#713: Chatting With Becca Lewis
Today, Dan and Jordan continue Sneak Week as they sit down for a delightful chat with researcher and expert witness in the Sandy Hook trial, Becca Lewis.
Aug. 9, 2022 - Knowledge Fight
01:25:21
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge Fight. | |
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge Fight. | |
| Dan and Jordan. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stop it. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's time to pray. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks for holding. | |
| Hello, Alex. | ||
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your room. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Hey, everybody! | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Jordan! | |
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, back in its company, very close to the altar. | ||
| It's right there. | ||
| And talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan! | ||
| Jordan! | ||
| Quick question for you, buddy. | ||
| What's your bright spot today? | ||
| My bright spot is, you know, we're back from our trip to Austin. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| And there are some things that you expect to be really exciting about coming back, like being in my own space, of course, Celine being around. | ||
| But then there's other things that are kind of a surprise. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think one of the biggest is my back scratcher. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I didn't have it with me on the trip, and I didn't realize how much I use it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, my back was itching almost constantly through the trip. | ||
| I was rubbing on doorways like a bear. | ||
| And coming back, I was like, yeah, I'm going to get a travel back scratcher. | ||
| I'm going to get, like, three or four of them. | ||
| It's going to be back scratcher city. | ||
| Maybe you just need some back lotion, you know? | ||
| Like, get some... | ||
| Juergens, really? | ||
| I mean, maybe you just have dry skin. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| This wasn't meant to be aggressive. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Can you have dry skin and also be quite sweaty? | ||
| Yes, you can, bud. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That's paradoxical. | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot, very similarly, is a small thing from home that I didn't expect to be such a delight. | ||
| I took a bath. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I had my bath salts in there. | ||
| I've turned into that guy, for sure. | ||
| You turned into me? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| It took years to get there, but eventually, your bath salts... | ||
| Pregnated my brain, and now, oh, it was so good. | ||
| There were tubs in our hotel rooms. | ||
| Yeah, there were. | ||
| How good was our hotel room? | ||
| Not good. | ||
| I did take a bath. | ||
| I think I might have taken two baths at that time. | ||
| Very deep tub. | ||
| But slender. | ||
| Mine was not deep. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| Maybe your bathtub at home is just super deep. | ||
| I think that's what it really is. | ||
| You have like a jacuzzi bathtub in your home. | ||
| It does have jets. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a bright spot. | ||
| Yeah, that is a bright spot. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have an episode that we're going to be doing. | ||
| This is very exciting. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is. | |
| Over the course of the time in Austin, when we were there for the trial. | ||
| That's where we were. | ||
| A certain figure emerged from the trial who our audience has taken to in a very serious way. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| She's somebody who I have paid attention to and admired a bit for her work over the years. | ||
| And we're excited to talk to her about. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you so much for having me. | |
| I've been admiring both of your work for many years now, too. | ||
| That is very kind and awesome. | ||
| It's great that we can finally sit down and have a chat. | ||
| But first, I have to ask you, what is your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot is really similar to both of yours, actually. | ||
| I am also back home, which is mixed, but the comforts of home are... | ||
| Are really nice to come back to, and that includes my own altar to my cat, Annie, who is a 17-year-old delightful, grumpy old lady. | ||
| Love it. | ||
|
unidentified
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I love it. | |
| I love a grumpy pet. | ||
| Oh, the best. | ||
| She's great. | ||
| Maybe grumpy's the wrong word. | ||
| She's very, very demanding of attention. | ||
|
unidentified
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She will let you know that you need to be petting her right now. | |
| Lemon, am I right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Classic. | |
| Yeah, I love an old pet, too. | ||
| Like, just sort of, like, doesn't have that vibrance. | ||
| Not gonna try and outrun you, just sort of, I know what's up. | ||
| I've lived a bit. | ||
| When we were at a friend of the... | ||
| A deep, close friend of the show who helped our audio issues, making him my hero. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When we were at his place, he had a very old Black Lab... | ||
| Golden Retriever. | ||
| Yeah, Golden Retriever and then... | ||
| Great Dane. | ||
| Great Dane. | ||
| So it was... | ||
| Huge! | ||
| It was the biggest dog. | ||
| It was too big. | ||
| It was so old, and then whenever she came over, I gave her the right ear scratches, boom, right on the floor, giving me some belly time. | ||
| It was amazing! | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Old animals are the best. | ||
| I only adopted my cat when she was 14, and they're just chill. | ||
|
unidentified
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They just sit there and hang out. | |
| And God bless them for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, indeed. | |
| So, Becca, you were a part of the trial for the plaintiff's expert witness. | ||
| Would you like to explain a little bit about what the subject matter you were brought in to talk about was? | ||
| Yeah, sounds good. | ||
| So, I research communications as the field that I'm in. | ||
| And specifically, I look at right-wing and far-right social movements. | ||
| And also, just more broadly, Disinformation efforts across the political spectrum and how they kind of disseminate throughout the internet. | ||
| So that was really the role they brought me on to talk about. | ||
| So other witnesses talked about, like Fred Zip, the journalism expert, talked about the actual protocols of genuine journalism and how Infowars wasn't following any of those. | ||
| Of course, the forensic psychologist talked about the mental anguish that the parents, Neil and Scarlett, experienced. | ||
| And my role was to talk about the role of Alex Jones in just how widespread this conspiracy theory has become. | ||
| A topic which I don't think either of you may be very familiar with. | ||
| I actually found a lot of your testimony pretty interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Illuminating. | |
| A section of understanding his reach, in particular his reach in the past, is something that we haven't delved too deeply into. | ||
| We don't even understand our own reach, let alone... | ||
| We're still like... | ||
| I swear, I think there's just 15 people listening, honestly. | ||
| I was trying to make a bad joke because I feel like you two are the most qualified people to talk about this ever, but I'm glad to hear it was interesting. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| No, we're both on your team. | ||
| We can talk ideas about Alex's coverage of things, but in terms of the stuff that's around him, you know, like that... | ||
| That picture is something that I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I certainly have a sense of it just sort of anecdotally from being around conspiracy circles at the time. | ||
| I mean, in a way, we know where bullshit is and you know where it goes. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| I like that way of phrasing it. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's true, actually, that when you work in this space, you quickly come to realize you're like, I am going to bite up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One very, very small piece of this puzzle. | |
| Because it is just so massive. | ||
| There's so much to delve into. | ||
| And so you really do have to rely on the work of other people. | ||
| And it's incredibly important, I think, to chat with and make sure you're gleaning expertise from other people around. | ||
| Because, yeah, you have to be the expert in your one spot and then make sure you're looking at what everyone else is doing, too. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| I think that's something that's really important, is that people niche and specialize a bit, and then networking can be important. | ||
| And I think one of the failings of our show, I think, really, is that there was none of that really early on. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| I think I was scared because I reached out to a couple people who I shan't name early on in the time doing this podcast and they were so resistant. | ||
| Understandably so. | ||
| We are not academics. | ||
| We don't have any real background. | ||
| I didn't graduate. | ||
| We study Alex Jones. | ||
| It's obviously like... | ||
| A concern that, like, oh, these are crazy people. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And I think that I got gun-shy about that and didn't really network nearly as much as I could have. | ||
| Actually, your expertise... | ||
| Oh, no, keep going. | ||
| No, I was just going to say, the cool thing for me is that during the trial, it's been, like, your podcast has been the forum where you've been able to bring a ton of people together, right? | ||
| You've heard from the lawyers, from Elizabeth Williamson, who's incredible. | ||
| If that wasn't the case initially, it certainly is the case now that you're bringing everyone together in a really cool way, I think. | ||
| Except for those people who I shant and hate. | ||
| And all of the people that I have spoken to are not brought together, I'll tell you that right now. | ||
