was very instrumentalin kind of assigning Antifa
blame to the violence that happened there.
He had a tweet that was basically along the lines of
like, oh, I saw this guy. He was in Patriot gear.

(01:38:27):
And then when he got inside, he,he turned, you know, he took his
clothes off and then we're all black or something, right?
Like it was just he didn't say the word Antifa, but he was he
was leading his audience to where they wanted to go.
You know, if I had a tinfoil hat, I would wonder if people
coordinated in advance. I mean, obviously Jack was a big
promoter of the stop to steal stuff.

(01:38:48):
You know, I mean, how many of these influencers were saying
like, hey, maybe we should, you know, we we, we should get some
of the stuff going at the time because it was timed really as
it was happening. But it's also possible that he
had a strike. You know, he was struck with
the, you know, a thought and decided to do it.
But it was not just him. There were a few other people.
And the most important thing, again, I bring up Jack Dorsey,
is that the Antifa narrative became huge because it trended

(01:39:14):
#1 on Twitter in terms of news as this was happening.
So because these guys were tweeting about Antifa doing it,
it people started to believe it.And then basically a third of of
Trump's base actually believed Antifa did the thing for the for
the first few months. Of it was, it was more, it was

(01:39:35):
more than that. It was 60%.
OK. Like like six weeks after
January, 660% of Trump supporters believe the riot was
a mostly Antifa inspired attack.Yeah, OK.
I mean, eventually they moved onand decided it was it was the
feds actually. I need to step in here and just
point something out. Sometimes they got a slow.

(01:39:56):
Give me a little space here, OK,If you go back to the beginning
of this podcast or. Whatever.
Nobody knows what Antifa is, right?
Nobody's really thinking about Antifa.
There's no Antifa organization underlying like, you know, in
our, you know, underground, in the nothing.
And now, in a matter of what? How many?

(01:40:17):
Years. Six years, I guess.
Six years. Six years.
You got 60% of Trump's base thinking that the Antifa did
January 6th before they were, before they had to reverse
course and be like, no, actually, wait, no, this just
in. It was good.
It was January. This wasn't good.
Yeah, it. It was like Antifa did it to

(01:40:38):
make us look bad. Wait, no, it was good.
We like it. Wait.
No, the feds did it. Wait.
But we still like. It.
But it's it's so mixed up, man. To cover this beat, you really
have become an amateur expert insort of mass psychology, you

(01:40:59):
know, because there's like so many weird delusions where
you're just sort of like, wait, what's what's happening, Right.
It's like you try to, you try toexplain this to somebody who's
just a casual observer of the news and they don't understand
how it's even, they're just like, well, they're crazy, you
know? But it's not actually that as
you see here, there's been a very determined effort from

(01:41:21):
propagandists close to Trump, people with, with really
fascistic ambitions to create a story, right, that runs cover
for the heinous things that theydo.
Yeah. I mean, I just wanted to stop
and say that because it's kind of nuts actually.
No, I mean, and no, of course. And it's like also like, I mean
in a really fucked up way, it's impressive.

(01:41:42):
Like they like, they, they like they took something that no one
knew anything about and like, literally the entire country
knows that word now and it's andthey built this narrative that
got so much traction. But yeah, anyway.
Sure. I mean, I mean, it'll it'll give
you cred in some circles too, because it's so infamous for

(01:42:03):
somebody like, oh, I heard he's Antifa.
That's cool. I like that, you know, Right,
sure. I mean, so it's not just it's
not just a boogeyman. It's like they've made it into
this thing when in reality is just like, I don't like fascism.
And also the name of that guy who calls himself Captain
Popeye. He's actually an accountant who
lives in, you know. Exactly.

(01:42:24):
Exactly. So, so by around like mid 2021,
like as the Biden administrationstarts rocking and rolling, you
start to hear about Antifa a lotless, and I mean a lot less like
so much less that Andy Noah, I'mpretty sure moves to London or
something. Sure does.
Like he gets out of here. He's he pivots to, you know,

(01:42:47):
making his grift just pure race baiting, crime clips and.
Shit. No, no, wait a second.
It's in taking other people's clips, right?
He's sort. Of like he doesn't even do
anything. Antifa has done a thing,
according to whatever Kate Bittencourt.
I don't know what the hell theirnames are.
I can't keep track of these people, but yeah, like, so just
like taking other people's footage.

