Offline with Jon Favreau - Can We Blame the Internet for Buffalo?

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

the example I always use, like if you're on a Taylor Swift forum and everyone's talking about Taylor Swift and some people hate some Taylor Swift songs, some people think she's doing the wrong thing or dating the wrong guy or whatever. That's totally cool. But if a guy came in there every day and is like, today I'm talking about honey baked ham every day,

everyone should eat one honey baked ham. And people who don't, by the way, should be shot out of a cannon. If the Taylor Swift forum owner is not allowed to ban the honey baked ham guy, then we're in deep trouble. It becomes a honey baked ham forum. Like you're allowed to do this HoneyBakedHam guy, then we're in deep trouble. It becomes a HoneyBakedHam forum.

Like you're allowed to do this. As a group, we've lived with this. College football forums on the internet have lived with this. There are basic sets of rules like in every community throughout the world. And if you want no rules, then you're going to end up with a really bad space. This is how it goes. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline.

Hey, everyone. My guest today is Ben Collins, a reporter who covers disinformation, extremism, and the internet for NBC News. The conversation the two of us had about the internet's role in radicalization is one that I've wanted to have for a while, though I wish this one had been under different circumstances. As you know by now, last Saturday, a gunman stepped into a Buffalo grocery store and shot 13 people. 10 were killed. 11 of the victims were black, which was exactly what the killer intended. The investigation is ongoing, but one thing we know for certain is that the internet's role cannot be separated from this tragedy. The killer claimed he was radicalized on 4chan.

He posted his manifesto on Google Drive and distributed it on Discord. He livestreamed the shooting on Twitch. I won't sit here and say, if we didn't have the internet, this tragedy wouldn't have happened. No one can say that. But I can say that the internet poured gasoline on this killer's racist ideology, that it helped him find a community who validated and encouraged him, and that it allowed him to spread his manifesto far and wide. And he wasn't the first.

So I'm glad I'm talking to Ben about this. He spent the last week reporting on the shooting in Buffalo, combing through online chat logs and analyzing the manifesto to make sense of the internet's role in radicalizing this killer. He joined me to make sense of another senseless massacre and to talk about the rise of replacement theory online, the ways that sites like 4chan and 8chan serve as breeding grounds for extremism, and what it's going to take from government, tech platforms, and each of us to face these ideologies of hate and violence head on.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or complaints, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com. And do please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Ben Collins. Ben Collins, welcome to Offline. Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. I'm glad you did it. I've wanted to do an episode about the internet's role in fueling extremism for a while now. You're one of the few journalists who cover that beat incredibly well. I wish we didn't have to have this conversation a week after a horrible racist massacre, but here we are. And I guess I'd like to start with something that you mentioned in one of your NBC pieces, which is that the killer claims

he was radicalized on the internet forum 4chan while he was, quote, bored at the beginning of the pandemic. We've talked a lot on this show about how the pandemic has led to a lot more screen time for everyone. But of course, most of us didn't become radicalized and go shoot up a grocery store. I know there's an ongoing investigation, but what do we know so far about how this 18-year-old kid went from sitting down at a computer because he was bored to committing domestic terrorism? What's the process of online radicalization like? Yeah, this is a pretty one-to-one version of this. He was on the gun forum, unfortunately, for that, which you would think the gun forum

is a radicalized space, unfortunately. And frankly, compared to the politics forum, it isn't at all. The politics forum is a white nationalist hangout and the gun forum, they talk about guns. It's like two very different concepts. But around, so he was a gun kid and around uh the start of the pandemic he said he got out of a fit of extreme boredom that's

what he called it um he went over to the politics forum and i think a really interesting thing that happened to this kid is over the course of the pandemic he developed a toothache i know it sounds nuts but he developed a toothache and he went to get traded from a dentist and the dentist could just didn't fix it i don't know what happened with the dentist can't tell you what it is because this kid had fortune in brain he was like the dentist is jewish the jews ruin everything um this is another thing in my armor that i have to go fix and then towards the end, at the very end of his discord log.

