42: Deradicalizing From Digital Hate (w/Caolan Robertson)
Imagine that you’re 25 years old. You grew up Irish, gay, and online. When the Orlando Pulse massacre explodes, you go to YouTube for the news. You watch Milo Yiannopolous and Gavin McInnes fake-kiss in front of the police-taped club and say that the Muslims are coming to kill all gay people. YouTube’s algorithm spins you downward into anti-Islamic content. Before long, you’ve left your marketing job with a mission: to make slick propaganda videos for some of the most despicable alt-right ghouls on the planet. You believe they’ll stand up for you.How did you get here at such a young age? What does it feel like? If you have a change of heart, if you want to fight back against your old life and its consequences, who will believe you? Should they believe you? How will you help them believe you?Today Matthew asks Caolan Robertson these difficult questions. After years of being the PR man for people like Tommy Robinson and Laura Southern, Robertson has shaken it off and started to collaborate with other ex-alt-right members on a deradicalization project called Future Freedom.In the Ticker, Julian reports on the new QAnon variant infecting telegram, Sabmyk. Matthew reviews how Christiane Northrup and a Gen Z priestess in a Greek eco-fascist group flip their positive orientalism on its head to diss the Dalai Lama for getting vaccinated. Derek looks at one of the strangest grifts around: pet psychics.Show NotesWhat Do Dogs Really Think? Pet Psychics Are Standing ByThe Sabmyk Network: How a mysterious disinformation network is hijacking QAnon – HOPE not hateWhat is Sabmyk? QAnon Followers Targeted By New Messianic MythologyAlso: QAnon was big in IranThe Dalai Lama Gets A COVID-19 Shot And Urges Others To Get VaccinatedAeifaron on InstagramSofia Katsaiti aka Sofia Tara on Instagram is very worried about the Dalai Lama’s vaccineAeifaron looks like a totally normal eco-fascist groupPfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine neutralizes Brazil variant in lab studyFuture Freedom project on
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Episode 42, Deradicalizing from Digital Hate with Kaelin Robertson.
Imagine that you're 25 years old.
You grew up Irish, gay, and online.
When the Orlando Pulse massacre explodes, you go to YouTube for the news.
You watch Milo Yiannopoulos and Gavin McInnes fake kiss in front of the police-taped club and say that the Muslims are coming to kill all gay people.
YouTube's algorithm spins you downward into anti-Islamic content.
Before long, you've left your marketing job with a mission.
To make slick propaganda videos for some of the most despicable alt-right ghouls on the planet.
You believe they'll stand up for you.
How did you get there at such a young age?
What does it feel like?
If you have a change of heart, if you want to fight back against your old life and its consequences, who will believe you?
Should they believe you?
How will you help them believe you?
Today, Matthew asks Kaelin Robertson these difficult questions.
After years of being the PR man for people like Tommy Robertson and Laura Southern, Robertson has shaken it off and started to collaborate with other ex-Alt-Right members on a de-radicalization project called Future Freedom.
In the ticker, I'll be reporting on the new QAnon variant infecting Telegram, Sabmic.
Matthew reviews how Christiane Northrup and a Gen Z priestess in a Greek eco-fascist group flip their positive Orientalism on its head to diss the Dalai Lama for getting vaccinated.
Derek looks at one of the strangest grifts around, pet psychics.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
Well, another week, another failed QAnon prediction, guys.
Supporters had been hopeful, right, that Trump would be installed as the savior-in-chief on March 4th.
He wasn't?
Well, I guess not.
Maybe he was in an alternate dimension, but thankfully here, where we live, the day passed without incident.
Anons have been left hungry for conspiracy breadcrumbs with Q no longer posting and many of the biggest influencers in the community banned from major social platforms and scattered to newer, unmoderated spaces.
But there is an opportunistic new strain of prophecy flexing its spike proteins in their direction.
It's a concoction of old world mythology and political propaganda, featuring a saviour, prophesied by biblical figure Noah, no less.
Meet Sabmik, who is supposedly awakened on December 21st of 2020.
Sabmech's destiny is to wield the sword of Shawanuaz that apparently once belonged to the Orion Kings of Atlantis.
I kid you not.
In an uprising against, you guessed it, the evil elite bankers, celebrities, and scientists who are exploiting and manipulating the common people.
Very nice, yeah.
Now, Sabmek will be recognized by a series of signs that range from 17 V-shaped scars on his left arm, to the Christmas star which apparently was just visible in the sky this Christmas for the first time in 800 years, to further Orion-shaped scars on his right hand made by the deliberate ritual wounding that apparently prepared him for the pain that comes from wielding the sword of Shawanuas.
He is totally cooler than Q, who has none of these accoutrements.
No scarring.
We don't know anything about Q's body at all.
This is a real superhero.
He has more magical scars, but I'm not going to list all of them.
But look, all of the Game of Thrones cosplay jokes aside, What's relevant about this fanciful tale is that since last December, at least a hundred different Telegram channels, followed by close to a million people, have started to meme-ify SabMik and the Noah Prophecy in ways that target the disconsolate Cumanon faithful.
This big tent network appears to be trying to coattail its narrative into the resurrection, the truth, and the light for conspiritualists by variously pretending to be merely white nationalists or anti-immigrant, anti-vaccine, evangelical Christian, or UFO-enthusiast accounts.
But then guiding consumers into the new sub-mic mythology.
They use names like General Mike Flynn and Rudy Giuliani for accounts, as well as fictitious news organizations they just make up, like London Post and Chicago Reporter.
You know, the non-fake news.
The largest of the Telegram channels cater specifically to QAnon, and it has 125,000 followers.
And during the 48 hours earlier this month that a UK anti-racist organization called Hope Not Hate reported observing it, the network as a whole gained over 81,000 followers.
The multiple channels in the network stay very active by retweeting one another's posts about 60 times a day.
And Newsweek reported at the weekend that Facebook had shut down eight accounts that were involved in spreading Sapmic content.
Here's the interesting part.
Patient Zero In this case, because it's been kind of boring so far, right, is an Iranian artist living in Germany who goes by Princess Amelie Akamianez.
She claims on her website to be descended from Persian royalty and to have been given the mythical sword aforementioned by none other than George Soros.
Who had, of course, attained it via the Rothschild estate.
Wow.
Being a pacifist, she broke the sword down into tiny pieces, as you do, that have been attached in capsules to her paintings and spread all over the world.
This is starting to sound like a Tom Hanks movie, right?
Well, what I'm wondering about is, so the sword was in the possession of George Soros, but it's actually an heroic sword, so she broke it, and she has defiled George in this way?
Is that part of the idea?
The best I could gather so far is that she's a pacifist and she doesn't want the sword to be used for violent means, yet somehow she's promoting this prophecy.
So, true to most of this kind of stuff, it does not need to have any kind of internal logical consistency.
Right.
And then of course, you know, pacifist princesses aside, some of the SABMIC-related accounts that have been followed in this reporting do have a militaristic tone and they call for going on the attack against the enemies of Trump.
And just a quick reminder, we're joking around a little bit here, but Pizzagate also sounded like ridiculous nonsense that no one could possibly believe when it started, right?
It seems the world has only gotten stranger.
One thing that came up for me this week, because, you know, as America actually has a president now who's doing good things and things seem to be returning somewhat to normal in some capacities.
I was struck that the response that Oprah had to give after her interview, and I have my own feelings on that interview that we don't need to get into, but the one thing she had to respond to was the QAnon conspiracy that she was wearing an ankle monitor and she came out and publicly said stuff.
This gets back to my long-standing fear with With people who are more liberal or progressive and don't pay attention to politics that much, is that all of the stuff we've been talking about for the last year and what's been happening isn't going away.
And how it manifests is going to be equally disconcerting.
And we're seeing this play out by just the fact that probably, arguably, one of the most powerful women in the world, from a media perspective, has to come out and just say, no, what QAnon says isn't true.
Yeah, and whether the story deserved to be such a big one or not, you know, given however you might feel about the newsworthiness of the royal family of England, she had to deny that she was wearing an ankle bracelet, meaning she might be under house arrest, and she also had to deny that she was a CGI construct, because she's already been arrested, you know, back last year sometime for her role in the pedophile cabal, right?
I would like to know more about the sort of ontological status of Sabmik himself.
Like, is he a human being walking around in the world?
Is he in hiding somewhere?
Is he trans-dimensional?
I mean, we're talking about, I love the signs and the scars on his arms and so on, and how he's been heralded by stars and so on.
Yeah, and this stuff has been, it's being distributed in very like, you know, it's like these memes that have really arcane looking illustrations and characters on them, you know?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, the thing that is so vexing about Q as an absent leader is the sort of vacuum where he should be.
There's no real sense of what his bodily form is or Where he might be, he's successful to the extent that he's actually a ghost.
And that means that QAnon followers actually have to embody his, you know, absent charisma by becoming digital soldiers.
But this is something very different, right?
Where people will actually have to become sort of devotionally attached to something that is divine but also not Christian at the same time.
I think there's going to be a lot of Anons that have have some problems with that in the transition.
Yeah, I mean, hopefully they do have some problems with it.
But, you know, the idea is that my interpretation so far is that this is a human being who has awakened to his true nature as the One, right?
It's this mythic, familiar mythic trope that on December 21st of 2020, he started to awaken to, oh, this is my destiny to wield the sword of Shawanuas.
So on Saturday, His Holiness the Dalai Lama left his palace compound to visit a local clinic in Dharamsala, where his government in exile has been seated since 1959.
Now, he could have gotten the Indian-made Covishield jab at home, but he went for the photo op to encourage his people to be vaccinated, and he made a little statement while he was there.
So I do that.
So I want to share more people should have courage to take this injection.
Now, it took only a day for Christiane Northrup to wave her cancellation wand at the Tibetan head of state on Instagram.
She posted a photo of the news story with a caption, We are now in a time of questioning all authorities.
And the comment section on that IG post is just a shitshow of innuendo.
So the Dalai Lama is Quote-unquote deep in the cabal, his vaccination was faked, it was CGI, one commenter tied him to Epstein, and another semi-rightly pointed out that one of his non-profits took a million dollars from NXIVM when Keith Raniere conned the office of the Dalai Lama into visiting Albany.
Now, the commenter made it sound like Keith Raniere slipped, you know, the Dalai Lama a million dollars in cash right into his robes or something like that, and that's a total lie.
But then we have somebody I haven't seen before on the conspirituality circuit.
This is Sophia Katsaiti.
She goes by Sophia Tara on Instagram.
She seems to be in her twenties.
She's a very charismatic member of what looks like a high-demand eco-fascist.
Victorian-era farming, herbalism, and heterofertility group outside of Athens, Greece.
And from its marketing videos, this group, Aetheron, seems to be comprised of no one over 30 and no one who can't rock strappy, flowy dresses.
All of the women sing and sway, and all of the men gaze beneficently at them while strumming bazookas.
Now, I can't tell much about the spirituality of the group, except that one video makes reference to the modern era Greek novelist Nikos Katsantzakis, whose tortured Jungian takes on Catholic Orthodox obsessions were quite the scandal in his day.
He's the guy who wrote The Last Temptation of Christ, which was then filmed by Scorsese with that incredible score.
But this group, what's it called again?
Apheron.
It has a physical culture component to it as well.
So, they work out.
They do yoga.
And their compound is in the foothills of ancient Nemea, which used to be the old-timey training grounds for the Olympics.
So, they say they're creating a modern Asklepion, which was the complex of ancient Greek healing temples.
And it looks like they're stockpiling a lot of massage oils as well, and they're going to just slip and slide back into the Iron Age.
So, Sophia took time out from her schedule of dancing, organic gardening, and decalcifying her pineal gland, that's actually not a joke, she has a whole lecture on this on Instagram, to express very pious concern on Instagram about the impact of the Dalai Lama's vaccination on the world and beyond.
Now, her main argument is that he is a global symbol of mindfulness and spirituality and his compliance with a vaccine agenda will have disastrous consequences for the medical and spiritual health of the world.
And as she speaks, she's sitting beneath a painted Tibetan yantra.
I can't tell which one it is because it's kind of fuzzy, it's out of focus.
I'm pretty sure she can't tell which one it is either.
There's also a Tibetan seed syllable peeking out around her left shoulder.
And despite her youth, she has totally nailed the middle-aged cult leader gaze.
It's like unwavering, unblinking, right into the middle distance, slight Mona Lisa smile.
Here she is with a little clip.
This involves the entire planet, both spiritual and non-spiritual, because he is a symbol.
This affects every single human being, directly or indirectly.
as it's an attack upon the symbol and reflection of freedom within.
Again, I say, regardless of whether he's been rotten for years, regardless of whether it's a clone or him himself doing it, the symbol remains.
So my ticker report ends with saying that these hot takes can just fuck right off.
But not before we look really carefully at what has happened here.
Because what we see with both Northrup and Katsayete in real time is a kind of positive, stupid Orientalism sliding into negative, stupid Orientalism.
