I Don't Speak German, Episode 4: Unite the Right, the Aftermath
In this episode, Daniel tells Jack about the aftermath of the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville 2017. They also get a tad more theoretical about some of the reasons for some of the behaviour of the 'alt-right', and chat about some related issues such as the recent controversy concerning the Covington MAGA kids.
Hello and welcome to I Don't Speak German Episode 4, and you know what it's about by now.
If you don't, you'll soon pick up on it.
Hi Daniel.
So tell me, what have we missed from previous episodes?
What do we need to catch up on?
Well, I did get another highlight from the continuing drama about David Duke's audiobook length.
It was not 42 hours, and then I was speculating, I forgot to look it up, about 30 minutes after you released the episode from last week.
I got a tweet.
I would name the Twitter handle, but I think it's a burner handle from somebody most likely.
Somebody just happened to have the knowledge in hand.
It's 40 hours, 12 minutes, 22 seconds.
So I can imagine that someone, I probably know who was kind of tweeting at me from a throwaway handle.
So, just in case we do want to make sure we're completely accurate, 40 hours, 12 minutes, 22 seconds.
Now, I did not verify that.
I would love to find out that even that number is wrong so we can keep debating this.
Yeah, so what you're saying is, because we said it was 42 and it's actually 40, that discredits everything else that we have said and will ever say.
Exactly, exactly.
Clearly we are fake news.
Okay, so anything else?
If you listen to Sam Harris's podcast at every episode, he starts out with OK, a little bit of housecleaning here, and I feel like I really don't want to do that, but I also do want to say, OK, time for some housecleaning, but I'm not going to tell you about all the stupid events I do with Jordan Peterson for 15 minutes at the beginning of every episode.
I'm going to... Well, that explains why he's cleaning his house.
He's been reading Jordan Peterson's books.
He's been cleaning his room.
Cleaning his room, yeah, no, exactly.
Put your shoulders back.
No, I found it was interesting, you know, every time we record one of these, at least every time we have till now, within a day or two of our recording it, I find something that just confirms everything, you know, something I've said during the episode.
And in this case, I think this Covington Catholic High School student event, which kind of hit social media on last weekend, is really, really interesting, and I think you and I were even kind of chatting about this.
This is an incident that happened at the Rally for Life in Washington, D.C.
at the Lincoln Memorial.
In late January of 2018 and, you know, it's essentially this Catholic high school kid with the smirk, the MAGA hat and the smirk, who was, you know, kind of disrupting the personal space of the Native American elder who was beating a drum and doing one of the traditional chants.
It's funny that, like, there are several different kind of versions of this that kind of came out.
I mean, the original kind of thing was just sort of the image kind of spoke for itself.
It does.
You know, and I think that it's really worthwhile to say, regardless of kind of surrounding context, that the image really does speak for itself.
And I've given you a link which argues exactly that, written by Laura Wagner at Deadspin.
So, you know, go check that out, audience, if you want to kind of get my feeling on the whole thing.
It kind of became this real back and forth among, you know, kind of the left and right and kind of different factions online over the course of the last week.
It's this, it became this giant story.
I mean, honestly, it's, it's really just more, you know, for me, it's more of an image and more of an incident.
It's, it's, I mean, it's literally something that happened over just a couple of minutes.
Nobody was injured.
It's just this sort of like, yeah, look at how disgusting these kids are being, and, you know, it wasn't even, like, that kid's face is sort of, again, just a powerful piece of optics, a powerful image.
Even more essential, I think, is the fact that, you know, he's surrounded, you know, this elder, this man, Nathan Phillips, is surrounded by, you know, the kid's classmates, all of them juniors and seniors in high school, so 17 or 18 years old, Doing things like the tomahawk chant and you know, like being openly, you know kind of disrespectful and etc It's it's it's it's a lot more than just this one kid, but it's not you know, nobody was injured at this, right?
I mean, this is this is just kind of a confrontation.
Um, so the fact that it becomes this like it's touched a nerve because the image is so you know It just tap straight into where we are, doesn't it?
Right, and it kind of becomes a bit of a Rorschach test where, you know, people can kind of see different things in it.
And also depending on how you want to spin the news.
And I think it really kind of plays into a little bit of kind of what we're talking about today.
Because we are kind of talking about the aftermath of Unite the Right today and kind of the optics debate.
Um, sort of the way that, um, you know, these organizations and these kind of, like, right-wing, um, alt-right dickheads, uh, kind of use images and kind of use, use the media's coverage of things in order to push their own agenda and how they do and don't fail at that.
And this is just kind of this really interesting case because, you know, um, so I'll just, I'll kind of jump to the, jump to the conclusion here.
I mean, you know, like, um, the Daily Show Up podcast, uh, Mike Enoch spent literally an episode and a half ...talking about this incident.
So that's, you know, three to four hours of content of ranting about, like, how these kids are completely innocent, they were doing everything they were supposed to do, and his take on it was, you know, we made the media kind of turn tail, and we in the alt-right have kind of, like, transformed this story, and it was like, they're lying like this all the time.
But really, you know, since we have this enormous power, we were able to kind of, like, change the narrative on this.
And that's a huge thing that basically the entire alt-right is trying to do, is to, like, change the terms of the debate in their interest, as opposed to, you know, what they perceive as this kind of establishment, you know.
They call it Global Homo Gaplex, or something like that.
You know, this kind of, like, neoliberal consensus, essentially.
And what's interesting here is that the alt-right really was not the one pushing this.
I mean, this was like a guy at Reason Magazine, this guy, Robbie Suave, who wrote this piece where he's, you know, kind of spinning it in the other direction.
This is a very, kind of, establishment figure, much, much less, you know, although they are, he has a right-wing shitbag, he's not as, He's not, like, an openly genocidal maniac, so he gets to be, you know, kind of the rational center, I guess.
That's just where we are right now.
But, um, you know, it's this guy, and then, you know, the fact that, uh, these kids hired, uh, like, their parents hired a PR firm.
You know, these kids are, you know, in a wealthy, all-white suburb, uh, in Kentucky, uh, of Cincinnati.
They're in, you know, so Cincinnati, Ohio, is around the border of Kentucky, and these are kids in Kentucky, but they're essentially living on the outskirts of Cincinnati.
This is an all-white private school, all-male private school.
And, you know, it turns out that, like, this school actually graduated, like, Donald Trump's personal lawyer graduated from this school.
So these are essentially prep school kids.
These are wealthy white kids.
These are, like, exactly the people that the alt-right is trying to reach in exactly that kind of age range.
And yet, because they have this kind of access to Media they have access to money they have you know the goes on Good Morning America.
He gets you know like mainstream press coverage in a way that you know David Duke or Richard Spencer or you know Mikey knocker you know Christopher Cantwell just can't they don't have that ability to kind of shape.
News cycles in the same way because they don't have that kind of institutional access because they're being kind of explicitly racist.
It's also, of course, interesting in that, you know, this is the exact narrative I was kind of talking about in the last episode with the unite the right, you know, the way that these guys kind of approach things is I'm going to get in your face.
I'm not going to actually do anything.
I'm just going to be in your space.
I'm going to be kind of intimidating.
And then if you strike out at me, then I'm going to claim victimhood about that, which, you know, is exactly what's going on at that moment as well.
So it just it kind of encapsulates in kind of a small way in this kind of, again, fractal form.
A lot of the kind of bigger ideas are going on in the culture.
And again, just the way the media just like harped on this for a whole week was was kind of fascinating.
Yeah that was what struck me about it because i was editing and then releasing the last episode as this was breaking and i was i was thinking this is just what daniel talking about this is the tactic you turn up or you just described it and.
These kids really they are the they are.
The kind of people who think all they have to do is to, I mean, I don't mean to pick on teenagers, you know what I mean, but they're in that socioeconomic bracket and that racial bracket where they're sort of trained from day one to just expect and, you know, sadly, rightly often, that all they need to do is show up and the world will just sort of bow to them and let them do whatever they want, you know, and it's for other people to get out of the way.
And really i think what you see i mean this is what i would what i would tell me apart from that disgusting behavior and they should they should get some.
I don't think kids they shouldn't be persecuted their lives shouldn't be ruined but they should face some consequences because you know too often kids like this just don't ever you know what you end up with a result that is Brett Kavanaugh.
You know, there was a really nice like, you know, the 20 years later tweets, you know, which was, you know, smiling, smirking kids.
Last name is Sandman, I think, you know, and then Brett Kavanaugh on the other side, you know, with a very similar facial expression.
It's like, yeah, no, exactly.
That's that's exactly who, you know, Brett Kavanaugh was in 1982.
Yeah.
Not that I'm saying any of those kids have attempted to rape anybody, but you know what I'm saying?
No, no, no.
I mean, even even aside from the sort of like, The sexual assault allegations.
That's exactly the kind of kid that Kavanaugh very clearly was.
You don't need that.
That should have made it obvious that Brett Kavanaugh shouldn't be a Supreme Court Justice.
That should have been the nail in the coffin.
It's just indicative of exactly who he was.
This is exactly the kid he was at that time.
Yeah, I don't want to get into the weeds on this I'm just thinking that sort of the thing the deal with people like Enoch and Cantwell and Kessler and people like that is that they're kind of they're the guys who've partially been you know I don't want anything I say to sound like any kind of sympathy for them because they're they're fashion they're scum I hate them but they're guys who've kind of partially benefited from the fact that the world is set up to privilege
White guys but only partially so these kids are going to covington whatever it is they're the ones that haven't been in catholic school.
