Part Seven: The Digital Reich traces American fascism's shift from street violence to digital organization, highlighting Louis Beam's 1984 LibertyNet and Milton Kleim Jr.'s "cyber guerrilla" tactics. The episode connects Alex Jones to extremist networks via the Mount Carmel meeting and analyzes how Usenet brigading and Gamergate mainstreamed hate. It details how manifestos like the Turner Diaries and Siege inspired lone-wolf terrorists including Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, and Brenton Tarrant, creating a decentralized pipeline of violence that continues with modern shooters targeting bureaucrats to beat previous "high scores." Ultimately, this evolution demonstrates how the internet transformed isolated radicalization into a global, lethal threat. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Trust Your Girlfriends00:03:35
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's making bad decisions, my me.
In the interim between the sixth and the seventh chapter, Sophie stole the case of Perrier that I was going to throw.
So I had to upgrade to a case of LaCroix, which is roughly twice the size and mass.
But before I throw this LaCroix, which will come at the end of our episode, I have a surprise thing that I'm going to throw.
I found an open base of overseeds.
Yeah!
Did it go everywhere?
Nope.
God damn it.
But now I've got a snack.
I was so excited.
What?
It was sealed pretty tight.
Thank you.
Sophie signaled that she had hidden the Perrier underneath a pillow.
So now I'm going to throw one of these two, but I don't know which yet.
But first, my co-hosts, who I didn't introduce before throwing it thing.
Katie Stolen Cody Johnson.
That's right.
That's who we are.
We all just had a snack attack.
He was snacking a little bit.
Has a bunch of snacks in front of him.
Cody's going to be nomin sunflower seeds like Fox Mulder in the first several episodes of The X-Files, but not after that because they decided it was a bad thing for his character to do.
Good change.
It's not the best thing to eat on.
I guess there's nothing.
There's absolutely nothing that's good to eat on a microphone.
The Conspiracy Pill00:10:36
No, but the worst thing is probably sunflower seeds.
Did it last time?
I know.
Yesterday?
I know.
And I can already hear the complaints.
Here's coming.
Chapter 7.
The Digital Reich.
Yep.
Yeah, you don't like where that's going.
Nope.
In the years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the white supremacist movement seemed to have spent most of its fury.
Nothing like sea drift occurred in the late 90s.
Nazi violence, when it happened, was mostly focused around racist skinheads and groups like the White Aryan Resistance or the Hammerskin Nation.
In 1996, a group called the Aryan Republican Army robbed 22 banks in the Midwest.
Several of them had ties to Elohim City, where Tim McVeigh had also tried to hide out after his attack.
But these, and other eruptions of violence, were dealt with in short order.
By the time the early 2000s rolled along and the war on terror kicked off, you could be forgiven for thinking the white supremacist movement was on its way out.
Everything You Love Will Burn by Vegas Tenhold chronicles the movement during this period.
One of the largest actions in these days was an 80-man march in Toledo by the National Socialist Movement.
Putting together a march that large was the work of the entire national organization, and they were so overwhelmed by counter-protesters that they never managed to take to the streets.
Remember back in Seadrift, Louis Beam met 3 or 400 Klansmen just to show up in hometown in Texas.
In 2010, the National Socialist Movement held a gathering in Trenton, New Jersey.
Vegas attended to chronicle the event, and the night before the march, he was present when a group called Anti-Racist Action assaulted the Nazis as they ate dinner in a rented meeting hall.
The next day, the National Socialist Movement marched.
Quote, The entire route of the march was lined with National Guard and riot police.
They'd closed off every access point, and no one was around to watch the Nazis trudge along the wet streets while the rain soaked their black uniforms.
They arrived at a wide square in front of the Capitol building.
A few modest steps led up to the entrance, and a small podium stood at the top.
Police had cordoned off the entire square.
In the distance, the counter-protesters had gathered.
The police, fearing another showdown, kept them two blocks away from the Nazis, just barely within shouting distance.
So the rally was reduced to a couple dozen neo-Nazis scrimming obscenities at 50 or so anti-racists down the street, while the anti-racists screamed right back.
The National Socialist Movement billed itself as direct successors to George Lincoln Rockwell's party.
In five years, they'd gone from being able to make a nationwide gathering of 80 men down to less than 30.
But looking at those numbers does not give a full picture of the American fascist movement during this period.
While the ability of old guard fascist groups like the NSM and the Klan to draw numbers had declined, the movement was deep in the process of spreading to a new generation through new means.
In the last chapter, I mentioned John Ronson's Them.
John's book gives us a look at the movement in the late 1990s from the perspective of individuals like Alex Jones.