So I, I should bring this up. He did this. He basically used discord. Like you would, if you were to email it yourself, like in the middle of the night and an idea or something, but he did that for six months and every idea or,

you know, like this armor doesn't work. I really need a haircut, basic stray thoughts that he had. That's how we use discord. For people who don't know, can you explain to people what Discord is? Yeah, sure. So Discord is a chat service.

It's like Slack. It's almost identical to Slack, actually. But it's used by kids. Usually they talk about video games, sometimes other things like that. But he basically Slacked himself is a good way of putting it. Got it. Every day for about six months. And that's how he uses like a diary and it became like it's very clear he used it as like a handbook

for future people like this gun would work in this thing and what you know i tried to move around in this thing um but what's fascinating about the toothache is towards the end of this whole thing um in may like a couple of weeks ago. He was like, well, you know, he wanted to survive the shooting. So you keep putting stuff out from jail. It's not how it works. But he said, you know, at least when I get into prison, I'll get some health care, and I'll fix my teeth. So there is this much larger problem with this whole situation, this kid is the picture of radicalization. 16 years old when this starts, at the start of the pandemic, he doesn't have a real-life community. His online community tells him everything that's wrong is the Jews' fault, and the Jews are replacing us with Black people, and that Black people are the problem because the Jews are replacing us. And he couldn't get help in real life for a problem that he had because our systems are

broken. There's a lot of decay in this country right now. He also probably couldn't get help because it's hard to get to a dentist in the middle of pandemic. And it probably worsened over time. And then at the end of it, he was like, okay, you know, I gotta, I gotta get to this. His initial plan, by the way, was to do this in the three-year anniversary of the Christchurch shooting. But he kept chickening out. He kept, you know, it kept being harder and harder for him to do it. So then he moved on to the next thing. Every day, he was like, I'm going to try to do it tomorrow, try to do it tomorrow.

And the toothache got worse. And at the end, he rationalized it in his head as, you know, at least I'll get some health care at the end of this thing. I mean, you know, in normal life, without the 4chans and 8chans and these online communities, someone has a toothache or they have something bad happen to them. They get pissed. they stew about it, and then they go out into the world and move on or find other communities. What is it about, for people who don't know and aren't familiar with 4chan and 8chan, what is it about those platforms that have made them breeding grounds for extremism and white nationalism? First of all, anonymity. So if you were to run a disinformation campaign, whether you are a that have made them breeding grounds for extremism and white nationalism? First of all, anonymity.

So if you were to run a disinformation campaign, whether you are a person who's angry at a corporation, so you want to deploy some stuff there, or you're angry at a person, a single person in your life, or if you're a state government and you're really angry at another state government, a good place to deploy a disinformation operation would be Fortan. No one can find out who you are. It's inherently anonymous. You can kind of de-anonymize yourself through a thing called a trip code, which is how we got QAnon. Q from QAnon was like, you know, he posted his Q by giving himself effectively a username. But the default setting on Fortan and 8chan is complete anonymity. And that's why it works so well. And they've built their own hive mind. They talk a lot about how they're big on free speech and things like that.

But you get shouted down if you have regular political beliefs on 4chan. You are viewed as a shill or a fed or a part of the government. So on 4chan and 8chan, that's what it is. It's the inverted reality that most of us live in. So this guy isn't the first shooter to leave a manifesto, which he posted on Google Docs. But it's notable that he apparently plagiarized two-thirds of it from the manifesto posted by the white nationalists who attacked a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, back in 2019. How common is this? And can you talk about the role that these online manifestos are playing in radicalizing white nationalists and extremists? Yeah, it's a big deal. I keep bringing up the word community here because that's what this is.

