It Could Happen Here - Right Wing Conspiracies and the Allen Shooting

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

Robert, Gare, and Mia talk about the right's embrace of conspiracy theories about the Allen Texas mass shooting and how they've become unmoored from reality.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. It's another mass shooting. I don't have a good way to start this episode. Yeah, but welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is also just about mass shootings now because yeah, great, great world we live in. Uh, with me is Gare and Robert. Hello. Hello. Yeah.

So a Nazi killed a whole bunch of people again. Yeah. Hello. Yeah, so a Nazi killed a whole bunch of people again. Yeah, in case there's been another one, we are talking about the specific mass shooting in Allen, Texas, with the guy who was covered in swastika tattoos that certain people are claiming is a fed. Yeah, that happened on Sunday, May 7th.

So I think Mia has some details about what actually happened to kind of put together. But for the majority of this, we're actually going to be talking about people's reaction to this, including some of the most influential people on the planet

and the level of reality denial that is, it has been bad before. It's just extra visible right now. And it's visible to a degree that is pretty worrying um and we we felt it was it was worth talking about just because of uh you know whenever a reality fracture is is is big enough to to be like this this noticeable that is always uh always an interesting sign of uh where we are at as a culture.

Yeah, I think, so before we fully dive into that, there's something that I do want to talk about like briefly with this, which is that, so like this is, you know, in the sort of mold of like white supremacist killings, it's like, this is very, very targeted at non-white people. So he shot one white guy who was a security guard, and then he shot like three Latino people and then four Asian people. And I don't know.

I wanted to just sort of like remind people that anti-Asian violence is still like a thing because everyone seems to have forgotten about it. And, you know, this is like, I mean, I think if you, if you exclude the,

if you exclude the three in California that were also committed by Asian people, this is like the fourth mass shooting in two years that's been at least half the victims have been Asian. It fucking sucks. We've talked about anti-Asian violence a decent amount on this show. None of the things we've ever talked about have gotten any better i the only sort of actual instrumental results of any of this is that like violence against asian people gets used as a rhetorical cudgel to justify killing black people which is fucking abhorrent and yeah i just i just wanted to get this in because the media has collectively forgotten that that was a whole thing and no one really talks about the shooting in that framing

and i think it's important to do so at least for a little bit i think the other thing to kind of just talk about at the top here latino white supremacists and lat Nazis are not, they are not an uncommon thing. This is actually quite common. Two of the most famous fascists in the world right now, Nick Fuentes and Enrique Tarrio are not white. No, I mean, just like think about, think about where, I mean, think about the fact that prior to World War II, Argentina spent a significant chunk of their defense budget bringing over Nazis to train their military, which spent a significant chunk of their defense budget bringing over Nazis to train their military, which is a big part of why so many Nazis escaped there via rat lines.

You know, we just did a series of episodes on Alfredo Stressner, the fascist dictator of Paraguay who put up and hid Joseph Mengele along with a bunch of other Nazis for a while. Mengele had citizenship in both Argentina and in, in Paraguay. Like this is, it's not uncommon. This is not like a new thing. We're not,

it's not like some sudden shift in the way that fascism works. Even the shooter himself, like posted memes about being a Latino white supremacist. Like it is a subculture big enough that it has its own like meme vortex. So and this shooter was actively engaged in in said like a mimetic culture. No. And it's also worth noting that a lot of the same things that we talk about when we talk about Nazi mass shooter culture in the United States, the fact that a lot of shootings are kind of incited on 8chan and 4chan and similar

boards. This happens in Latin America. Brazil in particular has a website called Dagolachan that has spawned at least a couple of shootings. And the last year they've had several more mass shootings that are political in nature, that are kind of driven by online fascists. This is not the only place that this happens. Serbia just had a couple as well. But like what this guy's doing is very much, just as the Christchurch shooting was very much something that occurred within the broader envelope of a transnational accelerationist fascist movement, you know, the Allen shooting,

as far as we can tell with the information we have available, seems to fit very well into that schema. Okay, we should talk about the shooter a bit. So there's a sort of, I don't know, there's like, after every mass shooting, there's this sort of like identification cycle thing that happens where like a bunch of news agencies and organizations start trying to figure out who the shooter was. a bunch of news agencies and organizations to try to figure out who the shooter was. So I think like the day after,

