Behind the Bastards - The Silly Bastards Behind the Modern Fascist Movement

Episode Date: August 22, 2018

Robert is joined by Bridget Todd, Hannah Ettinger, and Nicholas Wood for a special bonus episode that looks into the modern American nazi movement and their methods. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here. I just wanted to explain that we've got kind of a weird week going on. As you'll notice, we'll be dropping three episodes this week. Last week, two weeks ago, by the time you hear this, I went to Unite the Right 2.0, the Nazi gathering in D.C., and counter-protested it with a bunch of people, other activists. So rather than hosting a new podcast, I'm hosting it with another HowStuffWorks host, Bridget Todd,

who hosts Afropunk Solution Sessions, and Stuff Mom Never Told You. And I'm there with a couple of different D.C.-based activists, who we all sort of marched in Unite the Right 2.0 together, and yelled at Nazis together. So that's who I'll be with. It'll have a different feel from a normal episode. So we included another normal episode this week, and we'll be talking about that in a couple of weeks. We included another normal episode this week. So those of you who just want the normal thing can get the normal thing.

And then we have this kind of weird two-parter about the modern fascist movement in America. So hopefully you'll like all of it. If you don't, there should still be something for you here. Hey, everybody. I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now, normally we record this story in a comfortable little recording studio in Los Angeles, but this week I am in Washington D.C. for Unite the Right 2.0, which has been billed a white civil rights rally by racists

and a fascist march on Washington D.C. by everybody else. I'm here with a group of D.C. and East Coast in general locals, and we're all going to be marching together. Why don't you guys introduce yourselves? Hi, I'm Hannah Essinger. I live in Roanoke, Virginia, and my podcast is The Kitchen Table Cult. And I'm here because I grew up in this world, and I'd like to fight against it. My name is Nick Wood. I was a Marine, and I also grew up in very conservative circles,

and I likewise feel the need to fight back against my old people. I'm Bridget Todd. I'm the host of two podcasts on this very network, Stuff I've Never Told You in Afropunk Solution Sessions. I live here in D.C., and D.C. is my home, and so when Nazis come to my home, I have to show them they're not welcome. Yeah, and I just don't like Nazis. Because I don't like Nazis, I've spent most of the last two weeks reading everything they've said to each other on the internet.

So there's this group of journalism collective called Unicorn Riot. And over the last couple of years, they have gotten dozens of leaks of huge chunks of chat logs between all of these different far-right groups, the traditional workers' party, and anti-com, and groups that are essentially Nazi groups. So that's what this podcast is about. We've taken all of their conversations, I've read them, I've analyzed them, and so we're going to be talking today about the first post-2016 wave of American fascist activists.

So, yeah, I'm just going to get into it. I'd like to start by giving an overview of the folks we're talking about. So the traditional workers' party, or TWP, was a far-right group that was profiled in that New York Times article, A Voice of Hate in America's Heartland. That's the article that got widely panned for the New York Times, basically giving a Nazi a big platform to talk about being a Nazi. They've never done that before. Never will since. And the TWP, like most of these groups, claims not to support racism,

but they also sold swatztika armbands on their website, so you can make that judgment for yourself. They dissolved earlier this year, not because the government rated them, but because their leader was caught having sex with his spokesman's wife, and his spokesman was also his father-in-law, and so the spokesman deleted their website. And yeah, but some of these guys are still active. Family drama gets all of us.

Even though they're these Nazis, they still have messy, personal stuff. And we'll be getting into that a little later. They all got messy, messy, personal stuff. The master race folks. Yeah, so Anticom is another one of these groups, and they're a big source of a lot of the conversations I read. They were billed as a right-wing counter to Antifa. I'm going to read a quote from their spokesman

that shows sort of how they marketed themselves to the world. From the beginning, we've attempted to make it clear that, though we defend free speech, we do not have and will never have an official political platform. We accept members regardless of ethnicity or gender, provided that they agree with the cause and can satisfy the physical requirements to join. Although the political and racial makeup of our members varies wildly, we have Korean libertarians, gay and arco-capitalists, Latino nationalists, and even some liberal centrists.

Our common mission has prevented us from splitting over such political lines. That's all lies, because you can read what these people said to each other in private on Discord, and it's stuff like, freedom of speech is merely a tool used to be able to persuade the masses. We want to destroy Antifa because they're Marxists. That's a message from a guy named King Bobo. Man, I'm all for no race mixing, even if it is fascist in practice. So, as we'll get into, anti-com was part of an attempt to sort of re-brand the far-right

as an opposition to communism, rather than a nationalist racist group. We're not racists, we have black friends. Yeah, we have black friends. Look at this one guy who's not white that we brought to the rally. See, we're fine. But a lot of them will admit, behind closed doors, to being fascists, like this quote from February of 2017 from a user named Max in the anti-com server. I'm both an cap and a fascist.

I think either can work, so I'd be okay with either. Which, if you're an anarchist, any kind of anarchist, you can't also be a fascist. They don't work together, guys, but they're done. These are all done. Another big group of fascists in our modern world are the Oregon Nazis. They're not one distinct group. Their prayer is an Oregon-based far-right, I would call them fascist group. They're the people who were just active in the big Portland protest.

They had a discord server called Cascadian Coffee Company that was a general, all of the fascists in Oregon talk on this channel. So we'll be hearing a lot from them today. There are a lot of groups we could get into. Vanguard America is one. The Nazi who killed Heather Hayer at Charlottesville last year was a member of Vanguard America. They split up recently into Patriot Front. Identity Europa is basically a Nazi group, Couchden.

We're just proud to be European, but we also want all immigration to end. They were at Charlottesville too. There's the League of the South. There's a lot of different groups of racists. Are some of these guys banned in Europe? Yes, Richard Spencer just got stopped from going, I think, to the Netherlands to try to give a speech. Ironic. Yeah, yeah.

Well, Europe, Europe's seen what happens if you let Nazis march. Yeah. It doesn't end well. So this brings us to Jason Kessler. He's the single person who best embodies the first wave of modern American fascism. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 2009 with a BA in psychology. He seems to have been, at one point, a Democrat who voted for Barack Obama. He claims to have been at Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

And in my time pouring through Archive Nazi Chats, I found that a lot of fascist activists have a similar background. In one conversation from last May, a user named Yarbles talked about his time with Occupy and said, back then I just hated the banks and the fiat system, not the parentheses, parentheses, parentheses, banks and the parentheses, parentheses, parentheses, fiat system, which is Nazi. When they put three of those marks on either side, it means they're talking about Jewish people. That's one of the coded phrases they have. So one of the weird things about these guys that they try to hide from the right-wing activists that they're trying to cozy up to, because they're trying to pull a lot more of the American conservatives their way,

but these guys are all pretty anti-capitalist because they're actual Nazis. They believe in having a strong social welfare system just for white people. That's part of why they want to kick everybody else out, but they try to hide that because they know that the modern American right-wing won't get on board with it. They're anti-Marxist? Yeah, they're also anti-Marxist. This makes no sense. They're not good at this.

