On with Kara Swisher - Anti-DEI Moms & the Alt-Right: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

At first blush, the successful, suburban moms in Southlake, Texas who helped kick off the anti-CRT/anti-DEI movement animating school board fights across the country have little in common with the young, self-described losers and incels who make up much of the alt-right. In fact, both are far-right extremist groups that are obsessed with race, trans people, and not surprisingly, Donald Trump — and they occasionally collaborate.   Kara talks to Elle Reeve, author of “Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics” and a CNN correspondent, and Mike Hixenbaugh, author of “They Came For the Schools” and senior reporter for NBC News, to break down the parallels and contrasts between the two groups.  Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find Kara on Instagram/Threads as @karaswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey, y'all. I'm John Blenhill, and I'm hosting a new podcast at Vox called Explain It To Me. Here's how it works. You call our hotline with questions you can't quite answer on your own. We'll investigate and call you back to tell you what we found. We'll bring you the answers you need

every Wednesday starting September 18th. So follow Explain It To Me, presented by Klaviyo. It's on! Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, we have a conversation with Ellie Reeve and Mike Hixenbaugh, two journalists who recently published books that document the rise of the alt-right and anti-woke parent activists, respectively. Ellie is a correspondent at CNN and a former correspondent for Vice News. You might remember her from Vice News' Emmy-winning special on the white supremacist march in Charlottesville. Her book is titled Black Pill, How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society,

and Capture American Politics. Mike is a senior reporter for NBC, the host of the Peabody Award winning podcast Southlake, and the author of They Came for the Schools. Both of these books are excellent and both warrant their own interview, but I wanted to speak to them together because the two movements they chronicle are in many ways two sides of the same fetid coin. The respectable upper middle class middle-aged suburban moms in They Came for the Schools might not seem like they have anything in common with the angry young incel Nazis who marched on Charlottesville, but in fact, both groups are, at their core, far-right political movements that are motivated by anti-Blackness and have recently shifted focus of their hate towards trans people. Ellie and Mike and I will talk about the genesis and evolution of the

alt-right and the anti-white parent activists, the differences, similarities, and parallels, and what effect they'll have on the upcoming election. And our expert question today comes from someone I know really well, Katie Couric, who also has been covering these issues over the many years. Ellie and Mike, thank you for being on. You've both written fantastic books that document, I would say, the rise of hate and tolerance and most of all radicalization, though they're very different books. But I felt like they belong together in a strange way. And so we're going to have a talk about where things are going. Let's start by introducing the books.

Ellie, in Black Pill, which is a great title, you write about how a subset of alienated young men who posted memes on image boards like 4chan and 8chan morphed into real-life violent white supremacists. Explain what Black Pill means, and how did the radicalization take place? Alienated young men is not a new, fresh thing for our society, but how did the radicalization happen? So most people who have encountered politics on the internet are familiar with the red pill. It comes from the Matrix where the hero is given either a blue pill or a red pill. The blue pill lets him live with the, you know, the fantasy 90s version made by machines. Or the red pill takes him into the horrible but harsh reality that they are slaves to machines. Opens their eyes. Exactly. This is often used as a metaphor for buying into right-wing extremist politics. But from that came a lot of different kinds of pills. We've seen coconut pill take off right now.

But the black pill is the one that I think is most important because it's not about an idea but like a feeling and a way of giving yourself permission to do bad things. It's this nihilism that society is absolutely corrupt and hopeless, and it is going to collapse. And if anything, you should enjoy and hasten the collapse of society because what comes after will be a new golden age. And that's how people give themselves permission to take very radical action that they wouldn't have normally done. So how do you get to a black pill? For the people that I interviewed, it happened in online chat rooms. Like you start feeling that everything is terrible and you seek out information that can confirms that idea.

You seek out communities where people are all posting and everyone is trying to one up each other for the the most dark and depraved analysis of where society is right now. And pretty soon, you don't get along with your friends anymore. The people in that regular world, your family, they don't get it. The people who get it and get you are the people in this world, and it helps seal you off from a reality where you can just go outside and touch grass. Life's not so bad. I'd rather live now than a time before penicillin, you know? Right, but it does jump. What is the jump point into real life? So with the far-right activists that I followed online,

they started wanting to, trying to affect the real world. First, they did this by trolling, by getting the media to repeat their in-jokes unintentionally on air. Once that started happening, then they started to try to move into the real world. There started being these brawls between far-right and leftist or anti-Trump protesters, especially in California. And they started taking videos of themselves fighting the leftists. And the audience was not for the people in, say, Berkeley. The audience was for the internet. And so they started seeing themselves, like, fighting.

It felt like they were winning, like they were bringing the left to heel. And so those brawls started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And all that led up to, in 2017, what they called the Summer of Hate. And the climax was supposed to be the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville. Which we were there. Let me get to Mike. The young men in Ellie's books are generally self-described losers, whereas the main subjects in your book,

they came from the schools or upper middle class parents in South Lake, Texas, a suburb outside of Dallas-Fort Worth, I guess anti-woke parents. They became similarly radicalized in a very different way that there was a national plot to teach white children to be ashamed of their race and to indoctrinate them into hating their country. Talk about their radicalization, because in a lot of ways, it's not a lot different, except not punching people necessarily. Yeah, right. I do think there's a lot of overlap in these books that is not immediately obvious. And so the parents I document in Southlake, Texas, who kind of serve as stand-ins for the conservative suburban moms who've gone to war with their school boards in the last few years under the banner of Moms for Liberty, anti-critical race theory, anti-DEI. These are parents who became convinced as a result of right-wing messaging that public schools were teaching their little white children to hate themselves because they're

