I Don't Speak German, Episode 13: Gavin McInnes and The Proud Boys
Special episode this week. Daniel has a special guest, Samantha Kutner, self-described 'Proud Boy whisperer' to talk about Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys. (Jack gets out of the way to let the grown-ups talk.) Warnings apply, as always. * Show Notes: Things Gavin McInnes has Written for Taki Mag https://www.takimag.com/article/the_west_is_history_gavin_mcinnes/ https://www.takimag.com/article/pretending_to_care_about_nazis_gavin_mcinnes/ https://www.takimag.com/article/a_dozen_unlikely_assholes_gavin_mcinnes/ https://www.takimag.com/article/the_importance_of_hatred_gavin_mcinnes/ https://www.takimag.com/article/the_importance_of_hatred_gavin_mcinnes/2/ https://www.takimag.com/article/storm_troopers_gavin_mcinnes/ https://www.takimag.com/article/wonder_woman_makes_you_wonder_about_women_gavin_mcinnes/ Gavin McInnes citing the '14 words' (with "western" replacing "white") Proud Boys as a Radicalization Vector (His Threats are echoed in articles below) https://officialproudboys.com/proud-boys/fighting-media-academics/ https://notvice.com/gavin-white-supremacy-article-agreement-page-160a4b5c9037 Islamberg Conspiracy Theory https://twitter.com/jjmacnab/status/1105884338174881792 Proud Boys Articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Boys https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/inside-miami-alt-right-and-proud-boys-chapter-10945821 https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-proud-boys-became-roger-stones-personal-army-6 * What You Can Do Get Involved With Light Upon Light & CTRL-ALT-DEL-HATE Campaign https://www.gofundme.com/light-upon-light Support the Development of the Proud Boys Incident Map and Dashboard https://www.patreon.com/ashkenaz89 Proud Boys Incident Map https://twitter.com/ashkenaz89/status/1051237360338259969 Defector Narrative Project https://www.patreon.com/posts/proud-of-your-on-25219991 Fash Fatigue Resources https://medium.com/@ashkenaz89/introducing-the-fash-fatigue-chronicles-34b80c679698 * Samantha Kutner Patreon SK Medium article on Roger Stone / Proud Boys * Twitter handles of people doing the work @askenaz89 @notcolloquial @_Shan_Martinez_ @_JesseMorton @lighttuponlight
Well, hello and welcome to episode 13, that's right, lucky number 13, of I Don't Speak German, a podcast in which typically my buddy Jack Graham and I talk about the conversations of the far right, the distant right, the alt-right, white nationalists, Nazi scum basically.
We gave Jack the weekend off this weekend, and I actually am bringing on a special guest, Samantha Kuttner, who describes herself as a Proud Boy Whisperer and is an expert on Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys, which is something I am not much of an expert on.
So, Samantha, welcome to the podcast.
Hi, thank you for having me.
So I am a researcher who studies violent extremism and the gender dynamics of radicalization.
I was approved to conduct ethnographic interviews with members of the Proud Boys and anti-fascists, and I conducted the majority of my interviews while members were still on Facebook and Twitter before their accounts were suspended in advance of the second Unite the Right rally.
Awesome.
So how long have you been kind of studying these guys?
I mean, what's been your kind of process of that?
Well, before studying the Proud Boys, I had studied foreign terrorism.
But after Charlottesville, I decided it was important to look how extremism and domestic terrorism operates from within our borders.
And so everybody saw Charlottesville and the Unite the Right rally And I noticed there was this one group that was claiming that they weren't really alt-right, and the members who attended that event were not really Proud Boys, or that they were former Proud Boys, and they didn't represent the values of the group as a whole.
So, rather than rely on what I had been reading in the news, I decided it was important to ask members themselves, you know, what is the reality of being a member?
Do you see yourself as alt-right?
Do you see yourself as a men's organization?
You know, in what ways is your experience different from the ways that you've been depicted in the media?
And I'm sure they had plenty of opinions about that topic.
They refer to all pieces outside of their closed media ecosystem as hit pieces.
Right, yeah.
I mean, it's all fake news unless it's, you know, like, fawningly positive to them.
And it conforms to their specific narrative.
It's all fake news.
And that's something obviously you see in all parts of this kind of far right space.
So the white nationalists will, you know, kind of do the exact same thing, you know, oh, no, it's not, you know, it's all obviously fake, you know.
So yeah, let's take a step back here.
Let's start with sort of the basic question.
Who is Gavin McGinnis?
Okay.
So Gavin McGinnis is the founder of the Proud Boys.
He has written for Taki Mag, VDare, American Renaissance.
He is a Canadian citizen who co-founded Vice News and left the group and left Taki Mag to form the Proud Boys in July of 2016 during Trump's presidential campaign.
Right.
He was previously working for Rebel, right?
But now, I think that relationship has now ceased, right?
Because I think Rebel was bought by The Blaze, I think?
Or one of the other organizations?
I believe so, yeah.
I remember there being some kind of press release that was literally like, everyone except for Gavin McInnes is now part of the blaze.
It was like he was hired and unceremoniously fired like 20 minutes later.
It was a pretty delicious moment.
Like, thank you everyone, not you, not you.
Everyone who's got to work for the Blaze, please step forward.
Not so fast, Gavin.
We need to talk.
Yeah, so Gavin, he's a very interesting figure.
He has a bachelor's degree in English.
He's written a series of magazine articles.
He wrote The Death of Cool, which was previously How to Piss in Public.
And the way that I read The Death of Cool was kind of seeing the makings of a charismatic extremist leader.
Now, was that his first book or is that the more recent book?
The more recent book is The Death of Cool.
Okay.
Yes.
So he, you know, in the book he describes his history of cocaine abuse and drinking, which is not inherently bad, but I guess if you want to define like addiction as anything that affects your ability to function, it has certainly affected his ability to function at certain times.
So it's a little problematic when he says that his group is just a fraternal drinking organization because there are always people that take it too far and drink too heavy and you know may come to like use alcohol to deal with some of the problems that may have led them to the group in the first place.
Yeah, I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to, you know, kind of make the kind of say like, you know, people with people with severe alcohol problems are obviously people that we should should get help, you know, that's, that's kind of the point of it.
We're not trying to like throw shade on that.
But, um, You know, it does seem that there is, you know, from what I've seen of the Proud Boys and from their rhetoric and from listening to one of their podcasts and everything, it does seem like they spend a lot of time kind of using alcohol as justification for, you know, certain kinds of, you know, street-level activity.
And it becomes sort of this, you know, oh no, we're just a drinking club and we got a little bit drunk and then we went off and did this thing and, you know.
You know, yeah, that's not so good.
So yeah, so that's Gavin.
My experience with him is, he does do the podcast, the Get Off My Lawn podcast.
I do listen to that sometimes and just try to get a sense of, just kind of listen to him.
I'll say that my experience of him was just sort of like, I thought he was just a clown.
Um, because I had been studying the, um, the white nationalist figures for, um, you know, since mid 2016.
I had really kind of gotten serious about kind of looking at, looking at this, this world.
And, uh, every time that kind of Gavin's name came up, it was always just, just kind of as a joke.
For those guys, they just kind of see him as like, you know, no different than like a Steven Crowder or like a Milo Yiannopoulos or, you know, he's just kind of that.
They definitely slot him more in that alt-light kind of category.
A running gag on the Daily Show podcast, or at least it used to be a running gag.
They don't really talk about Gavin anymore, but they say, you know, the Proud Boys are really just white nationalists with Asian girlfriends.
Yeah, I mean, the whole tenets of racial purity and things like that don't necessarily apply to the group.
But when thinking about the Proud Boys, it's important to understand that you can be bigoted regardless of race, class, ethnicity, gender, religious orientation, sexual orientation.
You know, we're prone to be biased just as human beings and then the more extreme manifestations of that are prejudice, racism, violence.
So being a Black Proud Boy does not mean that you are not racist or bigoted.
It means you are someone who espouses an ideology that Attacks marginalized communities, and you also happen to be black.
Right.
Exactly.
And I mean, you know, there's a certain I mean, and this is something we might we might get into, you know, there is a, you know, those figures within those communities who are non, you know, white, by whatever standard we're using to define white, are still expected to recite, you know, the mantra, basically the 14 words with the word white switched in with Western.
Exactly.
So I wonder if this is one of the things that kind of got to me when I was kind of thinking about these guys because at first I thought Gavin's a bit of a joke I'm not really you know I listened to a little bit of him I watched a couple of YouTube videos and just kind of went yeah he's bigoted against trans people and he's a deep fucking misogynist and he's a horrible horrible human being but he's kind of outside this like white nationalism thing that I've been studying and I have enough stuff to already cover and then like when proud boy violence started happening on a kind of a regular basis and I started to see like the
Real connections between this and actual Republican operations, you know?
