I Don't Speak German, Episode 3: Unite the Right, Charlottesville 2017
In this episode, which runs a bit longer than the first two, and which goes to some very dark places, Daniel tells Jack all about the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, 2017. The episode features discussions of violence, and we try to signpost when we're getting into the painful details. But warnings definitely apply from the start. We're discussing virulent racism and bigotry. (Also, we're on iTunes and YouTube now.) Of necessity, we're only glancing at this incredibly big and complex subject, so we're going to be coming back to many of the issues, organisations, and persons mentioned. And here are some notes, sources, and references. (Oh, P.S. Fun fact... Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropped into Hbomberguy's Donkey Kong charity Twitch stream as we recorded this.) * NOTES Firstly, everyone interested in this should follow and support Emily Gorcenski and Molly (Socialist Dog Mom) on Twitter. Here's Emily's livestream of the tiki torch rally Here's Molly's podcast The Trial of James Alex Fields First Vigil - tracking fascist violence Texts between Jason Kessler (UtR organiser), Richard Spencer, other UtR participants: SPLC/Hatewatch Document at DocumentCloud Unite the Right poster Enoch and The Right Stuff crew photo with Taylor Wilson and James Alex Fields (tweet from Sandi Bachom): Jason Kessler tweets about Heather Heyer after Charlottesville Hunter Wallace (Brad Griffin) smears Heather Heyer. White Boner's conspiracy theory video Alex McNabb, the 'Nazi EMT' Daniel has curated a selection of clips relating to the subjects touched on in this episode. Beware, some of these clips feature people like Jason Kessler and Mike Enoch being vile. Here. David Futrelle's blog We Hunted the Mammoth, is a good source for lots of information about the far-right in its many forms. The blog originally tracked the 'Manosphere' (i.e. MRAs, Incels, etc) but has increasingly tracked online hate more generally as the Manosphere joined up with and fed into the so-called 'alt-right', Trumpism, etc. Here's his post on nazis mocking the murder of Heather Heyer in their memes... ...and here's his post on the Daily Caller's call for people to run over protestors. And here is the video we refer to in the episode, 'Charlottesville: The True Alt-Right' by Shaun - excellent stuff. * Timeline of Rallies 2017: Feb. 1: Berkeley. Milo rally cancelled. April 15: Berkeley. "Free Speech Event," Nathan Damigo punches "Moldylocks." April 27: Berkeley. Ann Coulter speech cancelled, "Based Stickman," Lauren Southern, et al. April 29: Pikeville, KY. TWP/NSM rally. Village Voice article. May 13: Cville. Richard Spencer torch rally. Charlottesville 1.0. -----June 2017---- UtR announced. July 8. Cville. Ku Klux Klan rally. -----July 11------ Kessler appears at town hall in Cville, publicizing UtR and distancing from Klan. August 11. Cville. UVA torch march, "Jews Will Not Replace Us," assault on Emily Gorcenski and Kristopher Goad. Emily Livestream. August 12. Cville. Unite the Right. State of Emergency declared at 11:00AM. Rally planned to start at 12:00PM. James Alex Fields Attack at 1:45PM. Oct. 28. Shelbyville. NSM/Brad Griffin/TWP/Klan "Hard Right" Rally.
No, there was one thing I was gonna do, but I... It's not actually 42 hours, it's 42 chapters, and I was gonna work out exactly how long it is, but it's not worth... I just completely forgot to do it before I sat down here, so... Right, okay.
That's a bit unfortunate, because I've been using the 42 hours thing.
Yeah, I know, and everybody's been hopping on that, and I'm like, oh, that's, you know... It's not much below that.
It's pretty close, because, you know...
most of them are about an hour, and then there are a few that are, like, there's a couple of chapters that are, like, nearly two hours, and then there are a few that are, like, 20 or 30 minutes.
So it's within 10%, I guarantee you.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, because that tickled me, as you can see.
I would actually really like for David Duke to find that and be like, no, it's only 36 and a half hours.
I'd really like for that to be the fact check.
That would be funny.
Although they do do that when they find people.
They'll take some minor difference.
Oh no, that happened in 2014.
You didn't do your facts, libtard.
Yeah, because that's all they've got.
That's all they've got.
That's all they've got, right.
Yeah, it's like fake news.
I'm not trying to genocide people because you got the year I graduated high school wrong.
Clearly.
Don't know what you're talking about.
I guess we can get started whenever.
I'm very aware of trying to make these kind of amusing and fun.
And entertaining, but also to like not to not like make people think I'm taking the subject lightly.
And yeah, the tone is hard to get, isn't it?
So listening back, editing them and I'm sort of laughing at things and I'm thinking, why are you laughing at that, Jack?
That's awful.
But it's sort of required, right?
I mean, it's just because if you didn't kind of have at least some levity to it, I mean, and these people are ridiculous.
So, I mean, there is this kind of sense of, you know, if there's not a, you know, I feel like that's sort of the thing I'm trying to capture, is this kind of combination of, like, these people are completely ridiculous and utterly terrifying.
Yeah and it's both at the same time and i'm sure we're gonna get into that in this episode quite well.
That's an important thing to remember that they are ridiculous yeah but they're also terrifying because i see a lot of liberal commentary on this stuff that kind of things are pointing out that they're silly is enough.
And it's not, because they don't look silly to each other, you know?
They don't think they're silly.
They take themselves very seriously, and so should you.
Because it doesn't matter how silly they are, they'll still kill you.
And if you're a victim, or a potential victim, they definitely don't look silly to you.
No.
And that's another thing, very aware of for this episode.
So yeah, I mean, we can get started.
In fact, you can use this as a sort of cold open if you want to.
I might just fade into this actually.
So yeah, this is episode three of I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which I get my friend and colleague Daniel Harper to tell me what he heard and learned Over more than two years from listening to the alt-right, which is really the far right, talk to each other in their podcasts and radio shows and YouTube videos and so on.
He went where most researchers don't go and actually listened to hours and hours of these people talking to each other.
So he has a unique perspective, which I'm hoping to bring out in this series.
So Daniel, hi, thanks for coming back.
I'm just glad somebody cares, that's all, you know.
I think a lot of people care.
We've got listeners now.
I mean, not a huge number, but we're building an audience.
And we are on iTunes now, so there are people who will now listen to us who would not have before.
That's right.
Yeah, we've joined the corporate behemoth.
That's great.
There we go.
Yeah.
So yeah, we're here this week to talk about the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville.
I think it was Emily Gorsenski said something about when the name of her hometown was just a place name rather than the name of an event, which was kind of brilliant and also very sad.
Oh yeah, no, that's definitely something.
And in fact, I'm very particularly, I want to Make it very clear that I'm talking about the Unite the Right rally as opposed to Charlottesville.
Because in the aftermath of the rally and following people on Twitter and doing the research, I have made friends and at least friendly online relationships with quite a few of the on-the-ground activists in Charlottesville, many of whom never thought they were going to be doing this with their time.
I do want to make this absolutely clear that I've spent a lot of time researching this and reading about it and following these people in their chats and their discords and their podcasts and YouTube channels and all that sort of stuff.
I get to turn this off when I feel like it.
I should probably do it more than I do, but I can't actually turn it off.
But on these on-the-ground rallies, and particularly in the Unite the Right rally, and particularly Charlottesville, this is a community of people who were invaded by this, and the name of their city is now a...
You know, it is a symbol.
It is a, you know, it's like Skokie.
I mean, I don't want to say it's like Auschwitz, but it is, you know, the word has a meaning that's completely outside of anything that they could have realized.
I mean, there are people who grew up in this town who.
Now we're just associated with that thing, you know, and yeah, I am never more aware than talking about this topic that I am not I'm telling somebody else's story and I am completely humbled, humbled at that.
And so I want to make that clear just at the outset that that's not what I'm trying to do, that I'm trying to do them justice.
Yeah, as you say, the name Charlottesville now has become at least in some context, The name of a horrific event rather than the name of a place.
We should keep that in mind.
We're going to be talking about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
That's a very serious subject.
Somebody died.
Several people were very badly injured.
For the crime of protesting against fascists invading their town invading their streets, you know So that this is very serious issue when we want to be respectful So if we if we do crack some jokes and laugh every now and again through it through the course of this It's not from any lack of respect indeed this this episode is Dedicated as I think this entire project is in some sense to those people and people like them To the people doing the real work on the ground.
I mean, in a lot of ways, the work that I am trying to do is in support of them and nothing else.
Because Charlottesville, the word now stands for the horror of these people invading your town, these Nazis, and then what they do.
It also stands for the incredible response to that from local people and lots of other people that came to join them in solidarity.
And we should remember that much as well, as much as the bad stuff.
Absolutely.
And in fact, that's, I think, is the I hope that will be the lasting legacy and I think we can kind of get into that as we discuss the sort of the the events here and kind of discuss this topic.
My goal here is what I want to do is to put the event in context because I think I mean it is now you know a year and a half ago.
And a year and a half feels like 25 years as far as this stuff goes.
It does, doesn't it?
It moves so fast.
But I do want to kind of put some of that summer of 2017 stuff into context, kind of where this comes from, what was kind of really going on behind the scenes, kind of discuss a little bit about what happened on the day and some of the stuff in terms of, you know, just kind of what led up to the rally being cancelled and that sort of thing.
And then, at the end of this episode, I want to save the car attack, any detailed discussion at all, for the end, and kind of signpost that so people can turn it off, because I don't think it's... even people who are willing to listen to this stuff don't necessarily need that material, you know?
I want to make sure they don't have to listen to any of the kind of violence, any of the discussion of that kind of violence, without knowing they're in for it.
Absolutely right.
So before we start talking about anything like that we'll signpost that we're going there.
Absolutely.
And then kind of I think we're planning on making this a two-parter and in the second part we'll discuss the kind of the after effects and kind of where you know what the reverberations of that are because in a lot of ways I was really kind of wanting to save this topic for a while but it kind of kept coming up as we were just discussing other things and
The reality is that the whole movement, all of the whatever we call the alt-right, because I do have issues with using that term, but it is kind of a generally accepted, you know, whatever, everything about like kind of what nationalism in the United States revolves around this event in one way or another and kind of complicated ways.
And so I think we just kind of have to dig right into it.
Yeah.
Going back a bit, let's just put a description of the event in a nutshell as simply as we possibly can before we go into the complexities of it.
Sure.
So the Unite the Right rally was a, basically it was a rally for white nationalists and other figures, hypothetically other figures on the right.
To come and protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12th, 2017.
And the event was supposed to happen.
They were supposed to have some speakers.
They were supposed to start at about noon.
There was some legal finagling ahead of the event.
The ACLU got involved and actually sort of forced the city to allow them to have the event.
Everybody showed up.
Anti-fascists and fascists and some of the militia patriot groups.
Everybody kind of showed up.