white and that the schools were teaching all of the black children that they are inherently victims. And so, this is a kind of a straw man depiction of what DEI is or what happens when kids learn about like the true history of slavery in America. And so, parents heard that message from Chris Ruffo on Fox News, on Tucker Carlson, and on their Facebook pages and started showing up at school board meetings. As that energy built in places like South Lake, Texas, people like Steve Bannon and Chris Ruffo and Tucker Carlson and everyone on Fox News saw that energy and kind of built the conservative political movement around school activism in recent years. And as these debates and these public meetings grew more hostile, you started to see people from the internet culture that you read about in Blackpill showing up at the meetings, these

kind of, you know, patriot front people showing up outside of drag story hour or protesting outside of libraries with Moms for Liberty. You know, Moms for Liberty would not declare themselves a white supremacist group. But, you know, at times, that's who's in their corner. There's been tons of nonsense on Fox News. Why did this illuminate them? Why did this get them going on this particular topic? Because there's all kinds of stuff, you know, that they put out there. Why did this, like the bathrooms thing, the trans bathrooms things didn't really work, right? Why did this work? suburbs because suburban schools, this is like, this is this place that's a magnet for people, all types of parents who have been convinced that that's how you're going to get your kid a great education. That's the path to the American dream. And so there's a reason that every 20 years

when there's a massive, you know, push into the culture war that schools are often the front line of this because, you know, schools are where we teach the next generation of kids what's true and what's right and what's good and decent. What elements of our history is worth remembering. who are most animated about this have internalized a version of America where America is good. America is a Christian nation. America has been ordained by God. And so, when you start teaching kids that, you know, for hundreds of years, America did these horrible things in the name of racism, that they enslaved, people were enslaved because they were black. You know, when you teach kids really what happened during Jim Crow, or the reason why some of these suburbs were created in the first place, that conflicts with the image that these parents are really invested in their kids' learning, which is America is the greatest country in the world

and has always been good and just. Right. So So Ellie, the Subway's New Yorks were initially anonymous, posting on forums using made-up names. They loved their names. I noticed that. Talk about the Jack's Vision team being anonymous and also creating community because you're sort of cosplaying, right? You're sort of a character rather than the person you are. And how did the dynamic change when they started meeting in person? Right. So part of the problem is that when they're chatting online, they feel like they're speaking to their best friends, right? But they're really speaking to a fantasy, their imagination. I mean, if you've done online dating, you kind of understand this, right? The person you're chatting with is a projection of your

fantasies. It's not necessarily how the real person is. Once they went out and started meeting each other in person, they were suddenly horrified. So I had a white supremacist, Chris Cantwell, tell me, wow, I really shouldn't have trusted that guy, Jason Kessler, who organized the Unite the Right rally because I thought he was fearless. But it turns out he's just clueless and doesn't understand the kind of danger that he's put himself into. But I just wanted to say something about what Mike was saying. I am also so happy to talk to you because one of the things a white nationalist told me that he thought was a problem with the alt-right, which was this new sort of internet-savvy version of white supremacy,

was that it was so heavily influenced by incels that it was very, very misogynist. Like, this was a massive break from the old white nationalism, with the hating of women, like, white women were a major enemy. And what he said was that, looking back in the past, like the 60s, white women had been more effective advocates for segregation than white men had. They had been much more effective because they had been arguing for these policies in the schools. They'd been arguing against busing. And so he felt it was a real tragedy that they didn't have white women on their side in the 2010s.

So they wanted less and sell more what? Less and sell more. Well, they don't want to look like losers more what? Less in sell more. Well, they don't want to look like losers. That's another part of it. So when they do meet in person, they don't like each other. That would be a negative for their movement, correct? Well, I think that's part of the reason why the alt-right started to fall apart after Charlottesville.

There were massive consequences, legal ones, financial ones. But they also realized they couldn't trust each other like they'd been all hyped up by these people they didn't actually know like there were I got into these message boards and these like internal chat rooms where they would be like how dare you criticize our comrade for hiling Hitler when he's willing to die for us. But they didn't actually know who that guy was. They had no idea whether he was willing to die for them. Maybe he was a federal informant. They had no idea.

Or they're just a wimp who didn't want to die for them, wanted to turn tail and stuff like that. Mike, you show how the backlash to a diversity plan in Southlake led to the formation of a super PAC that supported far-right candidates for the school board. They took over the board, and their success has been replicated by conservative groups across the country. And this is an in-person movement of people who do know each other, even though they use social media and reinforce each other. But they also use things like mailers, yard signs, in-person school board meetings where they get people to speak up. yard signs, in-person school board meetings where they get people to speak up. Talk about the in-person dynamic here, because it's almost an opposite to what was happening in Ellie's book.

Yeah, and what's fascinating is the way that people in Southlake who've become aligned with Southlake Families PAC, that's the political action committee you mentioned, and in other places, these folks have really built their identity around these fights and around the communities that they've built in the last few years to fight these battles. And so in Southlake, what they did was, after the school district had to try to address the types of racist incidents that were bubbling to the surface in 2017 and 2018, in the midst of Unite the Right and all that. bubbling to the surface in 2017 and 2018 in the midst of Unite the Right and all that. Explain what the incidents were. They were people chanting,

correct? Yeah, this is a majority white school district that had grown more diverse. And so, you know, the thing that set everything off was a group of white students in high school filming themselves chanting, like a call and response, chanting the N-word. And after that video kind of went viral in town, black parents came to a school board meeting in 2018, and parent after parent said, do you know what happens when my kid goes to school? They hear jokes about lynching.

