It Could Happen Here - The Weird Meme Ecosystem Behind the Highland Park Shooting

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

We discuss Post-Manifesto Terrorism as related to the recent Highland Park mass shooting and how the aesthetics of research are used to manipulate you.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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don't i don't know that's probably not a good way to yeah it'd be like that sometimes garrison what are we what are we talking about today this is it could happen here podcast bad things world falling apart there's just been a big shooting in boston you probably heard about not boston chicago highland park chicago i don't know why i said boston chicago not b shooting in boston you probably heard about not boston chicago park chicago i don't know why i said boston chicago not boston the boston not boston not boston not this i was thinking about the boston bombing oh there we go it's also not really in chicago we should know it's like 30 miles away right yeah yeah it's like it's it's it's it's a northern suburb yeah it's like it's and it's yeah because i i've heard a bunch of people say it's a northern suburb. Yeah.

It's like, because I've heard a bunch of people say it's like a super rich neighborhood. And then I've heard other Chicago folks say that, like, no, it's like an upper middle class neighborhood that used to be richer. And anyway, whatever. It's not like Chicago. That and. Yeah. yeah we'll be talking about it because it's it is an incident that fits within a pattern of behavior that very few people understand nor really prepared to think about and it part of why is because if you actually understand what's going on with this shooting there is no political utility in what happened yeah um and i mean that a number of ways there is no if utility in what happened. Yeah. And I mean that in a number of ways. There is no, if you are someone who is supportive of more stringent gun control, there is not

political utility in the shooting for a number of reasons, including the fact that Illinois has strict gun laws. And while a lot of Illinois gun crime has to do with weapons that come in from other states, he bought his legally in the state of Illinois. And even though like this guy was on police radar radar he had made threats before they had confiscated all of his knives and he was still allowed to buy guns even though Illinois has a red flag law that very easily if you can confiscate a man's knives they could have confiscated his stopped him from buying guns or whatever plenty of laws on the books to have stopped this and it's useless

in a left-right political sense of the word because there are this guy does not graph onto any of that i i have i think it is there's a value in kind of putting out some of the trump imagery he's put on only because the right has immediately leapt on calling him a transgender antifa shooter and i guess in terms of a social media thing sharing him draped in a trump flag is the quickest way to like rebut that but that doesn't mean he's not it's it's not useful for actually understanding what's going on right yeah so let's yeah there's very this is it's it's in a pattern of shootings that are becoming more common the past few years we saw it at the... There was a school shooting last October or November

that the shooter had a very similar profile. And it's a part of this growing online trend using imagery related to mental illness to encourage and justify mass acts of violence in some rebellion from how our regular society is structured and how people usually think of reality. So it's something that we, generally, people who spend a lot of time researching this, myself included, try to be very careful about how we talk about this, right? Because we don't want the wrong things boosted, but also everyone just being in the dark isn't great either, right? That's frustrating, right? If people are curious, they're going to start to look stuff up. And it's

better that they have someone who knows what they're talking about explained to them than just have them be in the wild west of the internet, on-site image boards or forums, them be in the wild west of the internet on side image boards or forms learning about these nonsense propaganda styles. There's a few things that are unique about this guy. I mean, he was not only making the propaganda, but he also did a violent act. That is actually more unique than usual. Usually the people who are involved in making this type of propaganda that he was making, he made YouTube videos, music. He was very prolific in what he was putting out content-wise into the internet.

And usually the people who put stuff out in this style of propaganda and this style of very meme-driven, violent, mental illness, fetishization subcultures. They don't generally the people who make the stuff don't go out and do the stuff. This is one instance where this did happen. So that's actually unique for a few reasons. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that's interesting about that is that, and this is something that has not been discussed nearly as much as i think it ought to have in the

wake of the shooting this guy basically released an arg at the same time as he carried out his shooting like we're gonna we're gonna get to that yeah i mean because in some ways this is a really good explanation or not explanation this is really an example of the post manifesto like post manifesto terrorism um yes there's not there's not a written manifesto it's someone's entire online presence and their entire online documentation is is that that serves as their manifesto the whole image of them online everything they put out it represents the thing that they want spread it's people these types of people aren't are less likely to write you know like a 10 page thing about how

about why they hate x minority instead they're going to leave piles and piles of clues and puzzle pieces music videos and content that lead people into what they want to project as their mental state to be um so it's like everything is and everything is part of what they want to project as their mental state to be. So it's like everything is part of what they want to put out. Yeah, and I think both you can see the act itself, the shooting itself, as an attempt to spread the art that he was making and to spread this profile that he had built. There's a reason why that logo that he had for himself was all over everything.

