QAA Podcast - Studying the Black Pill feat Elle Reeve (E285)

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

We explore how disaffected young men anonymously posting memes online led to real-life violence including multiple mass murders, the forming of what came to be known as the alt-right movement, a seismic shift in the Republican party, and the January 6th, 2021 storming of the capitol. Joining us for this very special episode is Elle Reeve, correspondent for CNN and author of the new book Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society and Capture American Politics. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to podcast mini-series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: http://www.patreon.com/QAA Elle Reeve: http://x.com/elspethreeve Black Pill: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Black-Pill/Elle-Reeve/9781982198886 Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

PII-Oh-Ki-O-Hi-Ki-E-O-O-O-W-O-O-O-W-Kee. KENI-KINI-A. If you're hearing this, well done. You've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 285, studying the Black Pill. As always, we are your host, Julian Field and Travis View. Joining us for this very special episode is Ellie Reeve, correspondent for CNN and author of the new book, Blackpill, how I witness the darkest corners of the internet come to life, poison society, and capture American politics.

The hardback is available now on... Amazon or from independent booksellers, of course, and you can pre-order the audiobook and the paperback. Go do it. I recommend it. Welcome back on the show, Ellie. Thank you for having me. I love this show. Your book does a great job tracking a pretty grand narrative that we've contended with a lot on this podcast, how disaffected young men anonymously posting memes online led to real-life violence, including multiple mass murders, the forming of what came to be known as the alt-right movement, a seismic shift in the Republican Party. and, of course, the January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol.

So before we jump into all of that, I wanted to briefly mention how surreal it feels that the last time we spoke to you on this podcast was episode 125, which was published soon after the January 6 riots, and that was more than three years ago and 161 episodes. Yeah. Feel strange. I feel like I've aged. I mean, how about the last 100 years felt for you? Well, it's like, I don't know if you've gone through the same journey, but at first you're obsessed with this stuff and no one will pay attention.

and you're thinking, this is crazy, this is crazy, why won't someone pay attention? Then it all bubbles up into the real world and you're like, oh my God, finally people are listening to me. But now more time is past and it's like, I can't believe this is still a thing. I can't believe this is still the thing. Like, it's at the center of the presidential campaign. Yeah, when I'm getting to know someone, I'm no longer enthusiastic about talking to them about the core subject matter.

They'll be like, yeah, what is the, what is it dream of Chrome? And I'm like, don't worry about it. like don't even I almost feel sorry because I know I know that once the door is open and this audience probably knows you kind of you learn things that you can't forget and can't really go back to to the innocent age of thinking the internet was just like a fun place to go and find information or you know pirate movies or other other fun stuff we definitely recommend I remember the first few years I did this podcast I had a little rehearsed speech that I had to say whatever and someone asked asked me what I did and sort of like what the subject matter was and it was QAnon, but like I'm not pro Q&O and all that stuff. I don't have to do that anymore. So people generally are familiar with the basics of the subject matter, unfortunately. Yeah. A friend of mine who I met about 10 years ago was saying how when she met me and she learned, you know, I cover extremism on the internet. She thought, well, that's really niche, you know, but now it's at the center of everything.

Yeah. My story, I breed goats. And then people are like, okay, that's really cool. So I thought we could start at the larval stage of this grand story that we've all been exploring. And more specifically, the relationship that you write about between a woman you call Anna and a figure who is probably familiar to listeners of the podcast, Frederick Brennan. So obviously, Frederick was the founder of 8chan. He was a user originally on 4chan. He's been a guest on this podcast many times. You know, he's since turned into a very different person than he was back then.

But tell us more about the era where he ran Wizard Chan, which was what they call an in-cell or involuntarily celibate forum and how he met Anna. So Frederick has brittle bone disease or osteogenesis imperfecta, which means his bones break very easily and his spine is curved. He's about three feet tall. So Frederick gets really into these image boards like Four Chan. And alternative chans, as he calls them, like Wizard Chan, which Wizard was sling for a man who's reached the age of 30 as a virgin, at which point you're supposed to get magical powers. So he's like into this Wizard Chan community. And at the time, he thinks of it as like a positive thing. Like they can create this kind of like monastic vibe where, you know, they can have a positive life even if they're a little lonely.

And he's so he's moderating Wizard Chan. Well, let me just say, like, one reason that the Wizards accepted him as a leader is they thought because of his disability, he could never betray them by actually dating a woman. So he's running Wizard Jan for a while, and he gets this message from a woman who says, do you want to lose your virginity? My fetish is virgins. I'm into that. Like, I can, we could have a relationship. And he's very skeptical. He thinks he's being trolled, but over time, he becomes convinced, and he buys her a ticket to fly to New York.

Now, I spoke to Anna, you know, she had had a difficult life. She had experienced abuse. She told me that she was drawn to Frederick because he couldn't hurt her because he was disabled. She was drawn to these Incell's idea of ugliness because she wish she had been ugly. Like, she had this idea that if she were ugly, she wouldn't have experienced abuse. So that's how she ends up circulating within this world, observing it, lurking, and finally reaching out to Fred. And so Frederick buys Anna a plane ticket and she meets him in person. Can you explain what happened after this?

So she arrives at his apartment. He's very, very nervous. And she tells him that this is something she's into. She says they won't be monogamous, but they might sleep together 10, 20 times. But over time, Frederick would become more confident in his sexuality and lose that original feeling. And at that point, their relationship would end. He was like, well, that's fine, but I have some conditions too. I'm disabled.

I need some help, like cooking and cleaning and showering and that kind of thing. And so she was, he was like, you're, you can live here and you can help me do that. And if we wake up, you can leave. And you can't hurt me. You can't steal from me. So they came to this very unusual agreement. So Frederick loses his virginity. How does that go over with the Wizard Chan fellows?