There was some fighting that happened.
A lot of kind of street violence.
A state of emergency was declared about 11 a.m.
on August 12th and then everybody skedaddled.
And then about 145 p.m.
as people were kind of leaving, we did have the car attack.
The other thing that people know about this event is the Tortlet Rally the night before, which they did not have a permit for.
They were working with cops, they had all kinds of...
Support for that.
There were about 700 open white nationalists in white polo shirts, mostly in white polo shirts and khakis with tiki torches, who surrounded the Robert E. Lee statue.
Anti-fascist organizers, including Emily Gorchensky, who is an amazing human being, and you should absolutely be following her on Twitter if you are not.
Emily Gorchinsky did a live stream that night.
I will include a link to that in the show notes so you can go and watch that.
It is absolutely heartbreaking.
About 40 mostly students and other anti-fascist organizers, anti-racist organizers, surrounded the statue and were brutally attacked by, you know, 20-something, 30-something men with tiki torches, and it's horrifying.
It's absolutely, you know, horror in the pit of your stomach to watch that video.
That was the crowd of men shouting, Jews will not replace us, and blood and soil.
They started off planting, chanting blood and soil, and I do recommend watching that live stream because you can kind of see the whole thing happen.
I mean, Emily is recording from, like, the time they're even starting to kind of get organized.
You can kind of see their piss-poor organizational tactics, their fake security.
In fact, Gorchensky even laughs at their fake security at the beginning of the video because if there's one person that they did not want to be anywhere near this rally on that night, like, watching them plan it, it's Emily Gorchensky, who they didn't like even before the rally.
And she's literally standing like three feet away from the organizers, you know, filming with a cell phone camera.
So yeah, great job guys.
You got a great OPSEC there, white nationalist shitheads.
Sorry, I'm trying to keep this light.
The gap between their image of themselves and who they actually are is staggering sometimes.
So you have the August 11th was the kind of Torchlit Rally, the Tiki Torch Rally, and then August 12th was the sort of more pre-planned thing that was supposed to be a speaking event, which was canceled about an hour before it was scheduled to start due to A lot of street fighting, and then again, the car attack happened a couple hours after that.
So that's in a nutshell.
And that is, as we say, the incident where a woman was killed by a car attack by somebody.
We'll get into this later, but that's that incident.
And afterwards, Donald Trump went on television and made his comments about how there were faults on many sides, and also very fine people on both sides, and about how it was all the fault of the alt-left and so on.
He had at least three separate statements in the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally, and none of them were at all sufficient.
I'm just trying to situate it for people who might be sort of dimly aware of some of these things, but don't realize that they're the same thing.
Where does this come from?
Who are these people?
I mean, where does it go back to?
It's the latest in a chain of events, isn't it?
And it goes back to something we've already talked about.
Heilgate, for instance.
Right.
So if you go back and listen to episode one, we talked a lot about this Howell Gate event, which was the, where Richard Spencer, recorded by the Atlantic on, before Trump's inauguration, but after the election, was, he gives a speech, which he uses words like Lügenpresse and essentially... Lügenpresse, we should jump in, is a German word meaning lying press that was used by the Nazis.
Right exactly i mean he's really kind of pushing me like i'm a dark evil genius kind of thing and towards the end you have a you know at least a handful of participants sources very on you know how many people are doing this kind of throwing what they call the roman salute which is the seagull salute.
Yeah really is sort of making it clear for everybody that trumps rhetoric about fake news is a very old fascist tactic by the way.
Exactly, exactly.
I mean, Lugan Press is lying press.
And I mean, you know, the connection between that and fake news is, I mean, that's, it's hardly worth even like, you know, examining more closely, right?
So anyway, after, after this event, and then this is kind of the, in a lot of ways, the high point of sort of the, the alt-right, this kind of white nationalist right, and within sort of a Semi mainstream political sources, you know, they really wrote all of 2016.
They were kind of getting bigger and bigger writing this sort of idea that they were, you know, kind of.
helping trump along and they were you know everybody within um this sort of coalition of sort of edgy young men online talking about kind of edgy politics uh who were loosely affiliated under the term alt-right uh you know this this idea that they they had a kind of singular goal and that goal was get trump elected and like piss off the libs uh that that's worth it's worth reminding i'm just saying it's worth reminding people that trump refused to disavow
people like this during his campaign didn't he was actually asked at one point about the fact that people in the clan were supporting him and he refused through through sort of fake ignorance to uh disavow well he was even he was even asked to disavow david duke himself and And Donald Trump knows who David Duke is.
Donald Trump disavowed David Duke during the 2000 Reform Party primaries.
I think the idea that Trump just had no idea who David Duke was is kind of ridiculous.
But he said that on camera, and that was good enough for them.
So anyway, you have this kind of… Well, David Duke's famous.
He knows who famous people are.
Right.
Exactly, exactly.
And, I mean, you know, Donald Trump was involved in politics from the late 80s, you know, right at the time that David Duke was kind of hitting his peak.
And, I mean, the idea that he didn't know who he was was ludicrous on its face.
And, you know, he just, you know, you just brazen through it and, you know, your fans are just going to go, yeah, epic troll, Donald, it's great.
I mean, it speaks so much to what they see in Donald Trump, but I'm trying to kind of get off of Trump.
That's another topic here.
The kind of the broader point I'm hoping that I'm making is that while they had Trump to kind of rally behind, while they had like this one thing they were trying to do, all of these kind of disparate, slightly ideologically disconnected groups could kind of like work for one goal.
After the Trump election, and in particular after his inauguration, You started seeing a lot of these groups kind of doing their own kind of splinter effect.
So you have a whole series of rallies during the kind of spring and summer of 2017.
There were rallies almost every weekend.
Some of them were, you know, 20 people, you know, defending a monument or something like that.
Um, but you have a whole list of these rallies.
Um, you know, there was a, uh, in Berkeley there were at least two what they call Battle of Berkeleys.
One on February 1st, um, after, uh, one of Milo Yiannopoulos' rallies got canceled.
Um, some anti-fascists showed up with bottle rockets and, um, that got turned into, you know, the new Reichstag fire, uh, according to, you know, what the media had to say about it.
There's a second one at Berkeley on April 15th.
This one was kind of branded a free speech event.
This is the one, if you again remember, this guy Nathan D'Amico, who is a founder of the Identity Europa group.
This is the one where he punched the young anti-fascist operator who turned out to have done some porn in her life.
She got the nickname Moldy Locks because if there's a young woman who you want to, who isn't on your side and who looks at all outside the Aryan ideal, you give her some name that is just about how disgusting she is and how you would never want to fuck her.
That's how this world works.
Um, so you have a series of these events.
They all kind of get, like, they're named after the city where they take place.
So there's, like, Battle of Berkeley 1, Battle of Berkeley 2.
You have events.
There's one in Pikeville on April 29th.
This is Pikeville, Kentucky.
This was basically a National Socialist Movement, like a straight-up National Socialist Movement rally with the Traditionalist Workers' Party.
That's the one with Matthew Heimbach.
Um, this is a little bit more of a hard-edged rally.
Um, this, uh, you know, as opposed to some of the other ones where, I mean, there is some kind of violence happening.
There was, I mean, there were people that even got, like, knifed, um, like, knife injuries, went to hospital for that, um, at, uh, I think the first Berkeley event.
Um, but you have multiple of these, of these events kind of going up, uh, through the thing.
The first one in Charlottesville was on May 13th, and this was a Torch Rally, where Richard Spencer had, I think it was only about 20 or 30 people, but this was the first time you see the Tiki Torch Rally, and this was in Charlottesville.
And there are three Charlottesville events.
This is the one they call Charlottesville 1.0.
The big one, Unite the Right, is 2.0, and then there's one later on, which is 3.0, which is a Flash Rally.
Anyway, so the The idea here, again, and you have a couple in New Orleans, but kind of the bigger picture is that starting after 2015, after Dylann Roof shot nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, there was a real pushback to sort of take a lot of these Confederate monuments down because it, you know, it didn't look good to have these Confederate monuments up with after this kind of terrible event where Dylann Roof was very closely associated with the
Confederate flag and this kind of rising tide of what nationalism and so you had cities that said We should really think about like taking these down or covering them or doing kind of other things giving them to sort of private groups There were lots of debates about that and the right started to organize around this idea of We all of us on this even the sort of like mainstream Right really don't want to see these monuments taken down that this is like an attack on our history, etc, etc Um, and so you start seeing more and more of this stuff.
They start rallying around this idea, and they get the idea that this could be kind of the new thing they can all rally behind.
That they can all come together and have this unite, you know, a reuniting of the right after the Trump election.
So instead of like kind of focusing all our energy, all their energy I should say, on The election of a political candidate, we can kind of rally around an idea.
And so simultaneously, this rally – so this guy Jason Kessler, who was originally associated with the Occupy movement back in 2008, 2009.
He used to be kind of more of a lefty liberal type and had kind of moved right over the years.
He was one of the Proud Boys, although he got kicked out of that.
He was actually writing for the Daily Caller as of, you know, mid-2017.
The Daily Caller is a, you know, kind of an internet right-wing blog site.
I mean, it is run by, or it's kind of owned by Tucker Carlson.
It's kind of his brand, although I'm not sure what, you know, how closely he's kind of associated with it day-to-day.
But, so Jason Kessler published a couple of pieces on the Daily Caller.
he was kind of becoming a bigger name within that movement.
He really only published a few pieces.
It's not like he's a very kind of marginal figure until he starts kind of announcing this rally.
And because there was this whole series of rallies over the summer, this one got announced early enough and they planned it far enough in advance to sort of make, okay, this is gonna be the big one, right? - And sorry, just to interject one thing.
Part of why it was able to gain that sort of traction in the wider movement, I understand, is because they were able to persuade both Richard Spencer and David Duke to turn up, our two previous subjects.
Right, yeah.
So Spencer agreed to show up.
So there are some, and again, there are some really amusing text messages because after the kind of like the shit show that this thing became, there was a ton of Yeah, there are still legal activities.
There's a civil suit still ongoing, still going on.
We don't know kind of where a lot of this stuff is going to end up.
A bunch of people are getting sued for, you know, kind of civil rights violations and that sort of thing.
But there have been a bunch of discovery motions and a bunch of, you know, kind of legal documents that are produced.
And there are some text messages, correspondence that has been kind of made public where Kessel was really toadying to Spencer.
He really wanted Spencer to show up to the event.
At one point he calls him my liege, which, you know, nicely done.
And I did give Jack this link, so please go and check this out.
It's some really amusing reading if you just want to know what these guys have to say about each other behind the back.
As always, a lot of what we talk about is going to end up in the show notes, in references in the show notes.
In mid-June 2017, I don't have the exact date in front of me, Kessler kind of announces Unite the Right.
