Behind the Bastards - Part Seven: The Digital Reich

Episode Date: August 23, 2019

Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston for a reading of Chapter Seven of Robert's. 'The War on Everyone. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. What's making bad decisions, my me. In the interim between the sixth and the seventh chapter, Sophie stole the case of Perrier that I was going to throw. So I had to upgrade to a case of La Croix, which is roughly twice the size and mass. But before I threw this La Croix, which will come at the end of our episode, I have a surprise thing that I'm going to throw. Hmm. I found an open mechanism for her seeds. Yeah. Did it go everywhere? Nope. God damn it. But now I've got a snack. I was so excited. What? It was sealed pretty tight. Thank you. Sophie signaled that she had hidden the Perrier underneath a pillow. So now I'm going to throw one of these two, but I don't know which yet.

But first, my co-hosts, who I didn't introduce before throwing a thing, Katie Stoll and Cody Johnson. That's right. That's who we are. We all just had a snack attack. Cody's going to be nomin sunflower seeds like Fox Mulder in the first several episodes of the X-Files, but not after that because they decided it was a bad thing for his character to do. It's not the best thing to eat on, I guess there's absolutely nothing that's good to eat on a microphone. No, but the worst thing is probably sunflower seeds. Did it last time? I know. Yesterday? I know. And I can already hear the complaints. Here's coming. Chapter seven, the digital rike. Yep. Yeah, you don't like where that's going.

Nope. In the years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the white supremacist movement seemed to have spent most of its fury. Nothing like sea drift occurred in the late 90s. Nazi violence, when it happened, was mostly focused around racist skinheads in groups like the White Aryan Resistance or the Hammerskin Nation. In 1996, a group called the Aryan Republican Army robbed 22 banks in the Midwest. Several of them had ties to a low-hymn city, where Tim McFay had also tried to hide out after his attack. But these, and other eruptions of violence, were dealt with in short order. By the time the early 2000s rolled along and the war on terror kicked off, you could be forgiven for thinking the white supremacist movement was on its way out.

Everything you love will burn by Vegas ten-hold chronicles the movement during this period. One of the largest actions in these days was an 80-man march in Toledo by the National Socialist Movement. Putting it together in March that large was the work of the entire national organization, and they were so overwhelmed by counter protesters that they never managed to take to the streets. Remember back in sea drift, we've been at 300 or 400 clientsmen just to show up in one town in Texas. In 2010, the National Socialist Movement held a gathering in Trenton, New Jersey. Vegas attended to chronicle the event, and the night before the march, he was present when a group called Anti-Racist Action assaulted the Nazis as they ate dinner

in a rented meeting hall. The next day, the National Socialist Movement marched. The entire red of the march was lined with National Guard and riot police. They'd closed off every access point, and no one was around to watch the Nazis trudge along the wet streets while the rains soaked their black uniforms. They arrived at a wide square in front of the Capitol building. A few modest steps led up to the entrance, and a small podium stood at the top. Police had cordoned off the entire square. In the distance, the counter protesters had gathered. The police, fearing another showdown, kept them two blocks away from the Nazis, just barely within shouting distance. So the rally was reduced to a couple dozen neo-Nazis screaming obscenities at 50 or so

anti-racist down the street, while the anti-racist screamed right back. The National Socialist Movement built itself as direct successors to George Lincoln Rockwell's party. In five years, they'd gone from being able to make a nationwide gathering of 80 men down to less than 30. But looking at those numbers does not give a full picture of the American fascist movement during this period. While the ability of old guard fascist groups like the NSM and the Klan to draw numbers had declined, the movement was deep in the process of spreading to a new generation through new means. In the last chapter, I mentioned John Ronson's Them. John's book gives us a look at the movement in the late 1990s from the perspective of individuals like Alex Jones.

Mr. Jones first rose to prominence within the fringe right in the mid to late 1990s, and his career illustrates the first stages of what would grow to be known as the alt-right. Now on paper, Jones was a libertarian, a political independent who attacked Democrats and Republicans with equal vigor, seeing both as agents of the NWO and the globalist elite. You would not hear attacks on the Jews as an ethnic group from Jones, nor would you see him sporting a swastika. But if you dig in just a little bit, there have always been connections between Alex Jones and the fascist right. At one point in Them, John tries to infiltrate a meeting of the Bilderberg group with a writer named Big Jim Tucker, editor of the Spotlight, Willis Carto's magazine.