| And all the people who seem to refuse to block you. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| So it's your sense, though, getting back to this idea, like... | ||
| That Alex really was the central galvanizing force behind a lot of the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorizing. | ||
| That was something that I took away from what you were saying. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, that's what's so fascinating to me. | ||
| As you can see, there are network studies that get done about the dynamics of these things. | ||
| You see the giant nodes that form. | ||
| In terms of the spread of right-wing ideas and information. | ||
| The big institutional hubs throughout the 2010s were Fox News and Breitbart, particularly through 2017, 2018. | ||
| But when you look at individuals, it's Alex Jones. | ||
| There's no one, really the only person with... | ||
| Comparable reach to him in this space is Joe Rogan. | ||
| Obviously, Joe Rogan is a bit more of a complicated person. | ||
| Back then, he probably had much less of a reach. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| When you go back and you look at what Alex's reach was in 2012, it was much smaller, but it was still huge for the time. | ||
| In 2011, he already had half a million subscribers. | ||
| At that point, there was no one with millions of subscribers on YouTube. | ||
| And by the time of Sandy Hook, he already had 100 million views on his page. | ||
| It was really, really substantial. | ||
| I'm trying to think of other people who would be in that conversation. | ||
| Bill Cooper was dead, so he couldn't really be a widespread individual voice. | ||
| Coast to coast? | ||
| Kind of, but not really. | ||
| It's not the same thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There were a lot of Angel Fire websites devoted to Dragon Ball Z that were all about disinformation, if I recall correctly. | ||
| But mostly about how Goku was a limited hangout. | ||
| It was a complicated case at the time. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like Alex Jones is really this hinge point where, it's like you're saying, he was... | ||
| He was there in the 90s. | ||
| He was doing the public access television. | ||
| He was doing the radio thing. | ||
| But then he also was incredibly prescient in a lot of ways and was able to do the online influencer thing pretty early on. | ||
| He was on the crest of that wave. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I have a quick question to ask you. | ||
| One of the funniest parts about your testimony, which of course is the only thing I pay attention to. | ||
| The funniest stuff? | ||
| The funniest stuff. | ||
| It shows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Your Twitter is just full of, hey, that was a good one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha ha ha. | |
| Is the... | ||
| The juxtaposition of how Alex describes all of his guests as the most qualified, the top of their field, the single greatest person. | ||
| Everybody knows this person. | ||
| And Mark could not have tried to twist the knife more at the beginning than when he was like, where did you graduate from? | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| Did you graduate from somewhere even more important? | ||
| Is that a prestigious college? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That was genuinely the most uncomfortable I was on the stand. | ||
| It had to have been, right? | ||
| Yeah, he warned me. | ||
| He was like, early on, I'm going to make you brag a little bit. | ||
| You're going to be uncomfortable with it. | ||
| And I was uncomfortable with it. | ||
| But then, of course, it's like you look back at Mark and he knows what he's doing. | ||
| And so I trusted I was in good hands, but it was really funny. | ||
| How many degrees do you have? | ||
| Just for... | ||
| I don't want you to name where they're from because I know that would be embarrassing. | ||
| And you're in bad hands. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| If you said one of the institutions, I'd be like, yeah, I got into there, and then I was like, they suck. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's the thing also, is that plenty of prestigious institutions have lots of idiots that go there, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
True. | |
| Harvard has turned out its share of people I've paid attention to, which is not good. | ||
| But listen, in my case, clearly, it only turns out... | ||
| The best. | ||
| I dropped out of high school and after that I was applying for colleges and I was guaranteed basically that I could get into the University of Missouri because I lived in Columbia and it was easy it was a dunk. | ||
| But the only other college I applied to was Harvard. | ||
| Alright, I'll go with the backup school of Missouri, I guess. | ||
| My dad went to Harvard, so I was like, hey, I'm a legacy. | ||
| This will make up for me dropping out. | ||
|
unidentified
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Did not work out. | |
| Did not get in. | ||
| Went to Missouri. | ||
|
unidentified
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Amazing. | |
| I regret nothing. | ||
| So, also, another thing that was fun, I believe it was you who, did the jury ask you to swear you weren't a lizard? | ||
| Or did that question not make it through? | ||
| Well, yes, it was the jury that asked me to swear under oath that I was not a lizard person. | ||
| The question did not make it through, so I didn't get to answer that question. | ||
| Well, I think we need an answer. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know. | ||
| Now is your time to really reveal yourself to the world, I guess. | ||
| Well, listen, I'll say two things. | ||
| First, I'll say that I am not a lizard person. | ||
| But second of all, I'll say that this podcast does not be under oath. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good point. | ||
| We've tried to do that. | ||
| I mean, if you think Selene doesn't hold you accountable for what you have to say, I would be shocked. | ||
| I can't lie to a cat. | ||
| And her form of holding people in contempt involves claws. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| There are forms of accountability greater than that of the law. | ||
| I'm thinking about this picture of the media landscape back then, in, like, 2012. | ||
| And even the thing that I brought up, I realize, like, Coast to Coast AM is probably one of the biggest things other than Alex that touches on some of these issues. | ||
| But that even seems silly to say, because Alex was constantly on Coast to Coast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| So he was using that platform to decide, and even, like... | ||
| A couple times they had Steve Pachanik on Coast to Coast. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| Hey, if you need a big swing, you call Stevie Peace. | ||
| Right, but you can't think that that wasn't done through Alex. | ||
| Oh no, of course. | ||
| I don't know if there are bookers reaching out. | ||
| He's like, wait, we gotta get the guy who murdered Aldo Murrow in here. | ||
| A couple of other things about the internet at that point, and I feel like, Dan, you brought this up in a recent episode about Facebook being an entirely different place back then, too. | ||
| The other thing you find when you go back and start rooting around in archive.org and these other ways you try to go back and look at what the internet was like then is it was much less... | ||
| People didn't have verified accounts at that point. | ||
| So you had Alex Jones' account, but then you also had dozens and dozens of, if you look at what the other recommended accounts were at the time, it's all of these Alex Jones rip-off accounts. | ||
| And so the posting and reposting and reposting is something that is hard for us to even conceptualize now in this. | ||
| Obviously, they're still posting and reposting, but it was a very different version of that back then. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| I mean, I sort of buried that memory, but there were, I know a couple of times a friend of mine was like, became friends with a celebrity on Facebook, and it was like, that's not a real account. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| It is like thinking of it as the Wild West, but when you think of the Wild West, you think of the distant past, not like a few years ago. | ||
| You're not like, oh, thank God the sheriffs have finally showed up. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it's true. | |
| We still think of social media as a cesspool, and obviously it is, but the amount that has changed between then and now is pretty remarkable. | ||
| And then to your point about the Alex Jones going on these other shows, I mean, this was something that I didn't really have time to get into on the stand, but... | ||
| That's a lot of what I look at, right? | ||
| Is how you get these different creators who kind of amplify each other and each other's ideas and create this self-reinforcing feedback loop, right? | ||
| It's like someone will reference Alex Jones as the authority and be like, well, that's why I can spread this idea. | ||
| And then Alex Jones will point back to Wolfgang Helbig or whoever and be like, oh yeah, he has his credentials. | ||
| And so then you start to get these networks of people. | ||
| Who are all going on each other's shows, who are all kind of amplifying each other's ideas and reinforcing them, and seem like they're kind of citing genuine people because they have this whole network of people that are their quote-unquote experts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like almost circular credibility, but it's a completely different shape. | ||
| It's a million-sided shape. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's kind of what I was going to ask, is could you give us kind of like a visualization of how that disseminates? | ||
| Like, what I kind of see in my head is almost these giant circles that eventually touch. | ||
| Well, actually, let me step in here, because actually, I wanted to bring this up. | ||
| One of the first things that brought you into my sphere of awareness was the Alternative Influence Network report that I believe was... | ||
| 2017? | ||
| 2018? | ||
| 2018. | ||
| And there is a visualization in there with a bunch of lines between... | ||
| Oh, surprise! | ||
| I haven't read the answer to my question already. | ||
