Offline with Jon Favreau - Silicon Valley’s Newest Bad Idea, Vigilantes Infiltrate the Far Right, and Should We Buy Infowars?

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

Alex Jones’ conspiracy media network, InfoWars, is up for sale, as is the at-home genetic testing service 23andMe…and potentially the DNA of 15 million people who used it. Meanwhile, TikTok grifters are using AI to fake defecting to North Korea, and it’s for a dumber reason than you could possibly imagine. But first! Silicon Valley thinks it’s finally figured out how to make smart glasses that someone will actually want to buy. Max and guest host Jane Coaston (What A Day) break it all down. Then, Max interviews New Yorker correspondent David Kirkpatrick about the rise of left-wing. internet vigilantes who are infiltrating white nationalist groups. 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.

A lot of these people, as I said, are a little bit paranoid, and they really fear, you know, rightly or wrongly, retaliation by their far-right opponents. I mean, there is a kind of a spy versus spy game going on here where each side tries to dox the other and harass the other as much as they can. I'm Max Fisher. I'm Jane Koston. Jon Favreau is on tour with his offline spinoff show, Pod Save America. I don't know. I've never heard of it. But if you're listening to this on Sunday, October 6th, you can catch him tonight in Philadelphia. That clip you just heard was today's guest, The New Yorker's David Kirkpatrick. David came on to talk about his journey investigating the rise of left-wing vigilantes

who are using the internet to infiltrate and expose far-right extremist groups, often by posing as fresh recruits. It's a fascinating story with some wild characters. But first, we have a special guest filling in for John to discuss the week in tech, the host of Crooked's daily news show, What A Day, Jane Koston. Hi, Jane. Hi, Max. How are you? So, Jane, just to give everyone a sense of your off-liningness, what kind of screen time numbers are we working with? What's your daily time on your phone?

Oh, it's seven, eight hours, something like that. No, come on. It's bad. Oh, with the laptop. Yeah, with the laptop. Yeah. I don't even look combined laptop because I just couldn't internalize that number. No, but also the number of times in which I have found myself looking at the same thing on my phone and on my laptop because I'm like, I need the dual stimulation. You've got to have it in stereo.

Yeah, I've got to get as much internet as possible. Well, Jane, we've got some juicy stuff to get into this week. Alex Jones's conspiracy media network Infowars is up for sale, and potentially so is the DNA of 15 million people who use the at-home genetic testing service 23andMe. Yikes and yikes. Meanwhile, TikTok grifters are using AI to fake defecting to wait for it in North Korea, and it's for a dumber reason than you could possibly imagine. But first, Silicon Valley is betting big that it's finally figured out how to make smart glasses that someone will actually want to buy. You remember the past versions like Google Glass

or Apple Vision Pro, which all failed to sell. The Valley's big new idea is, you guessed it, adding AI features. Apple, Amazon, Google, and Snap are each reportedly working on their own AI-aided smart glasses, but leading the pack is the god-king of failed product launches, Mark Zuckerberg. He unveiled Meta's new AI glasses, Orion, last week. Orion is just a prototype meant to demonstrate the technology. It's not something you can actually buy, but a few tech reporters got to test drive it, like Alex Heath of The Verge.

Let's play a clip. The way you navigate the interface is through eye and hand tracking, voice, and most importantly, the neural wristband. It's hard to compare this experience to a laptop or phone, but in the simplest of terms, your eyes or hands act as the mouse, and you click by pinching your fingers together. So, Jane, who asked for this? No one. Absolutely no one and I remain it is so interesting to see like the Venn diagram of people who want this and people who want to make this is like as far away as you can possibly get it's two different circles like especially because we've seen this before like I don't know if you ever actually saw

anyone in real life with Google Glass never someone who was not a tech reporter or product reviewer. Yes, exactly. I've only seen images used on Getty images of people with them. It has never entered the lexicon. It has never entered the mass usage, but it seems like Silicon Valley is obsessed with this idea. And it honestly, like,

I would respect it more if they were like, this is shit for us. Like, this is our weird thing. It's like, there are specific things like when New Yorkers get real weird about like, I don't know, bodegas or something like that. And I'm like, congratulations, you invented stores with cats. But like, that's you. But what about the expired products that are also wildly expensive? Actually, it is very Google glass. Yeah, it is. It is. But I'm just like, it's your shit. Whatever. That's fine. Whatever you're into, you do that. But like the degree to which, and it's been interesting because I think that there's this

idea that they're like, okay, you know, what is the problem that this is solving? Because I can't figure out what that is. Like I've never thought, wow, I wish my glasses also could mean that I would accidentally open my bank account information if I just look in the wrong direction. That is what the product is. So let me describe the new generation of smart glasses like Orion. It has two basic functions. One is so-called augmented reality, and this is where the AI comes in, and this is where the glasses will overlay relevant information. Like the idea is that if you're looking at a bus, it will display the bus routes.

If you're looking at food, it will display the nutritional facts. The other use is basically a smartphone duct tape to the front of your face where the glasses will display your email or your Instagram feed, and you use your fingers and you kind of gesture and gesticulate to browse. So does any of this interest you? No, no, no, no. I'm horrified. I mean, especially 404 media reported that immediately people are like, oh, you could dox people with this. I saw that. Using the AI with facial recognition. Yeah, you could absolutely dox people. And I'm like, what? I don't, if I, if I want to find the bus schedule, I will simply look up the bus schedule. I know, it's saving like two steps. It's interesting to see people, it's like you're problem solving for a problem nobody had.

Like, if you are looking to, one, like, I don't want to see my Instagram feed just on my face. Right. Like, I don't want to do any of it. Plastered in front of you. Yeah, I'm good. Like, if I want to look at my Instagram feed, I will look at my phone, which is always with me. Like, again, this is attempting to get out ahead of a problem that doesn't actually exist.

So the software, like a lot of AI, does not actually do that much that seems particularly interesting. And the hardware, and this has also been the big problem with smart glasses for a while, the hardware, like, kind of works, but the battery life and the screen resolution, I guess, is a problem they still have not solved. Oh, so there's an issue with screen resolution on something that's supposed to be in front of your eyes? I don't see how that could go wrong.

Snapchat makes glasses. The battery life lasts for only 45 minutes. So how useful of that is even walking around all day with just dead battery smart glasses on your face. Facebook's, again, this is just the like high-tech prototype that you can't even buy. You have to carry around, they call it a compute puck, but it's basically just a smartphone without a display. So really all it's doing is saving you from picking up your phone. There were a couple of things that I did find trying to like be sympathetic, did find like potentially a little bit cool about this.

One is the translate function. I do when I travel. I don't know if you ever use the Google Translate thing on your phone where you hold your phone up in front of text. Like there's a poster in Japan and you want to read it. You hold up your phone and it auto-translates. It'd be kind of cool to have that on classes. I don't imagine myself walking around Japan or whatever with my smart glasses on, but that would be neat. And the other is the way that you control the screen by flicking your hand. The Facebook prototype Orion has this wristband you put around your wrist,

and it does read the specific motions of your fingers, and that does seem kind of cool. I don't think this is the right use for it because this is a dumb product, but that is kind of cool technology, I feel. It is. I just keep thinking about you're going to flick your wrist accidentally and be like, oh, fuck, I just deleted something from this interface. But I also think like, there's something about how, you mentioned translation technology, that's huge. That is absolutely huge.

