I Don't Speak German, Episode 12: 'Fash the Nation' and Donald Trump
Slightly lighter fare this week (everything being relative) as Daniel tells Jack about how the far-right have seen Donald Trump, from the rise of the romance through to the fall, via the fluctuating feelings of the hosts of the 'Fash the Nation' podcast. As always, warnings apply. Us on iTunes * Show Notes: Cantwell banned from Gab Fash the Nation Fash the Nation interviews Tila Tequila Fash the Nation David Duke Fash the Nation Paul Nehlen Jazzhands McFeels on the Radical Agenda in 2015 Enoch, Jazzhands, Allsup, Sven, etc 2018 Midterm coverage Fash the Nation deletes its archives after Enoch/Dunstant doxxing White Hot Takes "Fash the Nation" (To the tune of Human League "Fascination" Svenpai "Right Wing Death Squads" (To the tune of Live "Lightning Crashes." Spencer/Enoch at Syria protest Trump's Far-Right Supporters Turn on Him Over Syria Strike Brad Griffin talks Andrew Yang at the Political Cesspool, 3/23/19 Yang Gang Explained at Rolling Stone
Hello and welcome to episode 12 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which I, Jack Graham, talk to my friend Daniel Harper about what he learned from more than two years of listening to the American far right talk to each other in their online safe spaces, their podcasts, their YouTube videos, etc.
And as I say, this is episode 12, and this week we are going to be talking about The big orange one himself, President Donald Trump, and specifically, more specifically anyway, about how the alt-right see him, and again, more specifically still, through the lens of something called Fash the Nation, which is also going to lead us into a little bit of discussion about how Daniel got into this project in the first place.
But yeah, first of all, hi Daniel.
I understand we do have a little tidbit of Cantwell news, don't we?
There's always more Cantwell news.
There's always, always more Cantwell news.
In this case, Christopher Cantwell got banned from Gab, the free speech Nazi platform.
He actually got kicked off, and he is not very happy about it.
I'd imagine not.
He was pretty much the number one user on the platform, and there's been some bad blood between him and the guy who runs the thing, Andrew Torba, for a little while.
They've had some missteps in the past.
Christopher Cantwell involved in a squabble?
I know.
It's shocking.
Such a mild and moderate man there.
But I would like to say that I – so the Gab kind of official account put out a statement.
about this and um you know basically said you know we're not you know gab is like nazi twitter isn't it it's nazi twitter right um it's a nazis and isis mostly nazis uh any kind of a quote unquote free speech platform uh ends up kind of becoming that uh pretty quickly um it's it's a delightful place to go hang out in No, it's not.
Don't bother.
It's fine.
It's also just sort of like, egregiously poorly run.
Like, none of the features work.
And, you know, it's... Anyway, but Kevin was an actual, like, pro member, meaning he was actually paying them a certain amount per month.
I think it's like 10 bucks a month to use the service and get, you know, some kind of special benefit features.
Anyway... Right.
So, uh, Gab is, uh, you know, has not, uh, sort of, like, released details of, like, exactly why they banned him, but I'm gonna read you the Gab post that he put up and then deleted just before his, uh, profile got deleted, and, um, this should probably tell you why.
Uh-huh.
Um.
I'm pretty sure that it would be against the rules for me to say that would-be mass shooters should find left-wing activists and gun them down instead of random people in mosques and synagogues, so I won't do that.
I really, I just really want these people to shut the fuck up, and that seems like the most obvious and enjoyable way of accomplishing this goal.
Like, if that dude killed 50 Muslims in New Zealand, how much did that change the Islamic influence on New Zealand?
Not much.
But if you killed the 50 loudest leftists in the United States, especially if you didn't get caught, and continued killing, these people would shut their stupid fucking asshole mouths, and that would save a lot of lives.
All these people should be in prison for the crimes they've committed in full view of the public over the last few years.
They bragged about it on Twitter, and everybody knows it.
They should likewise be prosecuted for sedition and treason.
Yeah, fuck you Cantwell.
Laws are not enforced.
Vigilantes emerge.
You don't enforce immigration laws.
People kill immigrants.
You don't enforce sedition, libel, and treason.
People start killing leftists.
It's predictable as the sunrise, and you can't blame me for saying so.
Good riddance, Christopher fucking Cantwell.
Yeah, fuck you, Cantwell.
I mean, I sort of half support that.
Don't go after unarmed people who are just in the mosque to take part in worship.
But that's not what he means, is it?
He's saying go murder leftists.
I mean, he's he's particularly saying go after the anti-fascist to piss me off.
That's that's sort of buried in there.
If you're sort of familiar with Cantwell's rhetoric, that's that's that's really what he's saying is there are particular people who He doesn't like and he would really much rather and and he linked to this video of like this like very mild Comic protest of Tucker Carlson or like people were just like bothering Tucker Tucker Carlson in public He is so enamored with Tucker Carlson.
He is like I think he really He he really thinks Tucker Carlson is the person who is saving the fucking country.
It's it's it's astonishing Anyway, so can't get booted off of gab He thinks one day Tucker will notice him and pick him out of the crowd and...
Take him on stage with him and they'll sing a duet together.
Oh, no, sorry.
I'm getting confused.
I think that's the Bruce Springsteen Courtney Cox video.
I think that's the thing you're thinking.
That's what I'm thinking of.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just you cut through the code.
It just amounts to where where people mean to me and say things I don't like go.
They deserve to die, which I don't know.
That doesn't speak very highly to the man's emotional maturity to me.
No, no.
I've been listening to him continually for a while now.
He is really circling the bowl.
I can't imagine he's going to keep going this way for too much longer.
He's pretty much openly tearing up on his shows lately.
He's just so upset over the state of the world and his life.
I mean, it would be sad if you weren't, like, a fucking violent Nazi, but, you know.
Yeah, there you go.
Okay, so we've caught up with Cantwell, so, which we apparently have to do every week now.
Yeah, it's just a thing, you know, there's always more Cantwell news.
I didn't even cover, like, the big thing that happened.
I mean, we're gonna do a whole episode on, like, that Cantwell drama that was happening for, you know, like, two months, but it's, yeah, no, there's just, there's always more stupid fucking Cantwell shit, so, no.
It's almost like he he you know he actually likes the constant drama but I'm not.
I think he probably does really enjoy the drama and he says you know openly you know that he.
Says deliberately provocative things as a way of like getting people to talk about him.
But he's also like really bad at it and he doesn't like actually reduces his access to platforms where he could spread his message more as opposed to yeah I mean.
There's an art to this chris and he's he's just not that talented also this is this is the deadly trapeze isn't he he does things to attract attention because anything is better than being ignored but every time he does it he reduces his own ability to.
Have any contact with the rest of the world precisely okay which is rather silly stop it chris.
Just stop believing all the silly things you believe as well.
They're silly!
Stop it!
Just stop the whole fucking thing!
Anyway.
We'll return to him at least briefly here later on, but that's fine.
Okay.
Yeah, but on to the main meat of the episode, which, as I say, is Donald Trump and how he's seen by the alt-right, with particular reference to something called Fashion of the Nation.
So, Daniel, tell me about Fashion of the Nation.
Sure.
Facts of the Nation is at least sort of around the time of the 2016 election and into 2017.
That's sort of the peak.
height of the alt-right as this sort of like cohesive thing.