When Roger Stone is using Proud Boys as unofficial official bodyguard stuff, that's the stuff that really starts to worry me when there is a sort of official legitimacy to this.
And that's when I started thinking I need to start paying a little bit more attention to it.
And yet it's still sort of like slightly... they just don't kind of operate in the space that's easy for me to follow them necessarily, you know?
Yeah.
And so that's one reason why I really wanted to cover them.
So there are two resources that I'm developing.
bring somebody on who knew a lot more than I did about it.
So there are two resources that I'm developing.
I am looking to generate more support for funding just the time it takes for the data entry and analysis.
One of them is the Proud Boys incident map and one of them is the Proud Boys dashboard.
There have been close to 100 Proud Boys incidents in America, Canada, and Australia.
When that dashboard becomes public, you'll be able to see the patterns that their rallies and incidents take.
And their ideology becomes very pronounced once you see just, you know, have this visual representation of the types of violence, the types of intimidation, the types of events they're purposely disrupting.
The classification of them as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center is accurate.
I would agree with that.
I'm wondering if you could just speak to that briefly and in a little bit more detail just to sort of justify it, you know.
Okay, so I'll try to start this with things that Gavin has said about white supremacy.
Sure.
On Tacky Mag, he said... Before you, just to highlight something, because you mentioned he has written for Tacky's Mag for American Renaissance and for V-Dare.
All three of these.
Now, Tacky's Mag may be a little bit less so, but the term alternative right was founded in Tacky's Mag to a certain degree, which we discussed in episode one of this podcast. - I believe it was Richard Spencer who coined that term, right? - Paul Gottfried is sort of the guy who coined alternative right.
And then Richard Spencer kind of shortened it to alt-right.
And then it's kind of a co-invention of those two guys.
Gottfried wants nothing to do with the term, Spencer wants everything to do with the term, so typically we kind of just let Spencer have it, but it does seem to have been, it was coined at a very particular meeting, there was a speech that Paul Gottfried gave on, I think, in November 2009.
And so he used the term alternative right to describe something that looks basically a rebranding of paleoconservatism.
That's sort of like where the term comes from.
And then like Spencer kind of ran with it and kind of made it his own.
So Gavin McGinnis got the position at Tachymad because Richard Spencer recommended him.
Right.
So that term alt right and alt light, which Gavin likes to use, I mean, it comes from that same ecosystem.
system.
What Gavin will say is, you know, he's kind of an inconsistent narrator, but what he will say is that white supremacy is an academic fabrication.
So to me that's kind of like Donald Trump saying that Global warming was a hoax invented by China.
There are very clear markers that these are issues.
The recent terrorist attack in New Zealand being a prime example of how white supremacy and white nationalism is a very severe and reoccurring problem.
Gavin needs you to believe that white supremacy is a myth invented by academics and Antifa terrorists.
Well, that's just true, right?
I mean, clearly.
Actually, when we spoke, and he wrote an article entitled Fighting with the Media and Academics, it wasn't much of an article.
He just kind of shared our private email exchange on his public platform and claimed that he was an Antifa journalist who was out to peg his group as neo-Nazis.
And I was not.
I think in understanding the Proud Boys, it's really important To say, no, they are not neo-Nazis, but they're also not just a harmless fraternal drinking organization.
And it's important to understand the people who have had affiliations with white nationalist groups and their different pockets of online media systems that they like.
cohabitate like the the manosphere the red pill communities um it's important to understand that groups like the proud boys are every much as dangerous as far right and alt-right groups or alt-right groups they have the ability to kind of act as the auxiliary arm of the gop
and you can get a lot of people to you know get familiar with these concepts and ideology that that come from those dark far right online spaces?
Yeah, I mean the thing that I've always said and the reason that I think that, you know, kind of studying the, I mean, I study in some ways the fringiest of the fringe, right, like the furthest out there, but those ideas get circulated back into the mainstream through these more alt-light and these more nebulous figures.
And also, I mean, something that I say, I think the first video I ever watched with Gavin McInnes was actually like talking about like the truth about the alt-right or something like that and he would go through and he'd say like oh and you got like this like a richard spencer guy who like he doesn't mention that oh he used to like edit me and he publicly got me jobs and stuff like he doesn't say that but like he'll he'll talk about richard spencer and be like yeah and he's just this irrelevant guy that like nobody really listens to and he's got no real audience etc etc
and then he uses this sort of existence of this further right movement of this further right person as a way of sort of justifying his own sort of like, I'm just a centrist, right?
You know, because because I'm not talking about gas chambers, because we've got African-American members, clearly we're not, you know, as far right as as we could be.
And so we're kind of like he sort of plays up his harmlessness through his rhetoric in that way, you know, is from what I can see.
Yeah, the whole Grandpa Gavin image is is very strong.
You know, he kind of presents himself as like, you know, the like the techno parent and like, you know, back in my day, things were like this.
And when you grow up, perhaps without a strong sense of a role model, You need someone to tell you how to do things.
If you don't have that in your life, if you come from a broken home, or neglectful parents, or parents who are working all the time and therefore can't give you the love and support you need, it's very easy to go online and find these far-right figures who will give you kind of a basic guideline for how to live your life.
Um, but the scary thing about people like Gavin is that in addition to what could be, like, truthful elements of, like, helpful life advice, are these really toxic, um, ideologies that, you know, place women beneath men, that think that feminism is the root of all evil, that are severely, um, uh, Islamophobic, um, just spread, you know, they spread hatred.
Yeah, I mean, they believe all the awful things.
They just don't go full race realist, ultimately.
Although, I heard one of the Get Off My Lawn podcasts, Gavin, was very much hereditary, and who you are is determined 95% by your genes, etc.
He says that, he believes that.
When you go that far, to a certain degree, you're really just hiding your racism behind a certain amount of obfuscation, in my opinion.
Yeah, exactly.
And the thing that is really important, at least for me, is that Gavin makes his members recite from Pat Buchanan's Death of the West.
Yes.
Gavin, you know, it really doesn't matter how many one months you spend jacking off to Pat Buchanan.
That's not going to make Gavin McGinnis an American citizen.
He's a Canadian citizen who formed a violent, crypto-fascist extremist organization in America.
He has maxed out his plausible deniability and he's trying to do everything he can to avoid a RICO warrant.
Sure.
No, I absolutely agree with that.
So, we should maybe back up just a little bit.
So, this all stems from the New York City, I guess, the NYC Nine, although I think there are ten of them now, but it got named when they thought there were only nine, something of that degree.
Would you like to describe that for the audience who may not be familiar with it?
Share your version and then I'll tell you some of the things that I saw and prompted me to create the map in the first place.
Sure.
So this was an event, I don't have the date in front of me, I believe October of last year, October 2018.
There was a Republican, basically kind of a fundraising event in New York City.
Gavin shows up and is doing a speech and he does a mock execution of a Japanese socialist.
Who was – I forget the guy's name.
I apologize.
I can't write it down.
But he does a mock execution of a Japanese socialist with what he claims was a fake sword, although there was some dispute about whether it was a fake sword or a real sword.
But let's take him at his word for no particular reason, but I'll take him at his word.
and say it's probably a plastic sword.
So he does this.
Apparently, there was some anti-fascist graffiti that kind of got sprayed on the outside of the thing like the night before.
And so these guys say, we were ready for that.
And then on the night of this event, they kind of step out.
They find some antifa making some noise.
And then they proceed to beat the ever-living shit out of them in a completely unprovoked, violent way Once you saw the full video, there's like a synced-up, there were several videos that got released, and there's a synced-up version that makes it very clear that, like, maybe, like, one guy threw a half-empty water bottle, and, you know, then they were just, like, completely beaten down.
And then they get arrested because, like, anti-fascist stalks these guys, and immediately, and put some pressure on them, and That's kind of the story and then since then Gavin has like kind of sort of stepped down from the Proud Boys but in a way that is completely deniable that he's actually done it.
And then like Augustus Invictus tried to troll and say he was coming up and being the leader of the Proud Boys.
And then what's this guy, Jason Van Dyke?
Yeah.
And then but what I understood like maybe he's also not really kind of doing the thing so you know.
JL has a lot of legal issues he's currently dealing with.
Some death threats and things that he has done have come back to bite him.
There was a letter from Proud Boys saying, you know, we like him, we respect everything that he's done for us.
It's hard because in the letter they say that he has a clear role in the group, that he threatens anyone with litigation if they try to accuse the Proud Boys of being alt-right.
So Proud Boys acknowledge his role in the group.
But when I spoke to Gavin back in November of 2017, he said, no, he's not a lawyer that represents us.
He's just someone who happens to do this thing.
So, you know, whether you believe that to be true, he's certainly playing a role and they're not telling him to stop.
So, you know, they're very unreliable narrators.