Yeah, I guess we'll talk about how good they are at it in a little bit. So most of these guys, if you search through the chats, just search for the term red-pilled, and you'll find a bunch of conversations where various Nazi activists talk about how they first got radicalized, essentially, and almost all of their journeys start on YouTube. One of the videos that I found a number of people commenting on was called The Lion of Europe, or Hitler the Lion, and it gets removed a lot, but the video is essentially, it's edited like a movie trailer. It's like a little four-minute video, and it starts with a dramatic voiceover

and clips from the movie 300 and clips from various World War II movies that show Nazis fighting, interspersed with gears of war and video game clips, and this voiceover talking about... It's telling like a... What's the word I'm looking for here? It's a guy giving a story that's supposed to... It's a propaganda piece. Yeah, it's a propaganda piece, but it's framed as like an apocryphal story about like a lion fighting jackals,

and obviously the jackals are supposed to be everybody that's not white people. It's mythologized. Yeah, exactly. I've heard the lion imagery used in conjunction with Trump, too. Yeah, yeah, and that's like the... They're not, they don't veil it that much. Yeah, so it's like, one of the things that's interesting to me is that this video and a couple of other little videos I found,

it's a mix of like historical footage, movie footage, but also video game clips, because these guys are all gamers, like that's a huge recruiting ground for the far right. Did most of them get their practice in Gamergate? A lot of them did. So if you search Gamergate in the archives, you'll find a number of people talking about having first, like that was their first experience in activism was Gamergate, and it led a lot of them to the 2016 election, which the term online and like alt-right circles is the great meme war.

Yeah, it's really like... They're very lame. It's frustrating to have to take the... Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, and what's funny to me is that the far right activists that, so the actual Nazis, the people who are in the groups that will be marching today at Unite the Right 2.0, they tend to call the alt-right the alt-right,

and they make fun of them too. They don't like them, but they see them as a recruiting ground. So like the alt-right hasn't been... Isn't like they're closer to where these people are? They're like one seat for the Nazis. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's like ROTC. It's where their kids come up.

But there's also like... You'll also find like frustration expressed from far-right activists about gamers and stuff. Like I found quotes from a couple of people like complaining that their Discord chat had a server, had like a chat room for video games, but didn't have anything focused on exercise and weightlifting and fighting. And he was like... You guys are too big a nerds, basically. You're making us look bad because you come out to these protests and you're chubby,

and like you don't look good in your armor. You don't look scary. You don't look like the master race. Nobody likes to date these, not even the Nazis. Yeah. Even Nazis don't like Nazis. You end up looking like a third string Ninja Turtle. So, back to Jason Kessler a little bit.

He's the guy who organized Unite the Right, the original Unite the Right rally, which was the second rally that Nazis had carried out in Charlottesville. There was a few weeks before Unite the Right, like a torch-lit march that was sort of the precursor to the first bloody Charlottesville battle. And he's the guy who organized this most recent thing. He also used to write for a website called The Daily Caller, which is owned by Tucker Carlson, and it's the home of Ben Shapiro on the Internet. I've heard of these guys before.

I haven't personally smeared by them. Oh, good! Have you been personally attacked by Ben Shapiro? I have. Yeah, you know you're a so-and-so in D.C., like left you organizing when they... Did he offer you money to debate him? I wish. I mean, you know, he is the kind of person that has to pay money to get a woman to talk to him.

And so, Jason Kessler used to write for, yeah, The Daily Caller, same site he did, and he got to write about the first Charlottesville rally for them, which now, in all fairness, The Daily Caller's editor at the time, Paul Conner, said that the story he wrote was factually accurate and plainly stated what happened. And when I say he plainly... or when Paul Conner says he plainly stated what happened, what he means is that Kessler said that the torchlet march was visually striking and then conspicuously quoted a black person who praised the marchers as being good people.

So that's a factually accurate and plainly stated version of the events of that march. But they didn't note the fact that he had organized the rally, which you should do as a journalist if you organize a rally and then report on it. Could be considered one. You're certainly supposed to let people know. Seems like it might be one. Ethics, man. Yeah. What are those?

Yeah. And if you're a fascist organizer, you should probably let people know that too before you report on a fascist gathering and don't mention any of the fascism, which he did not. Now, also in fairness to the Daily Caller, they polled Kessler's articles and ended the relationship with him once it became very clear to the entire world that Jason Kessler was a Nazi. I'm fascist. Well, because he was an open Nazi and so they're just a wink, wink, nod, nod, Nazi like Shapiro. Yes.

And that's... We'll be getting into the wink, wink, nod, nod part a couple of points in this, but that is an important thing is that like these guys, their whole goal is to get the rest of the right on board with them and essentially poll moderate conservatives further to the right. And there's a substantial amount of evidence that that's worked. I mean, Laura Ingram just got on Fox News and made comments about how like essentially immigration is changing the nature of the country and we're losing our culture and stuff. The quote was like, and we didn't vote for this.

Yes. Which actually 53% of us did. The majority. So, a little bit back to some history. Right after that march that Jason Kessler covered in The Daily Caller next month in June of 2017, Kessler started a Facebook group to try to plan the Unite, the right rally. And he started going around online and in person to a variety of different fascist activist groups. He made contact with Richard Spencer, Matthew Heimbach of the Traditional Workers Party,

the League of the South. He also became a member of the Proud Boys, which is a group funded and founded by Vice Co-Founder Gavin McEnnis. Now, Jason Kessler's goal seemed to have been to make himself a bridge between the disparate wings of the alt-right. He basically wanted to be like the central spoke in the Nazi wheel. That's kind of how he was trying to set himself up as. And that was the goal of the Unite, the right rally. It was a heady time to be a fascist. It was a heady time to be a fascist activist because Donald Trump had just gotten elected.

The alt-right was in the news and these guys kind of figured, well now is the time for us to tip our hands and to get into politics and just see where the waters are. So they were hoping that Unite the Right would be like a coming out party for the political far, far, far fascist right. It's the debutante ball of the Nazis. Exactly. It was the Nazi debutante ball and of course it was an incredibly bloody shit show. That's what they're good at. Yeah, that's what Nazis, that's the only thing Nazis do. And at the time it was widely seen as a disaster for the white national movement or that was debatable.

It was ultimately a disaster for Kessler who got dropped from the daily wire and disavowed as a proud boy when he became famous for being a racist. There was a court case levied against him which is still in process, Signs vs. Kessler. It's basically alleges that Kessler and other organizers including Richard Spencer and Matthew Heimbach had been part of, quote, a direct conspiracy to commit violence. Now they obviously claimed this was a peaceful rally, it was just for political purposes, the things that they said online and discord and on Twitter, even in the open, sort of belayed that. The anti-com official Twitter, like right before Charlottesville, tweeted a picture of Hitler

and several leading Nazis in an open-topped car. And the text on the image read, get in loser, we're invading Charlottesville. Seems like a pretty clear statement of intent. Yeah, Hitler in a truck with a bunch of Nazis around him. He's definitely not going anywhere for like a... They're not going shopping. Yeah, a wreath lane. Hitler didn't go places to not be violent.

Yeah, so one of the saving graces of the modern fascist movement, at least from the perspective of the rest of us who aren't fascists, is that they kind of lack in self-control. They're obsessed with violence and racism and they have trouble hiding it well. That doesn't stop them from trying. They have a focus on what they call entryism, which is basically trying to find ways to get normal right-wingers on board with their extreme ideas. Yeah, redpilling is another term you'll hear used for it.

And there's one of the Discord channels leaked to Unicorn Riot was hashtag Beltway Bigots, which is a chat room for DC and Virginia-based. Bigots. Here's a quote from Unicorn Riot sort of summing up those conversations. Local Charlottesville Unite the Right Organizer Jason Kessler repeatedly posts in Beltway Bigots about his intention at various events to try and provoke anti-fascists into a violent confrontation that could be spun as an attack against regular conservatives. So that's their goal with these marches.

And here's a direct quote from Kessler himself. We're going to be triggering antifa to protest and force the alt light's hand. Just wear your MAGA hats and blend in as proud boys. It'll be fun. So their stated goal is to blend in as more moderate conservatives so that if there are fights with antifa, it looks to mainstream conservatives like basically radical communists are ganging up on normal conservatives. And it serves the dual purpose of putting the alt light in a situation where they're suddenly in violence and then it creates that us versus them group thing to tell me.

