Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 886: Who are the Groypers?

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Who Are the 'Groypers'? - The New York Times The Conservative Old Guard Wakes Up and Smells the Groypers People Are Underestimating America's Groyper Problem - The Atlantic Grappling With the Groyper Problem: Insight From Columbia University | RealClearPolitics

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Glororhole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is Cognitive Dissence. Every episode would be blasted anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news,

makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at. Today is Thursday, December the 18th, and it is Longform Day. Audience's a little peek behind the curtain. Cecil finds the stories.

And so Cecil will very often, for the long form, give me multiple options to pick from. And this week, he sends me two basic options. I can learn about Groyper's or Laura Lumer. There was one on birth, but I didn't send it to you. And I looked at it. And I was like, this isn't a choice. No, it's really, it really is. It is, you know, you're talking earlier, like in the week, last week on our last show when you're saying, would you like your shit with corn or peanuts? Yeah, man. You gave me a corn peanuts question, man. It's really not. Neither of them

are very good. I picked, we're going to be talking about Groyper's today. I picked that. I don't know if that was the right choice, man. I know. know more about Groyper's, and I probably should. I will say the Laura Lumer one is interesting because it made a comment that essentially was like she's their sort of social media enforcer. And it was a long article. We're going to be covering multiple articles on Groyper's. And these ones sort of all come from a very similar time frame.

And the reason why they all come from the same time frame is because a very important Groyper moment happened recently. And that's Tucker Carlson had on Nick Fuentes on his. show. Sotko Carlson, certainly a far right piece of shit is a more mainstream far right piece of shit than Nick Fulentes is. Right. And him reaching out to Nick Fentz and having him on his show was a big moment for these people and the people who follow Nick Fentz. And so that's why there's sort of this cultural moment where a bunch of different people were writing about it all at the same time. Yeah. And real quick, this isn't Nick Fentz's first brush with

national political power. I didn't realize this is where he came from either. So, well, I was going to mention he had a meal with Trump. So crazily enough, I was listening to, on my way here to the studio, after I read the articles, I was listening to Ezra Klein. He had like an hour and a half show

to get through the whole thing. So he talked about the gropeization of the GOP. And he reminded me that at one point, and here's a sentence that I feel insane saying, at Marilago, Trump invited Kanye to fucking lunch

and then Kanye showed up with Nick Fulence. And that is a bingo card that like, as soon as it lines up and I'm like, oh, I have bingo. And then you kill yourself. It's like, you're leaving the house and you're like, oh, I don't have my

anti-Semitic coat with me. Right. And then you have to go back in and grab your Nick Fentz and take that with you. But one thing I didn't realize was where Nick got his start. which was at the Unite the Right rally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When he was a college student. I didn't know that either to this article. I didn't know that's where he got his start. That's where he got his start. That's where he showed up. And that's where all this, you know, that's where a lot of, I mean, really, if we want to look at the reset of the United States, a lot of it started happening right around then, right? That's a really good point, Cecil.

That's a really good point. Because like that should have been an inflection point where we all said, whoa, tone it the fuck down. There's some evil shit over here on the right. And instead, the president who sets the tone, and we'll talk about this in the article, sets the tone, sets the stage, creates a permission structure

for this kind of stuff to exist and to expand. The president came out and said, very fine people on both sides. Yeah. Did not decry this. Did not launch an immediate federal investigation. Did not do any of the common sense things. And I think America stood up and said,

wait a minute. Yeah. there's room for this now. People will say that Trump didn't mean very fine people on both sides because he said, I don't mean the white supremacist. And you're like,

Trump was talking out of both sides of his mouth. Absolutely. That's what you have to remember. People will say, well, he didn't say that. And then he came right out of and he said that. No, Trump was talking out of both sides of his mouth when he said that. He was saying, well, I don't mean the far right people.

What do you mean the medium right people? Yeah, right. Because they were all standing together. So it's not like, it's like coming in and seeing a table full of, you know, four Nazis with six other people and then being like, well, I didn't mean the Nazis. Well, newsflash, they're all Nazis. They're all Nazis. They're all hanging out together. Yeah. So you can't, the problem is is people, people hear this. And then they say, point to the words he said as if that is the way to exonerate Trump from saying this.

And the thing is is that it's very calculated by him saying that he's not only dog whistling to the racist, he's also assuaging the guilt of all the people who stood side by side with the racist. Exactly, dude. And you know how to know that that's true, like legitimately. You know how to know for certain that that's true is look to what the racist and the Nazis said about Trump at that time. They were very explicitly celebrating when Trump came out and said that. So when people who are evil, like what you're doing, you're enabling evil. Rethink. Right.

Just for a second. You don't, there's no possible, like I literally, there is no possibility that a bunch of fucking neo-Nazis were happy about what you did and said, but what you did and said was not in support of the neo-Nazis. It's not possible. The neo-Nazis were thrilled with the way Trump handled that situation. Absolutely. They came out on a lot of their like, fuck, and I remember reading articles, like they came out

a lot of their fucking message boards and other, you know, fucking lurking, crawling spaces, basically saying, hey, we don't have to hide anymore. We've got a guy who's going to create space. Allow this sort of, we don't have to scuttle like fucking cockroaches when the lights come on and keep our horrible, awful views hidden from the eyes of decent people any longer because Trump has created this infrastructure and permission structure that is institutionalized by his power as president. I remember this very specifically

because I got into an argument with a listener at the time. Our show, when it first started, had sort of a broad appeal. And it lost that broad appeal because we had an inflection point at this point, right? You and I saw this. Initially, I think we both thought Trump was bad, but not so bad that it's going to be

the death of America. Right? we thought he's bad, but we can weather this. We even had a first 100 days talk right afterwards to try to be optimistic about what's going to happen in the Trump's first 100 days. Yeah, it's going to be bad, but we can weather the storm. What can we do? What can we do to weather the storm?

