There Are No Girls on the Internet - DISINFORMED: Meet the activist using data science to fights Nazis

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

Activist Emily Gorcenski uses her data science background to track and combat Nazis and white supremacists. She explains why the dangerous work of resistance has often fallen to women.Follow Emily on Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenskiFirst Vigil: https://first-vigil.com/Question? Comments? Just wanna say jambo / hola / hello? [e-mail]( If you’re reading this far, why not take a moment to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts? It actually will help us grow. ) Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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844-844-I-Hart. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. And nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where SportsSlice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports

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You're listening to ThisInformed, A mini-series from There Are No Girls on the Internet. I'm Bridget Todd. During World War II, many women did the dangerous work of resistance. Dutch sisters, Freddie, and Truss Over Stiggen, would get all dawed up to flirt with Nazi soldiers at bars before inviting them out for a romantic walk and luring them to their deaths.

Dancer Josephine Baker secretly worked as a spy, passing on secrets she learned while performing to the French military. Elizabeth Gloden hid Jews in her home in Berlin before getting them out of Germany to safety. Their work was often quiet and behind the scenes, and also very dangerous. Today, there's still dangerous work to be done. On January 6th, we watched white supremacists breach the Capitol,

and they were brazen, posting for selfies, live streaming, seemingly not caring if anyone knew who they were. I still see their smiling faces when I walk around my neighborhood in D.C. on bus stop bay posters asking for the public's help with identifying them. Over 270 have already been charged. No, I'm not going to lie. In the aftermath, it was kind of satisfying to watch people who were once so brazen get arrested, but I know it doesn't end there.

It's important to follow up with what happens, even after the arrests are made. What were they charged with? Were they convicted? What happens next? Luckily, digital infrastructure that makes this easy for anyone to do already exists, and much of the dangerous work of building it out has been done by brave women armed with data. Women like Emily Gorsensky. Emily is an activist who uses her data science background to fight Nazis and white supremacists. It's dangerous work. She moved to Berlin,

in part just to get some space. Emily attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Heather Heyer was killed. There, well-known neo-Nazi, Christopher Cantor, Cantwell assaulted Emily with pepper spray. She pressed charges, and in turn, Cantwell tried to press charges against her. When Cantwell learned that there was a warrant out for his arrest, he filmed himself sobbing, thus earning the nickname The Crying Nazi. Just a few moments before I spoke with Emily, news broke. Cantwell was being sentenced to 41 months in prison for trying to extort a member of a rival

group of neo-Nazis, who call themselves the Bull Patrol. They were bull haircuts in tribute to Dylan. roof, who shot and killed nine at a Charleston church. Cantwell has been harassing Emily for years. And now he's going to prison. She sift blue label whiskey as we talked, a quiet celebration. Usually I start these interviews asking about people's backgrounds and where they came from and all of that.

But I have to mention top of the show, white supremacist, aka crying Nazi Christopher Cantwell, was just sentenced to 41 months in prison. How are you feeling? You know, I feel relieved and I feel grateful that this is something that I don't have to worry about anymore. So for those who don't know, Chris Cantwell was nicknamed the crying Nazi because in 2017, he came to the United Right rally. There was this vice documentary that featured him very heavily. He was talking a big game about like how much violence he wanted to do. He was going to kill people.

like, we're going to kill all these commies and stuff like that. He had all these guns and was talking about how many weights he lifts. It turns out that he actually assaulted me at that rally with pepper spray. I'm during the infamous Tiki Torch rally at the University of Virginia. I pressed charges. And when he found out that there was a warrant for his arrest, the reason that he found out that there was a warrant for his arrest is I kind of purposely let it slip that I had signed, sworn a warrant for his arrest.

He recorded this really long YouTube video where he like started crying about having a warrant for his arrest and then read his phone number off to like on this YouTube video like his actual phone number and you know this was just a few days after the event in Charlottesville

so it was very much in everyone's mind and so he became known as the crying Nazi and since that moment And his life has taken many, many, many turns for the worst. And he went to jail. He pleaded guilty for assaulting me. And then he recently was in this process of extorting another fellow white nationalist, which got him in trouble with the feds.