Big Jim Tucker was a friend and a frequent guest on Alex Jones's info wars in its early days. Like Jones, Big Jim was obsessed with the Bilderberg group. He viewed it as part of the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the globe. Jones possessed the same beliefs, minus the J word. That 1999 gathering at the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco that I talked about in the last chapter. When John Ronson showed up with Randy Weaver, that gathering was a volunteer effort to rebuild the Branch Davidian church, organized by 25 year old Alex Jones. He told the Oklahoma, quote, we've had school teachers and black single mothers and auto mechanics and doctors. There is even a Jewish rabbi out here one day helping us. Sure, we've had folks in their

camo and their camo hats and with the militias helping us too. One of the men who gathered in Mount Carmel that day to help Alex Jones was Colonel Bo Gritz. Gritz was a legendary figure in the Patriot movement, a decorated veteran, the supposed inspiration behind the character John Rambo and a hardcore believer in Christian identity theology. In 1998, right before the Mount Carmel meeting, he sent out this in an online bulletin to his followers. Do you see the sign, the scent, the stain and mark of the beast on America today? Are you willing to submit and join this seed line of Satan? Look to those who are openly antichrist, who in the world is promoting abortion, pornography, pedophilia, godless laws, adultery, new age, international banking,

entertainment industry and world publishing. Wherever you find perversion of God's laws, you will find the worshipers of Baal with their roots still in Babylonian mysticism. So that's cool. Now, new age, international banking, the entertainment industry and world publishing is a bit coir than just shouting, Jews. But Bo Gritz was more direct in a bulletin. He sent out a year later during the 2000 election. Jews, feminists, other liberal activists may install gore over an apathetic moral majority. If so, runaway abortion, antichrist, God and globalism are certain. The first message was too subtle. Now, think about those messages, as I read this quote that Alex Jones has related in John Ronson's book,

Them, which was said during that Mount Carmel meeting. The Bilderbergers said, Alex, are the Roman Senate. It's a pyramid. They're way up there. Below them, you've got the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, and then you've got us down here, the cattle, the human resources. And Randy Weaver is way out over there. See, he left. They hate that. So they scared the cattle back in the pin. See, burn them out. I'm living in a place where black helicopters, 150 miles south of me, are burning buildings, terrorizing people. And I'm the extremist? Who says you're an extremist? I asked. That's Ronson speaking. The Anti-Defamation League, he yelled. The ADL are a bucket of black paint and a brush. They're worse than the Klan.

They get massive funding from the globalists. It doesn't matter if your girlfriend's Jewish, your little sister's Korean. Anybody who wants to live free is a racist. The ADL is the scum of the earth. Okay. Alex Jones, 1999. Yeah. Yeah. He did a good job. Yeah. What he was trying to do. Yeah, he really succeeded. So these are more or less the same beliefs that Alex Jones has been years broadcasting to millions of listeners around America in the late 90s and early 2000s. Viewed independently, Jones looks like a harmless conspiracy theorist. But placed next to Beau Gritz, we can see him for what he is. A way to ease people into Christian identity-style beliefs that lead inevitably to exterminationalist anti-Semitic beliefs. 100%. 17 years later,

I published a study with the investigative journalism collective Bellingcat on how 75 fascist activists were initially red-pilled to the cause. My research was based on leaked internal conversations where these neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other extremists discussed their ideological evolution. Six of them credited Alex Jones with their red-pilling that even had a name for it, taking the conspiracy pill. There was an explicit understanding. Oh, good. I love that that's a brag. Yeah, we call it taking the conspiracy pill. Wild the things these people will brag about. Yeah. Yes. One user wrote, I don't give a fuck if you think it being the secret rulers of the world are aliens or not, as long as those aliens are Jewish at the end of the

day. Yikes. Yeah. Pretty explicit. Ridiculous, obviously. Yeah. For those of us who grew up online in the early aughts, the last five years or so have been a continuous, dispiriting process of watching outright fascist beliefs bubble up on places like Reddit and 4chan. It seems at times as if the Nazis have literally eaten the internet we all knew and loved as kids. This did not happen by accident. Alex Jones is just one prong of a concerted digital power grab that began before most of us knew the internet existed. In 1984, Louis Beam used money he'd received from Robert Matthews' order to create LibertyNet. Yeah. An international network of code word accessed message boards. The goal of LibertyNet was to link the white power movement together.