They're furious. They absolutely are outraged. Frederick and Anna post this photo of them holding hands, his arms. is curved because of his bones, you know, hers is regular. They cast him out of their society. So they had had this idea that in normal times, right, every man and woman is ranked in terms of attracting this from one to ten, right? And in normal times, tens like have sex with tens, eights, you know,

people at the bottom, twos and threes, they have sex with each other. But because of feminism, relaxed societal norms about sex, the hot guys are sleeping with all of the women. because women always want to sleep with the hottest guy and men will sleep with anything. This is the in-cell ideology. So after that happens, they say that that means there's nothing left for the ones, twos and threes, right? So after Fred sleeps with Anna, they create a new rule, at least for a little while,

which is that the people at the very, very, very bottom, the zeros, they'll be able to have sex because some women will have fetishes for disabilities. And so how does this relate to the red pill, this kind of in-cell culture that was developing online? Right. So pretty much anyone who's been involved in internet politics understands the red pill metaphor from the matrix, the idea that if you take the blue pill, you live in this pleasant illusion, you take the red pill, you live in the horrible reality, right? So for a lot of these guys, the red pill is like feminism is cancer, feminism is bad, like racism is good. And the way Anna saw it being blackpilled was this idea that it's over. Instead of anger towards women, it was total hopelessness. Like there's nothing they can do to change. change. Like, your life is over. An old, like, in-cell slogan was lay down and rot. You know, there's nothing you can do to change your circumstances. It's extremely bleak and extremely depressing. And so Anna has this idea that you explore a little bit in the book, in psychological terms, that the real world is the conscious and that the chans are sort of the subconscious.

Could you elaborate a bit on that? Right. To Anna, she found that, you know, she spent a lot of time in these really toxic communities and she thought they're racism, ableism, sexism. There, that was stuff that a lot of people really believe, what they were afraid to say in the real world. She also believed that these men,

they wanted to imitate men that they had seen dominating women. They were trying to replicate that, even if they could only replicate it online. And she also found that these spaces rewarded cruelty, that the worst you were to people, the meaner, the nastier, the more you were

cool person within this world. The more you are elevated, the more social status you had. And that also meant you had to accept people saying horrible things about you. Now, I've talked to other incels about this, about what a trap it can be because they say like anything, any time you step outside the line in like these Discord servers or communities like that, somebody is going to come at you with the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Someone's going to say, hey, well, you don't agree with me? Well, weren't you molested as a child? Didn't your girlfriend break up with you? Don't you weigh 300 pounds? every single day you're bombarded with the worst parts about your life.

And so simultaneously to, you know, getting into these cultures, there's this belief behind it all that Anna can change these young men. How did that manifest? Yeah, she thought she could offer them empathy. She thought by being kind to them, you know, she could show them like there was another way to be. And it, in some sense, did work for Frederick, them hanging out together, sleeping together, trying psychedelics together. He came to accept his disability in a way he'd never been able to when he was younger. But it didn't really last. I should say it's like almost a delay to lesson for him because once he and Anna broke up, he went right back to the incels. He went right back to Wizard Chan, right back into thinking that women were horrible,

predatory creatures, and that he was ultimately unlovable. But his mind has been open to psychedelics, and he eventually founds 8chan on the come down of a mushroom trip. He thinks of it as an infinite chan, which is the 8 turned into the infinite sign. And he thinks, what if users could make their own boards and what if there was no limit to free speech at all except American law? Right. This might be surprising, but 4chan actually has some moderators.

You can get kicked off for saying certain things. So he wanted total freedom. And he imagines that in this world, of total freedom, you know, it would be this grand marketplace of ideas where ideas would be competing and fighting and the best ones would rise to the top. He thought that, sure, there might be neo-Nazi boards, but there'd be like little kids boards, video game boards, you know, sports, all that kind of thing. He thought it would be a place for everyone. Unfortunately, there were little kids boards, but not in the way that he imagined them.

No, not, no. You know, it's one of the strange things about all this is the two kinds of content that caused the most problems are hate speech and child sex abusive material, right? In America, only the child porn is illegal. But in Europe, it's hate speech and child porn. And so they are constantly dealing with take down requests from abroad. You know, he would reject the hate speech ones because it was legal in America. Or revenge porn. That was legal in America for a while.

You wrote in your book that he basically told the Russian government to fuck off at one point? Yes. As well as the Australian government, he called an Australian. an authoritarian hellhole for requesting he take down revenge porn. Oh, man. Well, before we move into all of this and how this marketplace of ideas basically gave way to what you describe as a pinball machine where there's only one idea bouncing around and it's fascism, which, by the way, fantastic metaphor.

But I want to talk a little bit about Bear, who was another in-cell that Fred knew from Wizard Chan. He comes to visit Fred and Anna, who are living a pretty strange, life and he is a virgin. So what happens? Right. So Bear is a fellow Wizard Chan moderator. They're all hanging out in Fred's Brooklyn apartment. Fred said he, if he had seen Bear on the street, he would have thought of him as a macho guy. He was like pretty big, curly dark hair. But he's a virgin. He's like nerdy. He's nervous. He's self-conscious about his weight. So they're all hanging out together. And at this point, Fred and Anna have done adventurous sexual activity. And so they tell Bear, they want him to go

home because they are ready to have sex and he asks if he can watch and they've actually done that before so they're like sure so fred is performing oral sex on anna and he's never done it before and he's very very nervous and he doesn't quite know what to do he feels self-conscious he's like bear can see me i feel weird about my body and do i have cellulite you know he's thinking all these things he's going really slow and bear starts getting really agitated and frustrated watching this and eventually he kind of stands up and takes off his shirt and kind of gets on the bed and Fred freaks out because as the bed sinks down, Fred is afraid he's going to roll off and would literally break his bones. He's like, listen, you've got to

get off. Like, you've got to stop. I got to like, I will get out of here. I will crawl off, but you've got to give me space. So he does slowly, bear weights patiently, and then he dives in and he starts performing our all sex on Anna and she loves it. She has a tremendous orgasm. It's incredible. Afterwards, they're all sitting together in the afterglow, you know, sort of cigarette break moment. And Brett's like, Bear, would you learn to do that? He's like laughing and says, it's porn. And then Fred is like, but what about Wizard Chan? And at that moment, Bear snaps. And he starts freaking out. He's like, oh, no, oh, no. What have I done? He's like, are we boyfriend, girlfriend now? She says, no, of course not. So he starts freaking out. He

kind of has almost like a tamper tantrum, a meltdown. He ends up laying on the floor banging his hands on the ground saying, I've ruined my life. I've ruined my life. You suck you bust. You've ruined my life. Fred can't really figure out. Why is he so upset? They tell him like, come on, it's okay. Like, you had a good time. We won't tell anyone. It can be a secret. You can go back to Wizard Chan, but he felt, Bear felt he had an obligation to be honest with his comrades. And in Fred's understanding, basically what happened is Bear is brokenhearted because he's lost his identity, right? He's not a wizard anymore, but he's not an army. He's just a lose. So Bear gets up and leaves. They ask him where he's going. He won't say. And he walks out the door and they

