Angry Planet - The Era of Shitposting White Nationalist Terrorism

Episode Date: March 30, 2019

On March 15, a shooter entered two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. He killed fifty and injured 50 more. He left behind a bizarre and meme-laden manifesto. In February, authorities arrested a Coast Guard lieutenant who had been stockpiling weapons in anticipation of kicking off a race war. When it comes to terrorism, America’s problems are overwhelmingly white and nationalist. In terms or raw numbers, it’s not even close.With us here today to talk about our collective white nationalism problem is Robert Evans. Evans is a conflict journalist who has reported on the fighting in Ukraine and Mosul, the host of Behind the Bastards—a podcast that explores the origin stories of the worst people in history, and and author of fine articles at Bellingcat where he charts the growth of online fueled right-wing terrorism. It’s the subject of his forthcoming audiobook—The War on Everyone.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.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. Hey there, War College listeners, it's me, Matthew. Just wanted to jump in here briefly to say that after we recorded this episode, Facebook announced it was banning mentions of white nationalism and white separatism from its platform. It had already banned mention of white supremacy, but some of the first.

a distinction in separatism and nationalism. Facebook no longer recognizes that distinction. Thank you. Here's the show. Start off with the voice of the lovely Robert Evans. I would say the manifesto had two equal purposes. One of them was to serve as a trap and to journalists and a trap to sort of the global media and law enforcement to confuse and distract them and essentially focus the discussion of the shooting around this guy. in his ideas even more than it was already going to be.

I would say an equal purpose of the manifesto was to entertain and inspire members of 8-Chance poll board. 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'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Derek Gannon.

And I'm Kevin O'Dell. On March 15th, a shooter entered two masts. in Christchurch, New Zealand. He killed 50 and injured 50 more. He left behind a bizarre and meme-laden manifesto. In February, just a month prior, authorities arrested a Coast Guard lieutenant who had been stockpiling weapons in anticipation of kicking off a race war. When it comes to terrorism, the West and America specifically have a white nationalist problem. In terms of raw numbers, it's not even close. With us here today to talk about our collective problem is Robert Evans. Evans is a conflict journalist who has reported on the fighting in Ukraine

in Mosul. He's also the host of Behind the Bastards, a podcast that explores the origin stories of the worst people in history, and he's the author of Fine Articles at Bellingat, where he's charted the growth of online-fueled right-wing terrorism. It's the subject of a forthcoming audiobook, The War on Everyone. Robert, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me on. All right, so I want to get some definitions up here at the very top because I think it's really important for the weird places that we're going to go in the show. First of all, what is shit posting and why is it important to this conversation? You know, shit posting, first I want to make it clear. There's no inherent like ideological

tinge to shit posting. It's just a thing that you can do, a tactic you could call it. And it's essentially filling an internet conversation with so much trolling, usually really low-quality trolling, lazy, distracting sort of comments that are meant to get people angry, rile them up, and also derail any kind of productive conversation. The reason it's important to this discussion of white nationalism, there are a couple of reasons. The most imminent one is that the Christchurch Shooter's Manifesto was kind of a picture-perfect example of shit posting, with the goal of confusing journalists, confusing law enforcement, and delighting his fellow trolls on 8chan's poll board, which is the particular corner of the internet where he

came from. What exactly is 8chan? What's 4chan and what's the difference between the two? And is there really a material difference between the two? Yeah, I would say there is. So, I mean, to get into a little bit of internet history here, back, you know, in the day, in the sort of the genesis of internet culture, there was a website called Something Awful that had some of the first very large-scale forums on.

on the internet. And there was like 100,000 some odd members, you know, back, we're talking like the early, early 2000s, the late 90s even. And they had a very strict moderation policy. So it cost money to be a member and they would ban you for things like being a Nazi. One of the members of that forum, a guy named Moot broke away and created 4chan, which did not really have moderation in the same way. And so became sort of a haven for more kind of extreme, extreme free.

speech would be the polite way to put it. It wasn't, I mean, there was a lot of different things that happened there, including a lot of people sharing underage pornography and anime pornography and stuff like that. But one of the things that started to develop on there was like a very virulent strain of reactionary ideology. And this sort of came to a head around 2014 when Gamergate broke as a story. And Fortun was sort of the online nexus point of Gamergate. And eventually that got so extreme and the harassment directed as a result of Gamergate became so extreme that 4chan essentially banned a lot of those people in that discussion from their message board. And then those people sort of migrated to 8chan and over the next couple of years,

it went from sort of a misogynist and reactionary message board where there was a lot of sort of, you know, joking, ironic, you know, neo-Nazi and fascist talk to a place where that stuff was not at all ironic and was, you know, more honest and open. And that sort of has culminated in what we have right now, which is the site that gave probably radicalized, almost certainly radicalized, and was the place where the Christchurch shooter chose to announce the start of his rampage. And when you say radicalized, there's like a specific word that she used to describe that radicalization. It's the red pill. You're taking the red pill, right? What exactly does that mean? I first don't want to clarify, that's their word, which is why I use it. I'm not a big fan of the

Matrix, but they all all love that movie. And that's where the term comes from. And of course, like, there's a number of different kind of fringe internet cultures who use the term red pilling, men going their own way, which is not a neo-Nazi movement, but is like a rabid misogynist movement. They'll use that term. The involuntary celibate movement will use that term. And And of course, internet Nazis and fascists will use that term. So red-pilling just refers to usually sort of the first moment where somebody stopped, you know, stopped joking about white nationalism, about neo-Nazism, and started really seriously, you know, taking it like as a legitimate ideology.

And, you know, for most of the people I've studied, I would say the vast majority, it kicks off on YouTube, usually as a result of a video suggested to them by an algorithm. That's extremely common. You know, that starts the process of them going from joking about this stuff to not joking about this stuff. You've kind of, you've described the radicalization process before for, for young dudes. And it's usually young white dudes, right? Not always, but mostly. Yeah, I would say the vast majority. Yeah. We talked a little bit before we started recording that, you know, you and I kind of come from the same place. And I think one of the things that's always disturbed me about this. stuff is that I grew up extremely online. I played online video games and ran in a lot of the same circles as these guys. And it feels like one day I woke up a couple years ago and then suddenly all these people weren't joking anymore. Yeah, that's exactly how it feels. Like I grew up on the internet. These places were very important to me. You know, I spent all of my time on them. And then,

And, you know, my career got very busy. And so for like, literally like two years or so, I stopped spending as much time on internet communities. And I feel like when I looked back, it had all turned to Nazis. I had this conversation with Jake Hanrahan from Popular Front recently because he also got his start on the something awful forums. And we were joking that it feels a little bit like that scene in Casablanco where all of the Nazis come into the bar and all of the French expatriates start singing the Marcos.

our sigh, like that, like that. Like we've, this place that we all sort of came from and that was kind of a integral in our ideological development, uh, took a really far right turn while we weren't looking and got eaten by the Nazis. It's, it's really strange. Why? Why do you think that happened? Um, that's a great question.

I have a conspiracy theory, which I do not have any evidence for, and I have the stuff that I have evidence for. So I'll start with the things that I have evidence for, which is that, the groups of people, particularly who congregated in sort of the, you know, the darker chunks of 4chan, 4chan's poll board. And I want to make it clear when I talk about 4chan, I'm not talking about the whole message board. There's a lot going on there. But 4chan's poll board is definitely more reactionary. And of course, 8chan's poll board is as reactionary as it gets.

And the people who congregated in these places often did not have a whole lot going on in their real lives, which you saw with the Christchurch shooter. He was not a guy with a very successful social life. He was not a guy with a lot of deep interpersonal connections. He was not a guy with a lot of successful relationships with the opposite sex. And so these people spend increasing chunks of time on these little corners of the Internet. And they start off joking about this stuff. But because it's not as funny if you keep telling the same joke over and over again, you get more extreme.

and you push each other into saying more and more extreme things. And eventually, I think you get so used to that rhetoric that you start to take it seriously. You know, it's one of those things as someone who consumes a lot of neo-Nazi and fascist propaganda. This stuff is dangerous. It does sort of infect you a little bit after a while. And so if you're in my line of work, you have to be concerned about that. And I had this conversation with one of the hosts of the I Don't Speak German podcast, which is a podcast about, you know, the fascist right, a guy named Daniel who does a lot more of this than I do.