Mr. Jones first rose to prominence within the fringe right in the mid-tlate 1990s, and his career illustrates the first stages of what would grow to be known as the alt-right.
Now, on paper, Jones was a libertarian, a political independent who attacked Democrats and Republicans with equal vigor, seeing both as agents of the NWO and the globalist elite.
You would not hear attacks on the Jews as an ethnic group from Jones, nor would you see him sporting a swastika.
But if you dig in just a little bit, there have always been connections between Alex Jones and the fascist right.
At one point in Them, John tries to infiltrate a meeting of the Bilderberg group with a writer named Big Jim Tucker, editor of The Spotlight, Willis Cartow's magazine.
Big Jim Tucker was a friend and a frequent guest on Alex Jones' InfoWars in its early days.
Like Jones, Big Jim was obsessed with the Bilderberg group.
He viewed it as part of the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the globe.
Jones possessed the same beliefs, minus the J-word.
That 1999 gathering at the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco that I talked about in the last chapter, when John Ronson showed up with Randy Weaver?
Well, that gathering was a volunteer effort to rebuild the Branch Davidian church, organized by 25-year-old Alex Jones.
He told the Oklahoman, quote, We've had school teachers and black single mothers and auto mechanics and doctors.
There was even a Jewish rabbi out here one day helping us.
Sure, we've had folks in their camo and their camo hats with the militias helping us too.
One of the men who gathered in Mount Carmel that day to help Alex Jones was Colonel Bo Gritz.
Gritz was a legendary figure in the Patriot movement, a decorated veteran, the supposed inspiration behind the character John Rambo, and a hardcore believer in Christian identity theology.
In 1998, right before the Mount Carmel meeting, he sent out this in an online bulletin to his followers.
Do you see the sign, the scent, the stain and mark of the beast on America today?
Are you willing to submit and join this seed line of Satan?
Look to those who are openly antichrist, who in the world is promoting abortion, pornography, pedophilia, godless laws, adultery, new age international banking, entertainment industry, and world publishing.
Wherever you find perversion of God's laws, you will find the worshippers of BAL with their roots still in Babylonian mysticism.
So that's cool.
Now, New Age international banking, the entertainment industry and world publishing, is a bit coyer than just shouting, Jews!
But Bo Gritz was more direct in a bulletin he sent out a year later during the 2000 election.
Jews, feminists, sodomites, other liberal activists may install gore over an apathetic moral majority.
If so, runaway abortion, antichrist, God, and globalism are certain.
The first message was too subtle.
Yeah.
Now, think about those messages as I read this quote that Alex Jones is related in John Ronson's book, Them, which was said during that Mount Carmel meeting.
The Bilderbergers, said Alex, are the Roman Senate.
It's a pyramid.
They're way up there.
Below them, you've got the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, and then you've got us down here, the cattle, the human resources.
And Randy Weaver is way out over there.
See, he left.
They hate that.
So they scared the cattle back in the pen.
See?
Burn them out.
I'm living in a place where black helicopters, 150 miles south of me, are burning buildings, terrorizing people.
And I'm the extremist?
Who says you're an extremist? I asked.
That's Ronson speaking.
The Anti-Defamation League, he yelled.
The ADL are a bucket of black paint and a brush.
They're worse than the Klan.
They get massive funding from the globalists.
It doesn't matter if your girlfriend's Jewish, your little sister's Korean.
Anybody who wants to live free is a racist.
The ADL is the scum of the earth.
Okay.
Alex Jones.
1989.
Yeah.
Now.
He did a good job.
Yeah.
What he was trying to do.
Yeah, he really succeeded.
So these are more or less the same beliefs that Alex Jones would spend years broadcasting to millions of listeners around America in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Viewed independently, Jones looks like a harmless conspiracy theorist.
But placed next to Bo Gritz, we can see him for what he is, a way to ease people into Christian identity-style beliefs that lead, inevitably, to exterminationalist anti-Semitic beliefs.
100%.
17 years later, I published a study with the investigative journalism collective Bellingcat on how 75 fascist activists were initially red-pilled to the cause.
My research was based on leaked internal conversations where these neo-Nazis Klansmen and other extremists discussed their ideological evolution.
Six of them credited Alex Jones with their red-pilling.
They even had a name for it, taking the conspiracy pill.
There was an explicit understanding that interest in wacky.
I love that that's a brag.
Yeah, we call it taking the conspiracy pill.
Wild the things these people will brag about.
Yeah, yes.
One user wrote, I don't give a fuck if you think it, it being the secret rulers of the world, are aliens or not, as long as those aliens are Jewish at the end of the day.