Being able to be in a space in which you can essentially respond to and interact with people speaking a different language pretty much immediately, that's amazing. That's cool. But I also think I'm like, yeah, we've got that. So let's just focus on making that as good as it possibly can be. Because I think that if you have traveled internationally, there have been moments in which Google Translate has, how best to put this, failed you a little bit, done some light failing, which is totally understandable. We are asking technology to do something that is like fundamentally challenging for anyone who has ever attempted to learn another language regardless of what it is.

So I think like there's a degree to which innovation becomes innovation for its own sake. No one's asking for this. I want the thing you were supposed to be doing before to be better, not a new thing that I didn't want that you're already bad at. Well, that leads me to my next question. We have been getting different iterations of smart glasses for 10 years now. They never sail. They never make any money.

Why do you think Silicon Valley keeps trying to push this technology on us? Honestly, I think it's because the people at the top of Silicon Valley are a very specific age, and they are a very specific age that remembers shows from like the Six Million Dollar Man or old school Superman, like shows in which technology is presented. Or, I mean, another great example is like James Bond. I know it sounds stupid, but I genuinely think that there are people who have watched James Bond movies, see the character Q,

and are like, oh, imagine if you could like, you know, move your eyebrows and take pictures through glasses. Like, that is 100% a Mission Impossible thing. And one, great action series. I will say, Tom Cruise, if he just never spoke about Scientology ever again and just made those movies, which I believe he will die doing. I loved the first one, the Brian De Palma one, because it's a Hitchcock

thriller. The later action ones did not do as much for me. I mean, I love the action ones, but no, there are moments in which people are like, oh, this technology would be so cool if it was real. They should sell the Mission Impossible masks. I would buy that before I would buy smart glasses. Yeah, the mask, especially it needs to work just as well and be just as believable. Like I need to be able to become R.I.P. the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Oh, sure. Absolutely.

Everybody in Hollywood should have to take a little run. Yes, just being like, you are Hoffman now. We need a little run. Yes. Just being like, you are Hoffman now. We need a Hoffman. But like, there's a degree to which this, I mean, this is like, it's imagination masquerading as necessity. Like, it's a cool thing. Like, this is the kind of thing where I'm like, that's cool that you want to do this. But don't try to tell me that it's for me. Don't try to tell me it's for a mass audience. Just say like, it's a thing we've always kind of wanted to be able to do. It's the lack of necessity is the thing that really sticks with me.

You know, it was not that long ago where it really did feel like every year Silicon Valley would invent something amazing and new that we all had to go get. You know, the first time they had the MP3 player or the first smartphone or like the first few iterations of the smartphone and then the tablets. Like they really were always coming out with new gadgets that were really cool. And it seems like they have just run out of ideas, especially with regards to hardware. And I think that's why they keep trying to push AI because they need something to catch on in order to maintain their inflated stock valuation. Right. But I also think that that is one of the key challenges of when you go from like, let's say you go from zero to one, 100% improvement, one to two, 50% improvement.

At a certain point, like I was thinking about this with I need to get the new iPhone because my phone has done its planned obsolescence thing. So it routinely is just like, I don't know what to do right now. And I'm like,

get a refurbished last year's model. That's what I always do. It's so much cheaper. And you don't... This is the thing. The iPhones do not improve that much anymore. No, and especially now that the iPhone now is like, oh, we've got Apple Eye. Their AI.

Where I'm like, I don't need... Right, it doesn't do anything. There is a degree to which what can be improved, especially like you've raised expectations to the point where there's- Or specifically with investors. With investors of like, oh, you're going to get this brand new thing and then you're furious

that you don't get a brand new thing. But going from no new things to all the new things, it's like that's going to, anything that's above that leap is going to be tough. Yeah, well, it's the foldable iPhones are not doing it for me.

All right, in other news, 23andMe is in big financial trouble. Jane, you remember 23andMe. You'd mail them $200 and a vial of saliva, and they'd send you a little report on your ancestry. I certainly did not do this. I mean, there's a degree to which my natural small L libertarian paranoia says, hmm, where's that going to go? Well, it turns out that you were correct because the company's valuation is down 99%. Its entire board of directors quit except its CEO. And that CEO, Ann Wojcicki, has said that she's ready to sell what remains of the company,

which at this point is really just its logs of genetic data on the 50 million people who use the service. Cool. Jane, what do you think? Is this the perfect time to get a discount 23andMe subscription? Absolutely not. Absolutely 100% not. Just send them your data and don't even get the report back. Yeah, just do it for fun. I don't know. Maybe you really are into spitting and devils. I'm not going to yuck your yum, whatever. So what's your read on why 23andMe collapsed? Was this inevitable, do you think, or did they make some mistake along the way?

I think this was inevitable. There is a degree to which you have simply run out of the number of people who want to do this. Everyone who is really interested in doing this, especially because there were two types, like 23andMe and Ancestry and a host of these other companies, there were kind of two prongs of what they were trying to do. There was one that was health data, like trying to find out what you have a proclivity,

not proclivity, like what are your risk factors for specific illnesses? And if you wanted to do that, you probably already did it. And there is no, there was an interesting piece in Wired that was talking about how basically they did not create an ongoing source of value. The second thing is that it got really, really expensive. And like the other prong was obviously the ancestry data, like finding family or stuff like that. But also if you wanted to do that, you probably already did. It actually kind of reminds me of Peloton, which had this massive pandemic blow up. But at a certain point, they reached the end stage where if you wanted

one, you already had it. And people who didn't have one didn't want one because they could just go to the gym again. And so I do think that there's just kind of an inevitable end where you don't provide any more value. There is nothing else people really want to do. Like, yes, I think it's very, you know, we talked about this. I think it's very interesting, the use of forensic genealogy in which people have been able to solve crimes or find, you know, finally name victims of crimes using genetic information. Right, thanks to 23andMe specifically data, right? Yes, specifically their data. Now that gets to the other issue, which we'll get to, which is that's a lot of genetic information going to a company now apparently that's one person.

Like that doesn't make me feel great, especially because then you have to start thinking about, I mean, obviously we'll talk a little bit about where that data is going to go now, but like where did that data go before? Who had it? Well, so this was, I think this speaks to why my read on why the company collapsed, which is this was always kind of a venture capital inflated thing where it's one of these startups where the model was never initially profitable and their pitch to investors, which is actually where they got the money was not from customers. Their pitch to investors was always, we're going to get all these customers. We're going to get all these people data. And further down the line, we'll figure out how to monetize it.

Oh, great. And they thought that, which is, you know, that's how the social media companies started. That's how like Uber and Uber Eats started, DoorDash started. And the idea is they get enough momentum going with the VC money that eventually it became profitable. But they never figured out how to become profitable with all of this consumer data on their genomes. And they tried to do it with the health plan or the health information that you mentioned that ended up just burning more data. So they collapsed and they had 20 years to do it. But now the question is the only thing they have a value is this consumer data, i.e.

