Jason Charter, a far-left anti-fascist activist, traces the "okay" symbol’s shift from 4chan trolling (2015) to far-right dog whistles, exposing figures like Gavin McInnis—accused of assaulting him at CPAC and promoting forced impregnation—as fascists. He argues their rhetoric incites violence, citing Charlottesville and mass shooters influenced by Alex Jones or Mike Cernovich, while contrasting left-wing phrases like "ACAB" as civil disobedience against unjust laws. Charter’s vision for America includes universal basic income, healthcare, free education, and restorative justice, blaming billionaires (Bezos, Mercers, Trumps) for systemic inequities. Despite death threats, he advocates dialogue to bridge political divides, framing anti-fascism as a tool to dismantle oppression through horizontal organizing. [Automatically generated summary]
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Anyway, my guest today is a far-left anti-fascist, which many of us call Antifa.
He is also the organizer of some of the protests that we've attended and filmed.
No, because I think both parties are honestly crud right now.
You know, I would say like, oh, I am left-wing, but for most people, left-wing is a Democrat, and I just don't affiliate myself with that party right now, especially given that Joe Biden looks like he's going to be the nominee for the party, and that just seems completely ridiculous to me.
You know, a party that's supposed to be moving forward is moving backwards with a guy like Joe Biden.
I don't think he's there on every single issue, but I think overall he is the candidate to push us into the future and to bring this country back to the place that we once were.
I think most people who identify as an anti-fascist would tell you that we don't have leaders.
We're against leadership.
We're against hierarchy, that we believe in horizontal organizing, which means that everyone is treated equally, that everyone's voice is heard equally.
So anarcho-communism is the idea of taking anarchism, this idea of no government, and bringing it to and bringing communism into a small level and bringing it down to the local level in your own communities, seizing the means of production, creating collectives in your own neighborhood and not really relying on a centralized government like you would see, like you've seen in the USSR, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago.
So obviously my understanding and my personal experience with Antifa, or I know Pete, you like to call them anti-fascists.
I'll just keep the Antifa for shorter for myself, is that there is a lot of movement towards using violence and vandalism to get their points across.
How do you, when you say like at a smaller level to push the anarcho-communism, how do they hope to accomplish that or what are their means of getting to that end?
So I don't think that anti-fascism is just going out in the street and fighting fascists.
There's a lot more to it.
There are folks who most of the work's actually done behind a screen.
It's finding where a fascist works.
It's finding who they are, finding out, especially groups like you've seen Patriot Front, who goes out en masse, fully masked up.
And these guys are pushing racist, white supremacist ideologies.
So they feel folks in the anti-fascist community feel that these folks need to be outed.
So most of the work that anti-fascists do are actually just finding out who these people are and making sure their employers know, making sure if they're at a school, making sure their schools know, and just making sure the general public knows who these people are.
Like doctors.
Sure, if you want to call it that.
Now, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
I've seen sometimes people not do it correctly, and that's been an issue.
But overall, that is the best way to stop a fascist is to make them outed as a fascist because for most of them, they don't want their family and friends to know who they are and what they believe.
So I saw a tweet that you shared recently, and it was explaining that Gavin McGinnis and other fascists are hanging out in Oxenhill, call the Irish Whisperer, I think call the Irish Whisperer, and let them know they are serving neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.
What's the point of letting somebody know where the direct location is of somebody hanging out?
Well, the purpose of that was actually to call the bar and have them get kicked out because Gavin McGinnis didn't get served anywhere in D.C., shouldn't get served anywhere in America.
He's a fascist.
The guy is a complete nutcase.
Tried to assault me at CPAC and then blamed me for getting kicked out and thinks that I have some weird relationship to Jared Holt.
I mean, the guy is on the farthest deep end hanging out with Alex Jones, doing coke on stage at his AF PAC conference that he had at the National File.
You know, these crazy things make him a danger to society.
So when you're saying fascist, he doesn't deserve to be served.
He is an American citizen, right?
And I think this is where people get into disagreement.
Even if people are crappy people and they have bad ideologies, I mean, I would condemn anti-Semitism, but anti-Semites do exist, and there are citizens of America who are anti-Semites.
And I know that if I was to fight in a war, I know I'd be fighting for freedoms of all Americans, even the ones that hold ideas that I disagree with.
So when you say he shouldn't be served, do you mean that private businesses should just refuse to serve fascists?
Or do you think that there should be some sort of like actual legal ramifications?
Or do you think that cities should go out on a state kind of level and ban these kind of people from being served?