And he's experienced the same thing where you find some of this stuff sneaking into your head, some of the terms, some of like the racial slurs. And it's, you know, you have to be very vigilant when you're consuming this stuff to not let it infect you and to sort of purge it from your, your mind's eye as often as possible. And so if that can happen to people who are specifically consuming the stuff in order to report on it and who are very much anti-fascist and against what these people are saying, I think it can be even more dangerous to the people who think it's funny. So that's the thing that I have evidence for because a lot of these people talk about their journeys to radicalization and their own conversations and we can see the sort of content that pushes them and how it happens. So it's possible that this happened all organically. Now, my conspiracy theory, which again, I have no hard evidence for, it's something that I'm always researching and trying to find more evidence for, is that there was a group of these people, you know, several years back, probably my guess would be sometime around 2011, 2012, who started really more seriously trying to insert in mainstream in these online communities, literal neo-Nazi, fascist, propaganda, that there was a concerted effort that's been largely successful to radicalize these online spaces. Again, I don't even know how you would go about proving that to a point

of certainty because it's very hard to find any kind of archive of conversations on, you know, 4chan's poll board or 8chan going back that far. Everyone's anonymous. You can't click on someone's account and find like their post history. It's just a suspicion that I have. You think you'd have to have a conversation with an honest conversation with Weave and you're not going to get that. Yeah, he would be certainly someone I think might have, if that happened, might have had some sort of role in it. But yeah, having an on, you know, having any kind of conversation with Weave is easier said than done. Forchan, for me at least, to include poll, changed as soon as Barack Obama was elected. It just changed. Everything became more extreme. And it does kind of,

infect your brain. Like you're getting on 4chan because you want to have a giggle on B. And it just, you just kind of get led down this path of just who can out, who can out discuss the other person. And I do remember Weave. Weave was one of those just aggressive ultra-trolls who just really enjoyed messing with people and just saying some of the most extreme things that you could possibly imagine. And now he's just become this, I think the very person I think he was trying to make fun of. Do you, do you think, do you think, do you think that? Or, I mean, I don't want to focus on weave too much, but he is kind of an archetype, if you will. The question of how serious, whether or not it started, like, that's the big question,

is did his rhetoric, was it always serious? And he just approached it from sort of an ironic and silly bent in order to make it more palatable and easier to sort of infect people with. Or did it start ironically for him and just the act of talking about it so much made it become less and less ironic. I don't know. I really just don't know. Does it matter? Yeah, I think it does. Yeah. One of the things that I'm curious about is whether or not there's a larger and well-funded. There's a lot of questions with groups like, you know, if you've heard of the podcast, Fash the Nation or the Daily Shoa, which are part of like the same fascist podcasting network. There's a lot of questions as to where their money comes from. There's a

lot of questions about their funding. And the National Policy Institute, which is Richard Spencer's think tank, is funded by a guy named William Regnery, I think Jr. And Regnery's dad back in the 30s was a founder and major funder of the first American fascist movement. And if we really want to get into the weeds here, Adolf Hitler in his very early period, we're talking like prior to the Munich Beer Hall Pitch, had a mysterious source of funding. And there were a lot of rumors at the time that there was a group of wealthy Americans funding him. And nobody really knows where that initial push of money came from. But, you know, right around the same time, we had the business plot, which was an attempted

fascist coup in the United States to overthrow FDR. So there's a lot of, you know, and it's easy to get too conspiratorial into this. But there are a lot of really good questions as to where the money behind some of the aspects of this movement came from. that leads me to suspect that there may have been a larger and more organized effort. Now, part of what makes this confusing is that it is perfectly possible that there was never any intent behind this, that it all happened organically, and that this is just the natural result of a bunch of people joking about being Nazis every day on the internet. I don't know what the truth is. This isn't just something that we're seeing online.

This is something that we're seeing very much in real life. You've covered some of the street violence in Portland where both me and Derek, or from, let's talk a little bit about some of the street violence that we're seeing these days. As a native Portland or like Kevin and I are, like this, you have to understand something about Portland. When I was growing up there, everybody was allowed to protesting wasn't a violent activity. It was like every Thursday, you would go to like the Pioneer Square and you could see everybody got there like two hours a block time. They would protest, you know, veganism to, you know, nuclear weapons to, to, to, to, uh, gay trans rights and this is in the early you know this is you know in the early 1990s all the way into the 2000s and you know I came back from the military and it was still going on and then like a powder keg kind of blew off and it was it is literally associated with online activity that just kind of moved into the physical so it's kind of interesting to see the city become this focal point of street violence between Antifa the the prayer network and the the proud boys which

Kevin back me up here. I mean, when we were growing up, there was white nationalism there. There was a lot of a punk rock turned kind of skinhead move. You know, they had the hammer skin. There was a lot of groups there that lived in like the, the Gresham area that was just outside of the city. It's just in your research, because I mean,

I've done a lot of research in the city itself, but in your research, like, where do you see that, how do you see the spider webs kind of connect into the center here? Well, you know, I mean, part of it is that Oregon in general has an extremely old history of white nationalism. I mean, it was literally the only state founded as a specifically whites only state. And that DNA, you know, there's aspects of that presence still. And you had in the early 90s the murder of Moologeta-Saraa. And that was, again, that was evidence of sort of how much of that white nationalist

sentiment was leaking under the surface because the people who killed sarah were radicalized by a guy named tom metzger and an organization called white Aryan resistance which was actually based i think in southern california but metzger saw how many sort of how many fringe reactionary skinheads there were in portland and saw it as a perfect recruiting ground so he dedicated an awful lot of his propaganda and his his essentially preaching um to you know particularly particularly the particularly the area around Portland. Another reason I suspect that it's come to a head in that city that like the street fighting has is because Portland is kind of a perfect microcosm of the political divide in the United States today because Portland itself, the urban areas are very much

liberal to leftist, you know, like, quite progressive. But if you go out into rural Oregon, and if you go out into places like, you know, Clark County, which. is technically part of Washington, but it's kind of a suburb of Portland. You have a lot more of a conservative community. And these people have very deep roots in the area. They're very white. You know, I lived in Josephine County, Southern Oregon for a while pretty recently. And I saw more Confederate flags there than I ever saw living in the deep south.

I was just going to ask you about that. Josephine County, you really lived, the state of Jefferson. those people want to secede so bad. Yeah, I have spent a lot of time in the state of Jefferson. I mean, it's beautiful up there. But, yeah, a lot of racism and white nationalism. And so you've got this very progressive liberal city that because, you know, and all of the cities in Oregon are pretty progressive.

And as a result, they sort of outvote the conservative rural areas, which is really frustrating to those conservative rural areas. And you've had that come to a head. head in a number of areas, including right now with a fight over gun control and some pretty extreme gun control regulations that have been proposed for the state of Oregon, which currently has very lax gun control. So all of these conflicts have been present for a while, and particularly these conservatives in Oregon have been really angry at the progressives in the cities for a while. And the internet provided a way for these people who are scattered geographically over the state to organize and to come together and to plan events in a way that would not have been possible in an earlier era.