| This exists as a visualization of things in 2018. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And so I would imagine that would be the way you'd look at it now. | ||
| But what's so fascinating is how different... | ||
| It is. | ||
| Even just a couple years later. | ||
| I mean, do you feel like there's differences that you have noticed specifically? | ||
| Oh, 100%. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, 100%. | ||
| I feel like, well, first of all, the thing about that network that I made was... | ||
| It was specifically looking at kind of like, it started with Dave Rubin as the seed account and then did like what we call snowball sampling from there because the idea was to say like the most mainstream, quote unquote mainstream person that I could think of who had influence and a lot of people on his show. | ||
| And then go from there and see where it spun out. | ||
| And the interesting thing is there's a ton of people from Alex Jones' world on that network web, right? | ||
| Like PJW is on there and a bunch of people. | ||
| But at a certain point, I realized I was going to start including Alex Jones in this, but the way I bounded it... | ||
| Ended up having to leave him out because he was at the center of his own alternative influence network. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| That's fascinating! | ||
| That's what I was thinking, is that if you added him, then it would sprawl a completely wild direction, even though there's a ton of overlap in terms of people he's connected with on here. | ||
| Well, I guess at the time, probably not Nick Fuentes, but he had Faith Goldie on his show. | ||
| Joe Rogan, Candace Owens, Gavin Cernovich. | ||
| But yeah, that is interesting that he would be his own... | ||
| The visualization of its yarn pattern. | ||
| Everyone else gets circles of influence in where they are, and Alex gets an amorphous blob of cancerous cells somewhere over there that just infects some stuff everywhere. | ||
| So yeah, I was like, if I include Alex Jones, I need to do an entire other report on Alex Jones, and that hasn't happened, but anyway, that's the first thing. | ||
| But yeah, it's true. | ||
| It's changed a lot since then, first of all, because YouTube has actually kicked a lot of these people off. | ||
| Oh, that's true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're not in the algorithm as much. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, you know, to YouTube's credit, you know, like, I think, and actually Alex Jones' lawyer asked me about Stefan Molyneux, which was... | ||
| Wild. | ||
|
unidentified
|
An odd choice, I would say. | |
| Right? | ||
| On all people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| You could choose a hundred different people that aren't avowed white nationalists. | ||
| The guy who literally said, I am a white nationalist now. | ||
| Based on empiricism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| I wish I had made that even clearer to the jury that, like, this is a man who has no qualms about describing himself this way, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| He became a white nationalist because people didn't yell at him in Poland. | ||
| For being a white nationalist! | ||
| They were like, oh, well, they're not mean to me about it, so I can finally just say it! | ||
| Great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And, like, just the amount of, first of all, like... | ||
| He's someone I legit have so many receipts on, like, at the ready. | ||
| And then, like, also is just someone who is... | ||
| It was a bad choice of someone to bring up, but he is such a... | ||
| He was such a powerful radicalization point, right? | ||
| Because he was someone that maintained enough, quote-unquote, credibility for a while that he would get invited on, like, Jordan Peterson's show, Rogan's show, Dave Rubin, these people that have kind of mainstream, again, quote-unquote, credibility. | ||
| But then he would go on these other more openly extremist shows and speak his mind much more openly. | ||
| He was just known to be... | ||
| Robert Evans wrote about this too in a lot of his Where People Got Red Pilled. | ||
| People talked about... | ||
| I believe that he was one of the ones mentioned by name, although it's been a while since I've read that, so don't quote me on that. | ||
| Yeah, so the fact that he got kicked off I think was a huge deal. | ||
| The fact that Red Ice and some of these other openly white supremacist channels got kicked off was a big deal. | ||
| So it really has changed. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Actually, I wanted to touch on Red Ice really quick because they've come up a couple times on our show in the past. | ||
| Looking at this 2018 report, Henrik and Lana are way off in the side of this visualization of the network. | ||
| But I was thinking about this as I was looking at it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Real quick, I just want to interrupt. | ||
| So, because we can't see you on the screen, Becca, you just need to know that Dan instantly brought up your article on his computer the moment that I brought up how stupid I am. | ||
| No, I refreshed myself on it in anticipation of speaking. | ||
| If you were to do an Alex visualization or a network... | ||
| They would be much closer and much more connected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They are connected to so many people in Alex's world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's super interesting. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And in my prep for the trial, I kept encountering them because it was, you know, what? | ||
| Was it Wolfgang who went on there? | ||
| A couple of several of these. | ||
| Roger Stone's been on there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| A man with Nixon on his back going on a white nationalist show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wild. | |
| I would say, this is a conservative estimate, 10 to 15 of Alex's crew, or roster of guests, have appeared on Red Ice. | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| This is the thing, it's like, and obviously it's not as germane to the case, so I get why it hasn't come up, but it just, the amount of Anti-Semitism and white supremacy that Alex Jones ends up baking into his conspiracy theories. | ||
| It's like the way that you come to see it is through the people that he's working with because he's good at couching them in his conspiracy theories. | ||
| That's a really good point. | ||
| But then the people that he amplifies, if you go onto their shows, they're not couching it in any way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Right. | ||
| He's crazy laundering, you know? | ||
| Well, like, I mean, just case in point, he had Owen Benjamin hosting the fourth hour for a while. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Before he had gone full, I'm a Nazi, but, like, after everyone had stopped talking to him, and he was just hanging out drinking in his backyard. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it was in that middle space. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I mean... | ||
| I don't know if you could say that's hired him, but he was hosting the fourth hour once a week for a bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's nuts. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuentes still has a channel on band.video and he posts some bad stuff. | ||
| Can I ask you, Becca, do you feel like in your research you've seen a lot of these people become more extreme or just stop laundering it so much? | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, are they actually increasing the extremism? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a combination of stuff. | ||
| First of all, you do have this interesting dynamic where, understandably, I think there's been a lot of anxiety around YouTubers radicalizing YouTube viewers, which, you know, that's part of what I've written about. | ||
| But then you also have this other feedback loop because viewers now can leave comments and like on live streams can, you know, comment in real time and all these things. | ||
| You actually have audiences demanding more extremist content from creators. | ||
| True. | ||
| And so you get this weird feedback loop where it's like creators end up, you know, kind of responding to the wishes of their audience. | ||
| Like I would say that Tim Pool is a really classic case of this where like... | ||
| I've done the knowledge fight treatment on Tim Pool where I've seen all of his content up through a certain amount of time. | ||
| And it's so interesting to watch him inch bit by bit into the positions that he has now, in part by seeing how when he delved into that stuff, that's where his audience really responded to it. | ||
| And I think maybe along the way, he kind of convinced himself of some of these ideas. | ||
| You know, there's always the question of, you know, how much is... | ||
| You become the mask you wear kind of thing. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| So there's that dynamic. | ||
| And then there's also the fact that, like, the Republican Party itself and mainstream conservatism has been going further and further to the right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| We're recording this on, I believe, the day or the day after Victor Orban spoke. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, exactly! | |
| The day after the fascist dictator is like, hey, Republicans, we all love each other, right? | ||
| So you might have a point. | ||
| Weirdly, what happened in the YouTube space, and a lot of these spaces, is I think the people that were strategic enough to straddle the line and never... | ||
| Openly say, you know, that they're a white nationalist or white supremacist, but who still use that rhetoric, they're still thriving and their rhetoric is getting more and more extreme, even as they're not like, you know, like it's one of my biggest pet peeves is when people talk about figures as being fringe, like white supremacists being fringe. | ||
| It's like, no, they are sitting there. | ||
| I've done this in certain presentations where I just take a quote of his about Great Replacement Theory, a quote of the Christchurch shooter, a quote of Charlie Kirk, and a quote of Jason Kessler, the organizer of Unite the Right. | ||
| Four quotes about great replacement theory are indistinguishable. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| If you don't have the names attached, and so, you know, of course, like, Alex Jones' lawyer was asking me about confirmation bias and stuff, but to me, the interesting thing is, if you take away that certain biases that we have and you just look at the data, that's the most damning thing possible. | ||