15 million people's genomes, who do you think are the likeliest buyers for all this genetic information? Which, reminder, is not anonymized whatsoever. Nope, nope, nope. Well, what I would think it would be would be like a health insurer, advertisers. But what it is most likely going to be is just like whoever is the shittiest group of people you can think of like i just keep thinking about the number of times in which i've received an email being like so your social security number has been exposed in some sort of data breach like that's you know my social security number obviously important my genome a little more um it's very personal it's pretty

personal and so i keep that information pretty close it's true It's true. It's pretty much just for me. And so I do think like there's a story to tell about what this could become. But in general, with any sort of information, especially information technology, I generally assume whatever is the stupidest outcome is going to be what it is. So my guess is that it is somehow going to end up and it's going to be another LifeLock situation. What's LifeLock? LifeLock is a company that you may have seen advertised while watching Law & Order on TNT like 10 years ago, where their whole thing was like, oh, we're going to protect you from identity theft. And so the advertiser, the guy who ran it, he had this whole campaign of like,

this is my social security number and you won't be able to steal it or do anything with it. Obviously, within about like 10 seconds, his social security number and you won't be able to steal it or do anything with it. Obviously, within about like 10 seconds, his social security number was used in like all these ways by people who obviously figured out how to do so. And it led to like some legal action. And it was, but it was just one of those things

where it was just like, obviously, this is going to go, you know, like this was, I just double checking. Yeah. The FTC asserted LifeLock failed to institute security programs that misled consumers about its identity protection services, obviously. But there is a degree. I generally go with the, I don't know what the corollary to the, if you hear hoof beats, it's horses, not zebras.

But I'm like, if you hear information technology, it's going to be stupid, not cool. I've never heard that expression before. That's a great expression. Yeah, it's going to be stupid, not cool. I've never heard that expression before. That's a great expression. Yeah, it's very helpful, especially when you think about like in our age of conspiratorial thinking where I'm like, okay. Just trying to keep it for the most obvious. So either it is going to be a complex web that requires millions of people to all be in it, or it's just a fucking hurricane. I mean, I feel like the hoofbeats here, like you mentioned, is probably advertisers, drug marketers, people who are going to want information on your health and will be able to mine your

genome for that. So then if you sent your information off to 23andMe 15 years ago, it may be that you're going to spend the rest of your life doused in Instagram ads from drug marketers who know maybe a lot of health issues you might be facing that you might not know. Or that you could be facing because some of it is like, oh, you have a propensity towards this. But like, will it actually happen? No one knows. Right. But that data is going to be out there forever.

So who knows that, you know, whoever gets sold to could sell it on to somebody at some point. So let this be a reminder. If there's some service out there somewhere that, like 23andMe, that says, give us a little bit of money and some of your personal information will provide you with a cool service, they are going to resell that personal information. It's going to be out of your control for the rest of your life. So don't send it out. Don't trust them with it. No, it's the same way.

You know how it's really difficult to unsubscribe from like Blue Apron or something like that? This is Blue Apron, but it's your jeans. That's right. So the one PSA I will give is some states like California and Florida do have genetic privacy laws that allow you to contact a company like 23andMe and insist that they delete your personal information. So I would say please Google that if you use 23andMe. You might have a chance to pull this back before they sell it off. All right. Let's talk about another company that's up for sale, my favorite and yours, Jane, InfoWars.

Speaking of conspiratorial thinking. Speaking, that's right, as we often are on this show. This is, of course, Alex Jones' notorious little far-right conspiracy media network. Last Tuesday, a Houston judge ruled that Free Speech Systems, InfoWars' parent company, would be liquidated and put up for auction in order to fund the $1.5 billion in damages that Jones owes to the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, who he defamed in really horrifying conspiracy broadcasts. Could not be a more deserving person. So, Jane, you know, the auction starts in just a few weeks. Be honest with me.

What is your top bid? Because it's not $0. It's not $0. I think I would bid with theoretical money. Sure. Five million dollars.

Okay. Because I think that, let's keep in mind that Free Speech Systems, which is InfoWars' parent company, not only sells InfoWars and the wars of the info, it also sells the entire range of nutraceuticals that InfoWars sells. Oh, their bullshit supplement, which was their real profit driver.

Their actual profit driver. I did some reporting on this several years ago, and something that was really funny to me was that many of the products they sold, which were all labeled things like testosterone wars or something like that, they're the exact same products as things sold by Gwyneth Paltrow's goop. Really? So it would just be like differently labeled, but basically the same things. That's so funny. It's goop for men who feel fragile about their masculinity.

Yes, exactly. Who really are like, I want to be more red. Like whatever it is, I just want to be more red. But yeah, I think like, because that's what made money. It doesn't just make money. Like, part of the money making of conspiracy is that you give people conspiracies, and then you somehow

you make them believe that they can't trust anyone but you. Of course. And you are selling them something that is going to save them from... Keep them safe. So, a lot of InfoWars broadcasts would talk about gold. Gold is a big thing, obviously, on the right. That's been a long time thing. A lot of preserved food, like emergency rations. Sure, survivalist stuff. Yes, which always featured like, oh, you could have 80,000

pancakes. Oh, I was always pancakes. It's always pancakes. You're not going to survive on pancakes. Just get some canned vegetables. It's true. I will say, though, that if you've got a fuck ton of oatmeal, you're links to their store, which is where they are selling you essentially vitamin D supplements and various nutraceuticals. Well, you would be set for life on vitamins. I was going to go much lower. I was going to say like one or maybe two grand, but I just want the desk. You know, the InfoWars broadcast, we're sitting at that giant blue desk with a shiny logo on it?

Yeah. I think it would be kind of fun to have that. We just have a bunch of rows of cubicles here. Replace my cubicle with the InfoWars desk. It would be really funny also if nothing else changed about the office. Right. You just have the InfoWars desk. People are popping by.

I'm drinking my coffee. How are you doing this morning? Had the giant flashing neon InfoWars sign behind me. Do you think, though, that it would be like – I remember reading this scary story as a kid where it's like somebody gets an evil desk. And it's like this guy. Is this a Goosebumps? It may have. It was like a Goosebumps or Goosebumps offshoot.

Sure. Where it's like, you know, this person had been, who previous owner had been terrible and the desk had soaked up all of their evil. So I would just be worried that you'd suddenly start being like really worried about Tetrazine. Like really, like more worried than we need you to be. Like we walk past drinking coffee and you just start talking about how the frogs are turning gay and we're like, okay. I would perform an exorcism on the desk.

We would be all good. So there are some actual supposed buyers out there. Media Matters is one of a few left-wing groups expressing interest in buying InfoWars. Do you think this is real or is this just a like schadenfreude PR stunt? Both. I think it is 100%. I mean, if you're Media Matters, especially because Media Matters is in the midst of a lawsuit regarding Elon Musk. But if you're Media Matters, this is one schadenfreude PR stunt.

But also, I would absolutely think that they would be like, we will put together a bid. This will be an actual thing. Because, again, you would then have InfoWars being sold to you is not just InfoWars. It's all of the information InfoWars has. All of its weird back catalog of articles. You can finally find out who were these people, who wrote this stuff. Maybe a bunch of recordings on the cutting room floor. Stuff they said when they thought the mics were off

and not recording. Especially because we've seen Alex Jones in legal proceedings. Especially with regard to his ex-wife. Because, as is often true, the divorced energy. Off the charts. But he said this is performance art.