There's a reason why- Pretty unique logo. Very unique logo. He put out some of the videos, one from 10 months ago, showed the location he's believed to have started shooting from, it looks like. So he was planning this for a while,

and I think this was meant both as, almost as like an advertising campaign for this guy's EP, if you want to look at it that way. But in a broader sense, it's more circular than that, right? He wasn't just trying to spread his stuff, but he was trying to spread his stuff in this imagery and branding that he had created for himself in order to put other people in that same mind state. It was also very personal to him. Um, he's,

I've spent the past few hours watching, watching hours of the stuff that he's put out. Um, and I mean, he's, there's, there's videos that he's animated of him doing a suicide by cop. Um,

there's, there's music videos he's made about doing a school shooting um these are these are ideas and thoughts he's been grappling with for a long time and he finally did the thing i'm i'm unsure currently if he always knew that he was going to do this or if he was actually trying to fight it now that's that's honestly not even worth debating because it's not useful to what's going on no because he did it right yeah because because he did it but we've had you can see the types of stuff he's been putting out like on. No, because he did it, right? Yeah. Because he did it. But you can see the types of stuff he's been putting out. Like, yes, the street that he did the shooting on,

he has a long zooming clip of that same street in videos that was posted over a year ago. So he's been thinking in this way for a long time. This isn't like a fast radicalization. This is someone who has been heavily steeped in very very small niche online subcultures for a long time i mean like the guy is 22 years old he's he's had his twitter account since 2011 he's been online so much um it's a deeply online person deeply alienated, socially isolated, deeply like disassociative. And this is, by the way, consistent with what his friends have said, consistent with what people who knew him and worked with him and put music and albums together with him have repeatedly, a number of them at this point, come out and said variations of like, man he he got like really weird like it was

not not like and not in the way that like oh he got super into q or like he became a nazi but like he got weird in a way i didn't understand and i stopped associating with he got he got detached from parts of like modern reality in ways that are really hard for people to understand um and i think it's it is important to emphasize just the deeply online nature of this he had yes he made a whole music video uh titled i rely on the internet um that you you can't find anywhere so don't even try to for the love of god you don't need to you don't need to but like but it opens but it opens by him saying i get mad when other people are more popular than me on the internet and the mass shooting is in line with this with this style of thinking right he's he is he is trying to reify himself into a into a memetic

image to spread around the same way many mass shooters try to do this same thing yeah he is doing this extremely intentionally um he wants to be the thing that represents a very specific idea and i'm it's again we are always trying to be very careful about how much we get into this because you don't want to boost the wrong thing. But it's important to talk about because it's costing a lot of people their lives and no one really knows how to deal with this problem right now.

One of the beautiful things about our current age is that if you are someone like if you are someone who researches terrorism extremism violence particularly in the american context although certainly not exclusively christchurch and all germany i don't need to go into it but if you are someone who who focuses on this stuff um you will repeatedly have the experience of encountering a new subculture online or a new trend, a new like species of meme and find yourself wondering like when the first shooting is going to be. Um, I made a significant chunk of my career cause I was paying attention to one particular group of folks online when they

did their shooting. And I am not primarily, I've not been in the, you know, we've talked a little bit about schizo wave, which is kind of broadly speaking the thing that this guy most embodied yes um that is that is the propaganda style which has a bad name yes it's we're not obviously it's because he's schizophrenic we're not endorsing its name this is the style that people who are involved in this online community use it's about fetishizing parts or fetishizing media-driven aspects of mental illness to encourage violence it is that's what it's about obviously mental illness yes the aesthetics of mental illness right people who are who actually you know deal with mental illnesses are much less likely to commit violent acts they're actually more likely