And he was just sentenced. He was found guilty at trial and just sentenced to 41 months. So this is somebody that had been harassing me for a long time. And this is somebody who's been threatening me and threatening my friends and my family. and, you know, prison isn't a solution for this behavior. Like, there needs to be a bigger fix. But by God, I'm going to be really grateful for 41 months of not having to worry about his bullshit. So is this how you thought you would use your data science degrees fighting Nazis?

No, not at all. In fact, I went to school. I wanted to design airplanes. And I did that for a long time until I realized that designing airplanes was boring. and data science both paid better and was more fun. But I never really set out, I never set out to be an activist. I always felt that I had some sort of responsibility to make the world a better place. When I was younger, there were stories about how the clan would march through

like the nearby city next to where I grew up, which was a small town in Connecticut. And it's like, what is the clan doing in Willamantic Connecticut? But, you know, the clan is everywhere because white supremacy is everywhere. And, you know, I used to joke with my friends. We used to, like, kind of fantasize, like, what would we do if the clan came to town? Oh, yeah, we'd, like, throw smoke bombs out of him and shoot paintball guns up or whatever. Like, we were, like, 13, 14 years old, and here we were, like, conspiring to commit what would probably be federal crimes. But, you know, that was, you know, long ago, statute of limitations has since passed.

But I always felt like, you know, racism when it got to, that degree was something that had to be confronted. It took me a lot longer to understand that racism wasn't just that public behavior, that it was something more deep, deeply rooted in society. And when I started to understand that, I started to become more outspoken. And I guess that's at the point in which I saw that I had a responsibility as a working professional who, who, somebody who was fortunate enough to have stable housing, loving wife, a good upbringing. It was my responsibility to say something about bigotry in the world. It was a pure coincidence that all of this shit happened in Charlottesville where I was living. And so it was a matter of circumstance, a matter of, you know, weird destinies of the universe,

and a matter of just always having this moral resolve that when things got really bad, I knew that I would be on the front lines. How did you wind up going to that Unite the Right, Riley? I know you lived in Charlottesville, but what made you say, I have to go out there? You know, I felt a responsibility to. I was somebody that had a decent social media profile at the time,

and I had spent the last couple of years speaking out about sexism in the tech industry, and I was doing things like, you know, I was working on things like video games for people to help people quit smoking and video games for stroke patients and stuff like that as part of my professional work. And so I watched GamerGate unfold as somebody doing this like game development

for, you know, people who weren't your typical gamer. And I kind of watched this whole thing unfold. Like, you know, if somebody finds out what I'm doing, are they going to call me some sort of like social justice warrior or whatever because I'm like trying to help elderly folks who have had a stroke like rehab themselves like it was really concerning and I found it you know deeply baffling so you know I kind of always like watch that that evolve and then I watched it evolve into the Trump campaign and I watched it evolve into the neo reactionary movement and I watched

evolve into like the culture wars with the tech industry. And I just kind of saw this happening and watching like, you know, this be dominated by these right wing, these fascistic forces with no real pushback. And I started thinking like, why don't we have better, why don't we have a better ground game when it comes to social media? So kind of like, as soon as everything started happening in Charlottesville, I was like, well, I need to figure out how to do this. You know, things in Charlottesville weren't just the one big rally. In 2017, there were at least five neo-Nazi rallies in Charlottesville. Charlottesville, Virginia became a hotbed of violent white supremacist activity, and I don't think I'll ever forget those chance. Some of them were smaller and most people forget about them. But the first

sort of one that made national news was Richard Spencer came in in mid-May, like Mother's Day in May of 2017. And that was when he held the first torch rally. And it kind of like, you know, raise people's alarms, like neo-Nazis with Tiki Tiki Tork, like with torches marching around in America. That's not cool. And this was like after Richard Spencer had gotten punched famously. And so there was like all, you know, he was kind of like a high profile figure. And when that happened, I was actually here where I am now in Berlin. And in Berlin, I was, watching how the activism here unfolds. You know, here, if there's an anti-Nazi demo, there's literally advertisements for it on the bus, on the trains, right?

