Angry Planet - On the Frontlines of America's Neo-Fascist Insurgency

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

Fascism. It’s back and it’s….Ironic?From Hungary to Brazil to the United States of America, facism—yes, fascism—is back in a big way. When our grandfathers beat back the Nazis in World War II, we assumed we’d beaten the ideology into dust. The problem is that fascism isn’t so much a coherent set of beliefs as it is a mutation, perversion, and reaction to the politics of the moment. The truth is, fascism is as American as apple pie and it’s been lingering in the wings for years.Here with us today to talk about the neo-fascist movement and its rise to current prominence is Robert Evans. Evans works with Bellingcat and is the host of the Behind the Bastards Podcast and has just published a free audiobook, The War On Everyone, that charts the rise of America’s fascists.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Because of the way the internet works and because of, you know, not just as a consequence of the internet, but also as a consequence of the work that hundreds of fascist activists have put in over decades recruiting on the internet, you now have what is effectively an insurgency. the United States. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt.

Kevin O'Dell, the producer, is ever, is waiting in the wings. Fascism. It's back, and it's ironic. From Hungary to Brazil to the United States of America, fascism. Yes, fascism is back in a big way. When our grandfathers beat back the Nazis in World War II, we assumed we'd beaten the ideology into dust. The problem is that fascism isn't so much a coherent set of beliefs as it is a mutation, perversion, and reaction to the politics of the moment. The truth is, fascism is as American as apple pie, and it's been lingering in the wings for years.

Here with us today to talk about the neo-fascist movement and its rise to current prominence is Robert Evans. Evans works with Bellingcat, and is the host of the Behind the Behind the Backer, Mastard's podcast and has just published an audiobook, The War on Everyone, that charts the rise of America's fascists. Robert, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, so last time you were on the show, we talked a lot about Portland, and you were back in Portland recently, right?

What did you see there? What were you covering? Well, I was covering, you know, the Proud Boy March, which was, I think, billed as like a rally essentially against Antifa. And, you know, most of the people that you talk to on that side of thing said that it about their support of declaring Antifa, a domestic terror organization. A lot of them would just say that it was their support of free speech or whatever. But yeah, it was a, it was a proud boy rally. And I think there were a couple of hundred proud boys. It's kind of hard to get an exact number,

but like it was a sizable. It was the largest showing on the right that I've seen. But they were still outnumbered 10 or more to one by anti-fascist. It was also the largest anti-fascist showing I'd seen, probably well over a thousand, maybe more like 2,000 some of. anti-fascists at kind of the height of the demonstration? There's some, some grifty internet personalities on the right that have made a lot of the violence that was at this particular rally. What did you see? You know, I didn't actually, like, I saw nothing that I would really even term as, as violence other than a couple of brief shoves between police and counter-protesters.

It was very peaceful. The vast majority of the demonstrations were. peaceful. The only violence I've seen was a couple of situations in which, like, one of the videos that's been going around is based Spartan, John Tarano, and his daughter, who, you know, attacked a group of anti-fascists and were attacked back in return. Like, the full video of the engagement shows that it was, it was a two-sided affair. So, you know, there's criticism to go around, but they were not just attacked for walking in, like he started swinging at people. And then the other video that's been going around is a bus that's usually been billed in right-wing media as a bus full of right-wing activists that was assaulted by Antifa. And the reality is that the bus,

which was an armored black bus that had like window screens and stuff on it, that was owned by and filled with members of American Guard, which is a white supremacist organization that's been tied to a number of assault, several murders, and like mosque burnings and stuff. So they're very bad guys and they were spotted after the demonstration, after the proud boys had left town trying to enter the like downtown Portland in their bus. And they were surrounded. They had some, a couple of what looked like sheet rock chunks thrown at them at their bus, you know, while they were inside and a couple of plastic water bottles. And they also had a couple of people kick the sides of their bus. And in response to this, they opened at the door. And they opened at the

and one of them started swinging a hammer at the people outside. And because he was not very good with his hammer, it was taken from him by one of the anti-fascists, and then he was hit with the hammer. Now, the videos that were shown by grifters like Andy Noe, who some people call a journalist, I don't think I would quite award him that title. But videos, or the pictures that he would, he spread initially, were just of the anti-fascist with a hammer and hand swinging it inside the, bus. He cut out the earlier parts where the guy with the hammer started attacking people.