They get made fun of. The kids come up and touch their hair. This whole horrible range of just explicitly racist comments to microaggressions. And so, the school district had made an attempt to address this by putting together a committee and developing a diversity plan that would include diversity training for teachers and students, culturally responsive curriculum, you know, a full counting of America's racist history. So, kids understand why chanting the N-word, for example, is bad. And that's when the backlash, that plan was released in 2020. And these white conservative parents who got together, formed a political action committee Committee really got connected with some really savvy political

operatives in North Texas. And they raised a quarter million dollars for school board elections where you normally raise $5,000. And they turned the local nonpartisan election into almost a referendum on what America is and should be. But there's an in-person dynamic and social pressure versus an online sort of fan base. These folks were getting together at school board meetings. School board meetings became what used to be this very empty room where one or two people would come forward. They became like political parties, like political rallies where these folks were packing the meetings. They were at times seeming to attempt to one-up each other with their comments. They were speaking for the room, but also for the camera that was live streaming this.

And it wasn't just at school board meetings that these folks were getting together. They were holding rallies at churches. Post-COVID, this was, for many people, their new social life was going to war over the school board. It's a party. It's a party. Yep. Vile party, but it's a party nonetheless. So, Ellie, as you touched on briefly, let's talk about gender and age. But alt-right is mostly young, male, and deeply misogynistic, which apparently is a negative for them. The anti-woke activist movement is led, in many cases, by women. And as you noted, Mike, the most well-known group is Moms for Liberty. well-known group is Moms for Liberty. So on one hand, we have angry young men, many of them self-diagnosed autists with limited social skills. On the other, we have sort of normie moms in their

30s and middle age, many of them savvy professionals. Talk about age and gender, how it affects these groups, how they mobilize. Ellie, you first and then Mike. Well, a lot of these guys got started into these extremist worlds by posting on a message board about how they were losers. It was a message board where you had to post something original and they didn't have much to talk about. But how you're losers. This is a message board discussing your loserhood. Exactly. Their humiliations at school. They had a term for embarrassing themselves in public, which was to have spaghetti fall out of their pockets. And what started as like pretty benign stuff escalated to more and more hateful ideas. And part of it was like, why is it this way? Why is this happening to me? And the answer they came up with was that

feminism or Jews had a plot to suppress the white male identity, to make themselves hate being white, much as we saw with this CRT controversy. And so that organized them into, like, they had a cause now, they had an enemy. I mean, it sounds absurd to repeat it, but the basic structure of this conspiracy theory is that Jews have an instinct to suppress white racial identity so that they don't end up with another Holocaust. They do this by convincing women, who we have evolved to be more conformist because when warring tribes invaded each other, they killed all the men and captured the women, and the women who refused to be war brides were all killed. So only conformist women passed on their genes. And then they believe that people of color are easy to control, right? So it's this conspiracy theory to make white people hate being white and want to have interracial families. So that's their idea.

That's what they believe. And as absurd as it sounds, with constant repetition, it became very obvious to them. I was listening to a speech by a white nationalist where he talked about the shock he felt when he was hanging out with a normal friend of his and realized that that friend believed that the Holocaust happened. And he realized he had been in such a bubble that he forgot that average people believe the Holocaust happened. And he realized he had been in such a bubble that he forgot that average people believe the Holocaust happened. So it's sort of a self-reinforcing thing that they go with each other, correct? Yeah. The problem is someone else is getting all the women, and they think they deserve the women. And so they want to reorder society in a way that they are allotted the women they deserve. Yeah, I've seen a couple of these speeches.

The strong men have to take back the women, correct? Right. But they're not particularly strong. But they so desperately want to be. They desperately, desperately want to be. And a lot of these far-right groups, a big part of their organizing is working out together, fighting together. They want to look physically fit.

And when there's infighting among them, it is often because of, quote, optics, which can mean like they thought they looked chubby in their uniforms. Like there's so much about these men wanting to be more attractive and wanting to attract women, and not because they want to fall in love, but because having a woman at their side projects social status to other men. And so talk about age and gender for your group, Mike. The connection is that a persecution narrative is what's motivating both of these groups. And so in the case of the people I document in my book, the moms are operating from a perspective that's very relatable for parents, which is this kind of mama bear mentality. I'm going, there's a risk to my child.

My child is threatened and I'm going to protect them. And so, you know, for a mom, if you come to believe the narrative that public schools are, have been captured by leftist, part of this, you know, democratic conspiracy to take over education over four decades. And they're trying to destroy America by teaching your children these horrible things. And they're, by the way, they're also going to convince your child to change their gender or to be gay. Although there's no evidence for that happening, what's powerful is the belief. And so these parents have come to believe these things. And what's motivating them is that maternal instinct that I'm going to do whatever I can to keep my kids safe and protect them. And that's also the patriotic Christian thing to do is to stop these leftist evil forces from infiltrating our society through our schools.

But where's the jump happen? Because these are pretty competent, successful, well-off suburbanites, right? Presumably they don't have a gripe. Where does the gripe come from? Because you can see how these young men by themselves at home, they don't have dates. They never date. They're lonely. But these people aren't like that. They have lives. And as the curriculum changes, as these DEI plans come in, as the demographics, frankly, continue to change, that they're losing their piece of the pie. And it's interesting. I talked with one black mother in Southlake and was talking with her about how her kids had suffered in the school district over the years. And we were speaking on January 6, 2021.