Both of them set up and fetishize the Dalai Lama as some vague validator of their New Age beliefs.
And if he serves that role for them, they don't need to know anything about or even care about Tibetan Buddhism or culture or the reality that this is a head of state who's about as complicated a figure as Martin Luther King was.
And, you know, the Dalai Lama is the one who in 1959 literally walked out of the pre-modern world and into the public eye And the liberal universe getting a crash course in all the ways in which science could actually help his people.
You know, neither Northrop or Katsa E.T. need to care that he's responsible for six and a half million displaced persons around the world, including 120,000 Tibetans in exile in India itself, where he's had to broker this, you know, delicate peace with often where he's had to broker this, you know, delicate peace with often hostile governments
They don't need to know anything about his diplomatic or political responsibilities because if they did, they would maybe mention that his job is to take care of the health and welfare needs of some very poor and vulnerable people.
So, you know, if you're an influencer and you don't know or care about any of that shit, Sure, the Dalai Lama can be the llama-spiration that sits on your coffee table.
He can be your bowing and scraping Asian mascot for you to project all your alt-health BS onto.
And then you can flip your positive Orientalism into the Orientalism of implying that he's part of the evil Chinese cabal or that he's sold out.
And all you will have done is spread stereotypes along with vaccine disinfo.
I'm looking right now at the Dalai Lama's 2005 book, The Universe in a Single Atom, and just flipping through, looking at my notes, this quote jumped out as you were speaking, Matthew.
Much of what is soon going to be possible is less in the form of new breakthroughs or paradigms in science than in the development of new technologies.
technological options combined with the financial calculations of business and the political and economic calculations of governments.
The issue is how to use this new knowledge and power in the most expedient and ethically responsible manner.
So when I see the posts like the Greek posts that I watched the other day when you shared it or hearing about Northrup, it's like they just had no idea who this man was.
No.
Or all of the work that he's been doing.
They take a meme and then they expect that to encompass his entire belief system.
And I've been a fan of his for so many reasons, but one, it's the same book where he made the statement that if science bears something out that Buddhism turns out to be false, then we should listen to science and not Buddhism.
So, when I saw all the pushback on the Dalai Lama, I was just like, you just haven't been paying attention this whole time.
And also the spirit of that quote, I believe, is that Buddhism should change in response to what new science reveals, right?
He has this very progressive attitude for someone who, as Matthew says, just recently stepped out of the pre-modern world.
Yeah, if you can, if, and to think about what that transition was like is always stunning to me because here's somebody who grew up doing line by line call and response meditation of medieval texts or memorization of medieval texts as his foundational education.
who learned and became proficient in rituals that date back to like the 13th or 12th centuries or something like that.
And then he also has to learn the arcane and Baroque bureaucracy of like just Tibetan monastic feudalism in order to become proficient in that.
And then where does he find himself in the 1960s?
It's just incredible what this guy has had to learn.
And he's really complex, and he makes some decisions that probably have to be reviewed and that historians are going to argue about for a lot of years to come.
But, I mean, he's not your coffee table doll.
He's not just a mascot for New Age projections.
No, it's bullshit.
Let's put the exact quote into the record here so we have it.
If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
Ah, okay, yeah.
I wanted to say too that this Katsaiti young woman, whatever she's doing, because we don't really know what the extent of this particular group is, It wouldn't be possible without something like Instagram.
It wouldn't be possible without a platform on which she can go and just stand there and deliver this, as you described it, this kind of cult leader gaze, the long pauses.
There's actually like a kind of parental scolding that she's doing in that video.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
It does seem like the sort of librarian in the New Age library trying to make everybody hush or something like that.
Yeah, which I feel is sort of, it indicates this sense of elevated, like, I am wise beyond my years and some deep spiritual intelligence is speaking through me and so I'm going to one-up you in this motherly sort of way.
Yeah, but I just can't get past the feeling that that has to be compensatory.
Like, isn't that exactly what you would adopt if you really had nothing?
Like, if there was nothing in your epistemology that you could really hang on to, if you didn't really have a job, you know, if you thought and you had bet your sort of life capital on this idea that you could build a modern Asklepion and... Perfectly qualified for Instagram.
Right, right.
I mean, it's tragic, really.
After Winston died, I got this gift.
To read animals' minds?
No, I told you.
I'm a communicator.
As he soon after Winston died...
I realized that I could hear animals speak to me.
I mean, I certainly hadn't been aware of that before.
And I don't read animals' minds.
But when they want to communicate, I can hear them.
You know, like you and I are talking, but we don't read each other's mind.
Is he saying something?
He says you have a hidden agenda.
He said that?
Well, if you're Bill Murray traveling the country visiting ex-girlfriends during your middle-age crisis, sure, the cat might have said that to you.
Or maybe his ex just knew something was up when her long-ago crush dropped in during the movie Broken Flowers.
But then again, people often have difficulty distinguishing between movies and reality, so some viewers might have taken satire for non-fiction.
Of all the grifts in the broader wellness space, I've always filed pet communicators in the, oh come on, category.
And don't get me wrong, I communicate with my cats every day, but not in English.
According to the Wall Street Journal, plenty of pet psychics have no problem listening to dogs, cats, pigs, alpacas, and steer speak in grammatically correct English.
One communicator, NotPsychic, assures us that sloths talk faster than they walk.
And she's especially skilled, considering she can also chat with horses in Dubai from her North Carolina home.
And oddly, I've never found that Zoom setting.
But, I'm sorry, I gotta hold on, I'm sorry.
They don't actually speak English.
As that communicator says, I've heard them in a way that doesn't involve the ears.
Yeah, right.
I've heard them in the heart.
Yes, yeah.
Now, this woman claims to have over 10,000 animal clients.
And of course, the animals aren't paying the bills, though they might be paying in other ways.
And in some ways, I get it.
Humans are so far removed from nature that it's easy to feel like the only way to connect is through our means, our consciousness, our language, and our expectations.
We've destroyed so many ecosystems and made so many species extinct that the notion of extrasensory, primal communication with animals is seductive and appealing.
But notice they only ever talk to domesticated animals.
I want to hear about the conversations with a mountain lion or bear they cross paths with, if they survive that encounter.
Disney-fied chatter won't cut it in whatever parts of nature we haven't decimated.
So if these communicators could talk to animals and not just pets, They likely wouldn't share tales most of us want to hear.
So instead of facing the destruction we've caused, we'd rather continue creating illusions that comfort us, not just the animals.
Our pets.
Now as the journal reports, more people are employing pet psychics since the pandemic began.
And pandemics, remember, are usually tied into our food supply chains and usually involve meat.
So pet psychics is kind of like wellness on steroids.
It's such an extreme version of the influencers we cover, which are a small cohort of people monetizing a special skill that few people have access to that So let's look at the bigger picture.
through normal channels of communication, and that can't be tested and must be felt in the heart.
So let's look at the bigger picture.
Not only can humans communicate with animals in certain ways, we are animals.
We're also, as I discussed in this week's bonus episode, the only animal that suffers from existential distress.
So So sure, other species get scared when threatened, and they fight for their survival, rightly.
That nagging sense of insecurity around mortality is uniquely ours, and we seem bent on applying it to other species.
So, to the communicator who discovered that her canine client wants his ashes scattered on the mountain by the farm he lives on, those are your insecurities, not his.
And that's what I'll never really understand about the wellness industry, how so many people don't recognize their own sense of transference.
Or maybe for them, it is just a job.
Their way of surviving in a hard and unforgiving world.
But I just wish they'd be more honest with their intentions.
Looking forward to the comments.
Yeah, Derek, did you...
Did you, is there an overlap between pet psychism and vegetarianism?
You touched on it a bit, referring to pandemics and food chains, but are pet psychics, are they vegans?
Not that I've found.
I mean, there's no evidence.
I mean, it could be, but that was not brought up in any of the reading that I did.
That case was in claim.
That's why I mentioned the fact that they only talk to domesticated animals.
So even though they do go to farms and stuff, but at the same time, they seem more likely to find clients who want to talk to their pets, not animals they're going to churn into food.
You know, I wonder if there's some sort of parallel arc between the rise and the proliferation of the disnification that you referred to of the animal world and the exposure that modern urban human beings have to Well, they're growing awareness of the horrors of industrial farming.
It's like those things seem to grow at the same pace that we have this proliferation of Jungle Book characters and Mickey and Minnie Mouses running around.
And this full animated kind of virtual world that is supposed to re-enchant us with the natural world that is actually disappearing, but that is also covering over the, you know, the leaked footage that might be coming out of slaughterhouses.
I remember growing up, my favorite cartoon character is Ricky Raccoon from Shirttails.
And as I aged, I remember in my 20s when I lived in a studio apartment, when a rabid raccoon was on my desk trying to break into my kitchen door.
And being like, the distance between Between what we, and don't get me wrong, I love Pixar movies.
I love a lot of Disney.
I mean, they're great for the imagination, but I do actually agree with you.
I think they feed into our sense of disconnection.
The re-enchantment is an illusion.
So we're not actually getting into the real life tales of what we're doing to animals.
It's a way to make us feel better as if we're actually doing something when we're not.
Yeah, there's something else there too about, you said something about being so far removed from nature and that sort of has my mind rippling with different, you know, associations there around an animal spirit world that we're sort of more comfortable projecting into, right?
And it relates then to the notion of mind-body dualism where there is some kind of immaterial aspect of the animal that the pet psychic is able to tune in on that even us who live with the animal, you know, day in and day out for years, somehow don't have access to.
So it's this mysterious supernaturalizing from a distance, we have more distance in some way.
And yeah, it's just that there's something there that I think is really interesting.
That's a really interesting point that I've never thought about, which is that if you bring your pet to a pet psychic, you're actually saying that, you know, I've known this animal for 10 years, but I don't have good communication or relationship with them.
What's going on with that?
Do people actually believe that, that they don't understand, or they don't commune with their pets, or they need some special... You know what it is?
It's the bell jar and the butterfly.
Some people have a certain kind of stroke, I believe, where they get locked in.
They develop locked-in syndrome where they're fully conscious but they can't communicate in any way whatsoever or move.
Exactly.
And so that's the story of someone figuring out how to communicate and how to enter into the inner world of someone who's suffering from that.
And I feel like this is similar where it's like, I believe that there is a locked in intelligence or consciousness inside this pet that the pet psychic can give me access to.
So just for context Matthew, The Bell Jar and the Butterfly was written by a former magazine editor who had that stroke and he was alive but completely paralyzed except he could blink one eye.
And so someone figured that out and he wrote the entire book by blinking his eye.
to a friend and they were they figured out the letters an entire book and the movie is I actually fear I don't fear a lot of mortality but I fear ever having that from watching that movie what was was incredible about the movie is that his the flights of fancy that he is able to go into in order to survive this condition of really being able to enter into his imagination and then convey that through the book through blinking letters of the alphabet right
but the other angle of conspirituality that has I don't know impacted our pet world in the last couple of episodes do you remember we talked about how Kelly Brogan was not going to use flea medication on her cats and they were and they were scratching themselves into infection and
And so, you know, I would almost hope that Dr. Brogan would take her pet to a pet psychic who could look at the cat and say, actually, yeah, I would like the fucking powder, please.
But it's kind of going the other direction.
She's assuming, I think, that the cat probably wouldn't like the flea powder because the cat has the same sort of bourgeois organic values that she does.
And last point, because this is something I think if we get to another episode on psychedelics I want to bring up, you can also, this mindset pervades in the psychedelic community with Cambo.
And there's this idea that... What's that again?
It's frog.
It's part of a frog.
You extract part of the frog.
I don't know if it's the secretion and then you cut yourself and then put it into your bloodstream.
And it actually poisons you, which is supposedly the detox.
The sacred detox that's necessary for the vision.
But the thing about that is, and you know what?
There might be some therapeutic utility, so I don't want to deny that, but People who I know who've done this are always like, it's part of the spiritual connection to frogs.
And I'm like, are you sure about that?
Are you sure that they want to be tied up all four and you peeling them?
I don't think that's what's going on.
Within frog culture, that is satanic ritual abuse.
Well, I don't know, unless you have safe words and there's like a whole frog BDSM thing going on.
But I mean, people would have to say that about the damn frog, wouldn't they?
They would have to say that the frog was willingly giving up their sweat glands or whatever.
Yeah, how would they not make some story up about it while they're tying the damn frog down to a table?
The jab.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
It is true that we live in an uncertain world.
But those fond of just asking questions will often bring the following topics up as reasons to be COVID vaccine hesitant, pointing out correctly that we just don't have all the answers.
Will they remain effective against newer variants?
How long will the immunity the vaccines provide last?
Will there be any scary long-term side effects?
Can we be sure that those already vaccinated might not still be asymptomatic carriers?
Perfect knowledge is impossible, but it's also not something anyone actually claims to have.
It is true that we do not and cannot have complete answers to these questions.
I'll do my best to address them as we go on.
