The Daily - 'Rabbit Hole,' Episode 3: Mirror Image

Episode Date: May 2, 2020

Note: This episode contains strong language. Today, we’re sharing Episode 3 of “Rabbit Hole,” a New York Times audio series with the tech columnist Kevin Roose.In this episode, our reporter continues to trace the journey of a young man named Caleb. Five years into a rabbit hole on YouTube, Caleb discovers a parallel universe.If you're tuning in to "Rabbit Hole" for the first time, start with the prologue. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/rabbithole.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. Today, Rabbit Hole. Episode 3. What dream or vision do you want to turn into reality? Hey everybody. Do you want to build a snowman? Equality is a dangerous myth. It felt like I was chasing the truth about reality.

Go to Africa and you will see a real rape culture. And it was an uncomfortable truth. Take your privilege somewhere else. These people hate Americans. They hate white people. They hate you and me. And I accepted that. And that's what made it even more compelling.

It's necessary to have a certain kind of celebration. Okay, so I'll let you. Yeah. Yeah, so when did you feel your views shifting again? So a big thing was Destiny. I'm going to die. Oh, no more enemies, please. Explain who Destiny is.

Destiny is a Twitch streamer. Okay. There is a rush to get all of the achievements for the campaign mode. Kevin Roos. 16 streamers, I think, that are participating. What is a Twitch streamer? Good job.

Thanks a lot. So what Destiny does is a version of this thing that a lot of people do on the internet for money now. They stream themselves playing video games. Oh, look at all the people. I'm gonna lose. I'm kind of loose. Hundreds of thousands of people are

watching them every time they go on stream and donating money to them and subscribing to their channels and this sort of becomes their full-time job. And if you've ever like spent time in like a multiplayer video game, you've met someone like Destiny.

Oh God, what is this fucking cancer? He's the guy in the chat room who's like profane and irreverent. You fucking suck shit, Jim. You're just sitting there fucking watching me, not doing anything. What the fuck are you doing? Edgy in this performative way.

But then after that, he like went back onto the autism train and went full blown fucking retard on everything. You know, if you tell him not to say something, he's definitely going to say it. I'm sorry. I'm a gamer. I use words like that. And he'd started doing this thing a couple of years ago where he would invite people on his channel. And while he was playing video games, he would debate them. All right. Can we be done with this? And then I think I don't think we're ever going to agree on this.

Listen, hey, dude, you're listen, I despite all our disagre Omni, listen. Hey, dude, you're, listen. I, despite all our disagreements, despite all of it, dude, you're a solid mind. I really appreciate it. And he doesn't just debate. I hate you. I legitimately fucking hate you. You are one of the people,

you are one of the people that I would seek to de-platform. He owns them. You unironically told me in here that Obama should be held accountable for the fucking housing crisis. You are beyond fucking retarded. His goal was not just to prove the other person wrong. It was to make them look like an absolute idiot. How is Trump cheating on his wife relevant to anything? Who the fuck cares

about that? Who cares about that? Who cares? You mean Republicans, the people that talk about fucking God every fucking Tuesday? You mean Trump? He would do these. They call them Internet blood sports. Where he just basically, like, he would hit you with facts and data, but at the same time he's making fun of you. He's saying that the idea that you're voting for a Republican because you don't like Clinton, because Clinton bombed some shit, is hilariously fucking stupid. Republicans are gonna fucking stop bombing the Middle East? The fuck is that shit? What a dumb fucking... Even though Destiny is very much on the left side of the political spectrum...

It seems like you're kind of trying to weasel in that, like, well, people didn't really think this thing, but you don't really have any polling data or anything whatsoever to support that view. That's just your personal belief, right? Do you admit that? Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's a personal belief that's based on... When he pops up in Caleb's feed and Caleb sees the way

that he is owning and destroying his opponents... No, no, I can't let you say something completely incorrect and move on because this is how you win your arguments. You say a bunch of bullshit and then you try to move on to a separate thing. Listen... Oh man, this Destiny guy's great. Like, that was awesome.

Caleb kind of respects him for it. And then there was this one day that Caleb got a recommendation for another Destiny debate. And this time, Destiny was taking on... Hello? Hey, what's up? Can you hear me? Lauren Southern. Yeah, yeah, I can hear you fine.