Fascination was alongside the Daily Show, the single biggest thing in the alt-right.
They were getting, you know, somewhere in the order of 100,000 listens per episode, if you can kind of believe anything that they have to say about it, which you can't, but, you know, it does seem to be, you know, it's a reasonable kind of ballpark estimate.
Fascination was then and is now part of the TRS, The Right Stuff, Radio Network, and they are, you know, again, one of the two flagship shows of that.
Um...
The show is hosted, at least it was around that time period, by two people who are kind of old friends of each other, who go by pseudonyms, who have not been doxed to date.
These are definitely the two biggest names in the alt-right who have so far not doxxed themselves at all.
They are very cagey with personal details of themselves.
There's some indication that they have worked in D.C.
on political campaigns or on think tanks of some kind at some point in the past.
We have some very, very sketchy details of their lives, but basically they are very, very careful about what information they do and do not let out into the public.
And so they've remained undocked.
But their pseudonyms, the main guy is named Jazz Hands McFeels, and his co-host is Marcus Halberstram.
And so we'll just kind of call him Halberstram and Jazz Hands for the purposes of this podcast.
Sometime in the middle of last year, they have a third guy who kind of shows up.
Who was originally sort of a caller into one of the paywall shows that they do.
Jazz Hands does the show with Jesse Dunston, who is Sven on The Daily Show.
He does a show called Jazz and Jesse, which is sort of a call-in Discord show.
There was a regular caller who goes by FNark, and he apparently lives in China.
He has also not been doxxed.
And he is probably 10 years older than most of the other people in the movement.
He's probably in his, you know, kind of late 40s, early 50s at this point, at least according to, if any of the sort of vague biographical details that he tells about himself are accurate.
So these three guys kind of make the court of jazz, pardon me, of Fash the Nation, and this is one of those, like a Sunday morning talk show, except, you know, really, really racist.
I first ran across this, and this is where I first started researching this stuff in a real way.
I saw a reference to the name Vash the Nation in a blog comment.
It had to have been on We Hunted the Mammoth because it's the only site that I was really reading any comments on at all around that time.
I'm out of Indian and Tacos.
Those are kind of two blogs I used to read pretty regularly.
I mean, I still read them, but not to the degree that I used to.
But I just kind of saw the name Facts of the Nation, and it sparked curiosity.
What would you talk about on a show called Facts of the Nation?
And so I downloaded it and I started listening to it.
And originally it was kind of like, oh, I'm going to listen to sort of one show once a week and just sort of get like a sense of this and just to kind of like understand what they're saying.
And, well, their theme song, their kind of closing theme music, was a piece of music called Fashionation.
By a group called White Hot Takes, and you can kind of imagine what, you know, what that means.
And it's one of these, we're gonna do a couple lyrics of some racist parody songs today.
At least a little, you know, a little bit just to give you a sense of it.
This one is to the tune of Human League's Fascination, and I've included a link to this so you can go listen to the whole song if you want to.
But the chorus of this song is That's the theme song.
That said, that really doesn't describe the content of their show.
It's just sort of the, like, that's the, that's sort of the meme.
And they used to do a lot more sort of like gas chamber talk and that kind of stuff, but it always seemed sort of Um, meant to, you know, just sort of meant to sort of be in that sort of mean logic that mean world, you know, at least now you can kind of relisten to that stuff.
And they were always much more kind of sober and much more interested in kind of like talking about.
You know kind of deep dive politics talking about like electoralism and you know sort of like how the primaries are going and how the votes are going to be counted and this sort of nitty gritty stuff that like people who are like deep inside the beltway would follow it to that level.
That's probably the clearest evidence that they actually do have you know some political experience some some actual you know professional experience in this regard is just the sort of like.
Just the sort of the level of sort of knowledge of the arcane, you know, stuff that you only get if you sort of work on the inside of that.
Now, I haven't really worked on any of those campaigns, you know, so it could be a snow job on their part, you know, but it sounds pretty, well, it sounds authentic to me, and I've been listening to it for a long time.
In January 2017, or late December 2016, when Mike Enoch and Jesse Sven on The Daily Show were doxxed, which I talked about a little bit in episode 9, Facts of the Nation deleted their entire catalog.
Up to that point and stopped doing shows for about eight months around unite the right they sort of came back and started doing shows again I mean, they just kind of kept up they just like whatever the next number was I think it was like 89 and so All those future episodes are just kind of in one feed So if you so if you go back and you will kind of listen to it now, they all start at like that episode number I think again, I think it is 89
The Internet Archive does have some old episodes available, so you can kind of go back and listen to the old ones if you're so inclined.
It is deeply, deeply fascinating to listen to people who are supposedly knowledgeable about the intricacies of politics take Breitbart seriously as sort of a centrist source.
It is this bizarre alternate universe, and it really helps you understand How this sort of mindset to get spread when you think that like you know fox news is kind of like you know basically on the left.
Yeah so this is like it's sort of it takes a sort of wonkish process focused attitude it's just that it's coming from people who apparently know their stuff but also happen to be.
right-wing extremists who as you say consider fox you know to actually be on the left-ish end of the spectrum and breitbart to be the moderate center right and in a lot of their a lot of these sort of like they've got sort of the factual details down on a lot of stuff you know in terms of like they'll analyze like sort of democratic candidates they'll analyze i mean uh republican candidates i think they definitely put their own spin on it and they have like this like deeply conspiratorial view i mean and this is something that i don't know
it's something that really only became clear to me after i've been listening for a while because it's very easy to just kind of listen to the stuff and just sort of follow kind of be lulled in by it a bit um because they do kind of seem so knowledgeable but then there's always this um like kind of beating heart at the center of their analysis which is that the media itself was sort of the mainstream media apparatus like which you know follows from you know everybody from you know the washington post the new york times the atlantic fox
uh the The Daily Caller, Politico, you know, any kind of like major news source are basically all continually spinning a single narrative and that this narrative is not sort of built out of a sort of materialist conception of like individual reporters and editors kind of making decisions, but making decisions in favor of, you know, certain kinds of systemic problems.
No, it's always the Jews.
The Jews are ...are controlling everything, they're spinning everything their way, and every piece of, like, media is therefore inherently suspect and inherently telling the same story that it is up to the stalwart, brilliant, genius, 250 IQ, Jazz Hands McFeels, and Marcus Halberstram to correctly spin back into a real direction.
It's a frankly bizarre listening experience.
Yeah, it sounds like entering a parallel universe.
It very much feels that way.
I have listened to very nearly every episode since I started listening to it in 2016, and then when they came back, I've listened to... I skipped a couple, but I have listened to very nearly every episode.
It is on my top-to-listen list.
Although sometimes if I get a week behind on it, I'll skip it just because I don't need to listen to them rehash last week's news.
They also do two shows a week now, and their Wednesday show is typically a paywall show, so I don't listen to those because I don't give these people money.
But they do have a website.
You can go check it out.
They have, in the same way that the Daily Show are rebranded as TDS, they are now FTN, and so they don't actually say Facts of the Nation, I guess.
Now they've kind of loosened up on that a little bit, but they will generally just call it FDN.
But you do see, I mean, Jazz Sands McFeels has been retweeted by Ann Coulter at least once or twice.
They do, you know, Jazz is pretty good about getting kind of memes out there and getting messages out there.
He is, you know, kind of invested in, you know, kind of pushing certain kinds of ideas.