very, very, very like pretty soon after the shooting, the New York Times runs an article that reveals that the shooter has this like, has an account on like a kind of weird Russian social media site. And from that information, Eric Toler, who's a uh researcher at bellingcat like tracks down the site and he finds a bunch of wild stuff he finds like i mean obviously the shooter is like

he finds that the shooter is a nazi he has like a swastika tattoo he has also has an ss tattoo from the shooting he's wearing like a right wing death squad patch it's like it's just like a whole thing that the proud boys also do it's like a patch that says like rwd yeah they sell rwds patches i mean i think a lot of it kind of comes out of some of the discourse around pinochet that goes back a few decades but at this point it's a much broader thing than that. I've got a bunch of photos of Jeremy Bertarimo, I think is his name, who was one of the proud boys. I believe he's the guy who got stabbed prior to January 6th during one of the big riots in D.C. after the 2020 election, but with a big RWDS patch on his chest. And you can find

like Tassitala Tozi, a uh an inveterate rioter uh with a patriot prayer up in portland would wear them all the time they're they're a common piece of uh fascism merch yeah and you know and and this this and also yes the the other thing that's kind of important that gets found on this like social media site which okay we should mention it's a kind of weird thing like he doesn't i don't know the the social media site seems like he was basically using as like a journal like there's he doesn't like follow people or like have followers so he's just sort of posting this stuff he also finds a bunch of clips of like tim pool videos and so this immediately sends the entire right into like you know a full-on defense mode right you know it turns out it's not great for your brand with like the sort of

general array of people if it's being associated with a guy who just did a mass shooting so tim pool responds to the other thing is there's like a manifesto on it and tim pool responds to this by i think i i think what actually like legitimately what happened is he read the manifesto and there's a thing in the manifesto like talking about the nashville shooter being trans or like specifically about the nashville shooter and i i think i think specifically he read that and was like, Oh shit, this is my out. I can go back and talking about the Nashville shooter. Um,

sure. And so he starts, he, he starts this, there's this whole sort of train of like right wing stuff about how all of this is fake. Um, so he starts arguing that like,

this isn't the guy's social media account. Uh, this, this sort of very very rapidly morphs into i mean just like full-on like sandy hook shit um one of his employees like tweets why is the corporate press so threatened by people questioning the authenticity of a mexican neo-nazi's r Russian social media account uncovered by state funded media. And this, because this immediately becomes the main line, right? State funded media things.

They're talking about bell and cat, which they're, they're hopping on all of the tanky conspiracy stuff and running with it because Twitter is a, is a cultic milieu of conspiracy and you can latch onto one talking point to make you feel okay about denying an entire like facet of reality and then it becomes an easy out yeah we're gonna we're gonna circle back to like specifically the tank of people getting involved in this because they do what

they're doing is a little bit of like an uh an evolution from what what's what folks kind of in the debating Christians about evolution and shit called the Gish Gallop, where the original idea of the Gish Gallop was when you're arguing from a creationist perspective about stuff like the age of the world, you bring up so many different kind of topics from different very niche issues you have with carbon dating to specific problems you have with the way scientists are you know, specific problems you have with like the way scientists are interpreting specific fossils. And it's just too much detail for somebody in like an ad hoc public argument to really like counter at once. And kind of the evolution of it is when you're dealing with something like this, rather than deal with the

broader picture, which is there's just a tremendous amount of evidence that this guy was a Nazi, that this guy was motivated and kind of brought into the community by a lot of content that guys like Tim Pool make. Instead, you focus on you pull up one single thing that you can kind of like try to get people to latch on to. And if you can get them arguing about that thing, you can get them to ignore the bigger picture. Like at least you can distract attention from it. And it works. It works for a lot of people. It's especially effective on social media. Yeah, and unfortunately, the social media platform

that this is mainly happening on is Twitter, which Elon Musk owns. And Elon Musk immediately, like, decides that he's just fully in on this shit. And he is, I mean, he is, like elon musk is like it's just actively promoting the sort of weird conspiracy that basically what the sort of right-wing story about this becomes is that like okay bellingcat is is the cia and they're being paid to create a, like a false flag thing that they're being paid to create a false flag to, to make this guy look like a Nazi and a Tim pool fan to distract people from the

Nashville shooting, which is just like absolute nonsense. But you know, know you you immediately get into like that that tim pool employee again like it like starts doing this whole like uh we are enshrined like with liberty to freely scrutinize every claim just as the sanctity of like every human being in america like has the right to question stuff it's like this is like literally like literally word for word stuff alex jones was saying in the Sandy Hook trial. But we've gotten to the point where you just, you know, like the sort of mainstream of the right just does this about every time there's a right wing mass shooting. And this particular time, it's been just everywhere. Yeah, we're going to, there's no smooth way to break to ads in an episode about a mass shooting, but that's what we're doing.

Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now. And I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few

more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas,

the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while commuting or running errands for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black

writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. I want to talk now a little bit more about the actual exchanges that Musk was involved in and how this narrative of like a psyop and this whole narrative around the shooting being a psyop, how that viewpoint got inflated on Twitter because Musk controls where all of the interactions go for tweets. get into how this specific conspiracy is a demonstration of how much of just a separation from reality that people like Musk are actively working towards. One of the main accounts that Musk was kind of riffing off of in this and who was trying to feed Musk this type of stuff was the redheaded libertarian who works for Tim Pool. She created a bunch of memes about this shooting talking about how the guy can't be a Nazi because he's Latino. Why would someone use a Russian social media site even though it's actually very common for American Nazis to use

Russian social media? We used to do an exercise at trainings that I did for Bellingcat where people would go through and use VKontakte, which is a Russian like kind of Facebook clone. And you would kind of use geographical search to find groups of like KKK members and shit in the American South because it was really common with them because it didn't have any kind of content moderation. So, yeah, so the types of like right wing content creators who are within Musk's Twitter orbit start pumping out all of this stuff. Right. And this is where Musk gets all of his information from. So he he starts he starts like just questioning the validity of this story, but then also specifically targeting Bellingcat,

just questioning the validity of this story, but then also specifically targeting Bellingcat, saying that didn't this story come from Bellingcat, which literally specializes in psychological operations, which first of all, is just a wild thing to say. When you're talking about it, specifically like an open source journalism website, like it's the most honest way you could do journalism because it's giving people the tools to literally check all of the work themselves like it's yeah i mean

this is kind of like a minor aside but one of the things that happens here constantly with all these people is they're like absolutely astounded like how like how how did belling get possibly find this guy it's like well it's not that hard it's really easy but the thing is the thing is right if if so like i am not a journalist right i i learned everything i know about this from gare in like one night and like i i i have tracked down like mass shooter social media accounts and like before the police got them like it's not that hard but the thing is it requires you to even like just a tiny tiny bit be a journalist and not a single one of these writing people has ever like done journalism ever and so like just like the tiniest bit of journalism just like destroys their brains and they're like they

they're physically incapable of comprehending how someone could have done a journalism and then they use this to sort of feed their base because their base also just doesn't understand how someone could do a journalism and this this this this lets you do this like cycle of like how could they possibly have found this they must have been given it by the government it's just like no all that really comes down to is is who has who is on their computer at the right time when this thing happens yeah whenever i find out or whenever i can id people it's always just a coincidence that the thing happens as i'm already at my computer so now i can look into this thing um right it is it is yeah who has access to the internet at the right time is the way that we figure out like who's going to end up IDing somebody.

Yeah, it's, it's a mix of that. And it's a mix of just who has the patience and the motivation to sit and comb through shit for hours and days, which is the same thing that like, it's the same thing that anti-fascist activists have been doing for years, you know, especially since Charlottesville, where you're just like, I'm going to watch the same videos of the same event and find new ones. And I'm going to spend three years doing that. And eventually I will catch a tattoo or a shirt with a logo. And that will let me ID somebody because, you know, of, of the, of the different social media shit that I've been pulling up. Like it's, it's, it's not, it doesn't take like spy satellites. It just takes motivation, being in the right place at the right time and having nothing else to do. Yeah. So eventually they started just kind of harping on this term PSYOP. Um, so PSYOP obviously means psychological operation, but what, what they mean when they say PSYOP is that they mean this was like a, this is a false, like a manufactured government planned operation. That's what they actually mean, right? Like in, in the conspiracy

space, PSYOP is more like a loaded term. They don't actually refer to like actual PSYOPs that get done like against like, you know, you can look at like COINTELPRO, right? You can look at, you can look at various ways that the FBI or the Army has done psyops. But what they mean when they say psyop is this is like, this is a government conspiracy theory, and it's a false narrative that's been crafted to like change public opinion. So I guess these people, Mia, you mentioned how they're making it sound like this was created to distract from the Nashville shooting.