They, there's resourcing behind anti-fascism. It's very deep in the culture in Berlin. You walk down the street and you will see posters for anti-foot demos. And it's not as secretive as a movement. And so I started to learn and I watched and I used these like international ties that I had to try to figure out, like how does activism work overseas? And when things started to unfold in Charlottesville, when the big rally was announced, and when the KKK rally in July was announced, so the KKK rally and United the Right were two different rallies, believe it or not.

So when these were announced, I was like, okay, well, I have this platform. And I've spent all of this time looking at how these European movements advertise themselves. Okay, let's see if we can change it up. So I decided, like, my best role was to use my voice, to be in the front lines, to report from the front lines, what's happening, to put myself in harm's way if necessary, and just try to make, you know, make the protest visible from the inside, not just as a journalist, but also as a participant, right? Like, this is me. Like, I'm actually protesting. and this is this is what it's about you know try to try to show it you know real and raw so that's kind of like the mission and you know when unite the right came around it was for me

it was like okay it's time for me to get up grab my phone and go like there was never a moment's hesitation i knew exactly what my role was knew exactly what my job was and for me it was just go out there and do it yeah i mean you talked about when you were young you know what would be do if the KKK came, I always, people say, you know, whatever you would do in, you know, Nazi Germany, what you're doing now is what you would have done, right? Like, whatever you would have done, like when you think of the civil rights movement, whatever you're doing now is what you would have done. And I feel like that line of thinking has really created some urgency in me to not just sit back and be like, oh, I support what they're doing, but I support it, you know,

just in my heart. I'm doing nothing in terms of actually meaningfully. supporting it. And it sounds like that was a motivating factor for you as well. Totally, totally. I think, you know, I spent a lot of that year traveling Europe and visiting sites of, you know, horrors throughout, you know, 20th century history, memorials to the victims of the Nazis and memorials to people like Jan Palach, who was a Czech activist, who self-immolated at the end of the Prague Spring in 1969 to protest the the oppressive invasion of the Soviet Union of Czechoslovakia at the time. And thinking of like, you know, what is it, what must it have been like to be in that position?

Right. How must it have felt when you don't have these choices? And trying to understand, you know, shaping my own perception, to understand that we look at history and we assume that there was clear black and white morals, you know, all throughout the time. Like that there was, you know, things were fine and then bad things were coming and it was like clear what side you should be on and it was clear what you should have done, right? We forget that the majority of people did not, you know, approve of Martin Luther King, right? We forget that the majority of people did not approve of the civil rights movement. We forget that there were, you know, there was massive support for not.

Nazi Germany in the United States. For example, we forget that, you know, the Nazi party was elected into power, right? So these things are not as clear. And when we look at the current era, it's very easy for us to say, well, things are a little bit ambiguous. I don't like what's happening, but maybe there's a way out where we don't have it. It doesn't have to be nasty. I don't think that's true.

I think that it actually has to be nasty. and it's up to us to control how nasty it is. And if we don't want it to be really, really nasty, then we have to deal with a little bit nasty. But there's no easy way out. And for me, that's like, you know, you just have to have a clear conscience about what you're going to do and what your boundary is, what your threshold is,

and then, you know, make that decision and act. So do you think that's necessary to get to a place where we won't have Nazis, you know, marching in the streets, that we have to get comfortable with some level of person personal risk? Is that what it's going to take? I think, yes. But I think that the more people who are comfortable with personal risk, the less risk it is, right? The more people who can do what I'm doing, the better it is for all of us, right? And this is definitely one of those things where

there's a finite amount of energy that these fascists have. And if we distribute that load, it becomes much easier to bear. You know, I think that this is a cost. This is a known cost. I knew what the cost of this was going to be going in. That doesn't mean it was easy because it's not been. And it doesn't mean I knew everything about how it would go going in. But I do think that like, you know, when you speak out against hate, people are going to, people who hate are going to push back against you. And I think that, you know, the harassment, the lies, the defamation, you know, all of this, it's, it's part of it's, it's part of the, of the cost. But the good news is that, you know, since those times, like, the amount of people