He has been banned from Twitter now, so that's nice.
But, yeah, so that's Fash the Nation.
They used to do, just to kind of give you kind of a hint, back before they got, they deleted all their episodes, before they kind of came back, they used to do kind of weekly interviews with people.
It was the first time I ever heard David Duke talk was when Fash the Nation interviewed David Duke.
That's technically not true.
I'm pretty sure I'd seen David Duke on Donahue back in the day.
in a young man's life, you know, like, oh, David Duke just used the word cuck.
That's bizarre.
That's just bizarre.
That's technically not true.
I'm pretty sure I'd seen David Duke on, like, Donahue back in the day.
I mean, I had heard David Duke talk, but it was really bizarre to hear, you know, like, this kind of open, like, clan guy show up at this, you know, show up in this, you know, kind of more modern thing and using the modern terminology.
It's, It's still kind of bizarre that David Duke, you know, where David Duke shows up and where he doesn't show up, but.
I first, uh, but he did do an interview on Fascination when I was listening to it back in, um, I think October of 2016.
Um, if you go way back in the archives, they actually interviewed Tila Tequila.
Now, uh, if you don't remember, Tila Tequila was a, or is, uh, she had a, uh, reality show.
For a while, which was a she is bisexual and so the the hook was it's like a dating show where she's dating both men and women and then she has to choose at the end and all that sort of thing.
It was kind of one of these VH1 celeb reality kind of things.
Teala Tequila also sort of like started.
Some time after her, you know, the kind of height of her fame, she started posting things like, hey, you know, maybe Hitler wasn't all bad.
And she started, like, actually hanging out and there are photos of her, you know, like doing the Roman salute.
Yeah.
And that sort of thing.
This is also around the time that she was dating Billy Corrigan.
And so there are a lot of us who are pretty sure that Billy Corrigan is a Nazi, although he chooses not to speak on those topics, I guess.
So alleged, you know, whatever.
Let's not get Billy Corrigan.
Actually, if Billy Corrigan were to sue us, that would probably really draw up for audience numbers.
So that would be a PR coup of Ken William proportions, really.
What I'm saying is I am certain that Billy Corrigan is actually a Nazi.
I am certain of that, definitely.
I was just going to say, like a lot of these minor celebs who've wandered over to the alt-right side, I know them almost entirely through that.
I have heard of Tila Tequila, but entirely through the fact that she was briefly a bit of a thing on the alt-right.
Yeah, I knew her back when she was Tila Nguyen.
Sorry, I can't really pronounce the Vietnamese name, but she is half Vietnamese, half German, I think.
And if you think, what are a couple of open white supremacists who make gas chamber jokes doing chatting with a half Vietnamese, half German girl and giving her any degree of respect?
I think the answer is she was really, really famous.
Yeah, exactly.
And a gorgeous model.
But like, I knew, I mean, you know, like, I read Playboy in the 90s, like, she showed up a time or two, you know, it's not, you know, I knew her as a model, you know, just in that, in that, like, realm.
And then when she kind of became like kind of the the isa lab and, you know, I think she had like a big MySpace profile and sort of thing.
But like, yeah, she went real Nazi real real quick around 2014.
And it's it's that interview is definitely kind of worth a listen.
If you're so inclined, I do have a link to that.
What you're saying about Tila Tequila is that, you know, her not from the articles.
Right, right.
I know her from the photos.
Yes, I'm aware of her from the photos.
We'll just leave it at that.
We'll try to be polite here.
That interview was actually interesting in terms of talking about the role of women in the alt-right because she describes the process of her
Kind of coming to these ideas as, you know, I had a kid and I felt like I wanted to be protective of my child and I felt like I wanted to, you know, like be able to take my kid to the park and not have there be like heroin needles everywhere and we know what kinds of people use heroin needles in the park, etc, etc, etc.
And that's sort of a narrative you hear kind of over and over again, particularly with Um, women who kind of come to this is, uh, you know, something about like sort of being protective of family and, um, you know, that kind of logic.
And, uh, that was the first time I had ever really heard that perspective in that way.
Um, and then since then I've heard it over and over and over again.
You, you kind of get that same kind of basic story.
Um, But again, they are very, very polite.
You know, they even joke in that interview about, like, you know, well, I mean, it's not like we want all the, you know, all the Chinese people over here.
We don't, you know, they don't use Chinese people, you know.
It's not like we want, you know, well, it's not like we want, like, rice burning to be a thing that's, like, just constantly happening here.
But, you know, we're a small minority.
I mean, as long as you guys stay clean, you know, that's fine.
No, no, no issues there.
And she kind of laughs.
It's sickening.
Yeah, she's, you know, like a lot of these people, you know, she Somebody needs to make them understand that they'll be on the cattle trucks too, you know, if these people ever take charge.
You know, they might be prepared to joke and laugh with you now, but, you know, if it ever comes to it, you'll be in the camps with the rest of us.
Exactly, exactly.
I say that laughing, but I say that with no relish whatsoever, by the way, you know.
No, no, absolutely not.
I think we can be clear on that.
So that's Fascination, and I've got a couple more links here.
You can listen to Jazz Science.
MacPhiel showed up on the Radical Agenda in 2015 in a very early episode of Christopher Cantwell's podcast.
MacPhiel showed up and did an interview, and you can go watch that.
This is back when Cantwell was doing much less overtly fascist but more libertarian stuff.
And it kind of marks a, you know, kind of his interactions with the TRS people mark a very clear kind of shift in his direction.
Like TRS definitely helped to radicalize him and kind of push him further towards the kind of openly fascist ideas.
I've also got a link to an article where this guy Paul Nealon, who was running against Paul Ryan for Paul Ryan's house seat in Ohio, No, Wisconsin.
He was running against Paul Ryan for that seat.
He didn't get particularly anywhere.
But he kind of became this kind of like white nationalist candidate.
He was willing to kind of appear on some of these shows and he really kind of crashed and burned after he read the book, The Culture of Critique, and went really, really hard against the Jews in public.
It got, yeah, once, you know, it's fine if you kind of go on a show called Fashion of the Nation.
I mean, that's just a way to sort of like draw up support for yourself, I guess.
But when you start like actually like naming members, you know, Jewish members of the media and start attacking them, you know, as Jewish people, because you read a very, very awful racist book, Yeah, that was the moment in which he lost any kind of hint of, like, even fringy mainstream respectability.
But there is a piece about him kind of showing up on Fascination saying very nice things about these guys.
So Paul Nealon was a fascist long before he read The Culture of Critique, but The Culture of Critique definitely had the, it did, it does something weird to these guys' brains, and that's something we will do a whole episode on that, on that book, because it comes up.
Over and over and over again.
It is actually more common for people to say they were radicalized by culture of critique than by like Mein Kampf these days.
Well, yeah, I mean, Mein Kampf is, you know, it's kind of a historical interest, isn't it?
Right.
I mean, some of them will say, I read Mein Kampf and it sounded awesome.
You know, I mean, you do hear that, but it's almost always cultural critique is the one that people say, oh, yeah, no, that was the one that really pushed me towards this.
So.
Anyway, and we will do more on that book one episode I've got I've got to reread the book so that I want to reread the book and go through the References and sort of dig out a lot of details and that's just a lot of work So that's why we haven't done that one yet.