They have various motivations for why they want to, but the important part is that they could use this word to just easily deny reality. And that is kind of beyond whatever motivations they have. It's just easy for them and their ideology to just block off this section of reality so that they don't have to, like, people who are, like, actually libertarians don't need to, like, confront what the extent of their ideology actually means, right? You know, there's certainly people who are, like, okay with mass shootings happening or, you know, are totally fine with, like, non-white people getting killed in mass shootings. But there probably are certain libertarians who don't actually like mass shootings. They don't actually like when fascists go kill tons of people and it's easier for them sometimes just to block off this section and ignore it than actually confront what their

ideology means so some musk kept saying is this is either the weirdest story ever or a very bad psyop uh the answer is neither this story is not super weird it's actually very very explainable if you understand the mechanisms at play here and even even just like not a bad sign off yeah i mean it's not even like it's not on it's like on the whole it's not a particularly complicated story like there are it is not an uncommon thing i mean the biggest most recent one before this was that uh that shooting in new york at the grocery store that was like a directly inspired, uh, Nazi attack.

Like this kind of shit happens constantly in the United States. It doesn't require, nobody has to be secretly armed by the feds. There's an AR 15 behind every Bush in this country. It's not hard for this kind of, this kind of shit. It's not hard to see where this like originates from. Yeah.

So it's, I mean, Musk, Musk just kept, kept replying to both Tim Pool employee tweets, tweets from the very blatantly fascist account to end wokeness, which Musk has been replying to quite a, uh, quite often recently. So this, and I think the reason why we wanted to just talk about this specifically is just because of you know like all of these musk tweets are getting like millions and millions of views if the view counter is any is anything to go by at the very least he's in the top three accounts with the highest engagement on twitter so these these types of conspiracy theories are getting inflated to extremely high degrees um at least online and the the separation of reality online

is inflated for these mass shootings um in a way that i have not seen in quite a while i have not seen this much just denial of like information regarding mass shootings in in quite a long time um and it just the combination of the stuff like the stuff with bellingcat coming from the tankies and how those conspiracies have now mashed with all of these like neo-fascist shit. It's a combination of reality denial that is absolutely worrying for like future mass shootings as well. It's a pivot in the kind of reality that's being denied. You know, not we have nothing to do with these Nazis who are parroting some of the things that we say about immigration. This is fundamentally not the attack that you think it is.

This is our enemies creating an attack to try to make us look bad. You've always seen bits and pieces of that. The fact that it's being parrotied by the wealthiest man on the planet using one of the biggest information fire hoses that exists is completely novel. Yeah, because I mean, a lot of these same conspiracy theories that specifically about like Eric Toller, we saw leftists and tankies bringing up the same stuff during the stuff with the Nazi National Guardsmen a month ago. And so we have a lot of the stuff has kind of been riding on the back of that and just continued and accelerating uh since then it appeared there's a few outlets like business insider and uh and bellingcat themselves reporting that they are they are uh receiving uh basically shadow bans on twitter

right now with their with their with their account and their posts having very limited reach. An interesting shadow band too, because it's not like it appears, at least from what I've seen, that what they're doing is they're making it so that when people type Bellingcat into the search bar, nothing comes up as opposed to like throttling the reach of the actual posts themselves, trying to make it deliberately difficult for people to actually look up information, which is interesting to me. Yeah.

And I guess, I guess it's worth saying that, um, the police in Texas have confirmed everything about, about, uh, the shooters political beliefs and his neo-Nazi ties in. He has a neo-Nazi shit in his apartment.

Obviously his body is covered with neo-nazi ties and he has neo-nazi shit in his apartment obviously his body is covered with neo-nazi tattoos i guess one of the things that some of the kind of right-wing content creators were trying to do is they were trying to say that um the specific pictures of the individual that bellingcat found online that that these pictures were not this person they in they in fact they were saying they were saying that the shooter is just somebody else which was also proven wrong but yeah they also they also they did another classic right wing thing which is that they they misidentified the shooter

yes I thought it was another guy with the same name because they're horrible at open source intelligence like and they misidentified the shooter and they misidentified the non-nazi tattoo that he had yes because he had he had weirdly enough. Because he had, weirdly enough, the city of Dallas' seal tattooed on his hands.