You know, when I think it was in 2006 when the Hammerskins tried to hold Hammerfest in Portland, Rose City Antifa shut that down very effectively. But the internet has given these people a way to organize. And it's not just that it's given them a way to organize. It's that sort of the modern tactics of the far right movement have made it easier for them to kind of hide the explicit fascism in a lot of their views. Because these people aren't, you know, Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys, they're not the hammer skins. They're not covered in swastikas. Their whole identity isn't based around like literally crippling people in the street. They're able to sort of camouflage themselves as mainstream conservatives supporting traditional religious.

values, traditional social values, you know, the Second Amendment is huge for these people. And so they're able to hide themselves in a way that makes them a lot more palatable to other conservatives and even to people who are maybe more like moderate conservatives who could vote either way depending on the election. So, and as a result of that, when they clash with Antifa, it's not, you know, nobody was going to be on the sides of the hammerskins, you know, back in 2006, because they're literal neonaut. But Joey Gibson and his crew, you know, they're able to get the direct sympathy of law enforcement and a lot of people in the city, whereas, you know, Antifa looks a lot less, a lot more radical to some of those people. So I think there's a lot going on. It's kind of a perfect confluence of events. But I think Oregon, one of the reasons I'm moving up to Portland, one of the reasons I think it's so important to cover what's going on in the city right now is because I think there are a couple of years. ahead of the rest of the country. And I think we're going to see, we've already seen that kind of

political violence in other parts of the United States. And I think it's only going to grow more common over the next year and change as we roll into 2020. Do you think it's also going to be more international or is it already international? I mean, yeah, the Christchurch shooting is proof that it's becoming more and more international. Because again, these groups, you know, a guy like the Christchurch shooter might have come across radical politics in an era prior to these internet message boards. But he probably wouldn't have had the sense of solidarity. He was able to feel like he was part of a movement rather than just a lone nut killing people

for no reason. I don't think this guy would have been attracted to the idea of just carrying out a massacre completely devoid of any ideology. He wanted to feel like a crusader and having this large international community, gave him that opportunity. Since you worked for Belling Cat, and I have to ask this question, do you see active measures here? Like the age-old, super-secret active measures

that the Russians are moving against the West? You mean, do I see evidence of, like, Russian involvement and some of this far-right radicalization? Well, not just Russia, just active measures on destabilization of the West through groups and organizations and for an 8chan type of forum boards. Do you see people, do you see maybe, and I'm just, this is just a conspiracy theory, I don't believe it, but do you see some sort of host nation, nation state kind of involvement?

Yeah, I mean, I suspect there has been some involvement with the Russian government in terms of, you know, pushing sort of the popular, more, more, less directly. encouraging fascist radicalization and more encouraging this sort of growth in the conflict between left and right, which has led to them, I think, sometimes encouraging more mainstream groups like the proud boys. And a lot of the members of these groups, you know, the more mainstream ones have wound up on places like RT. I don't think there was a concerted political effort on behalf of the Internet Research Agency and the Russian government to, you know, push mainstream to like to encourage uh the literal neo-nazi movement in the united states but i think

there has been an overall uh movement to encourage the spread of very far right voices in the united states with the primary goal of increasing political tension and political conflict in the country um so i i would say that i think we have seen some evidence of that of just their desire to uh encourage that political divide and that conflict So you're a student of history. Right. A lot of your Behind the Bastards is based on, like, just a ton of research. I'm thinking in particular of the George Lincoln Rockwell three-parter that you just did.

One of the things that's so frustrating listening to that show specifically is how much of this stuff has happened before. And we're seeing a lot of the same playbook as far as kind of spreading and mainstreaming of this. stuff. Can you speak to that a little bit? How much of the stuff is actually old tactics? I mean, you can draw a real direct line between, you know, shit posting as a modern internet tactic and a lot of what Rockwell was doing. Because George Lincoln Rockwell, you know, one of his tactics, he had something called the hate bus, which was like a Volkswagen bus covered in racial epitets and slogans that he would drive around in the wake of the freedom writers during the civil rights movement. He would also regularly show up and, you know,

the best word for it is troll. He would troll Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists as they did their marches in Selma and the like. And he did it because he knew that he on his own, with his couple of dozen followers, did not have the kind of media reach to really draw much media attention. But if you showed up at this enormous civil rights march, which was already going to gather a lot of attention because it was a massive story and a huge march. If he showed up there wearing swastikas with his stormtroopers, then he would get a lot of media attention. Then people would pay attention. Then he could have an impact on the discourse. And one of the things that Rockwell said when he talked about why he embraced the tactics he embraced was that he believed the only way to influence people's mind was to influence them emotionally. If you made people angry, you could influence their thinking. If you got people furious, then that was the mind state where they were most open to being influenced by his propaganda. If you triggered them?

If you triggered them, exactly. So a big part of his goal was just to trigger people. So you can see in those tactics the genesis of a lot of what we see the modern far right using the day. And of course, there's more direct comparisons. He was a big college speaker. He made a lot of his money from touring colleges. And, you know, there would be protests against him at those colleges and fights at those

colleges and the news attention would drive more donations to his organization. You know, one of the things he did, you know, a lot of these guys on the far right love challenging people on the left to debates. And that was literally something Rockwell did to Martin Luther King Jr. tried to force him into a debate about civil rights, which, you know, thankfully Martin Luther King Jr. was smart enough to not take that bait. But, you know, he really is the most influential, single figure behind particularly the American fascist movement today, but also behind sort of the global resurgence of this ideology we've seen. Because whether or not these people know it, they're all influenced and are all, I would say, ideological descendants of Rockwell.

Down to the fact that the Christchurch shooter had the number 14 written on his rifle in a number of places, which is a reference to the 14 words, which is a neo-Nazi slogan about wanting to protect the white race essentially. That slogan was written initially by a guy named David Lane, who was a member of a terrorist group, a fascist terrorist group called The Order. It was called the order because that was the name of a fascist terrorist group and a fiction book called the Turner Diaries, which was about essentially a terrorist underground organization that sparks a racial war in the United States and eventually globally. The Turner Diaries was written by a disciple of George Lake and Rockwell.

So if you trace back any part of this movement, even today, it almost always comes back to him or to one of his immediate disciples. Switch gears a little bit, something I think is important for us to focus on in the shit posting element. And something that you talked about in your recent Bellingcat article about the Shooter's Manifesto is how much of it is for sure. show to get people distracted, to cause them to have a conversation about things that aren't anything to do with what's going on? Like, you described the manifesto as a trap laid for journalists? Yeah, yeah, that was, so I would say the manifesto had two equal purposes. One of them was to serve as a trap and to journalists and a trap to sort of the

global media and law enforcement to confuse and distract them. and essentially focus the discussion of the shooting around this guy and his ideas even more than it was already going to be. I would say an equal purpose of the manifesto was to entertain and inspire members of 8chance poll board. I would say those were both equal goals of this guy. And I would say that, you know, the stuff that he put in the manifesto as traps for journalists is also stuff that, that everyone on 8chan was going to find funny. And they would find it even funnier if that stuff got covered ad nauseum in the global press. You know, the idea that CNN and the BBC would be discussing these weird little memes like Remove Kabab

that are popular in these corners of the Internet, that I think he knew, number one, that that would further his goal of sort of distracting and confusing the issue in the wake of the shooting. But it would also be really, really, really funny to everybody on 8thans' poll board. and that would make them, you know, that would make them essentially like this guy even more, like what he'd done even more, and then maybe be more, maybe some of them would be more likely to carry out a copycat shooting. You know, they would find the whole thing more inspirational. So this also points to something I want to talk about, which is the differences in the difference in organization between this and other kinds of terrorist movements. what we've seen largely, the violence, except in a few cases, is disorganized. It's mostly lone wolves acting on their own behalf.

