How the death of Ashli Babbit was manipulated by Neo Nazis and the right to fit their political goals. Our guest is Talia Lavin, journalist and author of Culture Warlords: My Journey Into The Dark Web of White Supremacy.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 151 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the MAGA Martyrs episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Today, we'll be talking about Ashley Babbitt, the woman who was shot and killed by a police officer during the January 6th storming of the Capitol.
Although others lost their lives that day as well, Babbitt has become a central figure for Donald Trump and right-wing political operatives intent on building a narrative of martyrdom that might serve in their struggle for political power.
Our guest is Talia Levin, journalist and author of Culture Warlords, My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy.
She recently wrote an article for New York Magazine entitled The Making of a Maga Martyr, exploring the aftermath of January 6th and how participants are being remembered.
But before all that, QAnon News!
For my first story, plan to reinstate Donald Trump as president circulated at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
This past week, Republicans and conservatives traveled to Dallas to attend CPAC.
Now, when I first heard that, I was like, oh, didn't they already have a CPAC this year?
And it turns out, yeah, there was a CPAC in Florida just in February.
I thought it was an annual thing, but apparently they're doubling up.
Now, this was mostly a mainline MAGA event, but there was also a strong presence of fringe right-wing groups.
There were lots of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, including Oath Keeper founder Stuart Rhodes.
White nationalist Nick Fuentes, however, he was denied entry.
This happened shortly after his longtime verified Twitter account was suspended.
So Fuentes is not having a good week.
He's been double canceled.
He's actually having a great week.
He's even more visible than ever, and all these little twerps are growing as he chases journalists at random big GOP events.
This is always what he's supposed to be.
He's supposed to be the little wrecker, the guy who brings in the pepes, who pretends to be against the GOP.
This is all just fucking political theater.
There was also some low-level QAnon presence.
For example, vendors were spotted selling QAnon merchandise, such as t-shirts.
There was also some QAnon-style hopium spotted at the event.
According to reporter Andrew Solander, attendees were handed a card titled, Seven-Point Plan to Restore Donald J. Trump in Days, Not Years.
So, seven points.
I thought we'd take a look at this plan to see how it holds up.
Here's step one, according to that plan.
Reveal Achilles heel.
Pull back the curtain on the horror show that is today's Democrat Party.
Watch Pelosi melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.
See the Black Caucus and other key groups flip unexpectedly and watch the tables turn.
No, I mean, already in step one, we're first of all, super, super vague about what what exactly is supposed to be revealed.
But there's also includes this fantasy that destroying the entire political party is just a matter of revealing corruption as if like, you know, corruption isn't just in the air we breathe.
Well, yeah, you're in the studio with Jake.
With my air.
You know, my air over here is pure and clean.
It's European air.
I'm here in France on a bed.
I'm using an iron and an upturned laundry basket to hold the mic.
And all is well.
I feel good over here, actually.
Boys, you should come to Europe.
The vibes are so much nicer.
Conspiracists, they're always frustrated because it's like they can see how evil their enemies are.
Why can't other people?
It's just a matter of revealing the information, distributing the information.
And once it's revealed, it'll go away.
So here's step two.
Witness a trusted conservative elected as Speaker of the House and finally reveal suppressed results of existing investigations into election racketeering.
This step rests on the premise that investigations have already uncovered massive election fraud, but they're just being suppressed for some reason.
Same old story.
It's like the truth is hidden, but once it's revealed, it'll change everything.
It's all been decided behind the scenes already.
We're just waiting for it to go public.
Here's step three of that plan.
Correct the official record.
Reveal that Trump legitimately won the 2020 election.
They're all waiting for that.
And here's here's step four.
The Speaker of the House drafts articles of impeachment for Biden-Harris.
OK, so this one's at least we're like, you know, in the realm of possibility, it is possible to impeach the president and vice president.
But here's step five.
Citizen Donald J. Trump is placed into the line of presidential succession behind the vice president by electing him speaker.
Now, this step is interesting because it actually could happen, at least in theory.
The Speaker does not have to be an elected member of Congress.
It can be anyone who a majority of the House members choose.
It just won't happen in reality.
And my question about this step is that why wasn't Trump elected Speaker Back at step two, the guy who drafts the articles of impeachment.
For some reason, they want someone else, even when people are fantasizing about Trump, they don't want Trump to do any actual work or thinking.
Well, here is step six.
Speaker of the House, Donald J. Trump, then calls for a vote to impeach, charge, and remove imposters Biden and Harris.
And then finally, here's step seven.
Duly impeach, charge, and remove Biden and Harris, whereby rendering all acts of said impostors while in office null and void and of no effect.
Then, duly elected Donald J. Trump resumes his rightful place as a U.S.
President.
We're still in fantasy land.
Even if, you know, you impeach a president, you can't reverse everything they did.
Like, you can't, like, retroactively make them not president.
This is like a Q-drop that they were just handing out on a flyer.
That's a new way to make drops.
For my next story, Capitol rioter and QAnon follower Douglas Jensen released on home detention.
Now, we've talked a bit before about Douglas Jensen.
He's the QAnon supporter who was filmed chasing a police officer up a flight of stairs during the Capitol insurrection.
So it sounds like he's going to have to be imprisoned at home while he waits for trial.
U.S.