Yeah they're the ones that benefit fully and then you have these people are sort of on the lower rung and they're kind of half elevated by the system of privilege but half not so you end up with this.
See you know the sense of entitlement coupled with this seething sense of resentment you know that the what the world to the tells them with one out one side of its mouth yeah you're special you're better than everybody else you should get everything you want and then of course because it's a it's a it's capitalism and it's a rigid class system and it's unforgiving of you know you're not born into wealthy probably never gonna end up with wealth.
On the other side of its mouth, it kind of says, you know, stay down there where you belong and don't expect a break, you know.
And of course, loads of other things have to happen as well.
And as I say, these aren't excuses and certainly not sympathy.
But I think that's kind of what's happening, isn't it?
Absolutely.
And I will, again, I've given you a couple of links.
There is this piece by Jason Wilson at The Guardian.
Jason Wilson is someone where Mutual follows on Twitter.
He follows this world pretty well himself, and I would definitely recommend you go follow him.
But he wrote a nice piece at The Guardian kind of describing how this story kind of went from this kind of Twitter sensation and how like kind of the right wing media just ended up being able to spit it into this like he said she said you know contested history thing you know um and it does very much like very much like Kavanaugh absolutely absolutely Whereas it's clear to anybody reasonable that, you know, Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth and Kavanaugh's guilty as fuck, but the media managed to turn it into, well, you know, who knows?
Exactly.
And, you know, the, and this kind of, you know, because the, I mean, these, I hate that we're kind of talking a lot about this because it is just kind of a, you know relatively minor thing but it is it does it's a bit in microcosm just sort of the way that these guys operate you know and then the whole the whole thing is they've been kind of trained by this right-wing media to um always you know kind of dissemble about the source to you know that if the new york times says it it's wrong period you know yeah um and uh
and and that you're always kind of looking for you know the deeper story You're always looking for the narrative.
And this kind of plays, and we'll get into this a lot more when we do kind of cover Enoch directly, because it's really, you know, his baby.
He's kind of the king of this.
And I mean, just to be clear here, I mean, I just want to, you know, just for my own, like, solve my conscience.
I mean, you know, there is some kind of stuff in kind of the initial reporting of this that does seem to have been, you know, mishandled.
And, you know, some of Nathan Phillips' background, I mean, you know, he does seem to have, you know, kind of played fast and loose with whether he was actually a Vietnam veteran versus like kind of a Marine.
And there is some stuff about that.
But again, none of that has any effect on like the actual story that's happening.
No, no.
And in fact, the real story is, I mean, there is the full video.
There is kind of this one of the Black Hebrews was filming the entire thing.
There's about an hour and 46 minute video.
And I did kind of skip around in that, I didn't watch literally every second of it, but I watched kind of the central kind of confrontation.
And, I mean, so the Black Hebrews are, like, they are classed by the ESPLC as a hate group.
Let's be clear about this.
These are viciously misogynistic, you know, Black nationalists who are not fond of Jewish people.
In fact, they are vicious anti-Semites.
This is not a good ideology and I have no, you know, I have no bones about, like, saying that.
That said, they are basically street preachers who kind of preach hate and they have absolutely no political power, so I don't feel the need to spend a whole lot of time thinking about them, frankly.
Well, the Covington students weren't going after them because they'd read about them on SPLC and they knew they were anti-Semites, were they?
It looks like what happened was the black Hebrews were kind of preaching their nonsense and they were kind of harassing people.
For about an hour and then the Covington kids kind of show up there They're like waiting for the bus and then there starts to be kind of like some some kind of slurs back and forth and then Phillips actually, you know kind of walks in between the music.
He's trying to diffuse the situation, essentially.
And then the kind of black Hebrews, they kind of like hang back.
And then, you know, Phillips gets surrounded by these, you know, racist white kids, you know, mocking him effectively and surrounding him.
And that's kind of where the incident comes from.
And so, again, you can watch this whole video if you're interested in it.
But that's pretty clearly what I see watching the video is that, you know, Phillips is really like trying to do the right thing and be the adult in the room and trying to, you know, diffuse the situation between these two groups who are being kind of openly hostile to one another.
Well, you call it like a Rorschach test, and it really is because it shows you that people see different things depending on their positionality, you know.
Whereas we would look at that and we see this arrogant, smug kid getting...
Getting in this guy's face and you know let's be clear they're all they're all wearing MAGA hats you know and I'm sorry but at this point you can't go out wearing a MAGA hat and just claim it you know shocks you know it's no that's a provocation in and of itself you are expressing alliance and sympathy with disgusting racism etc etc so there's that you know and and but people look at that and what they see because this is a this is a gentleman of color.
You know a native gentleman etc what they see is kind of this aggressive person and you know he's playing the drums at them.
He's he's playing the drums yeah but by the time it's filtered through people's certain people's perceptions it's he's.
He's playing the drums at them you know like that's a threat like you like he's trying to hit him in the face with the with the drumstick or whatever and yeah by the time it ends up in a Ben Garrison cartoon you have this sort of disgusting stereotype of an indian chief.
And any sort of he's got his arm around this terrified little white child you know and it really does show you.
How people just interpret reality differently based on.
Absolutely and and to be clear you know the the sort of the mainstream kind of media like the sort of the mainstream right you know i can add it to towards this was a little bit more.
Well, these kids are kind of acting boorishly, but you know, they, you know, boys will be boys.
The world is just set up to excuse these kids anything from day one.
Exactly.
But the actual sort of like, you know, again, kind of Mike Enoch's perspective on it is, well, these are white kids.
This is their country.
Any kind of disrespect shown to them at all, they had the absolute right to respond in any way they saw fit, you know, up to and including.
I mean, he wouldn't actually kind of like openly advocate for violence, but had there been like a fight breakout or something, had this kid like swung at the Phillips, He would have absolutely supported his right to do so because like any any action by a non-white person in a quote-unquote white country is a is a provocation.
Well this is a it's not it's not to do with what happened it's to do you know the the the attitude is determined from the start whatever actually happens based on.
Will it let's let's just be honest about this based on the skin color the person who is white is in the right the person who is dark is in the wrong that's the assumption and whatever happens you interpret it in such a way as to support that assumption exactly.
And then they claim that we're the ones doing it the other way around.
That white people are never right.
That these kids could never have been in the right in this situation.
Which is complete and utter nonsense.
Again, I just told you that the Black Hebrews were a hate group.
And that Phillips has probably played a little fast and loose with the facts in his background, etc.
We're being honest here.
Well, false equivalence is always the major weapon in their arsenal, isn't it?
Absolutely.
Anyway, I think we've kind of covered that.
I just, I do, I just thought it was a really interesting moment in terms of trying to kind of get at the way that these guys, you know, try to shape narrative and try to use media because what we're gonna kind of end up talking about today is sort of the aftermath of Unite the Right and this thing called the optics debate and this kind of like plays into that same idea and I thought it was, I thought it was just again an object lesson in sort of the way this works.
Yeah.
It must be very frustrating for them, actually, because, you know, all they have to do is go out flying a swastika, and suddenly the assumption of innocence that they normally get afforded just disappears.
I mean, you can understand why they're confused and frustrated by that, can't you?
Well, I mean, it's like, you know, we can go out and we can say the liberal elites, and, you know, you can get all this media coverage.
You can be Ben Shapiro, Who is, who is Jewish and of course they, that's like the disgusting thing, you know, they can't, you know, of course they, he gets to do what he wants because he's Jewish, etc.
You know, that you can be this kind, you can get this kind of conservative institute money and you can get all this, like, kind of fame and fortune as long as you use the word liberal, liberal elites instead of Jews, or globalists instead of Jews.
And so long as you say, well, you know, I have black friends, but there's something wrong with their culture that causes them to have, you know, illegitimacy rates and that so many of them you know commit crimes etc etc instead of like no it's actually this genetic predisposition that's just because of you know like nazi race science and that's literally they use nazi race science to prove some of this bullshit you know um because racism is just a thing that bad people do
and you're obviously not a bad person what you're doing can't be racism um the the great irony there of course is that the ability to define racism so that it it's never what you're doing is itself white privilege Exactly and I mean it is and it is like I mean that the whole I mean a lot of what and again we're gonna get into this when we cover in kind of future episodes is sort of.
You know I've used the the Overton window concept a few times in this in this show and you know I know that I know you and I both have kind of issues with that you know kind of framing I mean it's kind of a bad a bad device but it's just sort of so commonly use that it's it's kind of not worth like.
fighting it too hard you know in these contexts but they're really not i mean you know when you look at when you look at kind of like again what what um a lot of these kind of top figures are doing they're really not trying to push debate further to the right because the debate's already pretty fucking far to the right they're actually engaging in meta-politics um
They're trying to use cultural forces to use these kind of online social media platforms and this sort of ability to reach audiences to change the terms of the way the debate is held.
You know it is it is this sort of like again neoliberal consensus you know there is a broad broad consensus that being racist is necessarily bad and so we just have to defend anything that we want to do we can defend it so long as we can like say it's not racist but
What they're trying to do is say no racism is good racism is healthy and natural and you know you should just be accepting that yes everybody's racist and that's that's actually a good thing we should be kind of acting in terms of a racial self-interest here and not do you know and so they're trying to change the terms of the way that the debate is framed and you know to some degree what they've done is they've just kind of missed the whole point of.