They start putting flyers out, there's this kind of famous flyer that looks like a Nazi rally.
July 8th, there is another rally in Charlottesville, and this is an actual, like, straight-up Klan rally.
You really don't want to look like the Klan if you're trying to be your kind of suit-and-tie white nationalism.
No, we're just, you know, white identitarians, etc., etc.
You don't want to be associated with the Klan.
Not because you disagree with the Klan, but because, you know, they wear hoods, and they're known for, like, hanging people, and, you know, no, we're not doing that.
We're just, uh, We're just trying to, you know, fight against affirmative action and try to, you know, hold our white identity movement.
And so, in fact, on July 11... The branding is off, isn't it?
No, and it is, and it is very much about branding, and this kind of feeds into a big topic we'll kind of get into, you know, particularly after the event happens, and that is the optics debate.
This is this huge, huge thing which is still reverberating through the movement, and in fact, it's not new to this, and this is...
The idea that like if, if we as white nationalists, and I'm kind of, I'm speaking through kind of their eyes and trying to kind of, you know, if you think of it through their eyes, through the way that they want to show themselves, you know, the idea is, you know, we can have
Our rallies and we want to get people to come to our cause we want people to agree with us and they will agree with us more if They like what we look like and the fundamental problem would say the Ku Klux Klan is not that people like disagreed with the Klan as much as You know people didn't like the robes or didn't like the the sort of being associated with this thing that is kind of dirty and kind of low-class and And that it and so if we can just find the right branding they talk constantly about their branding
And about like how, you know, what clothes do we wear?
I think I mentioned this in one of the previous episodes, but the white polo shirts and khakis was meant to be, you know, if you're a sort of, you know, working, you know, kind of middle class working class guy working in an office.
Working in the tech industry or whatever, you basically wear a polo shirt and khakis to work every day.
And so it's meant to be sort of like the kind of standard work uniform and it's meant to be like accessible to those kinds of people who work in kind of office jobs, cubicle jobs, whatever.
And then, of course, that puts off people who do work kind of more working class, you know, people who work is like in construction or in the trades or in, you know, plumbers who see, you know, no, the real working classes, you know, We're working, you know, we're wearing, you know, the Dickie shirts and the overalls and that sort of thing.
And that's more kind of where, again, this guy, Matt Heimbach and the Traditionalist Workers Party, they wanted to kind of wear more of that kind of gear.
I'm sure we'll talk more about him.
Some of these some of these groups in you know in more detail in later episodes no no absolutely we're kind of we're kind of walking past a lot of like other topics that we can cover and i'm definitely interested in.
What people want to know more about so please give us like commentary and like dm me or tweet at me or whatever i'm at daniel harper that's the best way to get a hold of me.
I just want to make sure listeners don't, you know, think, you know, you say the name of an organization, Traditionalist Workers' Party, and people think, what?
Who?
Where?
And, you know, don't panic.
We're going to come back to this.
Just bear with us.
The goal here is to kind of get this big topic out of the way and then kind of come back.
So, no, the Traditionalist Workers' Party is, it has a kind of complex history, but they end up kind of being kind of the shock troops on the day of Unite the Right, actually.
Um, because these are kind of more, um, you know, blue-collar, quote-unquote, working class.
I know it's a complicated, I hate using that term here, but, um, they, this is kind of how they describe themselves is, you know, we're, we're the more working class, kind of closer to the earth, we work with our hands kind of things.
Matthew Heinebach never had a real job in his life.
He didn't come from wealth.
He went to school.
He founded a political organization.
Apparently he did have to work in an Amazon warehouse, off and on, in order to make ends meet.
I'm not saying he... He definitely didn't live in the kind of comfort that some of these other figures like Richard Spencer did.
But, you know, the idea that, you know, he's this, he's like a welder, you know, kind of going on and, you know, who's trying to work for, you know, this kind of white identity and work for like working class white people in Kentucky or West Virginia.
It's just, it's just, it's a complete, you know, it's kind of a non-starter in a lot of ways.
So, this kind of leads us up to the date.
So, leading up to Unite the Right.
So, again, the whole idea is to kind of get everybody together on one page.
Kessler reached out to basically everybody who was anybody in sort of the online right wing in this kind of edgy, you know, space.
Alt-right figures, alt-right figures.
he reached out to Gavin McInnes, who had a show on Rebel Media at that point, who was one of the co-founders of Vice back in the day.
Yeah, at this point, he had definitely founded the Proud Boys, and the Proud Boys are basically a street fighting gang.
Gavin McInnes is a hugely complicated figure, but we will come back to Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys.
That is a huge, complicated, convoluted topic, but he definitely identifies as much more alt-light as opposed to alt-right.
And so he was kind of reaching out to me, Many many of these figures and the plan was to kind of get everybody together to make a speech about you know to kind of everybody gets to have a speech about like protecting the monuments and about you know sort of Western values and Western culture etc etc and the idea was to kind of make that a thing and that's why they called it Unite the Right.
Well once these kind of figures like Gavin McInnes realized there were going to be kind of like people openly like walking around in Klan hoods and Nazi uniforms His desire to be seen next to those people and to maintain his slightly more cushy media environment.
He's risking his job by being seen as a Nazi.
Whether he is a Nazi or not is a more complicated question that we will get into.
But you don't want to be seen next to the people in the swastika armbands.
You don't want to be seen with that because then everybody thinks you're a Nazi.
So basically everybody who was a sort of alt-right figure, everybody except for the open white nationalists, Did not show up, they declined or kind of withdrew before the day.
And so it ends up being an openly white nationalist rally.
That's just what it was.
Everybody who was there was somewhere on this kind of race realist, openly white nationalist alt-right.
So you, sorry not to interrupt, but you have an interesting phenomena there, don't you?
An attempt to unite the right, an explicit attempt to unite the right, actually fails to do that because loads of the people who might be very sympathetic Indeed are very sympathetic to extreme right-wing, hard right, white nationalist, white supremacist ideas, etc.
Self-select themselves out of the meeting because they don't want to be seen marching alongside people who are flying Sonnenrads, you know, Nazi runes and things like that.
Exactly.
Okay, that's interesting.
Yeah, and again, the original question was, so who are these people?
And the answer is, these are white nationalists, the people who were there in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11th and August 12th, 2017.
They are the hardcore devoted white nationalists.
This is who they are.
If you were marching that day in Charlottesville in favor of those statues, you were doing it explicitly as part of this coalition and not as part of the broader, you know, kind of alt-light kind of figure.
And I think that that's important to note, is that, in fact, even Gavin McInnes even told the Proud Boys, he said, you know, if you're a Proud Boy and you show up to this thing, you are going to be kicked out of the Proud Boys.
Now, whether that happened or not, I don't know of any stories of that happening.
There are kind of tales of people who, you know, basically showed up, you know, Proud Boys who showed up, but they did so not in the kind of the gear that would announce them as such, you know, but nobody marched under the Proud Boy banner.
But I'm about 99% certain that there were at least a few proud boys in that group who, you know, just decided to kind of go slightly more incognito for that.
In their unofficial capacity.
In unofficial capacity, right.
I mean, this is something that you actually see kind of going back.
I mean, you know, one of the really interesting things is that while These groups have these kind of very well-defined identities and kind of well-defined ideologies in terms of, you know, kind of going back to like, say, the 80s or the 70s and the 80s, you know, like that, you know, the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan are not necessarily kind of preaching the same doctrine, and yet people would kind of like go from one to the other.
And attend one meeting on Wednesday and one meeting on Friday and that sort of thing.
And so the sort of the basic group of people who are kind of getting involved in this kind of politics are much less doctrinaire about exactly which people they're going to follow and which doctrines they believe in than they are in sort of opposing their kind of united enemies.
And that's something that, you know, they were definitely trying to kind of reach out to in this kind of unite the right idea and, you know, trying to say, let's focus on sort of a common goal.
The problem is that if you ask anybody who was there at the rally at that time, any of the kind of big personalities, and you say, OK, so what are you trying to do here?
They have these kind of two competing things.
And, you know, they have this idea.
Oh, no, we're just here to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue.
Out of one side of their mouth and then on the other side and, oh, and we're also trying to, you know, unite these kind of disparate groups and kind of all of us kind of work together.
And the fact that it was called Unite the Right instead of, you know, something related directly to the Lee statue, it definitely sort of affects their branding and sort of the way that people come in.
And I think it affected just sort of the way that even people in the movement kind of saw what this thing was supposed to be.
Um, I mean, it's definitely sort of confused.
Um, you know, there is a kind of, uh, and I hate to give these guys advice for, like, how to brand their shit, but, you know, there are, I mean, if you think about, say, like, the Women's March, um, the day after Trump's inauguration, and, uh.
You know, what are we here for?
And it's basically like, oh, for the rights of women, you know, it's just kind of vaguely defined, like we're all going to come together and kind of protest this one thing.
But like, it's not like sort of this like concrete political goal that we can then work towards in the future, except for, you know, we're all just kind of like showing kind of a show of force.
And one of the problems that the that this kind of white nationalist movement that the alt-right has in terms of Really getting their ideas to spread to any degree is that they a they can't agree on anything within the movement and they're also like always trying to reach for this kind of highly complicated You know, kind of mean culture, this highly complicated, you know, sort of like intellectual history, although it's mostly pseudo history and pseudo science.
But, you know, they're reaching for these kind of very complicated ideas that it's not necessarily that they don't even that they don't well, they wouldn't resonate with a broader public, but.
You know, they're not able to kind of get that across to a sort of, like, ordinary kind of working population that isn't paying that close attention to this.
I mean, I, you know, I'm very aware here that I've spent a lot of time, like, kind of studying these guys.
And, like, electorally, this is a complete fringe movement.
Like, they're important because they're able to sort of push ideas into the mainstream and sort of, like, get things to, like, push slightly in their direction, you know, day by day.
They're dangerous for for that reason at least on a political level But you know the the total number of people who are kind of openly white nationalists in the United States And the best estimates I've seen have been in the like 300,000 range And that's I mean that's really I mean it's for across in a country of 300 million people That's that's 1 10th of 1% of the population.
This is a tiny group But they can make themselves seem much much bigger based on you know Being able to go online, and that's why, again, talking about Unite the Right, they're this hugely powerful thing.
I mean, if you are on the internet, if you are on Twitter in, you know, mid-2017, and on Facebook, and talking about politics, you have alt-right memes, like, shoved at you constantly, because they are very, very, very aggressive about doing that online.
Once they show up in public, they turn into a complete shitshow, because they don't know how to do this shit.
But that's kind of the story of how this thing came to be.
The danger always is that, you know, movements like that, even tiny ones, they don't just exist in isolation.
They're like the most extreme edge of a continuum of ideas, and they can reach further back, as it were, into that continuum towards people who aren't In their group, but who share a lot of their ideas.
Right.