who are speaking up and fighting back has gotten larger and it's gotten easier. You know, but for, you know, if you're high profile, you're always going to get hate. And for me, you know, now it's like, I'm just glad that I can absorb some of the hate so that it doesn't fall on to the next person. It's if you want to like come and troll me on Twitter, like I really prefer that you don't. But if I had to make a choice between me, and like some, you know, random, you know, more vulnerable, nervous person who's finally getting the courage to speak out, like, come at me with everything you've got. Like, I can take it. That person over there is going to have a much harder time.

Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. The worst singer in the group? The worst?

Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group, the yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. Uh, one or. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and friends on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.

And as the number one podcaster, I-heart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart.

Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode we're cutting through the noise. Breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines.

We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves. Their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live there. them. Listen to Sports Slice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok.

Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WMBA standout, Kate Martin and rising hockey star, Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel on. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs, Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladeki. The ability to show a gold medal to someone

have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world, old. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. And we're back. Emily is trans. So when white supremacists and Nazis harass her, they do so by weaponizing her identity. And people, even those who are ostensible, on her side. Don't always speak up about it.

I mean, something else that I noticed in your situation is, you know, you talked about assuming risk and harm. I do feel that a disproportionate amount of that risk and harm falls on people who are the most marginalized. And for you, you know, in this case with this white supremacist, both he and his lawyer continuously misgendered you. They filed a petition to use your dead name in the proceedings. It's like, I almost feel as if, you're a lawyer, you're even from folks on the left, we don't talk about the specific ways that people's identities are weaponized by, you know, white supremacists, bad people. And it makes, it gives the impression that people are all absorbing the same level of risk when in your case, you clearly are not. You are absorbing more. Yeah, I think it's, it's a shame that we fail to do that on the left. And this is one of the things that, you know, I didn't really account for. I thought I would have had a little bit more.

support in those matters. And it's frustrating at times when I see things like, you know, a right-wing author writing about me using my dead name and transphobic commentary for no, for that has nothing to do with the book, but he's doing it because he knows that he can hurt me. That's one thing, you know, and that sucks. What really sucks is when it, that gets ignored. And I see this all the time. I see this with, you know, trans people, you know, people aren't calling out transphobia. And it's, you know, people aren't understanding the ways that transphobia harms, right? And these are leftists who fancy themselves to be trans allies, but they still don't understand those harms. And, you know, I'm sure that, you know, you know, it's, we, we see this all

the time, like, black women get attacked, and we find the attacks reprehensible, but somehow we still separate ourselves from like the anti-blackness of it, right? And, you know, it's, I know it's hard to understand and to empathize, but I think, you know, we really have to do better at seeing these things and understanding what those costs are. I mean, could you imagine what would have happened if the judge allowed that petition for me to be dead named in court and misgendered court. Like, I didn't want to have to fight a battle over basic, you know, naming rights, you know, and it could have been that. Thankfully, it wasn't, but, you know, these are the, like, those are the stakes. And, like, that just gets swept under the rug. Was some part of you worried that

that proceeding, that would be allowed, that you would be, that they would officially say, yes, we're using your dead name? Um, no, because I, you know, I didn't, you know, I didn't even, know that it happened until after it was handled by my lawyers. I was on a like a work trip. I was at in Portland, Oregon. I get a call, you know, after work one day. My lawyer is like, all right, Emily, I got to tell you something, something really shitty happened, but don't worry, it's okay. I'm like, all right, what's up? And so she told me how she had to like go and argue in front of the judge and all of that. And, you know, we could have just gone in with my name change form and been like, no, you have to do this. Otherwise, it's contempt of court. But we actually managed to argue it

successfully without needing to go and like, like, formally do it because I think, you know, not every trans person can afford a name changer has access to one, right? So it's actually an important thing to do. So I'm grateful that my lawyers were so amazing and that they went to bat for me. But, yeah, you know, it's just these, it's always going to be something, right? And it feels like it's always going to be something that follows me for the rest of my life. Yeah, and it's like, you know, it's like one more thing you don't fucking need. One more thing to take you away from your work or to take up your energy or your time or your capacity, which we know are finite resources.