And I can say from the in-depth interviews I've conducted with Proud Boys, the way that they engage with you one-on-one is very different than when they feel they have the support of their group online and in public.
So, when I talk to them, there's, you know, there's just a lot of There's just a lot of pain behind their stories.
And, you know, in the media they're depicted as, you know, neo-Nazis, a fraternal drinking organization.
But what most of the media outlets miss is that these are largely men who didn't really get what they need in life after some major life transition and gravitated to these groups.
Can you tell me who the typical Proud Boy is maybe?
From the person you interviewed.
Your typical alt-right, ground-level person is basically...
A guy who works in software who's you know in his late 20s to early 40s maybe who spends who spent a whole lot of time online arguing about arcane like weird politics for a number of years and who like kind of gradually like shifted his way to white nationalism some of the younger guys just kind of.
Became straight-up Nazis from the beginning, but your typical kind of like person who would say oh, I'm all right, or I'm in the distant, right?
They sort of have like that general kind of story.
They tend to be kind of from wealthier households.
There tends to be some kind of trauma in their background there, but you know that kind of describes pretty much all of us, but they tend to be kind of internet nerds who you know come from some degree of wealth and then Uh, you know, kind of embrace this, like, horrible reactionary politics.
So, my impression is that the Proud Boys don't really, that doesn't really describe the Proud Boys necessarily, but, like, why don't you tell me if I'm right or wrong about that?
Well, just as there's no one unique profile of a terrorist, there's no one unique profile of a Proud Boy recruit.
But I've interviewed older Proud Boys, I've interviewed younger ones, I've interviewed Black Proud Boys, I've interviewed Hispanic Proud Boys.
And really, to understand the ideal recruit, you have to understand the Manosphere.
We will eventually do an episode on the Manosphere, I promise.
That's a huge topic.
I look shy at trying to do that.
Sorry, go ahead.
I'll give you a super quick, as brief as possible, breakdown of the Manosphere.
You could think of it as the online ecosystem where various men's rights groups inhabit.
So there's MGTOW, which stands for Men Going Their Own Way.
There's INCEL, which stands for Involuntary Celibate, PUAs, Pickup Artists.
And then there's people that embrace this ideology called RADTRAD, or Radical Traditionalism.
So, how they differ from incel would be, an incel believes that they are involuntarily celibate because men are largely subjugated by women under feminism.
So it's all kind of hopeless and there's like a very nihilistic, dark element to incels.
Where proud boys differ, they're more the rad trad route, is, you know, Wouldn't it be nice to go back to a 1950s version of traditional American values where women were expected to be in the home and they kind of knew their place?
So it's a fundamentalist element with very rigid gender roles.
You hear a lot about that on the kind of alt-right.
The white nationalist will kind of say exactly that thing as well.
That's very common.
You know, this kind of like return to the 1950s.
Some of them want to go back to the 1650s, but that's slightly a minority position.
You hear a lot about the wheat field girls and this idea of you want the trad wife as opposed to the thot and that sort of thing.
I feel like I don't highlight enough just how deeply fucking misogynistic this entire Like, all of these guys are just deeply, deeply fucking misogynistic, and I almost just take that such, like, for granted, that it's not even worth remarking on, but it absolutely is worth remarking on more so, you know, and I feel- I spend so much time focusing on the racism because the racism is also really, really bad, that, like, it's worth noting, like, all the time, like, no, these guys are absolutely fucking misogynist, like, every single one of them, like, to the core.
Yeah, like it's good to say, you know, not all misogynists are Proud Boys, but all Proud Boys are misogynists to varying degrees.
You know, they might frame it more paternalistically, like, like, I don't know, some certain Proud Boys that I was speaking with, you know, really wanted to know, you know, my age and like, if I was in a relationship and, you know, said things like, oh, wow, you know, this is all you do, what a waste.
And I was like, Of what?
A uterus?
What role am I supposed to be in if I am not in this very narrow desiring to be a housewife?
And there's nothing wrong with being a housewife, that's your choice.
But the moment where anybody says, this is what all women should do, or this is what all men should do, they're not really reflecting the way the world is. - Exactly, and I would absolutely agree with that.
I want to come back to that, but my feeling is always like, well, I'm a socialist, you don't have to agree with that, but I'm a socialist, and my opinion is like, well, yes, I think that reproductive labor should absolutely be something that is absolutely essential to the propagation of the world, and that should be, if that was paid work, if that was something that we actually
Give people resources for then we would you know you could solve this whole like birthright problem by you know just Stopping this like capitalist engine.
We're all in the middle of you know and people could choose to do that And you know but like that would also give you know people who can carry children of any gender more Autonomy, and it's the personal autonomy part that they seem to have the deepest problems You know you know that they really like it when you know Well, I mean, that's the hard thing about my research is everyone that I've interviewed, even the ones that – there were two that left after Gavin McGinnis kind of did what he did and shared the article and tried to shut down my research project.
it and it's absolutely vile and disgusting and I kind of hate all these guys.
Anyway.
Well, I mean, that's the hard thing about my research is everyone that I've interviewed, even the ones that, there were two that left after Gavin McGinnis kind of did what he did and shared the article and tried to shut down my research project, long story there.
I don't hate any of them.
The thing that I've learned from interviewing Proud Boys and anti-fascists is that we're all products of our environment.
Have you gone to that school?
Have you interacted with this certain group of people?
Have you found these websites?
Had you not gone to that rally or gone to this other one, you might turn out to be exactly like the people that you've come to despise.
I want to be clear.
I don't hate them as individuals.
I hate the ideology.
I hate the construct they put around it.
So I was speaking slightly, kind of loosely there, and I do want to make that clear, though.
You mentioned a second ago that they would try to tell you that you're wasting your potential, or that you're wasting, like, this is all you do, was the question.
Was that in sort of the context of being a woman?
Popping out babies?
Or is that more you're following us around like you're studying us and that seems like such a like silly thing for you to do?
Because in sort of the white nationalist circles I mean like the podcast that I listen to will say all the time that you Antifa fucks who are like listening to this you guys the SPLC and all that sort of thing like Why waste your time with this?
And they spend a lot of time trying to black pill quote-unquote, you know, people who are researching them specifically to get them to stop researching them, you know?
So I'm wondering if that was the context or was it just because they thought you were a woman?
Well, the fact that I'm researching this group and that I've had the ability to interview as many members as I have is somewhat threatening.
The fact that I am exactly who I say I am, I am a researcher who studies violent extremism, you know, I can build rapport with members because I'm myself.
I'm not trying to trick them into anything.
So I think that some Proud Boys felt threatened that, you know, some of what I revealed kind of speaks truth to power and You know, may not make their group look great, and then some take that misogynistic route and think, you know, you should be in the home.
Like, I've been told by some Proud Boys that I am, like, you know, an attractive female, and it just, like, it doesn't compute for them that I could be an attractive female and also be this hardcore researcher.
It's like a Not being able to place me in a box causes them a fair amount of anxiety.
So it's like, can you, wouldn't you be happier if you were doing well?
Yeah, wouldn't you be happier just being at home?
And there's also, I mean, you know, this sort of Manosphere stuff.
I mean, I spent a lot of time kind of like following that community before I got into kind of following white nationalism, at least a bit, not to the degree that I do it now.
But I definitely, you know, kind of was aware of, you know, like We Hented the Mammoth was like a daily read for me for a number of years.
And, um, You know, a lot of the sort of ideology also comes down to this sort of like innate sense of gender that there are like two genders, men and women, and this sort of the ideas of like hypergamy and, you know, women are, you know, all want to, you know, have sex with the alpha chads, like in the top percentage of the attractiveness quotient or whatever, and that, you know,
Men are kind of a little more... and that you end up... this sort of idea that if you're attractive, you don't have the biological urge to do anything other than just absorb resources from men using your pussy, right?
So clearly, it just doesn't compute that you could be both attractive and intelligent.
It's just bizarre, right?
Obviously, I don't believe that.
That's me trying to summarize this bizarre hierarchy of sex that these guys just seem to build into their brain.
Yeah, I mean, I think I was talking to a Proud Boy a couple days ago.
We made a joke that he's like a Proud Boy emeritus, where he's no longer, you know, he's no longer actively engaged in the group to the extent that he was before.
But he's, you know, he's starting to pull away.
And just yesterday, he said, you know, I'm done.
I'm done.
Like he started learning more.
And it just, you know, threw him for a loop.
But we've had some really great conversations over the past few months.
And yesterday, We were talking about masculinity and the issue of masculinity and what he feels drives some people to the Proud Boys.
And what I asked was... Oh, and this is with his permission.
I always check to make sure that anything that I share, even though I would never reveal this Proud Boys name, I have permission to share this, that it's totally okay.
He's actually probably going to listen to it after this, so...
Hello there.
Hi, nice to meet you.
Feel free to message me if you feel, you know, my contact info is there.