District Judge Timothy J. Kelly said that Jensen's conduct was serious, but that the threat Jensen posed to the community could be mitigated through strict conditions of release.
Now, what's most interesting to me is that Judge Kelly cited Jensen's poor understanding of the U.S.
government in his decision to release Jensen.
The court actually released videos to the media showing Jensen repeatedly claiming that he was at the White House, despite the fact he was actually at the Capitol building.
This is me, touching the fucking White House.
This is why we're here.
Look at your faces!
Absolutely just baby brain.
Knows nothing.
Just excited to be there.
He's just angry and there.
And he knows the White House is a big deal.
It's the only building in Washington, D.C., don't you know?
Today we're going to talk about the death of Ashley Babbitt and I think it's very important because it's clear that her death is going to be exploited by the far right and conspiracists for a very long time.
We're going to be talking about her even though I really hate Ashley Babbitt discourse.
It's obvious that like propagandists they want people to focus on her death and whether the use of force was justified because that conversation distracts from bigger questions about how she was radicalized and why all those people were in the capitol building in the first place.
That, I suspect, is the purpose of the Who Shot Ashley Babbitt campaign.
It feels like a rhetorical sleight of hand that attempts to reframe what happened on January 6th.
Instead of it being about a delusional and aggressive mob who are trying to reverse the results of an election, they're trying to make it about an innocent woman who was killed by a government aggression.
And also, conversely, if you join the discourse, you find yourself basically listening to people saying this kind of stuff, the martyr, you know, bigger than life, and then on the other side it's like, yeah, she deserved to die.
Yeah, yeah.
And that is a horrible thing to just watch a bunch of liberals just pile on.
I don't. Yeah, it's like it's I think it's like it's a topic that is difficult to navigate with the appropriate
level of nuance intact, I would say.
Like like Babbit is someone who I'm someone who died relatively recently in a very public way, who was not a
public figure before she died.
And she didn't have a history of violence or anything like that, even though she I mean, she obviously had abhorrent
views.
She also has surviving family members, which I want to be as sensitive as I can about that fact.
But at the same time, we're forced to talk about because the tactless among us, they're going to exploit her death.
We have no choice but to unpack how her tragic death is being turned into a martyr narrative.
I want to emphasize, like, like, I think by calling her death tragic, that doesn't mean by itself that that the
shooting that killed her was surprising or even unjustifiable.
I mean, there's obviously an element of like, you know, what the fuck do you think was going to happen?
Like if you are rampaging through the Capitol building with people who are trying to find lawmakers because they believe that, you know, they're going to disrupt the normal function of the legislature and overthrow the U.S.
federal government, you might get shot.
There's a possibility that might happen.
You should be prepared for that.
I mean, like we talked about in the Kuhnen episode, it's kind of a miracle that the day wasn't deadlier than it was.
And if it was less white or a left-wing mob, it would have been, certainly.
It's a delicate balance, but I think it's possible to reject martyr narratives or talk about celebrating the death of a woman, which is not something I'm really interested in at all, while also acknowledging the tragedy of the whole situation.
And it's tragic because if you zoom out from the moment of the shooting, you can see many scenarios that would lead to Babbitt still being alive.
Ashley Babbitt should not have been radicalized.
While she was in a radicalized state, she should not have found QAnon and found it so appealing.
She should not have been in Washington, D.C.
on January 6th.
Even after she arrived in D.C., she should not have been able to make it inside the Capitol building.
There are many points of failure or outright malice that ultimately allow this tragedy to happen.
And I'm also not saying that she's like a perfectly innocent little lamb.
There's obviously no equivalence between this case and the many cases of police officers killing unarmed people.
I'm talking about cases like Tamir Rice, or Philando Castile, or Sandra Bland, or Eric Garner, or George Floyd, or even Daniel Shaver, or the many, many other cases we've heard about in the news that I can name that were indefensible murders by police.
Calling this particular situation a tragedy is merely observing that if very powerful or influential people made different choices, this whole ugly situation could be avoided and Ashley Babbitt would still be alive.
And one could acknowledge that while simultaneously acknowledging that Babbitt was an adult who was responsible for the needlessly risky choices that she made.
And I guess what I'm saying, just personally, this is like my personal take.
This is a highly sensitive subject matter, so please don't get mad at me after you hear this episode and then get mad and then sort of at me on Twitter.
This is basically my main message, I think.
How many fancy sentences does Travis have to put together before you stop bullying him on Twitter and calling him Travis Pew or Fartfist You?
This is a perfect kind of thing that is poorly fitted for Twitter discourse, but well suited for propagandists, which is why it's being picked up by them.
Now, with all that being said, let's take a look at the facts surrounding her death and how the narrative around her martyrdom formed.
Ashley Babbitt was a San Diego native and served in the Air Force for 14 years.
While she was there, she was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
She was discharged as a senior airman, which is a fairly low rank given her experience.
She reportedly had difficulty adjusting to civilian life and worked as a security guard before running a financially troubled pool cleaning company, which she had purchased.
Once she joined the private sector, she did, however, take to politics and became a passionate open supporter of Donald Trump.
She was also a QAnon follower who was once pictured wearing a Q shirt and regularly used QAnon phrases on her Twitter account.
Interestingly, there's some evidence that her obsession with politics, and Trump in particular, may have hurt her in her day job.