But we can make predictions about what we don't know based on what we do know and in turn adapt based on how those predictions turn out.
So I want to talk just a little bit about knowledge and science here.
Science progresses by the method of first forming a hypothesis and then testing it via experiment.
Then evaluating the data that ensues and inviting other qualified people to examine and critique your process.
None of this takes place in a vacuum.
Established knowledge, like the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, and existing theories, like those of cells, gravity, and evolution, will all constrain and inform how new hypotheses are created.
It's a network of knowledge that makes predictions about what is unknown in the context of what is known.
That doesn't mean there's no room for innovation or for knowledge and evidence that breaks new ground.
But it does mean that more foundational chains of knowledge supported by consistently confirmed predictions are less likely to be overturned.
Thank you for indulging my perhaps abstract-sounding philosophical musings.
Here's why it matters.
When it comes to the COVID vaccines, there are undeniably things we don't yet know.
So we don't know the long-term effects of messenger RNA vaccines just because they're new.
But that statement is incomplete without also saying that they have been in development since the early 90s and have previously been tested in humans for rabies, influenza, cytomegalovirus, and Zika.
The scary sounding unknown should also be contextualized by recognizing that a. there's no reason or precedent to think they would result in any negative long-term effects and b. so far phase 3 trials done on tens of thousands of people have shown excellent safety and many millions of doses now delivered have demonstrated the same at scale.
We also continue following up with the people who've been in the trials to see how they're doing.
An important feature of mRNA vaccines is that they're deconstructed by the body fairly quickly after the message has been delivered, leaving no trace.
And no, it doesn't change or even interact with the DNA in your cell's nuclei.
So notice how providing this kind of context can help to de-escalate the alarmism of how the question is initially positioned.
Let's move on to asymptomatic spread via people who have been vaccinated.
We don't know for sure, because a. that was not the focus of the initial research in developing and testing the vaccines, and b. this is something that's going to be very hard to test.
But early data shows that people who have been vaccinated are much less likely to infect others.
More research is necessary, but these findings are consistent with existing knowledge that says that if the vaccine reduces the amount of virus present in someone's system, there would be less viral shedding and therefore lower risk of being infectious.
How long will being vaccinated provide immunity?
Again, with a novel virus and new vaccines, we just don't know yet.
Early data shows between three and nine months, but that short-sounding period has more to do with not having had enough time yet to see if it lasts longer.
If we contextualize this with the earlier SARS-CoV-1, we know that antibodies provided protection for a two-year period in that case.
More data is required.
Now with regard to the variants, so far the existing vaccines are still effective at preventing severe illness, hospitalization and death, but may be somewhat less effective at preventing mild and moderate symptoms.
In hopeful news this week, the Pfizer vaccine has joined Johnson & Johnson in being shown as effective against the variants out of Brazil, England, and South Africa.
Vaccine research and development will continue.
And yes, we may need a booster shot or even a yearly vaccine.
There's a lot we don't know.
But here's what we do know.
The more people are vaccinated, the more we reduce infections, severe illness, and death, the more we contain the virus, and the more we slow down the evolutionary process that results in new adaptive strains circulating.
Contain the virus and you stop giving it the opportunity to keep getting stronger.
The only context within which all of this means anything other than get vaccinated as soon as you can is one in which suspicion of vaccines as themselves potentially dangerous colors the question per a kind of risk-benefit algorithm.
So let me reiterate, the risks for both individuals and your family and community of not getting vaccinated are exponentially higher than any rare and transient strong side effects may be.
Here's today's takeaway.
Yes, ask questions, ask all of the questions, but try to do so responsibly with well-informed context.
I'm not going to do a lot here to introduce Kalen Robertson because in this breakout interview, he really lays out his life story as it's unfolded over the last four years or so.
And as you'll hear, it's a whirlwind of strange radicalization events, cultic enmeshment, and a painful waking up process that has really only just started.
And all I can really say is, well, first of all, I'm really grateful that he was willing to speak with me.
And I'm really looking forward to what he goes on to do with his new project, which is called Future Freedom, where he's working with ex-alt-right radical Caleb Kane, who was one of the featured subjects of the New York Times' Rabbit Hole podcast with Kevin Roos, and a woman named Samantha, who is a former recruiter for Identity Europa.
We just know that there's a lot of people out there who are going to need a friendly hand as they try to claw their way back out, up, out of the rabbit hole.
Hello, Kaelin.
Thank you so much for taking the time.
Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Hi, thanks so much for having me.
To start, I wanted to ask, very simply, what are you trying to accomplish with future freedom?
There are a huge number of people who are still existing in far-right circles, like the Proud Boys, audiences for people that I used to make movies and sort of content for on YouTube, who haven't really seen anyone walk away from that, disavow that, or live normal lives after leaving those groups.
There's a lot of groups that have been set up to deal with people that exit gangs or people that exit neo-Nazi groups from the 90s or lots and lots and lots of different things like that.
But nothing specifically for people that joined the sort of very, very modern internet-based 2016 plus online radicalization.
And we wanted to basically like use my experience inside of the far right walking away and sort of having a normal life.
And also that of Caleb Kane and Samantha, who helped build an entity Europa to show other people that they can walk away from these things as well.
To elevate lots of other stories of people that come to us, of them successfully being able to leave.
And then also to make videos and resources about how Facebook elevates extreme content and sort of how YouTube algorithms do the same.
to sort of expose how a lot of that stuff works.
Now, are the stories starting to come in as you gain more media attention?
We launched a couple of weeks ago, and I expected it to be a very soft launch.
I expected it to be something that we just do very slowly and very gradually.
As soon as Caleb tweeted it out, it had 4,000 likes and something like, you know, the tweet just did.
Hundreds of retweets and so many people were inquiring through the forum.
I remember I woke up the next morning after I had blown up and there were so many messages from different people from the UK, there was someone in Hong Kong, there was someone who was We had a rabbit hole of transphobia in Hong Kong.
Loads of people who were in the Proud Boys and loads of different groups, people who were supporters of Tommy Robinson, people who were in it, right at the centre, who have loads of questions, people who are just on the cusp of people that have already left.
And it was amazing.
We were completely inundated with it.
We all had a call together and we were like, how are we going to handle this?
So we ended up just spending all of our time speaking to all these people and putting it all together.
And it sounds like the identification aspect has been really important and that your own personal story, to the extent that you've disclosed it so far, has been provided a sort of permission for that flood of attention.
So, can we do a little bit of your basic timeline?
How old were you when you began making media for the alt-right?
What happened before that?
What was the step over the threshold into that world?
How has that looked in general?
Yeah, it was quite a long journey, but in 2016 and 2015, I was like 20, 21, living in London.
I had a good job.
I wasn't political at all.
I never really I grew up not watching mainstream media, not reading the newspapers, not watching TV, like most people my age have got all my information from the internet.
But crazy cultural and political events started happening that were really significant.
You've got Brexit back in early 2016 was dominating the press and then it happened.
And then you had the rise of Trump, which was causing mayhem in politics.
And then suddenly people around me and in the office and people started to really start to talk about political events.
And I didn't really have an opinion or anything.
So I was like, well, I've never thought about, you know, what any of this means, the European Union or whatever.
You know, I was just working in marketing.
I remember the Pulse shooting happened in Orlando where 58 gay people were killed by an Islamist and that was all over the news and that hit me so hard because I came out when I was quite young as gay and I remember my first experience going to a gay nightclub and feeling like finally this place is like amazing where I can completely be myself and something like this has happened in a place that I just felt was really sacred and like really it was just horrific so I went online to try and find out more about why that had happened and what what was going on.
So I remember I just typed in Orlando shooting into YouTube and I remember the top rated results were like quite fiery videos.
They were, number one was like a rebel media video with Gavin McGuinness and Milo Yiannopoulos outside the scene of the shooting.
And they did a gay kiss, even though Gavin isn't gay, to kind of defiantly stand up against this.
And they said that, you know, and this is like a flamboyant young guy.
He looks gay.
These don't look like threatening people.
And these ideas weren't anything I was exposed to.
But they were like, Islam is at war with the LGBT community.
That is why this has happened in this nightclub.
It's been going on for this many years in every country.
Gays are killed.
This, this, this, this, this, this.
And they were like, because we've imported these people into our country, we're going to start seeing the same stuff that that goes on in their country.
They're going to bring that culture over here.
I think the way they said it and the way that they came across it kind of made sense.
I was like, OK, I mean, there's no one else saying anything contrary.
So I clicked off that and then I got to the video below, which was another Rebel Media video analyzing it from Ezra talking about the same stuff.
And that was it.
I walked away and I was like, God, that's Though in my mind, I've met Muslims before and they've never been that horrible to me, but I guess there's like a deep-rooted problem.
And then the YouTube algorithms, I guess, kicked in because I'd watched those two videos.
I remember whenever I went on that YouTube homepage the next day, there were a few recommendations from rebel again, and also a couple of similar kind of obscure right-wing sites.
One was talking about Che Guevara, one was talking about communism, one was talking about I guess it was more anti-Islam stuff.
I just started watching these and I'd never heard stuff like this before.
And it seemed really like it seemed to make sense.
You had Lauren Southern going to this.
She had just gone to this slut walk, which is a feminist rally.
And she was like, there is no rape culture in the West.
And she was sort of wrecking these blue haired feminists.
And she came across as this cool counterculture, like fiery young girl.
Like she came across as like kind of badass, but also likable and cool.
And I was like, oh, this is This is really enjoyable to watch and it seems safe.
It's got ads on it.
It's, it's, uh, she's my age.
It's, it's relatable.
Um, and I just got ended up being like completely hooked with this content.
Like.
I was emailed loads of recommendations by YouTube every day to watch more of these things.
Even though I wasn't subscribed to a lot of them, I just ended up constantly, constantly listening to Stefan Monius break down on the truth about this subject, this subject.
On the way to work, I was listening to it a lot more.
And then Donald Trump won the election.
And he stood up on stage and he said, I will protect the LGBT community.
I will protect the gay community.
He held up a gay flag from a toxic foreign ideology, which no other politician had said on the left.
So I was like, right.
The right have my back.
The right are the winners here.
The right are the ones that care about, you know, freedom of speech and protecting people like me.
And we're like at war with the left.
And I don't know, I just ended up getting really, really riled up with all this because the videos that were being recommended, videos that I was watching a lot, became a lot more intense, a lot more extreme.
They were a lot more kind of like scaremongering about how genuinely a war is coming between our societies.
You know, invaders, and also between the left and the right, and these awful left AWs who want to take away everything we hold, and they hate white people, and it all became, like, amplified.
So I remember just being, like, completely brainwashed by it, and George, who was my partner at the time, was even, like, noticing just a difference in how I was acting in normal life, like, just treating other people in a way, a little bit more suspicious of people.
You know, I just started talking about it more openly in the office, and kind of...
People were getting a bit shocked and everything, but January 10th came the inauguration and there was a big protest in London.
It was a feminist march against Trump.
So I just grabbed a camera and I was like, I'm just going to go and film and like do a real life video because no one in Britain had ever done anything like this before.
No one in Britain had done any of those kind of Lawrence Southern cultural things where you like do a protest and wreck someone.
It never happened.
So I was like, well, someone needs to do it.
You know, someone needs to hold the left to account.
Someone needs to show that, you know, we need like a place in this country where we can talk about these ideas.
Because Channel 4 had just done a documentary called The Jihadi Next Door, which is about Muslims in London who are really extreme and said that they wanted to install a caliphate and throw gay people off buildings.
So we had all these crazy cultural thoughts happening here, you know, Channel 4 just released a study that was found that of a thousand Muslims across the UK, 95% disagreed with homosexuality.
So I was like, fucking hell, this is, we've got it worse here than in America.
We're going to have our own false teaching.
So I went to this rally and I put a microphone in front of them and I just emulated what I saw on Rebel.
I was like, why are you here?
They gave me a dumb answer.
Maybe they didn't know why they were there.
And then I cut it all together, you know, selectively, and put it out and it blew up.
It got like 1.7 million views on YouTube.
You know, Nigel Farage, Raheem, Red Bull were all cutting it up and sharing it on all their platforms.
And I was getting phone calls from all these people that I've been watching for the last six months, kind of idolizing.
And they were like, who are you?
Like, we want to hire you.
So Ezra called me up and he was like, you're great.
You're amazing.
Whatever your job is, like quit your job, like leave your job.
We'll hire you full time.
We'll take care of you.
We'll, you know, send you a microphone.
And Lauren had just left Ripple at this time.
So he was like, we'll send you the microphone that Lauren used to do all of her stuff.
And I got posted that.
I remember looking at it, like I'm carrying on this like flame.
And I was just like, Oh my God, like a, like a, like a baton or something.
Yeah, like it was so, so surreal and so intense.
I remember just looking at it thinking, like, we're going to take over the world.
Like, this is going to be amazing.
And Tommy Robinson had just been hired by Red Bull.