to be the recipient of yes of violent acts yes it's not extremely documented so like yeah this is this is like i think important to actually get people to like understand because this is one of the things that if you look at like tucker carlson for example like how alex jones responded to all these shooters the thing they pivoted one of the things they pivoted to is oh it's because all these people are on antidepressants and it's like no no I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about so there was there was this tweet by I hate talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene because I think it's useless to talk about her

and it's only gives her inflates the thing that she represents but but but she had this tweet about a picture of him that that that that he that he posted and she's asking is he in jail or a rehab center or a psychiatric center in this photo it's a picture of him that he posted. And she's asking, is he in jail or a rehab center or a psychiatric center in this photo?

That's not his bedroom. What drugs or psychiatric drugs or both does he use? And the image here is of an image very clearly photoshopped of this person sitting in like a mental institution holding a Bible. And it's part of this thing that is like, fetishizing in like a mental institution holding a bible and it's part of this thing that is like and fetishizing the aesthetics of mental illness right it's like yeah oh look at me i'm i am so detached from reality i be i i belong inside a mental institution

yeah and the aesthetics of christian fascism which is also a weird part of it there's a photo one of the like uh images he posted in 4chan. I think it was 4chan. I may be mistaken about the exact location. But it was, like, it was a Catholic saint with, like, the sacred heart, like, in her hands with the head replaced by, like, some anime girl. I have not seen that yet. Yeah, yeah. I'll send you a link.

This image that he made of of inside this this mental hospital like that that is that is part of the joke to him right yeah the joke like i don't think he would actually assume that someone would think this is an unphotoshopped image i think he would he would find that hilarious so obvious like so clearly like marjorie taylor green is just like just like unable to determine the most basic photoshop but you can see the edge marks very clearly so but yes but this but like this is part of the joke right and everything getting into what he actually believes about reality and stuff isn't important because everything about this is has to do with like post-ironic violence and

post-ironic like comedy post-ironic ideas of reality. It's the difference between what is sincere and what is real and what is ironic and what is fake don't matter. As long as they're happening, that's what's happening, so it's all as real as anything else. So getting into specific ideas about what he personally believes doesn't actually matter because, one, we don't know if that's genuine at all. He's putting everything out intentionally.

And, two, it doesn't matter on the actual material circumstances what are producing effects inside our world right now like these types of like acts of violence but it's it's everything is put out should be it'll seem like contradictory it'll seem confusing right he he he opened a video of his that he was like doing a live stream like like i think like over like a year ago and he he calls everyone who's watching his live stream of like he calls them communists he's like hey communists um and it's not because they're actually communist it's not because he likes communism it's not because he's necessarily a fascist either it's that all these things are so blurred and you use them interchangeably to produce this sense of meaninglessness and the reaction to this meaningless world that he's constructed for himself and these types of online subcultures try to construct the only sensible reaction

to this meaningless world is for them to do these types of acts of violence that is that is the point so the actual details what they're saying aren't important because it's all about constructing this world that is utterly meaningless and self-contradictory and confusing and nothing makes sense. And the only way to respond to that is to get out of it. And that's part of what they're trying to do. And there are – I mean, again, part of the frustrating thing is that there are – all of these things that people try to kind of simply affix to this are pieces of it. Yeah. American gun culture, the fetishization of violence as the way to achieve positive ends in our culture is a part of this. It's why –

Absolutely. It's part of why the natural response to everything is meaningless and confusing is go on a killing spree. Yeah. Exactly. meaningless and confusing is go on a killing spree. Exactly. And likewise, the fact that politics is where it is, where you have like this one party that's the Republican Party that is almost entirely dedicated to like owning the libs and just purely attacking people rather than trying to do anything because their policies have been unmitigated disasters for the country. And the other side just kind of blithely tells people to vote. Like that hopelessness, that like – that kind of nihilistic aggression on the right all feeds