| Yeah, that's something that I've long thought, and that is that, like, everybody says, like, Alex has taken out of context and stuff like this, but, like, In context, all of this stuff that we're talking about ends up worse. | ||
| Yes, totally! | ||
| The other thing, too, that I thought of when you're saying these statements are the same with the names removed. | ||
| One of the most difficult episodes that we did was about the day of Anders Breivik's attack. | ||
| I ended up pulling over his manifesto, and one of the things that really stuck out to me was the Yeah. | ||
| and it was just that was kind of a revelatory moment for me of like how gross and Yeah. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's a really good scholar of extremism who defines extremism as an in-group that defines their success only by punishing an out-group. | ||
| Oh, you mean like owning the libs? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But the thing that I love about this definition is that he says it's a misunderstanding to say that... | ||
| Extremism is defined by being outside of the mainstream. | ||
| Because if you think of some of the most important extremist regimes in history, they were the mainstream, right? | ||
| Nazi Germany was the mainstream during World War II and the Holocaust, right? | ||
| In U.S. slavery, that was the mainstream system, and that is an extremist system. | ||
| And so I think that we still hang on to these myths that like... | ||
| These things somehow stand outside of the mainstream. | ||
| And no, that's also why I like that one of the jury members asked me the question of like, is Alex Jones the mainstream media? | ||
| Which I thought was a great question. | ||
| It really was, yeah. | ||
| Because it puts the light of that, right? | ||
| And you guys call him on this all the time that it's like... | ||
| When it's advantageous to him, he says, oh, we're just an upstart little, you know, we're the underdog. | ||
| Mom and pop information store. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, that was a really interesting part of your testimony, especially when the question came from the jury, because that was almost the identical question Bill asked Owen in his deposition. | ||
| To define the mainstream media. | ||
| You say you're against the mainstream media, define it, and then see if you don't fit all of those definitions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| And he sure did! | ||
| Owen was basically walked into conceding that himself and most of the people he thinks are fringe are actually mainstream, according to his own definition. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And Alex writes about that, too. | ||
| When it's advantageous for him, then they're the biggest, most powerful people on the air, you know? | ||
| Of course! | ||
| Yeah, like a million times the traffic of CNN, but also CNN is somehow... | ||
| The mainstream, everybody watches CNN. | ||
| We have more viewers and listeners and everything, but yeah. | ||
| I was just going to say that. | ||
| Dan, you had a great line on a recent podcast that stuck with me and I'm going to use, which is that Alex Jones or one of these folks want their cake and eat it to and to have a slice of pie. | ||
| To me, just like in every respect, that defines Alex Jones, right? | ||
| It's like, he'll answer completely opposite things and somehow try to hold them both in his mind and in his rhetoric in a way that lets him squirm out of anything. | ||
| And also throws a hat on it. | ||
| Yeah, well, thank you. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| That turn of phrase came out of my righteous indignation over the... | ||
| I think it was the Q&A. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| I really tapped into something full of anger. | ||
| That was deep. | ||
| Powerful. | ||
| It was strong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because of Glenn Greenwald, I don't see why that would be anchoring it anyway. | |
| I will say, it's been a long time since I sat down in preparation for an episode and wrote a speech. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And a good one, too. | ||
| A stump speech. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Have you had a chance to see Alex's documentary by chance? | ||
| I have not yet. | ||
| I listened to your podcast episode about it, but I haven't watched it yet, and I think I need to be in the right headspace to even tackle it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good luck. | |
| Yeah, it'll probably make you pretty angry. | ||
| What fucking headspace is that? | ||
| I think I've poisoned the jury here, though, on it. | ||
| Because now, if you watch it... | ||
| You can't get the confirmation bias out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know, I know. | |
| Speaking of that, how did it feel to be cross-examined by the defense's lawyer? | ||
| Because the moment he asked you after, well, one, he said two things that made me want to fight him. | ||
| Before he even started asking you questions, he was trying to imply that you were unqualified, despite the fact that we heard... | ||
| A list of qualifications that can only be described as the most overqualified human being ever to sit in that chair. | ||
| And then later, when he asked you what confirmation, if you knew what confirmation bias was, I was ready to jump over the walls and just be like, Yeah, it was a wild experience. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I'd be lying if it wasn't nerve-wracking. | ||
| And this was my first time testifying. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You did great for your first time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Part of me wishes I had maybe been able to do a lower profile case first. | ||
| Way to start at the bottom. | ||
| Gotta do a couple open mics. | ||
| I gotta get my type 5 down first. | ||
| The confirmation bias thing, that one didn't really faze me because, particularly actually with this 2018 report that I released, that one caused such a stir among the YouTubers that I was writing about. | ||
| They did not take it well. | ||
| They did not take it well, no. | ||
| And they hurled that exact line of reasoning at me. | ||
| To me, that wasn't a new thing that I've heard. | ||
| And of course, it's not only directed at me. | ||
| You constantly hear that line being read about any piece. | ||
| The irony of it is too much because, of course, they're using that line as a defense to not have to interrogate their own biases, right? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| They might as well literally say, I'm rubber and you're glue. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Childish. | ||
| The neener, neener defense. | ||
| Yeah, it is! | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| So that one didn't faze me so much, although, yeah, I... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a little insulting, though. | |
| Yeah, of course, of course. | ||
| I think that was my main thing throughout this whole thing, is I'm a teacher, and so talking to the jury, to me, I could just kind of be in teacher mode, and that, to me, is really natural and fulfilling, but... | ||
| As an academic, I'm not used to having these interactions that are, by their very structure, adversarial. | ||
| I would find myself... | ||
| He would ask me questions and my immediate response was like, oh, I just need to inform him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then I was like, wait, that's not what I'm supposed to do. | |
| If I get the chance, I can really explain to this guy how things work. | ||
| Not really understanding that he doesn't give a fuck at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| I have to check myself a couple times and be like, wait, no, no, no. | ||
| This is not a teaching opportunity. | ||
| You're not going to black pill the lawyer. | ||
| So it is different in that context to be like, okay, what are the... | ||
| And also because I, as an academic, you know, you get me rambling about these things and I can talk for hours and it's like, no, I have to limit myself to what is applicable for this specific case. | ||
| You know, that was the other thing to try to gauge, like, because he started really getting into the weeds on statistical stuff. | ||
| And so I was trying to gauge, like, okay, how much do I prove that what he's asking is, like, absolute nonsense? | ||
| Well, like, yeah. | ||
| His questions were getting, they were getting towards, like, with his questions, he was getting towards basically, like, prove to me statistics exist. | ||
| You know, like, it was leaning towards, like, the bickering about sample sizes and what have you. | ||
| Is this a credible outlet? | ||
| I mean, he literally asked you, he was like, hey, this statistic, these are based on phone interviews. | ||
| You don't even know if those people are real, do you? | ||
| And you're like, I don't even know how to engage with a person who's like, if you call somebody on the phone, it doesn't count as another human being. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah, it was just, some of those were easier to respond to. | ||
| Like, when you start getting into... | ||
| What is statistical significance? | ||
| That was the part where I just decided not even to engage with it because there's no way I'm going to be able to respond to that in 30 seconds in a way that's satisfying to jury members. | ||
| But that's frustrating because to actually answer the questions he was asking me, I couldn't really answer them without going into some of those details. | ||
| We'd like to introduce Exhibit 64, and that is a six-hour lecture by Becca Lewis on how to deal with fucking statistics and media literacy. | ||
| You have to watch it all or else it's out of context. | ||
| You've got to play the whole thing, otherwise it's out of context. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And every 30 seconds, we'll jump in and say unresponsive. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Nonresponsive. | ||
| I asked a bad question. | ||
| I wanted to loop back to the Alternative Influence Network thing, because the report that you did in 2018, like you said, a lot of blowback from people included in it. | ||
| You were like, I'm not bad! | ||
| It was the MIAC report of lying. | ||
| You look at a lot of these people who are on here, and we see where they've gone since, and I think their arguments are a little bit flawed. | ||