That's part of the plan, right? This is a weaponized sort of war of attrition, right, that they do this. Because if they get you spending your energy on all of these little things, ultimately, if you needed to swallow it, you could to get the job done. You would just swallow it to get the job done. But you want to fight it, right? And so they're trying to distract you. They're trying to steal your energy fighting these pointless battles. And they're not pointless battles, but they're not the main point of battle, right?

So it's like death by a thousand paper cuts with all of this stuff. And yeah, I don't know. It just seems like that's part of this like fascist strategy is to just keep you constantly occupied so that you can never get ahead because they know that if you had a moment peace, right? imagine what we could all do given that. Like the stuff that I'm accomplishing now, having moved to Germany, having gotten some space between, you know, the trauma and the noise and all of that, and like the healing that I've done.

Like I'm doing the best work of my life right now because that's the power that I have. And I got that power by having to fight all, like, by surviving all of these fights for so long. You know, as somebody that's mixed race, as somebody that's transgender, as somebody that's queer, right? It's just a constant battle. Well, surviving that has given me the tools to excel. But at the same time, like, sometimes I wish I could just be kind of normal and just, like, exists like everyone else.

And then just have a normal life, right? And not everyone gets to make it through all of that noise. And they, you know, that's the point. That's how they keep us down. Yeah. I even see it in, you know, I feel that a lot of the online conversation around issues impacting the trans community, people, like bad actors and shitheads have dominated, especially online, dominated those conversations.

And so every conversation is like trans people in sports, bathrooms. And it's like if we, if folks did not have to constantly, you know, contend with these very loud people who essentially, in my opinion, have been able to really own the conversation online. Like, could we actually have a productive conversation that moves us forward? But I feel like we can't because we're still the people who want to be flooding every conversation with like a bunch of nonsense. They have dominated the online space, I feel.

Yeah, and it's all culture war stuff, right? Like this whole thing now, it's about trans kids in sports, right? There's no problems with trans kids in sports. all of these things that they're talking about, there's no statistics whatsoever that suggests that this is a problem in any way, shape, or form. If a bunch of trans girls were out there winning every sports championship in high school women's sports

and college women's sports, even I would say, like, you know, maybe we need to revisit this, right? But that's not happening. There's none. There's none. There are no trans women dominating collegiate athletics. There are no trans women dominating high school athletics. There are no trans women dominating the Olympics, you know, women's competition. There are some trans women who are successful in those competitions.

But we do not see a wave of, you know, cis men trying to pretend that they're trans women so they can get in a gold medal. We don't see that. We don't see trans women, trans girls joining these teams to dominate them. This is a completely fabricated issue. And the reason it has been fabricated is in a. order to create this polarization so that the right can stay relevant by creating this cultural division. And trans people have been historically used as scapegoats as just, you know, we are just

one sort of identity that has been used as scapegoats. You know, three, four years ago, this was all about bathroom bills. Okay, well, there was no evidence of any trans women ever sexually assaulting anyone in the bathroom or any men trying, you know, cisgender men trying to pretend that they are trans women to assault women in bathrooms. There were plenty of cases of cisgender men going into women's bathrooms when a cisgender woman who was like a butch lesbian went in there and then beat her up. So the actual threat of men, men, again, men on women violence and women's bathrooms was the opposite of this problem, right?

The thing that they were saying was going to happen was the thing that they were doing. All of this is culture war stuff. All of this is designed to keep inflated this polarized version of politics and to rally people to, you know, the right knows that it is a losing cause, but they create these fake issues to mobilize people. And it works because we're left here holding the, the bag because we have to be outraged and we have to fight it because if we don't fight it, it's a catastrophe.