Yeah, so that's an interesting thing because, but when you say like, it always kind of confuses me when they say people shouldn't get served, because to be honest, if I'm in the business of, let's say, selling alcohol, my goal is to sell alcohol to people who will drink responsibly.
I don't care if they're divorced.
I don't care if they're homosexual.
If I'm a Christian guy and I run a restaurant and we serve alcohol and I'm like, oh, well, gay, I don't believe in homosexuality and I think it's a sin and dirty.
So then I shouldn't, then we shouldn't, you know, shouldn't serve homosexuals here.
I don't think private businesses in a lot of ways, especially at restaurants, when their sole purpose is to do this, if it doesn't conflict with their faith or something, why would we be encouraging people to not serve people that help them reach their end goal?
You know, I just don't think fascists should go out in public.
If you're going to be a public fascist, then I don't think you should get served anywhere.
And I think it's up to the public to stand up against you, whether that's confronting you in person or going and calling the restaurant that you're at, like what happened at Maggiano's when the MPI conference happened.
Stopping people from being able to have a place to hang out, have a place to congregate, have a place to spout these fascists, these racists, these misogynistic ideas is what we need to be doing.
I know what you're saying.
I hear what you're saying.
Oh, it's going to stop someone's bottom line.
But if you're not serving 15 people that night and that's really caused making and breaking your business, then you might want to rethink your business plan and not think about serving fascists.
I mean, a fascist, there are so many different forms of fascist ideologies from proto-fascism to national socialism.
So I don't want to go into any specifics, but I believe it, you know, in general, fascism is someone who believes that the state should be oppressing the people and should use force to enact the laws that they believe and not have a democracy, not have the people's voice heard and just institute rule by authoritarianism.
I mean, you can hear him talk at his AF PAC conference about basically wanting to, basically, if women do not want to get impregnated, that he should force himself on them.
And when you hear stuff like that, that just makes me think, yeah, you're a fascist, man.
You're a fascist.
You're going to impose your will, your sexual will, on someone else.
I think fascism takes many forms and doesn't just mean specifically in the form of government.
Fascism is an ideology the same way anti-fascism is an ideology.
And me as an anti-fascist, I do a lot of things differently in my daily life than someone who necessarily wouldn't consider themselves an anti-fascist or someone who would consider themselves right-wing.
Okay, so speaking of that lifestyle, so let's take Gavin McGinnis.
I have no way to confirm.
I'll take you at your word.
I have no way to confirm what he did or didn't say because I wasn't there.
So he says this statement, right?
Obviously, not a great statement about if you, whatever this is being said.
I would say that that statement stuck with you.
It's something you disagreed with.
And what I've noticed today is an uptick in a trend in that people who are not being physically violent with force are often being met with physical violence from people that call themselves anti-fascists.
And so if someone were to say something like that, does that justify physical force in response?
If I was to say something that is fascist in nature, would that be violence?
I believe that it's up to the community to choose how to defend themselves against someone who wants to kill them for their skin, who wants to rape them because they don't want to have sex with them or they want to do something.
James Fields heard the speakers at Unite the Right and took it upon himself to drive a car through a crowd of protesters, including me.
I almost died in Charlottesville.
Thank God I was about two feet away from where the car hit.
Otherwise, I probably wouldn't be talking to you right now.
People's voices matter.
What they say matters, and it can have lasting effects.
Look at the Tree of Life shooter.
Look at the shooter in Florida, Nicholas Cruz.
Look at Dylan Roof.
Look at these shooters.
They listen to people like Mike Cernovich, listen to people like Gavin McGinnis, listen to people like Alex Jones, and listen to these crazy people who are going to give them information that makes it seem like the world's ending.
It's all the liberals' fault.
It's all the Jews' fault.
It's all black people's fault.
It's all someone else's fault.
But in reality, it's the government's fault and it's the rich people's fault that the world isn't as good as it should be.
I think that if we did something to stop the rich and stop the mega-rich, especially these people who have billions upon billions upon billions of dollars, I don't really see the purpose of needing more.
I can't see what you can buy with $2 billion that you can't buy with a billion.
So why do you even need to be a billionaire in the first place?
Yeah, you actually shared a tweet that all billionaires are bad.
And I'll get to that in a second, but I want to unpack some things you said.
So it's like, obviously, these people that are these white nationalists are people that are killing people based off of hate intentions, I would say, in general.
That's not even just racism at that point.
If you're killing someone based on their religion or how they look, it's evil, right?
Including if you're killing someone for any reason other than self-defense, I would say, and maybe a few other, maybe in war, I'd say you're probably an evil person to begin with.
But I know that a lot of these shooters, the people that they listen to are probably much more extreme.
They're in a lot more of these chat rooms and underground things.