Yikes.
Yeah.
Pretty expressive.
Ridiculous, obviously.
Yeah.
For those of us who grew up online in the early aughts, the last five years or so have been a continuous, dispiriting process of watching outright fascist beliefs bubble up on places like Reddit and 4chan.
It seems at times as if the Nazis have literally eaten the internet we all knew and loved as kids.
This did not happen by accident.
Alex Jones is just one prong of a concerted digital power grab that began before most of us knew the internet existed.
In 1984, Louis Beam used money he'd received from Robert Matthews' order to create LibertyNet.
Yeah, an international network of code word accessed message boards.
The goal of LibertyNet was to link the white power movement together.
It was used to spread recruitment materials, and its establishment allowed the movement to switch tactics quickly, as was seen after Estes Park.
It also included personnel ads and pen pal programs, which could be as innocuous as connecting racists for social purposes, but was also useful in planning crimes.
The internet allowed Beam to send racist propaganda into places where it was illegal, like Canada and Germany.
After setting up LibertyNet, Beam wrote, Finally, we're all going to be linked together at one point in time.
Imagine, if you will, all the great minds of the patriotic Christian movement linked together and joined to one computer.
Imagine any patriot in the country being able to call up and access these minds.
You are online with the Aryan Nation's Brain Trust.
It is here to serve the folk.
It has been said that knowledge is power, which it most assuredly is.
The computer offers, to those who become proficient in its use, power undreamed of by the rulers of the past.
1984.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's like the beginning of the dark west.
Yeah, the beam wars go back further than most people would answer.
This is crazy.
The meaning of the starts the wars.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Computers were not cheap in the 1980s.
Beam's work required the modern equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in seed money.
A single Apple computer cost $2,000 at the time.
Without the order, none of this would have been possible.
And while law enforcement was diligent about trying to track down all the rocket launchers and machine guns and explosives bought with the Order's ill-gotten games, they barely seemed to notice the computer equipment that Louis Beam had bought.
Yeah, weird about that.
Classic underestimation of the internet.
After all, why would the 1980s FBI care if some Apple IIs wound up gifted to Nazis around the country?
How could that cause a problem?
I don't know.
I don't.
Yeah.
By 1995, slightly over a decade later, Nazi efforts online had crystallized into a cohesive and effective digital Reich.
Fascists were some of the first people to effectively harness the power of the internet in an organized way.
The book Nation and Race, edited by Jeffrey Kaplan and Torb Yorgo, includes a chapter that delves into the state of the online white power movement at this time.
They cite Walter Benjamin, a scholar who wrote an essay about how new technology, like photography, was harnessed by Nazism.
Mass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye.
A bird's eye view best captures gatherings of hundreds of thousands, and even though such a view may be accessible to the human eye as it is to the camera, the image received by the eye cannot be enlarged the way a negative is enlarged.
While photographs and film best capture the character of the original Nazi movement, its modern descendant is best captured online and countless conversations and debates across message boards, image boards, YouTube's comments sections, and the like.
In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, and in response to the effectiveness with which anti-racist street movements like Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice shut down fascist street gatherings, the internet became increasingly central to the development of American fascism.
You know what's not central to the development of American fascism?
Mass Movements Revealed00:03:54
I don't know.
It's an ad plug.
It's the products and services that support this show.
Sophie, is that a good ad segue?
Sophie's saying I did well.
Yeah.
I liked it.
You guys excited about this, Canon LaCroix.
I'm going to throw increasingly nervous.
Good.
Well, increasingly nervous is the right way to feel when products.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place to come look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five.
City wall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber deducts a shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, you just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you.
A victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
Online Nazi Havens00:10:26
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back!
We're back!
We're back.
We are back.
In the early 1990s, Milton John Kleim Jr. was a 25-year-old studying at St. Cloud University.
His school provided him with a free Usenet account, and one of his professors rather accidentally gave him the listing where he came upon Alt.skinheads and the Onazi newsgroup.
Milton was one of the first young men to become radicalized into fascism through the internet.
Kleim grew obsessed, spending hours a day writing thousands of newsgroup posts and emails.
He'd become a coordinator for several digitally inclined fascists.
Kleim graduated in 1995 and shortly thereafter had his first face-to-face encounter with a member of the movement, Lynn Young, William Pierce's secretary.
She gave Kleim a check for $500, which he used to buy a computer to continue his work now that he was no longer at the university.
Kleim never again met another Nazi in person, but he continued his activities, and later that year wrote an essay on digital strategy that he posted to the Aryan Crusader Library's website.