And I didn't know who he was, like, the EDL or anything.
I just thought he was like a rough middle class kind of looking guy.
But I remember being like, look, if we want to blow up in this space, if we want to become really successful, Tommy, We need to clean you up, we need to give you production value, because our ideas are seen as fringe, so the only way we can make them acceptable is to make you very, very polished in production.
No webcams, no stuttering, everything needs to be done through a teleprompter and a script, and everything needs to be done in a suit.
So we went and bought expensive cameras and we were like, Everything needs to be curated and done really, really seriously.
So I ended up raising his profile hugely to the point he became a household name.
And we just went across the country, like going to towns, wrecking feminists, you know, doing all those rallies.
We went to the trials of grooming gangs who were on trial for, you know, suspected whatever.
And we interviewed Muslims who literally were like, yeah, they deserved it.
Like they're white girls and stuff.
It was crazy.
Those videos caught like millions and millions and millions and millions of views.
Terror attacks started happening.
We were on the scene of those within minutes and we were, you know, ranting about it.
And it felt like, it all felt like it was getting so, so, so intense and riled up.
And I remember BBC and Sky, a producer from Sky ended up telling us that our coverage of reporting and shouting outside the Westminster attack had more views on social media than Sky and BBC combined.
It was 20 million.
So we were just like the main voice.
People started recognizing us in the street a lot.
And we just felt like we were on this crusade across the country.
But what happens is all of your normal friends start peeling away and start leaving.
Because I guess it's discouraged a bit to hang around with...
My friends were left wing, normal, middle class people.
And I guess people like Tommy wouldn't trust them at all.
They'd be like, oh, they're probably secret.
They're going to record you.
They're going to betray you.
So I guess it was discouraged to have people like that around you.
because they're not in the club.
So those people slipped away.
My family kind of slipped away a lot as well.
I stopped speaking to them.
So it was like a total echo chamber as well.
There was no one ever questioning what I was doing, questioning my views, which were getting more extreme.
And it was just like really, really, really, really intense.
But then I ended up going and working and making documentaries for Lauren Southern.
I made her biggest ones about South Africa and borderless.
But we ended up running a rally, organizing a rally outside Downing Street, which had 15,000 people, which was called Day for Freedom.
And it was like one of the biggest right-wing protests ever in the UK.
And it just was at the center.
It was weird.
I was like at the absolute center of the world that I had watched for those six months.
And like working for all of those people, you know, Alex Jones, Ilo, Gavin, I was flying the wall out to the UK, then making stuff with them.
And I became part of the structure that pushed me down the rabbit hole.
I became part of creating those videos and I was getting more extreme myself by working with these people and having conversations with these people.
The stuff that Milo believes.
Behind the scenes is different to what they say publicly.
He would actually say that, you know, terrorism is not actually a terrible tactic to scare journalists and to scare tech workers.
And if we have, you know, an attack outside the New York Times or an attack outside Google, then those employees would be far less likely to ban us, no platform us, and write crap about us in the media.
And I was just like, oh my God.
I guess a lot of it was that behind the scenes a lot of their views were a lot more extreme than like actually seriously like far right.
I just ended up becoming more extreme too.
It really drove a lot of my content to get more radical and YouTube would reward that more.
80% of all of my views that I was putting out, of which we've been attributed to nearly half a billion, were all for YouTube recommendations to non-subscribers, people that weren't looking for this content.
So it was very crazy.
Do you know, like, I'm almost hyperventilating just from the speed of the account, because you're talking about something happening between Pulse and the Westminster, let's say, are we talking about six months, eight months, something like that?
Yeah, it is extremely rapid.
Westminster was March, Pulse was...
Pulse was halfway through 2016, so this would have been about nine months, I guess.
So the whole thing of going down that rabbit hole was very, very, very quick.
That was between Pulse and Christmas.
And then on January I started, I picked up my first camera.
And then Westminster was a couple months later.
And you're also saying, though, that at a certain point you started hearing things that didn't sit right for you.
On one hand, you are creating the public face for people like Tommy Robinson and you're making films for Alex Jones, but then what is it, over dinner or at the cafe or something like that, that they're saying the quiet parts out loud about the necessity for terrorism?
Is that how it worked?
That was how it worked with Miles, especially.
I remember Lauren back then when I first met her was back in 2017 was was more like sympathetic for fascism.
And, you know, if there are neo-Nazi groups that she might diss about online, probably she'd be like, yeah, well, at least they're doing what they need to do.
And there was kind of this acceptance that there was an ecosystem that existed where you kind of have the front of the front of the rabbit hole, which is the friendly faces like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and sort of the acceptable ones.
And then on the second layer, it was kind of like me and Rebel Media and Gavin and kind of the more edgy, fiery stuff.
And then there's, you know, there's more.
And then as you get towards the end, it's like the Charlottesville people and neo-Nazi groups.
But there was kind of a bit of an acceptance with a lot of those people that it was all part of the same ecosystem and that it was all kind of, they played just as much of an important part as us to like pull people in and to.
So it was kind of weird because I never really related to those groups that much.
I never really understood what those groups were because it was so far away from my normal life.
But when I was really, really, really in it and everyone started to be kicked off the internet, when people started to have the government clamped down on it a little bit, people like Lauren.
It felt a bit more like we were kind of enemies of the state and we were kind of like...
I don't know, like, yeah, like on more of a bit of a crusade because Lauren got kicked out of the UK permanently and all that kind of stuff.
We ended up spending time with Generation Identity, who are like a very, very, very big kind of group across Europe that do physical stumps and physical acts.
And then I was, you know, like invited to their wedding of the owners, Martin and Brittany.
And I was up in the Alps with them going through airplanes.
Like closing borders and things like that and it felt like we were kind of also on this Tiny, tiny, tiny club.
And like everyone goes through extreme betting processes to be able to get into GI extreme betting to make sure that you're not like an infiltrator.
And I was like allowed in and accepted.
And it was this tiny, it just, it all became far more of a club.
And, and that whole infiltrator thing started to become a lot more prominent with the people that I was working with and the distrust of people outside the groups and my, you know, ex friends and people like that, the further we got into it, because You know, suspicion and stuff like that is like at the top of everything.
So it really made it feel like you were quite special as well, like to be there, to be trusted by these people and to be like in their circles.
But with a double edge because there's also an increasing isolation from anybody else who either knew you in your previous life or anybody who would hold opposing views or anybody who would provide a reality check.
So you get this specialness but also a kind of narrowing of your bubble.
Yeah, and it's kind of like when you are, when the cameras are all switched off, when you're all behind closed doors, like it's kind of rewarded the more like extreme that you can be in your conversations, like the more based stuff that you can say, whether it's I don't know what the examples are right now, but the more extreme your conversations would be, the more cool you would be seen, the more in the club you are, how far you're willing to say things should go for this situation to be fixed.
It was very strange.
And it was the same with the Proud Boys and things like that.
I remember being at initiations with the Proud Boys and they do this thing where they like beat each other up and then they're like in the club and they also do lots of vetting to make sure like they go to their homes with the new recruiters to make sure there's no stuff that that could tie them to like left-wing groups or anything um so it was like there was a lot of actually going to people's residences and and and going through their their personal effects i had heard i had heard stuff like that that local leaders and things like that had done that to new recruits and new people that that just as a vetting process
So it was very like it just became it was weird because when I joined it all it looked like it was just like fun flowery thing that we could just kind of go out and spread the news and spread the word of what was going on and wake people up.
But it was more of like a very highly ideologically driven, like kind of culty Movements, I guess.
I don't really know how to explain it.
It's very strange.
And I didn't really realize it was like, when you're in that stuff as well, it just makes you feel special.
It just makes you feel like, yeah, well, of course they have to do that because we might have infiltrators and we might have people who, you know, want to tear us apart from the inside.
But like, The way that I was treated went towards the end when I was, you know, texting people and I was saying like, look, I don't think I believe a lot of this stuff anymore.
I think I'm going to be pulling back.
You know, they might say, oh, your latest documentary was actually quite like it went too far to the left or whatever.
The reaction I got was just like huge hostility from people like Milo, like really intense, horrible stuff.
I remember when I told Milo that I wanted to pull out or even not have him in some of the future content that I wanted to do.
He like went on a thing and texted everyone that I knew and was like, Kalen is a left-wing informer.
Kalen works for the CIA.
Wrote an article about it on his website.
Like Kalen is a thief and he'll steal money from you.
And he works with the government and he works with Hope Not Hate and the SPLC.
Like crazy stuff.
That's how it starts when you start questioning that stuff and you start wanting to walk away.
They'll start turning on you and start accusing you and all this kind of stuff.
And it was just super, super stressful.
So it sounds like the attitude or the basic structure of conspiratorial thinking, like the Islamists are out to get us or there are, you know, left wing informers everywhere, can very quickly turn internal and begin to eat its own.
Yeah, completely.
And at that point when I was texting Milo that and he started like, you know, taking me down and everything, he had done it to a couple of other people that were thinking about leaving or a couple of other people that have gone too far to the left of their ideology.
And I was like, God, I don't really want to operate in this space much anymore.
I still believe a lot of this stuff, but I feel like what if the people specifically in the groups I've been involved in have been really fucking unhealthy for me?
Like, I remember gaining weight.
I remember I don't know.
I just became really unhappy towards that period and pulling back in a lot of my content.
Well, can I just ask you about the physical day-to-day of that whirlwind?
What was it like, hour by hour, to spend time with these influencers and to be, I imagine, at their beck and call and in endless WhatsApp meetings and so on?
What did it feel like?
What was your daily experience?
Non-stop voice notes.
That was the way that Tommy communicated anyway.
Like I would always wake up every, every single morning, even at like 9, 8 AM.
And I would just have like 20 voice notes from him all with either a crazy mix of ideas and videos that you wanted to make, or things that had happened online that were like really crazy, like things that people have said about us or journalists that have done things.
Uh, and I remember it just being like, Like a lot of the time I would wake up and there would be like beeping because he'd be like outside my house.
He'd be like, let's go, let's go, let's go.
We've got to like go after these people like that journalist has just written an article about me calling me white supremacist.
We know where she works.
We're going to go like go to the office and like confront her.
Let's get the cameras.
Let's go, go, go.
And most of it was just me being like half asleep in a car, like a hundred miles an hour, making a lot of this stuff.
Like, yes, I was I was like making this content, but I wasn't.
It was weird, like I wasn't coming up with a lot of the ideas and like a lot of the structure and I didn't have, I didn't plan my own time.
It was all pulled through it, with him specifically anyway.
It was all like It was just a million miles an hour.
It was constant voice notes.
I remember there were entire weeks that would go by and I wouldn't know what even day it is anymore.
It was just non-stop filming, non-stop videoing, and there was always this crisis.
Everything was always at 2000% as if we're at constant war.
Everything's on the brink of collapse.
We're about to be infiltrated.
I remember Tommy was convincing me that If, you know, one day the police are going to come to your house and they're going to confiscate all of your computers and all of your laptops and like, it's going to be really, really bad, but we'll have your back.
And like, I was constantly living on the edge.
It was just highly stressful.
So, yeah, I mean, every day.
And then it was like just making videos, rushing back home, editing for hours while Tommy was like, is it ready?
Is it ready?
It's ready.
And then we'd post.
We'd get the likes.
We'd get the hits.
We'd get the donations.
It would boost.
And then you'd crash and then wake up and it would all happen again.
But it was just like a Extremely stressful.
I remember I definitely aged five years.
I look okay now, but I remember feeling old just after a few months of doing that.
Do you know, you brought up, I think you used the phrase, strange type of cult or something like that.
And there's a couple of, as a cult researcher, there's some huge red flags that are waving back and forth as I listen to you.
One of them is this really articulate representation of the various layers that you're describing of the front-facing organizations
And the inward facing organizations that the layers of media that actually function as recruitment platforms for more radical and more right wing stuff that, you know, Jordan Peterson is on the surface, but then, you know, a few steps down, you get to Stefan Molyneux, and then a few steps beyond that, you get to Tommy Robinson.
That's straight out of Hannah Arendt's studies on totalitarianism, actually.
What she says is that in order for any kind of cultic structure to work, there's got to be a front-facing kind of propaganda arm that's able to normalize and to invite people from the public in.
And you're also describing your position in that layering system that isn't quite aware of what the innermost layers are doing.
You don't have to be actually tuned into Tommy Robinson's deepest sort of goals in order to be inviting people into his circle.
So that's really fascinating to me.
Was that particular aspect openly discussed in your group?
Like, did you, was that, you know, you said there was an understanding of the ecosystem, but did you actually talk about, okay, well, Jordan's doing this job and Stefan's doing this job and then Tommy's got this job to do?
I remember there was a lot of conversations like that where it was like say Ben Shapiro or someone would say something that people like us would describe as like really cucked or it was like a take saying like oh Jewish people are amazing or something or Israel is great or whatever and we we'd always like you know you'd roll your eyes and be like oh but like he's got he
We understand his role and we all get what's going on, that he has to say that and that's extremely important to have people at the very, very beginning because we know that a lot of, like most of our audience, most of our people weren't open up, weren't directly Finding us because we were on like the second layers.