(01:43:09):
It it fades out during the Bidenadministration for most of it,
it seems like the Antifa grift. It's pretty much over for a
little bit. Any theories, guys?
How did it lose steam? You know, Antifa super soldier
Joe Biden is in the White House and they just give up and
they're like, well, we lost the war.
You know what? Why do we think that faded out?

(01:43:31):
I mean, it was so, it was so potent for so long.
Yeah, the state started to the state started to try to
prosecute the case of, you know,how did the fascism happen,
right? There was a January 6th
committee and a bunch of stuff like that.
And there were a bunch of arrests and things like that.
And it's sort of in the same waythat right now you don't see as

(01:43:52):
much many Proud Boys actions. As I said on the premium
episode, a lot of the people whowould be in the Proud Boys are
just signing up for ICE now, right?
I mean, you know, the state kindof, I think took over to some
degree. I don't know what you think,
Chris. No, I mean, I, I think, I think
that's right. I think after January 6th, the
far right kind of went to groundlike they were scared about

(01:44:13):
being prosecuted and stuff. So they needed the Antifa
boogeyman a little less because they weren't going on the
streets anyway. And like the far right was in a
bit of disarray. Yeah.
I don't know. Is that, is that what you think,
Jared? I know.
I, I mean, I think it's probably100 different contributing
factors, right? But, but I also think a huge

(01:44:36):
part of it is the fact that right wing media went from being
on defense in the Trump years. Like the Antifa pogeyman is, is
defense, right? It's very, it very much
resembles offense. It really has fucked people's
lives up. But but the utility in right

(01:44:56):
wing media is that it deflects and distracts from uncomfortable
realities about MAGA. Now that MAGA is pivoted and it
it's just attacking the Biden administration and Democrats,
it's less useful. Also, a lot of the left wing
energy went towards the pro Palestine protests and and you

(01:45:21):
know, of course, you know, a genocide takes center stage, you
know, for, for, for that type ofactivism.
And then similarly, those the people who participated at those
demonstrations, they became targeted not just by the right,
but also by Democrats, quite frankly.
And that sort of changed the conversation quite a bit.

(01:45:44):
So, yeah, although it's become sort of a dead time, it's
important to know that in the election season, obviously,
things are really heightened because Trump is coming back and
people are kind of in disbelief throughout the entire time that
he's actually going to win. I can't believe it.
But the polls all show that he'sgoing to win.
And then we have two attempts onhis life, which I'm sure people

(01:46:05):
will try to ascribe to Antifa inmaking this argument that
everybody to the left of Chuck Schumer needs to be arrested.
But there's no evidence that these guys were actually antifa
in any way. We certainly don't know what was
going on with the guy in Pennsylvania, in Butler, PA.
I still haven't figured out whathis deal was or what his

(01:46:25):
motivation was. I think his father was like a
big Trump supporter. Again, he didn't leave behind
very much. And then the the other guy who
tried to shoot him and I think it's a GG.
Yeah, at A at a golf course, he like hid in the bushes or
something and Secret Service found him, I guess.

(01:46:46):
He was really into Ukraine or something.
It's gonna really, really difficult for them to try to
spin that as being black bloc Antifa, but I'm sure they're
going to try, right? It's certainly because the
target was Trump can be portrayed as left wing violence.
Although once again, the one in Butler, PA.
I really still don't know. I just had no idea.

(01:47:08):
But yeah, then there's a lot of protests start in 2025.
There's a lot of them. And they're also not very sexy
for the the far right guys because there's a lot of
grandmas protesting Tesla stations, right?
And things like that. They're also fire bombings of
Tesla charging stations and, like, actual destruction of

(01:47:31):
property. Yeah.
So we don't know that's antifa or not Antifa or really just
animosity for Elon Musk and who recently, of course, had done a
Roman salute and had helped release the Ghostbusters lock on
all the Nazi accounts on Twitter.