| I wanted to get your sense, because you're somebody who still watches a lot of this stuff, and you still are studying this space, and maybe outside of YouTube, but who do you think is the big nodes now? | ||
| Who would you think are on radars, or should be more on radars? | ||
| And, secondarily, do you think that The people who are on here, did anybody ascend? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| The phrasing of that question isn't great, but I think you maybe get what I'm asking. | ||
| I totally get it. | ||
| There's certain nodes on there, like Andy Worski was really big for three months in 2017, so he takes up a big spot on there and he's not relevant at all anymore. | ||
| What's interesting to me is... | ||
| First of all, how much this network has continued to overlap more with cable news networks, right? | ||
| So at this point, I don't know how I could talk about these figures without talking about Tucker Carlson as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Or just be like, Kellyanne Conway is a regular guest on MSNBC now. | ||
| Yeah, we're front. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| And Tucker Carlson... | ||
| Did entire segments defending and hosting Martin Selner and his wife, who were people that the Christchurch shooter ended up visiting before his massacre. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I don't know how I could do that without talking about him. | ||
| He also, whatever, he fully endorsed and amplified Lauren Southern's White supremacist conspiracy theory about farmers in South Africa. | ||
| But she's sorry now! | ||
| She's brunette, and therefore reformed. | ||
| Yeah, she went away for a little while and said she was retired, and then she came back, and now she's sorry! | ||
| Yeah, and as we all know, an insincere apology will be reported as a 100% sincere apology, so everybody will believe it. | ||
| She's sorry, but she's also still suspicious about immigration. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But the other thing is that, I mean, I really think that what happened is you kind of had YouTube taking action against a bunch of people. | ||
| You also had some people just kind of shooting themselves in the foot. | ||
| And declining in popularity. | ||
| But then there was a vacuum. | ||
| And I do think it was people like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi who stepped into it. | ||
| And so it's a little bit less... | ||
| I saw a job opening. | ||
| Yeah, precisely. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| I think it was a strategic... | ||
| I mean, obviously, I don't know what their mindset was. | ||
| But whatever they were doing was clearly strategic because it worked in terms of bringing them fame. | ||
| And it felt like a very... | ||
| Dave Rubin-esque move, right? | ||
| Why I left the left type of thing. | ||
| And that's what Dave Rubin was doing in 2015, 2016. | ||
| And now here they are doing it in more recent years. | ||
| So it's a little bit less YouTube-centric, but it's still about this loose network of influential people who I think are able to... | ||
| Help each other out with networking, but also maintain some type of plausible deniability. | ||
| The lines Glenn Greenwald was using about interviewing Alex were precisely the lines that Dave Rubin used about interviewing people like Stefan Molyneux five years ago. | ||
| And the lines that Greenwald has about the... | ||
| It's identical, essentially, to Ruben, too, with the, like, I'm not on the right, but the left has gone too far kind of mentality. | ||
| And that's exactly what feeds into, you know, right-wing audiences and further right-wing audiences to sort of anesthetize them to the idea that they're further to the right than they think they are. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| And then I think... | ||
| My other big figure who has been so incredibly successful, but somehow has managed to stay so under the mainstream radar is Tim Pool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's got billboards outside of Midway. | ||
| Like, it's nuts. | ||
| And Times Square, from what I saw on Twitter. | ||
| I don't know if those were Photoshop, but I assume... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've seen the ones outside of Midway driving back just going, like, what in God's name is that? | ||
| I didn't believe it at first. | ||
| Further evidence that that is not a real airport. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's a bus station. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The pool is somebody who, like, I've wanted to cover maybe, and, like, people have asked us to, but he seems like somebody who is so into attention. | ||
| He would try to start a fight with me, and I just don't want to do it. | ||
| It seems like it's more trouble than it's worth, and other people are somewhat paying attention to him. | ||
| You see some critical coverage, whereas when we started this podcast, I don't think there was really anything that was... | ||
| Sort of pointed in the right direction with Alex. | ||
| I always like those why I left the Democratic Party posts or why I left the left for the right. | ||
| They never say millions of dollars. | ||
| It's so weird how they suddenly get millions of dollars and they say it's a principled position. | ||
| It's wired. | ||
| And a lot of fame and attention. | ||
| Yeah, that has nothing to do with it. | ||
| Yeah, it's so crazy. | ||
| That's one of Alex's pieces of his own mythology that I kind of believe. | ||
| I was offered all of this stuff and I turned it down. | ||
| I don't know if he turned it down or not, but job offers at Fox and the idea that you'll have a book that you put out and we'll automatically make it a bestseller just by buying tons of them. | ||
| And you won't have to write it. | ||
| Those kinds of things are very enticing for people, I think. | ||
| Totally, totally. | ||
| And to me, it's just so depressing and cynical, and in a weird way, even more depressing than the true believers, because with a true believer, you can work on de-radicalization. | ||
| I mean, not to be too flippant about it, but it's like the big Lebowski line, right? | ||
| Like, say what you will about national socialism, at least as an ethos. | ||
| Well, that's fair. | ||
| The nihilism behind just doing this stuff for profit and thinking you're above the politics of it is just so disgusting. | ||
| And I think with the true believers, those are the ones where I still hold out hope. | ||
| There are people that work on de-radicalization with them, but what do you do with someone that's just purely in it for the money? | ||
| It's hopeless. | ||
| Until the money runs out, I guess. | ||
| I really do liken it to religious people insofar as I respect people who believe it. | ||
| Who really believe all of it and try to do the stuff. | ||
| Even if I think it's absurd, at the very least I can see them Processing this information, believing it, and acting upon it. | ||
| And it's the people who are manipulating them for, let's say, a trillion dollars in gold that they wear around their neck or whatever, you know? | ||
| It's like, you're the most monstrous thing I can think of. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And that's the thing, too, with Alex Jones' viewers, these people, you know, it's... | ||
| It's a little bit like thinking about cult members who go on to recruit new cult members, right? | ||
| It's not to take away the responsibility of the Alex Jones viewers who went on to harass the Sandy Hook parents, but it is to say that they are also being harmed by Alex Jones and his rhetoric because Alex is feeding them lies and they are trusting him to deliver the truth. | ||
| They are also harmed by this, even as they are part of the problem. | ||
| Leaving someone like Lucy Richards and the folks who harass the families aside, let's leave them aside for a second. | ||
| In principle, I always have tried to look at things as empathy towards the consumer of this bullshit and really real strong disdain to the producer. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Because, yeah, they are being at least disserved. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And in this case specifically, part of holding Alex accountable is that the people who harassed the families, they're the bullets, you know? | ||
| And Alex is the gun that fired them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I don't like bullets any more than I like the person firing the gun. | ||
| But if you try and punish the bullets, The gun is going to keep firing. | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally, totally. | |
| There are more bullets out there. | ||
| Nobody stopped making bullets. | ||
| Totally, totally. | ||
| Yesterday, I taught my class about the First Amendment and misconceptions around the First Amendment and how it relates to social media. | ||
| Did they give you a standing ovation when you walked in the room? | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| That was your first time testifying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Although a lot of them were like, how was the trial? | ||
| How did it go? | ||
| But yeah, this is the thing that like, and there are incredible scholars working on this, that historically thinking about the First Amendment, This idea that Alex Jones promotes about, like, the First Amendment and freedom of speech means that I personally, as an individual, should be able to say anything that I want to say. | ||
| That's not been the way that the First Amendment has been understood, like, throughout the history of the United States. | ||
| And in fact, like, many kind of top legal minds have said actually that, you know, you need to think about... | ||
| Freedom of speech more in a communal sense and thinking about what will get the most speech to flourish within a community. | ||
| And also, part of freedom of speech is also the freedom to hear valuable information. | ||
| And so that is where it's... | ||
| Sorry, I'm rambling now. | ||
| No, you are not. | ||
| You're telling obvious and noble and real truth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah, I always find that so interesting, but in a boring way, if that makes sense. | ||
| The notions of the First Amendment that people like Alex have. | ||
| It's interesting to me that it exists, but it's so boring how much they bring it up in completely unapplicable situations. | ||
| As a fan of baseball. | ||
| The true American pastime is misunderstanding the Bill of Rights. | ||