So we thought it was bad, but we didn't think it was that bad. But I remember when this happened, I was in a Twitter argument or an email argument with somebody who was telling me, you're misunderstanding the Kakistanis. You're misunderstanding who these people. are they're making fun of the far right. And I remember arguing with this person and saying, they're literally standing next to someone on the far right. They're chanting the same things. They're in the same kind of outfit. When the wine moves forward to push the protesters out with their shields, they're all doing it in lockstep with the rest of them. How exactly are they

making fun of those people? What you're saying, what they do is they lied to you to say, I'm doing this satirically. You know, it's like, I just satirically slapped your ass. You know, it's like, no, you sexually assaulted somebody, but you're like, no, no, I was just kidding when I did it. I was just, you're doing an evil thing and then saying you're kidding because you're a coward.

Yes. That's why. Yep. This is a big thing I want to talk about with relation to these articles. And it's one of the, one of the mental notes that I had made is the new, the new, I guess the new racism, the new anti-Semitism, the new misogyny that is taking hold online, is being excused by the people who perform it,

as well as by the people who are trying to investigate, report, or understand it. It's being excused as they're joking or they're being ironic. There is, there is, but like, I really want to be very clear about this. I was thinking about it, like, all morning, that's not possible for that to be true. because one, it's not possible for that to matter. It doesn't make any difference if somebody slaps me in the face ironically. My face still stings. You still hurt me.

You still cause damage. It literally, it's not possible for me to say, you didn't intend the thing you actually performed and did. You, of course, intended it. You performed it and did it. You cannot ironically perform racism. That's not a thing. It's not possible. You can't ironically perform misogyny.

or anti-Semitism. It's not ironic when you do it. What they do all the time. And like, this is a tactic for abusers of all stripes, is they'll perform their abuse. They'll do their abusive action. And then they'll say, I'm just kidding. Why can't you take a joke?

It's just a joke. I didn't mean it. Again, that's not actually possible. You can't do a thing and not mean the thing you did. You can't. And if somebody says it's a joke, what is the joke? Yeah. How does the joke?

Jokes are structural, right? We've, there's actually a large body of academic evidence on how jokes work, what they are, the different types of jokes. These are not jokes. They're laughing. So they think it's a joke. But remember that like you can laugh because you hurt someone and you take pleasure in their pain. That is what's happening.

Yeah. These guys are confusing the fact that they find something enjoyable and funny with a joke. That's not a joke. Yeah. Jokes don't work that. that way. Literally, they cannot perform that way structurally. Just because you hurt somebody and you think it's funny does not mean that it was a joke. What it means is that you're a sadist. Yeah. Full stop. I think, I agree with you. I think that there are instances where people can do

satire with really horrible things. I think it's possible. Sure. Sure. I think it's possible. I don't think these people are smart enough to do that. I think they are literally just being mean and then relying on the crutch that it's just a joke afterwards. That's what I think is actually. happen. Yeah. Well, like, and I think it's a really good point. So I want to, I want to like amend what I was saying. Like, again, and this is important. So like, if you were to read Jonathan Swift's a modest proposal, right, that is a piece of satire. And at no point when you read that, the way, like broadly speaking, the way the satire works is you do or say something that is so, that sort of like aligns with a position, but then inflates that position to the point of obsoles. in order for that absurdity to create a highlight moment, right, of the position that you're satirizing. Broadly speaking, that's how it works. The problem is, that's not what these guys are doing.

They aren't satirizing anything. They're just living in that space fully. And then they're trying to convince you that in their heart, they didn't mean it. They're not actually saying, I'm going to take these bad ideas and I'm going to amplify them to a point that allows them to be highlight. for the cruelties and absurdities that they are, that would be satirical. That's not the thing that they're doing.

They're just also racist. If it's indistinguishable from the genuinely held views of a racist, then it hasn't done the exaggerative element of satire. No, I'm right there with you. I just have to make that point. But I wanted to mention it too because there's sketches that Elyle or I'll write for citation needed that are really, there's a horrible thing that happens.

Yes. But there's a joke in there. Right. Right. And most of the time that joke is very specifically casting its light on something that is something bad that happened in society, right? A negative aspect of society. There's a joke in there about that sort of thing.

Oftentimes can be about inequality, whether it be racial or, you know, gender or whatever. It can have those own elements. That doesn't mean you can't make a joke about it. It just means the joke has to be funny. It also means you have to be sincerely making a joke. And there's oftentimes, because of that subtleness of these things, you can't tell that they're making a joke.

And that's not funny. If the joke was to trick me, that's not a funny joke. Right. That's not funny. That's like what what chicken butt? I mean, like, that's nothing. So, but one of the things that struck me when we're talking about this is I used to spend a lot of my time wondering if people like this were sincere.

I would be like, is this person sincere? Is Nick Flentes sincere? Is Alex Jones sincere? Is Joe Rogan sincere? And when it comes to certain things, like certain parts, like racism very specifically, if you're not a sincere racist, but you're racist for money,

you're just a racist with extra steps. Yeah. Like you're not, you're still a racist, right? You're still doing all the things that are racist. You're just whether or not you believe it in your heart of hearts doesn't matter because what you're doing is you're willing to exploit a whole group of people for your financial gain.

that's racist. That is. Regardless of how you look at it, you just absolve yourself of any guilt after the fact. And I think that that's a real problem. Is it like a lot of people get hung up on, they'll say something like, well, does Nick really believe this stuff?