The degree to which he believes any of this, which one doesn't actually matter. It doesn't matter. I abide by it. It's interesting. It is interesting. But it is like the way in which he has talked about what he does when he has been under oath is very much like, oh, this is a performance art thing. And so I think finding out that information would be very valuable. That it's a grift.

So InfoWars was launched 25 years ago and had quite a journey. The brand is obviously dead now. But, you know, you look around you and you kind of have to ask yourself, in the end, did InfoWars win? I think so in some ways. I think that the challenge has been InfoWars, I think, they made the subtext of conspiracy text, which is always, that's the end point. Wait, how do you mean? I mean that Alex Jones would literally be like, aliens are running America. They are reptilian creatures.

They are trying to kill us all. And so once you've got that, there's no imagination left. It's just like, aliens did it. But if you're just constantly like, what don't they want us to know? What aren't they telling you? What aren't they telling you? What's going on here? What's happening?

Like there is a, you know, there's a long history of conspiracy in this country. A long history of conspiracy in the world. But like I think that the way in which Infowars also made it so that being a conspiratorial thinker was praised, was something that was good, that indicated that you weren't owned by the man. Especially on the right. Like, you weren't owned. You were not, you know, you're not part of the New World Order. It's also interesting because Infowars attempted to separate a lot of conspiratorial thinking from the ultimate conspiracy, anti-Semitism. And so there's a lot of things, like a lot of things where it's like,

no, no, no, we don't mean Jews. We don't mean Jews. And then they had Kanye West on. He was like, I 100% mean Jews. The most uncomfortable Alex Jones has ever looked in his entire life. That's so funny that that is the thing that was too far for him. Oh, no, because you can't. There's a degree.

I mean, I remember looking this up. So InfoWars has comments. But there are terms of services to the comments because they are permitted to do so by Section 230 of the Communications Agency Act of 1996, one of our great laws. And one of the things is like, don't be anti-Semitic. And you're like, if you are asking InfoWars commenters,

the most conspiracy minded people in the world to not be anti-Semitic that is like asking a group of like really enthusiastic ocean swimmers to not get wet like that's that's kind of their thing well the thing is that so much of the right kind of

became even if they never experienced InfoWars directly like started to become InfoWars-style thinkers, their political outlook became very, like Pizzagate, QAnon, these are all things that were not invented by InfoWars, but really promoted by it. Especially because the loss of guardrails

means that there's no, you know, the purity spiral presented by something like InfoWars, that type of thinking. You can't say it's wrong. You can't say this is bad. You have to say it's not effective, but you can't say it's wrong or bad. Right. That was the, I feel like that was the moment they won is they specifically

remember this moment. It was maybe it's 2017, 2018, some Senator who I just, I can't remember the details because I just like caught it on my peripheral vision on some cable news network being asked about an Infowars conspiracy theory and them clearly not wanting to say it's not true. And it's like, oh, he's kind of running the party now. Okay. Well, one last item before we get to David. A North Korean researcher named Martin Williams recently highlighted a very strange little trend. Videos are popping up on TikTok supposedly taken by Americans who claim they have given it all up to move to, yes, North Korea. Each video starts with a story about visiting North Korea as a tourist and falling in love with, quote, the real way of life in North Korea.

The TikToks cite low crime rates and high employment. Weirdly, many of the videos describe being arrested by North Korean police while pregnant and being forced to give birth, which, yeah, sure, sounds great. Punchline is that the TikToks are, of course, actually AI-generated, and I did not see this one coming, although maybe I should have, designed to sell cheap health supplements with Gitch Promoted at the end of each video. So, Jane, my question to you, what the fuck? I have, I'm very online. I know this is offline, but I'm very online. I mean, there's nothing more offline in the podcast than very online. I know this is offline, but I'm very online. I mean, there's nothing more offline the podcast than being online. Exactly.

But there are moments like, you know, I am intensely tethered to the internet. And this was a moment where I was like, I don't get it. I'm out. I'm lost. Like, this is too much for me, especially because there are, I mean, there's obviously the underlying AI bullshit. Like, there's like an image of a fantasy public transportation system in which you can clearly see that two buses are about to get in a horrible accident.

And you're like, oh, no. There's the fact that many of the people in these AI-generated images, something I found interesting is that many of them are supposed to be African-American. I was struck by that, too. Sure. But also that the element of people being arrested by North Korean police, having to give birth in jail, describing how great it was giving birth in jail,

and how North Korean doctors gave you these special health supplements, which get promoted at the end. I'm like, that is, I was reading something a friend of mine wrote for his Substack where he was talking about how at a certain point, like the argument of can AI create art and who would it be for? And I think that his, a part of his argument is like, what if AI starts creating art that can only be enjoyed by AI? And this think that part of his argument is like, what if AI starts creating art that can only be enjoyed by AI? And this was that.

This is a moment in which I'm like, maybe AI thinks this is super effective. I'm just weirded out. Especially, someone pointed out to me that this same TikTok, the same strategy has been used, but the country was like Norway. Which at least I could kind of see people being like, I'm not sure if there's the same, oh, we got arrested and had to give birth in jail, but it was awesome element. The Norwegian supplements, I would be interested. Yeah, Norwegian supplements. Like if you sell people, you can sell people on Nordic shit all the time.

They don't know what it is. It's fine. That actually makes me feel like I do understand this trend now because I bet they started with those videos and people weren't finishing it. But if you start a video with, I got kidnapped in North Korea, gave birth in a North Korean jail, and fell in love with the place, you're going to watch to the end.

It's true. You're going to watch to the end, and then if they push the supplements on you, maybe only one in a thousand actually buy them. Yeah. But that's all they're, you know. I mean, I'm kind of, speaking of my extremely online-ness,

there is a YouTube, separate from the MTV show, there's a YouTube catfish series that's run by this company where they are attempting to help people who have been catfished online by romance scammers specifically. And there is something deeply, whenever I'm like, I don't understand why people would believe in things, episodes of that show in which someone truly believes that they are communicating with and buying hundreds of thousands of gift cards for Johnny Depp. Oh, no. Because it is that one. It's always gift cards.

It's the one out of a thousand. It's the one out of 10,000. Also, don't buy gift cards for literally anyone. Yeah, don't buy it. Don't do it. That is how scams and grifts work. Like, most people will just walk on by. But I think that, like, we're in an era of, era of, if you look at Facebook, there's AI slot bullshit.

And then there are the comments of the AI slot bullshit where it's like, Trump lifting a building to rescue a child. And all the comments are like, I never knew about this. Trump 2024. And I'm like, woof, woof. I mean, that's just what happens when you have essentially a, you know, you have, what, 330, 350 million people in America. Some of them are going to fall for shit. And just because, you know, I think about this. I'm not sure if anyone listening has ever had like an older family member fall for something online.

But there is a degree to which you're like, oh, you weren't prepared for any of this. You didn't know that it was coming. You didn't know it was coming. You are not soaked in the internet. You are not born of this world. And with stuff like this, I'm like, it works on someone. And that someone is more money than it probably costs to make it.