It was used to spread recruitment materials and its establishment allowed the movement to switch tactics quickly, as was seen after Estes Park. It also included personnel ads and pin pallet programs, which could be as innocuous as connecting racists for social purposes, was also useful in planning crimes. The internet allowed Beam to send racist propaganda into places where it was illegal, like Canada and Germany. After setting up LibertyNet, Beam wrote, Finally, we're all going to be linked together at one point in time. Imagine, if you will, all the great minds of the patriotic Christian movement linked together and joined a one computer. Imagine any patriot in the country being able to call up and access these minds.

You are online with the Aryan Nation's Brain Trust. It is here to serve the folk. It has been said that knowledge is power, which it most assuredly is. The computer offers to those who become proficient in its use, power undreamed of by the rulers of the past. 1984. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's like the beginning of the dark ones. Yeah. The meme wars go back further than most people would. That's crazy. The meaning of the starts the wars. Yeah. Yeah. Computers were not cheap in the 1980s. Beam's work required the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in seed money. A single Apple computer costs $2,000 at the time.

Without the order, none of this would have been possible. And while law enforcement was diligent about trying to track down all the rocket launchers and machine guns and explosives bought with the order's ill-gotten games, they barely seemed to notice the computer equipment that Louis Bean had bought. Yeah. Weird about that. Classic underestimation of the Internet. After all, why would the 1980s FBI care if some Apple IIs wound up gifted to Nazis around the country? How could that cause a problem? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. By 1995, slightly over a decade later, Nazi efforts online had crystallized into a cohesive and effective digital rike. Fascists were some of the first people to effectively harness the power of the Internet

in an organized way. The book Nation and Race, edited by Jeffrey Kaplan and Tor Bjorgor, includes a chapter that delves into the state of the online white power movement at this time. They cite Walter Benjamin, a scholar who wrote an essay about how new technology, like photography, was harnessed by Nazism. Mass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye. A bird's eye view best captures gatherings of hundreds of thousands. And even though such a view may be accessible to the human eye as it is to the camera, the image received by the eye cannot be enlarged the way a negative is enlarged. While photographs and film best captured the character of the original Nazi movement,

its modern descendant is best captured online, and countless conversations and debates across message boards, image boards, YouTube's comments sections and the like. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, and in response to the effectiveness with which anti-racist street movements like skinheads against racial prejudice shut down fascist street gatherings, the Internet became increasingly central to the development of American fascism. You know what's not central to the development of American fascism? It's an ad plug. It's the products and services that support this show. Sophie's that a good ad, Segway? Sophie's saying I did well. You guys excited about this, Ken on LaCroix I'm gonna throw?

Increasingly nervous. Good. Well, increasingly nervous is the right way to feel when products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is

floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back. We are back. In the early 1990s, Milton John Clime Jr. was a 25 year old studying at St. Cloud University. His school provided him with a free Usenet account and one of his professors rather accidentally gave him the listing where he came upon Alt.Skinheads and the Onatsi news group. Milton was one of the first young men to become radicalized into fascism through the internet.

Clime grew obsessed, spending hours a day writing thousands of news group posts and emails. He became a coordinator for several digitally inclined fascists. Clime graduated in 1995 and shortly thereafter had his first face-to-face encounter with a member of the movement, Lynn Young, William Pierce's secretary. She gave Clime a check for $500, which he used to buy a computer to continue his work now that he was no longer at the university. Clime never again met another Nazi in person, but he continued his activities and later that year wrote an essay on digital strategy that he posted to the Arian Crusader Library's website. In it, he wrote that the internet, quote, offers enormous opportunity for the Arian resistance to disseminate our message