That is an important episode It's just that one's gonna take like, you know, 20 hours of work to really do properly and I want to do it properly So yeah, absolutely.
I'm looking forward to that one.
But that's a you know, that's what we need to take our time over I'm a little I'm curious about, I mean, you've covered the basic facts about Fashion of the Nation quite well there.
I'm interested in, you say they talk a lot about process, you know, electoral process and the nuts and bolts of politics and stuff like that.
I mean, do they have like a pro-Republican orientation or do they like assess candidates according to, you know, how closely this particular Republican accords with our views or is that how they do it?
Yeah, no, it's definitely that.
I mean, I think the, and this kind of leads us into, you know, this is what we call a leading question, I suspect.
Jack knows exactly where I'm going with this.
You're revealing my technique, you know.
Yeah, exactly.
This is actually something that, like, a lot of these shows will do is they draw attention to the segues, to the little clever bits that they do to each other.
The Daily Show is, so, they do this often, they actually call it a segue instead of a segue.
They have weird ways of pronouncing various words and, like, once you know that, you can always just... That's interesting.
It's very interesting!
It's a great story.
It's a story.
Sorry, I can do them all day.
We can do it now, parrot fashion, yeah.
But my question, I mean, I hope it does lead us onwards, but my question is a genuine one, you know.
Well, if you look at the sort of the history of, you know, these kinds of movements, they typically are not very invested in traditional electoral politics.
Um, you know, the kind of open white nationalist types that didn't think that both both major parties are just kind of complete failures in terms of, you know, solving any of these problems.
They do prefer Republicans to Democrats in sort of the kind of the modern.
Set up although, you know prior to the Civil Rights Act that would have been kind of switched in the south I mean the Dixie Crads, etc.
Anyway, there's a there's a kind of a complicated history of electoral politics, but they tend to not See electoral politics as their as their solution, you know is sort of the thing that they're interested in and in fact it does sound like Jazz hands and and Haberstram were both sort of outside of they like they didn't vote for a few cycles up to the 2016 cycle and midway through 2015 and a
Certain man came down an escalator and started talking about a wall and immigrants bringing crime and rape etc etc and trolling everybody and they went for Trump in a big way that Trump was one of them to a degree that I think that
No other candidate possibly would have been like they thought that like Jeb Bush like if Jeb Bush had been the Republican nominee there's no reason to bother voting for or against Jeb Bush over Hillary Clinton they're both like sort of equally awful not going to kind of go talk about immigration they're just sort of like corporate toadies and that Trump is this kind of figure who shows up and brings like life into this thing he's also like a guy I mean
This is kind of a complicated thing because, you know, certainly as I've sort of moved further left, I mean, you know, I kind of look at maybe the naivete that I had in 2008 that Obama could actually sort of like do things and change things.
And I was, you know, aware that, you know, electoralism is not necessarily the answer.
But after eight years of Bush, it definitely felt like.
You know, this was a moment that had real potential and something, isn't it?
Right, right.
And, you know, like, certainly I was definitely a, you know, I would have called myself, you know, kind of I would I was definitely a liberal, but I was sort of a progressive liberal, but I was not sort of an anti capitalist.
I was certainly not a socialist at that point in my life.
I just didn't have enough exposure to that sort of idea, and then I've been kind of moved further and further to the left as, you know, as the world has kept burning, right?
You know, like you start seeing the solutions are not necessarily going to come through a, you know, candidate like that.
So, but, you know, for me, you know, so much of what made Obama appealing, I think, to sort of mainstream or sort of progressive Democrats and people who are sort of in my place was, you know, not necessarily a sort of policy perspective, but, you know, he comes out and he's smart and he can, you know, kind of, Um, you know, speaking complete sentences, which George W. Bush could not do.
And, uh, you know, he was African American.
He had a compelling kind of personal story.
And he was just someone that, you know, so many politicians kind of get by on this sort of sense of, you know, they, they sort of sell a version of themselves, uh, you know, as, as a personality, as much as, um, any kind of like strictly strict policy proposal and.
That's just kind of successful political candidates in general.
And so if, you know, my sort of like wonkish 28 year old self responded to Obama, you know, being able to, you know, sort of like, you know, quote, talk the details of health care policy in reasonable ways, and being this sort of like center left person who was willing to speak to the concerns of Republicans while at the same time pushing a, you know, sort of a left leaning agenda, and was talking against the war, etc, etc, etc.
What the alt-right saw in Trump was exactly all of the disgusting stuff that, like, horrifies sort of the pundit class, you know, the cocktail party class, all the stuff of him, you know, well, blood coming out of her wherever, you know, all of the insult, you know, the, you know, the lion Ted and little Marco and all that kind of stuff.
That was exactly the stuff that they just wanted.
Some guy to stand up there and be that avatar and just like tear the system apart from the inside.
Just kind of be this, like, chaos figure who was just gonna, you know, kind of burn it down from the ground.
And I think they would have responded to that personality trait of his, even aside from sort of the policy stuff.
But the fact that he was talking about the wall, the fact that he was talking about, you know, the trade deals being terrible, really sold him to them in a real way.
And I see Trump as this.
I mean, the problems with Donald Trump and sort of the issue with with this man being the president meeting the most powerful person in the world are are very real.
But I also see.
The way that he's sort of catalyzed this, uh, what was even in 2014, this kind of like fringy online subculture, the way that he both kind of bolstered them and then they bolstered him.
And then there really is this, um.
This degree to which they both, both the movement and him played on each other to, you know, their greatest success to, you know, November 8, 2016, when he was, you know, when he won the election.
The alt-right is not a electoral force.
There are not enough of them to actually sort of make up a real voting bloc, even if they all kind of moved into one place.
It's tiny.
It's a tiny, tiny group of people like open white nationalists, but All of that, like, sort of internet work, all of the meme magic they played, all of the, you know, shit they did online, all, you know, they were absolutely able to shift discourse around and sort of force certain kinds of ideas into the mainstream, and then Trump would do things, and then they would push him even further, and there is this very real sense in which this thing was born off of Trump, even though Trump isn't really part of it.
Um, that said, even as Trump sort of they sort of like hitched their wagons to Trump and they they saw him as this as this, you know, almost like legitimately, you know, great white hope kind of kind of figure, um, they increasingly They didn't see him for who he really was.
And this kind of gets into a complicated question, because these guys are always lying all the time, particularly when you're talking about someone like Jazz Hands, who is just a spin artist, and he admits that he's just kind of trolling.
So he kind of puts out narratives and it is kind of like, you know, watching somebody on a Sunday show and saying, well, what do they really believe?
It's like watching Tucker Carlson and say, does he actually believe the shit that he's saying?
Or is this just him sort of like spinning a narrative for a political end?
There's always that question with any of this kind of stuff, particularly when you really don't get to kind of see these guys with their hair down and kind of like when they're talking to each other a little more casually.
I mean, Jazz Hands is very, very controlled in terms of like how he pushes messages.
And he doesn't talk about himself ever.
And so it's really difficult to sort of get a read on it.
But there was this sense in which they really thought that he was going to kind of be the guy who was going to do things.
I mean, if you remember, right after the election, when like all of us on the left were kind of terrified at what Trump was going to do, and you know, we had You know, like Stephen Colbert would go on The Tonight Show or The Late Show and say, it's day eight or whatever, you know, we just had this like kind of impending doom when, you know, for that first 12 or 13 days, there was some new terrible thing that was coming out.