Why is this fascist movement not, or at least the violent parts of it, not more organized, do you think? Is it that they're hiding their power level? Yeah, I would say it's intentional, and I would say it's probably a mistake to refer to them as lone wolves, because they really aren't. These guys are whether or not they're receiving direct material aid and carrying out their attacks, which I don't think the Christchurch shooter was. He was part of an organization. He was part of a group and he saw himself as part of a movement, which is why he announced his shooting on 8chance poll board. There's a lot of ways in which the modern white nationalist movement learned from ISIS and the Islamic extremist movement, which is that it can be very effective to disseminate propaganda over the Internet and to inspire attacks. over the internet. But if you have a concrete leadership hierarchy and a concrete funding structure, that's very easy to disrupt. And the sort of decentralized acephalist nature of the international

fascist movement makes it harder for law enforcement to disrupt because you can't just cut down a few funding streams in order to stop it. I would say rather than lone wolf, a better term for what this guy, the Christchurch shooter was, is a, you know, his attack was an example of leaderless resistance, which is a tactic that was invented by another disciple of George Lincoln Rockwell. And the idea is that it came out of the fact that the initial American Nazi party and the KKK, you know, by the 20th century, anytime these groups would have a resurgence, they would be heavily compromised by the FBI. Sometimes the majority of the people marching at their little marches would be informing.

or double agents. And so it was recognized that because of how good law enforcement had gotten and infiltrating these people, if they wanted to continue to do damage, the best way to do that would be to not have, you know, you have the organized groups that exist to spread propaganda and carry out marches and do things that are legal because it doesn't matter so much if those are influenced by law enforcement or infiltrated. But when it comes to the actual terrorism, you leave that up to. individuals like the Christchurch shooter who don't have direct ties to an organization. And so it's

much harder to stop them when they plan something. So again, I think leaderless resistance is a better term for what we saw in the Christchurch shooting and what we saw with a guy like Dylan Roof than a lone wolf because there are connections between these guys in the broader movement. They're not alone, but they're not a part of an organization with a with a discrete leadership. Chandra, because again, that's easy to disrupt. You just touched on something else, I think, that I want to talk about, that there's kind of a connection in terms of tactics, if not necessarily concrete ideology, between the Islamic State and this new white nationalist violence.

And in fact, some of the people that, you know, some of the Westerners that have joined ISIS were once neo-Nazis, right? So what's, what is this connection? Well, you know, it's just like Adam Woffin, which is a neo-Nazi terrorist group, some of the murders were when one of their members essentially switched over to Islamic extremism. And I think the reason for this is that the guys, and they're almost all guys, who can be convinced to buy a bunch of guns and kill a bunch of strangers on behalf of an ideology based on things they read online, whether or not those people pick neo-Nazism or Islamic radicalism or whatever. the ideology to credit the attack with, those individuals all have a lot more in common with each other than they have with anyone else. And more in common with each other than they have with more mainstream members of their movement. Like someone like the Christchurch shooter has more

in common with, you know, one of the ISIS terrorists who drove a truck into a crowd in New York or wherever than he has with a guy like Richard Spencer. Because the kind of people who can be radicalized to that sort of violence are all very similar. And I think, you know, one way to look at this is that ISIS and the international fascist movement, they're all sort of recruiting from the same pool of unstable, angry young loners who can be influenced to do extreme violence to strangers. You know, that's a group that has existed in the United States for quite a while, you know, at least since the Columbine shootings and almost certainly, you know, before. And it's a group, I think, I think their numbers have increased, and there's probably a number of reasons for that, probably has in part something to do with the rise in suicide rates among the same demographic.

You know, I don't think they're entirely disconnected from one another. But you have this pool of young people who are almost, you know, like flesh-in-blood cruise missiles that can be either through direct incitement propaganda, inspirational, you know, terrorism, where someone's saying, somebody should carry out a fatal attack or through stochastic terror where someone's not saying I hope somebody kills these people but somebody saying hey these people are killing us and so the logical end result of that propaganda is that other people you know decide to strike at and kill members of whatever group they're being propagandized against and I think stochastic terror is more dangerous because inspirational terrorism is illegal it's illegal to do what ISIS says and say hey rent a truck and drive it into people.

You know, that's, that's, our free speech doesn't cover that. But our free speech does cover saying all day, every day, um, black people are killing white people or Muslims are killing white people or migrants are killing white people. And the end result of that rhetoric after enough time is that some people are going to kill members of those groups. You know, if you read Dylan Roof's manifesto, uh, he was a big fan of a website called council for conservative citizens and the number one kind of, you know, news content they posted where, lurid articles about supposed black-on-white crime.

Bisonnet, the Quebec City Mosque shooter, I think in 2015. His favorite guy in the internet was Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro posted constantly about the supposed crimes of Muslims against Christians and white people and Jewish people, the supposed crimes of migrants. And, of course, on the Christchurch shooter's gun, he wrote Bisonet's name. And in his manifesto, he directly referenced a dillard. and roof. So yeah, I think you can, and I think you could say that the, the, the, the, the, the, church shooter's manifesto was an act of inspirational terrorism, because his goal was to directly

inspire other attacks. But he was, I think, radicalized in part by stochastic terrorists, people who were not directly saying, you should kill Muslims, you should kill migrants. But again, if you really believe what these people are saying about white people being replaced, about, you know, the dangers of migrant crime, then violence against those communities is a natural conclusion. I want to touch on something that we brought up a little bit earlier about how a lot of these groups do seem to have the goal of just dividing society as far apart as possible and to just start conflict between various groups. Because one thing that this makes me think back to a little bit is the maxline stabbing. Jeremy Christian, who was one time affiliated with Patriot Prayer,

killed two people on a train and wounded another when they intervened when he was harassing two young black women. And the two people that he killed actually were one was a Reed College graduate and the other was a Gresham Republican and an Army veteran. Two people who don't have that much in common and also two members of groups who these groups are convincing us can't come together and can't do anything constructive. How dangerous is it when these people start making everybody look at? over their shoulders and see anybody who looks like they might be hostile as hostile. I mean, I think it's extremely dangerous. I think that it's the kind of rhetoric, again, that while not inherently illegal in and of itself, can only end in violence. And I, it's extremely concerning to me when you see someone like, you know, Alex Jones, who I think

is laughed at a lot by people, liberals and people on the left, when you hear him talking about how liberals are anti-freedom scum and they need to be purged. You know, these people are coming for you. They're trying to attack you. A lot of the rhetoric that we're seeing from the far right and even increasingly the moderate right against liberals and leftists is very similar to the rhetoric that the far right has been pushing for a long time about migrants and about Muslims. And I'm very concerned as to where that will end.

I mean, we remember what Jeremy Christian shouted as the police were dragging him away from the max train where he murdered two people, like what he said was that's what liberalism gets you. So yeah, I'm really worried about the escalating rhetoric. And I don't see it slowing down at all. Well, one part of that that interests me, and I think all of that was super important. But one tiny part that I think is also interested is the incitement angle. Because one of the people that he actually killed, like I said, was a Republican army veteran. Somebody who was active in Republican Party politics. And you'll sometimes see people on the left saying, well, we need to step up our attacks on people like that guy. And that seems to be something that these people want.

Yeah. And I tend to, you know, as a journalist, it's not my job to give advice to protest movements. But if I was going to give advice to Antifa as a collective, it would be really be careful about the anti-police rhetoric. I get, you know, I've covered a lot of police violence. I've also been, you know, the first person who ever pointed a gun at me was a cop when I was 11 or 12 years old. I get the motivation behind a sentence like all cops are bastards. But I've also done a lot of lecturing to federal law enforcement about how to fight right-wing terror. And there's a lot of people involved in that who are very committed to stopping this problem. And I think, you know, I would not, I'm not going to apologize for what the Portland Police Bureau has done and sort of coordinating with Joey Gibson and Patriot Prayer because I think a lot of

it is, is irredeemable in some ways. And a lot of the people involved need to lose their jobs. But if you're getting shouted at and having bottles of urine sprayed on you and stuff, which is not as common as people on the right want to portray it, but does happen, you're not going to, you're not going to have a charitable view towards those people. And I think that's, I have a lot of concern with how rhetoric on the left is getting increasingly anti-moderate right, because I don't think that's a way towards victory or a way towards making this movement less dangerous. I think, you know, while we're talking about Oregon, I think groups like the Rural Organizing Project, whose goal is to go into rural conservative parts of the state. and talk to these people and build bridges and help them with their problems and maybe help them see how progressive politics are the solutions to some of the issues they've been facing. I think that's much more productive in terms of lowering the temperature and reducing the chances of internecine conflict than chanting about how all of these people on the other side are bad.