(01:47:51):
So there's a lot of reason why people didn't like him.
But again, these are things thatare happening there.
People are making them into a bigger deal over there.
And then we have a lot of stuff starts to happen again this
summer, right? And in LA, there are these
spontaneous protests against ICE.
I should point out actually before that, that ICE is doing

(01:48:13):
some very bad things to kind of trigger this anger.
Yeah, so, so you've got, you've got protests against ice.
People are vandalizing ICE, you know, getting confrontations
with officers, you know, some, some tense scenes.
Like you said, Mike, these, you know, these protest movements

(01:48:35):
are going on. And occasionally you're getting
these instances where things go a little bit further and and get
a little bit more confrontational at the same
time. Again, MAGA is this all this
immigration stuff they're doing is not polling well.
It's not popular. They thought it was going to

(01:48:55):
make them the heroes. People aren't really digging it.
They are talking about invading cities with the military.
That's not popular. The Epstein files is a huge
fucking disaster. That's embarrassing.
Basically like the Trump administration is flailing,

(01:49:18):
cracking down. Things are starting to feel
palpably more fascist in this country.
Well, then in September, Tyler Robinson, allegedly, you know,
the main suspect, GAX, Charlie Kirk, while he's speaking at a
university event in Utah. It's very graphic.

(01:49:39):
It's recorded on video. And, you know, there's these
bubblings of Antifa panic. I remember people like Andy.
No, right. Like trying to, you know, smear
pro Palestine protesters by trying to like link them to
antifa. I don't know if that really ever
caught on. But like he was trying to do

(01:50:01):
that. People were trying to do that.
And then, you know, when CharlieKirk dies, Antifa panic, full
force, full send, you know, these developments that took
years previously, you know, between Antifa disinformation
and Trump declaring this a national security emergency or

(01:50:23):
whatever happens in the span of a few hours.
And it's just full tilt all the way.
And we have these executive orders now that we're seeing,
you know. I just want to add for Chris's
Chris can weigh in. There were these markings
apparently on Tyler Robinson's bullets, right?

(01:50:44):
And then the first thought was, oh, these are Antifa first.
There was also, they were, they're trans markings, right?
Because that's, they're, they'reso bigoted, they can't imagine
anything beyond that. But there was like, oh, these
What markings did they think they were seeing?
So right, So one of the bullets said Bella Chow, which is a song

(01:51:07):
that Italian anti fascist repurpose into like an anti
fascist anthem in World War 2. And like since then and since
then has become like an anti fascist anthem across the world.
There were I believe on one of the other bullets, the three
arrows, but then there was also a series of other arrows after

(01:51:28):
them. And so basically like what?
And yet another bullet said, hey, fascist catch, which was
really close to the title of my book, which is weird.
So initially there was like all those things could be out of
context, construed as maybe antifascist or antifa.
But what some good reporting that came out afterwards kind of

(01:51:52):
revealed was that this is actually from a pretty niche
video game culture and that there were references to that
culture. Is that your guys kind of
understanding of it too? Yeah, I think, I think the hey,
fascist catch and the arrows were actually on the same bullet
and the arrow was like from HellDivers 2, which is, you know,
it's just I haven't played the game.

(01:52:14):
I don't I'm not a gamer, but like what I read is that that's
how you call in an air strike. And it's like a meme among
people that play the game. Yeah, exactly.
And I think Bella Chow was a reference to another video game
or maybe the same video game like it was, even though like
they're. I'm not sure but he's basically

(01:52:34):
shit posting on bullets though you know?
You know, just just to, you know, just to entertain this,
you know, he may not be Antifa in the sense that he's an anti
fascist activist who's been doing this for a while, but
using that language or whatever it's, you know, not
inconceivable that he believed Charlie Kirk was a fascist and

(01:52:56):
shot him, right. I mean, it's, it's possible that
he took the language of the gameand applied it for that reason.
So we don't know that. But I mean, yeah, I mean, I do
think there are a lot of disaffected people in this
country who feel helpless, as I was saying before, who are now,
you know, you, you, you got somebody who is not particularly
stable or who may be cut off from more reasonable voices and

(01:53:22):
has no leadership, and they are more likely to do something like
this in general. Obviously the Charlie Kirk
assassination was horrifically glory and so many people saw it
and it was really visceral and it was just a basically a snuff
film. Yeah, it was awful, Yeah.
Yeah, it was just awful. It was like, I mean, it was just

(01:53:43):
a really scary looking video. It's like not something I ever
want to see again. And I am sure that for Magga,
this whole story about Antifa really came to a head there,
because it really did, almost for the first time, really prove
the case that they had been trying to make for many years.