It activates radicalizes them. Yeah, and it also makes it easier for the fascists to go out and march in public. That's being usually clever. Yeah, yeah. Here's a quote from a user in one of these channels who said, I love larping as a normal Trump bro, not even kidding. It allows me to feel kind of normal rather than a revolutionary. Of course, I never deny being a white nationalist, which again, they'll admit white nationalism because they think they can get away with that right now, which I guess maybe they can. Here's another quote from Kessler in the planning.

Bring your MAGA hats if you've got them. If antifa fucks with us, it'll look like average Trump supporters and alt light are under attack. So on July 11th, 2017, Jason Kessler went to a Charlottesville town hall to talk about Unite the Right and make it clear he was not associated with the loyal white knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who just toasted a rally in Charlottesville. He said, I didn't want them here. As a note, he's going to be marching with the KKK today. So he's clearly no longer disavowing them.

But on June 22nd in a private discord chat, 11 days after he disavowed the KKK, Jason Kessler said this, the Confederate flag is the best optics because it's beloved by legions of Southerners who are on the doorsteps of becoming just like us if we can move them beyond heritage, not hate. So again, like they know they can't, they know marching with swastikas is a bad idea, but they figure if I march with a Confederate flag, then I can get people who maybe aren't full on Nazis, but who, you know, are proud of their Confederate heritage for some reason on board with my Nazis. I think he's underestimating Southern manners.

What do you mean? The heritage not hate people don't like fighting. Well, I mean, that's optimistic then. I hope so. Not all of them, but definitely there's definitely a manners system in place that the ugly fighting offends. Well, in that, they do talk a lot about how they should represent themselves and how they should sort of present themselves to the public. Like there's a lot of focus on not dressing like soldiers, which they were early on, not wearing like military body armor, not wearing camouflage.

A lot of people focus on like wear white polo shirts, dress nicely, because then you will look like a nice polite member of society. And again, it's all about entryism. That's smart. Because after, after Charlottesville last year, I was campaigning with Fort Northam in Roanoke, and I had a lot of people who had been moderate Republicans who were like, well, that was just really ugly. So we're going to vote Democrat for governor this time around because we don't want this kind of thing happening again.

And it was the optics of provoking violence and bad manners, if you will. So that was getting them to distance themselves from it. Do you find that those glowing, or maybe not glowing, those sort of New York Times trend pieces about, you know, look at this Nazi with this nicely tailored suit and like this trendy haircut. Do those sort of aid them in this quest for better optics? Yes, that's very important to them. So there were, there were in addition to all these discord chats, there was a Facebook chat, very long one that went over the course of a couple of weeks, that was also leaked by Unicorn Riot.

And it, it was the planning for this rally that we're going to. And in it, they talk about their frustration with getting mainstream media outlets to talk to them. Like a lot of these guys, a number of them mentioned having connections to InfoWars, but they're clearly interested in getting respectable news outlets to cover their beliefs. Which I think it's like the NPR recently interviewed Jason Kessler, and essentially let him talk for like three minutes about the stuff that he believes, which is exactly what he wants, and what the New York Times gave them was exactly what they wanted. It legitimizes it.

Yeah, they want people to, they want respectable coverage. They do want to be a mainstream political party. You'll hear regularly conversations where they're basically saying, the police are not on our side yet. We have to be careful until we're in control. You know, like it's, it's this understanding that if they play nice enough, long enough, they think they can gain functional political power. So yeah. Well, this has been the rights, conservative rights strategy for the last 30 years.

If you look at the origins of the moral majority and the Auburn Avenue theology people, you get, when you have people who want to create a theocracy out of America, they want to take on mainstream avenues and like take it on step by step and get themselves legitimized and accepted into those worlds. And, and honestly, a lot of them are just straight up stealing from Antonio Gramsci's theories of like seven spheres of cultural influence and like we have to treat it like trench warfare and we're going to, we're going to take over this media. We're going to take over this.

We're going to take over the church. We're going to take over this and like slowly gain ground. And I think what these guys are trying to do is essentially, because you're talking more like the sort of Christian right, hard right conservatives. I think these guys are trying to hijack that essentially. Yeah, this is the blueprint. Yeah. And there's a big question within these groups about how openly racist to be.

The real subject of debate among racists is like how clear can we make it that we're fascists? Like I found a brainstorming thread in the anti-com channel where they were trying to figure out like a logo for their organization. And one of them suggested a design that included little swastikas and a person responded, people will compare us to that then and normies know like Nazis. Other users agree. One said for sure we ought to steer away from anything that can be interpreted as Nazi symbolism because that's going to be exactly what they are looking for.

Another person said have to hide the power level. You can't red pill normies by shoving 1488 in their faces. That's a really common phrase, hide the power level. What does that mean? It's a reference to Dragon Ball Z because these guys are giant fucking nerds. I say this is a giant fucking nerd. But yeah, it's a reference to Dragon Ball Z containing their hidden, this is not even my final form.

Right. And again, this is taking a play out of the Christian rights playbook that's been developed for the last 30 years. The cool youth pastor who kind of walks kids into that. Like hey, if you come to youth group, we're going to watch movies and play Halo. We're going to charm everybody and then we're going to turn up the heat and boil the frogs in the water. And before you know it, you're protesting outside an abortion clinic or something insane like that. Well, and when we get on the subject of especially like the nerdy language these guys use, that brings us to another topic that's really interesting to me, which is the gamification of street violence and protesting,

which is really big among far right circles. So a lot of these people, like I have some recorded chats that I found on 8chan from like, as early as like two or three weeks after the election, where people were lamenting like the end of the election and like, I never feel as important as I felt when I was like making these memes that were spreading and like, felt like I was taking part in this culture of movement. Well, yeah. Welcome to Hell, kid.

Those kids and that energy is exactly what these movements are trying to co-opt, and they've done it in a variety of different ways. The Proud Boys are probably, which is again that group founded by Gavin McGinnis, have probably done the best job of this. By the way, he got banned from Twitter today. He sure did get banned from Twitter today. The Proud Boys' whole organizational structure is based in part around whether or not you've been in a violent fight.

So to be a first degree Proud Boy or whatever, you have to declare online via YouTube or something that you're a Proud Boy and a Western chauvinist and you believe in the supremacy of Western culture, yada, yada, yada. Then you have to promise not to masturbate, which is key. You don't want to get rid of your real energy. Yes, you want to contain that. Can I have sex?

And they can masturbate if a woman is in the room who is consenting. You've specified that, but they cannot masturbate just for their own pleasure. This is so specific. It is. Imagine your shitty ideology having a masturbation clause. Welcome to the right-wing circles of Christianity. Yeah, not even kidding. I was like, oh no, that sounds... That sounds pretty standard.

And then after you've declared your Western chauvinism and promise not to masturbate, basically the best way to get, I think, fourth degree or whatever, is you have to either be arrested for the cause or be involved in a serious fight. And they pretend that that's not what they want. This is a consolation for having been involved in something so horrible. But you also, the only way to progress in ranks is to be involved in street actions that get violent. And so it is gamifying. It's like giving you a little achievement. It's like now you've been in a street fight, you move up a level.