And so I was watching the monitors on MSNBC of people storming the Capitol. And she was telling me her theory for why this is all happening. And her theory boiled down to Southlake's getting a lot more diverse. There's some really highly competent immigrant families. And those kids are all valedictorian, salutatorian every year. And some of the backlash is because the white kids aren't at the top anymore, and it's not just about them. And she was describing like this hyper-local replacement theory as being a motivator for the school board backlash. While I'm watching on TV, you know, the results of the great replacement theory essentially playing out in Washington, D.C. So, I think all of these storylines are connected.

It comes back to this belief that we're going to lose what we've earned. They're coming for what we've earned, and they're going to give it away to people who don't deserve it. Who don't deserve it, even if they deserve it. So in both cases, we have a group of mostly white people who are, in a broad sense, angry at black people, and the anger gets expressed in different ways. Ellie, as you explain, in the case of the alt-right, young men get blackpilled, and that's the book's title, into thinking American society is corrupt and completely irredeemable. And they descend into this nihilistic hopelessness as the only solution is to blow things up and start again. And Mike, the organized anti-woke movement doesn't want to just get rid of diversity

programs. That's where it started. They want prayer in schools. They moved to the next thing that they wanted, which is prayer in schools and publicly funded private school vouchers, right? Yeah. So one of the things I found is, you know, the initial CRT backlash, a lot of different groups on the right saw that as an opportunity. So including, you know, the far right, white nationalists, incel type folks saw that as an opportunity. So, including, you know, the far-right, white nationalists, incel-type folks saw that as an opportunity to kind of move into the mainstream. At the same time, groups that have been pushing to restore what they say is America's Christian origins, these people have been fighting for this for decades, they saw these school fights,

particularly in Southlake, as a chance to advance the ball. And so, David Barton is a political activist who presents himself as a historian. And if you have heard a politician say that the separation of church and state is a myth, or that that was meant as a one-way wall to keep the government out of the church, not to keep the church out of the government. You've heard Lauren Boebert say that, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Johnson. David Barton is the guy who has created that narrative. For 30 years, he's pushed this kind of false history of America being explicitly Christian

and that basically society in America was great and godly until 1960s when the Supreme Court removed prayer from school, and then after that, you know, everything's gone downhill. And so, as the CRT backlash became the lead story on Fox News and in conservative media, folks like David Barton and his allies saw this as a chance, okay, let's not just remove DEI, let's not just push out LGBTQ content, let's push in the Ten Commandments, let's do prayer again, we've got a good Supreme Court now, so we're going to win these court battles. And you see this most explicitly in Oklahoma now, where the state school superintendent, Ryan Walters, has just pushed

through to mandate that every classroom have a Bible and that kids learn from it in public schools. And the ultimate hope is there's a two-front kind of campaign. It's put God into public schools and also allow parents to get public money to send their kids to private Christian schools. So, the school voucher stuff that is at the heart of Project 2025. We'll be back in a minute. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see?

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of Black Lives Matter's movement, whereas the anti-woke parents are more focused on BLM in their case. The fights were imaginary, really. No one from BLM ever hurt anyone in Southlake or damaged property, but their imagined specter still terrifies these parents. Ellie, talk about Antifa in the alt-right's collective consciousness. It endures, even though it doesn't quite exist in the way they think it does. And how do they perceive these enemies? And then let's hear Mike talk about how BLM lives rent-free in the anti-woke parents' minds. This continues to. Yeah, they're very, very, very afraid of Antifa. When Trump was inaugurated, during Trump's inauguration, Richard Spencer was standing on the street doing some broadcast interview and someone sucker punched him. Explain who he is. Richard Spencer became the face of the alt-right. So since the alt-right was mostly anonymous trolls on 4chan, hardly any of them would show their real face and real name. But he was absolutely willing to. He was part of

the more older white nationalist movement. But once he saw this wave building, he tried to surf it and not quite successfully. So he was wearing a Pepe the Frog lapel pen, standing on a street corner during Trump's inauguration, and someone ran by and punched him in the face. This led to, like, people thought this was hilarious on Twitter. Like, finally, this jerk gets what he deserves. He's talking about peaceful ethnic cleansing. Like, he's talking about fundamentally violent things. Finally, he's faced with some violence himself. But when the alt-right saw that, they were like, oh, God, they're going to try to kill us. This led to a military veteran starting to form a security group to protect Spencer because he thought Spencer would be killed. They always perceive themselves as the ones under threat,

the ultimate victims, the truly oppressed. And the reason this is important is that this is how they start justifying violence as self-defense in advance of anything happening. They start working themselves up into thinking how evil and predatory Antifa is, that they'll beat people senseless with bicycle locks. And so that's how they decide to start carrying weapons, how they decide to have security guards. Because they believe the people will attack them. They believe they'll be attacked. When there hasn't really had anything happen except for the sucker punch. Right. Or some fistfights in California.

You saw in Charlottesville, they march in with these big shields, thinking that violent anti-fascists are going to attack them. And one white nationalist marveled to me afterwards. He was like, yeah, we were outnumbered, but in terms of the people prepared to fight, we far outnumbered them because they turned out to just be, you know, liberals who wanted to stand up against hate. Right. Now, talk about how BLM affects these anti-woke parents, because they also are similarly, they get very incandescent about it. Yeah. Well, you know, the fear, Inspector, of Antifa and Black Lives Matter was an instigating factor in all of this in Southlake.

So, 2020, summer of 2020, all over the country in the midst of the protest for racial justice, this viral conspiracy theory was hitting towns all over the country saying, Antifa's coming to your neighborhood, to our neighborhood, and they're going to... I saw this in my neighborhood outside of Houston at the time, this little suburban, and they're going to, I saw this in my neighborhood outside of Houston at the time, this little suburban, you know, subdivision called Timber Lake Estates. We didn't have sidewalks, but my neighbors on my Facebook page were warning that Tifa was coming on July 4th. They're planning the attack for that night to mask the gunfire under the cover of fireworks, stack up, you need to get your guns ready and loaded now.