One man interviewed by the CBS affiliate News 8 in San Diego said that he stopped using her pool company services after being subjected to a political rant by Babbitt.
He was a loyal customer of Fowler's Pool Service for more than three decades, until a conversation he had about a year ago with the co-owner of the Spring Valley company, Ashley Babbitt.
A conversation he will never forget.
I brought it up, I think, about a political race that had just happened.
And Ashley absolutely went off and just started talking about people who oppose Trump and about Nancy Pelosi and Schumer and homeless people.
And she said, I'm not going to have any homeless people crapping in my front yard.
And I, you know, I, it just didn't even, a lot of it didn't even make any sense.
She was so, and literally went on for about a minute and a half.
Ashley Babbitt is the Trump supporter who was shot and killed by Capitol Police on Wednesday as she tried to storm through a window towards the House chamber.
Babbitt and her family purchased the pool service company three years ago from the family that owned the business for four decades.
The Fowler family currently has no connection to the business.
It was shocking that she would be talking to a customer the way she was talking to me and using a variety of four-letter words.
The San Diego customer said he stopped doing business with the company, telling the pool service man in person he was fired.
I said, I'm going to have to let you guys go.
I said, I just think it was too much.
And so he said, she's done that to other customers and I'm going to talk to her.
And I said, well, I'm sorry.
And so I hired another pool company.
Yeah, the stakes in that moment are so low, which is why it's so bizarre to hear that in context of everything that happened.
It's like, I'm going to use a different pool company.
Yeah, her politics became so central to her identity.
She would just go on a rant while talking to a customer while trying to do business.
It just infected her thinking in every single moment, it seems like, and it cost her.
It seems that Babbitt believed by flying to DC on January 6th, she was participating in the storm.
The day before her death, she tweeted this.
Nothing will stop us.
They can try and try and try, but the storm is here and it is descending upon D.C.
in less than 24 hours, dark to light.
Video from that day shows a crowd of rioters smashing glass on the door leading to the Speaker's Lobby of the Capitol.
Babbitt was at the front of the crowd, wearing snow boots, jeans, and a Trump flag wrapped around her neck like a cape.
She shouts, go go, and then she is hoisted on the now broken window.
As she sticks her head through the frame, a plainclothes officer shoots her and she falls back into the crowd.
But that is just what's evident from social media videos.
Here's how a Department of Justice investigation described the events leading up to the death of Ashley Babbitt.
Miss Babbitt was among the mob of people that entered the Capitol building and gained access to a hallway outside the Speaker's lobby, which leads to the chamber of the U.S.
House of Representatives.
At the time, the USCP was evacuating members from the chamber, which the mob was trying to enter from multiple doorways.
USCP officers used furniture to barricade a set of glass doors separating the hallway and speakers lobby to try and stop the mob from entering the speakers lobby and the chamber, and three officers positioned themselves between the doors and the mob.
Members of the mob attempted to break through the doors by striking them and breaking the glass with their hands, flagpoles, helmets, and other objects.
Eventually, the three USCP officers positioned outside the doors were forced to evacuate.
As members of the mob continued to strike the glass doors, Ms.
Babbitt attempted to climb through one of the doors where the glass was broken out.
An officer inside the speaker's lobby fired one round from his service pistol, striking Ms.
Babbitt in the left shoulder, causing her to fall back from the doorway and onto the floor.
A USCP emergency response team, which had begun making its way into the hallway to try and subdue the mob, administered aid to Ms.
Babbitt, who was transported to Washington Hospital Center, where she succumbed to her injuries.
Based on that investigation, in April, U.S.
officials declined to support a criminal prosecution of the officer who shot her, citing insufficient evidence of a crime.
Extremism researchers noted that within days of her death, some corners of the internet began portraying Babbitt's death as a martyrdom.
The people who first created this portrayal were explicit white nationalists and neo-Nazis.
Now, there's no evidence at all that Babbitt was ever affiliated with neo-Nazi groups, but those are just the people who first saw the potential in portraying her as a martyr.
One popular image of Babbitt portrayed her in a two-tone image of a woman that our guest today, Talia Levin, sort of describes as like, kind of looks like the face of the mermaid in the Starbucks logo.
In that portrayal, there is an image of a single drop of blood positioned in front of the woman's neck.
She is pictured in front of a red capital dome, which is surrounded by four stars.
The dome is said to represent the blood that was spilled, according to online messages, The four stars represent the four deaths of Capitol insurrectionists.
Now, that original version of the propaganda image of Babbitt was apparently not anti-Semitic enough for some.
So there was another version of the image that circulated on Telegram depicting a star of David on the dome.
And this is, of course, a reference to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that the U.S.
government is controlled by Jews or is the Zionist occupied government, as it's referred to.
This stylized image of Babbitt was quickly printed on a flag, which apparently was flown on at least one flagpole.
On January 9th, a user of the alternate social network Minds posted a picture of the Babbitt flag flapping in the wind in an unknown location.
That post included the caption, Ashley Babbitt Martyr Flag.
So these, they know exactly what they're doing, the narrative that they're, you know, sort of seeding.
On January 10th, online accounts for the Neo-Nazi National Social Club claimed that members placed a banner over Interstate 93 in Concord, New Hampshire.