So again, like, you have these situations that are complex and are never just a random assault. I don't know, I've never seen that happen at one of these events where just some right-wing demonstrators completely minding their own business and just gets attacked violently. There's usually shoving that starts it or, you know, it's like with the demonstration a couple of months before this. There was a video Andy-No spread or picture, Andy No, spread about an older man in his 60s with blood streaming down his face. And it was like Antifa attacked this old man in the street. And then, of course, you look at video from before and the old man had a telescoping riot baton. There's like a picture of him smiling with it, charging into a

crowd, swinging at people willy-nilly. And it's like, yeah, you do something like that. You can argue that they shouldn't have swung back, but like, I'm a believer in self-defense. The guy attacked people with a weapon and got hit in the head. That's what happens. You know, that's, that's kind of the story. These are, these are street fights, and they've been going on for a while, and you can criticize the fact that they're still happening. You can criticize a lot about it, but the depiction that is being pushed in the right-wing media that these are like, Antifa just assaulting people is completely inaccurate. In many cases, Antifas are the attacks of anti-fascists on the other demonstrators are cases of self-defense or,

or just as often mutual combat, where two groups of people who want to fight get into a fight. All right, and this controlling of context and the controlling of the message, I think, is one of the themes of your audiobook, has that for a segue. The War on Everyone, correct? Yeah, yeah.

And the War on Everyone deals more with how we got to this situation of regular what some people call lone wolf attacks, you know, leaderless resistance is the term I prefer. in the term that the Nazis came up for it. It deals more with that. But these different sort of street gangs from the proud boys on to more extreme groups like American Guard, they play an important role in radicalizing people and pushing people towards carrying out those attacks, which is why, you know, if you look at the Charlottesville marchers from 2017,

the United the Right rally attendees, not only did one of them commit an act of terrorism on the day of that rally, but a number of them have either been arrested attempting to commit acts or threatening to commit acts. Most recently, a guy with the last name Reardon, who was like arrested with a cash of weapons, I think planning to shoot up a synagogue. But like multiple of those guys have been arrested now planning or attempting to execute terrorist attacks. So these different groups and this sort of street fighting does play an important role in radicalization. And it has for decades, you know, Bob Matthews, who's the leader of a, a white supremacist terrorist group called the Order in the 1980s, which was probably the most successful white supremacist terrorist group of recent memory. You know, they stole about $4 million, which was used to heavily arm the movement and also connect it through an internet network, like an early internet network by computers to connect all these different groups around the country. Matthews got his start in white nationalism brawling with anti-fascists in Washington State,

not all that far from Portland, in defense of Richard Butler, the head of the Aryan nation. So, yeah, there's a long history of these groups sort of acting as recruitment funnels. Let's back up just a minute and go kind of big picture. I want a definition of fascism because it gets thrown around a lot. And I think that it's important that we understand what we're talking about, what we're not talking about. So for the purposes of the war on everyone, what is your definition of fascism? You know, the most useful definition I've ran into is the one included. in Umberto echoes er fascism essay. And I think, you know, most dictionary definitions of fascism,

I consider very incomplete bordering on completely inaccurate. And part of the reason is that they apply equally to regimes like Stalinist Russia as well as they do to Nazi Germany. And obviously, Stalinist Russia was terrible and Nazi Germany was terrible. But if you're calling, if your definition of fascism works just as well for totalitarian communism, it may not be a great definition of fascism, because one thing that fascism does, the totalitarian Stalinism does not do, is fascism has the ability to kill open societies. That's where it gestates, and that's, you know, that's where especially Nazi fascism really gestated was within, at the time the most progressive democracy in the world, Weimar, Germany. And I think if I was going to come up with a shortened definition

of fascism that's shorter than Umberto's multi-thousand-word essay, I would say fascism is an authoritarian system that gestates within open societies and kills democracies. And then Echo's essay provides what I would almost call a checklist with some pretty, uh, a pretty great explanations of, um, the telltale signs. These are the things to look for. If these things are going on, your government or your political movement, might be fascist. Yeah, might be fascist or sort of in that, what I like about ECHO's definition and what's wrong with a lot of

the dictionary definitions is that they start at describing fascism at its end point. You know, so they look at the characteristics of Hitler's Germany once he was in power and established, and they define that as fascism. And that leaves out most of the history of the Nazi movement. It leaves out a lot of other Nazi movements or fascist movements that were less successful. So Echo essentially tried to start describing fascism from an earlier point, and it really is, it's a set of things that kind of congeal around one of a couple of different facets. So either like, you know, an idealization of the past, you can have a fascist movement sort of congeal around that.