And their whole, I mean, and again, they have been very, very successful at doing that.
They are pushing memes into the mainstream in really interesting, complicated ways.
I mean, it is, it's, you know, it's again, terrifying, but fascinating to see exactly what kinds of stuff they're able to kind of like push into the mouths of, you know, elected officials and media officials.
I mean, the fact that, you know, Tucker Carlson is basically spreading like coded white nationalist propaganda and not even that coded.
But I mean, he'll basically, you know, put out the thing of like, why are these, you know, foreigners coming in and shitting all over our parks?
I mean, I'm not saying this is a skin color thing, but like, isn't there just something wrong with this culture?
Do we really want these people here?
And I mean, just because he says, you know, oh, I'm not making this a racial thing, but...
It's very clearly a racial thing, and all the white nationalists love this guy for being able to do that to an audience of millions of people.
And yet, the reason that Tucker Carlson is pushing that, I mean, whatever he believes in his heart of hearts, the reason he is able to do that is because there is this prominent Further to the right thing that exists that he can say.
Oh, no.
No, I'm not a racist They're the racists, you know, and so in a lot of ways the alt-right, you know This one a white nationalist right exists to to be that fringe that other people can point to again their whole goal Richard Spencer's entire goal from the beginning is I want to push the Everton window in my direction That's sort of the short and medium term goal and he has been enormous successful doing that Not alone through through the other all these other people as well, but you know, sorry
Yeah, that's where the success lies, because they have been successful in that respect, pushing the so-called Overton window, on that interesting sort of double front that you just identified, where on the one hand their ideas are being adopted by people in the mainstream or, you know, quote-unquote respectable right, in a diluted, encoded form, and I'd love to have a discussion about that in an episode.
I mean, you know, Tucker Carlson...
That's a hugely hugely important car i mean i just did for my money carlson is one of the most dangerous people currently operating in politics but you know maybe we'll do that another time but on this we will definitely come back yeah yeah where they sort of.
Influencing these people and at the same time providing them with an alibi where they can adopt.
As i say diluted and encoded versions of their ideas while at the same time pointing to them and saying well i'm not gonna i'm not one of those guys.
That's where it's had an effect in the direction of what these people wanted, or at least some of them, the more quote-unquote sophisticated amongst them.
Whereas in terms of direct effects, it was pretty much a disaster for them, wasn't it?
At least in the immediate term.
Well, and the reality is, and this is where I kind of land on this in a lot of ways, is that
What we see with a lot of these movements are, you know, kind of when this kind of pops up is you see a kind of rising kind of openly racist, openly white nationalist, white separatist, white supremacist movement that gains some kind of, you know, traction or some kind of power, some kind of ability to kind of spread their message up until the moment when some bit of like terrible violence happens and then
Anybody with any degree of respectability kind of drops them like a hot potato and then they end up going back into hiding in their little scurrious corners for another 10 years or so.
The Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh kind of acts as that.
Up until, you know, from basically the early 80s into the mid 90s, you see this kind of rising tide of this kind of open white nationalism, open racism, kind of tied into this militia movement and this kind of anti-government movement in some complicated ways.
After Timothy McVeigh, after the Oklahoma City bombing, You really start to see people keep their distance and then you only have like kind of a handful of people kind of like Only from you know with the 10-foot poles distance Really able to kind of interact with these groups and they and they lose that kind of mainstream Respectability until they can kind of come back and not a lot of ways the unite the right rally kind of ends up being that I I don't know had it not been for the for the car terror attack and
Would it have been quite as strong because there were other events that sort of had violence and that really never made the The news in the same way that really never kind of had that like impact on people I think the scale of this and particularly I think that August 11th event was That that not that torch lit Rally that torch lit.
I mean The Tiki Torch Rally.
I think that really kind of got people's attention in the way that the other ones didn't.
You also had more media there.
One of the things that happened was because they announced it so far in advance and because the buzz around it was so large, you had major media figures who kind of showed up and covered it.
This is on CNN live, you know, you saw like people fighting in the streets and just the fact that you suddenly had, you know, kind of mainstream cameras there recording this, then it wasn't something that was just online.
That was something that was kind of on people's television screens in a way that it wasn't.
These are the rallies where it was maybe a 30 second local story or a five minute local story.
This became national news just because there were just enough cameras covering it.
And, you know, it was the largest kind of openly white nationalist rally in decades.
But it's certainly nothing compared to say, you know, in New York City in I think 1922, you know, 40,000 people marched.
And this is, you know, a few thousand at most.
There were something like 700 people, 700 white nationalists at the Torchlit Rally on the 11th, and most would say like a couple of thousand.
It's really difficult to get a reliable number because there's so many different groups and so many different, you know, sort of competing things and who counts and who doesn't.
But, you know, most would say a couple of thousand, two, three thousand maybe is probably a good estimate.
I think, yeah.
One of the things that I was thinking about when you were speaking before about this sort of chain of events that led up to Charlottesville was the fact that this was happening.
Stuff like this was happening before Charlottesville.
Oh yeah.
And it was flying under the radar of the mainstream.
I mean, people just weren't reporting it.
And that's got to be part of how this was allowed to happen.
It was a snowball that was rolling and nobody was watching.
Wasn't it?
Right.
I mean, and then, you know, it wasn't nobody, nobody in kind of a position of, you know, with any kind of like media power was really covering it.
And I mean, there were a lot of questions about like how and I mean, this is something that I run into is like, how do you talk about this stuff without kind of giving it oxygen?
How do you describe what's happening here?
You know, and there were a ton of pieces, you know, but they're nothing really gained traction until Charlottesville.
And it's, I think that the, just the kind of complete clusterfuck of it was kind of part of what made it happen.
I think that just the sheer size of it, like it just, and I mean, you know, in some ways the, you know, the optics at that Torch Lit Rally, at the Tiki Torch Rally were effective in that, you know, if you are kind of on their side, they look really impressive and intimidating and badass and, you know, like they look really impressive and intimidating and badass and, you know, like I want to be a part And if you're a victim or a potential victim of them, they look absolutely fucking terrifying.
And so it's, you know, really easy to sell To sell magazines.
It's really easy to kind of make these glossy pictures into something that people want to watch.
And I mean, there's something, you know, it's really difficult to combat that when, you know, you want to show this as it is without, you know, kind of glorifying it.
And I think, you know, the question of sort of the news media's complicity and kind of allowing this to happen.
And by this, I mean, you know, not just this rally, but the whole movement is very much an open question.
And, you know, I am very, I am very cognizant of how hard it is on a deadline to produce really complex, nuanced takes on some of this.
You've got four hours to write a story, and you've interviewed people, and how do you cover this, and what are the ethics of it?
That's a really complicated, interesting question, and there's been some really good journalism about this stuff, and there's been some really awful journalism about this stuff, and I don't think anybody's really found the right answer to it yet.
There's a really complicated kind of series of events that leads to this being kind of the big thing.
If you go and do a Google Trends for the term alt-right, so you want to see kind of how people are Googling it, what people are searching for.
You get a spike.
Hillary Clinton gives a speech in late 2016 where she uses the term.
That's a spike.
Right after Trump's election, right at Howgate, you get a big spike.
That's the big one.
And a couple of little ones and then you get a big one, not quite as big as Howgate, but still pretty big, on August 12th at Charlottesville.
And then after that, it's really just a long tail.
It's statistical noise compared to that.
Partly what's going to have attracted so much attention, it's sort of a recursive process isn't it, is what's called the counter-protests, the presence of anti-fascist protesters.
Right.
And certainly, you know, this gets played kind of both ways, right?
Where within the sort of the right-leaning or even mainstream press, I mean, there are a lot of, like, scare pieces about, like, oh, who are these masked anti-fascists who are, you know, like, punching Nazis?
And the whole debate about, like, what are the, you know, oh, there are people, like, committing violence at these rallies and that sort of thing.
You know, the idea that, you know, there is no, that there's in any sense an equivalence between a, you know, Someone, you know, promoting a, you know, even peaceful ethnic cleansing, quote unquote.
I mean, these are these are people promoting genocide.
And to say that, you know, there's a moral equivalence between that or that that has to be allowed.
I mean, legally, yes.
Under the First Amendment, I'm not going to disagree with that.
If you want to be a Hardcore reason civil libertarian.
I completely support that position, but on a moral stance, you know when you see fucking Nazis Standing and spreading this message of you know where they're gaining real political power You know I think there is an ethical duty to go punch that person in the nose and to say that like the punch in the nose is worse than like preaching this like absolute vile
Form of political action is you know you it's it's just to miss the entire point of the thing You know if you listen to these guys podcasts like you know this this figure Mikey knock he was at the rally David Duke was riding in a van with Mikey knock he spoke right alongside Mikey Mike is probably the most important person in this movement that most people don't know his name he is the kind of founder of a blog and a radio network called the right stuff and
And produces a show called The Daily Shoah, although they don't call it that anymore, they just call it TBS, pronounced T-B-S, so, you know, oh, it's not the same show, it's a different show, it's fine, but whatever, they're hiding in plain sight, they're not really hiding very well.
We should say, for people who don't know, Shoah is, I believe, the Hebrew word for Holocaust.
Shoah is a word for the Holocaust, yes.
And of course, we will do probably several episodes on this group.
This is a hugely important group.
Um, but I, I have, you know, I went through and I kind of found, uh, if you listen to what they were saying before the event, and this is one of the guys, this is, uh, actually when Richard Spencer, when Kessler was trying to get, uh, Kessler, the organizer of the rally, he was trying to get Richard Spencer to, uh, to come in, and he says, you know, I got Enoch and Duke, you know, he said, Mike Enoch and David Duke are coming, and, um, it was on that, it was one or the other, it's in a, uh, it's in a, like, a text message, so it's unclear,
You know, he says Enoch first, then Duke, and then Spencer responds, so we don't know, you know, which one he actually was saying yes to, but, uh, you know, Enoch was at a whole bunch of these events that summer.
He is all over the place.
If you go and look at the footage from the summer, uh, from the summer of 2017 and all these rallies, um, he wasn't at all of them, but he was in the background of a whole lot of them.
I often, I often He claims to have been.
with myself looking at these footage and just going like find Mike Enoch.
It's one of those things.
And he's always kind of in the background.
He is apparently, you know I haven't seen him in any of the footage, but apparently he was even there at Heilgate on that day in that hotel room.
He claims to have been.
I did not see him in any of the footage, but there's not that much footage from that event.
He was a big pal of Richard Spencer during this whole period.
Anyway, He also has a huge listenership as well.
Oh yeah, he has what is probably the single largest listenership kind of audience in the entire movement, much bigger than Richard Spencer, kind of equal or nearly the size of say Andrew Anglin at the Daily Stormer, and the Daily Stormer is a You're only racist.
Far-right, basically troll news agency where they put out absolutely sickening material.