It was always through those people.
And those people were directly connected to us as well.
Like Jordan Peterson did stuff with Rebel Media.
I met him at Rebel Media speaking tour that I did in Toronto.
And he did stuff with, you know, I think he did a crossover with Stefan.
Yeah, he went on Stefan Molyneux's show.
He's like a few layers down the rabbit hole.
Then Stefan did stuff with Richard Spencer.
So it's all they're all physically connecting on a map and they all know each other on the map.
But they're just happy to They understand what the layers of acceptability are and how all that works, and that certain people can't go down certain things, that everyone has their own roles and their own places, that they can't step outside.
Lauren couldn't go too far right, because that's the kind of job of the other people and the generation identity groups.
But she was in bed with them too.
We went up in the mountains with them and did propaganda for them.
We did it more as pretending it was news reports.
Because it would be too extreme and out of our place to be able to like fully collaborate with them on camera.
So we would do like news reports about them to assess them and we would say to them like, Oh, you've been criticized by the media.
Like, how do you respond to that?
Wow.
But it was still to just do glossy propaganda for them because then the next thing would be like cool music of them coming down the mountain and stuff.
So it was just like an acceptance of all that stuff.
That's slick.
So not only is there a kind of paranoia about who's infiltrating, there's also sort of a hyper-awareness and hyper-vigilance with regard to who the influencer's particular demographic is and
And also probably this vigilance around how far are you going to push any one line before you are in either somebody else's territory or the whole sort of project of working together with these other groups begins to fall apart because you've pissed too many people off or you've gone too far.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly how it is.
I remember I met the most extreme group that I met was the Soldiers of Odin in Finland when I was on my first line.
Right.
And they took us to, like, all their club houses, and they, like, really took us into their club, and it was really intense.
They were like, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna, like, take over Finland, and this, and this, and this.
And they had, like, you know, fully National Socialist stuff, and they had, like, Hitler in their house.
Like, they were full-on Nazis.
But they were, like, We get what you're doing, like, keep up the good work.
To me as well, they were like, Caelan, you and Milo, like, being gay and doing this, like, this is really good, like, it's really, really good for us all.
Even though they're, like, full-on, I guess, gay-aging Nazis, they're, like, they understand the role that I had and people like Milo had, and they understand that they need that for themselves to grow, because they're at the end of that rabbit hole.
So there was an understanding from even the most extreme groups.
So I want to come back to the cult material in a bit, but let me just focus in on that.
It blows my mind that Pulse is your, the Pulse shooting is your gateway into this world.
And then you end up waiting hand and foot on Tommy Robinson and basically serving him for, it sounds like, was it close to a year or something like that?
Yeah.
Now, at what point does it become clear that he doesn't really care about the LGBTQ community?
At what point does it become clear that you're surrounded by people who don't, who are homophobic or who are, you know, extremely heteronormative in that fascist sense?
Where does that start to become clear?
It was weird because my, um, when I started I was like, you know, gay marriage should obviously be legal.
And I was, you know, and LGBTQ hate crimes are happening.
It's extremely important that, you know, we have laws and legislation to protect them.
But my views started to change because, you know, when you're in the club and when you're having private conversations with everyone and when you're not having stuff questioned, the more right wing, the more far right your ideals can be, the more you're kind of proved behind the scenes.
And I remember like not doing it to prove myself, but I remember hearing a lot of views that were like, you know, well, actually gay marriage is slippery slope because if you have that, then you have, you know, you have marriage between like, you know, like seven people and all this kind of stuff.
And I remember being like, oh, okay.
And it was always like, look, gay people are fine.
Like, you're okay.
Look, you're with us right now.
But like, they can't have special treatment.
Like they can't have special hate primals and stuff like there's nothing special about whatever.
And I remember just being like, OK, that makes sense.
And they were like, you know, if you have special treatment for gay people and you have laws specifically to protect them, then people are going to resent them and straight people are going to resent them.
And it's going to make them more ostracized.
So like we need to not.
So I remember changing my mind about a lot of the stuff and being like, actually, gay marriage is a waste of time.
I don't really want to get married anyway.
And this and this and this.
And then I remember thinking that gay pride.
I remember a lot of people like Rebel were like, why don't you go and cover Gay Pride?
And we had a lot of audiences who were like kind of celebrating, like who didn't like Gay Pride.
I remember going and just being like, why are you here?
I did a video like bashing it actually, doing a video being like, why is this happening?
There's no reason to have Gay Pride.
Like you already have like gay rights.
And just like doing a video that's still online now, being like, this is a load of shit.
And then Douglas Murray DM'd me after I made that video.
And he was like, love this video.
This was so good.
Gay Pride is degenerate.
Like most of the gay community is fucking degenerate.
Like it's disgusting.
Like we don't need to...
And I remember being like, yeah, and I did a podcast with Lauren and it's called Talking to a Real Life Gay and it's still on her channel now.
And I'm literally being homophobic.
I'm like, most gay people are fucking degenerate.
Most gay people.
And I was like, most child abusers are gay.
And I ended up pushing like really far right anti-gay stuff in that video that I never thought I would ever have thought in my entire life, because I was just that was my fucking I don't know how to explain it.
Like that was how everyone else around me thought.
That's that's how I kind of proved myself as well with them is like is like being a bit like that.
And I guess, yeah, it was weird.
And so I did hear Tommy make some comments when he didn't think I was listening in the back of it.
A People Carrier to an ex-Muslim that had just joined our crew and he was like, the ex-Muslim guy, I guess, was really homophobic.
And Tommy was just like, oh yeah, I can't let George again.
And he looked surprised.
And I remember seeing him in the windmill and George was making like gross face indications.
And he was like, I know it's gross and stuff like that.
And I was like, fuck.
I mean, I didn't really hate him that much when he did that because I was already becoming so fucking radical that I was even adopting anti-gay views.
So I was like, OK, whatever.
He's obviously just got hang ups from like the actual degenerate gays, not me.
But like I thought those were the moments as well.
I realized that Tommy had spent weeks when I met him convincing me that he was doing what he does every day and wakes up every day to protect the rights of gay people and women and free speech and freedom and democracy in this country and victims of grooming gangs.
And I realized that actually he doesn't give a fuck about fucking gay people at all.
In fact, he obviously doesn't like them at all.
It was just useful recruiting for him.
Can I just drill down, this might be a little too granular, but in the moment in which you realize that he must not be talking about you, he must be talking about the degenerate gays, what's the difference at that point between you and the degenerates?
How did you rationalize that?
Well, like Martin Sellner from GI, which I was spending time with, and we were on this crusade as well with in a lot of ways.
I remember him saying it to me as well.
He was like, look, the gay community, gays, we wouldn't normally let them join GI or anything like that.
But you're really great, Cailin.
You're completely different.
Like, I want you to come to my wedding.
Like, you're in our club.
Like, we trust you.
You're some of the good ones.
Like, you're, like, you're the, you know, one of the good ones.
And you're, you're okay.
But everyone else, all the other gay people are, like, gross.
And, like, you know, those people are, and then they would reference all the stats, all the actual homophobic views that I ended up adopting.
But I was the okay one.
You, but you were also, you were making them look fantastic.
Yeah, I was doing all of their... The GI stuff, when I made videos that were doing their reports, they would be massive recruiting tools for them.
They made them look incredibly normalized and respected.
Lauren's coverage of them was basically their PR wing.
So I was making them look... And no one else in the movement had the technical skills that I did to make people look.
Nice, like well lit, well presented, well edited, slick.
And they saw the movies and documentaries that I was making and they saw those as like unbelievably powerful propaganda, basically.
And they were just like, you're incredibly useful to us, I guess.
So looking back, I guess that's what it was, you know.
Back to the sort of cultic dynamic that you're beginning to describe, especially really intensely with the sort of daily immersion, not knowing what day it is, being constantly on call.
It sounds like Tommy Robinson's voice is in your head with the voice messages.
You know, there's a...
There's a sort of tunnel vision that develops but also a kind of terror that's invoked by this constant state of crisis, which is very familiar to me from the cult literature that a group or its leadership especially will always sort of amp up the outside threat.
It will always present its mission as being absolutely critical at all times and also completely crucial for the salvation of the world, right?
It's not just that you have to get projects done.
It's that if you don't get projects done, your world is going to collapse.
And I'm wondering, as I'm contemplating the incredible cognitive dissonance of being gay and beginning to express anti-gay views,
It feels like the bonding of that cultic environment is so powerful that it will even begin to, you know, push you towards speaking against yourself.
And I was, like, rewarded for that.
I remember the first time I said a couple of those views, like, about how gay marriage is actually super sober.
And people were really impressed.
They were like, Oh, like that's really based.
That's clever.
Like it was, it was like super rewarded and, you know, with more trust and more of like inside circles by, by saying that kind of stuff to, you know, people like Stefan or people in our groups.
And I guess, I guess that's because, you know, obviously what they present and what they put out, the content they say is very different to what they actually believe.
But the state of crisis, I remember as well, it was always like, it wasn't just Tommy.
It was like when we were working with like, um, Like Stefan, it was like there's going to be a coming civil war coming at any moment, like society's going to collapse at any moment and you need to make as much money as you can doing what you're doing.
You need to make as much content and movies to get yourself resources to bunker down to get food and to buy bulk of food and to go and live in the country.
There was this constant state that everything was about to fall apart.
And then there was also this thing of like, When I was with GI in Vienna, it was like Antifa are going to burst through the front door at any moment and like kill us.
And we have to have like someone waiting at the door to like do peepholes.
And everyone was like constantly on edge.
And I felt like we were caught in like Tommy and everyone was always like, you know, there's always a threat of an attack on us.
I've been, you know, talking about Osmo Mornings and like how the state as well as Muslim groups, as well as left-wing groups could like come to our house and burn it down at any moment.
And they were always, always, always amping that up.
So I was, you know, Perpetual state of fear, like even going through airports, walking through anywhere, I was constantly nervous of something that could happen, but nothing ever did.
And I feel like that was completely manufactured, a constant state of fear for everybody to keep everyone completely on their toes and committed.
Um, I don't know.
It was, it was really overwhelming.
It was like incredibly stressful.
I, I not only hyperventilating on this end, but also, also I can feel the claustrophobia of it.
It's like there, it feels like there's no way out of this particular, uh, bubble.
And I also know that, um, there are, you know, overt enforcements of the isolation, not only, You described Tommy Robinson encouraging a distrust of former family and friends.
But I think I'm right in saying that Stefan Molyneux actually has an entire theory around removing oneself from one's family of origin.
And that his wife actually, I think they're both still in Canada, I'm not sure, but his wife is a psychologist who was actually disciplined by her college here for sharing those views openly.
In a way that the college found to be anti-therapeutic and violating her license.
So was that an overt part of the conversation as well?
Did Stefan tell you that you have to leave your family of origin in order to realize the truth of reality?
I remember I had already met Stefan quite far down the line.
And I had already had, you know, my family had already basically disappeared at this point.
But I was still very distressed about a lot of that.
And I was still, you know, missing him.
And, you know, I was still...
Yeah, but I remember when I was in Australia with him and I ran his tour.
So we went to like seven different cities and traveled a lot.
With Southern.
Yeah, so I did that tour and organized a lot of it and did the press for it and everything.
I remember having conversations about feeling sad about it and he was like, no, it's a good thing.
Families can be incredibly abusive.
You need to treat them the same way you treat with a friend that doesn't have much respect for you.
If they don't have that respect, then you can cut them off.
People have very miserable lives because they put up with behaviors from their sister or their mother or type of languages from their families that makes them feel low and you need to walk away from all that.
I remember a lot of that stuff, but I'd already heard I think I'd already heard him say stuff like that in a video, so I think it was just, like, comforting.
Now, your turnaround, it begins with hearing that, you know, the views are much more extreme than you're willing to tolerate.
Is there another sort of key moment where you claw your way back out of the rabbit hole enough to see the light of day?
I mean, there was a couple.
One that was the most visceral was when I was traveling to Turkey because we were doing a documentary for Lauren and we decided to When Tommy had displayed those views and he was being a bit rude and he kind of was being a bit like, I felt like it wasn't that he was being homophobic.
I felt like that it was disrespectful towards me personally.
That just made me feel a bit like, Oh, so I am some of the gays.
I am like part of the gays that you all hate.
I'm not just the special one.
Like you're obviously just like, whatever.
Like he just, it was just very disrespectful.
So he, when he, I decided to just go and work with Lauren for a while, just us and her, and I decided we're going to make a movie.
We're not going to do it about GI, we're not going to do it about Tommy, we're not going to do it about any of these groups.
We're just going to do it about the European refugee crisis, and we're just going to do it on facts and people on the ground.
No commentators, no politics, nothing.