to the unaware and the ignorant. It is the only relatively uncensored free-forum mass medium which we have available. The state cannot yet stop us from advertising our ideas and organizations. Now is the time to grasp the weapon which is the net and wield it skillfully and wisely while you may still do so freely. In the mid-1990s, Usenet, an early predecessor to modern forum culture, was where most online discussions occurred. The most critical Nazi destinations had names like alt.nationalism.white, alt.revolution.counter, alt.skinhead, and, as a prelude to 8chan's poll board, alt.politics. This is all very much in line with the ideas that Bayum had laid out a decade earlier, but Clime wanted to see his fellow fascists move on from their digital safe

spaces and become what he called cyber gorillas. Quote, he decided they should quote, take up positions on mainstream groups, except on our groups avoid the race issue, sidestep it as much as possible. We don't have time to defend our stance on this issue against the comments of hundreds of fools, liars, and degenerates who, spouting the Jewish line, will slaughter our message with half troops, slander, and the ever used sophistry. That'll hide that power level. 1995. Clime's writing is particularly fascinating to me for the similarity as I see between it and the things I've encountered in my own explorations of modern online Nazi haven 8chan. Near the end of his essay, Clime writes,

all of my comrades and I, none of whom have ever met face to face, share a unique camaraderie, feeling as though we have been friends for a long time. Selfless cooperation occurs regularly amongst my comrades for a variety of endeavors. This feeling of comradeship is irrespective of national identity or state borders. Now, what Clime expressed there is not so different from what Pauwei synagogue shooter John Ernest related in the 8chan post he made announcing the start of his rampage. It's been real dudes, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything. Keep up the infographic red pill threats, I've only been lurking for a year and a half, what I've learned here is priceless. It's been an honor. Yeah, always keep posting. Always keep posting until

you start shooting. So Clime's last line about feeling comradeship across national barriers would prove to be an eerie premonition of the future of the international fascist movement, because during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the American fascist movement went international in a way it never had been before. Even back in the 30s and 40s, Italian, German and Spanish fascism were all very different beasts. One side effect of the propaganda that started emanating out of the US as a result of Beams Liberty Net was that all the world's sundry fascists started getting on the same page. I found a 2002 study by Les Black published in the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies. Les interviewed an Irish fascist with the

internet handle White Wolf. During the height of his involvement in the movement, he was spending five hours a day online. He lives in an Irish town where there are virtually no visible minorities. He was drawn to the White Power movement through a fascination with Nazism. He concluded, mostly Americans are on the net, but there are British, Irish and lots of others from different countries. The net breaks down the distance. A person who was living on a 2000-acre farm in Australia and had nobody to talk to about his views suddenly understands that he can link people who would never have met and talk with them, plan with them, learn and teach one another things, help each other. Our Aussie friend, who may be well removed from the rest of his comrades,

can nevertheless play a part in forwarding the agenda of a group. Racists love the internet. Yeah, they do. People love the internet. People do love the internet. Racists love the internet. Yeah. Well, it's like that's, I mean, it's, no matter who you are, you can find your group online and then you have people actively trying to... Yeah, he's saying all the good things of the internet, but not saying the dark things and use it to do what they do. It's like when you, like when you talk about like ISIS recruitment and stuff, it's... I've been thinking that this entire book about how this is like, I keep saying terrorist, but yeah, it's like ISIS recruitment. Yeah, it's the same basic strategy. Going after the same pool of people.

17 years later, a young man who might very well have been the Aussie friend that White Wolf was talking about, Brendan Tarrant, drove to a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and gunned down more than 50 people. Like White Wolf, Brendan was a loner, spending hours a day online, building a sense of rapport with his far-fung digital comrades and fascism before finally deciding to take action. Now, the thing that really shocked me when I started digging into this research was how damned groundbreaking the fascists were in their understanding of what online culture would become and how to manipulate it. I'm going to quote from that book that I quoted from earlier, Nation and Race. Quote,