It's difficult to get real numbers as to what these guys, what the kind of reach is, but they get on the order of tens of thousands of listens per episode.
Possibly as many as 100,000.
That's probably an overestimate, but tens of thousands is not an unreasonable estimate.
You know, 20, 30,000, 40,000, something, somewhere in there per episode.
So, if Richard Spencer hears that Enoch's going to be coming, he's going to know that Enoch's going to be promoting this event on his much-heard show.
On his much-heard show.
And, I mean, again, they're friends.
Spencer appeared on the Daily Show many times.
Basically, everybody who was anybody kind of appeared on that show at least once.
I have a more or less complete archive of it stored.
I could give you a list.
Don't worry, we will cover this guy.
We'll get into this.
We'll get into this.
So I have audio in.
Enoch is kind of pushing this, and I use this as an example because you hear this all over the place.
Everybody was talking about this rally in advance of it.
Enoch was kind of pushing this.
He says over and over and over again.
We are not here to be violent.
We are not here to push a violent message.
We are not trying to be these people.
We are just coming to have a peaceful rally.
We want to have a speech.
We want to get our message out and then we want to go home and we are and it will always paint the anti-fascist organizer.
The anti-fascists are the ones coming to attack us.
They're the ones giving violence to us and we are just trying to Have, you know, have our speech.
We're just trying to speak.
Now, the reality of this is you bring, you know, A, it's completely, when you look at, I mean, for instance, the torchlight march, you look at the tiki torch march, you know, 700 Nazis with tiki torches attacking, you know, 20 or 30 or 40, I forget the exact number, essentially students, you know.
I have met people personally on the internet who took a tiki torch to the face that night, and it was completely unprovoked.
The idea that there's not this kind of inherent violence at the core of this is complete nonsense, even on the base physical level of this kind of confrontation.
That said, and you see this through a bunch of stuff, particularly the groups out of Portland, and this group called Patriot Prayer, who do not mark themselves as overtly kind of white nationalists, who kind of market themselves as, we are free speech groups, we are trying to You know, fight the left's intolerance, et cetera, et cetera.
And so what they say is we're just coming out here.
We're just like making our making putting ourselves in meat space.
We're putting ourselves in the real world.
We are having our rally and we just want to kind of come and be here and say our thing.
But the message they're spreading is this like argument for the exclusion and the marginalization of the most marginalized people in society in favor of this kind of like supremacist, you know, vision.
They also come armed, and they will say, oh no, this is all defensive.
You see some of these shields, this is not like a defensive shield.
These are one step below like SWAT gear in a lot of cases.
I mean, these guys come, particularly the TWP, the Traditionalist Workers Party, they're coming in helmets and visors and all kinds of stuff.
And the anti-fascists, and anti-fascists have...
Long arguments about, you know, kind of where the lines of acceptable, you know, resistance lie and it's a highly contingent process.
People do step over that line.
I'm not going to pretend that that doesn't happen.
I'm not going to pretend that there aren't, you know, mistakes made and that there aren't bad people kind of doing stuff and there aren't people kind of coming to who like the violence.
I'm not going to pretend that that's true.
The point of anti-fascist action at this level is to disrupt, and so they will do things.
They will throw urine at people.
They will throw water bottles.
They will throw, you know, they'll make noise.
A lot of it is just, you know, kind of drowning out the speakers with, you know, with a bullhorn or with drums or with, you know, kazoos or whatever.
The point is to make it harder for white nationalists to organize.
So white nationalists come in with this message.
They come in with this overtly Overtly aggressive, aggressive posture.
And they see antifascists, any motion that an antifascist makes for any kind of purpose, even if it is to disrupt, you know, to throw urine, to, to, Et cetera, et cetera.
Any of these other techniques get seen as an excuse to retaliate.
And that retaliation is almost universally with the goal of some version of basically complete destruction or damage.
And so basically, if I'm a white nationalist, I show up, I get in your face, I see you do anything at all in my direction, and then it gives me the excuse to beat the fucking shit out of you.
And that's what we see over and over again at these rallies.
And then they say, no, no, we were the ones acted upon.
We did not cause the violence.
It was the anti-fascists.
Those are the ones that caused the violence.
But again, this is the exact same rhetoric you saw during, say, the 60s, during the Freedom Riders.
We, the Klan, did not cause this.
They came in and disrupted our thing.
They came in, you know, they were outside agitators.
They all use that kind of same language.
But this idea, you know, kind of feeds into the kind of libertarianism, the kind of non-aggression principle, that aggression gets defined in this very particular way that is designed to In which, you know, taxation and murder are the same thing, you know?
In libertarianism, the non-aggression principle is just a great big excuse.
Anything you don't like, you label aggression.
That's essentially it.
Exactly, exactly.
And it becomes very clear because if you look at...
Audio from the way they're talking beforehand.
No, no, we are here to just to make speeches.
We are not here to and then you look at kind of the what they were saying afterwards and they're, you know, you listen to the tone of voice.
You listen to what they're saying.
Yeah we're proud of what they've done they are this is it this is anything you don't like is is aggression where is marching in public laughing is ss robocop screaming about jews and advocating genocide that's not aggression apparently.
No it's not and and you know they will they will brag about like how many you know there's.
One guy who's like, you know, I took out I took out like seven of them before, you know, they kind of hit me in the back of my head and I had to stop, you know, they they brag about this.
And again, after the after the rally, if you listen to these podcasts, they brought in a ton of people who would kind of show up and, you know, we're just kind of kids on the street.
And they just they were invigorated by getting to go and like beat up their enemies and by scaring people.
This was absolutely pervasive at all of these rallies.
They just they they use this as a As a rallying cry they use this as a way of kind of building the movement of building solidarity together essentially and They absolutely fantasize about doing direct and concrete violence against again marginalized people, you know African Americans people that they see as weak or degenerate or Or stupid, or whatever.
People that they see as lesser, and people that oppose them.
And in particular, you know, people who are openly opposing them.
Anti-fascist journalists.
You know, writers.
People who podcast about them.
They fantasize about, like, smashing their faces in.
And you can hear it.
You can hear it.
I've listened to them talk and talk and talk about this.
And they love it.
It's – and I'm not going to say you never hear that from the other side, but certainly I've never kind of listened to an anti-fascist podcast or kind of read – kind of seen people bragging on Twitter about how they – You know, how much they fantasize about, like, breaking a Nazi's nose in, unless that Nazi is, like, actively working against them, you know?
There's a difference in tone here, and there's a difference in, you know, what we're trying to do here, and again, I am not here to apologize for those incidents where people do things they're not supposed to do, who are on quote-unquote my side of this argument, but the scale of it, the difference in scale is absolutely staggering.
Yeah, yeah.
There's assholes on the left, there's poor judgment on the left, there's boasting and rhetoric on the left, etc, etc.
The content, even if the form is only slightly resembling, but even when the form resembles, the content is still completely different.
Because we're talking about fucking Nazis here!
Exactly.
I mean, one of the big cases, and I think we're leading into some of the discussion of, Direct violence.
I'm not going to get into the car attack just yet, but I think we are kind of moving a little bit more in that direction.
So just kind of be aware of that if you're listening.
On that subject, by the way, what I just said, I want to point people towards a very, I mean, I think you'd agree with me.
A very, very good YouTube video about this by Sean of Sean and Jen.
Oh, yes.
It's called, I think it's called the true alt-right or the real alt-right.
Again, I will... The true face of the alt-right or something like that.
This is an excellent, and it's got a ton of great footage in it.
Some of which Sean apparently found before it was deleted.
Because I've been looking for some of his source video material and I can't, I haven't been able to locate all of it.
Again, I will put a link in the show.
But yeah, no, definitely check that video out.
It is a really, really good video.
Because you will be able to see who these people are.
You will be able to see them making Nazi salutes, shouting Sieg Heil, flying Nazi flags, Nazi runes, you know, making disgusting jokes about ovens and stuff like that.
It's there for you to go and see and hear.
And, you know, and I really try not to say, you know, I want you to trust me when I tell you that this is real, and I would really love to be able to encourage everyone to go listen for themselves.
Most people just can't, and most people won't.
And I do not blame anyone for that.
I do this so you don't have to.
But I do think having a little bit of exposure and seeing it for what it really is, as opposed to, you know, kind of the vision that they try to sell of it, I think that that's a lot of what I'm trying to do here.
So, yes, definitely go check out that video.
It is an excellent video about this rally and about who these people actually are.
So one thing, speaking of the Sean video, looking at the, because it's, he uses loads of material from live streams that they made on the day.
Watching them, what strikes me, I mean, we've talked about this before, these people are, they're incredibly sinister and terrifying, obviously, but they're also just ridiculous.
And one of the things that's ridiculous, I mean, that doesn't stop them being deadly, the fact that they're ridiculous, but they are ridiculous.
And one of the things that's ridiculous about them is that they're so larpy, They're so poser-ish.
You see Richard Spencer walking around surrounded by bodyguards like he's a Bond villain or something, and people wearing Wehrmacht helmets and shit.
It's just bizarre.
Right, and they'll say all of this is because of the deadly threat faced by anti-fascists.
I know I said we weren't going to talk about Cantwell at all, but Uh, you know, he has, you know, he's just a clear example of, you know, he's got this like fantasy of, you know, I go armed everywhere I go because I've got enemies who are out to kill me, et cetera, et cetera.
And, uh, but he's, he's never served in combat.
I mean, he said in an interview, you know, every bit of experience I have with the gun is at a range.
You know, there is this fantasy kind of LARPing element to this, and I mean, they'll even make fun of each other for it.
I mean, they'll say, you know, stop LARPing.
I mean, I think in some of the audio I gave you, there's a, you know, Enoch is saying, you know, all this kind of looked a little LARPy to me on the day, and then I saw how terrible the anti-fascists were, and like, oh no, this is absolutely real, because, like, we're in real danger here.
They act like they're going into a combat zone and you know again, I wasn't there on the day I mean some of that stuff looked really nasty.
I would not want to you know Be punched in the face by these people, you know, and then I get like you can do serious head injury damages with With the club and I'm not trying to diminish that in particular.
I have enormous respect for the anti-fascist organizers who Confront this stuff directly on a physical basis, which I I don't do on the ground activism like that.
But You know, you're not exactly, you know in the jungles of Vietnam here, you know, and There's a very different kind of thing going on.
You're walking through a park and people are throwing water bottles at you, and you're acting like you're in violent, angry confrontations at all times.
Honestly, the point of the anti-fascist activity is to make them feel scared, to make them go away.
I mean, and you know, in that sense, it's enormously effective.
But I mean, I think that this sort of escalation is sort of the idea that we're going to carry shields.
I mean, you know, we're going to have shields, but they're going to be wooden shields that we kind of make at home.
There's like an arts and crafts kind of element to this.