They're not listening to more of these mainstream people as the justification for what they're doing.
Because even if you look at in, you know, I mean, to bring a side soap, I'd like to get your opinion on the Dayton, Ohio shooter and like him being a part of the gun, similar gun club that helps protect some of the far-left events in Seattle.
And what I was going to say is that extremism should be condemned, but I found that I wouldn't say that Cheng Unger from the Young Turks is anything similar to Antifa.
I would consider Antifa to be much further left or much more idealistic in their ideas than someone who's a Cenk.
And I wouldn't consider somebody listening to Chenk as being a far left.
And he should step down from any organization he's currently running, whether that be Justice, Democrats, the Young Turks, or any other 501c3 or C4 that he's created.
If Hitler wasn't there, if Hitler wasn't speaking, if Hitler didn't have his rallies, would Nazis still have gained power?
You know, it was one man with a voice and the ability to speak eloquently to trick the masses into doing evil things against the Jewish people.
People like Richard Spencer, who believe in what he wants to call peaceful genocide.
I don't know what the hell a peaceful genocide is, Richard, but in my opinion, that sounds like you want to kill people or you want to push people off their land or you want to push them out of this country strictly because they are not white.
This isn't a white nation.
It's never been a white nation.
Black people built the White House in case you are wondering.
Slaves built the White House that our president currently sits in.
So when people like Richard Spencer, when people like Alex Jones, when people like Gav McGinnis, when people like Joe Vall and all these other crazy people out there, Jack Pesobic for one, going out there and putting out these racist, misogynists, using gaslighting to do it, it's creating a form where people can hear these ideologies.
And what people are doing is taking action from listening to these public speakers, to these people who represent themselves, who represent an ideology, who represent a group, who represent a type of way of feeling in America.
And I think that's something that we need to stop.
I think de-platforming is a great tool.
And de-platforming Richard Spencer, Laura Loomer, for instance, is another one.
These people should not be on Twitter.
I know Richard's got his Twitter back, but he lost his verified status.
There's at least a dozen Proud Boys that have run for Congress since Donald Trump has won the election.
So when I see that, when I see a violent group like the Proud Boys, one who have people in jail for assaulting people in New York when Gavin was walking around with a katana.
Gavin, take the sword off and use your fists like a man.
I apologize for language.
I know we're on top of television here, but like, you know, these people are a violent group and there's no way to say that they aren't.
And their words have created actions that have resulted in people getting hurt and continued to result in people getting hurt.
Because my goal here is not to like, you know, to shock the crowd and like prove you wrong or something.
My goal is to get into your mind here.
And this is true.
For people listening that are wondering, why don't you say this or that?
This is not a gotcha interview to get Antifa and get him in their words.
This is a genuine podcast, which I'm hoping could set precedent for the future if the sides could just actually speak to each other instead of trying to be assholes 100% of the time.
You know, when you talk about someone like Richard Spencer, it's clear to point out to me this guy is not a good guy because of A, B, C, or D.
And if you would stop this guy for A, B, C, and D or this A, B, C, and D he said has led to this, that, and that, I can listen and I can get on board and try to understand.
And if you say, like you said, if Hitler's on Twitter, you go, Hitler's calling for anti-Semitism.
He's deeming this.
He's trying to gain power of the military, right?
And he's not bound.
He's an authoritarian.
He's trying to introduce fascism, which would then limit the Constitution and give him authority.
He's actually, he's moving in this direction.
Well, real fast, real fast.
I'm saying I could understand that.
But when you start throwing at all these names, what I think even confuses people is where do we draw the line and actually have some sort of standard of truth to actually understand this?
Because I myself would not consider, I don't think I'm as out there or, I mean, I don't agree with you, but in your terms, I don't think I'm as extreme in certain things I've said or would say as a lot of the people that you're mentioning.
And I don't think I share a lot of their beliefs, especially Richard Spencer.
I really don't like him.
I think he actually holds a lot of weird left-wing ideas.
How can I prove to them, like, if there's these ideas, like, well, when Trump says this, he means this.
But where's the facts, Jason?
That's what I want to say.
Like, how do we know that?
Because I understand that we need to have intuition.
And I get that because if you don't use intuition, I mean, if, like, for instance, if we didn't use intuition with the Chinese government, with Xi Jinping, and we took him at his word on the coronavirus, 100% China's lying.
Yeah, yeah, but I'm saying, but when it comes to these ideas of looking into things and assuming, right, doesn't this lead to a lot of confusion with the average person?
Because when we say this is fascism, but it's not clear.
It's like, well, fascism now is an overarching thing, and it can be like this, and it's this lifestyle.