In it, he wrote that the internet, quote, offers enormous opportunity for the Aryan resistance to disseminate our message to the unaware and the ignorant.
It is the only relatively uncensored, free forum, mass medium which we have available.
The state cannot yet stop us from advertising our ideas and organizations.
Now is the time to grasp the weapon which is the net and wield it skillfully and wisely while you may still do so freely.
He was right.
Never stop posting.
Never stop posting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Lone wolves.
In the mid-1990s, Usenet, an early predecessor to modern forum culture, was where most online discussions occurred.
The most critical Nazi destinations had names like alt.nationalism.white, alt.revolution.counter, alt.skinhead, and, as a prelude to 8chan's poll board, alt.politics.
This is all very much in line with the ideas that Bayeem had laid out a decade earlier.
But Kleim wanted to see his fellow fascists move on from their digital safe spaces and become what he called cyber guerrillas.
Quote, he decided they should, quote, take up positions on mainstream groups, except on our groups, avoid the race issue, sidestep it as much as possible.
We don't have time to defend our stance on this issue against the comments of hundreds of fools, liars, and degenerates who, spouting the Jewish line, will slaughter our message with half-troop, slander, and the ever-used sophistry.
That'll hide that power level.
1995.
Kleim's writing is particularly fascinating to me for the similarities I see between it and the things I've encountered in my own explorations of modern online Nazi haven, 8Chan.
Near the end of his essay, Kleim writes, All of my comrades and I, none of whom have ever met face to face, share a unique camaraderie, feeling as though we have been friends for a long time.
Selfless cooperation occurs regularly amongst my comrades for a variety of endeavors.
This feeling of comradeship is irrespective of national identity or state borders.
Yeah.
Now, they love the word comrade.
You do.
They do.
Everybody loves the word comrade.
It's a good word.
Now, what Kleim expressed there is not so different from what Powe synagogue shooter John Ernest related in the 8-Chan post he made announcing the start of his rampage.
It's been real, dudes.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything.
Keep up the infographic red pill threats.
I've only been lurking for a year and a half.
What I've learned here is priceless.
It's been an honor.
Yeah.
Always keep posting.
Always keep posting.
Until you start shooting.
So Kleim's last line about feeling comradeship across national barriers would prove to be an eerie premonition of the future of the international fascist movement.
Because during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the American fascist movement went international in a way it never had been before.
Even back in the 30s and 40s, Italian, German, and Spanish fascism were all very different beasts.
One side effect of the propaganda that started emanating out of the U.S. as a result of Beam's Liberty Net was that all the world's sundry fascists started getting on the same page.
I found a 2002 study by Les Black published in the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Les interviewed an Irish fascist with the internet handle White Wolf.
Quote, During the height of his involvement in the movement, he was spending five hours a day online.
He lives in an Irish town where there are virtually no visible minorities.
He was drawn to the white power movement through a fascination with Nazism.
He concluded, mostly Americans are on the net, but there are British, Irish, and lots of others from different countries.
The net breaks down the distance.
A person who was living on a 2,000-acre farm in Australia and had nobody to talk to about his views suddenly understands that he can link people who would never have met and talk with them, plan with them, learn and teach one another things, help each other.
Our Aussie friend, who may be well removed from the rest of his comrades, can nevertheless play a part in forwarding the agenda of a group.
Racists love the internet.
Yeah, they do.
Yeah, they do.
People love the internet.
People do love the internet.
Racists love the internet.
Well, it's like that's, I mean, it's...
No matter who you are, you can find your group online, and then you have people actively trying to get a lot of things.
Yeah, he's saying all the good things in the internet, but not saying the dark thing and use it to do what they do.
It's like when you talk about ISIS recruitment and stuff.
I've been thinking that this entire book about how it's upsetting.
I keep saying terrorists, but yeah, it's like ISIS recruitment.
Yeah, it's the same basic strategy.
Going after the same pool of people.
17 years later, a young man who might very well have been the Aussie friend that White Wolf was talking about, Brendan Tarrant, drove to a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand and gunned down more than 50 people.
Like White Wolf, Brenton was a loner, spending hours a day online, building a sense of rapport with his far-frung digital comrades and fascism before finally deciding to take action.
Now, the thing that really shocked me when I started digging into this research was how damned groundbreaking the fascists were in their understanding of what online culture would become and how to manipulate it.
I'm going to quote from that book that I quoted from earlier, Nation and Race.
Quote, This arena has spawned its own language and combines previous forms of right-wing organizing with new political strategies.
CNG, variously referred to as the cyber-nationalist group, cyber-Nazi group, or computer nationalist group, is the brainchild of activist Jeff Voss.