never see him again. So before we get into the aftermath of the breakup between Frederick and Anna and how this leads into what is known as GamerGate. I wanted to quickly address this obsession on the chans and later in the altruite movement with autism and being autistic. So do you think this is because a lot of the participants in these movements were really on the spectrum? What's happening there. It's something that I've been trying to figure out for years. There's no objective way of knowing because the chans are anonymous. If I wanted to survey all of them, you couldn't. You don't know who they are. So for a long time, all I had as evidence was these constant references to autism and their supposed autistic traits. You know, this word autist, A-U-T-I-S-T as in someone who seems autistic

was so common on these boards. I had that and I had the psychiatric evaluations of people who committed violence because that was entered into court evidence. And that's really the only way that someone's like mental health records become public is, you know, Dylan Roof was diagnosed autistic. Several others were as well, a shooter, a mass killer in Canada. So that's all I had for a while until I did a little bit more reporting. I found two white nationalists who were heavily involved with this, who were diagnosed with Asperger's when they were young. Fred had been told that he was on the autism spectrum when he was young. Fred's sort of partnering crime and really expanding A. Chan and making a very popular through

Gamergate was a man named Mark Mann who lives in a home for autistic adults in Brooklyn. And so you end up testing yourself for autism. What happened there? Yeah. And by the way, it's really important to say that like autism doesn't cause violence. There are many research papers that show this that autistic people are more likely to be victims of violence. They are sometimes like they are sometimes victims of predatory people who take advantage of their lack of social skills and their inability to read social cues. So, like, that's really important to say. Autism does not cause violence. Absolutely. But wait, what was your question? My question is, why did you test yourself? Did you start to doubt that you shared some of these

traits? Yeah, and I first started reading, so there was a message board on Fortune called R9K, where you could only post original content. And if you're, like, a loser or whatever, living at home in your mom's basement, there's only one kind of content. It's like your social humiliation, people bullying you at school, like your inability to speak to girls. Like, this became the thing they talked about. And I'd be reading these posts and feel this kind of chill of recognition, because I was a nerd loser in elementary school and middle school. Like, I felt so many of these same feelings. And he supposed autistic traits. Like, I recognize them in myself. I mean, I'm good at standardized test. I'm left-handed. I'm good at math. I, like,

struggled socially in school as a kid. And I was reading enough of it. I was like, Well, she's just, like, actually ask a pro. So I found a clinical psychologist and got her to evaluate me. Her findings were that I share some autistic traits. However, I don't have the repetitive stereotype behavior, which means, like, flapping your hands, that kind of thing that you typically see in autism. So my husband said I was decued on a technicality. But I do want to say, so this, like a lot of people have been seeking an autism diagnosis,

like especially post-COVID. There used to be this hashtag on Twitter, hashtag actually autistic, meaning you had a real diagnosis. It's totally given way to this TikTok mantra of self-diagnosis is valid. And there's this whole world, particularly of women, of people who have diagnosed themselves as autism and consume and make all this content about their struggles in the world, their alienation, which they attribute to a difference in brainwiring.

Yeah. And the term sometimes surprises people who listen to this podcast because it will come up. as part of QAnon in weird places where people will say, we're an army of Anans, like we're an army of autists. And people are like, what? It just feels completely out of left field because they don't understand that this is a long time in-joke and kind of self-identification that occurs among Chan users. So it carried over through the Chan's, through Gamergate, through the Altarite, all the way to QAnon where you have, you know, middle-aged guys who have like a family. being like, we're an army of autists, and it makes no sense anymore.

And they call their research weaponized autism, you know, when they're able to affect the real world. Absolutely. So, okay, let's stop for a second and talk a little bit about Gamergate, because in the aftermath of the breakup with Anna, Frederick sees an opportunity to expand the new image board that he created, 8chan, by letting people who were getting kicked off of 4chan, who were part of a harassment campaign that came to be known as Gamergate,

onto his new platform. So how does that go? Yeah. Well, so he teams up with Mark Mann, who had been very into video games. And Man reaches out to like e-celevs, you know, influencers of GamerGabit, is like, come over here. You can talk about it as much as you want. You can coordinate these harassment campaigns as much as you want over here on 8chan. And Fred played it up. He played this role of super villain of the internet. Any criticism he'd got, he pushed back on 100%.

He could accept or acknowledge like no criticism. He's like, this is about free speech. And you guys are calling it harassment because it's free speech from people you don't like. And it was massively successful. He went from like 100 posts a day to having millions of users. And GamerGate is basically an anti-feminist crusade by self-identified gamers who came to believe that a specific female game creator was responsible for sleeping with a man in exchange for a review of her game, which was called Depression Quest. And this review didn't exist, as you mentioned in the book, but the harassment campaign became a huge cultural movement. It became news because it started to spill into essentially the real world.

It was no longer marginal. Can you explain how that happened? Right. I mean, it got the attention. It starts bubbling up in mainstream news, New York Times, like mainstream coverage. Gawker was covering gamer. Gate and one of their writers made a joke that GamerGate is the reason why nerds need to be bullied. So these GamerGators were able to use their intensity.

They might call it autistic intensity, but we don't know if that's real, right? But they use their frenzy to overwhelm Gawker's advertisers and say, like, how dare you support this site that supports bullying? Bullying is horrible. Like, this is like an era of anti-bullying campaigns. And it was successful. A good cost Gokker a lot of advertisers. You know, there's think pieces about like a women's place.

I don't know. It was just, it was huge. Yeah. And it involved long arguments about jiggle physics in female breasts and video games and things as absurd as that. But of course, it also included harassment campaigns and drives to get people to kill themselves. Yeah, they coordinated this in chat rooms related to 4chan. They're like, we should harass this woman. I mean, some of the women at the center of it all received hundreds and hundreds of death threats.

One of the women was supposed to speak on a college campus, and it had to be canceled because they couldn't secure it. You know, where were the free speech activists to defend her? You don't hear much about that. It was just was a moment when these guys realized that they could have power in the real world. They all had to work together. They didn't need to know each other's names. They didn't need to see each other's faces. It was mostly through the principle of trying to one-off each other on jokes.