And it really started to feel like this might be sort of this, you know.
That we might see kind of the beginning of an actual dictatorial president those guys were cheering on the entire fucking time this is exactly what they wanted from him and.
They really can't hitch their way to it they really can't believe that he was gonna be that and that he was gonna be able to get all this accomplished and.
When sort of the mechanisms of government kind of stepped in, and when the courts kind of didn't allow him to do things, and he started kind of going off and pouting like a little baby, they kept telling themselves over and over and over again, this is like 88-dimensional chess, this is, you know, some move that he's got, this is always this thing, and they didn't believe the reports in the mainstream media, like that when, you know, pieces come out in the Washington Post, or the New York Times, or Politico, or the Atlantic,
Um, and this very consistent, constant, like, kind of drumbeat that this guy is basically a fool, that he has no understanding of anything that's going on, that he believes the last thing that, you know, the last thing that someone says to him in a room, you get him to make a decision by just being the last person to talk to him, and that's just kind of where he goes.
That he's watching, you know, Fox and Friends in the morning and that he's getting his, like, talking points from there.
They never believed that.
They always thought, oh, that's just the lying media, that's the lying media, that's the whole, you know, and they spent two fucking years over and over and over again believing this and believing that, like, all the- they believed all the things they wanted to believe out of his mutually contradictory word salad of speeches and then just kind of ignored the rest.
And finally, about two weeks ago, I heard my keynote on the show.
I go, you know all those things where they said, like, he really just believes the last person that talked to him?
Maybe all that's true!
And it's like, no fucking shit!
Holy God, man!
Yes!
That has been, like, completely consistent.
This man is not, like, you know, this genius, you know, political operator.
He's, he's... Oh my God.
It's just starting to penetrate now.
Jesus Christ.
There are different figures that have been on and off the Trump train over the years.
The first time that you really saw this break was, I believe, April of 2017, when Trump fired 59 missiles into Syria.
Richard Spencer broke down in tears on camera over this.
Yeah, I remember.
Was it Cernovich had a total freakout session on Twitter?
They all.
I mean, yeah, I'm sure Cernovich did.
I don't follow Cernovich closely, but there are plenty of these figures.
I mean, you know, and listening to it in my headphones and kind of watching the YouTube videos and stuff, they, I mean, that was a moment when they almost all broke ranks with Trump just because he did.
I mean, this, I mean, this is what the imperial presidency does, guys.
Like, come on, what are you talking about, you know?
And they they took like that like super 100% seriously like that was a betrayal of everything that you know that that was this thing and yet they ignore the sort of bigger picture that you know Trump is
Basically let the let the air war loose over the Middle East that there's more tonnage being dropped in Afghanistan now than ever during the last 16 years that the things have gotten worse and worse and worse but like it's not because it's not like being reported on in sort of the big News organizations because it's not part of the quote-unquote narrative.
It's sort of outside their view.
And so these guys are both sort of these sophisticated Political observers who are aware of, you know, the sort of the nitty gritty of like sort of how politics is done and yet they because of this kind of baseline conspiratorial thinking that.
You know there's got to be like some small group secretly controlling all of this from from the from the from the behind the lines.
Suddenly it all just it has to be like you know that you can like track the that you can track the lies from you know just the headlines and that you know whatever story we're being told has got to be false and because they're absorbing their news through you know these incredibly Just outright lying right wing sources.
They don't have any kind of ability to sort of calibrate their views on this stuff and you're right.
It is this very strange alternate universe to sit and listen to these guys who are obviously really bright guys who really like no things that like.
You know, if we got them to our side, they would be really effective, you know, on political actors.
And yet, because they're, like, involved in this fetid swamp of, like, disinformation and bullshit, they've completely, like, kind of lost the chain.
They're off in fantasyland, you know?
Yeah.
It's a real case of, uh, who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes, isn't it?
As great Richard Pryor once put it.
I suppose the ones that couldn't, uh, you know couldn't get past the idea that it was 88 dimensional chess they're the people that fell into the q anon thing aren't they well q anon is sort of a um a different thing um from my understanding and i'm not an expert on q anon um i do i do kind of talk to people who follow q anon
I see QAnon, because when the Q stuff first started coming out, now there are some people who are sort of like, oh, this is interesting, this is like a thing, it seems...
But the whole thing with QAnon was that the Mueller investigation was ultimately against Hillary Clinton and was – again, that Mueller and Trump are sort of like working together to bring down the deep state.
Like that's sort of the central organizing mythos of Q.
And that narrative doesn't serve the purposes of the dissident right, the alt-right.
It doesn't serve their interests because they want Mueller to be an enemy that needs to be kind of taken down by Trump.
They want Trump to sort of be unheralded, unrestrained dictator who's going to fight for the white race or whatever.
And so the Q stuff is much more sort of like that kind of older school, baby boomer, you know kind of kind of uh political activity it's much more sort of like trump can do no wrong kind of stuff and let me be clear these guys were always critical of trump when he wasn't kind of doing the things they wanted anything that trump did that had any kind of like positive news for israel for instance was just they were they gritted their teeth at that um
oh they're um they're anti-israel are they yeah they are they are A lot of these people are very pro-Israel.
I mean, obviously, within the confines of being anti-Semites.
Well, it's more like Trump doing things that are sort of like getting invested, like moving the embassy to Jerusalem, for instance.
That's kind of it.
Anything that like Trump like wearing a yarmulke and going to the wailing wall and praying like, you know, or anything like that.
Just they see that as, you know, again, the Jews are in control of the U.S.
government.
And so it's Trump genuflecting to this power and not standing up to it properly and like, you know.
Ian kind of always had this line, you can't be in real estate in New York City and not be J-Woke, man.
He's got to know the things that we know.
And yet, why does he do this?
Why did he give his daughter to a Jew?
They would spin these elaborate theories about why this had to be the case.
And the reality is, no, you're completely fucking stupid.
Your complete conception of reality is just wrong.
It's just fucking heads.
Yeah.
I suppose QAnon was more a sort of parallel version of the same sort of thing.
Right, right.
QAnon, there are some kind of figures in the alt-right who seem to sort of take it like, seem to sort of do a thing with QAnon where they're interested in it, although they don't kind of buy it completely, but the people who are really invested in QAnon are not the sort of white nationalist far right, or at least not some of the major figures.
No, fair enough.
So I will, I will mention that one of the kind of constant refrains on, um, you know, Fascination, one of Jazz Hands McFeel's, uh, favorite, uh, things is, uh, any, anything that Trump is doing that's bad, that they don't like, um, that's ultimately Jerry Kushner's fault, um, because Jerry Kushner is Jewish, obviously, you know.
Uh-huh.
There's all, anything that's like bad for, any news story that was kind of bad for Jerry Kushner, they would like chortle over her, you know.
Any time that Donald Trump was disrespectful to Jared, they basically pulled out their dicks and started stroking it right there on the microphone.
They had this fantasy that like anytime that like the Syria airstrike I think this was a jazz hands thing that it was Ivanka had brought him had seen like photos of like starving Syrian children or whatever and like like victims of Assad and had let gone crying into daddy's lap and that was the reason
And it's like, you know, because Jason was as deeply misogynistic as all of these fucking people are, but, you know, he kept doing this line like, you know, oh daddy, buy me a pony, Ivanka.