Just Because it's the truth and we had raised quite a lot of money to do it, like $200,000.
So I was like, so we flew to Turkey and we were getting information from like human traffickers and things like that where refugees were being dropped off on the shore before they get into rubber boats and head to Europe, you know, in the middle of the night.
So we were like camping out lots of nights on the different parts of the coast where we knew the jumping points were.
And then one night finally the We had like a breakthrough and like a hundred refugees turned up with the traffickers and we walked down the side of the mountain with them towards the beach and like it was crazy like the only thing illuminating all this was just moonlight but it was really insane because what I was expecting to see before
They arrived were angry, fighting young men, invaders who would be hostile, who would be quite violent towards us, who just wanted to like basically take over Europe and benefit for themselves and like all this kind of stuff.
The stuff that I've been convinced that we were going to see by the press on the far right and by people in those circles.
But what emerged through the bush was like old women and and like people with all of their possessions just in black bin bags and like young people who were traumatized and they told me all these stories about how like they wanted to stay but they had no choice and if they stayed in Turkey then they would be put into camps which they would and like it was just the opposite of everything that I thought was was true and um my heart was so broken at that moment for those people and it took me like a year to be able to even talk about this story
Without getting extremely upset.
Because I also felt like I had contributed to demonising these exact people.
I remember we waited for hours for the rubber boat to show up, but it never came.
And I thought, maybe it's because we're here and the traffickers think we're the police.
So I thought I was really nervous.
We could have been arrested by the Turkish police at any moment.
The traffickers could have like shot us at any moment.
And I was just as nervous as the refugees were because they were terrified that they were going to get picked up by the local military.
So we were all fucking scared.
And I remember just leaving them and getting back into our car and driving away.
And I remember thinking, That I hope the boat came and they made it to Europe, which was the opposite of everything that I thought and believed, that I'm literally rooting for them.
And that was the moment I was like, okay, I want to start pulling this back.
But what I'm going to do is we're going to steer this movie in a whole different direction.
I'm going to make this movie about literally telling the stories of the refugees that make it to Europe and that are successful or some that are unhappy.
But like, it's I just didn't want to turn it into like a propaganda thing again.
And that's if you watch the movie, it's not it's not like what you would expect.
And all the comments are right wingers being like, oh, my God, I didn't expect this.
Like this is actually open my eyes to whatever.
So it's it's pretty good.
It's just a shame that Lauren is still presenting it because she's extremely biased.
And I couldn't I took it as far as I could.
But that was that was kind of slowly on the way out.
I decided to go and start working with Alex Jones for a while because he was He wasn't Tommy and he wasn't in Europe and it just felt like it was a bit further away from what I was doing.
But then Christchurch happened, which was March, which is two years ago this month, two years ago this week.
And that's when I completely shut it all up.
And I was like, I want nothing to do with any of the people that I worked with before.
I remember Lauren when we broke the news.
I remember I woke up at four o'clock in the morning and I had heard what happened.
And I called her and I said, Lauren, we've just deleted the Great Replacement video from your YouTube channel, which I run, because it's going to be like, because I read the manifesto and I don't want another single person to ever see this video again.
And then she went mad and she was like, what the fuck?
Now people are going to think that I'm like guilty.
And then like a couple of people tweeted being like, well, Lauren's taking down her Great Replacement video.
And she was more upset about the fucking fact that I'd taken down the video than the shooting that happened.
Was that an admission of guilt, she felt?
I don't know what it was.
I think it was just that she's driven just by complete selfishness.
I don't know what it was, but it just showed me that it didn't bother her what had happened, or she felt like she had no connection to it.
But I just was like, I can't do this stuff anymore.
I can't take part in this stuff anymore.
So I cut off everyone.
I just stopped talking to Alex.
I stopped talking to Milo.
I had a few more articles written about me from far-right people being like, he was a plant.
He was a CIA agent all along.
We need more protective measures and everything.
But yeah, I just walked away.
I was just like, that's it.
And at the same time that you're cutting ties, this is 2019, I believe.
Yeah.
That goes in phases, and I think there's a moment in there in which there are some left-of-center publications that pick up on the fact that you have left Tommy Robinson, but they publish some sort of skeptical comments about whether or not you're, you know, sort of really de-radicalizing or whether you're going to become a right-wing plant on the left.
So how was that playing out?
There were some doubts as to your earnestness with regard to leaving this behind.
There was a mix of things with that, which made it very difficult because I just wanted to disappear and I just wanted to go and work in a pub and I didn't want to do media anyways.
So I didn't really at the time, I didn't really care that much.
But what had happened is Milo had gone and emailed editors from like everyone that covers disinformation, everyone that covers this stuff.
And he had said something like, oh, I had exposed Kalen for being a plant and for this and this and this.
And so he was kicked out of the far right and did not walk away.
So he doesn't deserve redemption because his views haven't changed.
It was something like that.
Because he wanted to make an example of me.
He didn't want anyone else.
And these people didn't want anyone else to walk away from their cult and be successful and be happy and maybe be portrayed positively in the media.
So they wanted to stifle all of that as much as possible.
So that made it really difficult.
And then I think a couple of vice journalists wrote things being like, should the far right be redeemed?
And also, what else happened?
I mean, that article was written actually before I left.
That was a weird thing.
But you left in stages, sort of moving, you know, from deeper in the hole to... So for you, cutting off with Tommy Robinson and working more with Laura Southern was a step in the right direction.
Yeah, it was.
So I went on Sky and I said that.
I was like, Tommy's ideas are actually a little bit too far and I don't want to participate in that, so I'm going to do documentaries telling the truth.
And then Vice were like, then Vice wrote an article saying Sky had just done a puff piece on Kalen because He's still working with Lauren Southern, who's still a far-right extremist, so he doesn't deserve redemption, which I actually understand.
I don't have a problem with that article.
What I find annoying is people read it now as if I'm still doing it, and I'm like, no, I left all of it.
Because it's my top-rated fucking result when you search my name.
That's the internet.
But then again, so much of your content is still up as well.
Yeah, which I can't take down because I'm still, like, radicalising people now.
That's one of the really difficult things.
That's why I started Future Freedom, too, because I'm still pushing people down the rabbit hole, even though I'm not doing it anymore, even though I'm actively speaking out against it.
And it feels like a cycle I can never stop.
I've tried to get them taken down and it won't work.
They've still got millions of views.
They're still growing.
They've still got new comments every day.
I still get messages on social media from people being like, keep up the good work.
And I'm like, please look at my Twitter feed.
I understand that you're lied to and you need to stop watching this content.
And you would have to do that in individual DMs or something like that, wouldn't you?
Yeah.
It's crazy.
Yesterday I was filming an interview for a local TV station in the middle of London, and mid-interview, which will come out next week, someone comes up to me and is like, are you Kalen?
Oh my God, I love your videos.
You're a hero and stuff.
I was like, I'm really sorry.
I mean, that happens quite a lot, but I don't think anyone believes me, but it happened on camera finally.
And I was like, look, I'm really sorry to tell you this, like you were actually lied to and I was pushing stuff that's actually bullshit.
And like, it's really like it's, you know, Tommy is a fraud and all this kind of stuff.
And he was just like, what?
Like his mind was just like blown.
So I do that as much as I can.
Because you're the same face.
You're the same person standing there.
You have the same control over your presence and you're as articulate now as you were then, even more so, obviously.
Yeah, it's almost like you need a t-shirt or something that says, I'm not the zombie Kaelin Robertson.
Because there's a ghost out there now, it seems, that is still getting these views.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe this comes around to, you know, I was in cults myself.
I enabled abuse.
I was complicit in abuse.
And then I also stood by as abuse happened.
And 20 years later, you know, I'm almost 50 years old now.
A lot of this still haunts me.
And part of me recognizes that I was under a kind of undue influence.
And then part of me recognizes that my participation was enthusiastic.
in the groups that I was in.
So are you dealing with these same issues and what's helping you see your way clear through all of that?
Yeah, because we were also taking over the world, it felt like.
We were in this club and we had moments that were hilarious and moments that were amazing and moments that were, like, life-changing and incredible together and really fun and really cool and really, like, I don't know how to explain it, but, like, it's hard to think back on those times because, you know, and not remember all the damage that it caused and all the terrible things that had happened and all the things that have been attributed to it and real-world violence that comes because of all this stuff.
So there's a huge difficulty with that.
I think the only reason I can cope with it Because when I left, I went and worked in a pub and I was like, I'm just going to disconnect from that world, from the internet completely, and just re-engage with society and move on.
I feel like I'd participated in what was an extremely damaging thing, that people are still being affected by, whether it's through violence or whether it's through people who have joined those groups and are still in those groups because they saw my first video two years ago, who need to get out.
And I was like, I genuinely feel like the only way that I can deal with this or even sleep at night, to be honest with my conscience, is to actively dismantle What I helped build and to actually work against it.
So that's why I went and I moved back to London and I started working for Byline, which actively are the only publication in the UK that really hammers and deals with like disinformation.
You know, working against the people that I used to work before, using my skills that I had to help build the Fulbright to build a place that's progressive, that's not harmful to society, that dismantles a lot of those ideas.
But also, To start Future of Freedom, which is to actively do something to help pull people out that are in there.
Because people who are in these groups don't trust the media.
The media are, you know, left-wing, they're monsters.
So if the left-wing media say something to discourage, to disparage Alex Jones or Lorne or anyone like that, no one will listen to it or to pull apart the ideas.
If professors or intellects or academics give speeches talking about it, well, they're all left-wing, they're all owned by the state.
But if I say it, the person that they recognize from those videos and the person who was involved in that stuff, I feel like it will be more effective.
And also I walked away and I'm happy now and I'm okay.
And it was fine.
And I, they can do that too.
Like we've had so many messages from people just being like, this is the first time I've seen anyone like publicly walk away and be happy.
And someone who was like, I'm really fucking scared, but I want to, I want to do the same thing.
And I want to talk to you.
So, I feel like now that I can, like, dealing with those thoughts and dealing with regret and things like that, it's only made bearable by the fact that I'm actively undoing that stuff now, rather than just leaving.
Now, moving forward, though, as you launch into this new project, which I think must only accelerate over time, given the need and how many people will, I mean, you've already got an indication of how many people are going to come your way.
It looks like you're setting in motion another type of very fast-paced public life.
And so I'm wondering how are you going to take care of yourself?
How are you going to manage to check in and, you know, be sure that you feel ethically grounded and that you know who your friends are and that, you know, you're not going to be pushed forward in ways that are difficult for you to understand.
I don't know.
I haven't thought about it yet.
I still have a very, because of the past, I still have a very unhealthy work life.
I still don't take any time off.
I still operate a thousand miles an hour and I still feel like things need to grow at an absolute exponential rate.
You know, the work that I'm doing and they are, you know, I'm getting millions and millions of views now for this channel and doing a lot of that stuff and it's great.
But I think I think it's going to be okay because the people that I'm around are genuinely good people.
You know, Peter, who runs Byline, cares about me massively and he's always encouraging me to take as much time off as possible, always encouraging me to say, look, you don't have to do anything at a million miles an hour, it'll be okay.
And I think it will.
I think it will, over time, start to return to how it was before I joined any of this stuff.
And just to be completely okay again.
Because I am around good people.
Have you been able to mend relationships with people that you fell away from?
I haven't reached out to any of them because I feel like it's quite... Well, no, I emailed a couple of old friends but I never got a response.
But I bumped into someone in the street a couple of weeks ago that was so...
Lovely.
It was so weird.
I had just been somewhere to like a clinic to like a cosmetic.
I don't know what I was doing.
And then I was walking, walking home and I just bumped into a friend that I haven't seen in like five years since before a lot of this stuff started.
And he was like, Oh my God, Kalen.
And I was like, Oh, like, how have you been?
And he was like, really nervous.
He was like, Are you still doing that stuff with Nigel Farage and with all these people?
Like he was kind of really nervous.
And I was like, no, I left it all behind.
And I just told him everything that happened.
And I just told him how I left.
And he was just like, he was just like, you seem so much more normal now.
He was like, he was like, I'm really happy for you.
He was like, we should grab a drink one day.
We should like, we should reconnect one day.
And it was just, it was just really, really nice.
It just made me think that It was like the ending.
I don't know how it felt like it felt like the end.
I felt like none of this was really over until like that had happened.
I felt like it was all still kind of a thing that dominated my life and still like a huge part of like everything that creates my identity.
You know, people that meet me now, the most interesting thing about me is that I was in this fucking thing.
But I don't know, just the fact that he was like, it's OK and you seem cool again and you seem like I want to be friends with you again, made me realize that it's finally going away.
And I'm finally like returning to, you know, who I was before and getting accepted by those people.
It was just an amazing thing.
I remember he walked away and I got really emotional.
And it was just really nice.
And I'm just going to meet him again for coffee when lockdown's over and stuff.
Yeah, it sounds that sounds great.
It sounds pretty normal.