You get to... I'm gonna give you a hug. Yeah. Giving you cookies for violence. Yeah. And there are extremist groups, I should note, have been using video games and video game imagery for quite some time. There's an ISIS-made mod for Grand Theft Auto, where you blow up American soldiers. During the start of the Ukrainian Civil War, there was this famous propaganda video,

I, Russian Occupy, that went viral, and it was a mash-up of a pro-Russian rant and a recruiting video with graphics that made it look like the opening to a Call of Duty game. So this is not, this is not like a new thing. And the, like I said, like the Lion of Europe video that the guy mentioned is red-pilling him, had a shitload of video game imagery in it, because they are trying to make you feel like the protagonist of one of these games. Well, one of the problems here too is, and you see this with Muslim radicalization, where YouTube doesn't really have any locks in terms of content,

and so the suggested Play Next Auto feature will get people down rabbit holes, which is why, like, if you have kids and you just let them sit on the iPad and, like, watch YouTube videos, they'll eventually get into, like, really sketchy territory, because there will be, like, parody videos made of common kids' shows that will just auto-play, and it'll eventually be, like, really graphic, horrific sexual content, and with, like, Teletubbies fucking each other, and, like... Like Peppa Pig getting decapitated. Yeah, and it's all because it's set on autoplay, and just, like, the, like, associative algorithm

will just send you down a really dark rabbit hole really fast. Uh, hey, we're gonna continue our talk about Nazis, and eventually actually go out and yell at some of them, and then tell you what that was like. But first, here's some ads. 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 not in the gun badass way. He'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. Okay, so we were talking about sort of like how silly a lot of the imagery around these guys are. Did you all see that picture of the green Keck warrior from the Portland protests? Yeah, that was what I was referring to when I said third rate Ninja Turtle. Yeah, third rate Ninja Turtle, but this is part of the reason that they dress like this is because they think it's less threatening and it's less overtly like violent than wearing, again, body armor that makes you look like a militiaman. He looks like your local LARPing suburban dad. Yeah, and he is in fact, if you look at his pants, I guarantee you he got those from his LARPing days or whatever. Like those are fantasy LARPing pants.

He got them at Renfair. I guarantee you he has recently had a conversation in which he explained just how many pounds of pressure it takes to break a human neck. Oh yeah, yeah. Only 10, right? Yeah. It's like 10 pounds. That's not how it works. So I don't want to get too deep in the woods on weird internet culture, but you can see the words Keck written on his shield in a stylized form, which is obviously that entered the internet because it was how gamers in Korea would type out LOL and it sort of became a part of internet culture. And then 4chan turned it into doing it from doing it to the LOLs to doing it for the Kecks or whatever.

And then this morphed into the idea of Keckistan, a fake country that was mostly a joke, but also not quite. Keckistan, and not everybody who talks about Keckistan or whatever is a far right nationalist, but Keckistan has a flag. You will see these flags at protests regularly. Maybe not today, but you saw it in Portland, you saw it in Berkeley, and that flag looks like this, right? Oh, I see. We'll have the pictures up on our website, behindthebastards.com. That is a green version of the Nazi naval flag. Huh.

So this is well known around... What's the icon in the center? Keck. It's like done to look like a palindrome. Yeah, the flag of Keckistan, so to speak, is exactly the same, with just the colors inverted as the naval battle flag for the Third Reich. So this gets into what I was saying about how a lot of the outright fascist activists are frustrated with some of the people on the alt-right, or the alt-light, as they call them. I found one chat in a Discord channel where someone said, The Keckistan meme has gotten too dumb to be useful, it doesn't trigger anyone now, you'd be surprised at how many people flying the flags, don't even know it's a variation on the Kriegsmarine flag.

And then there's a lot of debate, because some people will say, Well, no, the fact that, like, that flag is out there is good, and, like, on the whole, I think that this thing is, like, a positive optics for us. So they're very much undecided about this, but it's interesting how... I think most of the people that you would see carrying that flag would tell you they're not Nazis, I'm not a fascist, but they are carrying a flag that's a rip-off of a Nazi flag. Do they understand that? I think a lot of them do. I think some of them don't, because it's gotten obscure enough and it's spread enough around the internet that some people who would never consider themselves Nazis still use that flag, but that is where it started. I'm just curious, do you think that that's what they want? Do they want this to become just a popular symbol where mainstream Nazis, you know, like, fly it without really knowing what it means?

So I think what they want is, it makes it easier for them to convert these kids later. If these people are already used to being out in the street, they're already hanging out when they're at protest around Nazis and they're flying this flag, it's like, you're one step closer. So they want to normalize it so that it can become a dog whistle when they want to activate it? Yes. Pakistan makes a good recruiting ground. Exactly. And it's all about, like, they recognize, and they don't like how small they are. There's somewhere between 200 and 400 Nazi activists, maybe less than 200 expected today, but that's just because these people are out racists. Groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, who were again at the Portland and Berkeley protests, they are better at hiding their fascism and better at hiding their racism.

And I think as a result, they're a lot more dangerous. But Kekistan and stuff is part of, like, it's a recruiting tool. And there are a lot of conversations in the Discord about, like, trying to harden up these kids, trying to, like, give them classes on how to deal with the police and train them to fight. The Proud Boys' initiation is you have to get punched by a bunch of other Proud Boys until you can name five breakfast cereals. And the stated goal is to, yeah, it's really dumb. If you find videos on it, it's the saddest thing in the world. Because they don't know how to punch. They don't know how to punch. Really look it up if you want to laugh.

But their stated goal for it is they want to train these kids how to focus while they're stressed out and in pain. It takes the Marine Corps three months to get that to you, so I don't think getting punched in a circle, name a breakfast cereal, actually. I don't think so either. But I also think that they're on the path to figuring out how to get better at this. And they're not just punching each other in a circle. They are showing up to protest where these kids are getting into fights and where they are gaining experience and functioning that way. Now, in terms of actual talk about terrorism, it's fairly mild on the Discord channels. They know that there's chances of being caught. But I have noticed that over the last couple of months that they were talking in the time after Charlottesville,

they got more open about talking about things like explosives. So I found one conversation on August 2nd where some guy was talking about legal explosives. And people immediately shut it down and told him that he was just like making them a magnet for the feds. But then a few weeks later, after Charlottesville and the same server, another user offered access to a library of 137 PDFs on how to manufacture explosives and received no pushback. Now, this did make the news once the chats got leaked and it got the Anticom server taken down. But it's interesting to me that in the weeks and months after Charlottesville, people got more and more comfortable among the fascist right with talking about explosives and terror attacks.

Do they use the word terrorism? Are they aware that that's what they're doing? I think so, because on December 19th, 2017, several members of the Traditional Workers Party Discord got into a conversation about how they would have carried out a Dylan Roof-style mass shooting at a black church without being caught. Yeah, I've got the whole conversation here. One guy said I would have parked a mile away. Another guy said same and ride a bike to the location. Another guy says I would have mapped out all the CCTV cameras first on a recon op, then planned parking accordingly. Another guy said that too. I follow the same MO when I go to a rally. The other guy said me too, man.

So they were basically talking about what they would have done to have carried out that massacre and then gotten away with it. Talking about this last night, do you think that a lot of these people are former veterans? Do you think they actually have any combat experience? Some of them. I'm not completely sure whether there are a significant number of veterans involved. I'm sure there are some. Or if the people using a lot of this jargon and stuff, because they use a lot of talk of military-style tactics, they talk about exfil points or exfiltration, how to get out. They talk about high-value targets. They refer to them as HVTs. The thing is that's very jargon-y and I'm not completely clear if there's actually a veteran in there writing their orders,

because it's not quite structured the right way. But it's also the use of jargon that you find among people who are like military-adjacent and want to feel really tough. Like their dad was a Marine or a cop or something, and they'll be talking about HVTs because it makes them feel like they're badass. So they're fangirling. I'm really not sure it could be just a veteran, but like a veteran who had a job like mine where they worked a 6-to-6 desk job and want to feel like they were a badass. Or they could just be one of these like military fanboy-nazis. They're like larpers. Yes.