In his article entitled The CNG, An Idea for Online Organization, a complete division of labor is outlined that assigns operatives particular roles within an overall strategy.
Voss makes a distinction between idea men and men of action.
The former provide background information for the latter to post within Usenet.
This manifesto outlines four different types of foreground operative.
DISS, a subtle disseminator of information, places it on FTP sites and makes subtle references to endorsements of such info on news, usually pretending to be a disinterested observer.
A pirate, a person who will pirate an account for a one-shot high-saturation dissemination of propaganda.
An impersonator who impersonates the enemy posting, embarrassing the left and infuriating the enemy.
And an infiltrator who infiltrates the enemy camp.
Wow.
1995.
Russia got their hands on it.
Oh, man.
Fascists were some of the first folks to develop a cohesive strategy around what they called flaming.
As early as the 1995s, researchers into online extremism had realized that, quote, a common endpoint used by right-wing activists is the stylized disclaimer, I am not a Nazi.
Those same researchers also noted the use of mailbombs or software that allowed fascists to deluge a recipient and hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of spam email in order to make an opponent's account functionally unusable.
21 years later, when I wrote my first article critical of 8-Chan in the lead up to the 2016 election, my work count was deluged in a massive flow of spam emails, which is why I still get emails from homeschooling.com every day.
Now, Wyatt Kaldenberg was an internet activist affiliated with Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance, or War.
We haven't talked much about them in this audiobook because I had to limit my focus somewhere.
But Tom was a major part of the skinhead movement, as well as an associate of the Order.
Back in the 1970s, he worked with David Duke to help organize the Klan Border Watch.
Wyatt helped spread war's message online and gained infamy as one of the first proponents for what would come to be known as brigading, disrupting other online communities in an organized way.
Wyatt wrote, This ought to be our new tactic.
Instead of hanging out around the four racist news groups, we can hit news groups as a mob.
We cannot win when we are outnumbered by Jews, but if we go in as a group, we can win with the average Joe Six Pack.
Post fact about black crime.
Give them your update numbers, web addresses, push books, newspapers.
Yeah.
What year is that?
1995.
Cool.
Fascist groups like the Carolinian Lords of the Caucasus started going into newsgroups dedicated to loneliness and people who had just ended relationships.
They went into newsgroups for popular musicians and even the news group for Denny's, which might as well just be a support group for lonely people.
Raids like this were often just for the purpose of harassment, but over the years, fascists got better and better at spreading their ideology in this way.
They quickly hit upon the tactic of hiding their beliefs as humor, retreating behind the shield of, or just joking, when people responded badly to their rants about Jewish people or black on black crime.
Like Hitler did earlier.
Like Hitler did earlier.
Yeah, it all ties together.
Christian identity theology also spread online in this period.
I found an article in the Journal of Black Studies written by Tanya Sharp in 2000.
She noted, The internet has become a primary means for disseminating information for these groups.
Currently, there are 25 websites and 13 newsgroups devoted specifically to identity Christianity on the World Wide Web, as well as 130 other websites that are devoted to similar and related topics.
Individuals can tap into these websites and find procedures for making bombs, obtain hate propaganda tracks, and request catalogs that market white supremacist books and paraphernalia.
So that's cool.
Isn't it?
It's very cool, Cody.
Very cool.
You know what's even cooler than spreading Christian identity theology online in the year 2000?
Tons of stuff, man.
Yes, lots of things.
Christian Identity Online00:05:39
Including the products and services that support our show.
Cody, could I get some of those nuts?
Want some seeds?
Yes, please.
Called those seeds nuts.
Oh, wait, no.
Damn it.
I almost got them.
That was really effective.
I just wanted you to have some seeds to eat.
Some nuts.
I don't scare you.
I'll have some, though.
All right, Sophie and I are going to do the exchange of the LaCroix for the Perrier.
You throw me the idol and I'll throw you the whip.
I have the Perrier.
It's too soon for me to get up.
That was a really good time.
Every time we do this, Zachar Audio Man looks back at me with this baleful look.
Just, what are you doing to the recording?
Great idea.
You're like lording over it.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Stad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber deducts a shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back, and I'm a villain stroking a case of Perrier as if it's a cat.
And what are you about to do to that Perrier?
I'm going to throw it, and it will be the last time I can throw something because we've done it way too much in this episode series.
It's fun in the room.
Gamergate Echoes00:15:00
I know it's going to wear on people in the recording, but you can't edit audio.
You can't cut this stuff out.
It turns out you can.
Nope.
Okay.
I'm undecided.
Bit by bit, and almost entirely in a decentralized manner, the digital right came together in the early 2000s.