It's, I mean, it's this weird, it's this weird thing that then it affects their optics, right?
I mean, like, you know, Some of them like to pretend that what we're doing and what they're doing is a, you know, like a like a white civil rights movement, you know, and they're trying to sort of model after, you know, the 60s stuff that was done by, you know, Martin Luther King, etc.
You know, the reason, you know, if you want to make yourself look like a victim, you know, I mean, in the 60s, they were victims.
But if you're, if you're reaching for that kind of thing, you've got to actually like take a punch, you know, like nonviolent resistance was like the point of what they were doing at that point.
And I think we would look very differently on Martin Luther King if he had been carrying around a wooden shield in case somebody hit him with a club.
And an SS helmet.
Right, right.
And they don't seem to get that.
They're obsessed with this kind of optics thing, but they don't get this idea.
They seem to have this sort of division right the way down their thinking all the way through, like the Tiki Torch Rally, for instance.
On the one hand, they're wearing polo shirts or whatever because they think that looks nice and friendly and cuddly and harmless and relatable.
On the one hand, they're doing that.
On the other hand, they're marching in a torch lit rally.
So it's like, again, they want to present themselves as the peaceful people, you know, just trying to pursue a white civil rights movement and they're being attacked.
And on the other hand, they also want to come dressed as the SS.
So it's like we don't we don't want to we want to look.
We don't want to look like victims.
We don't want to look weak because their entire ideology is built around being strong and being stronger than the other.
You know, we are the white Aryan race that is, you know, the victors of society and we're being, you know, victimized.
And, you know, you know, we are being replaced by, you know, conniving figures with three parentheses around their names.
And so they can't allow themselves to look weak.
And yet they also want to kind of appear To be victimised and of course they can't like thread that needle it's not a thread of a needle.
I don't want to give them advice but like either you come out there and say we're gonna kick the shit out of the people we don't like or you gotta like actually come out and be peaceful like it's one of the other guys you know.
It's just a fundamental disjunct between you know what they actually think and feel on the one hand and what they're pretending to think and feel on the other and they can't as you say they can't square that circle.
They literally can't help advertising their insincerity as they walk around in public.
Right.
And again, this fission, you know, this paradox that comes back over and over again whenever you take a look.
You know, this fission, this complexity is fractal within the movement.
Like, the more you look at it, the more this kind of comes up over and over and over again.
Like, we can look at almost anything, any single incident, any single person, any single event, and you run into the same kind of problem in that this is like fundamentally self-contradictory.
Yeah.
On on fundament on on on so many levels and looking at the history of it, looking at, you know, the the original, the Nazi 1.0, the actual like the NSDAP in the 30s was, you know, on the outside.
They made themselves look like this, you know, imperious, hyper efficient war machine.
And in some ways they were.
But the the party itself was completely fractious and they were murdering each other left and right, you know, and constantly at odds with each other.
And, you know, You see this again and again within this stuff.
It's inherently self-contradictory.
And I mean, ultimately, I mean, again, a lot of the ways that I think we can fight this is just to encourage that.
Let them fight, you know?
Yeah.
There's no need for us to waste our energy if we can just get them to fight each other, you know?
It reminds me of that line in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide novels, Douglas Adams, About the sort of war like aliens and the guide says, you know, the best way to deal with them is to just lock them in a room on their own because eventually they'll beat themselves up.
Right.
There was a lot of internal chaos, but also external chaos on the day.
It was a chaotic day.
Obviously, the people to blame are, first and foremost, the F.A.S.H.
It's their fault.
Also, I'm afraid, as has been established, again, watch the Sean video, a great deal of police incompetence and just general sort of clusterfuckery going on on the day.
Yeah, there's a lot of that.
You see I mean, and there, you know, there were like podcasts and radio shows and writing that was done literally hours after this event.
And the version of this that they were always selling was the cops didn't do their jobs and the cops like pushed us into Antifa again, making the anti-fascist, the violent aggressors again.
And the cop, the cop's job was to keep us safe.
And, um, The reality is, I mean, there is a report, like an independent commission that produced a report about, called the HEFI report.
I can give you a link to that, that you can read if you want to kind of...
See what what happened and you know, everybody again.
This is kind of one of those contested history things.
I think the reality is that the bash were kind of being slightly misleading about how many people they expected and they kept changing their plans around.
Jason Kessler was a terrible organizer of these things.
And, you know, was not communicating clearly between the kind of different people he was trying to juggle.
The cops clearly were outmatched by the challenge by just the size of it.
There was a lot of mismanagement.
Also, I'm afraid, I mean, not to derail, but the cops fundamentally didn't understand what they were dealing with to the point where they actually sort of put sections of the alt-right contingent in charge of security in certain areas.
Oh yeah, and certainly there's this sort of the cops and clan go hand in hand kind of idea.
It seems like there was at least a little bit of a boys will be boys kind of thing.
We don't really like the communists in our city either and maybe there was a little bit of a wink wink nudge nudge.
There was sort of this idea that they were going to let The the alt-right figures actually decide who got to kind of be on their side of the barricade and kind of handle their own security.
Ostensibly, it's a sort of like, well, you know who your people are and who they aren't better than we do.
But, you know, kind of allowing the F.A.S.H.
to sort of like handle their own security with police protection is definitely, you know, this is not like just keeping the groups apart.
Uh, you know, a much more direct, uh, you know, kind of assistance.
And, um, so, so there was a lot of that.
Um, it does seem like there was some incompetence that there was.
Um, you know, there was a, uh, there, there were some, uh, things said.
There were some, some, uh, you know, uh, uh, documentation of, uh, you know, the police chief saying, you know, well, just let them fight, whatever.
You know, so that, that sort of thing.
Um, and, uh, just, it just kind of becomes a general clusterfuck.
And again, I'm, you know, I wasn't there.
I haven't looked deeply into the logistics and how these things are normally planned.
This was by far the biggest event of this kind that's been done.
But there were plenty of other events this summer that did not go off like this.
But this does seem to be a large scale failure of miscommunication and people lying to other people Again, especially the fascists.
I mean, there are kind of documented cases of Kessler just not communicating clearly with the police, but possibly the police kind of letting stuff happen that they shouldn't have let happen.
I mean, this was preventable.
Even if this event was going to go off, it did not have to go off in this way.
I mean, people died, you know?
Many people were injured and one woman died.
We said we'd signpost it.
We're at that bit now, I think, aren't we?
However we feel about the police in general, however we feel about, you know, sort of the state of, you know, at the very least, the job of a police force that has any right to the name is to, you know, protect the citizenry from themselves and to keep this safe.
And they should have been able to do it, and they didn't.
Well, you've got the police standing still behind barricades watching the fascists beat up anti-fascist protesters.
You've got fascists letting off firearms and the police doing nothing about it.
I mean... Oh yeah, no, that was a very, that was actually, it turned out, Richard Preston is his name, and he is a former Klan leader, one of those guys who saw a young man named Cory Long who was using an improvised flamethrower to defend an elderly man who was, you know, kind of behind him.
and oh my god did the Fash whine about that flamethrower it's like there's a man with a flamethrower it's like no this is an aerosol can and a lighter I mean you know like nobody was injured if you look at the full frame video there's a little bit of video out there this does not look nearly as threatening as it does in sort There's a fascist swinging a flag at Corey Long.
where it looks, you know, this is, there's a fascist swinging a club at, swinging a flag, I should say, at Corey Long.
And Corey Long is like making him keep his distance by, you know, like putting a little bit of flame in front of him.
And Richard Preston, you know, apparently yells a racial slur It's kind of unclear.
The audio isn't very good.
But there is some indication that he either did or almost said a racial slur to get his attention and then goes to fire and then fires at the ground instead.
So I think Cory Long was, you know, one second of hesitation away from being shot through the chest.
I think that was kind of the original goal there.
Richard Preston does have, I believe he is currently in jail.
I don't know exactly what his sentence was.
I don't have it in my head.
But I will say, and this is a good place to mention it, that if you do want to Check this stuff out and kind of know the kind of the legal status of kind of where white nationalist movements are throughout the country.
Emily Gurchensky has made, you know, this great website.
She is a data scientist by trade and she is collecting all of this laboriously and you can find that at first-vigil.com and I will, I have given that to Jack to put in the show notes and it's a great resource if you do want to know kind of the status of the legal cases that's the place to go.
Okay, but do we now want to talk about the climax?
Yeah, we should talk about James Alex Fields, yes.
Oh, God.
I, again, I wasn't there.
I have watched this video, various versions of this video, probably a hundred times.
James Alex Fields was, or is, he is currently, I think, 22 years.
He was 20 at the time of this, of Unite the Right.
By all accounts, so a lot of these other guys who have had kind of legal issues surrounding the events of Unite the Right He has not, you know, I've heard no one like answer.
He hasn't answered any letters.
He hasn't done anything.
of them on his show and kind of done like the 15 minute phone call they're allowed uh james alex fields has as far as i know spoken to no one in any place that i can find it um he has not you know i've heard no one like answer he hasn't answered any letters he hasn't done anything as far as i know he has um done the uh smart thing if you care about your legal case and uh stayed quiet
i would um love to hear him talk for for five minutes and i kind of get a better sense of where his head was at that time.
But at this moment, at the time of this recording, I don't have that information.
Everything that we know, he was a kid, he radicalized online, he kind of had a tough childhood.
He had some mental health issues.
That does not defend the horrifying racism, and that doesn't defend what he did, but he did have some mental health issues.
He was kind of working on getting his medication into shape for that.
I think he dropped out of community college.
He was working as a security guard in his little town in Ohio.
Came to the United Rights Rally alone.
And he had a change of clothes.
He actually changed into the white polo and khakis at the time.
He was planning on driving back and going to work the next day.
He met up with some people from the American Vanguard, picked up a shield, and went on the march.
We don't know who Ollie talked to.
We do know that he kind of gave three people a ride after the cancelled rally.
From all accounts, he was kind of perfectly calm during this process.
Maybe a little frustrated because he had driven all this way and didn't see the rally.
He's driving out of town.
Runs into a...
Well, I would say run into...
He kind of turns a corner where there was a closed street and there is some, some, again, some, some, a little bit of a, uh, a contested history about, uh, where the, uh, whether that, uh, street was supposed to be closed.
There was a, uh, police officer who was stationed at this corner who, uh, uh, sometime maybe about 20, 30 minutes before the, uh, the attack had, uh, felt, uh, in fear.
And I had a radioed in and requested to permission to Leave this was basically a former like school resource officer just someone you know not someone who had like experience with with riots You know again.
There was some lack of training lack of police understanding of what they were getting themselves into but So he turns left down this street he Drives down a little ways he finds a crowd a group of
People of anti-fascist anti-racist Celebrating they had won they were chanting who streets are streets and By all accounts and we do have several witness accounts of this and some video footage, although that footage has not been made public He sees the crowd he reverses and
He idles for about a minute, maybe 70 seconds, and then puts his foot on the gas.