That was sort of the line that he always had about Ivanka.
What a fucking planet!
That Ivanka Trump is the person who, you know, like, calls the Syrian... on no evidence!
No, they're just making it up, you know?
Yeah, it sounds right to them, it must be true.
The idea of Ivanka Trump ever doing anything for another human being out of compassion, the idea of Trump, the whole idea of Trump as like, you know, this champion of the white race, he doesn't give a fuck about the white race, that doesn't make him any less of a right-wing proto-fascist, but he doesn't care about, you know, his race or his civilization or whatever bullshit you want to project on.
The idea of Trump ever putting himself out even a tiny bit for anybody other than himself, it's just What are you talking about?
Why is he giving his daughter to a Jew?
Why can't you see the plain obvious truth that this is a family business of capitalist grifter gangsters?
And I think it partly it's they just wanted it to be true so hard.
They wanted it to be the thing they wanted.
And so like there is this sort of like getting high on your own supply a little bit where they just sort of like bought into it because they were spinning it already and they just needed it.
They just they just needed it to be true and they wanted that support and they sort of the God Emperor Trump memes.
They wanted it.
To be real, and like as it sort of increasingly became not real, and then occasionally Trump would like put out that tweet about white genocide in South Africa, and they would be right back on the train again, or he would insult somebody they didn't like, and he, they would, I mean, they kind of, they've been going back and forth and back and forth, and they, you know, James Edwards at the political cesspool, like he, he, he raided Trump, and I think he gave him like a C-minus, like, he's going out there, and he's kind of talking on white issues.
I mean, James Edwards constantly says, I wish we had, Candidate Trump in office instead of, you know, President Trump.
The candidate Trump was much more aggressive on this stuff.
It's like, he told you what you wanted to hear!
That's just the thing!
I mean, it's just like, and these people get paid to do this shit, you know what I mean?
It's just, it's silly.
A bunch of children, you know, going, I do, I do, I do believe in fairies.
I mean there's another just kind of bit of the bit of music I'll kind of read a couple of Verses from this kind of gives you a sense of you know kind of how the memes How the you know how the sort of quote-unquote comedy and how the memes and how this this whole?
Sort of thing worked is this a song right-wing death squads, and this is written by Jesse Dunstan under the names of NPI and Um, and this is to the tune of, uh, Live's Lightning Crashes.
I'm not gonna sing it, I'm just gonna give you the lyrics here, you know, but, you know.
And so, when I say right-wing death squads, that's to the, like, that's to, you know, lightning crashes.
It's right-wing death squads, anyway.
So, right-wing death squads, the new Trump and Reich, wall construction crews head south.
I can make America great again.
Banning Muslims.
Sending back Mexicans.
Building walls and making them pay for it.
They have to go back.
And so you can see they're using Trump's campaign rhetoric in this even more extreme far-right Nazi ideology, and then they're making it into a joke.
And this is, you know, they played that song for the first time at the first of the TR WrestleMania live shows, which is kind of a big hangout for the sort of like big-time supporters, you know, the people that they kind of knew personally.
And you know Sven played that song from the stage, and then he did like kind of a nice recorded version nice recorded version He's a professional musician.
We'll just kind of leave it at that But I did include a link to that if you want to listen to the full thing It's got the version I shared does have a bunch of memes from that era You know like kind of the God Emperor Trump stuff and including a PewDiePie photo in a military garb you know gunning down people so Go check that out, if you want to kind of throw up a little in your mouth.
If you want to be sick, yeah.
Interestingly, the thing that seems to have really sort of like turned them off of this completely was the fact that the wall has not been built.
He hasn't even really started building the wall in their eyes.
It's all just sort of rhetoric, and of course he was never going to build the fucking wall.
It's like it was never ever going to happen.
The practical Just the sheer practical things that get in the way of being able to build a 2,000-mile fucking border wall on the southern U.S.
border, it's nonsense to think that that was ever going to actually really happen.
But they believed it was going to happen, and they are very, very mad at him for not accomplishing this thing.
For not delivering.
For not delivering the impossible thing.
But so, the government shut down.
The, like, 30-what?
35-day government shutdown?
He shut down the government for 35 days, and then when the air traffic controllers said, yeah, we're not going to work anymore, and the entire fucking, you know, economic system of the United States was about to, you know, crumble, And he blinked, and they thought that was a really terrible thing.
They were completely willing to let the entire system just crash and burn, let anything, any sort of positives from the US government would, Be, uh, you know, it's fine for all of that to go by the wayside and for wall funding.
It's eventually, you know, the, the Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, these, these terrible, terrible people who are kind of terrible people, but you know, not for the reasons that they think they are, you know, Chuck Schumer is like very, very Jewish, obviously.
Um, and, and so they are Chuck Schumer, you know, they always kind of do it in that, that kind of voice, but, The idea that Trump blinked to them was sort of a big, um, a big kind of eye-opening moment for them.
Yeah.
That Trump wasn't going to give them the thing.
And then the fact that he sort of, like, signed the continuing resolution.
Like, he essentially sort of gave up even trying to shut the government down again.
Because they were really down for, oh yeah, no, give it two weeks and then shut it down again.
Just keep shutting it down until they give you your fucking wall money, Donald.
Like, that's exactly what they wanted.
Fascination jazz hands in the sky F dark went through like they found this like weird provision in the code and like the legal code that allowed for They have like three separate like legal scenarios that allowed Trump to basically do whatever he wanted in terms of like getting money for the wall based on like like they spun their wheels on this over and over and over again finding these kind of
You know, legalisms that, like, I'm assuming have no actual validity to anyone who understands anything about how, like, federal legislation works, but the hours and hours of this stuff, of, like, talking about and pushing this into this idea, and when Trump, like, just didn't, just kind of gave up on it in early 2018, 2019, even though he's talking about it and he's not doing it, and they've kind of That was a real kind of breaking moment for them.
The thing that really did it, though, was at the State of the Union after Ilhan Omar's – after the – how shall we put this kindly?
After a few news cycles of Republicans calling Ilhan Omar anti-Semitic, And using her as the punching bag at the State of the Union address, Donald Trump talked a lot about how bad the Holocaust was and brought on a Holocaust survivor and as a way of sort of saying, no, the Democrats are the real anti-Semites.
And that seems to be the real moment.
Like, that's the real thing.
Do where you can you can shit on us you can not give us a wall you want say the holocaust is a real motherfucker and we will burn you alive that is exactly at the moment which they just they just they just have what they lost it.
Too much yeah exactly and.
Yeah, now they're doing this thing, I don't know if you've seen any of this online, the Yang Gang stuff?
Nope.
So, Andrew Yang is a Democratic political candidate, he is kind of a... I've heard the name, but... Sure, so you have no reason to know who this guy is unless you're either kind of following American politics in kind of Democratic primary very closely, or if you're like some alt-right dickhead.
Or if you follow alt-right dickheads, then you know who he is very well.
Andrew Yang is a Chinese-American, kind of former entrepreneur.
He's kind of worked in the NGO sector quite a bit.
He announced he was going to run for president, didn't he?
He has announced he's running for president, and he's pushing a universal basic income Is kind of a plank of a signature issue $1,000 a month to every American over the age of 18 Um, and, uh, he said nice things about white people dying of, like, the opioid epidemic in, uh, uh, in, like, West Virginia.