into this. And you could say that like a great deal of right-wing media, particularly right-wing alt-media is kind of – forms a heavy component of like the milieu that this guy was radicalized in. But it's more like that kind of stuff provided a language for him than it is that that kind of stuff was specifically like his motivating. I mean, same thing with like Trumpism, right? Like, yeah, he he engaged with Trumpism only in a way that it helps kind of destabilize things. And is this like orbit of chaos, right? That's, that's why it that that that's why it's into it, right? He was deeply into stuff around conspiracy theories, paranormal, deep nihilism, getting cut off from consensus reality, getting awakened to some, like, greater truth. Everything that he's actually into is all just to serve those types of means. Politics aren't the core part of that, but it's a reaction to politics. And then he's going to use it as just, as just another tool. It's because yeah, many of them are racist. Maybe they can share racist memes, but that's not actually the, the, the center point of, of what's going on. Um, and you know,

in some ways it'd be easier if it would be, cause that gives you something actually easy to target. Otherwise right now, you know, when you're trying to address this whole propaganda style that is encouraging these things to happen it's a harder thing to clamp down on because it's it's in like an endless game of whack-a-mole trying to find out you know who's the big people pushing content like this right now in like these weird niche communities how can we get them taken down and they just always pop back up right it's always it's it's this endless game so it's hard to target and that leaves you with the feeling of like hopelessness on how this situation will be solved which is like also part of the point of why these attacks happen is to is to get that reaction um but it sucks like it's it's

it's and it's always bad to just have the like the only thing you think about is like oh wow i don't see a way to solve this it's just terrible but that's part of the intention here. And man, it's not good. Because, you know, this isn't the first shooting that has happened from this schizo wave aesthetic. There has been other ones.

But these things are... Normies are going to start hearing more and more about this. And that sucks. It's going to become more of a of a thing that people are going to be aware of right as soon as as soon as mpr starts talking about it you're like okay this is this is fully this is this is fully escaped the box it's it's it's one of those things when um because i was just i was saying earlier like what it's like when you finally when you find yourself staring at something that is going to blow up in a violent way and just not knowing when.

You are one of a number of folks who I've known who are kind of particularly dealing with this space. And it's been like two years that folks have been saying like there is, there will a bit like, and the thing that is most, almost as frightening as like anything else is that and then fucking brett bear is going to be talking about schizo wave on the news like we're going to have to we're going to have to deal with like joe rogan trying to parse this shit out while stoned um while stoned and and while talking about the cali yuca and we'll talk about the fucking cali yuca which does lead us into the bored ape yacht club garrison so are we gonna are we gonna segue so we're gonna talk about one thing that dealing with schizo we finished talking about one thing dealing with schizo wave then we're

gonna enter into other thing that the only accurate way i can describe describe this is that my my dives into this into this theory are the equivalent of what it feels like to have a psychotic episode. And that's not disparaging at all. It's about the actual things your brain does when that happens. How you take one meaningless piece of information and project meaning

onto it to make it super important. And how that kind of cascades down. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. 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.

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Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts oh boy so the board the board ape yacht club um aka now i guess the board ape nazi club because people online have decided that they're yeah we're really good at researching nazis i guess hop somebody hop into the fucking subreddit and tell us that we needed to be

dealing with this. I was like randomly, I visited some of my friends in Chicago who are like normies and they were telling me about this video and I was like oh no. Yeah, it is again, it has fully escaped the box now and that's part of the problem.

There is this YouTuber who made a video in partnership with a quote-unquote internet artist um about how the bored ape yacht club uh friends of the pod uh are secretly this nazi op to troll everyone into spreading esoteric nazism that's that's the claim now first i'm going to say that the guy who made this video was in partnership with this internet artist who at the same time launched a rival ape based nft project and this video served as an ad for his rival ape nft project and his to be clear his ape nft project was taking the art that the board ape yacht club used for their apes

making no changes to it and just selling it to people on a different platform which is like intellectual property theft right right like i never want to be the guy saying the board apes are legally on the right i know right sure are i can't believe like we are not defending board ape yacht club it's stupid and i want them to be hit with a brick. We're talking about this because people are appropriating the term, appropriating the, almost like the aesthetics of anti-fascist research to start selling their own products. They are appropriating the aesthetics of scholarship focused on extremism in order to sell NFTs. That's what's happening with this the board ape yacht club are nazis video so it gets so all the information comes from this from this guy who's a rival a rival nft internet artist what's his fucking name um hi writer rips i think yeah writer rips yeah