Yeah, for sure. It is definitely a reminder that the more AI we get, the more our internet is just going to be flooded with grifters and scammers. All right, before we get to the break, some quick housekeeping. If you'd like this conversation, make sure to check Jane out on our daily news podcast, What A Day. It's a quick 20-minute lesson that lets you take the top news and stories with you on your daily commute or your daily wander from kitchen to desk if you work from home.

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their Instagram page for you to share. This message has been paid for by Vote Save America. You can learn more at votesaveamerica.com, and this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. There is a shadow war being fought right now on the Internet. On one side are far-right extremists who use platforms like Telegram and Discord to organize and recruit. They terrorize neighborhoods, commit vandalism, and sometimes far worse, as we saw in Charlottesville in 2017 or on January 6th, or in the mass shootings these groups help to inspire. On the other side is law enforcement sometimes, but agencies like the FBI have found there's only so much they can do or will do. In their place, a front of left-wing

internet vigilantes is taking up the fight. Their methods are unorthodox, but their results speak for themselves. David Kirkpatrick infiltrated this shadow war as part of a long and fascinating investigation for the New Yorker magazine, where he is a correspondent. Before that, he was a long-time foreign reporter for the New York Times, where he shared in three Pulitzer Prizes, and even more impressively, shared a cubicle wall with me while at the London Bureau. David, great to see you. Thanks for being here. Good to talk to you again. So how did you get into this story? How did you first hear about this?

Well, the assignment that I got was to check in on the FBI. It had been a while since President Biden inaugurated a new approach to political extremism, violent extremism, and we wanted to know how was the FBI doing. You know, all this came out in the aftermath of the January 6th riot and before that Charlottesville. So I frankly was expecting to learn about a crackdown. I wanted to go to the FBI and give them a chance to tell me how terrifically successful they'd been. And instead, what they told me was that in their view, the First Amendment means they can't do that much.

They can't change their practices. They can't go after groups. They can't change their practices. They can't go after groups. They can't go after ideas. And a lot of speech, which comes close to or actually glorifies violence, while at the same time deprecating a minority group, is constitutionally protected. So the story that I wanted to tell of a radical overhaul and a much more aggressive crackdown on far-right violence was not a story the FBI wanted to tell me. And that sent me on a journey. And I discovered that in the place of the FBI, these other vigilantes, some of whom are quite eccentric or even a little paranoid, were trying to fill the void.

Were doing on their own the kind of vigilante versions of the undercover work we expect of the FBI. Well, I want to ask you more about the eccentric and paranoid left-wing online vigilantes because what could be more internet than that? But first, let's talk more about this point that you made that I had not realized that the FBI will target individuals for individual crimes, but will not target the groups or ideas that I would seem to me very obviously play a big role in encouraging these violent acts. And you illustrate this line really well with a story about a guy named Xavier Lopez and a group called the Society of St. Pius X. So tell us about that and how that kind of illustrates why this line matters. So we're talking about two things here.

The first thing you mentioned is just the distinctive American approach to the First Amendment. So unlike a lot of our counterparts in Canada or Britain or Australia and other English-speaking countries, those countries can prescribe a domestic terrorist group and say, you know, the Proud Boys, for example, in some of those places are considered a terrorist group because they like to travel expressly to commit violence and they do it again and again. In this country, no. They're treated as a political organization. They have freedom of expression. And we have no prescribed groups. We have only foreign terrorist groups. So that's just the American way.

What you're talking about with Mr. Lopez is a step further. So that's a case where we have to broaden the conversation and talk about politics. As you are aware, the Republican Party lately has been very suspicious of law enforcement. Historically, the Law and Order Party, many of them now are inclined to talk about deep state conspiracies and federal law enforcement and the FBI going after the right. So in this case, Lopez was a guy who I think we would all consider dangerous. You know, he'd been in prison. He had a record of writing online and to his family members, vicious, anti-Semitic, racist stuff, encouraging violence and others. And it turned out to have been stockpiling weapons.

The FBI managed to catch wind of this and basically nabbed him and arrested him right before he probably would have carried off a massacre. That seemed to be his intent. But in the aftermath, somebody in the Richmond office of the FBI put together a memo and they said, look, this guy Lopez was fishing around this eccentric offshoot of the Catholic Church, the St. Pius X movement, which has been kicked out of the actual Catholic Church, radical traditional Catholics. So they reject a lot of the modern Catholic reforms and in fact tend to sort of perseverate on the fact that the Jews killed Jesus, if you know what I mean.

There's a whiff of anti-Semitism historically around the sect. So this memo that was cooked up in the Richmond office of the FBI said, look, we see this guy fishing around in this church, in this sect for other recruits for his violent schemes. And in fact, in some of our other FBI bureaus, there have been other examples of this. Maybe we ought to try to cultivate some sources inside this sect, inside the radical traditionalist Catholic world so that we can sniff out this kind of violent plot before it happens the next time. But Republicans in Congress caught wind of this and exposed the memo and denounced it as an example of the FBI targeting Catholics. And in fact, in the view of, you know, the FBI's leadership, the memo was written in such a way

that it actually came a little bit too close to scrutinizing Americans on the basis of their religious beliefs. So the director of the FBI testified and repudiated the memo. And I think they all feel very embarrassed about it, even though, you know, from a public safety point of view, locking this guy up was undeniably a good thing to do. So to your point about how there are kind of two forces at play here, one is the unusually American approach where we will say individual acts of violence or plot to commit violence, that's illegal. But a group that might implicitly encourage that violence

or cultivate a worldview that encourages that violence, that's fine in this country. And then at the same time, we also have, like you were saying, the domestic politics where the republicans are so suspicious of law enforcement deep state they're persecuting conservatives christians blah blah blah is making it even harder for law enforcement to scrutinize these groups it would seem to me that the role of the internet in extremism and radicalization would make that distinction between groups and individuals even more important and would make it even more important for law enforcement to be able to monitor extremist groups. Do you get the sense that the internet is changing the way that law enforcement at all thinks about monitoring or preempting, I guess is maybe the bigger question pre-empting far-right extremist violence well the people in law enforcement would be the first to tell you that the internet has changed the game

it makes it much easier to recruit it makes it much easier to radicalize it makes it much easier for some young man and it's usually a young man to fall into a set of radical ideas online, you know, through some chat group, and then begin to carry out an attack on his own, right? So that's a whole new kind of threat that is very hard to foresee and prevent. And that's what a lot of the big mass politically minded, you know, far right mass shootings have been in recent years. So that makes life much, much, much more difficult for the FBI, especially in a world, as you say, where they can't police free speech, where you can say whatever you want on the internet. I mean, the distinction they draw isn't between groups and individuals, which is important. The distinction

they draw is between sort of talk and action. Our jurisprudence says you can say, you know, the Kirkpatricks are terrible people and I wish that some violence would befall them. And that's fine. It's not until you say, I'm actually going to come after David on Sunday and start collecting your weapons to do so, that's when the FBI can swoop in and wrap you up. Now, critics of the FBI say that they've taken this speech action distinction and they've conflated it with the group individual distinction. You know, the critics say, look, Mr. FBI, you're too nervous about policing speech, and that causes you to give groups a wide latitude, pretending they're political groups. But maybe they're not.