So just put it out there.
So I asked, have you noticed that some of the Proud Boys that might be struggling with depression and self-hatred kind of try on aggression like a new suit?
You know, like if you can don that, then perhaps they can use it to get over their own depression and self-hatred.
You know, and he agreed that there are people that feel that they'll get that benefit from joining the group.
And then the other thing we talked about was regarding trolling and how men can, you know, they have such a vicious response to women online that are vocal about certain movements or, you know, vocal about anything really.
It's all about ethics in video games journalism.
Remember that.
Um, so we were trying to understand the concept of trolling.
This is an older Proud Boy who kind of refers to the younger ones as kind of dopier and prone to liking conspiracy theories, which is a whole other issue.
But, um, I said, you know, would some members of this group, you know, the ones who go out of their way to try to make a woman feel like sex objects or less than or incompetent, like, do you see a sense of nihilism about it all?
Like, Do some of these members think, well, I'll never get a girl to like me, so I have free reign to say whatever I want to them, because it doesn't really matter what I say to them, and it's kind of just better that they pay attention to me rather than ignore me or not even realize that I exist.
And he said that was a big issue, that there are some guys who Well, he says they're just fucking dopey, right?
That's it.
He likes the term dopey, but it's a little bit more to that.
There is a there's a sadness involved, like, you know, lashing out at someone you've never met before who happens to be female usually has nothing to do with what the female initially said and has to do with how you've been conditioned to see women.
Right.
And ultimately, you know, a lot of that comes down to a kind of a there's a seething resentment and a lot of these guys to where they just, you know, they, they feel like they haven't been able to get a date, they feel like they haven't, you know, I mean, there's, there's a lot of, particularly in kind of the younger crowds, I mean, you know, at least self reported.
And I mean, you could talk to this if you if you can, a lot of them will kind of describe themselves as a needs, you know, not an education, Employment or training.
Sorry, I had to remember what that acronym is.
Oh yeah, I heard that too.
It was like perfect Yang Gang material.
Oh yeah, I know.
The Yang Gang, we talked a little bit about that last week with the way that the alt-right has just completely moved away from Donald Trump, which doesn't seem to really strike me.
I don't know if you've seen that in your Proud Boys stuff at all, like in the last month or so.
The white nationalists I follow, like the entire movement has just completely given up on Donald Trump.
Because he was there to secure the border wall.
The border wall.
They just they just think he's just he's just not going to be able to get anything done.
And they've they've just they've just moved on from it.
And I mean, this is, you know, there were there were people who spun all kinds of reasons to justify continuing to believe in Trump for far longer than there was any justification for doing so.
And now now there is this kind of push to embrace Yang, Andrew Yang.
But then that gets resistance because he's he's not white.
And obviously that's a big thing for for a white nationalist movement to be in support of a non-white candidate.
But that does also, um, that does seem to come a lot from the idea that, you know, a whole lot of these guys, at least kind of the lower level guys, are kind of embracing this, like, $1,000 a month, I can just, like, get a roommate, get, like, three of us together in, like, a shitty apartment, and we can just shitpost all day, and just, like, live our lives, and, you know, wouldn't that be, like, the perfect existence?
You know, you're just gonna create a troll army out of these gang bucks, you know?
And, um, I don't know, have you seen a kind of, like, pulling away from Trump at all?
Um, in terms of the people that you've been following?
I don't know how, how kind of fine-grained or how recent your interviews are, but... What I've seen are, uh, two journalists.
One's named Andy, and one named, one is named Tim Poole.
Um, they're... I'm very familiar with Tim Poole, and Andy, Andy Go?
Andy... Yes.
Yeah, okay, yeah.
I know these guys.
So, I think it was David Newhart who had an article out today or yesterday that described the slew of anti-LGBTQ crimes that have been occurring in the Pacific Northwest region.
I'm pronouncing his name correctly.
Uh, Andy Nego said that people were largely faking those incidents and the evidence he used was That people who were attacked refused to talk to him.
It wasn't just that he was annoying as shit.
Or that they knew he was going to spin the narrative.
They know where he comes from.
If you're a victim of a hate crime and Andy and Goh comes up and says, hey I'd like to interview you, you know there's an agenda there.
You don't want that agenda to be pushed so you don't talk to figures like that.
That's not evidence that those crimes didn't occur.
So, like, their standard of evidence is, you know, it's almost non-existent.
And then Tim Foole will say that he's an unbiased journalist, but he has been photographed several times with members of the Proud Boys and, you know, trying to kind of hide in the background.
I don't know if you saw that picture.
There are photos of him, like, sitting at, like, dinner with, or having drinks with, like, James Alsup and I think Brittany Pettibone.
I'm a centrist because I'm in the center between Marco Rubio and Adolf Hitler.
"No, no, I'm just a centrist journalist." It's like, yeah, how many socialists have you had on your show there?
How many, you know?
Like, I'm a centrist if, you know, like I'm a centrist because I'm in the center between Marco Rubio and like Adolf Hitler.
I'm the center between those two figures, you know?
Right.
It's like if Jacob Wohl had a journalism agency, like let's say called it like Surefire Journalism, like the first person he would hire would be the Andy Ngo's and the Tim Pool to further their narratives.
Oh yeah, Tim Poole is somebody that I'm so happy we're talking about him because he's such a ridiculous figure and he has far, far too much influence.
Anyway, but that's not really the topic of today's conversation.
You had some quotes that I kind of stopped you, unfortunately, from Gavin that you wanted to just sort of justify that Gavin is...
Who Gavin is, and I'd like you to just read what you have there, if you don't mind, just so we can be clear in this podcast of, like, exactly who Gavin is.
Okay, for sure.
So I'll start with the article, Fighting with the Media and Academics.
I sent him an email back in November of 2017 that said, a conversation with a proud boy that you might find interesting.
Um, we had come up with an analogy to describe radicalization, because this one proud boy had said, you know, we're kind of like, most people prefer beer or wine.
We're kind of like the cheap whiskey.
We're not everyone's taste, but we're rebellious to social norms.
And, you know, that's just our thing.
And I said, Okay, if Proud Boys are akin to cheap whiskey, would you say that white nationalism is akin to moonshine?
And, uh, if you develop a taste for cheap whiskey, can you not, over time, develop a taste for moonshine?
And then he said, well, proud boys!
I mean, referring to, um, the alt-right.
Uh, the alt-right's kind of like Huff stolen out of a 97 Honda Civic.
They have no sense of humor at all.
So instead of saying moonshine, we started referring to people who had, like, gone far right or alt-right as, like, Huffers.
Oh, I see.
So I said, if you could develop a taste for cheap whiskey, can you not develop a taste for Huff?
And he said, oh, for sure.
He'd seen it happen in the group.
Members had been kicked out of the group for that beliefs.
That same person said that members of the Hammerskin Nation showed up to an event thinking that they were welcome.
And that kind of speaks to the core of the ideology.
They will say that they're not a dog whistle.
They'll say that they're not white nationalists.
They'll say that they're not alt-right.
But some hardcore white nationalists and neo-Nazis have shown up thinking they're welcome.
So just to clarify for the audience, the Hammer Skins are a street gang.
I mean, they're an actual neo-Nazi street gang that was once the biggest gang of its type in the country.
They have some international connections, but it's largely a U.S.
phenomenon.
But when you think of the canonical 80s skinhead, these are the Hammer Skins, ultimately.
And they still exist now, and they exist as sort of the enforcers of, you know, some of the kind of more overt political sort of National Socialist Movement, you know, stuff.
So yeah, that's who the Hammerskins are.
Just wanted to clarify for the audience.
So he had showed me a photo that he had taken of the event of Hammerskins showing up, thinking like, I don't know why they thought they were welcome.
And this is kind of the conflicting thing about Proud Boys, because there are some people that you could classify as, like, colorblind racists.
The ones who are like, Well, there's no such thing as neo-Nazism now because, you know, World War II ended.
Or there's no such thing as white supremacy because, you know, academics are just looking for someone to blame.
They're chasing Bigfoot, you know?
I love these talking points so much.
I just, it's so, oh yeah.
Please, go ahead, go ahead.
So there are some that are like, I don't know why they keep showing up.
And then there's some that know exactly what they're doing and use the, you know, the Western chauvinists.
Like Gavin himself repeated the 14 words on a YouTube channel and just replaced white with Western.
In his book, he said you can't say white in Taiwan where he was doing some type of shitty teaching.
you know, thing abroad.
You can't say white in Taiwan because that's considered politically incorrect.
You have to say Western.
So you can see how he uses terminology to obfuscate some of the truer intentions of the group.
And you don't have to be a neo-Nazi to affiliate with them.
You don't have to be an ethno-nationalist to associate with them.
You can say you're a civ-nat or a civic nationalist, but if you attend rallies with ethno-nationalists and chum it up, you know, what does that mean?