And so, in Southlake, you know, this again, this is an affluent, mostly white, but more diversifying community. Some young students, some high school students decided to hold their own Black Lives Matter rally that summer in, you know, kind of the ritzy town center with, you know, it's kind of one of these little downtowns that has an Apple store and some, you know, movie theater. And the parents in South Lake were, had been whipped up into a frenzy that outside groups were going to come. They were going to smash the glass and that there was one kind of locally viral Twitter post that from an account called Antifa Lockhart, where they were clearly made up. They had like two followers, but they had warned that they were shipping bricks in. They were going to ship bricks into town centers that there were bricks handy to chuck through the glass.

And so all these parents in Southlake were all geared up. The mayor of Southlake and city council members and even the school board were warning not to go. We can't ensure your kids are safe. And so this fear that someone from the outside is coming to change your community, to hurt your community, was really revved up that summer. And it was in that context that they began to, they pivoted to not this physical threat, but they're not coming to take Southlake by force. They're already here. This Black Lives Matter mentality is already in our schools. It's in the curriculum.

It's in this diversity plan. And this is our fight. Right. And one of the reasons is because they have thought leaders, as you both have been talking about. And you mentioned Richard Spencer's one of them. Steve Bannon's another one. But in the case of the anti-woke authors, it's Chris Ruffo. So talk a little bit, and then I would love you, Ellie, to talk about Steve Bannon's impact on this, because I think he is kind of the patron saint of these guys.

But Chris Ruffo didn't lead the parents at Southlake, but he's done more than anyone else to popularize the term CRT, critical race theory. He's into the parental rights thing and the scaremonger around it. Talk about his strategy because he's quite intelligent in the way he does it. You can watch his moves. But talk about his strategy and how did he manage to brand well-intentioned attempts at promoting diversity as essentially reverse racism so successfully. He's also extremely transparent. He just tells you, which is fascinating to watch. Yeah. And so interestingly, the fight over the diversity plan in Southlake was really, had taken off in the summer and into the fall of 2020. And it was in the midst of that,

And it was in the midst of that that Chris Ruffo appeared for the first time on Tucker Carlson's show that September. And he went on, you know, this is a guy who had obtained documents showing that, you know, workers in Seattle had these optional diversity trainings that separated people based on their race. And he saw a lot of like Ibram Kendi's writings. And so he went on Fox News and declared that the entire DEI infrastructure in the federal government that workers have to take these trainings, it's all built around this thing called critical race theory, right? And that was the beginning of him, what he described later as creating a national brand, finding basically a scary sounding phrase that could be what conservatives point to anytime they see something dealing with race that they don't like or makes them uncomfortable. or dealing with race that they don't like or makes them uncomfortable.

And he's also worked to create that straw man that I talked about earlier where every white kid is being taught to hate themselves or that America is bad. Black children are being taught that they're victims. And it was amazing to watch how the language that Chris Ruffo brought to Tucker Carlson's show, that then was quickly picked up by Donald Trump in the weeks after, suddenly was being repeated at every school board meeting in Southlake for the rest of the fight there. The parents did adopt that language and that framing. And it, in a way, intensified what was already a really intense fight because now the framing was, this isn't just a diversity plan that has gone too far. It's not some well-intentioned neighbors who I disagree with. It's, oh, this is part of a bigger left-wing plot. Critical race

theory is this thing they've been trying to embed into our lives and into our schools for two decades. And oh, we caught them. We caught them before they could do it here in Southlake. And so, it turned your neighbor not into like, oh, I disagree with you politically. It's, oh, you're like a foot soldier in this bigger movement that's out to hurt my community. So, Ellie, when you talk about this, what are the parallels? Because they're more crude, the groups you talk about. They're more fantastical, some of their theories, some of their ideas. But it's not unlike each other.

Can you talk about the parallels between – because they're not reading Chris Ruffo, these guys you're talking about, or are they? Well, they are now. I mean, one of the most fascinating things to me are the guys who, they got sued for organizing Charlottesville. They had to look at all this evidence of all the things they had done, and they were chastened. They admitted as much. Richard Spencer doesn't even call himself a white nationalist anymore. What's he call himself? Just a jerk? Well, on Bumble, he called himself a moderate.

Okay. I assume you did not dating him but go ahead last we spoke he was trying to build a religion that would compete with and ultimately destroy christianity built around the um god apollo so you know but so they look at the chris ruffo guys they find this more menacing they think in their words normie conservatives are actually more radical in their tactics than the alt-right was, and they are afraid that they might win in bringing down American democracy. But Steve Bannon was one of the first to understand the power of this kind of participatory conspiracy theory movement, the way these guys were always trying to one-up each other with better memes. He talked in 2015, 2016 about how you can bring these guys in through

Gamergate, this controversy over women in the video games industry. I was right there. Exactly. And you can introduce them to conservatism. When he was running Breitbart, Milo Yiannopoulos worked there. He wrote this pretty definitive guide to the alt-right that was very much apologetic for them. And it also made the case that the full-on Hitler-hiling swastika folks were just ironic. It also quoted Curtis Yarvin, a blogger in the Peter Thiel orbit. J.D. Vance is a fan. Exactly.

