| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Alt-Right Internet Movement
00:08:43
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|
| I mean, if someone told me two years ago that we would be here, that we'd have these new words, I mean, I think alt-right was beat out as the word of the year by... | |
| Post-truthiness. | |
| Post-truthiness. | |
| But it just... | |
| Oh, thanks. | |
| Do you think the alt-right is, uh, real? | |
| What does that mean? | |
| Well... | |
| It's mostly an internet movement. | |
| I looked at the 990s of your non-profit operating budget of less than $100,000. | |
| Is it mostly a mirage out of a lot of Twitter bots? | |
| A characteristic thing about the alt-right is that it is coming from the internet. | |
| And there are a lot of reasons for that. | |
| A, I think just any new movement is going to probably emerge from the internet in 2016 now anyway. | |
| But we're going after big taboos. | |
| People have something to lose. | |
| So the anonymity has allowed many more people to write and interact than we would have otherwise if a similar movement were going on in the 1980s or 50s or whatever. | |
| What we've been able to do is leverage ourselves because of the power of our ideas. | |
| So everything you just said, I could flip around and say, yes, you're right. | |
| We don't have a George Soros throwing money at us. | |
| Yet we're the ones making a splash. | |
| We're the ones people want to talk to. | |
| We're the ones people fear. | |
| And that shows our power. | |
| It's like you're right in a way. | |
| There's no single institution that has a building like the Heritage Foundation or that receives eight-figure donations from these big patrons. | |
| We will get there. | |
| But the fact that we make a huge splash, the fact that everyone wants to talk to us and learn about us, just shows our power. | |
| Well, but maybe everyone wants to talk to you because you're flashy and you, like, tweet pictures of ovens at people and figured out how to manipulate journalists' fixation on Twitter. | |
| That just seems to be... | |
| Saying what I said, just, you're using your, like, little kind of snarky words, like tweet pictures with ovens or whatever. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But it's like, yeah, they want to see us because we're flashy. | |
| That means, that's like, we understand PR. | |
| We understand how to talk and manipulate journalists. | |
| I guess I'm doing that to you right now, and you're, like, yes. | |
| I mean, we have bold ideas that are out of the mainstream. | |
| And they're just inherently exciting. | |
| And this is going to keep going. | |
| Even if Donald Trump lost, I think this interest would have kept going. | |
| But now that he's won, I mean, it's going to be huge. | |
| We're never going back. | |
| If I were a liberal, maybe what would make me so disappointed is that my ideology is so just stale and lame that it's become a joke. | |
| If you want to talk about something, you know, like, oh, you know, I think we're just all individuals and, like, everyone's great. | |
| And we should have, like, more rights? | |
| And, like, whatever? | |
| That is the stupidest shit I've ever heard in my life. | |
| That offends no one. | |
| Effectively, you could say that to the President of the United States. | |
| You could say that to anyone else. | |
| You're not challenging anything. | |
| You could say that to a financial bank. | |
| You could say that to the federal government. | |
| You could say that to the U.S. military. | |
| And they are not going to disagree with you. | |
| And that shows how utterly fucking lame it is. | |
| Why? | |
| It is a... | |
| Because. | |
| It is old. | |
| At one point, that actually challenged the system. | |
| At this point, that liberalism and just goofball rights while individuals talk, that is the system's ideology. | |
| You're not speaking truth to power, right? | |
| That is power speaking. | |
| Do you ever feel like 10,000 neckbeards are living vicariously through you? | |
| I've never thought about it that way. | |
| Uh-huh. | |
| Uh... | |
| Uh, look. | |
| Look, because this is a radical movement, not everyone can be open. | |
| Not everyone's willing to do that, and I totally understand why. | |
| So if they want to see me as a representative, great. | |
| I don't see what's wrong with that. | |
| You'll often, like, compliment the alt-right, but just use snarky language. | |
| So I actually agree with a lot of the things you're saying, just not the tone and the snark. | |
| Well, I like to troll the trolls. | |
| It's probably not going to work on me. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| Try harder. | |
| Yeah, come on. | |
| Troll. | |
| You want more trolling? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Come on. | |
| Start trolling. | |
| I think you're a fraud. | |
| Spit it out. | |
| You think I'm a fraud? | |
| You're a fraud. | |
| How is that? | |
| Let me tell you the moment I was like, "You're definitely a fraud." It was when you... | |