Is it? I don't know. Does he really, it doesn't matter. None of that shit matters. Like he doesn't have to. And his followers don't have to either necessarily if they keep promoting the same message over and over. Like if we hold as fairly self-evidently true that racist speech has consequences or misogynist speech or anti-Semitic speech has consequences for its target, right?

So if we hold that as a reasonably true fact, right, then this would be no different than saying like, well, when you robbed a bank, did you do it ironically? Yeah. The consequence is still that you robbed a bank. If the consequence is still that a marginalized persons or group is being defamed, belittled, those aren't even the right words. Those are not, those words aren't even big enough. That a marginalized group is being hurt, right? If that is still the consequence, it's like, well, yeah, okay.

But when I said, stick them up, I have a gun, give me all your money, or I'll kill everybody in the building. I, you know, I was actually, in my mind, I was thinking of this scene from this movie and, like, how ridiculous is it that somebody would rob a bank at a cashless society? And, like, of course, I don't have a gun. I have a soap gun. And that's, like, a fucking nod to fight. Like, whatever second stupid shit you have going on in your brain, you still robbed a bank, right? It doesn't matter. The inside of your mind is not actually important to anybody but you. I think the reason why, for a long time, I was hung up on this, the motivations.

Why I was hung up so much on the motivations was my thought was is if I could prove they didn't believe it, then it would be easier to convince the people who do that it's bullshit. Right. I think I had convinced myself that the proper path to debunking

would be to say, they don't believe this either. You shouldn't. They're doing it just to get money off you. You shouldn't. But I don't think that matters. It doesn't matter to the person who's hearing it, and it doesn't matter to the person who's saying it, and it doesn't matter to the person who's

hurt by it. All those things don't matter in the end. You just got a chance to speculate on somebody what's going on in somebody's head, and it didn't help anybody. Right. But my brain thought it would, but I think I was wrong. Yeah. Well, look, I actually fully agree with that, and that's what I would try to do as well. Because the idea is if I can show you that you're being grifted, then that would dissuade you from the grift. The problem is that people, who are excited about that message, they want permission to feel that message is truth, right? That's what they want. So somebody like Nick Fuentes is not, for the most part, telling people something they didn't know.

What they're doing is they're offering up a way for people to take the things that they feel and to create a rhetoric that they can repeat to themselves and to other people that buys them time and acts as a set of apologies for their deeply held racist views. That's what they want out of this transaction. And they're more than happy to financially incentivize that for people like Nick Fuentes

because they're already walking around oftentimes sympathetic at the very least to this kind of shit, right? So like I really think that that's part of why it doesn't matter. I would add too something that just occurred to me to get down the same road again. but like you are racist if the if let's say it's let's say somebody said well Nick doesn't really hold

these uh misogynist views they're not really sincerely held then why did he pick women to target yeah because he hates women you can't choose to target a group and say well like i just random i had a dartboard full of you know it was going to be you know seabass but i didn't hit that on the dartboard it struck women Like, no, these people are choosing, you know, the Jewish people, they're choosing women, they're choosing people of color, they're choosing people that are, you know, in the LGBTQ spectrum. They're choosing those people because they have deeply held sincere beliefs that those people are worthy of being targeted.

And if they're hurt, their hurt doesn't matter the same way. Yeah, yeah. Well, we've covered a lot of stuff about them. But let's talk about what the groopers are. Okay? So there's an article here. The first one is, who are the groopers? And they talk very specifically about where they come from. They come from this idea of a cartoon meme is where they initially get their name from.

It's from very specifically a meme that someone who wrote it, who actually made it, didn't want it to become that. But it became a meme. And so then they just sort of followed that. It's a hateful racist. Like, it's a hateful racist ideology because they went through and said, We're going to make this sort of comical frog into a hateful racist because it's funny to us. Right. And that's what they wound up doing.

And that's the sort of, Hey, Ontario. Come down to Bed MGM Casino and see what our newest exclusive the Price is Right, Fortune Pig has to offer. Don't miss out. Play exciting casino games based on the iconic game show only at BedMGM. Check out how we've reimagined three of the show's iconic games like Plinko, Clifhanger, and the Big Wheel,

into fun casino game features. Don't forget to download the BetMGM Casino app for exclusive access and excitement on the Price is Right Fortune Pick. Pull up a seat and experience the Price is Right Fortune Pick, only available at BetMGM Casino. BetMGM and Game Sense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager. Ontario only, please play responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConX Ontario at 1866-531-260 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. That's the thing that Nick's group picked up on, right? So Nick Fuentes spouts hateful, racist, misogynist, anti-cult multicultural bullshit. He spouts that shit all the time.

That's like literally what he made his bread and butter on. I mean, you can tell if he gets to start at the fucking unite the right rally, you know what his fucking mean. What got the guy to go to fucking Charlottesville or wherever the fuck it was? was very specifically, you know, you don't get motivated by anything but racism. That's the case. So he's a racist, a shitty racist person, and this is the sort of thing that he tunes up all the time. One of the things I want to read from this is, this is a quote in the article, it says,

Catherine D, who writes about internet culture, said that fealty to Fuentes is the Groyper's defining feature. I think Nick Fuentes is among the best examples of politics as fandom that exists. otherwise it's a fairly loose group without clear ideological borders. So that's a really interesting take, I think, on who Nick Fuentes is and why Nick Fuentes is important. One of the things that I find really interesting that I've been sort of viewing as an alien visiting humanity

for the first time, right? You have these moments in your life where you get a chance to view something and you're like, I can't believe we do this. Right. Why do we do this? And one of the things that is really interesting to me is there's a whole Twitch culture of like drama hounds. There's these people who just, they have to just dig up drama on these people.