I think there are, I think if we're going to stop this problem, it's going to require, among other things, broad sort of cooperation among all of the people who aren't fascists and who aren't Nazis and who don't want to see things escalate to violence. We can have a lot of disagreements about certain things without it getting that far. So yeah, I'm concerned about the rhetoric on the left. I will say having, you know, I monitor left-wing groups too just to see if, you know, because I'm worried about seeing the rise of eliminationist rhetoric. like we've seen on the right. And I really don't see that. I see a lot of anger at police. I see a lot of anger

at Republicans. I don't see people talking about wiping those groups out. So I will say that while I'm concerned with where that rhetoric's going, there's just a lot fewer calls for violence on the left, which is why, you know, we've had one, I would say one left-wing terrorist attack in the Trump years, which was the shooting of those congressmen at that baseball game, whereas we've had dozens of far-right attacks in the same period of time. I think that's a good sort of gauge for sort of the difference in violence between the two groups. But I do worry that – so, you know, the thing that scares me most is a potential for where things could go is say we've got one of these big rallies between Patriot Prayer or whatever right-wing groups

in a place like Portland, Oregon, where you've got a lot of left-wing demonstrators who are very active, but it's also got very liberal gun laws. And so there's people concealed carrying. And you have an altercation between some people in masks and between a far-right protester and a MAGA hat. And the far-right protester pulls a gun and kills one or two or three people. And you have video of it, but it's not super clear. And like with the, you know, think back to the confrontation between Nick Sandman and Nathan Phillips at the Marquis. for life where we have a huge amount of video from multiple angles of what went down and everyone on the right has one interpretation and everyone on the left has another interpretation.

Imagine something like that but with a shooting at a protest and imagine like the person responsible for the shooting is exonerated. And then think about the inspiration for copycat attacks, the amount of other people who might go to rallies. We've already had people go to rallies with guns in the hope of shooting leftists, which is how that street medic got shot in Seattle outside of, shoot, I think it was a Milo Yianopoulos rally. It was. Yeah, yeah.

So this is all brewing and building, and I'm really worried for where it could lead because you're having both groups get increasingly heavily armed. You're having eliminationist rhetoric, at least on one side, raising considerably. And I think, you know, a couple more martyrs is all that's going to. to be necessary to really kick this into high gear into something that might even be like a low intensity civil conflict in this country, you know, an insurgency. I think that kind of violence is not nearly as far away as we may want to think that it is. And that actually, I want to go back on something because I'm not sure that our listeners would necessarily be as familiar with it as maybe we are. But the relationship between Portland PD and Patriot Prayer

and Portland PD's awareness of basically weapon caches that Patriot Prayer was stockpiling around places in the city, and I think it would be good for them to have some background on what that relationship is and why people are concerned about it. Oh, boy, it's just an example of a lot of dumb stuff happening at once. So essentially this truck, the Patriot Prayer truck was found on top of a parking garage with some firearms in cases, which is totally legal in the state of Oregon. I want to make that very clear. these people were not in any way breaking the law, the mayor made the decision to call it a weapons cash, which I think was a very poor decision on his part.

And the police sort of, I think the more damning thing involving weapons in the Portland Police Bureau, rather than that incident, which I think was almost more an issue in how it was framed by the authorities, was at another rally, there's evidence and text messages of Portland Police Sergeant, Jeff Nia advising Joey Gibson on where his members could enter the protest to not be searched for weapons. That to me is a much more damning example of collusion between law enforcement and Patriot Prayer. Whereas there really wasn't a whole lot Portland Police Bureau could do about guys on the top of a parking garage with unloaded firearms and cases in the back of their truck. You know, people have the right to do that. So I think the explicit text evidence we have,

the Portland Police Bureau telling one side of a conflict how to sneak weapons in. And there's other stuff. There's evidence of video evidence of police officers walking over to the Patriot Prayer, proud boy's side of a rally, and advising them on, you know, who needed to leave the rally to avoid getting arrested because they had open warrants. And, you know, at the same time as they arrested people on the anti-fascist side of things for the same, you know, for the same thing that they gave these guys a warning for. So there's a lot of evidence of collusion of that sort of telling these guys how not to get in trouble of warning them about, you know, where police would be, of in one case even telling them where a smaller group of left-wing demonstrators were so that,

you know, Patriot prayer members would be able to outnumber them. That stuff is damning to me. I think the weapons cash is an example of incredibly bad framing of something that happened by local authorities. And, you know, one thing that everybody on the left and the right in Portland can agree on is that Mayor Ted Wheeler is not a great. great mayor. That does seem to be one of the areas everyone could come together on. I'm going to take it back just a little bit, but I want to piggyback off the Portland thing and how the Portland Police Department is really not handling this really well. And you are right with the concealed carry gun laws in Portland as a Portlander and as a veteran. I just felt it was extremely

there was a, there's a gray area. One minute a police officer is telling that you can't conceal carry down in the city. Another one's like, that's no big deal. It isn't a big deal. If you look at the law, It's extremely liberal. Yeah, you can carry in court buildings and in the outside of security at an airport in the state of Oregon. The state of Supreme Court has, you know, allotted substantial freedom to people who own concealed handgun licenses in the state. Now, with that, there's something that was interesting here in Dallas. It was during the Confederate statute debate, and they had a rally here. in Dallas that I attended to kind of cover for a journalist for a journalist outlet.

And something that I noticed was that the police department along with, there was about 35 to 4,000 people at the main city hall. You know where I'm talking about down in Dallas. It's like that main area. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was extremely organized. It was extremely organized. And you got to remember, 10 Dallas police officers were shot and killed, not but two years prior to this by a loan gun.

gunmen. So they coordinated very well with the protest movement, almost so that I actually felt kind of proud. I'm like, wow, this is, this is much better than you would expect as a Portlander than you would see in Portland. Like, they were very well ingrained into it. Well, something that I noticed, and I kind of want to go back to the cohesion statement was I noticed that I was supposed to meet an group of Antifa. And they were very, you know, I had to do a near and far signal. I felt like I was, as a former Green Beret, I felt like I was meeting, you know, an agent of a foreign country. I had to have like a bandana, all this thing. Anyways. So I never got to cover that and they were late. And then they showed up in the middle of the rally. And they just started

screaming this rhetoric, upside down flags, fuck the police, all this, you know, all the things that are going to incite somebody, mainly the police. And what was interesting that I saw that it, I didn't, I don't, I saw a little bit of it when I was covering protests in Portland, but not as nearly as organized as Dallas was the crowd turned on them. They quite literally forced them out of the park and over to the cemetery, where then, interestingly enough, they got into a scuffle with the Black Lives Matter group that was over there. And this one Antifa guy called up, uh, what looked, what I assumed was the leader. I don't know if there's leaders or what have you, but there was the mouthpiece of the BLM movement in Dallas. Called him an Uncle Tom and then threw a bottle of piss on him. So then that fight broke out and the sheriff's apartment and everything, they kind of broke it up and then handled it really, really well.

It just seemed like that group was ultra, I guess, aggressive. Yeah, I've seen a lot of different. I mean, there's a, you know, again, as another acephalous movement, there's a lot of, difference between the different anti-fascist groups. And I have seen, I've seen at rallies in Portland individuals who, like, part of what's, it's difficult to tell, like usually in Portland, Rose City, Antifa, they show up in block together. They have a big sign. They're pretty disciplined. I agree. But I've seen other individuals who are also wearing black masks, do stuff like Chuck Bottles in situations where they were the ones provoking. And I don't think those

people are involved with a group like RCA, but it's impossible to tell. And so, you know, you have, showing up in block like that is kind of a double-edged sword. The benefit of it is you don't know who is involved. So if, you know, illegal action is taken. And I, I'm not someone who thinks that there's never any cause for taking illegal action, especially when you've got Nazis in the streets. Because we did see in New York when the proud boys were not confronted by large opposition. They just assaulted people. but at the same time, if another person wears the same color clothing as you and dresses the same way and starts going out there and committing crimes, there's no way to dissociate yourself from those individuals. I've also seen groups in block who have shown up and who have done what I would consider to be very counterproductive things in terms of their rhetoric, in terms of their physical actions, in terms of their violence. and I I it's it's it's frustrating because it number one is harmful to I think what are the broader

positive messages of that movement which I think has there's a lot of wisdom in some of the anti-fascist tactics we've seen develop over the last couple of years particularly the internet based tactics if you look at what groups like eugene you know antifah which is one of the better groups that doxing has done you know one thing when I was doing that international press tour after my Bellingcat article about the Christchurch shooting, people asked, you know, how can we find people like this in the future? And I said, well, look at what a lot of anti-fascist groups are doing. This is why when there's rallies, they do their best to name and, you know, to match faces to names of every single person who marches

with the fascists and talk up and point out where they live. It's because they think that the individuals, the people of color, the members of minority religions who live near these people, need to know that someone who's potentially dangerous and radicalized lives near them. And I think that's very defensible as a tactic, especially in light of shootings like this. I think showing up in block and throwing piss on the police and chanting deliberately inflammatory statements, which is also something I've seen a number of people do, I think that's very counterproductive and it's very frustrating to see. It's one of those things. I don't think that has a great endpoint.