They are Nazis, but they're larping being tough and doing tactics and stuff. They don't think they could actually hack it in the military, but they want all of the prestige and fun. So they think they could hack it in the military, or if they were in the military and in a job like mine where they didn't see action, they think they could hack it as a grunt, but they've never been tested. There are, however, some of them who have been. Some of them who are combat veterans, although that's not the norm. And in fact, it's more common around groups like the Oath Keepers and the 3%ers, those militias, which they hate. What does the 3%ers mean?

The idea is that only 3% of Americans would be ready to like defend their country and defend the Constitution. And it's supposedly a group of veterans who stand ready to defend free speech and whatnot. Though they do have some of the same problems the Proud Boys do of having people in their organization who are like, I would have joined the military, but PT was hard. Yeah, and they also get infiltrated by fascists and stuff. But in general, they're treated with contempt by the fascists because they call them oath cucks. Because they will do stuff like stand-around antify protests and try to build a wall between them and the police. And they masturbate, so.

And they probably masturbate, so that means they're right out in terms of protecting Western culture. How much messy, petty infighting and drama is there in this community? Huge amounts. They sound like a lot of caddy high schoolers in a lot of ways. And one of the things that is again makes them easier to fight is that they have no sense of in-group loyalty whatsoever. When Unite the Right was a disaster and someone died and there was a lot of blood, they abandoned Jason Kessler like that. Like he has become very marginalized and insulted and mocked. And the same thing happened with Matthew Heimbach when he got arrested for beating up his father-in-law after having an affair with his father-in-law's wife.

He was made fun of and mocked and pretty much dropped by the community. No loyalty for their heroes. No loyalty for their heroes. And I should note that conversation we were going through with these guys, we're talking about how to carry out a Dylan Roof style shooting on a black church. One of the two members in that goes in discord by the name of Hopsturmführer Pepe. Hopsturmführer was a Nazi SS rank, it means essentially like Stormtroop leader. Hopsturmführer Pepe was also the guy who started Anticom, that group that was supposedly non-partisan and non-political and contained people of all political persuasions. He was the guy talking about how to carry out and get away with an attack on a black church.

And here's a picture of him. He's a baby. He's a baby. Oh my god. We will not be posting the picture of him because I don't want to dox this guy because I'm not 100% sure it's him. But there is a Trump stamp on the side of his computer tower and he looks like the guy. He is a babyface child. These are the guys that you could really use just because their egos are so fragile.

Yes. To be like, well, you could be the great leader and then cause a lot of discord and like keep things disorganized because they're all fighting each other. Yeah, and also like it's hard to say, it's probably like the conversation they're saying, Karen talking about how they'd get away with an attack. I'm going to guess this guy's never going to do anything. But like this kid looks like he's maybe 18. He's got no hair on his face. He looks like a little baby. He looks like all the mass murders I've ever seen on the news.

Exactly. That's what's scary because there is, this guy does look like exactly the kind of person in age group and there's nothing stopping him from getting an AR-15. What's the Venn diagram overlap with incels in these guys? They do not, like none of these guys identify as incels that I have found. And there's not a lot of talk about them here because the incels are, for one thing, a lot of incels are not white. They are like, like Elliot Roger wasn't a white kid. He was obsessed with wanting to be and look white because he thought that those were the guys who get all the girls and you'll run into that along the incel community. But I think these guys would generally view those people as degenerates.

Although they do share some of the same goals, I think incels also masturbate a lot so they couldn't be proud boys. Yeah, that's the problem. Yeah. So Anticom, the leader of this baby-faced Nazi, was a member of that claimed not to be a political group that included, yeah. He looks like a half-baked puppy. These guys got kicked off of Discord after Charlottesville in September in part because of like the bomb stuff that was being shared on their Discord chat. But from February to September of 2017, their members posted more than 90,000 messages and they were a prominent part of the first Unite the Right rally. Their Twitter account is still active. They don't seem to be doing a lot right now.

But I do think the basic ideas behind this group have sort of been funneled into the activism of the proud boys and groups like Patriot Prayer. They've just done a better job of hiding the racism. But it's important to know that, like, there's a lot of movement between all these groups. And Anticom got shut down. All of the Anticom guys started talking in the traditional Workers' Party Discord. And, you know, while Patriot Prayer and like Gavin McInnes of the proud boys said, don't attend the first Unite the Right rally. Ordered his people not to. Posted a big article saying, we're not part of the alt-right. We don't associate with the alt-right. A ton of proud boys showed up at Charlottesville the last time. They might be there this time. The guy who's the leader of their, quote, militant order in the proud boys, the fraternal order of alt-nights, which Gavin McInnes says has nothing to do with the alt-right.

A lot of them were there at Charlottesville. So it's, again, they say we have no affiliation with these groups and the leaders will disavow them. But you look at what their people do. Can the bad guys just not be the lamest version of themselves for like 20 seconds? Like, we're in the dumbest timeline. We're in the dumbest timeline. And what sucks is that, like, being the lamest version of the bad guys might work. Yeah, that's why this is the dumbest timeline. The Third Reich would never have these guys because they have no dignity. And the fact that that makes them more dangerous is really stupid. Yeah.

Because it makes the police are more likely to be sympathetic with them. And because moderates are more likely to be sympathetic with them. Because they look like kicked puppies. Yeah, they look like kicked little puppies rather than like fucking Reinhardt-Hydrick marching down the street or whatever. I think that you could make a, I mean, it would probably be a whole other big pile of research and a whole, maybe even like a whole other podcast. But you could talk about how, you know, you said a lot of these guys identified as former Democrats who voted whoever and then like got switched. And they were, a lot of these guys were probably pretty centrist as it were. Because they just, they were centrist and they hated, like a lot of them will talk about how they didn't like banks and they didn't like capitalism or whatever. But it's because they think the Jews are behind it.

And so they started out being more moderate and then they realized that there was this whole ideology Taylor built to people who were paranoid about all that shit. Yeah. So they just found their people basically? They found their people. It took them a little while. But the 2016 election really gave them an opportunity to get out in public with this shit. The first Unite the Right rally, as I said, was meant to be like a political coming out party for the fascist right. It seems to have been their high watermark so far. But there's disturbing trends that they're winning both in terms of like the further right tilt that you've seen among a lot of conservative commentators and stuff like the NPR talking to Jason Kessler.

Because they let him talk about his theories on like, you know, the data says this about these are all the most intelligent races. And one of the things Kessler did that they'll usually do, they'll never say white people are the most intelligent race because they say they're not white supremacists. They'll say Ashkenazi Jews are the smartest and then it's Asians and then it's white people and then everybody else comes on. But that gives them again, they can couch it in science. They can say, I'm not a white supremacist. What science? Yeah. Well, it's never any good science. It's like phrenology, but like they'll be like, facts don't have feelings.

Well, they're not facts, but because you said the phrase facts don't have feelings. Now we're debating on your terms. Yeah. And they'll talk about like IQ tests and stuff and ignore the fact that like, well, no, actually you can give someone a 20 minute coaching session that raises their IQ score by 20 points, which proves that the IQ is not a measure of intelligence, but as a measure of your ability to, yeah. That's been debunked like 20 years ago. It's constantly debunked. Yeah. It's like, it's like, it's one type of intelligence.

Yeah, the polygraph. It's like how polygraph is still used and stuff. But like your average person is like, oh, yeah, the polygraph is not that accurate. Yeah. The whole government is still polygraph people. But you can heck it. Yeah. It's frustrating bad science, but it gives them camouflage and it's all about camouflage. And that's part of why the Nazis were going to be seeing today.