Like, they were able to affect mainstream society. You describe this phenomenon in the book of essentially generational amnesia among the users where one generation of users, and this happens over a pretty fast process. We're not talking about generations like, you know, of human beings. We're talking about generations of people who come and go from these websites often as they mature into adulthood, they just naturally leave. So each generation would have inside jokes that they're doing ironically. And then the next generation would come along and they would not be doing the same joke with iron. at all. So things naturally became more serious. And with that came a focus, a renewed focus on race science and white nationalism and racism in general. So how did that happen? Right. The idea is

that what one generation of a community does as parity, the next generation will miss all those social cues and take it as sincere. So over time, it becomes a thing that it's satirized. There's a lot of reporting, not by me, and for like going decades back, that when Fortune started getting the attention of mainstream societies, they started posting, like, Hitler and Nazi memes as a way to repel those people. But over time, people were like, yeah, like, I'm into the Nazi stuff. In 2016, I was interviewing Richard Spencer, and I kind of made a reference to that. And he was like, yeah, I have met young men who come up to me and say, I read eugenicist texts. I read racism. I read sex misogynist texts in order to become a better troll.

And in the process, I red-pilled myself. I started believing it. This focuses often on a book by Charles Murray. It's a race science book called The Bell Curve, which is considered junk science. But the far right and these Chan users start to glom onto it. And suddenly there's an emergence of something that starts to identify as the alt-right. So, yeah, can you explain a little bit how that coalesced? Yeah, the bell curve is almost a symbol of, like, secret repressed science.

Like, these people believe. So Murray asserts that IQ is immutable and inherited, and some racial groups have a higher IQ than others. He further says that we should discourage immigration from low IQ societies and encourage high IQ Americans to have more children. It just becomes a symbol of the liberals, right? suppressing the like secret true reality, which is that these like internet Nazi guys are actually the people who should be at the top of society because they're geniuses. What was the rest of your question? I guess the question can can naturally progress into discussing two figures you explore in the book, Matthew Parrott and Matt Heimback. Right. So Matt Parrott, who is a

lesser known but really important white nationalist, he's a person for whom this is, the bell curve was an important part of his identity. I mean, it really guided the direction of his life. So when he was very young, he tested with a very high IQ. And he just, that was so important to him because he didn't have a lot else. He wasn't a rich kid. He wasn't cool. He was terrible at sports, but he had this high IQ. And when he took standardized test, there was black and white proof that he was better than everyone around him. So when he finds this book, the bell curve that says IQ is everything. It determines your success as an individual. It determines the success of a society at large. Like, he has, like, held it very closely. Like, it's like, this, this is it. Like, this is the guiding light. And he rejects that way of thinking now. But, yeah, this was how he saw the world. I mean, and he's not alone.

Like, if you dig a little in sort of right-wing Silicon Valley world, you find a lot of this idea, you know, a little bit more mellow form that, like, they are the real geniuses, the rightful rulers of society. And they should be, they should be in charge of these. low IQ people all around. You know, like we, we would be the low IQ books, unfortunately. Right. And so Parrot and Heimbach, they're kind of the frenemies at the core of your book in some

ways. It's really fascinating to watch their story progress. But they are kind of very involved with taking what was originally just on the chance, this identification with like an alt-right identity and the support for Donald Trump that is ironic and becomes very serious. And marrying that with a broader, more tangible white power, maybe more old school white power movement and racist movement in the United States. So can you explain like the tensions there and then in a bit we can get to their relationship and more specifically? Yeah. So Matt Perrett and Matt Heimbach were both diagnosed with Asperger's as

young kids and their IQ is very, very important to them. Parrott is 10 years older than Heimbach. He got his start on the internet in atheist chat rooms. He loved debating fundies, you know, Christian fundamentalist. He liked feeling intellectually superior to them. Over time, with the help of the bell curve, that becomes white nationalism. And he develops this white nationalist identity that is a little more socialist than what was the common, they now call it white nationalism 1.0. Like that kind of white nationalism under the Bush administration, Clinton administration

had become associated with poverty, old people, there are no women in it. Someone called it a sausage fest. So when these guys start entering white nationalism, like, the old guys around them are like, what are you doing here? Is this like your grandpa's thing? Like, why are you involved in this? Heimbach is about 10 years younger than Parrot. And the difference between them is that Heimbach got a lot of intervention as a young child in social skills. So he was taught how to have a conversation.

He was taught how to pick up on social cues. He was taught that a conversation is like a game of tennis where you love it. ball back and forth even if it's kind of boring. And so Parrots saw in Heimbach someone who could be the face of his ideas, someone who could connect with an audience who could help bring in young people. So together they started a white nationalist organization called the traditionalist Workers Party. As they were doing that, 4chan is coming in. You know, they're big on the chans. They're really into this. Like the alt-right starts swelling of its own accord. Richard Spencer had coined the term alt-right, but it kind of abandoned it.

And these new internet racists on the chans had started making it their own and developing their own culture and ideology around it. So these guys who were willing to put their face to this movement, as opposed to the anonymous trolls, they like tried to take it over as their own. They tried to sort of surf the wave of it. So little by little, you have this kind of fusing of the online racist trolls and people interested in a way more tangible. let's say, IRL white nationalist movement. And meanwhile, there's old money behind them. So I'm thinking of the members of the Charles Martel Society, figures like William Henry Regnery the second.

So what role does this older, richer generation play in what I can only assume was a very alienating and weird culture to them, these online Pepe the Frog, memesters, these self-identified autists? Yeah. Well, this is a story that repeats over and a lot. over with internet sub-cultures and extremism, but they thought they can control it and they couldn't. But the Charles Martel Society was founded during the Bush administration by these old-school paleo-conservatives. They were furious at the neocons. They were angry about the Iraq War.

They didn't understand where they were being shunted out of the movement just because they were racist. There had been a long, you know, Nixon's Southern Strategy. There had been a long history of racism in the Republican Party, but now they are on the outs. So the Charles Mortel Society founded to bring together these kind of old, we're talking 60s, 70s, now 80s, guys, these kind of like tweet, they imagined themselves as intellectuals, the more explicitly racist version of the bell curve. So they have a society and they all come together and they have these meetings and they try to find like new faces of the movement. And one of the people they picked up was Richard Spencer. They also cultivated Matt Parrott and Matt Heimbach for a while before deciding

that those guys were a little too working class in appearance for their sensibilities. They helped found and encourage and fund identity Europa, which became a racist frat that we all saw in Charlottesville. Those are the guys who did the white polos.