Like, what distinctions are important anymore?
Well, and a lot of my work is trying to define these cleavages pretty precisely as a way of sort of understanding how they differ and sort of like, you know, so that we can use the techniques that are necessary to oppose them, you know, so that we're not sort of wasting effort, you know, sort of thing.
I feel like a lot of what I've just tried to do is just try to understand who they are and to kind of understand that.
But when you see a group like the Proud Boys, and they do – I mean there are overt national socialists who will say… I'm an ex-Proud Boy.
Gavin kicked me out when I made it too obvious, you know, that sort of thing.
I mean, there are figures that I could point to who, you know, a lot of people kind of flirted with the Proud Boys, who kind of, like, came in and out, kind of, you know, joined in and joined.
It also strikes me that there's a, and again, this is something that maybe I don't have my facts quite right on this, but it strikes me that there's a little bit also of a, sort of, the regional groups I'm not sure how much autonomy they have in terms of, you know, like, Gavin seems to kind of keep his distance away from, you know, overt white nationalism, except for when they're publishing him and giving him money, like Richard Spencer.
But, uh, you know, it does seem like some of the, um, some of the more kind of localized, like, Facebook groups seem to be a lot looser about who they, who they kind of let in and don't let in.
Um, is that your experience, or, you know, okay.
So they have a, they say they have a strict vetting process.
Mm-hmm.
But judging by the volume of members they have kicked out, which I know from my interviews with Proud Boys, they may not know how to screen effectively.
They're putting this big call and, you know, again, there has to be something about the ideology that makes certain people feel like They're welcome.
And when they go into the group, and they'll say, you know, be like, stop playing, come on, like, just drop the act, like, we know why we're all here.
And like, you know, fervently maintaining that no, no, we're, we're civic nationalists.
We're not white supremacists.
We're Western chauvinists.
If you look up chauvinism in the dictionary, it just means being a patriot.
Sure, absolutely.
You know, like there's all these ways that they kind of try to maintain plausible deniability.
But given all the recent terrorist attacks and the increase in white supremacist violence, the group is on the verge of maxing out their plausible deniability.
Sure.
Absolutely.
I agree.
So what else did you have from the from the Gavin piece that you were talking about?
We keep dancing around it.
Right.
So I asked him if some people took his rhetorical tap dancing as a literal truth.
And at that point, he stopped the conversation.
He shared our private email exchange on his public platform and tried to say I was an Antifa journalist that was out to peg his group as neo-Nazis.
And then he sent me an email on November 13th that said, you're starting a war you can't finish.
It was my understanding that I was conducting an ethnographic interview project.
Right.
I had no idea what he meant by that.
But I found out that same day that that email was sent to me, my review board, which handles ethical considerations, said they had received an anonymous complaint.
And, you know, they needed to stop my research project until a thorough investigation had been completed.
That investigation took six months to finish.
So six months where I had to reassure the members that I interviewed that I would reach out to them at some point, but I was not allowed to until the investigation had been completed.
So, you know, given the timing, of that incident, it is very likely that it was Gavin McGinnis himself who tried to shut my face search.
Or someone working closely with it, you know, like there's, there's a, we can't, we, we have, we'll put the word allegedly here, but you know, this, this seems pretty, pretty obvious.
I'm I'd just like to mention, Proud Boys showed up to, what's his name, Vic Berger's house.
There's this guy who basically just does funny video edits, and just edited together a bunch of Gavin looking ridiculous, including Gavin sticking a dildo up his ass.
and saying the n-word a whole lot and uh i think saying bad things about jews i mean he does say bad things about jews i don't know if that's in that particular video or not but um he put together basically like a two-minute like greatest hits quote-unquote uh compilation of gavin and uh literally got you know a proud boy coming to knock on his door you know and so this is this is not i mean you know whether gavin ordered that or not is obviously you know i mean i would i would doubt that gavin actually ordered that you know
this is this is kind of where the legalist resistance stochastic terrorism kind of stuff comes in you know obviously gavin is unhappy about that so Somebody took it into his hands to make to do the intimidation tactic and so I just want to put point that out there that this is not a Almost everyone who studies the Proud Boys kind of ends up with a story something like this.
I was wrapped up in that as well.
I had two people call my phone trying to pose as legal officials around that same time.
The decree that I sent you that Gavin McGinnis sent out would end with everything short of stabbing.
Like, get creative.
And all of this will be in the show notes, right?
So you provided links to all this, okay.
So, you know, the thing that bothers me most about Gavin is that he builds his platform against social justice warriors and claims to be about free speech at all costs.
But you can't be free speech or 100% free speech while actively policing it in others.
So, you know, the way that I was raised, your word is your bond.
You say something, you act on it, you commit.
I have no respect for people who backtrack and waffle whenever it's convenient for them.
And by extension, I have no respect for Gavin McGinnis as a person.
Sure.
I mean, Gavin is such a, you know, from the time that I've spent just kind of listening to him and kind of reading him and just kind of watching videos of him, I get such a sense of He's just kind of a dipshit.
He just wants to shitpost all the time.
He just wants to get out there.
I mean, he walked out of a recent legal hearing and he's surrounded by some guys, some lawyers.
I think this is related to the SPLC lawsuit.
But he comes out and he's just like, yeah, the left, you're just anti-fun.
We're just trying to have fun here.
And it's like, no, you're beating people in the streets.
You know, in service of a far-right ideology.
And the fact that you're not being explicitly racial about it does not make it not a far-right ideology.
But he seems to sort of have that, like, oh, I'm just a comedian thing.
And he does that all the time.
I mean, the reason that I don't listen to his show more is I just find it insufferable and kind of low information.
And when you think about the other stuff I listen to, there's just nothing in it.
It's just kind of...
Making terrible jokes about like shitting his pants and getting erections and you know like aren't aren't people with various you know aren't midgets funny or whatever like it's it's just it's just that that's all it is and then he'll like sneak in like you know oh when they call us a hate group hey we got black people and so how can we be a hate group it's all it's all this very you know kind of low
I agree.
I started looking at this group from the perspective of them being a radicalization vector.
The place you get comfortable with these ideas.
It was my research peer, CV Vitolo Haddad, who said they're information maunderers.
They pull stuff from the bowels of 4chan and 8chan, Reddit, and they make it more mainstream.
They imbue it with pop culture references.
For example...
What was the movie where they put on that ring and it wound up killing a bunch of the heroes?
I think it was a Marvel comic.
Oh, the Avengers.
Right.
So some of their memes, it was on Columbus Day they shared.
They shared like an old-time picture of Native Americans and then people coming in like with that ring like colonizers wearing a ring and then disintegrating.
You know, like, that type of ideology where, like, yeah, you chuckle and, like, your defenses are down a little bit because humor is, you know, there's some obfuscation going on there.
So, um, it's not- That's turning genocide into a meme.
That's literally what that is.
It's just that that's a genocide we're, like, more acceptably allowed to joke about.
Because it's, you know, because it's just more pervasive in the, you know, in the culture.
I mean, like, Ben Shapiro, like, put out, like, a cartoon on Columbus Day, I think it was the year before last, which was, you know, it depicted Native Americans as cannibals, and then being civilized by the, you know, pilgrims coming over or whatever.
And it's just, you know, like, that sort of thing, it's just like, it's just more acceptable than doing it when you're talking about, like, Auschwitz, you know?
Like, that's, And that's the whole, that seems to be such the dividing line, you know, in a lot of ways.
It's just, you know, don't make it explicitly about, like, the really sensitive ones that we're talking about.
But as you get more used to, you know, talking about the Infinity Gauntlet killing all the Native Americans, pretty soon, you know, it's not too hard to start talking about Jews.
I mean, you know, it's just, you know, and I'm not, I'm being a little bit light-hearted here, but I do want to be clear, you know, I'm giggling at it because it's just so, like, silly and ridiculous and terrifying.
Right, right.
It's very similar to, um, there was a leaked style guide from the Daily Stormer that's like, you know, they should be confused.
That's the point.
They should not know where the line is between satire, irony, and legitimate hate, you know.
Yeah, um, Andrew Anglin said, I believe in that style guideline, you know.
This is real Nazism hiding behind ironic Nazism hiding behind real Nazism.
He's trying to be three levels of meta-narrative deep.
That's the thing that fascinates me about the whole use of humor, is that it's designed to be very clearly understood by the people on the inside of the joke, and to be completely obtuse to people on the outside, so that they do have these infinite justifications.
And yet, even on the inside of it, I listen to hosts on these podcasts say, hold on, hold on, do you mean that ironically or non-ironically?
They have to stop each other occasionally, even at this top level, and clarify, like, what are you trying to say here?
It's kind of amusing when even they can't keep track of the irony anymore, or the sarcasm, the levels of metanarrative.
And it's definitely at play in the New Zealand shooter.