This guy thought he was going to get his name added to the next manifesto, and he cited every other person before him. Like for example, the Poway shooter, the shooter who shot up the synagogue in Poway in California. He, his, his was like almost directly plagiarized. It wasn't like two, there was almost the entire Brent Tarrant manifesto. So it is a, I was really depressed after that one. Cause I was like, Oh, they're not even putting effort into this anymore. They're not even like, they don't, there is no, you know, this guy had, had didn't have something to say he was just trying to join this cult uh that's when i realized it wasn't gonna stop really uh so that's what this is these people want to be part of a uh of a movement a much larger movement this kid wanted to survive and be part of the movement because he thought

he would be you know eventually absolved um in the of history. That's what these people think. And if they don't have a community in real life, this seems like a good solution. It seems important to point out that, yes, this manifesto is an unoriginal racist screed. Yes, replacement theory is a deranged conspiracy, but it's also a detailed, fairly coherent ideology that the rest of us have to figure out how to grapple with, right? Yeah, I always say conspiracy theorists have much better stories than the truth. Yeah. The truth is super boring.

Like, if you think about, like, the truth of that toothache was that guy got a toothache and his dentist sucked and that was it. That was the end of the story. Yeah. Like, that's all that was. But in his world, it's part of a much larger, his dentist sucked. That was it. That was the end of the story. Yeah. Like that's all that was. But in his world, it's part of a much larger, you know, problem with the world. And the coherence to them is real. It allows you to believe, you know, there's this guy, Brian Keeley, who wrote this thing 30 years ago about conspiracy theories in the early 90s.

And he said, conspiracy theorists are the last believers in an ordered universe. Basically, everything that happens in the conspiracy theory universe happens for a reason. Your whole life means something all of a sudden. If your life is really bad, if you don't, this kid was 16 and then the pandemic happened, he had nothing going for him.

Suddenly, there's a lot of meaning for this guy to, you know, fight the cabal and, you know, take down the Jews or whatever. That's what this is about. You know, it's a better story. That's what this is about. It's a better story. It's a full identity play. Great Replacement Theory is part of that. It's a war that you get to join by shooting up a supermarket.

And reality is a lot more boring than that video game solution, which they're comfortable with. This becomes a Marvel movie in their head. It also seems to be a response, or these conspiracy theories increasingly seem to be a response to this lack of trust in institutions all over the world and in your local community as well. Because if government and business and religious institutions and the press and everyone else has let you down, then at least you can hang on to this belief in this conspiracy theory that might give you, you were talking about order,

some order to all of this randomness. Yeah, exactly. And that's why, that's why I'm a little worried now because previously conspiracy theorists, when you look to them, they were people who had exogenous shock that has made their life considerably worse.'re older people who like you know the jade helm people they're like oh yeah there's going to be black helicopters that are going to come down because you know one time you

know i i might i crashed my car because of a pothole infrastructure sucks like that's fine if you're like a young person though pretty much all you know if you're 18 like this kid all you know is political chaos. You only know a government that has large contempt for everything, like for every average person. That's all you know. You've just known nonstop political infighting and nothing getting done for several years. So if you're 18 also, your teenagers are robbed by a virus. So that also sucks.

So if you are born into that sort of doomerism instead of learning it over the course of your life, it does a lot more damage. That's how you get, you know, full blown fascist movements, I think. Yeah. And you're going to be susceptible. I mean, I do want to talk about this larger social political context because, you know, as we know, this isn't like a lone wolf falling down an internet rabbit hole. You know, you've been saying it's about community. You know, we talked about how the killer mentioned being bored at the beginning of the pandemic. A year into the pandemic, we see the culmination of what Donald Trump's presidency unleashed during the January 6th insurrection. Like you said, you could go as far back as the financial crisis of 2008 and how, you know, we hadn't fully recovered from that, right? So it's these generations of kids now

coming up in this country where everything seems disordered. How has this brand of white nationalist extremism or right-wing extremism grown and evolved over the last several years, at least what you've witnessed and what you've reported on, is this community getting larger or are we just hearing about it more? It's definitely getting larger. And I think that, you know, a lot of people want to blame just Trump for it or say it's tied to Trumpism or, you know, he becomes president again, it's going to be a whole, you know, it's going to be much worse. But a lot of these communities have moved past him. They either a whole, you know, it's going to be much worse. But a lot of these communities have moved past him. They either find him, you know, out of touch or like too wrapped up in the cabal or something.