Yeah, the Texas tattoo on his shoulder. Yeah, there were a lot of conspiracy theories about that. And a lot of them related to the fact that the first photos we got of the guy were the kind of photos you get of a dead man at a mass shooting that someone takes through a window while sheltering so it wasn't clear so they would take a picture of like a social media picture of the tattoo on his hand and then a picture of him dead and like the the tattoo on his hand in the picture of him dead was like blurrier and they were like look the lines

aren't straight they're straight in the picture on his social media and it's like well yeah because those were taken by very different cameras in very different situations. Like, you know how cameras work. You know how this is. One of the funnier ones that one of these content creators was doing was they were posting the photos of the Nazi tattoos that the shooter himself posted online,

being like, look how fresh these tattoos are. How can, how can, if he had these tattoos for years why do they look so fresh in these photos because the photos were from right after he got the tattoos like you do when you get a tattoo yeah there's like i have tattoos pictures of me getting tattoos from like 15 years ago somewhere on my Facebook. Like you could do the same thing. Suspicious, Robert. One of the interesting things is that like we see the same thing with all of like all of the worries around like deep faking stuff. Like all of all of the like weaponized unreality stuff, it doesn't need to actually be convincing.

It doesn't need to be good. Like deep fakes don't need to be good quality. You can post a meme of like a picture of Biden's face and some text under it with a quotation mark, post it on Facebook, and millions of people will believe that's just true. Like it doesn't need to be real or convincing in order for it to have it like an effect. And it's also, it's not just about, I think it's thinking like, it's not just about i think it's it's thinking like it's not just about convincing people it's not about making them believe it this is like this is the thing that i tried to talk about years ago during the eight chance shooting it's shit posting part of the goal is just to disrupt conversation it's to make people engage with the fake stuff it's to make

people break kind of the um the lines of reasoning that they are going in with like it's to make people distract people from the stuff that is really clear and obvious and just kind of fracture the conversation. Because the more that you do that, the weaker you make the response to what's happened. And the more kind of that you can distract people from the degree of complicity

that the people in kind of the media sphere on the right have for all of this shit yeah and i think that's why like specifically the going after the bellingcat stuff has been really effective with that because like like i there are like people who i am friends with in real life who like are convinced that bellingcat is a cia psyop like this is like a like like really not insignificant portions of the left believe this yep and that means that it's you know unbelievably difficult to form any kind of coherent response when like half of the people who would normally be doing this stuff are like oh well they are actually cia so like yes the the netherlands-based cia unit yeah it's like yeah it the i mean like at least in the time i was there the primary

people funding us was the dutch postcode lottery like it's it's it's i don't know like almost every news organization they take grants where yeah they can get them yeah and like i i want to specifically talk about the ned a tiny bit because people like so like the main conspiracy is about like they like at one point they took they took a grant for national endowment for democracy and like yeah those people do weird shit sometimes but they also for example like if okay so if you're gonna have the line that every single person who's taking money for the ned is a cia thing like you have to accept that for example like the pro beijing electoral party in hong kong party in Hong Kong is a CIA op because they also got a shit ton of NED money, right?

Like NED just gives money to a shit ton of people. It's definitely worth emphasizing that like the initial groups that were pushing the Bellingcat conspiracies were all gray zone people that are specifically, specifically paid by the Russian government because Russia was mad at Bellingcat for exposing their war crimes. And that's where all of this stuff starts. I don't know how much point there is in laying into this specific thing too much. I would remind you at all times when you are dealing with breaking news like this

and there's a bunch of different conflicting arguments are like dealing with breaking news like this and there's a bunch of different uh and there's a bunch of different kind of like conflicting arguments about what's actually happening um occam's razor isn't a hundred percent of the time the way to go but in a situation like this you have two possibilities one is that a nazi went on a killing spree as happens constantly as has been happening since the Nazis became a thing. The other possibility is that the federal government, for unclear reasons, convinced a man to cover his body in swastika tattoos and shoot random people at a mall for gun control that's not going to get passed in the state of Texas. I don't know.

Like, which of those seems likelier to you? Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHe and sonora an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of latin america from ghastly encounters with shape-shifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who

find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I did this thing like very deliberately to myself

like about a year ago where i was like i was very deliberate like i'm going to like unconspiracy theory of my brain because you know like there is a lot of like like the the kind of reasoning you get in this stuff which is like hey here's a thing that like quote unquote looks weird so this whole thing must be suspect so it must be an op is like a, really kind of... It's a really common kind of reasoning now that just a lot of people across the entire political spectrum have.