Law enforcement was not just helpless to do anything.
It's debatable whether or not they even realized what was happening.
Most of their online efforts were spent keeping track of known quantities with long-standing online ties, like Don Black and his popular fascist website, Stormfront.
Now, Stormfront is important.
Nearly 100 hate crime murders have been traced to the site, but the FBI wasn't even particularly good at monitoring them, which is why nearly 100 murders were traced to the site.
In July of 2019, in response to a FOIA request, the Bureau admitted that they had somehow lost almost all of their files on Stormfront.
Somehow.
Oh, I hate it when that happens.
Like internal files on white supremacist movement be lost.
Not worth examining.
I know.
I can begin to fathom how that happens.
Yeah, I can't think of a theory.
You're right.
Cody, it sounds like you're about to accuse the FBI, the Bureau, of whom a member heroically was present during the Greensboro massacre and didn't do anything to stop it.
You're going to accuse that FBI of acting to defend Stormfront.
I don't know what I was thinking.
I took the conspiracy pill.
You know what I think?
The FBI is good, and Bob Mueller is going to save us.
I.
Yeah, man.
It's going to be all.
Everything's going to be real good.
It's going to be great.
Go away and handcuffs that guy.
Yeah.
So the FBI only did a quarter-ass job of monitoring the most obvious Nazis online, and if that's the case, it's probably not surprising that they completely failed to notice when fascists started infiltrating communities on websites like 4chan and Reddit.
It happened slowly, camouflaged in irony and humor.
As a young man, I was only vaguely aware of the changes taking place in the digital spaces I've grown up around.
Holocaust jokes became more common, so did racist humor.
More than just growing more frequent, these jokes grew more specific, evolving from jibes about Jewish people being stingy with money, clearly inspired by South Park, to memes about how Hitler did nothing wrong and image macros that repeated bad science about race and IQ.
In 2018, I found an article on The Observer by Holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder.
In it, he comments on the use of irony and humor by fascists to mainstream their views.
Quote, What the 21st century culture has introduced is that nothing is really serious, and that is an interestingly dangerous idea.
Because if nothing is serious, you can have this ambiguity where you can actually be doing something very serious, but you're pretending not to.
And you can always fall back and say, well, that was just a joke, because everything is just a joke.
But of course, you don't really believe that everything is just a joke, or you wouldn't be promoting fascism or white supremacy or whatever it may be.
Yeah, that's well said.
Yeah, Timmy Designer knows his fucking shit.
There's a SART quote that's that too.
I shouldn't have brought it up because I can't, I don't remember it.
But it describes that sort of thing.
You say it, and then when it's a little too far, you're like, oh, it's a joke.
And you challenge them, and then they sort of walk away.
Yeah, whether or not you laugh determines whether or not I decide I was joking.
Yeah.
Just a prank, bro.
Just a prank, bro.
Don't you have a sense of humor?
Yeah.
In 2014, things on the internet rather suddenly boiled over into the cultural phenomenon known as Gamergate.
On its surface, Gamergate was a reaction to corruption and video games journalism.
In reality, it was an eruption of white and male supremacist hatred, an attack on modernity and liberalism by an army of young men who believed they'd been wronged by society.
There has not yet been a great deal of research into whether or not there was an organized attempt by the white power movement to co-opt Gamergate, but there is ample evidence that the ideas of that movement quickly made it into popular memes spread by Gamergaters.
During my research, I came across a thread on the website, Recetera, filled with other confused digital natives trying to figure out just what the fuck had happened with Gamergate.
One user posted a series of memes he'd saved during that time.
In retrospect, they seem to show a progressive descent into white nationalism.
The first is a propaganda poster featuring a cartoon mascot of 4chan's poll board, Paulina, advising the Anons of Poll on how to effectively aid the movement.
Paulina is blonde-haired and blue-eyed.
At the top of the poster are the words, who is that girl?
Blonde-haired, blue-eyes, fair skin.
Why?
It must be Paulina.
Another meme from further on in the collection is significantly Nazier.
It's based around an old labor movement political cartoon, Pyramid of a Modern Capitalist System, showing laborers on the very bottom being exploited by the classes above them.
In the Gamergate adaptation, gamers are the bottom of the pyramid, with games journalists above them, critical theorists, social justice warriors like Anita Sarkeesian above them, cultural Marxist academia above them, and then Fafsalones atop, represented by an Illuminati eye symbol.
We don't see explicit anti-Semitism in this cartoon, but it is there subtly in the caricatured drawings of Jewish video game critics.
It's clear at this point that some white power talking points had started to mutate to better appeal to modern and extremely online youths.