And it sounds like he remembered you.
It sounds like he remembered you from before.
Yeah, it was really nice.
I don't know why it hit me so hard, though.
It was just really, like, really, really emotional.
Oh, I don't know.
But I think things will be OK.
We're around good people.
And at the end of the day, like the side of politics I'm working on as well now, it's progressive and it's not hard left.
It's not anything like that.
It's just good.
It's just disinformation.
It's punching up.
It's trying to make the world a better place.
So I feel like it's healthy, you know.
What a courageous young man.
It was a great interview, Matthew.
Yeah, thank you.
I was really moved to speak with him.
Yeah, there's something that really struck me there that jumped out in relationship to the White Noise documentary that we covered a couple weeks ago when I talked to Daniel Lombroso, and it's the difference between Kalyn and Lauren Southern.
You know, the moment, you may know the one I'm referring to, is in White Noise, we see Lauren Southern interviewing a group of African and Middle Eastern migrants under a dark nighttime overpass as they sit around the fire and, you know, they have their makeshift sort of campsite.
And this would be the trip that Kalen talks about as a turning point for him, right?
He describes being on the Turkish coast.
He's with her making the documentary.
They're hiding from the police.
They're hiding from helicopters.
They're huddled with the migrants and refugees waiting for the trafficking boats to ferry them to Greece.
And he's afraid for his life, right?
He says we could have been shot.
Yeah, and he's two years out of a marketing career in London, London.
Like, what the hell is he doing there?
Yeah, unbelievable.
But what he says then is that his experiences on that trip humanized the very people that he and Lauren Southern had gone there to demonize as being the ruin of Europe.
He talks about expecting them to be aggressive and angry young men, and instead he finds children and old ladies and people generally frightened and vulnerable fleeing.
As they tell them, from horrific conditions into the jaws of a lesser danger.
He notes that after surviving that ordeal, he found himself surprised to find, right, that he was hoping they made it.
And that there was sort of an epiphany at that point.
Yes.
I could feel it's like, because so much of the conversation for me brought up these kind of red flag indicators of Cultic enmeshment.
These moments in which there's this sort of sliver of light or realization that comes in and says, oh, actually, things are not as they seem, or you have been deceived, or this person that you are working for, they've actually been concealing their real motives from you, or they actually secretly hate you and they only really want you around because you do good propaganda.
Like, those moments were very, very powerful.
But I think the most powerful one, right, is what you're referring to is this sort of outflow of empathy that just overtakes him.
One scene that jumped out at me during that part of the interview was It just reminded me of the level of privilege that some Westerners live with, and that came into stark focus for me when I was 25.
I spent my 25th birthday backpacking around the Yucatan by myself because I couldn't find anyone to go with and I really wanted to see the ruins.
And I ended up in Merida, which is the capital city of the Yucatan, and I met someone there who He told me that he could sell me some peyote and I stupidly believed him and I ended up getting, you know, I ended up hanging out with him for a few days but I got in a car with him one day and drove about 45 minutes outside of the city with three Mexicans that I didn't know and really rural Mexico.
And as I'm going, I'm like, oh, this is how...
You just, you can die, like very possible.
And they, you know, they were cool.
I paid them and there was all good and the peyote wasn't real, it turned out.
And you know what?
For the money that I lost, it was fine, but it was, it was just a, it was a reminder to me to be smarter in my life.
And when I hear how Kalyn, like what he got out of that compared to her is so indicative of, of how, whether or not you're willing to grow as a human being and empathize with other people.
Yeah, and the point that you were making, Matthew, about that sliver of light, right?
It's not just cognitive dissonance, right?
It's a dissonance between the ideological commitments that you've been indoctrinated by and the emotional empathy that you feel for other human beings where you realize, oh, I can't just dehumanize them.
There's also a category shift from an online technologized sensationalistic world that is spinning at 10,000 miles an hour and then sitting his ass down on the beach in the cold with the sound of choppers overhead.
I mean, the world actually hits one in the face if one enters it, right?
And yet, and yet, the contrast then is in the Lombroso footage in White Noise.
Southern is obviously visibly shaken.
She's emotional in the back of her cushy SUV rental.
And this is in France, in Calais, I believe it was, after hearing the migrants' harrowing stories around the fire under the freeway.
But as she dabs her teary mascara, she affirms that even though she feels for these people, they still don't belong in Europe.
So she is moved, but not enough to reconsider her basic commitments, right?
I wonder if that actually works for her demographic or it doesn't.
Like if she's able to express empathy while also maintaining the sort of firm line in the sand.
Of anti-immigration ideology.
Does that actually work for who she's appealing to?
Does that actually contribute to this sort of, you know, liberalized face or, I don't know, the softer, you know, what would you even call it?
The soft, the pastel-cue face that she's adding to the anti-immigration movement.
Yeah, yeah.
Even though I feel for them, I'm a human being, it's still wrong on principle, right?
But the thing about that is, is that it's in White Noise, and I think it's footage that he got that wasn't actually in her movie, right?
Sure.
Yeah, great.
Well, it also has this feeling of this is going to hurt you more than it hurts me.
Or hurt me more than it hurts you, right?
I got that wrong, actually.
Right.
Yeah, spoken as a fellow sufferer of corporal punishment growing up, Matthew.
Right, yeah.
One other thing from the interview that really popped out to me was when he, when Kalen was talking about the way, the intersection of all of these different characters, it really reminded me of the Hay House downline.
And how they all support one another and they all are vying for the best endorsements from one another.
But instead of being unified by this sense of spiritual enlightenment, they're under this constant sense of collapse, as he put it.
Right.
And the intersections are understood to be necessary but also instrumental that everybody has their role to play and that they can rely on on Dave Rubin to do this type of work and then they can rely on Stefan Molyneux to pick up slack over here and then they can rely on Laura Southern to make this particular thing look good
And they all are kind of aware that they are both sharing and mutually benefiting from the same space, and that their audiences are feeding into each other, and that the whole sort of machine is moving towards normalization.
Like the project is normalization, right?
So you need a lot of, you need your hard edges to actually get your ideology across, but you can't show your cards to everybody all the time.
Yeah, it's this layered system, right?
In terms of how extreme and how frank the white supremacist views are going to be.
There's another point of intersection here that I found really interesting, which is that before his work with Lauren Southern, Kaelin had worked for Tommy Robinson, and he talks about that.
I had not heard of Tommy Robinson prior to his brief, and as it turns out, ill-fated intersection with Majid Nawaz, who some people may know of.
He's the British-born Pakistani who was radicalized into Islamism.
As a young man following a youth in which he and his friends were subject to violent racist attacks by white nationalists.
And Nawaz became involved with a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir and traveled to Pakistan and Denmark and Egypt pursuing their Islamist agenda to establish a global caliphate.
And eventually he was arrested in Egypt and imprisoned for five years.
His experiences while in prison de-radicalized him.
Including being adopted as a political prisoner by Amnesty International, which was a group that he had previously demonized, right?
So that sort of turned things around for him.
He ended up, they helped to get him back to England and he starts Quilliam, which is a counter extremist organization.
So he has a similar kind of arc to Kalen in a way, although perhaps even more intense on a few different levels.
Anyone who's interested, he tells a story in a 2012 book called Radical, My Journey Out of Islamist Extremism.
Yeah, that looks really good.
Yeah, yeah, and the thing about Nawaz is he was involved in Tommy Robinson's very public exit from the white nationalist group that he had originally founded, Robinson, called the English Defense League.
This happened in 2013, where they did a press conference together and the move was heralded by Nawaz's group, Quilliam, as a victory for community relations.
Robinson then came out and publicly apologized for his previous Islamophobic comments and for creating fear amongst British Muslims.
Wow.
But all of that was very short-lived, right?
And it's like fully four years later that Kalyn Robertson is curating Tommy's new public image, dressing him up in tailored suits, shooting glossy footage of him as the respectable face of the English alt-right.
So we have a few different versions of how deradicalization can go.
Well, also, we have this sort of, like, flipping of this very opportunistic flipping of contexts, echoed by how Kalen is describing that he's initially radicalized by the news that he receives after the, from YouTube, after the Pulse massacre, where, you know, Milo and Gavin McInnes are the ones to announce to him that
It's the Islamists who are coming to kill all of the gay people.
And that becomes his doorway, strangely, into this world where none of these people give a rat's ass about LGBTQ.
None of them accept him.
him.
None of them care about social justice or equality.
None of them care about what's actually most precious, what actually drew him into their sphere.
And then there's this process of gradually tolerating bit by bit all of the things that offend that initial kind of allegiance until he can't take it anymore.
Well, yeah, yeah.
And him thinking that, well, these are the ones who will protect me where the liberals won't.
The fascinating thing about Milo Yiannopoulos this week, I believe it was this week or maybe last week, is that he's just recently started, and he may be trolling, because he is a troll and he is a bizarre character, but it appears that he has decided to kind of stop enacting his gay sexuality.
I don't know if you guys saw this.
I did.
He's given himself conversion therapy or something?
Well, he's now referring to his husband, ostensibly, that he's been living with for quite some time as his roommate, and saying that he is controlling his gay sexual desires because he feels that they're actually unacceptable.
Well, you know, I mean, control seems to be part of his toolkit, given what Kalen said about what it was like to hang out with that bunch of people over those many years and how, you know, this sort of constant paranoia and concern over who was going to be outed and who was going to be ratted out.
He was going to have shit talked about them behind their back when someone else was present.
Absolute, absolute paranoia.
And one thing about Milo that's pretty apparent is he just wants to be in the spotlight.
So if his pivot is there, it's his pivot.
But that sense of paranoia that Kaelin talks about just reminded me of the sort of social immaturity that these figures also have.
And that's something that's always baffled me about.
We can cross over both into wellness and we can look at far right.
And this is the intersection of where these broken figures are championed as these exemplars of virtue or some knowledge that other people don't have.
And I've, I mean, we've talked about it before, and Matthew have asked you this specifically about cult leaders, but what, what is it about these people who are so, so emotionally broken and they get so much power.
It's, it'll always baffle Yeah, I mean, Daniel Shaw's psychoanalytic presentation of what he calls traumatic narcissism is about the most cogent picture that uh, we've got out there in the literature, even though there's a lot of cult researchers who like to stay away from sort of speculating on the inner lives of cult leaders
because, you know, they never go to therapy and we never get to ask them any questions, but he points, he paints the picture of the person who is traumatically narcissistic.
And, you know, if you sort of take the profile of grandiosity and self-centeredness that we understand through narcissism, and then you, then you add a traumatized amplified aspect to it, uh, you wind up with somebody who, um, Can't stop attracting attention to themselves or being the center of the universe because if they stop doing that, they will feel like they are dying.
They will feel like they don't exist.
And so, when Kalen talks about waking up to 30 voice messages from Tommy Robinson about all of
The shitty videos that he wants to make that day and then he looks out his window and there he is down there in the street like, you know, he's in, I don't know, some gangster picking him up and they're gonna bomb off to confront some journalist and then he never gets to sleep and that kind of sort of immersive activity and demands made upon everybody that's in the sycophantic circle
is like, according to Shaw, the person can't stop doing that because if they do, they won't know that they're alive.
Yeah, the terms that I've always liked in terms of a psychological analysis of this too is the perfect marriage of people with very strongly unmet or deeply unmet narcissistic needs.
On the one hand, then that would be the figures that you were just describing.
And then in terms of the followers or the sycophants, unmet idealization needs.
This comes from Heinz Kohut's self-psychology model that these two very intense needs come together in sort of the perfect alchemy.
And then if you add the pace and the feedback loop rhythm of social media immersion, it's almost like we've created technologies by which these pathologies can, like, They can themselves logarithmically deepen and complexify and speed up, right?
It's not just... I mean, I was around cult leaders who couldn't stop working, who never slept.
Michael Roach would maybe sleep four hours a night, but then he was flying around the world.
And then, you know, the young women who were his secretaries were always at his sides typing out dictations and stuff like that.
There was no end to the chaotic activity around the person.
And what it meant was that everybody lived in this feeling that everything was falling apart.
And they must act and they must serve the person's needs so that they not only stay alive, but that they save the world at the same time.
Because the leader's body and their personality and their charisma in the world becomes equivalent to the world itself.
And so, yeah, there's this activity that is ongoing.
Ongoing, but Michael Roach wasn't even I wasn't hanging out with him in the social media age, right?
Yeah, like that was before Dude could have been on Instagram all day and Twitter and Twitter all night It mean it would have been fucking worse.
It would have been worse Meaning you you all had some breaks from him at least right?
It wasn't a continuous feedback loop Exactly!
We didn't have mobile phones.
I mean, that alone is horrifying to me to think on with regard to what people in contemporary culture are going through.
When sources were telling me about the constant WhatsApp messages coming from Guru Jagat at Rama Institute and how they could never get away from her demands and how that would go all day and all night, that's just a It's a fucking nightmare.
It's like, it's the worst of like Jim Jones did not have that shit.