There are many different organizations run by members of the Charles Martin's Health Society, and those organizations might appeal to different constituencies like maybe Jews are into racism or maybe something focused more on anti-immigration, policy. But they're all like the same guys. Like you see the same guys over and over and over again,

and they email each other all the time about how to move and shape the movement. So yeah, let's talk a little bit about Richard Spencer then. You know, you describe him having a mom who lives in a ski town. There's cotton farms involved. So he definitely is bringing a kind of upper class element. This is no longer like a street gang, like skinhead type movement, nor is it, you know, kind of working class online alienated trolls like Parrot and Heimbach. So, yeah, tell us a little bit about Richard Spencer. So Bill Regnery, who founded the Charles Mollertel Society, he had this non-profit called the National Policy Institute.

He created it to be a vehicle for a friend who died. So it's sitting there as an empty shell. Spencer reaches out to Regnery. He's like, hey, you know, I could run this thing. Put me in charge. Spencer had always wanted to run a think tank. He wanted someone to fund his ideas. He wanted to be a kind of intellectual.

He imagined himself, as he put it, completing nature's project. So Regnant re-agreed. So Spencer's there running this thing. He's got like a racist publishing imprint. They're just publishing sort of eugenicist texts going to these conferences. Not a lot is happening until 2014, 2015, when the alt-right starts bubbling up on 4chan and 8-chan. So Spencer coined the term alt-right in 2008. but then he like gets in fights with people.

I don't know. He lets it go. But the chans take this idea over and they make it their own and he sees that and he's like, I'm going to, I want to run that. And because, you know, people like me, reporters like me, like we're seeing this like new wave of internet racist, but they all have Pepe avatars. They don't use the real names. Like, who are they? Only guys like Spencer and Perrin and Hivok would show their real face and the real name.

So Spencer becomes the face of it. Now, the Charles Martel Society guys like him because he looks rich. He looks successful. he's tall, he's young. Like, he seems like the guy who could be the face of their ideas. And so this kind of tenuous alliance of various different people that are tied to this nebulous, mostly anonymous and highly volatile group of online trolls kind of unite. And what is their perception of the GOP?

They hate it. They hate it. They think they've been told for all of their activist lives here. You know, crime stats, IQ scores, vote Republican. You know, Spencer complains like, oh, we're the racist add-on. We never get to be the main thing. We never get to be influential. We just have to be this, like, sidecar.

And he wanted to be the real thing. And then Donald Trump comes along. Yeah. How does he figure in their kind of revenge fantasies or fantasies of taking over the Republican Party? So Donald Trump talks about not just calling Mexicans rapists, right? he also talks about no foreign wars you know they these were people who were outraged by the iraq war they love that according to heimbach and parrot like where they were in ohio there's no real trump infrastructure like there's no campaign infrastructure so when some random volunteer sets up a pro-trump

event like all these white nationalists show up and the little old lady who found it has no idea who they actually are there was actually like a mini scandal and pbs did a story on some Trump supporters, I think in Kentucky. Anyway, so PBS did a story of some Trump supporters not noticing the 88 tattoo on the woman's hand, which in white nationalist circles is clothed for Heil Hitler. So they see Trump as like their vessel. What they love about him is how angry it makes all their enemies. They love that he makes feminists angry.

They love that he makes liberals angry. At the time, there's this term social justice warrior, now it's DEI, whatever. They loved the idea that people who. oppose racism and other kinds of bigotry would be infuriated by Trump. Like, it's not even so much about what Trump is for. It's about how he pisses off all the people that they're against.

So, you know, they like start this, like, internet campaign like for Trump and they kind of believe that their memes make things reality. Like, there is Hillary Clinton being sick. They, like, started this meme that she was dying. And then one day Hillary does cough and kind of falls at an event.

And it's like they have willed this into reality. Like, they feel like they're really part of something like they're making a difference in the real world like this is like game for gate times a million yeah famously there's a chan user at a hillary clinton speech asking the chans on his phone what should i say what should i scream out and then you know kind of interjecting and she has to start contending with you know during the campaign season with the rise of the alt right with pepe the frog uh which they see as a huge win because it's so absurd it's like look at what we made this serious do like look at what we made her talk about it's it's a stupid cartoon frog so that's very funny to

them just as it's funny to them that they get the okay symbol that you can make with your your hand by putting your your thumb to your finger they make that associated with with the alt-right and with white supremacy so they're having a good time they're trolling they're meming but there's also a very physical aspect here they're trying to get together more and more physical gatherings and these grow increasingly violent right there are a serious of confrontations with leftists, you know, whether it's at an anti-Trump protest or whatever, there's like this thing where it becomes a thing that show up and fight leftists. And then the images of that get rocketed all around the internet. So it doesn't really matter what the people

in this like location, whether it's Berkeley or New York or whatever. It doesn't matter what the local people think of it. The point of these images is that they go around the internet and have this message of like join us be cool be a tough guy so all these guys who may have come to this feeling like incels losers they're in their own terms fat and unattractive needs not an income education or training they see these guys fighting and they want to be like them they're like finally we're able to like physically beat down the leftist so from 2015 then through 2016 and really into 17 there becomes this like it just becomes cool there are these series of battles where like people wearing 4chan memes are just like punching anti-fascists.

And they have a style and aesthetic called fascia wave and the same haircut. It becomes a genuine physical cultural movement as opposed to the type of violence that was generated directly from the chans to lone shooters who would go on murder sprees, which happened multiple times in various different ways around racism, around anti-feminism. But this time it's a movement that is curating an image and that it's a movement that is curating an image and that is gathering people to slowly build a critical mass. Right. And image is just, it's so important to these guys.

Like, there's a group called the Rise of Buff movement in Southern California where they, you know, they're like work out together. They're kind of a fight club. They pose with their muscles flexed. And like there's a video of the founder of Identity Europa, Nathan D'Amico, punching a woman in the face. And this is like, they don't think that that's dishonorable. They think this is like, this is a Chad, like finally put. a woman in her place, a leftist woman in particular. Like, there's, like, giddiness about the violence.