| Well, it's like if someone hits a foul ball out of the park and they invoke the infield fly rule. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is happening? | |
| But that's the thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's not just Alex Jones. | |
| It's the social media platforms have promoted this idea of free speech. | ||
| And the reason that it's partly interesting to me is that... | ||
| The reason they promote that idea of free speech is because that's the idea that's profitable to them. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Isn't that crazy to think about how it's not just the people who use Facebook who are advancing this concept. | ||
| It is Facebook itself because they don't have to hold themselves accountable. | ||
| So they sell this idea of like, you should be allowed to say whatever you want because no one will sue us then. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, that's an interesting picture. | ||
| Then it becomes more clear that there's a lot more responsibility to go around. | ||
| The amount of responsibility to go around, I find absurdly high. | ||
| Yes, pretty heavy. | ||
| And in all of these cases, it's like, this is not to take away the responsibility from the other people. | ||
| It's just that there's also more shitty actors involved in various ways. | ||
| I mean, it goes all the way back to, you know, we discussed it a while back, le problematique, you know, like the idea that all of these things are interconnected. | ||
| They are not individual elements or individual things. | ||
| They're all part of a larger whole that we're not dealing with. | ||
| See, Jordan's talking to an academic now, so he tries to sound smart by pulling out something from the club of Rome. | ||
| I pulled out the one thing I remember from our past. | ||
| Can I actually say, though, okay, I know, Jordan, you like to say that you're, like, just a clown and all of this stuff, but I have to say that you're... | ||
| Do not. | ||
| Whatever you're about to say next, do not say it. | ||
| He's gotten too much positive feedback over the last two weeks. | ||
| I am a clown. | ||
| I remain a clown, and I shall stay one till the day I die. | ||
| How dare you, madam? | ||
| Okay, I'm just going to make you angry for a second and say another nice thing, which is as clownish as the delivery was. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| I couched it in an insult. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Now I'm listening. | ||
| Now I'm listening. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Your critiques of the media coverage of the Alex Jones trial, I think, have been... | ||
| So necessary and spot on because this is actually even before I wrote my report on YouTube, my colleague Alex Marwick and I wrote a report about how much the mainstream media plays a role in the amplification of far-right content and feeds directly into their ideas. | ||
| And I think that you've been hitting the nail on the head with all of that and the coverage. | ||
| There have been a few journalists who have been there day in, day out who are doing incredible work. | ||
| Obviously, Elizabeth being one of them. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Don't forget Murdoch. | ||
| Sebastian was there. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Incredible work. | ||
| And then people that have less Twitter presence, but there's an incredible court reporter from Reuters. | ||
| Dan Solomon from Texas Monthly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| He's been crushing it. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But then you get all these other people parachuting in only when Alex... | ||
| I mean, I'm just telling you what you've been tweeting. | ||
| But yeah, it really is perfect. | ||
| I have to push back a tiny bit on your compliment to Jordan because... | ||
| Oh, please. | ||
| I think that you're totally right that the critiques that you were making and putting forth were valid and very valuable. | ||
| Somewhat. | ||
| But also, let's not encourage the... | ||
| I mean, it's done. | ||
| I said what I wanted to say. | ||
| I mean, I said the final thing. | ||
| You don't need to tweet at Glenn Greenwald a thousand times. | ||
| I don't need to tweet ever again. | ||
| That is done. | ||
| That is the end of that. | ||
| I'm finished with that. | ||
| I'm just saying, make those critiques. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I mean, yeah, there is that. | ||
| I just feel like the last thing I said was... | ||
| Send a thousand tweets at Ron Flipkowski. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| That is fine. | ||
| I can't even fuck with Barnes anymore. | ||
| He got shit on real fast. | ||
| He blocked you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, I do think one of the big things that the media absolutely refuses to acknowledge is that part of the reason they like to amplify these voices is so they get to clown on them. | ||
| And then creating that... | ||
| Owning the conservatives turns into another owning the libs, and it just creates this feedback loop, and they refuse to acknowledge their part in it. | ||
| Well, I think that, particularly in the case of, like, the Ron Flipkowski guy, it's kind of the same criticism, or at least tangential to it, that I had of the documentary about Alex. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that is that, like, you're not giving people context for this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So you're showing this video of Alex saying something that he would probably stand behind. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| And the implication is you're supposed to see this and already know it's nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And already have some sort of a criticism for it. | ||
| But instead, it's just being broadcast to tons of people. | ||
| It's just being amplified. | ||
| I don't think it gets the effect that people who are putting it forth seem to think it would. | ||
| I think it gets the effect that Filipkowski wants. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lots of traffic? | |
| Yep. | ||
| Richard Spencer was a master of this because at any time the mainstream media wanted to talk to him, he was more than happy to chat with the mainstream media that he so hated. | ||
| And if you wear a tie. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Look at a New Yorker profile about him. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Nice Nazis. | ||
| Why are we mean to them? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And listen, if 99 out of 100 people read that and hate him, He doesn't care. | ||
| It's that one person who listens to him and says maybe he has a point that he's trying to reach out to. | ||
| And the mainstream media, I mean, this is also why I think people like Alex, one of the reasons they can be effective is because the very first fraction of the first part of what they're saying is a valid critique of the mainstream media. | ||
| And then they just take it from there and take it in wildly inaccurate, awful directions, right? | ||
| But to say that the mainstream media is sensationalist is true. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Well, that's the problem with a lot of his critiques. | ||
| I mean, there's a critique to be made of the government being ineffectual and not representing necessarily the will of the electorate. | ||
| You know, there's things like that. | ||
| I mean, just to be totally clear, false flags do exist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It is a thing that has happened. | ||
| And so, yeah, those kernels of something, he gets too much mileage out of it. | ||
| Well, I mean, the simplest critique that there is to make, honestly, is the same thing that you could say for the Democrats. | ||
| What your real electability comes from isn't what you say. | ||
| If you govern well, people will be like, hell yeah. | ||
| The reason that people hate you is because you're also failing. | ||
| Maybe you're doing some good. | ||
| Maybe you're doing, on the whole, more good than bad. | ||
| But at the same time, if you're not willing to engage with all the bad you're doing, then you're just going to keep doing it. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And yeah, I just want to make clear, those kernels, I think, they're dangerous because that becomes a... | ||
| It becomes a mechanism by which to kind of ensnare people in his worldview. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, absolutely. | |
| 100%. | ||
| So hold on. | ||
| I don't think I got an answer to my question from earlier, except for Tim Pool. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Who else should we be afraid of? | ||
| Oh, I think the exact people that you're covering. | ||
| I think Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Tucker Carlson, Tim Pool. | ||
| I think it's a much more institutionally powerful... | ||
| What do all those white men have in common? | ||
| But I think that what's interesting is that for a while it was this group of, for lack of a better word, internet weirdos, right? | ||
| A lot of them didn't have institutional power, and now a lot of them do. | ||
| And some of these people who are in this, people you pointed out in 2018, are people who have ascended to more seeming institutional power, like Dave Rubin from From having just a YouTube thing to now he's on Glenn Beck's network. | ||
| Steven Crowder has certainly... | ||
| Oh, wait, he's on The Blaze too. | ||
| But he's certainly elevated significantly since this point. | ||
| Nick Fuentes, you know, back then was just sort of a Nazi who would go and argue with people on Twitch or YouTube. | ||
| Now has his own cozy streaming platform. | ||
| Certainly more centralized power. | ||
| Milo Yiannopoulos. | ||
| Fell apart, but now I guess is working with Marjorie Taylor Greene. | ||
| Sure, why not? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A lot of this has changed. | |
| That's a great point with Marjorie Taylor Greene, that now you have enough literal members of Congress who are on board with these folks that that has significantly changed the landscape as well. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's also an argument that I keep coming back to of like, it is very easy to get caught up in this sort of recency bias, while at the same time. | ||