You know, like, you know, you can have your, like, effectively all-white ethnostate as long as you just, like, code it as, like, you know, I want to have good schools.
I mean, they just, they just kind of missed the point that, like, you know, your life was pretty good already.
And, you know, if you just kind of, you know, don't, you know, the rich guys, the people at the top, the people with this kind of institutional power, just know they can be racist as long as they just, they're not too openly racist, you know?
Like, I mean, Tucker Carlson would do this, you know, he's like, you know, I don't care about skin color, I just think, you know, all the, all these immigrants, they're just dirty and they bring in, they shit everywhere, you know?
And it's just like...
You know i'm like you only just say i'm not racist and then suddenly you have you can just say whatever you want it does feel like they're there there's this kind of level of like you know they're they're just kind of too.
Honest weird way you know to always feel like this like there's a sense in which extreme right wingers.
I'm kind of taking the ideology of just normal capitalism, which is based on racial hierarchies and stuff like that.
They're just taking it kind of a little bit too ideologically.
They're sort of systematizing it and taking it too literally, as it were.
The point of it is to allow capitalism to function with racial hierarchies.
You know capitalism doesn't actually want states because that wouldn't work for capitalism but these people are taking the ideology that capitalism uses to create racial stratification that's good for it and the sort of running with it and turning it into these these grand ideological theoretical narratives so.
It's like they're taking, it's like, because they're always coming out with dog whistles, it's like they're the ones who've taken the dog whistles that are coming from the mainstream, and taken them too literally, and are taking them too far, not to absolve the mainstream.
Right, exactly.
I mean, you know, yeah, it's just, they see, they take, they see the way the game is played.
They see the kind of surface level and they think that that's what like people actually believe and they think that that's the underlying, you know, and they're not seeing.
The mainstream is kind of saying, yeah, all we needed was sort of an excuse for there to be black ghettos.
We don't actually want all this sort of, you know, these days anyway.
Right, right.
Well, I mean, there's this great book, Stamped from the Beginning by Ibrahim Kendi.
And he has a really nice frame that I think is worth thinking about in these contexts.
And I'm not sure if it's original to him.
I mean, it may be.
It may be something that kind of comes out of theoretical research in these fields.
But I got it from him, so I'm going to give him the credit on this.
He says, you know, most people kind of thinking about American history and American politics think there – you kind of think there are two positions.
There's a racist position and a not racist position and that these are kind of binaries.
But really what there are is there is a segregationist position, there's an assimilationist position, and then there's an anti-racist position.
And both the segregationist and assimilationist positions are racist positions.
And so you have to actively be anti-racist in order to really be fighting against these hierarchies.
And so, just to give an example, the segregationist position would be something like either an ethnostate or racial segregation, as it was practiced in Jim Crow, etc.
The assimilationist position is, well, People of color are fine so long as they like adapt to our rules and they adapt to, you know, they come in and assimilate.
They accept quote-unquote Western values and they pull their pants up and they listen to, you know, our kind of music and learn to speak English, etc, etc, etc.
Whereas the anti-racist position would be, of course.
No, people have inherent dignity and human worth and, you know, we don't judge people based on how well they match some, you know, white supremacist standard, regardless.
And I feel like there are a lot of people in that, like, sort of assimilationist position who are, you know, who, you know, will say like, you know, oh, it's just a shame that, you know, black crime rates are the way they are and it's because they don't have, you know, the proper father figures and they feel bad about that and they think, you know, I'm not racist because I'm not.
You know, I don't feel bad about, you know, I'm not thinking negatively about people.
I'm not thinking that, you know, it's not because of their color that I'm saying that things are bad for them.
I'm, you know, I'm kind of treated as a kind of a cultural issue.
And then they react very strongly to like being correctly told you're exhibiting signs of white supremacy and, you know, you're embracing this system that is enshrining a particular kind of, you know, white nationalist history, you know, ultimately. white nationalist history, you know, ultimately.
People should check out a book called, a recent book called White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo.
Yeah, no, that's very good on, you know, looking into the ways in which, you know, it's almost it's it for a lot of white people.
It's just impossible to get them to talk about race, you know, because the defenses go up.
I have I have I have seen this book discussed.
I have not read it yet, but but I've read it.
I thought it was, you know, I had my issues with it, but I thought it was pretty good.
I really did.
So people should look at that.
Another thing people should look at is a recent video from Innuendo Studios on YouTube.
You know, again, I have my issues with Innuendo Studios, but they've done some good stuff.
This new one of theirs is pretty good.
It's called The Card Says Moops, which people might recognize as a reference to a Seinfeld episode.
But that's sort of got into, that's touched upon some of the things you've just been talking about with regards to the way the right argue.
The other thing you were talking about, the three positions, that sounds to me quite persuasive and it sounds like sort of an extrapolation on the fact that really the politics of America are still stemming from the fact that America is initially, the United States of America, a settler colonial society because that sort of division between segregation, assimilation and the anti-racist position,
That's very much like how the politics, you know, the sort of population management of settler colonial colonial states plans.
Of course, there is, of course, another racist position which emerges at times of crisis, which is the eliminationist position.
Right.
I think I think Kendi would kind of call, you know, all of those positions essentially, you know, the eliminationist position, the segregationist or even sort of a white nationalist, you know, because they're like kind of supreme.
He would he would kind of class all of that as like, Some version of segregationism as you know they need to be like separated from the society.
I mean he doesn't quite go into that kind of you know I yeah he would Yeah, I'm not trying to put words in his mouth.
And this book won a National Book Award.
It's a very well-regarded book, so you don't need me to tell you it's good.
Oh yeah, I haven't read it, so I can't comment on it.
But I suspect he would.
He's just kind of saying there's all the stuff we would just kind of normally think of as racist, and that's sort of what he calls the segregationist position.
And then there's this kind of middle ground that we don't think of as typically racist.
But is, and that's, you know, kind of that, like, kind of middle ground centrist white supremacy, you know, stuff where, you know, you're just kind of taking advantage of systems that are already pre-built for you, but you're not, like, challenging them in any way.
And again, it's been a very, very useful book in terms of it kind of, like, that framing really has helped me to cut through some of the chaff and trying to understand kind of where this stuff comes from in some really good ways.
So again, highly recommend that book.
And I guess this sort of narrative of, you know, well, they're just kids and they, you know, they didn't know what they were doing and they were probably scared by the guy with the drum and we shouldn't hold them responsible.
That's kind of how you negotiate the problems from inside the, I'm not racist, assimilationist position, isn't it?
While retaining the, yeah.
Okay, we've gone a bit theoretical at the start of this one.
Yeah, no, I think I was kind of expecting this one to be a little bit more theoretical, so I'm very happy with how this goes.
I do want to kind of, we've stayed very close to the ground, very close to the facts on the previous three, and it's been kind of a little bit of a dry recitation of just kind of like basic information, and I do have some of that here as well, but I was kind of thinking this one might go a little bit more theoretical and a little bit more big picture, so I'm very happy with this actually.
Great, yeah, but we do also want to be informative, so we'll... Yeah, so the original thing we were going to do here is we're going to cover the sort of, so last week we covered the Unite the Right rally of August 11th and 12th, 2017, and kind of like the things leading up to it and then the events on the day.
And then the flip side of that is the aftermath, kind of what happened after this and why this event ends up being this sort of like – I think I described it as like the hinge on which this entire kind of 21st century white nationalist kind of moment kind of rests.
And the truth is that like the aftermath of this event is – there's kind of like three kind of separate threads.
There's kind of legal action being taken, there's deplatforming, and just a general sense of disorganization that kind of goes through the entire movement.
Up until Unite the Right, this movement was, you know, remarkably solid.
They were all kind of working together in a lot of ways.
I mean, there were, there were kind of personal conflicts and there were, you know, kind of issues and certain people didn't like other people.
But you saw, you know, like a whole lot of, like, kind of people guesting on other people's shows and, you know, a whole lot of kind of working together.
And even if we're not, you know, see eye to eye on, you know, kind of the details of what the economic program is going to look like in the ethnostate, we're all going to be able to kind of work together regardless.
And all of that completely collapsed after Unite the Right because they turned into a bunch of bawling, scrambling man-children.
So, just to kind of cover a little bit of the stuff that we missed the first time, there was one other...
Yeah, I almost asked you about that last time, but we were running super long, so I thought we'd get to it this time.
Yeah, we were running long, so I kind of figured I do want to just kind of cover that.
I'm not going to go into details the way I did with the James Alex Fields thing, and I appreciate everybody.
A lot of people sent me some very kind messages after that episode.
So I think people really appreciated that, but we don't need to go into that kind of detail again, at least not today.
But there is this young man, DeAndre Harris.
He was the one who was attacked in the parking garage on August 12th, 2017.
There's a lot of kind of contested history here about what DeAndre Harris was doing that day.
You know basically if you google deandre harris maglite you find a whole bunch of right-wing cheds kind of you know pretending that you know a very kind of limp-wristed Swing in a with it with a flashlight was actually a meant to be a killing blow and that sort of thing Basically there was a such Sorry, there's such pussies aren't they?
Well, they just, they, they, it's just everything is like, you know, man, that Maglite, he could've, he could've like busted his head open if he'd hit him hard.
It's like, you know.
Yeah, he waved the Maglite at me.
He drummed at me.
He didn't even, he didn't even strike him.
I mean, he came kind of close, but it's also, this is in the middle of like a fight, a two-way fight.
You know, this is, this is, you know, DeAndre Harris was trying to, uh, help get another guy away from a white nationalist here, you know?