And then I remember seeing the Lauren Southern debate pop up on the sidebar. And I clicked on it. Oh, man. How's it going? I am stoked. And I thought, oh, Lauren Southern. This is going to be great. Okay, so here's my problem, Doug.

Five or six years ago, I was a pretty right-leaning person. Okay? Really? Yeah, believe it or not. But the Lauren Southern that he sees. Do you agree or disagree with that? I don't know. I don't know, honestly.

Is not the one he's used to. You did a video where you linked an article about how refugees were causing an increase in crime. But if you follow that article and read it, I don't remember if I tweeted this at you or not. The article actually stated that even though the amount of refugees coming into the country was increasing, the per capita crime was actually decreasing drastically. And that the majority... You're saying that there is no proof that immigrants are a net drain on the country, I think is ridiculous. I mean, most of the reading that I did to prepare for this was of the economist that you cited in your book, who agrees that immigration has been a net gain for the entire Western world. They were talking about immigration and he nailed her down on the stats.

You focused a lot on the economic side, and I got to admit, I am not an economist. I don't think either of us are. Then... So I want to talk about culture for most of this, quite frankly, but if you want to talk about economics... She wanted to jump topics to culture. But, but, but, you have a whole chapter on immigration... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

...and that negative on the economy. How could you say that? I dedicated about three pages to the economy and the rest was about culture. And he would just pin her into a corner and get her to admit that she didn't know she was talking about basically. I believe he compared human workers to a resource that was

a natural resource we should let in. You know that's true, right? Like labor and work is a resource that the market can take advantage of. If you run out of it, it's really bad. Humans are not exactly equivalent to resources. So I put this. I was like, what? Do you understand what a cross-sectional analysis is?

I thought we're the ones with facts and logic. Does that phrase mean anything to you? No, elaborate. Okay. When you're pulling groups of people. We're the ones that own the lids. In your book, you cite the term reactants, right? As people wanting to do the opposite of whatever it is they're told.

That's what I see your entire movement as. And you can tell from looking at his watch history that this is like a moment for him. It embarrassed Lauren. Because he actually goes back and like rewatches that video several times. So is your goal to be just as retarded as the opposition? Is that your life goal? No, it's to present the other argument. But why do you have to present the other argument that is currently not being presented in popular culture. But why do you have to do that by taking up the most extreme anti-opposition side? It was the first moment I

was like, how did this liberal do that? Destiny, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Pretty good. And then slowly slowly Destiny would keep appearing. Just move on from the gay marriage thing and assume that... Yeah, I think death penalty is a better example. Okay, death penalty, sure. I don't agree and I think it's wrong, but even if what you're saying is true, I could sell any brand of bullshit and achieve the same thing. Until one day, he got recommended this video in which Destiny was talking to someone new.

People on the left, we get like, we just get kind of flustered and befuddled and just like exasperated and desperate. We end up looking bad. You know what I mean? Eventually he talked to ContraPoints. Her name is Natalie Nguyen. She goes by ContraPoints on YouTube. And in some ways, like, she's sort of the mirror image of someone like Stefan Molyneux. So I feel like great rhetorical use has been made on YouTube of painting this, like, social justice warrior caricature of these, like, screaming college students. Yeah. And who are self-evidently a mockery and who everyone finds basically annoying.

She's a former academic. She studied philosophy. She then started a YouTube channel. And she kind of breaks down and explains these complicated ideas. This is something I try to do often when I'm making YouTube videos. Don't wait for the comments section to post the objections. Yeah. Like, figure out what they're going to say first.

And like Destiny, she's a progressive who debates people on the internet. But if you want to convince people who aren't on your side, there actually comes a point where it's helpful to sort of understand what this thing you're opposing comes from and why people believe it and precisely why it's wrong, not just because you have... But she's not doing it by like owning people or calling them names or making them look like idiots. The way that she presents her ideas is different than anything that Caleb has been watching on YouTube. Hi, in this video, I'm going to talk about how to recognize a fascist. She's trans. She's doing these drag style, like theatrical performances. Of course, I wasn't actually being racist. It was just an edgy meme.