| Being like well you know things were different back then People were more in the middle And maybe there's just part of it Is that because society was so geared Towards white people They didn't even have to say anything Why would you be an extremist during slavery You own people Totally. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| I think that's spot on. | ||
| Of course, my area of research is the internet, and I think it would be weird if I were studying that and didn't think that the internet played an important role. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| That being said, I think that you get in my field way too much of people claiming that it's all the internet's fault, and I don't think that's true at all. | ||
| If you look at the radicalization of the Republican Party, That was starting in the 1960s, right? | ||
| That was the tweet that Alex Jones' lawyer was trying to catch me up. | ||
| So funny. | ||
| So funny. | ||
| It was about the Southern strategy. | ||
| Yeah, prove the Southern strategy was racist. | ||
| Oh, did they say it was racist? | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| He got you good. | ||
| But you know, even then, the Southern strategy wouldn't have worked. | ||
| Unless there was a demand for it. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Totally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And none of this content and the production of it that we're discussing would either. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| They're tapping into an audience. | ||
| They're tapping into an audience. | ||
| And they're fueling it and growing it, but I know. | ||
| I'd be curious to hear how... | ||
| How you all are feeling after what has just been like a rollercoaster couple of weeks, because I've found it to be quite draining, to say the least. | ||
| Yeah, I've found it to be less sleep than I've ever not had in the past. | ||
| It was chaotic, for sure. | ||
| We should just be totally clear. | ||
| We're recording this after the compensatory damages have been announced, but they're still deliberating the punitive, so we don't know the full outcome of everything. | ||
| But yeah, it was, you know, it... | ||
| The case itself and going to the trial was draining in many ways. | ||
| Some parts of it pretty rewarding and I think affirming. | ||
| Scarlett's testimony in particular was something that I think will stay with many people for the rest of their lives. | ||
| I won't forget it. | ||
| But then also just the... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe I'm in a unique position because I was there for the depositions of Daria and Alex. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I had heard a lot of the content of the first few days. | ||
| And so for me, it was kind of a... | ||
| Some of that stuff was a little bit of an exhausting thing for me, because I just didn't have anything new for my brain to attach to. | ||
| Yeah, I think the one thing that I really noticed from the trial is that, well, I'll say there's two things. | ||
| First off, that job opening concept that I really feel like Glenn and Matt just jumped in. | ||
| I also feel like we just jumped into a job opening. | ||
| There should be a media outlet that has us. | ||
| Just two people who study one subject so thoroughly. | ||
| One. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, goddammit! | |
| Goddammit! | ||
| To be clear. | ||
| I got my ass beat on that one! | ||
| I just got a spank now back! | ||
| Well, to be fair. | ||
| I mean, the problem is you're right. | ||
| That was a weird thing for you to say. | ||
| It was a weird thing for me to say. | ||
| But it was still a job opening. | ||
| And maybe more newspapers need clowns. | ||
| But the other thing is that when they were choosing a jury, the concept of you shouldn't know anything about Alex Jones or the Sandy Hook case, to me, is not a jury of your peers. | ||
| It just isn't. | ||
| The only peers that Alex have are people who understand why Alex is never telling the truth or never lying. | ||
| He just doesn't care. | ||
| So whenever you get him caught out in a lie and you get caught out in a perjury situation, he doesn't even know. | ||
| And the other thing that was really exhausting, I think, about the trial too was the constant Pretend game that the defense was playing where they pretended not to understand it was a damages hearing. | ||
| So infuriating. | ||
| That, to me, was exhausting. | ||
| Here's why he's innocent. | ||
| I just felt also a lot of emotional whiplash because it was this constant thing between the clownishness and constant chaos of Alex Jones' world and the very real And present sense of tragedy that was there and it was just back and forth between those two incredibly intense kind of emotional states for two weeks solid. | ||
| And that day, that Tuesday, where it was Neil and Scarlett in the morning and then Alex testifying after was just like... | ||
| That whiplash was abusive. | ||
| Yeah, it was abusive. | ||
| I took a nap afterwards. | ||
| I was like, I can't. | ||
| I mean, yeah, we both went home and we're just done, you know? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's like, you know, you all have been saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just the chaos and the clownishness. | |
| It's so easy to get wrapped up in it, and I get wrapped up in it, and then I find myself feeling awful, because really, at the end of the day, it's about Scarlett and Neil, and just, I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I feel like that's such a great point, and it's something that I feel privileged to have been able to. | ||
| I did a few interviews with things, and being able to stress that has been really I think important, like being able to have that voice. | ||
| But the thing that kind of bums me out is when I have, the reporters have seemed surprised a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're the Alex Jones guy. | ||
| Only talk about Alex Jones. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That kind of makes me a little bit sad. | ||
| I think a lot of forest for trees is going on. | ||
| I won't name anybody's name, but we got an email from a t-shirt producer that was like, I can see you're getting a lot of heat for this trial thing. | ||
| Do you want to do a special on your shirts? | ||
| And I just replied back like, hey, listen, are you saying that we should profit off of the families of Sandy Hook? | ||
| Is that what you're really trying to tell me right now? | ||
| Because that's what you are telling me. | ||
| And it's like, I want to light you on fire. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. | ||
| I've been grappling with that too because obviously I am... | ||
| I've seen a lot of the love that Knowledge Fight listeners have been giving to me, which is so appreciated and really validating and affirming. | ||
| But also, it's not about me. | ||
| It's not about any of the people that are surrounding this. | ||
| It's about these parents, and it's just so easy to forget that. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| But I think that one of the things that is great About our listeners is that I do think that they're appreciating you because of that. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It is on behalf of the family. | ||
| Because it's, you know, you're a presence that is there helping highlight this thing. | ||
| I should be clear, that's not a dig at your listeners at all. | ||
| They've been incredible. | ||
| This is about me and my discomfort with attention. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| You heard Jordan's response to a compliment earlier. | ||
| Yeah, it's the same thing. | ||
| So what about you? | ||
| All in all, what was your takeaway and experience of being there? | ||
| And I apologize that we actually didn't even get a chance to meet in person due to schedules. | ||
| Obviously, the whole thing was chaos. | ||
| I also was specifically trying to lay low before I went on the stand because, you know... | ||
| It was very funny. | ||
| You didn't know this, but actually at one point... | ||
| Maybe you did know this, but actually at one point I was sitting directly behind you while you were having a conversation with Mr. Zip about your upcoming testimony. | ||
| And I don't think either of you had any idea who I was. | ||
| It's very funny. | ||
| That's really funny to hear because I did know who you were. | ||
| I thought you had no idea who I was. | ||
| Oh, no! | ||
| To be fair, you were also sitting behind her, so easy to ignore someone behind you. | ||
| I did spot you guys a couple of times in the courtroom, but I think maybe on the first day, were you there in person? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sweaty as hell. | ||
| Sweaty as hell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for forgetting that! | |
| Thank you! | ||
| That really does make me good! | ||
| I genuinely didn't see the sweat in person, but I saw the memes about the sweat. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Way better. | ||
| Way better to hear it through the news. | ||
| There was a part of me that kind of felt like maybe it would be inappropriate to talk to you also because of your status as a witness. | ||
| I don't know what the rules of those things are. | ||
| That's why I didn't speak to anybody. | ||
| I tried to stay as silent as possible. | ||
| Technically, as an expert witness, I think it would have been fine, but that was my approach to it. | ||
| It was just like, I'm not going to go up and introduce myself to them until after I've... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've testified, but then we didn't get a chance to do that. | |
| But anyways, yeah, so that's funny that we all knew who all of us were. | ||
| And yeah, in terms of my reaction, yeah, it's really similar. | ||
| I found it to be thrilling at times because it really does feel like this is the start of a snowball of accountability, hopefully. | ||
| And at times, at other times, I found myself feeling like it doesn't matter how much money ends up coming back to him because so much damage has already been done that can't be undone. | ||
| And I don't know, I just, I find myself kind of yo-yoing between these intense reactions. | ||
| And then also, I did find, like, you both have been commentating on that the... | ||
| The dynamics of the trial and the media around it and everything are fascinating in their own way. | ||
| So there was my direct emotional response to it, and then there was also the academic response, or in your case, the podcaster response of like, What the fuck is going on? | ||
| This is a phenomenon worthy of study and commentating on in itself, right? | ||