Um, there's also a bunch of stuff with like, there's a flag where this guy, um, Harold Cruz, who is the, uh, one of the, uh, head guys in the League of the South.
This is a neo-confederate organization.
We will cover them in more detail in a future episode.
We're going to get back to that.
Oh yeah, no, the League of the South is definitely.
So, Brad Griffin, who I, again, I talked about a little bit in the last episode, at the end of the last episode, in some intemperate language that I in no way stepped back from, frankly.
You know, Brad Griffin is associated with the League of the South.
Yeah, we will definitely cover this group.
But they, certainly on that day, they kind of were, along with the Traditionalist Workers' Party, which is, again, a Matt Heimbach's organization at the time, they end up being kind of the foot soldiers.
They end up being the ones kind of really willing to kind of get their hands dirty and do actual violence on the day.
Stormtroopers, exactly.
Which makes these sorts of people sound so impressive.
We're talking about street thugs.
Yeah, they're street thugs, but they came with intentions in mind, let's put it that way.
So the League of the South, alongside the Traditionalist Workers' Party, both of whom may get their own episodes or they may just kind of get thrown in.
I don't know, we'll see, but we're still trying to plan things out exactly how they're going to go.
These guys end up being the kind of the shock troops on the ground.
These are kind of made up of more kind of quote-unquote working-class blue-collar kind of guys.
Most of the kind of named figures, most of the people that we've talked about thus far are very, you know, kind of white-collar, they work in technology kind of guys.
Whereas the people in the, you know, kind of, again, the foot soldiers in the League of the South, etc., end up being, you know, they kind of work as machinists or they work as, you know, they work with their hands, they work in, you know, some of them work as like gardeners and cut grass for a living and, you know, put up sheetrock and that sort of thing.
And so there is a kind of internal class division there, which kind of becomes relevant as we kind of move forward.
I think we'll come back to that here in a minute.
Several of the members of the League of the South were kind of connected with the people who did assault DeAndre Harris, and the League of the South ends up having to, in the run-up to Unite the Right 2, where they were some of the less...
Less self-aware members of this movement decided we're gonna try to do this again.
Yeah when your anniversary This was a very very bad idea.
Everybody knew it was a bad idea from the beginning Except for you know a handful of people like Jason Kessler decided it was going to Organize the first event and organize the second and pulled it off I think 20 people showed up and something like a million dollars to spend on security.
It's ridiculous Jason Kessler I think it's fair to say not somebody terribly good at spotting bad ideas In so many ways.
We'll come back to Jason Kessler in a second.
Anyway, the League of the South ends up, they end up in some legal actions with some people bringing civil suits against the organization itself from Charlottesville.
They end up signing a consent decree where they will not ever again return to Charlottesville in groups of more than two, and they are not allowed to bring weapons to that city.
a consent decree in case you're, in case, you know, and I'm no lawyer, but I mean, it's essentially a sort of a legal option where, you know, if you're, you can essentially sign some paperwork where, you know, instead of having to kind of go through a lengthy trial kind of legal process, you can just sort of agree, okay, we're just, it's like a settlement, you can just sort of agree, okay, we're just, it's like a settlement, you know, but it doesn't reflect sort of like financial, but more like this is the way we're going to conduct ourselves in the future
And you do find these often kind of civil rights cases is like, you know, we're not trying to, you know, we don't necessarily have the evidence to like put you behind bars.
I mean, I can't sue you, but you know, we've got enough to sort of like draw you through the mud for a while.
And so just like disband.
And that's kind of what happens here.
It's not that the League of the South disbands, but they are certainly, I mean, they signed this piece of paperwork pretty quickly.
They're not going to be able They knew they were they were in deep shit.
So, and I do have some text from that, I'm not going to read it here, but they are not allowed to return to Charlottesville with more than two persons and they can't have any weapons.
And you can't do any rallying or anything like that.
And so, yeah, the fact that they signed that, the fact that they were kind of the big badass people who were kind of doing the Most of the or at least a lot of the violence who were kind of like directly connected to that.
And then they decided to actually sign this decree.
It was kind of the moment of, you know, United Right was never going to kind of be what it was the first time United Right to was never not going to be what it was the first time and it kind of made the League of the South a much less.
useful organization.
I mean, they've kind of disappeared from the internet.
They still do some kind of Confederate rallies and stuff, but I mean, they had a podcast and they just kind of shut all that shit down.
They were planning on doing, you know, all kinds of rallies they had, you know, at the end of 2018 or the end of 2017, they had, you know, all kinds of, you know, announcements of like, we're going to be here, we're going to be here.
And they went nowhere.
It It was, they were just done.
So, you know, that's one of the things, you know, the organization, it doesn't disband, but it's not nearly as kind of important as it once was.
We also do have, in relation to this DeAndre Harris assault, we do have some people who get arrested and are now sentenced.
Jacob Goodwin, Alex Ramos, and Daniel Borden all sentenced.
I do have links to that so you can read about that.
You can also go to FirstVigil.com.
I mentioned it last week.
And I kind of get some of those original court documents and kind of see where everything is in relation to this.
And I'm not going to go too deeply into that.
All three of these people have, from jail, called into Christopher Cantwell's radio show, and he has put out, like, calls from them, you know, and there's some kind of interesting stuff there.
Next time, we are going to start talking about Christopher Cantwell, and we can kind of get into some of this, I think, at that point.
Let's see.
Immediate aftermath of the event, you've also got... Sorry, I'm kind of going through my notes here.
Jason Kessler.
We should talk about Kessler.
I'll tell you the funny story first.
Let's have a laugh here.
Immediately after the Unite the Right 2 event, he was doing this YouTube show where he was interviewing people.
He was interviewing this guy named Patrick Little.
Now, Patrick Little is a vile piece of shit.
He's about as close as you get today to George Lincoln Rockwell, who was a former military veteran who founded the American Nazi Party in the 60s, and who was assassinated by one of his underlings.
Patrick Little is a scary guy because I think he's got some real, he also has a military background and he's got some real kind of ability to organize.
No one seems to be kind of following behind him except for a couple of toadies and I'm not quite sure what's going on there.
I imagine he's just kind of a very difficult person to be around but he's the one who you know puts up the like the blimp in like the San Francisco Bay Area like Jews rape kids.
He is about as a hardcore anti-semitic as it is possible to be he is on the unironically nuke Israel plan So, you know pretty vile human being he was being interviewed by JC Kessler who again pretends He's just kind of I'm just for like white civil rights and I'm just trying to you know Bring people together and I just don't want white people to be discriminated against and then he does interviews with you know unironically nuke Israel Patrick little and
He also had like a member of the Hammer Skins, which is the kind of a white supremacist street gang.
It had their height in the 80s but they're still around.
They are like effectively the sort of the actual, you know, like...
You know, boots and, uh, boots and brass knuckles Nazis.
I mean, he has a number of the Hammerskins in his, like, handful of people private, like, planning-unite-the-right-to, um, Facebook chat logs, which got leaked.
Um, so, you know, Kessler is in no, like, he pretends to be kind of like the, you know, kind of up in, you know, kind of Thai-Nazi kind of guy.
Um, he pretends to be just for white civil rights.
Do not believe it.
He is 100% committed to, uh, the most awful things that you can imagine, or at least he's associated very closely with people like this.
But, At one point he is doing this interview with Patrick Little and I'm going to include a link to this little snippet of video and it's definitely worth watching.
At a certain point a voice comes in from off camera and it ends up being Jason Kessler's dad who is asking him to get out of his room because Jason Kessler lives with his father.
And his father is none too keen on the whole anti-Semitism stuff.
It's a really, really amusing video because it reveals just how pitiful Jason Kessler is as a human being, that his dad is going, get out of the room, kid!
Awkward.
Yeah, it's very, very awkward.
And then Patrick Little is like, what is it?
Are you living with a Jew?
That's his immediate response, because Kessler's trying to play it off as like, this person I live with is slightly less inclined to support the Hebraic criticism that we do.
He uses some language like that.
Anyway, go check it out.
It's much funnier than I've made it sound, but check it out.
So, Kessler, right after the event, he tweets out about Heather Heyer, the young woman who was killed in the car attack.
This is his tweet.
I'm going to read it for you.
Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting communist.
Communists have killed 94 million.
Looks like it was payback time.
It was in the response to this tweet that Jason Kessler basically gets dropped by the entire movement.
Not because they don't believe similar things and won't say certain things themselves, but because you can't be that direct about it in a public forum.
He gets dropped by most of the movement.
He later deletes the tweet and claims that it was because he was on Ambien at the time.
I've taken Ambien and I don't think I've ever tweeted out racist propaganda while on Ambien.
That's probably just me.
It's probably on the known side effects somewhere, right?
Yeah, I was going to say, is it on that little information sheet you get in the box?
It might turn you into a Nazi.
Don't operate heavy machinery or Twitter should probably be on there.
Don't be a horrifying racist and take this.
So Kessler kind of gets dropped by the movement.
He does kind of come back.
He tries a few times over the course of the next year and a half to sort of come back and be more of a figure, but I think everybody kind of realizes what a pathetic loser he is, and I'm not sure quite where he is now.
I haven't heard from him in a while.
So you have this kind of like general disorganization around these figures.
You also have kind of the beginning of a crackdown from tech companies and social media companies.
One of the big ones is that this service Cloudflare.
Now Cloudflare provide DDoS protection to websites.
DDoS is Distributed Denial of Service attack.