So you can have this kind of thing that's pretty natural in conservatism and not inherently toxic, where you harken back to a time in the past in which things were supposedly better. better. And if enough things break the right way, you can have a fascist movement congeal around that. So, yeah, that was one of the points echo made is that like it's not, it's more useful to look at fascism and when you attempt to define it, to define it as the process that it is rather than just picking an arbitrary end point and saying that's fascism. One of the one, one of the things that he lists that I think is really useful, especially when we're looking at the modern American fascist movement, is, uh,

This idea that your enemy is, the enemy of fascism is incredibly strong and always about to win, but also is super weak and effeminate. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and you can even see that sort of in the way that the fascist right tries to paint Antifa, both as this dangerous terrorist threat that needs to be confronted by the full force of the state. and is these ridiculous, effeminate, effete, uh, kitties dancing around and playing dress up? All right. So then how do you, uh, because I don't think I'd ever really, I don't think I'd seen anyone or really read any scholarship that explicitly ties

fascism in this sense to, uh, America's, I guess, we'd call it white nationalist, white power movement, um, and kind of, tracks the growth of that ideology explicitly in the lens of fascism. And that's what the war on everyone is, right? Yeah, and there are some other people who have done it. You know, one of my main sources for the book was Leonard Zeskens' blood and politics, which is an absolutely critical text and was a central text in me being able to write that book. And one of my goals in writing that was essentially to take a lot of what I'd learned in blood and politics, expanded a little bit because Zeskin wrote it years ago and there wasn't as much, you know, he didn't really focus as much on sort of the internet and how things had evolved after that.

But take a lot of what I'd learned in that and kind of try to present it to people in something they could digest in a couple of hours because blood and politics is a very long and very dense book. So it's not something you're going to get a casual person who's curious about all these terrorist attacks to sort of dive into and read in detail. So kind of one of my goals with the war on everyone was to take this information that other people had absolutely, compiled and written about before and presented in a way that was easier to digest and that could reach a larger audience. I grew up kind of really thinking about the white nationalists. You and I are about the same age and we're both kind of from the same area. So like we remember Waco, we remember Ruby Ridge.

Oh, yeah. And Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma City were these big events. And the way they were always described to me is kind of removed from context. These are terrorist events, and they certainly were. But what you really do is paint clearly how these are all part of a continuity. And why do you think that continuity is important? Well, because without the continuity, you just see it as like a random series of events. You know, without the continuity, all of these different attacks look like, you know,

they're no different from a bunch of different break-ins, you know, of houses in a neighborhood. and if you don't have the continuity, you treat them like that. And so you might wind up occasionally busting an attack by recognizing, you know, similarities in radicalization or whatever. But like you might, you might wind up occasionally catching one of these guys or stopping them in the act, but you'll never stop them well ahead of time. You'll never stop the process that creates these new terrorists unless you treat them like they're part of a movement.

You know, one of the things that I've been trying to push in the media and in law enforcement when I talk to law enforcement is treating the white supremacist movement in the United States and internationally like a terrorist organization in the same way that ISIS or Al Qaeda is, even though they don't have, they're not as centralized and they don't have a central figure at their head. They function very much in that way because that's kind of the way that distributed online communities work. work. And the only way to fight them effectively is to treat them as if they are that way. Another thing that I thought was really interesting about this book is that kind of is growing up these figures, white nationalist figures, Ku Klux Klan, you know, they were held up as figures of ridicule. We were told that they were kind of powerless and that these were old ideas and like, look how stupid and dumb these people are and that laughter will always win against fascism. Do you think that's true? And in more, further, do you think that maybe that was the wrong

tactic? And we screwed up a little bit. Yeah, I think it is. I think that, you know, there's a reason why, even though they were being laughed at, all of these guys were so eager to put themselves on daytime TV shows and the like where they would be laughed at. And it's because, you know, even if a thousand people laugh at them, if a couple of people took them seriously, that was what they needed. And that's really been, you know, it was George Lincoln Rockwell strategy going back to the 1960s, was knowing that what was important was just reaching some of these people eventually. And, you know, you kind of accepted that a lot of folks were going to consider you ridiculous, and it was worth it. And I think that as the fascist movement has aged and as our culture has aged, one of the things

that has helped them a great deal is kind of the growth of this sort of ironic, nothing matters culture that the internet has very much inculcated. It was really critical in my development as a young man, too, this sort of attitude that the internet helped breed in us that like nothing was worth taking seriously. And that has really provided a lot of camouflage for these groups. And you could see them writing about it back in the 1990s when some white nationalists were publishing guides on the internet on how to convert people to need. neo-Nazi and white supremacist causes through, you know, early Usenet boards and stuff like that,