They've moved past him in general. And young people really have. They don't care about Donald Trump, but they've used a lot of his ideas and pushed him forward. For example, a lot of young people have seen the effects of climate change or, you know, like their roads getting worse, stuff around them getting worse, water getting worse around them. So they accept the concept of climate change and decay, but their answer isn't to fix it. It's to hoard resources. And that's what eco-fascism is, by the way, the idea of eco-fascism. And I think if you were to read some people on the right

in the last few days you would see that they were calling him a leftist because of this oh man dude that was a big thing why don't you talk about how he says he's a leftist and he explicitly says I'm not on the right I'm not on the left I'm an eco-fascist and eco-fascism is huge among young people

it's very seductive in the 8chan and 4chan space because of that it's the idea like of course it's all uh gonna get worse and i have to fight for myself in my people and if my people means white people to this game um then it's even more dangerous so that's that's the that's the real worry with young kids they see the reality they can't reject the science anymore about a lot of this stuff but they can can reject the solutions. So their view is that we're headed into a global conflict for increasingly scarce resources because of climate change that is going to be a conflict between demographic groups and races. Yes. And it's a good thing. That's right. Their idea is like, yeah, it's, I mean, this is fine. Like I have, I have weapons and they do not. That's where this is headed. I doubt you will find even many young far-right conservatives who don't believe in climate change anymore. They are aware this is going on. They don't care that they've been lied to for a long time, but they have moved forward and just picked up arms and said.

So clearly there's a larger socio-political economic context that is making radicalization and extremism more likely. Also, there's the internet, right? Now we live extremely online lives. What is it about online life that makes radicalization easier and more successful than offline life? We just talked about anonymity as one factor on forums like 4chan and 8chan. Are there other things at play here that make online radicalization easier? Yeah. A big term with kids right now is touch grass. Like if you, you know, go outside, touch grass and be like, you know, don't be a part of the internet for a minute and see some real life. For two years, they couldn't touch grass. Like going outside was a dangerous activity and it left them in these filter bubbles where they had months at a time, just constantly refreshing stuff.

And that's how you get political polarization. There are easy good guys and easy bad guys on each side of the aisle here. And it's very easy to see why we are so polarized if you see that technology works like this. You don't see the other side, let alone try to talk to them or grapple with them. They are just totems or ideas. The pariahs that they've created for the other side are much better, I would say, political drivers than actual politics now. So that's where we're at with our politics in this country. We fight the big enemy on the other side, but we don't actually talk about solutions at all.

And that's definitely true for people who've spent many years online, extremely online, trying to just make themselves not extremely bored all the time. Yeah, I mean, and when you read like philosophy or history about authoritarianism and totalitarianism, you see come up again and again, Hannah Arendt writes about this, that isolationism and being isolated is one of the key ingredients. Because when we're all isolated from each other, physically, socially, et cetera, it becomes easier to fall into these totalitarian ideologies. And clearly, two years of a pandemic where everyone's online, seeming like they're all connected online, but not really being connected to each other, because so much of it is anonymous. So much of it is just chat rooms or just these sort of kind of phony connections that aren't that aren't based in real life. Yeah, I mean, you I'm sure you've seen it. But if you talk to anybody who's had a year apart from somebody went back to the

playground where their kids were previously. And they talked to somebody who's fundamentally changed. And they're like, do I have to like, not talk to this person anymore? Like, is this guy a part of my life? I don't know. I have no, like, you know, I don't know what happened to him. He was super normal last year. Now he's like, you know, there's, there's magnets and the vaccines, like, do I want to be around this guy anymore? And we're all going through that. Everybody's had that experience at some point, I would say in the last couple of years. And it's because that's how the machines are built. The machines are built to, you know, isolate you and drive you away from real life experience into some sort of, you know,