If you want to shut down a website and you're a hacker, what you do is you get a bunch of servers to Continually request information from a particular website and then kind of slow down the servers and then make it to where people can't access the site.
It's kind of a common thing.
It's called a DDoS attack.
Cloudflare will protect your website from this.
They serve a whole lot of sites all around the world, including, you know, like apparently some sites are kind of affiliated with like the Islamic State, etc.
They booted the Daily Stormer on August 16th, 2017, just four days after the event.
Daily Stormer, because we haven't really talked too much about it, is basically this kind of racist rag.
It is kind of the far, at that time, it was kind of the far right wing of this, you know, kind of like, we're kind of doing ironic Nazism, but it's really real Nazism.
It's really extreme language.
All you have to do is kind of go look at their archives and see kind of the, you know, the tone.
This is Andrew Anglin's website.
And Andrew Anglin kind of becomes the persona non grata to a large degree after this.
He has to change even his domain hosting.
So not just the kind of web host, but he has to keep changing his domain registry.
So that's your three-letter.
So if you're talking about google.com versus google.net.
So he has to keep finding new countries and new registrars that will actually allow him to Well, he went through at least 50 of these over the course of a few months because he kept bringing it back up in a new country with a new acronym, or a new TLD, and then people would find them, they'd get reported, and then he'd have to take it back down again.
I think he's basically just on the dark web.
I think it's dailystormer.name now, so whoever owns that one apparently doesn't give a fuck.
Yeah, so the Daily Stormer kind of loses their hosting.
Twitter finally kind of gets their shit together, and they announce at a certain point in, I think, late November, that there's gonna essentially be a Nazi ban beginning on December 18th, 2017, and a whole bunch of accounts get kicked or go dormant.
It is a very...
Loose?
I mean, it is, there are a lot of holes in it.
Like Jared Taylor, who runs American Renaissance, but who is just very kind of polite.
You know, he's been in this since 1990.
You know, he never uses kind of ethnic slurs and that sort of thing.
Not sort of the obvious, you know, well this is the one guy we need to kick off Twitter.
He loses his account.
Richard Spencer doesn't.
You know, various other figures, you know, Mikey Enoch has kind of come and gone a few times, and it's very inconsistent in terms of kind of the way it's handled, and we don't really have any kind of sense of what the rules are, or, you know, what you are and aren't allowed to say, and it seems to be kind of more of a cosmetic thing than anything else, but this basically kind of becomes the point at which, you know, The alt-right stops thinking of Twitter as kind of the place they can go and troll the libs or whatever.
They had kind of been in this process of moving to this other service, Gab, which has basically just become Nazi Twitter at this point.
But that was kind of the moment in which Gab becomes the place where they go and congregate.
And then that site has its own kind of like complex history.
This also kind of ends up feeding into some other things like the ban on Alex Jones and Infowars.
That happens in September 2018.
Seems to be not directly connected to, you know, because Alex Jones is not really a Nazi.
He's just kind of a conspiracy mongering shithead.
I mean, he's definitely a right-wing figure, but he's not, you know, he's not like openly talking about Jews on his site.
He's like, you know, the globalist, you know.
Um, but he loses his service, uh, and he actually gets kicked off of YouTube and, uh, plenty of others, and Spotify.
Um, and this was, uh, again, a little bit after, a little bit more than a year after, you know, at the right.
Um, and I'm including it here mostly, it's just kind of to, to show that this, um, you know, the way that these tech companies are choosing to sort of, like, act in this new era, and the fact that they're, again, wildly inconsistent, um, and, and just seem to have no real, like, rhyme or reason behind it, except, like, People made a stink and then you know people get kicked off of platforms and they're essentially they're responding to consumer pressure more than anything else on there i think.
Right right i mean it's like you know you make enough noise about in fact the the alex jones band seems to be there's a there's a journalist over at right wing watch named jared holds who.
You know, does some does some good work.
He kind of follows this stuff.
He kind of writes about a lot of these people.
He's definitely worth a follow.
He has a pretty good podcast called The Shitpost Podcast, which is which is a fun listen.
But he seems to be kind of the one that kind of made this happen in terms of Alex Jones.
Mostly because he was like kind of looking at like Spotify and he kind of had his own podcast and he noticed that InfoWars was on there.
And it's apparently very difficult to get your podcast onto Spotify.
And he just sort of reached out to Spotify and was like asking, you know, like these guys violate your terms of service like every day.
And he gave them some examples and then like asked why is this happening.
So Alex Jones actually like personally blames Jared Holt for having all of his services denied.
And apparently Jared Holt got a whole lot of hate mail after that happened.
Um, and Holt himself says, you know, that he, you know, it wasn't his intention.
He was, he was just, you know, asking questions like why, why, why is this here?
And I can't get my kind of stuff out there, you know, like why, why is this allowed to continue?
Cause he is, he is kind of legitimately a journalist.
Anyway.
The question of the rights and wrongs of banning these people, I think we'll just skip over that completely because that's such a huge topic.
Yeah, I mean the kind of the role of social media and all this I think is I mean that's kind of its own episode as well and kind of like the way the way that this kind of rises and falls based on social media and that a lot of ways social like Twitter and Facebook and some of the other sites.
kind of allow this kind of conversation to happen, kind of allow the growth of this movement in some really interesting ways.
But I think at this point, I'm just going to say, like, yes, the context of, like, should it be allowed for Twitter to just randomly kick people off for, like, you know, opaque reasons?
No, I think that's really, really bad.
I think that's really, really fucking bad.
But all of this shit has happened to leftists way, way before it happened to anybody Alex Jones was in violation for like a decade, but was allowed to stay on because he made plenty of money for the hosting providers.
And ultimately the issue is that these few tech companies have way too much power over our lives and we need to be working to make that not be true.
But I'm not going to take up the cause of putting Alex Jones back on social media because I think it's a good thing that Alex Jones is not on social media.
Uh, one, kind of two more little bits, kind of on the legal side.
I know I'm kind of, it's a little bit rambly here, but I mean there's just kind of a lot of detail of stuff happening.
There is a kind of big legal case, Signs v. Kessler.
I've got a link to that in the show notes.
This is essentially this big class action lawsuit against Jason Kessler and then a whole bunch of other figures in the alt-right who are, who did kind of show up to Charlottesville.
So there have been a lot of criminal proceedings.
This is actually a civil proceeding and it is currently ongoing.
Mike Enoch was a named defendant in this.
He is the one person who managed to argue that he should not be a part of this lawsuit.
It did cause a whole lot of stress if you listen to his podcast around the time that this lawsuit was happening.
He was a very unhappy man.
Let's just leave it at that.
But he did manage to argue his way out of it.
You know, a judge agreed that you know, that there was no kind of intentionality or whatever.
I forget exactly what the logic was.
But he gave him some double talk, and he is not subject to it.
But a whole bunch of other figures are.
And there's a link where you can kind of get the full list of them.
I don't have them all in front of me here.
The other thing is this group, the Rise Above Movement.
Sorry, you need to explain what it is, the case, I think.
Oh, yeah, yeah, sure.
So, yeah, this is from the Vox piece, which kind of describes this, the case.
Kind of at the time it was originally kind of brought forth.
And it says, the plaintiffs and Science v. Castle are arguing that the Unite the Right rally wasn't an expression of free speech to get out of hand.
But instead, as lead attorney Roberta Kaplan, who, by the way, was also a lead attorney who argued the gay marriage case before the Supreme Court.
But as lead attorney repotent Roberta Kaplan told me, a direct conspiracy to commit violence.
So essentially what they've done is they've gone through a whole bunch of podcasts and chats and discords and all sorts of stuff and they are trying to kind of argue that while basically the alt-right pretends to be All about, you know, we're just a free speech, pro-white movement, that they are actually a large-scale conspiracy to commit violence.
And that the Unite the Right rally was that what happened was like intended to happen on some level.
And that is still ongoing.
I don't know exactly kind of where the legal status of that is, but Mikey and I did manage to kind of like wriggle out of that.
Richard Spencer is still very much a part of that.
Andrew Anglin is on that.
I think the League of the South is still kind of subject to that.
Cantwell is subject to that.
And, you know, they are all kind of still fighting this protracted legal battle.
And they claim, no, this was all just kind of this free speech thing.
I really don't know what's going to happen once this hits court.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's just going to be some kind of settlement at some point.
Um, but, uh, if this, if this goes forward and if this kind of is successful, um, this will absolutely decimate this entire movement.
They will all be completely broke for the rest of their lives.
So, uh, you know, we can, we can kind of see how this goes.
Um, I mean, the reality of, of sort of legal action, uh, in terms of these guys, uh, and, you know, if you look at the kind of the history of like people suing them and the history of sort of federal prosecutions, uh, this stuff gets really iffy.
There's a whole lot of like shit that the FBI does that, uh, you know, and this, this isn't like an FBI action, but you know, the FBI kind of went after like white, white supremacist groups in the eighties and nineties and, uh, really dropped the ball on a whole bunch of It's a really mixed bag in some complicated ways.
have kind of it's it's a it's a really mixed bag and in some complicated ways even in the the Bundy clan the the you might remember the kind of the takeover the Maliar wildlife River Reserve in Oregon There was court cases around that and they got prosecuted for a lot of that action.
They ended up being in a mistrial.
They ended up not being able to even try the case again.
Because it came out that the FBI was not providing proper discovery motions to the defendants.
They were actually engaging in the kind of conspiracy that these right-wing shitheads like to claim.