Can't anyone take a joke anymore? Or will the Antifa fascists violently attack you over humor now, too? Where she dresses up in costume and acts out these ideas, and it's all very vivid, and there's a lot of pageantry to it. Hello, Leute. I mean, hello, fellow Americans. Do you have a

moment to talk about the need to secure the existence of our people and the future of white children? Hang on a second. The content she was making, it's like very theatrical and engaging and interesting. I was like, wow, this content's way better than watching some dude stand in front of a camera for three hours. Are you a Nazi? Nein! Nein! I mean, no, of course not. I'm simply an alternative pan-European ethno-nationalist identitarian with some socialist leanings.

Oh. And she was edgy, too. She would dress up as a Nazi and, like, Zieg Heil and... This man is clearly a Nazi. Well, he says he's not a Nazi. Actually, I prefer Z pronoun. Stop forcing your made-up gender on me, you fascist snowflake. And I was like, oh, that's kind of cool.

And it made me uncomfortable, too, because at the same time, she's telling me how wrong I am. The most basic way to resist fascism is to recognize its propaganda for what it is. The idea that appreciating European culture is in some way linked to establishing a white ethnostate is just nonsense. And the thing that she's doing that is so revolutionary for Caleb is that she is saying this secret knowledge that you've been getting, like all this stuff about the West and gender and race and IQ, like the real secret about all of that?

Fascism promises you a part in something greater than yourself, a homeland for your people, a sense of belonging to a tradition that stretches back thousands of years. Is that all those people are full of shit? Just be sure to be extra proud of the parts of your heritage that involve buying and selling other human beings as property.

And so I just kept watching more and more of that content. Last month I made a video called Why White Nationalism is Wrong, in which I argued that reverting multiculturalism... ...is this. If you care about even one person of color or queer person or immigrant, stand up for that person by opposing the all right. So when you see people joking about being Nazis, they could just be joking, or they could be using irony to partially conceal the truth. And kind of seeing that,

wow, she really knows what she's talking about. White supremacists don't usually like bringing up the Holocaust as a point against them, but as ContraPoints has already pointed out in their brilliant video on white nationalism. Once I started watching a but as ContraPoints has already pointed out in their brilliant video on white nationalism. Once I started watching a lot of ContraPoints' content. So today I want to talk about Lauren Southern and an announcement that she made on Twitter. I started finding all these other YouTubers that I had never seen.

It's a validation machine to conservative and potentially conservative men who are looking for a reason that they haven't made Hello everyone today We're gonna take a look at a Lauren Southern video entitled what every girl needs to take a look We see a section in her video description titled links to studies How many of these links would you guess actually link to studies? This is when Caleb discovers... They call it bread tube?

Bread tube. We can call it bread tube. We can call it left tube. We can call it the anti-alt-right. Which is a reference to this 19th century anarchist book title. I used bread tube because I thought it was kind of a cool little name with some interesting history behind why it was chosen. The whole, you knowotkin conquest of bread yada yada it's this loose group of leftist YouTubers some of them are you know Marxists some of them are Democratic

Socialists some of them are anarchists but all of them are very concerned about what they see as this fascist movement gaining power on YouTube. A Stefan Molyneux video. Oh my God. And the way they deal with this is kind of fascinating. This video is titled The Truth About Sex. Facts You Won't Believe Are True. Which, yeah, no shit. They basically mock the far-right YouTubers. To be an anti-feminist, you have to have no understanding of how to read studies or what words mean and insist on remaining that way by ignoring criticism. And they try to show that these YouTubers, they're not edgy. Lauren Southern is repeating the same tired old debunked conservative talking points

that we've all heard a thousand times. The other thing they do really goes back to the thing that brought Caleb deep into YouTube in the first place. I get a lot of people telling me how they used to watch various anti-SJW YouTubers and who are also very ashamed of their former beliefs. They offer help. To you, it's a community of rational truth-tellers that don't shy away from discourse and is also often in the role of the underdog against things like the mainstream media. They empathize with people who have been drawn up into these far-right movements. The people on your computer screen are average joes, often broadcasting from their own homes and who are accountable only to you and

the rest of their families you stumbled into a big community that values the same things you do free speech common sense and putting facts over and they tell them things that you're feeling the things you believe there's really no reason to feel ashamed for buying into the whole anti-sjw thing in the past it's not all your fault There are forces here that are beyond your control. The people who further this kind of stuff to the point of a conspiratorial worldview are the ones who are embarrassing themselves. And you can do something about it.