Maybe they're actually criminal gangs. example, a group that likes to get together repeatedly and travel to left or other political rallies so they can beat up their political opponents is not actually a political group. Maybe that is a criminal gang that is more about violence than it is about ideas, and they should be policed as such. Well, the speech action distinction, I understand it on civil libertarian grounds. You kind of you like the idea that law enforcement is not going to be. And you write about this in the piece, especially after the FBI's crackdown on the civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s. You kind of like the idea that they're now not going to be going after people or groups on the basis of their ideas. At the same time, like you're saying, the internet really changes the nature of the relationship between speech and ideas, where now it's not, you know, a bunch of people might gather in a basement somewhere

beneath a bar and have a lot of speech that leads to the incitement of action. And you can kind of monitor that because they're all in one place. Now, because this speech happens on the internet, it's happening in Discord forums, or it's happening on 4chan or Facebook in front of huge audiences, the ability of radicalizing speech to lead to action is much more diffuse and therefore much harder to track. And so having all of this speech that could be said to be inciting political violence without a check on it because we have the civil libertarian protection also feels more dangerous, which leads in part to the entrance of the left-wing vigilante groups that you write about. So can you talk about how you first heard about or came into

contact with these movements? Because I will be honest, I had not heard about this before I read your piece. I'm not sure the moment when I first stumbled into that world, but early on, I found that a group of neo-Nazis who had been exposed by one of these stings, by an undercover operative of a left orientation,

they not only were not so embarrassed that they slunk away forever, they instead decided to sue him. And they sued him for costing them their jobs, right? They're being exposed as members of this group, the Patriot Front, caused them to be fired in some cases from pretty

lucrative middle-class jobs, you know, as civil engineers or real estate brokers or, you know, electricians or what have you. And when I read that lawsuit, I thought, well, now this is really interesting. And so I traced back and tried to tell the story of that particular individual whose sting against Patriot Front was especially fruitful because many of these people will join a chat group or infiltrate an online network and then record a ton of stuff and dox some people. Some, like this infiltrator we're talking about in the Patriot Front,

actually go underground in real, undercover, that is, in real life. So he was actually going to meetings with the Patriot Front guys. He was putting up the anti-Semitic or racist, you know, or ultra-nationalist graffiti. He was helping them prepare banners. He was hanging out with them, which is, you know, risky in a way, and also kind of morally complicated. And to say nothing of, of course, deceitful. So I was eager to tell that story. But he's not alone. It turns out this stuff happens all the time.

He took his cache of records and recordings and internal information and delivered it all to a website called Unicorn Riot, which has become a kind of clearinghouse for this stuff. It's a lefty organization in general that made a name for itself by publishing the discord conversations for the planning of the rally in Charlottesville that turned bloody back in 2017. So I think you're talking about, this is Victor Washington, right? Yeah. He went out, that was his assumed name, Victor Washington. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, among many others. So I want to ask you about him. But first,

I want to ask you about another one of these left-wing vigilantes who you write about, because I found his story particularly illuminating for kind of how this starts, or this movement kind of picks up speed or becomes so much larger. You refer to him as Einsatz, which is the Discord handle that he uses to infiltrate one of these far-right groups. So tell us this guy's story, how he gets into this and what he does. Yeah, I was the first journalist to talk to him, which was fascinating to me. So he is out in Seattle. I got to be sure to protect his privacy appropriately. So he is out in Seattle. I've got to be sure to protect his privacy appropriately. So he's out in Seattle and becomes increasingly alarmed by the signs of far-right organizing around the Pacific Northwest. A friend of his, I think, was shot at some kind of a protest around a far-right speaker at the University of Washington.

It was the night of Trump's inauguration, right? That's correct, right. And he becomes more and more involved in efforts to track down and expose and dox local far-right groups, even doing things like placing magnetic trackers under people's cars to see where they go to work um and one day he's walking along and he sees a sign uh for a group called anti-communist action uh with a discord handle you know a discord server that you could you could sign on to to try to join so we thought what the heck you know maybe i'll get to dox a few people and he adopted that group einsatz which is the name of hitler group of hitler's paramilitary squads uh and apparently with that name as his credential he

was accepted right in uh so he lurked around inside anti-communist action for a little while and then he was invited to another series of discord servers that eventually hooked him up with the people who were planning the unite the the Right rally in Charlottesville. And on the eve of the, he kept all this to himself and just lurked in the background and did as much listening as he could. And then on the, but he was alarmed. He was alarmed because it was very clear to him that the people, you know, planning the rally were planning for violence and they were planning for violence against Jewish people and people of color and leftists and eagerly. And so right before it happened, he did a couple of things. One,

he called up his anti-fascist friends and they all called Airbnb and got as many rooms canceled as they could for the far right organizers who were going to be attending the event. And then through an intermediary, he connected with the Unicorn Riot and he let them know that the Unite the Right organizers were planning a torch march that night, unannounced at the University of Virginia campus, and turned over his credentials so that they could log on and ultimately copy the whole Discord chat. And that Discord chat became the basis, really almost the entirety of the evidence for a historic lawsuit against the organizers of the Unite the Right rally

accusing them of deliberately planning the violence that took place there. Yeah, those logs become incredibly consequential, right? I mean, you tick through all of these lawsuits and criminal investigations that cite these logs of so many of the organizers discussing, like you said beforehand, openly talking about make sure to concealed carry. Here's, you know, use a flagpole like this because this is the best way to beat people. We're going to try to find Black Lives Matter protesters to attack.

I mean, it's really staggering how open they were. They just seemed to have no sense at all that this could happen to them. Yeah, it's an ugly world. I was pretty sheltered and had not really opened my ears to the internal discourse of the far right. And I'm going to try to avoid repeating slurs here, but it's bracing. So, how did you end up getting in touch with this guy?

With the guy who was trafficking under the name Einsatz? Well, through an intermediary, and I agreed to keep his name, the intermediary's name out of it and also Einsatz's real name out of it. I think he wants to continue to live his private life. But a lot of these people, as I said, are a little bit paranoid and they really fear, rightly or wrongly, retaliation by their far-right opponents. I mean, there is a kind of a spy versus spy game going on here where each side tries to dox the other and harass the other as much as they can. Did you get, speaking to him, did you get a sense of what his kind of theory of political change was? Like, what was he hoping to affect by taking these steps,

which in some cases seemed like they were quite risky uh are you talking about einsatz here or victor einsatz vincent washington but i guess it's also i mean vincent washington seems like he's kind of his own case so i i think a lot of these people uh subscribe to the same uh ideology or philosophy um and uh it's distinctive right so these are not your garden variety leftists. They lean, some of them use the word anarchist or use the word anarchist, but kind of cringe at it. And what they mean is that they don't trust the right and they don't trust the state, right? They don't trust the state to protect them. They don't trust the

police. They won't ever work with the police. And yet at the same time, they believe that the far right is a kind of, you know, a proto-fascist movement and that citizens shouldn't wait to speak out against that and shouldn't trust law enforcement to do it for them. Am I making any sense when I describe their worldview? Because they're very, they're very, in talking to me again and again, they were very eager to distance themselves from, you know, the people who, the so-called sedition hunters, you know, who actually want to help the FBI catch the far right types who attacked the U.S. Capitol. That's not what this is. These people, these anti-fascist researchers, as they call themselves,

consider themselves very much at odds with the police on the one hand and the far right on the other. Well, it made me surprised that they spoke to you because in my experience, these folks also tend to be very skeptical of reporters in the media. Yeah, correct. No, they definitely did not want to share their names with me. They were very suspicious of me. They were very suspicious of the mainstream media. And also, they didn't want to share their names

because, as I said, they're very paranoid that the far right is going to come after them. Right. Or the police. They suspect that the police are often going to come after them and turn a blind eye to the right. That's a common belief among that crowd. So I got the sense from your narrative, and tell me if you think this is right, that this guy and the logs that Unicorn Riot gets of all of the Unite the Right stuff as a result of this guy kind of helps to inspire what becomes a larger movement.