And the Twitch personalities and these streaming personalities recognize this and play off of it. And so you'll see one of these guys who does news content will sit at his table at a Twitch stream of him watching this or her watching the footage of a news conference or whatever, and they're commenting on it. But you're not watching that particular thing. You're watching another Twitch streamer watch their Twitch stream. Okay. So you're like, you're like two asses back on the human centipede.

Is the top still spinning? Or is it, I can't remember. No, no, it's a human centipede. It is definitely not an inception thing, Tom. It is a human centipede thing. You're three asses back at that point. So you're, and why you're watching it isn't so much about the political content. It's about the drama that's happening between these two personalities that are fighting amongst themselves on the Twitch screen so that you can see the drama that's popping up.

Their fight is about the politics, but you don't care about the politics. You care about the fight. Damn, dude. So that is fascinating and is, I have. had this whole point that I had like queued up to make about Nick Fentas at first I thought of them they referred him in one of these articles remember which one they referred him as a cult leader and I thought to myself that doesn't feel right to me because this is all a one-way communication and in a cult there's often not always but almost always there's often like an interaction with

the guru in some way right there's somebody in the fuck you someday right yeah a hundred percent Right. Like you're not doing hot yoga for nothing, right? So, but like this feels different. I was actually going to say like there's a new kind of parisocial cultism that is forming that I think is kind of interesting where the relationship being entirely one-sided allows its adherence to sort of pick and choose how and what they will ascribe to their cult leader. And I think that there's maybe still some truth to that. But I think that your broader. point is more right. That what really attracts a certain kind of person into the cult, or at least keeps them there, is the drama.

It's the drama. It's the drama. I didn't think about that. I had that, like, I was like, I have a cool explanation maybe, and like, but I think you're a hundred percent right. I think the drama is really important, and I think a lot of people have forgotten that the real winners and losers of politics is the

American people. And so, they don't realize that it's a game that they're participating in. They don't realize that. They think it's a game that they're manipulating. Right. And they don't, to them, the outcome isn't as important as the winning. Yeah. And that's, I think, the real problem that we're running into is that they don't realize.

And we talked about this for years, voting against your own interests, right? We talked about it for years. There's been a cult of personality that has drawn in voters that identify a certain way that will then pull the lever very specifically for a group that may or may or that in many cases doesn't represent them at all, right? Yeah. In fact, is is antithetical to their best interests. We know and we know that's true.

So we know that that's a thing that human beings do and have done for a long time, at least in our America. And you're in my America that we grew up. Yeah, right. I can't speak for America before I was alive. I don't know what it was like during those times. I know what it was like when I was alive. And it has always been people that have been marginalized

will vote sometimes very differently than they should be voting if they really cared about their own interests or the interests of their neighbors, right? They don't care as much. So I think there's always been that sort of party stuff. But I think what has happened is that there's been a weaponizing of the sort of home team versus the visiting team stuff that we've seen,

this sort of fight. and people now they're part of a team, they're part of a group and I think we're seeing that play out in some really damaging ways and those get amplified by the drama that they get that they are so

so they're craving. They're craving that drama. Yeah. Well, I think that that's incredibly true. And I'm thinking like while you're talking like I also, I get a sense that what helps to magnify this

to a large degree because I'm thinking like how does this take hold? Why is this such like why are we so excited to do this work to ourselves? Why? And why do we want to continue

going back time and time and time again? And I do think that there's something about the way this becomes like a kind of like politics that becomes gamified by existing in a space that is divorce from humanity.

Right? We're not having these. things as debates. We're not even necessarily doing these as a video and a reaction video and a person and a person. We're doing a lot of this stuff exclusively using avatars. It's online. It's almost all words. It's this like low stakes, infinite loop of game playing. I can keep playing this game. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't ever think I'm playing with people. And I don't ever think I'm playing with real ideas and real stakes. And that's why it's so different when you interact with the human being. Right. Right. And like, if you, if you sort of accept that idea at least a

little bit, one of the things that would necessarily follow from that is that hate gives me a bigger weapon in the argument. If I don't really care, because I don't really believe this or, you know, I'm really just trying to get, like, the goal is to get a reaction out of this, this bot on the other side or this, you know, avatar on this other side. And I just, I want my words to get more updutes than your words or however you're playing your game with your online sort of, then you can sort of like level up your rhetoric. Yeah. And if I level up my rhetoric, it's going to get more attention, right?

Because it's more exciting. Like the, I fucking love Hitler shit, right? Like that's so egregious. It's going to get more attention. It's going to get me more, like it's like hauling out a bigger gun into the fight. I feel like that lack of personalization and the sort of gamification of like, the way that we're speaking to each other and the way that we think about winning versus losing, it all kind of like converges. In my mind, it all kind of converges to create this like weird toxic soup

that like they do believe this stuff because they wouldn't be choosing their targets as women, as, you know, people of color, as LGBTQ people. They wouldn't choose those as their targets if they didn't believe it. but I don't think that they understand that there's consequences like actual human to human consequences I you know what's what's really maybe that's stupid I don't understand that I think that I think they

maybe they don't give a shit what I'm focused on is the is the leaders of these parties right the leaders of these groups right the leaders of the Twitch guys who are doing this the Dick Fuentes is Ben Shapiro there's a quote from Ben Shapiro here let me read it to you it says, No to the Groypers read the first line

of an ex post by Ben Shapiro, an influential conservative figure. Mr. Shapiro's post made on November 3rd has been viewed more than 33 million times on X in the span of four days. And I think, like, like, Ben, I don't think Ben believes that. And the reason why I don't think Ben believes that

is because Ben is happy to be a villain to the Groyper's because a view is a view. Yeah. And a click is a click. and whatever he is, I think Ben could easily play into that because if Ben really cared about hate speech, Ben would be on the side of everybody else