| True. | ||
| The way that Alex Jones and his team are trying to abuse the justice system in the same way that they've abused the media system is fascinating. | ||
| And succeeding. | ||
| And succeeding. | ||
| And I don't know if you had the same response that I kind of did, but as I come home and I have a little bit more distance from it, I realize that I felt a little bit of a dissonance and maybe even a little bit of a shame about the... | ||
| Because I try to, as much as possible, despite my very impassioned speech at the beginning of the Greenwald episode, I try to keep a sort of distance from the topics that we cover in order to not just be you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I don't mean that in an insulting way. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| So it was really difficult to have this thing. | ||
| That I have a huge interest in having a detached approach to where you have this trial of the person that I've been studying and this is ridiculous. | ||
| But then at the same time, the impossible to not have an emotional connection with experience of seeing Neil and Scarlett in the courtroom and testifying and their therapist. | ||
| That conflict. | ||
| Was really difficult to live in. | ||
| I'm not generally a fan of weeping in public, but there's no other way. | ||
| Yeah, and in fact, I completely agree, and I struggle with that dissonance too, although I also don't think... | ||
| Sometimes I think that the dissonance or pitting these things against each other, they don't need to be pitted against each other. | ||
| You can... | ||
| And this is maybe a little bit what I was trying to get across when I talked about confirmation bias, that to be starting with the data and not having confirmation bias doesn't mean you can't have opinions or emotions about the things that you're studying. | ||
| It means that you start with the data and you let that inform your thoughts and opinions, but you still have those thoughts and opinions. | ||
| They're just informed by the data. | ||
| And I also think that to study these issues in any kind of ethical way, you need to approach it with humanity. | ||
| Because otherwise you're just going to get swept up in their propaganda. | ||
| You need to have that humanity there first and foremost and think about the people that are being harmed by this rhetoric. | ||
| No, I think you should just write a lot about how the families want money and Alex Jones is really sorry for what he did. | ||
| And he admitted that he was wrong. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a good way to do it. | ||
| I say this also as someone who, like, in 2016, there was this wave of scholarship that started to come out about the alt-right that just came from these people that were kind of like, oh, isn't it fascinating that 4chan has all these memes, right? | ||
| And it wasn't really coming from it from a place of thinking about why does this matter? | ||
| And the minute that you start thinking about why does this matter, there's going to be emotions involved. | ||
| And so I think it's actually important to hold space for those. | ||
| And that doesn't have to be in contradiction to kind of approaching things from a fairer and balanced and non-confirmation bias perspective. | ||
| Yeah, I appreciate that point. | ||
| I think that's definitely right. | ||
| But it still can be difficult. | ||
| But yeah, I think you're totally right. | ||
| I'm not saying it's easy. | ||
| I struggle with it all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think most people, especially in America, believe that expertise leads to bias. | ||
| Because you understand all this stuff, you can't think about it objectively, which is absurd. | ||
| See, that's interesting, because I think that most people think that expertise leads you to be sort of a cold, dispassionate... | ||
| I mean, in terms of... | ||
| I don't know how many... | ||
| Professors in, like, classics or philosophy you've met. | ||
| But a lot of them are pretty... | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, like, the reaction to experts in... | ||
| Well, I mean, like, the reaction to Dr. Fauci. | ||
| You know, like, the reaction to these people... | ||
| Do you mean Dr. Fausty? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| The evil Dr. Devil-worshipping Fausty. | ||
| Lock him up! | ||
| But there is a bias against people who know things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, I guess that's right, right. | ||
| Again, when I was on the stand, like, oh, you already knew that Alex Jones was harmful when you got hired. | ||
| It's like, yes, that's... | ||
| How could I not? | ||
| It is interesting that premise of you had a position and then they hired you. | ||
| It's like, do you want them to randomly hire somebody? | ||
| Off the dome, I'm going to go and say Alex might be good. | ||
| Or let's look at another unfortunate reality, and that is that anybody who is probably sort of credentialed to be in the position you are in... | ||
| Has a negative opinion of Alex. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| There's a reason they didn't bring their own expert with a different opinion. | ||
| There were none. | ||
| Nobody was like, Alex Jones is really bringing the world to a better place. | ||
| Except for maybe Steve Pachanek and there would be conflicts of interest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There would be an issue there. | |
| Yeah, I mean, this is a debate in social science too, right? | ||
| You have people that try to say that you need to take this completely like... | ||
| You need to try to have this neutral approach that's a view from nowhere type of thing. | ||
| And then you have people that tend to be more ethnographers and people doing qualitative research who say, no, none of us can escape our own perspective. | ||
| It's about understanding how that perspective informs what you're doing. | ||
| And so it's like, yes, as a woman, a bi-woman, a bi-Jewish woman, All of these things, I'm very conscious of how that affects the way that I read hate speech online, right? | ||
| And the way that, like... | ||
| Wow, I can't believe the far right really attacks you. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| But on the flip side, I'm a... | ||
| You've got the trifecta! | ||
| On the flip side, I'm a white woman, right? | ||
| And so, like, I need to stay conscious of that when I'm reading anti-Black racist content. | ||
| You know, that, like, I'm not going to fully understand the pain that that brings to Black people. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| And so I think there are ways to understand where we all are situated in the world that aren't... | ||
| It's not about confirmation bias. | ||
| It's about staying conscious to our own... | ||
| The very academic-y word about it is positionality. | ||
| What's your position within the world? | ||
| And how does that affect how you see things? | ||
| And I think... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll stop going down that rabbit hole. | ||
| It is a little bit like the idea. | ||
| I saw a University of Chicago economic study about slavery that treated slavery as purely an economic system. | ||
| Was this a libertarian thing? | ||
| It's the University of Chicago economics department. | ||
| They tend to do stuff like that. | ||
| I feel like ethically that is just a wrong thing to do. | ||
| The libertarian study on the economic impacts of feeding your child. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely! | ||
| It's like, what are we talking about here? | ||
| It turns out feeding your child is negatively beneficial for economics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, absolutely! | |
| The problem is you care about your child, and that's where this whole system has gone wrong. | ||
| Because it's negative, you have no positive obligation to feed your child. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, I guess that's the wrong side of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, hey, Becca, we should probably wrap this up before too long for a couple of reasons. | ||
| First, this has been a delight, and I hope we can talk again soon. | ||
| But second, I have the live stream up of the courtroom. | ||
| There's movement in the courtroom. | ||
| So the jury may have reached the punitive... | ||
| Or they just have more questions. | ||
| Which is possible. | ||
| But I feel like we all have an interest in this. | ||
| Thank you for the heads up. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me on the show. | ||
| I can't stress enough how much of your podcast I listened to when I was prepping for this case. | ||
| That's so great and a thrill to hear. | ||
| And right back at you, a lot of your work and published pieces have been... | ||
| Really important in terms of giving some context and insights into a lot of this world. | ||
| That is a compliment that we will take. | ||
| You listen to our show to apply Dan's life's work for good. | ||
| That's good stuff. | ||
| I'm glad that I can look at you as I feel like we can be peers. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Not at Clown College, though. | ||
| I dominate that space. | ||
| I wish I had a honk sound effect. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| Is there anything you want to direct listeners to, the place they can find you? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| If you're interested in reading my research, you can go to my website, which is beccaloo.net. | ||
|
unidentified
|
B-E-C-C-A-L-E-W dot net. | |
| Or you can go to my Twitter, which is Becca Lou, and that's where I shitpost. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Well, thank you again for joining us. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| It's been just a treat. | ||
| And like I said, I hope we can speak again soon. | ||
| And thank you for being a voice that centers the families, too. | ||
| That's very, very important. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, we'll be back for another episode. | ||
| But until then, Jordan, we have a website. | ||
| We do have a website. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight. | ||
| And... | ||
| Oh! | ||
| Jordan is... | ||
|
unidentified
|
No? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Well, we'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
| I hope you all have a wonderful, dreamy, creamy summer. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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