That banner listed the names of the four deaths related to the Capitol Siege, including Babbitt.
Above the names was the phrase, Eternal Glory.
Below the names, it states, U.S.
Capitol 1621.
Some people on Telegram even started to organize what they call the Million Martyr March in honor of Babbitt.
This was supposed to be a protest on January 20th in D.C., but it just never materialized.
After the seeds of the martyr narrative were sown by white nationalists, it was quickly picked up by more mainstream pro-Trump figures.
One person who promoted Ashley Babbitt's martyrdom was the Florida-based rapper Forghiato Blow.
Yeah, he sucks, man.
I've been watching that guy for a while.
The first clip we saw, I think we looked at it on our stream, and he was just in full MAGA gear with a t-shirt, and then his boat was decaled with Trump as well, and he was flying flags, and he's just... It's very, it's very bad stuff.
And he was also the same rapper who was seen next to a dancing Roger Stone in front of a big SUV.
Yeah, it was a big truck, actually.
It was like a truck with, like, speakers on it or some shit.
Now, Blow had previously collaborated with Rick Ross and Vanilla Ice, but... What?
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
Apparently he's... He's worked with some mainstream figures.
On February 1st, Blow updated a music video for his song, Ashley Babbitt.
In the video, Blow drives into a cemetery in a Rolls Royce that has the Bitcoin logo emblazoned on the rims.
He then proceeds to rap while surrounded by solemn-looking people holding up pictures and tributes to Ashley Babbitt.
I done seen them barricades open and people jumpin'.
I done seen the media police walk around in.
They gon' try to lock us down, you know we poppin' out.
1776, boy, you know we rockin' out.
People judging people, this is crazy these days They been shooting, they been rioting for hundreds of days
Patriots we fed up, we know that we got set up Who made that phone call that got that Patriot wet up?
Ashley Babby, yeah you know we hold you in prayer Ashley Babby, yeah you know your soul's in the air
Ashley Babby, yeah you know true Patriots care Left your blood up on the battlegrounds like this affair
♪ Oh no, oh ♪ I think what's really interesting about that bit of the rap is that he calls where she died a battleground.
Right.
Yeah.
There was no battle that happened.
For boogs and neo-Nazis, they see this almost as like the Bay of Pigs for the Second Civil War.
Kind of failed.
The war's not over, though.
Perhaps my favorite part of the rap has to be the part where Blow says that he was in D.C.
on January 6th, but makes a point of saying that he was never in the Capitol.
Oh my god.
That is so... He literally stops rapping, basically.
*outro* From there, Ashley Babbitt was elevated in the conservative media.
For example, in April this year, radio host Jamie Ellman produced a report on YouTube called Ashley Babbitt, Portrait of a Patriot.
It tells the story of her life using home videos of Babbitt and interviews with her grieving mother and widower.
To this date, no member of Congress, no person in any kind of official capacity in Washington, and no member of the news media has dared to question the death of Ashley Babbitt.
When they do mention her name, they dehumanize her and disparage her.
But the fact of the matter is Ashley Babbitt was indeed a human being.
She was a veteran, a model citizen.
She was a wife.
She was a daughter.
And today we're going to talk to those who loved her and get a portrait of a patriot.
In June, Ashley Babbitt's husband, Aaron Babbitt, also appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, which is the highest rated show on cable news.
Trump himself did not comment on the death of Ashley Babbitt until July 1st, nearly six months after she died.
And from this we can kind of see how the narrative of Ashley Babbitt's martyrdom traveled.
First, it was seeded by online neo-Nazis, then it was picked up by MAGA influencers, then it was promoted by low-level right-wing media, and then high-level right-wing media, in the case of Fox News, before finally reaching its final form and being promoted by Trump himself.
Trump issued a single line statement which just said, who shot Ashley Babbitt?
Now notably his first statement wasn't something about condolences to the family of Ashley Babbitt or anything like that because this was like the narrative that would have incubated and won out.
During the recent Trump rally in Florida, he again promoted her name and suggested that the officer who shot her should be strung up.
And by the way, who shot Ashley Babbitt?
Who shot Ashley Babbitt?
Who?
Who shot Ashley Babbitt?
We all saw the hand.
We saw the gun.
I spoke to her mother the other day, an incredible woman.
She's just devastated, like it happened yesterday.
Devastated.
You know, if that were on the other side, the person that did the shooting would be strung up and hung.
Okay?
Now they don't want to give the name.
They don't want to give, but people know the name.
People know where it came from.
And it's a terrible thing.
Right shot.
Boom.
There was no reason for it.
Who shot Ashley Babbitt?
It's got to be released.
When talking about Babbitt, Trump has also repeatedly said that she was shot in the head, which is incorrect.
Here he is at a recent press event in New Jersey.
But the person that shot Ashley Babbitt, boom, right through the head, just boom.
There was no reason for that.
Again, that's not true.
Early reports said that she was shot in the neck, and later investigations claim that she was shot in the left shoulder.
But Trump says that she was shot in the head, I suspect, for like two reasons.
Number one, he doesn't really give a shit about the details.
He just wants the drama.
This is the sick thing.
He's punching up the story of her death for dramatic effect.
Like, it's gross.
Again, this doesn't absolve Babbitt of the choices she made.