who says you shouldn't say hate speech. Right. Hate speech is bad. We shouldn't have a platform where anybody can just do a hate speech and then face no repercussions. Because what that does is it accelerates everybody to do a hate speech

and then we just have a place in our society where someone can turn it on on their, everybody has the thing in their pocket, and it can just be a hate speech machine. That's not great for people, it turns out. Really? That's not super great. And to not hold that company responsible for their hate speech amplification

is a huge detriment to society in general. Ben doesn't care about that. Ben cares about his checkbook. That's what Ben cares about. Ben doesn't give a fuck about hate speech because hate speech would, reduce Ben's checkbook. What Ben cares about, and here's the thing,

right, whether Ben cares about it or not, he 100% profits from whether or not he's going to get into a fight with Nick Fuentes. He's going to profit from that. Charlie Kirk probably loved Nick Fuentes before he got shot in the fucking throat. He fucking loved that guy because he was going to generate

clicks for Charlie Kirk's videos. Because you know what? Some asshole, maybe right now, because this might be called Nick Fuentes or Gropers, some asshole on YouTube right now might be hate watching us about this. Giving us clicks, but not also leaving a comment about us. And being like, you guys, Algo, the fucking Nick Flentes is great. I fucking suck his balls off every day. He's the best. And so they might leave some stupid fucking comment, but you just boosted us.

Right. You just boosted the algorithm on us. No, another person's going to see us that wouldn't saw us before. Right. Yeah. I like, there's that accelerative element to the whole, to the whole algorithmic model that they're absolutely juicing. They're taking advantage of it. Like one thing, too, that, like, all of these guys on the right, Ben Shapiro, I want to single out, but like the Charlie Kirk and then, you know, like any of these other political figures who are just now pretending to wake up. First of all, it's a pretense. Yeah. They were very happy to allow the fringe to be on the fringe, right?

So what I mean by that is they knew that if they got the fringe animated enough, that that fringe was going to empower them. And they wanted that fringe when it was necessary, but what they wanted to do is to put a little fence around them. You guys do what you guys, I need you guys to go out there and do very important work. And I need you to motivate a certain base of people. I need that certain base of people to become politically engaged in a way that helps me and that boosts my side of things. But I also want to draw borders around you.

And I think one of the things that is freaking out the Ben Shapiro's of the world is that this movement is not well contained. and it is expanding and it is no longer on the fringe. And so that they don't have control over it the same way that they used to feel erroneously like they had control over it. But fuck them because they didn't denounce it

from the jump. Ben Shapiro's denouncing it now because as a Jewish guy, this is really dangerous. But your point is exactly right. Ben Shapiro doesn't care about hate speech. Look at the way he talks about women. Sure.

Right? He's okay with hate speech as long as it doesn't sing, him out. Look at fucking Charlie Kirk. Right. Talking about Black pilots. Right. Right? Constantly. 100% okay. It was a hate speech. Literally couldn't stop talking about it.

There's multiple clips about him fucking telling you that black pilots are not qualified and you shouldn't believe that they're qualified. He's literally said it out loud. He's a piece of shit. He's a dead piece of shit, but he's still a piece of shit. I want to read a quote. This is from this other article. This is from the bulwark.

Conservative Old Guard wakes up and smells the Groyper. Funny article, admittedly. Yeah. But one of the things that they say, It says in recent weeks, I've watched with fascination as prominent professional conservatives have seemed to realize in a sudden flash of horror, something has seemed obvious to me for years. The GOP kids are not all right. A significant following and growing faction of the early career operatives entering the party ranks,

irony drenched, nihilistic transgressives, and theatrical bigotry aren't just considered acceptable. They're the heart of the politics. And one of the things I think, you ever heard that old adage that someone will say to like I would say to a Christian. I would say, I contend we're both atheists. It's just you believe in one less God than me. Right. Like you've heard that.

I forget who coined it. It might been Dawkins. Could have been Hitchens. I'm not sure. It's one of those guys said that. Professional debate talk about. Professional debate guy said that, right? And it makes sense, right?

They don't believe in any of the other gods. Right. They just believe in that one God. Well, this also works for Charlie Kirk, right? I contend that you and Nick Fentez are both racist. Right. He just also is racist to someone else that you support. Yeah.

Jews, right? He's also racist to those people. But the thing is, is you didn't give a fuck at all when he was racist to the right people. Yeah. Now that he's racist to the wrong people, which are the people on your side, you give a fuck. Here's the thing. Racism is bad. Okay?

Right. You let racism in the door and you let it fuck your wife. Okay? You shouldn't let it in the door. Don't let racism in the door. but you guys didn't give a fuck when it was other races. You didn't care when it was other races. And I don't want to make a thing to make it seem like it's some sort of Jewish conspiracy.

I don't think any racism is good against the Jews or anyone else. It just so happens that these people like Ben Shapiro cares when it's about a Jew because he's a Jew. That's when he gives a fuck because he's a Jewish person. That's why. But before then, he didn't fucking care a wit. Yeah, well, I think I would go a step further and say, until that Venn diagram swallowed him up as well. He did care because he wanted to use them.

Yeah, no, you're right. Exactly. He cared the wrong way. He cared the wrong way. It's like, let's keep them. Let's not denounce them. Let's not, because what the rights should do, right? If you, think about this if this was not political. If somebody was like, hey, I am Tom's friend. Also, I hate the Jews. I'd be like, hey, man, very publicly, we are not friends. I dis, we are, I am disavowing you. Years ago, years ago, on Twitter,

we had someone who was a trans person on our show. Yeah. They came on our show and somebody on Twitter sent a message and said, that person sounds like their, the gender, a different gender, right? And Tom didn't respond by anything other than, he said, don't listen, you embarrass me. And then Tom threatened him physically,

and I had to delete it. But Tom had threatened the person physically by saying, like, I will fucking punch your teeth down your throat. I think I offered a fly out and meet him somewhere. I had to delete it off of Twitter because I was like, Tom, you can't just threaten people on Twitter. Well, you can, unless someone deletes it. You know, you fucking can now. Like, you fucking can now. But in any case, there was an instantaneous.