because he's being sued now by the board apes or whatever and like good god i and i mean everything i i i i i'm not if you watch the video that we're referring to i'm not disparaging you in case you thought it was convincing because i mean that was part of the editing is it was trying to make it seem convincing yeah but every every single thing is like cherry picked and squished together to resemble meaning but once you actually open it up you're like oh this is actually nothing. The whole 30-minute section on the cipher is about them doing ciphers badly to get a result out of the clues that they were

given. They're looking for specific results to match whatever they want to see. And everything else is, the connections are so tangential, and it's like synchronicity gone bad, right? It's people who take these things and project meaning onto them when in reality, that's just how everything in the world works, and it's like synchronicity gone bad right it's people who take these things and project meaning onto them when in reality that's just how everything in the world works and it's

not actually meaningful or important it's just because you're focusing on it so you're going to see it everywhere this is the same thing we were talking about in our food factories conspiracy video yes our podcast sorry and it basically one of the things that has made this i think spread so virally is that there's a germ of not truth, but there's a single convincing point that it all starts from. And the single convincing point is that the Bored Ape Yacht Club logo looks like it very – Was ripped from that other Nazi logo. Absolutely. Yeah, it is very much patterned off of like the old SS Death's Head.

Well, I shouldn't – yeah. Because – There's a number of things going on there. Because the Nazis were really good at graphic design. And because also that's not originally a Nazi thing. It has its origins in a Prussian military unit. And there's a reason why the death's head went so far. And it is generally like, for example,

when you see a death's head on a Ukrainian soldier in like Ukraine, that dude's probably got some pretty Nazi fucking beliefs. Yeah. It's not a it's it's not a again so the fact that you see something that looks like it may have an inspiration in that um but like is a worthwhile point to start looking at stuff absolutely but once you go at it with a conclusion in mind then find things just to back up your own conclusion that's not how you do good

research because man like one of the founders is jewish not saying jewish people can't be fascist or whatever but like half the people who started it are ethnic minorities they're really bad writers and they put together this thing that's complete nonsense and people are now assuming it's this yeah mega conspiracy and it's not it's just bad so and i think part of why people are so so i think part of why a chunk of the people who hate it want there to be a conspiracy is because this thing has made so much money and it is utterly banal and and idiotic and it is utterly banal and idiotic and part of the thing a lot of this comes out of and a lot of the strength that kind of this

individual this thing has this this video has comes out of the fact that years ago, a number of folks, some of whom are present company here, started warning people about the ways in which fascists would hide things like 14s and 88s. Yeah, all of like dog whistles, hidden imagery, all that kind of stuff. And so people started to get primed to the fact that that happens, that Nazis hide shit and that you should be on the lookout for it. But one of the things that has been forgotten, I think, in kind of the rush to do that for shit like this is that it's not just the fact that they're hiding. Like in the specific case of people who are putting 14s and 88s and shit, when I was discussing

that, it was nearly always in the context of like members of Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys and affiliated groups who were beating people in the streets. Right. So you're not you don't just have the imagery. You have someone going out and doing things that like they are claiming have nothing to do with fashion. But like, no, you can see if you have an ape and their care. Yeah. If you have an ape that's numbered one, four, eight, eight, which is a video.

It's because there's like 10,000 of these apes and they're all numbered in numerical order. Yeah. It's like the fact that in a group of a set of 10,000 apes, one of them is a number of 1488 is not Nazi dog whistling even any more than it would be satanic dog whistling that there's going to be a 666 in there. It's like it's just like there's one that's 6969 just like there's one that's two three four seven whatever yeah it's like that thing people used to do where like

i don't know if people still do this but like there when i was like kid people would like you'd get someone who'd like pull out a grid of a city and they start drawing pentagrams on it yeah exactly and it's like well yeah there's a bunch of random lines if you can you can draw anything you want yeah but the other thing that's that, yeah, there's a bunch of random lines. If you can draw anything you want. Yeah. But the other thing that's a really that's a big problem about this is not only it's passing off bad extremism research to sell their own NFT product, which is bad in and of itself. It's also saying the stuff that doesn't need to be said out loudly to a huge audience,

all while using the fast wave image style. And that sucks because it's talking about things like traditionalism it's talking about types of esoteric nazism that usually we don't want to put a giant megaphone on because when people get really into this you get stuff like the shooting that happened a few days ago that's that's those are the same internet communities that this stuff is really fostered in so we don't like to amplify it because the more people who are in these communities, the more their brains slowly get chipped away at by these people making these types of like hypnotic propaganda.