where, you know, a lot of the focus was, you know, if somebody attacks you for, like, being a Nazi, claim that you're just joking and, like, go after them for not having a sense of humor. All this kind of stuff has been a strategy for a very long time. And, you know, one of the dangers of this sort of idea that, like, this kind of, like, humorous nihilism that, that is so rampant in our society is that if, you know, nothing matters, then why is it bad to be a Nazi? And, you know, that may sound silly to those of us who still have enough of a grounding in the way things used to be. But, you know, the growth of the white supremacist movement in the last decade is all the evidence you need that it's a functional recruitment strategy. If you look back at, you know, a good book to read if you want an idea of where the fascist movement was in the early aughts. Vegas 10 holds everything you love will burn. Kind of catalogs the movement in the the 2000s prior to Charlottesville.

And prior to the 2017 unite the right rally in Charlottesville. And prior to that rally, if you got 20 neo-Nazis or KKK folks together, that was a pretty good-sized rally. And it was not common for there to be more at a group or at a gathering. And then hundreds of them show up in Charlottesville in 2017. And they outnumber the anti-fascist. And, you know, we saw what happens when they have the numbers on their side and how ugly that gets. But the reason they were able to draw so many people in that movement, you know,

you can say some of it has to do with Donald Trump and some of it definitely did have to do with that campaign. But I don't think his campaign created a lot of them. There's definitely a number of people and not an insignificant number who will say that like their entrance to white supremacy started with the Trump campaign. But it usually if you go into like their explanations as to why, it's not because Trump himself redpilled them on white nationalism. It's because getting involved with communities of Trump supporters online gradually got them drawn into white supremacist spaces online and pulled into sites like 8chan where they were further red-pilled. But the reason that those sites were in place that there were so many people working to red pill

and convert people on those sites is because they'd been spreading in those online spaces for years and kind of cloaking themselves in these robes of irony. so you couldn't really tell who they were. And, you know, I think that at this point, it should be obvious to everyone how effective that strategy was. Can you talk about a little bit, you touched on it a little bit earlier, about how they were really early adopters of the Internet and message boards and how they do this, like what the methodology is by which they spread? Yeah, almost no matter who you are or how early you got online, there were Nazis involved in that much earlier. It started in the early 1980s, 1983, 1984. When that terrorist group I spoke about earlier, the order was robbing banks.

A significant chunk of their money went to a guy named Louis Beam, who was a grandmaster of the KKK, and the guy who came up with the term leaderless resistance, and was one of the architects of this modern wave of terror that we're currently suffering through. And Beam used the money to buy a significant number of Apple II computers and early networking equipment, which he used to connect white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups all over the United States, Canada, and Germany, with what he called LibertyNet, which was essentially an early internet just for Nazis. One of its goals was to allow this kind of white supremacist propaganda that they were making to spread in countries where it was illegal. So Canada and Germany had laws against that stuff, but that no one was watching this very early kind of proto-internet. So this allowed them to spread stuff to folks over there. It also allowed them to coordinate and to plan and to meet each other and to like people who might be the only person with those beliefs in a town to connect to other people.

And you have, you know, going up into the 1990s, you start seeing communities that are sizable of these people form online and plan to infiltrate other communities and, you know, talk about which different groups of people in the internet are going to be most receptive to their ideas. And, you know, you even have, I found posts from the 19, like, 1994 or 1995 with people talking about, you know, the, the, the, the, the internet's really the best thing that's happened to fascism in the 20th century. And, you know, now I have all these comrades in Australia and Ireland who, you know, I may never meet in person, but we believe the same things. And we all influence each other and push each other to take more actions. And one of the things that was interesting to me about just hearing him specifically mention Australians is, of course, that's where the Christchurch shooter came from. So you had all these people in the late 1990s really running an increasingly effective propaganda campaign online and infiltrating these communities. And it's one of those things where, you know, because of the nature of sites like 4chan and 8chan, there's, you're not going to find hard proof of. of this. But a lot of people have wondered, how did so much neo-Nazi stuff perpetuate in these online spaces? And, you know, there's this attitude, I think many of us had for a while that it had just kind of been an accidental byproduct of the fact that these different groups, like,

these people were just joking about this stuff and then it turned serious. And these people were just joking about that stuff, but I think one of the things that all these manifestos from the 1990s, where you have white supremacists talking about their plans to use the internet, One of the things that suggests to me is that a lot of the turn that we saw in 4chan and then 8chan and other online spaces like the Donald, where they've been pushing this anti-Semitic propaganda, pushing white genocide narratives, pushing white supremacist narratives. A lot of that was intentional, and it was done by people who'd probably been on the internet supporting white nationalist causes for years and years and years prior to this point and realized what an opportunity these sites. presented. So I don't think it was entirely accidental that a site like 8chan went from being a misogynist gathering place online for like Gamergate to straight up neo-Nazi propaganda where people are like debating about the best translation of mind comp and literally planning