If we do fight it, it becomes this polarization vector. And then all of these talking heads, you know, on social media and in the New York Times op-ed and on cable news, they're all sitting here going, hmm, is America so polarized? Like, is it really both sides that are bad? And like, fuck you, buddy, you're not affected. Like, you're not going to get beat up if you go to try to take a leak in the bathroom at a courthouse or a school, right? This is not an issue of people becoming polarized. This is an issue of people who have always had a right defending against lies that are being used to try to remove that right in order to further a different political

agenda. Like, we're not a, you know, we're not a football, right? We're people. And then us fighting to retain whatever little dignity we are granted somehow becomes like a both sides issue. Fuck that. It's so insulting. And I think people forget that these are people that, yeah, we're people, it's like, you're, yeah, you're not, I guess I hate when I see people talking about other human beings as if it's some sort of ideological exercise or something, you know, not someone's actual life. It's very frustrating. More after a quick break.

Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel,

help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get. Get your podcast. Hum me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-heart to get started. That's 844-8-4-Eheart. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind.

Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athlete themselves.

Their locker room stories, their reaction, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight real. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaders to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions

everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 and the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On hurdle with Emily Abadi,

we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards. If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain. It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it. An Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ladecki. The ability

to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile that means the world to me and that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience

isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Let's get right back into it.

Emily lives in Berlin. After being on the receiving end of ongoing harassment campaigns and attacks, including being swatted, a terrifying harassment tactic where law enforcement is summoned to your address under bogus pretenses, she was just looking for some space and some healing.

You mentioned that having moved to Berlin, that you've been able to have a little bit more space, a little bit more healing, which I'm so thankful for because Lord knows you deserve it. But I guess one of my questions is, I read that you initially decided to leave the country after things just got so scary for you. You know, I read that you had a, like, you were swatted, essentially. Can you tell me about this? Yeah, I was swatted, lots of death threats, other threats of violence, lawsuits.

you know, all of this stuff came down on me. And, you know, the swatting incident in October of 2017 was a wake-up call. You know, thankfully, neither my wife nor I were home at the time. But, you know, terrified the whole neighborhood. I mean, they came in, they blocked off the street. They had men running down the street with assault rifles. You know, and I wasn't even in the state when this happened. That was a bit of a wake-up call.

And the next month, I came here to Berlin for a month. I had to testify at Chris Cantwell's preliminary hearing for my case. And after that, I was like, I need to get out. Because here I am Chris Cantwell's preliminary hearing. There's a dozen Nazis in the courtroom. They all know where I live. That's a scary thing to begin. So I figure, like, I'm going to.

I'm going to, you know, get out of the country for a little bit because the threat was just so, so prominent, you know, prevalent. And Chris Cantwell is, you know, he's posting in his blog posts about, you know, posting blog posts about me, writing and gab about me, saying, I'm going to kill you, you know, rallying up violence against me. People were drawing pictures of me being run down with a car, singing songs about, you know, gassing K-words and trannies, right? And so I just said, you know, I left in November 2017 for a month. And it was very healing. And I came back and I felt really good as, you know, when I came, when I was there. And I came back and I watched my mental health just go to him. And then the threats, you know, we're still there.

And then every time I would leave Charlottesville, I would feel better. And every time I would come back, I would spiral. And at some point, you know, I was like, I need a change. And my wife saw it too. She's like, you're not going to survive if you keep doing this. So, you know, my best friend had moved to Berlin at the beginning of 2017. They said, you know, we have a position open.

Why don't you apply? So I did. I got the job and I said, I need a change. You know, it's not safe for me here. I'm not healthy here. Why not? Let's make it an adventure. What does your healing journey look like?

Very nonlinear. Healing is very nonlinear. It's been a lot of trying to unwind, trying to let things go, knowing that I don't have to fight every fight, getting some space, some physical security, some mental security. Keeping myself busy with new intellectual challenges, like learning German, not an easy language to learn. You know, trying to do that keeps me busy, keeps me engaged. So for me, it's really just about, you know, finding the mental space and energy to feel like I'm, to feel good about myself again.