Subscribe to PewDiePie and all these memes that he threw in.
All of his references to Candace Owens and I think it was Bellingcat who had a great article on that.
Yeah, Robert Evans.
We linked that in our Christchurch episode and we talked a bit about that.
And then somebody, somebody's graffitied a Holocaust memorial with subscriber PewDiePie, which again makes it, you know, it's, it's a joke about something that you, that you feel is real.
Like, you know, this is, you're, you're, you're mocking the Holocaust.
We're going to do a whole Holocaust denial episode at some point in the not too distant future, and we'll get into some of the way that that works.
And I don't necessarily want to go there, go there today, because I know you've got plenty of other material that you'd like to cover.
So, Did you have more in that piece or would you like to kind of move on to a different topic?
I think I'd like to reiterate, you know, like in this role when people are wondering, you know, irony, satire, shitposting, being an edgelord, LARPing, Gavin exists to say white supremacy is an academic fabrication.
These social justice warriors want to attack our free speech and our right to bear arms.
And they have created this.
They've summoned it into existence.
They make no mention of Trump cutting funding to countering violent extremism programs.
They have no mention of him saying his both sides after Charlottesville.
They have no mention of Trump and his strategic silence after the On Holocaust Remembrance Day.
They are willfully blind in some areas and Gavin exists to kind of shift their lens to where they don't even see like the harm the ideology is causing other people.
Yeah, you can't trust the lying media.
You can't trust the fake news.
But you can trust us, and we're going to give it to you straight, or any of you, the real version of it.
But ultimately, it's just this completely transparent spin, once you kind of step outside of it at all.
So you've mentioned that you've had a couple of, at least some experience, sort of de-radicalizing some of these guys.
Can you describe that process, or sort of what gets people to kind of like, Wake up and come out of it.
So most most terrorism scholars would say you know Deradicalization is a fairly murky term.
How do you measure the extent that someone is deradicalized?
Do you measure it in behavioral outcomes?
Do you measure it in in what they say?
One way of thinking about it is the term disengagement.
It's something that someone does on their own The only reason I can say that my experience with some Proud Boys led some of them to leaving is because one person jokingly said, I blame you for it.
So I have evidence that he said that I... He thought it was a negative thing.
Yeah.
In a sense.
At least, I don't know, ironically maybe.
He was joking, yeah.
You know, like, I can't deal with this anymore and I blame you for it.
Like, I have to confront these things I've been ignoring, you know.
Right, yeah.
With that Proud Boy, he had an aversion to violence.
He did not like violence.
He saw the Berkeley riots and he's like, who are these anti-fascists?
This is not right.
They're just expressing their speech.
I want to join this group.
But as more of the violence became pronounced and jails, death threats became a major thing.
It was in the Huffington Post and other news outlets.
This Proud Boy who started with this aversion to violence realized that the group he joined to some extent was celebrating and endorsing that violence.
So over time and talking to him, I never I never tell any of them what to believe.
But I think coming into contact with someone who's willing to listen to them is not attacking their ideology and is not an angry feminist in the way that they understand feminists to be.
The straw caricature of a feminist, to be fair.
Yeah.
I mean, people are complex and multifaceted and they can be feminine in some ways and have more masculine traits than others.
And when people come into contact, like on a human level with somebody, A lot of the justifications they have against feminism and the ideology, it kind of falls away over time when they realize, like, oh, okay, so I can't really generalize to everybody, or, well, I hate feminism, but you're okay.
You know, like, that's like often the starting point, you know.
Yeah, did you see that documentary, what is it, Meeting the Alt-Right, Facing the Alt-Right?
There seems to be some of that going on, where even Jeff Shoup is kind of going like, well, you're one of the good Muslims.
And forging that connection seems to be something that helps some of them.
Although, from what I've seen, it does seem that people don't really Leave it and then work actively to confront, you know, what they, they just kind of leave it and then just kind of lead private lives or whatever.
You know, there's, there's a lot of that where, you know, it's not necessarily that I don't still believe in white racial superiority.
I just kind of like don't talk about that much because it's just kind of like difficult to, you know, to get along with my life that way.
And, you know, I've always said, you know, leave your microphones behind and I'll stop listening to you guys.
I will not pursue you.
I've got plenty of other guys to listen to.
Um, but, um, you know, it would be nice if you saw, like, more of them, like, actually confront that, like, the evil that they've created in the world a little bit more, but, you know.
You've come into direct contact with that evil on that farther extreme scale.
Um, I know that we're talking about Fash Fatigue, and that's perhaps for another episode, but can you tell me, like, what some of your experiences have been, and, like, what it is like to constantly be in contact with, kind of, the darkness of The human psyche?
Sure, I mean, it's, you know, the funny thing is that, like, you get, I mean, I don't have to tell you, I guess, you know, you do get used to it after a while, like, ironically, like, doing the podcast makes it a little bit harder because I'm constantly, like, recalibrating, because by describing some of this, and then Jack goes, oh my god, and then, like, listeners will email me and say, I don't understand how you do not, like, shoot yourself every day, you know, like,
Uh, you know, like, like, I had to listen to that episode in three-minute chunks, and, like, you're literally, like, exposing yourself to it in, you know, full-time.
And, um, so when you do recalibrate like that, it does just sort of, like, remind you of how terrible it is.
And there are things, and I don't want to, like, kind of...
You know, basically anything I say on this podcast that is uniquely bothersome to me, I will get in my DMs tomorrow.
I assure you.
So, you know, we'll kind of avoid that necessarily.
But there are certain things that are bothersome in certain times when I just do have to sort of let it go.
I'll listen to music or whatever.
And it is a balancing act in terms of that.
A lot of it is also just sort of like understanding that like when people do come to me and say this was really useful to listen to this or this is really useful to like see you tweet about this or like you gave me some good information or, you know, just just knowing that it is actually like making a difference in people's lives.
You know, knowing that it's for a productive purpose does sort of help me in terms of my own just kind of like getting back to it and kind of like knowing that knowing that it's not just sort of being lost into the ether.
You know, so I mean, that's kind of the big answer.
And I have I have like kind of like I have a very comfortable home life.
I mean, not very comfortable, but I have a job, I have a wife, I have pets.
My life is very, very quiet aside from this stuff.
And I have actively tried to simplify a lot of that as a way of keeping my personal life fairly stable.
I have a safe space.
That's how you do it, right?
You make a safe space and that's what safe spaces are, not the straw version that these guys all pretend like, oh, you just want to be protected from the real world.
No, the point of the safe space is to then deal with the real world in ways that you need to.
Anyway.
I think it's important for more than just one individual to bear the burden alone.
That's why I signed on to be a shapeshifter for Light Upon Light.
Sure.
Yeah, talk about this.
Talk about this.
So, Light Upon Light is about promoting dialogue.
So, when people get into the mentality of us versus them, They're not seeing the world as it is.
They are insisting the world conform to their standards.
It's a very narrow, toxic worldview, and if you stay in that long enough, Violence against an out group becomes a legitimate option.
So it's not just feminism is a cancer.
It's all women need to die, or all women need to be subservient to men.
All women need to be breeding vessels, essentially, you know, to propagate the white race, you know.
Yeah.
So parallel networks exist, not just to counter radical ideology in the far right space, But in the jihadi, the Salafi extremist space as well.
So there's multiple converging extremisms and there are spaces that work to promote dialogue to prevent those extremisms from becoming more mainstream.
So Light Upon Light is an organization That is going to be doing, you know, bearing some of that burden with an amazing team of people.
And I really look forward to being a shapeshifter for Light Up Online.
And I also look forward to seeing the content from this cadre of former extremists.
So it's definitely an organization to support and follow up on because they're going to do some really amazing work.
Sure, there will be a link in the show notes for sure to that and so we'll definitely cover that.
It sounds wonderful.
So much of what I do is just trying to understand and report about what's going on.
And, you know, what I've kind of found in, like, interacting with you on the internet and some other people is that, you know, the work of kind of reaching out and de-radicalizing and, you know, kind of dealing with sort of the ground-level people as people and sort of, like, really reaching out to them, that is such difficult, like, emotionally fatiguing work, and I have the utmost admiration for that.
I will say it now, if you are a white nationalist or are probably listening to this podcast and you want to reach out to me, I will be happy to talk to you if you want to be authentic and you want to actually have a conversation.
I'm happy to do that.
If you're trolling me or wasting my time, you're not going to get my attention.
I will happily chat with you if you do want to.
If you want to reach out and have a conversation, I will have that conversation.
I think that's wonderful.
And I'd also like to add, you know, you are a group that claims to be about free speech at all costs.
If you are truly about free speech, You wouldn't have a leader or a chapter organizer telling you who you can and can't speak with.
I think as a human being, as an intellectually curious individual, you should see what is out there and see the discrepancy between what you've been told and what people like me and Daniel are like.