genocide and taking steps to execute mass killings. I don't think that was an accident. I trace what's happening on 8chan now in the attacks this year. I trace that directly back to Liberty Net and to Louis Beam. And I can also trace that to the National Alliance in William Pierce. Pierce wrote a book called The Turner Diaries, which is about essentially a distributed white nationalist terror organization that carries out a series of seemingly random attacks on U.S. soil in order to stabilize the country and spark a civil war and lead to the establishment of a white ethno state. It's a very popular book. It was one of the major inspirations for Timothy McVeigh's attack. The National Alliance.

in the late 1990s was sending out $500 stipends to different people who were like white nationalists who graduated from college and needed computers. Because like back in the day, you know, in the mid-90s, you would get internet access essentially through your college. And then, you know, once you graduated, if you didn't have a machine of your own, you couldn't have it. So they were funding people, giving them cash to buy machines and to hook themselves up to the internet. So they could continue recruiting people through the internet. So yeah, I consider this all part of a very low. long and decentralized, but very cogent and effective plan to radicalize people and to spark an insurgency.

What is it about fascists that makes them so good at being early adopters of technology? Because they hate modernity, right? But they love gadgets. They hate modernity in a cultural sense. They've never hated modernity in a technological sense. And in fact, that, like, one of the key factors of fascism is an embrace of a lot of that stuff. You know, the Nazis were very advanced in certain technological areas and certainly had no problems with a lot of types of science. And in fact, science was at the core of what

they were doing, which is bad science, racial science that had no actual validity. But like, they're very drawn to kind of hyper modernity. What they don't like about what we consider modernity are the cultural aspects, where we have greater equality and greater acceptance of difference and greater intermingling of different groups. They hate. that, and in some ways they harken back to the past in kind of a aggressive way, but they love technology. And I think in another area, you could say that, like, white nationalists love the internet for the same, and were early adopters of the internet, for the same reason that the porn industry was, which is that they're on the fringes of society. And so when something like

this opens up, you know, there's no, there was, there was no room for white nationalist ideology in the newspapers of the late 80s and early 1990s. You're just not going to get a gig writing for a sizable, writing about that stuff for a sizable, you know, media organ, or you're not going to get on TV other than, you know, the odd episode of like a Jerry Springer type show. But the internet, it's new, it's open, there's no rules yet. So you very much can get in on the internet and have an influence on the internet and spread your stuff on the internet in that period because it was the Wild West. So, you know,

I think any kind of fringe group, it is not, you could say the same thing, anarchists, you know, have always had and sort of techno-utopians had an outsized impact on the internet in its early days, too. And it's just because people who are kind of not included in sort of the mainstream zeitgeist of our media organs are always going to look for places where they can have an outsized impact. And the internet was an obvious choice. To drive home, like, how dangerous this can get, can you tell us about Louis Beam in Galveston Bay? Because that was a story I had not heard before. Yeah, so there's a town of sea drift called Seedrift on the Texas coast.

It was a crabbing town. I don't know if that's still its major industry, but back in the late 70s, it was a crabbing town. And they suddenly got in an influx of Vietnamese refugees. And, you know, ironically, a lot of these people were refugees from Vietnam because they'd sided with the U.S. and the South Vietnamese government and had lost everything. But nonetheless, you know, some of the people, many of the people in Seedrift, the white people, some of whom were veterans, most of whom were racist, started attacking these people as like commies who were essentially coming into Seedrift and, like, stealing the good crabbing spots and stealing their jobs and suddenly, like, conspiracy narratives form that, like, these people are being funded by. the government to wipe out the white community in Seedrift. And Louis Beam, Grand Dragon of the KKK and Texan, looks over to Seedrift and is like, oh, this is an opportunity.