And it's not actually a good way to understand the world. It simply is not. We live in an increasingly absurd world where every single weird thing is more and more visible because of the internet, so we're more aware of how much weird shit happens all the time. stuff that and stuff that may not necessarily be weird because like everything there is an expert in every field who can who can explain to you why

this thing actually makes perfect sense um and it's just people being exposed to things that they're not used that they're not used to i think one of the interesting one of the last things i think we should like mention about this is just the influx of how militant like neo-Nazism or like visible neo-Nazism has just been, people have just been saying it's feds in an increasingly concerning way. Like, I think like last month there was this viral video of a whole bunch of Nazis dressed in in red and black i think protesting something i forget the exact circumstances at the moment i think it was a drag i i think it was i think it was some drag related protest but yeah there was there was this group of nazis dressed in red and black doing nazi shit and when you looked at any of the videos on twitter you saw hundreds of replies from people with blue check marks just calling them feds saying, Oh wow. Look at all these feds.

Oh, I can't believe the feds are so busy today. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know,

it's, it's, it's like the a 100 person NPC meme with them all wearing the blue check mark on their forehead saying it's the feds just because it's, it's once we get to the point where we have more Nazis doing mass shootings again, the same way, like there was an influx between like 2017 to 2019

then 2020 there was kind of a dip because all all crime kind of had a dip as we're gonna go into the next next election cycle as things are gonna start looping again um when more and more nazis start doing shit just how there's gonna be a bigger swath of the population who just denies that's what's happening and that is gonna make make the problem of nazis probably a bit harder to deal with i mean there's there will still be anti-fascists doing their work to like docs and id people and and and all that stuff but the amount of like visibility and the amount of traction that that this level of reality denial is getting around like militant neo-nazism and around like Nazi killings will be a kind of a new thing to

navigate or not a new thing, but like it's a, the problem will be bigger than what it used to be. I wanted to kind of note one thing on a, on the other side of the ideological spectrum and, and not to equate the two, but there has been something kind of concerning that I've been seeing crop up in liberal circles. You may have noticed kind of as a response to all of the mass shootings and the idea that you should spread pictures of victims of shootings and a focus on the amount of damage that like a weapon like an AR-15 does to a human body. People can have their own opinion on like whether or not this is a helpful idea, but I have noticed in sort of arguments I've been having with people a troubling trend,

which is when I talk about the importance of doing stuff like taking stop the bleed training, carrying things like tourniquets, I've gotten responses from a couple of people that are like, AR-15s are so powerful, the wounds are not survivable. There's no point in doing this. That is not the case. I have known dozens of people who have been shot by AR-15s in some cases, in AR-style weapons in some cases multiple times and larger weapons and lived. It is always worthwhile to have stopped the bleed training and to carry equipment.

If you hear anyone saying that, please, please correct them. Because whatever you think about gun control, it is very important for people to know how to deal with those kind of injuries. And it is important in the immediate wake of an attack. One of the things that was really unsettling is in the immediate wake of the Allen attack after the shooter was down. There was a couple of people who ran in to try to provide life saving aid and a bunch more who took photos of the people who had been wounded and killed. And it's possible that if more of the people taking photos had gotten in and attempted to provide aid, some of the people who were injured might have survived. No way to know, but always worth having that training. That's just something I've noticed, not to put it in the same moral universe as trying to pretend your calls for violence aren't calls for violence, but it is something that concerned me and that people should maybe keep an eye on.

and that people should maybe keep an eye on. Yeah, I mean, that was the case with the Rittenhouse shootings. There was someone who basically had most of their arm blown off, but they did not die. So yeah, that is not true. And I've watched a lot of the Rittenhouse footage, and yeah, it is nasty. But no, that is a good thing to note yeah and also like

on just a fundamental human level like do do not let yourself be consumed by the algorithm so much that your first reaction to seeing someone get shot is to try to film them like yeah we we need to be better than this like we have watched people die because of this like we like this this is not a thing as society that we can continue to be doing like we simply cannot we simply have to act and not like become part of a sort of like mass media spectacle instead of doing something yeah the footage of things is not going to change it especially with mass shootings um footage of mass shootings usually actually makes the problem worse and it's mostly used by people who want to be mass shooters yeah i'm i i we that may be a conversation we should uh we should expand on at

a later date but um you know don't don't let the bastards grind you down take a stop the bleed course you know bring a tourniquet with you down. Take a stop the bleed course, you know, bring a tourniquet with you out in the world. These are action items that you can do that might in fact help. So that's going to be it for us today at It Could Happen Here. Until next time, you know, keep your head on a swivel.

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