demagoguery, basically. So I know the government and law enforcement and the tech industry made some effort to crack down on these extremist accounts after January 6th. Did that work at all? Like, did they just find other platforms and channels that are even deeper underground? I know like the Oath Keepers aren't as online anymore. Like what's happened there since January 6th? I would say it's mostly people who are spooked than anything else. Like, you know, they've moved their communications to more private communications. The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and militias who identify as militias,

they went away from public places in general. And sometimes when they get more brazen again, and it will happen as midterms or elections come through again, they will come back up and start being more violent in those spaces. It's not as a big of a deal on Facebook or Twitter because, you know, a lot of those things were banned after the 6th.

Like they were just like zero tolerance policy for this sort of thing, election denial, COVID denial, all these things. It's just like, you know, we need a safe space for people to talk on our platforms without being constantly in a day with violence. So that is a thing. I will say that the places that really did plan it, like January 6th, like the Donald, which is now called something else, but it's the Donald, that still exists. It's more violent than ever. The mechanisms through which they planned January 6th and put the maps there and showed people pictures of their ammo from their hotel room, it's all still there. There's nothing stopping them. But I think the threat of the feds has changed how public they are about this stuff. Whereas previously, I think, you know,

the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys posted openly about these threats because they thought they had diplomatic immunity. Well, so some of them have gone a little deeper underground, but a lot of this is more above ground, right? Like there's been a lot of discussion about the role that Tucker Carlson and some Republican politicians play in normalizing white nationalism and replacement theory by giving people a slightly sanitized version on the air. How do you how does that dynamic work with with some of these people who are getting radicalized? Yeah, like fortunately, people call Tucker our guy. They think he's the only person in the mainstream media that speaks for him for it speaks for them in any way at all like they actively make fun of like sean hannity for example

like those they are just as truly against sean hannity as you know your average like lefty on twitter but they they like tucker carlson they do they uh the difference is with tucker and fortune is the call to action. The talking points are the same. You know, it's like they're replacing us. Somebody's replacing us. The they is vague. And the difference is on 4chan, it's like we got to do something about it.

Like how do we, you know, how do we by force stop this? That's the primary difference. The rhetoric, the actual, you know the actual talking points are the same. It was just a few years ago where Steve King, the congressman from Iowa, was ripped apart for saying basic replacement theory stuff. every night on Tucker's show now. Like he's persona non grata now and Tucker just keeps going. But he realizes he has an audience for this. And Tucker is also just asking the questions. That's all he's doing. He's just asking the questions. He's just, you know,

everything has a question mark at the end. So it provides good cover. It's plausible deniability. He's just asking questions and he does try to put it into this partisan political context where, well, it's the Democrats are doing this for electoral gains, right? Which allows people to say, oh, well, I could see a political party

doing that just for their own partisanship. And it's not some gigantic, you know, replacement theory. I don't believe in that kind of stuff. I don't believe that, you know, the Jews are trying to bring in people of color to replace whites to dilute their power. But the Democrats are saying they want immigration because they think that they're going to get votes from people of color like that. So it's an easier it's an easier sell that way. Yeah. And also, there's no A to B here either. Everyone's like, well, they're coming into the country. Well, how are they going to vote? They're not on a voter roll. They're just gonna it's a 70-year game plan by some people who are fleeing i don't know what is it it's also like and and by the way uh latino voters are constantly in play and trump did better with them in 2020 that he didn't 2016 is a preposterous but they don't care right like

the theory itself is preposterous but like no... No, it's about, yeah, it's about authorizing minorities. You can blame minorities for much larger social change. And, you know, instead of blaming, for example, corporations or people taking too much for failing infrastructure, you can just blame, you know, the people who are invading us and taking all of our stuff. Like a big thing with the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter, I i don't know if you remember that there's so many mass shootings now that i'm like do you guys remember this one i know it was so and they're all eight related all but the gilroy garlic festival shooter as well as the el paso shooter to some extent uh we're obsessed with the idea that eventually they're going to take our public lands this is