But Trump, by stirring up lies about the election and then inviting people to come to D.C.
on January 6th because he did that, was the one who ultimately arranged the meeting between Babbitt and the officer.
And when that meeting ends in her death, Trump immediately exploits her death for political purposes.
Just absolutely ghoulish.
Now it's worth noting that it's actually a bit out of character for Trump to express outrage at use of force.
Recall back in May of 2020 when there are protests outside of the White House, Trump tweeted this.
The front line was replaced with fresh agents like Magic, Big Crowd, professionally organized,
but nobody came close to breaching the fence.
Unsurprisingly, Paul Gosar is right on that, issuing a long statement about it.
There's also Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said this during an interview on Newsmax.
That's when people would have been really badly hurt, at least.
Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action.
Of course, members of Congress have also taken to promoting the martyr myth of Ashley Babbitt.
Unsurprisingly, Paul Gosar is right on that, issuing a long statement about it.
There's also Marjorie Taylor Greene, who said this during an interview on Newsmax.
You two, I think, would have been friends.
I'm sure we would have.
She seems like she was a very passionate patriot and a very proud Trump supporter, which I really appreciate that.
And she was also a veteran, so I'm thankful for her service to the country.
I've already been speaking about Ashley Babbitt.
I've also met with her attorneys as well, and I think it's very important for her family to know who killed her, because if this country can demand justice for someone like George Floyd, Then we can certainly demand justice for Ashley Babbitt, and everyone deserves to know who killed her.
Not just seeing a gun and a hand on a video clip, but we need to know who it is.
Yeah, it's absolutely outrageous.
And, you know, the martyr narrative is, I mean, it's additionally worrying because it's even dangerous, I would argue, mostly because one of the functions of the martyr narrative is to incentivize people to take similar actions as the martyr.
This was noted in the article Fabricated Martyrs, the Warrior Saint Icons of Far-Right Terrorism by Ari Ben-Am and Gabriel Wyman, which was published last year in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism.
Am and Wyman say this.
Martyrdom, by providing an ideological, religious, and occasionally material incentive to join an organization, and being willing to die in order to promote its interests, is especially relevant for extremist organizations who often lack other means of incentivizing members to act publicly.
In recent years, the concept of martyrdom and its accessibility in the far right has changed drastically and arguably become more in line with traditional forms of martyrdom as seen in global Salafi Jihadist movements.
The willingness to die for the movement is inherent to martyrdom.
But to the far-right and Salafi Jihadism, the concept of willingness to die has been expanded upon.
In these terrorist movements, a martyr's willingness to die for the movement carries within it the willingness to kill for it as well, with martyrdom being achieved as the result of carrying out a successful attack.
In contrast to Salafi Jihadism, dying as the result of a successful terrorist attack is not a key requirement to become a martyr for the far-right movement.
Carrying out the attack and being jailed for it is sufficient.
This development in martyrdom in the far right has occurred over time as the far right in general has transitioned from organized ideological movements to violent outbursts of terrorism from lone wolves primarily due to the internet.
This process has translated into the ascension of a more decentralized and occasionally even leaderless organizational structure.
This structure has necessitated the creation of a system of martyrdom for far-right terrorists in line This is, I think, a real concern.
far-right extremists and organizations, primarily the desire to encourage
individuals to carry out lone wolf attacks that cannot be easily thwarted
by law enforcement or intelligence agents. This is, I think, a real concern. I
don't want to see anyone else wind up like Ashley Babbitt, even if they are
radicalized, even though they do have vile views. But people in the far right,
they're portraying Babbitt's story as heroic and patriotic.
That makes it sound like a tale that's worthy of emulation rather than an avoidable tragedy.
And that carries the risk of encouraging more people to follow in her footsteps.
We are joined now by Talia Levin.
She is a journalist who has written about extremism for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, and many other publications.
Her most recent piece in New York Magazine is headlined, The Making of a MAGA Martyr.
She is also one of our very first guests we ever had on this podcast, first joining us all the way back in 2018.
Talia, thank you so much for joining us again.
Yeah, no problem.
What a long, strange trip it's been, huh?
So, as you write in your piece, the first people to immediately seize upon the death of Ashley Babbitt and use it to create online propaganda were neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
So, I mean, is this really common behavior?
Are they often on the lookout for people they can elevate into martyrs?
Yeah, absolutely.
In a couple of different ways.
So there's a long history among anti-government groups.
And, you know, neo-Nazis are sort of militantly anti-government.
They often call the U.S.
government the ZOG, the Zionist Occupied Government.
It's all very nasty and anti-Semitic.
Incidents of martyrdom have included Waco and Ruby Ridge, which was, you know, a shooting standoff between a family of white supremacists and the government.
That wound up in like, frankly, some pretty tragic deaths, could have been handled better.
And I think the canonization of Ashley Babbitt falls well within that tradition of sort of this person is a noble patriot martyr, victim of the US government, tyranny, etc, etc.
And that applies to kind of her beatification across the far right.
More specific to the neo-Nazi sphere is that there's a very common tendency for them to adopt specifically mass shooters and murderers and call them saints.
So, you know, they call Dylan Roof, Saint Roof, Anders Breivik, Saint Breivik.
You know, they'll say, Hale, Breivik, Hale, you know, Roger, Elliot Roger, etc, etc.