I'm sure some of it was happening before him, but it seems like it really picked up after him and after Charlottesville. Is that right, do you think? Yeah, I think that is right. But you know what, the right picked up after Charlottesville too. So we've got three things going on. There's that example. There's the rise of the far right, the alt-right, if you will. And then as you mentioned before, there's the internet, which really invites impersonation. Even as it allows groups on the far left and the far right to organize and reach out like never before,

it also invites infiltration and impersonation because, as you know, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. But it turns out people do know that you're a far-right extremist now because now all of these... Something I think you do a really nice job of showing is how all of these logs fit together and all of these leaks fit together because we're really ultimately talking about a relatively small number of far-right extremists who are operating under pseudonyms but they're on all these different

chats and they're all linked together and kind of the more information these groups are able to gather about them it seems to me the more effective they have become in identifying people, which then does become effective if some of them get picked up for crimes further down the line. Yeah, it was interesting. I talked to someone in law enforcement who said, you know, from our point of view, this is kind of a mixed bag. You know, on the one hand, one, these people are putting themselves at risk, which is not good.

And two, in the old days, if we were going to infiltrate some far right group ourselves, we just had to check with the other intelligence agencies, you know, maybe the local ones and the federal ones and so forth. Now we also have to worry whether the people that we're spying on and infiltrating are actually left as vigilantes, you know, because they're not coordinating with us. Right. So you've got to be sure the bad guys you're spying on are actually the real bad guys. Right. It's very interesting the way that they kind of, they draw on some of the

methods and norms of law enforcement, some of the methods of journalism, and some of the methods of just kind of like early social web, like the anonymous hacker group and these kind of online, you know, decentralized, dispersed vigilante groups, and it seems like they kind of pull them all together into a political cause. In a way, yeah. Of course, but they're not journalists. No, no. We call up the subject and say,

this is what I've heard about you. Is it true or what do you want to say? They don't do that. So they make mistakes. There are people who get temporarily and collaterally embarrassed and called out as a Nazi when they're not a Nazi. You know, there are mistaken doxings. And there are, you know, there's a young man after Charlottesville who was exposed as one of the rioters and is believed to have killed himself.

He certainly died. On the far right, everyone believes, yeah, that he was driven to suicide by his doxing by these leftist vigilantes. Wow. Okay, well, let's talk about a guy who you mentioned a couple of times. A fascinating case. You opened the piece with him. Vincent Washington, a.k.a. David Alan Capito Jr., a.k.a. about 17 other things. What is his story?

Because it's really fascinating, I think. Well, we don't know that much of his story except that he is a Seattle area anti-fascist, somebody who was a participant in the John Brown gun club, a kind of a far left or anarchist movement out there. And he decided one day to volunteer and go to become a member of the Patriot Front, which is a white nationalist or far-right group with kind of neo-Nazi overtones. I don't think they would call themselves neo-Nazis out loud, but there's a whiff of that around some of the paraphernalia they enjoy. And he studied up.

He learned to talk about the right books and mention the right influencers and express the right ideas about the coming day when white people are a minority in the United States of America and how terrible that would be. And so he was able to become a member of the Patriot Front. And it turned out that he was a big guy, that he knew some martial arts. They liked to spar and train to fight, and he could do all that. And what's more, he brought his own camera.

He was a skilled photographer. And so they quickly appointed him their kind of unofficial group photographer for a lot of their marches and graffiti actions and stunts. And that put him in a terrific position to really hoover up a lot of information about Patriot Front all over the country, which he then divulged to Unicorn Riot, and they presented in a searchable form on the internet. And it seems like he also represents a kind of more overtly militant

faction or school of thought in this in terms of some of the steps that folks take on his behalf or using his information against Patriot Front. Can you talk about like the attack on the cars? Oh yeah, that's right. The moment when he gave up his undercover, uh, identity, uh, some of his Seattle, um, uh, colleagues in Patriot Front were all gathering at the airport to fly to Washington DC for a big March there. He missed the plane. He did not fly to Washington. Instead, he let some of his anti-fascist allies around Washington know where all the demonstrators were going to be parking

their cars before they took some trucks into Washington. And those demonstrators showed up and slashed the tires and broke the windows and spray painted all of the cars and did as much damage as they could. I'm sure some of your listeners are thinking, well, you know, those white nationalists got what they deserved. It's a crime. I don't necessarily want to live in a world where extra-legal vigilantes decide whose cars they're going to destroy.

Right, that that's how social norms are enforced is by destroying people's cars. And also, I'm sure the Hertz rental car company doesn't want that. There's a very funny section in your story where you, of course, you have the text messages and some of the posts and exchanges among members of Patriot Front, this far-right group,

after this happens, and they're talking about the thousands and thousands of dollars of damages that they're going to have to pay because of what's been done to these cars. And one of them posts to one of the other Patriot Front members about a pillow that has been taken out of his rental car. That's a $100 pillow, bro. I love that because it feels to me like part of the aim here is to, you know, it's to coerce. It's to intimidate. It's to dox, reveal. It seems like part of the aim is also to mock. I mean, part of this hack, they got these like embarrassing text messages that they printed out and put on posters around town.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, each side tries to belittle and humiliate the other as much as possible, and certainly the anti-fascists did that in every case. In that mention, the pillow, I'll tell you something that I left out of the story and I kind of regret it. His father, who was white, is now remarried to a woman who's non-white. And it clearly bothered the son who joined Patriot Front. Wow. That pillow was a gift from his birth mother, who is white. So it may have had all kinds of significance to him. And who knows? Maybe his white nationalism was attached to his feelings about his stepmother and his family.

It's a complicated story. It is, yeah. That's so funny. Well, I want to ask you about how effective you think this is. Because it seems like it's aimed at kind of bringing political change or coercing the far right in a few different ways. One is, and of course you talk a lot about this in the story, doxing members of the far right. Just, you know, if you're going to have these ideas, be a part of this group. We're going to expose you under your real name.