So I'm happy to speak to Proud Boys as well and I hope that you'll speak to Daniel because as a man he might understand things Better than I could as a woman.
You might be able to relate to him more.
So, I suggest if you are listening and you do want someone to talk to, that you consider speaking to him.
Awesome.
So, did you have a... Sorry, just... Did you have anything else you definitely did want to cover before we kind of wrap up here?
Because we've been going for, you know, hour 15.
So, you know, I'm kind of... I think I want to cover...
A lack of understanding of Muslim culture and Islam in general.
Not to get into the theological debate, but one of the things that Gavin McGinnis told me in the beginning was, you know, when I started asking about his group, he's like, Jesus Christ, you people are obsessed!
Where's the scrutiny of Islam?
And I said, wait a minute.
I have a publication scrutinizing not Islam, but Salafi Jihadism, which is an extreme branch.
It's the Muslim version of the alt-right, but it's, you know, dangerous, you know.
So I have a publication critiquing certain elements of the religion.
So yes, I've critiqued both.
Extremism and fundamentalism are problems affecting everyone globally.
They're not confined to one country or group.
And I'm asking You know, I was asking Gavin to try to understand where his group is actually at, but I made the mistake in assuming that Gavin was someone who I could talk to as like a logical, rational human being.
That was my fault, I guess.
But ultimately, he just starts memeing at you at a certain point.
He just kind of starts, you know, like, oh, you're just an Antifa journalist, you're just an academic out to destroy us, you know?
Like, any sense of being able to sort of interact with him then just kind of shuts down because he goes into, like, that protection mode and starts... I like to think of it as, like, throwing chum in the water, like these chaos agents, where it's just, like, you just kind of throw stuff out there to sort of...
Distract from the real thing that you're doing, like the inkblot of the squid or whatever, you know?
That's sort of how I see a lot of this stuff, and I'm not necessarily saying Gavin was doing that in that moment, but certainly, like the Britain-Toront manifesto.
There's so much stuff that just seems to be where normie journalists are just gonna Read it and fall down these rabbit holes and then they laugh about how they fall down the rabbit holes and that sort of stuff and I feel like there's a lot of like when you get too close that's literally and they just kind of like spew their squid ink and run away.
Exactly!
You know, DARVO is a great way of describing it.
That's squid ink.
It's a good way of putting it.
Jennifer Freid came up with that term.
It's an empirically validated response to being accused of wrongdoing or sexual assault.
So, DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim Offender.
So, if I say Hey, Gavin, you guys might not be neo-Nazis, but there is a problem of radicalization, or the potential for radicalization to occur in your group, and I'd like to know honestly what you're doing to combat that, or if you're aware of the issue.
And so the denial part would be, we're not alt-right, I've said this a hundred times, Jesus Christ.
And then they'll point to, like, look at all the members that we kick out as soon as we find out they're white nationalists.
Look at all the members we've gotten rid of, you know, as soon as they let their cloak slip.
So that's just another, like, standard dodge that he does that I've seen, right?
And the attack would be, um, mentally ill news, you people are obsessed, where's the scrutiny of Islam?
And then reversing the victim-offender, and this is kind of like the concept of a psychological projection.
So in the article he said, you know, it's really tricky spotting these frauds.
And I was like, okay, who is the Canadian citizen wrapping himself in the American flag talking about our boys?
Like, you can't say our boys.
You're not from this country, motherfucker.
You know?
Like, what are you doing?
So, like, it's a level of dishonesty, like when somebody is cornered or somebody is not willing to engage in conversation, they resort to these tactics to make the person who accused them or asked about something kind of doubt themselves momentarily.
You could think of it as gaslighting as well, but I really like your term, like the squitting response.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, no, that, you know, the deny, attack, reverse victim, offender, Darvo, I keep, I do, I do like the term, I do come back to it because you see it on the kind of more white nationalist side as well, and you know, it's, it's, you know, it's the Jews, they always blame the Jews, right?
So, you know, no, we're not the ones who are promoting genocide, the Jews are trying to genocide white people, that becomes the white genocide myth, and then the attack is, you know, Oh, like AIPAC and all these kind of Jewish organizations.
Israel is – and then they attack Jews for engaging in quote-unquote Jewish behavior, etc., etc.
And then the reverse victim-offender is the – I don't know.
I mean you may have listened to this episode.
I described it in one of the episodes previously, but there's what they call an old Polish proverb.
Yeah!
which I haven't looked into the origin of it as far as I can tell.
It's probably true.
I don't know, maybe.
But it's the Jew cries out as he strikes you.
And you hear that over and over and over again if you listen to these guys for a while.
Meaning that the Jew is going, Oy vey!
And punching you, but pretending that they've been attacked at the same time.
And it's such a constant thing.
It all just fits into that.
The whole thing about the Jewish question in their mind seems to fit very neatly into this Darvo framework.
And so it's something I've been kind of thinking about back and forth about how those parallels work.
But I just wanted to kind of highlight it here because I wasn't sure how much of that kind of stuff you had actually been exposed to.
Are you a soccer fan?
I'm not, you know.
I'm one of those soyboy cucks who doesn't follow sports at all, so.
I won't watch the Little Games, but I'll love watching the World Cup.
So there's some soccer players where nobody is around them, but they have tripped and fallen mysteriously, and they're like, oh god, it's broken!
I kind of see Proud Boys engaging in similar pre-emptive Darvo, if that makes sense.
Someone filmed themselves falling down or lying down in a library and they said that anti-fascists had attacked them, but there was no evidence to confirm that was what occurred.
Like, there was just a proud boy lying down in the library.
It's just interesting the ways that Proud Boys make Antifa the terrorists.
And I say this having interviewed both groups extensively.
Sure.
There are fucked up elements in Antifa and there are fucked up elements in Proud Boys.
But in terms of being a reliable narrator, Proud Boys fail more significantly.
I'm not picking sides, nor would I, but... - And I wouldn't ask you to.
I mean, I'm picking sides, but I wouldn't ask you to pick sides. - If you have to look at four or five different sources to confirm what someone is saying, to try to piece together what the truth of the situation is, what good is one proud boy who lists himself as a source of information? what good is one proud boy who lists himself as If they have a habit of willfully lying, denying things, and using the Darvo tactics, what can you really trust in what they say?
For example, a Proud Boy that I was talking to, who, I think he unfriended me and blocked me after I created the Proud Boy's incident map.
He said, He said at at Westfest, you know, we were all just wearing Hawaiian t-shirts.
I mean, no one should take us seriously.
And right around the same time he was saying this, he was trying to openly establish a dialogue with more hardened white nationalists and ethno-nationalists to forge some type of bond.
So, There's a lot of deceit that can go on.
And then there are moments of honesty and Proud Boys coming to terms with some of the actions that they do.
Like the Proud Boy who left the group, the one who was an emeritus who has now left.
You know he just is amazed by how much like he turned the other cheek and looked the other way because while he was in the group he was you know he was an older guy that got to have like social ties and kind of the frat like you know male bonding life and uh you know I compared his experience to um a woman who leaves a kind of like unfulfilling or abusive relationship
Uh, you know, he says, you know, when they're, they're nice guys, but like, once you, like, they're not all bad once you get to know them.
They didn't really mean it in that way.
Like, they're good family men.
Like, you're not seeing the full picture.
And I just, after everything I would share and like, like, tell me what it is that I'm missing here.
Um, and then over time he just, like, I mean, I don't want to speculate, but from what I understand about our interactions, there's just things he couldn't justify anymore.
Yeah.
Um, you know, he kind of said... That seems, that seems to be a real, like, sort of, sort of a thing that, like, there's, you know, it's not necessarily that there's some moment, like, there's some, some, you know, a light bulb goes off as much as it's, you know, at a certain point you realize how much you're kind of, like, spinning your wheels in the mud trying to, uh, Trying to justify things that you shouldn't have to justify.
One thing that I'll also just kind of mention is one thing that you mentioned that I haven't really read on is that this concept of self-improvement sort of like runs through…
A lot of the, you know, the main figures and the people on the ground, you know, a lot of like, um, you know, Chris Cantwell's callers on the Radical Agenda, they'll talk about, you know, how, you know, finding white nationalism, finding this kind of, kind of taught them to, you know, they stopped drinking, or they were able to kind of kick drugs, or they were able to, you know, kind of put more work into themselves and to find like a purpose in their life.
I mean, a lot of these guys do feel kind of purposelessness.
That then is sort of, like, filled by this movement, by these groups.
And, um, you know, it does, it does strike me that, you know, this kind of process, I mean, Cantwell himself has, like, stopped drinking.
I don't know if he is now, but, like, he was, you know, definitely kind of working to stop drinking precisely because he, you know, so that he could be a better white nationalist, which is, you know, like, you know, he sounded like he was a really horrible problem drinker.