(01:54:07):
Yeah, I think I think that's absolutely right.
I think like, let me put it thisway, I think Andy, you know, was
pretty stoked about what was on those bullets and the kind of
traction he could use this anti antifa narrative.
He could bring it back. And it really has kind of
provided the pretext for what MAGA has wanted to do for so

(01:54:31):
long, which was really crackdownon the opposition and crackdown
on the left. And I think like, you know,
we've talked in this episode about all these anti Antifa
panics before over the last however many years, 10 years,
this feels like the real escalation.
Like this is the kind of what they've been building towards

(01:54:53):
with the Antifa boogeyman. And like, you know, as genuinely
funny as the Antifa boogeyman has can be, and like, as we've
discussed in this episode, I guess ridiculous and absurd as
it is, like the developments of this past week are genuinely
scary. I think like the three of us

(01:55:14):
have been labeled Antifa by folks and we have seen the kind
of harassment that that can invite the the list of Antifa
journalists that we were all on got repackaged into a neo Nazi
kill list that we were on. I looked at Twitter this
morning. So I was curious and I saw that
our old friend Owen Lanahan was calling for me to be charged as

(01:55:39):
a domestic terrorist. And this is like how they will
deploy this narrative full throttle from here on out.
I, I've seen a lot of chatter on, you know, police guy, where,
wherever kind of comparing this to like a Reichstag fire moment.

(01:56:00):
And, you know, maybe there is a parallel to be drawn there.
This is a an event that they aretrying to use as a pretext to
fill out their their fantasies. There was this event that
happened, you know, a few days ago where this guy tried to
shoot at people in an ICE detention center.

(01:56:22):
It's getting a little bit less traction because very sadly, ICE
detainees were were killed in this.
I still haven't figured out everything about this guy's
motive or what was going on. I I mean, certainly it was
called Antifa before anything had come out because of course
that's what they're going to do now with almost everything we

(01:56:42):
think about. Also, Luigi Bangiano, we did, we
kind of skipped over in this. He has, Jared pointed out, you
know, a lot of his apparent ideology appears to be right
wing, right? But all that stuff is going to
be sort of tied together right now, I think, into a narrative
about left wing violence and used by these propagandas to try

(01:57:06):
to put their opposition in prison.
Yeah. And you know, it's, it's weird
how like the Charlie Kirk shooting like a the fact that he
was being asked about mass shootings when it happened and
he was being asked about transgender mass shooters when

(01:57:28):
it happened, which is kind of, Ithink like the anti trans panic
crosses over with the anti Antifa panic a lot of times.
Yeah, they have a name for it. Trantifa.
Trantifa Yeah, yeah. And also that this happened on
the same day that there is a mass shooting at a school in
Colorado. And the shooter appears to have

(01:57:48):
been well versed in white supremacist online culture.
And that's something that's almost a routine at this point
that we almost forgot. And like, Yeah.
And then what happened in the ICE facility in Dallas this
week? I think we're also contending
with the fact that a lot of shooters ideology are not good

(01:58:10):
is not going to be readily apparent and it's going to be
muddled and not always explicitly ideological, which
creates a situation where a lot of bad faith actors can go in
and blame the left, even though it's not.
So I don't know, it's, it's a scary times, I guess.
A scary time, but also we've seen how ham fisted this

(01:58:35):
administration really is in carrying out almost anything.
And I think like if your principles are good, if your
heart isn't like, I'll tell you one thing about violence.
I don't even own a gun, people. I don't own a gun.
I've never shot anybody. I've never gone to a gun range.
And I'm not saying that if you do that, you're what I'm just
saying like all I can do is is be myself, right?