It's almost especially more effective because it's like that dork fantasy shit with gamers.
Yeah.
Yeah, and we're just joking.
We're just joking.
It's the same source of resentment, too.
Yeah.
Grievance and all that.
Yeah.
Stuff they gravitate towards.
It's the KKK dork loser stuff.
Yeah, I know exactly the LARP.
It's especially frustrating because it is clear that that's a connection there.
But because it's a lot of image boards like 4chan, it disappears really quickly.
So there's less record of that time of the sort of the proto what's going on.
Yeah.
We'll have all these up on our website behindthebastards.com and of course thewaroneveryone.com, which I have not plugged enough in this series because we're just barreling along.
Eventually, the harassment of video game journalists and critics, most of whom were women, grew severe and illegal enough that 4chan exiled its gamergators.
Many of them migrated to 8-Chan, and, over the next several years, they grew more radical and more explicitly fascist until, eventually, they were openly planning for how to cause a new Holocaust.
It's impossible to know how much of the ironic fascist shitposting started off innocently and how much of it was seeded by white power activists, but we know they were engaging in that behavior purposefully for more than 20 years.
And in the years after Gamergate, this work has paid dividends.
The true danger of the digital Reich was best expressed by Alex Curtis, the publisher of an extremist neo-Nazi magazine and self-proclaimed lone wolf of hate.
In the early 2000s, he wrote of his hope that, quote, some well-placed Aryans will one day cause some serious wreckage.
A thousand Timothy McVeys would end any semblance of stability in this racially corrupt society.
Just gotta find enough of lone wolves to connected by some magic computer thing.
Some historical echo that won't go away.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, continue.
Well, no, we have not yet reached a thousand Timothy McVeighs, thankfully.
But we have seen a market increase in the amount of right-wing domestic terror over the last several years.
Yeah, yeah.
And it certainly seems to be driven largely by online radicalization.
Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter, was radicalized in part on Gab, a social network for Nazis.
He announced the start of his rampage there.
Six months later, the Pauway synagogue shooter announced the start of his rampage on 8-Chan, as had the Christchurch shooter six weeks prior.
There are other names in the roll call of internet-inspired fascist violence.
The Adam Woffen terrorist group, responsible for three murders so far, started off with extremely online Nazis working to form a terror cell in imitation of the book Siege, written by James Mason.
We talked briefly about Mason and Siege at the start of this book.
He was a student of William Pierce, and Siege might thus be understood as a more academic accompanying text to the Turner Diaries.
Where the diaries proposes fiction, Siege outlines in strategic depth.
Mason advocates for leaderless resistance and lone wolf-style attacks.
The lone wolf cannot be detected, cannot be prevented, and seldom can be traced.
If I were asked by anyone of my opinion on what to look for or hope for next, I would tell them a wave of killings or assassinations of system bureaucrats by roving gunmen who have their strategy well mapped out in advance and well-nigh impossible to stop.
Early in 2019, Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Hassen was caught planning this exact sort of attack.
He had a cache of weapons and ammo and a kill list of journalists and Democratic politicians.
Hassan was obsessed with the manifesto of Anders Breivik, a right-wing shooter who murdered dozens of students in New Toya, Norway.
We don't know where he first came into contact with that manifesto, but spreading it has been a priority of online fascists for years.
In the wake of the Christchurch shooting, fascists have started spreading Brenton Terrence manifesto as well.
The Poway Synagogue shooter cited both manifestos as inspirations for his attack.
In his own Rampage Threat on 8-Chan, the Powwe shooter stated his desire to beat Terrence's high score.
In this, we see echoes of Eric Harris, the Columbine shooter who was obsessed with beating Timothy McVeigh's high score.
Right now, as I read this, violent armed men in 8-Chan's poll board and numerous Discord chat rooms are plotting for ways that they might beat their heroes and win a high score of their own.
On Telegram, the Bowl Patrol, a group of young fascists dedicated to Charleston church shooter Dylan Roof, celebrate St. Ruth and fantasize about new acts of violence in his name.
The early harvest and blood these young men will reap was sown by Louis Beam, William Pierce, and Bob Matthews.
Now, though, there is no need for an organization to buy up arms and plan terror attacks.
The order proved to be less resilient than the completely decentralized radicalization and killing machine made possible by the advent of the internet.
The internet has given the white power movement a steady supply of armed and ready young killers, living cruise missiles who strike unpredictably at targets around the country.
Bit by bit, their attacks chisel away at our sense of security, our national stability, and our trust in each other.
It took decades, but Louis Beam and his comrades did bring the war home to all of us and against all of us.
The end.
Cool.