He drives down this little kind of one-way street.
His moving top speed is something like 27 or 28 miles an hour.
While he is driving down, while he was going to ram into these protesters, Two people hit the back of his car with bats.
I think one had a bat and one had a flag.
And this becomes, in the conspiracy theory, this is the reason he did it.
Because, you know, he was terrified for his life after these two bumps on the back of his bumper.
Smashed into one car, which then smashed into a van.
Hit several people outright.
19 people were injured.
Many of them, seriously, will have lifelong injuries because of this.
And I killed one young woman who was, I believe, in her early 30s, named Heather Heyer.
She had a heart attack due to the injuries that she had attained during this attack.
And, again, that becomes a conspiracy.
Oh, she died of a heart attack, and that's, you know, the cause.
She was overweight because she smoked Newports, because she was perceived as not being a proper arrogant woman, because she was a communist.
She was actually an IWW member.
Because of that, the alt-right immediately jumps on, well, you know, a land whale died of a heart attack next to a car accident.
It's sort of the language that you start hearing used.
over and over and over and over and over again.
After Fields runs his car into this group of people, he immediately reverses a A large number of people start smashing in the back of his window, and apparently there were at least two guns that were drawn.
Emily Gorchinsky was in the group.
She was not hit by the car, but she happened to be right there.
I didn't find this out until after the trial, actually.
But she was there.
There are photos.
She has identified where she was on Twitter.
And, uh, she says she was terrified that, um, the guy that whoever was driving the car, because obviously she didn't know in that moment, was gonna come out shooting.
And, uh, she was armed at that moment.
And she was fully expected to have to, uh, take him down because there was no one else that she saw who was even remotely armed.
And she was very close to this.
Um.
Uh, Fields, uh, reverses.
Heh.
Uh, front bumper trailing.
Uh, he turns down another street.
And, uh, he tries to flee the city.
Minutes later he is pulled over by the cops.
He does again try to flee, but he does stop and Cops bring him out and said that he he asks he smells of urine Most likely because he had had urine thrown on them earlier in the day again He was aggressed upon so clearly he was you know not at fault here according to the right-wing conspiracy theories and He's brought into custody.
And that was that.
That's the incident.
I've kind of given you some hints about the way that this was treated.
The first immediately dodged challenger memes become the biggest thing on the message boards.
The Dodge Challenger of Peace, they say, you know.
Everybody fantasizes about running over protesters.
It's just a thing you do.
Oh, come on, I gotta get to work.
Oh, come on.
Nobody likes these people.
You're in my way.
I just want to run you over.
Everybody fantasizes about it, and so, of course, it's fine.
There was actually a piece fantasizing about exactly that published on the Daily Caller, I believe.
Yes.
Yeah, no, I mean, this is... Before this.
And this isn't, like, just on the kind of the alt-right, this kind of edgy meme far-right.
In fact, one of the arguments that you start seeing made around the time of his trial was, you know, oh, this is just kind of like a normal thing that everybody wants to do, right?
I mean, you know, like, clearly, you know, everybody wants to run over him.
Now, I have never in my life fantasized about running over anybody.
You know, maybe I'm the oddball here, but there are so many So much talk about this, and eventually he goes to trial.
His federal trial has not occurred yet, but his state of Virginia trial, and he has been sentenced to 419 years plus life.
James Alex Fields will never see the light of day again, barring either fascist takeover of the United States or a really, really impressive series of prison reforms, basically dismantling the carceral state.
And those are, you know, I would be fine with him getting out if we dismantle the rest of the carceral state first.
That would be fine with me.
But obviously that's not my, you know, I wasn't directly involved.
Sorry, I'm trying to keep this within the realm of...
You know, something that people might actually want to listen to.
But this is tough stuff.
If you want to know about the trial in particular, my friend Molly, she's at Socialist Dog Mom on Twitter.
She did an almost daily podcast.
She mainly killed herself getting this out because she would go to the trial and take notes all day and then write up a full summary.
Of what happened and then record it into a microphone at night and then edit it and put it out and she did that Not literally every day of the trial, but nearly every day of the trial She put out a full length, you know, 30 minute 30 to 45 minute podcast episode involving pages of writing it is Herculean effort and that podcast is about the best place imaginable to go learn about the reality of the trial and kind of what happened and
I highly, highly recommend it and please go follow Molly again at Socialist Dog Mom.
She is an amazing human being and she does great work.
She attended a lot of these rallies that we've been talking about during this episode during that summer and obviously on the anti-fascist side.
So what do you want to know about James Alex Fields?
Did he have any connection to the movement before this?
Or was he just somebody who was connected solely from, you know, his computer?
By all accounts he had no, I've seen no indication.
I had some thought based on some of the people, like when I found out there were other people in his car kind of right before the attack, the terror attack I should say.
I thought that there might, that this kind of proved some larger connections because apparently two of the people who were in the vehicle did have some kind of connections to the larger movement.
But by all accounts, as far as I know, there has been no concrete evidence.
He literally just learned it all online, as is common.
We'll probably end up doing an episode about the leaderless resistance concept down the line.
This kind of comes out of an old Klan guy, an old associate of David Duke's, named Louie Beam.
Back in the 70s and 80s, and this kind of model of, instead of having a kind of hierarchical structure, what you do is, you know, kind of spread ideas and then people kind of build little small, sometimes down to one or two people, but, you know, some small resistant cells that are going to kind of go off and cause havoc.
And the Internet allows individuals to just do this, to radicalize themselves online, and then to decide to engage in this kind of Horrifying terrorist activity.
We see this over and over again, don't we?
Another word you see around this is stochastic terrorism, where instead of being an organized group, it's individuals who are self-radicalizing and engage in this kind of behavior.
There is a this gets a actually believe it or not this gets darker and we will not talk about the the Dylan roof worshippers today but we will another episode.
Yeah but Dylan roof is another example of essentially a. Dylan roof is exactly this figure exactly even more concretely than James Alex fields was.
But yeah, no, you see a very similar kind of, again, we don't really know a lot about what James Alex Fields was reading and exactly who he was listening to or what videos he was watching or whatever.
We just don't have that information yet.
I'm hoping some of that comes out in the federal trial and in some of the civil suits.
I mean, we're still kind of in the midst of kind of learning exactly how all this works.
But, you know, yeah, Dylann Roof, what's his name, the Brevik.
Anders Brevik.
Yep.
So many of these.
Anders Brevik, for the listeners, is the Norwegian terrorist who committed the Utoia attacks.
Set off bombs in Oslo, I think it was.
Yeah.
And then also went to a Norwegian Socialist Party's youth training... Yeah, like a summer camp, essentially.
Essentially a summer camp, and just walked around the island massacring these kids with a machine gun.
This is the guy we're talking about, also radicalized, essentially on his own, sat in his room alone in front of a computer.
That's what you're getting at, isn't it?
Exactly.
And you see, like, kind of the incel attacks, these van attacks, these, you know, sometimes it's a guy who goes and kills his girlfriend, or goes and kills some girl who didn't want to date him, or, you know, kills a teacher, or kills, you know, his dad.
All this kind of violence, all this happening due to people absorbing the stuff that I've been absorbing for two years.
And I, you know, let's, I mean, This stuff is ridiculous, but it's effective at doing what it's doing.
And the organizers of these movements, the people making these radio shows and doing these podcasts and doing these YouTube videos, they will say, we don't want violence here.
This isn't about being a violent movement.
We're trying to engage in political rhetoric.
But, you know, the Jews are trying to replace you with mud people, and there's nothing really that you can do about it except to try to join this movement and try to work in our way.
You know, they're subhuman, they're lesser than you, and, you know, look at these fucking degenerates and look at these trans people and how disgusting they are, etc, etc, etc, etc.
Hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of people just joking, just joking about, you know, the people they don't like in ways that are utterly dehumanizing.
I know more racial slurs than anybody you know, most likely.
This isn't the goal, I don't want to say, you know.
Richard Spencer wants this to happen, but he doesn't care that this happens.
No.
It's grist to his mill.
Exactly.
He might not be sitting there... Isn't it unfortunate?
They'll talk about Dylann Roof, and they'll say, we wish he had found us earlier, we wish we had been there at that time, that we could have convinced him not to go out and do this stuff.
Um, that he could have joined the movement, that he could have been, he could have done more.
Um, again, Cantwell does this explicitly.
I could, oh, because he actually takes live calls on his show, so he gets people actually calling in and fantasizing about this stuff, and he talks them down.
No.
Live for this movement, don't die for it, etc.
But when it happens... While constantly peddling the filth that pushes them to that point in the first place.
Exactly, exactly.
They keep their distance and there's a... We'll go ahead and include this in here.
There's a photo taken on August 12th, 2017 and it's from a A video taken by a photojournalist named, I don't know how to pronounce her name, but it's Sandy Bakum, I believe.
She and I are mutual followers on Twitter.
She's a 72-year-old independent journalist, and she took some video on that day.
And people have gone through and scrubbed all this video and kind of tried to identify people.
And in this video you can find, and you know, there is a link here so you can look at this yourself, and it's... When I first found this I was astonished, and again, it's one of those things.
The three members of the Right Stuff, of the Daily Show Up podcast, who were there that day, Mikey and I have mentioned, J.O.
Deloray, who's a completely disgusting human being who has not been doxxed as of yet, And Alex Wingnab, who you may know is the Nazi EMT, who has kind of recently come to some prominence on mainstream media.
Is that the Spectre guy?
No, no, no, that's another guy.
There's an EMT in Virginia.
Spectre is also part of the TRS network, but he's on another podcast.
Although he's probably guesting on the show at some point.
Okay, sorry.
Oh, no, no, not at all.
There was an EMT technician who co-hosted the show under his real name and who had posted these kind of quote-unquote comedy bits where he had fantasized about sticking large needles into terrified black children and using ethnic slurs.
Towards towards people.
I he did he did this under a segment on the show called dr. Narcan and He recently got suspended without pay from his position on this Service and I can I can give you a link to that people can read that if you if you haven't seen that but these three guys who are Top top name figures within this movement if you follow these if you follow this movement, you know, these guys are celebrities in this world
And then among the kind of fairly small crowd, you know, but standing right near them are this guy, Taylor Wilson, who was convicted of terrorism after he took a bunch of, I think, PCP or LSD and tried to hijack an Amtrak train and kill a bunch of black people.
And James Alex Fields is standing right there.
He's standing inches from this guy, Alex McNabb, who was the Nazi EMT guy.
And you gotta wonder, Did they chat?
They're standing right there.
Was there some mingling going on?
I can find no evidence that it happened.
And believe me, there are people hunting through all this video.
There is a ton of video from this moment.
I'm not trying to say they did or didn't.