So the clan starts going there and they start burning boats and effigy and training people in like how to carry out attacks on the local Vietnamese fishermen and, you know, hosting rallies. And there's several boats are burned. People are attacked. There's a lot of violence. And, you know, it culminates in the clan, enrobed clan members on boats carrying rifles, sailing around in boats in the harbor, patrolling, and essentially acting as their own law enforcement force within seedrift, you know, and terrifying the Vietnamese people who had moved to that town for good reason. Because, again, there's people are being attacked, boats are being burned. there's death threats coming in and then there's uniformed clansmen patrolling. And like the police had, were essentially helpless to do anything because they were outnumbered by these armed and armored

clansmen. And it was finally shut down by the Southern Poverty Law Center who, you know, carried out like a major legal campaign against them and a judge issued, you know, ordered them to stop and stuff. But it was, it was going, heading in a really ugly direction up to that point. And, you know, the fact that they eventually got hit legally for what they were doing in Seedrift caused an alteration in tactics, but it didn't stop any of this. They just moved underground and altered their tactics somewhat. But yeah, it's one of those things you don't often hear about Seedrift, but it is this case where you had literally a white supremacist insurgency trying to take over a small town.

And thankfully, in that case, the violence was, I don't know, comparatively minor. But one of the things that inspired Seedrift was a situation in Greensboro, I think Arkansas, where there was like a KKK march that was, and like there was a communist party march that the KKK crashed and eventually opened fire into killing like five people, which was like one of the big sparks of, um, uh, behind Seedrift was this idea. that like they'd shot all these communists and then in a court of law they'd been let off because they basically claimed self-defense and the the jury who you know had sympathized with the clan because a lot of them were racist and all of them were white um had let these people get off so they were like well let's see what we can do in this other town and they did get checked legally in that case um in

seedrift which is kind of an example that like when these people face resistance they they can crumble pretty quickly. There's not a huge amount of real deep backing behind them, but you have to actually confront them. And so this is part of the problem that I think we're having in the United States right now with the modern incarnation of the fascist movement is they have to be confronted as what they are. And there's not really any political will in our current government to do that, which I think is part of why things are continuing to spiral. Now, you've started to see some changes in that since El Paso, which is why there have been something like 27 arrests of people threatening attacks, most of which, at least from what I've seen, have been

white supremacist in nature, like 27 arrests for like suspected potential mass shooters and stuff, people making threats, people stockpiling weapons. So that's, that is a positive sign that maybe it's starting to be taken seriously. But, you know, we haven't seen prosecution of sort of the ideological leaders of this movement on a sizable scale yet. And, you know, Some of that's due to the fact that these people are canny and it's kind of difficult to prosecute those people. But a lot of it's just due to a lack of political will. So I think that until we see a concerted effort to both call this what it is and to prosecute it like a movement, you know, we're going to continue seeing attacks.

So we just talked a lot about the centrality of white supremacism to this movement, but that's not necessarily what draws everybody into this. While we use the words Nazis and fascists interchangeably, a Nazi is a particular kind of fascist. And different people are drawn into this ideology different ways. Like, you talked about Randy Weaver, who isn't necessarily, well, probably pretty racist. Definitely pretty racist. But that, yeah, he was not, he was not a racial activist. Like, his whole, Randy Weaver's whole motivation was just to get the hell away from everything.

But he was drawn into white supremacist groups as part of a strategy. that they increasingly pushed in the 1990s to really recruit and spread propaganda among kind of the prepper and militia community. So like, oh, these people are mostly white. They like guns. We like guns. They tend to live in the middle of nowhere. We tend to live in the middle of nowhere. And they tend to be kind of on the fringe, like have some racist attitudes.

So if we can start talking to these people, we can get them on our side. And that, again, that's part of like, you know, the Turner Diaries was kind of explicitly a racist book. But one of the inspirations for the white rebellion that it chronicles is gun confiscation. And then there's been, like, essentially books that are spiritual sequels to the Turner Diaries that cut out the racism and just focus on civil wars sparked by the liberals confiscating guns. And there's a reason that the Christchurch shooter and the Powway shooter, both. and their manifestos stated that one of their goals with the attack was to spark gun control in the United States so that they could start a civil war. So there's been this understanding for a while now in the movement that there's a lot of

people who aren't willing to consider themselves Nazis aren't really fascist either, but who are pretty racist and who sympathize enough with the other things that fascists and Nazis like, like, guns and like survivalism, that they can get them on their side. And certainly, even if they can't get them acting for the movement, when bad things happen to those people, when they run a foul of law enforcement, when they get in gunfights with police, if they adopt those people as members of their cause and use them for propaganda, as the white nationalist movement used Ruby Ridge and used Waco, you can draw more people into the movement that way, too, by saying, okay, these people wouldn't have gotten involved if we just said, hey, we're the KKK or we're the Aryan nations, and, you know, we want to create a white uprising. But if you focus on, look, the government just killed these people in Waco and at Ruby Ridge. And this is part of a genocide plan, a plan to strip Americans of their weapons and a plan to kill, you know, to destroy freedom of white Americans and whatnot. Well, then you can start drawing these people in because they're already scared by these attacks and they're willing to listen to your propaganda now. And maybe a lot of them will never be primarily motivated by race.