To feel like I have progress to make, you know, like at some point I will speak fluent. German. And I am getting closer every day. The fight against white supremacy feels like it has no end. I can docks 100 Nazis. I can, you know, put 100 Nazis in jail. And there's another 100 Nazis to go. And so, you know, it's not like we can't win the fight, but I can't win the fight. Right? I can learn German. I can learn a new programming language. I can learn to be a better salesperson. You know, I can learn to lead a team better. I can learn to, I can travel. I can open up my mind to these experiences, right? And for me, that's like really concrete, really tangible. Well, I guess I can't travel now because it's stupid pandemic. Yeah, I have to tell you, this is kind of an aside, but

I'm from Virginia. I'm from Midlothian, small town, right outside of Richmond. And the, and so, you know, people in Virginia, there's a certain kind of southern politeness. And when you go have an interaction with like a retail worker, you know, it's like, it's got to be like, oh, you look just like so-and-so. Are you related to them? Like every interaction is 20 minutes. When I visited Berlin for the first time, it was so jarring to me how efficient every transaction was. And that was a real learning curve. I had to learn how to conduct myself in exchange, in like retail exchanges with very efficient Germans in Perlland. Yeah, this is not a land of small talk.

Try to make small talk with somebody. They're like, what? Why are you asking me this? So for me, coming to Virginia, it was like, you know, you ask somebody how they're doing and then they actually answer. And you're like, it's a real particular thing. Tracking the court cases of white supremacists and Nazis

is surprisingly difficult. Cases can move slowly. And sometimes our media landscape is only interested in high-profile offenders, while smaller-scale ones can go overlooked. With Emily's work at FirstFigil, she's using data science to make it easier for journalists and activists and all of us to keep these people on our collective radars. Can you tell me about First Vigil?

First Vigil is a resource for keeping track of criminal cases in the U.S. involving white supremacists and other far-right actors and hate crime emitters. And so it's basically just a public, it's essentially a front end for a public records service, right? So one of the things that I noticed in following up with the cases around Charlottesville and the other high profile white supremacy cases and far right cases throughout the U.S. in 2018 was that it's really hard to keep track of all of them. Because the legal process is quite slow. It typically takes a year or more for a criminal case to resolve. Chris Cantwell was arrested in January of 2020,

and it's now February of 2021. He just got sentenced. That's a relatively fast case, and that's over a year. Somebody like Robert Bowers, who's accused of murdering 11 Jews in the synagogue in Pittsburgh, three years ago, almost, still has not gone to trial. So I wanted to create a resource for, activists and journalists to be able to keep up with what is happening in these cases. Because if you're only writing a story when the big things happen, like the big, you know,

oh, so-and-so had a hearing or so-and-so has a trial or so-and-so got sentenced, you know, that's months in between each event. It's really easy in the pace of today's world to lose the thread in that time. Right. So if you're, if you write a story about somebody getting arrested in in January and the next time anything happens is in September, you've completely lost the threat of that case. We're going to see this, by the way, with the capital riot case. All of these arrests are happening now. A lot of these guys, you know, they've already been detained pending trial unless they plea out and the feds are going to be in no rush to plead them out. The next time that we're going to hear anything is probably going to be 2022. This is going to be a distant

memory. So First Vigil is a resource designed to try to keep that thread together. So it's essentially a court calendar with details about what people are charged with. I try to bring the charging documents. I try to make those available when I can. I try to add context around like, you know, how many years could they be looking at, you know, what is the crime that they're, you know, associated with. And so it's just like a way for me to track what's going on. And it's not comprehensive because, frankly, if I worked 80 hours a week on it, I couldn't keep up.