Explain who Yarvin is, because he's really quite, along with Deneen, the rest of them. Yarvin once wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. He's this leader of the neo-reactionary movement. The idea that in order to make the change that we really want to see, we need to have a dictatorship in America, Caesarism. He once wrote that while he was not a white nationalist, he was not exactly allergic to this stuff. And that his main problem with or his problem with white nationalism is how it activated the left. It created an overwhelming backlash that ultimately hurt the cause of

right-wing advocates so they're not quite subtle enough another they're not subtle enough and i do think that there are far-right people who learned from the alt-right that you need to be more subtle the alt-right itself even developed a term hide your power level which meant when you spoke publicly you needed to conceal just how racist you really were until you gained enough power to do something about it. And then the racism comes out. They can't help themselves. It's like Donald Trump. But interestingly, both the alt-right and the anti-white parents have also switched their focus to gender and sexuality. That's the new motivating force, it seems like. They're

motivated by anti-LGBTQ ideology, especially against trans kids. That's their wedge into it. Mike, talk a little bit about this and then Ellie, because it started to become something, this idea of family and children. well, these issues around sexuality and gender, there's a lot more sentiment built up around that probably than even the race issue. And again, very transparent, that was part of the beginning of this pivot. And the reason that's even more effective is, it's one thing to say, they're teaching my kid about this history of racism or that, you know, white people are oppressors, it's much more personal when you convince parents that the teachers, the librarians, the books that my kids are reading, they're working to make my kid gay. Or they're pedophiles or groomers, right? Yeah, and they're trying to convince my kid to change their gender, and these people were grooming them, which is, you know, this term that just took off online, where anytime there was a book that depicted an LGBTQ

character, and if you supported having that in a school, even if it's a graphic novel aimed at, you know, fifth graders that doesn't even have a kiss in it, that you support grooming kids. You're a pedophile. And I actually was on the receiving end of this from just reporting on it. Some parents in Katy, Texas, because I had spoken to an LGBTQ teenager for a story, they threatened to report me to the police and report that I had solicited a minor. And you know what? It's a really, it's a really effective tactic because I work in journal, we work in journalism, right? We're used

to nasty messages and it doesn't get under our skin. But something about this threat from these moms really hit me. I'm a dad and it's like, you're going to tell the police that I'm a pedophile. And it's like, you're going to tell the police that I'm a pedophile? Even though I knew it was nonsense, it had me thinking, do I want to keep pursuing this? You know, this is, why do I put up with this shit? No, it can be effective. I've been called a pedophile and groomer a hundred times. Well, think about how a librarian, a school librarian or a teacher received that message. They're not used to getting those messages. And so it's very effective at silencing these ideas, at pushing books out of school and getting

teachers just to self-censor or quit. And so in some ways, they can win this fight without even winning elections just by kind of making- Making people nervous. Yeah, making them afraid. Ellie, is that the case with your incel group, the idea around gender and sexuality? Yes, that's the center of everything. It's all about breeding. And talk about that. You know, I...

Because let me just say, Elon Musk talks about breeding and pedophiles almost continually. Right. Well, the first person who ever... The first time I ever heard of Drag Queen Story Hour was in 2017 when a teenage fascist troll sent me a screenshot of one. So that stuff was circulating on 4chan long before it showed up on Fox News, which is a pattern we see repeating. Yes, it goes up and down the stack, essentially. All of these racist conspiracy theories, at their heart, it is about sex and children the idea that we are being outnumbered we are being replaced we are being taught white people are

being taught not to have children in order to suppress their numbers and and i mean like just fear that they're being castrated is is it's so year after Charlottesville, I was in this really dirty, cluttered apartment belonging to Chris Cantwell. He'd been under house arrest in Virginia for almost a year. it was a very depressing place. He was struggling with alcoholism, but he looked at me and said, I matter. I matter more than most people ever will. I want to matter.

I want to have children. It's just the idea that one real man masculinity is being erased and that that is a way to stop white people from having kids is the absolute animating motivation. We'll be back in a minute. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees? And it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot.

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Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you. Deliver that feeling to your customers every time. Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter digital relationships with their customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. Make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com slash BFCM. So let's get, let's do the contemporary politics because I think think one of the issues is, it's actually jumped into real politics right now. We have J.D. Vance talking about this. I got into it with him on Twitter over procreation. He kept saying liberals don't believe in the future, they don't have children. And I kept saying, I have double the children you have, so what's wrong with you? Like, can you not have children? Do you have an issue with your procreation?

I just was trying to bother him. But one of the things that they talk about, and as much as you joke about this childless cat woman thing, which is funny on its face, it's a real thing, right? And Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and many others are taking advantage of this. And Donald Trump, who is one of the greatest trolls in history, I think, attacks trans people because I talk about transgender and everyone goes crazy. Talk a little bit about it jumping into this mainstream way. First, how do you look at what's going on with J.D. Vance? Because everyone's, again, joking about it, but it's not, it's real that he really does think this about children. Well, I was so fascinated. People were so shocked by this childless cat lady comment because it was 2016, 2017. I was called that hundreds and hundreds of times by these little alt-right trolls.

Like, I mean, that's their go-to joke. And I was recently talking to my father-in-law's friends, you know, these folks in their 70s, and they were so shocked by that. They're like, people say that to you online? That's horrible. No one should ever say that to you. And I'm in my own bubble where this has become normal, right? Right. Do you indeed have a cat?