There was never a second that you wavered that you thought, well, maybe this person has a point. Maybe I should be mean to this trans person who was on our show. Maybe I shouldn't care that that trans person. You didn't fucking waver for a second. You're like, no, I, fuck you, never listen. The first thing you said afterwards was never listen. That was what you said. Never listen to our show, you embarrass me by proxy.

That was the actual thing that stayed. That's what was quote was up. That's the thing, right? It's like, if you have morals, if you have something in your heart that says this is wrong, there's a bad thing. This is a bad thing you're doing. You will stop all the presses. Right.

And you'll be like, this has to be contended with. We have to fix this now. It's not like, well, maybe, maybe, I don't know. I'm getting money out of it. I don't know. That's exactly. And if you want proof of this, you can see it in action. When Tucker Carlson recently had Nick Fuentes on, the Heritage Foundation at first supported it.

So the Heritage Foundation at first was supportive of that interview. And it was only after the outcry grew large. enough. In other words, it was only after the Heritage Foundation said, hey, this actually is working against us rather than for us that the Heritage Foundation decried Nick Flentas. So you can tell from that, like the Heritage Foundation, which is, you know, just like emblematic of the right side, these are useful people. We want these useful people to motivate their base and we want to get them to do the things we want. And until that burns us, we are not only not going to denounce them, we are going to quietly embrace and apologize for them.

Boost them. Boost them if you can. Yep. Because it's fucking great for us. The other article that I'd like to talk about, there's another one here. This is from the Atlantic. People are underestimating the Groyper problem. And what's interesting about this article is it brings in another thing that we didn't

talk about on the show, which is on Twitter, Elon Musk recently put in a rule that said, where you post from will come up on your profile. It's going to pop up on your profile. So if you're posting from a country, it's just going to pop up from where you're posting. And they only had it up for a very short amount of time because what it revealed was that many of these loud, very loud people for MAGA were not living in the United States. So many of the people who were far right influencers that really showed that they were specifically from very specific places, talking about very specific things that happen in those places were from places like China

or they were from Russia there was plenty of places all over the globe where they weren't from that they were talking about very specifically influencers from another country trying to influence literally influence things happening in a different country so they turned it off

like can we turn turn turn that off why do you think Elon Musk turned that off how does that align with Elon Musk's interest. I think it turned it off because he didn't like that it was showing. I think he thought that it was going to show the opposite. I think he thought it was going to show that leftists don't believe what they believe.

And what it showed was is that the right is being manipulated far more often from foreign actors than the left is. God, we need a law. What an interesting thing. We need a law that means that that happens. Because it's great. That's awesome if that happens. That's great if it happens. I also think it's really interesting because I've been hearing Joe Rogan argue against the thing called digital ID that they're trying to introduce in the UK.

And what's interesting is Elon Musk putting this in there to me says that's a little piece of digital ID that I thought that they would be very opposed to. I would think that they would like that anonymity. So it's interesting that Elon Musk would do it. But I think I didn't read any of his reasoning. So I'm just speculating on why he did it. but I think that he really thought that it was going to be a reveal, a rug pull on the left,

and what happened was is all these far right accounts did it. Well, initially I thought, well, that sort of proves, guys, come on. Don't you see that this is the case? But what happened was really interesting, and I didn't really realize it until I read this article,

was that the people on the right then said, well, see, all that hateful stuff isn't really coming from the right. So, therefore, it doesn't matter. But what they don't get is is that there people are marching on our streets right now

with fucking Nazi flags screaming white power in the middle America. We're seeing white power flags at big rallies for the right. We're seeing these people

the proud boys and other that are white nationalist groups grow in number. So you can't, there's no way this would work if it wasn't a fertile field for it. That's exactly right. Yeah.

That's exactly right. It does matter very much that the exacerbation that the gas that is being poured on the fire is coming from overseas. But the Tinder is here. That would not work. Like it's not like somebody, again, all you have to do is just shrink the problem down and think about it differently. Would it matter if somebody came to your house and said a bunch of racist shit? Would you be like, wow, that is convincing?

No. You'd be like, that's crazy. Get the fuck out of here. There's no Tinder for your fire. So you can't pour fuel on it. There's no spark. Right. The problem is that what this does is it says it creates people who are good at saying these

things. So the people who aren't good get to feel more comfortable hearing and repeating. Yeah. That's the problem. The problem with Nick Flentes is that he is a pretty, like all shit aside compared to the average person, he is a pretty good rhetoration. Yeah. That's a problem.

That's the problem with Charlie Kirk, too. Charlie Kirk, please don't send me messages that I know he's not perp, but like Charlie Kirk was a pretty good rhetorician. Compared to a lot of other people, he could talk circles around that. Charlie Kirk could dunk the fuck

on some fucking college kids. He could. He could dunk on those college kids day. He did a lot. And that's what he did. Yep. So, and what I mean by rhetorition isn't that he's right.

It's that he's good at appearing, right? He looks, he is convincing enough to the people who already believe him. And that kind of stuff is important because it allows the laundering of these ideas into the fertile minds of those willing and receptive to receive them. And then those people take, because most people aren't content creators. Most people are content amplifiers. They take content and they share it. We amplify the messages of other people far more often than we create any messaging of our own as a rule.