And so the violence escalates until one day, you know, this awful event called Unite the Right happens in Charlottesville, which is the second time that this group visits Charlottesville, but this time it's advertised because they are essentially looking for people to fight. They want it to be a showdown. They want it to be, like, what they called the Battle of Portland, which they considered a win for their side. And at this point, there are new figures associated with the movement like Chris Cantwell, the person who was later dubbed the crying Nazi due to the fact that he wept in an interview with you, which we will get to. But what is this ramshackle group of people

that come together to create the torch march in Charlottesville? The chance of Jews will not replace us. You know, I think for a lot of people, you know, that are not necessarily examining these subcultures, that was a really shocking, weird moment that seemed to come out of nowhere and was just so extreme that they couldn't believe their eyes and ears. So, but you were inside this thing. You, you were among these people. A lot of these people were sources that had been talking to you for years. And they kind of hated you, but they also wanted to go down in history in some way. So they tolerated the idea that a journalist could kind of tag along. And I mean, a lot of the times the descriptions of these physical altercations in your book are terrifying. Like, it feels like you are in real danger. So I don't want to downplay that, of course. Yeah. But tell me about, for lack of a better word, tell me about Charlottesville and the group involved

and maybe a little more about Chris Cantwell as well. So first, I should say, so there's kind of a dry run of Charlottesville in May of that year where unannounced, they show up with a bunch of torches at night around this Robert Ely statue. Again, what happens in the local area? Like, that didn't matter. But the images go around the Internet and they look cool.

Or these guys think they look cool. So another guy decides, I want to do that, but bigger. I want to make this the biggest ever event, like far right event. I want to have all their guys and all our guys fight it out in the streets. Hold on one second. Craig, chill. Craig, you can't just be an anti-racist dog that woofs every time you detect racism in a conversation. Right.

He knows Charlottesville is emotional for me. It is. It was emotional for me reading your account of it. I was really moved. It was, I mean, terrifying and awful. and moving. Thank you. Okay, so by summer 2017, which they call the summer of hate, so I'm a meme to this guys. They hate me, but they also, like, they want to get a picture of me. Like, I'm not a person to them anymore. Like, I have this tick in my interviews when I'm

interviewing, like, someone with despicable ideas is I say, that's interesting. Because I can't say that's cool. Like, right on, man. You know, so I can only say, okay, that's a significant statement. You have said, I acknowledge it. So they pick up on. that and wherever I would go in a crowd of them, they'd be like, hello, oh, that's interesting. I mean, it's just like, it's scary. It's intimidating. It's also, like, so absurd. You know, you're living in this, like, unreality. This is like, like, I feel like I'm in, like a satire. Like, I don't feel, like I feel like I'm in VEP or something like that. I don't feel like I'm in a regular reality, like a boring reality. And there's a darker aspect to this because they are also doing awful, like,

pornography, photoshopps with you in them. Like, you become a real figure of, and target deemed worthy of harassment. Yeah, the first time I met Samantha Frolic, who had been part of identity, Europa, and quitted, renounced racism. First time I met her, she looks to me, it goes like, Billy Reeve, sitting in my kitchen, I can't tell you how many times I've seen your head photoshopped on porn. Like, cool.

Yeah, we will definitely get to Samantha Frolic. But yes, so please go on. I mean, yeah, they sent me dick pics. You know, like, on the record. Elliot Klein, former leader of identity Eroba, sent me a picture of his testicles. But anyway, so I'm like a meme to them. So Chris Cantwell, who had been a libertarian until he got fired for saying something racist and created his own internet radio show.

And then essentially all these Nazi callers would call in and sort of black pill him until he became like a full-on anti-Semite racist, like pro-genocide. guy. Like, he really wanted to be a shock jock, right? So, like, to climb the heights of shock jockdom within a neo-Nazi movement, like, you've got to go pretty, pretty far. So he pretty openly called for violence several times on his podcast. So I knew Charlotte'sville was coming. I reached out to the organizer asking to interview someone. He puts my name in some chat room asking who wants to interview that bitch from Vice where I was working at the time. And Chris Cantwell put up his hand and he called me you know and like he reached out to me i i had put off contacting him because

i just you know there's only so much racism you can take in a day you know and he almost pitched himself to me as the quote edgiest that was the term of the time code for racist as like the one of the edgiest guys and he all right and he plays a big role in the violence in charlotsville that culminates in the death of a young woman heather heyer right he sort of appointed himself as offering some kind of physical security to protect these guys from Antifa. But the night of the torch mart, they're not being attacked by anyone. They're able to march all over campus for about 45 minutes. And then finally, they get to this Thomas Jefferson statue

where just a couple dozen college students have encircled it and, you know, just sort of just stand up and say like this doesn't represent us. This mob of hundreds of Nazis swirls around them with their torches and starts beating these students. There's massive melee ensues. And Cantwell's right in the middle of it. And there's video of him in the middle of it, video that he thinks is exonerating,

but most people, he looks completely out of control. There's a video where there's like a fist fight happening. He jumps in and starts punching a guy over and over in the back. He grabs a woman. You know, there's this very chilling moment in one of the videos from that incident where a guy grabs Cantwell by the waist and pulls him out of a bra and tells him, you shouldn't be fighting like that because you have a gun. And the next day, the violence is not quite as asymmetrical.

There's a larger group. Some of them identify as anti-fascists. And a big brawl ensues during which one of the participants in the Unite the Right rally rams his car into a group of counter-protesters, as I mentioned, killing Heather Heyer. And in the aftermath of all of this, after the violence dissipates, the group of sort of alt-right the ramshackle a coalition of alt-right people, including Heimback, Parrott, Spencer, and Cantwell, they retreat to, well, I'll just read from the book if you don't mind. Okay.

The alt-right inner circle gathered in a house in the countryside outside Charlottesville hours after the rally. They'd spent several days planning the perfect after-party, and they'd expected a wild celebration. But the scene had become a bunch of guys on their phones, making desperate calls. to find any new scrap of information about what happened and how much trouble they were in. Someone called a meeting and the leaders filed into a room and closed the door behind them. There were about half a dozen guys, among them Ellie Klein, Nathan Domingo, Jason Kessler, and Richard Spencer. They asked one another, what should we do?