And then there's Laura Loomer.
Like Laura Loomer and Richard Spencer are very different.
I mean, like, Laura Schummer assaulted me at a Friends of Abe event that James O'Keefe was speaking at, stole my idea and put it on Twitter.
She has literally said awful things about Muslim people in this nation, has been banned from Uber, has been banned from Lyft, and has been banned from various other social media sites, including Twitter.
now she's using uh i know on a she has a organization loom media um but you know like her words are are really bad And she doesn't even use dog whistles.
Like, I don't even have to sit here and be like, oh, no, she used this word, then it means this.
No, she's directly used bad words that have like that have actual, you know, connotation to them.
When I'm talking about dog whistles, though, these are words being used by the government that they say one thing they're doing.
And then they, you know, separating families as a way to quote unquote stop illegal immigration.
You know, that's not really, that's a dog whistle for we're going to, you know, we're going to make it so difficult for these people.
We're going to harm them.
We're going to put them into separate cages, cause severe trauma to these children.
I mean, I don't know a seven-year-old who wouldn't get traumatized by getting their parents taken away from them and locked in a cage for months on end and then have to go into a trial where they have to speak in English when they don't even know English.
You know, these things have these dog whistle words, these phrases that Donald Trump uses, that Jack Bosovic uses, that Mike Cernovich uses, that most of the alt-light and the alt-right use are terms that mean something else.
And there is some great dictionaries out there.
I know you're not a huge fan of Jared Holt, but I'm sure he has a dictionary out there of right-wing terms that mean something else that are dog whistles.
And I think that if Americans understood the meaning behind these words, and I don't think the American people are foolish, I think that they're just misled.
And I think that we as a public need to do a better job of, you know, letting folks know that when someone's saying one thing, they really mean something else.
Like, most people don't know the okay symbol for a lot of folks means white power.
Because to be honest, what I know about most right-wing people, if they know the left thinks something's a dog whistle, they purposely, they think, like, and I would say this myself, it's like, it's so outrageous that we're thought of as fascist and all this stuff that we go, it's so funny how we can like say like a frog and an okay symbol, all this stuff are racist, and it makes us laugh.
And so then when it's kind of like triggering, like you have a little sister, and you know, like, you know, when you pull on her pigtail, she like freaks out.
And it's kind of mean.
And it's like, well, you should, if you're a little brother, you shouldn't pull on your sister's pigtail.
But you see, like, your little, you know, you see, like, your sibling out there, you're politically, you know, because we're politically charged, you're politically charged, and we know that all we have to do is make the, you know, whatever, the okay symbol.
And then everyone thinks you're a white supremacist and they get all freaked out and write articles.
Personally, I think B Gay Do Crimes is a great phrase and it encourages people to push against the government narrative, to push against this populist right-wing agenda that Donald Trump is pushing against.
So, um, for me, you know, like, I'm personally a pansexual.
Um, you know, I don't care what's uh, what genitalia someone has.
I like someone for who they are.
Um, you know, so for me, it means, like, it's okay to be gay now.
It's okay to be out there as a gay person in this world.
It's okay to be able to do IA plus.
Um, you know, do crimes.
I mean, you know, it's considered a crime, jaywalking.
You know, what's also considered a crime?
Incommoding.
Do you know what incomoding is?
I will literally get arrested if I sit down on the floor in Mitch McConnell's office and it will charge me with a charge called incomoting.
Is that a that's a crime?
I'm committing a crime, but I'm also doing an act of civil disobedience now.
So that's necessarily where a lot of those folks are going.
And also, you know, maybe stopping fascism in a more community defense way than with your words sometimes needs to happen, especially in a community like Charlottesville, where, you know, fascists tried to run through the streets and tried to cause a whole bunch of trouble.
And one of them killed Heather Hayer.
And I think that if anti-fascists weren't there, it would have been a lot worse.
So sometimes just needing, there's just a need for community defense.
There's an atrazine that turned the frogs gay, though.
Never forget that.
Let me ask you this then, because we were talking about this with the community defense.
Obviously talking about, I didn't even, a lot of people didn't know the whole LGBT.
There's a huge amount in the community.
But were you familiar with the protests against the Trump, the violent protests that ended up breaking out against the Trump rally in Ilhano Mars district in Minnesota later last year?
Look at that motherfucking So we got some Trump hats that were set on fire here today on my left we have over here the actual police officers who are trying to allow cars to exit safely But Antifa and other groups have joined together to try to block the police officers These are actual hats.
They still smell like ooh, they do.
They still smell like soot.
So these hats, People were stealing these Trump hats, including Antifa.
There was quite a bit of Antifa there.