So when we have a YouTuber that has a video with millions of views talking about the Kaliuga, talking about Julius Evola, talking about a whole bunch of stuff around like extremely niche occult nazism that's not great especially when they're using the fast wave style of video editing to make it seem really cool and scary and when they're doing it ultimately to make money in an nft scheme right it's it's it's more than just this is not just somebody did research that was like bad um this is somebody crafted a viral thing using the aesthetics of research um and dropping some really dangerous shit into the consciousness in an irresponsible way to sell the same ape drawings they were attacking extremely frustrating because yeah even the whole cipher section of the video I'll still reel against because it's about people using a bajillion cipher methodologies to get specific results out of it that they want.

And all the results they get out of it also are like not problematic and are kind of explainable. Like all of them refer to something about monkeys anyway. So even if they are true, it's not it's it doesn't necessarily need to be referencing this obscure thing in traditionalism. It's like, oh, no, that's because it's the name of a fucking monkey and i don't again i don't have any actual opinion on whether the board api club has someone working for it that is hiding in secret references because honestly i don't care uh because all because what it's viewed publicly as is a stupid nft thing yeah i mean it's. It's not viewed publicly by people who use it as a secret Nazi conspiracy because if it is, what's the impact? How would it matter if it's a secret that people were hiding in these right-wing street movements, a bunch of whom wound up feeding into Jan 6th, it's easy to say, well, what the harm was. They were going out.

They were beating people. They were planning terrorist attacks, right? Doing terrorist attacks. Again, I fucking hate these Bored Ape motherfuckers. I think this is the stupidest fucking, I don't know, trend I've seen in my entire goddamn life. I cannot point to anything even vaguely Nazi they have supported or done. Like, among other things,

if you want to know if something is a dangerous conspiracy or a stupid grift, one question you should ask yourself, and this isn't always relevant, but one question you should ask yourself is, is Jimmy't always relevant, but one question you should ask yourself is, is Jimmy Fallon involved? Because if Jimmy Fallon is involved, it's probably just a dumb grift.

It's a grift! Because, I mean, the whole watching this guy break down how you get secret messages out of these ciphers is, it's the same thing as, like, QAnon shit. It's people wanting to get an answer out of numbers and things and then pushing that answer as truth, even if it's not based in any form of reality. Yeah.

So it's really frustrating to watch people basically start using QAnon-style research tactics to justify their hatred of an NFT project, which is like, no, you can just dislike it for being an NFT thing. You don't need to wrap it in this package that is just really bad extremism research. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, Andrel, won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be

digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again.

The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes.

You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999,

a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. González wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. about this attack and about like what's going to happen kind of in the media after it is that um i think kind of inevitably these aesthetics are just going to get co-opted on a wider and wider basis that's what's happening on tiktok right now oh good these these types of fast

wave and schizo wave aesthetics are just becoming a core part of the zoomer online aesthetic and that sucks the the other point i was i wanted to mention about the highland park thing is like this this guy that did this is such a perfect profile of this type of de-attached uh like gen z like almost i i like like post-politics terrorism um that like he is such a perfect example of someone who's been online since he was a very very little kid trying to make content online right everyone in gen z needs to be performing all of the time right your whole life is a performance for the internet um he was doing that same thing he's been making been making music and videos and shit since he was since he was

like younger than me like he's been doing this for a long long time um and the types of like you know like nested communities that you get like that you like fall into it's such it's such like a clear example of the very types of things that you know me and others have been talking about and warning about for a while. And it's the whole muddledness of reality that we even get with this Bored Ape Nazi Club video, right? They're all part of this same problem with the internet. Our brains weren't designed for this much information coming at us at the same time.