Like, he, he, he made mention of that on Tucker Carlson's show, because he, like, early in his sort of, like, run, he, he went on Tucker Carlson, and he went on Joe Rogan, and he, like, talked to those issues, and that's something they've been wanting Trump to say explicitly.
They just want Trump to say white people explicitly.
It's not enough to, like, Be the standard Republican.
Be the standard, like, American political candidate who only cares about the needs of white people.
Implicitly, not enough.
He has to actually say white people and, like, treat them as a group, quote-unquote.
And the fact that he never really did that, or he hasn't done it to date, you know, is kind of a big lack of a selling point.
You know, it's one of the things I've been most frustrated with Trump over.
And then when this guy Andrew Yang, despite the fact that he's not white, This is now tearing the movement apart from the inside between the, like, pro-Yang and, like, anti-Yang, he's not white crowd.
Um, but, uh, Yang Gang, if you go to hashtag Yang Gang, you will find all of the energy that they put into electing Trump in 2015 and 2016, they're kind of putting it all towards Yang right now.
Um, I listened to an interview today with this guy, uh, Brad Griffin, on the political cesspool.
He did, like, a full hour on, like, you know, Actually we hear like we are like populist right where white nationalist and we're kind of in the middle of the political spectrum because we're not as far left as like the AOC like socialist people like we want to have like sort of this like, you know, private enterprise and free speech on that sort of thing, but we also want.
Like, we're not anti-white, quote-unquote.
We're not, like, you know, that kind of, you know, but we're also, like, not, like, super, super pro-capitalism.
We want, so, he's trying to push it as, you know, the alt-right, this dissident right, the white nationalism is really the center of the American political spectrum, and we're gonna see how well that works out for him, but, man, I listened to him talk about it for an hour today.
Brad Griffin is vaguely pro-slavery.
You are not at the center of American political discourse, you fucking dickhead.
Brad Griffin, I'm just going to remind you, was sort of the central guy who kind of built up the, like, Heather Heyer was a fat pig who died of a heart attack next to a car accident.
He was the one pushing that more than anyone else.
Brad Griffin, you are awful, awful, awful human being.
And, um, yeah.
It's hard for me to pick someone that I hate more in this movement than Brad Griffin.
I mean, there are a few, but Brad Griffin is way, way up there in terms of, I just find him just repugnant on, like, on a visceral level.
But yeah, no, he's a moderate centrist, you know, because he feels like he is.
So obviously he must be.
So then you work out how and why he's a centrist and other people to either side of him from that basic premise.
You know, you start from the assumption that he's a centrist and then everything else flows from that.
And that's how they reason politically.
Exactly.
And there is a bit to where I think he is trying to meme it and he is just trying to kind of push that and he's trying to, you know, they're trying to, they spend so much time, and this isn't necessarily just Brad Griffin, it's, you know, Enoch is on this all the time and saying, like, I, you know, we're just normal, ordinary, like, people.
We're just working class white people and we just believe what other working class white people believe in.
You know, honestly, if you spend time in sort of like, you know, vaguely conservative Facebook groups and stuff, if you spend time in sort of the, not even the MAGA stuff, but just kind of libertarian, kind of like, not the kind of overtly Nazi shit that I follow,
But if you just kind of like have like, you know, relatives who might come from the state that I'm from, and you sort of poke in at their profiles every now and then, you can find like really, really violent far-right stuff like just underneath the surface.
Like, they won't say, oh, we want to kill all the like brown people.
They'll say all the illegals need to be gotten out of this country.
They'll say, you know, oh, all those like Thugs with their, you know, like, pants around their ankles and the, you know, the 40s in the pockets and all that sort of thing.
They will, they'll swear up and down, oh, we're not racist because, like, oh, I've got a black friend.
And the whole of the alt-right, the whole of this, like, white nationalist thing is, like, not understanding that, that...
They just they wanted to be more explicit than that that's their entire fucking argument you know it's the whole thing.
It really is all about just what they want to hear isn't it like you just been describing their process of.
Enrapturment and then disillusionment with trump and it's based on he's saying things that that service their emotions and you know and then he stops and he says the wrong thing suddenly he says something that's a that's a that's a deal breaker you know he says that the holocaust was real and that that that can't be born you know that's too much they they they they hate hearing that so much now they hate him
And then this other guy comes along and he says something about white people because they just want to they just want to hear somebody talk about white people and it's it's just it's just validation that's really all they're after they're after personal validation of their feelings of resentment and fear and sadism.
And stuff like that.
No, absolutely.
I mean, it's just, you know, they spend so much time spinning their wheels and doing this sort of, like, pseudo-intellectual justification of this stuff, and it really is just like, does a baby need a bottle?
Like, do you just, do you just, do you just, and like, I, I... It's their baby!
Talking about the... I don't want to infantilize these guys, okay?
And I don't want to, um...
There's a difference between the people who are at the top of these movements, who I think are, like, to some degree know that they're just outwardly lying about certain things.
Yeah.
The dividing line between self-serving cynicism and just outright lying grifterism is very fuzzy, isn't it?
Right.
But there are a lot of people sort of at the bottom end who are the consumers of this stuff, who listen to this stuff, who do feel
Isolated who do feel alienated who lost a job or had to drop out of school or who you know a lot of them do have you know drug problems or alcohol problems and then you know that leads to sort of an and these guys are giving them this answer you know it's not like capitalism that's the problem is not you know austerity culture is not you know toxic masculinity and you know that's what it's it's it's the immigrants is the jews it's the it's the gay people it's trans people don't they make you feel a key.
You know, and it's all these other things that are, you know, tempting scapegoats and tie in with pre existing xenophobic and authoritarian attitudes that they've exactly got.
And, you know, it becomes, you know, not.
I've seen you and because in a lot of ways you know this sort of like simmering resentment and rage in this sort of like desire to like you know this like open support of like the death penalty for like these i mean i have seen people like people i considered friends in my late twenties who you know we worked at like retail stores together who would say like well i just think you should just like anybody who steals something you should just cut their hands off that's what they do in the middle east it's like whoa whoa.
But, like, this is, you know, perfectly nice polite guy, like, no, just, just, but, believe, yeah, no, this is just what should happen.
And when that kind of cruelty is just sort of built into your political culture, um, you know, fascism isn't far behind.
And it's so difficult because the thing that I'm doing is trying to follow the details of this pseudo-intellectual rhetorical movement and trying to figure out how to prevent this radicalization and trying to inform people about it.
But there's this much, much larger thing just beneath the surface, and that's just mainstream conservatism at this point.
Well, it's not even – I mean, to be fair, it's not even limited to conservatism.
Oh, no, no.
Sorry.
I'm kind of taking the sort of the Fox News viewing audiences like, yes, that's the sort of central problem.
That's where it's concentrated.
But it's certainly – it's built into just this kind of basic white supremacist culture ultimately.
I mean you were talking earlier about you know certain things are just inevitabilities with president with the imperial presidency and certain things are just inevitabilities in the imperial society you know and and we're talking about a society that is.
Structured at its most basic level at its most at its most basic economic level it structured along lines of imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy so it generates these attitudes and they become very widespread and then it becomes very easy for somebody to come along and exacerbate them and play upon them.
Exactly.
I mean, it's, it's, it's so just sort of endemic and built in that it's, it's, it just becomes this like huge lurking problem.