I would say the Antifa there were a little bit more peaceful than the actual, like the than like the Black Lives Matter and the DSA and stuff were a little bit more violent at that one, but they were stealing the Trump hats off people.
We saved a bunch and they they were lighting them on in fire at one point, creating an entire bonfire of these hats.
It's a way for a community to uh to express their frustration.
Um rioting is the language of the unheard.
Uh is a phrase used uh.
That was uh said by um Martin Luther King Jr.
Um when he was still alive.
Um when people are um so uh oppressed, um attacked so much and um brought down so much that sometimes the only way they can get their um, their voices heard is to do something.
Um extraordinary is to do something out of, out of the realm of reasonable to most people um, and that's totally fine.
We don't know, like I can't.
I can't tell um a black person how to react to something um.
So you know, if they choose to react to something you know um that they see as hateful, i'm going to say okay, that must be hateful um, because black people are telling me it's hateful um to them.
You know um the same way, if uh, i'm not gonna use the word, but if someone you know used the derogatory term against uh Jews um, I would consider that hateful um.
And you know um.
Those words, these um, these uh, derogatory phrases um, sometimes lead to uh, lead to action And sometimes lead to people taking action in community defense against the people who are spouting these hateful ideologies, as I've said before.
With all this being said, right, you believe these things about the administration, about commentators like Gavin, and then you have these ideas, these hashtags, these ideas about billionaires, all this coming together.
So many things we could talk about.
We could spend hours in the future breaking apart other things.
But then, overall, then, this has to go from just a philosophy to action, and there has to be an end point.
What does an ideal America look like to you then?
If your ideas were implemented or anti-fascist, and I'm not using you as a spokesperson for everyone, but if in general, if you can use your mind and intuition to kind of take this, what's an ideal Jason anti-fascist America look like?
So, I personally work for a political party, obviously, not the one, not the Republicans.
And I have done a lot of work to elect people because I do still believe that there is some form that we can elect people who will create better laws, who will create a better America.
And a better America for me, and I said I would drop out of politics if three things happened.
If universal basic income came in and a real universal basic income, not the $1,000, whatever thing that the Yang Gang was producing, universal health care and free education for all.
I would quit politics tomorrow.
There's a lot more work to be done.
We need to dismantle the current policing system in America and the criminal justice system in America that's created a prison pipeline and rebuild it into something that's more restorative justice than punitive justice, like that we see in other countries like Norway, Switzerland, and in the Western, in a lot of Western European countries.
We need to change the way we vote, allowing for more access to people who can't necessarily get to the voting polls on a weekday.
There's so many things that we need to do to make this America great.
But I think overall, what we need to do is really just make a more fair playing field for every single American.
And I think that's what anti-fascists want to do in general.
You know, I can't speak for every single anti-fascist out there.
There are going to be a ton of them who are like, bring back Stalinism.
There are going to be people out there who are going to say, bring back Maloism.
It's a wide umbrella the same way the far right is a wide umbrella, you know, or the right in general is a wide umbrella.
People have all these types of ideologies.
But for me, it's really just about creating a more equal America, creating an America where every single person has a fair opportunity, where every single person is on an equal playing field.
And I don't feel like I am on an equal playing field as Jeff Bezos.
I don't feel like I'm in an equal playing field as the Mercers.
I don't feel like I'm in an equal playing field as the Waldoffs.
I don't feel like I'm in an equal playing field as the Trumps.
I don't feel like I'm on an equal playing field as the Bloombergs or the Clintons or any other one of these filthy, filthy, filthy, rich people who have such a leg up in society and their children will not want for anything in their entire lives while Americans are starving.
Right here in Washington, D.C., there are people who are delivering hundreds of meals a day to people who are affected by the coronavirus shutdown and are unable to work, unable to get the food they need.
And because of that, you know, that's we, the people, anti-fascists, Black Lives Matter, anti-social justice organizers that are filling in the gap where the government's screwing us over.
You know, that's the America I want to see where people are rising up to the challenge and not necessarily the government doing it.
A better America, a more equal America where everyone is helping each other.
I was hoping in the future, if you like what you end up seeing, to bring you on in the future, even just to comment on different things, because we want to get a left's perspective pretty much as often as possible.
Yes, since nobody, please, and I'm going to say this because I have to say this in case there's one idiot who goes in there and sends him stuff, please do not send him anything hateful, anything rude, derogatory, or anything that if you're any crazy person, this show does not condone anything like that, of course, or any harassment of Jason.
I only have a lot of thanks for him being willing to come on a show, which many people, including prominent people on the left, would never dare to come on.
Anyway, thank you guys so much again for watching.
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