I don't think are the most dangerous ones because they're just not disciplined enough to camouflage well. Gavin McInnes has done a better job of camouflaging, although he's still got banned from Twitter. The Patriot Prayer guys, Joey gets in there better. It's so hard to do. It is. I mean, it's really hard. For a white guy. Yeah.

Speaking of Jason Hessler and speaking of Twitter, here's what he said less than a week after the first Unite the Right rally on Twitter. He essentially said that Heather Hayer was a horrible, disgusting communist. Quote, communists have killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time. Now his tweet ignited a firestorm of condemnation. And this is the shit that I think NPR should have brought up. They shouldn't have said, what do you believe?

They should have said, after Charlottesville, you said this. What is your plan for the current rally? Explore yourself. I'm frustrated at the bad journalism of just letting this guy talk about his shit. Because this is not the kind of thing even other fascists weren't willing to stand up for him. Richard Spencer, after this tweet, came out, disavowed him and said, I will no longer associate with Jason Hessler and no one should. Hayer's death was deeply saddening.

Payback is a morally reprehensible idea. Because she was a white woman. But also because these guys are scared, they don't want to be seen as culpable to the death. Because Spencer's part of the lawsuit against the organizers of United the Right. So he's scared too. Okay. Yeah. They're all fucking scared.

You can't take much more bad press after getting punched in the face on television. Yes, and we will get into the Nazi punching debate in a little bit here. I want to read a quote from Matt Novak of Gizmodo, who described sort of the general fallout from Jason Kessler tweeting that Heather Hayer deserved to die because communism, quote, some so-called alt-right activists said that Kessler is a secret Barack Obama supporter and even wanted Hillary Clinton to win. Basically the worst things you can say in the white supremacist community about other neo-Nazis. Others said that Heather Hayer herself was some kind of government agent.

So that's, again, like these, it's, this is one of the saving graces that we have, is that these guys have not gotten good at keeping one unified line, which the original Nazis were fucking great at. Everybody stuck to Hitler and everybody stuck to the same story. For his part, Kessler posted a tweet the next day saying, I was hacked last night. I apologize for the tweet sent out from my account last night. Yeah.

At least he didn't blame Ambien. Well, he did. Oh, no. Ambien makes everyone race this game. It's a little known side effect. He deleted that tweet very shortly after and then put up another one saying, a two-part tweet saying, I repudiate the heinous tweet that was sent from my account last night.

I've been under a crushing amount of stress and death threats. I'm taking Ambien, Xanax, and I had been drinking last night. Sometimes I wake up having done strange things I don't remember. So, you called it. Did Ambien reply to him? No. No, they did not. Just Roseanne.

Okay. But there were even jokes among the Nazis about his comment and Roseanne's comment and about like, maybe we should all just say we're on Ambien. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Wow. Free advertising for Ambien, though. Yeah, Ambien. Definitely.

It turns you into a Nazi. Racism cover. I guess whatever the competitor of Ambien is should really. At least our drug doesn't make you a Nazi. Whiskey helps you sleep and doesn't make you a Nazi. I'll get back now. Having trouble sleeping? Try alcoholism. Doesn't lead to Nazism.

They are sometimes correlated. The Nazism came first, though. Side effects include. So again, after Unite the Right 1.0, a lot of the groups that were involved in planning had collapsed. The traditional workers' party fell apart back in March when Heimbach was arrested for assaulting David Parrot, the husband of his mistress and spokesperson for the TWP and also his father-in-law.

This is his stepmom. Yeah, this is his stepmom. He was fucking his stepmom. This is some messy shit. This is like Shakespeare level of stepmom. Yeah. And just like, come on guys, don't play into your own stereotypes of being incestuous and weird.

Just don't masturbate. That doesn't lead to weird shit at all. Yeah, and there was a lot of the Nazis sort of recognized this at the time. I found one user who summed up a lot of people's opinions when he said, seems like if we had higher standards, this whole shit show with Heimbach wouldn't have happened. What did I say earlier about dignity? Maybe if you hadn't been Nazis, that would have been part of it. So yeah, a lot of these groups have fallen apart.

Vanguard America went to the ground and split up into new groups, including Patriot Front, the TWP collapse, Anti-Com collapse. But all of the people are still there. It's not worthwhile to focus too much on the names of most of these groups. Like right now, Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys are kind of the most ascendant in like the far right, the fascist right, street violence groups. But I'm sure they will collapse, but the people will still be there. And form another one.

Yeah. Yeah, they move very freely within these groups. It's frustrating, which gets me into the matter of how their tactics have evolved. Because this is what does concern me. Because as ridiculous as these people are, they have hit upon some good tactics for getting away with the shit that they do. At that Portland protest, I want to read you a quote from a frontline PBS correspondent who described Patriot Front and how they presented themselves at Portland.

I would say that it was perhaps a fascist rally in Portland, but not a white supremacist rally. And that's sort of a new wrinkle in the far right movement. So the groups that were in Portland, they wanted you to know, hey, look, we're not racist. And many of them have had leaders who were people of color. But they also said, hey, we're really into fascist characters like Pinochet. The first guy I met had a huge shirt on that said Pinochet did nothing wrong. And other people had shirts on that would say things like right wing death squad. And so these people are what it would call multicultural, multi-ethnic fascist groups

that laud characters like Pinochet. And that just happened to be like 97.8% white. Yeah. Yeah. They just happened to be the vast majority of white and they happened to have been caught online, sent a bunch of racist shit. Yeah. Almost all dudes.

I have a question about when are these groups his prayer in their name? Yeah. Do they have a prayer report to be Christians? Yes. And they were saying that they were praying like they were having a prayer rally in Portland. So do they have their churches like disbarred them or given like withdrawn their membership or given them any kind of church discipline? They're not.

Did the evangelical right come out and disavowed Trump during all his mania? Yeah. No. I haven't heard of any disavowing. I wouldn't expect it. I'm just curious if there's been any internal rejection of them from the Christian community. I am sure there have been churches that have rejected them particularly in Portland, but these guys are not affiliated with a particular church.

They just claim to be a group of patriotic anti-communist activists. So that's again, that's the new camouflage the far right has. The people we're going to be seeing today are people who will say they're white nationalists. Most of the movement has moved away from that and say white nationalism isn't a selling point. Let's call ourselves anti-communists. Well, that goes, yeah, the Reagan era. Huh?

Yeah. So we're going to get more into the strategies with police that these people have evolved and the wisdom of whether or not it's a good idea to punch a Nazi. But first, ads. 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 not in the good and bad ass way. He'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 happen. 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. So I want to talk a little bit more about, again, how connected these groups are.

Because one of the things that they are doing to try and protect themselves and save their movement is to claim, like Patriot Prayer will claim, we have nothing to do with Jason Kessler. We have nothing to do with the traditional workers party. We have nothing to do with Charlottesville or any of those people. Even though Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer has been photographed and found, talking with a shitload of people who were at the first Unite the Right rally. It's also worth noting that like Pinochet was the dictator of Chile and one of the things he did. He had a lot of communists executed and including a lot of people thrown from helicopters.

Now, among the Patriot Prayer people, you saw a number of shirts with like flinging people from helicopters on them and with like Pinochet did nothing wrong on them and right wing death squads and stuff because Pinochet had right wing death squads to kill communists. So they are willing to harken back to that. And even a year or so before these guys were very active, the Pinochet obsession was obvious on the far right. Like in the chats from these various groups, I found more than a dozen references to throwing communists out of helicopters, mostly on anti-com, which I think is kind of an intellectual precursor in a lot of ways to how Patriot Prayer is marketing themselves right now. And there were also numerous references to right wing death squads and to Pinochet.