So you only need a handful. Remember the vaccine disinformation? It was something like this study that's something like 80, I'm getting the numbers wrong, but you'll understand the point. It was something like 80% of all the vaccine disinformation originated with 12 people. But it amplifies out millions of times because what most people are is not content creators. We're not making our own memes, most of us. We are sharing more stuff than we create.

So as long as you have people, even a small handful who are really good at creating this clippable shit. Yeah. you don't have to also only say horrible shit or really racist stuff to get people on the racist pipeline. And one of the things that I think is really

interesting listening to Joe Rogan is Joe Rogan and Elon Musk because Elon Musk amplifies this message all the time, they both believe in the Great Replacement Theory but they only believe it up to a certain point. Right?

So they believe multiculturalism is evil. They believe people are getting shipped in to vote. They're going to replace these people so that they can take over the country. They're not making that final step that it's Jewish people that are doing it, right?

That's the great replacement theory. Eventually, when you spin the spinner, it winds up on the Jews eventually, right? But all the stuff that leads up to it, they all preach and talk about all the time. Joe Rogan will constantly talk about how they're shipping people all over the country to try to take over these congressional districts

so that the Democrats can get more votes. But the thing is, is like if he's planting that ground and then he hands that person off to somebody else, like a Nick Fuentes. Right. Nick Fuentes can add the Jew cherry on top. Yeah.

That's real easy for him to do. Alex Jones can add that cherry on top. They can do that sort of thing if that ground is fertile. And these people are plowing their fields for them, essentially, all these young minds. It's a great point. And so you're seeing,

and especially Elon Musk, Elon Musk controls the spigot of Twitter. He controls an entire AI that gets to tell people what's real and what's not. Yeah, yeah. And it's also important to mention who is the choir here. It's a demographically, it's a small choir. Yeah. Right?

It's young white men. It's it. That's the demographic choir here. It is youngish white men. They are an incredibly important. demographic because the way that the patriarchal hegemony structure in this country works is they are also the most empowered demographic. So there's a reason that they are the target audience here.

It's because like most people, if you were like, again, to your point, like, if an alien were to look down at this, they'd be like, wait a minute, this makes no sense at all. Like this kind of speech actually shits on numerically the vast majority of people. That doesn't seem like that makes any sense. It's like, well, yeah, because how could this gain traction? Right. Yeah, if you're going to shit on women, that's half, then you're going to shit on people of color. And let's say that's 25% or, you're like, you've cut your pie pretty small.

But like, we've concentrated power there. The thing is they just got too much power. Right. They're going to continue to have it. It's not like that's going to go away. And the reason is we're telling them be afraid that your power might disappear. You're going to lose it. Don't use it or lose it.

And they're trying to use it to subjugate other people. Yeah. And that's what they're doing. There's a final article we. should touch on. This is from Real Clear Politics, grappling with the Groyper problem, insight from Columbia University. This is written by a Columbia University student.

Not crazy about this article. I think this article is way too both sidesy. And I think this article is way too middle of the road. There's a part of this article I want to read. One of the pieces, because they're talking about Tucker Carlson having on Nick Fuentes. And it says, Carlson has spent years pushing the Overton window of

conservatism farther right. By conversing with Fentz, he was thus legitimizing and implicitly endorsing him, he's saying this as if it's someone else who's speaking it, right? So he's writing this as if the person who's speaking it, he's going to try to refute this point. I think that this point is perfectly made, to be perfectly honest. I realize that they're trying to refute this point,

but to be honest, he is legitimizing this stuff. We've been saying this for a long time. This is something that a lot of people have been saying that you do legitimize this when you put them on. They respond to this by saying, this ignores a few facts. First, since his departure from Fox News, Carlson has become less strictly right wing

and is now hosted more on more than one occasion, ardent leftists, such as the economist, Jeffrey Sachs, the Young Turks co-host Anna Kasparian, and independent journalist Gren Greenwald. The transition is far better described as populists than it is far right. But what you're not explaining is that he doesn't have those people on because he wants to amplify their ideas.

He has them on so he can fight and then convince the people who are listening to him that these people are crazy, right? He doesn't have these people on because he thinks that Anna Kasparian is fucking awesome and that she has a ton of great ideas. He has her on

because he wants to go out of his way to say that these people are unhinged and I'm having an unhinged person on. You can't just automatically think that somebody like Tucker Carlson has people on and those people have equal weight. They do not have equal weight.

And that's a bad, it's a bad formulation by the person who's writing this article. Yeah, I felt the same way from the same part, I would just add, the author is making the mistake of assuming that Tucker Carlson is acting in good face. Yeah, perfect.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. There's also another part, too, where they talk about, let me just read this. It's what he said about J.D. Vance. Fuentes, however, considers Vance a, quote, fat race mixer who's married to, and then he uses an Indian slur, end quote. that's the kind of person you're dealing with, right?

So anybody, and the thing is, like he goes on fucking on Tucker and he can tone it down. In this article, they do a good job of saying there's two Knicks. There's Nick on Tucker who's reaching a wider audience and being pretty reasonable.

And then there's Nick on his own show saying this horrible shit about a guy I fucking hate. Right. But it's a shitty thing to say about somebody and it's essentializing people down

into pieces that they can't change about themselves. You're a fucking bad human being. Like Nick Fuentes is a shitty, bad human being for saying these types of things. But Nick Fuentes has two different Nick Fentzes. And we've, I've seen this again, this is another throwback to Rogan. I've seen rogan get tricked by people like this. Oh yeah. He'll have a person on who isn't nearly as fucking crazy as they are on their own show. And he'll be like, well, you seem fucking perfectly reasonable. And they do seem perfectly reasonable on Rogan. And then they get off his show and then

they say fucking shit like this. Yep. Like we should be very careful. I think this is again, I think this is a real, I think there are really savvy people who understand that media is now consumed context free in clip form only. And so what they do very astutely is they create two different kinds of clips to be shared amongst different audiences. So they create the clips that go out to their other groper.