pure eco-fascism that eventually that you know immigrants were going to like start living in national parks or something and that's like can you imagine how racist you have to be to even go down that path? It's true. It's truly ridiculous stuff, but they do younger people who are inundated with this stuff, uh, go down this path in general. Now it's, it's pretty scary. So in terms of trying to fight online extremism and prevent future attacks, I think there's two broad categories here. The first is what governments and tech companies can do to clean up and moderate these platforms. The second is what we as a society can do to fight white nationalism and systemic racism. I'll start with the first.

There were a lot of apps and platforms and channels involved in just the planning and amplification of this attack. 4chan, 8chan, Discord, Twitch, Google Docs, Twitter. Where do you even begin when the problem is so decentralized? If we did have a functioning government and responsible tech platforms, what could they do about this? What are some steps that would be at least somewhat effective? Please don't say I'm a shill for big tech, but I think Google did the best they could. You can't upload that manifesto to Google. You cannot. It's been hashed, which means they've basically taken the manifesto itself, turned it into code,

and anytime anything resembling that code gets uploaded to Google Drive, it gets instantly deleted, and they send you an email being like, don't do that. What are you doing? Like, that's, that's what happens with, with Google Drive now. So like the responsible companies are doing the responsible thing. Twitch says it took, they took it down in two minutes, which doesn't make any sense because the video is, you know, longer than two minutes. I don't know where they got that number. Discord said that they, you know, nuked the accounts and all this stuff, but none of that matters because you can archive your own stuff and send it out to people, which is what this guy did. And then the bad places don't even want to stop it, right? 4chan and HN, they exist to host this stuff and they will sometimes take it down because it makes

them look bad, but they don't have any personal responsibility to do so. So it has become decentralized. And there is, I'm telling you right now, there is no way to stop it. You have to get at the root of the issue issue which is the radicalization itself to realize that it is a problem as you know as it is i don't i but what am i going to do call tucker and be like please stop doing this it's killing people i don't know how to stop that you need better leaders who wanted to face this head-on this stuff that happened this week with the disinformation board was really uh ridiculous to me because they created the disinformation board was really ridiculous to me because they created a disinformation board to just study and look at how disinformation moves, usually international.

Luke Gromen, For example, how Russia had this firm grasp over its populace when it was lying to them for years and continues to. That's really what this was about. It was mischaracterizedized every single day on fox news they made an eight and a half month pregnant woman look like the devil for two weeks she was the main character on it for two weeks and like at one at one point the conversation they ran out of things to say about her so the conversation devolved into why is joe biden hiring someone this pregnant for something like then they dissolved the board. They dissolved the board because of disinformation. It was a disinformation board.

It's so it's the perfect microcosm of sort of the mismatch of the battle here, because but also what everyone is up against, who is is look there is one set of society that is trying to create more trust in institutions and defend institutions and to be the defender of an institution you don't want to use tactics that the other side that's trying to tear institutions down use so they are always going to have a leg up on you because tucker and the right are always going to throw shit at that disinformation board. And the White House is not going to hit back and start yelling at Tucker and start doing the same shit. They're just going to sit back now.

I think they probably could have just kept the disinformation board and said, fuck you people. But again, it's just a classic example of the mismatch here. Yeah, it's like if there were if two teams are playing basketball and once I was playing you know with five players and playing by the rules not traveling and the other side was playing with uh eight players and uh fouls were not called and also they had a bazooka that's just like yeah that's the difference one has brought weapons to a basketball game and the other side is trying to play a basketball game right actually what i would what i would say really is that one side knows it's a game and is constantly breaking the rules of that game the other side isn't even aware they're playing a game they're not aware of the entire premise

of this thing and they're you know they're trying to be like kind and open to all sides of this thing yeah uh when they realize the other the other side is laughing at the premise that they don't even know that they're part of the game. So it's really, it's very depressing stuff. It's also, again, even in the United States here, we're limited by the global, what we can do is limited by the global reach of the internet, right? We could try to shut down 4chan and 8chan here or any of these platforms and they'll just pop up somewhere else in the rest of the world and you can use your VPN and get there. And that's that, right? Like, so this is a, it's a global problem.