What should we say? Spencer stood to address his men. They'd been drinking, and when Spencer began ranting, someone in the room was secretly taping. And so I'm just going to play this tape. that is now publicly available. Fair warning to the listener, there is an anti-Jewish slur. But I think it's important because it's a pivotal moment and also allows you to understand

what the alt-right really stood for at the time and what Richard Spencer was really like behind closed doors. We're coming back here like a fucking hundred times. I am so mad. I am so fucking mad at these people. They don't do this to fucking me. We're going to fucking missalistic. humiliate them.

Go ahead. I am coming back here every fucking weekend if I have to. Like this is never over. I win, they fucking lose. That's how the world fucking works. Little fucking kites. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking loxeroons.

I mean, my ancestors, fucking enslaved those pieces of fucking shit. We're gonna win. I rule the fucking world. Those pieces of shit get ruled by people like me. They look up. and see a face like mine looking down at them. That's what the fucking world works.

We are going to destroy this fucking town. So now we will continue with Ellie's words in the book Blackpill. The word humiliate and some of the fuckings were warped by the force of Spencer's shouting. Other words, quote, ruled by people like me, sounded like they were pushed through clenched teeth. There was no pretense of irony or that this was one big cosmic gulf. joke or that he simply wanted open debate among reasonable people. Spencer sounded sweaty and crazy. A couple guys clapped lightly and one offered a soft, yeah. But right there in that room, Spencer lost the movement. Obviously, a chilling passage in your book. Can you explain what effect

this rant had on Spencer as a figure and also his supposed allies? Right. This rant was devastating to Spencer for several reasons. Like, one, he lost this image of the cool, calm, collected guy who's like kind of above it all. It was just a fun intellectual exercise. But more importantly, Spencer had been known as a narcissist within white nationalism for a long time. Spencer himself says he's a narcissist. But it was in that moment people realized what a problem this was for him. Because there were dozens of people who were injured and hurt and three people had died, Heather Hire, as well as two police officers who died in a helicopter crash. Like most people knew that the consequences were going to be pretty devastating. But for Spencer,

it was all about him. You know, they don't do this to me. You know, I rule the fucking world. So only the white nationalist leaders knew about this rant for a while until it was released publicly by Milo Yanopolis a few years later. And Spencer was completely humiliated. And then when he was sued, along with a couple dozen other people for his role in organizing Charlottesville in a federal civil lawsuit, he's forced to listen to this rant. over and over and over again and it's proof of like it's this mask off moment like this is what these guys really believe it's not just protecting their culture or the dignity of white men you know it's about domination it's about hates so you know i mean at this point spencer has completely alienated

everyone within white nationalism he doesn't even call himself a white nationalist anymore he actually was in the news a couple years ago for his bumble profile because it's he'd as his politics as moderate. There is a recurring thing in your book with some of your subjects where they kind of later regret or reconsider their beliefs. One of these figures is Samantha Frolic that you mentioned earlier. And in this movement, she goes by Helen of Goy, or at least that's how some people refer to her. So tell us a little bit about the role of Samantha Frolic, the shifting role of women and gender within the alt-right, and what the hell white shirt. Maria is. Right. So in 2016, Samantha and her boyfriend, they had a very difficult relationship,

but he started making these little jokes. And eventually she Googled them and realized he was a fascist. And she was appalled, but she wanted to stay with him. So she got into it. And by January of the next year, they were joining Identity Europa. Now, her boyfriend eventually washed out, but inside Identity Europa, she was able to have some power. And she was ambitious. She climbed to the pop to be women's coordinator. She organized women within the group. She helped plan some of their events. She moderated some regional white nationalist chat rooms.

She felt like she was somebody. And she also, because this movement was so small, you know, she could go to parties and meet Richard Spencer. She could, and she felt like she was meeting rock stars, you know, these like racism influencers. Like, once she was so deep in that world, like she felt like she was meeting. like rock stars. But because this new kind of white nationalism was so heavily influenced by in-cell culture, it was extremely misogynistic. Like, I interviewed this old school neo-Nazi Jeff Scoop who talked about how bizarre it was when these alt-right guys started coming online

and they were making all these jokes about white women being raped. You know, he said like back in his day, you know, guys like that, they would have gotten a boot party. They've gotten their asses kicked. But now this was like ironic and cool. So, do you know, he said, like, back in his day, you These women who got drawn into identity Europa publicly, they're, you know, they're like, oh, these guys are just joking. They laugh along with it. They're happy to play along with this very trad idea of femininity where they're wearing white dresses and they're demure and they're submissive.

But behind the scenes, when they're messaging each other one-on-one, they're saying things like, I'm scared of this man. Like, I went on a date with this guy. He's terrifying. he, like, he shouldn't be around other women. They're saying, like, I've been working to make propaganda to bring people into this movement, but I don't think I can do that in good conscience because it hates them. One of the memes that got going, one of the just jokes, was white Sharia.

The idea is that because women vote Democratic, women are more socially liberal, they're ruining the country, and the only way to bring the country back to the way it should be is to deprive them all rights. It's like they're a very cartoonish idea of Sharia where women can't have credit cards, jobs, there's child marriage, all of that. And it's supposed to be just a joke. But for some people, one couple in particular, like, they started living it up.

Like, this woman started wearing burqas she bought on Amazon to parties. She, you know, she, in public, she would play along with this, like, honestly, like, really terrible dehumanizing treatment. I mean, this man spit on her in front of other people. And in private messages, she's texting Samantha, like, I don't know what to do. Like, these guys, at first she'll be like, oh, they're like so funny. They're meming so hard, talking about impregnating thoughts, as in that hoe over there.

And then later, she'll be texting saying, like, I've been dehumanized enough for one weekend. Like, do not trust these men. I don't know if I can ever respect myself again. I'm outside at 2 a.m. in the car crying because they're so cruel to me. She was, she would complain about this horrible treatment. And then hours or days later's come back and be like, well, maybe it was just a joke. You know, maybe I'm the one not cut out for this movement because I don't get the joke. Like, was he just meming?

Like, was it all just a meme? Like, maybe something's wrong with me. Sorry. Where else do you want me to go with that? It's like the most fucked up shit I've ever read my life. It's okay. I mean, yeah, it is like profoundly disturbing stuff. And you use Dworkin to examine the role of women.