It was true!
The FBI was plotting against you and actually using legal actions against you and not playing by the rules they're supposed to.
And it does seem like...
What you just feed into their nonsense you know by by actually being the evil villain that they think you are it's.
So so i'm well you know again the the FBI is a huge not that we need to not that we need to you know like get be on the side of the FBI here certainly i'm never gonna like.
Pretend that I I'm just kind of like a kind of making the point that you know you look at the history of these The way that these kind of legal battles go and it really is difficult to make any kind of prediction at all Yeah, you know I've kind of I've kind of looked into enough of the kind of the history for going back to you know even the 70s and the 80s and you know different kinds of prosecutions and civil actions and the SPLC does a lot of this work and you know some kind of independent groups and and
It really is just kind of a crapshoot in terms of like how this is gonna end and that's kind of maybe why I'm you know just I'm saying this is a thing that's happening.
It's affecting them.
It's costing all of the money.
I have no idea what it's how it's gonna end.
You know it does seem to be a little bit of a kind of a grab bag of a lawsuit to a certain degree.
It does seem like you know this is kind of lawfare activity where you know you just kind of sue people who don't really have the money to fight you long enough and they will Gotcha.
and they will just essentially have to give up.
Which, you know, again, lawfare is a terrible, terrible thing.
It's also been enormously effective at, like, kind of crippling this movement to a large degree.
And, I mean, it's a complicated place to be, you know.
This is just the world we live in.
Totally, yeah.
Yeah.
The only other kind of, like, legal activity I'll mention here is the Rise Above movement.
The Rise Above Movement is a group, there's a real nice piece from ProPublica that I'm going to share for you.
They are essentially a street fighting gang.
trained specifically for street fighting, and they went to a whole bunch of these events during the summer of 2017, including to Unite the Right, and they actually have been kind of named as, you know, kind of like federal, they're in you know, kind of like federal, they're in federal court for crossing state lines to commit a riot, because the way our system works over here in the U.S. is, you know, there are kind of state charges, but anytime you kind of cross state lines to commit some kind of violence,
but anytime you kind of cross state lines to commit some kind of violence, to commit a crime, or you use like a phone line that crosses, you know, And so these men have been charged with that.
And for a while that was a bit of a kind of a call celeb among the alt-right.
It really was kind of something that they were like selling stickers in support of these guys and trying to kind of raise money for the legal fund.
But I haven't seen a whole lot Going on I mean the thing with the the kind of these legal battles is is they take so long that it's difficult to get you know sort of a Movement built around like 17 year olds hanging out in their basements on the internet too long To really kind of like have a have a long-term perspective on how these legal battles go and so you know you kind of get news about it and then it kind of disappears in terms of the public eye for a while and then once they're once they're in court or once there's some sentence that happens and everybody can I moans about it, but I
You know, not a good place for them.
They did commit a whole bunch of violence on that day, and again, I'm not sure exactly where that is in the moment.
I think they are all in jail, or being prosecuted for crimes they committed that day.
But if you do see a reference to RAM, capital R-A-M, or the Rise Above Movement, that's who these kids are.
Right.
And it does seem to be that the prosecutor who's prosecuting that case, and a bunch of the indictments, or a bunch of the information, seems to have come from anti-fascist bloggers.
Basically, anti-fascists gave the federal government this information specifically to go after them.
And then ProPublica, there was this ProPublica piece about them.
The thing got turned into a they then kind of did a nice like kind of coverage of once they were arrested kind of how that went about And a bunch of this information from kind of like journalists and from anti-fascist Researchers did end up kind of actually affecting the way this prosecution happened which of course means that the the Antifa are really just the foot soldiers of the establishment and
working hand-in-hand with the FBI and no one ever charges anti-fascists with any crimes.
That's the version of this you hear from the far right, of course.
Of course, yeah.
Okay, so we've talked a bit about some of the legal consequences that they faced.
We've talked a bit about the deplatforming that started to happen.
Can we talk a bit about the disruption and the optics debate and that stuff?
Sure.
So, These guys are completely obsessed with their image and their branding and this is something that we've kind of discussed the entire time is like what they look like to the public.
It's usually important to them.
After Unite the Right, the entire movement turned into, again, squabbling man-babies arguing over how we're supposed to look in terms of getting our message out to the public better.
And that kind of turns into class divisions, it turns into...
You know just kind of personality conflicts because you know some of them will say well no we shouldn't be like bringing swastika flags to events and if anybody does they shouldn't be allowed to be a part of our thing and then the other guys are like no you're just cucking because you're you know just alongside the Jews and where you know if we don't you know support an openly national socialist position and allow swastikas then like we're not any different than the alt-white that we all hate and so this this becomes this huge Massive debate.
I couldn't even possibly, like, try to tell you the number of hours of, like, people arguing over, like, what kind of shirts they should wear to these events.
Ends up being, like, this hugely important thing.
I mentioned the Daily Stormer and kind of their, like, they were the kind of the edgy, like, the far-edge wing of this kind of movement.
They were the ones who would kind of go there and actually, like, You know, make, like, fairly unironic jokes about, like, putting people in ovens and, you know, hanging people and stuff.
Um, and they ended up basically trying to, you know, rebrand themselves as quote-unquote American nationalists.
Where, you know, it's like, well, everybody's gonna, nobody will kind of realize what we're doing if we just kind of put American flags over everything that we do.
And we kind of rebrand ourselves as almost like a, like a Fox News with just kind of edgy humor.
And if you go to their website now, it's filled with eagles and flags, and they call themselves amnats.
And we're above – we're kind of the higher class version of this.
And then they call anybody who doesn't agree with them.
And I'm going to have to use a little bit of language here.
I apologize.
But they call themselves – they kind of create this term wignat, W-I-G-N-A-T.
And wignat is – and again, I apologize.
Wiggar nationalist, and I think you know what wiggar means.
Perhaps for people who don't.
Sure, it's white n-word essentially.
And basically it's implying – and this term gets thrown around a lot.
Poor white kids from the city or from the suburbs that dress with gold teeth and listen to a bunch of rap music and kind of act like the stereotypical image of that particular racial slur essentially.
that particular racial slur, essentially.
And so that's what a Wigur means.
And so that's what a Wigur means.
And so Wignat is Wigur nationalism, meaning all of these poor, low-class people who nonetheless support a sort of white nationalism but are not part of our more high-class movement that we're trying to build, where we're at the Daily Storm low-class people who nonetheless support a sort of white nationalism but are not It's a really weird pivot that they did.
And I think it's just kind of this ultimate major troll where they were just trying to throw chum in the water and confuse everybody.
There have been a bunch of allegations that they are actively trying to dox people behind the scenes or even further to the right than they are and that they're essentially kind of working with the feds because Andrew Anglin's been hiding from a subpoena for the last two years.
You know, that they are actively trying to dox people behind the scenes or even further to the right than they are.
And that they're essentially kind of working with the feds because Andrew Anglin's been hiding from a subpoena for the last two years.
And this guy, Robert Ray, who's known as Asmodore, who works with the – who's like a writer for The Daily Stormer.
He's the – if you watch the Charlottesville documentary, the Vice documentary, Charlottesville Race and Terror.
He's the older man with the long beard who's kind of sitting in the back of the van being interviewed by El Reeve.
And he goes by Asmodore.
His real name is Robert Ray.
He's an ex-Clan guy.
He's been in this forever.
He's also in the Sean video, which we mentioned last time.
And he has very choice words in all of those places if you go and follow him, which I will not repeat here.
I've already used more language than I necessarily wanted to.
But the idea that the Daily Stormer is trying to distance itself from this far, this openly genocidal message, and trying to rebrand as this pro-America movement, it's just really weird.
And nobody really understands what's going on there.
The big picture there is that nobody really brings Anglin on to their shows anymore, In fact, even second and third tier people who write for these various sites, you don't see them sharing in the same way.
Anglin does occasionally go on the Daily Showa, but he used to be on all the time, and I really don't see him...
I haven't seen him do that in months and months.
And I think, again, that's related to the kind of lawfare and kind of distancing themselves.
I think TRS, The Right Stuff, the show with Mike Enoch, have spent a lot of time basically just distancing themselves from anybody who was not 100% on their side and was not kind of under their thumb.
and taking care of them.
TRS used to syndicate, you know, dozens of shows from various perspectives within this movement.
And, you know, now it's down to kind of, I think, about 10 or 12 that are much more kind of curated, like pushing a particular kind of, like, TRS message.
TRS also used to basically be syndicated on the Daily Stormer.
Their radio feed was essentially the Daily Stormer's radio feed.
They were just kind of working together.
I forget exactly what the incident was that made that not happen, but essentially one day the Stormer just shut that down completely and just removed all those archives.
Just for releasing their own, like, radio shows instead of, you know, syndicating somebody else.
And so, there's a lot of this kind of stuff going on behind the scenes.
We'll talk about Cantwell next week.
He's essentially, like, off in his own little box.
You know, not really talking to anybody, and he used to kind of, like, guest on other people's shows.
He used to do all kinds of stuff, and now he's just kind of doing his own thing.
He still kind of gets guests that come on and some of the lower-level people.
I mean, there is a little bit of, kind of, communication back and forth.
But you really see, you know, everybody kind of gets siloed a lot more, you know, whereas, you know, it was kind of united to a much greater degree before Unite the Right, and now they're all, like, scattering because they're all arguing about optics, and they're all arguing about, like, what's the best way to reach the mainstream with this extreme far-right message?