And I hope that the future of kind of anti-fascist action in this country is more organized and disciplined and less of these sort of of almost like chaos generating actions. I don't like to see that. Okay, this is something that we're not seeing not just seeing play out in the streets and online. a lot of the scarier stories, as we've, you know, as we kind of teased with the Coast Guard stuff up at the top is these people are present in the American military, right? And in kind of frightening numbers, why is that? Are they just seeking training, basically? Yeah, I mean, if you want to learn how to fight and kill effectively, how could you do better than going through Marine boot camp? You know, our military has gotten exceptionally good at preparing young men. and women to do violence. You know, for a necessary purpose, you know, you need, it's always necessary to have people who have those skills when we've gotten good at imparting them.

And it's not just, I do want to, while white nationalist infiltration of the military and law enforcement is a massive problem, they've also found there was a port a few years back that different sort of criminal gangs, you know, not ideological criminal games, but like groups like the Crips and the Bloods and MS-13 had infiltrated every branch of the military, not infiltrated, but had members who had joined every branch of the military too. And it was specifically so that these people could get combat training and experience and then come back and train other people how to fight because it was useful in sort of their conflicts with other gangs. And I think white nationalists and neo-Nazis value military training

and value having, you know, some of their people join the military for the exact same reason. And you've seen, you know, American military veterans training people in groups like Adam Woff and training, you know, people with who don't have that sort of experience. You know, they'll go out in the woods and they'll do like an intensive weekend of, you know, firearms and combat training because these people have, you know, valuable skills. It's a, it's a logical decision. Although I think I agree it's incredibly worrisome. And again, one of the things that anti-fascist groups have been doing that I think is very productive is trying to identify active duty members of the military who are members of these groups and getting them fired,

because I certainly don't want neo-Nazis receiving, you know, combat training. That doesn't seem like a good thing to me. Well, not just combat training, but also potentially being the mentors and trainers of other soldiers. Absolutely, absolutely. And radicalizing other soldiers and being in positions where, you know, it's not unheard of for the United States military to be called in to deal with civil unrest. It happened during the 1993 Los Angeles riots in the wake of the Rodney King beating. It happened in a number of cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

It's a thing that has been done and might be done in the future. And I'm very worried about what would happen if one of those men was, you know, a lieutenant in charge of a platoon, you know, in a city like Los Angeles where there was a great deal of street unrest. You know, that could get very ugly quite easily. The radicalization of U.S. troops is this isn't new. This isn't like the 2000s because I remember when I was in, I'm old in the early 90s. we had to get our if you had tattoos you had to get them checked out

because there was a there was a shooting on Fort Bragg and that's where I was stationed at and a lot of these bases the major bases in the United States military are in the south they're in the south so you get a lot of rhetoric

on the right while you're stationed there and I know that there was problems with the Ku Klux Klan in the you know the Aryan nation and you know the League of the South was big

and I that's just something you had and you had mentioned the autumn Woffin kid this Devon Arthur's kid in Tampa, this 18-year-old who one minute he's very, he's very white nationalist Ottomoff and Storm Trooper risk. And then within like a week or two, he changes to his ideology to Islamic State. But we're not focusing on the National Guard guy that he was hanging out with, which was that Brandon Russell guy, who was stealing ammunition and explosives, by the way, blasting caps and everything else like that. I also want to bring it back to, and I hate saying this because we're

a proud bunch of group of dudes, which is the Green Berets. We have a, we had a disavowed green beret from fifth group in Charlottesville literally inciting riotous violence. Michael Tubbs. For us, first of all, he was a trained special forces demolitions expert. The cash of, of ammunition, explosives, bombs, ammunition's weaponry that he had in the eight when he got arrested in the early 80s. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay, back up. It's for the completely ignorant. Who is Michael Tubbs?

So Michael Tubbs was, he is the leader, the de facto leader of a group called he's the Florida chapter leader of a group called the Legion of League of the South, which is a very white nationalist group. He's a former Green Beret who we called

disavowed because he was a He was released and sent to prison from active duty, you know, active duty military for stealing weaponry. And he also had a list. He had a kill list. He and his brother set up a kill list in the early 90s of journalists that were, that were of Jewish descent and Jewish descent or Jewish owned businesses.

Who, you know, he was active duty. So he went to prison for a while and linked up with League of the South while he was in jail. and then got out and I'm assuming, which is very, if you watch the videos from Charlottesville, you can see his bright, silver-haired, long ponytail in his mustache, you know, attacking without provocation, you know, Antifa, almost like a Spartan phalanx movement, if you will. He was just a very dangerous, dangerous person. And you've talked to him, right?

You've met him. Sort of. It was online. It wasn't like audio. It was online. I've actually, he didn't identify himself, but I was very much, he was talking about Michael Tubbs in the third person, but it was a lot of, as soon as I asked if he was in fifth special forces group, it became more of a personal, it was, it was almost instantaneous responses. Like, so it, I'm going to assume I was talking to Mr. Tubbs himself. And he, his rhetoric was he, he was attacked, his group was attacked by, you know, Antifa and other left wings and left wing nut jobs. That's his words. And that their job, they were defending women and children in the infirm who just wanted to show up to listen to, you know, good old fashioned, proper god-fearing white nationalists. That was what his defense was for inciting all this violence. This is a long-winded thing. I get kind of goosey when I hear, you know, I don't like knowing the active, there's, there's

guys and gals in the active military that are fascists, or not, not fascists, but white nationalists. I don't like hearing that, but it's a problem. The most terrifying thing to me about that is that, like, this guy is a demo, was a demolitions expert. Timothy McVeigh was a very good soldier, was not a demolition's expert, was able to build a 6,000 pound bomb capable of destroying a large building, just based on the fact. that, you know, he was, he had a very disciplined mind. He understood how to approach planning and executing an operation. Someone with even more training, one thing that concerns me very much is sort of the ability of radicalized people, particularly with specialized with like special forces

training to do damage in an American city. You know, if you look at a guy like Chris Dorner, who in 2013 shut down the Los Angeles Police Department for more than a week. I think he killed five people. He was an underwater demolitions expert. I don't think he had combat experience, but he was very well trained. And, you know, this guy on his own was able to shut. I mean, the LAPD isn't just one of the largest police departments in the U.S. It's one of the largest armed forces on the planet. And he locked them down for a week. And one of the things that terrifies me is imagine you have, because Chris, Dorner, I don't know, I wouldn't say he was a leftist, but he was certainly, he was a former police officer who was radicalized because what he saw as violence committed by and covered up by the

LAPD who fired him for trying to report it. If you were to have a large Occupy-style protest in the United States and someone like Chris Dorner get radicalized and start attacking police officers with the skills and the ability to really keep them from, you know, effectively, like to really keep them on their toes for a week or more. If you have that going on with a large street protest, I don't know if there's any police department in the country that could handle that without things getting very, very bad very quickly. You know, that's one of the nightmare scenarios for me. Well, Eric Rudolph, you remember the Atlanta bombing? He was a Green Beret, and he literally locked the state of Georgia and South Carolina down.