And so these figures are almost like living saints for them, living martyrs.
And, and that's really, really common.
And like, I can't tell you how many times I've seen these, these murders, like photoshopped into sort of saintly icons, like you'd see in the Russian Orthodox Church or something.
They don't need to literally die in order to be a martyr.
They can just be in prison, just do horrible things and be in prison for it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, so there are dead martyrs and living martyrs.
So I would say the Babbitt canonization falls within the sort of anti-government martyr complex, but it also very much tracks with this lionization of imprisoned murderers as well.
Where you seize on these figure heads that you can use to amplify emotion and galvanize the movement and you know Babbitt as a white woman in her 30s and thin and sort of attractive really fits that mold of someone That you can endlessly reproduce images of, and as I know in the piece, the kind of Babbitt battle flag that's been made is like this image of her, I think I called it a more Marshall version of the Starbucks logo.
It's kind of this idealized feminine image, that kind of female figurehead and she has like a drop of blood.
Dangling from her neck and she's against a blood-red Capitol Dome and like some of the first neo-Nazi iterations of that like included a Jewish star on the Capitol Dome and the word vengeance and like gothic font.
It's useful propaganda.
You can see it.
And it's shown up all over at different protests.
I think it was prominently displayed at like one march in Huntington Beach.
It's showed up all over this Babbitt flag and also Kmart sells an Ashley Babbitt shirt, which is funny.
That's... surprising?
I mean... It says, like, Ashley Babbitt, American patriot, with, like, a black and white American flag.
I was really surprised when I saw that.
It appears on, like, these random T-sites, like, T-shirt sites, too, and eBay, as well.
Like, I think sometimes, like, just the algorithm will, like, sweep things up in weird ways.
It's always either, like, a machine or a white supremacist or both.
Yeah, yeah at one point there was a QAnon book which was the second best-selling book on Amazon list in the list of bestsellers It was number two for a while.
You know, I thought was really interesting how you write about how How the Ashley Babbitt sort of martyr narrative, you know, it sort of started in these, you know, these vile corners of the Internet, but then it really creeped into the mainstream, much as the same way we kind of saw, I guess, QAnon generally.
I mean, we saw, you know, we saw it started, you know, with literal neo-Nazis promoting this propaganda, and then eventually it made it all the way to the lips of Donald Trump, who was promoting, you know, this who shot Ashley Babbitt kind of question.
Now, is this something that, I mean, you see often as someone who, like, monitors these neo-Nazi channels?
Do you see someone, like, some Republican congressman or some mainstream pundit on Fox News say something, and you think to yourself, hey, I saw that on these Telegram channels, like, six months ago?
Oh yeah, totally.
I mean, that's really common.
There's a pretty established 4chan to Fox News pipeline, particularly and unsurprisingly on Tucker Carlson's show, where the things that preoccupy 4channers will very often make their way to his show in particular.
I think he's the closest to the white power pulse of all the Fox News primetime lineup.
But yeah, when I was at Media Matters briefly, I did a couple of pieces on the 4chan to Fox News pipeline.
And actually, yeah, I wrote my piece and it got published before Trump started like tweeting out or you know, whatever.
Press releasing out who shot Ashley Babbitt and talking about it at his Rallies which just sort of emphasized the point that she's become this this martyr I think in this case.
It was sort of yeah neo-nazis were like the first wave And they've used her in their physical propaganda as well.
You know banner drops Say her name Ashley Babbitt, which is obviously sort of a co-optation of the Black Lives Matter slogan Say her name about black female victims of police violence, so it's like another...
Perverse sort of appropriation there.
But then the MAGA right did take up the Ashley Babbitt cause fairly immediately.
I would call it less neo-Nazi influence per se, although I think definitely with the parlor ban and more MAGA right folks and QAnon folks migrating to Telegram, there's been more of a crossover and cross-pollination between those two communities.
like, you know, neo-Nazi sense like a fertile recruitment opportunity, which we've certainly
seen with like Ghost Ezra and other QAnon influencers. But I think it's more of a case of
kind of the anti-government like Ruby Ridge, Waco stuff does run as a pulse throughout the right,
certainly through militia groups as well. I think a lot about the way they use the term "patriot."
The Kmart shirt, the description said, like, American Hero Patriot, right?
The Maga Rite called themselves Patriots.
Babbitt, in particular, was an Air Force veteran.
I believe she'd served in the Air Force for 14 years, and that sort of military cred, I think, boosted her martyrology.
It was like, she served this country, she died defending this country.
The Babbit, Martyrology in particular, I think it's more the case of parallel convergence than direct neo-Nazi influence, but certainly A phenomenon of kind of neo-Nazi 4chan preoccupations making their way directly to the GOP and its, you know, right-wing media spokespeople is definitely not uncommon.
And we've seen that since the inception of Trump as a political figure.
I mean, back in 2015, during the campaign, like his team were lifting graphics from the Donald and from 4chan.
Like the infamous Sheriff Star, anti-Semitic meme about Hillary Clinton that he tweeted out,
various neo-Nazi figures that he retweeted.
The lines have been very porous.
You're also talking a bit about your piece about how individual participants in the Capitol riot
are also pushing their own personal stories of martyrdom, especially on these GoFundMe campaigns and stuff.