That's a good book.
Robert, that was an excellent ending chapter.
Yeah.
Devastating.
Yeah, it's just very upsetting.
The gamer thing is so interesting.
Yeah, it really is.
And apparently, it's like, oh, gamers.
But there is that element that it's drawn to and like with the New Zealand shooting, live streaming it.
You're broadcasting a video game.
Yeah.
Exactly.
You're trying to make it look like Call of Duty.
Right.
And then you get the high score talk, and then it accelerates it even more.
Horrifying to see it all laid out so linear like this.
The single biggest surprise to me in researching this was when I came upon the fact that Eric Harris had specifically stated his desire to beat Timothy McVeigh's kill count.
Like realizing, like, oh, that part, it's the same thing.
Like, it really, all of the, like, that's the problem.
We look at this so much is like separated.
And like, even as far back as the fact that the Nazis trying to recruit kids on the internet in 1995, like one of the guys doing that had his computer bought for him by William Pierce's National Alliance, the guy who wrote the Turner Diaries, the book which inspired Timothy McVeigh, which inspired Eric Harris, which inspired 79 other mass shooters.
Yeah, it's a whole web that's really hard to describe and to lay out.
Because there's so much I had to leave out.
I could have done this whole thing about, I could have done a whole seven-part episode on Alex Jones's ties to explicit terrorists.
That's one of the most frustrating things because it's like once you see it, it's not you see it everywhere.
Once you see it, you see it where it is.
You realize how big it is.
Yeah.
And it's, yeah.
It's really upsetting.
Oh, God.
It is upsetting.
What's even more upsetting is that it's time for me to throw the Perrier.
Now I really am getting up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You'd better move away from that point because that's where I'm going to chuck it at.
No, it's okay.
It's okay.
All right, guys.
Cody, I need you to get close to your microphone and describe this as I do it.
No one seems thrilled about it.
Sophie's hiding.
No, she's not really hiding.
She's just sort of like sleeping.
Oh!
I'm looking through the chair.
I'm really not doing a great job.
Robert stood up.
Two hands on the Perrier.
Winding up.
Taking a few breaths.
Throwing it.
That was a good thing.
Three pens fell out.
Katie shouted.
That was so anticlimactic.
Well, it popped.
It's just a new way to open up a box of Perrier.
Yeah, it worked.
Now we have to see Perriers.
One for everybody.
I dare you to open it.
All of your worry was for nothing.
Did you film it?
It's one for each of us.
Here we go.
I don't want one.
Yeah, I don't know.
I just prefer throwing it.
Oh, yeah, they're pretty good.
Pretty good out of shape.
You should open it now, though.
I mean, just see.
Totally fine.
Nothing happens.
Complete disappointment.
Everything about this has been disappointing.
Except for you, Robert.
That's refreshing.
And your work.
Well, can I have some sunflower seeds, Cody?
You know what?
Yeah.
In the moment, I'm going to close it real quick.
Get a little wrinkle going.
Incredible audio content.
Cody closes things really meticulously and well, so I'm not surprised that it didn't open when he threw it against the wall.
Yeah, you gotta make sure it's closed.
What I'm surprised about is what good audio content Cody's really Voices in this eight-part, seven-part Cody dropped a bunch out of the bag.
Just a few there.
I got him.
I got him.
It's fine.
Well, guys, you want to plug your plugables?
I don't really want to.
I just want everybody to read.
I guess you already listened to the book.
Give people to read the book.
Yeah, listen to the book.
It's a topic that everybody should be aware of.
I don't know.
I'm really glad we did this.
I'm glad we did this too.
I wish we did.
I hated myself during it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We didn't smoke earlier, but I wish we didn't smoke earlier, too.
But, you know, we've all learned things.
We take these.
We take that with us.
That's a lesson of money.
Just like Lewis Beach.
I apologize.
Let's not say just like.
Nope.
Just like Lewis speech.
Okay.
That's, I guess, what we learned.
So, some more news.
Yeah.
This show's called some more news, even more news.
You know this.
My name is Cody Johnston.
My name's Katie Stoll.
My name's BehindTeBastards.com, the website where you can find the sources for this podcast.
You can also find it on thewaroneveryone.com.
You can buy shirts on tpublic.com by looking for Behind the Bastards.
We have a Twitter at BastardsPod and an Instagram at the same name.
Check ourselves.
Why not disgust it, Sophie?
You proud?
Oh, yeah, because I remembered two finally.
Yeah, you did it all.
Well, guys, time to go online.
Yeah!
I just threw some seeds at Cody.
The episode's done.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
Will Farrell Returns00:02:04
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.