Timothy McVeigh's primary motivation was not racial, which is why he chose a target like the Murrah building. He didn't pick a black church to bomb. He didn't pick a synagogue to bomb. He chose a federal building because his main enemy was the federal government. But he was racist. He was comfortable with racism. And he was very much influenced by explicitly neo-Nazi and fascist propaganda, even though he wouldn't have considered himself a neo-Nazi.

Do you think we're in a uniquely dangerous moment right now? I think the Internet has made it a uniquely dangerous moment. I think Louis Beam's attitude of leaderless resistance which was that, you know, instead of planning attacks as coordinated cells that can be easily spotted by the FBI and infiltrated and stopped, we should seek to motivate individuals and small groups of friends to carry out actions on their own to destabilize the country. That idea was only really good for sparking a handful of attacks in the 1990s and late 80s, which was when Beam was theorating, formulating his philosophy. But the creation of the Internet has really allowed leaderless resistance to be an effective tactic.

Because for one thing, you can now shotgun out propaganda that is not illegal because you're not telling people to go commit violent crimes. But if people become convinced of the propaganda, the only reasonable thing for them to do is to carry out violent attacks, You can get that propaganda in front of millions of people, and hundreds, thousands of them will find it compelling, and it will influence them and they will become believers. And a few dozen of that will actually go about carrying out attacks. And what we've seen in the last year and the sheer number of white supremacist attacks that have hit the United States is that once this system is up and running and going, it's number one very difficult to combat. and number two, very effective in creating a drumbeat of terrorist attacks, which is why, you know, ISIS attempted the same strategy. If you read the issues of De Beek that were coming out around 2016, 2017, they were trying to do stuff like convince people, hey, just go, just go buy a knife or rent a car

and ram a crowd and, like, do that everywhere. And then, you know, you'll be supporting the Islamic state. A few people took them up on that. There weren't a huge number of attacks, you know, one or two in North America by ISIS sympathizers going with that exact tactic, whereas we've had a couple of dozen attacks and attempted attacks in the United States just in the last 12 months, because obviously there's more people who are sort of sympathetic to white nationalist ideology in the U.S. than there are people who are sympathetic to Islamist, Islamofascist ideology in the U.S. But, you know, I think because of the way the Internet works and because of, you not just as a consequence of the internet, but also as a consequence of the work that hundreds of

fascist activists have put in over decades recruiting on the internet, you now have what is effectively an insurgency in the United States. And I think that Louis Beam belatedly has been proven very accurate in his writings on leaderless resistance. All right, so fascism is a fuzzy ideology that hijacks the powers and privileges of an open and free society to kind of shut that free society down. And we're seeing like a hyper version of that on the internet, right? This new fascist ideology hijacks the good and open and free parts of the internet to do these horrible ends. Is there a non-reactionary way to combat this? You know, that's a great question.

I think combating this is a multi-step process. I think part of combating it is what we've started to see from law enforcement in the last couple of weeks where they just take this stuff seriously and take these warning signs more seriously. So I do think that's an aspect of it. But I think the bulk of the job of fighting this happens at the community level. It's a ground level effort. Part of that effort is when groups like this come to march in a city confronting them in the street and outnumbering them, not necessarily violently confronting them, but making sure they are heavily outnumbered, which is why I support things. Like, you know, in 2018, when Jason Kessler tried to host a second Unite the Right rally,

and like a dozen white nationalists showed up and like 5,000 counter-protesters showed up. stuff like that is an important part towards fighting this. I do think that in certain cases, taking their sites offline can be helpful. I suspect that it'll probably wind up being a good thing that 8chan was taken offline in the long term, although it doesn't solve all the problems and they've split apart and there's a diaspora occurring. And some of them will find other places to gather. There's evidence that when you shut down sites like this, they lose a substantial number of their less dedicated members. and then those people don't get further pulled into the ideology.