We cannot sort it all out. And it's not ideal. It's not great. I would rather it not be like this. I don't know how to, like, come at people with a solution to this because this is an unsolved problem. It's like come up with a solution for the fucking the fact that emissions, like, are not going to be reduced. I know because the world because the world does suck. Yeah. like are not going to be reduced i know because the world because the world does suck um but yeah very be very cognizant of video propaganda styles and anyone that uses flashing like classic or

catholic um like uh imagery be very very careful be very careful of people who fetishize the aesthetics of mental illness be very careful about about people that that you wrap these aesthetics of of mental illness and like a very violent package um because like that that's what we get with with with the shooter he was like doing doing videos about about you know these aspects of mental illness that end with him just like a picture of like a drawing of him holding a gun um you know way before he bought a gun he was making art about about this yeah um i think the one that stuck out to me most was him repeatedly referring to himself as a sleepwalker yeah um which which i don't know like obviously that is very much in line with the the schizo wave aesthetic stuff that like you have been talking about it also

kind of makes me think i mean it it it brought me to thinking about uh barbara tuckman who is a historian who wrote a book called the guns of august that's a history of world war one um that that describes kind of the machinery that got set up and marched everybody into that situation exploding like sleep sleepwalkers right um like this system has been set up and the people are kind of so unwilling to see where it's leading that uh everything's just kind of marching with a with a sense of inevitability towards a worse and a worse end point and that's that's what scares me most about this. I've listened to many of his horrible songs

and there's lyrics very similar to that idea about that kind of inevitable, like fate-driven nature of our current situation and how reality has become so muddled with the internet. And there's been an intentional top-down effort to destroy any nature of consensus reality and make everything up for debate um there's there is there isn't facts no longer are a thing like they just don't exist um yeah and this is the world that results from that happening. When there's people in power who are pushing for this, like Steve Bannon is among one of many people who are pushing for this type of world.

This is the result that we get. And this is the result that they kind of want us to get. Yeah, I mean, because if everything is true, and that's fundamentally like what they're going for, is this idea that like... Everything's true and that's fundamentally like what they're going at for is this idea that like everything's true and nothing is everything yeah and if every like and if you hit that state you can do anything right like to to steal a quote who is that was that fucking crowley um the but but like that's very much nothing is true everything is permitted yeah yeah i mean that goes all the way back to the

assassins the yeah well allegedly goes back yes sure sure sure uh-huh um but no but it is like that is that is the thing right if you get even this even the shooter guy had numerous discordian references in in his shit um yeah it's all about the same stuff it's all all dealing with these same problems. And, right, obviously, if, you know, if you deal with disassociation, as I sometimes do, if you, you know, like parts about the Discordian aesthetics and like the kind of ideas they play with, that does not make you an inherently dangerous person.

That's not the problem here. Right, like you could, like, I'm, you know, in some ways, but I think about a lot of a lot of these same topics because i look at all of this i'm i look at all of this research all the time so it is my brain's in a similar is in a similar place that's that's that doesn't make you a bad person that doesn't make you dangerous um but i think it's important to be cognizant of the type of propaganda that people are pushing the types of propaganda trends and styles that are producing material effects in the world like these types

of shootings yeah and so i don't know what else to say honestly because it's bad yeah it's it's a problem i would say if anyone ever tells you about something they saw on the internet, hit them and run away screaming. That's a good way to move forward. And please don't start other things. The right is going to have two possible reactions to stuff like this. They're going to, one, do a satanic panic. They're going to be like, oh, look at these people doing occult shit. Let's do another satanic panic they're gonna be like oh look at these people doing a cult shit um let's do another let's do another satanic panic which would suck there's there's

there's there's that option obviously that that would tie into like transphobia that would tie into a whole bunch of whole bunch of bullshit um the other option is that people start you know using mentally ill people as a scapegoat and start saying we should lock up people who deal with mental illness yeah that is also not in homeless that would suck wouldn't solve the problem either wouldn't do it yeah and like that's the thing i've actually been seeing this in the last really like probably three months is there's been a bunch of people who've been calling for like bringing like bringing sort of old school asylums back that's that's exactly what the people the people who make this propaganda that's exactly what they want that's that they want you to have that reaction.