So what did she have to say about this kind of thing? Andrea Dwork and wrote this book in 1983 called Right Wing Women. And part of the reason that, I mean, I sent this to Samantha and many other women who later left the movement. And part of it, it just felt kind of transaggressive to have the, like, the figure of the most like boot stomping, like sex negative, like anti-porn feminism, like to send that woman to these people who had been so anti-feminism, these trad wives and trad girls. friends that was exciting to me. But her analysis is the best thing I've read on why these women do what they do, which is that these women essentially into a contract with these guys. The idea is that they will embody their ideas with perfect fidelity. They will be the perfect leftist, white nationalist, whatever. They will do it too extreme to prove their value to these men. And

And in exchange, they expect protection from male violence. Did you say leftist? Well, this is what Dworkin says in the book. Like, even the leftist par excellence. Like, that is part of her critique. But anyway, she says the idea is that these women will embody the ideas of the men in the exchange that these guys will protect them, will respect them, will give them some meaning to their lives.

And the men usually don't hold up their end of their bargain. And that is true in the case of several white nationalists. I mean, their wives and ex-girlfriends have alleged in court that they were physically or emotionally abusive. And this is true in the women I talked to who I talked to Samantha. Another thing that Dworkin writes about is that in these right-wing societies that degrade women so much, like every part of them has been cut away as, like, valueless. Like women are thought of as like stupid and silly and superficial, uneducated, right? And so the only thing they have that gives them meaning is this ideology, is the ideology of these men that they're clinging to.

And so they can't let it go. Like they hold to these ideas desperately like a clinging vine. Because to lose it would be to lose all meaning. So in the aftermath of Charlottesville, there is obviously a lot of legal fallout. You know, the man who rammed his car into protesters is currently serving a life sentence. Parrot and Heimbach, who at this point have fallen out over a series of bizarre love triangles and an event called Night of the Wrong Wives, which I'll let people read your book because it's just so bizarre and interesting and you explore it so well. So pick up the book. But there's this sentence

in particular that I thought was maybe the most cursed sentence in the entire book. So here we go. The trial brought Parrott and Heimack back together out of legal necessity. Parrott's legal fortune was tied to Heimbeck's, and Heimbach hadn't been responding to the filings. They hired as their lawyer Josh Smith, the gay Jewish Holocaust denier who wore an all-over-print Rocky and Bullwinkle shirt. What the fuck is going on? Yeah, quite a picture. Yeah.

So that was quite a scene. These guys had rented like an Airbnb through this like six-week-long trial. And that was the first time I met their lawyer. And there was this incredible moment where he was telling me how he became a Holocaust denier, that he could point to the one specific mean that did it. And he would look it up for me. So he's like searching on his iPad. And I'm thinking, like I'm bracing myself for some really like gruesome or visceral propaganda.

Like I've seen so many awful images reporting on this stuff. Like I'm waiting to really be hit in the face with some vile piece of propaganda. And he turns around his iPad and it's a stick figure. in black and white with a speech bubble. And it says something about how, you know, how could it be logistically impossible to deport 11 million illegal immigrants and at the same time it would be possible for the Nazis to kill 6 million Jews? And he's like, yeah, this is a thing that did it for me.

That is, I don't even know what to say about that, but it's part for the course. You know, your book is so full of these amazing and bizarre moments. I was so moved by parts of it. I was laughing out loud in other parts. I was recoiling in horror and, and, uh, cringing intention, uh, in many parts. So really good job on Black Pill. I'd like to discuss before, before we, uh, you know, have to bring this, this wonderful

interview to a close. What you think the lasting legacy of the alt-right is in today's America and it's, and it's politics, because obviously there's things we haven't explored, like the proud boy movement. There's January 6th and the storming of the capital. I mean, you know what? We can't do everything on one episode. You're going to have to listen to other episodes. You're going to have to pick up Black Pill, the new book by Ellie Reeve. Okay, I'm going to stop shilling for you now. Tell us, what do you think the lasting legacy is? Because when I try to think about QAnon and the alt-right and all that, what it feels like is that there was like a drop of like poisoned food coloring that just got put in a container of water that is like the Republican Party and maybe even the general culture. And that now everything. just has this light tinge. Everything is just slightly a different color and a little more toxic. Right. So these alt-right guys imagined that, like, they were going to become somebody. They were

going to ride this out to, like, get congressional staff jobs, you know, did not happen. They were totally shunned by society. But a lot of their ideas and their methods for doing politics live on. So, like, the Republican Party is not shouting Jews will not replace us. But you see on Fox News, people talk about replacement theory. Maybe they don't say Jews are replacing white people with people of color, but they say Democrats are in order to gain power. Elon Musk is saying that on his platform that he owns now. Elon Musk is tweeting pepes. He's, yes. I mean, it's like Donald Trump sat down with Nick Fuentes. I mean, there's like Turning Point USA is handing out white boy summer hats.

See, there's just not enough in one episode. Turning Point USA. The Grooper movement. I mean, there's just, yeah, anyways, go on. Just this idea of like participatory conspiracy theories, like I think is really powerful. Like people have understood, or some people have taken the lesson that instead of saying, oh, QAnon's not real, like, you're like, well, maybe it's, you know, it's okay. Like these people are really, like, what did Trump say is like these people are against pedophiles, you know? I mean, that's a good thing to be against. Is that so bad? Is that so bad?

Right. So it's like, it's like, I think there's a recognition that there's a lot of power and giving people a feeling like they get to be involved, you know, know, the bakers, the researchers, like they get to have a piece of the movement. They get to be a part of history. And I think the Republican Party has taken a strong lesson from that. The book is Blackpill. How I Witness the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics by Ellie Reeve. There will be links in the episode description.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I think you guys are great. Well, it's an honor, and we did get a little mention, so we're glad to be in the footnotes of the book. Oh, yeah, he did. I forgot I mentioned you guys. Yeah. Yeah. And I saw that Rachel Maddow gave you a shout now, too. Ah, yes. Well, yeah, we're now actually produced by Rachel Maddow, and our subscribership has more than doubled because the amount of people that watch Rachel Maddow and listen to us, I mean, it's just huge. Huge. Lots of crossover. So the bump is real, folks. Thank you for listening.

to another episode of the QAAA podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and our mini-series. For everything else, we've got a website, QAApodcast.com.

Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you. We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. These are racist ideas, race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-women, all key tenets making up the emerging racist ideology known as the alt-right.