I would probably suggest that there was not a direct conversation more than hi or whatever.
But seeing two terrorists and three prominent radio hosts in a crowd of 15-20 people, it does say something about how close these guys are despite how far they try to push them away, doesn't it?
Oh yeah.
I mean, whether there was a conversation or not, at the very least, they are the people that James Alex feels.
This alienated, isolated, sad, without any sympathy for him whatsoever, pathetic individual.
He went there that day on his own.
And they were the people that he was trying to get close to and trying to earn approval from and trying to impress clearly.
He was clearly trying to kind of come in and say, I mean, you know, how do you get that close?
Except, you know, these are the celebrities and I don't know anybody and I'm going to try to be a part of this crowd.
These are the cool kids.
You know, these are the people I want to be like.
And, you know, Do you want to talk about the conspiracy theories?
Or are you done?
Yeah, we can do that.
Just kind of briefly.
Just to lighten up the mood slightly, because... To get us out.
To get us out again.
To get us out again, yes.
Sorry, I went to some dark places in that moment there, but... Well, this is dark stuff, so... So, there is a figure, you can find him on Twitter, at altrighttruth.
He has an avatar that looks like Jimmy Neutron.
He's apparently in his 30s.
I recommend everybody go and look at this guy's Twitter.
I actually don't, but I haven't looked at it in a while.
Anyway, he has a YouTube channel, apparently a previously kind of existing thing, or he would have just called it Alt-Right Truth, but his YouTube channel is White Boner.
Of course it is.
Of course it is.
The noted legal scholar White Boner, the noted forensic expert White Boner, has detailed reconstructions.
He also did a podcast.
So Molly, our friend Socialist Dog Bomb, did an exhaustively researched podcast explaining the legal details to the best of her ability, consulting with legal experts before, during, and after the trial, in terms of trying to understand what was actually going on.
White Boner here just spewed a bunch of fucking nonsense and listening to two minutes of this will convince you that there is clearly some medication issues.
Which I do not want to belittle, but this is a man who cannot complete a sentence to save his life, who routinely goes off into bizarre theories about how the defense is actually out to get James Alex Fields and out to destroy the movement.
You know, all the court is in on it, and produced a podcast that is, you know, pretty much an unlistenable radio unless you just find this shit amusing for some reason.
He also, and I hope that people watch this, I hope that people watch this, he produced a little CG animation, a reconstruction of the actual event.
If you watched this, and this is something I sent this to Jack beforehand.
Jack, would you like to share the message you sent back to me?
I believe the message I sent back to you was, the fuck did I just watch?
That's pretty much the response you should have.
I said something about it, about the famous early computer animation in the Dire Straits video, I think.
Right, it looks a lot like that.
And again, I'm not like, if you're working by yourself and are not conversant in CG, you know, like you kind of make something that kind of looks crude, I'm not in any way kind of, you know, like, that's fine.
I, you know, it's fairly unprofessional if you're, like, the guy that they're going to, but, you know, if you're working, yeah, you know, we're fine, you made it home.
For me, the real key is... You need to be able to take a look at it and say, actually, no, I can't show that.
Actually, no, I can't do this, right.
Yeah.
So, taking the kind of technical merits aside...
Putting the production values to one side.
Putting the production values, putting the actual making of the video aside.
It's filled with details that are just not true.
In particular, there's a guy named Dwayne Dixon.
This is kind of the big conspiracy theory around this thing.
Dwayne Dixon is a member of Redneck Revolt, which is a sort of a...
Not really an anti-fascist group, but a sort of like armed resistance group.
Basically like a sort of a patriot group, but you know, anarcho-communist, anarchist.
You know, people who believe in community self-defense will sometimes, may involve like carrying weapons to sort of meet firepower for firepower.
Dwayne Dixon is a part of this group.
However you feel about that, and I don't really have a huge problem with it personally, he was After the Unite the Right rally, he is an academic.
He does work at the, I believe, UVA.
He was sort of bragging about, you know, James Alex Fields came down and I used this weapon, his AR-15, and shoot him away and, you know, this is why we need this kind of support.
Well, the right wing jumps on this as a fantasy of proving that James Alex Fields was just terrified for his life and that, you know, running from Dwayne Dixon is why he crashed into this crowd of protesters.
This was debunked almost immediately.
If you look at the timing, Dwayne Dixon was at least two or three blocks away.
It actually turns out that there was another Challenger, a light-colored Challenger, that was driving around that was probably like a security car for the cops, like an unmarked police car, and that that was the vehicle that Dwayne Dixon saw that day and actually might have, you know, kind of waved his rifle at.
So, in this fantasy, Reconstruction quote-unquote.
Fields is supposed to have seen Dwayne Dixon and terrified like accelerates into the turn and then turns and then slows down and just stops.
So terrified enough To run from Dwayne Dixon, but because White Boner has to be at least supposedly accurate about the timing of events, he does have to admit that there was plenty of time to slow down and wait still, and the actual attack doesn't happen for another minute and a half, two minutes.
Furthermore, White Boner shows protesters both in front of and behind the car.
It is very well documented there were no protesters behind the car.
He could have turned back around and left at any time.
White Boner also posits that not only was Fields looking at his phone during the time frame in question.
We do know, it came out in the trial, that Google Maps or whatever was active on his phone at the time.
There's no indication he was actually looking at it.
It could have just been on, like anybody in an unfamiliar city would just have their phone on or looking at.
But not only does he do that, but he indicates The James Alex Fields is texting with his mother really adorable things like that's okay mom I'm going to be home tonight.
Don't worry mom I'm going to be home tonight because I'm definitely not planning on committing a crime of any kind in the immediate future.
And there's no evidence that there were text messages.
I mean, maybe there were.
I don't know.
I haven't heard anything that was saying that there were text messages that were sent in that time.
And neither has a white voter, because I guarantee a white voter has spent less time on this than I have.
There's no indication of this.
He's literally making up details to make Fields look innocent.
Well, my favorite are the internal monologue that he has Fields.
Oh, yeah!
That he performs for us.
And that is White Bonner's voice, so if you do want to listen to what he sounds like and not through the absolutely absurd podcast that he produced, that's how to do it.
This is definitely a let's all point and laugh at how absolutely...
Transparent a manipulative ploy this was and also the fact that While no one only one person from the alt-right actually showed up to Fields his trial and that was a Greg Conti who is basically one of Richard Spencer's buddies He actually wrote a couple of pieces for I think I forget which website, but he wrote a couple pieces about the trial and even did a podcast with white boner and
White Boner appeared on a bunch of podcasts, including Red Eyes, including The Daily Show, and with this guy, he did a, no, Conte didn't do a podcast with White Boner, he did a podcast with this lawyer named Augustus Invictus.
More about him in a future episode.
White Boner kind of got to do the rounds for a couple of days about this and his talking points, you know, he's basically just repeating the lies that were already being said, but a bunch of the stuff that he was saying just kind of becomes just common knowledge.
In this community, I mean these lies just you know easily disprovable like instantly disprovable lies That don't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny become like the standard thing that now everyone disbelieves Yeah, and it sounds like what they want to believe so they believe it so they repeat it So the other guys that want to believe it hear it and think oh well there you go
And they were they were propagandizing this stuff like instantly one of the again you can use this or not and you can cut this or not but One of the, you know, the very first episode of The Daily Show that was released after Unite the Right, and they did four episodes the week after Unite the Right.
But that very first episode, you have Enoch putting together the, you know, Fields was running for his life, you know, the back of his car was hit, and he hit the gas.
And this was essentially the same narrative.
And he accelerates.
He accelerates towards the protesters in the certainty that if he just drives with conviction they'll get out of the way.
That's another wonderful detail from the video.
Yeah, no, and it's this complete, you know... This is basically White Boner's fanfic, you know?
Well, it's not even White Boner's fanfic.
It's the version of the narrative that, as far as I can tell, Enoch creates in the day after the event.
And it becomes the thing that everybody just believes.
So Enoch creates it, says it, White Boner hears it, Takes that as a fact, puts it in his video, and then he goes back on Enoch's show as an expert.
There you go.
Exactly.
And I mean, this is something that I kind of watched happening in real time because I was paying very close attention to this stuff around that time, and it's really funny now that I've watched all the videos to kind of go back and re-listen to those episodes, and there are holes all in everything they're saying.
It's complete nonsense.
Of course.
Yeah, so many figures that I've mentioned that we will definitely do full episodes on in the near future.
But yeah, no, I think that's enough.
There's much more.
I should say the big person who was smearing Heather Heyer, and it kind of brought up the big conspiracy theory over like, you know, she just had a heart attack because she was fat.
You know, is a guy named Hunter Wallace.
That's his pen name, Wallace from George Wallace.
And Hunter is the second book by William Luther Pierce who wrote the Turner Diaries.
Turner Diaries is a famous racist novel depicting a race war in future America.
It was one of the central organizing texts of the kind of militia movement, really, from the 70s forward.
You know, everybody like David Duke was dealing with in the 70s and 80s would have read it.
And in particular, it's most famous for being the direct inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombing.
So Hunter Wallace, his real name is Brad Griffin.
I'm not doxing him.
That is his name.
He was born and raised about two counties over from where I was, believe it or not.
I'm going to link you, I'm going to give you a link to this absolutely terrifying, horrible thing in which he literally puts a lot of work, admittedly, into finding every little piece of video that he can find that has either higher edit and then putting together a narrative to where she was just
You know, she felt it was dangerous, and she was overweight, and she knew she was going to die if she stood there any longer, and she just happened to be kind of right next to the car when she died.
And it's absolutely despicable.
Hunter Wallace is one of the worst people in the movement.
And yeah, we'll cover him at some point, don't worry.
Fuck you, Brad Griffin.
There aren't many people who I think should die in a fire.
Fucked a lot of them.
Yeah, I mean, fuck them all.
Fuck them all.
Brad is a particularly disgusting person for a lot of complicated reasons, but yeah.
Okay, so thank you.
That was fascinating.
We're going to be returning to... This was a super long one.
I've tried to keep these as short as possible, but this was a super long one, but I think it was worth it.
We're going to be returning to this subject because we're going to be talking about the aftermath Yeah, the Aftermath will be a separate episode, and that'll be kind of focused on the optics debate, which feeds into Robert Bowers and the synagogue shooting and a lot of the, just a lot of the internal strife and infighting that happened after Unite the Right.
And we just, let's not do a four-hour episode on this, I'm done.
No, that's enough for tonight, and then we'll come back to, we'll do the Aftermath, as I say, and we're also going to come back, as indicated throughout this episode, we're going to come back to a lot of these.
Individuals and and issues in future episodes.
So yeah, great Daniel.
Thanks very much Thanks so much for editing all this so I don't have to Know it's it's it's fine.
It's the least I can do and thanks for listening everybody.