That would make things so much worse. If you put people like this in an asylum for 10 days, then they get out, they are so much more likely to do these types of things. Not because they're actually like, not because like, nothing to do with their actual whatever like mental things they have going on. It's because of the aesthetic

stylings, right? They want to be a character in a story. If they feel like their life is going in a direction that they are a character in a story, they're getting put in these situations that they've memed about, right? This guy's pictures, he's photoshopped of himself inside mental institutions, right? It's a character in a story.

If you do that, you're playing right into their hands. That should not be the focus of what we are doing. Carceral problems are not the solution to these types of things um especially for people who are who are like just making music online like what are you gonna do fucking arrest people for the like for the music they make like that is not the solution Don't let people turn this into targeting people who have actual, like, mental things that they deal with. Don't make them the scapegoat of this. And be very careful if anyone tries to do any kind of satanic panic nonsense about secret occultists who are trying to alter your kid's reality or whatever. Be very careful because anyone who uses that type of framing for this

problem is not genuine. They do not actually care. They are pushing something that they want. Yeah. I mean, and I think one of the reasons why the idea that these people are kind of seeing themselves as part of a narrative is important is because it represents a discontinuity with the way mass shootings have worked for most of the time that people listening to this have been alive in the United States. Prior to a couple of years ago, really 2019 was the big break year for this, the vast majority of mass shooters were also committing suicide. That was part of the goal. That was what happened. And if you are an individual with a gun who has just committed a series of murders, it is very easy to make sure you

die in that attack. It's extremely easy. That is why so many of them did it. That has stopped being a given in the way that it used to be. The change, I think, was Christchurch was the main inflection point for this. But a lot of these guys go down alive. The Buffalo shooter taken alive. The last the last shooter from a few months ago was taken in alive.

It's intriguing because if I was to watch all this video propaganda beforehand, I would have assumed that this guy wanted to die within the act. A lot of the stuff was written about him doing this to kind of end his life and escape into whatever is next. That's the kind of feeling I get a lot of a lot of his writing and yet he didn't uh it is it's a great deal of the uh of the imagery he was putting out particularly the shit with him in in the asylum as kind of evidence of of where like part it was part of why i suspected like he had he intended to get taken alive that is that is that is very possible i mean like yeah because in some way yeah i'm not going to speculate this is not not necessarily the most useful yeah i'm not gonna i'm not gonna speculate further uh but there's a lot of a lot of possible things to to to think about there which i will do so because i have all the stuff

don't no one else please it's you don't don't look at this stuff because it's like forbidden right don't don't don't seek it out because it's like oh it's forbidden knowledge that they they don't want you to see it's dangerous ooh and that's that that's not the point the point is it's bad and now it's also like hard to find so like just like don't don't watch it like it's not it's not even it's not worth watching it's not yeah like i watch a bunch of this stuff like like in the immediate wake of it of it and what happened to me was I got a fucking headache and I felt bad. You feel bad and

it wastes your time. If you want to get the experience of this without having to do this shit, eat a shit ton of candy. Watch Pink Floyd's shit. Watch Pink Floyd's The Wall. Jesus Christ. Except the thing is watch watch pink floyd's yeah watch watch pink floyd's the wall jesus christ yeah except except

the thing is the thing is if you're eating a bunch of candy you're watching the fucking wall like it's actually better experience before this is actually good yeah whereas this is just like it's it's only the bad parts of that but i i only look at this because it's my fucking job and yeah it sucks yeah all right well um you know know, I'm going to say we're probably done here. I'm done. Yeah. So, I don't know. Until next time, again, if anyone tries to tell you about something that happened on the Internet, strike them and flee.

Remember, run, hide, fight from people trying to tell you about things happening on social media. This is the good strategy going forward. CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at CoolZoneMedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better get your podcast. At times unhinged, look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died

trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jamee Jackson-Gadsden.

We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions. So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.