I mean, could you talk a bit about those crowdfunding campaigns that you saw?
And what do you make of the fact that so many are eager to claim the status of this helpless victim?
GoFundMe, I think, is not the main place they're gathering.
There's a Christian fundraising site called GiveSendGo.
That I did a feature on for The Nation a while ago.
It's like very specifically and openly far-right friendly.
You know, I talked to them at great length and the founders of the site and they said like, you know, if the KKK were fundraising on our website, we would like, you know, welcome them into the arms of Jesus or whatever.
Like they see this fundraising site as part of their Christian mission and they've sort of been very welcoming to the far-right.
I think they have far-right sympathies and that sort of came out.
In, like, subtly in our conversation, but also just practically, like, you know, Enrique Tarrio's raised thousands.
Kyle Rittenhouse, the most sort of, like, high profile of the far-right figures on the site, like, raised half a million dollars on Gives & Go.
There's also, like, it's a funny site because they have not just, like, a Give Now button, but they have a Pray Now button also.
It's like very, very Christian.
And so you can like also send prayers.
So that you had like proud boys being like, yeah, like pray for me.
I'm totally super into Jesus.
A lot of the Capitol defendants like are pretty sincerely into Jesus and pretty sincerely into talking about patriots and appealing to their fellow patriots.
The two examples that I looked at in the piece are Mark Sahadi and Sue Yanni, who are like the founders of a homophobic hate group in the Boston area called Super Happy Fun America, that I think is like also raising money on Stripe.
They organized a street pride parade in Boston.
And they're just like generally horrible people.
And they were also, like, not only were they at the Capitol riot, but they also, like,
organized buses down to D.C., like, 11 buses.
And they've raised nine thousand dollars by kind of saying we are being persecuted.
Area, like, radical leftists, like, think of us as extremists.
And so, like, we can't get a fair shake.
And, like, only you can help us, patriots.
Like, it was very much this sort of sob story.
Yes, but also a story of living martyrdom.
And Sean Watson, another defendant, like, you know, talked about being persecuted by the FBI and the shame and embarrassment that came to him for being arrested and appealed to his status as a veteran, appealed to his fellow patriots.
And the responses are very along those lines of like, God bless you.
You know, you're showing what patriotism is, like you're an example.
Uh, so it's, I mean, it falls within a certain pattern of like talking about political prosecution, about prisoners, you know, I think the Christian language of martyrdom and the sort of political language of martyrdom have some overlap here.
Like you mentioned in the piece, you know, Ashley Babbitt was a veteran and, you know, she also served in two wars.
So what do you think the military could do in order to better confront the issue of extremism, both in like active duty service members and veterans?
Because it seems like this is, you know, we see this issue over and over and over again, where the people who are, you know, taking part in this extremist action, you know, had Serves when you would you might hope that once they come home and they re-enter civilian life, they would be model citizens.
There are so many complex factors that go into the radicalization of both active duty military and veterans.
So Spencer Ackerman, he talked about over the past number of decades, the physical concentration of the US military, like where the bases and stuff physically are, has moved to the south and west into more conservative areas.
And like that and while they recruit from all over the country, the sort of cultural milieu of the military has like gotten more and more conservative and the people drawn to the military are kind of enmeshed in that culture as well.
So in terms of people who are recruits who are active duty, Like the people who are drawn to that are coming out of a right-wing culture.
But like this is also a long-term problem.
I mean, there was like a Klan cell at Camp Pendleton in like the 70s, you know, that was well known and in lieu of like Court-martialing or, you know, dishonorably discharging the members.
The response of the army was basically to split up the Clavern and like send them to different bases.
Basically just a perfect way of seeding new radicalism.
Some experts I talked to basically said this is how the military deals with it.
They They'll, like, give a very earnest statement to the press of, like, extremism has no home in our ranks and then honorably discharge or kind of shuffle folks around.
I mean, it's easy to move people around within the military and, you know, they won't do shit about it until there's a stink in the press and then they do as little as possible.
I mean, like, there's a degree to which they don't want to alienate the conservative cultures that they're drawing from in terms of recruiting.
You know, and there's also I would say like a natural harmony in certain regards between the military's goals, like you're serving your country, you know, you're going to get proficient at weapons, you're, you know, you're imbued with the spirit of sort of martial patriotism that like, you know, that harmonizes with a lot of far right groups.
And what they aim for, particularly militias.
Timothy McVeigh was a veteran.
Terry Nichols was a veteran.
In Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew, you know, she talks about specifically how the culture of white grievance that grew up around Vietnam veterans was crucial to the resurgence of the Klan in the 70s and 80s and 90s.
Like Lewis Beam was a veteran who, you know, became A high-up figure in far-right extremism.
A lot of white supremacist terrorists got their training in weapons in the military.
With regards to militias, I explored militias a little bit more deeply around the election, just because I think we all knew there was going to be some fucked up shit happening around the election.
And thereafter, and so I like for a while actually embedded in a Zello channel.
Zello is like a push to talk walkie talkie app that's popular among extremists.
So I embedded Undercover in like a Zello channel for the 3%.
The Georgia 3% Security Force, which is a 3% splinter group militia.
And, you know, I had a whole fake voice and everything.
Patriotic Jen.