This arena has spawned its own language and combines previous forms of right-wing organizing with new political strategies. CNG, variously referred to as the Cyber Nationalist Group, Cyber Nazi Group, or Computer Nationalist Group, is the brainchild of activist Jeff Voss, and his article entitled The CNG, An Idea for Online Organization, a complete division of laborers outlined that assigns operatives, particular roles within an overall strategy. Voss makes a distinction between idea men and men of action. The former provide background information for the latter to post within Usenet. This manifesto outlines four different types of foreground operative. DISS, a subtle disseminator of information, places it on FTP sites and makes

subtle references to endorsements of such info on news, usually pretending to be a disinterested observer. A pirate, a person who will pirate an account for a one-shot high-saturation dissemination of propaganda. An impersonator who impersonates the enemy posting, embarrassing the left and infuriating the enemy. And an infiltrator who infiltrates the enemy camp. Fashists were some of the first folks to develop a cohesive strategy around what they called flaming. As early as the 1995s, researchers into online extremism had realized that, quote, a common endpoint used by right-wing activists as the stylized disclaimer, I am not a Nazi. Those same researchers also noted the use of mail bombs or software that

allowed fascists to deluge a recipient in hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of spam email in order to make an opponent's account functionally unusable. Twenty-one years later, when I wrote my first article critical of 8chan and the lead up to the 2016 election, my work count was deluged in a massive flow of spam emails, which is why I still get emails from homeschooling.com every day. Now, Wyatt Caldenberg was an internet activist affiliated with Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance, or war. We haven't talked much about them in this audiobook, because I had to limit my focus somewhere. But Tom was a major part of the skinhead movement, as well as an associate of the order. Back in the 1970s,

he worked with David Duke to help organize the Klan border watch. Wyatt helped spread war's message online, and gained infamy as one of the first proponents for what would come to be known as brigading, disrupting other online communities in an organized way. Wyatt wrote, This ought to be our new tactic. Instead of hanging out around the four racist news groups, we can hit news groups as a mob. We cannot win when we are outnumbered by Jews, but if we go in as a group, we can win with the average Joe Sixpack, post fact about black crime. Give them your update numbers, web addresses, push books, newspapers. Fascist groups like the Carolinian lords of the Caucasus started going into news groups dedicated to loneliness and people who

had just ended relationships. They went into news groups for popular musicians, and even the news group for denies, which might as well just be a support group for lonely people. Raids like this were often just for the purpose of harassment. But over the years, fascists got better and better at spreading their ideology in this way. They quickly hit upon the tactic of hiding their beliefs as humor, retreating behind the shield of, we're just joking, when people responded badly to their rants about Jewish people or black on black crime. Like Hitler did earlier. Yeah, it all ties together. Christian identity theology also spread online in this period. I found an article in the Journal of Black Studies written by Tanya Sharpe in 2000. She noted,

the internet has become a primary means for disseminating information for these groups. Currently, there are 25 websites and 13 news groups devoted specifically to identity Christianity on the World Wide Web, as well as 130 other websites that are devoted to similar and related topics. Individuals can tap into these websites and find procedures for making bombs, obtain hate propaganda tracks, and request catalogs that market white supremacist books in paraphernalia. So that's cool. It's very cool, Cody. Very cool. You know what's even cooler than spreading Christian identity theology online in the year 2000? Tons of stuff, man. Yes, lots of things. Including the products and services that support our show. Cody, could I get some of those nuts?

Want some seeds? Yes, please. Called those seeds nuts. Oh wait, no. Damn it. I almost got them. That was really effective. I just wanted you to have some seeds to eat. I'll have some, though. All right, Sophie and I are going to do the exchange of the La Croix for the Perrier. You throw me the idol and I'll throw you the whip. I have the Perrier. It's too soon for me to get up. That's really good timing. Every time we do this Zachar audio man looks back at me with this baleful look of just what are you doing to the recording. Great idea. You're like lording over. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI

had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. It's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country,

the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and I'm a villain stroking a case of pariet as if it's a cat. And what are you about to do to that pariet? I'm going to throw it and it will be the last time I can throw something because we've done it way too much in this this episode series. It's fun in the room. I know it's going to wear on people in the recording, but you can't edit audio. You can't cut this stuff out. It turns out you can. Nope. Okay. I'm undecided. Bit by bit,

and almost entirely in a decentralized manner, the digital right came together in the early 2000s. Law enforcement was not just helpless to do anything. It's debatable whether or not they even realized what was happening. Most of their online efforts were spent keeping track of known quantities with long-standing online ties like Don Black and his popular fascist website, Stormfront. Now, Stormfront is important. Nearly a hundred hate crime murders have been traced to the site, but the FBI wasn't even particularly good at monitoring them, which is why nearly a hundred murders were traced to the site. In July of 2019, in response to a FOIA request, the Bureau admitted that they had somehow lost almost all of their files on Stormfront.