So again, these groups will all try to say we're different from the fascists who marched in Charlottesville. We're different, but they're not different. They talk about the same things. They have a lot of the same members in common. Well, this is like the conservative Christian thing because they're all decentralized and they have so many splinter groups, but they all believe the same stuff that they're able to disavow each other and still promote the same ideas. Yes, and they are, again, one of the things that's really frustrating is that a lot of the journalists covering these people do not do their due diligence. So they'll talk to Gavin McKinnon about the Proud Boys and he will say, you know, we're not a violent group. We don't start fights, but we will finish them.

The violence you see in the media is us defending ourselves from lunatics who want us dead for no discernible reason. But if you actually do a little bit of digging, you can find other quotes from Gavin McKinnon, including this one from a right-wing Canadian website called The Rebel, quote, we're the only ones fighting these guys and it's fun. When they go low, go lower, mace them back, throw bricks at their heads, let's destroy them. We've been doing it for a while now and I got to say it's really invigorating. Well, my question is, what role do you think the media should be playing? Like, how can you report on these people correctly? I mean, okay, so there's no way to say this without sounding like a little bit narcissistic.

But like what I am trying to do in my reporting on them is I am not trying to report on their beliefs. I'm not trying to read out quotes about here's what they believe about the world. I'm going to read you like a page of statistics about what they think about IQs and race. Because that would bring the debate to their terms. Yes, what is important to talk about is what these people believe, what they say and what they do in the streets, because you can't just ignore them because they are out there, they are all marching and they are hurting people. If you're going to cover them, you have to do your legwork. You can't just say Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys deny any involvement with a violent group and say that they're not,

you know, they're a multi-racial group or whatnot. You have to look at the quotes from these guys where they say, incredibly racist shit. Like there's a, you can even find it on their website. So in that article Gavin wrote called We Are Not Alt Right, he had a quote where he said, there are no racial requirements to be in the Proud Boys, there are no special rules for black Proud Boys. But then he said, this overrides anything previously published about black Proud Boys. Which means that at some point he had special rules if you were going to be black and a Proud Boy. It takes very cursory research to find out all of the back chatter sort of

and all of the times where these guys contradict each other and where they are clearly racist. But you have to do that research, otherwise you're just letting them present themselves. So you have to zoom out a little bit further than you would do for a specific event based reporting and look at the context of the entire worldview and the conversation that's come beforehand. And you need to pay journalists more so that they have time to do that research. Yes. You need a journalist who will go at them kind of in a style referred to as kind of like bulldogging. Like just keep hitting them with things like on this day, at this time on this website,

you said this, what do you have to say for yourself? And then like as they're trying to spin it away when they try to pivot, go for another one. Well, on this day, on this session, like have your ammunition. High school debate style. Yeah, yeah. Have the receipts. Yeah. Make them answer, well, it is basic debate tactics.

If you make them answer you, they're losing. Yeah, exactly. Like that's what you have to do. You don't come to them and say, well, like NPR did, tell me what you believe. You come and say, you tweeted this about Heather Hayer. Are you still saying it was Ambien? Like you said, because again, we have thousands of things that Jason Kessler posted in these quotes, including an enormous amount of really racist shit, which I'm not going to read out here.

But just type in racial slurs into the search database that Unicorn Riot has provided for these guys quotes, and you will find them talking about racist shit. It is not hard. It's very easy to find. As in specific racist slurs? You type in any slur, you'll find a bunch of conversations. Or you just type in his name. He was mad dimension on the forum.

So if you type that into the search thing that Unicorn Riot provides, you can find everything he said. And you can find plenty of evidence that Jason Kessler is as racist as someone helped me with a... As the day is long. Oh, there we go. Okay, okay. We are in the south, so... So has NPR done a counter balancing interview? If they gave him three minutes of spare time, did they give someone else three minutes of spare time that should have that?

No, but they did during the same day kind of equate Black Lives Matter as like the opposite of these guys in a way that basically implied that the Black Lives Matter is as extreme as these guys, instead of just being like, hey, we'd like to stop being shot. That'd be fantastic. Yeah, no. Black Lives Matter is nowhere near as radical as Malcolm X's followers or anything. They're very, very... Well, even Malcolm X wasn't that radical.

Like, it shouldn't be radical to just say we don't want to be shot anymore. Yeah, it's not that complicated. But it is. So there's a lot of false equivocation happening. And that's exactly the point of a group like Anticom and what I think is their mental descendants' patriot prayer. That's their goal. And their goal is to say Antifa is not an organization. There's no national Antifa.

There are different cities and whatnot, but everyone should be antifascist. It's not... And if you... I started interviewing antifascist activists right before the election and a little bit after. And this was back before Antifa was a word most people knew. And there were a few dozen of these people, really, who were active around the world outside of a place like the UK where it was common. It was not... It's not an organization that exists to further an ideology.

It is grassroots organizations that have started because there's Nazis marching. And what the Nazis are trying to do is say, no, no, no, no, no, these people are communist activists. And so we're not fascist activists. We're anti-communists. They're essentially trying to turn around... They're trying to make themselves look reactionary against a group that doesn't have a coherent ideology and is itself reactionary. Yes. And they're doing that in order to gain the sympathy of the police and moderate conservatives.

Because that is what worked in Germany in the 1930s. That's why Hitler came to power in large degree, because the German centrists and German conservatives... And we go over this on our episode about the non-Nazi bastards behind Hitler, so I won't labor the point too long. But I will say... Everybody should read True Believer, because it gets into all of this, and it's a real short book. And the death of democracy. But one of the points is that these guys are not ignorant about the history of the Nazi party. They have also done their reading on how Hitler rose to power, and they know what works.

They have the playbook. They have the playbook, and it's worked once before. So I think actually at this point, I do want to kind of go around the table and get sort of your expectations of everybody for how this protest is going to go today. Because probably in about an hour or so from now, we'll be face to face with the members of the fascist parties in the United States who are willing to call themselves white nationalists or fascists. So what do you expect? And let's start with Nick. I expect that they want us to start shit. I expect that they will be as inflammatory as possible.

They're going to say things. They're going to try to like make eye contact. They're going to try to like draw us in. I will be interested to see what they chant. Because like one of the things that made the march in Charlottesville so startling to people with some of the like legitimately scary things they were chanting. Like just hearing the audio of those people chanting like blood and soil, blood and soil. Like that scared people. Jews will not replace us.

Yeah. Like I mean that one sounds lame-er. So I think that they're going to try to do stuff like that second one. Like Jews will not replace or whatever. They're going to try to be like as specifically insulting as possible to try to get someone to snap. And you, when we had a phone conversation prior to coming out here, you talked to me about something that those chants made you remember from your time at the Marine Corps. Right. So I will refer to the boot camp process in the Marine Corps' brainwashing, which not everybody likes because it's an ugly word.

But it is what it is. It's also a science fiction term. It is exactly what it is. In the Marine Corps, what one of the things that's intended in boot camp is to basically what they want is the military has no use for just a regular human personality with all of its chaos and disorder. So what they do is they strip out your personality through a lot of psychological crap and then they build a new personality that values order and authoritarianism. And then your old personality, depending on how strong you, your personality was to begin with, it grows back. Some people, it doesn't grow back. And those are the guys that like have a high end type for the next 40 years. Yeah.

And like treat their kids like their kids are at boot camp. And, you know, like I had a gun like that way. There was like a platoon, like a dinner or something, and his kids were standing in attention by the wall, like that kind of creepy shit. Those guys, their personality never grew back. The rest of us, our personalities grew back. And after a few years, the brainwashing starts to wear off, but you still have the basic frame of a very orderly authoritarian Marine. If you put a bunch of veterans in a room and give them basic instructions on how to do a task, none of them have ever done before. You will find a lot of times they still complete the task faster and more efficiently than a group of civilians who've gone through it once before.