And I talked to them, a lot of them were veterans, and these militia groups,
this is not like a new observation that I'm making, but they very specifically utilize military structure,
hierarchies of command, often much of the language of the military.
They engage in firearms training.
They do field training exercises.
It's all very explicitly to mirror the military.
And so for returning veterans, particularly in a country that has no safety net.
A VA that like, you know, continually fails veterans in varieties of ways.
Finding a group that not only has a familiar structure and familiar sort of methods of command, but also a sort of stirring story that rhymes with what they've learned in the military.
Also, veterans are very prized recruits for these groups, obviously, because they have Pool under fire, they're organized, they have ability with tactical weaponry.
The Pentagon has sort of set up an initiative to maybe tackle this, but I'm pretty skeptical about it.
It also creates a major conflict of interest in terms of cracking down on extremism and membership in militias, you know, where the military doesn't want to alienate what's like a very large recruitment pool for them.
And also, you know, alienate the culture.
What seems like hypocrisy on the far right, and the right in general, is usually just a will to power.
Like, back the blue is a useful cudgel, and then when it's not useful, the cops create martyrs, is more useful than embrace that.
There was a private in the army named James Burmeister II who had a Nazi flag above his bed, would wear skinhead shirts and use racial slurs.
He was in the 82nd Airborne Division Parachute Infantry.
And then he and two comrades from the division just shot a black man and woman in Fayetteville.
And Burmeister had been talking about wanting to earn his spider web tattoo, which is something that you get as a skinhead in certain white supremacist skinhead groups, for killing a black person.
That was his goal.
It was not subtle.
It was well known.
He literally had a swastika flag.
So it's just like, this has been a problem in the military for Decades and decades and decades, I think it will continue to be a problem.
And there are structural disincentives to really routing out the sentiment.
The forces that extremism preys on are not necessarily so much like low education or socioeconomic marginalization, although those certainly factor in.
What they really prey on is a pretty universal sentiment that crosses socioeconomic, educational,
and geographic lines, which is a sense of like, I feel lost, I feel alienated,
I don't feel my life has purpose.
With the capital writers, similarly with like militias, it's like, oh, these guys are just like ignorant rednecks.
And like not understanding that the power of the ideology and the danger it represents
is that it gives people a sense of purpose, imbues them with a feeling of nobility,
tells them that they've stumbled on a secret truth that only they are contributing to
along with their compatriots.
And like, that's an incredibly powerful set of motivations that draws people in.
Now before I let you go, I gotta plug your book, which I also highly recommend.
That's Culture Warlords, My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy.
It is fascinating and terrifying.
So how would you describe what your book is about?
So it's a lot of what I've been talking about today.
And if you like my voice, which I find very sultry and And lovely, I also read the audiobook, if you're into that.
The book is sort of an examination of the neo-Nazi right online.
It talks about, you know, incels, white supremacists, Proud Boys, far-right influencers like Andy Ngo and Tim Pool, and an assorted cast of characters.
And I also talk about Antifa and, like, why you should be an anti-fascist.
It's for sale everywhere.
It's Culture Warlords.
Thank you so much for having me on, guys.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
We have a website, it's QAnonAnonymous.com, and you can find all the podcast links there.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's auto-tune.
♪ Children in the swamp, America, that's why we love 'em ♪
♪ We the people, got us back, you know we stand for something ♪
♪ I was at the Capitol, witness hate in they eyes ♪ ♪ I stood on them battlegrounds, they won't catch me
inside ♪ ♪ Roasted with them patriots, they had tears in they eyes
♪ ♪ Tryna steal our pride, but yeah, you know we outside
♪ ♪ They can never take our freedom, real patriots ride ♪
♪ They can never take our freedom, real Americans ride ♪
♪ I done seen them barricades open and people jumpin' ♪ ♪ I done seen the media police walkin' right in ♪
♪ They gon' try to lock us down, you know we poppin' out ♪
♪ 1776, boy, you know we rockin' out ♪ ♪ People judgein' people, this is crazy these days ♪
♪ They been shootin', they been riotin' for hundreds of days ♪
♪ Patriots, we fed up, we know that we got set up ♪ ♪ Who made that phone call to got that patriot wet up?
♪ Ashley, baby, yeah, you know we hold you in prayer.
Ashley, baby, yeah, you know your soul's in the air.
Ashley, baby, yeah, you know true Patriots care.
Left your blood up on the battlegrounds like this affair.
At least we making history.
Never forget what they did to me.
Boy you know I bounce back on 'em, won't even say names They tryna ban me, yeah, I make a new page
Trained in the swamp, America, that's why we love 'em We the people, got us back, you know we stand for something
I was at their capital, witness hate in they eyes I stood on them battlegrounds, they won't catch me inside
Posted with them patriots, they had tears in they eyes They tryna steal our pride, boy, yeah you know we outside
They can never take our freedom, real patriots ride They can never take our freedom, real Americans ride
Let's start a patriot party, yeah, let's start a patriot party
I repeat, anybody who lost they life at the Capitol, man January 6th, on both sides, you know, I saw with my own
eyes My feet were out there, I was on the battlegrounds
I was not in no Capitol though, never went up in the Capitol
I was just out there seeing it firsthand I put a lot of time in for Trump, we put a lot of time in
for Trump Truck rallies, boat rallies, patriots stand up