Somehow. I hate it when that happens. Like internal files on white supremacist movement would be lost. Not worth examining. I know. I couldn't begin to fathom how that happens. Yeah, I can't think of a theory. You're right. Cody, it sounds like you're about to accuse the FBI. The Bureau, of whom a member, heroically, was present during the Greensboro Massacre and didn't do anything to stop it. You're going to accuse that FBI of acting to defend Stormfront. I don't know what I was thinking. I took the conspiracy pill. You know what I think? The FBI is good, and Bob Mueller is going to save us. Yeah, man. Everything's going to be real good. That's going to be great. Go away and handcuff that guy.

Yeah. The FBI only did a quarter-ass job of monitoring the most obvious Nazis online, and if that's the case, it's probably not surprising that they completely failed to notice when fascists started infiltrating communities on websites like 4chan and Reddit. It happened slowly, camouflaged an irony in humor. As a young man, I was only vaguely aware of the changes taking place in the digital spaces I'd grown up around. Holocaust jokes became more common, so did racist humor. More than just growing more frequent, these jokes grew more specific, evolving from jibes about Jewish people being stingy with money, clearly inspired by South Park, to memes about how Hitler did nothing wrong, and image macros that repeated bad science about

race and IQ. In 2018, I found an article on The Observer by Holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder, in it he comments on the use of irony in humor by fascists to mainstream their views. What the 21st century culture has introduced is that nothing is really serious, and that is an interestingly dangerous idea. Because if nothing is serious, you can have this ambiguity where you can actually be doing something very serious, but you're pretending not to, and you can always fall back and say, well, that was just a joke, because everything is just a joke. But of course, you don't really believe that everything is just a joke, or you wouldn't be promoting fascism, or white supremacy, or whatever it may be. Yeah, that's well said.

Yeah, Timothy Snyder knows his fucking shit. There's a start quote that's that too, I shouldn't have brought it up because I can't, I don't remember it, but it describes that sort of like, you say it, and then when it's a little too far, you're like, this is a joke, and you challenge them, and then they sort of walk away. Yeah, whether or not you laugh determines whether or not I decide I was joking. Yeah. Just a prank, bro. Just a prank, bro. Don't you have a sense of humor? Yeah, in 2014, things on the internet rather suddenly boiled over into the cultural phenomenon known as Gamergate. On its surface, Gamergate was a reaction to corruption in video games journalism. In reality, it was an eruption of white and male supremacist hatred, an attack on

modernity and liberalism by an army of young men who believed they'd been wrong by society. There has not yet been a great deal of research into whether or not there was an organized attempt by the white power movement to co-opt Gamergate. But there is ample evidence that the ideas of that movement quickly made it into popular memes spread by Gamergators. During my research, I came across a thread on the website, Resetera, filled with other confused digital natives trying to figure out just what the fuck had happened with Gamergate. One user posted a series of memes he'd saved during that time. In retrospect, they seem to show a progressive descent into white nationalism. The first is a propaganda poster featuring a cartoon mascot of 4chan's poleboard, Polina,

advising the anons of pole on how to effectively aid the movement. Polina is blonde-haired and blue-eyed. At the top of the poster are the words, who is that girl? Blonde-haired, blue-eyes, fair-skinned, why? It must be Polina. Another meme from further on in the collection is significantly Nazi-er. It's based around an old labor movement political cartoon, pyramid of a modern capitalist system, showing laborers on the very bottom being exploited by the classes above them. In the Gamergate adaptation, gamers are the bottom of the pyramid, with games journalists above them, critical theorists, social justice warriors like Anita Sarkeesian above them, cultural Marxist academia above them, and then FAFSA loans atop, represented by an Illuminati eye symbol. We don't

see explicit anti-Semitism in this cartoon, but it is there subtly, in the caricature drawings of Jewish video game critics. It's clear at this point that some white power talking points had started to mutate to better appeal to modern and extremely online youths. Yeah, it's also especially more effective because it's like that dork fantasy shit with gamers. Yeah, absolutely. We're just joking, we're just joking. It's the same like source of resentment to grievance and all that and stuff they gravitate towards. It's the KKK dork loser stuff. Yeah, I know exactly. And it's especially frustrating because it is clear that there is a connection there, but because it's a lot of image boards like 4chan, it disappears really quickly. Yeah.