And, I mean, this is why I really wanted to talk about this incident with the Covington kids at the beginning, because It shows like what they're looking to be able to do is to be able to like manipulate public opinion by having sort of the right message and being kind of able to kind of reach these mainstream outlets in a way that they just can't.
But despite the fact that they think they're very powerful at that, They really can't, like, shape narrative, they can't shape the news cycle in the way that even something like Reason, which is still kind of a fringy website, but in terms of, you know, like, much more than, like, Fox News or, you know, NBC or something, you know, Reason is not like this kind of big publication with, you know, like, a lot of mainstream cred, and yet that is able to sort of push a narrative far more than, like, the alt-right is.
And, um, this, this whole, like, the whole thing that they're trying to do is to be able to get to that point to where they can kind of shape The narrative in their own direction, and that's kind of what this whole optics thing is.
I mean, they really think if they can just put on the right kind of clothes that everybody's just going to accept the need for gas chambers for the Jews.
And it's just the amount of time they spent arguing about it, the amount of infighting that goes on about this is amazing.
It's kind of the eternal debate that goes on, I suppose, inside all Fringe political movements, isn't it?
Because a fringe political movement, by definition, it's full statement of belief.
Is going to look at the very least it's going to look eccentric to the vast majority of people simply by virtue of being a fringe movement and therefore the ideas are very much in a minority and yet at the same time there's the desire to not compromise them.
I sound like I'm being empathic towards them but I kind of understand the dilemma they're in.
No, absolutely.
Part of what I've done...
I'm not trying to be sympathetic to the message, of course, but, you know, just as people, you can certainly, like, well, you've got this certain set of political beliefs and you're kind of locked out of mainstream sources, and you're frustrated by that.
Like, no, I understand.
I'm a socialist.
I get that, you know?
You're producing this horrifying message that I think, you know, is rightfully not accepted by the mainstream, but, I mean, there is a certain degree of...
I get your frustration on this, and they do try to borrow from leftist movements.
They do try to borrow from the leftist organizational tactics and such.
Fascism always does.
It's always parasitic on the left.
It always tries to copy the left.
Always has done.
And yet they fail so hard at it because they don't have the ability to organize, because they can't subsume themselves in a larger structure.
I mean, one thing that you hear, there's this...
There's this guy who's, I think he's Swedish, who kind of guests on some of these American shows.
He's kind of a regular contributor in a couple of different places.
He's been kind of involved in some of the Swedish far-right movements, where there is a certain degree of institutional strength that they have that these guys over in the US don't have.
And he's like, you know, the thing about the alt-right, the thing about the American alt-right is, you know, you guys have this enormous, like, energy, but, like, you know, everybody wants to be a fascist, but nobody wants to take orders.
And, you know, if you want to be a fascist, you gotta take fuckin' orders, guys.
And, you know, we chuckle at that, but it's like, yeah, no, exactly, everybody wants to be on top of this, like, pack of hierarchy, and yet, uh, Again, it's that kind of inherently contradictory thing.
They're dangerous because they can push a message, and they are getting better at pushing a message.
But they lack a mainstream respectability, not because they're wearing the wrong shoes, or they're overweight, or their beards aren't trimmed.
They're wearing glasses or whatever, but they fail to achieve that because people rightfully kind of reject their ideas.
And they think if they can just find the right brand, then people are just going to hop right on to national socialism or to kind of a more open racism.
And I mean it's just not – it's just amazing to listen to them like argue about this as much as they have.
And the fact that real friendships and real organizations, real people working together for a common cause get completely destroyed over this, over this.
Over, you know, like, purity spiraling, over, you know, who's really cucking here, you know?
It's just this...
Astonishing kind of lack of clarity on their part, lack of understanding of how you organize political movements, which doesn't make them less dangerous.
I mean, in some ways it makes them more dangerous because when they get disorganized, then that's kind of where the… Desperation strikes.
I mean, you know, if you look at the Robert Bowers, the man who shot up the Pittsburgh Synagogue last year, his last post to gab was, you know, screw your optics, I'm going in.
People kind of didn't understand what that was, maybe, but that was a very...
That was him saying very clearly as part of this whole conversation, you know, the optics say we're not supposed to go and commit violence because it looks bad and it just sets back the cause, but I am frustrated at the activity that this group is doing enough that, like, I don't care about your optics anymore.
I don't care, like, about how it looks.
And the fact that they literally say, well, we shouldn't go shoot up Cenogeist because it's not effective, It's not like, oh, this is a really horrifying thing to do.
It's like, well, no, I understand.
Of course they're Jews and they're actively working against the nation here and they're subverting everything that's good and holy, etc.
You shouldn't go and kill them because it looks bad, you know, and it makes it harder for us to kind of do.
And again, you hear this kind of over and over again.
And again, it's just this thing that's just, it's this continual debate.
Again, it's kind of died down a little bit just because everybody's just kind of like siloed off in their own little places now and they're not they're not arguing quite as It's less of kind of an active conversation just because, you know, the people who agree on some particular kind of angle on it just sort of like all work together instead of kind of working across those boundaries.
But the fact that that's the thing that kind of happened, that this thing that was supposed to unite the right ended up just fragmenting the whole movement is fitting, I think.
I was thinking about trying to find some audio of these people arguing about this, and trying to find examples of it, but it was just so pervasive for so long, it's hard to find a really good example of it.
But it's definitely something that's real, and I think the big picture is this fragmentation over branding, and this idea of not being able to manipulate the media because they think that if they can just look the right way, then people will just look past it.
They think that, you know, like InfoWars has better optics than, you know, the Daily Show and that's why InfoWars is allowed to be on, you know, kind of mainstream networks, you know, although InfoWars get kicked off.
But, you know, you kind of get the idea that, you know, they're all trying to, like, be the next Tucker Carlson or something, but, like, be more explicit about it.
If only they understood that the reason InfoWars is as big as it is is because it makes a lot of money because Alex Jones is a very skilled entertainer.
Right.
That's essentially why InfoWars is as big as it is.
Alex Jones is very good at playing... I'm not saying he doesn't believe every word he says, I suppose he probably does, but he's very good at playing this character and people find it extremely amusing.
And then he sells merch, you know.
This is why InfoWars is as big as it is.
They're never going to get that big based on listening to these dreary guys have four-hour conversations about the Covington Catholic school kids, you know.
Well, I mean, yeah, and I mean, you know, again, if you kind of listen to something like The Daily Show, I mean, you know, it is, it is, like, meant to be kind of a comedy show, and, you know, they do segments, and they do kind of, you know, they make kind of racist jokes, and that sort of thing, and, you know, it's, they're able to attract this, I guess, I guess this is where I want to leave off, like, they're, they're able, they were able to kind of get to the size that they are by attracting this sort of edgy right-wing kid who is looking for
This kind of unconventional kind of shock jock humor on all racial lines and so by being kind of more extreme.
They were able to kind of get in more and more of these kids who wanted that kind of content but then it really works with people that were already inside the subculture that doesn't it all right.
That's the frame of reference within which this is funny.
Exactly, exactly.
And, you know, so they can't, like, keep building that kind of audience and also sort of pivot to a more, you know, kind of, like, normie-friendly presentation without, you know, kind of losing their edge and, you know, and ultimately all they have is this sort of, like, Manufactured can a racist edge that's that's the whole thing that there that they can build everything on and again this is one of those trying to.
The trying to break into the mainstream what i haven't realized is that they stick only works as a subculture right.
You know, and I mean, there's also just that kind of point like after Trump's election, I think a lot of them really, I mean, there really was this sense of like, yeah, we're six months away from like, you know, the day of the rope guys, you know, and the day of the rope is this, you know, fantasy of, you know, one day, you know, society is going to break down and we as, you know, kind of…
White nationalists and right-wing people are going to hang our enemies from from trees and lampposts and that means you know all of the All the non-white people all the communists, etc, etc, you know all the gay people, you know So that's that's what the day of the rope is But I think a lot of them really there was the sense that like we got Trump in and you know We're gonna we're gonna be like moving, you know, we're gonna their concentration camps are coming like immediately and
And, um, when it didn't happen, I mean, there was this kind of, again, these guys have no, um, you know, kind of perspective on, you know, like, what they're really trying to do and how long it takes to sort of, like, tackle a, a real society.
I mean, again, I'm not in favor of what they're, what they're trying to do, but there's, you know, there is this, you know, Because they're not leftists, they don't have a systemic view of this in a lot of ways.
And their politics isn't grounded in mass movements, or even the idea or the goal of mass movements.
Right.
There are some people who are smarter than this, who do recognise the need for a mass movement.
Some of this, I mean, you know, there are some people who are like smarter than this, you know, who do sort of like recognize the need for kind of a mass movement.
I mean, there is this kind of idea that, you know, if we just.
I guess Unite the Right was kind of an attempt to start to foster that, wasn't it?
Right, exactly.
I mean, and if Unite the Right had kind of gone off the way I think some of them wanted it to, you know, kind of the way that they pretended it was, you know, I think what Unite the Right teaches them is that, you know, while they were very effective online because they could kind of, you know, manipulate social media in particular ways, that they were not ready to actually be a kind of IRL, you know, on the streets movement.
And it's because They just didn't have that kind of organizational ability and partly that's like Kessler is just really bad at this shit.
But partly it's just again the kind of inherent contradiction of a bunch of like teenagers and 20-something kids, you know, putting on white polo shirts and pretending they're like a really authentic movement, you know, and they're not.