The nobody, Marshall, what's his name?
Heaven's gate dude did not have that stuff.
They had to do it.
They had to do it with their bodies.
They had to come by it honestly.
Right.
They had to do it.
And that's why I think there's going to be more of these fuckers around, because the technology actually allows more people to behave like cult leaders.
The technology starts to become a replacement for the old school indoctrination style where you meditated on the form of the guru, right?
You meditated on becoming one with the guru.
In fact, the guru is installed in your head via social media.
Right, right, and the meditation is the scrolling, right?
You don't have to, and I was, you know, when I thought about this big problem, just coming back to what we were talking about with, what's his name, Sabmech, who woke up?
Sabmech, yep.
Right, okay, so if he's the Q replacement, and Q is this mystery because he was an absent
But when I'm thinking about how to understand Q as a cult leader when he's not even there, is that, as I said before, the excitement of the followers in their gamification of, you know, finding out what the Q drops mean and all of that, that becomes the charisma of the leader.
But it's diffuse.
It's diluted out over other people.
But then, I mean, when you have the YouTube algorithm leading Kalen Robertson from, you know, Milo and Gavin McInnes kissing in front of Pulse nightclub to Stefan Molyneux to, you know, whatever Nazi swastika Nazis he winds up looking at,
You have the algorithm playing this charismatic function of leading you to something more and more flashy, more and more fashy, more and more extreme.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, on the topic of fascism, I feel like there's this powerful overlap here, whether we're talking about Islamism, I was just talking about Majid Nawaz and his journey, or the alt-right, as we've been discussing, or QAnon, as we have ad nauseum.
There's this global phenomenon that happens through online means, and these are all essentially fascist groups.
And I just came across a definition of fascism that I had not seen before, which is Roger Griffin's definition as palingenetic ultranationalism, which sounds really fancy.
Right.
Palingenetic refers to spiritual rebirth.
The former glory of the nation has been corrupted or the group, right, by decadent foreign forces and the ultra nationalist bent prioritizes a restoration of the pure identity of the true people and their superior country or traditions or religion.
And I just find this really fascinating, because we've evoked the concept of fascism quite a bit, and I notice, too, that conspiritualists tend to evoke fascism as their enemy as well, even though they perpetuate aspects of this myth.
No, they fucking love it!
They love it!
They love the aesthetics, because they don't understand the Exactly.
They understand all of the micromanaging things that fascists are supposed to do to their bodies so that they can become triumphant.
They know the massage oils and the meditations and the postures and the broad jumps and the fucking high jumps and all that.
They know all of that and so they go off to Greece and they join Aforon and they have their eco-fascist cult.
They rail against fascism.
But they actually love the sort of textures of it.
And that's particularly dangerous because it makes them blind, of course, to the anti-Semitism.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So they're perpetuating aspects of the myth, especially the glorious rebirth, great awakening kind of part.
But then they project fascism onto public health measures.
So this brings me to Naomi Wolf.
Who we know is the prolific feminist author and former political advisor to both Al Gore and Bill Clinton.
And this past week, who did she pair up with but anti-vax big kahuna RFK Jr.?
Well, they have to find each other, right?
They have to find each other.
He gets he gets turfed off.
She's going to lose her Twitter account soon enough.
They've got to hang out.
They've got to hang out at the Asclepion in Aferon.
They're going to go and Sophia Tara is going to massage them both.
Absolutely.
She will be the facilitator.
This is for RFK's misinformation show, which of course is called Truth.
Central to their discussion is Wolf's current turn, and I didn't know this about Naomi Wolf, she's turned into framing the pandemic as an example of emergent fascism in America.
She's written a piece in conjunction with this RFK appearance that's on the, what's it called, the Children's Defense League or something.
I'll find it in my notes here.
Children's Health Defense Fund.
That's right.
It's We Love All the Children Fund.
Yes.
We love every child.
Yes, unlike our enemies who are absolute monsters.
This piece that she's written draws on her 2008 book called The End of America, a letter of warning to a young patriot.
The warning signs must have been there.
Before you go on, though, I think it's important because I shared the videos in 2008 when this book came out.
I used to run a book reading in Jersey City with my my good friend Dax, who's been on the podcast.
And we had Naomi in to talk about this book.
Now, remember the remember the cultural conditions at this time where you were at the end of the Bush era.
So that book was very focused on that time.
So at the time, Like, her book actually made a lot of sense, but as you'll get into where it's now gone is a little off the rails.
So, 10 Easy Steps to Fascism is an excerpt from that book, and she warns that the pandemic is being used as a pretext to move the entire globe towards Step 10, which is the title of a forthcoming book.
Step 10 is the book?
Step 10 will be the new book, yeah.
Yeah, which is an interestingly cryptic kind of title for anyone not in the loop.
It's a Naomi drop.
It's a Naomi drop.
It will require interpretation and symbolic hermeneutics, right?
I wanted to read some of the interview highlights that were listed on RFK's Children's Health Defense website.
So here they are.
We're reaching a point reminiscent of what led to the American Revolution.
People are willing to die rather than give up their rights.
This is this histrionic thing that RFK gets into, right?
It's essentially all about COVID vaccines, but now this is a front for the next American revolution.
The Constitution wasn't written for easy times, but for emergencies such as the current COVID crisis.
God, it's so weird.
It's like so antique-y and it's like...
It's fantasy stuff.
I imagine guys playing flutes, marching up and down with hats and stuff.
They're doing their reenactments.
This is LARPy too, isn't it?
Arbitrary restrictions are being put in place by those abusing emergency powers at local, state, and federal levels because you have to have this official sounding language.
In a free society, points are made and arguments are won through free speech and open debate rather than censoring opinions that differ from ours.
He said that on his website, right?
Yeah, and this is of course because he said that on his website.
Yeah, exactly.
They're being de-platformed and yet here he is with his talk show that she's appearing on.
Authoritarianism has no place in medicine, although most liberals are accepting edicts promoted by Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates.
And the thing that blew my mind here in listening to some of this, I couldn't get through all of it to be honest, is that they reference Noam Chomsky And Amy Goodman of Democracy Now as being people who have been co-opted by the mainstream narrative and that now Naomi Wolf and RFK are the last bastions of progressive politics, right?
Amy must fucking hate that.
Oh, my God.
Unbelievable.
Of course, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation neutralized once-independent media, including The Guardian, NPR, and public television through their big financial gifts, so they bought out the media.
Democrats are leading the quote-unquote biofascism charge.
There's no science to back up the widespread suspension of our constitutional rights.
Nonpartisan grassroots efforts are, though, gaining momentum and can preserve our freedom and prevent totalitarian takeover.
Didn't Texas just, didn't the Attorney General just say, come out and say that he was going to sue businesses that enforced mask mandates within their stores?
I think he threatened the Mayor of Austin, right?
He threatened the Mayor of Austin, but also business owners.
Well, the entire Council of Austin said that they were going to continue to enforce mask mandates, which of course Put them at jeopardy of lawsuits because of the state mandate.
Is that a grassroots effort to preserve freedom?
Is the Texas AG part of the grassroots movement?
Well, he is.
Bill Gates is going to help the Austin people in the lawsuit.
Right.
Reading over your list, though, Julian, it reminds me of two books that very much influenced my thoughts on this topic, which are A Terrible Love of War by James Hillman and Christopher Hedges.
War is a force that gives us meaning.
And I have this idea when I see stuff like this, I personally like living in an era of peace, militaristically and not having to fight.
I think that's a good look for humankind overall.
But we are still biologically and culturally encoded to fight.
And it feels like when I see stuff like this, it's just this lacking in these people.
Maybe it's their physicality, maybe it's some inner drive.
But they have to militarize their language against targets that don't deserve it in order to feel like there's this fight.
It seems like, I don't know if we ever escape this conundrum of our psychology.
Yeah, needing to be at war, needing to be the good guys against some terrible threat that is going to destroy our way of life.
Yeah, because if you're actually fighting, I mean, I don't know, I have very limited experience with martial arts, but I'll tell you when I was sparring with people, there is such an immediate sense of life, of fight or flight that is there.
And if you are in a sustained war, I mean, I'll point people to like the documentary Restrepo is a great example of that.
When your nervous systems are always prepared, which is most of human history, people had to be prepared for encounters at all times.
And because we don't have that anymore, we just seem like we have to militarize something.
Well, this makes me think that Tim Kennedy, who is one of J.P.
Sears' best friends, the MMA fighter, and I guess he's, was he, was he an army ranger or a Navy SEAL or something?
Yeah, so, I mean, in a strange way, he might present as one of the most integrated human beings that we cover, in the sense that there's a real cohesion between, you know, he's going to go out as a muscular patriot and, you know, defend the American empire, And then he's going to come back and he's going to, you know, gear up and go to Portland and throw protesters into the back of tactical minivans.
And he's also going to take that kind of bellicose attitude towards vaccine science and mask mandates.
So there's kind of like a like the guy talks, walks his talk in a way that that It actually is kind of unique, right?
Whereas we have Mickey Willis, you know, kind of, he goes to storm the Capitol so that he can do the selfie.
Right?
So that he can take selfie footage of him narrating whatever he's going to make up in his next film.
Yeah, it's social media figures who are sort of terrorist-adjacent, right?
Or freedom fighter-adjacent is how they would put it.
Yeah, but I guess what they do is a kind of media and emotional labor on behalf of the people who are willing to lift the weights.
Yeah, as well as spiritual space-holding.
They wouldn't say adjacent, that's the whole point.
Like, RFK wouldn't say, I'm freedom fighter Jason, he would say, I am a freedom fighter.
And that's what I'm getting at here with the psychology behind this, is that they're actually, with the loss of the physicality in the actual war, they're inventing one and then putting themselves in that hero myth.
Right.
Exactly.
So there has to be some kind of outlet for all this energy.
So just to reiterate here, in this distorted worldview, quarantine measures, global philanthropy, and vaccine distribution apparently represent fascism.
They just don't.
Like, Wolf is just wrong.
She's got it completely, absolutely wrong.
Fascism is anti-science.
Fascism is mythic, it's nationalistic, it's not globalized.
By definition, it's not globalized.
It's about blood and soil, not all over the world, but in your homeland, in your motherland.
It's about beautiful bodies doing triumphant things on behalf of the nation.
It's about Marjorie Taylor Greene doing CrossFit in her fucking congressional office.
That's fascism.
Totally.
And it's also the longing for a spiritual rebirth and going back to nature and not needing medicine, never outsourcing your truth.
All of this is inherently fascist in its tone.
It's crazy because, like, have you ever heard anything out of Tony Fauci's mouth that remotely resembles, or Bill Gates either, that remotely resembles, you know, we're going, we're sort of going to regenerate nature and we're going to have a spiritual rebirth.
And humanity is going to be made new again.
Nothing like that.
There's no glorious triumphantalism, right?
And I think what's happening with Wolf maybe is a little bit she's protesting too much, right?
That actually the values that are objectively true about fascist movements throughout history Are the ones that she actually values.
And so they have to be put out onto other people when they're completely inappropriate.
We're talking about, like, liberal middle managers who just want to fucking give people vaccines.
They don't care about biceps and, like, they don't care about Greek God stuff.
They're not about to take away your freedoms.
They're not, no!
I am happy so far, and I think this will change is what scares me, but that Americans have generally elected the stupidest fascists.
I mean, we know Trump, but also, I don't know if you saw Marjorie Taylor Greene's, what she said at CPAC about stop sending money to foreign lands like Guam, which is U.S.
territory.
So far, we're at least electing stupid fascists, but somebody's going to dial it in and figure it out, and that's when we're going to see real trouble.
Yeah, I wanted to mention here too, just as an aside, that the resonance of this, uh, this conspirituality-style message is exemplified by our old friend Charles Eisenstein, who shared the Wolf RFK episode to his 82,000 followers on Facebook this week as well.
Yeah, not good, not good.
Do not approve.
And, you know, with a glowing review that this is a really amazing conversation that's seeing some things that very much need to be heard right now and are absent from the mainstream dialogue.
Oh, you know, okay, so did you read The Beauty Myth back in the day when Wolf came out with that?
Because that was super compelling to me, and it was really helpful in my early understanding of feminism, and I'm really, really sad to see this turn, actually.
Yeah, I was under the impression that she was a serious and progressive intellectual.
Yeah, absolutely.
That was a fantastic book.
Well, she was.
She was.
I mean, let's be clear, she was.
And again, the book you referenced before, The Ten Steps, I mean, that was at the end of the Bush era.
Part of me feels like her thunder got stolen by the other Naomi, Naomi Klein, with the Shock Doctrine, who had a much better, more thoughtful version of it.
Hers was kind of like a Cliff Notes version, but what happened in the intervening years, I don't know.
Well, and what I've seen with Naomi Wolf as well is that she keeps getting fact-checked.
She keeps having her research questioned.
She keeps having moments in interviews where people say, actually, I think you got this piece completely wrong.