So there's less record of that time of the sort of the proto what's going on. Yeah. We'll have all these up on our website behindthebastards.com and of course, thewarandeveryone.com, which I have not plugged enough in this series because we're just barreling along. Eventually, they're harassment of video game journalists and critics, most of whom were women, grew severe and illegal enough that 4chan exiled its gamers. Many of them migrated to 8chan and over the next several years, they grew more radical and more explicitly fascist until, eventually, they were openly planning for how to cause a new holocaust. It's impossible to know how much of the ironic fascist shitposting started off innocently and how much of it was ceded by white power activists, but we know they

were engaging in that behavior purposefully for more than 20 years and in the years after Gamergate, this work has paid dividends. The true danger of the digital rike was best expressed by Alex Curtis, the publisher of an extremist neo-nazi magazine and self-proclaimed lone wolf of hate. In the early 2000s, he wrote of his hope that, quote, some well-placed Aryans will one day cause some serious wreckage. A thousand Timothy McVeigh's would end any semblance of stability in this racially corrupt society. And it certainly seems to be driven largely by online radicalization. Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter, was radicalized in part on GAB, a social network for Nazis. He announced the start of his rampage there. Six months later, the Pauway synagogue shooter

announced the start of his rampage on 8chan, as had the Christchurch shooter six weeks prior. There are other names in the roll call of internet-inspired fascist violence. The Adam Waffen terrorist group, responsible for three murders so far, started off with extremely online Nazis working to form a terror cell in imitation of the book Siege, written by James Mason. We talked briefly about Mason and Siege at the start of this book. He was a student of William Pierce, and Siege might thus be understood as a more academic accompanying text to the Turner Diaries. Where the Diaries proposes fiction, Siege outlines in strategic depth. Mason advocates for leaderless resistance, and lone wolf style attacks. The lone wolf cannot be detected, cannot

be prevented, and seldom can be traced. If I were asked by anyone of my opinion on what to look for or hope for next, I would tell them a wave of killings or assassinations of system bureaucrats by roving gunmen who have their strategy well mapped out in advance and well nigh impossible to stop. Early in 2019, Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Hassan was caught planning this exact sort of attack. He had a cache of weapons and ammo and a kill list of journalists and democratic politicians. Hassan was obsessed with the manifesto of Anders Brevik, a right-wing shooter who murdered dozens of students in Newtoya and Norway. We don't know where he first came into contact with that manifesto, but spreading it has been a priority of online fascists for years.

In the wake of the Christchurch shooting, fascists have started spreading Brinton Tarrant's manifesto as well. The Poway synagogue shooter cited both manifestos as inspirations for his attack. In his own rampage thrown on 8chan, the Poway shooter stated his desire to beat Tarrant's high score. In this we see echoes of Eric Harris, the Columbine shooter who was obsessed with beating Timothy McFay's high score. Right now, as I read this, violent armed men in 8chan's pullboard and numerous discord chat rooms are plotting for ways that they might beat their heroes and win a high score of their own. On Telegram, the Bowl Patrol, a group of young fascists dedicated to Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof, celebrates St. Roof and fantasies

about new vax of violence in his name. The early harvest and blood these young men will reap was sown by Louis Beam, William Pierce, and Bob Matthews. Now, though, there is no need for an organization to buy up arms and plan terror attacks. The order proved to be less resilient than the completely decentralized radicalization and killing machine made possible by the advent of the Internet. The Internet has given the White Power movement a steady supply of armed and ready young killers, living cruise missiles who strike unpredictably at targets around the country. Bit by bit, their attacks chisel away at our sense of security, our national stability, and our trust in each other. It took decades, but Louis Beam and his comrades did bring the war home

to all of us and against all of us. Cool. That was an excellent ending chapter. Yeah. Devastating. Yeah, it's just very upsetting. The gamer thing is so interesting. Yeah, it really is. And a parent, it's like gamers, but like there is that element that it's drawn to and like with the Denny Zeeland shooting, live streaming it, like that's your broadcasting a video game. Yeah, exactly. You're trying to make it look like Call of Duty. Right. And then you get the high score talk and then until it writes it even more. Horrifying to see it all laid out so linear like this.