They're never really going to be able to organize in that way along that kind of line.
I did want to, there was one more thing that kind of came up as I was, this really fascinating moment, and I think it encapsulates so much of kind of the result of Unite the Right to Me, and it's this piece from GQ, and there's a little bit of video attached, and I really recommend that people go and check out this video, and the title of the piece is Scared White Supremacist Takes Off His Uniform, and if you watch the video, it's a confrontation between this
This kid, this blonde white nationalist kid, and he was at the rally.
He was, you know, kind of isolated, and a bunch of anti-fascists are kind of coming after him.
They're still some distance away.
They don't make contact with him, and he basically, he like stops.
He goes, okay, I'm done.
I'm done.
No more.
He puts down his stuff, whatever he was carrying, like he had a backpack, and he takes off the white polo shirt, and he's like, I'm done.
I'm not, I can't do this anymore.
And the journalist from GQ, the guy with the camera, kind of walks up to him and says, you know, so, so what was that?
What happened there?
And he's like, man, this was, this was just, it's fun to say white power, right?
It's kind of fun to kind of be this, but like, I, I didn't know it was going to be like this.
You know, like the minute he, the minute there was a, like, like a confrontation, the minute that he had to be confronted with, Sort of the reality of putting his ideas out there.
He gave up on it immediately.
I mean, he literally calls Truce.
He takes off the polo.
He's kind of walking through the camera and follows him and is like, so you're going to put the shirt back on?
And the kid's like, you know, it's kind of, it's just this fascinating moment.
I have no idea what happened to this kid.
I mean, he just kind of disappears into the crowd at a certain point.
But, you know, he says, you know, I've been to jail before.
I've been, you know, I've kind of, he's, You get a sense like there's a real kind of history here.
There's something kind of going on in this kid's life that made him kind of join this.
And he's just like, you know, it's just fun to kind of go out there and like, you know, own the libs and fun to kind of like exert your power and kind of call white power and be, you know, be this kind of edgy thing.
But then, you know, when there is kind of any Resistance to that once it's not fun anymore, and they kind of they peel off withdraws I mean so you get a whole bunch of people who are happy to like Shitpost on gab and kind of put out Twitter accounts and go and harass people on the internet But when you start revealing who they are and you know kind of put names and faces there are a whole lot of people who've done a lot of doxxing of these guys and they're all terrified of that now because like what if my mom finds out what if I lose my job at the grocery store, you know and I
You know, again, I know that people have issues with doxxing, and this is something that can be done badly, and it is something that can be put in the wrong directions, but it has been enormously effective at shrinking the ability of these guys to come out and exist in physical space.
I mean, you know, lawfare and doxing are kind of the two, like, really, really effective techniques, and those are kind of the two, you know, ethically questionable, shall we say, techniques.
But, you know, it's amazing work, and, you know, I have a deep respect for people.
I don't dox people, personally, just gonna put that out there.
It's not the work that I do, but there are some really great people who've done a lot of really great work of, you know, You know, if you're if you're going to come out and you're going to you're going to, you know, pretend like you can hide behind, you know, your your your white skin and that white polo shirt and not have to be held to account for, you know, calling for literal genocide, you need to think again.
Yeah, there might there might actually be consequences, which, again, takes you right back to those stupid Covington kids, you know?
Yeah.
You know, there are consequences for this.
And, you know, while it's all online, You can LARP all you want, but you need to take this shit seriously!
Because if you're going to do this, if you're going to be a part of this movement on the streets, you are putting people, whether you have cared to think about this or not, you are putting people in danger, you are putting people in terror.
You know, you cannot just expect to do that and face no consequences for it.
And, you know, thank goodness for these people, these committed anti-fascist activists.
Again, you know, no movement is perfect, etc.
But there's people who make these people afraid to come out on the streets and shout their disgusting, you know, filth and make them afraid of consequences.
And, you know, thank God for these people.
Absolutely.
I mean, I'm 100% on board with, you know, the street-level anti-fascists are the heroes working in American society today.
I am in awe and inspired by, you know, the work that a lot of people do.
And so many people working behind the scenes, so many people doing, you know, informational work, you know.
You know, hanging out and creating Facebook accounts and trying to kind of dig through people's photos and figure out who people are and kind of sharing information and, you know, doing this, like, very thankless work, quite honestly, you know, of just following and just kind of understanding who all these people are.
People, you know, go through hours and hours and hours worth of video and try to, like, just identify faces.
And, you know, it's, again, it's, trawling like thankless work to get this stuff done and people do it you know for free and with with no sense of you know appreciation or obligation no sense of their name is going to kind of get out there with it in fact they they do want to hide because the nazis will come after them you know yeah absolutely that's that's that's the thing that that's the thing that happens you know um and you know like like what you know what i've done i mean even even they don't
they don't like you like they don't like people like me listening to their podcasts They don't like people watching their YouTube channels and saying the things that they're saying and going through their motivations and trying to understand them.
They don't like us paying attention to them.
That really gets at the heart of it, doesn't it?
Because on the one hand, they have this fantasy of breaking into the mainstream and getting their ideas out there and making everybody realize these These do you know supposed truths about the world that they think they figured out and converting everybody and you know and at the same time at the exact same time the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Makes them terrified because they know they don't stand up to it.
Right, and they talk about their need for messaging and branding.
They talk about their optics openly in places where I can hear you talking, guys.
I can listen to all of this.
Most people won't because most people don't want to spend this much time with you, but you're putting this out there for public consumption.
You're just assuming that only your people will listen to it.
And so then when you kind of come forward and you try to kind of pretend to I mean they'll use this term called like hide your power level and what that means is you know You know, hide the things that you really believe and use sort of coded language or dog whistles to sort of like push your agenda, but don't let people know that you're an actual Nazi, basically.
Don't let people know that, you know, and so you say things like, you know, don't you think that, you know, the African-American family is broken and isn't that horrible as opposed to, you know, kind of talking about like, you know, inherent genetic propensity to crime and IQ and that sort of thing.
You know, so, they'll talk about the need to hide their power level, and they'll talk about, like, what terms can we use, and, you know, and then when I find them, you know, using those terms that they themselves said they were gonna use, and then you put that right up next to them talking about how they're gonna hide their ideas and get their stuff in the mainstream, uh, they don't like it when you point that out, you know, but they're doing it publicly, you know, it's not...
It's not a secret, guys.
If you don't want me to be able to hear what you say, maybe you should say it more quietly.
Just walk away from the microphone.
That's all you have to do.
I'll stop paying attention to you.
There you go.
I get so threatened by this.
It's amazing.
I get trolls all the time.
I mean, they will even talk on their podcast about people.
It's not just me, there are other people.
There's a really great blog if you do want daily or regular updates on what's going on day to day.
Angry White Men is a great blog and the Twitter that is at Eyes on the Right.
It's essentially, if you know, We Hunted the Mammoth, it's essentially that but for Overtly white supremacist white nationalist people, you know as opposed to sort of the the larger kind of men's rights activists stuff It's a great resource.
I definitely go check it out.
That's and that's a great Twitter feed as well It's lots of lots of really amusing stuff and a great way to kind of follow this stuff I'm kind of a more day-to-day and what I do is a lot.
I'm I'm just a bad blogger so I just don't like kind of have the ability to do it, you know three times a week and Um, and so I kind of look at a little bit more of the big picture stuff, but that's a great resource if you do want to kind of follow the day-to-day.
So, I don't want to pretend like I'm the only person out there, you know, talking about it, but all I do is, like, tweet about it, and I get these, like, cheds, you know, like, coming after me and, you know, just trying to make me feel bad about myself.
They always say, you know, like, oh, well, if it's a white guy listening to this, you know, and they also assume that there are, like, you know, hundreds of people employed at the SPLC to track this stuff, which, as far as I know, is not true.
If there are, I could use a job, guys.
Like, you know, at least some financial support.
But they will occasionally kind of like call out the people that they know are listening, you know.
They're like, well, if he's a white guy, you know, clearly, I mean, he's just going to be convinced by us eventually.
And it's like, guys, I am several thousand hours into this, and if anything, you have pushed me further to the left, motherfuckers.
In any sense on board with you, I'm opposed to everything that you stand for.
And I think that's the best place to end.
Yeah, because the more they, you know, they want to get their message out there, the more they get their message out there, the more they show people their message and people look at it and they find it just disgusting.
Right.
And you know, you should be thanking me.
I'm talking about you.
I'm, you know, but I'm just going to expose you for who you really are.
And that's what you can't have.
And your optics aren't the problem.
It's your ideas.
Yeah.
That's not what I just said, by the way, is not an argument for platforming these people because platforming alters the dynamic.
But yeah, that's that's that's another topic again.
OK, so I think we're we're done for another episode.
Thanks, Daniel.
And you say the next one's going to be about Campwell.
Yeah, we're going to do at least one on Cantwell, and I will try to figure out some way of organizing this fucker's life for you.
There's so many digressions and so much nonsense here.
He has a long, long history, but I think we're going to have to do two episodes on Cantwell.
We'll figure out how to organize that.
It might be a chat.
I don't know.
I'm still working on that.
I have overtly avoided talking in detail about Cantwell because he's so associated with the Unite the Right Rally.
His piece of this world is so big by himself that I wanted to let him be his own.
Anybody who doesn't know Chris Cantwell is the crying Nazi, and I think that might be the place to start because it's very It's very if you watch that whole video.