And he lived in the woods on his own for how many weeks? They were, it was a massive manhunt for this guy. His ideology was anti-gay and lesbian, anti-abortion clinic. Again, who I felt like I was talking to Michael Tubbs, I asked him, you know, what was your, what's your plan for the League of the South? And he said, well, Michael Tubbs is is evoking the de espresso Libert, which means to free the oppressed, uh, motto to his, to his, uh, his marginalized white America. And that scared, that actually frightened me because now you have a guy who's extremely well trained.

That's a former Green Beret, former demolitions expert, and also a former direct action, you know, trained individual that fully believes that feels he's fighting that war in the United States. And that's frightening. That's scary that he's taking that ideology to that level. It's extremely frightening. Yeah, I agree with you completely. And, you know, part of what we're seeing is something that was predicted more than a century ago by a guy named Mikhail Foucault. It's, you know, Foucault's boomerang is the theory that techniques and military tactics and policing tactics that were initially invented to clamp down on colonial insurgencies and maintain the power of colonizing nations over their colonies inevitably returned to be used on the population of that colonizing country by its own government. And, you know, one of the most obvious examples of this is the concentration camp, which started as a way for colonial powers to fight back against insurgencies.

And then, you know, a couple of decades later was being used on Europeans in Europe. And I think we're seeing some of the same boomerang effect when people talk about militarized police and police using militarized tactics that were, you know, initially pioneered for use in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. and then these equipment and tactics start being used in the United States. And I think a corollary to that boomerang is, you know, it's usually mostly envisioned as sort of the state using these tactics and these weapons. But it can just as easily be individuals who gained their military experience, who were trained to fight in these sort of, you know, colonial wars and, you know, wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan,

taking some of these tactics back to the United States. You know, one thing that really scares me is the amount of damage that could be done by an effective truck bombing campaign on American highways because something like 70% of this nation's food travels on trucks. And even a campaign the last of a couple of weeks, the amount that it could raise food prices, the amount of sort of fear that that could generate, the economic impacts, especially if it happens during a time of economic downturn, that's very frightening to me, especially when you consider that you can order Tannerite ship to your door in most states in the United States, in most states of this country.

And, you know, even even a very dumb person can turn Tanneride into anfo, which is, of course, the explosive that the IRA used to great effect during one of their bombing campaigns. So how do we stop kids that are smoking too much weed and playing the division while listening to Joe Rogan podcasts? How do we stop these people from falling down the 4chan rabbit hole? You know, it's a, I think, a multi-pronged effort. I think a lot of this starts, you know, one of the people I talked to a while back was Chris Piccolini from Life After Hate. He's a big believer in that the only long-term solution to this is better education, both into what fascism really is. I don't know about you guys, but when I was in school, I didn't learn a damn thing about what the Nazis actually were, about how they actually gained power. You know, it was just sort of vaguely told to me that, you know, Hitler hypnotized his country.

And then, no, there was actually like a very successful series of tactics that are very familiar to different things that far-right groups are used. using today. So I think better education to kind of raise the cultural level of immunity to this sort of propaganda is necessary. I think that's only one aspect of it, though. I think another aspect of it is better mental health care because a lot of these people, you know, I'm not blaming the problem of mass shootings on mental illness because I think that's silly because there's a lot of mentally ill people who never do, you know, anything violent. But I do think better access to mental health care is one way of stopping these people before they get too radicalized. There are people who are currently carrying out outreach campaigns to people who are on these

kind of dark corners of the internet. I think that's important too, is to talk to these kids and to try to de-radicalize them. And I think one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that when people leave this movement, that when people sort of repent and recant these beliefs, they need to be welcomed with open arms, and we need to talk about how they were sort of reclaimed, because that's important too. I also think that we need to have better law enforcement monitoring of some of these little corners of the internet. I think the one thing that could have stopped, you know, I suspect there's going to be copycat attacks inspired by the Christchurch shooting, probably quite soon. one thing that might have stopped that is if, you know, if 8chan's poll board had been treated like an Islamic extremist gathering place on the internet, there would already have been FBI monitoring.

And if that guy was driving to the mosque for six minutes before he started shooting, you could hear his GPS directions. I do not believe it is unreasonable to have expected that someone in the FBI could have reached out to New Zealand law enforcement and said, you guys have a fucking problem on your hands. It was live streamed. Yeah, exactly. You couldn't have stopped him from kill him. some people, but if instead of finishing his 16-minute live-streamed video, essentially a perfect massacre, if he had been gunned down by armed New Zealand cops, I think that would be, I think a lot fewer people would want to be copycats. I think there would have been less cheering for his action. I think it would have given them something to be, to think about seriously,

if this guy had been gunned down by cops before he could complete what he was doing. I think, So I think there's a multifaceted, when you talk about how do we fight this, it's quite multifaceted. It involves community outreach with things like the rural organizing project, talking to people in these communities, building bridges. It involves things like what anti-fascists are already doing, trying to name these people and where they live and warn people about their ideology. I think, you know, one thing, someone needs to shame the hell out of Joe Rogan for his role in this, because I don't think it's insignificant. although I don't think Joe Rogan's a white nationalist or a fascist. I think he's just a kind of dumb, open-minded guy who doesn't challenge his interview subjects at all.

But I think that reducing these people's ability to get paid, reducing, you know, kicking them off of payment platforms to essentially force them back underground and force someone to just go back to working, you know, regular jobs as opposed to creating far-right propaganda, there's no silver bullet. It's not as simple as, oh, we just pass this one law, and it'll be done with. You know, I know a lot of people are advocating for more gun control in the wake of the shooting, and I'm not anti, I certainly think we could have more effective gun control in the United States than we currently have. But I'm also not in favor of a situation where we just freeze things as they are and let the Nazis keep all their guns and stop what we've seen,

which is sort of the arming of, you know, transgender people, of people of people. of color, which, you know, is not unimportant. If you look at how the, uh, the Stone Mountain march, you know, there is that planned KKK march that got disrupted by a large group of armed leftists who showed up and peacefully marched with their guns, um, and basically scared the KKK back into hiding. I think that's part of the solution too, is making sure these people know, is making sure these people feel too scared to talk because right now they're not. Right now they're not too scared to propagandize. And they were at one point.

And, you know, I think making racists afraid again, making fascists afraid again of openly admitting their views is part of the solution to it. And treating ironic fascism as fascism. Yeah, yeah, being like, you know, I'm not okay with that. Stop it. That's one thing that certainly has occurred to me, you know, kind of what we were talking about earlier in the conversation about we were returning to these spaces and then finding out they were full of Nazis is that, you know, growing up, I think I did a piss poor job as I didn't

understand of policing my own community, right? Because I thought all these things were just jokes. And it turns out that some of these people were serious or became serious later. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a part. You know, I think when I think back to why I didn't, you know, wind up going down this road at all, I think part of it's probably that, you know, the place I spent most of my time on the internet, something awful, you know, had moderators who'd shut that shit down. If you started talking about the Holocaust being fake, you'd get banned. Like, they didn't put up with that stuff. And that's why this sort of radicalization didn't happen there. It happened on 4chan where there was no sort of effective moderation, really.

So I think that's part of it too, is these communities, the people who don't want to be associated with neo-Nazis just because they like talking about anime or shit posting on B, those people need to be more active in disavowing and fighting against these people. That makes me think of one thing that often gets brought up in this, and that is the question of censorship. One thing that I think is interesting is if we look at a country like France where Holocaust denial is a literal crime, we're still seeing a rise in anti-Semitism. And to some degree, I've heard a few people make this connection, and I'm not quite sure because it's very hard to quantify this.

But I'm not sure that those laws are really helping. I'm not sure that that censorship really makes it work. If anything, it makes Holocaust denial seem like the punk rock underground thing to do, and it creates a certain appeal when you ban something. You know, that might be the case. I don't know if I think that, though. I because I you know this is we have seen a global surge in in far right activity and it's

occurred in places like Germany like France where Holocaust denial is a crime I don't know that it's been the same level of serious though I don't know that it's been as much of a problem it seems like they have had less success in in organizing and in doing violence And I, you know, it's one of those things. I'm just not prepared to say whether or not it's been effective across the board or not, because I have not, I don't have any sort of apples to apples comparison about the, the comparative size of the fascist movements in those countries relative to the comparative size of the one in the United States. I just don't have that information on me.