The single biggest surprise to me in researching this was when I came upon the fact that Eric Harris had specifically stated his desire to beat Timothy McVeigh's Kill Count. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, that part. It's the same thing. Yeah. It really all of it, like that's the problem. We look at this so much as like separated and like even as far back as like the fact that like the Nazis trying to recruit kids on the Internet in 1995, like one of the guys doing that had his computer bought for him by William Pierce's National Alliance, the guy who wrote the Turner Diaries, the book which inspired Timothy McVeigh, which inspired Eric Harris, which inspired 79 other mass shooters like.

Yeah, it's a whole web that it's really hard to, it's really hard to describe and to lay out. Because there's so much I had to leave out for this. I could have done this whole thing about, I could have done a whole seven part episode on like Alex Jones' ties to explicit terrorists. Yeah. That's one of the most frustrating things because it's like once you see it, it's not you see it everywhere. It's once you see it, you see it where it is. You realize how big it is. Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's totally upsetting. Oh God. It is upsetting. What's even more upsetting is that it's time for me to throw the Perrier. Now I really am getting up. Yeah. Yeah. You'd better move away from that point

because that's where I'm going to chuck it at. No, it's okay. It's okay. All right guys. Cody, I need you to get close to your microphone and describe this as I do it. No one seems thrilled about it. Sophie's hiding, this is not really hiding. She's sort of like sleeping. Oh, I'm looking through the chair. I'm really not doing a great job. Robert stood up, two hands on the Perrier, winding up, taking, taking a few breaths, throwing it. That was so anticlimactic. Katie shouted that was so anticlimactic. Well, it popped. It's just a new way to open up a box of Perrier. Yeah, it worked. Now we have three Perriers, one for everybody. I dare you to open it. All of your worry was for nothing.

Did you film it? There's one for each of us. Here we go. I don't want one. Yeah, I don't like Perrier. I just prefer throwing it. Oh yeah, they're pretty good. But you got out of shape. You should open it now though. I mean, just see. Totally fine. Nothing happened. Absolutely. Everything about this has been disappointing, except for you, Robert. Refreshing. And your work. Well, can I have some sun in the rubber seats, Cody? You know what? Yeah, in a moment, I'm going to close it real quick. Go on, go on. Get a little crinkle going. Incredible audio content. Cody closes things really meticulously in a while, so I'm not surprised that it didn't open when you threw it

against the wall. Yeah, you got to make sure it's closed. What I'm surprised about is what good audio content. All of our choices in this eight part, seven part. Cody dropped a bunch out of the bag anyway. Just a few there. I got them. I got them. It's fine. Well, guys, you want to plug in? I don't really want to. I just want everybody to read. I guess you already listened to the book. Give it people to read the book. Yeah, listen to the book. It's a topic that everybody is aware of. I don't know. I'm really glad we did this. Yeah. I'm glad we did this too, even though I hated myself during it. Yeah. I wish we didn't smoke earlier, but I wish we didn't smoke earlier too. But you know, we all learn things. We take that with us.

Just like Louis B. I apologize. Let's not say just like. Nope. Just like Louis B. Okay. That's I guess what we learned. So some more news. Yeah. Some more news. Even more news. We know this. My name is Cody Chonston. My name's Cody Stoll. And that's my name's behindthebastards.com, the website where you can find the sources for this podcast. You can also find it on the war on everyone.com. You can buy shirts on tpublic.com by looking for behind the bastards. We have a Twitter at at Bastards pod and an Instagram at the same name. Check out the picture. Why do you look so disgusted, Sophie? You're proud? Oh, yeah, because I remember to finally. Well, guys, time to go online. Yeah, I just threw some seeds at Cody. The episode's done.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that

tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.