In fact, you have to do something about it. If you're someone who's gotten involved with the alt-right in the last couple years and is now disillusioned to find yourself in the midst of a dangerous hate group, you have get out now it's not too late society will forgive you if you don't know how i was like where why where were these people at why wasn't i seeing their content it's like you ran into another part of equally always online youtube but they were just on the other side of this continent of YouTube that you were on?

Like a parallel rabbit hole. Yeah, yeah, it was like a parallel rabbit hole. White supremacy as a general attitude has, of course, been around for centuries. And you can see in Caleb's YouTube history that over a period of months... That is the issue with Lauren Southern. She literally believes that stats are the plural of anecdote. I was watching, you know, more left-wing content, but... What did the mainstream media do? Well, they lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie.

I was still also watching right-wing content. He is ricocheting between this far-left YouTube universe and this far-right world. 80% of black households are single-parent households because we pay them to. So I'd go back and forth. The more ethnic diversity you have the higher your levels of violent crime. The white genocide theory also known as ethnic displacement by savvier white nationalists who know that white genocide sounds like a crackpot notion because it is. Why would I want my nation to be populated by and reflect the culture of people who have come from all other places in the world? It was kind of, it was breaking my head basically from where I was at.

You're becoming part of this hive mind of people viewing politics through the lens of what they watch on YouTube every day. If you have the facts, you can make better decisions, which is why the left is opposed to you getting any facts. But here I am arguing with facts again, and white nationalism is about facts. Come on, this all can't be right. I believed this stuff for five years, and it's all about the facts and the logic. Everything you hold dear is right now hanging by a thread. What the hell's going on? Choose wisely. This choice will not come again. One day, after about a year of this back and forth, Caleb takes a new step in his political evolution. And he joins this

big group chat room that Destiny has set up for himself and the fans of his videos. And when I went to the Destiny servers, and I talked to actual leftists, and I talked to actual communists, and they have these like very long, actually intellectual conversations, they know what they're talking about. There's PhDs that come in Destiny's channel every once in a while and they know what they're talking about. And every time I would see a right-winger come in there, they'd just own the shit out of them and laugh them out of the chat.

And I thought, holy shit, like, I'm wrong. Thank you. Caleb spent weeks in these chat rooms talking with Destiny's fans. Today we're going to be talking about a website called therightstuff.biz, which I'm sure has some fucked up cult following or something like that. And it's there in those conversations. Specifically, we're going to be talking about their podcast called The Daily Shoah. And of course, Shoah meaning the extermination of the Jews. That Caleb realizes there's this world on YouTube that is further to the right than anything he has ever watched. This country, this constitution was set up for me by my ancestors.

This historical legacy of rights and privileges, these are mine. I don't owe them to you. Effectively, because blacks can't really seem to get into this whole deal of an abstract philosophical concept as having any kind of validity, you know, like, well, you shouldn't steal because that's wrong. He meets these new characters. They don't really do that. People he's never heard of

before. You just don't belong here. Yeah, like, our communities just don't mix. And Caleb realizes just how far the right-wing rabbit hole that he was in goes. You look at Hollywood, this is a Jewish cultural system

designed to market what they view as good to a foreign race, which is us. They're a human disease. And it legitimately scares him. And I listened to the things that they said, and they were like, no, the idea of Western civilization is dumb.

It's white civilization. And it's not cultural Marxism. It's the Jews. I really don't like Jews. They're just despicable, horrible things. It was so raw. And what scares him about these people isn't just the stuff they're saying. It's not just the racism or the anti-Semitism that they're talking about.

It's that they understand YouTube. Favorite alt-light figure, Lauren Southern. They get the mechanics of how it works. She has good instincts. She has balls, so to speak. I think that she does have the most potential of them. They get how channels build their audiences and how they appeal to new people.

And then I would listen to them and they strategize. We see them flirting with our ideas. And they joke about how they took all the little alt-lighters and the conservatives and they pulled them down the funnel and they'd say yeah you know you just go on their shows and next thing you know they're watching your content. They know they're not right but they're just nervous about about espousing these ideas fully and they're coming up with kind of like shit-tier like excuses to not go all the way. We can't disown these people you got to let them play with the ideas and get used to it.