And that leads some people to get fired, lose their jobs, especially if they're cops or work in the military. You're not supposed to be part of an extremist group if you, you know, work for the government. Part of it is also exposing people who are involved in crimes like the Unite the Right leaks that you mentioned, expose some people who are involved in that to a criminal degree. January 6th, some people were involved in that, get exposed, become these leaks. It seems like part of the idea around it is or could be to also kind of constrain the movement more widely to act as kind of a deterrent against these movements? And you talked to someone who talks about we want the far right to be afraid of far left infiltration in a way that will make them dig a little bit deeper underground. Do you think any of these are having a meaningful effect on the far right? You know, I will say that, you know, as part of this reporting, I followed a group of anti-fascist researchers working online, sleuthing around to try to expose one particularly

active online neo-Nazi type in North Carolina, working with the Southern Poverty Law Center. And they told me who it was. Just as they were getting ready to expose him. He's a soldier at Camp Liberty. And I flew down and met with him and he denied everything. Or I'm sorry, I talked to him on the phone and we arranged to meet and he didn't show up for the meeting, but he denied everything, told me he was going to convince me it all wasn't true. He was applying actually to get a job as a police detective when he left the meaning. But he denied everything, told me he was going to convince me it all wasn't true. He was applying actually to get a job as a police detective when he left the military. And instead, he was exposed, kicked out of the military, and charged with several crimes, including illegal weapons dealing, as well as lying on an application for a government job,

presumably that job in law enforcement. So that's an example right there where this kind of infiltration and sleuthing, the sleuthing in this case, made use of the records leaked by Vincent Washington, actually led to an arrest. Now, you're asking a broader question, and I think you want me to kind of speak normatively

about whether this is good or bad or not good or bad. I mean, if you're comfortable. I'm not comfortable with that. Okay. No, I'm not really. I mean, I'll just say it's morally complicated. I think the people in law enforcement would say it does have a constraining effect on the far right.

And I think other people in law enforcement would say, like, would you just please stay home and leave it to us? So I think opinions are mixed. You know, I will say, back to something you mentioned a minute ago, to be slightly normative, you were talking about how perhaps troublesome it is that law enforcement takes this broad view of freedom of speech in the United States, especially in the internet era, where words arguably can cause real trouble. Before we go too far in questioning our First Amendment principles, you know,

there are other ways to reduce mass shootings. For example, gun control comes up right away. We don't have to push things into the realm of, let's just assume everyone has easy access to a semi-automatic weapon and then we'll just hope that the ideas don't inspire them to act with it. That's a good point. Yeah, normatively, I agree with you. Well, I mean, to think about the kind of strategic goals of this left-wing movement to infiltrate these groups, a lot of it does rely on doxing, right? Which it relies on a belief that there will be some sort of social sanction for people who are exposed as part of these groups. And something that I was thinking about reading your story is that we can count on that right now for

the most part, the idea that if, you know, your community, everyone suddenly knows that you're a member of a far-right group, that is going to have an effect on you and on your life. But I wonder how true that will continue to be, especially if Donald Trump is elected again. I'm not going to ask, you know, you don't have to speculate on that, but I'm wondering if you have heard the people who you talk to, do they just take for granted that it will always be a taboo to be part of the far-right, or do they worry about those norms shifting? They totally worry. I mean, when we're talking about this far left

anti-fascist research crowd, as I said, they're quite paranoid. And their biggest fear is that these norms will change. You know, what they're out to do is to name and shame partly in order to try to reinforce these norms so these norms don't get whittled away, so it doesn't become acceptable, for example, to be a white nationalist.

You know, the contrary view would be, look, slashing tires and lying to people and costing them their jobs and behaving outside the law, that doesn't make your cause very attractive. And that isn't necessarily reinforcing the right kinds of norms in terms of most of all our faith in the law and law enforcement. Right. Which I guess speaks to part of the effect of this, whether anyone intended it or not, the fact that this part of the enforcement against the far right is now falling to members of these far left groups where I don't know that they are necessarily trying to nationally win the argument so much as they are trying to coerce and terrify members of the far right. And I came away thinking maybe that is effective in a kind of narrow immediate sense that the particular, you know, the Patriot Front members who had all of their cars fucked up and they had to spend a lot of money on that. Well, that's now money that they're not spending doing other things. They're going to be harmful to people, but doesn't seem like it is maybe going to move the needle nationally on the rise of the far right.

And then it does seem like it is a really important kind of barometer of the extent to which the far right will or will not rise is the role of the internet which is of course also what this show is about and i feel like for as long as i have been aware of the existence of the online far right which you know maybe like 2014 2015 gamer gate kind of. It has felt to me like the nature of the modern social web generally is tilted in favor more of the far right than against them. Recruiting, radicalization, organizing all seem to happen to a really significant degree for the far right online. And reasons for that are complicated, of course.

Maybe it's algorithms, maybe it's lax enforcement on the platforms, maybe something else. But whatever the reason, the internet seems to be a boon for this movement. And I was wondering of your sense coming out of this kind of spending time looking at the way that the far right is talking to themselves and organizing online and the way that these counter far left movements are organizing against them, do you get the sense that the tilt on the internet in a way that seems to have been favorable towards the far right, is that changing at all, do you think? I'm not sure I want to agree with you that there is an innate far right bias to the internet as a medium for organizing. Certainly when I was in the Middle East in the early days of the Arab Spring, it seemed like

the platform was open to lots of different causes to organize in lots of different ways. I think people on the far right right now believe that they are sort of underdogs and outsiders. And they find the internet a congenial place to speak anonymously because we have the norms that we have. And it's not cool to be a white nationalist in the society we live in. But the leftists who are giving them a run for their money are also making pretty good use of the Internet to organize into their, you know, anti-fascist research collectives. But again, the world that's happening out there online in these anonymous forums is a tribe versus a tribe world where my team takes on your team. It's not a rule of law world. And the most hopeful way for our society to flourish is a rule of law world. And the most hopeful way for our society to flourish

is a rule of law way. That's so, it's very interesting to me that that is, I agree with you. And it's very interesting to me that that is the conclusion that you came away with after spending time with these left-wing vigilante activists who have racked up so many successes that even when you see the vigilante people who say we're going to go outside of the rule of law because we don't think it works for us we don't trust law enforcement we're going to take things into our own hands even when you kind of see them at their most successful that despite that or maybe because of it you come away thinking that this is actually all the more reason that we should have a society that functions on rule of law, you know, knock on wood, inshallah, rather than on the right vigilantes beating out the wrong vigilantes.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, many of these anti-fascist researchers just do not trust the police in any case and think the courts are all corrupt. That's not me. I would much rather put my faith in the judicial process than the verdict of some anti-fascist research collective that makes up its own mind about me. Right. I agree, which makes it fascinating that some of the folks you talked to in the FBI were not entirely condemning this movement. Yeah, a little ambiguous. Yeah, a little ambiguous. Ambivalent, I should say, a little ambivalent. Ambival movement. Yeah, a little ambiguous. Yeah, a little ambiguous. Ambivalent, I should say. A little ambivalent.

Ambivalent. Yes, that's a good word for it. Well, David, it's been a joy to chat and I love the piece. Great talking to you too. Thanks a lot for having me. Thank you. Offline is a Crooked Media production.

It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher and Emma Illick-Frank. Jordan Cantor is our sound editor. Charlotte Landis is our engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reed Cherland, and Adrian Hill for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Terima kasih.