And that's where they say horrible, racist, misogynist, evil shit, right? And then in order to launder people, in order to launder their message to a broader audience, they go on something like Tucker Carlson, who is still vehemently right wing, despite having had like, what, three people who are not right wing on? And one of them is fucking Glenn Greenwald. Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, I don't know. You're fucking kidding me.

Glenn Greenwald might not be fucking right wing, but you sure fucking carries their water a lot. That's for sure. like, I'll give you 2.1, right? So, but fine. What these guys very astutely do is they create different kinds of clips. Fucking shooting McDeadneck, I forgot his fucking Charlie Kirk. Like, he was very good at this. He understood this.

So he would, in some contexts, say really vile shit. And then in other contexts where he knew that that stuff shouldn't be so explicitly said. He was very good at being less explicit and still laundering those ideas, which then people will click on and they'll go down the rabbit hole and the algorithm will then do the work of radicalizing people.

But it's because we live in these context-free, clippable absorption modes. That's how we get our information now, which makes us intensely vulnerable to these kinds of people who understand how to manipulate their message. Yeah. Nick's a real problem.

I think this guy's a real problem. I think he's a real problem for the future of America. I really do. I think he's a, he is spreading the worst kind of hate. The worst, the easiest, it's easy to spread. He's good at it and it's easy to spread. It's easy to stoke fear like this. And I think Nick does a good job of manipulating these really easily manipulatable people

who listen to him and pay attention to what he has to say. and this sort of thing doesn't stop. I don't see how you, I mean, how do you get these fucking snakes back in the container that you're gonna pop open again and they shoot all over the fuck?

I don't know how you do it. I mean, I don't know, because there's not any will for any of the companies that spread his hateful message to be responsible for it. Right.

So there's not any will for rumble or kick or whatever the fuck he's on to be responsible for the hate speech that he sends out. There's not, any will for Twitter to clamp down on racist and to stop racist and to stop hate speech. These people

don't even believe that hate speech exists. Like they will tell you. It doesn't even exist. You can't stop what you don't believe then. It's not even real. Right. So these people are going to continue to amplify this message and you're going to always have a space, a place where hateful racist can get reinforced. And people like Nick will be there to fluff them. Nick's a racist fluffer and he's sucking every racist off that he can to get him ready for the big bang. He's fucking Bonnie Bluing this shit all day. I think I want to leave it with this thought. And this is my takeaway from these four articles personally.

And one of the articles mentions it is that we do ourselves not just a disservice, but we put ourselves in real existential danger if we dismiss these people. as basement dwelling fringe nuts. Yes. That is not true anymore. Maybe that were true a decade or a decade and a half ago. But the world has moved on. It has moved quickly.

This is a group that is ascendant in terms of their political power. This is a group no longer relegated to fringe spaces. This is no longer a group of people who do not have access to power, both institutional and otherwise. So we need to cut that shit out. And we need to stop dismissing stuff as they're just being ironic. They don't really matter. They're just adjusted, just to only, only. Stop. Stop with that stuff. Stop. This is a danger. We are in danger right now. Recognize the danger, except that this is a group that is on the ascendancy and that we have to at least know it. I think there's a lot of heads and a lot of sand right now, man. And there's a lot of people that

give way too much fucking grace to those who are behaving ironically. I think the grace thing is where I'm starting to really push. I think

I don't want to give people any kind of support in my life that think that other people don't deserve human dignity. I just don't want to give it to them. I just don't. Like years ago we said

no quarter for racist, right? We said it years ago. And I still believe that. I'm like, you know what? If you're a racist, if you're out here cheering what ICE is doing, you're a piece of shit.

I don't want you in my life and I don't want to reinforce anything you do. Right. Like, sure, can you exist in the world? Yeah, you can exist in the world. But I don't ever want to interact with you. I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to be around you.

I don't want to support you. I don't want anything to do with you. I want nothing to do with you. And I wonder too, like, if you could unplug these people, would it work? If you unplug them from your life, does it work?

Does it change their mind? Does it make them think? that they're doing the wrong thing, that they're being bad. It feels like we haven't, we haven't punished these people for being bad in our own personal lives. It feels like we've sort of forgiven them

for being bad. And I feel like you've got to punish these people for being bad. I'm not saying like physically hurting them. I'm just saying like punishing them in your physical, in your social life, meaning not being around them.

Yeah. Leaving them alone. Not, not communicating with them. Yeah. I think it is impossible to say, I don't want to live in a rape culture, but I accept misogyny. I think it is impossible to say I don't want to live in a racist world, and I allow racists

to come to my Thanksgiving and be a part of my family, be a part of my social circle. You are creating a space for them and welcoming them in, and maybe you're hoping that they're going to change, but there's no consequences. It's okay to do it if they do change. Sure. If they do change and say, you know, I made a mistake. You're right. I was cheering on those ice things and I made a mistake.

I was wrong. You know what? You're absolutely right. Okay. All right. Let's start over then. Let's move on. Let's try to figure this out. But if they're just going to be the same person and you're just going to keep forgiving them for being a bad person, then you're just saying, I accept bad people. I think the bad people are okay. And why would these people change? Yeah. There's no incentive. There's no incentive. All right. Well, that's going to wrap it up for our long-form show this week. We'll be back on Monday with the full show. We're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babillon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble,

pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late night infoducatainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death and tower. tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, wizards, vaccine nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense.

Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonance pod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Prits, all under the handle at DissinencePod.

This show is Can Credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at 649-4255. or on their website at creator accountability network.org.