I'm not, you know, saying, like, go be an alcoholic, Chris, but, you know, like, uh, you know, That's better for the world.
Better for the world if you kill your liver than like, you know, spread this noxious garbage.
But um, you know, there is some of these guys, there's this self-improvement, there's this almost like self-help book kind of quality to some of it.
And they find that in the community as well and these guys who are like supporting them and kind of like they feel like Like this kind of challenged masculinity that women are out there sort of and people like trans people like the transphobia that runs throughout this whole thing you know they they have this response to you know people who aren't just like them people who are not sort of masculine men who are kind of trying to like put them into a box or saying like maybe this impulse isn't the healthiest or whatever.
And what they find these groups seems to be like oh no you want we want you to be a big strong man we want you to be aggressive with women want you to drink and have all the fun you want to have and we want you to kind of get to be yourself and like that's healthy and natural right arm.
And it just strikes me that.
It's one thing to say, oh I need to let off some steam.
I'm a guy, I let off steam with the guys.
It's a thing that happens.
I let you drink, but I don't build my political ideology around that.
I don't go beat up people in the streets because I like to go to the bar and have drinks with guys.
It's a different thing.
You're a guy that's always been the nice guy, and you can't possibly understand what it is about you that women are not responding to.
Or you are recently divorced, or you have gone through a really painful breakup, and you are reeling emotionally.
And as a man, you're not given many outlets for expressing your pain, because it's considered a form of weakness in some You know, in mainstream society.
But you're looking for a reason to explain and perhaps heal from your pain.
I like to describe it as like some people, when they go through something traumatic or something where they're going through some major life transition, They put their feelings in a box, and put that box on the shelf, and when they're ready for it, perhaps they can return to it at another time.
There's some guys that rather than do that, would rather set that fucking box on fire, along with their capacity to feel and empathize with other people.
So, the pain is very real.
The pain that drives men to go into the manosphere, do Google searches, and try to make sense of their experience, that's real.
But when you go online in this manosphere and get red-pilled, there are people waiting for you that say, hey man, it's not you.
All women are like this.
Right.
And you're in pain and you are hurting.
hurting like hurting hurting like a black hole of pain and suffering so if you like you know stop sniveling and lift lift your head up and be like oh all women are like this you know like it can help like it's it's it's like a temporary relief that turns into a permanent toxic ideology
Like, if you get into a bad breakup, of course you're going to have bad feelings, you haven't really, like, had time to, like, properly attribute, like, blame and see where you might have been the messed up one.
It feels good for a girl to be like, oh man, he was a fucking asshole, and your girlfriend's saying, oh, you know, like, He wasn't worth your time, I'm so glad you left, right?
And you might be hurting deeply inside and know that's not really true and you really did love that person, but temporarily it makes you feel good to say that.
Because you temporarily, and some of these guys who get into these groups, you know, they aggressively perform masculinity to overcome sometimes the pain of rejection or their own depression in general that may not be attributed to any one woman.
And it's very sad that these men who could benefit from some skills training and like dealing with rejection, how to handle that, how to move forward, how to Build your self-esteem.
That doesn't happen.
They often get recruited by these groups who, you know, it's like replacing one toxic substance with another.
Right.
I may have gone drinking or doing drugs, but I see the world in such a fundamentally skewed way that, like, all it might take is one instance for me to be like, that's it.
It's go time.
I'm going to go to that rally or I'm going to go plan this and, like, just Understanding the far right is like a study in pain.
It definitely is and it's such a like and I want to be careful here because I'm not trying to justify behavior or trying to justify like horribleness.
But there is a sense in which like the low level people in this are victims, almost to the degree that they're victims are victims like they have been targeted and victimized and kind of given this like poisonous ideology and given this, you know, kind of place in the world.
And it just makes, you know, the top, the leaders of the movement, these e-celebs, it makes, you know, Gavin and Mike Enoch and Richard Spencer and, you know, all these guys just that much more horrible because even the people who are, like, they're victimizing all of the people downstream from them, you know, by...
putting out this propaganda.
It is.
And, you know, again, I am not in any way trying to sort of justify, like, the horrible beliefs and certain actions.
But there is a sense in which, you know, the victimized becomes the victimizer in this.
And it is thoroughly depressing.
It is.
I mean, the sad thing is, Proud Boys are largely blue collar men.
And a thing that made me really, really upset because I grew up working class.
Like, I understand things don't come easy.
They never have been.
But I was raised, you know, with enough tools to help, you know, overcome that.
And a lot of persistence, you know, most people don't, a lot of people don't get that.
The Gavin, on his lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center, raised something like, And Gavin is rich!
$140,000 to crowdfund his lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center based on the backs of, like, working-class blue-collar people.
He's a millionaire.
And Gavin is rich.
Gavin is actually legitimately rich.
He lives in upstate New York, I think, like, somewhere.
Somewhere around there.
I mean, I'm not trying to talk to him or anything.
He lives in that area.
His neighbors are not happy with him.
He talks about his neighbors not being happy with him on his podcast.
He did an episode where he talked about how the hate has no home here.
All of his neighbors put those signs up and he whined about it for 45 minutes.
It was pretty delicious, actually.
And the excellent thing was in Tacky Mag, he's quoted as saying, let me find the exact quote because I'm all about accuracy, love your neighbor like Braveheart.
He was referencing being respectful and cautious around your neighbors, some unrelated article that was on Tacky Mag.
Right, right, yeah.
Well, and that whole, like, again, subversion of, like, existing institutions is exactly what they claim that, like, the Jews quote-unquote are doing.
I'm not saying Gavin is saying that, but, like, that's a very, like, common thing is that our society has been subverted by, you know, Gavin would say liberals or communists or leftists or whatever, and then, you know, the more extreme white nationalist guys are, you know, they just call it the Jews, you know, like, and You know, exactly what they're trying to do is take this healthy multicultural society that we have issues in our society, but we're trying to work on them together, and they're trying to subvert that from within.
So again, it's just more of that, like, Darvo kind of process.
It's more of that, you know?
You know, Braveheart, I just looked at my thing, and I realized there's a typo.
I said, love your neighbor like Braveheart.
I was like, wait, that's a violent movie.
I'm pretty sure it's love your neighbor like a brother.
Oh!
That makes a lot more sense!
Love your neighbor like Braveheart.
Throw fruit at them and then torture them to death at the end of a three hour ordeal.
That's just more sign that we're just fake news.
Any minor mistake we make.
It's clearly just an indication that everything we've said is false and that you shouldn't listen to any of the rest of it.
It's really true.
And you shouldn't follow organizations like Light Upon Light because, yeah, we're doing exactly what you think we're doing.
Yeah.
We're just trying to subvert your healthy white male masculinity.
Your virility.
We're trying to turn you into women, ultimately.
That's the thing.
Being a woman is the worst thing imaginable.
Clearly.
Well, I think that's a nice place to end it for now.
I do hope you'll come back at some point in the future and we can kind of talk about more of the issues that we kind of touched on today.
Tell us where we can find you, like your Twitter and etc.
Where would you like people to find you if they want to know more?
Sure!
My handle on Twitter is Ashkenaz89.
If you would like to support the development of the Proud Boys Incident Map and Dashboard, you can become a patron.
My Patreon account is patreon.com slash Ashkenaz89, like my Twitter handle.
I have recently signed on to be a shapeshifter for Light Upon Light.
And so you can look for Light Upon Light on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube.
You can donate to their GoFundMe page, which will also be linked below.
And I also encourage you to follow researchers who have been in the trenches and studying the far right.
Researchers like Sivi Batolo Haddad.
I'm pretty sure her handle is Death of Discourse, but I will double check that.
Who else?
There are so many people that deserve a lot more credit.
I'd also like to credit Unicorn Riot.
Oh, definitely.
Regardless of your political affiliation, the volume of articles that have come out based on the leaked transcripts are so immensely valuable that I think that I would call on everybody to give credit where credit is due and support people that are producing that content. the volume of articles that have come out based on Are so immensely valuable that I think that I would call on everybody to kind of give credit where credit is due and support people that are producing that content.
So that's another one that you can donate to.
There's also Life After Hate.
There's also individuals like Jesse Morton, Shannon Martinez and Christian Picciolini.
Um, so consider any of those.
Um, I think that, you know, we can't do this work alone.
It's, it's hard, and we don't have the infrastructure to do it anymore, so we're trying to rebuild that.
So donating to organizations like Light Upon Light, Life After Hate, and individual researchers like me, it can be of great use to people.
I'd like to be a resource, as Daniel's a resource, and I think it's really important to know who to go to support and know where to get the good information.
You mean you're not funded directly by George Soros?
Well, we don't tell people that, Daniel.
Oh, right, right, no, I'm sorry, I was being a little too modest there.
Thank you so much, Samantha, for being on the show, and we will definitely talk again.