| you fancy yourself as an intellectual, right? | |
| But during that press conference, you mentioned the Daily Stormer, which has absolutely no pretense of intellectualism. | |
| It's pure thuggishness from behind a computer, just swastikas and the most vile depictions of African-Americans possible. | |
| I actually didn't mention the Daily Stormer. | |
| And the crowd roared. | |
| I actually didn't mention the Daily Stormer. | |
| The crowd cheered more than one of the journalists did. | |
| Okay. | |
| And they cheered, right? | |
| They're just as happy to hear about Andrea Anglin as they were to hear about Nietzsche or whatever it is you want to name drop. | |
| Right? | |
| Like, that's the driving force, is cruelty and hate. | |
| Not some, like, highfalutin, like, philosophy. | |
| Okay, so that makes me a fraud. | |
| I don't even understand. | |
| I mean, it's just like, people can have different interests. | |
| People can also just support. | |
| You know, some guys who are in the movement. | |
| I don't see how that makes me a fraud in any way. | |
| You are exploiting hatred that has always been around and will always be around. | |
| And you've repackaged it and you've become the face of it. | |
| Okay. | |
| Look, I was doing this for a long time. | |
| I mean, relatively speaking. | |
| I'm under the age of 40. There are a lot of other people who we've been developing these ideas for a long time. | |
| The idea that we got in this to exploit people or, I mean, for what? | |
| Just for making money or something? | |
| I mean, I don't... | |
| And fame. | |
| And fame? | |
| Yeah. | |
| See, I think what you're basically describing... | |
| Something that I would agree with. | |
| Again, you're just describing it in your snarky tone. | |
| I would never say that Richard Spencer has, through rational argumentation, convinced millions of Americans to vote for Donald Trump or created the alt-right through rational... | |
| I've convinced each and every person. | |
| I am riding a wave, too. | |
| We're all riding a wave, this social change that we're experiencing. | |
| And it is collective. | |
| And we feel it. | |
| I want to get these ideas out in the world. | |
| Do I have my own personal career ambitions? | |
| Yeah, sure. | |
| I bet you do too. | |
| But it's about exploiting something. | |
| It's about seeing that there's a big change and seeing how you can take advantage of it to further your goals, to further, sure, further your career. | |
| Great. | |
| But it's always done idealistically. | |
| You can criticize me in all sorts of ways. | |
| You can totally disagree with everything I think. | |
| That's fine. | |
| But the idea that I don't do this for idealistic reasons, I just think is totally off base. | |
| And I think you know that too. | |
| No! | |
| You kind of like say vague things like you're a fraud. | |
| What? | |
| Who am I fraud defrauding? | |
| Well, I mean, I think a core concept in the alt-right sort of defines how fake it is, which is the idea of meme magic. | |
| Right. | |
| You mean things into reality. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Do you really think that it's real? | |
| Yes. | |
| Do you have Steve Bannon's ear? | |
| Can you call him on the phone? | |
| No. | |
| But in terms of meme magic, yeah, I think there is something about, I would call it like a self-fulfilling prophecy. | |
|
Meme Magic and Truth Quality
00:01:37
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|
| We memed alt-right into existence, and it's now almost a household name. | |
| We didn't meme Donald Trump into existence, but I think we have inflected... | |
| Donald Trump's trajectory, and at the very least, we've inflected how he's perceived. | |
| So that is meme magic. | |
| So it's like, you can think of it as like, oh, this is crazy Keck and Pepe the Frog and whatever, and that's fine. | |
| Or you can kind of look at what's happening and understand it on a little bit of a more rational level. | |
| But you didn't create Pepe. | |
| I didn't create Pepe, no. | |
| No. | |
| I didn't create everything, I'm sorry. | |
| No, but the people who created, like, the... | |
| The texts of the alt-right are teenagers on 4chan who've trolled themselves into believing anti-Semitic stuff. | |
| I have actually met some kids from 4chan who started reading some identitarian or some of Kevin MacDonald's work or anything critical of race relations, immigration, Jewish influence, so on. | |
| And they actually read this stuff so that they could troll people. | |
| So they read it almost like... | |
| It's like, oh, I want to get these arguments so that I can really piss people off. | |
| That was their entrance to it, but after reading it, they were actually convinced by it. | |
| That demonstrates, in a way, the truth quality to it. | |
| Doesn't it just mean they're too committed to a joke? | |
| It's not a joke at some point. | |
| That's an expression of that it is true. | |
| It started out as a joke, and then it became real. | |