It's more than a US problem. Oh, absolutely. And by the way, that's not inherently a bad thing. Like the existence of those tools helps people in Russia, in China, you know, in oppressive states to get states to get information out about their government. That's the thing is, I think a lot of people want to de-anonymize the internet. And I don't think that is a great idea in general. I was just talking to a bunch of college kids who use an anonymous app like Yik Yak, but it's not Yik Yak.

And it has unveiled a roofing problem at their school that otherwise would not have been public. But the difference is those platforms are moderated. In those spaces, you can't target specific people. You can't say, this guy is something horrible, whatever, because it's a small enough space. It's community. They realize it's community. They have to keep some rules, ground rules around it. The anonymity is not the problem,

you have to have a baseline of rules. Every space like I was the example I always use, if you're on a Taylor Swift forum, and everyone's talking about Taylor Swift, and some people hate some Taylor Swift songs, some people think she's doing the wrong thing or dating the wrong guy or whatever. That's totally cool. But if a guy came in there every day and is like, today I'm talking about honey baked ham every day, everyone should eat one honey baked ham and people who don't, by the way,

should be shot out of a cannon. And if the Taylor Swift forum owner is not allowed to ban the honey baked ham guy, then we're in deep trouble. It becomes a honey baked ham forum. Like you're allowed to do this as a group. we've lived with this college football forums on the internet lived with this there are basic sets of rules like in every community throughout the world and if you want no rules then you're going to end up with a really bad space this is how it goes you made the point a couple times now that like the real problem is the ideology itself are these

ideas itself that we're going to have to face at some point so the the second big question here is like what what can we all do about white nationalism and systemic racism which you and i are certainly not going to solve here but but i did i heard heard you on Rachel Maddow the other day, and I wonder how you think about the balance between not giving these killers what they want by amplifying their racist ideologies and making sure that people understand these racist ideologies

so that we can figure out how to fight them and undermine them with narratives and arguments of our own. Yeah, look, there is, it's very complicated about what the line is about how much we share from a manifesto, what is amplifying it, you know, what is giving oxygen to something that does not need more oxygen. The line is still super blurry. But I will say that these are ridiculous ideas. They are very stupid ideas.

I think a big reason, if you look back at what Charles Manson believed, it was so absurd and dumb that when you tell people, they laugh at it. And that's great replacement theory is like that. It's almost identical to it actually it's it's very stupid stuff and if we're allowed to say that if you're allowed to go through it just walk through what they think which is that like you know it's it's a it's a dumb michael

crichton novel basically like badly written michael crichton novel then you can you might be able to change their mind. But the fact that it's a hidden idea, the fact that there is some novelty to, you know, you know, it's something they don't want you to see or whatever. That's really seductive to teenagers. It's a really seductive concept. So it's still, look, I don't have the answers for this and I'm trying really hard to figure it out. Trying really hard to figure out like, you know, do we directly quote him? How much is too much of directly quoting this person? But I do think you have to talk about the underpinning ideology here and talk about

why these people get to that point. Like his discord chat is so much more illustrative than the manifesto that he, you know, kind of wrote. The manifesto is actually kind of uninteresting, but the discord is it shows a really hopeless, like incel style guy. And if you show off how pathetic the lifestyle is, show off how boring and stupid the ideas are, then fewer people are going to be interested in that. And more people are going to be interested in, you know, the problems around the community that led him to that. Yeah, no, that's right. I often think that by the time you get to the point where this kid is planning the attack and talking about how he's going to do it, we've lost those people, right? We're not going to get those people back. But I think about the kid who turns on Tucker for the