And then slowly they'll come to our side and slowly they'll see that we're right. And I just saw it and I was like, they're doing this intentionally. This is a strategy. They are aware of the way this works. And what's interesting is that when he clicks back into BreadTube, they also have a strategy. If you want to win a culture war, you need young people, as a matter of fact. That's why the alt-right rabbit hole is so successful.

They're bringing in young people. For how to win people over to their cause using YouTube. They have to be radicalized by somebody. I think we can all agree it's probably best if they're radicalized by the left and not by the right. And you have to reach people on their level. Edginess, okay? It's important. You have to talk to people on their level, and part of that is edgy humor, part of that is memes, you know? My main goal is, and will always be, to spread leftism.

To bring as many people as possible to the left, okay? And also, liberals and leftists put out content. And so if you can indoctrinate, like, teenagers, now you're looking pretty good for the future. And inspired by what he sees on BreadTube... Unless YouTube does something about it directly, then it's only going to happen by overrunning the content that these people have put out.

Caleb decides that after all of these years... But it's difficult because the alt-right, they do streams for hours and hours a day. And all these thousands and thousands of videos he's watched. He gets out his laptop, sets it up in his grandparents' dining room. Hi, everybody. My name's Caleb.

Hits record. So, you can probably tell by the description on the video in the title what this is going to be about. And then he uploads it to YouTube. I fell down the alt-right rabbit hole. You know, my story, it starts, it actually starts in high school. I'd spend a lot of time on YouTube. I'd spend a lot of time on the internet and reading things. I listened to bands like the Dead Kennedys.

Was there ever a moment where you felt like maybe the solution was like just sort of pulling away from YouTube altogether. Oh, no, I was addicted to it. I'm still addicted to YouTube. No. It never felt like, okay, maybe the problem is like not what I'm watching on YouTube. It's that I'm watching YouTube all the time. And I thought it never even crossed my mind

even for a second. It's interesting. The concept of sort of edginess is one that's been sticking in my brain since you talked about your high school personality and then your sort of post-college personality as both being sort of seeking the edge. Was there a certain point at which

it started to feel edgier to be on the left than on the right? There's some of that, yeah, yeah. Because, like, we have our little form of blood sports, too, and, you know, it's fun to own people. I mean, I guess what I'm sort of wondering is, like, it seems like, you know, you went pretty far down this alt-right rabbit hole. You didn't get to the bottom, maybe, but, you know, you went pretty far down this alt-right rabbit hole. You didn't get to the bottom maybe, but, you know, fairly close. And then you kind of found this path to this other part of YouTube that works kind of the same way,

but with just a different ideology and got sucked pretty far down into that by some of the same algorithms and the same forces that had pulled you into the all right. And I guess I'm just, I'm wondering if that makes you feel like the problem is still that you kind of are in the rabbit hole, but you're in just a different one. You're still susceptible if the algorithm were to change in the future and lead you down some other path that maybe was more dangerous, that this could happen to you again. Yeah, there's always that concern. It's possible.

And so I just have to be conscious of it. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm wondering, like, if you think you're still being manipulated. Um, yeah. Because that is the problem with YouTube, right? It's going to recommend you what you want. But you don't plan on leaving YouTube? Don't plan on leaving YouTube, no. I know that sounds crazy.

I get how that sounds, but no, I don't plan on leaving YouTube. And now I've got a YouTube channel that's going viral, so it's like, I'm kind of in there now. You know? So what do you do about that? Okay, guys, so today... Let me go back to full screen here. So today we've got a couple things. I'm going to read through some articles on Stefan Molyneux because today we are going to talk about a topic of insecurity and how insecurity can lead one

to feelings of superiority. Hey there guys, Faraday here with a, you guessed it, another journal entry. So I hope you guys are enjoying these. Like what's the standard that you hold a person to, right? Is the standard like way up here? Do they have to be, like, damn near perfect? Do you have to, like, psychoanalyze everything? How do I tell when I'm being manipulated?

What's real and what's not? I don't know how to answer that beyond that. That's it guys. That's today, guys. That's today's entry. Have a good one. To hear more, go to whatever app you're using to hear me right now. Search for Rabbit Hole, two words, and hit subscribe.