That's how bad it is right now. Wow. You brought up the insurrection. I don't even really know how to ask this. I feel when you first started getting a high profile on social media for some of the work you were doing unmasking Nazis, obviously I thought it was. the fucking best. There were people, even people who I feel, I agree with who would say, like, oh, you shouldn't be doxing people, blah, blah, blah. I guess I don't feel like that work was

necessarily well received by everybody. And I found that surprising. And I think now that we've had this insurrection, I'm very grateful that you started what seems like kind of thankless work, not to mention dangerous work of creating an infrastructure where we could track some of these cases, where it wouldn't just be, you know, they got charged, they got arrested in charge, and then you didn't follow up with what happened. And I guess I wonder, do you feel that you, do you feel as if you've seen a trajectory of people being like,

oh, this work is bad, to now people being like, oh, thank God, this work exists? Yeah, I think, I mean, I wasn't the first person to out Nazis. I mean, there's a long story of history of doing this. And the work I do with First Vigil is not, is actually not about outing them. because I source all of that information from news stories, right? So first vigil is a journalistic resource.

But before I created that, there was no real good public comprehensive database of these events. And First Vigil may not be comprehensive, but it's at least contemporary. And the reporting was like there's a small handful of reporters who did a good job, but they were clearly overwhelmed. and I think that in the time since I've created First Fidgel, we've actually seen a lot of activity to, by other groups, both activists, journalists, and academics and think tanks, to make this stuff available, to make this information available. I think it's a public good to do this.

And I'm just really glad that lots of people have seen that, like, one, my resource can't be the one overriding dominant resource, and they can add their own flavor. But two, that there's a need for this, right? Like one of my sort of philosophies is, you know, find work that needs to be done and do it. That's what First Vigil was all about. It was just like, I saw a need, so I decided to create a thing.

Lots of other people are doing this. They're adding their own spin to it. This is great. Like the world is richer when more people are taking public data, making it available, and adding their own interpretation, right? Because we are better off

when we as intelligent thinking people, and we are all intelligent thinking people, can see different sides of a story, different perspectives, make their own decision. Right? So, sure, like, you know, I might not agree with everything that the ADL does.

You know, I think they're overall a pretty good organization. I don't agree with all of their politics. I don't agree with all of their conclusions. But if they're doing this work and I'm doing this work, great. Now you get two different perspectives on this work. And none of those perspectives have to be, oh, what if the Nazis the good guy, right? And more of those perspectives have to center this clear evil. And to me, that's important.

So, you know, I think that it's good that more people are doing this because we really need to understand this as a society. We really need to understand white supremacy. The business of resistance is women's work. And Emily follows the legacy of women working quietly behind the scenes to build out the infrastructure for accountability. So many of the people doing this work yourself, Molly Conger, others are women. How does it make you feel that this work that is so risky and sometimes, you know, thankless, so much of it is being done by women. Like, why do you think this is? I think because women support each other.

and have to support each other to get by. And this is actually a way of us supporting each other, right? We're putting this out there to protect each other. I think that, you know, there are men in this space and they're doing really good work. But I think that overall, there's less impetus for men to see this at, like they see this as work and they see it as important, but they don't necessarily have the same experience

of, you know, needing to create these support structures publicly and for strangers. Women, you know, women support each other when they see each other crying in the bathroom at a club, right? Women support each other, you know, on the internet, on the bus. I think that a lot of the women are doing this work because they see, they know the harassment that they've received. They know that they're not the only ones receiving the harassment. And putting that resource out there, it's like a signal. It's like a, you know, we're fighting for you. I might not know who you are, but I'm fighting for you.

Emily, where can people keep up with all the amazing, heroic stuff that you are up to? I don't know if I'm up to any heroic stuff, but if you want to see cute selfies and random tweets and probably grammatically incorrect German from time to time, the best way to keep in touch with me is that Emily Gorsensky on Twitter. So that's where I'm at. I hope that you're out celebrating tonight, kicking back, having a good one, you deserve it. I've got a little bit of work to do, but yeah, I've got a beer here and a whiskey, and I'm going to enjoy this win, and look forward to the next win.

Cheers. If you enjoyed this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi. We'd love to hear from you at hello at tango.com. Disinformed is brought to you by their No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer.

Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Lever. help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day

and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Life is full of hurdles, so how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional Apple athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital

One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. And nobody's telling you exactly what happens. That's where SportsSlyce comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to Sports Slice on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling. the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on, a Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghini's, private jets,

a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast.

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