(01:58:59):
I'm a writer and that's all I am.
I'm also an anti fascist and I'm, you know, I've been
outspoken about that. I, I, I inherited the title of
this podcast. Although, Jared, I think when
you were, when you were naming it originally, I helped workshop
it with you over text. But I, you know, I've, I've come
to view it as, you know, I mean,look at what's happening in this
country. Like it's a it, it is really an

(01:59:22):
authoritarian right wing authoritarian takeover of the
United States. And I view the title as just
sort of we're posting through it, right?
We're posting through this together and so I think the only
thing you can really do is hold on to your principles.
It's not bad to be anti fascist.You should call out fascism.
It's no way to live. Yeah.

(01:59:43):
I I also consider myself an antifascist, not a militant black
Block St. protester. I've never done anything like
that in my life. I'm too much of a baby.
I'm a sweet, I'm a, I'm a, I'm asweet boy.
I'm also a writer and I'm a podcaster.
And yeah, yeah. I mean, if they want to come for

(02:00:07):
us, they're, they're going to have to come get us, you know,
because, because, because we're not going to shut up and we're
not going to do what, you know, unfortunately, a lot of like
organizations and, and people inthis space that, you know,
having their nonprofit status pooled or whatever is it, you
know, could kill them business, business wise.

(02:00:28):
You know, I think we're going tosee a lot of places, a lot of
media outlets or whatever kind of soften up to try to stay out
of the targets here. But I just can't shut up.
It's not my style. So we're going to keep doing
this. I was through it.
Absolutely. I just want to say that I, I
hope when they, you know, if they take me away, that the Fox

(02:00:49):
News, Chiron says, quotes Peter Brimelow and says Communist
enforcer Michael Edison Hayden. So I was like, I'm going to take
any of their titles. That's the one I like best.
I think I'm I'm I should have pitched my publisher on this,
but I've kept a doc Google document of like what all these
people have called me and I wanted to do like one of those

(02:01:11):
anti quote things on the like anti blurb sections on my book
where like I'm called like a notorious communist Dr. when
Gavin McGinnis calls me and Tisalike that should be on the book.
Absolutely. Well, Chris, thanks for joining
us this week. Hopefully listeners understand a
little bit more where this anti Antifa panic came from.

(02:01:35):
It's got by today's standards and news and information or
whatever. I feels like a long history, but
we're really only talking like 10 years here.
I know something. So much we left out too.
That's. The other thing, it's just so.
Many. Somebody in the audience is
going to remember some weird antifa disinfo campaign.
I'm like, Yep, that too. That too.

(02:01:57):
There were so many. Yeah, but but I'm just
remembering something you said of like this went from being
something no one had heard aboutand 10 years later, this
administration is now declaring it the gravest threat to
domestic national security. It is just really, really

(02:02:18):
surreal. But thanks for joining us.
I'm really looking forward to your book when it comes out next
year. Where can people follow you?
Where can people pre-order the book?
Yeah, thanks. Not the guy, the guys.
This was great. It was felt like we just caught
up on 10 years of knowing each other.

(02:02:38):
But yeah, basically you can findme at Let's Go Mathias on Blue
Sky and Twitter X. And I'm writing occasionally now
for The Guardian and MSNBC Zeteo.
And you can pre-order my book wherever you pre-order books,

(02:02:59):
including on simonandschuster.com.
It's called To catch a Fascist the fight to expose the radical
rape. And if you're listening to this
on Spotify or Apple, you can also find us on Patreon.
All right, we'll see you guys next week, and for our Patreon
subscribers, we'll see you Thursday.
Bye everybody. Bye.
Thanks so much guys. My house, Pay Ali, walk by

(02:03:36):
myself. We're smiling sanctions in a
family portrait by the trophies on my shelf.
I want to live like everyone else.
Pay Ali, walk by. My life is easy when you're be
out at fun. You fucking pay you.

(02:03:58):
The fuck you Life is empty when you're wild.
That's what they tell you. That's not fair, but it's nearly
overtime. It's cheaper than growing older.
Life's not fair, but it's nearlyovertime.

(02:04:18):
It's cheaper than growing.

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