And so what is this? How does this connect to the chanting? The chanting, one of the ways that you get people to sync up together is if you can make them say the same thing at the same time over and over again, it makes people feel like a group. We are heard creatures. If you make us all chant one, two, three, four, I love the Marine Corps over and over again, you, A, begin to believe the things you're saying and B, feel like a big piece of a unit. There's some biological evidence for that with like parasympathetic responses in terms of meditating with a group and chanting together, your body does get into like the same kind of rhythm and breathing pattern. It's call and response. And the chanting blood and soil, blood and soil isn't really that different from, you know, going on a run and then the person calling Cadence sings something and then everyone knows how to respond and they all respond. It makes you, I mean, people make fun of calling Cadence and stuff in the Marine Corps, but there's no doubt that it makes you feel like part of the team.

And it's a part of, you see it in the military, you see it in pep rallies in school where everybody's chanting their, whatever their team slogans are, and it works. It really works. It's a psychological tool. You'll probably try to do things like that and one of the ways to defeat that is either to make it hard for them to focus and frankly, white people aren't great at rhythm. So another thing to do is to chant over them and chant things that do the opposite of what they're trying to do, scare them. Like a chant that I would like to hear out there. I don't know if anybody could get it going, but a chant I would like to hear out there is we are many. We are few because one of the things they're very afraid of is out being outnumbered and having a thousand black people being like, there's a lot more of us and there are a few here will break that feeling of like.

Well, a lot of the old resistance chants from like the sixties have that kind of mindset, like the will overcome song, like that's the same kind of idea. You know, because we both come from that like church conservative background saying together in church, exact same thing. Hannah, you want to talk about your expectations for today? I'm not really sure what to expect. It depends on the numbers. But I do agree with Nick here that they really want to be seen as the victims and so they will try to provoke things that will make it look like they're the victims. And it's just schoolyard bully tactics. That's kind of what I'm anticipating. And the point is to not let them get a rise out of us. Yep. Bridget?

I'm not expecting that much. I think it's going to be a hundred of the guys that look first wave fascist. Yeah, I think it's going to be like very sunburned white people who like don't look scary at all. I don't think it's going to be as intimidating as maybe they are hoping to look. Well, because they're not open carrying this time. Correct. Yeah, I think ARs that'll help. Yeah, I think a city like DC, it's a very black city. It's a city where you don't, you don't fuck with people from DC. I think that all of the nonsense that you see in other places, I don't think any of that shit's going to fly here. I was really happy to hear it was going to be in DC because DC is used to protests and mass movements.

And the police here are equipped to deescalate things. Definitely. Like during Occupy, I was, you know, I went to Occupy, New York, a couple, you know, out on the west coast. DC was by far the most well managed in terms of police interactions because this is DC. There's a protest of some kind every weekend. The police, you know, I'm no big champion of the police, but the police, when it comes to, you know, big rallies and stuff like they know what they're doing. And so I think that if it was any other city, I would be worried, I would be concerned, I would be maybe even scared. I just think in DC, like this is my home, like I just know that we, we don't put up with that shit. And I would, you know, I would, I would love to see some of these guys like on the Metro with your average DC Metro ridership.

They thought that was really cute, that they wanted their own private Metro cars and they thought that that would fly here. Yeah, and you know what, you know what stopped it was Union. Yeah, no, the Union, the Metro Union was like hell no. Let's go back a little and explain that because there was rumors about a week or so ago, I think, that the DC Metro would essentially be giving three train cars to the protestors, to Klan's men essentially, and Nazi activists to sort of privately take them in and out of where they were going to march. And then the, the Metro Union was like, we will go on strike the whole weekend. Which like, they never go on strike. They'll put up with anything.

So if that's their limit, pretty good. And again, the first target of the Nazis in Germany was the trade unions. The first target before the Jews, before anybody. Yeah, so. Wait, what are you expecting? I'm expecting about 150 to 200 Nazis and activists. And my worst case scenario expectation is that the police will be jumpy, which again, I agree with Bridget, that's not as likely in DC as it was in Portland. The worst case scenario is, you know, the police start firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd.

I expect if there's violence, it will either be, so I've read all the planning chats for these guys. Jason Kessler, like one of the things he says over and over again is that if this gets violent, we're done as a movement. So Jason Kessler does not want today to be violent. But other members of his group talked regularly about hoping to get in fights with Antifa and hoping they have an excuse to be violent at this rally. They want to get their black belts. They want to get their, move up a degree. Although these guys aren't proud boys, although some of them might be, but they're not, the proud boys are not openly allowed to attend this event. But they still put a lot of cachet in being involved in fights.

So if there's violence, it's possible it'll start with the anti-fascist activists just getting too hot under the collar. There's also a bunch of wild cards among these guys, which does bring me to someone I want to bring up in terms of what scares me potentially about this rally. Does anybody know about Vasilios Pistolis? I've heard the name. He is a guy who showed up to unite the right one, and I think he marched with the traditional workers party. I don't know off the top of my head, but he was a member of a group called Adam Waffen, which is the German word for atomic weapons. And Adam Waffen is a fairly small group, but one of the more, they like, there's multiple murders associated with Adam Waffen.

They've killed a number of people and attempted, In the states? Yeah, in the US, and attempted to carry out terrorist attacks. Now, Vasilios Pistolis was one of the most violent people at the first United Right rally. There's at least three videos of him very clearly committing assault, like beating people with sticks. I think one person went up in the hospital because of the violence he did. But he was found at the time through the work of an activist, who I'm not going to name on this. It doesn't hide her involvement, but I don't want to add any harassment.

But an activist who was at Charlottesville and attacked at Charlottesville exposed this guy. He was an active duty United States Marine. And it took a surprising length of time for the Corps to separate this guy. And he's not the only member of the United States Armed Forces. One study that I found suggests that about one quarter of all active duty US soldiers have met a white nationalist while on duty. Like in the military. I actually met a like literally card-carrying member of the KKK when I was in the Marine Corps. A guy that was in my office.

He was like part of one of the other platoons and he tried to tell me that it was just a local community organization. It wasn't about racism anymore. So I told him that racism is a primitive caveman idea. And then he was an idiot for being one because I was trying to get him to fight me in my office. Since if there's a thing that I could have gotten away with when I was in the Marine Corps, it would have been beating the shit out of a KKK member as a black guy in my office. Like I could have been like, sir, it was a Nazi. What the fuck did you want me like, yeah.

That's all we're going to have for today. We're about to go as we record this. We're probably about 30 or 45 minutes out from reaching the protest location. So we're going to go do that. We need to grab some Doritos first. Yeah, we got to grab some Doritos, protest Doritos, and protest water. And then we're going to go march. And so the next episode that drops on Thursday will be us talking about that.

And we'll also talk a little bit about the history of punching Nazis and how well it tends to work historically. Not that any of us are planning to punch Nazis, but it is a subject of debate. But all of us know how to punch. All of us know how to punch. And this is the city where Richard Spencer was punched during the inauguration. That's right. And basically every guy at every radical house party I went to after that was like, hey baby, that was me. You know the guy's face was covered.

Every dude was taking better for it. I got 100 guys who claimed to have been the puncher. How adorable. Okay, well, for a look into the history of punching Nazis and whether or not that's a good idea because it's very much debatable. And for our after rally experiences, you will have to check in on Thursday when we will be recording all of that. Or when we will be airing all of that. We're already recording it. Time is a flat circle.

It's a relative concept. I'm Robert Evans. This has been Behind the Bastards. You can find us online at www.behindthebastards.com. You can find us on Twitter at Instagram at atbastardspod. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. See you guys soon. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, 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 and 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.