Just asking. No, I'm allergic to cats. I mean, that was always my first response. I would read that and somebody would be like, are you crazy? Like, I could be in hives the rest of my life. Break out in hives. Yeah. Right. Okay. Why is that? Talk about why that is, this idea. Because it's not just they won't have sex with me, it's that they're childless cat ladies. I don't even get that. many partners, but they should never settle down because children are not rewarding. And so that women are denying their own natural instincts until it's too late and they're barren. And so all they can do is feed their cats and make other people's lives miserable. I mean, the things that he said, to me, it's J.D. Vance himself who has also been stuck in a bubble where that comment,

I mean, when he said it, he didn't have a look on his face like he thought he was being, like, provocative, right? Like, he just rattled that off, like this is a normal thing to say. And it makes me wonder if he is living in a world where that's a completely normal commentary and he's lost sight of the rest of reality. Yeah. That's strange. Or perhaps he's the most ambitious fucker in history, and that's what's going on. But Ellie, Vice President Harris obviously is now likely to be the Democratic nominee, a black woman. Will that lead to increased interest

in extremist groups, both online and in person, or will it give their ideas more salience, or is she beating them like a drum right now? Well, long before Joe Biden stepped down, Well, long before Joe Biden stepped down, white nationalist Matt Parrott told me how afraid he was of Vice President Harris, that Joe Biden was the last of his generation, the last old school politician who was moderate punish white people for the sins of the past. So for all this talk of white guilt, it is often the white nationalists who have it the most. And they have said to me explicitly that they are afraid when people of color are in power, they will do to white people what white people did to them a few decades ago. So that is driving their fear. And is this animating these groups that you're monitoring right now, her ascension? What has been far more motivating for them, more animating for them was October 7th because they felt that there is no criticism of Israel from the right.

And so into that void, they were able to offer their voices. And many white nationalist accounts were able to grow their followings on X by a huge amount because they were the ones willing to drive an anti-Semitic message. They were thrilled that Elon interacted with the hashtag ban the ADL. So Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist Holocaust skeptic who dined with Donald Trump, was thrilled when Elon was sort of said,

this is true of a great replacement theory tweet. He's like, this is the richest man on earth. And he is saying exactly what we said in Charlottesville, which is Jews will not replace us. And if you look at that chant, and you look at the Republican Party six years later, have I moved closer to the Republicans or have they moved closer to me? And he obviously thought the answer was they have moved closer to him. That's interesting. She's driving them crazy.

Anyway. Oh, just give it time. Give it time. Yeah. Yeah. Mike, the same thing. What started as anti-CRT that became anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ in schools has now coalesced under this umbrella of anti-DEI. Yeah. LGBTQ in schools has now coalesced under this umbrella of anti-DEI. And it's so interesting how much more explicit the messaging is.

You know, during the anti-CRT movement, you'd routinely hear parents quoting MLK, talking about how we don't want to see color. Parental rights. Right. I don't, my kids should be taught not to see color. See color. Parental rights. Right.

I don't, my kids should be taught not to see color. And, and now with the anti-DEI kind of rhetoric, it's much more, I do see color and it is, the real racism is hiring black people for positions because I can't trust that they're actually qualified. So you can see that kind of, it's not a dog whistle anymore. You know, it's very kind of explicit. So to declare, you hear Charlie Kirk talking about how I can't trust that if I see a black pilot on my airplane that he's qualified because this idea that it boils down to this idea that, and then I heard even from the beginning of my reporting on this, which is that on the one hand, they think everyone's equal and everyone has a fair shot

regardless of their race in our society. But when you confront some of these folks with statistics showing that, you know, for example, the black family median income is way lower than white families. And you ask them, is that systemic racism? Does racism exist? They say, no, that everyone is treated equally based on merit. And so, but when you really drill into that idea, there's only really two options. Either there's systemic racism or structural racism that leads to that inequity, or you think black people are not as capable. Lesser than. Yes.

Right, lesser than. And so you're seeing that play out in this DEI commentary that anytime, you just, you know, Kamala's a DEI vice president or president. You know, Kamala's a DEI vice president or president. And the idea is that, well, she's black, therefore she must have been picked only for her race. And inherent in that is this idea that are there no qualified black people? Yeah, they 100% think that. So every episode, we ask an expert for a question. We've got a good one today.

Let's hear it. in August of 2017. It was appalling to see them walk across the lawn of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, chanting Jews will not replace us, as well as the violence that broke out the next day. So my question is, since the organizers were found liable for the violence that broke out in Charlottesville. Did that have any impact on these organized groups? And have they changed their MO since that event as a result? Kelly, why don't you take this one? Yes. The short answer is yes. So most of the people who were found liable at that trial backed out of white nationalist organizing. These were devastating consequences for them. They were forced to look at their messages, their internal communications with each other and see how crazy it had gotten, how foolish they were, how glib they were about violence.

They're forced to confront, are they going to have to spend the rest of their life paying off this debt. So Matt Heimbach, Matt Parrott, Richard Spencer, they've backed off from IRL organizing. The ones who went on, they, again, like it's about being more subtle instead of doing these really alienating things like wearing swastikas or doing the Nazi salute. They wrap themselves in the American flag.

So Patriot Front, which was founded by a guy who had founded a group that was in Charlottesville, they wear red, white and blue. They showed up recently in Nashville, marched on the street. They have these shields that are almost like a comic book style superhero shield, red, white, and blue. They are trying to make the implicit case that being proud of America means white nationalism. They're trying to conflate the meaning of those two things. Right, or get rid of the word white nationalism. Exactly. Replace it with patriotism, correct? Right. Nick Fuentes calls his movement America First, right?

So they've tried to reposition themselves as defending the greatness of America rather than this like weird sort of Nazi fetishism. Which, of course, America First was supported by the Nazis back in the day. But is that working from your perspective? I think those guys, their usefulness, you know, they were sort of a patsy. There are many conservatives who are willing to use some of the tactics, the internet tactics, organizing tactics, the way of talking about DEI and CRT, they've figured out all that stuff that was good or that was popular and gotten rid of all the weird, creepy, like the incel stuff, the misogyny, you know, again, they realize that women can be very effective advocates for these ideas. So there's, it's self- winning power locally?