And, you know, that's never going to be solved by just like electing the right candidate.
It has to be cultural.
It has to be, it has to be something that we're, that, that we learn to see each other as, as, you know, equals again.
And we, we learn to confront the, Horrifying nature of our past and atone for it and you know become active anti-racist active anti-capitalists and that's just actually seek redress, you know redistribution equality justice At the most basic economic level of society That's how you and that's that's the beginning of the long slow process of actually addressing this I think I absolutely agree and
I mean, it's just, you know, following this stuff and sort of seeing and, you know, you feel like it's great when, you know, these guys squabble in there and like less able to get their kind of messages out there.
But there's just so much is just buried beneath the surface.
I mean, the Christchurch massacre, you know, I've been obviously they've been talking about it.
So I've been listening to them talk about it for the last week and a half now.
And the standard issue response, and this is not just like sort of the Nazi response, this is like Sean Hannity's response to this shit, is, you know, well, look at this other time, you know, like just a few days before that there was this group of 120 Christians that were murdered by, you know, black people in Nigeria.
And like isn't that ultimately and and you know the the mainstream conservatives guys will kind of talk about this as you know.
Oh, this is this is you know the story you're not hearing that they're kind of focusing on this on this like kind of sectarian thing that that a white nationalist did because they can pin it to Trump, but the kind of overt Nazis are saying like this kind of you know.
Um, conflict is just going to happen naturally and that we have to like separate, you know, the races so that you don't have this kind of thing happen.
And look, all of those things are tragedies.
I'm not, I'm not, but, but you're comparing two very, very different things, which is like this overt, like white nationalist guy walking into a mosque and murdering 50 people because For the lulls and because he's been like fed this bullshit about like, you know, these are invaders coming to like destroy the white birth rates versus what looks like when she looked at the details.
I mean, this is like border violence between.
You know, groups of nomadic tribes and farmers, and these kind of atrocities have gone back and forth for many years now, and that much of this is also caused by the vestiges of colonialism, which is that long ago in Nigeria.
Plus, if we're going to start counting all the violence that any person of one color does to a person of another color, let's talk about American imperialism and how many bombs we still drop on Afghanistan and how many people are being murdered every day for that.
And again, all of this context, just to bring it back home, and I'm sorry to kind of bring that topic up again, but all of this context gets lost because ultimately it's all about the narrative.
It's all about this sort of political move.
It's all about what's the top story in the headlines today, and what's it going to be tomorrow, and how do we spin this?
And it's just this like disgusting thing that's just sort of built into this subculture of just as built into just sort of the way we consume news.
It's sort of built into the way we seem to absorb this stuff these days.
And it's just it's really depressing to me that that like that's the that that's the thing and that then that we're scoring political points based on this stuff instead of looking at the stuff that really matters to our lives.
And, you know, Sean Hannity and people like him don't give a shit about a massacre happening in Africa at any point other than when they need to, you know, pull one out of their hat to make some disingenuous point about the media being unfair.
And I'm not even going to say that they're entirely wrong about the media.
The media do concentrate too much on Trump because, you know, there's an aspect of social and cultural liberalism, centrist liberalism in the proper sense of the word liberal, not the way they use it.
You know, in the media that does sort of overhype Trump and look upon him as an overly, you know, overstress him as an unusual thing, you know, and they do.
Yeah, there's even the grain of truth to that.
But the thing is, that's, you know, if you're going to start complaining about them unfairly picking on Trump, the next move is to say, well, why don't the media talk constantly about the abuses of American power and the American empire around the world?
Why do you know it's true they they they go after trump for things in a way that they didn't used to go after obama to an extent that's true but the thing there isn't to say all will you know trump's being unfairly treated the thing there is to say that overall on balance.
The american political establishment imperial establishment is absurdly constantly love the hook.
And you can extend the same view to the entirety of the capitalist system.
Yeah, Trump is getting an awful lot of attention for his manifestly criminal, dodgy business dealings.
Yeah, absolutely.
The thing there isn't to say, oh, it's unfair that they're picking on him.
The thing is to say, why isn't the fact that this is rampant throughout the entire system, Why isn't that the story as a matter of course and then of course that leads you into the real problems with the media system and that's not that the jews control it i show you.
I mean i think they constantly harp on about like the jews have disproportionate influence and you know american media it's like so.
So your issue isn't that there are billionaires controlling the news sources and spinning things in their direction.
You're only concerned with the X percentage of them that are Jewish.
Let's talk about the power of billionaires over all of our lives, and I'll bet we could come to some agreements here.
But no, it has to be this deep conspiracy.
It has to be this thing that has this ethnic You know, background that, you know, that's kind of driven by, you know, ethnic concerns and it's like millennia back and you scratch the surface of these guys and you find this conspiracy.
We're going to have to do a whole episode on like the Jewish question down the line a ways because that gets like really, really uncomfortable very quickly.
Um, but like it's, it's, you know, it's, it's deeply, deeply fucked up and, uh, yeah.
They don't want to, they don't want to talk about how the media is, you know, a branch of corporate America and how it, it manufactures consent to coin a phrase for the, for the capitalist imperialist system.
I think there might be a book, right?
Yeah, I think I've heard that somewhere.
I've heard that somewhere, yeah.
Yeah.
They want to talk about how it's unfair that the media, you know, um, Talks too much about racism and normalizes immigration, because it's run by the Jews, because they're trying to bring brown people in to replace you.
That's the bullshit spin they want to put on it.
They don't want to talk about the actual problems with it.
Exactly.
All right.
I feel like that's how the alt-right feels about Donald Trump, and I think that's an interesting episode.
I hope people enjoyed that one.
Yeah, I enjoyed talking about that.
So, do you know what we're doing next time?
Well, I've got a guest lined up that we might be talking to next time about the Proud Boys and Gavin McInnes.
If that doesn't turn up, or if there's some issue with that, then we'll do an ordinary episode.
See, my thing is always to like find the like really interesting little technical tidbits that like and kind of do the rabbit hole deep dives on this stuff because that's kind of interesting to me, but I'm aware as this podcast gets bigger that people need sort of primers on.
Some of the basics just as well.
And so I think I would like to do an episode on the red pill on what that means and what that means within the movement and sort of the various ways that people get drawn into this stuff.
And so we'll do one of those two things next week.
Right.
Yeah, so I may or may not, if we do have an episode with a guest, I may or may not be on that.
It depends if I have other stuff to do and if I'm even needed, but that'll be interesting.
And yeah, certainly, Pumped to do a red pill episode and I've been I've been chatting with some with some people who I think Would love to come on the show and talk about things that you know Because there are a lot of things where I feel like I'm just not confident to talk about the proud boys to the local detail that I'd like to be able to but I know people who are so That would be really great.
Let's hope that happens if you want to Get in touch with us.
My best way to do that is on Twitter.
My Twitter is at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore Daniel is at Daniel E Harper.
Get in touch, tell us things, ask us things, please do.
You will find links to our various, I'm using the word things too much, but our various things there as well, including our Patreons.
Hint, hint.
I do feel guilty about like pumping for money too often, but you know there are costs associated with doing this podcast, so you know.
Yeah, but thank you so much.
I have gotten some some new patreon donors in the last week or so Thank you all very much.
I do appreciate it and believe me this this this podcast will always be free if I have anything to say about it, so Likewise, okay.