I do think that's an aspect of it. I think a lot of what anti-fascists on the Internet have been saying for years, that there's value in matching faces to names when these people march, figuring out who they are, figuring out where they live, warning their communities, warning law enforcement. You know, the fact that, number one, some of the research from these groups has been used in cases like the New York case against the proud boys who committed those assaults,

like anti-fascist research, you know, naming those people, was used by the police. in that case is proof that it's effective. Another proof that I would see that this strategy works is one of the primary questions I was asked when I started doing media appearances after the Christchurch shooting was, how could we have spotted this guy ahead of time? And I said, well, this guy had been tweeting for days prior to the event, pictures of his weapon with like the names of white supremacist shooters written on it. And if there had been a larger and more active, particularly that part of the world, anti-fascist organizing scene, who had been on the lookout for something like this,

it's possible somebody would have spotted him ahead of time. And in a broader sense, like, this is why I explained why anti-fascists have been saying, you have to name these people, you have to let people in their community know, there's a Nazi who lives in your town, and here's him posing with guns and writing about his desire to wipe out the Jews, because that's an important step in self-defense is knowing that there's someone in your area who might mean to do you harm. So I think all of these are aspects of fighting this problem.

I do think, you know, counter propaganda is an effective strategy towards fighting this problem, too. I think groups like Life After Hate and Light Upon Light that focus on de-radicalizing white nationalist guys like Christopher Piccolini, who it seems like just succeeded in kind of de-radicalizing one of the long-term heads of the National socialist movement, who's been in the movement for decades and is no longer a white nationalist. I think he should be, Christopher should be applauded for his efforts. I think that kind of stuff is valuable. De-radicalization is important.

Ground-level activism in order to spot these guys and warn communities is important. Greater knowledge and activity from law enforcement is important. And then, you know, more work on behalf of social media companies and internet companies to de-platform hate is. important. I think Twitter could be doing a lot more to kick off explicit threats from, you know, I've had, I've reported neo-Nazis for talking about Holocaust denial and insinuating that the Jews are behind, you know, spreading the kind of ideology that led to the Tree of Life synagogue shooting about Jewish people being behind immigration and whatnot. They don't get banned because they're

not explicitly saying kill anybody. I recently got a 12-hour suspension on Twitter because I stated my hope that the television show The Simpsons would finally die, as in be off the air. And that, because I use the word die, that got plugged by Twitter. But again, these guys spreading the same propaganda that led to a mass shooting that killed, you know, more Jewish people than have ever died in an attack on Jewish people in the United States. That propaganda is okay on Twitter. So, yeah, I think there's a lot more that can be done.

And I think it's a multifaceted approach to fighting this. There's not a single silver bullet. But if all of this stuff starts being done increasingly and taken more seriously, I do think we can get a handle on the problem. And just to toss in my own two cents on the irony angle, believe people when they tell you who they are and we are who we pretend to be. Yeah, there's a great statement from a lawyer who actually went after Hitler directly, Hans Litton, back in the 1930s. He was a Jewish lawyer, and he took Hitler to court and actually cross-examine him at one point. And the case was over some Nazi stormtroopers who had murdered a couple of people. And what Linton was alleging is that based on the letter of Nazi propaganda that the party had put out that Hitler had personally approved,

these murders were not being directly ordered by the Nazi party, but the propaganda was urging people to commit crimes like this. and so Hitler and the party should be seen as culpable for the murders that these individuals had committed. And one of the things, you know, Hitler made the claim, like, when he got up on stage, you know, made a bunch of claims that like, look, no, I never told anyone to commit any crimes. I said this and I said this, but I didn't say actually go kill people and like, this is a, you know, this guy's just trying to like tramp on my right to free speech and like all this stuff. and essentially claiming that like the stuff that Lytton found most damning in these actual Nazi party documents had been not serious or not meant to be interpreted the way that these stormtroopers had interpreted it and that like he hadn't meant things that way. And there was a line hit and lit and dropped in the courtroom where he pointed to Hitler and looked to the judge and said, don't listen to him. He's telling the truth. And I think that gets to an important truth about fascists in general.

about the way they cloak themselves and what they want. You cannot listen to them when they say they're just joking, when they say they're not serious, when they say that the obvious conclusions of their propaganda are not the obvious conclusions of their propaganda. The worst things they say, the violence that's kind of inherent in their ideology, that's the truth. And that's what you should listen to. Robert Evans, thank you so much for coming. coming on to War College and walking us through this. The podcast is Behind the Bastards.

The book is The War on Everyone. If you go to The War on Everyone.com, there's no ads. It's totally free. And there's like a torrent link and stuff, so you can just download it to your phone. Yeah. Any way you want to consume it is fine with me. Again, Mr. Evans, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me.

That's it for this week, War College listeners. War College is me and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like what you hear, we've got plenty of archives available for free through SoundCloud, Spotify, and wherever else. Fine pods are casted. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave us a review on iTunes and a star rating. It helps other people find the show. We'll be off next week because I will be out of town doing some work on some nuclear-related issues.

But we will be back after that. Stay safe. Until then.