So in 2021, when the school board fights were really popping off, Steve Bannon went on his War Room podcast and declared that the path to saving America is going to run through the school boards. And what he meant was... Ralph Reed had said this previously. He said, I'd rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board member. What Bannon was saying was, what he meant was that we're going to win back the suburbs. We're going to win back these disaffected white suburban voters by fighting CRT and these book bans. We're going to win them back because moderate conservative white women who don't like Donald Trump like this stuff. And that just has not proven out.

Moms for Liberty is losing in all kinds of communities. And what's really happened, what they've succeeded at doing by making these local school board into partisan fights, they've taken kind of the ugliest divisions of our national politics and culture wars and pushed those down into local nonpartisan races. And so if you're in a suburb like Southlake that was Trump plus 30, the Moms for Liberty, Southlake Families Pack, conservative people are going to win seats on the board. And if you're in a blue or purplish district, Moms for Liberty is losing those races because there's a lot of moderate conservatives. Those white women voters actually don't want people messing around with their schools. They don't want this stuff. There was a group outside of Austin in the suburb of Round Rock, a group of progressive and moderate conservative, mostly white parents banded together to fight back against the

conservative takeover. Their slogan was, make school boards boring again. And they won by double digits. And I think you're seeing that message coalesce on the national level with, I think you're seeing that message coalesce on the national level with, you know, Governor Walz is, you know, these guys are weird. Let's not elect weird people. That seems to be the message thatoud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the three percenters? They are fielding candidates in school board elections, but what has been the most effective thing and where have they sort of lost a step? Making the bad guy gay people and trans people is much more effective than racism. It just is. So the Proud Boys, after Jan 6th, a former Proud Boys told me he was afraid of being part of this group anymore because he thought he would get drawn up on RICO charges or something like that. They're afraid that because Canada has declared them a terrorist group, that they will be spied on.

So the national group is broken apart and instead you see them protesting drag queen story hours and drag shows. So what you see going forward is more of a focus on sex and less on race. And it's working from your perspective or not. Yeah. Well, better than, I'll give you an example. I interviewed this guy who owned a Trump store in southwestern Virginia filled with Confederate flags. And he introduced me to his friend who was a black woman who owned her own Trump store. Like people who might even have some bigoted beliefs don't want to think of themselves as racist. They don't want to think of America as racist. And so this like very hard edged racist advocacy is very off putting to people.

Whatever his motivations, I do think he was onto something with his observations some 15 years ago, which is that white nationalism motivates a massive backlash from the normal people. That's not the world that they want to live in. Right, exactly. So how do you look at this group? Is it on the run or is it just regrouping? And then, Mike, same thing with the Moms from Liberty and those groups. Well, one of the things I write about in the book is decades-long fight between the mainstream conservative movement and the far right, the far right trying to get in and being pushed back. So this is a struggle that goes on and it will continue to go on. I don't know what's going to happen. All I've ever been good at predicting is when I see a lot of people who are not connected with each other all excited around one event.

So that happened with Charlottesville. That happened with January 6th. Just diverse people who never knew each other were all wanting to go to these events. So in the fall, like Mike, I've done some reporting on school boards, and I went to Florida, where Moms for Liberty has been very successful in getting these laws passed to help them ban books. And there was a massive turnout of people who were opposed to them. And not just a stereotypical NPR listening liberal or something. stereotypical like npr listening liberal or something like people of all stripes working class parents people who had blended families they thought they were like one guy said to me listen i wasn't the kind of guy who would wave a pride flag okay but these guys are going too far banning books is cheap going too far trying to make these rules about how we talk about slavery is going too far.

And so that is what I've seen. I've seen a very big backlash to these far-right movements and the gains that they've made in infiltrating the mainstream. And Mike? I don't think Moms for Liberty is going away, even though they've lost a number of races. But this, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of people have built their identities around waging these fights. But there's a subset of these parents in these groups that I've been really watching, and it ties back to Christian nationalism. There are influential faith leaders,

pastors, apostles, prophets, whatever you want to call them, who have been preaching to large audiences, including via Charlie Kirk's program, that America is engaged in a spiritual war between forces of good and evil. They point to the school stuff and the trans stuff as evidence of that, and that we're in the end times. Jared Ranere Jerry Falwell. It's retread Jared Follwell. Yeah, it's beyond that. God has chosen us as the rapture generation. And in order to pave the way for the return of Jesus, we need to rally around and support Donald Trump in November.

And that rhetoric was, that type of rhetoric was partially motivating for what we saw in January 6th. And I think that language that, you know, this idea that it's good versus evil and the folks pushing LGBTQ and trans are the evil. They're, they're Kamala is being guided by a demon. One of these guys,

Lance Walnau has said recently. And I think that is setting the table for something. I don't know what, but people are— Yeah, because there's nowhere to go. Some people believe this. The reality is people believe that we're in a struggle, not just to save America, but they frame it as like an existential, will God win in the end? And we need to get Trump in the White House to do that. Yeah, I've heard it from, I've heard it.

At one point, one of my relatives believed in the rapture and my brother made a bumper sticker for her that said, when the rapture comes, can I have your stuff? She didn't. Did she put it on? That's good. No, isn't that good? She didn't like it.

Thank you so much for both of you. And these both books are really important reads for all of us, I think. Thanks. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yochum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Gabriela Bielo. Special thanks to Sheena Ozaki, Kate Gallagher, Kate Furby, and Kaylin Lynch. Thank you. on Endless Loop. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

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