I think that would be, that is something somebody should be looking into, perhaps me when I get some time, because I think that is a very important question to answer. I will say that, you know, I tend to be something of a free speech absolutist. However, I think you could make an argument that when you're talking about advocating for Nazism, that falls under, you know, shouting fire in a crowded theater. Because the only logical end result of shouting fire in a crowded theater is that people are going to get hurt panicking. The only logical result of neo-Nazi rhetoric is that people are going to wind up in camps, you know?

So I think you could make that argument. I don't know that I do. You know, my preference would honestly be something more like these people getting the shit kicked out of them in the streets and the police just sort of watching and cleaning up afterwards. And everybody just sort of agreeing that when Nazis march, they should be allowed to march. Cop shouldn't stop them. But they shouldn't walk away without a bloody nose. But, you know, obviously that's not something you can approach in a concrete legal manner. That's just some, I just sort of think that no healthy society should let Nazis march around without some physical consequences.

But that's more my personal politics than something that I think could be approached on a massive scale. I'd say that I'm probably pretty sympathetic to that. But I'll ask one more question on that. And I think this is a scary one too. What happens when after you beat up the teenager and he stops talking about it but doesn't disavow his beliefs? and then very quietly decides to join the military or become a cop. That's where we are now. So it's one of those things where I have trouble.

Some of this is still going to happen no matter what. Back before these people felt confident gathering in public, you talk about the late 90s or the early 2000s when these movements were almost dead. They were on life support. Getting 20 people to show up at a neo-Nazi gathering would be a big gathering. They still existed. There's no, I don't think, I don't know how you stop it entirely without, again, like a comprehensive reformation of the educational system to just make people less vulnerable to this kind of ideology.

But I think that it's possible that sort of a response, you know, making these people scared again reduces the problem. It reduces their ability to recruit. It reduces the number of them. Some of them are still going to join the military. some of them will even carry out attacks. But we're not, we're not, this isn't a zero-sum game. It's not either we stop them completely or we let them grow, you know, unchecked. I think there are ways in which it could be less common.

It's sort of like the problem of how do you deal with mass shootings in the United States? You know, when you talk about things like ending face-to-face sales, like expanding an international or a national gun control restraining order program so that people who are violent to their spouses can have their weapons. taken away, that sort of thing. That doesn't stop every shooting. But if it stops some of them, then we're in a better place than we are now. And I think you have to look at this problem the same way. It's okay, how can we cut their membership by 30 percent? How can we cut their income by half?

How can we chisel away at this movement? Because that's the only, there's no silver bullet to dealing with these people in one fell swoop. It's a matter of basically wearing them. down by degree. Something has been bothering me since you said it. I find it extremely interesting that we spend billions of dollars on networks of surveillance on everything from WhatsApp to just a plethora of online information that only specifically deals with jihadist or people of color terrorism.

We hyper focus on that. What bothers me, and what I don't understand is like you said earlier, there's been one far left uh far left terrorist attack against the the republican congressman and there's been numerous throughout you know the years through the early through the late two thousands of far right terrorist domestic terrorist attacks where is the money for domestic surveillance i hate saying surveillance but where is the money for the domestic cyber surveillance of these extremist groups uh forums like iron cross you know out of the where adam often hangs out eight chan And why do you seem to think that the United States government or law enforcement is so adverse to tracking domestic terrorism?

Why can't they? Some of it, this is a two-part factor. There are, because again, I lecture to, I talk to these people. I've done a workshop at the American University with some of these people. There's a lot of will and desire to tackle this problem. You know, you look at in the wake of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. one of the, I think it was the director of the FBI, I forget exactly, who came out and called it an act of domestic terrorism. But that guy wasn't charged with domestic terrorism.

And the reason is, is because domestic terrorism isn't a crime. Obviously, shooting a bunch of people in a synagogue is a crime. But there was no separate domestic terrorism statute to charge this guy under. Likewise, if you are sending money to ISIS, if you're help or paying for someone, you know, to carry out an attack on behalf of ISIS, that's a crime. that's a crime. Aiding, like funding domestic terrorist groups in the United States is not a crime. There have been two prosecutions for that. It's almost impossible. There are some ways to prosecute that under the existing statutes, but I think it's been done twice in the last 20 years. It's almost impossible, too. And there are a variety of reasons for that. One of them is just a factor of fear because the FBI and other federal law enforcement are very cognizant of the fact that, you know, they go after. that guy at Ruby Ridge, you know, Waco happens. A lot of people die. And then it inspires Timothy McVeigh to kill 168 people at the Oklahoma City building.

And ever since then, they have treated domestic terrorists, far right terrorists, you know, particularly neo-Nazis and groups like that, sovereign citizens, with kids' gloves because they're scared of something like that happening again. So that's a factor. Another factor is that, you know, is like, radical ideology is very much out of line with any chunk of the American mainstream. Nobody on the left or the right in any sort of prominent position preaches anything like what ISIS preaches.

If you look at, you know, the League of the South or even Adam Woffen, if you look at some of the things they talk about, you know, the dangers of immigrants, the dangers of, you know, multiculturalism. You can find people on Fox News talking about, you know, a diet version of that. But like Christopher Cantwell has, you know, played chunks of Christopher Cantwell, the crying Nazi, one of the big forces behind the first Charlottesville, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Daniel Harper, one of the guys I follow, has found a clip of him playing a chunk of one of Tucker Carlson shows and then reading a section of Mind Kompf that was almost word for word what Carlson's saying. So part of the problem is that there's less political will to fight this because so much of what these people are saying is so, close to stuff that's already mainstream, or if not mainstream right, at least close enough to the

mainstream right, that it's very common. In the immediate wake of the Christchurch shooting, I was talking to my mom, who's a Trump voter, very conservative, and she started talking about how this is more evidence that we just need to, the United States needs to just withdraw all of its troops, needs to be completely independent of the international community, needs to have as few connections with the rest of the world as possible, she was essentially espousing the idea of autarky. Autarchy is a very common political idea within the fascist movement and has been since the 30s, and it was specifically the ideology that was advocated by a guy named Oswald Mosley. Oswald Mosley was the founder of the British Union of Fascists, which was the British Fascist Party in the

pre-World War II period. And the Christchurch shooter name dropped Mosley multiple times in his manifesto. And in fact, the overarching ideology of his manifesto was primarily inspired by Mosleyite propaganda. So again, I think that's a big part of why there's no political will on the right to deal with this problem because this problem hits so close to home for them. I think that is a great and depressing place to go out, which is how we usually like to do here on War College. Robert Evans, thank you for coming on and talking to us about this. Do you have some things that you're, some campaigns that you're running that you'd like to plug at the moment? Yeah, you know, I've got to go fund me that will be running until the end of March.

It's already met its goal, but if you, if you want to donate, you know, the money will be going to both, you know, keep me fed and also help me, you know, do stuff like more conflict journalism, hopefully in Rojava, you know, maybe another trip to Ukraine. If you look up the war on everyone and go fund me, you can find it there. I'd also say check out my podcast behind the bastards. It's free. You can find it on Spotify or iTunes or wherever. And I'm on Twitter at I Write Okay. So that's where you can find me. Perfect.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. Thank you so much for listening. This is the longest episode of War College we've ever done. And I wouldn't say we enjoyed it, but I think it was a good episode. War College is me, Matthew Galt, Galt, Derek Gannon and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields, who I'm sure, is upset he missed out on all this week's hot Nazi action. You can find us on iTunes and wherever

else find podcasts are distributed. Please leave us a rating and a comment. It helps other people find the show. We are on Twitter at war underscore college and on Facebook at Facebook.com forward slash war college podcast. We will see you next week. Until then, stay safe.