first time or goes to 4chan for the first time, is bored, is lonely, is thinking about this stuff. Like there is a way to grab, at least hopefully, at least we have to try to grab a whole segment of these people who could be falling down this path, but haven't quite gotten there yet. Yeah, again, it's on us as reporters and journalists to make the story just as interesting as the lie it's really hard to do it the lies have better characters and they have really easy solutions but the it's on us to

be like this is not true first of all it's but but the just scolding people doesn't help telling people that there are solutions and that you are facing real problems as a person and that the country is going through some stuff. Right. But the solution is not, you know, kill a bunch of people at the supermarket. The solution is not get rid of a bunch of people at the top who, you know, there's not four people, you know, running a, you know, Microsoft or something. Yeah, exactly. Like there's no, nobody's eaten babies. It's not, that's not what this is about. You've got to give them some agency back because those people who

are that hopeless just don't have any agency at all. Let me ask you a personal question. You call your job the dystopia beat. What kind of a toll does it take to immerse yourself in this filth and hate all the time? Oh man's uh it's a lot i think i used to i used to take it really really personally but what i always tell people is like i try to get into everything else in my life and with the same level of granularity like i can tell you like the salary of like the 14th guy on the warriors and i can it's annoying like it's it's really obnoxious like i they'll be like, oh, should they trade? Like, you know, Andrew Wiggins for like Rudy Gobert.

And I was like, you moron doesn't work under the cap. What are you, an idiot? See, like, that's what I did. My brain has to like go as like deep divey into that sort of thing, just to stay sane. And it, it is good though. It's like helpful to have that sort of thing, but everybody should have, I say this to everyone now, not just people who do this beat,

not just reporters. It's going to get pretty dark in this country in the next few years. I'm just telling you. And if you don't have that thing that you can really deep dive into, that is good for your brain or even like fine for your brain, then you're missing out. This is the best way to do it. Find a second community because it will really help you. It's so funny. I mean, it's one of the reasons I started this series,

but I have been thinking the same thing myself, I think since the pandemic started and we had the 2020 election. I was like, I do this shit for a living as opposed to just reading the news, which I'm interested in, even if I wasn't doing this for a living. So that's a lot of my life. That's reading about like Donald Trump and, and the MAGA movement and democracy falling apart. And like, I care about all that stuff a lot.

That's why I do it. But I'm like, at some point I need another hobby because you do this all the time. Like no one can sustain this. I imagine, especially when you're like digging into either these massacres or when there's not a especially when you're like digging into either these massacres or when there's not a massacre you're digging into sort of online extremism like it's got to just it's got to be rough it's it's very hard and it's hard because like there are people in my life who have gone down this path literally nobody has escaped this i don't think um and you lose um i don't know you look back and you're, um, I don't know, you look back and you're like, were they always like this? Was it me? Um, cause like, is the fact that I can't accept this, my problem, right? The

fact that, you know, some of these people are like, you know, drinking, uh, you know, bleach and stuff in my life, you know, is that my issue? Did I either did I fail them? Or should I be more accepting of them hurting themselves? Like, I don't, I don't know. But that's like, I don't I don't have answers for every single person. I can just tell you that you have a much larger community of people who are going through this than you'd ever imagine. Yeah. And I do think, like you said, telling the truth about what's actually happening with in-depth reporting of the kind that you do is, you know, one of the most effective and best things you can do. And that's, you know, that's, that's important. So thank you for what you do. Thank you for this conversation. It was great. And go try to enjoy, enjoy New Orleans and not think about extremism for a little while. Yeah, trust me, that's not going to be a problem. Maybe I should move here. Always an option.

Always an option. Ben Collins, thanks for joining Offline. Awesome. Thank you. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor.

Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Andy Gardner-Bernstein, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, Narmal Konian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.